Free Lord Mullion's Secret by Michael Innes Page B

decorum of the scene had been suddenly and most hideously disturbed. Moments before, the air had held nothing but a solemn stillness tempered by the soft susurration of the wind in the trees. Now from the interior of the barn there was issuing a howling and wailing as of some living creature in atrocious pain. And it was accompanied by a sound, metronomic in its regularity, which powerfully rekindled in Honeybath his worst memories of Draconian prefectorial attentions during his earlier years at school. In short, within the barn somebody was receiving an uncommonly vigorous walloping.
    Charles Honeybath was not the man hastily to intrude upon any episode of unseemly violence. If an irate farmer were chastising some urchin caught stealing turnips the incident, although distressing and contrary to the liberal and humanitarian spirit of the age, was no business of his. But it was clearly not an urchin that was involved. The dire screeching and yelling – perhaps, as often in such cases, pitched a little in excess of actual need – was issuing, he felt sure, from a female throat. Chivalrously aroused, Honeybath hastened into the barn. A shocking spectacle met his eyes. On a bale of hay there was sitting a powerful male character belonging obviously to the lower reaches of rustic society. Across his knees he held down a young female who was not precisely a child. And he was at choice intervals belabouring her person, appropriately exposed, not indeed with any instrument of correction whether improvised or other, but with a bare hand as large and heavy as a ham.
    â€˜You scoundrel, stop that instantly!’ Honeybath, although profoundly shocked, found himself adequately articulate at once. ‘Desist!’ he added, as if to make his meaning more abundantly clear.
    The rural executioner, thus adjured, raised his arm again in air – and there maintained it immobile for a moment, as if himself poised between astonishment and augmented rage. Whereupon his victim, profiting smartly from this brief indecision, wriggled free and made a dash past Honeybath for liberty, pulling a scanty skirt down to her knees as she ran. Although but briefly glimpsed, she was revealed to Honeybath as an ungainly trollop in her latest teens, or possibly even a little older than that. This circumstance, although it perhaps enhanced the high impropriety of what had been going on, in fact a little relieved Honeybath’s mind. Even as the man jumped to his feet and pursued the escaping young woman with a shout of rage, he arrived at the swift perception that this was a family affair. It was a father who had thus been so vigorously correcting his child. Perhaps he even had some legal entitlement to such drastic behaviour: it must depend on his daughter’s actual age. Both of them were now half-way across the nearest field, and the man was waving his arms less with a suggestion of further castigation than of a labourer herding an escaped heifer in some desired direction. Parent and child were in fact on their way home.
    Honeybath, who had at least a reading man’s knowledge of the mores of rural society, felt little doubt as to the prompting occasion of what he had interrupted. So clear was he about this that he looked about him for a second and probably younger man. Even as he did so he heard a sound behind him, turned round, and found himself confronting Swithin Gore. Where Swithin had bobbed up from he didn’t know, but it seemed a rational inference that it was from some hastily achieved hiding place under the hay at the other end of the barn. What Honeybath had stumbled upon – or what the outraged parent had stumbled upon perhaps only minutes before – was an episode of youthful incontinence somewhat in the spirit of Tom Jones .
    â€˜Just what have you been up to?’ Honeybath demanded. Being extremely displeased, he spoke with a sternness wholly unwarranted by his standing in the affair. He had, after all, no