Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

CHAPTER I

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THE GIRL with the guitar-case was standing alone at the Belwardine bus-stop when Arundale parked the car before the station entrance, and went in to collect the records Professor Penrose had left behind. She was still standing there when he came back and stowed the battered box under the bonnet of his grey Volkswagen. She had the green-railed enclosure to herself. She didn’t know it, but the Belwardine buses were independents, and waited for neither man nor train, and there wouldn’t be another for more than half an hour.

Arundale was not a man who went out of his way to offer people lifts. It was the guitar-case that stirred his sense of duty; but for that he would hardly have been aware of her at all, for only one woman really existed in his life, and that was his wife. This girl was perhaps nineteen or twenty, tall, slim, and of striking appearance. Her face was thin, richly coloured, with long, fine-drawn features and large, calm, fierce eyes as blue as steel. Her great fall of heavy brown hair coiled and spilled round her face with a dynamic life of its own, and was gathered into a waist-long braid as thick as her wrist, interwoven with narrow strips of soft red leather, as though only tethers strong enough for horses could confine it. She had a duffle bag slung over her left shoulder, and wore a duffle coat carelessly loose over a charcoal-grey sweater and skirt of deceptively plain but wickedly expensive jersey. She stood carelessly and splendidly at ease, but her face was intent and abstracted. She looked like a fate in the wings, imperturbably waiting for her cue; and that was what she was. But all he saw was a long-haired girl with a guitar, and an inescapable and rather tiresome duty. He had delegated this course to his deputy; it was annoying that he should be obliged to ferry in the strays.

She looked at him, and found him looking at her. Without hesitation and without mercy, as the young will, she took all decisions out of his hands.

“Excuse me,” she said in a voice unexpectedly cool and limpid, the voice of a singer off-duty, “could you tell me how often these buses run?”

She could pitch that superbly soft and confident note clean across the station approach at him, but he had to move nearer in order to reply without a sense of strain.

“I’m afraid they’re not very frequent. In the evening there’s a forty-minute interval. Perhaps I could be of service to you. I’m going that way myself.”

“I’ve got to get to a place called Follymead,” said the girl, measuring him without haste or prejudice. “It’s a sort of musical college, they’re having a week-end course on folk-music. Maybe you know the place.”

“I know it,” he said. Who could know it better? But for some reason, or for no good reason at all except lack of interest in her, he didn’t tell her how closely he was connected with that curious foundation. “I can take you there with pleasure. It would be much quicker than waiting for the bus.”

She gave him the quick scrutiny wise girls do give to middle-aged gentlemen offering lifts, but it was a mere formality; his respectability, his status, and the store he set on keeping it, were all written all over him. He was fifty-five, and still an impressive figure of a man, even though his frequent games of tennis and squash could no longer keep his weight down as low as he liked it. He had a businessman’s smooth-shaven face and commanding air, but a don’s aloof, quizzical, slightly self-satisfied eyes and serious smile. He thought well of himself, and knew that the world thought well of him. She couldn’t be safer.

“Really? I shouldn’t be taking you out of your way?”

“Not a yard, I assure you.”

“Then thanks very much, I’ll be glad to accept.” And she let him take the duffle bag from her, but she held on to the guitar-case, and herself stowed it carefully on the rear seat of the car before she slid into the front passenger seat with an expert flick of long legs. “My train was late. I only made up my mind to come at the last moment.”

“You’re not actually taking part in this folk-music course, then?” he asked, casting a glance behind at her instrument as he started the engine.

The girl followed the glance with a thin, dark smile. “Oh, that! I just happened to have it with me when I made up my mind to come. No, I’m not on the programme. Just one of the mob.”

“You came to study the form?” he suggested helpfully. He was surprised, all the same, for the guitar-case was old and much-carried, and her speaking voice promised a singing voice of quality.

The small smile tightened, burned grimly bright for an instant, and vanished. “That’s about it,” she agreed, her eyes fixed ahead. “I came to study the form.”

