Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (4 page)

“ ‘I’ve cursed three times since last Easter Day.

At Mass-time once I went to play.

I passed through the churchyard one day in haste

And forgot to pray for my mother’s rest’.”

By the time he reached:

“ ‘Good people who dwell in peace and joy.

Breathe a prayer and a tear for the Croppy boy’.”

he had several of the teen-age girls in tears. That startled him, too, but he was disarmed. It was the first time Tossa and Dominic had seen him look kindly at his fans.

“And what’s the third one to be?” asked Meurice amiably.

Lucien thought for a moment, his lip caught between his teeth, his fingers muting the strings of his guitar. He looked across the rows and rows of expectant students, and Dominic, turning his head to follow that glance, caught a glimpse of Liri Palmer’s chiselled profile and great coil of brown hair. She sat at the back of the assembly, attentive and still. There was no reading anything into her face.

Lucien began to sing. They all knew the air as “Believe me if all those endearing young charms,” but that was not what he was singing.

“ ‘My lodging is on the cold, cold ground.

And hard, very hard is my fare.

But what doth me the more confound

Is the coldness of my dear.

Yet still I cry, O turn, love.

I prithee, love, turn to me.

For thou art the only one, love.

That art adored by me.

I’ll twine thee a garland of straw, love.

I’ll marry thee with a rush ring.

My frozen hopes will thaw, love.

And merrily we will sing.

Then turn to me, my own love.

I prithee, love, turn to me.

For thou art the only one, love.

That art adored by me’.”

“That ought to fetch her,” whispered Tossa, shaken, “if anything can.”

Dominic was astonished. He hadn’t noticed this incalculable girl of his following any significant glances, and yet it seemed she knew very well what was going on. He wished he did. There was certainly something, and there was a tension in the air that threatened more; yet nobody else seemed to have noticed anything. Maybe all the girls took that declaration to themselves, and applauded it accordingly; and it was just possible – wasn’t it? – that that applied to Tossa, too.

“Now hold your horses a minute,” beamed Dickie Meurice, fanning down the applause. “We haven’t finished yet. Oh, yes, I know that’s all we promised you, but we’ve still got a card up our sleeve, you’ll find. Some of you know it already, but to most of you it’ll be great news. Do you know who’s been modest enough to come along to this course as a student? She’s right there among you at this moment, maybe some of you talked to her at dinner and never realised. Liri… Liri Palmer! It’s no use trying to hide back there. I know where you are.” She hadn’t moved, not even a muscle of her disdainful face. She didn’t want to be haled out of her anonymity, but she certainly wasn’t hiding even from the crack of doom.

“Yes, folks, that’s the whole secret. Liri Palmer is here among us. There she sits! Now you give her a big hand, and maybe she’ll surrender.”

He was growing by the minute, expanding to fill the twenty-one inch screen that wasn’t there, to dominate the cameras, the emotions and the events of this evening. This was what he’d been waiting for.

“Come along, Liri, don’t cheat us. You can’t blame us for wanting you. Come up here where you belong, and let us hear from you.”

Every head had turned by this time, even the slowest of them had located her, even those who knew nothing about her had identified her by the glutinous stares of the others. Someone began to applaud, and all the rest took it up like a rising wave.

“Come on, Liri, we’re all waiting just for you.”

She rose from her chair, but only to gain a hearing. “I came to listen, you must excuse me. And I haven’t got my guitar down here.”

“Lucien will lend you his guitar, I’m sure. Come on, you can’t disappoint everyone. Lucien, don’t just sit there, help me out. If
you
ask her, I’m sure she’ll come.”

Lucien Galt was seen for once out of countenance, and that in itself was astonishing. He sat shaken and mute, staring across the array of hopeful faces to where Liri stood braced and annoyed, her brows drawn down in a formidable scowl. It was Lucien who flushed and stammered.

“Yes, Liri, please do. You’d be giving everyone so much pleasure.”

There could have been no milder invitation, but what happened next was more like the formal acceptance of a challenge.

