Dark Angel (20 page)

Constance kneels back on her heels; she is trembling. There is a tight pain in her chest. She cannot swallow. She knows she would like to scream; she knows she would like to kill the person who did this.

Suddenly, wildly, she jumps up. She picks up a stick; she whirls around the circle of the clearing, smashing at the undergrowth, at the nettles, the brambles, the places where more snares might be hidden. And then she sees it. Just to the right of the track she came by, disguised by branches she has now knocked aside. She stops, lets the stick fall, stares down in disbelief.

There is the man-trap, just the way Freddie described it. A metal mouth, two jaws of steel edged with rusty teeth, a springing device; in the sunshine the jaws grin at her.

Constance stands very still for a moment. Does the trap still work? It must be an old one, a broken one…. Constance looks more closely. It does not look broken. The undergrowth around it is trampled, as if it were newly placed. The branches that were over it, the ones she moved, are freshly cut; their leaves are only just wilting.

She stares at the trap for a long time, fascinated and repelled, tempted to poke at it with a stick, frightened to do so but wanting to know for certain if it works. The jaws grin; the branches of the trees lift in the breeze and fall. Quite suddenly Constance loses interest in the trap. She has remembered the time; it must be three-thirty by now. The wood is silent; her father must not be coming. She will go and look for him.

But first she must bury the rabbit. She cannot just leave him.

She goes back to the rabbit, touches its fur, which is still warm. The blood on the fur is drying. Poor rabbit. Sweet rabbit. She will make a fine grave for him.

She picks up her stick again, selects a place, scratches at the earth under a small birch tree. The ground is soft after weeks of spring rain, but even so the job is difficult. Discarding the stick, she digs with her bare hands. It hurts her hands and tears the nails, but she manages it. After some fifteen minutes she has made a shallow indentation in the earth. Into this, absorbed, concentrated, Constance lays a bed of pebbles, then covers the pebbles with grass. The grave looks inviting now, a nest, a bed for her rabbit. She picks some of the wildflowers from the edge of the clearing: yellow celandine, a violet, two early half-opened primroses.

These she lays around the edge of the grave, kneeling back on her heels to admire her handiwork. Then, gently, she picks up the rabbit. She lays it in the grave, on its side, and puts a celandine between its front paws to take with it on its journey. Then she covers the body of the rabbit with tufts of sweet grass. At first she lays the grass so the rabbit’s head is still uncovered, so it looks as if it has a green quilt. Then—she does not want the earth to go in the rabbit’s eye—she covers its face. A sprinkling of earth; more earth; she tamps it down firmly and rearranges grass and leaves on top of the mound.

Her rabbit. Her secret rabbit. Constance kneels beside the mound, head bent. It is only when she pushes a strand of hair back from her face that she realizes there are tears on her cheeks. Sweet rabbit. Secret rabbit. Is it for the rabbit that Constance—who never weeps—has been crying?

From his perch in the branches of the oak tree, Freddie has a commanding view. In one direction he can look down the path from the woods to the estate village; in the other he can look back across the lawns to the house. He himself cannot be seen, which is precisely why he has come here.

Freddie leans back, settles himself as comfortably as he can, with his back against the trunk of the tree, his bottom well supported by a smooth branch. Then, smiling to himself, he extracts from his pockets the cigarette he purloined that morning from Acland’s bedroom. He unwraps the paper he has secreted it in, lights it, and inhales. He coughs a little, but not very much, and he is pleased with himself: He is making progress.

The first cigarette (cadged from Cattermole, hand-rolled) made him violently sick, which caused Cattermole great amusement. Since then, Freddie has been practicing: one a day, occasionally two—no more, or Acland might notice his supply was depleted. Acland’s cigarettes, the best Virginian tobacco, supplied by a firm in London, are a great improvement on Cattermole’s. They are mild yet pungent; they produce in Freddie an agreeable light-headedness. He now has it down to a fine art: the whole business of lighting the cigarette, wafting it around in a devilish sophisticated manner, and finally extinguishing it. He has modeled his performance on that of the actor Gerald du Maurier, whom he saw playing the gentleman burglar Raffles a few years previously. Du Maurier, the man Freddie most admires in the whole world, had a certain way of holding his cigarette which Freddie is hell-bent on copying. Now, he feels he has succeeded; slightly narrowed eyes—that was it—the tube of tobacco held at a negligent and rakish angle …

He makes the cigarette last and extinguishes it with reluctance. He consults his pocket watch—almost three—considers what he might do now the high point of the afternoon is over.

