A Mansion and its Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

typical of me that I should keep it faithfully. There was no one in the family I would want to entrust it to, and this made me congenitally mistrustful. For that reason it was seldom that I confided anything of importance to Beatrice or Miss Roxby, my new governess. Miss Roxby was well read for a governess. Her mother had imprudently married an actor, and had warned her against contracting an alliance based on personal attractions (unnecessarily, or so it seemed at the time). We neither of us found it easy to express emotions, though I had a great respect for her – and, eventually, she for me.
    The double joy of a secret is that you can not only hug it to yourself while it is a secret, but when it comes out, you can reveal that you have known it all along. Providence, not generally kind to me during my childhood, gave me that second joy in good measure. I remember it as about a month after Frank’s leaving Blakemere that we heard from him, but perhaps it waslonger: he had, after all, an expedition to prepare. It was late in the day and Miss Roxby and I had just come in from some botanical excursion in a distant corner of the prison compound when my father and grandfather arrived back from a day at the Bank in London. Grandpapa, as was his custom, took up the evening post that was lying on a silver salver on the fat-legged marble table nearest the large double-doored entrance. He riffled through them, then brought one up close to his old eyes.
    ‘Your brother Frank’s writing,’ he spluttered to my father. ‘From Port Said.’
    My father said nothing, but stood there waiting. I never quite knew what his attitude to his brother was. I did not see him often enough to have the information.
    ‘The damn fool! He’s got up another of his preposterous expeditions – to cross the Gobi Desert!’ said my grandfather in a voice of outrage.
    ‘Oh, I knew that, ’ I said loudly. For once I was the centre of attention.
    ‘You knew?’ said my father.
    ‘Of course. From Kanchow to Ulan Bator.’ I turned to Miss Roxby. ‘He said you would help me to chart his progress.’
    Miss Roxby blenched. I don’t think she was terribly well up in the Gobi Desert.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone,’ demanded my father.
    ‘Who?’ I asked, to underline my solitary state. ‘Anyway, I thought everybody knew.’
    I was a truthful child as a rule, but my probity had its limits. I turned from their gaze and toiled up the stairs with Miss Roxby. I did not tell them that Uncle Frank had said he might be willing to marry Miss Coverdale when he came home. This, I thought, was part of the secret I had been sworn to keep. Anyway, he might have changed his mind when he returned, and decided to wait for me.
    Miss Roxby was nothing if not industrious. Within a week she had procured from among the unread volumes in the irrelevant library a large, dusty, and leather-bound tome with an unmanageable folding-out map of China and Mongolia. This was to be our Sacred Book for the next few months. From the letter from Port Said she had tried to calculate Uncle Frank’s likely date of arrival in Shanghai, so we could talk till then of his possible ports of call, before we discussed his overland route across the dreadfully inhospitable landscape – that slow,painful journey of twenty miles a day to Ulan Bator.
    The fact that all our calculations were grossly inaccurate does not lessen my gratitude to her: our discussions and fantasies were the one thing that lightened the burden of the long months of separation. As I sit here in the gatehouse, enjoying the long summer evenings, I remember fantasies I indulged in with particular pleasure. They included a romance for Uncle Frank, in the middle of the desert, with a Mongolian lady dressed in improbably bright clothing, facially somewhere between a Japanese geisha and an illustration in one of my books of Pokahontas. Uncle Frank also rescued other members of his expedition from terrible dangers, and repulsed