Free The Catherine Wheel by Patricia Wentworth Page A

“Yes, I would,” and saw the look in Eily’s eyes change to relief. She thought, “She was afraid I was going to say I had seen her before.” And then she was out of her chair and crossing the room.
    The door closed behind them, and they went up the stair. Eily said in a quick whisper,
    “You didn’t say you’d seen me?”
    Jane shook her head.
    “Aren’t you supposed to go out with John Higgins?”
    “No—no—I’m not.”
    “Why?”
    They had come out on a square landing. There was a side passage with four irregular steps going up to it—doors on either side of it, and a passage going off to the left—two steps up, and two steps down again farther along. All very bewildering.
    Eily turned into the right-hand passage. At the top of the steps she opened a door, disclosing a large gloomy bathroom with worn brown linoleum on the floor and a painted Victorian bath profusely stained with rust and furnished with a broad mahogany surround.
    “It’s the little room next door I’ve given you. Lady Marian and her husband are beyond, and Captain Jeremy and Mrs. Duke and Miss Taverner opposite.”
    She stood aside to let Jane enter a small room almost entirely taken up with a very large double bed. It was lighted, like the bathroom, by a wall-lamp which diffused a warm oily smell. It was a forbidding little room. A battered chest of drawers painted mustard yellow, a tarnished looking-glass standing on it, two chairs, and a shabby washstand, were all the furniture. There was a huge flowered ewer in a small plain basin. Half a dozen rickety hooks behind a yard or two of limp chintz supplied the only hanging accommodation. The window curtains of the same material swayed in an unseen draught. The pattern of the carpet had long ago been obliterated by dirt and age.
    Eily shut the door and said,
    “It’s no place for you at all. John said to tell you that.”
    Jane had so much of the same feeling herself that she found this rather undermining. She put out a quick thought in the direction of the hundred pounds, and said with spirit,
    “Well, you’re here, aren’t you? What’s the difference?”
    Eily said in her pretty, mournful voice,
    “He doesn’t like my being here.”
    “Then why do you stay?”
    “I can’t be leaving Aunt Annie.” A pause, and then after a dreadful sigh, “I’d not dare. He’d have me back.”
    Then, before Jane could say anything at all, she was gone, opening the door and slipping out without any sound.
    CHAPTER 9
    Jane was drying her hands, when there was a knock on the door. As soon as she said, “Come in!” Jeremy was in the room. He shut the door, came up close, and said,
    “We’re just staying as we are. I suppose you’re getting into a dress.”
    “I thought I’d better.”
    “All right—hurry! There’s a little room half way down the stairs—I’ll meet you there. Don’t take too long over the face— it’s quite good as it is.” And then he was gone again.
    Jane hung up her suit on two of the hooks behind the limp curtain, improved the face, slipped on a grey dress with an amusing rose-coloured curlicue coming down off the left shoulder, and went down to the little room on the half-way landing.
    She found Jeremy walking up and down like a hyena in a cage.
    “Why do women take hours to do the simplest things?”
    “Darling, they don’t. What is it?”
    “What is what?”
    “Why the assignation?”
    “I had to see you.”
    “You are seeing me.”
    “Jane—what were you talking about to Jacob Taverner?”
    “Gramp’s bedside stories.”
    “What did you tell him?”
    “I said there was one about a passage from the shore.”
    “Was there?”
    She nodded.
    “What did Jacob say?”
    “Wanted to know where it came out this end. So I said I didn’t suppose Gramp knew and sheered off. And then Eily came in with Castell.”
    Jeremy said, “Look here, he asked me the same sort of thing. Did my grandfather tell me stories about the old place—if he did, what