Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Thunder came. Then a steady rain began to fall. Ganelon sat on the edge of his bed and pondered how a cufflink could be worth an elaborate ruse like a Phantom Balloon sighting. He now became aware of a cold draft across his bare toes coming from under the carved highboy on the opposite wall. In his carpet slippers he tried to inch the heavy piece of furniture forward and was surprised when, with a click, it swung out into the room on concealed hinges, revealing an upward flight of stone steps.

Armed with a lamp, Ganelon mounted up into the darkness. The room beneath the conical roof was fitted with a cell with stout iron bars, whose door stood open. Crowded inside was an iron bedstead, a treadled potter’s wheel, a box of hard rubber mallets and an ominous-looking bowl: a devilish grail of fire-scorched iron fitted about with large rusting screws. Cocking an eyebrow, Ganelon followed his footprints in the dust back down to bed.

Rising late the next morning, he found Hardacre playing pool alone in the billiard room. The man informed him that Gruber was off at pistol practice and the Sandors hadn’t yet returned from church.

Ganelon said, “By the way, I recently met another American working in your line. Jeremiah Wynne?”

Leaning to make a shot, Hardacre laughed. “I reckon not. I’m Wynne.” He straightened up and explained, “After the baron’s father hired me on, I got wind the Old Father William people needed a North American man, too. So I paid them a visit in a fake beard. Hell, why not? Peddling both meant two salaries and double travel expenses. With the Big Drink between us, who’d be the wiser?”

“The baron deserves better.”

Chalking his cue stick with care, Hardacre said, “A while back I found a thousand-legger — you know, a millipede — on my bedside rug. I stomped it good, and you know what? It was one of my own fake eyebrows. So the jig was up. I told the baron everything. He didn’t mind. He said Old Father William would be bankrupt way before I got back home to the States.”

In the music room, Ganelon found the Nawab deep in the Times of London and Sowerby playing Patience at a table nearby. And there, through a window, was Thorwald walking backwards across a muddy flower bed toward the château, his head thrown back on watch for the Phantom Balloon. He was coming dangerously close to the moat. As Ganelon moved to rap on the window glass, Thorwald reached the gravel path along the excavation work, turned, and walked away.

After a breakfast of coffee and a roll in the empty dining room, Ganelon asked LeSage to show him the hat and stick Cipriani had borrowed. LeSage led him back to the gun room and indicated a cloth hat with a peppering of small holes in the crown and a blackthorn from a rack of walking sticks.

“You also examined Cipriani’s atomizer?” asked the detective, running his fingers over the stick.

“And needed several washings to rid my hands of the smell of lavender, sir.”

“Could the blue bottle have hidden a blue sapphire?”

“The stone was much too large to pass through the neck of the bottle, sir,” LeSage replied and took his leave.

The Nawab appeared in the doorway. “May I share a moral dilemma, Monsieur Ganelon?”

“You mean, should you admit you shot off Cipriani’s hat, not Major Sowerby?” The Nawab’s astonishment obliged Ganelon to add, “A great-aunt on my mother’s side who was afflicted with flatulence late in life always kept an old cocker spaniel close by for scolding purposes should the need arise.”

The Nawab understood. “Yes, Major Sowerby has very kindly taken upon himself my shortcomings with the shotgun,” he admitted. “Yet I don’t know how it happened. I knew Cipriani was there behind the bushes. I swear I shot high enough. Well, perhaps some day I will master the weapon.”

“And whist, your excellency?” asked the detective.

The Nawab laughed at himself. “You can’t become an English gentleman overnight. Still, I’d rather not call attention to my ineptitudes. But no one has ever left the table out of pocket because of the help Major Sowerby gives me.”

Ganelon decided he needed a long walk in the open air to think things out. Leaving the château, he took the path toward the summit of Mont St. Hugues. If the perfume atomizer hadn’t been used to smuggle out the sapphire, then nothing really made sense. Cipriani steals a single cufflink when he could have stolen the pair. To give himself an excuse to carry off his modest prize, he intrudes a borrowed hat on a borrowed stick into the hunters’ line of fire, leaving telltale scratch marks of shot on the blackthorn. Sowerby, having been apologizing all morning for the Nawab, takes responsibility once more. Cipriani cries murder and decamps without the sapphire. No, it made no sense at all.