Sonnet of the Sphinx Read online

  “Bakamen,” Kameko said under her breath.

  There was no trace of the Tattooed Lady beneath the dark, mannish suit. Kameko was a girl who clearly loved dressing up.

  “I think I’ve probably had enough,” she told Kameko. “I had a late lunch at the Tower Bank Arms. It’s inJemima Puddleduck.” Her voice wavered on the name of Jemima Puddleduck. She hoped that she was not like Jemima Puddleduck, cozily ensconced in a feather-lined trap.

  “Drink,” Kameko ordered.

  Grace gulped down the brandy, sneezed, and got control of herself.

  She was aware that DI Drummond watched her every move. He said at last, “If what you say is true, you showed amazing resource getting yourself out of that car alive.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, although he had not phrased it as a compliment. She wiped her eyes again, relieved to be mistress of herself once more.

  Then the questions began in earnest. Did she see the other driver? Could she read the number plate? What make of car? How long had the car followed her before the attack? Had she noticed anyone following her earlier that day? Had anything happened at Hill Top Farm that made her suspicious? Had she had any arguments or disagreements with anyone recently?

  “Only you,” she told the detective inspector.

  Drummond looked taken aback. “Naturally I don’t count,” he objected, sounding testy.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Mr. Matsukado giggled.

  The questions started again.

  “No, no, no,” answered Grace tiredly. She couldn’t think about it anymore. The oversize dressing gown slipped from her shoulder, and she pulled it up hastily. She met Detective Inspector Drummond’s light eyes. They were the shade of blue that looks gray in certain light.

  They looked gray in that light.

  Another of the Shogun’s servants appeared in the drawing room doors and announced that the doctor had arrived.

  “I think that’s about it,” Drummond said, and the constable flipped closed his notepad. “Naturally you’ll ring us if you remember anything else.”

  Grace nodded.

  They rose to leave, but the detective inspector paused on his way through the double doors.

  “Where is Mr. Fox this evening?”

  Grace glared at him. “He’s on a buying trip.”

  “Convenient.”

  She opened her mouth, but another sneeze interrupted her. She felt as if her head had been stuffed with pepper.

  “We’ll be in touch, Ms. Hollister,” Drummond informed her. “In the meantime, if I were you, I’d watch my back.”

  13

  Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean my boyfriendisn’tout to kill me. Grace was not in good spirits, having woken at Mallow Farm with a raging head cold and a collection of bruises more colorful than Kameko’s tattoos.

  Or had she dreamed up those tattoos? The night before had taken on a distant surreal quality. Had someone really tried to run her off the highway, or was it simply a case of mistaken road rage? Did theyhave road rage in England? More importantly, did they have NyQuil?

  She didn’t really believe that Peter was her attacker, but it was obvious that DI Drummond did. She understood that the detective inspector had a policeman’s jaded view of human nature, but she didn’t think much of his detecting skills. Did she really seem like the kind of woman who couldn’t tell the difference between a sociopath and a…a perfectly decent scoundrel?

  Perhaps Drummond was a fan of gothic romances. She liked the idea of the humorless, uptight—and too-good-looking—inspector kept up late at night, poring over the adventures of damsels in negligees.

  Breakfast was served on a tray in her room. Grace studied the lacquered bowls doubtfully, but the miso soup proved to be hot and salty and soothing to her scratchy throat. She hadn’t appetite for the rest of the dishes, but two cups of tea gave her the strength to drag her aching body out of bed and scrutinize her reflection in the mirror.

  What is it with thee, sister? Thou art pale.

  She looked like something that spent a lot of time underwater: blanched and dark-eyed. Her hair looked flat and lifeless. There was a bruise along the side of her neck where the seat belt had jerked tight. Her eyes were red, and her nose was pink.

  Very depressing. She was further depressed to think of her beloved car at the bottom of Lake Swirlbeck. Would the police retrieve it? How expensive would such an operation be, and would her insurance cover it?

  No doubt DI Drummond would be happy to give her the bad news.

