Another Woman's House (11 page)

“I've got to go away, Richard. I can't stay here.”

Again for an instant his face looked like his father's, stubborn, implacable. He said: “All right. But you can't leave this minute.” He took his hands from her face and turned and started for the hall. She said, “What are you going to do? Where are you going?”

“I'm going to phone for Sam. We'll have to get hold of Tim, too. Where is he?”

Tim—of course. She told him the number quickly and then rose and followed him to the library door. “Let me talk to him, Richard, when you get him.”

“All right. I'll phone Sam first. He may be hard to find.”

Along the hall, just under the great stairway was the niche where the telephone, an extension, stood on its table. She could not see Richard, but she could hear his voice. She stood there waiting, while he tried one or two numbers and then apparently at the third was told to wait. No one was in the hall. On some surface level of her mind she wondered where Barton was, what the servants were doing about dinner, and then remembered that Alice, rightful mistress of the house, had already given orders about dinner—her dinner and Richard's, shared together over a small table, alone, in Alice's wide, beautiful room with its silk and lace cushions and its scent of lilac sachet.

She moved sharply. She turned back quickly into the library as if by sheer physical movement she could escape thought.

Someone, of course, would have to tell Aunt Cornelia. Or had they already told her? Had Alice already gone to her to be welcomed with all of Aunt Cornelia's staunch loyalty and feeling for family?

It was darker. The window above the bookshelves, where the Governor had swept back the red curtains, glittered against the darkness. She started automatically to close the curtain and, as she did so, someone tapped quickly at the terrace door and opened it.

It was Mildred Wilkinson. Her elaborately curled and coiffed hair looked disheveled. Her long, thin face was pale and her light eyes had bright, wide black pupils. She was wearing a dinner dress, a long, pale green chiffon with a light tweed topcoat slung around her shoulders. “Myra,” she cried, and came into the room quickly, closing the door behind her. “Myra, is it true? Is Alice home?” She saw the answer in Myra's face. She cried excitedly, “I saw the car! I was sure it was Alice sitting in the back. But I couldn't believe it. I simply couldn't. I was just at the entrance of my own drive. … I'd stopped to see Dottie Campbell after I left here and I was turning into my own drive when the car passed me, and it looked so like Alice, somehow; veil and all. I watched and it turned in here, but I still couldn't believe it. I went on to my house and changed for dinner and kept thinking, could it have been Alice and what happened! Finally I had to come! What happened? Is she ill? What has happened?” She was panting, her words and movements jerky and rapid. She stopped to catch a quick breath and Richard came back along the hall.

“I've got Sam,” he said. “He's coming straight out. But Tim …” He saw Mildred and stopped, and Mildred cried shrilly, “Is it true? Is Alice home?”

For an instant Richard did not reply. He was thinking quickly, Myra knew, trying to cover all the contingencies that Mildred's unexpected appearance and knowledge might evoke. He said then, directly and very gravely, “Yes. It's true. But I must ask you not to tell anyone yet, Mildred. The statement has not been given to the newspapers yet and won't be until tomorrow.”

“Oh, I'll not tell a soul,” promised Mildred hurriedly. “But what happened? Is she sick? What's happened?”

Again Richard seemed to think hard and quickly for an instant. “She has been pardoned. She'd want you to know.”

“Pardoned!” Mildred's face was a queer blue-white. She caught, her breath with a rasping sigh. She stuck her head forward greedily, so the cords of her thin neck showed up sharply. She's older, thought Myra suddenly and queerly, than I knew. Mildred cried, “Pardoned! What has happened? Why …”

“Webb Manders has confessed to perjury.”

“Webb! But he saw her kill him. …”

“He says he did not see it. He says he lied. It was all a lie. He has signed a confession to that effect.”

“Confession! Of murder? Webb …”

“No, no. Of perjury. Webb is to be charged with perjury. They'll open a new investigation.”

Mildred's drooping, rather limp green chiffons seemed to waver limply, too, for a moment, as if deprived of support. She said, “Investigation …”

“Yes.”

“All that? All over again?”

