![]() She appears to combine the functions of a White Witch and detective." She is the greatest hand at hunting down ghosts and anything supernatural that ever was known. May I ask if we have ever entertained the lady?" "Miss Bartendale, Miss Swanhild? I do not seem to recognise the name. "Call in–Oh, Doyle, or Professor Lodge, or Miss Bartendale." "If you knew when to expect it, Miss Swanhild, might I venture to ask what you would do?" "If one only knew beforehand when it was going to manifest itself!" she sighed. The girl shuddered and abandoned her pretence of indifference. Once it was quiet a hundred and twenty years, and then it came up worse than ever–" He glanced involuntarily at the Warlock portrait. "Why, it hasn't been about for forty years." "Don't worry about the Monster," she advised. Oliver went to Lower Dannow it's to be hoped he won't take the short cut back by the Shaw–"Īs he was voicing her own unconfessed fear Swanhild was curt. "Well, Miss Swanhild, there's no knowing." He hesitated. They wouldn't dare to do anything after saying it." Oliver when he was out of Lewes, Miss Swanhild." "He swore, and so did young Bob, to do for Mr. Oliver would have been content with jailing him." It was I who sent Oliver round directly I found the traps. Oliver one for that thrashing last month." The Ades were always a vengeful lot, a gipsy strain about them, you know, Miss Swanhild. "You observed yourself, Miss Swanhild, that fellows who set traps that mauled the poor beasts would be capable of anything. Those two Ades are likely to be about their tricks on a night like this." "It's mischief getting at him I dread, Miss Swanhild. "We can trust him not to get into mischief, Walton." Oliver's very late, Miss Swanhild," he observed uneasily. His manner was one of nicely suppressed alarm. Soon after midnight appeared Walton, the butler, with some trifling enquiry as transparent excuse for a little talk. Of the Warlock Sir Magnus, for the portrait, the face outlined palely in a black wilderness of background and Tudor cap, and the features traced like rivers on a map, might have been a coarsened likeness of her. She was a typical Hammand of Dannow, evidently a descendant She was a big woman of twenty, slimly but largely built, with aquiline features, big grey eyes, calm and wide-set, and a wonderful crown of glowing curls, every lock a separate shade of gold, from coppery to that pale tint that suggests warmed silver. ![]() The rest of the apartment was all shifting shadows, Swanhild herself was the only bright and vivid feature of it when the fire had gone down to a sullen smoulder. Swanhild saw all three whenever she consulted the clock, as only one lamp was lit, over the mantel, and they were enshrined in a little oasis of warmth and light in the vast spread of wainscoated room. Over the mantelpiece the little, black, Streete portrait of Godfrey's father, Sir Magnus the Warlock, who committed suicide after surviving an encounter with the Monster on a frosty night of 1526. Flanking the fireplace were the two dubious Holbeins, portraits of Godfrey Hammand and his wife: both killed by the Undying Monster of Dannow on a frosty night in 1556. She waited in the Holbein Room, not the best place in the circumstances. Swanhild could not hear it distinctly, the Manor walls are a yard thick, only she felt it sweep round the building, and there is nothing more harrowing than a deadly hush with the feel of a great noise round it. It was not a noisy wind, but the kind that suggests something very big and thin fresh from the horror of Infinite Space. There was a breeze down in the Weald of Sussex, which meant that Dannow, up on the Downs, was in the track of half a gale. ![]() She really had cause for uneasiness, Oliver was out late: they kept the sort of hours at Dannow Old Manor that make Summer Time an injurious insult, and it was the kind of night against which the ancient family rhyme warned the Hammands of Dannow: It was not true, but it served to reassure her for several seconds. She fidgeted too much over Oliver, so she impressed on herself as she looked at the clock for the fifth time between 11-35 and midnight. It was to allay her growing nervousness that she dwelt on it. ![]() Swanhild told herself that as she waited on that winter night. The two had always been good pals, Oliver Hammand and Swanhild his sister, and now they were left alone the bond between them was intensified. The end of the Fifty-two Months' War left the family of Hammand of Dannow reduced to two members. "Pardon for … 26,000 Yeares and 26 Daies" 64 ![]() A Celebration of Women Writers The Undying Monster:Īuthor of the £750 Prize Novel, "Miss Haroun Al-Raschid" ![]()
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