“Very well,” said Liri abruptly, “since
you
ask me.” And she walked fiercely up the gangway between the goggling fans, and stepped up on to the concert dais in the great window-embrasure, where the artists sat. She took the offered guitar, sat down on the forward edge of Dickie Meurice’s table, and stroked the strings, frowning. There was a moment of absolute silence, while she seemed to forget they existed, and only to be gathering herself for a private outburst. Then the whole drawing-room shook to the shuddering chords she fetched out of Lucien’s instrument, and she lifted her head and poised her silver-pure entry with piercing accuracy, like a knife in the heart:

“Black, black, black, is the colour of my true-love’s
heart
!

His tongue is like a poisoned dart.

The coldest eyes and the lewdest hands…

I hate the ground whereon he stands!

“I hate my love, yet well he knows.

I love the ground whereon he goes.

And if my love no more I see

No one
shall have his company!

“Black, black, black, is the colour of my true-love’s
heart
…”

An achingly sweet voice, so rending in its sweetness as to corrode like an acid when she used it like this, as if all the frightening possibilities of her nature, for good or evil, could be molten in the furnace of her feeling, and pour out in that fine-spun thread of sound to purify or poison. She sang with such superb assurance that they all accepted it as the only rightness, only realising afterwards how she had changed words to her own purposes, and torn the heart out of the song to leave it the antithesis of what it was meant to be. As if she turned the coin of love to show hate engraven in an almost identical design.

The silence was unnerving, but it did not unnerve her. She stood up, and the applause began, noisily and violently, with almost guilty fervour, to cover the pause which should not have been there. She laid down the guitar on the table.

“It doesn’t sing properly for me. I’ll use my own tomorrow, if you don’t mind.” There was an empty chair behind the semi-circle of artists; she slid by them and took it, abdicating from public notice before they had stopped approving her, and giving them no acknowledgement.

The incident was over before half of those present fully grasped that there had been an incident. But with the end of the applause the numbness wore off, and the shock reached them all.

In the front row old Miss Southern, as innocent at seventy as she had been at seventeen, leaned anxiously to her neighbour. She had come to this course in the hope of hearing again “Early one morning.” “The Oak and the Ash.” “Barbara Allen,” and all the songs she had been taught at school – sometimes in bowdlerised versions! – and nobody could put anything over on her where the canon was concerned.

“But she got it wrong,” she whispered. “It’s
hair
. ‘Black is the colour of my true-love’s
hair
.’ Do you think we ought to tell her?”

“
No
!” hissed her neighbour, appalled. “For heavens’ sake!”

“But perhaps she got it from one of these degraded variants, you know. I learned it at school. It’s ‘
hair
,’ not ‘
heart
.’ Shouldn’t we…?”

Half the front row had heard this last agitated utterance. Professor Penrose came up off the small of his back with the agility of an ageing monkey, but without any appearance of haste or concern, and demonstrated his right to be in charge. His old voice had all the power and command it needed, and he, at seventy-five, was not innocent at all.

“Well, I’ll admit I did issue a sort of challenge,” he said, scowling amiably round the half-circle of tense and quiet singers, “to our young friends here, and they certainly took it up. We’ll go into details to-morrow morning. All I’ll say now is that we’ve just had a very ingenious demonstration of one of the essentials of folk-song, and that is its ability to change and renew itself. Folk-music is organic. It adapts itself to answer the needs of expression of those whose natural music it is. Once it becomes static it has begun to die. One of its chief functions is to be the voice of the otherwise inarticulate, and don’t you forget it. As for you,” he said severely, wagging a finger at the Rossignol twins, who gazed back at him with benign smiles, “I’ll deal with you to-morrow. Toss a sophisticated little court-pastoral melody at me, would you, and hope for me to fall over my own feet telling you it isn’t a folk-song! Of course it’s a folksong! The people took what they wanted where they found it, as well as creating it for themselves, but don’t doubt it became truly theirs. From the court, was it? So was the
carmognole
! So was the
Ça ira
! Go collecting in the more rural parts of Bohemia, and you’ll find themes of Mozart sung to folk poems, and if you go back far enough you’ll find they were genuine folk-songs almost before Mozart was dead, and those who heard them carried from the distant towns and took them for their own use never knew or cared what seed they were cultivating. And don’t think you can faze an old hand like me by bouncing off into Auvergnat
patois
, either. I knew that lullaby before you were born.

