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  "As a lovers' meeting," said Bennett slowly, "no. But then you can't describe an atmosphere, any more than you can describe a sultry day. And it's atmosphere that Tait carries with her. For a public face she tries to be-what's the word? effervescent. She's not. You've hit it exactly in saying she looks like one of those Restoration women on canvas. Quiet. Speculative. Old-time, if you follow me. Patches and languor, and thunder in the distance. You could feel it in the air, again like a sultry day. I suppose all these fancy words simply mean Sex, but I should say there's something else too; something," said Bennett, with more vehemence than he had intended, "that really did make great courtesans in the old days. I can't make it quite clear. "

  "Think not?" said H. M., blinking over his spectacles. "Oh, I don't know. You're doin' pretty well. You seem to have been a good deal bowled over yourself."

  Bennett was honest. "God knows I was — for a while. Everybody is who has the customary number of red corpuscles. But," he hesitated, "competition aside, I don't think I'd care for the emotional strain of staying bowled over by that woman. Do you see, sir?"

  "Oh, ah," said H. M. "Competition was brisk, then?"

  "It was ceaseless. There was even a gleam in Canifest's eye, I'm fairly sure. Thinking back on what you said.

  "So. She met Canifest?"

  "She'd known him in England, it seems; he was a friend of her father. Canifest and his daughter-Louise, her name is; she was acting as his private secretary — Canifest and his daughter and Bohun were staying at the Brevoort. Very fine and sedate and dignified, you see. So (to the astonishment of everybody) the flamboyant Tait also puts up at the Brevoort. We drove straight there from Grand Central. Canifest was photographed shaking hands with and congratulating the famous British artiste who had made her name on the screen: that sort of thing. It was as fatherly and disinterested as though she were shaking hands with Santa Claus. Where I began to wonder was when Carl Rainger, her director, arrived the next day with almost as big a public following; and the press agent with him. It was none of my affair — I was there to escort Canifest. But Bohun had arrived with the script of his brother's play: Tait made no secret of that. There was a sort of armed truce between Tait and Bohun on one side, and Rainger and Emery on the other. Whether we liked it or not, we were all mixed up together. It was explosive material. And in the middle of it was Marcia Tait, as expressionless as ever."

  Staring at the lamp on H. M.'s desk, he tried to remember just when he had first been conscious of that ominous tension, that uneasiness which scratched at the nerves in this incongruous company. Sultriness again. Like that drum-beat, muffled under the music, at the Cavalla Club. It would be, he thought, in Tait's suite on the night Rainger arrived. An old-fashioned suite in an ancient hotel, heavy with guilt and plush and glass prisms that suggested gaslight: yet with the pale glitter of Fifth Avenue outside the windows. Tait's sultry beauty was appropriate to the setting. She wore yellow, and sat back in an ornate chair under a lamp. Bohun, who always looked thinner and more high-shouldered in black and white, was manipulating the cocktail-shaker. Canifest, fatherly and heavy-mouthed, was talking interminably with his usual unction. Nearby Canifest's daughter sat on a chair which somehow seemed lower than the others; silent, efficient, and freckled, Louise was a plain girl made plainer still by her father's wishes; and she was permitted only one cocktail. "Our Spartan English mothers," declared Lord Canifest, evidently scenting a moral somewhere, "knew nothing of it. No." It was shortly afterwards that the house-phone buzzed.

  John Bohun — Bennett tried to explain it to H. M.- John Bohun straightened up and looked at it sharply. He made a movement to answer it, but Marcia Tait intercepted him: her face had a faint incurious smile, and her hair under strong light was brown instead of black. She said only, "Very well," before she replaced the receiver, still smiling. John Bohun asked who it was, in a voice that seemed as incurious as hers. He was answered in no very long time. Somebody knocked briefly at the outer door of the suite and threw it open without waiting for an invitation. There entered a quiet little man, pudgy but not comical in stiff-jawed anger, with two days' growth of beard on his face. Paying no attention to the others, he said quietly, "Exactly what the devil do you mean by walking out on us?" Marcia Tait asked to be allowed to present Carl Rainger.

  "— and that," said Bennett, "was nearly three weeks ago. It was, in a way, the beginning of it. But the question is this."

