Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (5 page)

They shifted and glowed, worshipping. They murmured that it was really big of him to look at it that way. They promised faithfully that they’d keep his confidence. And within minutes they were dropping off from the edge of his circle to spread the news.

The girl with butterfly glasses peered through the brick-red fringe that came down to the bridge of her nose, and her short-sighted eyes glistened. She had relayed the tale four times already, and it got better every time. Her fellow-missionaries were circulating with equal fervour round the room, avoiding only the august vicinity of Edward and Audrey Arundale, whose position, among this largely under-twenty assembly, remained very much that of the headmaster and his wife, and effectively froze out gossip. The only other islands immune from this industrious dirt-washing were where Lucien Galt moved aloof, abstracted and tense, with Felicity faithful at his elbow, and where Liri Palmer sat withdrawn and alone. Every other soul in the room must be in the secret by now.

“… madly in love,” said the girl breathlessly, “and then it all blew up in their faces, just two weeks ago. They had a terrible row.
She
broke it off, but
he
was just as mad with her. Well, you can imagine what a fight between those two would be like. So they parted, and they haven’t seen each other since, not until to-day. And now suddenly she turns up here, where
he’s
got an engagement for the weekend. Just as if she’s following him…”

“How do you know all this?” asked Tossa sceptically.

“Dickie told us. He knows them both well, he’s worked with them before. You can be sure it’s quite true. If you ask me, she’s come to make mischief if she can.”

“She certainly didn’t seem to be in any conciliatory mood,” admitted Dominic, ”when she laid off just what she thought of him, to-night.”

“She didn’t, did she?” Delighted eyes blinked behind the butterfly glasses and the curtain of hair. “It’s thrilling, really, because when you come to think of it, she actually
threatened
him! She said if she couldn’t have him, nobody should. And did you know? – they had some sort of a brush before they came in here. No, honestly, I’m not making it up! She
bit
him!”

“Oh, go on!” said Tossa disbelievingly. “People don’t go round biting each other, not even the folk element.”

“All right, if you don’t believe me, take a look at his left wrist. You’ll see the marks there, all right.” Her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper, drunk with the pleasures of anticipation. “You don’t suppose she really came here to try to
kill
him, do you? I mean, she as good as
said
…”

“No,” said Dominic flatly, “I don’t suppose any such thing. One minute you’re telling us she gave him the push, and the next that she’s carrying a torch for him, and will see him dead before she’ll let anybody else have him.‘’

“Well, they could both be true, couldn’t they?” said the girl blithely, and went off to spread the news farther.

“And the devil of it is,” said Tossa, looking after her with a considering frown, “that she could very well be right. They’re getting good value for their tuition fees this time, aren’t they?”

“Now don’t you start!” protested Dominic. “Don’t forget this has all come from Dickie Meurice, and you said yourself he must hate Lucien, so what’s odd about his drumming up all the trouble he can for him? But it’s just a load of personal spite. It won’t come to anything.”

The Arundales, dutifully circulating among their guests, were approaching this quiet corner by easy stages, the image of a successful, efficient, socially accomplished college head and his eminently suitable and satisfactory wife. “Now I ask you,” said Dominic, low-voiced, “how on earth could melodrama muscle in on any party of theirs? It would never get past the secretary’s office.”

Half an hour later he was not quite so certain.

The party broke up early. The warden had no way of ensuring that his houseful of young people would stay in their four-bedded rooms, even when he had got them there, but he could at least set a good example, and hope that they would take the hint and follow it. Felicity had already been detached unwillingly from Lucien Galt’s side and edged away to bed. A few of the older people had drifted off to their rooms, and more were on their way, pausing to nose along the library shelves for bedside books. The Arundales completed their tour of all the groups left in the drawing-room by half past ten, said a general good night, and strolled out along the gallery towards their own rooms. And so powerful was the compulsion of their authority that Lucien Galt, who happened to be with them at the time, fell in alongside and left with them, and half a dozen others wound up their conversations and followed.