“But you are a folk-singer?”

“I’m a ballad-singer,” she said, with the crisp and slightly irritable intonation of one frequently forced to insist upon the distinction.

His eyebrows rose. Rather dryly he said: “I see!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, softening, “I didn’t mean to sound touchy, but it’s a sore point with me. I’ve never claimed to be a folk-singer. I’m not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is, and I’m dead certain too many people use the term to mean whatever they want to persuade the world they are. About a ballad-singer you can’t be in much doubt, it’s somebody who sings ballads. That’s what I do, so that’s what I call myself. How far is it to this Follymead place?”

“Nearly five miles. We’ll have you there in a quarter of an hour.”

The streets of Comerbourne slid by them moistly in the April dusk. Neon-lit shop-fronts, all glass and chrome, gave place to the long, harmonious Georgian frontage of Crane Place, and that in turn to the two smoky lines of hedges streaming alongside like veils, just filmed with the green of new leafage, and the sinewy trunks of beeches, trepanned with metal reflectors. April had come in cold, angry and wet, trampling and tearing the heavy late snow with squalls of rain, and bringing the flood-water rolling down the Comer brown and turgid from the hills of Wales. But this evening had fallen quiet and still, with a soft green afterglow in the sky, and a hazy, glow-worm look about the first side-lights wavering along the road.

The girl gazed ahead steadily, her fine brows drawn together, her profile intent and still. She watched the budding hedges swoop by her, and the compact villages come and go, and made no comment. Her mind, somewhere well ahead, grappled already with the unknown realities of Follymead; but when it came it was none the less daunting.

A deep half-circle of grass swept inward on their left, the tall grey-stone wall receding with it. The drive swung in towards huge, lofty gate-posts that almost dwarfed a tiny hexagonal lodge. The wrought-iron gates stood wide open, and on either side, on top of the yard-thick posts, an iron gryphon supported a toppling coat of arms. Beyond, acres of park-land stretched away in artfully undulating levels that owed very little to nature.

“This is it?” asked the girl, staring out with astonished eyes at the monsters pole-squatting ten feet above the roof of the car.

“This is it.” He had already turned the car inward towards the open gates.

“Oh, just drop me here at the entrance. I can walk up to the house.”

“With your luggage? It’s nearly a mile. In any case, this is where I’m going. I should have told you before,” he said, condescending rather complacently towards apology. “My name’s Arundale, Edward Arundale, I’m the warden of the college.”

“Oh?” She turned her head and gave him a full, penetrating look, probing with candid curiosity, and some distrust. “I see! Then it was you who arranged this course?”

“Not exactly, no. My deputy’s running this one. I’ve got some outside engagements that are going to take me away for most of the week-end. In any case, this isn’t really my field. My wife’s the enthusiast for folk-music. And your lecturer is a don from our parent university, Roderick Penrose. No, I’m staying strictly in the background. Penrose forgot a case of recording tapes at the station, that’s why I offered to run in and fetch them for him, otherwise I shouldn’t have had the pleasure of offering you a lift. The guitar, you know. As soon as I saw it, I thought you must be headed for Follymead.”

“Lucky for me,” said the girl, “that professors live up to their reputation for absent-mindedness.” She peered out unbelievingly at the fantasies of Follymead unrolling along the drive. The dusk softened their outlines and colours, but there was no missing them. In a clump of cypresses on top of a hill too artfully rounded to be natural, the pallor of a Greek temple gleamed, a hotch-potch of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian in flaking plaster. Distant on the other side of the drive the tamed park gave way to a towering wilderness of crags, with the mouth of a cave neatly built in at a high level, no doubt for the hermit without whom no Victorian poetic landscape would be complete. A coil of river showed in angry silver among the folds of greensward, an arched bridge where certainly no bridge had been necessary before the landscape gardeners got busy. Somewhere ahead, on a still higher viewpoint, the jagged outline of a ruined tower posed self-consciously against a sky now darkening to olive-green.