  He leaned across and put his finger on H. M.'s desk. "Who in our party would send Marcia Tait a box of poisoned chocolates?"

  CHAPTER TWO

  Weak Poison

  "One of your party, eh?" said H. M. meditatively. Been sending her poisoned chocolates. Well. Did she eat 'em?”

  I'm getting ahead of the story. The poisoned-chocolates business occurred only yesterday morning, and it's nearly a month ago that Tait arrived in New York. I never expected to come to England, you see; I never thought I should meet the party again once I had gone back to Washington; and it wasn't as though I had made particular friends with any of them. But it was that damned atmosphere. It stuck in your mind. I don't want to make the thing sound too subtle,

  H. M. grunted.

  "Bah. Subtlety," he said, "is only statin' a self-evident truth in language nobody can understand. And there's nothing subtle about trying to poison somebody. Have another drink. Then how did you come to be tied up with these people later?"

  That, Bennett tried to explain, was the curious thing: the metamorphosis of John Bohun. No sooner had the errand boy returned to Washington, than he was despatched with Washington's platitudinous goodwill letter to Westminster in the role of dummy diplomat. A dummy diplomat had no job: all he must do was say the wise, right, and sensible thing on all occasions. He sailed on the Berengaria, on a bitter gray day when the skyline was smoky purple etched out with pin pricks of light, and the wind cut raw across a choppy harbor. He had noticed a more than usual chatter, a more than usual quickened excitement aboard. They were just out of sight of the handkerchiefs at the end of the pier when he came face to face with Marcia Tait. She wore smoked glasses, which meant that she was incognito, and was swathed in unwieldy furs, smiling. On one side of her walked Bohun, and on the other side Canifest. Canifest was already looking pale with the motion. He went to his cabin at lunch, and did not return. Rainger and Emery seldom left their own cabins until the liner was a day out of Southampton.

  "Which," said Bennett, "threw Marcia and Bohun and myself together for the crossing. And — this is what puzzled me — Bohun was a different man. It was as though he had felt uneasy and a stranger in New York. He could talk, and he seemed to develop a sense of humor. The tension was gone while only the three of us were together. I suddenly discovered that Bohun had wild romantic ideas about this play he was going to produce. So far as I can gather, both he and his brother are steeped in seventeenth-century lore. And with reason. This house of theirs, the White Priory, was owned by the Bohuns in the time of Charles the Second. The contemporary Bohun kept `merry house'; he was a friend of the King, and, when Charles came down to Epsom for the racing, he stayed at the White Priory."

  H. M., who was filling the glasses again, scowled.

  "Funny old place, Epsom. `Merry house.' H'm. Ain't that where Nell Gwynn and Buckhurst lived before Charles picked her up? And this White Priory — hold on! I'm thinkin' Look here, it seems to me I remember reading about some house there; a pavilion or the like, attached to the White Priory, that they won't let tourists see… "

  "That's it. They call it The Queen's Mirror. Bohun says that the mania for importing marble into England and building imitation temples on ornamental sheets of water is traceable to the Bohuns who built the place. That's not true, by the way. The craze didn't start until a hundred years later, in eighteenth-century fashions. But Bohun violently believes it. Anyhow, it seems that ancestor George Bohun built it about 1664 for the convenience and splendor of Charles's all-alluring charmer Lady Castlemaine. It's a marble pavilion that
contains only two or three rooms, and stands in the middle of a small artificial lake; hence the name. One of the scenes of Maurice's play is laid there.

  "John described it to me one afternoon when he and Marcia and I were sitting on deck. He's a secretive sort, and-I should think — nervous. He always says, 'Maurice has the intelligence of the family; I haven't; I wish I could write a play like that,' and then smiling casually while he looks at people (especially Marcia) as though he were waiting for them to deny it. But he's got a flair for description, and an artist's eye for effect. I should think he'd made a damned good director. When he got through talking, you could see the path going down through lines of evergreens, and the clear water with the cypresses round its edge, and the ghostly pavilion where Lady Castlemaine's silk cushions still keep their color. Then he said, as though he were talking to himself, `By God, I'd like to play the part of Charles myself. I could and stopped. Marcia looked up at him in a queer way; she said, quietly, that they had got Jervis Willard, hadn't they? He whirled round and looked at her. I didn't like that expression, I didn't like the soft way she half-closed her eyes as though she were thinking of something from which he was excluded; so I asked La Tait whether she had ever seen Queen's Mirror. And Bohun smiled. He put his hand over hers and said, `Oh, yes. That was where we first met.'

