“No.”
“It cuts down the area enormously, and both of us know the local countryside like the backs of our hands. All the same, as you say, there are dozens of woods. It would take us centuries to explore them all.”
Phillip slumped. “We're only guessing they're not more than a few miles off, anyway. It's hopeless, isn't it?”
Daisy had never seen him so downhearted. His usually equable temperament took the rough with the smooth, occasionally a bit ruffled but without a stumble. Even the dreadful years in the trenches of Flanders had left little apparent mark on Phillip, unlike so many more sensitive spirits who still suffered years later.
It must be true love. She remembered how her heart had hurt when Michael's ambulance unit left for the front, knowing his noncombatant status was no protection against stray bullets, poison gas, or landmines. Then there had been the awful time when Alec was in danger, and later his little girl. Daisy had been
able to help both Alec and Belinda, though. Half the pain was the helplessness of wanting desperately to do something when there was nothing to be done.
Phillip must be given something to do, however useless. And you never could tell, it might prove useful after all.
“Buck up, old thing,” she said. “We're not going to give up so easily.”
“What can we do?”
“The first thing is to go round the villages making enquiries about Cockneys, or other conspicuous strangers. Or Americans, come to think of it, though I doubt he'd risk letting anyone hear an American accent near the hiding place. Still, with luck we'll be able to pinpoint a smallish area to search. I suppose it's no good asking Fenella to help?”
“The mater would want to know where she kept disappearing to. What's more, she'd tell. She's not much more than a child, in spite of that broken engagement.”
“My mother's going to be a problem, too,” Daisy reflected. “She's bound to find out I'm here and she'll want to know why I don't stay at the Dower House, and if I do
she
'll want to know where
I
keep disappearing to. Nor can you stay there without a risk of her catching the wrong sow by the ear.”
For once Phillip was quick on the uptake. “You mean she'd think we were engaged?” he cried, aghast.
“Or on the brink.” She continued the dispiriting list: “You can't go home without all sorts of explanations. Neither of us can stay at Fairacres without ⦠. Phillip, I've got an absolutely spiffing idea!”
“What? What is it? Tell me!”
“Not yet. Just be quiet and let me work it all out. There may be an insuperable flaw I haven't seen yet. Hush.”
E
dgar arrived in the dining room after the green pea soup, just as Daisy and Phillip started on lamb cutlets with parsleyed new potatoes and salad. He apologized for his lateness.
“Very bad form when we have guests,” he said with a severity directed at himself.
“Soup, my lord?” enquired the butler.
“Yes, Lowecroft, if it's still hot.” Gazing at Daisy and Phillip with a puzzled air, he went on, “Please, carry on, don't wait for me. Odd, Geraldine's not here to entertain you?”
“She's lunching with a friend in Worcester, I believe, Cousin Edgar.”
“I rather thought I should be lunching alone. She must have omitted to tell me you were expected, Daisy. And you mother ⦠? Ah!” He rubbed his hands together as Ernest set a bowl before him. “There's nothing like a soup made with new peas from one's own gardens. It pains me to admit that school food, though of course nutritious, was not always toothsome.”
Daisy had decided to tackle Edgar first. Geraldine would find it difficult to express her inevitable disapproval openly if her husband had already succumbed. Now he had given her a perfect opening.
“There are so many things I miss about living in the country,” she said, trying to sound wistful. “The fruit and vegetables are one, of course. By the time they've been carted up to Covent Garden and sold to greengrocers and carted off again to the shops, they're always a bit battered.”
“My dear, I can very easily send you up a hamper of whatever's in season now and then. I wish you had mentioned the matter sooner,” Edgar reproached her.
“How frightfully kind of you, Cousin Edgar,” said Daisy, filled with guilt. “Lucy and I would enjoy fresh stuff no end. That's another thing I miss,” she ploughed on gamely for Phillip's sake. “Lucy often invites me for country weekends at her parents', and I hate not being able to reciprocate. I'm afraid Mother's not really in a position to entertain a crowd of young people.”
Edgar blenched, but equally gameâperhaps also equally guilt-ridden, as a usurper, however legalâhe squared his shoulders. “You know, Daisy, Geraldine and I have frequently begged you to regard Fairacres as your home still. Naturally that must apply to inviting your friends to stay. A crowd?” he added with misgiving.
“Just in a manner of speaking,” she hastened to assure him. “Half a dozen or so. I wouldn't dream of trying to arrange formal dances or anything like that. Tennis and golf and bicycling and hiking ⦠.”
“Hiking?”
