Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

“We can only try. Yes, I think we might.”

“Even the girl? This Felicity?”

“Yes,” said Tossa positively. She cast a quick glance at Dominic, and went on, encouraged: “She has a special reason for keeping quiet. Dominic didn’t tell you quite all about her afternoon. Oh, he told what we know, but not what we think we know. You see, she’s an odd child. But no, it isn’t odd to be like that, not at her age, it’s not odd at all. She’s awkward and tense and self-conscious, and she’s a sort of poor relation here, and things are pretty much hell for her, even though everybody means well. And this weekend she’s gone right overboard for Lucien Galt, that’s all about it. That’s why she followed him out this afternoon. And when we met her coming back, we felt pretty sure he’d got fed up with having her round his neck, and sent her off with a flea in her ear. So if she seems to be covering up, that’s what she’s covering. And whoever tells more than they need about this afternoon, it won’t be Felicity.”

“I see,” said George, touched by what she had omitted rather than what she had said. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave her her dignity.”

“I know,” said Tossa warmly.

“What about the mere fact that one of the artists has missed two sessions? I suppose he should have appeared in all of them? Aren’t quite a number of people going to wonder about that? Even if they don’t notice your absence from the audience.”

“I don’t think we need worry about that. We sit where-ever we happen to, find a place, it’s liable to be different every time, and if you’re not along there now, why shouldn’t you be somewhere at the back? They won’t wonder about us, among so many. But about Galt it is rather different. We left that to the professor. Unless he saw a need, I don’t suppose he’s told them anything at all, just sailed on as if everything was just as it was meant to be. But if he thought they were beginning to do some serious wondering, I bet he could hand them an absolutely first-class lie.”

“He may have to. Keeping it quiet suits me, too. I don’t want seventy excited people tramping all over the place and getting in the way, any more than the county or the warden want their cherished college to get the wrong sort of advertisement. Will they still be in at the lecture now?”

“Should be. We ought to have half an hour yet.”

“We’ll go down to this grotto of yours first, then. Can we slip in by a back door afterwards, and dodge the house-party?”

“Yes, easily, from the back courtyard, where the garages are. There’s a covered passage to the basement stairs, and the warden’s office is quite near the top of the staircase. The front’s all gilt and carpeting and ashlar, but the back stairs is a little spiral affair. Pity,” said Dominic, “about the light. But there’s a huge torch in the glove- pocket here.”

“I want to take a look at the marks to-night, lift a sample, if possible. It’s going to rain before morning.”

“He covered them,” said Tossa, promptly and proudly.

“I should hope so,” said George; but he smiled.

They swept round the dramatic bend in the drive, and the house rose superb and staggering in the bone-white moonlight to take their breath away. The long range of the drawing-room windows blazed with light, flooding the lowest of the terraces; the class was still in session.

Dominic drove round the wing of the house and into the courtyard, and there they locked the station wagon and left it, taking the torch with them. The whiteness of moonlight on the pale, complex shapes of stone here was hard and dry as an articulated skeleton, the windows glared like empty eye-sockets. Dominic led the way down to the footbridge, and in the spectral, half-fledged woodland he switched on the torch. The great, gaunt gate towered in its inadequate fence, a few yards beyond the redwood tree. They came out on the blanched greensward by the grotto. The noise of the river, more deadly than by day, reached for them, a humming, throbbing, low, ferocious roar, a tiger-cat purring, and just as dangerous and beautiful.

Carefully Dominic circled his ring of rhubarb leaves, and lifted them. The little pool of the torch’s light moved in deep absorption all around the area, an eye of warmer pallor in the cold pallor of the moon.

“All right, cover them again,” said George at length. “Where’s this stuff that may be blood?”

The two heavy drops seemed to have shrunk since early evening, but even by this light they were there, clearly visible. They had no colour now, only a darkness without colour; but they had a clear form. Liquid had dripped, not directly, but in flight from a body in motion. One was flattened on open stone, immovable; but the second was on hard ground. George took a pen-knife to it, patiently and carefully, and pared it intact out of the ground, while Tossa held the torch for him. He had brought pill-boxes with him for such small specimens as this.

“To-morrow morning, early, I’ll go over all this open ground. Maybe Mr. Marshall can find me a tarpaulin, or something to drape over this. Now where was this medal and chain you found? Yes… I see.”

Behind them the river roared as softly as any sucking dove, and they felt it there, and were not deceived into believing it harmless. The sound had a curious property, it seemed to be one with the vast outer silence which contained it. At night, in the grounds of Follymead, Pan and panic were conceptions as modern and close as central heating, though what they distilled was a central chill. Dominic folded his arm and his wind-jacket about Tossa, and felt her turn to him confidingly. She wasn’t afraid; she only shook, like him, with awareness of chaos, braced and ready for it.

“All right,” said George, in a soft, surprised and gentle voice. “Let’s get back to the house and talk to Mr. Marshall.”

“We must have tests made, of course,” said George, installed behind the desk in Edward Arundale’s private office at the top of the back stairs, “but I think I ought to say at once that this is almost certainly blood.” The little pill-box with its pear-drop shape of dull brown on fretted gravel lay in his palm; he shut the lid over it and laid it aside. “I needn’t tell you that blood in that quantity could come from the most superficial of injuries. But we’re faced with the fact that Lucien Galt has not reappeared or sent any message. Those who know him say he wouldn’t cheat on a commitment. I regard this as good evidence. They know what to expect of him; they didn’t expect this, and they don’t accept it. He was regarded as in many ways a fiendishly difficult colleague; but he didn’t give short weight once a bargain was struck. We must also face the fact that the Braide in flood ran a yard or so from where these tell-tale marks were found. If there was a struggle there, as appears to be the case, then the loser may only too easily have gone over the weir and down the river. I am putting, of course, the gravest possible case, because we can’t afford to ignore it. We must take into account all possibilities.”

Henry Marshall licked his dry lips and swallowed arduously. “Yes, I realise that. I… may I take it that you will