Paragon Walk

Ten

Charlotte went to the garden party feeling marvelous. Emily, high on the wave of her own well-being, had given her a new dress, all white muslin and lace, with tiny pin tucks at the yoke. She felt like daisies in the wind of a summer field, or the white foam of a mountain stream, inexpressible, shimmeringly clean.

Everyone in the Walk was there, even the Misses Horbury, as though they were making a determined effort to put everything sordid or tragic behind them, firmly in the past, and for a hot, still afternoon totally to forget it.

Emily was gowned in spring green, her best color, and she positively radiated delight.

“We are going to find out what it is,” she said softly to Charlotte, gripping her by the arm as they walked across the grass toward Grace Dilbridge. “I haven’t made up my mind yet whether she knows or not. I’ve been listening very carefully to everyone the last few days, and I rather think Grace doesn’t wish to know, so she has made sure not to find out by accident.”

Charlotte remembered what Aunt Vespasia had said about Grace and her enjoyment in being put upon. Perhaps if she discovered the secret, it would be too appalling for her to find any pleasure in it anymore. After all, if one’s husband sinned in an average way, only slightly more openly than most, one could be expected to endure it gracefully and be sympathized with. One’s social position would not be jeopardized. But if the sin were extraordinary, something unacceptable, then one would be required to take action, even perhaps to leave-and that was altogether another matter. A woman who leaves her husband, for whatever reason, is not only financially a disaster, but socially quite beyond condoning. Invitations simply cease.

They were now in front of Grace Dilbridge, who was looking rather a poor color, in a purple that did not suit her. It was far too hot a shade for such a heavy day. There were tiny thunder flies in the air, and it was difficult not to forget one’s manners and brush them away quite violently, as they itched the skin and caught in one’s hair in a most unpleasant sensation.

“How charming to see you, Mrs. Pitt,” Grace said automatically. “I’m so delighted you were able to come. How well you look, Emily, my dear.”

“Thank you,” they both replied together, then Emily went on, “I had no idea your garden was so large. How lovely it is. Does it extend beyond that hedge also?”

“Oh, yes, there is a herbaceous walk, and a small rose garden.” Grace waved an arm. “I have sometimes wondered if we should try growing peaches on that south facing wall, but Freddie won’t hear of it.”

Emily’s elbow poked Charlotte, and Charlotte knew she was thinking of the garden room. It must be somewhere behind that hedge.

“Indeed,” Emily said with polite interest. “I do love peaches. I should insist, if I had such a place. There is nothing like a fresh peach, in the season.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Grace looked uncomfortable, “Freddie would be most angry. He gives me so many things, he would think me most ungrateful if I were to make an issue of such a small matter.”

This time it was Charlotte who poked Emily discreetly, with her foot, under the clouds of her skirt. She did not want Emily to press too hard and make their interest obvious. They had already learned enough. The garden room was behind that hedge, and Freddie did not want peaches anywhere near it.

They excused themselves, after again saying how delighted they were to be there.

“The garden room!” Emily said as soon as they were out of earshot. “Freddie does not want her going there to pick peaches at awkward moments. He has his private parties out there, I’ll wager you anything.”

Charlotte did not take her up.

“But parties are not much,” she said slowly, “unless something quite awful goes on. What we need to know is who goes to them. Do you think Miss Lucinda recalls with any clarity at all what she saw? Or will it be so embroidered over with imagination by now that it isn’t any use? She must have told it umpteen times.”

Emily bit her lip in irritation.

“I really should have asked her when it happened, but I was so annoyed by her, and so delighted that someone had given her a good fright, that I deliberately avoided her. And I didn’t want to pander to her vanity. She was sitting up on the chaise lounge, you know, with smelling salts, an embroidered cushion with Chinese dragons behind her, so Aunt Vespasia said, and a whole jugful of lemonade, receiving callers like some duchess and insisting on telling the whole story right from the beginning to every one of them. I simply could not have been civil to her. I should have burst into laughter. Now I wish I’d had more self control.”

Charlotte was not in a position to criticize, and she knew it. Without replying, she looked around the rose-hung garden to see if she could find Miss Lucinda. She was bound to be with Miss Laetitia, and they were always in the same color.

“There!” Emily touched her arm, and she turned. This time they were in forget-me-not blue, and it was far too young for either of them. The touches of pink only made it worse, like some confection that had become overheated.

“Oh dear!” Charlotte said under her breath, stifling a gasp of laughter.

“It’s got to be done,” Emily replied severely. “Come on!”

Side by side, they attempted to look casual as they drifted over toward the Misses Horbury, hesitating on the way to compliment Albertine Dilbridge on her gown and exchange a greeting with Selena.

“How did she take it?” Charlotte asked the moment they were away from her.

“Take what?” Emily was for once confused.

“Hallam!” Charlotte said impatiently. “After all, it’s a bit of a letdown, isn’t it? I mean to be ravished in overwhelming passion by Paul Alaric is rather romantic, in a disgusting sort of way, but to be molested by Hallam Cayley when he was too drunk and wretched to know what he was doing and didn’t even remember it afterward is just terrible”-she stopped, and all the mockery drained out of her-“and very tragic.”

