Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (6 page)

“He stayed here,”‘ said Dominic. “Tossa and I saw him go out, soon after the coaches left. He started off towards the river, by that path that dives into the trees.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No. Felicity just might have. She was down that way this afternoon, we met her coming back.” No need to say she’d followed Lucien from the house; she knew there were others who knew, she’d be able to answer questions and keep her secrets, too.

“Shall I go and find Felicity?” offered Tossa, to fend off any other messenger.

“If you wouldn’t mind, my dear. No need to broadcast anything – not yet, anyhow.” The professor smiled at her, but he was not quite easy in his mind, even then.

“No, I won’t.” And in a few moments she returned from the drawing-room with Felicity. The girl was pale, her eyes huge and opaque as grey glass, her mask slightly and frighteningly out of drawing.

“Felicity, we’ve lost Lucien Galt.” The professor was placid and gentle. “Maybe he’s just loitering about somewhere with a stopped watch, maybe he’s gone to sleep in the summer-house, or something daft and simple. But we’d better have a look for him, perhaps, just in case. I hear you were down by the river this afternoon, did you see anything of him? I’m told he’d gone that way.”

“I… we went out together,” said Felicity in a thin thread of a voice. “He was just ahead of me when I went out, so I caught him up and we went together. We went downstream on the other side, but only as far as where the paths cross. You know, by the baby redwood tree. Then he went on across the loop, I think… anyhow, I crossed over again by the stone bridge, and left him there.” She looked from the professor to Dominic and Tossa, and moistened her lips. “I met Miss Barber and Mr. Felse when I was coming back.”

“And you weren’t out again? And you haven’t seen Mr. Galt come back to the house?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No. I was indoors all the rest of the afternoon. I had some work to do for Uncle Edward.”

The whip of the warden’s name stung Henry Marshall into full awareness of his responsibilities. Arundale was in Birmingham by now, and the whole load of Follymead came down on his deputy’s shrinking shoulders. The social load was enough, but that he was prepared to tackle. This was something that hadn’t been on the agenda, and he didn’t know what to do.

“He must be in the grounds,” he said unhappily. “Apparently he simply went out for a walk. I suppose there’s always a possibility that he may have had an accident, just an ordinary fall. It’s not so difficult to break an ankle, or something like that, along the river-banks. Professor, I really think you’d better get on with your lecture, and try to manage without him, if you can, while some of us have a hunt through the park for him.”

“I think I had,” agreed the professor dryly, one ear cocked for the rising noise of conversation drifting in from the distant drawing-room. “I’ll tell them nothing about this. Better keep it to the few of us here, until we know what we’re about.”

They agreed, in a subdued murmur.

“You find the lad,” said the professor, swooping towards the door. “I’ll keep this lot quiet.”

When he was gone, there were just five of them left in the room, Tossa, Felicity, Liri Palmer, Dominic and Marshall. It wasn’t the party they would have chosen. Three of them women, and two of those tense and anxious already. Liri was unquestionably durable, but Felicity looked brittle as glass, ready to shatter. Dominic touched her hand lightly, and urged her with a frown and a silent shake of his head to leave the search to them. Nevertheless, they were still five when they went out in the green, misty, pre-evening light to quarter the grounds for Lucien Galt.

The path by which Lucien and Felicity had vanished in the early afternoon sank itself deep in groves of diverse trees, artfully deployed, and reached the river at some distance from the house. A narrow footbridge with a single handrail brought Dominic to the other side. The largest of the three weirs that controlled the passage of the Braide through the Follymead grounds lay upstream, and here the waters rolled brown and high and fast, seamed with currents, and tossing twigs and branches from hand to hand as it rushed along. The spring rains had been heavy after heavy snows, the sodden grass of the banks fermented with brownish foam, and strained at its roots, streaming out like dead hair along the taut surface of the water. On the other side the path turned downstream, at first close to the bank; but in a little while it plunged into woodland again, and left the waterside to take a short cut across one of the artificial loops into which the Braide had been contorted by Cothercott ingenuity.