  She dismissed the annoying Drummond from her thoughts and set about getting ready to face the day. Her clothes would never be the same again, but they were freshly laundered. She dressed and opened the door to her room.

  She was startled to find Mr. Matsukado in the hallway. She had the distinct impression he had been hovering outside her door waiting for her to wake—an unsettling thought.

  “Oh, good mordning,” Grace said thickly.

  The Shogun, dressed in flannels and a Fair Isle pullover that made him look like an overage schoolboy, looked sympathetic. “Ms. Hollister, you are unwell.”

  “I may have caud a chill.” She sneezed, and Mr. Matsukado’s hand went to the banister as though to steady himself in the typhoon.

  “Ms. Hollister, I must speak to you,” he said urgently.

  Grace’s sole ambition was to get home and into her own bed. She groaned inwardly, but, after all, she owed Mr. Matsukado and his household for their hospitality of the night before.

  Obediently she followed him into the library, wincing at the bright glare flooding down from the giant skylight. The room looked as if it had been ransacked the night before. Papers were everywhere, strewn on every available flat surface as well as scattered across the carpet. Her host waved off Grace’s expression of dismay with that disconcerting giggle.

  “No, no. All is in order. There is method in my madness, don’t you know!”

  She didn’t know, but she hadn’t the energy to worry about it. Grace sank into a comfortable club chair that she recognized from its brief stay at Rogue’s Gallery. She would have liked nothing better than to close her eyes and go to sleep in the honey-colored sunlight flooding through the skylight.

  Mr. Matsukado was all solicitousness, ordering grapes and ice water for her. He rang for one manservant to fetch a pillow and afghan, and another to supply a box of tissues.

  “Really,” she protested feebly, “if we could judst…”

  Mr. Matsukado waved at her as though warning her to silence. Grace’s voice died, and he went over to a wall safe, unlocked it, and removed an oblong object. He brought the object to Grace. She stared down at a leather journal embossed with a compass.

  It looked old. Not 1800s old, but old. The faded leather was genuine. She traced the compass with a gentle finger and looked inquiringly at her host.

  “I’m afraid I don’t…”

  “It is difficult to know where to start, what?”

  “Why not start at the beginning?”

  He nodded curtly, then began to stride up and down the room with restless energy. Grace did not know what to make of it. She sipped her ice water and resisted the temptation to open the journal or ledger or whatever it was.

  Suddenly Mr. Matsukado swung on heel and faced her. “Ms. Hollister, you and I share a great passion!”

  “Uh…”

  He giggled at her reaction. “Ours is a passion for the writings of your English Romantic poets, what?”

  “What? I mean, yes.”

  He gave her a cunning look. “I believe we share a secret, Ms. Hollister.”

  “We do?”

  “It is the secret of the Sphinx.”

  Grace sat very still, as still as the Sphinx had through centuries of sand and sun. Whatever he read in her face he took as affirmation.

  “For many years, it was my dream to find an original lost work by one of these great men and present it to the world.”

  A tickle
between her eyes had Grace reaching for a tissue to muffle her sneeze. “I guess id’s everywad’s dream,” she managed with the insular view of the academic.

  He approached her chair and leaned over her, his face close to hers. Grace withdrew. Uncomfortably, her eyes rose from his mouth working beneath the Shredded Wheat mustache to his incandescent gaze. She hoped he was not going to spontaneously combust.

  He said in an undervoice, “For many years now I put out my tentacles—”

  “Yourwhad ?”

  Mr. Matsukado looked uncertain. “My—how is it you say,feelers.”

  “Oh.”

  He straightened and began again to pace up and down the length of the room. Grace felt her forehead—107, 108? She wondered if she wasn’t a bit light-headed. She sipped more ice water.

  “One day in a shipment from England I found something most interesting. It was a journal by a man named John Mallow.” He stared at Grace.

  She coughed politely into her fist.

  “He had a friend in Italy, this John Mallow. When war came, the friend sent many books and papers back to England for safekeeping. But the friend died, and John Mallow, sorting through his belongings, found what he believed was a poem—a sonnet—by the great English poet, Percy Shelley.”

