Black Is the Colour of My True Love's Heart

It must have been nearly eight o’clock when they heard the first footsteps crossing the terrace, the clash of the window-latch, a heel on the sill, stumbling, uncertain. Two people, the second closely following the first, but never touching him. A hand reached over an oblivious shoulder to the light-switches at the end of the gallery, hesitated, and chose the single lamp that made only a faint pool of radiance in a corner of the twilit room. Nobody said anything; but Dominic caught Tossa’s eye, and Tossa rose softly and slipped past Lucien Galt, who neither saw nor heard her, Dominic took her hand, and drew her away with him, and Lucien and Liri were left together.

He saw her, and his eyes came to life in the shocked grey mask of his face. He pushed himself off from the doorway, and walked into her arms without a word, and without a word she opened them to him. He slid to his knees at her feet, and she held him on her heart, along with the chill and the dank smell of the river; and she knew where Audrey had gone. After a while he stopped shivering, and locked his arms tightly round her body, and heaved a huge sigh that convulsed them both; and neither he nor she would ever know whether it was of grief at his loss, or involuntary relief at this vast and terrible simplification of his problems, or both, and in what measure.

“I called to her,” he said presently, in a voice drained and weary. “She was on the parapet. I wanted to tell her that we… that you and I… that we didn’t care, that it didn’t matter any more…”

“It wouldn’t have been any good,” said Liri. “It did matter to her.”

No, it wouldn’t have been any good, even if she had listened to him. How can you convince a person like Audrey Arundale that she no longer has to sacrifice everything to respectability, to public reputation, to what the world will say? What’s the good of arguing with her that her parents are dead now, and Edward’s dead, and the people she has left simply don’t look at values that way, simply won’t care, that they would welcome her back even after years of prison, and damn the world’s opinion? How do you set about convincing her of that, when she’s been trained to subdue everything else to appearances all her life? She couldn’t be expected to change now. This way there wouldn’t be any murder trial, there needn’t even be much publicity of any kind. The police are not obliged to make public the particulars of a case which is closed to their satisfaction, when the person who would otherwise have been charged is dead, and the public interest wouldn’t be served by stirring up mud. They simply say the case is closed, no prosecutions will be instituted as a result of it, and that’s the end of it. General curiosity only speculates for a very short time, till the next sensation crops up. This way everything would be smoothed away, everything hushed up, everything made the best of, just as it had always had to be. Maybe they’d even succeed in getting an open verdict on Edward’s death, and the locals would evolve improbable theories about a poacher or a vagrant surprised in the park, and hitting out in panic with the nearest weapon that offered. Audrey wouldn’t care. Audrey had observed her contract and her loyalties as best she could to the end. Edward would have wished it.

“I got her out,” Lucien’s labouring mouth shaped against Liri’s heart. “They’ve been all this time trying… trying…”

Yes. Trying to revive her, of course; but Audrey, it seemed, had made quite sure.

“All I meant to do was warn her,” Liri said. “I’d just found out that he knew… It was the only way I had…”

Her voice flagged, like his. They had no need of explanations, and speech was such an effort yet that they could afford to use it only for the ultimate essentials. With her cheek pressed against his wet black hair: “I love you,” said Liri gently, and that was all.

“She was my mother,” he said, “and I can’t even bury her.”

The ambulance had come and gone. Henry Marshall had had a fire lit for them in the small library, and left the handful of them there together in the huge and silent house. Lucien had bathed and changed, and put on again with his fresh clothes a drained and languid calm. Liri sat across the hearth from him and watched him steadily, and often he looked up to reassure himself that she was there. Two dark, reticent, proud people; in the intensity of this unvoiced reconciliation their two young, formidable faces had grown strangely alike, as though mentally they stared upon each other with such passion that each had become a mirror image of the other.

“I’ve got to sit back and let Arundale’s relatives do it for me, because I can’t compromise what she wanted left alone. All her life keeping up appearances, doing the correct thing, and now she has to die the same way.”

“She chose it,” said George.

“She never had a choice, being the person she was. If my father hadn’t been killed…”

“You do know about your father?”

“Do you?” challenged Lucien jealously.—

And neither of them was speaking of John James Galt, though he had done his part well enough, no doubt, during the year or so he had been in the place of a father.

“I know the Galts re-registered you as theirs when you were only a few months old, presumably as soon as the adoption proceedings were completed. I’m reasonably sure that your real father must have been one of the Czech pilots who were stationed at Auchterarne during the war. I guess that he must have been killed in action in 1942. But adoption certificates carry only the Christian names given to the child, and the name of the adoptive parent. His name I don’t know yet. I shall get it eventually either from Somerset House or from the service records. But that’s unnecessary now,” said George gently. “You tell me.”

“His name was Vaclav Havelka. I know, because she told me about him. Vaclav is the same name we call Wenceslas. That’s why he gave her his Saint Wenceslas medal. He hadn’t got anything else to give her. He hadn’t even got a country, then, only a job and a uniform. He was twenty years old, and she was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and they met at some innocent local bunfight when her school was up there in Scotland. There wasn’t a hope for them. Her people were set on her getting into society and marrying a lord, or something, not a refugee flyer with no money and no home. So she did the one thing really of her own that she ever did, she gave herself to him. Maybe she hoped to force her parents’ hands, and maybe she might even have managed it, but it never came to that, because my father was shot down six months before I was born. After that, she didn’t put up much of a fight for me.”

“How much chance did she have?” said Liri in a low voice.

“Not much, I know. With my father gone she hadn’t got anybody to stand by her. She had to tell her folks, and they took her away from school quickly and quietly, and then set to work on her, for ever urging her to have it all hushed up, to spare them the shame, to think of her future, when she hadn’t got any future. She gave way in the end. She’d have had to be a heroine not to. She let them hide her away somewhere to have me on the quiet, and then she let me go for adoption. But she insisted on meeting the Galts before she’d sign. They were decent, nice people who badly wanted a child, she knew I’d be all right with them. So she asked them to make sure that I kept my father’s medal, and then she promised never to trouble them again, and she never did. And after the war they married her off to Arundale, a big wedding and a successful career, everything they’d wanted for her. You know how he first met her? He gave away the prizes at her school speech-day, the last year she