“Oh!” Emily obviously had not thought of it. “I don’t know.” Then the idea began to interest her. Charlotte saw it in her face. “But now that I consider it, she has rather gone out of her way to avoid me ever since then. Once or twice I have thought she was going to speak to me, then at the last moment she had suddenly found something else more pressing.”

“Do you suppose she knew it was Hallam all the time?” Charlotte asked.

Emily screwed up her face.

“I’m trying to be fair.” She was finding it an effort, and it showed. “I don’t know what I think. I don’t suppose it matters now.”

Charlotte was not satisfied. Some small doubt, a question unresolved, gnawed at the back of her mind. But she suffered it to remain for the moment. They were approaching the Misses Horbury, and she must compose herself to pry discreetly and with grace. She fixed an interested smile on her face and plunged in before Emily had the opportunity.

“How nice to see you again, Miss Horbury,” she gazed at Miss Lucinda with something like awe. “I do admire your courage after such an appalling experience. I am only beginning now fully to appreciate what you must have been through! So many of us lead sheltered lives, we have no imagination of the dreadful things there are so close to us- if only we knew!” She mentally kicked herself for being a hypocrite, the more so because she was rather enjoying it.

Miss Lucinda was too steeped in her own convictions to recognize a complete turn of character. She puffed herself out with satisfaction, reminding Charlotte of a pastel-colored pouter pigeon.

“How perceptive of you, Mrs. Pitt,” she said solemnly. “So many people don’t understand what dark forces there are at work, and how near to us they are!”

“Quite.” For a moment Charlotte’s nerve failed her. She caught sight of Miss Laetitia, her pale eyes wide, and was not sure whether there was laughter in them, or if it was only a reflection of the light. She took a deep breath. “Of course,” she continued, “you must know better than the rest of us. I have been fortunate. I have never been brought face to face with pure evil.”

“Few of us have, my dear,” Miss Lucinda was warming to this new show of interest. “And I most sincerely hope you never have the misfortune to be one of us!”

“Oh, so do I!” Charlotte put a great deal of feeling into it. She deliberately creased her brow in anxiety. “But then there is the question of duty,” she said slowly. “Evil will not go away because we choose not to look at it.” She took a deep breath and faced Miss Lucinda squarely, meeting her rather round eyes. “You will never know how much I admire you for your conduct, your determination to get to the bottom of the circumstances here, whatever they may be.”

Miss Lucinda flushed with satisfaction.

“How kind of you, and how very wise. I know few women of such sense, especially among the young.”

“Indeed,” Charlotte continued, ignoring a nudge from Emily. “I admire you for coming here today at all,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “knowing what we have heard about parties here!”

Miss Lucinda blushed, remembering her previous remarks about Freddie Dilbridge and his dissolute gatherings. She struggled for an excuse for her presence.

With increasing delight, Charlotte gave it to her.

“It must require a lot of self-sacrifice,” she said soberly. “But I do appreciate that you are determined, at any cost to yourself in embarrassment or even positive danger, that you must discover whatever dreadful thing it was you saw that night.”

“Yes, yes, quite.” Miss Lucinda fastened onto it eagerly. “It is a matter of Christian duty.”

“Has anyone else seen it?” Emily managed to say something at last.

“If they have,” Miss Lucinda said darkly, “they have not said so.”

“Maybe they were too frightened?” Charlotte tried to get to her actual purpose at last. “What did it look like?”

Miss Lucinda was surprised. She had forgotten the actuality. Now she tried to picture it again.

“Evil,” she began, wrinkling her face. “Most evil. It had a green face, like a creature half man and half beast. And there were horns on its head.”

“How appalling,” Charlotte breathed out, suitably impressed. “What manner of horns? Like a cow, or a goat, or-”

“Oh, like a goat,” Miss Lucinda said immediately. “Curling back.”

“And what manner of body?” Charlotte went on. “Did it have two legs like a man, or four like a beast?”

“Two, like a man, and it ran away and leapt over the hedge.”

“Leapt over the hedge?” Charlotte tried not to sound disbelieving.

“Oh, it’s quite a low hedge, just ornamental.” Miss Lucinda was not as impractical as she appeared. “I could have jumped it myself, when I was a girl. Not that I would have, of course!” she added hastily.

“Of course not,” Charlotte agreed, struggling desperately to keep a straight face. The picture of Miss Lucinda taking a flying leap at the garden hedge was too delicious to be denied. “Which way did it go?”

Miss Lucinda did not miss the point.

“This way,” she said firmly. “Down the Walk, toward this end.”

Emily saw Charlotte’s face and rushed to rescue with noises of sympathy and horror.

It took them some time to break away without obvious discourtesy, and when at last they did, with an excuse that they must speak to Selena, Emily turned to Charlotte, pulling her back by the sleeve, in case they were upon Selena before having an opportunity to speak to each other in private.

“What on earth was it?” she hissed. “I thought at first she was inventing most of it, but now I really do believe she saw something. She isn’t lying. I would swear to that.”

Charlotte had already made up her mind.

