“Don’t go, Mrs. Arundale! If you’re free, please stay. I think you should be present at this.”
“If you think I ought to,” she said, her eyes opening wider; and she closed the door quietly, and sat down in the chair Dominic hurriedly drew out for her from behind the desk. Felicity had given her one long, unreadable look, and returned to the painful contemplation of her own rigid hands.
“But if you don’t mind, I should be glad if you’d make no comment or interruption until Felicity has finished what she has to tell us.”
“Of course,” said Audrey, “I won’t say anything.” Her voice was light and plaintive, as though the weight of events was too much for her, and she had lost the thread; but her behaviour would always be gentle, coherent and dignified. If there was something tougher and shrewder, and altogether more passionate, beneath that bland, bewildered and charming exterior, she had it under absolute control.
“Go on, Felicity. I’m sorry if we’ve broken the thread for you.”
“It’s all right,” said said bleakly, “I can’t lose my place. I wish I could. Well, that was what Lucien said to me. And it was so cruel and so wicked, and I was so terribly hurt, that I just looked right back at him and said all right, I would. And I walked away from him, and away from the grotto, and latched the gate after me, and came straight up to the house. That was when you met me.” She flashed one grey glance towards Tossa. “And Uncle Edward and Aunt Audrey were still sitting over their coffee in their sitting-room. So I delivered Lucien’s message.”
Something vengeful was still left in the thin voice of hopeless despair and regret. At first they didn’t understand fully; she saw the faint, cloudy questioning in their eyes, and made full and patient explanation.
“Word for word, just like he’d given it to me, I recited it aloud in front of both of them. I said: ‘Aunt Audrey, Lucien’s down at the grotto by the river, and he says he’s got to talk to you alone, and will you please go down to him there as soon as you can, and he’ll be waiting. And I was to give you his love’.”
In the instant of horrified comprehension the silence was absolute. Then Audrey Arundale’s long, elegant hands made a sudden abortive motion of protest and pain, groping forward along the arm of her chair; her fair head arched back, and speech came bubbling into her throat, but never reached her lips. George gave her a sharp glance and a warning frown, and she subsided into her old apparent calm, even sighed the worst of the passing tension out of her soundlessly, and continued watching her niece with nothing in her eyes but a grieved and helpless sympathy.
“I see,” said George, in the most impersonal of voices. Possibly, Felicity had wanted to shock, not wantonly, but to ease the burden of her own horror, and to reassure herself that this crisis of hers was indeed something large and dreadful, even by adult standards, and not a triviality of childish spite of no significance to anyone but her. That would make her anguish even sharper by making it pointless. She needn’t have worried on that score, he thought ruefully. What was done to her was a truly cruel and ferocious thing, and what she did in return was large enough even for a Shakespearian woman scorned, or one of those ballad heroines whose wrongs and revenges Liri Palmer sang.
“And then?” he said, in the same neutral tone.
“They sat there staring at me like stones, both of them. It was terribly quiet, you can’t imagine how quiet. And then they both turned, ever so slowly, and stared at each other, and Uncle Edward got up, and put his coffee-cup down on the table very carefully, as if it was full and might spill over, but it was empty. He thanked me, and told me I could go. You know? Just as if I’d come to say tea was ready. So I did. I went out and closed the door, and left them there.”
“And you knew then,” asked George, “what you’d done?”
“I knew what I’d done. I’d even meant to do it, and yet in a way I hadn’t, but by then I couldn’t undo it. You can’t, you know. The very next minute is too late. I wanted somewhere to hide, so I went up into the turret and on to the roof, the side where I couldn’t see or hear anything from the river. I stayed there until tea, hoping nothing would happen, hoping everybody’d appear as usual. But Lucien didn’t come. And then I knew I’d done something terrible, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I was afraid to.”
She raised her eyes to George’s face, and from behind the windows of her glass prison he saw her staring out at him in awful panic, while her slight body sat demure and still.
“It’s all through me,” she said with terrified certainty, “that Lucien’s dead, and Uncle Edward’s on the run.”
Audrey uttered something between a gasp and a cry, and put up her hands to her face. Her eyes appealed wildly to George. How could this child possibly know about Edward being missing? Nobody had known but the three of them, George, Henry Marshall, and Audrey herself. And now Felicity brought out this flat, fearful pronouncement as though its certainty was not in question. George shook his head at her, just perceptibly, and she clutched at the hint of reassurance with unexpected quickness of apprehension. Of course, Felicity was merely drawing an inference which seemed to her self-evident, not speaking from knowledge at all. Audrey sat back wearily, one hand shading her face, her long-drawn, aching breaths shaking her whole body.
“We don’t yet know,” said George sensibly, “that anyone has died, or that anyone has any cause to run. It may very well turn out that we’re all worrying without cause, and that goes for you as much as for any of us. Whatever you did, and whatever you think may have followed from it, don’t jump to any conclusions yet. Wait and see. Mr. Arundale isn’t due back from Birmingham until this evening. It won’t be time to conclude that he’s on the run, as you put it, until he failed to do as I hear he always does, come back right on schedule. Give yourself and him the benefit of the doubt until to-morrow, and don’t be in too big a hurry to think you’ve caused a tragedy. Who knows? You may find yourself sitting opposite Lucien at breakfast.”
He seemed, Dominic thought, to be choosing his words with some care, and he could not be sure if it was for Felicity’s benefit, or for Audrey’s; or, in some more complicated process, for both of them, and in different ways. Felicity looked at him doubtfully, afraid for a moment of disbelief or disparagement; but though his voice was dry, reasonable and quiet, his face was grave. He contemplated her without a trace of the indulgence she dreaded; she believed that she had let loose a death, and he acknowledged the validity and solemnity of her belief.
All he was doing now was reminding her that evil sometimes misses its target. So that was all right, in so far as anything so monstrous could ever again be made all right; and there was now nothing more she could do. Unexpectedly, Felicity began to cry; she had had neither time nor energy to spare for it until then. Between her sheltering hands she said indistinctly: “Is there… anything else you want to ask me?”
“Not now. But later I would like to talk to you again. What I suggest is that you three skip the next lecture, and go and have some tea by yourselves, in the small library, perhaps. And you come to me here, before dinner, Felicity, say seven o’clock, and I may have one or two questions to ask you then. Thank you for telling me all this. In the meantime, don’t think about it more than you can help. If you have no objection, you and I will think about it together, this evening.”
