Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (21 page)

“ ‘Oft have I by thy cradle sat

And fondly seen thee sleep.

But now I go about thy bier

The salt tears for to weep…’ ”

In the changing temperature of the evening the normal small dusk wind arose, as suddenly as was its habit here over the open sward. It took the unlatched window and swung it wide against the curtain, seized the folds and set them swinging. A chill draught coursed along the wall, and fluttered the skirts of gold brocade at every window embrasure.

George heard and felt the abrupt, cold whisper from the outer world. He came to his feet with a leap, lunged silently along the wall, and whisked round the curtain to the open window, now swinging fitfully in the fresh currents of air.

Far down the slope of grass he saw the fair head receding. The curtain shook, and he, too, was gone, down the steps and after her in a soundless run. And Lucien, the thread of his passionate concentration broken by the sudden movement beside him, came out of his dream to the sharper and more personal pains of the real world. She saw him rise, and felt the belated shock of knowledge and realisation sear through him; but there was nothing she could do, as he groped his way blindly after George, except sing on to the end, prolong the postlude, cover the slight, the very slight disturbance, and make those few who had noticed it forget it had ever been.

“ ‘And syne she kissed his bloody cheek

And syne his bloody chin:

‘Oh, better I love my Gil Morrice

Than all my kith and kin.’

‘Away, away, ye ill woman.

And an ill death may ye dee.

Had I but known he’d been your son.

He’d ne’er been slain for me.’ ”

Five minutes more, to preserve the integrity of the course, and nobody, certainly not the professor, would dream of filling in with something smaller after this monstrous
tour-de-force
. Liri knew her worth. But don’t let them go yet, hold them fast, keep them from looking out of the windows yet, tie their feet from following. She didn’t know what she had done, but she knew there must be no interference with it now, no well-meaning onlookers, no witnesses to tell the story afterwards.

She raised the volume and passion of her instrument to a crisis of anguish, improvising in a galloping rhapsody that bore the fortunes of Lord Barnard and his lady and Gil Morrice racing to ruin together, away down the wind and into the distance of antiquity, where old hatreds and old agonies lay down together between the four lines of a ballad verse as in a bed, and slept, and dreamed. The threnody sobbed away beneath her fingers, diminuendo, and died on a mere breath, one muted quiver of a single string.

She felt the sweat cold on her forehead and lip, and the silence came down on her stunningly, like the fall of a roof. It seemed to last for a long time, while she could hardly breathe or stir for weakness; and then a sigh like a gust of wind went through the room, and they were all on their feet roaring and clapping together, and Professor Penrose had his old arm round her shoulders and was shaking her in a joyful embrace, while out of the contortion of her mouth that passed for a smile she was howling at him over and over, under cover of the din:

“Get them away, quickly! Get them out of here… get them out
… get them out
!”

After they were gone, with all that merry racket of cars and voices and horns, like a wild hunt of the twentieth century – and some of them still singing – the house was awesomely quiet. So quiet that it was hard to remember that somewhere downstairs some dozen or so resident staff still remained, few of them ever seen by visitors.

Celia Whitwood had tucked her harp lovingly into the back of the huge old car she drove, and set off westwards for home with Andrew Callum as a passenger. The Rossignol twins and Peter Crewe had clambered gaily into the station wagon, bound for the London train, and after them the professor, embracing his inevitable notes and leaving behind in his bedroom the same case of recording tapes he had forgotten at Comerbourne station on Friday evening. Even Dickie Meurice was gone with him, edged competently and civilly into the transport by the deputy warden, with his consuming curiosity still unsatisfied. From his front seat, for once in the audience, he had not seen Lucien appear or Audrey disappear. To him it was only a matter of time, of a little patience, and Lucien’s arrest was a pleasurable certainty. Let him go, let him sit and gloat in town, waiting for the flare headlines he was never going to see. He had never been of much importance; now, in this immense calm after the whirlwind, he was of no importance at all.

Liri sat in a deep chair in the gallery, her eyes half-closed, exhaustion covering her like a second skin. She saw the growing dusk take away the small possessions of the Cothercotts one by one into shadow, the fan that concealed a dagger, the empty place where the sword-stick had hung, the silver-chased pistols, the miniatures on ivory; and then whole pieces of furniture, the love-seat with its twisted arms, the spinet, the inlaid cabinets, the entire end of the long room. Darkness crept in upon her, and was welcomed. She seemed to have been there alone for so long that it was strange to hear a movement in the room with her. It could have been Felicity’s fictional ghost; but it was only Tossa Barber, sitting just as quietly on a high-backed chair by the library door.

