The dinner dragged on. It was, he supposed, a good dinner, but to Bennett the very steam was nauseous, and the bursts of conversation worse. Maurice lingered over every course, descanting. A clock struck eight-thirty. When Katharine and Louise tried to withdraw from the table as Thompson set out the decanters, Maurice's thin voice forbade them. H.M., who had not spoken throughout, sat back wooden and motionless. The sharp noise of Maurice cracking nuts sounded thin in the big room. Now the firelight had begun to die down, and the moon was high beyond one wall of windows.
Crack. A faint thump as the nut-cracker was put down. Bennett suddenly pushed his cold coffee away..
"I think," said Maurice, "that we are almost ready to proceed with the curious experiment Sir Henry has suggested. I may say that it will not, of course, lead us to anything that concerns the actual murderer of Miss Tait. Although at Sir Henry's express wish I have refrained from telling all of you the facts, nevertheless we ourselves have little doubt. But this reconstruction should be most interesting to some of us, particularly"-crack! the little steel jaws snapped again- "my dear young friend Louise. Ha ha ha. Besides, I am always. willing to lecture on the beauties of the White Priory, as I did last night. Sir Henry, do you wish me to take all of you on a full round of the house, as last night?"
"No," said H. M. They seemed a trifle startled to remember that he was there. "Nothin' so elaborate as that. We'll start from here, and go up to the room. Humph. I got no objection to your lecturin', if you like. Besides, I shouldn't be much good in Tait's part, should I? Hey? No. We'll simply imagine she's here. It'll be easier, in the dark. Imagine she's walkin' between you and me. We'll go on ahead, and the others can follow in the order they did last night."
Maurice rose. "Quite so. Louise with my friend Jervis. Little Kate with Mr. Bennett in the role of our other absent guest. I should earnestly recommend that each person act as he or she did last night. As for myself, I have so often fancied I walked and talked with dead ladies in this house that it will scarcely be a strain on my imagination to see the latest of them walking beside me. Thompson, you may blow out all the candles except one."
As each candle puffed out, it was like the driving of a nail into a door that shut them back into the past: even though it were only the equally irrevocable past of last night. The moonlight probed down through the wall of windows, touching silhouettes and the sides of faces turned the color of skim milk. Feet shuffled. The little yellow flame from the candle in Maurice's hand flickered as he raised it aloft. It touched a portrait, a darkened and paint-cracked portrait of a woman in a yellow gown, the semblance of whose inscrutable eyes they recognized an instant before the light lowered again.
"This way," said Maurice.
Again the footsteps rasped on stone. The pin-point flame moved ahead. ' Bennett felt Katharine's arm trembling against his own. It was just when they moved out into the maze of passages that Maurice's thin voice began to speak smoothly and pleasantly.
"It is an interesting thing concerning this fleshly charmer," he said, smirking down at an empty space under the candle-flame, "that, aside from the one affair with a monarch which may be only likened in analogy to a tolerant Providence protecting her, her life was chiefly distinguished by the love of four men. One was a famous actor. One was a playwright. One was a dashing captain whose first name was John. One, of course, was her complacent husband.
"I refer-ah — to Barbara Villiers Palmer, first Lady Castlemaine and later Duchess of Cleveland. The actor was Charles Hart, the grand-nephew of Shakespeare and Drury Lane's great tragedian; who, they said, could teach any king how to comport himself. The playwright was William Wycherley, a witty dog, ha ha, who complimented her Grace on `understanding nothing better than obliging all the world after the best and most proper fashion.' The dashing captain was John Churchill, later to become famous (for his love of money) as the Duke of Marlborough. The husband was little Roger Palmer, who never mattered at all..