BPCC Hazell Books Ltd
Member of BPCC Ltd
Aylesbury, Bucks, England
Futura Publications
A Division of
Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd
66-73 Shoe Lane
London EC4P 4AB
A member of Maxwell Pergamon Publishing Corporation plc
Black is the Colour of my True-Love’s Heart
CHAPTER I
^ »
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
“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!”
