Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

CHAPTER V

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AS SOON as he was back in Edward Arundale’s office, with the door closed on the distant and cheerful din of the house-party and the close and fearful silence of the warden’s apartments, George telephoned his chief. Detective-Superintendent Duckett was Midshire born and bred, with all the advantages of having come up from the uniformed branch the hard way. It meant he not only knew his job and his own subordinates, but also all the complex social pressures of a conservative county; sometimes, in his less tolerant moments, he called it a feudal county, and nobody had a better right. The first thing he said was: “Thank God your boy was there!” And the second: “Can you still keep this dark?”

“Yes,” said George, with fair certainty that he was telling the truth. “We’ve no body, no proof of a crime, only a very, very fishy situation that still may confound us by coming out blameless. Let’s hope it does. In the mean-time, we’ve every right to behave as if nothing had happened, on the surface, provided we dig like moles underneath. Only seven people know anything about my being here to investigate Galt’s disappearance, though they must all know by now that he’s gone. That can’t be helped. Only Marshall and Mrs. Arundale know that Arundale’s apparently run out.”

“That suits me, and it’ll suit the Chief Constable still better. He’s a prime backer of that outfit at Follymead. The place balances its budget and fends off the tax-payers by luck, faith and act of God. What can we dig for you?”

“It’s going to be pretty sticky,” said George honestly, “in any case. Don’t forget one of the parties concerned is the warden. What we’re going to find is anybody’s guess, but what I’ve got here is a nasty situation in which two people have vanished, one apparently without warning and involuntarily, the other with evidence of premeditation. No bodies, no known motives for any violence, but some evidence that there was a struggle, that there were injuries. If there’s a link between these two people, I want to know about it. I’m not so simple as to believe that they could both take off into the blue at the same moment, and no connection between the two events. It’s against the law of averages. Now, these two are public persons. I’d like reports on their backgrounds. I want to know if there could be a link between them, and if so, what it is. And brace yourself, in case what comes out goes against Arundale. Because he’s the one who planned his departure, not the boy.”

“If he slung the kid in the river,” said Duckett with admirable directness, “neither you nor I can get him out of the resultant mess, George, my boy. With luck we might get Follymead out of it. Knock off fifty per cent for over-enthusiasm, and still the place is worth preserving.”

“I think so, too. All right, at first light I’m going down to look over the ground again, carefully. I hope to have some specimens for the lab boys, and I don’t care if we do have to pull ’em back from their Sunday hobbies.”

“Right, and first thing to-morrow I’ll have Scott turned loose on their histories.” He was silent for one pregnant second. “How’s the flood level?”

“High,” said George. “I reckon anything that went in there would bounce that last weir like a cork, and be out of the grounds long before now. We’re past the fancy curves at that point. The next real check is the bend by Sandy Cliff, the other side of the main road. Anything can happen with this sort of spring flow, but I should start dragging there. That’s where he’s most likely to come ashore.”

George went down to the riverside in the first light of morning. The threatened rain had fallen in the small hours, while he had slept uneasily and briefly in Arundale’s office, declining the bed Marshall had offered him. The dawn sky was tattered with filmy clouds and fitful brightness, and the grass was saturated and silvery against the river’s turgid brown. Slanting light picked out in deep relief the wounds in the turf, still dark, fresh and soft from the protection of Marshall’s plastic car-cover. George went over the ground carefully, inch by inch. There was only one clear print, and that of only the sole of a shoe, stamped into the raw clay, a composition sole cross-cut in saw-tooth grooves for grip. A well-shaped shoe with a good conservative toe, maybe size nine; the kind two-thirds of the men in the house probably wore, half of them in this size. All the rest of the tracks were trampled over, crossed and blurred by the resilience of the grass, but in sum they were there, and their implications unmistakable.

He found one other thing. One of the stamping feet, driving in a heel deeply, had left behind in the print one of last autumn’s leaves from the ride, one of the old ivy leaves, rubbery even in decay, that drop with their naked, angular stems, and lie long after the rest of the woodland loss is mould. This one had been cupped round the edge of the shoe’s heel, and remained so, pressed into the turf; and something that was not water, something hardly visible at twilight against its brown colouring, had splashed into it later, and gathered in the cup. Warm and sheltered under the plastic sheeting, it had remained moist. Not so much of it, maybe, as they take from your thumb for a blood test; but possibly as much as the lab. boys would need in order to group it.