“Someone dressed up to frighten her,” she answered under her breath, not wanting any passerby to overhear them. Phoebe was only a few yards away, standing with a wan smile, listening to Grace’s misfortunes.

“Away from what?” Emily smiled dazzlingly at Jessamyn as she floated past. “Something here?”

“That’s what we have to find out.” Charlotte added a gesture of greeting. “I wonder if Selena knows,” she went on to Emily.

“We’ll find out.” Emily sailed forward, and Charlotte was obliged to follow. She still disliked Selena, in spite of the admiration for her courage. She faced the unpleasant possibility that her feeling was mainly provoked because Selena had said it was Paul Alaric who had assaulted her. Charlotte most intensely did not wish that to be true. Alaric was here this afternoon. She had not spoken to him yet, but she knew precisely where he was, and that at the moment Jessamyn was drifting casually over toward him in a froth of water-blue lace.

“How pleasant to see you again, Mrs. Pitt,” Selena said coolly. If she was indeed pleased, there was nothing of it in her voice, and her eyes were as remote and chilly as a winter river.

“And in so much more fortunate circumstances.” Charlotte smiled back. Really, she was getting to be a total hypocrite! Whatever was happening to her?

Selena’s face became even colder.

“I am so happy for you that the entire matter is over,” Charlotte continued, goaded on by the profound dislike inside her. “Of course, it was a tragedy, but at least the fear is past, no more mystery.” She allowed her voice to be as cheerful as was decent. “No one need fear anyone else from now on. All is explained and in the open-such a relief.”

“I had not realized you were afraid, Miss Pitt!” Selena looked at her with a distaste that suggested her fear was quite ungrounded, since she could have been in no possible danger.

Charlotte rose to the occasion.

“Of course, I was, and for Emily too. After all, if a woman of decorum and position such as yourself could be molested, who on earth could count themselves safe?”

Selena struggled to think of an answer that was not blatantly rude, and failed.

“And such a relief for the gentlemen,” Charlotte went on relentlessly. “None of them are under suspicion anymore. We know now that not any of them were in the least way guilty. It must be a sad and distressing situation, to be obliged to suspect one’s friends.”

Emily’s fingers were digging into Charlotte’s arm, and she was shaking so hard with suppressed laughter she had to pretend to have a sneezing fit.

“The heat,” Charlotte said sympathetically. “It really is most oppressive. I shouldn’t be surprised if the weather breaks soon and we have a thunderstorm. I love thunderstorms, don’t you?”

“No,” Selena said flatly. “I find them vulgar. Exceedingly so.”

Emily sneezed again violently, and Selena backed away. Algernon Burnon was passing with a sherbet in his hand, and she seized the chance to escape.

Emily came up from her handkerchief.

“You are absolutely appalling!” she said happily. “I’ve never seen her better confounded.”

Charlotte’s mind knew at last what it was that troubled her about Selena.

“You were the first to see her after she was attacked, weren’t you?” she asked soberly.

“Yes. Why?”

“What happened-exactly?”

Emily was slightly surprised.

“I heard her scream. I ran out through the front of the house and saw her. I went to her, naturally, and took her inside. What do you mean? What is it, Charlotte?”

“What did she look like?”

“Look like? Like a woman who has been assaulted of course! Her dress was torn open, and her hair was all over the place-”

“How was her dress torn?” Charlotte insisted.

Emily tried to picture it in her mind. Her hand went up to the left side of her own dress and made as if to rip it.

“Like that?” Charlotte said quickly. “And was it muddy?”

“No, not muddy. There was probably dust, but I didn’t notice. It was hardly the time.”

“But you told me she said it had happened on the grass,” Charlotte pointed out, “by the rose beds.”

“It’s a hot dry summer!” Emily waved her hands. “Anyway, what does it matter?”

“But those flower beds are watered,” Charlotte persisted. “I’ve seen the gardeners doing it. If she had been thrown to the ground-”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t there! Maybe it was on the path. What are you trying to say?” Emily was beginning to understand.

“Emily, if I tore my dress open and pulled my hair out, then came screaming along the road, how would I look different from the way Selena looked that night?”

Emily’s eyes were very clear blue.

“Not at all different,” she said, as perception dawned.

“I don’t think anyone attacked Selena,” Charlotte framed her words with deliberation. “She made it up, to draw attention to herself and to get even with Jessamyn. Only Jessamyn guessed the truth. That was why she pretended to be so sorry for her, and yet it didn’t trouble her at all. She knew Paul Alaric had never touched Selena!”

“And neither did Hallam?” Emily answered her own question with the tone of her voice.

“Poor man.” Tragedy overtook farce again, and Charlotte felt the chill of real terror and real death. “No wonder he was confused. He swore he didn’t attack Selena, and it was the truth.” Anger hardened inside her, for the mischief Selena had caused, albeit some of it unknowingly. Still, it was a selfish and callous thing to do. She was a spoiled woman, and part of Charlotte wanted to punish her, at least to let her know that someone else knew what had really happened.

Emily understood immediately. A look passed between them, and there was no need for explanations. In time, Emily would allow Selena to perceive very precisely both her anger and her contempt.

