“I’ve got to go to London, make a call and wait for a Telex.”
            Poole stood with Amanda under the portico, watching a sullen rain.  The dinner gong was due to sound, but Poole pulled Amanda aside from the influx of members at the refectory.  He wanted to brief her on his plans before he left Ashpole Manor.
            “You have a free afternoon Friday,” she said.   “After three o’clock.  Do you want me to drive you?”
            “No, I want to be as unobtrusive as possible.  I’ll catch the train. I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait.  If I call now I’ll catch Harvey Lewis at midday in the States.  He can send the data right away.  But you should keep an eye on Marcia, and anyone else who needs watching.”
            “What information are you after?  Our members’ files are fairly detailed.”
            “Yep, but files they submitted.  I want to check everything TransAtlas has on them.”
            “You think some prior connections may explain all this?”
            “It’s all I can guess.  Eliminate the possible, and so on.  We see these people every day in meetings, but there must be hidden connections we don’t know about.”
            “It just sounds so conspiratorial.”
            “I know members have been screened and selected by different branches, and we thought we had a pure mix of administrators and executives without direct working relationships.  But we don’t really know who all these people used to be.”
            “Perhaps it’s not related to TransAtlas at all but to the Institute?  Neither Schwann nor Drus were tied to TransAtlas, but it’s happening here.  Maybe it’s the place.”
            At dinner they separated.  Poole eavesdropped on members’ paranoid fantasies about John Walker, Sir Leicester, Marcia and Marion and the total infernal concept of the Cavendar Process.  They acted like extras in an old Warner Brothers prison movie, damning the warden and plotting a break-out through the laundry.
            After the meal, Poole donned an old sweater and strolled around the grounds—past the massive stable block, marveling at its architecture.  He peered into huge stalls made for the Shire horses that once worked Ashpole’s acreage.  Old carriages and buggies were restored to museum condition, relentlessly cleaned and polished.  In one stall was a noisy Dalmatian bitch with three half-grown pups.
            The stable was built of yellow stone, with massive doors and trim, and above the stalls was a story with small gabled windows.  Outdoors servants must have been quartered with the horses.  Standing in the big cobbled yard, he felt a prickle of discomfort, a sense of being watched.  He thought he glimpsed a movement in one dark window above.
            He crossed the yard and walked through a wide gateway.  Each segment of the polygonal stable was, on the outside, like a small stone cottage.  Each had a green-painted door, two windows up, two down.  It was as trim as a child’s building-block village, made by William Kent so the fourteenth earl could gaze at a quiet pastoral scene, ignorant of the workaday functions of his estate.
            Poole read the brass door numbers.  He peered into the mullioned window of No. 3, making out little—an empty, dusty room, an old grate in one wall, narrow stairs up from this parlor.  The door was firmly locked.
            Dismissing his itchy discomfort, Poole walked away from the stables and the house toward the quiet river that wound sinuously through the estate.  Lancelot Brown and Humphrey Repton had reordered the ancient river into canal-like passages, sensuous curves of beauty, with little weirs and waterfalls, flowing between the three ornamental lakes.
            Strolling the riverbank, he regarded a flotilla of swans sailing downstream.  One held her wings half-erected like sails on a dhow, and between them crouched several cygnet passengers.  He passed the Palladian bridge, which featured the five orders of architecture plus caryatids, gods and goddesses in niches and a beautifully wrought balustrade.  Despite its wedding cake top-heaviness, it spanned the stream gracefully.  Poole noticed conference members walking in the distance but elected solitude and walked upstream, following a narrow path to the Vale of Ida.
            A tiny round pink, white and yellow temple stood nearly shrouded by rhododendrons, the broad green leaves anarchic against the white Doric columns that marched around the little structure.  Art and Nature intertwined.
            Poole walked from the woodsy shade to the temple, when he saw a figure move behind the barred pattern of columns.  It turned from him, and he increased his stride.  In twenty seconds he crossed the lawn and strode up the three shallow steps into the temple.  It was empty.  Out the back of this little tea house or summer house, Poole saw a slight figure moving away, several hundred yards down the slope.  He charged down the back steps of the temple in pursuit.
            He was sure it was a woman, but the figure faded into deep, latticed shade under a trio of giant cedars.   He started to run then recalled how rubbery his legs felt and how shallow his breath.  He was twenty years beyond an all-out footrace.  He angled toward the grove, guessing where his quarry would emerge.  Wrong.  Little Ms. Whoever had emerged from the opposite side and was into the broad meadow that led past the eyecatcher and up a steep slope to the Gothick Temple.
