Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (14 page)

“O, Yarrow braes, may never, never rain

Nor dew thy tender blossoms cover.

For there was basely slain my love.

My love, as he had not been a lover.”

Suddenly he wanted to understand her, he wanted to know, his normal inquisitiveness came to life again and shook off her influence. He always had to probe into everything that came his way, in case there might be something in it for Dickie. He cast one rather reluctant but still avid glance at the elusive thing he was supposed to be watching. It idled on the current like a skater, swayed in a slight, rhythmic movement.
He
wasn’t going anywhere. Fixed as the Rock of Gibraltar.

Dickie Meurice could move very rapidly indeed when he chose. He made better time than Liri herself over the obstacle-strewn course to the stone bridge. By the time he reached it, and paused on the edge of the open parkland on the other side, Liri was well up the slope towards the house, and running strongly. He kept to the edge of the trees instead of following her by the direct route, until she came to the steps that led up to the south terrace. She didn’t climb the steps. He saw that, and hugged himself. She was up to something, or she would have taken the direct and open way in. Instead, she was circling the wing of the house to enter by the courtyard, as she had left it. Dickie let her slip from sight, and then abandoned his shadowy shelter, and set off at his fastest run across the open ground, and in at the front doors. By the time she had threaded the passage into the house from the rear, he would be hanging over the rail of the back stairs, ready for her.

The gong for dinner had not yet sounded, but everyone was gathering into the public rooms in readiness for it; he could hear the babel of voices from the gallery and the libraries, high and merry, as he slid through the quiet corridors and leaned over the well of the back stairs. Any sounds from below would come up to him clearly here; he would know when she arrived, and whatever her intentions, she would have to cross that quiet lobby below him.

The staircase was old, solid and tightly wound, and made a wonderful funnel for rising sounds, especially as the lower corridor was of stone. He made his way down perhaps a third of the flight, to a point where he would still be well out of sight of anyone approaching from below, and have time to make his escape into the labyrinth of public rooms before she reached this upper landing. Follymead might have been designed for monstrous games of hide-and-seek. He leaned cautiously over the oak rail, and peered down the coiled, enclosed space, as into the whorls of a shell.

He could see beneath him the stone flags of what had once been the central lobby of the service floor and was now a cool, indoor spot for summer days with a fantasy of plant-stands, tapestry-draped walls, a few white-painted wrought-iron seats, and two pay-telephones discreetly tucked into the corner under the stairs, and walled round, but not roofed, with reeded wood shells just six feet high, painted ivory-white. They provided adequate insulation on their own level, and an excellent sounding-board to carry conversation up the well of the staircase. No one involved in the re-designing of Follymead as a college had thought of that; none of them had envisaged a future clientèle, addicted to listening in on other people’s telephone conversations. Their mistake, thought Dickie Meurice, speculating pleasurably on one possibility.

The crisp, chill sound of Liri’s footsteps, walking briskly, came along the stone passage ahead of her, and rang hollowly up the stairs. Low heels, but narrow and sharp, tipped with metal. Kitten heels, they called them; appropriate enough for that young tigress. Their rhythm didn’t slacken or turn aside towards the staircase. He saw her foreshortened figure cross below him, the dark brown head so erect and beautifully balanced, the impetuous outline of brow and nose, the great braid of hair lashing like a tail for the tigress. Straight towards the telephones! He heard the soft clash of the swing door closing, reed to reed, snug as the seam of a dress.

He dropped one turn lower, sliding down the rail of the stairs eagerly. Almost above her head now, and though she was out of his sight he could hear and time every turn of the dial. Two revolutions, one long, one short. For the operator, so what she wanted was not a local call; but he had never supposed that it would be. And blessedly, that meant she must ask for her number. Things could not have been going more smoothly his way.

“I’d like to call a London number, please. Valence 3581. This is Belwardine 640.”

Every word clear and unmistakable so far. Coins rattled into the slot, below him. They waited for what seemed a longer time than the two minutes it actually was, and in the interval the gong sounded for dinner. That was the signal for the whole hungry party to come milling along the gallery from the small drawing-room, from the terraces, from all the corners in which they were disporting themselves, and converge on the dining-hall. It was on the same main floor, situated above the special level of the great drawing-room, and those once-menial regions where the telephones had been installed. Meurice could maintain his place on the stairs brazenly, and nobody would bother him. But the cavalcade of joyous voices drowned out Liri’s first words when the distant party, whoever he might be, answered her, and blotted into meaningless murmurs half of what passed afterwards. It is hard enough making sense of one half of a telephone conversation; trying to make something of half of that one half is a job for the cypher experts.