“All right, let’s break off there for to-night, and think over what we’ve heard. To-morrow I hope you won’t be afraid to disagree with me, there’s room here for a lot of different opinions. If you think ‘My lodging is on the cold ground’ can’t be a valid folk-song because the words are by John Gay, and have the ring of the theatre rather than the village, you stand up for your views. We probably shan’t come to any firm conclusions, but we might uncover some very interesting ideas. As well as hearing some very fine singing and playing, I may say, if they live up to to-night. And now let’s all adjourn to the small drawing-room for coffee.”

And they went, swarming out of the great room and along the corridor, so bemused by his persuasive tongue that they were almost convinced nothing fiery and violent had ever passed between those two people now silently following. Just a clever bit of impromptu theatre, to show that folk-music was alive and adaptable to a human situation to-day, no less than two hundred years ago. All the same, there was something still quivering in the air, electric and disquieting; something that moved the left-handed Rossignol twin to murmur to the right-handed Rossignol twin, as they climbed the staircase:

“Do you know,
mon vieux
, I think perhaps this week-end is going to be not so boring, after all.”

She hadn’t reckoned fully with his ruthless ability to rid himself of unwanted company, and had supposed that if she hung back until all was quiet he would be swept into the small drawing-room and the coffee conversation by the crowd of eager fans that swarmed about him, enthusing, flattering and angling for position. But when she came to the turn of the stairs, alone, treading on the fringes of the distant clamour, he reached out from the folds of the velvet curtains and caught her by the arm, pulling her to a standstill face to face with him.

“Liri, I want to talk to you.”

His voice was taut and very low, his face flushed and dark and convulsed with pride. She tried to wrest her arm out of his grasp, and instinctively gave up the attempt, knowing she could not do it by force and he would not let her go.

“
I
don’t want to talk to
you
. Let go my arm.”

“Liri, don’t be like this, I tell you I’ve
got
to talk to you…”

“You did talk to me,” she said through her teeth, “just now. You talked and I answered, and I’ve said all I’ve got to say to you. Now get away from me.”

“I don’t believe it! If that’s all you’ve got to say to me, why did you come here at all?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she demanded fiercely. “I came as a student, like anybody else…”

“That’s a lie,” he said bluntly. “You came because you knew I should be here, you must have, you couldn’t have known the course was on at all without knowing I was part of it. You followed me here. Why, if you’ve got nothing to say to me now you’re here?”

“You!” she said, suddenly rigid with quiet fury. “You think the world goes round you. You think you can play what tricks you like, and no one has the right to kick. You wouldn’t know what I have against you, would you? Oh, no! Listen just once more, and then I never want to see you or hear your voice again. I’m finished with you! I don’t know you, I don’t want to know you, you mean nothing to me, and you never will mean anything again. Now take your hands off me.”

“The devil I will, till you listen to
me
…”

Lucifer blazed, and the answering fires burned up in Liri’s eyes. She would have liked to swing her free palm and hit him resoundingly in the face, but in the quietness where they were, and sharp above the still ferocity of their voices, it would have brought the curious running as surely as a pistol-shot. There were other ways. She stooped her head suddenly, and closed her teeth in his wrist.

He never made a sound, but his startled muscles jerked, and in the instant of surprise when his grip relaxed she tore herself free, eluding the recovering lunge he made after her, and slipped away from him up the staircase.

By one of the coffee-tables in the small drawing-room – they were just getting used to applying the term to an apartment about as large as a tithe-barn – Dickie Meurice had gathered his court about him, and was exerting himself to be at once king and court-jester. He, at least, was having a successful evening. Things were shaping up very nicely. He didn’t miss Liri’s entry, or fail to hug himself with satisfaction at sight of her high colour and burning eyes; but he let her alone. So far from having anything against her personally, he was just beginning to find her interesting. She might be a tigress, but she had looks and style; she made most of the girls look like mass-produced dolls. There might be a bonus in it for him if he could make certain that her separation from Lucifer was permanent.

Lucien Galt came into the room with his usual long, arrogant step, his head up, his brows drawn together into a forbidding line. He crossed to the coffee-table and helped himself without a word or a look for anyone, and then stood balancing the cup in his hand and looking round until he found Liri, in a group surrounding Professor Penrose, in the far corner of the room. He watched her frowningly, attentively, without a thought for all the curious, covert glances fixed on him. It was like him not to bother to dissemble for them; the most offensive thing about him was that he made no concessions to his public. In Meurice’s catalogue of sins that was blasphemy.

