The Shivering Sands

by Victoria Holt

  I had admitted the possibility of the doubts which had been niggling in my mind for some time. Poor Edith, what a dilemma for her. What if she confessed to her husband ... My imagination was running away with me, and I could see a terrible tragedy looming up over Edith’s head. I heard her voice raised in fear when she talked to a blackmailer. She looked so innocent on the surface, and she was innocent, I was sure of it. It was life that was cruel.

  Sir William was silent for a while and I asked him if he would like me to play for him now.

  He said he would and the pieces were on the piano for he had already selected them.

  They were light, gay pieces; among them I remember were some of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words. I remember in particular the Spring Song, gay light music, full of the promise of gay young life.

  I had played for an hour when Mrs. Lincroft appeared. She came into the room and quietly shut the door behind her.

  “He’s asleep,” she whispered. “He is so contented.” She smiled as though Sir William’s contentment was hers; and I thought of what Mrs. Rendall had hinted about the relationship between them.

  “It is really so satisfactory ... so soon,” she went on speaking quietly. “Personally I didn’t think Edith was robust enough, but often those delicate-looking girls are the ones who have the children. Then Napier ... he has shown quite clearly that he ... Well, what I mean is he could scarcely be called a devoted husband. But he knows that Sir William expects him to provide the heir. He was brought home for that.”

  I said rather indignantly: “Rather like a stud bull.”

  Mrs. Lincroft looked very shocked at my indelicacy and I was a little ashamed of it myself. There was no need for me to be so vehement. Napier had come home of his own free will, knowing what it involved.

  “At least he must do his duty,” said Mrs. Lincroft.

  “And it seems he has.”

  “This puts him on a firmer footing here.”

  “But surely as Sir William’s son, his only son...”

  “Sir William would have left the house and a considerable portion of his income elsewhere if he had not come home. But he came ... naturally he came. He was always ambitious; he always wanted to be first. That was why he was jealous of Beau. Well, that’s all over now. He’s accepted his father’s terms and when the child is born Sir William will feel more kindly towards Napier, I am sure.”

  “Sir William is a hard man.”

  Mrs. Lincroft looked pained. I had again forgotten my place. It was the influence of Napier. Why did I want to defend that man?

  “Circumstances have made him so,” she said coldly, and there was a note in her voice which told me that I was showing poor taste in passing adverse opinions on my employer. She was a strange woman, but I was deeply impressed by her absolute devotion to two people—Alice and Sir William. She seemed to regret her coldness towards me for she went on in a different tone of voice: “Sir William is delighted now with this news. Once the boy is born everything will start to go well in this house. I feel sure of it.”

  “What if it should not be a boy?”

  She looked a little startled. “It’s a trend in the family to have boys. Miss Sybil Stacy was the only daughter for several generations. Sir William will have the child named Beaumont—and then I think he will be quite contented.”

  “What of the child’s parents? They might have different ideas about naming the baby.”

  “Edith will be eager to give way to Sir William’s wishes.”

  “And Napier?”

  “My dear Mrs. Verlaine, he could raise no objection.”

  “I don’t see why. He might want to forget that ... painful incident.”

  “He would never go against Sir William’s wishes. If he did it might mean that he were sent packing again.”

  “You mean having done his duty in siring a child and bringing a Beaumont back to the family he might once more get his conge.”

  “You are in a very strange mood today, Mrs. Verlaine. It is unlike you.”

  “I am becoming too interested in the family affairs I expect. Please forgive me.”

  She inclined her head. Then she said: “Napier’s staying here depends on Sir William. I think he knows that.”

  I looked at my watch. The old excuse of work to prepare was on my lips. I did not want to hear any more. I had thought of him as bold, frank—at least that. I did not like to think of him knuckling under to his father for the sake of his inheritance.

  On my way back to my room I met Sybil Stacy. I had the idea that she had been hanging about waiting to intercept me.

  “Hello, Mrs. Verlaine,” she said, “how are you?”

  “Very well, thank you, and you?”

  She nodded. “It’s a long time since you’ve seen me, isn’t it? But it’s not a long time since I saw you. I saw you talking to Napier ... In fact I’ve seen you several times. I saw you coming in one evening after dusk.”

  I felt indignant. The woman was spying on me!

  She seemed to sense this and be amused by it.

  “You’re very interested in the family, aren’t you? Now I think that’s very kind of you. I’ve discovered you are a very kind person, Mrs. Verlaine. I have to observe you, don’t I, if I am going to paint you.”

  “Do you paint everyone who comes to work here?”

  She shook her head. “Not without reason. And only if they are interesting to paint. I believe you are going to be. Come along to my studio now. You said you would, didn’t you? After all you didn’t see very much when you came before.”

  I hesitated, but she laid her hand on my arm with her little girl gesture. “Oh please, please...”

  Then she clasped her hands together and as she was standing so close I saw her face in the harsh daylight and thought once more how grotesque the blue bows were on that white hair, how pathetically childish simpering was at odds with that wrinkled face.

  But she fascinated me, as everyone in this house seemed to do and I allowed myself to be led to her studio.

  The picture of the three girls was still on the easel. My eyes went to it immediately and she stood beside me wriggling a little in pleasure.

  “It’s a good likeness,” she said.

  “It’s very good:”

  “But time hasn’t drawn anything on their faces ... yet.”

  She pouted as though she had a grievance against time. “It makes it very difficult for the artist. You can’t read anything in those faces, can you?”

  I agreed. “They look so young and innocent.”

  “Yet we are all born in sin.”

  “Some people manage to live good lives in spite of it.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those optimists, Mrs. Verlaine. You always believe the best of everyone.”

  “Isn’t that better than believing the worst?”

