“If you wouldn’t mind, my dear. No need to broadcast anything – not yet, anyhow.” The professor smiled at her, but he was not quite easy in his mind, even then.
“No, I won’t.” And in a few moments she returned from the drawing-room with Felicity. The girl was pale, her eyes huge and opaque as grey glass, her mask slightly and frighteningly out of drawing.
“Felicity, we’ve lost Lucien Galt.” The professor was placid and gentle. “Maybe he’s just loitering about somewhere with a stopped watch, maybe he’s gone to sleep in the summer-house, or something daft and simple. But we’d better have a look for him, perhaps, just in case. I hear you were down by the river this afternoon, did you see anything of him? I’m told he’d gone that way.”
“I… we went out together,” said Felicity in a thin thread of a voice. “He was just ahead of me when I went out, so I caught him up and we went together. We went downstream on the other side, but only as far as where the paths cross. You know, by the baby redwood tree. Then he went on across the loop, I think… anyhow, I crossed over again by the stone bridge, and left him there.” She looked from the professor to Dominic and Tossa, and moistened her lips. “I met Miss Barber and Mr. Felse when I was coming back.”
“And you weren’t out again? And you haven’t seen Mr. Galt come back to the house?”
She shook her head vehemently. “No. I was indoors all the rest of the afternoon. I had some work to do for Uncle Edward.”
The whip of the warden’s name stung Henry Marshall into full awareness of his responsibilities. Arundale was in Birmingham by now, and the whole load of Follymead came down on his deputy’s shrinking shoulders. The social load was enough, but that he was prepared to tackle. This was something that hadn’t been on the agenda, and he didn’t know what to do.
“He must be in the grounds,” he said unhappily. “Apparently he simply went out for a walk. I suppose there’s always a possibility that he may have had an accident, just an ordinary fall. It’s not so difficult to break an ankle, or something like that, along the river-banks. Professor, I really think you’d better get on with your lecture, and try to manage without him, if you can, while some of us have a hunt through the park for him.”
“I think I had,” agreed the professor dryly, one ear cocked for the rising noise of conversation drifting in from the distant drawing-room. “I’ll tell them nothing about this. Better keep it to the few of us here, until we know what we’re about.”
They agreed, in a subdued murmur.
“You find the lad,” said the professor, swooping towards the door. “I’ll keep this lot quiet.”
When he was gone, there were just five of them left in the room, Tossa, Felicity, Liri Palmer, Dominic and Marshall. It wasn’t the party they would have chosen. Three of them women, and two of those tense and anxious already. Liri was unquestionably durable, but Felicity looked brittle as glass, ready to shatter. Dominic touched her hand lightly, and urged her with a frown and a silent shake of his head to leave the search to them. Nevertheless, they were still five when they went out in the green, misty, pre-evening light to quarter the grounds for Lucien Galt.
The path by which Lucien and Felicity had vanished in the early afternoon sank itself deep in groves of diverse trees, artfully deployed, and reached the river at some distance from the house. A narrow footbridge with a single handrail brought Dominic to the other side. The largest of the three weirs that controlled the passage of the Braide through the Follymead grounds lay upstream, and here the waters rolled brown and high and fast, seamed with currents, and tossing twigs and branches from hand to hand as it rushed along. The spring rains had been heavy after heavy snows, the sodden grass of the banks fermented with brownish foam, and strained at its roots, streaming out like dead hair along the taut surface of the water. On the other side the path turned downstream, at first close to the bank; but in a little while it plunged into woodland again, and left the waterside to take a short cut across one of the artificial loops into which the Braide had been contorted by Cothercott ingenuity.
Dominic turned with the path. Almost certainly Lucien had come this way with Felicity this afternoon, just as she had said. She had reappeared from the copse on the other bank, having recrossed by the arched stone bridge two or three loops downstream, the bridge which was designed as a part of the Follymead stage-set, to be seen in exactly the right place in that elaborate landscape when viewed from the drawing-room windows. Somewhere between this spot and that bridge she and Lucien had parted company. Dominic walked the widening ride, fenced off now on the water side by a barrier of old, ornate iron posts and fine chains, and his feet were silent in last autumn’s rotting leaves.
It didn’t follow, of course, that Lucien need be anywhere in this quarter now; in the time between he could have been anywhere in the grounds, or even several miles out of them. There was so much of Follymead that the five of them had had to spread themselves out singly in order to cover it all; and it was hardly surprising that Felicity had set off, at first, in this direction. But she had drawn back when she had seen Dominic heading the same way, and gone off voluntarily to thread the shrubberies and gardens on the other side of the house. Liri and Tossa were patrolling the more open ornamental park-land, one on either side the drive to the lodge. Where Marshall was he didn’t know; probably in the distant preserves which were going to be the worst job of all if they were forced to make a real search of it.
The river was out of sight now, somewhere away on his right hand; but here came a small cleared space where another path crossed his, and the right turn here must surely close in on the Braide again, and bring him to the bridge. And here was Felicity’s baby redwood, just inside the railed enclosure, an infant of about fifty or sixty, probably, with the characteristic spreading base and narrow, primitive, aspiring shape. He leaned over the chain fence and stuck his thumb into the thick, spongy bark. So here it had happened, whatever had happened between them… here or somewhere close by, she wouldn’t bother to be accurate to a few yards. And after that nobody had seen anything of Lucien again. Though there was always the comfortable possibility, of course, that he had simply decided to be irresponsible this evening, and gone off to the pub in the village to see what entertainment was offering locally.
Dominic would have liked to believe it; but whatever Lucien Galt might not have been, he seemed to be a conscientious professional who delivered what he promised. And again, and more disturbingly, the prosaic solution didn’t chime with the atmosphere of this fantastic place.
He hesitated at the crossing of the two paths, and then turned right, as Felicity must have done when she took her broken heart and hurt pride in her arms and ran away from the debacle. And twenty yards along, with the chain fence still accompanying him on his right, he came to an enormous scrolled iron gate in it, massive with leaves and flowers, twice as tall as the fence. Evidently the gate was a survival from some older and far more solid fence, long taken down for scrap. To judge by the gate itself, it dated from the high days of iron, maybe around 1800 or even earlier, stuff that could go neglected for centuries before it even began to corrode seriously. It hadn’t been painted for a long time, and it sagged a little on its hinges, but swung freely when he pushed it. The bracket into which the latch should drop was still fixed immovably to the gate-post, as big as a bruiser’s closed fist; but there was no latch hanging now in the wards.
The elaboration of the approach suggested that this patch of woodland by the river bank enshrined one of the