“I suppose so. Mildred, you must keep this to yourself for the moment. We depend on you.”

“Oh, of course, of course!” Mildred stared at him unblinking for a long moment, then she cried, “I must see her.”

“She's very tired, Mildred. She's resting. …”

“Oh, of course.” Two red spots had come into her ashy face. She cried, clutching tremulously at her chiffons and her beige tweed coat with her long, thin fingers, “I can't wait to see her. I'm her best friend. I only want to tell her how glad I am. But I mustn't tire her. I'll go now and come back when she's rested.”

“I know she'll want to see you then.”

“Yes, yes. How wonderful it is! I'll go now.” She wavered toward the door, waved excitedly and hurried out. Her green skirts and flat-heeled gold sandals flashed along the terrace and disappeared. Richard said, “She was always crazy about Alice. Well, I got Sam, Myra. He'll be here as soon as he can make it. Tim's out somewhere. At least I couldn't get him.”

“Where is he?”

“I don't know. He'll turn up. Don't be frightened, Myra. He's all right. And he'll be all right. You'll see.”

“Why would he do it, Richard?” she cried again. “He couldn't have really forgotten. He must have understood how important it was!”

“You saw him in England, didn't you? Later?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly did he say of the murder? Can you remember?”

S
HE WENT BACK IN
her mind to that cold, wet London day. Tim had had a short leave. She had come up from Aunt Cornelia, still in the nursing home, in the country, to meet him. They'd met at Paddington Station, blue and dimly lighted, sandbagged, bombed, crowded with service men and women and small sandwich bars. He'd been nervous then, she'd thought—thin and white and fine-drawn. He'd come hurrying, only one of the many in blue or khaki-colored uniforms until something in his walk, something in his thin face and tall, slender body identified him as Tim. They'd met, almost casually, concealing emotion, and hurried. Always hurried. It was one of the things she remembered most clearly about the war. There was never enough time for the trains with their fantastically interrupted service, for taxis, for the long queues.

They'd only said a word or two and pushed their way through the crowds and managed to get seats in a bus and eventually reached the Claridge and had tea. Tim had searched around in the pockets of his A.A.F. uniform and got out some sugar he'd brought her; possibly half a cupful. He hadn't wanted to talk of the murder or of the trial. He hadn't really, she thought suddenly, wanted to talk to her. Yet he seemed to reach out toward her, too; he'd seemed to want to be with her. It was as if he'd needed a kind of reassurance. She'd thought then that it was because of the war, because by then he was going, as one of the gunners, on almost nightly missions.

She said slowly to Richard, “He didn't say much. It was hard to talk, somehow. We hadn't met, you see, for nearly three years. He'd grown up so much, yet he was just the same, too. Except we couldn't—we didn't have time—to—to get acquainted again. We had so little time really. He had to get a train back and so did I. He thought then that he might get a week's leave later. He talked about the training; he talked about the bomber crew—some. He talked about London. I could see, then, that he didn't want to talk of the trial. He asked if I'd read the papers. I said yes. Then I said something about his part in it. I said I had wanted to be with him.”

“How did he seem?”

“Hurt. Sick. Hating to talk of it; hating to think of it. But”—she caught herself quickly—“not as if he were guilty, Richard. I felt it was because it had happened here; it had happened to you and Alice. That was what he hated. And because he'd had to testify against her.”

“Did he tell you anything about the inquest?”

“He said—what I already knew—that they'd subpoenaed him; that they'd had his leave extended by his commanding officer; so he came later, with another unit. But that was sort of—oh, by the way—when he was talking of the rest of the crew. He said that they had been strangers to him when he arrived. He was a replacement, but they'd taken him in as if he weren't a stranger. It was not direct—the allusion to the inquest and the trial, I mean. Then, when I asked him directly about it, he—well, again I saw that he hated to talk of it. I wished I hadn't asked. He told me only what was in the papers.”

“Tell me,” said Richard.