“No pagoda?” said the girl disapprovingly; and suddenly there was the pagoda, prompt to its cue, peeping out of the trees behind the heron-pool. She laughed abruptly and gaily. “Who in the world built this place? Beckford?”

“It was built by a highly-respected family named Cothercott.” The tone was a reproof, for all its forbearance, and all the chillier because she had surprised him by knowing about Beckford, and had got the period exactly right. Follymead was within ten years or so the same vintage as Fonthill Abbey and Strawberry Hill and all its neo-Gothic fellows; and she hadn’t even seen the house yet. “They had more money than was good for any family, and spent it on building their private world, as so many others were doing. And like most of their kind they dwindled away for want of heirs, and the last of them left Follymead to the county, about twenty years ago. With a very good endowment fund, luckily, or it would have been impossible to use it. As it is, by charging a fairly economic fee for board and tuition, we can contrive to keep out of the red. The place is considered a very fine example of its period,” he said forbiddingly, lest she should be in any doubt where he stood, “and the grounds are justly famous.”

The girl was as capable of delighting in fantasy as anyone else, but she had not, until then, been disposed to take Follymead seriously. She took a sidelong look at the regular profile beside her, the austere cast of the lips, the smooth-set, humourless eyes; and she saw that Edward Arundale took it very seriously indeed, perhaps not for its own sweet sake, perhaps because it was an appurtenance of himself, and sacred accordingly.

“So they turned it into a residential music college,” she said. “I shouldn’t have thought there’d be enough demand for that sort of thing.”

“There wouldn’t be, locally, but from the beginning I’ve made it my policy to turn the place into a national asset. We draw on the whole country. We’ve got adequate space for conferences and festivals, as well as providing our own courses and recitals. It’s taken a few years to establish us properly, but I think I can say we’ve achieved national recognition now. International, even.”

His voice had taken on the smoothness and richness of an occasion; she felt herself acting as audience to a lecture, and remembered the time-table:

5.0 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. Students assemble. Tea will be available on arrival.

5.30 p.m. Conducted tour of the house, optional.

6.45 p.m. Assemble for dinner. The warden, Dr. Edward Arundale, M.A., F.R.C.M., will welcome artists and students to Follymead.

She wondered if it was always the same address of welcome, suitably modulated, or if he ever made allowances for the sceptics, and admitted to the possibility that this kingdom he inhabited was a monstrosity. And yet, was it? She found herself almost tempted to enjoy a fantasy so uninhibited, as somebody had enjoyed creating it. Not reverently, like the warden, but exuberantly, with all the abounding energy and ingenuity of the eighteenth century, no holds barred. And who cared what a plethora of turrets might be jangling overhead, as long as the acoustics in the music rooms were right?

“It was particularly suitable to use it for music,” said Arundale, unbending a little. “It so happens the Cothercotts were a musical family, and they left us a very fine collection of instruments with the house. We had to restore the organ, but the other early keyboard instruments are splendid.”

Clearly this was his field; he still sounded like a lecturer, and perhaps he always would, but at least there was the warm flush of enthusiasm in his voice now. But he didn’t enlarge; she was merely one of the folk-singing clan, he could hardly expect her to be interested in the Cothercott virginals and the perfect little table spinet by Holyoake. And in any case, the car was just rounding the final, planned curve of the long drive, and the house would be waiting to take the stranger’s breath away, as it had been designed to do.

Here came the curve. The bushes shrank away on either side, the great, straight, levelled apron of lawn expanded before them, and the house, nicely elevated on its three tiers of terraces, soared into the dusk and impaled the sky with a dozen towers and turrets and steeples and vanes, tapering from steep gables above row upon row of mullioned windows silvered over with the faint afterglow, as calculated and stunning as some monstrous stage-set at curtain-rise. There were tall, glazed oriels, rounded rose-windows, tight, thin arrow-slits; there were battlements, and pediments and conical roofs, and galleries, and even gargoyles leaning darkly from the corners of the towers. It was so outrageous as to be almost beautiful, so phoney that it had its own kind of genuineness. For one thing, it hadn’t happened by mistake, or through sheer over-enthusiasm. The effect it produced was the effect it had been made to produce, and no chance horror. And it had been built well, from a lovely light-grey stone, and with a certain assured symmetry. There had been a mind behind its creation, as well as money, and an individual, cool and sinister mind at that. The owner or the architect?

