With her heart in her mouth, Charlotte followed her.
At five minutes past one o’clock Charlotte and Emily, dressed in dark stuff gowns and with shawls tied over their heads (Emily most particularly to hide the pale gleam of her hair), crept along the pavement towards the garden entrance of Dulcie Arledge’s house. The carriage lamp was not lit; the streetlights were sufficient, and anyway, they wished intensely not to be noticed.
“Next one,” Charlotte whispered. “I’ve got a knife and a skewer in case it is locked.”
“A skewer?” Emily questioned.
“A kitchen skewer. You know—to test if things are cooked.”
“No, I don’t know. I don’t cook. Can you use it?”
“Of course I can. All you have to do is poke it in.”
“And the door opens?” Emily said with surprise.
“No of course not, fool! You know if the meat or the cake is cooked.”
Emily giggled, and immediately in front of her Charlotte gave a little hiccough of excitement, and giggled as well.
When they reached the gate it was indeed padlocked, and Emily was obliged to light the lamp and hold it, with her back to Charlotte and her eyes fearfully watching the road, while Charlotte twiddled the skewer around carefully and at last managed to move the very simple latch. Emily doused the lamp instantly, and they undid the lock, took it off its chain and opened the door.
They slipped inside with a gasp of relief and pushed the gate closed again, being careful to take the chain and padlock with them, in case its open state should be noticed and cause suspicion.
Charlotte looked around her. It was extremely dark. The wall was high enough to block off almost all the light from the streetlamps beyond, and the sky was too overcast to allow much of the pale, three-quarter moon to shed more than a faint luminescence.
“I can’t see,” Emily whispered. “We aren’t even going to find the greenhouse in this, never mind a bloodstain.”
“We can find the greenhouse,” Charlotte replied. “We’ll light the lamp again when we are inside it.”
“Do you really think anyone in the house would be awake at this hour?”
“No, but it isn’t worth the risk. We would be turned out before we could find anything, and how on earth would we explain ourselves?”
The argument silenced Emily. The thought of being found was too hideous even to contemplate. They had no imaginable excuse whatever.
Charlotte leading the way, they crept forward along a narrow cobbled path, slimy with moss and dew, Emily clinging onto Charlotte’s skirt to make sure they did not lose each other in the dark. To do that, and then come face to face, would be enough to break their nerve entirely. One shriek, however involuntary, would waken the neighborhood.
The huge mass of the house rose to their left, black against the pale clouds, and ahead of them was a broken roofline and the serrated edge of the spine of a lower roof, an elegant finial pointing a sharp finger upwards at the end.
“Greenhouse?” Emily asked softly.
“Conservatory,” Charlotte replied.
“How do you know?”
“Finial,” Charlotte whispered back. “Don’t have a finial on a greenhouse. It must be beyond, ’round the corner.”
“Are you even sure they’ve got one?”
“They must have. Every house this size has a greenhouse or a potting shed. Greenhouse would be better.”
“Why?”
“Easier to lure him to. How would you lure your husband to the potting shed in the middle of the night?”
Emily giggled nervously. “Don’t be ridiculous. Conservatory, maybe. A romantic tryst? Put on your best peignoir and languish among the lilies?”
“Hardly. If you’ve been married twenty years—and he preferred men anyway. Damnation!” This last was added as Charlotte tripped and stubbed her foot against a large, decorative stone.
“What is it?” Emily demanded.
“A stone. It’s all right.” And gingerly she resumed her very slow forward pace.
It was five minutes before either of them spoke again. By this time they were around the back of the conservatory and creeping across an open terrace towards a further dense shadow ahead.
“That must be the greenhouse,” Emily said hopefully.
“Or a summerhouse,” Charlotte added. “Maybe that would be as good. Oh—no, of course it wouldn’t. Nothing in a summerhouse to cover stains.”
“I can’t see any glass,” Emily said with a note of desperation.
“I can’t see anything at all!” Charlotte responded.
“If it were glass we should see some gleam of light on it!” Emily hissed. “It’s not that dark!”