  "I tell you, it didn't mean anything, but for a second it gave me a creepy feeling. We were alone on the deck, with the sea booming past and the deck-chairs sliding: and those two faces, either of which might have come out of canvas in an old gallery, looking at me in the twilight. But the next minute, along came Tim Emery, looking a little green but determined. He tried to be boisterous, and couldn't quite manage it. But it closed Bohun's mouth. Bohun detested both Emery and Rainger, and didn't trouble to conceal it."

  "About," observed H. M. in a thoughtful rumble, "about Messrs. Rainger and Emery. Do you mean to tell me that a highly paid director, well known in his own name, threw up a good job to chase across the ocean with this wench?"

  "Oh, no. He's on leave after two years without a vacation. But he chose to spend his vacation trying to persuade Marcia not to be a fool." Bennett hesitated, remembering the fat expressionless face with its cropped black hair, and the shrewd eyes that missed no detail. "Maybe," Bennett said, "somebody knows what that man thinks about. I don't. He's intelligent, he seems to guess your thoughts, and he's as cynical as a taxi-driver."

  "But interested in Tait?"

  "Well possibly."

  "Signs of manifest doubt. You're very innocent, son," said H. M., extinguishing the stump of his cigar. "H'm. And this fella Emery?"

  "Emery's more willing to talk than the others. Personally, I like him. He buttonholes me continually, because the others like to sit on him and he frankly detests 'em. He's the hopping, arm-flinging sort who can't sit still; and he's worried, because his job depends on getting Tait back to the studio. That's why he's there."

  "Attitude?"

  "He seems to have a wife back in California whose opinions he brings into every conversation. No. Interested in Tait as the late Mr. Frankenstein was interested: as something he'd created or helped create. Then, yesterday -

  The poisoned chocolates.” As he began to speak, the heavy gong-voice of Big Ben rose and beat in vibrating notes along the Embankment. It was a reminder. Another city, with its blue dusks and deathly lights where top-hats made faces look like masks, and where Marcia Tait's welcome had been as tumultuous as in New York. The liner had docked day before yesterday. In the crush as the boat-train drew into Waterloo station, he had not had the opportunity for a leave-taking. But John Bohun had elbowed through the corridor for a parting handshake. "Look here," he said, scribbling on a card, "here's the address." Once in London atmosphere, he was himself again; brisk, efficient, humorous-eyed, because he was at home. "Marcia will go to the Savoy for one night, as a blind; she'll slip away tomorrow morning to this address. Nobody else knows it. We, shall see you, of course?"

  Bennett said of course. He knew that Bohun and Marcia had had a sharp battle about that address before it was given to Rainger and Emery. "But it will go to Lord Canifest," said Marcia Tait, "of course?" As he fought his way to a taxi, Bennett looked back to see Tait leaning out of a trainwindow in the sooty dimness, smiling, receiving flowers, and shaking hands with some man who had his back turned. A voice somewhere said, "That's Jervis Willard"; and flashlights flickered. Lord Canifest, very benign, was being photographed with his daughter on his arm.

  Speeding along Waterloo Bridge in a yellow December afternoon, Bennett wondered whether he would see any of them again. Ship's coteries break up immediately, and are forgotten. He went to the American Embassy, where there was solemn pomp and handshaking; then to fulfill his mission at Whitehall, amid more of the same. It was all done in a couple of hours. They put a two-seater Morris at his disposal, and he accepted two or three invitations that were his duties. Afterwards he felt lonely as the devil.