“We’ve still got to find out what is going on here,” Emily began again after a few moments. “That is only one small mystery solved. It doesn’t tell us what Miss Lucinda saw.”

“We’ll just have to ask Phoebe,” Charlotte answered.

“Don’t you think I’ve tried that?” Emily was exasperated. “If it were so easy, I would have known the answer weeks ago!”

“Oh, I know she won’t tell us intentionally,” Charlotte was not upset. “But she might let something slip.”

Obediently, but without any expectations, Emily led her to where Phoebe was sipping a lemonade and talking to someone neither of them knew. It took ten minutes of innocuous pleasantries before they could get Phoebe on her own.

“Oh, dear,” Emily said with a sigh. “What a tedious creature. If I hear one more word about her health, I shall be positively rude.”

Charlotte seized her chance.

“She doesn’t realize how fortunate she is,” she said, looking at Phoebe. “If she had been obliged to endure the strain that you have, she would not make such an issue of a few sleepless nights.” She hesitated, not quite sure how to phrase the question she intended so as not to be obvious. “When you know something dreadful has happened, and suspicion is directed at those in your own family, it must be a nightmare!”

Phoebe’s face was vacant for a moment with unfeigned innocence.

“Oh, I was not worried over much. I did not think Diggory would do anything so cruel. He is not in the least unkind, you know? And I knew it could not have been Afton.”

Charlotte was stunned. If ever there was an innately cruel man, it was Afton Nash. She would have suspected him still, if there were any crime unsolved, but, of all crimes, rape seemed to satisfy his character best.

“How can you know?” she said without thought. “He was alone some of that evening.”

“I-” To Charlotte’s amazement, Phoebe blushed scarlet, the color burning painfully up her face to the very roots of her hair. “I-” She blinked, and her eyes filled with tears and looked away. “I had confidence it could not be him-that-that is what I meant to say.”

“But you do know there is something wrong in the Walk!” Emily took advantage of the moment, and Charlotte’s sudden silence.

Phoebe stared at her, her eyes widening as her mind flooded with a great question.

“You know what it is?” she breathed.

Emily hesitated, unsure which was best, to lie, or to admit ignorance. She compromised.

“I know something. And I mean to fight it! Will you help us?”

It was masterly. Charlotte looked at her with admiration.

Phoebe took her arm, squeezing it till the pressure made her wince.

“Oh, don’t, Emily! You can’t realize what you are doing! The danger isn’t over, you know. There will be more, and worse! Believe me!”

“Then we must fight it!”

“We can’t! It is too big, and too dreadful. Just wear a cross, say your prayers every night and morning; and don’t go out at night. Don’t even look out of your windows. Just stay at home and don’t inquire into anything! Do as I say, Emily, and maybe it won’t come after you.”

Charlotte wanted to say more, but she was hurt inside by such fear. She grasped Emily.

“Perhaps that is good advice.” She swallowed her feelings. “If you will excuse us, we must speak to Lady Tamworth. We have not even acknowledged her yet.”

“Of course,” Phoebe murmured. “But, do be careful, Emily! Remember what I said.”

Emily gave her a weak smile and walked reluctantly toward Lady Tamworth.

It was another half hour before they had the opportunity to fade behind the rosebeds and disappear, unobserved, into the private part of the garden. They were in a herbaceous walk, backed by an even taller hedge of beach, quite impenetrable.

“Where now?” Charlotte asked.

“Behind that,” Emily answered. “There has to be a way around it or else a gate.”

“I hope it isn’t locked.” Charlotte was annoyed at the thought. It would stop them completely. Oddly enough, it had not occurred to her before, because she never locked doors herself.

They walked along side by side, searching the thick leaves till they found the door, almost overgrown.

“It looks as if it isn’t used!” Emily said in disbelief. “This can’t be it.”

“Wait a minute.” Charlotte looked at it more closely, studying the hinges. “It opens the other way. It must be all cleared on the other side, for it to swing. Try it.”

Emily pushed. It did not move.

Charlotte felt her heart sink. It was locked.

Emily pulled a pin out of her hair and pushed it into the lock.

“You can’t do it with that.” Charlotte let all her disappointment into her voice.

Emily ignored her and went on poking. She took the pin out and straightened it, making a loop on one end, then tried again.

“There,” she said with satisfaction, and pushed the flat surface of the door gently. It swung open without a sound.

Charlotte was staggered.

“Where did you learn to do that?” she demanded.

Emily grinned. “My housekeeper’s always taking the keys with her, even to bed, and I hate being obliged to ask her to get into my own linen cupboard. I thought it was rather a nice trick. Come on, let’s see what is through there.”

They tiptoed through the door and swung it shut behind them. At first it was disappointing, just a large garden room set out in paved walkways with little plots of green herbs between. They went all the way round it, but there was nothing else.

Emily stopped, disgusted.

“Why on earth bother to lock the gate to this?” she said angrily. “There’s nothing here!”

Charlotte bent to touch one of the herb leaves and crush it between her fingers. It smelled bitter and aromatic.