  Grace could hear her own somewhat asthmatic breathing in the silence that followed. “How do you know all this?”

  He pointed to the leather-bound book she held. Did young men even keep journals these days? Grace’s fingers itched to open the book on her lap.

  “The sonnet was titled ‘Sate the Sphinx.’ Have you heard of it?”

  “No.”

  He breathed a relieved sigh. “I thought not.”

  Grace’s mind was racing. Sate the Sphinx? Probably Sat the Sphinx; Shelley’s spelling and punctuation were always a bit iffy—although perhaps it was sate. Impossible to know without reading the poem.

  Matsukado was continuing. “I bought this house, the house of John Mallow, and I made up my mind to search for this poem.”

  “Bud surely the journald would tell you where the poemb is—was?”

  “The journal ends in December 1941, when John Mallow returned to his regiment.”

  Two years year before Mallow had disappeared. The year the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She glanced at Mr. Matsukado, wondering if he was aware of any irony in his obsession with a lost English soldier. Except, like herself, it was not the lost soldier that interested him, it was the lost poem.

  “There’s no hint of what became of the poem?”

  Mr. Matsukado shook his head regretfully.

  “Was there proof that the poem was Shelley’s?”

  Another shake.

  Grace bit her lip. No, because in 1943, Mallow had been waiting for “tetchy old Fen” to authenticate it. Had he given the poem to Fen to keep, and if so, had Fen ever returned it?

  Mr. Matsukado advanced on her again. “I believe that somewhere in this house, perhaps in the items that you and Mr. Fox returned to me, is this poem.” He looked as feverish as Grace felt.

  “It’s possible.”

  “I wish to propose a partnership.” Mr. Matsukado bent over her and spoke in a heavy stage whisper. “A partnership between you and me.”

  “I—”

  “If you will help me locate this poem, I will share with you all remuneration, all fame and fortune.”

  She stared, her hand unconsciously stroking the embossed leather. “Why?”

  “Because you are an expert on these matters. And because you have a knack for finding what is lost.” His eyes gleamed. “And because it would be nice to have someone who understands and can share in my triumph.”

  Grace didn’t know about that, but she wasn’t about to debate her credentials. She wanted in on this quest.

  She opened the journal.

  It was a relief to be home where she could give in to feeling miserable. Her head felt like the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

  She pulled out the sofa bed and, despite the warmth of the day, cocooned herself in pillows and bedclothes. The sofa did a couple of slow and sickening swoops. Hectic images flooded her mind, memories of the terrifying drive with headlights burning like comets in her rear window, of the car plunging into the blackness of what might have been her watery tomb, of Percy Shelley’s battered body burning on a funeral pyre while Byron and Trelawney looked on.

  Grace’s eyes jerked open.

  That last image wasn’t memory. It was sheer imagination triggered by the Shogun’s amazing revelation. Was it possible that the sonnet still existed, that it was genuine? She tried to imagine the first line.

  “Solemn Sphinx, were I as stedfast as thou…”

  “Hail to thee, blithe Sphinx…”

  Well…probably not.

  She woke up from an unpleasant dream in which she was arguing with Detective Inspector Drummond. It occurred to her that she never dreamed about Peter. Was that significant? He certainly filled a large portion of her waking thoughts. Just than she was wondering where he was, and what he might be up to. He had said he was not pulling “a runner,” but would he tell her if he was? Might he someday disappear out of her life without a word of warning?

  In the midst of these none-too-pleasant reflections, her landlady, Sally Smithwick came around with a pot of chicken soup and something called Beecham’s All-In-One. Grace dosed herself with soup and the yellow syrup, and sank into a deep dreamless sleep.

  When she woke, she lay quietly listening to the doves cooing under the eaves with what her poets called “sleep-drowsed senses.”

  The danger and fear of the previous night seemed a lifetime ago.

