Lord Mullion's Secret by Michael Innes

as a punctilious guest, and suspected that her informant had been young Cyprian, who might even have adorned his tale with a little ludicrous fiction. ‘What happened was that I ran out of petrol. Or, rather, I imagined I had.’
    â€˜Imagined you had? How very peculiar!’
    â€˜It does sound odd.’ Honeybath considered embarking on a description of little green and red lights, but reflected that such gadgets didn’t belong to Miss Wyndowe’s period. ‘However, I was rescued by one of Henry’s gardeners, an obliging lad called Swithin Gore.’ Swithin, as one whom he had unjustly aspersed, was still running in Honeybath’s head.
    â€˜Gore? I don’t think I know him.’ Miss Wyndowe appeared to consider this remark with care. ‘But he may be the boy who used to look after my donkey-cart, and who has received some promotion since then. Do you use a donkey cart, Mr Honeybath? As you know, the Queen enjoys driving one. Only they call hers a donkey carriage.’
    â€˜Is that so?’ This information struck Honeybath as improbable, until it occurred to him that the sovereign thus augustly invoked had probably enjoyed this mode of conveyance at Osborne or Balmoral rather a long time ago.
    â€˜And – now I come to think of it – there have been Gores on the estate over a number of generations. I seem to recall an Abel Gore. One might imagine him to have been some sort of bull.’
    â€˜The boy who coped with my car wasn’t at all like a bull.’ It had taken Honeybath a moment to catch up with the sense of Miss Wyndowe’s remark, which revealed a process of mind as peculiar as had yet come from her. He wondered whether she was adept at advanced crossword puzzles. ‘As a matter of fact, when I first glanced at him I supposed he might be Cyprian. But that had something to do with what he happened to be carrying.’
    â€˜And also an Ammon Gore.’ Miss Wyndowe was pursuing her own line of thought. ‘Or was it Mammon? The lower classes were formerly prone to make an uninstructed use of scriptural names. But I think it was Ammon. The Ammonites were the children of Lot. His wife, you will recall, was of a retrospective habit, and was turned into a pillar of salt as a result. The notion of a pillar of salt is elusive, but some sort of stalagmite may have given rise to the conception. Can you tell me, Mr Honeybath, whether there are stalagmites in the Holy Land? It is on record as flowing with milk and honey – but not, so far as I know, with carbonate of lime.’
    Honeybath felt that this was getting beyond him. He wondered whether it represented a form of witty conversation fashionable at dinner-tables in this aged person’s youth. Or was it some kind of family joke that hadn’t been explained to him? This last speculation, which really had very little sense to it, at least confirmed the fact that he had a strong impulse to be bewildered by Great-aunt Camilla. He remembered Lady Mullion’s saying, on an impulse, that she felt her husband’s kinswoman as suggesting that some mystery attached to her; that she had a secret. Might it be that at least she had a past – which was not quite the same idea, but came close to it? The oddity of her conversation seemed not entirely a matter of senility or mental decay. It had too much intermittent point to it for that. Was it, conceivably, in part a defensive mechanism; something left over from a period in which an evasive inconsequence was useful to her? This notion, if not without subtlety, was rather unpersuasive as well, and Honeybath abandoned such idle speculation. During the rest of dinner he talked in the main with Lady Mullion. But on several occasions when conversation among the small party grew more general, and Miss Wyndowe contributed to it with a kind of random liberality, it struck him that a good deal of the effect she created proceeded from nothing more