Gibbous House 73

The repeater watch showed one: it was a pleasant afternoon, I bade Maccabi see to the provision of a luncheon for myself and the reporter on the terrace outside the library. Maccabi seemed about to make some unwise remark, but closed his mouth and went about the arranging of the seeming miracle of food production from Mrs. Gonderthwaite's domain. I turned to the reporter:

'Well, Mr Allan, you are strange fish to wash up on these shores, I think.'

Despite my bantering tone, the man's eyes narrowed to a sharp glare and his voice emerged sharper still:

'What do you mean by that, Moffatt?'

He gave a consumptive little cough and spat gelidly to the the side.

'I simply meant that you are no Northumbrian.'

I raised both eyebrows to convince him of my innocence of any guileful motive.

'No, no. I am not, at that. I – I have been sometime abroad. My family are ... Reynolds from Gainsborough... Lincolnshire. Edgar Allan is a professional name. '

His accent bespoke the the Americas, although he was trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to disguise it. There seemed little of truth in anything he had said - and perhaps that was to be expected of a newspaperman.

We reached the terrace with its furniture of iron after the style of the Spanish rejeria or the ironworking fashions imported for St Paul's or Hampton Court. I had little time for chairs and tables of this kind: the artful whorls and curlicues in the metal in no way made up for the impracticality of the tables and the uncomfortable seat in the chairs. I would have preferred banquettes of honest wood. Still, it was indeed a pleasant day and I motioned the reporter to a less fussy arrangement of four chairs and a table of rectangular, rather than the more common circular, shape.

We sat, Allan almost over his alarm at my remark. How he did seem to be a man with a past not quite behind him; a past he would most likely have looked for over his shoulder, were he not hidden half a world away from whatever his true place of origin might have been. I sat in a chair which offered a view of the site of the shepherd's demise. The reporter began patting the pockets of his coat, before withdrawing a clay pipe. A further search produced a box of blackened metal about the size of a folded handkerchief. Allan opened it and withdrew a white-headed lucifer. He bent to the flagstones and ignited the match so as to avoid any harm to myself from stray sparks. I had never been a smoker and I never would begin until the unlikely day that someone invented an affordable match that could be used in safety.

Arabella Coble had enjoyed tobacco, although she had never smoked in public. I did enjoy watching the pleasure she drew from the pipe quite as materially as she drew the smoke from it. The child had died because of the matches and Arabella's decline began shortly afterward. She did not smoke again, but kept a similarly blackened box at her bedside in memory of her daughter. I buried it with her.

The reporter let out a contented sigh and seemed for the first time relaxed in my company. His legs were stretched out before him, crossed at the ankle, and both he and his clothes cut a slightly less ridiculous figure in that pose.

'A man with a smoke is ever in want of a drink, I find, Mr Allan' I said.

I stood and entered the library via the french windows.