“I wonder if it is some sort of drug,” she said thoughtfully.

“Nonsense!” Emily brushed it aside. “Opium comes from poppies, and they grow in Turkey, or China, or somewhere.”

“There are other things.” Charlotte refused to give up. “What a peculiar shape this garden is, I mean the way the stones are laid out. It must have taken someone an awful lot of work.”

“It’s only star-shaped,” Emily replied. “I don’t think it’s very attractive. It’s uneven.”

“A star!”

“Yes, the other points are over there, and behind the room. Why?”

“How many points altogether?” Something was beginning to form in Charlotte’s mind, a memory of a case Pitt had been working on more than a year ago, and a scar he had spoken of.

Emily counted.

“Five. Why?”

“Five! That means it is a pentacle!”

“If that’s what you call it.” Emily was not impressed. “What does it matter?”

“Emily,” Charlotte turned to her, the idea hard, frightening inside her. “Pentacles are the shapes people use when they practice black magic! Maybe that’s what they do here, at their parties?” Now she remembered when Pitt had mentioned the scar-on the body of Fanny-on the buttock. The place of most mockery.

“That’s why Phoebe is so terrified,” she went on. “She thinks they have begun by playing but have conjured up real devils!”

Emily screwed up her face.

“Black magic?” she said incredulously. “Isn’t that a little far-fetched? I don’t even believe in it!”

But it made sense, and the more Charlotte thought of it, the more sense it made.

“You haven’t got any proof,” Emily went on. “Just because the garden is set out in a star shape! Lots of people might like stars.”

“Do you know any?” Charlotte demanded.

“No-but-”

“We’ve got to get inside that room.” Charlotte stared at it. “That’s what Miss Lucinda saw, someone dressed up in black magic robes, with green horns.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Bored people sometimes do ridiculous things. Look at some of your Society friends sometime!”

Emily squinted at her.

“You don’t believe in black magic, do you, Charlotte?”

“I don’t know-and I don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t.”

Emily gave in.

“Then I suppose we had better see if we can get inside that room, if you think Miss Lucinda’s monster could be in there.” She led the way across the bitter herbs and took out her hairpin again, but this time there was no need. The door was not locked. It swung open easily, and they stood staring into a large rectangular room with a black carpet and black curtained walls with green designs on them. The sun streamed in through a totally glassed roof.

“There’s nothing here,” Emily sounded annoyed, now that she had come this far and was half convinced.

Charlotte squeezed past her and went in. She put her hand to the velvet curtains and brushed them slowly. She was more than halfway around before she came to the space behind and saw the black robes and hoods. There were crosses embroidered on them in scarlet, upside down, symbols of mockery, like the one on Fanny. She understood immediately what they were, and it was as if they were still alive. The evil in them remained after the wearers had gone out of this place, stripped to their ordinary faces and their daily lives among other people. How many of them carried that scar on their buttock?

“What is it?” Emily asked from just behind her. “What have you found?”

“Robes,” Charlotte said quietly. “Disguises.”

“What about Miss Lucinda’s monster?”

“No, it isn’t here. Maybe they didn’t keep it.”

Emily’s face was pale, her eyes shadowed.

“Do you think it really is black magic, devil worship, and that sort of thing?” She was struggling to disbelieve it herself, now that she actually saw it in its ugliness and absurdity.

“Yes,” Charlotte said quietly. She reached out and touched one of the hoods. “Can you think of any other reason for all this? And the pentacle, and the bitter herbs? That must be why Phoebe wears a cross and keeps going to church all the time, and why she thinks we can’t ever get rid of the evil now that it’s here.”

Emily started to say something, and it died on her tongue. They stood staring at each other.

“What can we do?” Emily said at last.

Before Charlotte could think of any answer, there was a sound at the door, and they both froze in horror. They had forgotten the possibility of someone else coming. There was no conceivable explanation they could make. They had unlocked the door in the hedge deliberately. There was no way they could have lost their way. And no one would believe they did not know or understand what they had found!

Very slowly they turned to face the door.

Paul Alaric stood there, black outlined against the sun.

“Well!” he said softly, stepping in and smiling.

Charlotte and Emily stood so close together their bodies touched. Emily was gripping hard, fingers digging in like claws.

“So you’ve found it,” Alaric observed. “A little foolhardy, wasn’t it-to come looking for such a thing, and alone?” He seemed amused.

At the back of her mind Charlotte had always known it was foolish, but curiosity had driven out awareness of danger and silenced warning in her brain. Now she stared at Alaric and felt for Emily’s hand beside her. Was he the head of them, the warlock? Was that why Selena found it credible that he should have attacked her-or was it why Jessamyn knew he had not? Or could it be that the head was a woman-Jessamyn herself? Her mind whirled around all kinds of ugly thoughts.

Alaric was coming toward them, still smiling, but with a slight furrow between his brows.

“I think we had better get out of this room,” he said gently. “It’s an extraordinarily unpleasant place, and I, for one, do not wish to be found here if one of its regular users should chance to come.”

“R-regular?” she stammered.

His smile broadened into a harsh laugh.

