Harriet Agley

2

Harriet Agley

    Oddly enough, though her brain, as she’d long since discovered, rarely switched off, no comparison with Lord Peter Wimsey rose to the surface of Harriet Harrison’s mind during the earlier part of that afternoon. Sean Nesbitt had been a bloody good lover, the main reason, as she’d freely admitted to herself even at the time, she’d let it drag on so long even though she knew there was no future in it and she was just a minor diversion in his life, but Crispin was every bit as good. Of course she was nervous—well, heck, there was no getting away from it, he was a sophisticated upper-class English gent, even if he did have a job, and she was just a too-plump Colonial lump with a smattering of a painfully dragged together education and parents who said “dare-runt” not “dairnt” as, the nice Englishman who’d filled in for Prof that year had informed her in shaken tones, was how “daren’t” was pronounced.

    But somehow Crispin seemed to understand her nerves and was very sympathetic, to the point of suggesting she might like to use the bathroom first. Even Sean had never done that, though he’d quite understood if she had to go—though always grinning and saying pleasedly: “Weak bladder,” sort of as if it proved what he’d always known about women. Crispin didn’t grin or make any comment but it was very soon very apparent that he knew just as much about women as Sean had done, thank God. Because Harriet had tried quite a few of the other sort—the push, grunt, flop sort—and she knew she couldn’t deal with them at all. What were you supposed to say? “Oy, I haven’t had a come”? Or “There’s more than one way of killing a cat and the simultaneous organism is largely a myth, mate”? Or even a simple: “Hey, I’m here, too”? She had never been able to say any of them and had dumped these ignorant and selfish blokes (as Sean had assured her they were) as fast as possible.

    Crispin didn’t prove that the simultaneous orgasm wasn’t a myth—though it wasn’t to be until quite some considerable time later that Harriet would tell herself that blimming Lord Peter undoubtedly had done so, reading between the 1930s’ mealy-mouthedness of Busman’s Honeymoon. He was, as he admitted himself, panting, only human, and she was too luscious and in short, if he just went ahead and left her behind—kissing her nose—he promised to give her a come afterwards. He actually said so. Harriet was, of course, already putty in his hands but if she hadn’t been this last would have done it. So he went ahead and had a come—up to now, though passionate, he’d really been very, well, gentle, really, but now he was pretty fierce. And yelled his head off uninhibitedly. She wasn’t too far gone to recognise that that made two blokes in her experience that did.

    “Sorry, darling!” he gasped, rolling off her, quite some time after the panting had stopped and his heart had stopped frantically pounding against her. He got his breath back, smiled, kissed her nose again, and said very softly in her ear: “I’ll get on with it, shall I, darling Harriet?”

    “Yes, please,” said Harriet hoarsely.

    Whereupon he simply got between her knees and gave her one. Harriet yelled her head off uninhibitedly: she always did, there was no way she could have stopped herself. Though from her far-distant thin-walled student flat days she knew there were lots of females that didn't.

    “Wow!” he said with a laugh, surfacing after getting the last twitch and a final yelp out of her.

    Harriet just panted.

    Quite some time after that he said, lying back with his hands linked behind his head—he had lovely underarm hair, a few shades darker than the hair on his head, but soft-looking, very curly and thick, though his chest wasn’t very hairy, just a sprinkling of pale gold, totally irresistible—“Fancy a drink, darling?”

    Harriet hadn’t expected a Pommy motel to provide a little fridge, but there was one. Okay, parts of Britain must have been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century after all. “I am quite thirsty, but they’ll make ya pay through the nose if we drink anything from that,” she warned.

    “Just call me King Cophetua, then,” he said, sitting up. “What you do fancy?”

    “Just a mineral water, thanks, King Cophetua.”

    Crispin got up, grinning. “Damn, forgot! Better get rid of this first.” He made for the ensuite, grabbing at the condom before it could fall off. Harriet made a face. Forgot? That proved he was married, didn’t it? If the fact that he’d had some in his pocket also proved that he was used to playing away. Well, she hadn’t needed proof of either of these facts, really, but— Oh, well.

    “Uh—it’s Perrier or soda water, I’m afraid, darling,” he said, investigating the fridge.

    Help. Perrier was awfully expensive, even without the motel-fridge mark-up factor! Oh, too bad, he could afford it. To her surprise, he chose a beer.

    “Isn’t that too cold for you?” she managed, as he tipped his head back and drank straight from the bottle—though he’d given her a motel glass.

    “No,” he said, lowering the bottle and grinning at her. “Got indoctrinated in the Middle East, see?”

    “The Muslim countries are teetotal, though,” replied Harriet dubiously.

    He laughed. “The British Army isn’t!”

    “I see. Help, were you in Iraq, then?”

    “Mm. Not this last stoush: Desert Storm.”

    “Ugh, Crispin, what about all that DU ammo?” she gasped, bolt upright and horrified.

    He tweaked a nipple, since it was there. “Mm, these are nice: did I mention how nice these are? –Surprised you heard about that, Downunder. Well, yes, the bloody stuff was used, all right, never mind our political masters’ attempts to deny it, fudge the facts or just generally gloss over the whole bit, but luckily our boys weren’t involved in handling the muck.”

    Harriet frowned. “Are you sure? Did you have your DNA tested afterwards?”

    “No, because I was fit as a flea. –No, honest, darling, no need to worry. It was the artillery chaps who had to handle the bloody stuff, and anybody involved in clean-ups, that sort of thing. Our boys were forward troops—infantry.”

    “Oh,” she said dubiously. “Well, you look fit.”

    “I am fit.” Crispin drank beer, lay back against the motel’s pillows and suddenly confided: “Besides, by the time I’d been back for a few months it didn’t really matter any more: I’d already perpetuated my genes and Deirdre decided that being married to a pen-pushing desk jockey didn’t by any means equate to being married to a gallant ’ero of Desert Storm, and gave me the old heave-ho in favour of a chap who was something very rich in the City. –Sat at his desk pen-pushing all day, don’t tell me it wasn’t logical!” he ended with a laugh.

    Harriet’s brain felt a bit numb, not least because he’d come out with something so personal. Finally she managed to croak: “You mean she divorced you because she got bored because you weren’t all romantic in uniform or something?”