  The next morning he was still more depressed, with Marcia Tait haunting his mind. In contrast to the easy comradeship of the liner, this dun-colored town was even more bleak. He was hesitating whether to go out to 16a Hamilton Place, the address on the card, and prowling aimlessly round Piccadilly Circus, when the matter was decided for him. At the mouth of Shaftesbury Avenue he heard a voice bellow his name, with friendly profanity, and he was almost run down by a big yellow car. People were staring at the car. From its massive silvered radiator-cap to the streamlined letters CINEARTS STUDIOS, INC., painted along the side, it was conspicuous enough even for the eye of Tim Emery, who drove it. Emery yelled to him to climb aboard, and Emery was in a bad humor. Bennett glanced sideways at the sharp-featured face, with its discontented mouth and sandy eyebrows, as they shot up Piccadilly.

  "God," said Emery, "she's batty. The woman's gone clear batty, I tell you!" He hammered his fist on the steeringwheel, and then swerved sharply to avoid a bus. "I never saw her like it before. Soon as she gets to this town, she goes high-hat. No publicity, she says. No publicity, mind you." His voice rose to a yelp. He was genuinely bewildered and worried. "I've just been round to see our English branch. Wardour Street bunch. Swell lot of help they are! Even if she did walk off the lot, I've still got to see she gets the breaks in the papers. Can you imagine, now-can you just imagine, I ask you-any woman who…"

  "Tim," said Bennett, "it's none of my business, but you must realize by this time she's determined to put on that play."

  "But why? Why?"

  "Well, revenge. Did you see the papers this morning?"

  "Say," observed Emery in an awed voice, "she's sure got it in for these Limey managers, hasn't she? That won't do her any good. But why bother about what they say in this town, when she can pull down two thousand a week in a real place? God, that's what burns me up! As though she'd got a…h’mm," said Emery, muttering to himself. "Woman With A Purpose. That'd make a swell lead. You could get a great publicity story out of it. If I could shoot the works on that but I can't. I've got to stop it."

  "Short of hitting her over the head and kidnapping her," said Bennett, "I don't see what you can do about it."

  Emery peered sideways. The rims of his eyes were red, and his breath in the sharp air was heavily alcoholic. Bennett saw the signs of an embarrassing and theatrical, if honest, attack of sentimentality.

  «Listen," said Emery, breathing hard. He had treated the suggestion with the utmost seriousness. "Kidnap her? Man, I wouldn't ruffle a hair of that girl's head, I wouldn't hurt her little finger so much as, for one split second in the world; and Lord help the man who tries it, that's all I've got to say. Yes. I love that woman like she was my own Margarette, and I want to see her have everything in the world…"

  "Watch the road," said Bennett sharply. "Where are we going?"

  "Out to reason with her, if she's there." "His white, fiercely earnest face turned away again. "She went shopping this morning — in a wig, mind you. A wig. But I was telling you: if she wants to make a pict
ure of this Charles-the-Second thing, all right. Why not? It's swell box-office. Radiant Pictures did one like that last year, and it got top rating from Variety. (That's the show you put Nell Gwynn in, isn't it? Uh-huh. I thought so.) All right. We'll fix it up with Baumann. We'll shoot a million dollars into production. A million-dollars," said Emery, savoring the words, "Yes, and so everything's right we'll bring over some of these Oxford guys to act as technical advisers. You think I don't want an artistic success? Well, I do. That's just what I do want," he said fiercely, and the car swerved again. He meant it. Jerking his neck sharply, he went on: "If that's what she wants, she'll get it. But not here. What kind of a guy is this Bohun, I'm asking you? — when he don't know his own mind from one minute to the next? Soft. That's Bohun. And here's their trick. To get her away from me, in case I'd make her see reason, they're taking her down to this place in the country; then we've lost her, see? But I won't bother with that end of it. She can go to the country. But there may be ways of queering their game right here in London."

  "How?"

  "Oh, ways." He wrinkled up his forehead and lowered his voice. "Look. Keep this under your hat. Do you know who's putting up the money for this show? Eh?"

  "Well?"

  "It's Canifest," said Emery. "This is where we turn:'

  He maneuvered through the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, and swung into the courtyard of a white-stone block of flats overlooking the brown earth and spiky trees of the Park. Emery beat the hall-porter into submission about not announcing their names; then growled and slid a banknote into his hand. They went up through a cathedral dimness to a landing where the door of Number 12 stood open. "Like a funeral," said Emery, sniffing the thick odor of flowers; but he stopped as he heard voices inside.