Read Online Most Secret by John Dickson Carr - Free Book Online Page A

two, another lighted match to a powder train. For all this cavalryman’s disinterested manner, he had an almost maniacal light in his eye. Then both controlled themselves.
    “Shall we set the seal on our bargain, then?” jeered the captain, lifting his right shoulder still higher. ‘Tonight? Leicester Fields? Eleven o’clock?”
    “Tonight! Leicester Fields! Eleven o’clock!”
    “Through the guts you shall be punctured, mark me again. Through the guts you shall be punctured, and die slowly. I can trouble myself with you no longer until then.”
    The captain turned round. Dismissing all, contemptuous of all despite the mudstains on his coat and breeches, he marched straight and high-shouldered towards the water stairs. You heard the noise of his boots on the steps; then he was gone.
    “Young sir,” interposed a new voice, “may I beg the favour of a word with you?”
    In from the Great Court end of the passage, attempting a complicated kind of bow as he did so, lounged a burly, middle-sized, middle-aged man of remarkable ugliness.
    He had a portentous air and a rumbling voice. He was dressed in rich if slovenly fashion: plum-coloured velvet coat above wine-stained waistcoat of canary yellow, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, and a finely carved hilt to his rapier. The coils of his brown peruke enclosed a countenance high-coloured with tippling, battle, and hard weather. And the newcomer’s presence brought reassurance. Even his ugliness was of the fetching and engaging sort; it compelled your liking even as you grinned.
    “Eh, now!” continued this newcomer, surveying Kinsmere with a ruminating eye. “Forgive me; do forgive the impertinence I utter! But—are ye strung on a wire of tautness, may it be? Does that heart knock at your ribs, and your legs know a certain trembling at the knees?”
    “In candour, sir, I must own to being a trifle distraught. Should it not be so; do you mean? Is this caitiff behaviour after all?”
    “Nay, don’t say it!” returned the other. “Don’t think it, even, since you are much mistaken. I too am a man of peace, though I seem always to walk incontinent towards trouble. And yet, for all my many years of finding broils or being found by ’em, I feel the same knocking heart and the same light legs on each occasion.”
    “Well?”
    “Forgive me, young sir, but I saw it all. I saw your broil with Pem Harker …”
    “Pem Harker?” demanded Kinsmere. “That’s the tall fellow with the nose and the bad manners?”
    “It is.”
    “What’s his station, then? Who is he?”
    “Captain Pembroke Harker, First Dragoon Guards, is a man of rare good birth. He is much at Whitehall, more particularly in the Matted Gallery. He hath some esteem, and is indulged by nearly all …”
    “Because he is so well liked, can it be?”
    “No, for the very reverse cause,” says this burly newcomer, “Pem Harker, d’ye see, is the sort o’ type”—he turned it into a French word, pronounced teep —“for whom most people will stand aside, and to whom they’ll even grant a mort o’ favours, because they don’t like him at all. We have all known the teep, have we not?”
    “Truly we have.”
    “Well, then! I saw and heard. And what you did was bravely done. But Pem Harker? Harker set on you with great deliberateness, to force a quarrel. Why did he do this?”
    “I don’t know, for the life of me; I can’t say!”
    “We must discover it; we must sound the depth of this business. Harker swore he would run you through the guts; and I dare vow he’ll make a tack at it. But not, it may be, in quite the way you think he will. Eh?”
    “Sir,” Kinsmere cried out, with bewilderment thickening round his wits, “I have no doubt you are certain of your own meaning. I am not. However, I thank you for the compliments you pay.” And he bowed.
    “Yet we must sound the depth of the business, believe me. That’s one reason why … Come!”
    Here the burly stranger, showing