Dominic turned with the path. Almost certainly Lucien had come this way with Felicity this afternoon, just as she had said. She had reappeared from the copse on the other bank, having recrossed by the arched stone bridge two or three loops downstream, the bridge which was designed as a part of the Follymead stage-set, to be seen in exactly the right place in that elaborate landscape when viewed from the drawing-room windows. Somewhere between this spot and that bridge she and Lucien had parted company. Dominic walked the widening ride, fenced off now on the water side by a barrier of old, ornate iron posts and fine chains, and his feet were silent in last autumn’s rotting leaves.

It didn’t follow, of course, that Lucien need be anywhere in this quarter now; in the time between he could have been anywhere in the grounds, or even several miles out of them. There was so much of Follymead that the five of them had had to spread themselves out singly in order to cover it all; and it was hardly surprising that Felicity had set off, at first, in this direction. But she had drawn back when she had seen Dominic heading the same way, and gone off voluntarily to thread the shrubberies and gardens on the other side of the house. Liri and Tossa were patrolling the more open ornamental park-land, one on either side the drive to the lodge. Where Marshall was he didn’t know; probably in the distant preserves which were going to be the worst job of all if they were forced to make a real search of it.

The river was out of sight now, somewhere away on his right hand; but here came a small cleared space where another path crossed his, and the right turn here must surely close in on the Braide again, and bring him to the bridge. And here was Felicity’s baby redwood, just inside the railed enclosure, an infant of about fifty or sixty, probably, with the characteristic spreading base and narrow, primitive, aspiring shape. He leaned over the chain fence and stuck his thumb into the thick, spongy bark. So here it had happened, whatever had happened between them… here or somewhere close by, she wouldn’t bother to be accurate to a few yards. And after that nobody had seen anything of Lucien again. Though there was always the comfortable possibility, of course, that he had simply decided to be irresponsible this evening, and gone off to the pub in the village to see what entertainment was offering locally.

Dominic would have liked to believe it; but whatever Lucien Galt might not have been, he seemed to be a conscientious professional who delivered what he promised. And again, and more disturbingly, the prosaic solution didn’t chime with the atmosphere of this fantastic place.

He hesitated at the crossing of the two paths, and then turned right, as Felicity must have done when she took her broken heart and hurt pride in her arms and ran away from the debacle. And twenty yards along, with the chain fence still accompanying him on his right, he came to an enormous scrolled iron gate in it, massive with leaves and flowers, twice as tall as the fence. Evidently the gate was a survival from some older and far more solid fence, long taken down for scrap. To judge by the gate itself, it dated from the high days of iron, maybe around 1800 or even earlier, stuff that could go neglected for centuries before it even began to corrode seriously. It hadn’t been painted for a long time, and it sagged a little on its hinges, but swung freely when he pushed it. The bracket into which the latch should drop was still fixed immovably to the gate-post, as big as a bruiser’s closed fist; but there was no latch hanging now in the wards.

The elaboration of the approach suggested that this patch of woodland by the river bank enshrined one of the features of the grounds. He went through the gate on impulse, and down to the riverside. He could see the distant gleam of sullen light on the water in broken glimpses between the trees; and the belt of woods thinned suddenly and brought him out on an open stretch of grass, ringed round every way with shrubs. Even across the river the woods lay close here, the alders leaning over the bank. A nice, quiet, retired place, carefully made, like everything here. Nature had abdicated, unable to keep up the pace. The cluster of rocks that erupted on the bank had been placed there by man, artfully built up to look as natural as the eighteenth century liked its landscape features to look. Dominic crossed the thirty yards or so of open meadow that separated him from it, and found that the face the rocks turned towards the Braide was hollowed into a narrow cavern, with a stone bench fitted inside it. The inside walls were encrusted with stucco and shells, and overgrown with ferns, and there had once been a small spring there, filling a little channel in the stone floor and running down to the river. There was only a green stain there now, and a growth of viridian moss.