    “Something very like that, mm. Luckiest break of my life, ’smatter of fact.” He looked at the horrified expression on her face and added: “You see, by that time I’d assisted her to produce the two offspring that she’d decided were enough, and I certainly couldn’t afford to support the three of them in the style she’d decided was her due.” He finished the beer and made a face. “There was also the small point that my old Uncle Ned, who was supposed to shuffle off this mortal and leave me his all, suddenly upped and married a bimbo a third of his age and produced lawful offspring!”

    Harriet thought it over. “Was it an awful lot he was supposed to leave you?”

    “Hell, yes, several mill’, Uncle Ned had pots! Came to the conclusion that that was the main reason she married me—well, that and the glamour of the uniform, you’re not wrong about that: she insisted on the full palaver for the wedding: regimentals, crossed swords, the lot. Bloody embarrassing. The chaps thought I’d run mad—and they weren’t far wrong.”

    “I see; she was very pretty, was she?”

    “Excruciatingly pretty, dumb as they come, and, QED, a mercenary bitch,” said Crispin, shrugging.

    “Yes. I’m sorry it had to work out like that, though, Crispin,” she said seriously.

    “Don’t be. Lucky escape.”

    “What about the children, though?” worried Harriet. “Are they boys or girls?”

    Crispin rubbed his nose. “One of each. Josh is all right: she was never much interested in him, think because he’s too much like me—not so much in looks, but in temperament. Once he was old enough to choose he used to spend all his weekends with me, until she insisted Donald—that’s the rich second—send him to school. My old school but Donald’s moolah paying the fees,” he said with a wry face.

    “Help, didn’t she make you pay?” gasped Harriet. “Those sort of ladies usually do.”

    He laughed suddenly. “They do indeed! No, well, I was living on my pay—you can’t get blood out of a stone.”

    Harriet could see it must have been very humiliating for him. She bit her lip. “Mm. Um, what about your daughter?”

    “Jacintha—Deirdre’s choice. Not too sure she is mine, actually. In any case, I’ve never been allowed to see much of her: she’s been fed the ‘Daddy’s a selfish monster’ line all her life and is firmly on Mummy’s side, except when she wants support in a campaign for a new pony or extra riding lessons or some such. –Fifteen. Horse-mad.”

    Harriet looked at him with great sympathy, but didn’t dare to express it. “So did you manage to see Josh much after he went to boarding school?”

    “Yes, had him most holidays, and got down to School for the long weekends, took him out for a nosh-up, you know the sort of thing, whenever I could manage it.”

    “How old is he now?”

    “Eighteen. Starting at the university in the coming term.”

    “I see.—Yes, your academic year starts in September, doesn’t it?—I thought if you were in the Army you had to go to that officers’ training school instead.”

    “He doesn’t want an Army career. Passionately interested in Renaissance literature, don’t ask me why.”

    “No, you.”

    “Oh! Well, nothing to stop one, having got one’s degree, then opting for an Army career and breaking one’s mother’s heart.”

    “Help, was she awfully upset?”

    “Wept buckets. I ignored her, of course—most lads don’t have hearts at that age. Hormones, yes: not hearts. In fact I pointed out, inconsiderate little sod that I was, that I wasn’t even the oldest son, she had John and he’d always toed the family line. Didn’t work: she reminded me that my maternal and paternal grandfathers were both killed in the War—inaccurately, my paternal grandfather got his in Malaysia, but history was never Mummy’s strong suit, ’specially not military history—and that one of my maternal uncles was killed in Northern Ireland.”

    “War is stupid,” said Harriet firmly.

    “I quite agree, but this was twenty-odd years back: I was young and thick.”

    “What about your father? Did he mind?”

    “Said I was bonkers but it was my life, and if I was too damned thick to grasp the lessons of history perhaps experience was the only thing that’d teach me. He was right, of course: he usually was.”

    “I see. I’m awfully glad your son only likes Renaissance literature.”

    He smiled. “So’m I, actually. Well, not only: girls and almost-vintage cars are in there, too!”

    “Good,” said Harriet, smiling back at him.

    Crispin took the glass of now warming mineral water gently out of her fist and kissed her thoroughly.

    “Thanks. What was that for?” said Harriet in some surprise.

    “Just for being you, I rather think! Let me top this up for you. Sure you don’t want something stronger with it?”

    “I quite like whisky but I don’t like it watered down.”

    The blond eyebrows rose. “A woman after my own heart. Well—tot of whisky each, then?”

    That’d mean paying motel prices, and he’d already sprung for the meal and the motel, and he’d said he was living on his pay when that awful lady divorced him... On the other hand that suit of his and his mention of his tailor suggested he wasn’t short of a few bucks now...

    “What on earth’s the matter?” said Crispin in some surprise. “I concede it’s only Red Label, not a single malt, and it’ll be cold as charity—”

    “No, I like Red Label. Um, if you want to open the bottle.”

    “I do, yes,” he said firmly. “I’m King Cophetua, remember?”

    Smiling weakly, Harriet conceded: “Then a whisky’d be lovely, thanks.”

    Over the whiskies they chatted about all sorts of things. He’d played cricket in his day and liked watching it but didn’t admire the morals or behaviour of most of the modern players, let alone the crowds, but said mildly that he didn’t insist other people had to like it, so Harriet then admitted she thought all forms of spectator sport were barmy, the ones that entailed hitting a small ball with a long stick barmier than most: you could understand the contact sports, that was an atavism, males aping the real fighting that would have gone on for millennia in prehistory, not to mention the body-contact that all male bonding seemed to entail, never mind the fact that they all denied strenuously any imputations of homosexuality, which was ridiculous, we all had male and female elements in our make-up and look at the North Atlantic grey seals, their young males had homosexual relationsh— At this point he was driven to tickle her unmercifully until she squealed for mercy.

    And he enjoyed chess but found it didn’t have the spice of games with an element of chance; he also played backgammon—no, darling, you’re thinking of baccarat!—collapsing in helpless sniggers and being firmly bashed with a pillow. And he didn’t read modern novels, by and large he found them pretentious and artificial, but he was fond of several of the 19th-century novelists: Dickens and Zola particularly—what was that face for? She didn’t have to like them, he wouldn’t mind if she admitted— Oh! No, read Zola in French, actually, was that all ri— Oh, jolly good! Harriet grinned sheepishly and admitted she loathed translations and he put his arm round her and hugged her hard and said so did he.