“Oh, it's a rather slangy term for tramping, going for long country walks. Gosh, Cousin Edgar, do you really mean I may invite a few people down?”
It was only fair to allow him a chance to back out. For a moment it was touch and go and Phillip's face took on a painfully anxious expression. Daisy had forbidden him to put his oar in, for fear of mucking things up. To her relief Edgar turned up trumpsâto use another slang term and mix the odd metaphor.
“Certainly,” he said bravely. “Er, which weekend were you thinking of? We shall have to consult Geraldine, I'm afraid ⦠that is, of course.”
“No time like the present. I don't want to disrupt Cousin Geraldine's plans for weekend guests, or put her out in any way. I'll make all the arrangements and sort out menus with Cook and so on. Tomorrow?”
Edgar's jaw dropped. “T-tomorrow? Oh well, I suppose it's best to get it over with. I mean, yes, by all means, why not tomorrow? As far as I know Geraldine has no particular plans for the next few days. Though she doesn't always let me know in advance ⦠.”
“Oh, if she's giving a luncheon or dinner party or anything, we'll clear out of the way with a picnic, won't we, Phillip?”
“By Jove, yes! Don't want to get in the way, dash it all. Awfully good of you, Lord Dalrymple, and all that.”
Daisy gave her cousin's hand a consoling pat. “Now, don't you worry about a thing. I shall see to everything. I dare say you'll hardly notice we're here.”
The utter disbelief in Edgar's eyes almost made her giggle, but she meant what she said. His unwanted guests were going to be invited solely to spend every minute of daylight scouring the countryside.
A gooseberry fool followed the cutlets. In spite of her persuasive exertions, Daisy thoroughly enjoyed the meal. At home she and Lucy subsisted largely on eggs, cheese, and sardines, for lack of both money and cooking skills. Her father had been fond of good food, and the prospect of several days of his cook's creations was almost enough in itself to reconcile her to the ignoble wiles she had used on Edgar.
Phillip's patent relief removed the last qualms.
Magnanimous in victory, she listened with every appearance of interest to Edgar's lepidopteran blather. As pleased as any big game hunter, he had captured several caterpillars of
Pyronia
tithonus,
the Gatekeeper butterfly. This afternoon he would prepare and furnish a tank in which to keep and study them until they pupated and hatched, when he intended to release them.
“I'm glad you don't spend your time massacring inoffensive creatures for the sake of displaying their remains,” Daisy told him.
“It is their life-cycles that interest me,” he said a trifle pompously, then added with a disarming honesty, “Besides, I have never had the good fortune to come across a rare butterfly. The most casual collector can easily procure a specimen of the Gatekeeper.”
Daisy pondered the irony of his snaring Gatekeepers on the very day he had proved himself so inadequate a gatekeeper. She had stormed the gates of Fairacres without firing a shot.
She had to remind herself not to triumph too soon. Geraldine was a harder nut to crack than her defenceless husband, who was accustomed to facing the simpler stratagems of small boys. Daisy's interview with her mother was bound to be difficult, too. To fortify herself for the battles ahead, she gratefully accepted a second helping of gooseberry fool.
Â
“When will Lady Dalrymple be back?” Daisy asked the butler as they left the dining room.
“Her ladyship expected to return for tea, miss, at half past four.”
“Not till tea-time?” exclaimed Phillip, agitated.
Daisy gave him a warning glance. He was a pretty hopeless conspirator, especially as he was the one who insisted on secrecy.
“It
is
awkward, Cousin Geraldine not knowing yet that Cousin Edgar has invited us to stay,” she said. “Lowecroft, I expect you heard Lord Dalrymple ask me to invite a few people to come to Fairacres tomorrow for a few days? I'll let you know
the exact numbers as soon as I can, but perhaps you would like to begin preparations.”
“Very good, miss.” The butler's stolid face gave no hint of whether he had noticed and appreciated her brilliant wangling. “I shall speak to the housekeeper.”
“Thanks. Mrs. Warden is still here, isn't she? I'll have a word with her later.”
Conveniently, Edgar had asked them to excuse him if he took his postprandial coffee in his conservatory-insectarium. Daisy and Phillip went out to the terrace for theirs.
“We can't wait till tea-time,” Phillip fretted as soon as they were alone. “Tom Pearson and Binkie will have to arrange with their offices to be gone for a few days.”
Tommy Pearson was a solicitor in his family's firm. Binkie did something obscure (to Daisy) with stocks and shares in the City, like Phillip but with somewhat more success. All three, having gone straight from school into the Army, were in junior positions.
