Free Sheiks and Adders by Michael Innes

pattern on the result. How fortunate that it is so fine an afternoon.’
    Thus bringing this conversation to a decorous close, Appleby squared himself on his chair again and turned to his own reflections. It seemed to him that ‘A Romantic Rescue’, although probably meant to refer to the mediaeval Cherry preserved from an enchanter by her knight, might by a little stretch of meaning cover the modern Cherry carried off by her desert lover. Perhaps the title had been arrived at in a spirit of compromise when the admissibility of Cherry’s own wishes in the matter had still been in debate within her family.
    ‘I thought you might know because I saw you with the young Chitfields.’ Appleby had not, after all, shaken off the woman behind him. ‘How delightful they are.’
    ‘Yes, indeed.’
    ‘Or my husband might know, since he is intimate with Richard Chitfield, and Richard is so much the moving spirit in this sort of thing. I wonder whether you know my husband?’
    ‘I don’t think I have that pleasure, madam.’ Appleby had been obliged to turn round again. His interlocutor wore a pair of wings – obviously wings of the most expensive sort – and a dress seemingly designed to suggest the firmament on a starry night. She also carried a wand with a further twinkling star at the end of it. She might have been the Good Fairy in a pantomime, but was probably intended to be of a superior order to that. A Fairy Queen, in fact – and not Spenser’s but Shakespeare’s. Here, in other words, was Titania – or this was an assumption so substantial that Appleby judged it possible to proceed on it. ‘Is it your husband,’ he asked, ‘who is sustaining the part of Bottom?’
    ‘Yes, it is.’ Titania was delighted by this feat of ratiocination. ‘Rupert has very considerable textile interests in the Far East. So I thought nothing could be more appropriate for him than Nick Bottom the weaver. I had the ass’s head specially made for him so that he has no need to take it off. He can’t eat or drink, of course. But it has a cunning little window set inside the mouth.’
    ‘Most ingenious. I congratulate you.’ Appleby reflected that poor Bottom couldn’t have been making for the bar, after all. ‘And have you brought along a friend,’ he asked, ‘in the character of Oberon?’
    ‘Well, no. But how delightful that you are a lover of Shakespeare! Rupert is a great lover of Shakespeare. You really must meet him.’
    ‘I shall hope for an opportunity.’ Appleby, a hardened proponent of what used to be called the forms, produced this response unflinchingly. He didn’t know this confounded woman from Adam’s Eve, but it was necessary to be civil to her.
    ‘Of course I know who you are, Sir John. Ambrose Birch-Blackie pointed you out to me earlier in the afternoon. He had just spotted you, and was hoping to have a chat with you later. I am Cynthia Plenderleith.’
    ‘How do you do? I think the curtain is about to go up.’
    ‘I don’t think so. They are merely testing it. I do hope Rupert will be back by the time the pageant really begins. He had to slip away, he said. I can’t think why.’
    Appleby might have said, ‘I suppose he wants a bit of hush.’ Or even, ‘Perhaps he’s looking for the loo.’ But as neither of these conjectures was admissible in polite conversation with a Queen of the Fairies he held his peace.
    ‘He said he might be away for half an hour. So meanwhile, Sir John, I feel quite unattended.’
    ‘I’m sure you need never, in fact, be that.’ Appleby produced this slightly laboured compliment while wondering whether it was requisite that he should move back a row and himself squire the lady. He decided to change the subject.
    ‘Is Richard Chitfield in fancy dress?’ he asked. ‘I suppose he ought to be Theseus, Duke of Athens. For here we are at a Court of sorts, and with a wood hard by.’
    ‘What an exciting thought, Sir John!’ Mrs Plenderleith, like her husband, was