    After that he told her a lot about the stuff he’d done for his degree—he called it his “far-off degree” but Harriet could see he was still interested in his subject and did a lot of reading. They’d done some Old French in his last year at School: the teacher was very keen on the Chanson de Roland and encouraged him when he found he enjoyed it, and he’d become fascinated by a book he’d lent him—a translation from Spanish into French, actually (with a silly face: Harriet giggled explosively)—which used a lot of evidence from Arabic manuscripts—yes, Moorish—and somehow that had led on to a tremendous interest in Arabic literature. So he’d mugged up frantically during his holidays, done a couple of introductory courses, kind of thing, gone on mugging it up during his first year at the university, not putting in much effort at the stuff he was officially supposed to be doing, and switched courses in his second year, thereby breaking his tutor’s heart. Well, yes, a Helluva lot of work, but his schoolteachers had always told him he was the sort that needed a challenge, and they were right. It had stood him in quite good stead, later on.

    Harriet looked puzzled but then agreed that yes, it would have been useful, being able to speak a bit of Arabic, in Iraq.

    Crispin just said mm, it had, and asked did she get much time for reading nowadays, so she admitted she didn’t, the new prof had lightened her workload slightly, but he didn’t have the funding for any more teaching staff and so she was  usually so tired when she got home that she just fell asleep in front of the TV. And in the weekends there was the shopping and the housework and the washing.

    Then somehow they got onto the subject of art. Crispin was very keen on Henry Moore’s more monumental works and he adored Barbara Hepworth—but as Harriet had never heard of the latter and only seen Moore’s work in books, this didn’t ring any bells. He also adored Rothko and the Indian miniaturists, which some might have said proved he was a split personality— No, never seen any Aboriginal dot painting, darling—wait a mo’, didn’t they have some in the new place in Paris, Quai Branly? Why not pop over there, then she could show him! Harriet’s jaw just sagged and after an appreciable pause she managed to point out that she was a foreigner, not an EU person, and she didn’t have a visa. He thought that’d be no problem, but unfortunately it would, as her plane ticket home wasn’t refundable. And shouldn’t he be seeing something of his kids these holidays?

    Crispin made a face and revealed that Jacintha was about to take off on a pony trek in the Scottish Highlands with a crowd of horsey girls and mistresses from her school, and that Josh was already in Paris, closeted in the Bibliothèque nationale in the intervals of doing a rather new French dollybird—Annick; yes, it was rather pretty, wasn’t it? Abruptly Harriet revealed that she’d thought you only got in there (Crispin nobly refraining, though the effort nigh to killt him, from the obvious remark) if you had a letter of recommendation from your uni saying you were a bona fide scholar, because Joan Mitchell from the French Department at work had had to get one when she went on sabbatical leave. Mildly Crispin replied that he didn’t know the ins and outs of it but he imagined that Josh had had a letter from his headmaster.

    Harriet was duly reduced to silence. Boy, imagine her turning up at eighteen in Paris with a letter from the head of Bells Road High! She had had an introductory letter at eighteen—yes. It was from the sympathetic Uncle Don to an old mate and his wife in Adelaide who wanted a boarder, because Harriet had decided she was gonna go to uni (in the teeth of Mum’s opposition) and she couldn’t swing the fare to Perth: Adelaide was as far away from Sydney as she could manage. After some probing by Crispin she burst out with this intel—not having meant, of course, to say any such thing. Somehow it made him very sympathetic and he kissed her and hugged her a lot and then somehow he found that he could again—if she felt like it?

    Strangely enough Harriet did feel like it, so they had another round. This time he did it for ages, ve-ry slow-ly, until she gave a terrific shriek, clawed his back furiously and came like the clappers, at which point he fucked madly for a few seconds and then came with the same roar as before.

    “Golly,” he managed to croak at long last, rolling off her with a great effort.

    “Yeah,” said Harriet very, very faintly.

    After quite some time he managed to pull her head onto his shoulder. Quite some time after that he managed to say, very faintly: “I think we must be sexually compatible, after all.”

    “Mmm,” said Harriet into his chest.

    Crispin’s arm tightened round her. “Mmm,” he agreed, smiling.

    When Harriet opened her eyes it was getting dark—not that the British climate had provided any sun today, but it was discernibly duller. “Help, did I go to sleep? What’s the time?”

    Crispin switched the bedside light on. “Getting on for seven. I’m afraid I’ll have to dash off, darling: I’m expected for dinner. How about you? Will the tour group be frantic if you don’t turn up for frozen peas and slime pudding?”

    “And pressed ham. With luck there might be potato salad, too. Stale and undercooked, sort of greyish and hard. –Well, probably: Jeavons went bananas when Amelia Jones and Cora Lee Kowalski were late the other day. They’d been for a stroll and stopped off at a dolling liddle Briddish pub.”

    He swallowed. “How graphic. I’ll grab a taxi, then, shall I, and drop you off?”

    Bugger. Why couldn’t she stay here, she didn’t mind dining on peanuts and potato crisps, even cold ones from the motel fridge, and it wouldn’t matter how late back he was— Oh, well. No doubt there was an elegant skinny lady waiting for him at this blimming dinner. Harriet swallowed a sigh. “Yeah, okay, ta.”

    In the taxi he put his arm round her and said: “It was lovely, Harriet.”

    “Yes,” said Harriet hoarsely.

    “Look, darling, can’t manage tonight, but I’ve kept the room on: could you possibly make it, tomorrow evening? I’m afraid I’ve got meetings all day tomorrow—see a man about a manuscript, kind of thing.”

    Harriet’s heart beat furiously fast and, though trying to tell herself this was mad, they had nothing in common except sex—well, Zola and Bach and a dislike of translations, that didn’t go far, and their senses of humour did sort of seem to mesh—she couldn’t convince herself to refuse sensibly. Even if she could have phrased it nicely, which she couldn’t.

    “We’ve got another stately home tomorrow, I’m not sure if it includes lunch or not, um, and a concert in the evening; I was sort of hoping that might be nice, Mary Lou Wiedermeyer said it was gonna be in the place Inspector Morse went to a concert, um, but I could skip that.”

    “Is this the Bach chorales?” he asked, smiling.

    “Um, I dunno, Crispin. The tour programme just said classical music.”

    “I think it must be, I don’t think there’s anything else on tomorrow night. Good, well, I was going to go to that too, so what say I simply kidnap you afterwards? And then we can have the whole night together.”

    Help, they’d all stare and wonder—aloud—who he was—and some of them, notably Jessie Craig, would probably uninhibitedly ask her in front of him—Louise Perkins, too, if he was wearing a suit anything like the one he had on today— Too blimming bad!

    “Yeah, okay, Crispin,” said Harriet hoarsely. “That’d be great.”