The girl sat silent, staring in fascination and disbelief, tensed in resistance, as the car approached along the pale ribbon of tarmac between the planed acres of grass, and the pile of Follymead grew taller and darker and vaster with every yard.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Arundale, aware that she hated being impressed by mere stone, mortar and glass; he could feel how furiously she was bracing herself against it. “Walpole stayed here several times. He described it as a house where drama was a permanent upper servant, eccentricity a member of the family, and tragedy an occasional guest.”

“And comedy?” said the girl unexpectedly. “They named it Follymead, not Nightmare Abbey. Maybe it took them by surprise, too, when they saw it finished.”

He drew the car round to the foot of the sweep of stone steps that led to the terrace. Lights winked on, one by one, along the great glazed gallery on the first floor, running the whole length of the house-front. Through the windows they saw a gaggle of people passing slowly, peering round them with stretched necks; earnest elderly ladies, bearded, shaggy young men with pipes, ascetic students in glasses, broad-barrelled country gentlemen with time on their hands and a mild musical curiosity, eager girls peering through their curtains of limp long hair.

“They’re just taking parties round on a tour of the house,” said Arundale, opening the door for his passenger. “Leave your luggage, I’ll bring it in when I’ve run the car round to the yard. You just trot in and join them. Formalities later.”

She reached in again for her guitar, all the same, and straightened up to look at the lighted windows above them. The party passing had halted for a moment, all their faces turned up to some painting hung very high on the inner wall. Only their guide faced the windows as she went through her recital; a very young girl, surely no more than fifteen or sixteen, slight and pale, with wings of mouse-brown hair framing a serious and secretive face, a face full of doubts and hesitations and flashes of uneasy animation, as early-April as the weather outside, and her own difficult season. Something in the fine, irresolute features, the set of the eyes and carriage of the head, made the newcomer turn and look again at Arundale; and she was not mistaken, the likeness was there, allowing for the years and the toughening and the entrenchment, though maybe he’d never possessed the possibilities of passion which the girl in the gallery certainly had, and didn’t know yet what to do with.

“That must be your daughter, surely?”

His face stiffened very slightly, though he gazed back at her with polite composure. “My niece. Unfortunately my wife… We have no children.” He snapped off the sentence briskly, like a thread at the end of a seam. A sore subject, she was sorry she’d embarked on it, however innocently. She was just wondering how to ride the punch, and whether his voice was always so constrained when he spoke of his wife, when he turned his head to look along the necklace of lighted windows, as willing to evade complications as she, and said in a very different tone: “Ah, there is my wife now, with the next party.”

She had thought him without passion, but evidently he had one. This was quite another voice, warm and proud and soft, heavy with unguarded affection. No, his wife’s childlessness was only a shared sorrow, not at all a count against her, or a shadow between them. The girl looked up, following his devoted, secret smile, and saw a woman caught for a moment under the full brilliance of one of the chandeliers. She was slender and fair and elegant in a plain dark dress, with pale hair piled on her head, and a swimming, wavering walk that seemed to balance the silvery coils like a conscious burden. Her eyes were dark and large, her colouring richly fair, her face bright and animated almost to the point of discomfort. She talked and gestured and passed, and the medley of students and guests passed after her, consolingly ordinary, unhaunted and content.

The girl stood fixed, watching her go without a smile, and for some moments without a word. When the pageant had passed she stirred, and moistened her lips.

“She’s beautiful,” she said at last, with deliberation.

This time she had said the right thing. She felt the evening filled with the glow of his pleasure.

