The Case of the Abominable Snowman Page 2

  ‘Oh, but really now,’ Nigel protested. ‘I can’t traipse over to Essex to find a missing cat.’

  ‘Go on. There’s more to the cat than that.’

  ‘– a cat,’ resumed Nigel, ‘belonging to Hereward Restorick, of Easterham Manor. I am not, I hope, fantastic in declaring that there was more – to use a cant phrase – than meets the eye in this cat’s behaviour. Unpredictable as are the ways of its tribe, we may yet have cause to wonder when such a creature generates universal alarm by transforming itself into a delirious Dervish. Though in the autumn of my years, I conceive I am not yet so much deprived of wit that I should attribute to the Supernatural what may surely be resolved by Reason. Should the ingenious Mr Strangeways lend his counsel to my own poor observations, he would, I make no doubt, bring lux e tenebris and in so doing ease the curiosity – nay, the worse apprehensions of

  Yr. obliged cousin,

  CLARISSA CAVENDISH.’

  When Nigel had got his breath back after the perusal of this extraordinary missive, he remarked to Georgia:

  ‘Well, really, you do have the most eccentric relatives. Who is this eighteenth century fantastic?’

  ‘I’ve not seen her for years. Not since she went to live at Easterham. Some great-uncle of mine left her a fair packet of money and she bought the Dower House, so they tried to clap her into a bin.’

  ‘Darling Georgia, please don’t talk shorthand at this hour of the morning. Why should they clap her into a bin for buying a Dower House? And who are “they”?’

  ‘The cousins who thought they should have got the legacy, of course. And it wasn’t because she bought the house, but because she acted so strange after buying it.’

  ‘As for instance –?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll see all that when we’ve got there.’

  ‘Now, Georgia, please. The ingenious Mr Strangeways is not going all the way to Essex, in wartime, to stay with an aged lunatic and investigate a cat which transforms itself into a delirious Dervish.’

  ‘He is. And she isn’t. What I remember of her, she was remarkably sane. And altogether charming. If she prefers to live in the reign of George III, rather than Queen Victoria’s like most old ladies, that doesn’t mean she’s soft in the head.’

  So it was settled. A few days later they arrived at Chelmsford where, as Miss Cavendish had announced in a stately telegram, a conveyance could be chartered to carry them the last stage of their journey. They had not, however, bargained for the severity of the weather in this part of the country; though in Devonshire it had been harsh enough. An icy east wind flailed at them as they emerged from the station; snow was piled everywhere; under the pewter-coloured sky all life seemed at a standstill.

  ‘Brrh,’ muttered Nigel. ‘So we’re to be frozen alive at the start of this wild-cat chase. Let’s go home again.’

  Even Georgia, whose experience as an explorer might have inured her to such rigours, felt a qualm of regret for their warm, thatched cottage in the south-west. However, they found a taxi-driver willing to brave the perils of the Easterham road, and set forth. The ten-mile journey took over an hour, by the time they had dug themselves out of a couple of drifts and narrowly escaped sliding into a river at a right-angled turn. When, finally, they reached Easterham it was almost dusk.

  The Dower House overlooked what must have been the village green, though the ubiquitous snow had obliterated all such features. It could not, however, entirely efface the charm of Miss Cavendish’s home, a red-brick building whose symmetry of window and chimney, sharply-pitched roof and snug dormers, portico, fanlight, and wrought-iron gate, muffled up as they were with snow, still retained, like an elegant woman heavily furred, the essential assurance of beauty.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ whispered Georgia. ‘Nobody could live in a perfect house like this and keep their insanity.’

  Nigel was doubtful of the logic of this remark. But his brain, numbed by the cold, had room for only one thought – how huge a house this was to accommodate so tiny a woman. For Clarissa Cavendish, who received them in the hall, was a mannikin, a mere wisp and miniature of a woman, as delicate in filigree as a snowflake, with white hair piled high on her head, and a complexion that was a triumph – whether of art or nature, Nigel could not be sure.

  ‘It is vastly horrid, this snow, is it not?’ she remarked in a crisp, tinkling voice all of a piece with her appearance. ‘You must be fatigued after your journey. I will show you your room. Then we will take a dish of tay, Georgia. Mr Strangeways will no doubt prefer clarry.’