“Good heavens, you think I’m one of them! I’m disappointed in you, Charlotte.”

For one idiotic moment she blushed.

“Then who is?” she demanded defensively. “Afton Nash?”

He took her by the arm and led her into the sun, Emily only inches behind her. He pushed the door closed and continued along the path between the bitter herbs.

“No, Afton is far too bloodless for anything of that sort. His form of hypocrisy is much subtler than that.”

“Then who?” Charlotte was sure enough it was not George to be unafraid of his answer.

“Oh, Freddie Dilbridge,” he said confidently. “And poor Grace studiously turns a blind eye, pretending it is just a normal excess of the flesh.”

“Who else?” Charlotte kept up with him, leaving Emily behind on the narrow path.

“Selena, certainly,” he replied. “And I should think, Algernon. Poor little Fanny, before she died-at least, I would guess so. Phoebe knows about it, of course-she is not as innocent of nature or people as she seems-and Hallam without doubt. And naturally Fulbert knew, from what he said, even though he was never invited.”

It all fitted into place.

“What do they do?” she asked.

His mouth turned down at the corners, rueful, a little contemptuous.

“Nothing very much, play at a little wickedness, imagine they conjure demons.”

“You don’t think it could be-real?” She hesitated to ask such a question outside in the summer garden with the beach hedge fluttering green above them. It was getting hotter and stiller, and there was a faint overcast across the sky. The thunderflies were worse.

“No, my dear,” he said, looking straight at her. “I don’t.”

“Pheobe thinks so.”

“Yes, I know. She imagines a foolish and rather sordid game that has suddenly summoned up real spirits, and set them loose in the Walk, to bring murder and insanity up from the dark regions of the damned.” His face was wry, utterly reasonable, dismissing such things to the realms of hysteria.

She frowned.

“Is there no such thing as black magic?”

“Oh, yes.” He pushed the door open in the hedge and stood back for them to go through. “Most certainly there is. But this is not it.”

They emerged into the color and normality of the garden party again. No one had seen them leave the beach hedge and pass along the herbaceous walk. Miss Laetitia was listening dutifully to Lady Tamworth expounding on the evils of marrying beneath one’s station, and Selena was having what appeared to be heated words with Grace Dilbridge. Everything was as usual; they might only have been gone for moments. Charlotte had to shake herself to remember what she had seen. Freddie Dilbridge, standing so casually with a glass in his hand, next to the pink roses, dressed up in robes with a hood over his head and holding night parties inside a pentacle, pretending to summon devils, perhaps holding a black mass, stripping the virgin Fanny and branding her body with the crooked scar. How little one knew of the thoughts writhing behind the facile mask. She must make a supreme effort to be civil to him now.

“Don’t say anything,” Emily warned.

“I’m not going to!” Charlotte snapped back. “There isn’t anything to say.”

“I was afraid you might try to point out how wicked it is.”

“I presume that that is why they like it!” Charlotte picked up her skirts and swirled over toward Phoebe and Diggory Nash. Afton was standing just beyond them. Before she got there, she realized that, although he had his back to them, they were in the middle of a rather unpleasant conversation.

“-damn silly woman with an overheated mind,” Afton said waspishly. “Ought to stay at home and find something useful to do.”

“That’s easy to say when it isn’t you.” Diggory’s mouth turned down in contempt.

“It’s hardly likely to be me!” Afton’s eyebrows went up in a sarcastic arch. “It would be a clever rapist who tackled me!”

Diggory raked him with a look of infinite distaste.

“It would be a damn desperate one! Personally, I would sooner try the dog!”

“Then if the dog is raped, we shall know where to look,” Afton said coldly, but without apparent surprise. “You keep some peculiar company, Diggory. Your tastes are becoming depraved.”

“At least, I have tastes,” Diggory snapped back. “I sometimes think you are so withered up you have no passions left for anything. I wouldn’t find it hard to believe that all signs of life are repulsive to you, and anything that reminds you you have a body is unclean to your mind.”

Afton moved fractionally away from him.

“There is nothing unclean in my mind, nothing I need to look away from.”

“Then you’ve a stronger stomach than I have. What goes on in your brain terrifies me! Looking at you, I could believe in those fantasies of the ‘undead’ that are so popular these days, corpses that won’t stay buried.”

Afton held out his hands, palms up, as though weighing the sunlight.

“As usual you are not very thorough, Diggory. If I were one of your ‘undead,’ the sun would shrivel me.” He smiled with slow derision. “Or didn’t you read that far?”

“Don’t be so obvious,” Diggory’s voice was weary and irritated. “I was talking about your soul, not your flesh. I don’t know whether it was the sunlight that shriveled you, or just life. But, sure as hell waits, something did!” He moved away, heading toward a tray of peaches and sherbet. Phoebe dithered for a moment and then followed, leaving Afton to notice Charlotte at last. His cold eyes looked through her.

“Has your over-frank tongue placed you all by yourself again, Mrs. Pitt?” he inquired.

“Possibly,” she replied with equal chill. “But if so, no one else has been blunt enough to tell me so. But then to be alone is not always displeasing.”