  Grace flipped through her edition ofThe Great Romantics, and was lost for a time in the delicate seduction of Shelley’s verse.

  And the sunlight clasps the earth,

  And the moonbeams kiss the sea—

  What are all these kissings worth,

  If thou kiss not me?

  Of all the Romantics, it was Shelley whose work most touched her. She thought of those heartbreaking fragments Mary Shelley had published after his death. Poems to his little son William, following the child’s death from malaria at age three. Half-started poems to Mary, whose own grief had left Shelley feeling shut out and abandoned.

  She read over her notes for her talk at the conference and slept some more, waking to the soft tap, tapping of her front door.

  Miss Webb, a vision in lime green and tangerine polka dots, stood on the cottage stoop. “Oh, jolly good. You’re home. I was afraid you might be at Rogue’s Gallery this afternoon. You will pardon the intrusion, my dear. I’ve had a rather odd experience.”

  Grace realized she hadn’t given the shop a thought all day. She hoped Peter’s finances could stand losing another day of business. Not that he didn’t take a day off whenever he pleased.

  “Please come in,” she invited, trying to sound gracious but wishing that she had never opened the door.

  Taking in the mussed sheets on Grace’s foldout bed, Miss Webb said, “Under the weather, my dear?” Unlike Sally Smithwick, she had apparently not heard of Grace’s adventures the previous evening.

  “Actually, I’m feeling much better,” Grace lied politely, sweeping up her bed, box of tissues, and books with ruthless efficiency. “Tea?”

  Miss Webb assented, and Grace went into the kitchen, washed her hands, and put on the electric kettle. She cut two slices of chocolate sponge cake and fixed a tea tray.

  From outside the kitchen window, she could hear the Smithwick children playing. “Not last night but the night before, twenty-four robbers came knocking at my door…”

  Smiling faintly, she put the tea things on the small kitchen table and beckoned to Miss Webb. She was surprised to find that she was ravenous. She ate every bite of her cake and drank several cups of tea. Miss Webb also seemed to appreciate the sponge cake, and Grace ended up dividing up the last of it between them.

  When they had finished their tea, and Grac
e was clearing up, Miss Webb dusted the crumbs off her cardigan and came at last to the point. “Mr. Sartyn paid me a visit this morning.”

  “Did he?” Grace’s nose tickled. She managed to raise her bathrobed arm in time to shield the tea tray and Miss Webb from her sneeze.

  “Gracious,” murmured Miss Webb.

  “Sorry. Summer colds are the worst, aren’t they?” she managed thickly.

  “It’s I who should be apologizing, my dear. You should be in bed.”

  You’re telling me.Grace kept smiling, though she feared it was a gruesome effort.

  Miss Webb’s own smile was rueful. “As I was saying, Mr. Sartyn was asking about you, my dear. Afraid I made the mistake of thinking perhaps he had a romantic interest in you.”

  Grace’s hands froze on the tea things. “Something changed your mind?”

  “You see, I realized that he wanted to know what you knew about Eden Monkton. As a matter of fact, he was asking all kinds of questions about the Monktons.”

  “Like?” That made absolutely no sense to Grace. Why should anyone, let alone Sartyn, care about the Monktons? Could Sartyn be interested in the Shelley sonnet? It seemed unlikely, given his disparaging comments on poetry and poets. Besides, his field was archaeology.

  “Afraid I didn’t pay a lot of attention. I was…well, troubled. He seemed like such a nice young man, but he was saying rather awful things about you.” She fastened Grace with her pale, pale eyes.

  “About me?” She wished her mind were sharper. She poured another cup of tea and gulped it down. “I can’t imagine why he would be interested. In either myself or the Monktons.”

  “Can’t imagine whyyou would be interested in the Monktons either, my dear.” Miss Webb sounded amused.

  “I’m not. Not per se. It’s just…” Now that she and the Shogun had formed their partnership, was there really any reason to conceal the possible existence of the lost Shelley? “Miss Webb, did you ever hear anything about the local discovery of a lost work by Percy Bysshe Shelley?”