“Some excellent judges have thought so,” he admitted, a little pompously, more than a little proprietorially.

“I have a feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before,” said the girl in a cool, distant voice.

“It’s quite possible. You’re a ballad-singer. Audrey has some close friends in folk-music circles.”

The girl with the guitar-case suppressed a faint and private smile. “Yes… yes, I’m sure she has,” she said gently, and turned from him and ran up the stone steps towards the great doorway.

Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends, was an implacable hater of all humbug, and a merciless judge of all those who seemed to her tainted with its unmistakable sweet, self-conscious odour. At rising nineteen she could afford to be, her own proceedings being marked by a total rejection of falsity. She had weighed up the celebrated Dickie Meurice, disc-jockey, compère and television personality extraordinary, before they had even reached the armoury and his third questionable joke. Give him an audience of twenty or so, even if they were by rights young Felicity Cope’s audience, and he’d have filched them from under her nose within minutes, and be on-stage. Doubtful, rather, if he was ever off.

“Licensed clown,” said Tossa fastidiously into Dominic Felse’s ear, as they followed the adoring giggles of the fans into the long gallery. “All he ever goes anywhere for is to advertise the product. I bet he cracks wise in his sleep, and has a built-in gadget to record the level of applause. What’s more, he won’t stop at much in the cause. Watch out, anybody in the business here who has a reputation to lose.”

“Could be several people in danger, then,” said Dominic critically, eyeing the group that surged amorphously before them, and seeing celebrities enough. And this was only one party of three perambulating the house on this conducted tour. Over by the window shone the cropped red heads of the Rossignol brothers; less vulnerable, perhaps, by virtue of being French, identical twins, and tough as rubber, not to say capable of considerable mischief themselves if they felt like it, but all the same this folk-music business was an international free-for-all, these days, and no one could count himself immune. The new young American, Peter Crewe, stood close to his guide, earnestly following everything she had to say, and turning his bright, weathered face faithfully from portrait to portrait, staring so solemnly that if there was anything to be discovered about the Cothercotts from those calculated approximations, he would surely discover it. Malice might well bounce off such innocence as his, but it might also take a strip of hide with it at every rebound. There was Celia Whitwood, the harp girl – the second witticism this evening had been at her expense, and she hadn’t relished it. And yet this licensed clown, as Tossa called him, could draw the fans after him with a crook of his finger, and have them hanging on his lips ready to laugh before he spoke. An extraordinary force is television for building or destroying public figures, without benefit of talent, desert or quality.

“I wonder who was the genius who thought we needed a compère for this week-end?” said Tossa, sighing.

“Somebody shrewd enough to know how to fill the house,” said Dominic simply. “He fetched the fans in, didn’t he?”

And he had, there was no doubt of that; but not only he, as Tossa promptly pointed out.

“You think all those kids fawning round Lucien Galt came for the music?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?” responded Dominic crisply. “Did you?” The slight edge to his voice, and the faint knife-prick of disquiet that went with it, startled him. He was accustomed to immensely secure relationships in which jealousy would have been an irrelevant absurdity, and the indignities a lover can inflict on himself came as a surprise to him, and an affront. As for Tossa, she wasn’t yet used to the idea that someone could be in love with her, and she wasn’t alert to possible pitfalls; she missed the smarting note and took the question at its face value.

“Idiot!” she said cheerfully. “Are you lumping me in with that lot? Not that I can’t see their point,” she added honestly, studying the lofty male head islanded among hunting girls. “At least he looks and sounds like a real person. Take his microphone away, and he’s still there.”

Lucien Galt certainly could not easily be ignored, even thus hemmed in at close quarters by his unkempt admirers. The black head tossed impatiently, the lean, relaxed shoulders twitched, like a stallion shaking off gadflies, and for a moment his face was turned towards the two who discussed him. Dark as a gypsy, with heavy brows and arrogant eyes, built like a dancer, light-framed and quick in movement, intolerant of too close approach, and scornful of adulation as of any other stupidity, he carried his nature in his looks, and took no trouble to moderate its impact. He slid from between the ranks of his fans and put the width of an inlaid table between himself and them, leaning with folded arms and braced shoulders against the damask-panelled wall. He had put Felicity off her stride by the abrupt movement; he caught her eye, and apologised with a brilliant, brief smile that transformed his saturnine face for an instant. And that was the only move he had made to charm, and no more to him than a brusque gesture of politeness.