He looked round the grotto dubiously, and was turning to leave it when he saw, between the stone and the river, the first raw scars in the grass. The ground was soft and moist, the grass still short, but lush enough to show wounds. Feet had stamped and shifted here, with more pressure and greater agitation than in mere walking. Close to the edge of the flood, gathering in concentrated force here before leaping the third weir, there was a patch of grass some two yards across that had been trampled and scored, the dark soil showing through. Here someone’s foot had slipped and left a slimy smear.

Dominic approached cautiously, avoiding setting foot on the scarred place. Close to the water the grass shrank from a bare patch of gravel and stone; and there were two darker spots on the ground, oval and even and small, a dull brown in colour. He stooped to peer at them. It had rained briefly in the morning, but not since. These were therefore more recent than that rain; and they looked to him like drops of blood. He went down on one knee carefully to look more closely, and put his supporting hand on something hard that shifted in the grass. He made an instinctive movement to pick it up, and then took out his handkerchief, and handled his find delicately through the linen. A small silver medal, worn almost smooth, some human figure, maybe a saint, on one side, and on the other what seemed to be a lion rampant. From the ring that pierced it above the saint’s head a thin silver chain slid away like a snake and slipped through his fingers; he caught it in his other hand, and saw that it had not been unclasped, but broken.

He had seen it before, or at least something so like it that in his heart he knew it was the same; round, worn, plain, of this very size, why should there be two such in Follymead at the same time?

This morning, at Professor Penrose’s lecture, Lucien Galt had worn an open-necked sweater-shirt, and several times he had leaned forward to attend to the professor’s record player for him. He had then been wearing this medal round his neck. Dominic had noticed it because it had seemed at first out of character; and then, and more acutely, because it was entirely in character, after all, that he should wear it as he did, without a thought for either display or concealment, as naturally as he wore his eyelashes. And the thing itself had an austerity that made it singularly personal and valid, like a silver identity bracelet round a sailor’s wrist in wartime. Not for show, but not to be hidden, either; something with a right to be where it was.

He stared at it in the fading light, and he knew it was the same. He looked at the sky, which was ragged with broken clouds, and then went and found some large leaves of wild rhubarb from the waterside, and laid them over the drops that were possibly blood, and the trampled ground, in case of rain. He found a sharp stone and drove it into the turf where he had picked up the medal. That was all he could do.

Then he went to find Henry Marshall.

“I’m not sure about the blood,” said Dominic for the fourth time. “I am sure about the struggle. Two people – or more than two, but it looks like two – were fighting there. And
this
was in the grass, and Liri says it was his, and I say so, too. And that’s all we’ve got, between the five of us.”

They were in the warden’s office, with the door tightly shut. Dinner was over, without them; they had sandwiches and coffee in here, but no one had done more than play with them. Liri sat bolt upright, pale and calm, her mouth tight and her eyes sombre. Felicity, mercifully, had been manoeuvred out of the council by Tossa, and driven in to the evening session, where she would have to mingle and be social and keep her mouth shut. She didn’t even know exactly what Dominic had found, though maybe she guessed more than was comfortable. Someone would have to keep an eye on her, and it looked as if the someone would have to be Tossa. But Felicity had resources of her own, and whatever she couldn’t do yet, she could keep secrets. At fifteen it’s an essential quality; one’s life depends on it. She wouldn’t give anything away.

“We can’t leave it at that,” said Dominic reasonably.

“No, I realise that, of course.” Henry Marshall was barely thirty, none too sure of himself after four months under Edward Arundale’s formidable shadow, and at this moment in an agony of indecision. “But we have no proof at all that anything disastrous has happened, no proof of a crime, certainly. And you must understand that this establishment is in a curiously vulnerable position. If a scandal threatened our reputation it might cut off funds from several sources, as well as frightening away our actual student potential.” He dug his fingers agitatedly into his straw-coloured hair, and his black-rimmed spectacles slid down his long young nose. “A bad period of some weeks could close us down. It would be cataclysmic. As long as we run steadily on a moderate backing we’re perfectly safe. But any interruption of any long duration would finish us. And that would be a real national loss. I know we must follow this up. But I must protect Follymead, too. It’s what I’m here for.”