“It’s only me. It’s all right,” said Tossa simply, “I’ll go away when they come.”

“I don’t mind. I thought everybody’d gone.”

“We have to wait for Mr. Felse. We’re driving back with him, if… ” She let that fall. Nobody knew when George would be ready to go home. “Dominic went down to see if he… to find them…” Every sentence flagged into silence. All they were really doing was waiting.

It must have been nearly eight o’clock when they heard the first footsteps crossing the terrace, the clash of the window-latch, a heel on the sill, stumbling, uncertain. Two people, the second closely following the first, but never touching him. A hand reached over an oblivious shoulder to the light-switches at the end of the gallery, hesitated, and chose the single lamp that made only a faint pool of radiance in a corner of the twilit room. Nobody said anything; but Dominic caught Tossa’s eye, and Tossa rose softly and slipped past Lucien Galt, who neither saw nor heard her, Dominic took her hand, and drew her away with him, and Lucien and Liri were left together.

He saw her, and his eyes came to life in the shocked grey mask of his face. He pushed himself off from the doorway, and walked into her arms without a word, and without a word she opened them to him. He slid to his knees at her feet, and she held him on her heart, along with the chill and the dank smell of the river; and she knew where Audrey had gone. After a while he stopped shivering, and locked his arms tightly round her body, and heaved a huge sigh that convulsed them both; and neither he nor she would ever know whether it was of grief at his loss, or involuntary relief at this vast and terrible simplification of his problems, or both, and in what measure.

“I called to her,” he said presently, in a voice drained and weary. “She was on the parapet. I wanted to tell her that we… that you and I… that we didn’t care, that it didn’t matter any more…”

“It wouldn’t have been any good,” said Liri. “It
did
matter to her.”

No, it wouldn’t have been any good, even if she had listened to him. How can you convince a person like Audrey Arundale that she no longer has to sacrifice everything to respectability, to public reputation, to what the world will say? What’s the good of arguing with her that her parents are dead now, and Edward’s dead, and the people she has left simply don’t look at values that way, simply won’t care, that they would welcome her back even after years of prison, and damn the world’s opinion? How do you set about convincing her of that, when she’s been trained to subdue everything else to appearances all her life? She couldn’t be expected to change now. This way there wouldn’t be any murder trial, there needn’t even be much publicity of any kind. The police are not obliged to make public the particulars of a case which is closed to their satisfaction, when the person who would otherwise have been charged is dead, and the public interest wouldn’t be served by stirring up mud. They simply say the case is closed, no prosecutions will be instituted as a result of it, and that’s the end of it. General curiosity only speculates for a very short time, till the next sensation crops up. This way everything would be smoothed away, everything hushed up, everything made the best of, just as it had always had to be. Maybe they’d even succeed in getting an open verdict on Edward’s death, and the locals would evolve improbable theories about a poacher or a vagrant surprised in the park, and hitting out in panic with the nearest weapon that offered. Audrey wouldn’t care. Audrey had observed her contract and her loyalties as best she could to the end. Edward would have wished it.

“I got her out,” Lucien’s labouring mouth shaped against Liri’s heart. “They’ve been all this time trying…trying…”

Yes. Trying to revive her, of course; but Audrey, it seemed, had made quite sure.

“All I meant to do was warn her,” Liri said. “I’d just found out that
he
knew… It was the only way I had…”

Her voice flagged, like his. They had no need of explanations, and speech was such an effort yet that they could afford to use it only for the ultimate essentials. With her cheek pressed against his wet black hair: “I love you,” said Liri gently, and that was all.

“She was my mother,” he said, “and I can’t even bury her.”

The ambulance had come and gone. Henry Marshall had had a fire lit for them in the small library, and left the handful of them there together in the huge and silent house. Lucien had bathed and changed, and put on again with his fresh clothes a drained and languid calm. Liri sat across the hearth from him and watched him steadily, and often he looked up to reassure himself that she was there. Two dark, reticent, proud people; in the intensity of this unvoiced reconciliation their two young, formidable faces had grown strangely alike, as though mentally they stared upon each other with such passion that each had become a mirror image of the other.

“I’ve got to sit back and let Arundale’s relatives do it for me, because I can’t compromise what she wanted left alone. All her life keeping up appearances, doing the correct thing, and now she has to die the same way.”

