“Now that you say it — yes, I believe I may have seen him in Lincoln’s Inn. Are you quite sure, Professor Tamar, that he is who you say he is? It is a matter, as it happens, of some interest to me.”
“Quite sure,” I said. “He is well known to me.”
He sat in frowning silence, evidently weighing up the significance of what I had told him, but showing no disposition to discuss it further.
“But I do not think,” I said after a few moments, “that there is any danger of his seeking to engage you in conversation — he seems very well content with his present company. Understandably so — a most charming and attractive woman. Would you say, Sir Arthur, that she much resembles her mother?”
He made no sudden movement or exclamation of surprise; but he betrayed his astonishment by that instant of perfect immobility which is the one undisguisable sign of emotion in those accustomed to conceal it.
“What an extraordinary question, Professor Tamar — how on earth should I know?”
“I cannot imagine,” I said, “that you will disclaim the acquaintance of Rachel Alexandre.”
“I find you, if I may say so, Professor Tamar,” he said, with a certain grimness, “excessively well informed on matters which seem to me to be no concern of yours.”
“To an historian, Sir Arthur, that can hardly be a reproach.”
“May I know, if you please, for what purpose you have engineered this meeting? After what you have said, you cannot expect me to believe that it is accidental.”
“I will not attempt to persuade you that it is — it was, I readily admit, in the hope of having some conversation with you that I came here this morning. My knowledge of your friendship with Rachel Alexandre is indeed accidental. I learnt of it by chance in the course of some research I was engaged in relating to the last year of the Second World War.” I hoped that he would not remember that I was a mediaevalist. “I believe, however, that the accident may prove to have been a fortunate one. Cantrip, you see, has been telling me a rather extraordinary story, to the effect that during the past three days you have been following the Contessa di Silvabianca across France and that during that time you caused him to be locked up in a wine cellar.” The judge said nothing, but his heavy eyebrows gathered themselves together in a manner which Julia would have found extremely alarming. “He has drawn the conclusion,” I continued, “that you intend some harm towards her.”
“That I…? Oh, that’s preposterous.”
“Knowing what I do, I have no doubt that it is, but he is convinced of it. You, I suspect, entertain a similar notion with regard to him. If you continue in your mutual misapprehensions, I fear that the matter may end in a good deal of embarrassment to both of you, not to speak of the Contessa herself. Sir Arthur, I understand that the reasons for your conduct may well be of a personal and confidential nature and that you would not wish them to be disclosed to Cantrip. Since, however, I already know so much of the story, can there be any grave objection to telling me the rest — in, I need hardly say, the strictest confidence? If I were able to tell Cantrip that I knew your motives and that they were in no way inimical to the interests of the Contessa, I believe that he would accept my assurance.”
The judge was silent, gazing down the sunlit street to where Cantrip and the Contessa were now engaged in a very animated and apparently entertaining conversation over a bottle of champagne. Neither of them looked, at present, to be much weighed down by anxiety. He was plainly inclined to tell me to go to the devil, but he was also reflecting, I suppose, that his conduct of the previous few days had been of equivocal propriety and that I might be a means of extrication from a potential embarrassment. Moreover, a man in his sixties does not easily decline an opportunity to speak of his youth.
“It’s rather a long story,” he said at last, “though I gather that some of it is already familiar to you. We’d better order something to eat.”
I had reason to be glad of the suggestion, for the story was indeed a long one. It began with an account, similar in substance to that I had heard from Colonel Cantrip, of the events which on that moonless night in 1944 had brought him, wet and shivering, to the cliff tops of Sark.
“There’s nothing like cold seawater for washing the heroism out of you, Professor Tamar. By the time I got back to the guard hut I was cursing myself for a fool for having gone. I was pretty sure it was too late to be any use — after all the noise, I was expecting to find the place full of German soldiers. But there were no Germans — just a girl in a white dress kneeling by the dead man’s body, with her hair shining in the light from the oil lamp.”
There was a warmth in his voice that I had not previously heard, and a note of remembered astonishment.
“I must have been a grim enough sight, dripping wet and with my face blacked, but she didn’t show any sign of being frightened. She asked what I was doing there and I told her about the raid and why I’d had to come back. She said she’d help me, but it wasn’t enough simply to undo the ropes — we had to dispose of the body altogether. She was worried about reprisals — if the Germans found one of their men shot dead they were likely to react fairly brutally against the civilian population. They might not even have believed there’d been a raid at all — the girl and her brother were the people living nearest the guard hut, and she thought they’d be the first to be suspected. He was a big man, the man I’d killed — it took the two of us to carry him. We threw him over the cliff at a point where we could be sure of him being washed out to sea — Rachel knew the currents and found the right place. In spite of everything, she was a good deal calmer than I was — she was a remarkable girl.”
“And afterwards she kept you hidden from the Germans?”
“For three months. Luckily for us, there was no great search made for the missing soldier. I suppose the Germans thought he’d deserted, stowed away perhaps in one of the fishing boats. Still, it was desperately dangerous for her — if they’d found out she was hiding me, they’d certainly have sent her to a concentration camp, if they hadn’t shot her outright. Her brother, too, I’m afraid, although he was only sixteen. Well, finally the news came through that St. Malo was in the hands of the Allies. As soon as we heard that, she set about finding someone to take the three of us across, and one night in July we were landed from a fishing boat on the coast of Brittany.”
“And you, I suppose, fell in love with her?”
“Oh of course — what else would a boy of nineteen do under such conditions? Head over heels in love with her, and making myself no end of a nuisance about it, I daresay. I must have pestered her almost to death trying to persuade her to marry me, but she wouldn’t have me.”
“Not even,” I said, having no choice but to venture the assumption, “when she knew she was going to have a child?”
“Not even then, though life wasn’t easy in those days for a woman with a child and no husband — it wouldn’t have occurred to her to marry for the sake of convenience. But things turned out well for her, I’m glad to say — she married a Breton businessman, and he made her very happy, I believe, until his death a few years ago. He brought Gabrielle up as his daughter.”
“But you have never met her?”
“No. Rachel thought that it would be disturbing for her to meet me, even when she grew older — it would hardly have been possible, even if it had been right, to prevent her finding out who I was. But Rachel and I kept in touch — chiefly by letter, though we met from time to time. So although Gabrielle knew nothing about me, I knew a great deal about her. Rachel’s letters were of almost nothing else — how pretty she was, how clever she was, how well she was doing in her studies, how successful she was in her profession. Her husband wasn’t good enough for her, of course, but then no one could have been. And then, a few months ago, there was something quite different — a letter suggesting disquiet.”
Gabrielle’s mother, it seemed, no less than her husband and Clementine Derwent, had noted the lowering effect on her spirits of events at recent Daffodil meetings and had eventually confided her anxieties to the judge.
“Did you,” I asked, “regard the notion that the Contessa was being followed as one to be taken seriously? Did you not think it more likely that she was simply imagining things? Her work is demanding, and she may be subject to considerable stress.”
“I could not be sure, Professor Tamar. I certainly did not think that our own Department of Inland Revenue would go to such lengths as she appeared to believe — or even the French Revenue authorities, though their methods of investigation are perhaps more vigorous than our own. I thought it not impossible, however, that her profession might have brought her into contact, and potentially into conflict, with persons very much more dangerous — if your clients are the sort of people who are anxious to hide their funds away in Jersey or Liechtenstein, then you are fishing in deep and murky waters.”