“Not that I shall get to bed for an hour or so yet,” observed Arundale with a rueful smile. “I’ve got to address the Vintners’ annual dinner to-morrow night, on adult education in general and Follymead in particular, and I haven’t got my ideas in order yet. We’re hoping to get an annual grant from them, of course! And on Sunday afternoon there’s a conference of clerical and lay educationalists, on the use of leisure – a big subject, and very much in the news just now. I’m afraid it must all sound rather boring to you,” he said, glancing across his wife’s fair head at Lucien Galt, with more of patronage than apology. “At your age the problem of leisure is largely a matter of getting enough of it – no difficulty in filling it.”

“I don’t find it boring at all,” said Lucien politely. And indeed, the dark profile he turned to the view of Dominic and Tossa, strolling a yard or two behind, did not look bored; the tight lines of it had eased and warmed, his colour was high and his eyes soft and bright. A slightly hectic gaiety touched him, perhaps from the salutary effort of making conversation; perhaps from the secret activity of his mind. He looked at Audrey Arundale, walking between them, and from her to her husband, and said with warmth: “I think what you’re doing here is fine, and I’m glad to be associated with it.”

Mrs. Arundale turned her head a little at that, and her dutiful, acquiescent smile, which seldom left her lips and never lost its faint overtone of anxiety, flushed into something proud and animated with pleasure.

“I’d like to think it’s fine,” said Arundale, accepting the bouquet. “I know it isn’t enough. I can only hope it has some effect.”

At this point Dominic’s thumbs pricked, surely quite unjustly, as he told himself. But who had ever heard Lucifer go out of his way to pay a compliment to anyone before? He sounded quite sincere, and probably he was, but even so it didn’t seem in character that he should say it. And the slight prick of wonder and curiosity suddenly reminded Dominic of that alleged mark on Lucien’s left wrist. That was why he happened to glance down at the right, or perhaps the wrong, moment, and see what Tossa failed to see.

The three in front were walking close together, the flared skirt of the woman’s dress rustling softly against her escorts as they moved. Lucien’s left hand, carried loosely at his side, suddenly uncurled its long fingers, and delicately and deliberately touched Audrey’s hand between their bodies, and in instant response she opened her fingers to accept him. They clasped hands ardently for an instant, and as quickly and smoothly drew apart again. Their steps had never faltered, their faces had not quivered; only the hands embraced and clung and separated with passion and resolution, as though they had an independent life of their own, or had drawn down into themselves, for one moment, all the life of these two people.

In an unexpected but natural reaction, Dominic looked round hastily and almost furtively, to see if anyone else had been watching and seen what he had seen. But Tossa, thank goodness, was looking up at the elaborate pendants of the Venetian chandeliers, now turned down discreetly to a quarter their full power, so that the long gallery was almost dim, even in its open walk; and the view of anyone coming along behind must have been blocked completely by their bodies. No, nobody! He was almost relieved as if he had risked being caught out in some embarrassing misdemeanour himself, and by luck rather than desert survived undetected.

Then a minute, sudden refraction of light drew his eyes sharply to the deep alcove where one of the Cothercott portraits hung. Someone was sitting there, so still that but for the ring she wore he would never have found her. But when he had once found her, her eyes burned brighter than the reflection from her ring. She sat motionless, the long, heavy plait of hair coiled on her shoulder. Her face was as fixed as ice, her nostrils flared wide. She was neither surprised nor disconcerted. She had seen only what she had been prepared to see, something against which she was forewarned and forearmed; but it was at the same time something she would never forget or forgive, and something she would not endure without retaliation.

They moved on, and Liri Palmer watched them go, and never moved. No one saw her but Dominic; no one but Dominic knew what she had seen.