George extracted the moulded leaf gingerly, and found another little box for it, propping its edges with cotton-wool and keeping it upright. There was nothing else here for him. He covered the bruised ground again, and prowled along the very edge of the water; it seemed to him that it had risen a shade higher in the night with the new rain, but he had seen it last night only by moonlight and torchlight. Certainly in this green, moist dawn, full of the drippings and whisperings of water, that concentrated brown flood was impressive. No finding anything in that without dragging, or going down into it; not until chemistry did its work, and it surfaced again, and judging by the force of this current that would be miles downstream. The coiled curve by Sandy Cliff just might bring it ashore, as he had said to Duckett; but even there the water would be over the summer beach and burrowing hard under the cliff, and whatever it carried might continue downstream with it.

George made his way thoughtfully back to the house, mapping this part of the Follymead grounds mentally as he went; and in the warden’s office Dominic was waiting for him.

“Hullo!” said George with unflattering surprise. “Whatever got you up at this hour?”

“I thought of something that may be important. I meant to be up earlier, but I had to be careful. I’ve got the Rossignol twins in my room, and they can hear the grass growing. I didn’t want to bring the whole hunt down on you. But it’s all right,” Dominic said in hasty reassurance, “I left them dead asleep.” He looked from his father’s face to the small box carried so carefully in his hand. He didn’t ask any questions about it, and George didn’t volunteer anything.

“All right, what’s on your mind?”

“It was on my mind, too, half the night. You know how it is when you know you’ve seen something before, and can’t for your life think where or when? I woke up suddenly this morning, and I’d got it. That medal… could we have another look at it, and I’ll show you.”

The pill-box that contained it was locked into the top drawer of Arundale’s desk. George extracted and offered it. Dominic remembered to turn it with the tip of a ball-pen when he wanted to refer to the reverse, as he had remembered not to handle it directly when he first found it. He shivered a little with clinging sleepiness and the chill of the morning.

“You see here, this side, that formalised figure in armour, with a nutshell helmet like the Normans in the Bayeaux tapestry, and a long shield with a sort of spread eagle on it…? I suddenly remembered where I’d seen it before. You can’t mistake it once you do get the idea. That’s Saint Wenceslas. Yes, I’m quite sure. He always looks like that. You ask Tossa, she’ll tell you the same, we got to know the form last year, when we were in Prague on holiday. And the other side…” He turned it delicately to show the lion rampant with a forked tail. “This I can show you, right here. I should have known it on sight if it hadn’t been quite so worn. Look! By pure luck I happened to have this still in my jacket.”

He held it out triumphantly, a small badge, questionably silver, unquestionably the same rampaging lion, with feathery fringes like a retriever, and double tail bristling.

“Lieutenant Ondrejov gave me that, before we left Liptovsky Pavol, last year. You see, it is the same. This is the Czech lion. And Saint Wenceslas is the chief of their patron saints, and doesn’t belong to anyone else. I bet you anything you like this medal originated in Czechoslovakia.”

George measured the two small heraldic creatures, and found them one. “Now why,” he wondered aloud blankly, “should Lucien Galt be wearing a Czech medal?”

“I wish I knew. But that’s what this is.”

George stared, and thought, and could not doubt it. This was, according to Liri Palmer, the one thing Lucien had that had belonged to his father. That didn’t, of course, determine to whom it might have belonged earlier. It was wartime, Galt could perfectly well have had some chance-met friend among the self-exiled Czechs who formed, at that time, the most articulate, the most reticent, – the two were compatible! – and the most nearly English component of the European armies in Britain. Maybe they swopped small tokens before the unit moved out for D-Day; and maybe the medal acquired value because its giver didn’t come back. There were such things, then, unexpected friendships that went deeper than kith and kin.

“Well, thanks very much for the tip. It’s certainly curious.” George pocketed the trophy along with his other specimens. “And since you are up, how about running me down to the lodge and bringing back the station wagon afterwards?”

“Yes, of course.” He brightened perceptibly at the thought of being useful. “You’re going in to headquarters? Is it official, then?”

