Free Twelve Drummers Drumming by C. C. Benison

secure Sebastian the verger’s position, which suggested some sort of prior relationship between the men, though try as she might—and Madrun had tried—she couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Too, Sebastian spent many hours tending the gardens at Farthings, the colonel’s home near the entrance to Knighton Lane, and sometimes took his dinners there. They were almost like old priest and acolyte, Tom thought, occasionally seeing them together in one of Thornford’s lanes, usually with Bumble atthe end of a leash. But Sebastian, his bronzed face drained of colour, had eyes ony for the
o-daiko
drum.
    “Is Sybella …?” he managed to utter.
    They all stared at him, waiting for him to complete the question. No words came. Finally, with a regretful glance at Colm, Tom murmured:
    “I’m afraid Sybella has died, Sebastian.”
    “Sybella,” Sebastian had repeated in a wondering tone. He had looked at them, one by one, as if seeking confirmation. Finally his eyes settled on Colm. “I’m so very sorry,” he said. His face shifted through sympathy to its normal, impassive mien. Though thinking about it now, as he rolled down the pavement past Pattimore’s shop towards Fishers Hill and the turn towards the adjunct road that would take him to Thornridge House, Tom was possessed by the worrying notion that it had been relief, or something akin, that he’d glimpsed in those cobalt blue eyes. No one at the fayre had known that Sybella was anything but asleep in the drum. Yet somehow Sebastian had intuited the most cheerless of scenarios. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask his verger if he had some intelligence on the tragedy, but a moan from the floor had redirected everyone’s attention.
    “Phillip,” Sebastian had said, the surprise in his voice detectably genuine. “What has happened to you?”
    “I’ve had a fall, my boy.”
    “Some of the boys were fighting and one of them knocked Colonel Northmore over,” Julia corrected. “And, yes, an ambulance is coming,” she added as Sebastian, kneeling by the colonel’s side, looked up at her enquiringly. “I’ve asked Alastair to come, too … oh, and here he is now.”
    Julia and her husband exchanged cool glances, after Alastair, dressed as if he’d just blown in off the course, in a blue and green striped golf shirt and matching golf cap, had pushed through the door. Quickly, wordlessly, he bent down across from Sebastian and twisted the bill of his cap to the back of his head. “Old Course St. Andrews,” Tom found himself reading. Alastair lifted ColonelNorthmore’s arm, pushed the shirt cuff back with one hand, and felt along his wrist.
    “Your pulse is strong,” he commented.
    “It’s the colonel’s
legs
, Alastair,” Julia snapped. “He’s had a fall.”
    “Do you mind? I’m the doctor here.”
    “Where’s your bag?”
    “It’s at the club. Old Mr. Gill had a seizure of sorts in the locker room.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It means, Julia, that I forgot my bag in the locker room after I’d examined Gill. I’m quite capable of examining someone without it.”
    Alastair ordered the colonel to try moving his right leg, then his left. Northmore’s features shuttered with pain as he attempted to shift the latter. “Ten,” the colonel gasped when Alastair asked him the level of pain he was feeling on a scale of one to ten.
    “Is something broken?” Sebastian asked.
    “You’re in my way. Move!”
    As Sebastian shifted off his knees, Alastair moved to the colonel’s right side, turned his suit jacket aside, and palpated alongside his hip with his hands. After a moment, he, too, rose.
    “Well …?” Julia said.
    “Well what?”
    “Perhaps the colonel would care to know your diagnosis?”
    Alastair jerked his cap back the right way. “Colonel,” he responded, readjusting his shirt over an incipient paunch, “an X ray will tell us more, of course, but I expect that you’ve broken your hip. I’m very