“You seem to be visiting us in the Walk rather frequently. You did not bother with us before the rapist. Does it still hold some fascination for you, perhaps? A titillation, an extravagance, a wallowing in emotions, hot dreams of violence and surrender without guilt?” His eyes traveled from her bosom down to her thighs.

Charlotte shivered, as if his hands had touched her. She looked at him with total loathing.

“You seem to imagine that women like to be raped, Mr. Nash. It is a monstrous piece of arrogance, a delusion to feed your vanity and excuse your behavior, and it is quite untrue. Rapists are not magnificent. They are pathetic men who are reduced to taking by force that which others can win for themselves. If they did not hurt others so much, one could pity such a creature. It’s-it’s a kind of impotence!”

His face froze, but there was raw, scalding hatred in his eyes, as primal as birth and death. If they had not been in this civilized garden, with its ritual conversations, the chink of glasses, and polite laughter, she felt he would have torn her open, hacked at her with the sharp blade of a knife, plunged it in hilt deep, and torn her open-

She turned away, sick with the taste of fear, but not before she knew he had seen the understanding in her eyes. No wonder poor Phoebe had never even considered him the rapist. And now Charlotte knew, too, and that was something for which he would have no forgiveness this side of the grave.

She moved away, unseeing, consumed with her knowledge. Silks hung limp in the still air. Flawless skins were blackspotted with minuscule thunder flies, and it was getting hotter all the time. Conversation flittered past her, and she heard its sound but not its words.

“You let it upset you too much. It’s foolish, and I dare say ugly, but it need not touch you, or your sister.”

It was Paul Alaric, holding out a glass of lemonade for her, his eyes concerned, but with the same inward gleam of humor as always.

She remembered the garden room.

“It has nothing to do with that,” she shook her head. “I was thinking of something else, something real.”

He offered her the lemonade and, with his other hand, brushed a thunder fly away from her cheek.

She took the glass, glad of it, and as she turned slightly, her eye caught Jessamyn Nash with a look of malevolence on her face. This time she knew almost beforehand what it was-nothing complex, just ordinary jealousy, because Paul Alaric had touched her, because his concern was for her, and she knew it was real.

Overwhelmingly, Charlotte wanted to escape from it all, the politeness masking the envies, the airless garden, the silly conversations and the hatreds underneath.

“Where is Hallam Cayley buried?” she asked suddenly.

Alaric’s eyes widened in surprise.

“In the same graveyard as Fulbert and Fanny, about a mile away. Or to be accurate, just outside it-unhallowed ground for a suicide.”

“I think I’ll go and visit it. Do you suppose anyone will notice if I pick a few flowers from the front as I go?”

“I doubt it. But do you care?”

“Not at all.” She smiled at him, grateful for his not saying the expected, and not criticizing her.

She broke off some daisies, some sweet William, and a few long heads of lupines, already seeding a little at the bottom but still bright, and set out along the Walk toward the road at the end and the church. It was not as far as she had expected, but the heat was getting more oppressive all the time. The clouds overhead were heavier, and the flies were everywhere.

There was no one else in the graveyard, and she passed unnoticed through the lych-gate and down the path, past the graves with their carved angels and their memories, and beyond the yews to the small plot kept for those without the blessing of the church. Hallam’s grave was very new, the ground still bearing the scars of disturbance.

She stood looking at it for several minutes before she laid the flowers down. She had not thought to bring any kind of container, and there was nothing already here. Maybe they thought no one would want to bring flowers for such a person.

She stared down at the clay, still dry and hard, and thought about the Walk, all the stupidity and the unnecessary pain, and the loneliness.

She was still thinking when she heard another step and looked up. Jessamyn Nash was coming out of the shade of the yew trees, carrying lilies. When she recognized Charlotte, she hesitated, her face pinched and hard, her eyes almost black.

“What did you come here for?” she said very quietly, coming toward Charlotte now. She held the lilies and their leaves upright, and there was a silver gleam of scissors in her hand.

Without knowing why, Charlotte was afraid, as if the thunder and the electricity in the air had ripped through her. Jessamyn was standing opposite her, the grave between them.

Charlotte looked down at the flowers.

“Just-just to put these here.”

Jessamyn stared at them, then slowly raised her foot and trod on them, grinding them with the weight of her body, till they were crushed and smeared on the stone-hard clay. She lifted her head and faced Charlotte, then calmly dropped her own lilies on the same spot.

Above them there was a slow crackle of thunder, and the first drops of rain fell huge and wet through their dresses to the skin.

Charlotte wanted to ask her why she had done that. The words were quite clear inside her head, but her voice remained silent.

“You didn’t even know him!” Jessamyn said between her teeth. “How dare you come here with flowers? You are an intruder. Get out!”

Thoughts whirled in Charlotte’s mind, wild and amazing like flashes of light. She looked at the lilies on the ground and remembered that Emily had said Jessamyn never gave anything away, even when she did not want it anymore herself. If she was finished with it, she destroyed it, but she never let anyone else have it. Emily had been speaking of dresses.

“What difference does it make to you if I put flowers on his grave?” she asked as levelly as she could. “He’s dead.”

