Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

His notebook was a joke by that time. He couldn’t talk without it open before him, and yet he had never been known to consult it for any detail, however abstruse.

“You’ve never needed it yet,” protested Liri, her eyes clinging to the distant pair at the back of the room, lost now in an even dimmer light. Someone had turned out the strip-lights over the pictures. “You’re not likely to start tonight.”

“There has to be a first time for everything. Go on, now, like a good girl.”

And she went, impatiently but obediently, flashing to the doorway and running along the corridor. Her heels rang on the polished wood with a solitary and frightening sound, for outside the great yellow room the house hung silent and deserted. Nothing now was quite real, so much of her mind laboured frenziedly with this crisis she could not comprehend. She pushed open the door of the warden’s office, which for the past three days had become an extension of police headquarters, while the house went about its blithe business oblivious of all evil. The massive folder of the professor’s notes lay on a walnut table near the window. She tucked it under her arm, and turned to the door again, and then as abruptly turned back, and crossed to the desk.

Would he leave anything, any unconsidered trifle, where she could find it and make sense of it? She had to know; there was a feverish pulse beating in her blood that insisted it was imperative for her to know.

She put down her portfolio on the desk, and began trying all the drawers one by one, but they were fast locked. She should have guessed that. There was nothing here for her.

But there was. Her eyes fell on it as she straightened up with a sigh from her useless search. There it was, propped against Arundale’s rack of reference books, eye to eye with her, the half-plate photograph of a young girl in a white party-dress. She had never seen the living face joyous like this, but she knew it at once, as she knew the little silver disc that hung round the girl’s neck on a thin chain.

Lucien’s medal, the one he had worn ever since she had known him, long before he met Audrey Arundale. The one thing that had been his father’s. And yet here it hung round the neck of the sixteen-year-old Audrey, how many years ago, how many worlds away?

Now she did understand. Intuitively, without need of details or evidence, she understood everything. Yes, even why Lucien was sitting there among the audience in the dressing-room, under no restraint, though he surely expected arrest afterwards. Liri knew better. She knew what was going to happen afterwards; she knew what went on behind George Felse’s unrevealing face.

She caught up the portfolio and slipped from the room, to run like a wild thing through the silent libraries, and along the corridors to the warden’s private quarters. But there was no one there. The lights were out and the rooms deserted. And she must go back, she couldn’t hunt any farther. Too late now to make any amends, too late to look for Audrey, too late to warn her. A minute more, and someone else would be out hunting for her.

She went back to the yellow drawing-room, back to her place on the dais. She gave the professor his notes, which of course he would not need or use. It was no use now; there was no way of reaching her. Liri raised her eyes and looked carefully over the array of attentive faces, little moons in a mild twilight. Those two at the back, side by side on their crazy little gilded perch, looked improbably at ease. The professor was talking about the summing-up of all that they had experienced together, the relationship of folk-music to the wider and deeper field of music itself. Presently the Rossignol twins were singing, two angelic voices, eerie and sweet.

The long range of windows that led out on to the terrace brought the dim and cloudy day in upon them in tints of subdued violet and green. Not even dusk yet, not by a couple of hours, and yet the low and heavy cloud hung like a pall, turning this after-tea hour into night.

The most distant of the long windows, down there at the back of the room, stood ajar. A while ago they had all been closed. The last chair at the end of that row, certainly empty then, was occupied now. Someone had come in by the window, and moved the chair aside into the embrasure, drawing a fold of the heavy curtains round it to screen her from at least half the room. A dead black dress, the sheen of pale, piled hair.

Edward Arundale’s widow, still chatelaine of Follymead, had come to the final concert. They were there in the same room together, there was only about fifteen yards of air between them, and yet they could not communicate.

Or was there still a way? That curious conversation with Felicity had started a tune running in Liri’s head, and it would not be quieted. It plagued her with reminders of the rogue page who tossed just such an apple of discord in among Lord Barnard’s household “where they were sat at meat.” The verse ranged through her head, in the light of what she had just learned, with a new and terrifying aptness. If they talked to her, they could talk to another person, one, the only one except George Felse and Lucien Galt, who knew the whole story, and would recognise only too well the full implications. She might still misunderstand; but that had to be risked. Liri could not leave her to step over the edge of the pit without so much as reaching a hand to her. Whatever her own wrongs, she owed Audrey that and more. She was indebted to her for a world, and she could make so little repayment now.

Liri folded her hands on her guitar, and waited. She knew now what she had to do.

CHAPTER XI

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PAST SIX O’CLOCK. The darkness was purplish, thundery, the air still as before a storm. It must be her turn soon. Why had the old man kept her until last?

“And now for Liri. She promised to sing us ‘The Queen’s Maries’ in the full text, which is by way of being a marathon performance, so I’ve reserved enough time for her to do herself justice. But now she’s whispering in my ear that she’d like to change her choice. It’s a woman’s privilege. So I’ll leave any introduction to Liri.”

“I thought,” she said, clearly and quietly, “that everyone knows the story of Mary Hamilton, and there are so many fine stories that very few people know. I warn you, this is a marathon performance, too, but I hope you won’t find it dull. I’d like to sing the ballad of ‘Gil Morrice.’ Anybody know it?”

Thank God, nobody did. She knew the proud, proprietary emanations of those who find themselves one up on the rest, and here there was nothing like that, only pleased expectancy. It’s still true, people love to be read to, to listen to stories. Even those kids who are so with it that they’ve completely lost contact with most of it – “it” being the total body of mental and spiritual fulfilment and delight, the mass of music, the body of books, the entire apparition of art – even they will shiver and thrill to this blood-stained tragedy, though they won’t recognise their excitement as something dating back into prehistory. They’ll think it’s because this is “folk,” of all the odd labels. This is human, which is more than being folk.

“Here goes then. ‘Gil Morrice’.”