I HOPE,” said Professor Penrose, casting a lightning glance at his watch, which showed twenty minutes past twelve, and lifting the tone-arm delicately from his precious disc of Moravian Slovak recordings, “that we’ve at least established a basis for the
name
of our subject. I hope we can agree that it should not be merely ‘folk,’ but ‘music,’ too. Beware of the fanatic who finds everything phoney that isn’t sung without accompaniment by an eighty-five-year-old in a public bar… without voice, too, as a rule, and who can wonder at it? No, we’ve disposed of that. We’ve surely demonstrated that there are places in the world where performances of the utmost virtuosity can be truly ‘folk,’ because the heritage of that particular people is a musical sensitivity which we, here in England, associate only with privilege, training and sophistication. Never lose sight of that humbling fact, and beware of subscribing to purely English standards – or should I say, British?” He cocked an eye at Andrew Callum, and grinned. “But they’re two different things, as I’ll show you this evening. The Celtic fringe has the drop on us poor English in so many ways, you’ll find. Puritanism has a lot to answer for.” He slammed shut the huge book of notes at which he never even looked, though he opened it religiously at the beginning of each session.

“Now be off with you and get ready for lunch. This afternoon is free, and I understand the deputy warden has arranged two excursions for us in the locality. I’ll be going with one of the parties myself, so one of the coach-loads, at least, will have to behave. And the rest of you I’ll expect here at five, fit and ready for action. Mind you’re not late. Away with you, and wash! Gong in five minutes!”

They took their tone from him, and rushed for the doors in a furious babble of argument and controversy. It was becoming clear now that the professor, from the recesses of his own antiquity, regarded them all as eighteen years old at most, and liked them that way. They’d had a deliriously happy morning with him; the afternoon was to be in every sense a holiday, and the evening a continued delight. He had his class exactly where he wanted it.

The first coach, headed for Mottisham Abbey and the antiquities of West Midshire, and captained by the professor, hummed away down the drive prompt at two o’clock. Tossa and Dominic watched it go from the highest view-turret at the front of the house, up among the fantasy of chimneys and gargoyles and leads that lived a film-cartoon life of its own over the heads of the music-students. A scarlet beetle, scurrying along a thread of pale gravel, it rounded the planned bend in the drive, and vanished from sight. In a few minutes more the second, bound for the region of geological curiosities in the north-east of the county, followed it, Henry Marshall no doubt still anxiously counting his chickens. When it was gone, it seemed to them that the whole house had been evacuated, and they were alone with the fairy-tale threat that had driven the others away. Only then did they become aware of the large bird-population of Follymead, the inhabitants of this roof-world. The noise of starlings and martins and pigeons was all the music left to them. Somewhere in the park a green woodpecker was beating out his staccato rhythms like a drummer.

“You’re sure you didn’t want to go with them?” asked Dominic, shoulder to shoulder with Tossa at the open window.

She shook her head vehemently. “No, this is better. You know all those places, and we hardly know this at all. It’s all ours now.”

“Oh, there must be a few others who chose to stay.”

They saw one of them at that moment, crossing the pale forecourt far below them, a tiny, foreshortened human creature, walking rapidly but progressing slowly. It was astonishing how long it took him to cross the open court and set foot on the grass path that led away into the park, downhill towards the river, glimpsed in a few specks of silver through the trees.

“Lucifer was in no mood for excursions, evidently,” said Dominic.

The small, dark speck achieved form and proportion as it receded; it no longer looked as if it could be smudged out of existence, like a May midge, by the pressure of a finger. And in a moment a second figure came bounding down the steps to the gravel, and set off full speed in pursuit, a thin little figure with a child’s long-legged and angular movements. She caught him up before he reached the trees. He checked and turned for a moment with a formidable suggestion of impatience, but then he set off again, and she fell into step beside him. They disappeared together where the trees engulfed the path.

“I shouldn’t!” said Tossa in a warning whisper, and shook her head over what she certainly couldn’t help.

“Maybe you would, if you were Felicity. Actually he’s been remarkably forbearing with her so far, considering his reputation. She was under his feet all last night, and he stood it nobly.”