“It’s official, but it’s still not for publication.”

“Shall I meet you at the lodge again when you come back?”

“No need. I’ll drive up by the farm road at the back, and put my car in the yard there. I might need to get out and in quickly, later in the day.”

“Is there anything I can be doing?”

“Yes, but you won’t like it much.”

“I still might do it,” said Dominic generously, “seeing as it’s for you.”

“Be on the spot here, then, attend everything, and help to keep everybody occupied and out of our hair. Have a word with Professor Penrose, and ask him to lay on a session after lunch, too, even if it wasn’t in the programme. Keep everybody’s nose hard against this folk-music grindstone, and try to make the whole week-end pass off without anything of this business leaking out. Get the professor to ask Liri Palmer to take part in every session. If the stars back him up, the rank and file won’t want to miss anything.”

“And in the meantime,” Dominic asked soberly, perceiving one answer for himself, and not much liking it, “what will they be missing?”

“Maybe nothing. But I don’t want them down by the river. They wouldn’t get to the grotto, anyhow, I shall have a watchdog on duty. But I’d rather they didn’t know that, either, so keep them hard at work here in the house.”

“We can but try. Anything else?”

“Keep your ears open. I’d like to know what sort of comments they’re making. The professor will probably have to tell them some tale about Galt being called away, but, even so they’ll have their own theories. I want to know what they are, and who starts them. And anything else you notice that may be of interest.”

“When shall I see you, then, to report? Hadn’t we better have an arrangement?”

“Come down to the grotto as soon after lunch as you can, and come on the quiet. If I’m not there, Price will know where to find me.”

“There it is, then,” said Duckett, shuffling the typed pages across the table, “and much good it does us.”

And there it was, compressed, bald and completely barren, the fruit of Scott’s interim researches into the past history of Edward Arundale and Lucien Galt. And nothing could be more above-board.

Arundale, only son of an illustrious academic family, one sister, five years younger; father a historian, mother a specialist in Oriental languages, both dead; his school, his college, his degrees, all listed, all impeccable; a distinguished teaching career, culminating in the headmastership of Bannerets, which he held for fifteen years, and after that this appointment as warden of Follymead. Married in 1946 Audrey Lavinia Morgan, only child of Arthur Morgan, of Morgan’s Stores, a chain of groceries covering the south of England. The bride, it seemed, was then twenty years old, and Arundale, thirty-five. Her father’s money was recent and plentiful, his father having merely run two modest suburban shops, and limited his ambition to getting elected to the local council. Arthur, or maybe Mrs. Arthur, had bigger ideas for their offspring. Audrey had been sent to Pleydells, a good boarding-school in North London, though evacuated to Scotland during the war years, which must have been Audrey’s period. It seemed that the Morgans were then on the climb, bent on equipping their daughter for an outstanding marriage. Maybe Arundale’s was the kind of lustre they valued and wanted. No university career for Audrey, no mention of any special academic qualifications; just as Felicity had said, quoting, no doubt, her aggrieved mother. Her upbringing had been aimed at marriage, not a career.

Edward supplied all the scholarly distinctions necessary, she provided him with a hostess well-trained, conscientious and lovely to look at. All very satisfactory, and nowhere a shadow on it. Their life at Follymead was constantly in the public eye, and the public eye doesn’t miss much.

That was Arundale. And in the other file, this boy from a children’s home, bright, handsome, aggressive, disdainful, intolerant of adulation, and single-minded about his art. Lucien Galt, born 1943, son of John James and Esther Galt, who kept a small newsagent’s shop in Islington. Parents killed by a V-2, one of the last to fall on London, son taken into public care and brought up in one of a group of cottage homes in Surrey. Good school record, early development of musical ability, apparently well adjusted, never in anything worth calling trouble. Not interested in staying on at school, already set on music. Left at fifteen, and worked as a garage hand and mechanic until he broke into the record business, broadcasting and television, all in the same month, at the age of nineteen. Made a tremendous success as a folk-singer, several European tours behind him, heading for a South American tour very soon. Said to be still on the warmest terms with his former foster-parents at the home, visiting them regularly, and being credited with several gifts to the present household. Considered difficult in the entertainment world because there are songs he won’t sing, engagements he won’t accept, places he won’t go, and indeed nothing he will do except what he wants to do.