  Nigel protested that he did not drink claret at four-thirty in the afternoon.

  ‘The bottle will serve for dinner, then,’ said Miss Cavendish – a reply whose significance Nigel was soon to realize.

  After tea, their hostess offered to show them over her house. Nigel, already fascinated by the many beautiful pieces he noticed around them in the drawing-room – the Hepplewhite chairs, a Bartolozzi engraving, a set of miniatures by Cosway, a side-table bearing several superb examples of Battersea enamel, a cabinet filled with fans, toys, snuff-boxes and knick-knacks of elaborate craftsmanship, the silk hangings and the Adam fireplace – accepted eagerly.

  It was certainly a big house, bigger even than he had imagined. Miss Cavendish, a tiny figure erect as a ramrod, went in front, leading them from room to room. Each room had the lovely proportions of its age. Even the electric lights which Miss Cavendish switched on, with a cavalier disregard for the black-out, making the crystal chandeliers sparkle like frozen cascades, did not destroy the illusion of another age: the doors were mahogany, the walls washed in delicate tints of green, yellow, blue, and dove-grey.

  ‘Lovely,’ Nigel kept repeating mechanically: ‘a perfect room.’ He kept pinching himself, too, to make sure that he was not dreaming. Georgia he did not dare to glance at. For every single room they entered, with the exception of the drawing-room, a small morning-room, Miss Cavendish’s and their own bedrooms, was stark staring empty. Not a single piece of furniture, not a curtain or a carpet adorned their exquisite symmetry. When they had returned to the drawing-room, Nigel cast about vainly for some comment which would do justice to the situation and no violence to Miss Cavendish’s sensibilities. Georgia, however, with her customary directness, went straight to the point.

  ‘Why do you keep all those rooms empty, Cousin Clarissa?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I cannot afford to furnish them in the style they demand, my dear,’ was the reasonable reply. ‘I had rather live in the part of a beautiful house than in the whole of an ugly one. You will allow that an old woman has a right to her fancies.’

  ‘I call it very sensible,’ said Nigel. ‘You have an elastic house. You can expand or contract within it according to the fluctuations of your income.’

  ‘Mr Strangeways,’ announced Clarissa Cavendish, ‘I perceive we are going to understand each other.’

  ‘You could put a grand piano in each of those rooms, and have ten pianists down to stay, and play them all together. The resonance would be remarkable with those high ceilings,’ said Georgia dreamily.

  ‘I nauseate the piano. It is an instrument fit only for tradesmen’s daughters to practise upon. The spinet is very well. The harpsichord will do. But the piano I believe to be a very vulgar pretentious noise. I am surprised at Restorick for playing it.’

  ‘Restorick?’

  ‘Hereward Restorick owns Easterham Manor. It has been in his family for a tolerable time now. It was they who built the Dower House.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Nigel. ‘He’s the chap whose cat has brought us together, isn’t he? Will you tell us about the cat, Miss Cavendish?’

  ‘After dinner, Mr Strangeways. It is a story which must wait upon good digestion. I am an old woman, and not to be rushed.’

  In their bedroom two hours later, dressing for dinner, Georgia said to Nigel: ‘I hope I’ve not done wrong, dragging you down here.’

  ‘Darling, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. But what made her
like this?’

  ‘It’s all coming back to me. Clarissa was one of the first blue-stockings – a don at Girton, I think. She made her name as an historian: the eighteenth century was her period, and she just soaked in it. Then she had a complete nervous breakdown – overwork, and I believe there was an unhappy love-affair: when she recovered, a part of her had got permanently stuck in the Georgian age. Of course, she had to give up her position; and she had a hardish time, teaching as a governess, till the legacy came along.’

  A faint, fragile chime, like the notes of a musical-box, came up the stairs. Georgia and Nigel went down for dinner. The white panelled morning-room set off their hostess’s grace and brilliant complexion; her eyes sparkled with sedate pleasure. Nigel was touched, seeing in this old woman the intelligence, the gay independence of the girl she had once been. To think of her as a governess, at the mercy of brusque or patronizing employers, gave one a really sickening qualm.

  A village woman, looking oddly fancy-dressed in her mob cap and short, muslin apron, waited upon them. The food was excellent, though the helpings were fined down to Miss Cavendish’s physique – a slip of sole, a tiny round of a tournedos, and wafer-thin fritters.