“It won’t last. She’ll be due for a shock pretty soon if she doesn’t get out of his hair.” Tossa looked after them with perplexed sympathy. “She’s a queer little thing, isn’t she? Rather sad, really. I was talking to that nice elderly maid in the buttery this morning. She says Felicity’s mother is Mr. Arundale’s younger sister, she’s a widow, not all that badly off, but the querulous sort, and it seems she’s inclined to think her distinguished brother owes her a living. She farms the girl out on Follymead every holiday as a sort of junior secretary, and has her hang around the Arundales all the time she isn’t at school.”

“Hoping she’ll come in for whatever they’ve got to leave, some day?”

“Well, that’s what Mrs. Bremmer says, anyway. After all, they’ve got no children of their own, so it’s a reasonable hope. And in the meantime, at least she’s making them provide for her nearly half the year. But what a life! I mean, it isn’t as if she was dumb. She isn’t at all, she’s rather too bright, if anything, she must know very well what goes on. Not too good for an intelligent adolescent,” said Tossa, wise at nineteen, “knowing she’s being used to prise hand-outs out of her relatives, and her mother cares more for her prospects than her company. No wonder she’s gone cagey. You can see right away that she’s all the time waiting for the world to hit out at her. That’s why she puts on the sophistication so thick, to pretend things don’t hurt.”

Dominic listened to this with the more respect because not so long ago Tossa herself had been in a somewhat similar relationship with the world at large, and her actress-mother’s procession of husbands in particular; and with the more tenderness and pleasure because her tone now indicated a quite remarkable degree of recovery. He was a little dubious of crediting himself with the change, but the fact remained that he had happened to Tossa just at the right time to assist the process. If she was right, then young Felicity Cope was all set to be a pushover for a grand passion; and if it went right it would liberate her for good, even if it afterwards went the way of most adolescent loves. But he couldn’t persuade himself that she was going to get anything but disaster out of Lucifer.

“Felicity!” he said thoughtfully, and made a wry face. “Whoever christened her that has something to answer for.”

Tossa leaned out from the window to look down dizzily on to the terraces below. “Look, there’s Liri, too.”

“So she didn’t want to go sight-seeing, either.”

Liri, in a red sweater bright as a drop of blood, crossed the terrace and walked slowly down the steps. On the drive she hesitated for a moment, and then set out briskly across the grass towards the distant hillock on which the fake ruin stood. She walked as one who has decided on an objective, rather than as one who is going somewhere with a purpose, and her chosen course was taking her steadily farther and farther away from the copse that had swallowed Lucien and Felicity. The damp grass showed the silvery line of her passing, lengthening along the sward; and it might also have been ruled there, it was so uncompromisingly straight.

“Let’s go down and have a look at the grounds,” said Tossa, turning away abruptly from the contemplation of that lance-like wake, “while we’ve got the place more or less to ourselves.”

They went down, and the house was wonderfully hushed and quiet about them. True, there were still one or two people around. The staff must be still washing up after lunch, Edward Arundale in his private quarters was collecting what he needed for his drive to Birmingham, there were two elderly ladies placidly reading in the gallery, and two more strolling between the flower-beds in the shelter of the enclosed garden; but with the withdrawal of some seventy people the whole house was changed, had reverted to its cat-sleep with eyes half-open, and lay deceptively still and harmless and helpless in the faint, stormy sunshine of April.

There was room in the grounds of Follymead to lose a thousand people, and still believe yourself alone. They walked away from the drive, turning towards the arched bridge that spanned the river in the distance. Crimson and orange alders showed the winding course of the stream, even when the flood-water itself was hidden from them. Clustering woods drew in to complete the picture like a blackcloth; and out of the trees, while they were still some hundred yards distant, came Felicity, her head down, her fleet, child’s running muted to a stumbling, rapid walk. She didn’t notice them until the sound of their feet whispering in the grass, and the hint of a shadow at the edge of her vision, made her fling up her head with a wild, wary gesture, like a startled colt.

She said: “Oh!… Hullo!” and her face put on its armour, settled narrow, clean-arched brows and quivering, irresolute mouth into arduous but instant serenity. “Going for a walk?”