“She chose it,” said George.

“She never had a choice, being the person she was. If my father hadn’t been killed…”

“You do know about your father?”

“Do
you
?” challenged Lucien jealously.—

And neither of them was speaking of John James Galt, though he had done his part well enough, no doubt, during the year or so he had been in the place of a father.

“I know the Galts re-registered you as theirs when you were only a few months old, presumably as soon as the adoption proceedings were completed. I’m reasonably sure that your real father must have been one of the Czech pilots who were stationed at Auchterarne during the war. I guess that he must have been killed in action in 1942. But adoption certificates carry only the Christian names given to the child, and the name of the adoptive parent.
His
name I don’t know yet. I shall get it eventually either from Somerset House or from the service records. But that’s unnecessary now,” said George gently. “You tell me.”

“His name was Vaclav Havelka. I know, because
she
told me about him. Vaclav is the same name we call Wenceslas. That’s why he gave her his Saint Wenceslas medal. He hadn’t got anything else to give her. He hadn’t even got a country, then, only a job and a uniform. He was twenty years old, and she was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and they met at some innocent local bunfight when her school was up there in Scotland. There wasn’t a hope for them. Her people were set on her getting into society and marrying a lord, or something, not a refugee flyer with no money and no home. So she did the one thing really of her own that she ever did, she gave herself to him. Maybe she hoped to force her parents’ hands, and maybe she might even have managed it, but it never came to that, because my father was shot down six months before I was born. After that, she didn’t put up much of a fight for me.”

“How much chance did she have?” said Liri in a low voice.

“Not much, I know. With my father gone she hadn’t got anybody to stand by her. She had to tell her folks, and they took her away from school quickly and quietly, and then set to work on her, for ever urging her to have it all hushed up, to spare them the shame, to think of her future, when she hadn’t got any future. She gave way in the end. She’d have had to be a heroine not to. She let them hide her away somewhere to have me on the quiet, and then she let me go for adoption. But she insisted on meeting the Galts before she’d sign. They were decent, nice people who badly wanted a child, she knew I’d be all right with them. So she asked them to make sure that I kept my father’s medal, and then she promised never to trouble them again, and she never did. And after the war they married her off to Arundale, a big wedding and a successful career, everything they’d wanted for her. You know how
he
first met her? He gave away the prizes at her school speech-day, the last year she was there. It must have been only a few weeks before my father was killed.”

A school speech-day, George thought, dazzled, why didn’t I think of that? The white dress, the modest jewellery permitted for wear on a ceremonial occasion, the radiance in her face – Arundale must have had that vision on his mind ever afterwards. And she without a thought of him, or of anything else but her lover, the bridal gift round her neck, and the child that was coming.

Liri was frowning over a puzzling memory. “But you know, what I don’t understand is that Mr. Arundale practically told me that his wife
couldn’t have
any children. Not in so many words, but that was what he meant.”

“Felicity told me the same thing,” said George, unimpressed. “That’s not so strange. Can you imagine a man like Arundale being open to the idea that the fault might possibly be in him?”

“No,” she agreed bitterly, “you’re right, of course. Even in the Bible you notice it’s always barren
wives
.”

“And how,” asked George, returning gently to the matter in hand, “did you come to meet your mother again?”

“It was at a party the recording company gave, about six weeks ago.” Lucien turned his face aside for a moment, wrung by the realisation of how short a time they had had together. “She’d lost sight of me all these years, but after I started singing she began to follow up all the notices about me. I kept my own name, you see, so she knew who I was. She began to edge her way into the folk world, to get to know people so that she could get to me. And I… it’s hard to explain. I’d grown up happy enough. After the Galts were killed it was the orphanage, of course, but that was pretty good, too, I didn’t have any complaints. They told me I’d been adopted, naturally, they always do that, because you’re dead certain to find out one day, anyhow. We had one committee-woman who’d known the Galts slightly, and she told me how this medal I had had belonged to my father, who was dead, and my mother had let me go for adoption. I never had anything against my father, how could I? But there was always this thing I had about my mother, pulling two ways, wanting her because after all you’re not complete without one, and hating her because she just gave me up when the going got rough. And then this one day, at this party, there I was suddenly alone in a corner with this beautiful, fashionable woman, and she said to me: ‘I’ve been trying for ages to meet you. I’m your mother.’ ”

He doubled his long hands into fists and wrung them in a momentary spasm of anguish, and then uncurled them carefully, and let them lie still and quiet on his knee.