            Poole lurched ahead, straightening his course to intercept his quarry in a few hundred years, if he didn’t die first.  His breath rasping, he aimed for the silhouette of the Aegyptian Pyramid in the meadow (a mausoleum for the favorite rat terrier of the sixteenth earl), a squat obelisk on stumpy Carthagenian pillars.  As Poole charged, he moved from smooth lawn to stubbly meadow grass, and he saw, horrified, a stone ledge underfoot.  Richard B. Poole, investigator with portfolio and trusted administrative assistant in the middle echelons of the world’s most widely diversified multinational corporation, ran right off the edge of the earth.

            “It’s called a ha-ha,” Amanda said.  “Actually an ‘ah-ha,’ originally. You were supposed to exclaim with surprise when you saw it.  But you weren’t supposed to see it, most of the time.  It was a surprise.”
            “I was surprised when I found it,” Poole groaned.  “I was going about five miles an hour faster than I should.”
            He sat propped in a leather chair, contemplating the fat bandage around his left foot, which lay across a hassock like an exhibit at a county fair.
            “Do you know what they always find on those airline voice recorders after a crash?  The last transmission is always 'Oh, sh*t—we’re going in!’  I think that’s what I said before I ate the dirt.”
            “I can’t work up much sympathy, Richard.  You had no business bulling about on your own.”  Poole was inured by now to this frigid schoolmarmishness every British woman kept on tap.
            He had experienced the hideous sensation of running off solid ground into thin air, and a spectator would have recalled Wile E. Coyote bushwhacked for the billionth time by the Roadrunner.  He had toppled, arms and legs windmilling, into the loam at the bottom of the fosse.  When he sat up, he found the bad ankle, a sore wrist and bruises over ribs, elbows and thighs.
            “You understand I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said.  “I wasn’t out for a big chase.  It just happened.” As usual around Brits, he felt in the wrong—it is simply naughty to hurt yourself, you big, silly Yank oaf.
            “You are a grown-up man with some sense.  People have been murdered, you’ve been assaulted—so you run off to fling yourself into a ditch?”
            “All right, but my stupidity aside, what does this mean?  It was a small woman, and I know she saw and heard me.  And she was definitely running away—damn fast, too!”
            “You don’t know that this was connected with what you saw—or didn’t see—at the stables.”
            “No, but somebody is trying to hide something.  We’ve got to assume it’s connected to the murders.”
            Poole had hobbled, an oak branch for a crutch, back to the Manor.  No one responded to shouts of “Hello?” and “Help!”  But he found John Walker as he limped across the lawn, and Walker had driven Poole to the village and a local G.P.  The doctor, a young man with a ginger beard and thick bifocals, was dragged from The King’s Leap to treat Poole.  He applied a small brace he described as “one of your space age polymers” and wrapped it.   He said it was a bad sprain but recommended X-rays.  He gave Poole a mild sedative and a crutch.
            “You’re still set on going to London?” Amanda asked him.
            “Yeh, but this is a complication.  I’d like to scout the grounds tonight, but I’m not up to it.”
            It was black dark, so Poole sat back and listened as Amanda summarized the plenary session he missed. 
            “No one missing, no one unusually agitated or odd?”
            Amanda snorted.  “No more than the Process makes everyone by this time.  Of course, I wasn’t watching for evidence of wild cross-country pursuit.”
            “She could have circled back.  And there wasn’t anyone to be a witness.  Damn it, I know this all connects, and it’s creepy being caught in the middle.”
            Amanda flounced on Poole’s bed.  He was wedged into his room’s one chair, and he felt claustrophobic and shrunken.  Another effect of the class system, keep you small and humble in your proper place, you teeny turd, you.
            As Amanda spoke, there was a muffled knock at the door.  Robin Heyward opened it and thrust in his head.
            “Hullo, you people.  Trust I’m not interrupting.  Thought I’d find kindred spirits interested in other spirits—a spot of dedicated malt-bashing.”  He waved a bottle and a tumbler.
            Sitting carefully cross-legged on the floor, he decanted a large drink.  Poole accepted the bottle and poured less gargantuan measures for himself and Amanda.  He wondered how this ancient scotch would enjoy meeting the doctor’s pain killer.
            Robin raised his glass and chirruped, “Cheers!  And confusion to your enemies.” Poole decided Heyward was both somewhat drunk and pretending to be drunker.
            “I was seeking uncluttered companionship,” Heyward said.  “Everyone I found was deep in the mysteries of the conference, plumbing psyches, unraveling relationships.  Gawd!”
            “Where’s Donovan?” Amanda asked.  “I thought you two always went pub-crawling at moments of deep disillusionment.”