“Well, Tim had been drinking a bit, and when Webb said he'd give him a lift as far as the gates here, he refused because he wanted to walk. Webb then later, after, I suppose, he'd reached home and then come back here, passed Tim on the drive but didn't stop. Oh, it's just as you and the Governor said—Tim followed him, heard the shoes, ran around the end of the house and on the terrace, reached the door and Jack was dead and Webb was bending over him and Alice was in the hall, phoning. That's all.”

She could see Tim saying it, crumbling up his sugarless, butterless muffin, not looking at her, darting quick glances about the room, lighting a cigarette with nervous, thin young hands.

“But you thought he was telling the truth?”

Had she? “Why, yes. Yes, I thought so.”

“Did you feel then that he realized fully the importance of his corroboration of Webb's story?”

“Yes. I think so. He seemed sick, Richard, unlike himself. Part of it, I thought, was the war, the nerve strain, the job he was doing. But underneath, basically, it was the trial, Alice's conviction. Yes, I think he realized his own share in the evidence that convicted her. I remember trying to tell him that he couldn't have helped it, that it wasn't his fault, that he must not feel that he could have changed anything.”

“What then?”

“That was all, really. He looked at his watch, and I could see that it made him miserable to talk of it. I—put out my hand across the table and he put his on it for a minute and then he gave a sort of start and said he'd better hustle along. So he did. I had to go to the London house. The east wing had been bombed and I wanted to see that it was boarded up properly, and then get some things from Aunt Cornelia's room in the west wing. He took me there and then he had to go on. He wrote. He's not a regular correspondent but he wrote whenever he could. But then he was sent home and then out to China and kept there. I didn't actually see him again until he got out of the army.”

“Has he talked of the trial or of Alice to you since he came back?”

“No. Not once.”

“I suppose it was this thing, working up to a climax, that was on his mind last week-end.”

Conscience, the Governor had said. So strong that now that he was at home, back at Thorne House for his usual visits, in familiar surroundings, yet made so horribly unfamiliar in Tim's eyes by the absence of Alice, its force was unable to be withstood. Secretly making up his mind to go to the Governor.

Richard saw the terrible speculation in her eyes. He said, “That boy might have killed Jack, but he wouldn't have let Alice take the rap. So that alone proves he didn't kill Jack. We'll get hold of him and he'll explain. He'll have a good reason …”

Barton came in the door. “I beg your pardon …”

“Yes, Barton.”

“About dinner, sir. It's rather late.”

Dinner. Myra looked at the little French clock. Long ago, in another world, she and Richard had gone for a walk and he'd said, there's time before dinner.

Barton, looking old and flabby, and still white with excitement, said, “Madam sent word I was to serve her dinner and yours in her room, sir.”

“Yes,” said Richard slowly. “Yes. That's right.”

“Yes, sir. And may I say, sir, that Lady Carmichael learned through one of the maids of Madam's return and sent for me to inquire. I took the liberty of replying to her questions so far as I was able.”

“That's right, Barton,” said Richard again. “Will you tell her, please, that I'll see her as soon as I can?”

“Yes, sir.” He started toward the door and then turned back to Myra. “Should you care to dine with Lady Carmichael, Miss?”

Myra hesitated. She only wanted to be alone. Aunt Cornelia's eyes were too wise, too perceptive. Yet she could not dine alone at the great polished table in the dining room with the candles flickering in their enormous silver holders, with Thornes of other generations looking down from the walls, regarding her, an intruder, an interloper, the other woman sitting at Alice's table, in Alice's place where she'd sat now (and felt so curiously happy, so secure) for so many months. She said, replying, “Yes, if she wants me. You might ask her, Barton.”

“Yes, Miss Myra. I'll serve your dinner, sir, then, immediately in Madam's room.” He glanced around the room, saw that the short crimson curtain above the bookshelves at the other end had been pulled open, made a soundless gesture with his lips, and waddled toward it and, as he did so, Tim opened the French door.

“Tim!” cried Myra.

Richard jerked around to look. Tim said, “Hello, Myra, Richard. Hi, Barton.”

“Tim,” cried Myra again, with almost a sob in her throat, and Tim sauntered very casually (although with a touch of defiance in his manner) into the room.