And all they knew of him, to add to that dossier, was that he had worn a silver medal on a chain round his neck, that he had told Liri Palmer it was all he had of his father’s, and that he had left it lying in the grass by the river when he vanished from Follymead.

“Not a thing in common between them,” said Duckett, “and not a thing to show that they’d ever clapped eyes on each other before Friday night. How can you get to the point of murder in only twenty-four hours?”

“How do you even get to the point of being on fighting terms in only twenty-four hours? With their kind of contact and at that kind of place?”

“There’s always the classic way,” said Duckett disgustedly. “Cherchez la femme!” He wasn’t serious, of course; Arundale’s past was so rigid with rectitude that the idea of connecting him with a crime passionnel managed to be almost funny. Besides, there was only one woman in his life, apparently, and that was his equally blameless wife, to whom he’d been married for twenty well-matched years. “Putting him on one side, just for argument, I gather there are others who might be capable of pushing this lad in the river?”

“Several, I’d say. The girl has all the necessary fire and guts, and Meurice hates him enough, given the opportunity. And either of them could have been there with him at round about the right time.”

Duckett breathed pipe-smoke heavily through his brigand’s moustache, and drummed a thick fingertip on the edge of his desk. “Well, I’ll keep Scott on the job. If we take anything out of the river,” he said grimly, “you’ll be the first to know about it. What can Scott most usefully be doing for you?”

George considered, frowning at the meaningless pages that yet must hold somewhere a more substantial image of the persons to whom they applied. “Seems to me that if Galt had anything to confide, the people he’d turn to would be his foster-parents, this house-father and mother – Stewart, the name seems to be. It might be worth a drive down there to see if they can shed any light. With a lot of luck he may have gone to them, or at least got in touch with them – if he’s alive, if this is some other sort of trouble that’s caught up with him. And Scott could call in on this service garage where the boy worked, that’s another possibility, if a thin one. Then there’s his business agent, of course. Send Scott down there, have him comb out the lot, all the people he might have turned to if he’s alive and in trouble.”

“Right, I’ll see to that. We can’t put out a call for Arundale or the car,” said Duckett reasonably, “unless we do bring the body ashore. It would be as much as my life’s worth to compromise that set-up for nothing, so let’s concentrate on finding the boy – dead or alive.”

George was smoking a cigarette moodily by the river, watching a methodical sergeant take casts – probably useless – of the one clear shoe-print and the indentation of the heel, when Dominic came to report. The dragging of the Braide had not yet reached the Follymead boundary, more than a quarter of a mile away; nor, so far, had it netted them anything more than driftwood, two long-abandoned eel-traps, and an old bicycle frame. By the quantity and size of the driftwood you could gauge the violence and indiscipline of the spring. The Braide ran down to the Comer, which was a river with its feet in the mountains; this was a tamed park stream by comparison with what the Comer brought down out of Wales. Any more rain, and Comer-water would be backing up from the confluence, churning up the muddy counter-current until they both spilled out over the whole expanse of the low-lying fields. Lucien Galt might yet fetch up on somebody’s doorstep.

George heard them coming through the trees, not one, but two, a boy and a girl talking briefly, in subdued and serious voices. He should have thought of that possibility, of course, but it came as something of a revelation that Dominic should have reached the point of taking it for granted that any privilege given to him automatically extended to cover Tossa, too. “They” were to be deflected by any means from this area by the river; but Tossa was not “they,” Tossa had become “we.” It was not quite so clear whether she also took it as her right. The moment they emerged from the trees she slipped her hand from Dominic’s and hung back, silent and tentative, but very much on the alert. She caught George’s eye and moved nearer, encouraged. Under the ornamental trees that circled the grotto she halted; the tiny blue crosses of lilac blossom drifted down into her dark hair, as the branches threshed uneasily in a rising wind.

“Well,” said George, “how are things going?”