“Did you telephone your office?” Daisy asked.
“I rang up first thing this morning and said I couldn't come in this week. They can give me the sack if they want, I don't care. But Tom and Binkie won't want to risk their jobs.”
“Lucy will have to notify clients, too,” Daisy pointed out dryly, “and you're jolly lucky I'm free at the moment. You're right, though, we must notify them right away. We can't wait for Geraldine's say-so. Anyway, however livid she is with Edgar, she's far too proper to rescind his invitation.”
I hope
, she added to herself.
Phillip's resolve wavered, his highly developed sense of social fitness momentarily coming to the fore. “It's not at all the thing, inveigling an unwilling hostess into putting us up.”
“It's for Gloria,” she reminded him. “Come on, let's decide how much we can safely say to the others to persuade them to
come. Then you can wire Lucy and telephone the others while I go and deal with Mother.”
“Right-ho.”
“And you'd better ring up Fenella. Tell her it's a house-party and we're having a treasure-hunt. That will explain us haring about the countryside.”
“She'll want to join in,” Phillip objected.
“Say she wouldn't enjoy it; everyone's older than she is.”
“Oh, right-ho.”
Half an hour later, Daisy wended her way across the park along the footpath leading directly to the Dower House. The afternoon sun was hot enough to make her regret that parasols, and even broad-brimmed straw hats, were out of fashion. She could practically feel the freckles appearing on her nose as she walked.
In the green patches beneath the clumps of trees, pale amber Jersey cows clustered in the shade, their tails swishing against the flies. Elsewhere the grass was parched to a golden brown. The only moisture it had received for weeks must be dew at dawn, evaporating before it soaked in except where protected from the sun. Even the air smelled dry. Most years the park stayed lushly green all summer; Daisy could not recall ever seeing it dried up so early.
Her footsteps kicked up puffs of dust. The sight lent weight to the scanty evidence that Phillip had really been confined in the midst of woodland.
Which still left a lot of ground to be covered. Even if enquiries pinpointed a general area, Daisy had little hope of finding Gloria Arbuckle before her father paid the ransom. The crooks surely wouldn't want to hang around for longer than necessary. But the searchers just might strike it lucky, and the quest would be worth the effort just to stop Phillip sinking into despair.
It might even be quite amusing, rather like the treasurehunts so popular among young people at house-parties.
She came to the gate in the high, neatly-trimmed beech hedge around the Dower House. The garden inside was equally neat and flourishing. One thing the Dowager Lady Dalrymple hadn't grumbled about for some time was the young Welsh gardener Daisy had foisted on her. Owen Morgan was a hard worker who knew his stuff.
Seeing him up a ladder picking cherries, she begged a handful and asked after his family before going on into the house.
Her mother was in the sitting room, seated at the satinwood Sheraton bureau, writing a letter. Daisy regarded her oblivious back with fondness mingled with anticipated exasperation.
A short, plumpish woman in her mid-fifties, the dowager viscountess was never happy without something to moan about. In her eyes, the charming and very comfortable Dower House was utterly inadequate. Its mere five bedroomsânot counting servants' quartersâmade guests other than family out of the question. Even her elder daughter Violet's family could only be squeezed in with the greatest difficulty. It would be unbearably cramped if her younger daughter came to live with her, yet she strongly objected to Daisy's working to support herself in London.
Both daughters neglected her terribly, their rare visits always much too short. What she would say when she discovered Daisy was in Worcestershire but staying with the enemy up at the big house remained to be seen.
“Hello, Mother.”
Lady Dalrymple started and swung round. “Good gracious, Daisy, what a horrid shock you gave me! I suppose it's too much to expect you to give me a few hours' notice if you mean to come down.”
Daisy kissed her. “I hoped it would be a nice surprise.”
“Of course I'm always glad to see you, dear, but I have the
Waddells and Miss Reid coming to dinner and bridge tonight.”
“I shan't upset your numbers, or put you out in any way. Edgar and Geraldine have invited me and several friends to stay for a few days.”
“Indeed! So now the encroaching parvenus are attempting to alienate my children from me? How
could
you accept?”
“It was very kind of them. One can't refuse all their olive branches, Mother. I'll be able to pop in to see you now and then without upsetting your bridge evenings or your other engagements.”
“If only you would learn to play bridge, Daisy. It's very awkward not being able to call on you to make up a table.”
Having sedulously avoided learning the game, Daisy had no intention of starting now. “I'd never meet your high standards,” she said. “I think my mind works the wrong way.”