“Never mind that,” he heard her say clearly, her voice low and guarded, but sharp with impatience and strain, “there’s no time…” And again, after a maddening moment when nothing was audible but the Rossignol twins marching along the gallery to the loud, gay strains of “Auprès de ma blonde”: “… just
get out, fast. The body’s been found… ”

There was more, a hard silence on her part, the distant voice inaudibly pouring words at her, never a name to identify him. Why must they sing even when they weren’t getting paid for it? There went Andrew Callum, leading half a dozen disciples in “The Boy from Killane,” and away went a burst of words from Liri, down the wind with the heroic lament for Douglas Kelly:

“Tell me, who is the giant with gold, curling hair.

He who rides at the head of your band?

Seven feet is his height, with some inches to spare.

And he looks like a king in command…”

And on the diminishing echo, clearly: “Damn you, I’ve
told
you, forget all that, and
go
. Good-
bye
.”

The receiver clashed in the rest, and the door swung before her thrust, she was out, and at the foot of the staircase.

He turned and took the rest of the stairs three at a time, in long leaps. By the time Liri came out on the main landing, he was away along the gallery and out through the great front doors, and bounding down the steps from the terrace towards the dimming slopes that led to the Braide. He ran like a hare, in exuberant leaps, back to the duty Liri had laid on him. The vacant, wandering hand was still languid and easy on the thrusting current. Meurice found himself a dry place to stand, and waited; it was certain he wouldn’t have long to wait.

“I wish I hadn’t done it now,” said Felicity, as many another has said before her with as little effect, and many another will certainly say in the future. “If I’d known…” She stopped there, jutted a dubious lip at what it had been in her mind to say, and rejected it ruthlessly. Whatever she lacked, she was beginning to discover in herself a rare and ferocious honesty. “I should, though,” she said, “the way I felt, even if I’d known how it would turn out.”

“None of us knows that yet,” George reminded her crisply. He had placed a chair considerately for her, so that no too acute light should touch her face, and no too direct glance put her off her stride. Oh, there was stuff in Felicity of which she knew nothing yet, even if she was finding out some things about herself the hard way, and too rapidly.

“No,” she conceded, “but we know the probabilities. I did know them, even then, or I could have if I’d been willing.”

“I doubt,” said George, doing her the justice of showing a like honesty, “if you anticipated that much success.”

She looked up quickly at that, a little startled, and considered it gingerly. The faintest and briefest glint of a smile showed in her eyes, and as feebly withdrew. “You’re not trying to make me think I haven’t done something dreadful, are you?” You, of all people! her tone implied.

“No, I wouldn’t do that. But I am telling you that something like that happens in most lives. Most of us, when it does happen, are lucky enough, clumsy enough, or scared enough to make a mess of our opportunity for malice. You were the unlucky one. You had the perfect explosive put into your hand, and the perfect fuse for it into your mouth. Even then, for some of us, it would have failed to go off. But we shouldn’t have been less guilty. Having something to regret leaves you anything but unique or particular in this world, Felicity, rather confirms you one of the crowd.” He saw her braced to think that out, and resolute to kick the argument to pieces, and saw fit to divert the event. “Look; suppose I ask you my questions first, and then we can talk.”

“All right,” she agreed. “But I’ve told you everything I can think of now.”

“Yes, this is a matter of something you did tell me. You said you left Lucien there by the river, and came away, ‘and latched the gate after me.’ Did you mean that literally? Not just pulled the gate to after you, but latched it?”

She was staring at him now alertly and brightly, momentarily deflected from her own problems. “Yes, latched it. Of course! Why, is that important?”

“It’s a detail. They all help. The latch was still in position then?”

She nodded emphatically. “You couldn’t very well miss it, it’s nearly as long as my arm.” An exaggeration of course, what she was really indicating with a small flourish was her forearm, from elbow to fingertips. “It hasn’t had any rivets, or whatever they are, holding it for a long time, it just hangs there in the slots, you can pull it out if you want to.”

“Yes, I see. And Lucien didn’t think better of it, and come after you? Try to stop you?”