“All O.K., so far. Everybody’s come along to the lectures, and they all seem to be enjoying themselves. I told the professor what you said, and Mr. Marshall, too. It’s working smoothly enough up to now. Nobody’s let anything out to the others, and they don’t suspect anything’s wrong. The professor made a sort of vague apology for Lucien’s having to leave, but he managed not to say anything definite about the reason. But you were right about the rumours. There’s a murmur that Lucien ran out because he couldn’t take the Liri situation… You know, she’d followed him here with a grudge, and the atmosphere was tense, and he preferred to duck out. It makes good sense, and it tickles them, so they like it. And it lets the professor out, too, because of course the authorities would simply have to accept whatever excuse Lucien offered, even if they thought privately he’d run for cover from a situation he couldn’t manage.”

“That ought to serve pretty well,” agreed George with a wry smile. “Go along with it. Who started it?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure it came from Dickie Meurice in the first place. That way, you see, he makes a good show of helping you to keep the thing wrapped, and at the same time he churns up a little more dirt to stick to Galt when he does reappear. If he does reappear,” he corrected himself, very soberly.

“He will,” protested Tossa, her eyes fixed confidently on George’s face. “Won’t he? This is just something quite stupid, that only looks like that sort of trouble, isn’t it?”

“We hope so,” said George gently. “You keep on thinking so. What about this afternoon?”

“That’s all fixed. We’re in session again at two-fifteen. We slipped out by the back way as soon as we got away from lunch, and came down through the trees. Nobody’s any the wiser.”

“Good! Has Felicity attended this morning?”

“We sat with her,” said Tossa, “the first time. I think she only came at all because nobody can talk to her while there’s a lecture going on, or people singing. She looks terribly wretched and sick. She dodged us in the second session, after coffee. And as soon as we’re out of the music-room she goes off somewhere out of sight. I’m worried about her. But she doesn’t want anybody, she only wants to be left alone.”

“Keep an eye on her,” said George, “all the same. Did Mrs. Arundale show up?”

“Yes. She looked pretty pale and anxious, too,” said Dominic, “but she’s keeping the thing rolling. It must be rather awful for her, having something like this happen, especially when the warden isn’t here. I bet she’ll be glad when he comes back to-night.”

George said nothing to that; there was no need to burden them with even more secrets to keep, however trustworthy they might be. As for accounting for Arundale’s non-return this evening from those meetings in Birmingham, leave that bridge to be crossed when the time came.

His mind had been much on Audrey Arundale, ever since he had talked to Duckett this morning. Cherchez la femme, indeed, but what an unlikely woman to look for at the heart of a crime passionnel. And yet she had everything but the temperament; beauty, a gentle appeal about her, even youth – she was only forty, and older women have changed history in their time. Maybe this wasn’t the first time she had met Lucien Galt.

No, it was crazy. He couldn’t picture her in the role, however objectively he tried. Nevertheless, he found himself asking, with deliberate and crude abruptness: “Have you seen any signs of a special relationship between Lucien Galt and Mrs. Arundale?”

Dominic was too startled to side-step, and too shaken to hide his discomfort. He stood staring in consternation, seeing again the ardent hands touch and clasp, seeing Arundale walk imperviously and majestically on his wife’s left, while she gripped Lucien Galt’s fingers on her right. The question was so unexpected, the incident had begun to seem so irrelevant, that the sudden attack took his breath away. After all, Arundale didn’t enter into the affair they were investigating. He was the one person who was out of it, surely. The only person.

“I… what on earth has that got to do… I mean, nothing, really, nothing of any significance.”

“Come on,” said George quietly, “tell it, and we’ll see.” Tossa was looking from one to the other of them, lost, a small, hurt frown contorting her brows. Whatever Dominic had seen had certainly passed her by.

“Well, I don’t know… It was just that on Friday night, when we left the drawing-room after coffee, and were walking along the gallery, we were behind the Arundales and Lucien Galt. Mrs. Arundale was in the middle. They were talking, just like anybody else, and Lucien’s hand brushed…” Dominic’s voice baulked at that half-willing distortion, and backed away from it. “He touched her hand, and she opened it, and they clasped hands,” he said grudgingly. “Only for a moment, though.”

“But…warmly?”

After a moment of silent debate Dominic admitted: “Yes.” He went on rapidly: “But it needn’t mean much, you know. Just big-headedness on his part, and maybe she felt a bit irresponsible for once… an accidental touch…”

“Did it look accidental?” asked George quite gently.