He was twenty-three years old, and already an artist on a world scale. In what other field can you climb the peak so fast? Or so suddenly slither all the way down it again and vanish? Or, once vanished, be so completely forgotten?

“You couldn’t say he went out of his way to please, could you?” whispered Tossa. “He as good as tells them they’re a bore and a nuisance, and they lap it up and come back for more. And just look at the other one, working at it every minute, ladling out the honey like mad. He must just hate Lucien.”

Considering she had never set eyes on either of the pair before, it was a fairly penetrating observation; but all Dominic noticed at the time was the easy way the name Lucien came to her tongue. The popular music world deals in Christian names, of course, and there’s no particular significance in it; still, he noted it, and was annoyed with himself for the resulting smart. Ever since he’d brought his girl home from Oxford with him for the Easter vacation, to meet his parents for the first time, he’d been discovering in himself nervous sensitivities he’d never suspected before, like broken nails forever ready to snag in the fine threads of this most difficult of all relationships. It wasn’t doing his vanity any good.

“Theirs is a cut-throat world,” he said sententiously. “Still, he looks as if he can stand it.”

“Oh, I should think he’s pretty tough,” she agreed serenely.

“With a name like that,” said Dominic, involuntarily rubbing the sting, “he’d have to be.” Who knew better than he did the hard training to be derived in early schooldays from having an unusual and provocative name? As if being a policeman’s son wasn’t enough in itself to keep a boy on his toes!

“From what I read somewhere, he was brought up in an orphanage, right from a baby. His parents were killed in the buzz-bomb raids on London at the end of the last war. They say he thinks the world of his home, though, and goes back there regularly. Not at all a deprived child type. And yet you never know,” said Tossa thoughtfully, “maybe that does account for the way they say he is.”

“I haven’t been reading him up,” said Dominic patiently. “How do they say he is?”

“Oh, like he looks. You-be-damned! Terribly independent, won’t compromise, won’t pretend, a real stormy petrel. The way I heard it, his agent and the recording people, and all the ones who have to work with him took to calling him Lucifer instead of Lucien.”

Lucifer leaned with folded arms against the wine-coloured damask panelling of the long gallery, under the carved black ceiling and the Venetian chandeliers. Rankly dramatised Cothercott portraits hung cloaked and hooded about him, the expensive, perilous and eclectic accumulations of generations of Cothercott collectors were elegantly displayed along the walls at his back, their often lovely and sometimes repulsive furniture fended off teen-age girls from too close contact with him. The dark, rich, Strawberry Hill colours, the heavy gilding, the assured and lavish use of black, all framed him like one of the family pictures. He looked at home here, and in his element, a little sinister, a little dangerous, treacherously winning, like the house itself.

“Now you can’t,” Dickie Meurice was saying persuasively, his incandescent smile trained at full-tooth-power on the warden’s niece, “you really can’t ask us to believe that all these characters were models of industry and virtue. Just take a look at ’em!” He waved a hand towards the family portraits deployed along the wall, and indeed half of them did look like romantic poets and half like conspirators. Even the ladies appeared somewhat overdressed in conscious merit, as though they had something to hide. “Every one of ’em straight out of the wanted file. There ought to be profiles alongside. Don’t tell me they got the fortune that built this pile out of honest trade.”

“Ah, but I think that’s just what they did,” said Felicity with animation, “and just what they didn’t want you to believe about them. They much preferred to put up on their walls something that looked like degenerate aristocrats who’d never done a day’s work in their lives.”