And, damn him, here came the girls, just the same! He could stand there and look through them as though they didn’t exist, and they came edging in on him like cats, purring and rubbing themselves against his knees. The Cope kid among the first of them, of course; she’d got it badly. Pale as death, tight as a bow-string, swallowing her desperate shyness in still more desperate bravery.

“Mr. Galt, you were wonderful! I know you must be tired of hearing it, but I do mean it, I really do!”

“Fabulous! I mean, that Irish song… I
cried
!”

“I always listen to your broadcasts… I’ve got
all
your records. But to hear you
live
, that was just out of this world. Mr. Meurice, wasn’t he
marvellous
?”

Dickie Meurice slid unobtrusively nearer, merging his own adorers into the rival group; that way, there was always a hope of annexing them all, or at least being credited with them all, when Lucifer lost his patience and swooped away, picking his feet fastidiously out of the syrup of their idolatry like a hawk ripping himself loose from birdlime. He was certain to do it, sooner or later.

“He was indeed,” said Dickie sunnily, and smiled into Lucien’s frowning stare. “If anybody got the message tonight, he did!” The bright, hearty, extrovert voice pushed the small, private barb home, and felt it draw blood. “Nice performance, Lucien, boy, very nice.”

“Yours?” said Lucien laconically. “Or mine?”

“Now, now! No bitchery between colleagues, old boy.” His blue eyes, wide and hard and merciless as a child’s, fixed delightedly on Lucien’s lean brown wrist, the one that supported the coffee-cup. The oval of tiny, indented bruises, strung here and there with a bead of blood, marked the smooth skin with an interesting pattern of blue and purple. “Well, well!” sighed Meurice, shaking his blond head. “And I was always taught that eating people is wrong!”

Lucien looked down at his own battle-scar, and raised his brows in sheer astonishment. He had felt nothing since she ran from him, and never even looked to see if she’d marked him. Observing the evidence, and hearing the small, indrawn breaths and the blank, brief silence, he would have hidden his wrist if he could, but it was too late for that. He let it sustain the sudden, avid weight of their curiosity, and looked over it at Dickie Meurice with a cool indifferent face.

“Really? You must have quite a job reconciling that with the tone of your TV programme, I should think. The only time I watched it, it was pure cannibalism.”

The circling girls shrank and gasped. They looked from Lucien’s stony composure to Dickie Meurice’s fair face, suddenly paling to bluish white, and as abruptly flushing into painful crimson. If there was one point on which he was sensitive, it was his programme. There was no parrying that straight stab with a joke, and the killing stroke didn’t come to him.

“Except that some of the meat you were gritting your teeth on was carrion,” said Lucien with detachment, “so I suppose the term hardly applies.”

He turned at leisure and laid down his cup, wasted a polite moment for any come-back, and hoisted an indifferent shoulder when none came. Without haste he walked away, weaving between the shifting groups of people; and Felicity Cope turned like a sleep-walker, and followed him.

“I never invited him to be my guest,” said Meurice, collecting himself. “Maybe that colours the view.” And he offered them his quirky smile and intimate glance, and got a slightly embarrassed murmur of response; but it was too late to repair the damage, and he knew it. He had been discomfited before his loyal and scandalised fans, something no public personality can ever be expected to forgive. Something heroic would be needed to restore his authority.

“Between you and me,” he said, his voice earnest, confidential and sad, “we have to forgive Lucien almost any crudity just now. God knows I wouldn’t want to score off the poor devil while he’s all knotted up the way he is over Liri. Don’t spread this, of course, but I think it’s as well if some of you know the facts. You can help to smooth the way if you understand what’s going on.” His tone was all warmth, consideration and kindness; and no one could do it better when the need arose. “You see,” he said, “up to a couple of weeks ago Lucien and Liri…”

His voice sank to a solicitous whisper, drawing their heads together round him like swarming bees to their queen. He made an artistic job of it, and sighed at his own cleverness. “What a situation! And here we are over the week-end, stuck with it! No, don’t misunderstand if I let Lucien get away with murder just now. I figure he’s got more than enough on his mind, without my turning on him as well, just because he takes his soreness out on me. My shoulders are broad, I can take it.”