“That doesn’t give you any rights,” Jessamyn’s face was getting whiter, and she did not even seem aware of the heavy drops now falling. “You don’t belong in the Walk. Go back to your own Society, whatever that is. Don’t try to force yourself in here.”

But the thoughts were hardening, clearing in Charlotte’s brain. All kinds of questions were at last falling into order, finding answers. The knife, why Pitt had found no blood on the road, Hallam’s confusion, Fulbert, everything at last made a pattern, even the love letters Hallam had kept.

“They weren’t from his wife, were they?” she said aloud. “She didn’t sign them because she didn’t write them. You did!”

Jessamyn’s eyebrows rose in perfect arches.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“The love letters, the love letters to Hallam that the police found. They were yours! You and Hallam used to be lovers. You must have had a key to the garden gate. That’s how you went to him, and that’s how you got in the day Fulbert was killed. Of course, no one saw you!”

Jessamyn’s lip curled.

“That’s idiotic! Why should I want to kill Fulbert? He was a miserable little wretch, but that’s not worth killing for.”

“Hallam admitted raping Fanny-”

Jessamyn winced, almost as if she had been struck a physical blow.

Charlotte saw it.

“You can’t bear that, can you, that Hallam wanted another woman so much he took her by force, least of all innocent, ordinary little Fanny?” She was guessing now, but she believed it. “You sucked him dry with your possessiveness, and when he wanted to let go, you clung onto him, driving him to escape in drink!” She took a deep breath. “Of course, he didn’t remember killing Fanny, and there was no knife and no blood on the road! He didn’t kill her. You did. When she stumbled into your withdrawing room and told you what had happened, your rage and jealousy all spilled over. You had been put aside, rejected for your own insipid little sister-in-law. You took the knife-maybe as easy as the knife from the fruit plate on the sideboard-and you killed her, right there in your own room. The blood was all over your clothes, but you could explain that! And you just washed the knife and put it back in the fruit. No one even looked at that. So simple.

“And when Fulbert knew you too well, with his prying eyes, you had to get rid of him too. Perhaps he threatened you, and you told him to go to Hallam, if he dared, knowing you could go there along the back path and surprise him. Did you even know Hallam was out that day? You must have.

“What a surprise you must have had when no one found the body. You knew Hallam must have hidden it, and you watched him come apart, tormented by fear of his own insanity.”

Jessamyn’s face was as white as the lilies on the grave, and they were both wet with the rain, their floating muslins clinging to them like shrouds.

“You’re very clever,” Jessamyn said slowly. “But you can’t prove any of it. If you tell the police that, I’ll just say you are jealous over Paul Alaric. You don’t belong in the Walk.” Her face narrowed. “And I know you don’t. For all your airs, your dresses are made over ones of Emily’s! You are trying to crash your way in here. You are saying these things out of revenge, because I know it!”

“Oh, the police will believe me,” Charlotte felt a surge of power inside her and intolerable anger for Jessamyn’s indifference to all the pain. “You see, Inspector Pitt is my husband. You didn’t realize that? And there are the love letters. They are in your hand. And it is very hard to wash all the blood off a knife. It gets in the crevices where the handle fits the blade. They’ll find all these things, you know, once they know what to look for.”

Jessamyn’s face changed at last. The alabaster calm broke and the hatred came flooding through. She lifted the scissors and plunged them toward Charlotte, missing her only by inches as her foot slipped on the wet clay.

Charlotte galvanized to life, turning and running back over the rough grass and the great roots of the yews, under them and into the graveyard, her wet clothes slapping and clinging to her legs. She knew Jessamyn was behind her. The rain was pouring down now, guttering in yellow rivers over the baked ground. She jumped over graves, caught her feet in flowers, and banged herself on the wet marble of the gravestones. A plaster angel loomed up in front of her, and she shrieked involuntarily, plunging on.

Only once did she turn back to see Jessamyn yards behind her, light gleaming on the scissors, her corn silk hair in streamers.

Charlotte was bruised now, legs spattered, arms hurt on the protruding corners of the stones. Once she fell over, and Jessamyn was almost on top of her before she scrambled to her feet, fighting for breath, sobbing. If only she could reach the street, there might be someone there, someone sane and ordinary who would help her.

She was almost there, turning back one more time to make sure Jessamyn was not on her, when she banged into something hard and arms closed round her.

She screamed, imagination sending the scissor blades lunging through her flesh as they had through Fanny’s, and Fulbert’s. She struck out, kicking and punching.

“Stop it!”

It was Alaric. For a long, breathless second she did not know whether she was more afraid of him or less.

“Charlotte,” he said quietly. “It’s over. You were a fool to have come here alone, but it’s over now-finished.”

Very slowly she turned round and faced Jessamyn, mudstained and wet.

Jessamyn let the scissors fall. She could not fight both of them, and she could not hide anymore.

“Come on,” Alaric put his arm round Charlotte. “You look appalling! I think we’d better call for the police.”

Charlotte found herself smiling-yes, send for the police-get Pitt! More than anything else-get Pitt!