    Blefford Park was a monumental mansion after the style of Blenheim Palace. Louise Perkins obligingly read out all the intel from her guidebook as they drew up on the sweep but as several other people were simultaneously reading out the intel from their guidebooks, and Jeavons was giving them his standard spiel, Harriet just let it all wash over her. They visited the chapel first; this was the oldest structure, it had been part of the original Elizabethan house which an enterprising Earl of Blefford had pulled down, possibly when he got his earldom, but as Louise Perkins was reading loudly and Jessie Craig, having found the dinkum oil on the latest earl, was counting backwards loudly and Bruce Andrews was loudly correcting her counting, Harriet concluded she was never gonna know. Anyway, the chapel was still standing, it was lovely, and it had an incredibly beautiful gilded ceiling. Probably gilded wood, if what she thought the official Blefford Park guide was trying to say was correct. (Jeavons had handed them over and was now back in the bus with the driver, smoking. The bus was ostensibly a smoke-free zone but everyone now knew that the driver always smoked when he had to wait for them. Shortly before they were due back he did open his window and if it wasn’t too cold and gusty the door as well, but this hadn’t stopped Louise Perkins and Lionel Lamont, to name only two, from voicing loud and almost-verging-on-official complaints.)

    Harriet just ignored all the racket and looked up at the wonderful ceiling for ages and ages...

    After that, visiting the house could only have been described as going from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was awful. The Earls of Blefford, though certainly collecting a tremendous lot of stuff on their various Grand Tours, must have had no taste at all. The National Trust had faithfully restored most of the rooms to late eighteenth-century condition, this having been the period of the zenith (nadir would have been a better word) of the Grand Tour collecting, and they were without exception putrid. Likewise the choice of marble for all the pillars and staircases and plinths and you-name-its that cluttered the place. Red Siena jostled green from-God-knew-where, black-veined white, pure white, white-veined black, yellowish, brownish... Likewise the giant vases and tortured statuary. Cripes. The gigantic pure white Laocoön in the front hall was particularly impressive, or would have been, were it not for the large Buhl cabinets flanking him, his sons and his snakes, the enormous gilt clock on one of these cabinets, and on the other the huge—huge—porcelain thingummyjig arising out of a forest of lesser bronze lions, bronze Classical figures, and china shepherds and shepherdesses. Harriet goggled at the thingummyjig. What in God’s name was it? And were those parrots on it? There were certainly knobs of this, that and possibly flower buds, and definite leaves, and almost definite monkeys, modelled by someone who had never seen a monkey, and a lot of very European-looking roses, and possible tulips... Or possible lotuses. Was it an épergne? On any dinner table, even a regimental one, it would have blocked a goodly portion of one’s view of the other diners, but perhaps that had been its purpose... Only didn’t they usually have little platforms for little dishes or pineapples or—hang on, that was a pineapple!

    “Gee whillikins,” said Mary Lou Wiedermeyer’s awed voice in her ear at this point.

    Harriet collapsed in helpless sniggers.

    “I think it might be Dresden china,” said Mary Lou feebly.

    Harriet nodded helplessly, finally gasping: “Right—Meissen!”

    “However did he get it home?” she wondered.

    Alas, Harriet collapsed again.

    They were then led up the Grand Staircase (Harriet counted seven different shades of marble in that alone, never mind the gilded whojamaflickies perched on its various knobs and plinths) and into the Grand Gallery. Several people shivered and Harriet was very glad she’d put on her thickest jeans and, under the parka, which was still zipped up, three tee-shirts plus a cardy which she’d almost left behind in Australia. The Grand Gallery was lined in dark green marble slabs to about tit-height and above that hung with “a faithful facsimile” (wasn’t that redundant?) of the original brocade chosen by the then Earl on his return from his Grand Tour with his famous picture collection, unquote. Some of them were now in the National Portrait Gallery and several had gone to the Royal Collection, and the Rubens of course was blah-blah but these were the original Tintoretto and a set of two charming Canalettos, there were more in the Red Salon which they’d see later, and blah, blah, blah. He had definitely been colour-blind, because the brocade was a horrible shade of puce. Mrs Perkins unerringly identified it as magenta but Harriet happened to know that magenta had only been invented in the 19th century and to judge by the doubtful frown and the way her lips moved silently, Mary Lou Wiedermeyer knew it, too. So Harriet said quietly to her: “No, it hadn’t been invented yet. Puce.”

    “You’re right, honey. Gee, he just had no taste at all, huh?”

    That was right. Some of the pictures were really third-rate but the Tintoretto was pretty awesome and the Canalettos were charming but heck, on that puce background they were all killed stone dead. A number featured scarlet this and thats—cloaks and draperies and so forth—and, as Mary Lou said in awe, they just screamed at that puce wall. Above the puce were heavy marble garlands of cupids, flowers, laurel wreaths, emperors’ heads—Huh? Okay, guide lady, emperors’ heads—and this one was the Earl himself! Supported by two cupids blowing trumpets, charming. (Not.)

    Above the garlands—oh, yes: that wasn’t the end of it, by no means—above that there were small—smallish—panels of alternating brown and yellow marble separated, or perhaps framed, by heavy strips of veined Siena, and above that you hardly noticed the ornate plaster ceiling from the hand of Whosis with its further garlands and bosses and— Strewth. It was only the Grand Gallery’s ceiling, of course: the ceiling of the actual front hall, pardon, Great Hall, was miles above them with skylights and gigantic chandeliers on gilded chains and more plaster and loads more gilding and painted panels featuring pink-tinted cupids gambolling amidst pink- and gold-tinted clouds on very blue skies...

    After some time Harriet managed to ask the guide—the poor woman wasn’t saying anything because Louise Perkins and Bruce Andrews were both holding forth—if the pictures were hung in the same order as they had been originally. As far as was ascertainable, was the answer. Cripes. At the moment they were standing in front of a sweetly pretty, pastel Arcadian scene of a shepherd and shepherdess in eighteenth-century dress with a Pan in a hairy rug, possibly after Watteau, with next to it on the left a scowling Dutch gentleman in a helmet holding a pike, a long way after Rembrandt, and on the right a violent battle scene with writhing horses and billowing scarlet cloaks by God-Knew-Who; and above them a long, narrow, very brown view of what, after the experiences the other day, looked to Harriet very much like the Norfolk Broads in a fog, and above that again two nice little Dutch flower studies that you could hardly see from this distance being jostled by a dark-faced, possibly Spanish gentleman in severe black with a tiny ruff and a possible astrolabe, if you’d been able to see it from this distance. They moved along, to be faced by a huge and very saccharine Italian thing of the Madonna and Child with St. Francis and St. John the Baptist—had they ever even been in the same room together? Never mind: artistic licence. Mannerist, was it? No, after the Mannerists, the guide was informing Bruce Andrews. So be it. Chiaroscuro—Louise Perkins was sure right about that, in fact it was the seventeenth-century version of HD TV. Jumped right out of the frame at ya: right.