In the distance, from the village, a thin column of woodsmoke rises into the clear spring sky. From his vantage point Freddie can see two men standing on the path from the woods, talking. The one leaning against the gate is Cattermole; the other—Freddie squints—the other is Jack Hennessy, son to his father’s head carpenter. Hennessy has a clutch of sons, all of whom work on the estate, and this son, Jack, is walking out with one of the Winterscombe maids, the plump pretty one called Jenna. Freddie has gleaned this information from his valet, Arthur Tubbs, a thin, acned Cockney boy brought down from the London house and not greatly liked by the other servants, most of whom are local. Freddie does not much like Arthur either, but he is a source of information, particularly on the subject of girls.

Arthur’s information in this department is a great deal more vivid than the often-conflicting information Freddie has received from boys at his school. The remarks concerning Jenna and Jack Hennessy were rather less welcome. A few years before, when he was thirteen, Freddie conceived an unspoken and unrequited passion for Jenna, so that when Arthur said she and Jack were courting, Freddie experienced a brief bout of jealousy. Now, however, that has worn off, and Freddie realizes it was foolish. No point in mooning about a maid, even a pretty one. Another year or so and Freddie will enjoy much more satisfactory conquests.

He turns his head. Cattermole and Jack Hennessy have broken apart; Cattermole has turned back to the village; Hennessy is striding in the direction of the woods. Freddie looks toward the house and gardens, where Boy and that pansy art fellow from London, Jarvis, have been playing tennis; Boy is handing his racquet to Jane Conyngham, and Jane, standing on the base line, has just served underarm straight into the net.

Boy does not stay to watch her play, Freddie observes, and grins to himself. They all know why Jane Conyngham is here today: She is here because Denton and Gwen have plans for her. They intend her to marry their eldest son, thus securing for Boy an estate of twelve thousand acres and an income conservatively estimated at fifty thousand pounds a year. Jane Conyngham does not interest Boy in the least, of course. For which Freddie does not blame him.

Freddie looks scornfully at Jane’s distant figure. Tall, thin, gawky. She has straight sandy hair and a narrow, freckled, sandy little face. She wears spectacles for reading (and she is always reading). What is more, the stupid woman cannot hit a tennis ball. Even Jarvis looks as if he is losing patience.

Freddie is growing bored; he feels the need for company. Perhaps he should wander back to the house? His eyes scan the terrace. But no, there is no sign of diversion there—just old Mrs. Fitch-Tench, who is fast asleep over her crocheting. Freddie’s mother is just going back into the house—Freddie sees her close her parasol and disappear from view—and Eddie Shawcross, whom Freddie does not much like, is wandering around the side of the house in a distracted way, glancing once or twice over his shoulder.

Freddie watches until Shawcross also disappears into the house, probably making for the library. Freddie begins to climb down from his perch. He will go and seek out Acland, he decides. Acland may prefer to be on his own—he usually does—but that is just too bad. Freddie, a gregarious boy, feels in need of conversation. Also, he is considering whether he might admit to Acland the truth about the cigarettes, whereupon Acland might—might—give him another.

And he knows exactly where Acland will be. By the birch grove, in the gazebo. He goes there now almost every afternoon.

When Freddie finds Acland, he is indeed in the gazebo, sitting on one of the seats with a book in front of him. Freddie, catching sight of him from a distance, assumes Acland has been there some while. When he enters the gazebo, however, he wonders. First, Acland does not seem pleased to see him. Second, Acland is out of breath, as if he has been running, and third, the book in Acland’s hand—a novel by Sir Walter Scott—is upside down.

Freddie wonders whether to comment on this and decides it would not be politic. Acland has a secretive side; he does not like to be spied on. “The trouble with this damned house,” Acland will frequently remark, “is that it’s impossible to be alone in it.”

Instead, Freddie flops down on the stone seat and mops his brow. He is feeling the weight he has put on this past winter, and the waistband of his new plus-four trousers is definitely too tight. Stupid tailors. He should not have eaten two helpings of pudding at luncheon. Thinking of the luncheon brings back the scene with his father, and Freddie lets out a sigh.

“God, what a day. First I lose to you at croquet. Then that fellow Shawcross bored me to death. Then Father made that terrible scene. I didn’t know what to do! My face was like a beetroot, and I haven’t blushed for a year and a half. I thought I’d stopped. Did you notice?”

