‘Just before nine.’
‘Just before—half an hour after dinner?’
‘That’s when I feel the most peckish. I nipped up into the galley, see, and there was this casserole on a hot plate but I’d only time for one spoonful when I heard two people coming so I jumped into the cool room.’
‘And waited?’
‘I had to wait.’ The Duke sounded almost virtuous. ‘If I’d opened the door even a crack they’d have seen me.’
‘So they didn’t see you. Which means they left. Then?’
‘They’d scoffed the bleedin’ lot,’ the Duke said bitterly.
‘Lucky you.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Moxen and Scott, wasn’t it? The stewards?’
‘How—how did you know?’
‘They saved your life, Duke.’
‘They what?’
‘They ate what you were going to eat So you’re alive. They’re both dead.’
Allen and Mary darling had obviously given up their midnight vigil for the lounge was deserted. I’d five minutes before I met Haggerty in the galley, five minutes in which to collect my thoughts: the trouble was that I had to find them first before I could collect them. And then I realized I was not even going to have the time to find them for there were footsteps on the companionway. Trying with very little success to cope with the wild staggering of the Morning Rose, Mary Stuart made her unsteady way towards an armchair opposite me and collapsed into rather than sat in it. Insofar as it was possible for such an extraordinarily good-looking young woman to look haggard, then she looked haggard: her face was grey. I should have felt annoyed with her for interrupting my train of thought, assuming, that was, that I ever managed to get the train under way, but I could feel no such emotion: I was beginning to realize, though only vaguely, that I was incapable of entertaining towards this Latvian girl any feeling that remotely bordered on the hostile. Besides, she had clearly come to talk to me, and if she did she wanted some help, or reassuring or understanding and it would come very hardly indeed for so proud, so remote, so aloof a girl to ask for any of those. In all conscience, I couldn’t make things difficult for her.
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