“No,” she said sombrely, “why should he? He didn’t know what I was going to do. He didn’t care about me one way or the other. I suppose there wasn’t really any reason why he should. He never even looked round. He was sitting in the grotto, glad I was gone. I realise now that he must have been at the end of his patience, to do what he did to me.”

“I suspect,” said George, “that his patience was always on the short side.”

“Maybe. I didn’t really know much about him, did I?” she said bleakly. “And neither did he about me.” She looked up earnestly into George’s face, and asked simply: “What am I going to do?”

Outside, the gong for dinner was bawling merrily, but they didn’t notice it, or hear the noisy parade to the hall.

“Live with it,” said George with equal simplicity, “and make the best of it. I can’t absolve you, and you wouldn’t be grateful to me if I tried. I can’t charge you with anything, and there isn’t any penance to be found anywhere, if that’s what you’re looking for. No, you’ll just have to hump the memory along with you and go on carrying it, like the rest of us, and learn to live with yourself and your mistakes. It’s the one way you find out how to avoid more and greater failures.”

“But if I’ve killed him?” she said in a whisper, her eyes frantic but trusting.

“Whatever happens,
you won’t have killed him
. Not unless you’d been responsible for living their two lives as well as your own, for all the qualities in them and all the things they’d ever done or thought that eventually made it impossible for yesterday to end without a tragedy – only then would you have killed the one and made the other a murderer. Your contribution was bitter enough to you, but only the spark that set off a fire already laid. Don’t claim more than your share, Felicity, you’ll find your fair share quite enough to carry.”

After a brief, deep silence she said in a low voice: “Thank you! At least you haven’t treated me like a child.”

“You’re not a child. Let’s face it, you’re not grown-up yet, either, not quite. But I’ll tell you this, you’re a great deal nearer to being a woman than you were yesterday, when I first met you.”

Her lips tightened in a wry and painful smile that was very close indeed to being adult, and she said something no child could have said. “That doesn’t seem much for Lucien to die for,” said Felicity, and finding her own utterance more horrifying than she had expected, rose abruptly to leave him. “There isn’t anything… useful… I can be doing?”

“Living,” said George, “and perhaps for the moment just living, without any thinking. And don’t think that isn’t useful. For a start you can go in to dinner with the rest of them, and help to tide Follymead over to-night.”

Faintly she said, the child creeping back into her voice and eyes uninvited: “Do I have to? I’m not hungry.”

“You will be. The least useful think you can do is make yourself ill. And you’re needed, don’t forget you’re part of the household, a bigger part than ever before.”

“All right,” she said grimly, and took a step or two towards the door. The weight of the house came down on her appallingly for a moment. She looked back at him in sudden piteous appeal, she didn’t know for what.

“Somehow it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said in a muted wail, “if only I wasn’t so damned dull and
plain
…”

“Plain!” George echoed incredulously. “
Plain
!” he repeated in a growl of exasperation. “Child, did you never look at yourself in a mirror?
Plain
! Come here!” He took her by the shoulders and turned her about, and trotted her sharply across the room to the high mantel and the Venetian mirror above it. It hung so high that at close range only her head came into view, with George’s impatient face above. He cupped a hand under her chin and tilted her face up to the glass. “My dear little idiot, for goodness sake
look
at yourself. What do you want, in heaven’s name? Do you have to be coloured like a peony to be worth looking at? What if you haven’t got your aunt’s milk-whiteness and roses, and a pile of fair hair?
This
… this pale-brown, baby-fine stuff you have got was made to go with
this
face. You find me a more delicately-drawn hair-line than this, or a better-shaped head. And as for your face, I’d like to know who put you off it in the first place. Look at the form of these eye-sockets, look at this line, this curve along your chin and neck.
Plain
! You haven’t finished growing yet, and the peak’s still to come, but if you can’t see it coming you must be blind, my girl. Don’t you realise you’ve got bones that are going to keep you beautiful until you’re eighty? The prettiest colouring in the world won’t stand by you like these will.”

Felicity stood transfixed with pure astonishment, her hands raised to touch the cheek-bones his fingers had just quitted. Her eyes, huge with wonder, stared unrecognisingly at the face in the glass. Her lips moved very faintly, shaping distantly and incredulously the word “beautiful.”

The sudden rush of feet outside the door, the rap of knuckles on the wood, never penetrated her stunned senses. Even when the door opened upon Liri Palmer’s roused face and glittering eyes, with Dominic close to her shoulder, Felicity only turned like a creature in a dream, still lost to every shock but one.

