she said hurriedly. "Mr Aske—Miss Audley." She grinned at Cathy conspiratorially.
" Ee-ore," said Aske self-consciously.
"How do you do, Mr Aske," said Cathy.
"I'm bad-tempered, actually," said Aske. "Nobody's offered dummy3
me a thistle forages."
"A— what?" Cathy regarded him incredulously.
"I haven't had my lunch, little girl," Aske sighed. "And I haven't had my tea, either."
Cathy wilted slightly at little girl.
"You don't happen to have a thistle, by any chance?" inquired Aske, before Elizabeth could intervene.
"Cathy—"
"Would you like a glass of sherry, Mr Aske?" said Cathy icily.
This time it was Aske who wilted.
"It's all right, Cathy," said Elizabeth. "We've just come back from France, you see."
"Or, to be exact, we've been thrown out—on our ears ... or maybe on some other part of our anatomy, eh?" Aske gave Elizabeth a rueful half-grin, ignoring Cathy Audley.
"Oh!" Cathy's ears pricked, and she turned to Elizabeth. "Is that persona non grata? Daddy explained that to me just recently—'grata' agreeing with 'persona', he said." She came back to Aske. "Which means you've been caught red-handed, he said."
Aske's mouth opened wordlessly.
"What did they catch you doing? Or shouldn't I ask?" Cathy over-fed his confusion before turning again to Elizabeth. "Of course—Daddy was going to France, wasn't he! I even gave him some money to buy that smelly after-shave for Uncle dummy3
Jack, for Christmas— Paco—Paco—Paco . . . Paco—did they catch you doing something too, Elizabeth?"
"They didn't catch us doing anything, really," said Elizabeth.
"Ah—now that is strictly true." Aske had recovered his cool.
"But they did catch us doing nothing, and sometimes that's just as bad as being caught doing something."
Cathy nodded seriously. "That's like at schooclass="underline" if they ask you what you're doing, and you say 'nothing' they never believe you, they think you're doing something bad. Poor you!" She nodded again, sympathetically this time, then frowned suddenly. "But where's Paul? I bet they didn't catch him!"
So Paul had made another conquest. But instinctively Elizabeth decided to leave his reputation intact.
"No, they didn't catch him, Cathy." Anyway, there was an element of truth in that: Paul had always been way ahead of them in expecting the worst. "He's gone to London." Besides, there was another and more pressing matter. "Hadn't we better go and meet the old gentleman?"
"Yes—" Cathy's answer was cut off by a sudden bleeping, muted but insistent, which seemed to come from inside her
"— oops! That means Mummy's puddings have to come out of the Aga!" She produced a slim pocket calculator from her smock. "I got this for my birthday—it's jolly useful, because it reminds me of things . . . He's in the library, Elizabeth—just down the end of the passage there. Can you find your way while I take the puddings out of the oven?" She started to dummy3
turn away.
"What old gentleman?" Aske called after her.
"The one that knows all about Elizabeth's ship, Daddy says—
Daddy asked him to come, he says—" Cathy disappeared through a door in what was presumably the puddings'
direction.
Aske looked at Elizabeth. "A disconcertingly precocious child, as well as a typical only child— persona non grata indeed!"
"She's probably learning Latin, that's all," said Elizabeth defensively.
"A typical Audley child, more like. 'Grata' may agree with
'persona', but she doesn't agree with me, Miss Loftus. And who is this old gentleman who knows all about your ship?"
"I don't know—except that he has hair coming out of his ears and is apparently very polite."
"Ah! Now that is a positive identification on both counts, if ever I heard one!" Aske perked up. "Let us go and meet the great Professor Basil Wilson Wilder, Miss Loftus—down the passage, was it?"
Elizabeth followed him into the green-shaded gloom of the passage, the windows of which were half-obscured by the wisteria on the front of the house. There was no help for it, but she felt daunted by the prospect ahead, not so much because two elderly professors in one day were too many, as by the memory of Father's enraged correspondence with this dummy3
same Professor Wilder, both in public and in private, over the Vengeful renaming. The two men had never been friends aftgr an earlier Wilder review of From Trafalgar to Navarino, which had mildly disagreed with Father's assessment of Collingwood. But after the Vengeful letters even the mention of the Professor's name had been taboo.
Aske held the door open for her, courteous as ever.
It really was a library, not merely a room with books in it: it was as totally book-lined as the ante-rooms in Professor Belperron's apartment, except that the book-spines were much more colourful, and the room itself was beautiful, with its oak-beamed ceiling and intricately geometric Persian carpet on an unpolished stone-flagged floor, and a great blaze of flowers in the open fireplace, and—
And there, on a low table in front of the fireplace, was Father's Vengeful box—her Vengeful box—
The old gentleman rose slowly from an immense leather chair, his back to her, refolded his Guardian unhurriedly and placed it on the box, and turned towards her.
"Miss Loftus, I presume?"
Age . . . yet with that indefinable twinkle, not of second childhood, but of victorious longevity, a quality Elizabeth had only observed once before, in a very old lady—a great lady, who had somehow combined age with inextinguishable youth, and had made it beautiful.
"Professor Wilder?" It had never occurred to her that a man dummy3
could achieve that same beauty; but of course it had nothing to do with being a man, any more than it had to do with age—
it was the triumph of mind over both those conditions.
"Mr Aske—we meet again!" The tiniest nuance of. . . it was not distaste, for this man was long past any desire to wound any other creature, whatever his second sight saw hidden in it... it was more like sympathy neutralising the instinctive but unfair emotions which Paul had for Aske, with which he had infected her. "What a pleasure!"
"For me too, Professor." Aske's voice thickened, as though he was unwilling to admit his own feelings sincerely. "But what brings you here—to us—hot-foot?"
"Hot-foot?" Wilder tested the image. "In this age of the motor-car that is almost a contradiction— my feet become cold with inactivity when I am carried urgently from one place to another . . . not like Roger Bannister, with his four-minute mile at Iffley—or Pheidippides carrying the news of Marathon to Athens, eh?" He smiled. "But hot-foot nevertheless—yes!" He transferred the smile to Elizabeth, and then re-edited it to seriousness. "Miss Loftus . . . we have never met until now, but as one of your school governors I have heard of your prowess with our history scholarship girls, and I have admired your results from afar. You have a rare gift, I think—rare, because those who have it tend to gravitate to university teaching . . . But you have not, and I am glad of it."
In that instant all Elizabeth's plans for enjoying her ill-gotten dummy3
gains as a rich woman went out of the window: if this old gentleman thought she must teach, then she must teach.
"I very much regret that circumstances have militated against our meeting until now. But that is in the past—" he twinkled at her "—and now we meet at last!" He became suddenly serious. "I was sorry to hear about your father's death, my dear. Because ... in our time we had our differences, for which I must take my share of the blame, I fear . . . but he was a considerable scholar in his own field."