Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

that’s what you’re looking for. No, you’ll just have to hump the memory along with you and go on carrying it, like the rest of us, and learn to live with yourself and your mistakes. It’s the one way you find out how to avoid more and greater failures.”

“But if I’ve killed him?” she said in a whisper, her eyes frantic but trusting.

“Whatever happens, you won’t have killed him. Not unless you’d been responsible for living their two lives as well as your own, for all the qualities in them and all the things they’d ever done or thought that eventually made it impossible for yesterday to end without a tragedy – only then would you have killed the one and made the other a murderer. Your contribution was bitter enough to you, but only the spark that set off a fire already laid. Don’t claim more than your share, Felicity, you’ll find your fair share quite enough to carry.”

After a brief, deep silence she said in a low voice: “Thank you! At least you haven’t treated me like a child.”

“You’re not a child. Let’s face it, you’re not grown-up yet, either, not quite. But I’ll tell you this, you’re a great deal nearer to being a woman than you were yesterday, when I first met you.”

Her lips tightened in a wry and painful smile that was very close indeed to being adult, and she said something no child could have said. “That doesn’t seem much for Lucien to die for,” said Felicity, and finding her own utterance more horrifying than she had expected, rose abruptly to leave him. “There isn’t anything… useful… I can be doing?”

“Living,” said George, “and perhaps for the moment just living, without any thinking. And don’t think that isn’t useful. For a start you can go in to dinner with the rest of them, and help to tide Follymead over to-night.”

Faintly she said, the child creeping back into her voice and eyes uninvited: “Do I have to? I’m not hungry.”

“You will be. The least useful think you can do is make yourself ill. And you’re needed, don’t forget you’re part of the household, a bigger part than ever before.”

“All right,” she said grimly, and took a step or two towards the door. The weight of the house came down on her appallingly for a moment. She looked back at him in sudden piteous appeal, she didn’t know for what.

“Somehow it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said in a muted wail, “if only I wasn’t so damned dull and plain …”

“Plain!” George echoed incredulously. “Plain!” he repeated in a growl of exasperation. “Child, did you never look at yourself in a mirror? Plain! Come here!” He took her by the shoulders and turned her about, and trotted her sharply across the room to the high mantel and the Venetian mirror above it. It hung so high that at close range only her head came into view, with George’s impatient face above. He cupped a hand under her chin and tilted her face up to the glass. “My dear little idiot, for goodness sake look at yourself. What do you want, in heaven’s name? Do you have to be coloured like a peony to be worth looking at? What if you haven’t got your aunt’s milk-whiteness and roses, and a pile of fair hair? This… this pale-brown, baby-fine stuff you have got was made to go with this face. You find me a more delicately-drawn hair-line than this, or a better-shaped head. And as for your face, I’d like to know who put you off it in the first place. Look at the form of these eye- sockets, look at this line, this curve along your chin and neck. Plain! You haven’t finished growing yet, and the peak’s still to come, but if you can’t see it coming you must be blind, my girl. Don’t you realise you’ve got bones that are going to keep you beautiful until you’re eighty? The prettiest colouring in the world won’t stand by you like these will.”

Felicity stood transfixed with pure astonishment, her hands raised to touch the cheek-bones his fingers had just quitted. Her eyes, huge with wonder, stared unrecognisingly at the face in the glass. Her lips moved very faintly, shaping distantly and incredulously the word “beautiful.”

The sudden rush of feet outside the door, the rap of knuckles on the wood, never penetrated her stunned senses. Even when the door opened upon Liri Palmer’s roused face and glittering eyes, with Dominic close to her shoulder, Felicity only turned like a creature in a dream, still lost to every shock but one.

“Can you come?” Liri’s blue stare fixed urgently upon George. “There’s something I want to show you.” She had bitten back, at sight of Felicity, the blunt announcement she would otherwise have made. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you, but it’s important.”

Her voice was mild, but her eyes were imperious. Liri’s maturity extended to sparing the children; or perhaps she was merely concerned with keeping them from under her feet.

“Felicity was just on her way to dinner,” said George, and started her towards the door with a gentle push between the shoulder-blades. She went where he urged her, obediently, like a sleep-walker. They moved aside from the doorway to let her pass, and she looked back for a moment with eyes still blind to everything but the distant vision of her own beauty, incredible and yet constant. She trusted George. There had been very few adults in her young life whom she had been able to trust.

“Thank you! I’ll try… I’ll do what you said.”

“Good night!” said George.

“Good night!” said Felicity remotely, and wandered away with a fingertip drawing and re-drawing the line of her cheek-bone and jaw, which George had found beautiful. Beautiful! She followed the beckoning word towards the dining-hall and her duty. She was enlarged, she contained and accepted even her guilt, even her inability to erase it. She had something to live for, so unexpected that it loomed almost as large as the death she had precipitated.

As soon as she was gone they all three came into the room and closed the door carefully after them. He should have known that where Dominic was, Tossa also would be.

“Well?”

“I’ve found the body,” said Liri, point-blank.

It couldn’t have been anything else, of course; he had seen it in her braced and motionless excitement. So there wasn’t going to be any blessed anticlimax, any apologetic reappearance. They had a body, they had a crime. And Follymead had the prospect of ruin. George looked at the dusk leaning in at the window, at the clock that showed five minutes past the dinner hour, and reached into the desk drawer for his torch.

“Where is he?”

“Caught in a fallen tree in the river. Below the stone bridge, in the wild part. I’ll take you there.”