    They moved on... It didn’t get worse, true. There were even, as the dazed Mary Lou ascertained, some real nice pieces. But the Red Salon was unspeakable: the hearty red of the faithful facsimile of the original hangings—walls and, uh, not curtains, precisely, festoons—this red successfully drowned not only the pictures, another mish-mash, with dead game jostling yet more simpering cupids, soulful Madonnas, simpering Venuses and the odd Dutch genre thing looking lost, but also the many cabinets, commodes, side tables, occasional chairs and so forth, not to mention a couple of really beautiful Persian rugs, neither of which contained any shade approaching that hearty, heavy red. The upholstered furniture was either covered in more of the same, especially the ormolu stuff—cheerful, yes—or in the original tapestry work, of, gee, pastel Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses, now faded to Hell and gone despite all the National Trust’s doubtless best efforts. Yes, that sure was a beautiful Venetian mirror over the fireplace. Pity the said fireplace was that particularly depressing shade of dark green marble, huh?

    They staggered on. Huge lump of gold writhing on a white-veined black marble plinth. Greek wrestlers. Uh, okay, done by an Italian hand, but— Yeah. White marble Venus, sculptor unknown. The Green Salon. Oh, Christ. The Music Room. Wonderful old forte piano, glided harp, and charming spinet, with lovely lutes and mandolins displayed enticingly on the walls, all hung in a faithful facsimile of the original vile mustard brocade...

    And now for the picture gallery! –No, that had been the Grand Gallery, this was the picture gallery, housing the main collection! Jesus, was the woman barmy? They’d already had to pause the tour twice: once because Kathleen O’Riordan, Helen Lamont and Janette Connors had needed the bogs and once because Lionel Lamont and Vincent Perkins had needed the guess what. They tottered off to the picture gallery. Okay, right, this was where the family portraits were hung. Well, yes, more or less in the original order, Mr—Andrews, was it?—lovely smile, not seeing him—yes, Mr Andrews, with some slight rearrangement to offer a more or less chronological blah-blah. Okay, early Barons Blefford. (Right, hadn’t yet got the earldom, thought so.) And Baronesses, yep. Not a Holbein, no, Mrs Perkins—she didn’t need to hesitate over that name, poor woman—attributed to Lucas Hornebout. Mrs Perkins was wildly excited, because she was sure there was a portrait in the Art Gallery of South Australia attributed to Lucas Hornebout! Now, was it the famous one of Henry VIII? The guide just smiled nicely and blankly, so she must have learned the stuff up like a parrot. And this was the companion piece, it was thought to be by the same hand, but that attribution was less—Mrs Perkins was sure it was, so gee, it musta been. The lady in question looked horribly grim but then, if she’d been married to the distinctly dissipated-looking Baron Blefford, who was pretty much a blond version of Henry VIII, it wasn’t just the clothes, she’d probably had good reason for grimness. An Elizabethan matched pair, unfortunately by an inferior hand. Their children. The ladylike guide didn’t say so, but theirs was by a very inferior hand: they all looked like miniature wooden grown-ups, the proportions were all wrong. Now, the next was generally admired and had been on loan quite recently in a most successful exhibition—

    Harriet wasn’t listening: she was gaping incredulously at a full-length portrait of Crispin Narrowmine in a floral pastel Elizabethan jerkin and awful white tights, standing with his weight on one leg, the other negligently bent in the most pansy pose she’d seen in her entire lifetime including the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, negligently holding a palest pink rose to his nose.

    “Oh, my!” cried Mary Lou. “Isn’t that just darling?”

    The ladies had clustered round and the guide was telling them who it was attributed to but Harriet didn’t hear a word. She came to, more or less, her heart thumping erratically and her head spinning, just when Louise Perkins was asking keenly who it was and Paul Harmon, who had been overheard quite some time back complaining about his aching feet, might have been heard muttering very quietly into Mr Perkins’s ear: “I bet he was gay.”

    “That’s Crispin Narrowmine, the third son of the Lord Blefford of the day.”

    “Crispin!” cried Mary Lou. “My, isn’t that pretty! It sure does suit him!”

    “Yeah, that oughta be a pansy, not a rose,” muttered Vincent Perkins very, very quietly and sourly to Paul Harmon.

    “He can’t be,” croaked Harriet.

    Louise Perkins had been pretending not to overhear the two male wits’ exchange and was very red. “That’ll do, Vincent!” she said sharply. “It’s art! And I’m sure he wasn’t, Harriet.”

    “No, I mean his name,” said Harriet numbly.

    “Crispin Narrowmine,” repeated the guide automatically, in the tones of one who knew she had to sing each song twice over and in fact was so used to the general inattention and deafness of the tourists that she didn’t even notice it any more. “Narrowmine is the family name of the Earls of Blefford.”

    Stephen O’Riordan had been loftily ignoring his peers and consulting his guidebook (instead of looking at the actual objects on display: it was a common syndrome and at any other time Harriet would have been amused by it). Now he announced proudly: “Crispin Henry Rupert Harpingdon Narrowmine. Oh, yes, possibly by—hmm. English school, at any rate. This is interesting: very like two of the later Narrowmines hung in the gallery.”

    Mrs Perkins pounced. “Ah! So a Narrowmine had already married a Harpingdon! That, you know, is the title of the eldest son!” she informed the group at large.

    No-one responded to this titbit except the guide, who managed to smile and nod, and they all moved on... Except Harriet. It was Crispin to the life. God, she might have known!

    She caught up with them as they reached the Lely, complete with Louise Perkins’s intel, pre-empting the guide, that it was under the Restoration that the Narrowmines had got their earldom. Harriet scowled. Yeah, they’d have been Royalists, all right. Not that she held any brief for the Nonconformists, either, but at least they’d had some faint notion that the upper classes needn’t have it all their own way.

    They moved on...