“Why don’t you come with us?” suggested Tossa impulsively, and her eyes signalled apology to Dominic for a rash generosity he might not approve. But the girl was so solitary and gauche, and her grey eyes looked out so defensively from behind the delicate, half-formed face, like lonely wild things in hiding. “You know all the best places. We haven’t seen anything yet.”

“I’d love to, thank you… but I can’t. I’ve got to go in now. I’ve got some jobs to do for my uncle in the office. I only came out to run down and have a look at the swans’ nest. There’s a pair nesting down there under the alders, on a tiny island.” She pointed rather jerkily, turning her face away from them. “But be careful if you go to look, don’t go too near, will you? The pen’s all right, but if the cob’s there he can be rather dangerous.”

“We saw you come out,” said Dominic casually, and saw the faint colour flow and ebb again in her solemn face, and the grey eyes in ambush flare into panic for an instant. “We hoped you were going to have an afternoon off, you spend enough time indoors. Can’t the work wait for today?”

But she did not want it to wait, that was clear. She began to sidle round them, intent on escape. “No, I’d rather get it done. Things like the press-cutting book and the photographs get into arrears very easily, you see, and we don’t just keep them for interest, the record’s needed for reference. But, look, if you go on this way, along the river, you’ll come to the summer pavilion, and from there you can work round through the woods to the pagoda. There used to be a heronry there at the pool, but the last pair flew away last year. You will excuse me, won’t you?” She was backing away from them towards the house, ten yards distant before she stopped talking, and turned, and broke into a run. The feverish sound of her voice clung unpleasantly in their ears as she dwindled, sometimes running, sometimes walking hastily and unsteadily, her track a shaky line in the wet grass.

“It seemed only fair to let her know we’d seen her,” said Dominic dubiously, meeting Tossa’s eyes. “She hadn’t said anything that
couldn’t
be true, up to then.”

“I know, I was glad you said it. I don’t think we’ll go and look for the swan’s nest, somehow, do you? It’ll be there, of course. She’s quick, she wouldn’t give herself an excuse that could be knocked down just by going and looking.” Tossa stooped and picked up from the grass a couple of tiny, cross-shaped blossoms that had fallen from Felicity’s hair as she combed it nervously with her fingers. “Lilac… look, what a colour! So deep, and really almost pure blue instead of purple…”

She stood for a moment holding them, and then turned her palm and let them fall again sadly into the turf. “I suppose he turned on her. Something happened.”

“I suppose so,” said Dominic. “Probably told her to run away and play with her dolls.”

“Isn’t it hell,” sighed Tossa, “being fifteen?”

The coach parties came back hungry and in high spirits just after half past four, and tumbled up the steps into the hall for tea. The noise, now that they had sorted themselves out into congenial groups and had plenty to talk about, was deafening. Arundale, if he had been there to hear, would have been satisfied of the success of the course by the soaring decibel count. There were no clouds, no shadows, no disagreements, no clashes of temperament, and nobody even wondered why; until five o’clock struck, and Professor Penrose came in to hasten the laggards along to the drawing-room for his next lecture, and looking round the emptying room, suddenly asked. “Where’s young Galt?”

He was not with the other artists, already on station in the window-embrasure of the yellow drawing-room. He was not in the hall, lingering with the scones and tea-cups. And now that the question arose, he hadn’t been in to tea at all.

“He wouldn’t stand us up purposely, would he?” asked the professor shrewdly, and in a tone which required confirmation of his own views rather than information.

“Surely not,” said Dominic, abandoning his self-imposed task of loading the huge tea-trolley; and: “No!” said Liri Palmer at the same instant, and still more positively, even scornfully.

“No, that’s what I thought. Boy’s a professional. No, I don’t think he’d welch on a session. So
where is he
?”

There was a dead silence. No one had anything to volunteer. There were only a handful of them left there, in the strewn wreckage of tea, a china battlefield.

“He didn’t come out with us this afternoon,” said Henry Marshall. “Was he with your party?”

“No.” The professor sounded a little testy. Lucifer was not the kind of person who could pass unnoticed on board a coach.