She had abandoned her usual recital already, derailed by Meurice’s facetious comments, and begun to indulge her own suppressed feelings about this formidable place; but it wasn’t at Meurice she was looking, and it wasn’t for him she was lighting up like a pale, flickering candle, her serious grey eyes warming into brilliance. She gazed wide-eyed at Lucifer, leaning there against the wall with his dark brightness dulling the painted faces on either side of his head, and her small, grave face reflected his slight, sardonic smile like a mirror. She was the teen-age fan with a temporary and precarious advantage, and she was using it for all she was worth, bent on catching and holding his attention now or never, and reckless as to how pathetically she showed off in the attempt. She had begun this tour, as on all the other similar occasions, very poised, very grownup, a world-weary sophisticate aged fifteen and a half, but the first time he had looked at her the shell had begun to melt, and let in upon her all the hurts and all the promises of the untasted world of maturity, and from the time that he had smiled at her she had thrown away everything else and bent herself to make an impression. Once for all, and now or never. She hated being fifteen, but she wouldn’t always be fifteen. She looked rather more, she hoped, even now. And he was only twenty-three himself. She knew all about him, he’d been written up lavishly since he became famous, and she hadn’t missed a single article about him if she could help it.

“Take this one – William Henry Cothercott the third. He looks like Byron turned bandit, I know, but he hadn’t a line of poetry or an act of violence in him. He made a pile out of the early railway boom, and he had some ships that weren’t too particular whether they carried slaves or not, when other cargoes didn’t offer, but that’s the worst we know about him. They even started collecting more curious things than harpsichords, just to give the impression they were a lot of romantic damned souls. There are some very naughty books you won’t get shown, but I doubt if they ever really read them. And all these rapiers and knives and things, here along the wall – those are part of the effect, too, just theatrical props. That fan – you wouldn’t know it had a dagger in it, would you? And this silver-headed walking-cane – look! The head pulls out, like this…” She showed them, in one rapid, guilty gesture, six inches of the slender blade that was hidden inside the ebony sheath, and slid it hurriedly back again. “Straight out of ‘The Romantic Agony’,” she said, purely for Lucien’s benefit, to show him how well-read she was, and how adult. “Only it doesn’t mean a thing, they were still nothing but stolid merchants. Not a mohawk among the lot of ’em. They never stuck so much as a pig.”

“And yet somebody put the devil in this house,” said Lucien with detached certainty.

“Maybe somebody here among us,” suggested Dickie Meurice, turning the famous smile on him, “brought that aura in with him.”

Lucien turned his head and looked him over again at leisure, without any apparent reaction. He knew who he was, of course. Who didn’t? He had even worked with him on two occasions. It couldn’t be said that he had ever really noticed him until now, and even now he wasn’t particularly interested. In such a narrow gallery, however, you can’t help noticing someone who is so full of quicksilver movement without meaning, and makes so much noise saying nothing. Lucien, when not singing, was a dauntingly silent person, and spoke only to the point.

“I doubt it,” he said indifferently. “This is built-in. More likely to have been the architect. What was he like? Who was he? Do they know?”

“His name was Falchion. Nobody knows much about him, there are only two other houses known to be his work. We think he must have died young. There’s a story,” said Felicity, recklessly improvising, and looking even more passionately truthful and candid than usual, “that he was in love with one of the Cothercott daughters. That one… ” She pointed out, with deceptive conviction, the best-looking of the collection, confident that no one would notice that she belonged to a later generation. “She died about the time the house was finished, and he was broken-hearted. They used to meet in this gallery while he was working on the features in the grounds, and she’s supposed to haunt here.”

She had Lucien’s attention, and she didn’t care whether he knew she was lying or whether he believed her. Maybe it would be even more interesting to be seen to be lying. In many ways this whole set-up was a lie, even though Uncle Edward was a genuine scholar and a genuine musician, devoted and content with his sphere. In a sense, only what was utterly and joyously false had any right to exist in this setting, phantasms were the only appropriate realities in this shameless fantasy.

