Free I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

horse.”
    “Horse, nothing—it was walking upright. But gosh, maybe I am going crazy-it didn’t seem to have any legs.”
    I guessed Topaz must have kept her black rubber boots on.
    “Stop talking about it, anyway,” the bearded man whispered.
    “There’s a child in a bath behind those sheets.”
    I called out for someone to bring my clothes, and put an arm round for them.
    “My God—it’s a green child!” said the American.
    “What is this place-the House of Usher?”
    “I’m not green all over,” I explained.
    “It’s just that we’ve all been dyeing.”
    “Then maybe it was one of your ghosts I saw,” said the American.
    The bearded man came over with my clothes.
    “Don’t worry about the ghost,” he said.
    “Of course he didn’t see one.”
    I said: “Well, he easily might, up on the mound, but it was more likely my stepmother communing with nature.” I was out of the bath by then, with the towel draped around me respectably, so I put my head round to speak to him. It came out much higher than when I had been kneeling in the bath and he looked most astonished.
    “You’re a larger child than I realized,” he said.
    As I took the clothes, I caught sight of the other man. He had just the sort of face to go with his voice, a nice, fresh face. The odd thing was that I felt I knew it. I have since decided this was because there are often young men like him in American pictures—not the hero, but the heroine’s brother or men on petrol stations.
    He caught my eye and said:
    “Hello! Tell me some more about your legless stepmother-and the rest of your family. Have you a sister who plays the harp on horseback, or anything?”
    Just then Topaz began to play her lute upstairs -she must have slipped in at the front door. The young man began to laugh.
    “There she is,” he said delightedly.
    “That’s not a harp, it’s a lute,” said the bearded man.
    “Now that really is amazing. A castle, a lute-his And then Rose came out on to the staircase. She was wearing the dyed-green tea-gown, which is mediaeval in shape with long flowing sleeves. She obviously didn’t know that there were strangers in the house for she called out:
    “Look, Cassandra’” Both men turned towards her and she stopped dead at the top of the stairs. For once Topaz had her lute in tune. And she was, most appropriately, playing “Green Sleeves.”

V
    Later. Up on the chaff in the barn again.
    I had to leave Rose stranded at the top of the stairs because Topaz was ringing the lunch bell. She had been too busy to cook, so we had cold Brussels sprouts and cold boiled rice -hardly my favorite food but splendidly filling. We ate in the drawing-room, which has been cleaned within an inch of its life. In spite of a log fire, it was icy in there; I have noticed that rooms which are extra clean feel extra cold.
    Rose and Topaz are now out searching the hedges for something to put in the big Devon pitchers. Topaz says that if they don’t find anything she will get bare branches and tie something amusing to them-if so, I bet it doesn’t amuse me;
    one would think that a girl who appreciates nudity as Topaz does would let a bare branch stay bare.
    None of us is admitting that we expect the Cottons to call very soon, but we are all hoping it like mad. For that is who the two men were, of course: the Cottons of Scoatney, on their way there for the first time. I can’t think why I didn’t guess it at once, for I did know that the estate had passed to an American.
    Old Mr. Cotton’s youngest son went to the States back in the early nineteen hundreds-after some big family row, I believe-and later became an American citizen. Of course, there didn’t seem any likelihood of his inheriting Scoatney then, but two elder brothers were killed in the war and the other, with his only son, died about twelve years ago, in a car smash. After that, the American son tried to make it up with his Father, but the old man wouldn’t see him unless he