“Not particularly.” Acland now has his book the right way up. His face is bent to its pages.

“Damned embarrassing.” Freddie has been practicing swearing as well as cigarette smoking. “Why are we saddled with a father like that? I ask you—no one else we know has to put up with a lunatic for the head of the family.”

“Lunatic?” Acland looks up. “Would you say so?”

“Yes, I would,” Freddie says in robust tones. “I think he’s crackers. Mad as a March hare. Always in a foul temper. Flies off the handle for no reason whatsoever. Mutters to himself. He drank his shaving water the other morning. Arthur told me.”

“Arthur is hardly a reliable source of information.”

“It’s true. In fact, if you want to know, I think Father’s going senile. I mean, he could be, couldn’t he? He’s as old as Methusaleh, and he dribbles—have you noticed? When he drinks his wine. And he farts. He let off the most enormous one the other night. I was playing billiards with him, and he leant over the table and—woof!—out it came. Sounded like a gun going off. Then he glared at the dog, as if he did it, and kicked it out the room. As if that would fool anybody…. And he’s foul to Mama. He’s foul to Boy. He’s foul to everybody. Getting Boy those embarrassing guns, when he
knows
Boy hates shooting and isn’t any good at it anyway. And his own shooting—well, you’ve seen. Even Cattermole was worried, he told me. He can’t control the gun at all anymore. It wiggles around all over the place. He nearly winged Shawcross last November. I mean, I know Shawcross was wearing that frightful hat, but that’s hardly an excuse, is it? You can’t shoot a man because he doesn’t know how to dress properly. I tell you, he’s mad. Look at that scene at luncheon. I thought he was going to explode. All right, so it was rude of Shawcross, all that stuff about the pictures—did you see how he looked at them? Personally I can’t see what’s wrong with them. The greyhound one’s damned good, if you ask me, jolly lifelike, but—”

“It was nothing to do with the pictures. Or Shawcross’s remark.” Acland closes the book. He looks at Freddie with an expression of mingled exasperation and amusement. He feels in his pocket, checks his watch, then produces his gold cigarette case. “You’d like one, I take it, Freddie?”

Freddie, to his consternation, blushes again. He hesitates.

“Well, it appears to be one a day now, occasionally two. You pinched one this morning, so I thought you might like another.”

“Acland … I …”

“For God’s sake. If you want one, take one. It might make you stop talking. With luck, it might make you go away.”

There is a pause. Freddie lights up, hoping Acland will notice the Du Maurier proficiency; perhaps Acland does, for he smiles narrowly but makes no comment. He, too, lights a cigarette, inhales, exhales, leans back against the walls of the gazebo thoughtfully.

“What provoked the outburst,” Acland continues after a while, “what occasioned it, was Boy’s remark. Didn’t you notice?”

“Boy? No. I was listening to that pansy fellow Jarvis. Boy was talking to plain Jane. I think he was talking to plain Jane.”

“Indeed he was. Boy is nothing if not obedient.” Acland stands up, wanders to the doorway, looks out. “Boy was talking to Jane, and Jane—who has a kind heart—was asking him about his photography. I must warn her not to do that, by the way. Once Boy is launched on that subject, he’s unstoppable. So, we had a detailed list of all the photographs Boy had taken between breakfast and luncheon. The last one was of the King’s bedroom. He was unwise enough to say so, and our father heard him. That’s all.”

Acland pronounces the phrase
King’s bedroom
with distaste. Freddie goggles at him.

“That caused it? But why should it?”

“Because, Freddie, because that room is to be occupied for the first time in five years, this evening. By Shawcross, no less. Papa would prefer not to be reminded of that fact. He’s sensitive about that room, as you know.”

“And he doesn’t like Shawcross.”

“True. True.”

“In fact, he can’t stand him. Arthur told me. Arthur says it’s because Shawcross isn’t a gentleman—”

“And what do you think, Freddie?” Acland turns as he asks this question.

Freddie, surprised by a new note that has entered his brother’s voice, frowns. “Well,
I
don’t know. Maybe that. Shawcross
is
a cad. He’s supercilious and vain, and he has horrible little white hands—have you noticed? Also, he wears those frightful suits.” Freddie laughs. “You remember the ghastly blue one he wore with the brown shoes? And the hats …”