Lord Mullion's Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

weather, St Swithin’s Day is a landmark in the English rural mind, and it had been natural and even edifying for Ammon Gore to call his infant after the saint. It had been like naming as Noel a boy born at Christmas. And now, having been a little venturesome with her assistant, Patty went further. ‘So how old are you now, Swithin?’
    â€˜Twenty. Did you say six inches?’ This question, briskly uttered, referred to the dibbling operation in progress at the moment.
    â€˜Yes, I think so. And not too deep. We’re not in a turnip field.’
    â€˜It would be a queer way to behave with turnips,’ Swithin said matter-of-factly, and bent again to his task. He performed it from the waist and without bending his knees. This, muscularly, was the economical and professional thing. And, again, it was attractive in itself. ‘How old are you ?’ Swithin asked, his nose close to the ground.
    The comeback was unexpected, and Patty found it disconcerting as well. Or rather she found disconcerting the fact that her spontaneous reaction to Swithin’s echoing her own question had been, if ever so faintly, disapproving. If she asked a young man his age why on earth shouldn’t he ask her hers? Her father, she knew, would judge the garden boy’s reciprocal curiosity to be entirely civilized and in order. Indeed, Swithin’s tossing the ball briskly back had been much nicer in him than that snubby ‘M’lady’ he had started off with.
    â€˜Twenty-one,’ she said, suddenly pleased and laughing. ‘So we’re both getting on. Do you like it here, Swithin?’
    â€˜I’ve been here always, haven’t I?’ Erect again, Swithin Gore made this reply with what appeared to be no enigmatical intention. But was that very straight glance faintly mocking as well? Lady Patience Wyndowe found herself, for reasons that were obscure to her, rather hoping that it was.
    â€˜Yes, I suppose you have,’ she said. ‘And I have too – except for going away to school. I didn’t much care for that.’
    â€˜But Lady Lucy does.’ Lady Lucy was Patty’s younger sister Boosie. ‘She has told me about some high old times.’
    â€˜Has she, now?’ Patty was astonished by this information – and abruptly jealous of Boosie, whom she wouldn’t have supposed ever to have held any conversation with Swithin at all. Perhaps Boosie was planning to convert Swithin to Euro-communism, or whatever it was that she at present believed in. ‘My sister bosses her school, Swithin, and that’s why she enjoys it. Did you boss yours?’
    â€˜Yes, I did.’
    This had flashed out from Swithin in a surprising way. Patty had only a vague notion of the kind of school a garden boy came from, but supposed it to begin with toddlers in snot-covered smocks and end up with beefy louts and larking hoydens largely beyond anybody’s control. The mere fact that he was alert and clever must have made Swithin something of an odd boy out. If he had really come out on top it was necessary to conclude that he had something. And this was becoming Patty’s impression anyway.
    But Swithin had returned to his work on the biennials, planting out with mathematical precision the wallflowers and polyanthus that would fill this one large bed in one of the several small gardens lying outside the moat of Mullion Castle. Patty was just deciding that it would be judicious (after this curious breakthrough) to leave him to it when Swithin spoke again.
    â€˜The poor man’s flower,’ Swithin said.
    â€˜What’s that, Swithin?’
    â€˜The polyanthus. It’s in a poem as that. “Or polyanthus, edged with golden wire, the poor man’s flower.” It’s just like that, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Yes – and how very interesting.’ What Patty meant was that Swithin was very interesting. He was becoming rather alarming as