            “Ah, our young Mr. Stallings has found fresh fields and pastures new.  He’s hard at work revising the Cavendar bible, at the express direction of Sir Leicester himself.”
            “Bible?”  Poole said.
            Heyward slumped.  “Sir Leicester sent forth a decree unto the Kingdom of Babel that Sir Alfred’s holy writ be edited and scrutinized, to shed its light more radiantly upon the Gentiles.”
            Amanda said, “Sir Leicester has been trying to update and revise the text for years.  That was one of Felix’s principal chores, but he spent more time arguing with Sir Leicester than in writing.  So, Donovan inherited the job?”
            “So you might think.  I believe the little toad crawled right into the presence chamber and appropriated the holy book to himself.”
            “A tiny touch of envy, dear Robin?” Amanda asked.
            “No fear!  I wouldn’t touch the blasted thing with tongs.  But I have dark reservations about the basic competency of little Donovan.  He’s so full of himself and his precious theories that he has absented himself from all felicity.  Ah, a touch of Felix in the night—felicitous Felix.  Not a chance of that!  As felicitous as a jackboot up the arse from Heinrich Himmler.”
            “You always had a knife out for Felix,” Amanda said.  “I thought he ignored your silliness with much dignity.”
            “Ah, but you’ve distanced yourself from the civil wars at the conferences.  Our Felix had a soft spot for women of your neat and trig variety.  But he regarded me and Donovan and even donnish John Walker as fags to fetch and carry for him.”
            “Nonsense,” Amanda snapped.  “I held no brief for Felix and his behavior, and I squabbled with him as much as anyone.  But you could be fair about his contributions to the Institute.”
            “Nay, lassie, ye dinna ken the darrrrker side of our Felix.  He had, you see, mastered the true essence of leadership.  A mastery of mastery, so to speak.  But for us lesser mortals, it was—” Heyward lurched to his feet, sloshing dregs from his tumbler and singing, “Lift dat barge, tote dat bale, gettaliddle drunk an you lands in jail!”
            He collapsed again and said in his normal voice, “Sorry.  I was dragged to a Paul Robeson concert as a toddler, and I’ve never been the same.”
            Poole fastened onto the notion of getting drunk and landing in jail.  Did that apply to Schwann?  His mind percolated as the whiskey collided with his doctor’s nostrum.  He invented word puzzles:  Schwann song, Schwann’s last flight, swans on the river with cygnets in tow.  Mixed with the last was a vision of Edwards’ signet ring.  The legend of the swan dying in song.  Felix Schwann shut up in jail, shut up permanently with a gun and a knife.  No tongue his tale to tell.  You always had a knife out for Felix.
            “Has Donovan cleaned out Felix’s files?” Amanda asked.
            "He’s moved himself, liver and lights, into Felix’s digs.  Another hop up the Cavendar ladder.  He hankered to move from the east wing, now he’s got that poncey suite to rattle around in.  Next thing, he’ll be dressing up in a monk’s habit or bloody old armor or dragging around chains.”
            Amanda sat up. “He’s living out at the Gothick Temple?  Now?”
            “Yes, indeed.  He grumbled about the distance and inconvenience, but he was perfectly chuffed with the idea of living like an eremite in splendid solitude, beavering away at that text like some blithering monk illuminating a manuscript.”
            “Richard?” Amanda said anxiously, “Donovan’s out there in the Gothick Temple, you see?”
            He saw her meaningful glance but his brain ran slowly, as if filled with treacle not whiskey.  “You were out there tonight!”
            “Oh, yeh, the Temple.”
            “I should go see him.  No, I’ll phone him,” she said.
            “Hold on.  What’s up, love?  Heyward asked.  “Bit late to go knocking him up.  And I don’t think his phone works.  He was jabbering about getting it repaired or replaced.”
            Amanda was up and out of the room.  Heyward looked bemused and peered at Poole’s bandaged foot.
            “Sorry, didn’t see.  You bunged up a trotter. What happened?”
            “An accident, but we need to stop Amanda.  It’s black as Ned’s hat out there.”  He stood and tucked the aluminum crutch under him.  Heyward looked genuinely drunk to Poole.  Weight on his ankle sent a bolt of lightning to Poole’s brain.  “God damn son of a bitch!” he howled.
            Heyward reached out then toppled slowly sideways onto the bed next him.  He lay like a beached fish, inert.  Poole weaved around his legs and by using the wall and the crutch hopped to the door.  He lurched down the dim corridor.  Hoarsely, he called, “Amanda?  Amanda!”  He stumbled to this rhythm, caroming off the wall and onward, as if experimenting with the way the White Knight moves. ###