  ‘We must celebrate your first night here,’ said their hostess. ‘Annie, the bottle of clarry.’

  It was, quite evidently, the one and only bottle of claret in her cellar. But it proved to be an excellent Chateau Beychevelle, and Nigel complimented her upon it.

  ‘It is a wine Harry was most partial to, I remember,’ said Clarissa Cavendish; a faint twinge of some emotion, to which Nigel could not put a name, showed on her enamelled face. ‘You will forgive me,’ she went on, ‘if I drink champagne. I cannot drink any wine but champagne.’

  Annie half filled her glass from a bottle that had been opened before this evening. The champagne was flat as stale water. Clarissa Cavendish squirted soda-water into it, raised the glass gravely to Nigel, and said:

  ‘A glass of wine with you, Mr Strangeways.’

  The blizzard howled outside the shutters. The old house stood firm as a rock. It seemed a night, desolate without, warm and reassuring within, made for ghost stories, and, as if she had taken the thought from his mind, Clarissa Cavendish, leading the way into the drawing-room, said in the crisp tones of a don probing her pupil’s knowledge –

  ‘Mr Strangeways, I desire to know whether you accept the supernatural.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘A harmless, necessary cat.’

  SHAKESPEARE

  ‘I BELIEVE THERE are more things in heaven and earth –’

  ‘Come, sir,’ interrupted Miss Cavendish, rapping her jewelled fingers smartly on her side-table. ‘I am not to be evaded by quotations.’

  Nigel tried again. ‘Well, then, I believe we do not yet fully comprehend the laws of nature, that nature may even make exceptions to its own laws, but that it is our duty to look for rational explanations of all phenomena.’

  ‘That is better. I conclude, then, that if you were to see a cat attempting to batter its brains out against a wall, you would not in the first place assume it to be possessed by a devil or attacking some ghostly apparition visible only to its own eyes: you would rather suppose it be rendered phrenetic by some internal disorder.’

  ‘Cat’s rabies,’ suggested Georgia flippantly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nigel. ‘The creature must have fits. Or else it was in agonizing pain.’

  ‘Scribbles never has fits,’ said Miss Cavendish severely. ‘And a few minutes after its droll display, it was fast asleep.’

  ‘I think you had better start at the beginning,’ Nigel said.

  The old lady, drawing herself even more upright, composed her fingers in her lap. Every now and then they made little gestures, as though toying with a fan. For the rest, nothing of her moved during her strange narrative except the mouth and the dark brown, scintillating eyes.

  ‘My story opens on the fourth day before Christmas. I was taking tay with Charlotte Restorick, Hereward’s wife. She is a – an American,’ (Nigel was convinced that Miss Cavendish had been on the point of saying ‘a colonist’), ‘but I find her civil enough, and she is generally accounted a handsome sort of female. Lord knows why she married Restorick: he’s a poor thing – all moustache and decorum: the Restoricks are sadly inbred, of course. Presently, the house party assembling, the conversation turned on the subject of ghosts. There is a room at the Manor, called the Bishop’s room, which is reputed to be haunted, and Elizabeth Restorick proposed that we should assemble there one night and – as she expressed it – beat up the bish.’

  ‘Elizabeth Restorick?’ asked Nigel. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She is a trollop,’ rejoined Miss Cavendish briskly. ‘Hereward’s sister, but a great deal younger than he, and a shocking forward chit. If Hereward inherited the Restorick fortune, Elizabeth inherited its vice. She was educated in America, to be sure, so we must not judge her too harshly. You are to know that Harold Restorick, Hereward’s father, was attached to the embassy in Washington, and, being as he was to live there for some years, he was under the necessity of taking his family out to America, so that the children only received what rudimentary education the country can furnish. A sad pity. For Elizabeth and Andrew both had talent.’

  ‘Andrew? That’s another brother, is it?’

  ‘Yes. He was Harry’s favourite son, though Hereward of course was the heir. Andrew, alas, disappointed his father. He turned out a rolling stone, a lover of low company. He’s a vastly handsome lad, though, and there is no real vice in him, unless it is a vice not to abide his brother’s sermons. He and Elizabeth have always been great cronies.’