    “Why, look!” cried Mary Lou. “Here he is again! Harriet, honey, just look, it’s the pretty young man again! Well, his descendant, I guess! Gee, they sure must be the family features, huh? Did you notice one of those pretty ladies, the William and Mary one, I think, had them too?”

    “Yes,” Harriet replied hoarsely.

    The guide said briskly: “This is generally considered one of the finest portraits in the collection, though the artist is not one of the most famous English portrait painters of the 18th century. Francis Cotes. Circa 1760. Portrait of Crispin Narrowmine, Lord Harpingdon.”

    The young man was seated in a window, leaning his arm on the sill and staring into space, the face rendered in three-quarter profile. He wore what was perhaps a blond tie-wig, perhaps his own fair hair, very neatly pulled back with only one tight roll over the ears, and a dull fawn coat open to display a waistcoat of blue silk and a long, lace-edged cravat. The artist had evidently done his best with the hands, which were lily-white faintly tinged with pink, but they were not the delicate ones of the Elizabethan portrait but very definitely the rather square ones of today’s Crispin Narrowmine. They were holding an open book, half-propped on the windowsill. Harriet swallowed hard.

    Jill Harmon came up to Mary Lou’s side and said: “I can’t think who he reminds me of... As well as that, Paul!” she added sharply. Ignoring her husband pointedly, she said to Harriet and Mary Lou: “At first you think he’s quite ordinary-looking, don’t you, and then when you look harder...”

    “Yeah, I’d sure walk barefoot to wherever it-was, as Shakespeare put it, for a touch of his nether lip!” said Mary Lou with a chuckle.

    “Of course! That’s it!” cried Mrs Harmon. “Robson Green! It’s the mouth!”

    Harriet swallowed again.

    “Especially in his earlier things. Our Bryony was over here for a working holiday a few years back and she sent me a DVD of Touching Evil—did you get that in Australia? Not suitable for children, of course.” Not waiting for a reply, she swept on: “It was rather horrid really, I mean, really evil serial killers and so forth, but then, so many stories are coming out about real paedophile rings these days, nothing’d surprise me any more. I said to Paul, I can’t say I’m enjoying these things Bryony sent out, though they’re very well done, of course. But you have to admit he was lovely. Did you get Wire in the Blood? That was horrid, too. I think he was older in that.”

    Mary Lou had been looking from one to the other of them during this speech, her wide, pink-cheeked face expressing nothing very much. Now she said briskly: “That sure sounds interesting, Jill. An English actor, is he? –Yeah. We just do not get all the good English series, back home. Now, I wonder if there’ll be a Gainsborough? You can say what you like, nothing can beat your real good Gainsborough when it comes to 18th-century portrait painting, and I said to my Hal, God bless him, this was the year before he left us, if there’s one thing I gotta see in California, Hal, honey, it’s Gainsborough’s Blue Boy...” Burbling gently, she led her away.

    Harriet just sagged. It was too much!

    The Gainsborough was past, so was the better Reynolds, so was the somewhat inferior Reynolds, said to have been largely his pupils’ work, so were the Lawrence and the Raeburn, and innumerable Victorian efforts, including an astounding Winterhalter that at any other time Harriet would have stood and gaped at: the lady’s crinoline was wider than the good-sized sofa she was sitting on: floods of it, palest pink silk dotted with tiny knots of pink and blue ribbon and embroidered here and there with tiny blue posies. But the very fair hair, not in ringlets as she would have expected, but gathered back in a sort of huge bunch at her neck, was Crispin Narrowmine’s fair hair, and the very clear blue eyes were his, too. Not to say that white skin of the chest, of which a lot was on display. Without, in the lady’s case, the sprinkling of gold hair, of course. Harriet had to swallow again. And got left behind again as the tour group moved on...

    “Oh, my, this is a Whistler,” said Mary Lou in awed tones.

    “Yes: Lady Blefford, or Study in Black and White,” agreed Harriet with an attempt at a smile.

    Mary Lou gave her a sharp look but said only: “Uh-huh.”

    The guide, who had been looking at her watch, was urging them on. Now, here were the Sargents! This was an earlier one: Lord Harpingdon, circa 1890, who tragically fell in the Boer War some years lat—yes, full regimentals, Mrs Perkins. Which—? Er, um— “Grenadier Guards,” supplied Bruce Andrews helpfully. Immediately Stephen O’Riordan corrected this to “Brigade of Guards” and battle was fairly joined...

    This was the later Sargent, one of the rare portraits of the period, as he painted fewer after 1907. This one dated to circa 1910 and showed the Earl of Blefford, the younger brother of the Lord Harpingdon of the previous portrait, who inherited the title owing to his brother’s tragic— No, Mrs—Mrs Andrews: this was after the father died and he became Lord Blefford. Yes, Mr Andrews, this was the third of the portraits of the fair Narrowmines who looked so alike. Officiously Bruce Andrews read out: “‘Generally acknowledged to be one of the finest portraits in the Blefford Park Collection.’ This is interesting, the name Crispin must run in the family: Portrait of John Crispin Rupert Harpingdon Narrowmine, 11th Earl of Blefford.”

    Mary Lou put a supporting arm round Harriet’s waist. “Honey, are you feeling ill? –Pardon me, this lady needs to sit down!” she said loudly.

    Immediately a terrific fuss arose and a chair that was not roped off from the hoi polloi was eventually found for her and, by this time heartily wishing she was dead, Harriet was duly sat down on it.

    “I’ll look to her,” said Mary Lou sturdily. “We’ll just make our own way back to the coach in a little while.” Immediately another terrific fuss arose but finally they all pushed off—they hadn’t yet seen the ballroom.

    “Don’t you want to see the ballroom?” said Harriet very faintly to her kind companion.

    “No, I don’t guess I do, honey, not if it’s more of the same! Gee, what a waste of a grand old Georgian house, huh? And the funny thing is, some of them look as if they’ve got taste, judging by what they’re wearing in their portraits.’

    “Yes, the bloody Narrowmines know how to dress, all right,” said Harriet grimly. Inexplicably then bursting into tears.

    Mrs Wiedermeyer just patted her shoulder and didn’t say a single, solitary thing. Which proved, didn’t it, that Harriet’s opinion of Americans had been totally blind and prejudiced. Or at least a gross generalisation.

    The rest of the day passed in a fog. They had lunch somewhere—Jessie Craig in particular being insistent that Harriet should get something solid into her stomach—and drove round miles of soggy green Oxfordshire. Harriet just looked bleakly out of the window and tried to make her mind a perfect blank. Blimming Lord Peter Wimsey and then some! Why had she ever— Well, her all over, of course.