Reluctantly but honestly again: “No.”

“And they went on making conversation to cover it?” No need to answer that, it was in his mutely anxious face. “Did anyone else see this?”

Almost to herself Tossa said: “I didn’t.”

“Yes, I think… I’m almost sure Liri saw it. She was sitting in a dark alcove in the gallery, quite still. I think she saw.”

Add about fifty per cent to that, and you might have some approximation of the ardour of that episode. Dominic had a very natural and human reluctance to admit to having witnessed a show of affection between two people who thought themselves unobserved. And it was no more than a crumb of a connection, at that, though a very suggestive one.

“All right, don’t worry, as you say, it probably means virtually nothing.”

But Liri had seen it, Liri of all people. Maybe the emerging pattern, after all, argued a man at the heart of it, not a woman. Cherchez l’homme! Women can be jealous, too, and dangerous.

“You’d better run,” said George, “or you’ll be late for your class. If you should want me later, I’ll be in the warden’s office.”

And they ran, Tossa looking back doubtfully at George for a moment with her chin on her shoulder. The lilac tree slapped a stray cone of blossom into her face as she turned, and she flung up her free hand – Dominic had taken possession of the other – and brushed it from her. The twig broke, leaving the spray of falling flowers in her hand. She allowed herself to be towed along the leafy ride still holding it.

“You never told me!”

“You wouldn’t have told me, would you? I never wanted to see it.” He wasn’t happy. “What put it into Dad’s mind, anyhow? I don’t get it.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he thinks Liri…”

“What, just because of that?”

“But it isn’t just because of that. Liri was already mad with him about something, what could it be but another woman?”

“You mean she followed him here because she knew about him and…? I don’t believe it! It wouldn’t be like Liri, anyhow.” He had never realised until now how firm an idea he was forming of Liri Palmer’s character. “If she’d broken with him, she wouldn’t follow him around to watch him perform… not to torment herself, not to hit him again, not for anything.” They had reached the footbridge; their hurrying footsteps clopped woodenly over it, and the flood below sent up a low, hollow echo.

“To get him back, she might,” said Tossa without thinking, and instantly drew back from a statement so revealing. She shook the loose blossoms from her spray of lilac with unnecessary care. “This must be a very early kind, look, dropping already, and it’s only late April. Did you ever see lilac quite such a pure blue?”

Even then she didn’t realise what she had said, it was simply a pleasant, superficial observation, something blessedly remote from the ugly mystery that was bedevilling this week-end. They were skirting the open meadow when the truth hit her. She halted abruptly, pulling back hard on Dominic’s hand; he turned in surprise to find her gazing at him in consternation.

“Dominic … she was there! Don’t you remember? I said then, how blue, really blue, not purple at all…”

She thrust the tattered cone of blossom at him, brandishing it before his astonished eyes.

“Have you seen this kind anywhere else? There’s lilac by the drive, and up by the pagoda, too, but it’s all white or mauve, and it’s only in bud yet. Nothing at all like this. But Felicity had some fallen flowers just like this in her hair yesterday! Don’t you remember, she was combing them out with her fingers?”

“Good lord!” he said blankly. “She had, too! Just like these!”

“I picked them up, afterwards. It was the colour …”

He remembered now with aching clarity how Tossa had turned her hand sadly, and let the small blue crosses float back into the grass.

“But she told Dad… she told us…”

“I know! She told us she parted from him where the paths cross. She said she left him there and came on over the stone bridge… She didn’t know where he went afterwards, but she left him there. But she didn’t,” said Tossa with absolute conviction, and very quietly, “Because before she met us she was under that lilac tree. She was there by the river with him. She knows what happened!”

They looked for her in the libraries, in the drawing-rooms, in the gallery, but she was nowhere to be found. In the end they were forced to go in to the afternoon session without having spoken to her; and at the last moment she slid in from nowhere and took a seat in a dim corner, and sat through the two hours of song and argument and speculation with a pale face and haunted eyes. But that meant that at least they could corner her when the session was over, before she could escape again into whatever lair she used for her private agonies.

