Read Cavalier Case for Free Online Page B

Cup team, whose looks alone—unquestionably justifying his nickname—had caused maidens of an earlier generation to swoon. Jemima remembered herself as a schoolgirl fancying him madly.
    I suppose he's still quite sexy if you like that fair type, she thought critically, which I don't any longer. He certainly doesn't look much like his famous ancestor. Green eyes instead of brown. Give me a romantic soulful poet over a tennis player however handsome any day.
    Jemima was surprised to see Dan frown.
    "Not much point in interviewing servants." He sounded uncharacteristically ahrupt. "You know how they exaggerate. Dorothy died years ago and Haygarth is getting quite gaga—lives in the past and all that. No, not the seventeenth century, nothing so fascinating. Just Cousin Tommy's wartime adventures. No interviews with Haygarth. I can tell you all you need to know." Dan Lackland jumped out of the car so swiftly and easily that he might have been jumping the net after a victory in a tennis tournament.
    But Jemima certainly saw nothing gaga ahout Haygarth. The man now heaving his master's suitcase out of the Mercedes might be elderly hut there was nothing necessarily wrong with his hearing: he could well have heard Lord Lackland's last dismissive remarks.
    "Welcome to Lackland Court, Miss Shore," Haygarth was saying; his voice was vigorous and he did not waver as he carried rather than lugged her case up the steps.
    But the sight of the Decimus portrait, hanging at the head of the broad double wooden staircase which led directly out of the great hall, put an end to other thoughts—at least for the time being. Perhaps it was the steep perspective of the staircase, the domination exercised by the single portrait at the head of it, perhaps it was her own emotion which gradually accumulated as they approached Lackland Court: for whatever reason Jemima felt a kind of faintness, dizzyness even, on seeing this particular version of the poet's portrait, which she could not remember experiencing before.
    With Rupert's portrait she had fallen in love: it was as simple as that. At the N.P.G. she had been mainly occupied trying to train her untrained eye to concentrate and spot the differences between the two versions as Rupert himself had suggested: the big dog—of whatever breed—in Rupert's version, had become for example a page at the N.P.G., a page attending in some wide-eyed way to the sash of his master's armour. Decimus' white hand had passed from the dog's head to a more military-looking baton. Here the dog was back in the place of the page, with the poet's hand spread out upon its head; but his other hand was also visible, one finger raised and pointing, as though in warning ... At the sight of this third version, she found that by now the intensity of her emotion was different, almost uncomfortably fierce in its quality . . .
    A pause for collecting herself, a necessary pause. It occurred to her that this after all was the portrait out of which Decimus himself was supposed to step. No wonder she felt faint. It was at the time a purely ironic thought.
    A ghost walking! What an absurd concept, if you considered it properly for one single moment. The further irony of the fact that she, a rationalist, or at any rate one who did not believe in ghosts, was about to make a whole series of programmes on the subject, was also not lost on Jemima. This particular development was however the joint responsibility of Cy's desire to please Lady Manfred and Jemima's own desire to please herself.
    It was at this point that Jemima realised, perhaps a little late in the day, that she had never really examined her own truthful thoughts on the subject of ghosts. If Decimus' presence lingered in this world, and for her it unquestionably did, it lingered in his poetry. What need of further corporeal hauntings on the part of a man who had written: "I fain would be thy swan" or "I could not love thy kiss." Decimus Lackland lingered alright, in the