    Why the discovery that Crispin must be closely related to the family who had once owned Blefford Park should have so overset her, she didn’t pause to reflect. Nor did she put the point to herself that she’d known all along he was a well-off, upper-class English gent and as she was due to go back to the other side of the world very soon and would never see him again, could it matter? Or that, logically, nothing had changed.

    She’d decided that nothing on God’s earth would persuade her to go anywhere near him again and she’d skip the concert this evening but somehow, after Jessie had nagged her into going downstairs and having her dinner (grey shepherd’s pie, frozen peas and brown slime pudding), a grim determination replaced her earlier soggy despair, and she decided she would ruddy well go, and sod him! Why should she miss out on a lovely Bach concert just because he was an up-himself Pommy prick that had never let on he was related to a ruddy earl? This was not the best mood in which to enjoy Bach, true, but though somewhere at the back of her mind this thought did arise, Harriet grimly ignored it.

    The competent Jessie had taken charge of her—ex officio, as her room-mate, presumably—and steered her onto the coach, but as Suzie O’Callaghan, Mary Lou’s friend, distracted her by asking her a question about the building the concert was to be held in, didn’t sit down beside her. Mary Lou came and sat quietly beside her instead.

    “I met one of them,” said Harriet abruptly as they set off.

    “Yeah, I gathered that, honey. You don’t have to tell me,” she murmured, patting her hand.

    Scowling, Harriet revealed: “He never said he was related to them.”

    “Maybe he didn’t want to boast about his connections, Harriet, honey.”

    Harriet lapsed into scowling silence.

    The Bach might have been wonderful: certainly Mary Lou sat through it with shining eyes and a flush on her round cheeks, and even Louise Perkins didn’t compare the performers unfavourably to anything she and Vincent had heard in Adelaide or any other part of the world; but Harriet didn’t really hear a note. The concert hall wasn’t very big but big enough, and it was full, she couldn’t see Crispin, but she was bloody sure he must be here. There was quite a long interval but Mary Lou just said she was sure there’d be a crowd, what say they just stay here? And Suzie quickly agreed. So Harriet, safely flanked by the two kindly ladies from Denver, just slouched down in her seat and remained unmolested by wandering Narrowmines.

    When the concert finished, however, Jeavons surfaced and ordered the tour party loudly to remain in their seats—please remain in your seat, Mrs Perkins—please stay where you are, Mr O’Riordan!—the coach would be round to collect them after the crowd had cleared. No, no autographs, Mrs Hatton. No, there will be an opportunity to use the conveniences when the crowd has cleared, Mr Lamont. Please remain seated.

    “I guess we just remain seated, huh?” said Suzie Callaghan with a jolly chuckle.

    They remained seated for some time. Unlike the Adelaide audiences to which Harriet was used—or rather, which were apt to make her cringe with embarrassment—people had not started pushing their way out past other people’s knees before the performers had even finished taking their bows. Her very worst experience ever had been at a lovely kabuki performance given at one of the Adelaide Festivals by a real Japanese troupe. For a start, a lot of people had arrived late, and very loud—and obviously very drunk, not unusual during the Festival, true. Then at the end the usual shoving to get out first had started up at the same time as the applause from the politer members of the audience, and the rude pushers and shovers had marched out not even acknowledging the presence in the doorway of a small group of people including the Japanese troupe’s producer, oh, God! Harriet herself had smiled shyly at him and done her best to give a sort of half-Japanese bow, hoping he wouldn’t be offended either by her awkwardness or by a gaijin’s temerity in attempting a bow at all, and murmured: “Thank you very much.” She hadn’t felt, however, that this in any way compensated for the rudeness of those loud, very well-dressed people. The more so as she had been wearing tired cotton slacks and a washed-out blouse that had seen better days—the weather was very hot and she’d had a late tutorial and hadn’t had time to change.

    At long last Jeavons shepherded them all out into the lobby, and gee, Crispin came right up to her and said with a laugh: “There you are, Harriet! I was beginning to think the place had swallowed you up!”

    Mary Lou, well-meaning as she was, might have been heard to gulp, and Suzie gave a gasp. And before Harriet, whose throat had closed up completely, could say anything—not that she could think of anything to say, though she’d thought of a fair few things earlier—bloody Louise Perkins cried: “Good gracious, do you know this gentleman, Harriet, my dear? But surely,”—coy smile—“it can’t be a coincidence, not after seeing all the wonderful portraits at Blefford Park only this morning!” –Coy leer.

    “Oh, Lor’, did you?” said Crispin to Harriet with a rueful grin.

    “Yes.”

    “Hideous lot, aren’t they?”

    “Oh, no!” cried Louise vividly. “Such a handsome family, we all thought so!”

    “I didn’t,” said Harriet stolidly.

    “See the blond clone of Henry VIII? He’s my favourite fright,” said Crispin, grinning.

    By this time the whole tour party was agog, of course.

    Harriet took a deep breath. “Crispin, can we—”

    “Oh, my!” cried Meredith Andrews loudly. “Don’t tell us he’s a Crispin, too!”

    Crispin took a look at Harriet’s puce and scowling face. “That’s perfectly correct, madam, though I’m afraid I can’t produce the white tights, the rose and the simper for you.”—Here Paul Harmon gave a definite snigger and Vincent Perkins smothered a cough.—“Come along, Harriet, we’ll be late for our appointment.” And he seized her elbow and led her briskly away, to a chorus of disappointed cries and not nearly sotto voce remarks.

    “Just round here—get in, quick, before they think of some excuse to pursue us!” he said with a laugh in his voice, steering her rapidly round a corner and opening a car door for her.

    “Why in Hell did you have to wear a dinner suit? Bloody Louise Perkins is bad enough, without that,” said Harriet tiredly as he got in. –This wasn’t, of course, what she’d intended to say. What she’d intended to say, supposing she spoke to him at all, had been something very dignified along the lines of: “This whole thing was a mistake, and we’d better end it. Goodbye.”

    “What? Well, dining with the Warden,” he said numbly.

    “Right. This is his car, then, is it?”

    “No, it’s my brother’s,” said Crispin weakly.

    “That’ll be the Earl of Blefford, would it?” replied Harriet very nastily indeed.

    “I call him John, but yes. Um, look, Harriet, I can’t help my family, any more than you can help yours.”

    After a moment Harriet’s innate honesty compelled her to say: “Mum is pretty ghastly.”