“Can you come?” Liri’s blue stare fixed urgently upon George. “There’s something I want to show you.” She had bitten back, at sight of Felicity, the blunt announcement she would otherwise have made. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you, but it’s important.”

Her voice was mild, but her eyes were imperious. Liri’s maturity extended to sparing the children; or perhaps she was merely concerned with keeping them from under her feet.

“Felicity was just on her way to dinner,” said George, and started her towards the door with a gentle push between the shoulder-blades. She went where he urged her, obediently, like a sleep-walker. They moved aside from the doorway to let her pass, and she looked back for a moment with eyes still blind to everything but the distant vision of her own beauty, incredible and yet constant. She trusted George. There had been very few adults in her young life whom she had been able to trust.

“Thank you! I’ll try… I’ll do what you said.”

“Good night!” said George.

“Good night!” said Felicity remotely, and wandered away with a fingertip drawing and re-drawing the line of her cheek-bone and jaw, which George had found beautiful.
Beautiful
! She followed the beckoning word towards the dining-hall and her duty. She was enlarged, she contained and accepted even her guilt, even her inability to erase it. She had something to live for, so unexpected that it loomed almost as large as the death she had precipitated.

As soon as she was gone they all three came into the room and closed the door carefully after them. He should have known that where Dominic was, Tossa also would be.

“Well?”

“I’ve found the body,” said Liri, point-blank.

It couldn’t have been anything else, of course; he had seen it in her braced and motionless excitement. So there wasn’t going to be any blessed anticlimax, any apologetic reappearance. They had a body, they had a crime. And Follymead had the prospect of ruin. George looked at the dusk leaning in at the window, at the clock that showed five minutes past the dinner hour, and reached into the desk drawer for his torch.

“Where is he?”

“Caught in a fallen tree in the river. Below the stone bridge, in the wild part. I’ll take you there.”

“We ran into Liri at the top of the stairs,” said Dominic, “and she told us. I hope that’s all right. You’re going to need somebody, if only to run the errands.”

“That’s all right. Anybody keeping an eye on him now?”

“Dickie Meurice,” said Liri, her voice suddenly shaken out of its calm by the surrender of her responsibility, as her legs shook beneath her for a moment. “He wasn’t with me… he just showed up. I told him to stand by.”

“Good! Tossa, you run across by the footbridge, will you, and find Lockyer, and tell him to meet us downstream. Tell him to bring some ropes down with him. And an axe or a hatchet, something we can use on the tree.”

“Right!” said Tossa, dry-mouthed with excitement, and whirled and ran.

“Come on, then,” said George. “Lead the way, Liri.” And they followed her out across the terrace, and down the slope of turf towards the distant stone bridge.

It took them half an hour to get him ashore, and not a word was said in all that time but for the brief exchanges that were necessary to the job in hand. If they had tried to hack away the driftwood that held him before they had a line on him, he would have escaped them again, for once dislodged, the flood would have taken him headlong downstream out of their hands. It was Dominic, as the lightest weight among the men present, who clambered out barefoot on the swaying barrier of branches, and secured a rope round the shoulder that just broke surface, cased in sodden tweed that was now of no colour at all but the river’s mud-brown. The driftwood under him dipped where he ventured too far; the ice-cold darkness rushed over his feet and tore at his balance. He thought of nothing as he worked; his mind had shrunk into his numbed hands.

“All right, come ashore.”

George reached a hand to retrieve his saturated son. Lockyer carefully took in the slack of the rope, and tested it with a gradual pull downstream; the arm that was all they could see of the dead man rose languidly along the surface, like the arm of a man turning in his sleep, but the body did not float free.

George looked along the tangled arms of the tree, and found the one that pinned the body in its clenched fist, half out of the water. “All right, we’ll bring him in branch and all, it’ll make a useful brake. Meurice, give me that hatchet.”

Dickie Meurice handed it eagerly. He would not for anything have forfeited his place here. He was only guessing, of course, but if his guess was right the pay-off would be worth a little discomfort.

“And the other rope.”

There was still a cloudy daylight out on the open sward, but here among the trees they had to peer to see even one another. The girls stood well back on drier ground, their faces two pale, still ovals in a green monochrome. Nobody had tried to send them away. What was the use of banishing Liri, who had been the one to find this pathetic thing they were trying to bring ashore? In any case, she would not have gone. She stood silent and intent, and her composure was impenetrable.