  ‘Was he in the house party at Christmas too?’

  ‘He was. The company was made up by Elizabeth’s latest conquest, a Mr Dykes – a tedious, ill-bred person, a writer of romances – and Miss Ainsley, a nondescript sort of fribble. Oh yes, and I am forgetting Dr Bogan. Dr Bogan is, I apprehend, a quack.’

  ‘It seems to have been a queerly assorted house party to find under so conventional a roof,’ Georgia commented. ‘A trollop, an Anglo-Saxon squire, an American wife, a rolling stone, a fribble, and a quack.’

  Clarissa Cavendish inclined her head. Her fingers fluttered, and composed themselves again in her lap. ‘Harry would not have countenanced it. But Hereward has no backbone. If Charlotte wishes to invite a person, then it is to be so. She is a snob, poor girl, and believes every freak duckling a swan. Well then, we fixed to assemble in the Bishop’s room on the night of Christmas Eve.’

  ‘What were you expected to see?’ Nigel interrupted.

  ‘It is a foolish, idle tale. The Bishop of Eastchester was staying at the Manor, in 1609. One morning he was found dead in that room. Some ill-conditioned persons alleged he had been poisoned by his host, and there was a scandal put about. But the Restorick of that time affirmed that the bishop, who was notoriously a gross liver, had taken a surfeit of venison the night before and died of it. I make no doubt this was the truth of the matter. However that may be, the superstition is that groans are heard by night from the Bishop’s room, and the bishop has appeared to the credulous in a cambric nightgown clutching his belly and groaning mightily.’

  ‘It sounds rather a frivolous ghost story to me,’ said Georgia.

  ‘At half an hour before midnight on Christmas Eve we all repaired to the Bishop’s room. It is a horrid cold room, used now as a little library, and Charlotte Restorick had brewed a bowl of punch to warm our vitals. A great deal of wine had been drank at dinner; so, what with this and the punch, Elizabeth and Miss Ainsley were getting quite tipsy. I recall that Restorick rebuked Betty for sitting in Mr Dykes’ lap, and she retorted that the bishop had done worse than that in his day. Her pertness started a very strange, vulgar scene. She is strangely violent at times. A positive virago. But what a beauty! Well, at the worst of the quarrel – though indeed the quarrel was all Elizabeth, and Restorick only trying to quieten her – the clock struck twelve. Andre
w Restorick said, “Pipe down, Betty, or the bishop will cancel his visitation.” After that she was quiet. His words seemed to sober the rest of the company too. We were sitting in a row of chairs along the wall opposite the fireplace. Someone suddenly said, “Look at Scribbles.”’

  Clarissa Cavendish paused effectively. In the silence, Georgia and Nigel could hear the howl of the east wind tearing past the house. Miss Cavendish shivered a little, so that her necklace made a sound like a faint tinkling of icicles, and resumed her story.

  ‘The cat had been lapping a saucer of milk which had been brought in for her. She was now purring aloud – a mightily harsh, disagreeable sound, as if the creature was a rusty clockwork and someone winding it up. Then she walked into the middle of the room, her legs strangely rigid, arching her back and still making that infernal purring. We were all struck dumb with amazement. Scribbles held the floor. She was crouching now, like a tiger, kneading the carpet with her paws, glaring into the far corner of the room. On a sudden she sprang at this corner. I wish I might not have seen it. She sprang, and struck the wall with her head, and rebounded like an indiarubber ball. This queer behaviour she repeated three or four times, with every circumstance of ferocity, flinging herself against the bare walls or the bookcases till we had thought she must dash out her brains against them. The party was vastly discomposed at the spectacle. One of the females – Miss Ainsley, I fancy – began to sob and caterwaul, shrieking that the cat was seeing some horror invisible to us.’

  ‘And what did you think?’ asked Nigel sharply.

  ‘I thought the cat was not frightened, but enjoying her hunt.’

  For some reason this comment, delivered in Miss Cavendish’s light, crisp voice, froze Georgia’s blood.

  ‘After some while,’ the old lady resumed, ‘Scribbles seemed to tire of these odd assaults. She prowled back to the centre of the room, suddenly commenced to chase her tail and went whirling round like a mad Dervish or a teetotum; then curled herself up in front of the whole company and fell asleep.’