The afternoon meeting ended with a tour-de-force by Liri Palmer, a thirty-five verse ballad without a dull line in it, all about a traitorous nobleman who killed his king and usurped his kingdom, but suffered the pregnant queen to live, on the understanding that if her child turned out to be a boy, he should be instantly killed, but if it was a girl she should be allowed to live. But the queen managed to elude her gaolers for a short time when her hour was near, and hid herself alone in the stables to bear her son. When the wife of one of the courtiers found her there, the queen begged her to exchange her girl baby for the royal boy.

“ ‘And ye shall learn my gay goshawk

Right weel to breast a steed.

And I shall learn your turtle-dow

As weel to write and read.

“ ‘At kirk and market, when we meet.

We’ll dare make no avow

But: Dame, how does my gay goshawk?

Madam, how does my dow?’ ”

Thirty-five verses, all to one unchanging tune, and mounting excitement with every verse. Liri Palmer was an artist, no question of that. It was partly the pure, passionate drama of her voice, and the latent acting ability that enabled her to people her stage with so many living characters, without breaking the melody or distorting the tone; and partly the virtuosity of her accompaniment, which varied with every verse, and produced the rattle of duels and the muted agitation of women’s plotting as fluently as the hammer of hooves or the ripple of rain. They reached the point where the gay goshawk had grown up, and was hunting with his foster-father:

“ ‘Oh, dinna ye see yon bonny castell

With halls and towers so fair?

If every man had back his ain.

Of it ye should be heir.’

“ ‘The boy stared wild like a grey goshawk:

“Oh, what may all this mean?’

“My boy, ye are King Honour’s son.

And your mother’s our lawful queen.’ ”

Tossa looked at Dominic, and her eyes signalled that they must be near the end of the story now. She was next to the wall, and in a quiet corner; she rose softly, and slipped back into the shadows, to circle the room unobtrustively to Felicity’s hiding-place.

The goshawk had reached his apotheosis, leaping the castle wall and confronting False Foundrage in arms. Not all ballads have happy endings. This one did. The boy killed his enemy, delivered his mother, and took the turtle-dow as his bride. The entranced hush broke, the moment the last shuddering chord of Liri’s strings had vibrated into silence. Under cover of the applause Felicity got up to slide out of the room; and Tossa’s hand closed on her arm.

“Felicity, come into the little library. We want to talk to you.”

The tone was quiet and reasonable, but Felicity recognised its finality. Perhaps she had been waiting for someone to take the burden out of her hands, with even more longing than terror. She went with them, stiff and silent, not trying to escape now, except into the deeps of her own being, and even there hoping for little. They, sat her down in a quiet corner of the small library; the cheerful pre-tea din told them where all the others were, and assured them that their solitude here was safe for a little while.

Tossa laid the spray of wilting lilac flowers in the girl’s lap. “We found these this afternoon. We were looking for you before the session, to show you. These are the same kind you had in your hair yesterday, when we met you. We know now where you’d been. Not just along the path to the bridge. You’d been by the grotto, with Lucien. Hadn’t you?”

Felicity looked all round her in a last convulsion of protest and despair, and shrank into herself and sat still, her eyes on the flowers. She didn’t try to deny anything.

“You’ll have to tell us what you know, Felicity. You understand that, don’t you? It isn’t any use trying to pretend you know nothing now. We know you were there.”

Felicity melted suddenly from her frozen stillness and began to shake uncontrollably. She linked her small hands together before her, and gripped until the slight knuckles were blanched like almonds.

“Yes,” she whispered, the word jerking out of her like a gasp of pain. She looked up at Tossa in desperate appeal, and asked in a small level voice: “What happens to people who’re accessories before the fact? Of murder, I mean? Supposing someone caused someone else to kill a person, but without meaning to?” Her face shook, and as resolutely reassembled its shattered and disintegrating calm; she wasn’t crying, and she wasn’t going to cry. What was the use now? “Or suppose they did mean to, but never really believed it could happen? What do they do to people like that? Do you know?”

They looked at each other over her head, shaken to the heart.

“I think,” said Dominic, with careful, appalled gentleness, “we’d better go into the warden’s office and wait for my father. You’ll have to tell him, you know. We don’t matter, but we’ll stay with you, if you want us to. It’s him you have to tell. You go and sit in there with Tossa, and I’ll go and find him.”