He Who Whispers

“About a hundred thousand acres.”

“As large as that? I hadn't realized . . .”

“Very few people do. But you can walk into the forest, over there, and get lost and wander about for hours, so that they have to send out a search-party for you. It sounds absurd in a small country like England, but my uncle used to tell me it happened time after time. As a newcomer, I haven't liked to venture too far myself.”

“No, of course not. It looks . . . I don't know! . . .”

“Magical?”

“Something like that.” Fay moved her shoulders.

“You see where I'm pointing, Miss Seton?”

“Yes?”

“Not a very great walk from here is the spot where William Rufus, the Red King, was killed with an arrow while he was out hunting. There's an iron monstrosity to mark it now. And?you know The White Company?”

She nodded quickly.

“The moon rises very late tonight,” said Miles. “But one night soon you and I?and Marion too, of course?must take a walk by full moonlight in the New Forest.”

“That would be awfully nice.”

She was still leaning forward, the palms of her hands flat on the window-sill; sh nodded as though she had hardly heard him. Miles was standing close to her. He could look down on the soft line of her shoulders, the whiteness of her neck, the heavy dark-red hair glistening under lamplight. Th perfume she used was faint but distinctive. Miles became aware of the disturbing nearness of her physical presence.

Perhaps she realized this; for abruptly, but in her unobtrusive way, she moved away from him and threaded a path back through the books to where sh had left the lamp. Miles also turned abruptly and starred out of the window.

He could see her reflection, ghostly in the window-glass. Picking up an old newspaper, she shook it out for dust, opened it, and put it down on a pile of books. Then she sat down, beside the little lamp.

“Careful!” he warned without turning round. “You'll get yourself dirty.”

“That doesn't matter.” She kept her eyes lowered. “It's lovely here, Mr. Hammond. I imagine the air is very good?”

“Excellent. You'll sleep like the dead tonight.”

“Do you have difficulty in going to sleep?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Your sister said you'd been very ill.”

“I'm all right now.”

“War?”

“Yes. The peculiar and painful and unheroic form of poisoning you get in the Tank Corps.”

“Harry Brooke was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk in nineteen-forty,” remarked Fay, with absolutely no change of tone. “He joined the French Army as liaison-officer with the British?being bi-lingual, you see?and he was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk.”

During a thunderclap of silence, while Mile's ears seemed to ring and Fay Seton's voice remained exactly the same, he stood staring at her reflection in the window-glass. Then she added:

“You know all about me, don't you?”

Miles put down the lamp on the window-sill, because his hand was shaking, and he felt a constriction across his chest. He swung round to face her.

“Who told you . . .?”

“Your sister intimated it. She said you were moody and had imaginative fits.”

(Marion, eh?)

“I think it was awfully decent of you, Mr. Hammond, to give me this position?and I am rather badly off!?without asking me anything about it. They very nearly sent me to the guillotine, you know, for the murder of Harry's father. But don't you think you ought to hear my side of it?”

Long pause.

A cool breeze, infinitely healing, crept in through the window-lights and mingled with the fustiness of old books. From the corner of his eye Miles noticed a black strand of cobweb swaying from the ceiling. He cleared his throat.

“It's none of my business, Miss Seton. And I don't want to upset you.”

“It doesn't upset me. Really it doesn't.”

“But don't you feel . . .?”

“No. Not now.” She spoke in a very odd one. The blue eyes, their whites very luminous in lamplight, turned sideways. She put on hand against her breast, a hand very white in contrast to the grey silk dress, and pressed hard there. “Self-sacrifice!” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“What we won't do,” murmured Fay Seton, “if we get a chance to sacrifice ourselves!” She was silent for a long time, the wide-spaced blue eyes expressionless and lowered. “Forgive me, Mr. Hammond. It doesn't really matter, but I wonder who told you about this.”

“Professor Rigaud.”

“Oh. Georges Rigaud.” She nodded. “I heard he'd escaped from France during the German occupation, and taken a university post in England. I only asked that, you see, because your sister wasn't sure. For some reason she seemed to think the source of your information was Count Cagliostro.”

They both laughed. Miles was glad of an excuse to laugh, glad to relieve his feelings by shouting at the top of his lungs; but the noise of that laughter went up with inexplicable eerieness under the towering walls of books.

“I?I didn't kill Mr. Brooke,” said Fay. “Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hammond. I . . .”

(God knows, Miles thought to himself, I do want to hear your story! Go on! Go on! Go on!)

“I went out to France,” she told him in her low voice, “to be Mr. Brooke's personal secretary. I wasn't what you might call,” she looked away from him, “experienced.”

Miles nodded without speaking, since she had paused.

“It was awfully pleasant there. The Brookes were pleasant, or so I thought. I . . . well, you've probably heard that I fell in love with Harry Brooke. I really did fall in love with him, Mr. Hammond, from the start.”

Mile's question, a question he had not meant to ask, was wrung out of him. “But you refused Harry the first time he proposed marriage?”

“Did I? Who told you that?”

“Professor Rigaud.”

“Oh, I see.” (What was that strange, secret, inner amusement about her eyes? Or did he imagine it?) “In any case, Mr. Hammond, we did become engaged. I think I was very happy, because I've always been domestic- minded. We were making plans for the future, when someone began circulating report about me.”

Miles's throat felt dry.

“What sort of reports?”

“Oh, of gross immorality.” Faint colour stained the smooth white cheeks; still she kept her eyelids lowered. “And something else which is really,” Fay half laughed, “too stupid to bother you with. I never heard any of this, of course. But Mr. Brooke must have been hearing for some weeks, though he never said anything. First of all I think he had been getting anonymous letters.”

“Anonymous letters?” exclaimed Miles.

“Yes.”

“Professor Rigaud didn't say anything about that!”

“Perhaps not. It's?it's only what I think, of course. Matters were awfully strained at the house: in the study