Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

my father. You’ll have to tell him, you know. We don’t matter, but we’ll stay with you, if you want us to. It’s him you have to tell. You go and sit in there with Tossa, and I’ll go and find him.”

CHAPTER VI

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YOU TELL IT,” said George reasonably. “You know what happened, and nobody’s interested in tripping you up or trying to make you say something you don’t want to say. Just tell us exactly what happened, and don’t be afraid that we won’t understand. Yes, Tossa’ll stay with you. Don’t worry! You’ll feel better when you’ve told us all about it. Take your time. We won’t interrupt you.”

They were all in the warden’s office together, the door safely shut, the room quiet and confidential, nobody to worry them or interfere with the desperate sympathy of their communion. Felicity sat shrunken in the arm-chair, her hands tightly clasped; the pressure seemed to help her to concentrate a mind which otherwise might fly apart from pure over-strain. Tossa sat beside her with an arm laid round the back of the chair, ready to touch the child or let her alone as the need arose. Nobody would have suspected that Tossa had so much patience and forbearance in her, least of all Tossa herself; but then, it had never been called into use until now. Dominic sat withdrawn on a rear corner of the desk, willing to remain unseen and unnoticed as long as possible; he was hardly more than an extension of Tossa at this moment.

“Lucien went out alone into the grounds yesterday afternoon,” George prompted gently, “and then you went out on your way to look at the swan’s nest, and saw him ahead of you, and you ran and caught him up. Tossa and Dominic saw you go down towards the footbridge together. Go on from there.”

“It wasn’t quite like that,” said Felicity, in a voice small, hard and clear. Now that she had reached the point of speech there were going to be no prevarications; there was even the faintest note of revulsion in her tone for this too fastidious consideration. She straightened her slender spine, and looked fairly and squarely at what confronted her, and didn’t lower her eyes. “I didn’t care a damn about the swan’s nest. There is one there, of course, but I wasn’t going out to look at that, I was just following Lucien. I watched him go out, and then I went after him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to get to know him really, properly, and for him to get to know me. Because I loved him. I do love him! I did, in a way, even before I ever saw him in the flesh, and as soon as I saw him I knew it was love. I knew I was the right person for him, and so I went straight for my objective, and I was sure he couldn’t help but feel the same way.”

Carefully, nobly, they all sat without stirring a muscle or drawing a hastened breath, nothing to suggest amusement, censure, or surprise. But Felicity knew her grown-ups, even those who were only a few years ahead of her. Faint, proud colour rose in her cheeks. She looked George fiercely, if wretchedly, in the eyes, and said with dignity:

“People think that at fifteen one has no deep feelings. They forget about girls like Juliet. It just isn’t a matter of age. And in any case women are always much more mature and formed than men of the same age, and much more likely to recognise the real thing when it happens to them. Look at Tatiana, in Eugene Onegin. She was the young one, and he patronised and talked down to her, and treated her like a child, and wouldn’t take her seriously, but she was right, all the same, and he lived to find it out when it was too late. And this was… rather like ‘Onegin’ over again. Lucien just didn’t realise how important it was, what was happening to us. He didn’t want anyone then, I suppose. He surely didn’t want me. He didn’t try to send me away, he only walked on and took no notice of me. We went along the ride there, on the other side of the river, and then we came to that gate, and he pushed it open and went on down to the grotto. He sat on the bench in there, looking at the river, and I sat by him and tried… I wanted him to understand, not to make a terrible mistake, but he didn’t understand at all. He was like all the rest, he thought I was just a kid. It was ‘Onegin’ all over again.”

All quite predictable, thought George sadly, but quite innocent. And yet something happened down there that wasn’t innocent, and she knows it, and is forcing herself towards it inch by inch. But he didn’t prompt her again. However she delayed, however deviously she approached what she had no intention now of softening, it couldn’t be long in coming. Only a quarter of an hour or so later, Tossa and Dominic had met her coming back towards the house.

For the first time it occurred to him as a serious possibility that Felicity had killed Lucien Galt with her own hands. Her situation must have been disastrous enough, and her disillusionment bitter enough, and a moody and impatient young man, getting up to prowl along the waterside without a thought for the love-sick child who meant no more to him than a persistent mosquito, would have been a very easy victim indeed. All that talk, faithfully reported by Dominic, about accessories before the fact, about causing somebody else to commit murder, without meaning to, all that might be mere talk at random, fending off the horrid fact itself. Or so he would have been tempted to believe, if this had been any other girl but Felicity. Felicity didn’t talk at random, didn’t toss about terms like “accessory before the fact” without knowing only too well what they meant. Her solitude had been peopled from books, and her vocabulary, at least, was an adult’s. No, wait for the truth to emerge, don’t anticipate. She didn’t push him. Nothing so simple.

“I told him,” she said, moistening her lips, ‘that I wasn’t a child, and he couldn’t solve anything by telling me to run away and play, I told him outright that I loved him, and he’d better think carefully before he threw away what he might never be offered again. And I said I’d prove it in any way he chose, because there wasn’t anything he could ask me that I wouldn’t do for him.”

She looked at her locked hands in faint surprise, suddenly aware for a moment that the tightness of their grip was hurting her. She relaxed them a little, and they remained steady at first, and then began to shake; the thin fingers clamped tight again and held fast.

“And then he turned on me,” she said in a precise, drained voice, “quite suddenly and viciously, and said: ‘All right, then, prove it. If you’re ready to do anything, then do this for me. Go and find Mrs. Arundale, tell her where I am, and tell her I’ve got to talk to her alone. Got to,” he said. “Ask her to come to me as soon as she can, he said, and I’ll be waiting for her here. And give her my love!’ ”

The brief silence hung blankly expectant, shocked but still braced for greater shocks, waiting for what was to follow. This was brutal enough, but no more than they might have expected; and yet there was something in the air that warned them that here the path twisted, and the place of their arrival, when they reached it, would be very far from where they had reckoned on finding themselves. The faint click of the door-latch drawing back hardly seemed to break the stillness; only the distant babel from round the tea-trolleys, gushing in through the opening door, made them all turn their heads sharply.

Audrey Arundale stood in the doorway, her eyes large and startled in her pale face, looking from one to another of them without comprehension, but with a remote and immured intelligence as piteous in its way as Felicity’s.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you weren’t alone. I’ll come back later.” And she was actually withdrawing, her eyes fixed upon George, when he called her back. Of course she had heard her own name. What was the point of shutting her out now? In any case, she had a right to hear this, it might even be helpful to have her there, to watch the impact of her presence on Felicity, and of Felicity’s words on her.