“She comes in daylight, not at night,” said Felicity, loosing the rein of her imagination, but holding fast to Lucien Galt’s black and moody stare. “She comes to meet him, and she doesn’t know she’s dead, and she can’t understand why he never comes. She’s still in love with him, but she’s angry, too, and she’s only waiting to meet him again and take it out of him for leaving her deserted so long…”

“She’s making it up as she goes along,” said Tossa very softly in Dominic’s ear. “What a gorgeous little liar!”

“It’s this place,” Dominic whispered back. “It would get anybody.”

“Has anyone actually seen her?” asked Peter Crewe, round-eyed.

“Oh, yes, occasionally, but it only happens to people in love.” Felicity turned, and began to pace slowly and delicately towards the great oak door at the end of the gallery; and they all caught the infection and walked solemnly after her, their steps soundless in the deep carpet. “You may be walking along here some day, just like this, going to put fresh flowers in that stone vase there on the pedestal. Not thinking about anything like ghosts. With the sun shining in, even, though it could be just at dusk, like this. And you’re just approaching this door when it suddenly opens, and there she is, confronting you…”

And suddenly the oak door opened, flung wide by a hand not accustomed to doing things by halves, and there she was confronting them indeed, with head up and eyes challenging, a tall, brown, imperious girl with a great plait of dark hair coiled like an attendant serpent over one shoulder, and a guitar-case in her hand.

Felicity rocked back on her heels, startled into a sharp and childish giggle of embarrassment. The procession at her back halted as abruptly, with a succession of soft, clumsy collisions, like a Bank-Holiday queue of ambling cars suddenly forced to brake sharply. It would all have been a little ridiculous, but for the composure with which the newcomer marched into the gallery and looked them over, undisturbed and unimpressed. Her glance passed over the whole group in one sweep, riding over their heads and rejecting all but the tallest. She found Lucien, alert, dark and still against the wall. There she fixed, and looked no farther.

Tossa, watching from the fringe of the group, literally saw the flash and felt the shock as their eyes locked, and her fingers reached for Dominic’s sleeve. The tension between those two set everyone quivering, even those who were too insensitive to understand why. And yet they could hardly have maintained a more stony assurance, calmer faces or stiller bodies. Only for the briefest instant had the daggers shown in two pairs of eyes now veiled, and cool. The girl’s face wore a newcomer’s polite, perfunctory smile, she was looking clean through Lucien and failing to see him, she had excised him from her field of vision. But the pressure of Tossa’s fingers, alert and excited, directed attention rather to Lucien himself. So far from crossing the stranger out of his notice, he was staring at her frankly and directly, trying to see deep into her and read some significance into what he saw; but if he was getting much information out of that closed and aloof face, thought Tossa, he must be clairvoyant. The glint in his eyes might have been alarm, or animosity or, curiously, elation. He might, for that matter, be the kind of person who would find a certain elation in the promise of a stand-up fight.

The instant of surprise and silence was gone almost before they had recorded it. The girl with the guitar turned to Felicity, and was opening her lips to speak when the high, self-confident voice of Dickie Meurice gave tongue smoothly and joyously:

“Well, well, well! Just look who’s here!” And he danced forward with arms outspread, took the girl’s hands in his, guitar and all, and pumped and pressed them enthusiastically. Her dark brows rose slightly, but she tolerated the liberty without protest.

“Hullo, Dickie, I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“I didn’t know you were. For goodness sake, why didn’t they have your name on the prospectus?”

“They didn’t know I was coming, and I’m not here to perform. I came as a student, like anybody else.”

“Come off it!” said Meurice, laughing, and tapped the guitar-case. “You think you’re the sort of girl who can take her harp to a party without anybody asking her to play? Not while I’m around!” He laid an arm familiarly about her shoulders, and turned her to face the company. “Don’t you know who we’ve got here? Just about the greatest ballad-singer this side of the Atlantic, that’s who. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to present to you none other than the great Liri Palmer.”