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

considerable agility for all his stockiness, wheeled round and bowed in reply. At something of a flourish he led Kinsmere back into the sun and smoke and commotion of the Great Court.
    “… one reason, good my lad, why I desired a word in your ear. Now permit me,” adds he, with a manner of stiff and profound courtliness in contrast to his great voice and many-coloured face, “permit me one further impertinence. You have engaged yourself to fight a duel with Pem Harker?”
    “I have.”
    “Tonight, at eleven of the clock, in Leicester Fields?”
    “It was so agreed.”
    “Ah!”
    The other man screwed round his thick neck out of a cabbage-leaf series of laces, peering in a mysterious manner up and down the courtyard. Then he lifted a large forefinger, tapped it twice against his nose, and smiled still more mysteriously.
    “Come, then, here are perplexities! Unless word of honour be set at naught, you are to meet Harker this night in Leicester Fields. Well, so am I.”
    “What’s that you say? Did the damned fellow challenge you as well?”
    “He did. For the same time, at the same place, and also without seconds or witnesses. Wherefore, being old and skilled in the ways of war and statecraft, I must ask myself—mark, alas, the Gallic influence!—I must ask myself the reason on’t. Eel muh fo demanday,” roared out the burly man, with a somewhat non-Gallic accent, “why Captain Pembroke Harker, First Dragoon Guards, should be at such pains to pick a quarrel with two people in our trade …”
    “ Our trade, is it?”
    “Ay, ecod, what else? For the same place, at the same hour, in hole-and-corner fashion to boot! There you have it in a nutshell, perhaps with hints of what’s a-brewing. Sir, do I speak plain now?”
    “Sir, you do not.”
    “Ah, discretion!” rumbled the other, again tapping his nose. “You’d be oon omm tray discreet, I know, and it does you credit. Still! In some matters, permit me to say, you use small discretion at the best o’ times. Wearing that ring, now! Harker’s motives we don’t know; but ’twas the sight of the ring set him on you.”
    “Now, what a fiend’s name of the ring? Had Harker a mind to steal it, do you think?”
    “ ’Tis possible; all is possible, no doubt, though this would add but fresh perplexity. Come! Be advised by me. You are young; you are new to the trade of—you are new to the work. Allow me to present myself,” says he, taking off his flat-plumed hat and sweeping it across his chest. “I am Bygones Abraham, at your service. Sir, will you drink?”
    “Sir,” my grandfather replied right heartily, “those are the first comprehensible words I have heard you speak. I will drink.”
    “But we’ll not betake us to a tavern, where we might be overheard. No, never. I have been given lodgings in the palace,” announced the man called Bygones Abraham, brushing up his moustache with much complacence. His thick chest swelled. “Which should mean (you apprehend?) a new errand ere long. By your leave, then, shall we visit my lodgings for a bone santy?”
    “By your leave,” says Kinsmere, “and with much pleasure, we will.”
    Beyond a hope that he had not encountered a wandering lunatic he did not reflect overmuch on the matter. Grinning, chuckling, with every exaggerated courtesy Bygones Abraham led him across the Great Court. But on one thing his new friend insisted. He must remove the sapphire ring from his finger and conceal it in an inner pocket.
    “For it would be a plaguey ill thing, you concede, if in evil hearts suspicion were roused of you, or of me, or of a certain exalted figger whose name we don’t speak unless ’tis needful. Hey?”
    Thus Kinsmere was escorted under the arches of the brick gallery, where stood the private coaches and sedan chairs. Beyond this gallery, in a huddle of buildings at the far side of the Great Hall, double doors opened into a foyer full of liveried attendants. In this foyer—dusky, illuminated only by