    “There you are, then,” he murmured.

    “But it wasn’t me that was hiding things! Why didn’t you tell me?” she burst out. “What are you, anyway? A bloody lord or something?”

    “Uh—yeah. I don’t use it, really, but I am Lord Crispin Narrowmine—yes. It’s only an honorary title, Harriet, and I’m not responsible for it. Though I’m truly sorry if it offends your republican sensibilities.”

    “Sensib—!” Harriet choked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

    Crispin bit his lip. “Well, um, in the first place I sort of thought you might make the connection, the name Narrowmine isn’t unknown in Oxfordshire—”

    “I’m from Australia!” she cried loudly.

    “Yes. I’m sorry, Harriet. When it dawned how you feel about bloody Lord Peter Wimsey I felt that it might be the last straw and you’d walk off without a backwards glance if I let on about the bloody title,” he admitted miserably.

    Harriet breathed deeply.

    Crispin swallowed hard. “Can’t you for God’s sake just see me as a person? I’m—I’m the same person as I was yesterday.”

    “That’s the flaming trouble,” replied Harriet sourly.

    “Look, this is inverse snobbery, Harriet!”

    “I dare say. It might not be, if you hadn’t been so underhand.”

    “I wasn’t! I just—I was afraid of spoiling my chances. Christ, can’t you make any allowances for human weaknesses?” he cried bitterly.

    Harriet had to swallow hard. After a moment she admitted: “Dad always used to say that was my besetting sin.”

    “I think he was right,” he said tightly.

    They drove on in silence.

    Eventually Crispin said in a low voice: “Will you at least give me chance to—to make it up to you? To prove that I do care about you as a person, and that the bloody title doesn’t matter a damn?”

    “You can’t make it up, because you did it. And kindly don’t try to seduce me.”

    He gave a shaken laugh and said: “I thought I’d already done that! In fact, I thought it was mutual.”

    “It WAS mutual,” shouted Harriet, “and that was because I didn’t know you were a bloody lord and please take me back to the hotel!”

    “To the avid curiosity and the rabid gossip?”

    “YES! And don’t make a joke of it! It’s not funny to me!”

    He swallowed. “It’s not funny to me, either. Look, we’re nearly at the motel: couldn’t we just go in and—and talk it over calmly?”

    “No. There’s nothing to talk over. We’re from different worlds and we’ve got different standards and I was stupid to let it start.”

    Crispin went very red. “We have not got different standards! I just didn’t want to risk losing you before I’d even started! And if the bloody title doesn’t matter to me, why the Hell should it matter to you?”

    “Take me back to the hotel!” shouted Harriet.

    “Very well, if that’s how you want it,” he said grimly.

    He turned the car and drove her to the hotel in dead silence.

    He made one last effort as they drew up. “Look, my brother’s a farmer, he leads as simple a life as anyone in Austr—”

    “Shut up. That’s got nothing to with it.”

    “Harriet, for God’s sake! We had something really good together—at least, I thought so. Don’t throw it away out of some daft preconceived notion of bloody class differences or whatever the Hell it is!”

    By this time Harriet couldn’t have said, actually, what the Hell it was. “You would think it was daft. They’re the sort of differences that allow you to tell lies to the lower orders without thinking it matters, and they’re not daft to me. Thank you for the lift.” With this she got out and hurried into the hotel.

    “Fuck!” said Crispin violently.

    Judging by the racket the tour group was jammed into the hotel’s small lounge knocking back the gin and the sweet sherry—their usual practice. Harriet hurried quietly upstairs. Phew—no sign of Jessie! Rapidly she got ready for bed.

    Having switched the light out she pulled the covers right up over her ears and shut her eyes tightly. It had been stupid, really stupid, and she wasn’t ever gonna think about Crispin Narrowmine again. Anyway, the tour was due to end tomorrow, so it couldn’t have lasted, could it? Anyway, she was never gonna think about him again. She was gonna forget him entirely.

    Crispin couldn’t face the motel, and he’d thanked the Warden for his hospitality and said goodbye. He drove back to his brother’s place. John lived in the old dower house and farmed what was left of the Blefford Park estate after generations of gamblers, spendthrifts, taxes, and death duties had done their worst. Canola—rapeseed. It wasn’t glamorous but it was a living: the whole of Britain seemed to live off rapeseed marg and rapeseed oil. And the fields were quite pretty when in flower, if miles of uninterrupted intense yellow was somewhat monotonous.

    John was still up, reading. “Hullo,” he said mildly as his brother came into the sitting-room, looking sour. “The date fall through?”

    “She’s insane,” said Crispin shortly, throwing himself into a chair and scowling at the electric fire.

    Since the divorce his little brother had more than had his share—more than—so John didn’t look particularly disturbed. In fact he said: “Good Lord, you’ve found the one sensible woman under forty in Britain.”

    “Not under forty, as a matter of fact, since you’ve raised the point.”

    John’s jaw sagged. “Eh?”

    “Only a year younger than me.”

    “Eh?”

    “Stop saying eh!” he shouted.

    “Ssh, you’ll wake Elinor and the kids. Uh—thought you said she was the Consuelo type?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Uh—oh! Good Lord,” said John slowly: “Consuelo at forty-one, that it?”

    “Shut—up,” said Crispin between his teeth,

    “Look,” he said with a sigh, hauling himself up, “have a drink and tell us what went wrong, old man.”

    Crispin scowled but allowed his brother to give him a stiff whisky.

    The explanation was rather involved and distinctly self-exculpatory, but John got the gist. “Good Christ,” he said slowly. “A woman of principle.”

    “Insane principle,” Crispin corrected sourly. “Look, it was—it was piffling! I mean, I don’t use the damned handle, you know that, John!”

    “No, you’d look pretty bloody daft swanning round ’5 calling yourself Major Lord Crispin Narrowmine,” he agreed.

    “Yeah.”

    John looked at him rather limply. “Well, I don't know, dear old boy. I suppose, if she was going back to Australia anyway, it could never have come to anything... Perhaps she’ll calm down, if you give her a little time, Crispin. Did you get her home address?”

    “No,” he said shortly. He got up. “I was going to, all right?” he said irritably. “In fact, tonight I was going to suggest going out there on my next leave— Oh, forget it!” With this he stalked out.

    “Oh, shit,” said the fourteenth Earl of Blefford numbly.

Next chapter:

https://trialsofharrietharrison.blogspot.com/2023/10/no-weddings-and-funeral.html