  “Not if the worst is there.” Her face puckered. “I used to be like you. I believed ... I believed in Harry. You look puzzled. You don’t know who Harry is. Harry is the man I was going to marry. I’ll show you a picture of him ... two pictures of him, shall I? At the moment I am working on Edith.”

  I looked at her steadily. She had tripped over to a pile of canvases; and I was aware that her footsteps were soundless. I pictured her silently watching the comings and goings of the people in this house ... myself included. Why did she watch? Merely so that she could learn of our secret motives, so that she could come up to this room and record them on canvas? The thought made me uneasy; and she was aware of it and amused. Beneath the little girl attitude was a character she wished to hide.

  “Edith!” she mused. “You see her on the picture with the girls. How charming they look there. Now look at this one...” She whipped out a canvas and put it on the easel covering up the one of the trio.

  There was a figure hardly recognizable. It was picture of a heavily pregnant Edith, her face twisted in an expression of something between fear and cunning. It was horrible.

  “You don’t like it.�
�

  “No,” I said. “It’s ... unpleasant.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh Mrs. Verlaine, I thought you were honest.”

  “It has a look of Edith ... but I am convinced she never looked like that.”

  “She will though. She is very frightened now. And each day she will grow more frightened. She will never stop being frightened until the day she dies.”

  “I hope no one has seen that picture.”

  “No. I will show it later ... perhaps.”

  “Yet you have shown it to me.”

  “That is because you are as interested as I am. You are an artist too. You hear music where others do not. Is that not so? You hear it in the sighing of the wind, in the trees and the rippling water of a stream. I find what I want in the faces of people. I never wanted to paint landscapes. I never cared for them. It was always people. When I was in the nursery I would take a pencil and sketch our governesses. William said it was uncanny. But I didn’t have the same gift then. It was only after Harry...” Her face puckered and I thought she would burst into tears. “I sometimes feel an urge to paint one person. I haven’t that urge to paint you yet, Mrs. Verlaine, but I know it will come ... so I’m stalking you ... like a lion stalks his prey. But lions never eat until they’re hungry, do they?” She came close to me and laughed up into my face. “I’m not hungry for you yet, but I’m in touch.” She lifted a hand and her face broke into a seraphic smile. “I’m in touch ... with ... powers. People don’t understand.” She touched her head. “Do you know what they say in the village? People are three halfpence short—not all there. That’s what they say of me. I know it. The servants say it. William says it, and so does that Mrs. Lincroft of his. Let them. I’m far more here than they are because I’m in touch ... in touch with powers they know nothing about.”

  A feeling of claustrophobia came to me; she would keep grasping my arm, putting her grotesque little girl face close to mine ... and I was in agreement with those who said she was not all there.

  I glanced at my watch and said: “The time ... I’m forgetting...”

  She had a little enameled watch pinned to her frilly pink blouse and she looked at it and then shook her finger at me.

  “You haven’t to take Sylvia until half past. So you have twenty minutes.”

  I was startled that she knew so much about my schedule.

  “And,” she went on, “you were all last afternoon preparing their lessons.”

  I felt very uneasy.

  “Now that there is no curate at the vicarage—” I began.

  “They are all working on the tasks Mrs. Lincroft has set them. What a clever woman she is.” She began to laugh. “I know how clever. And getting her child brought up here too. That would be one of her conditions. She thinks the world of Alice.”

  “It’s natural that she should think a great deal of her own daughter.”

  “Oh, very very natural; and there we have Miss Alice brought up in Lovat Stacy, for all the world as though she were a daughter of the house.”

  “She is a good child and works very hard.”

  Sybil nodded gravely. “But it is Edith I’m interested in now.”

  “Well, I never expect to see her looking like that.”

  “Shocked, shocked, shocked!” She pointed at me and chanted mischievously, the little girl again. Then her face stiffened. “They will call the child Beaumont,” she went on. “They think they can replace my Beau merely by calling a child by his name. They never will. Nothing will ever bring Beaumont back. My darling boy ... he is lost to us.”

  “Sir William is delighted at the prospect of having a grandchild.”

  “A grandchild.” She began to titter. “And to call him Beaumont!”

  “Everyone is a little premature. The child is not born yet and it seems to be presumed that it will be a boy.”

  “They can never replace Beaumont,” she said fiercely. “What’s done is done.”

  “It’s a pity it cannot be forgotten,” I said.

  “Napier thinks that. And you take his view, of course,” she was accusing, mocking.

  “I have been here such a short time, and as I am not connected with the family, it is not for me to take views.”

  “But you take them all the same. Oh yes, I shall most certainly paint you, Mrs. Verlaine. But not yet ... I’ll wait a while. Has anyone ever told you about Harry?”

  “No.”

  “You should know. You like to know everything about us, don’t you? So of course you should know about Harry.”

  “He was the man you were going to marry.”

  She nodded and her face puckered. “I thought he loved me ... and he did. Everything would have been all right, but they stopped it. They took Harry away from me.”

  “Who?”

  She waved her arms vaguely. “William stopped it. My brother. He was my guardian because our parents were dead. He said, ‘No. Wait. No wedding until you are twenty-one. You are too young.’ I was nineteen. Nineteen was not too young to be in love. You should have seen Harry, Mrs. Verlaine. He was so handsome, so clever, so witty. He used to make me laugh with his quips. It was wonderful. He was very aristocratic, but he had no money and that was really why William said I was too young. William thinks too much about money. He thinks it is the most important thing in the world. He punished Napier through money, you know. Go away ... you are banished. You shan’t have my worldly goods. And then he wanted a grandson so Napier is summoned to return and meekly Napier comes. The bait is ... money!”

  “It might be something else.”

  “Now what else could it be, Mrs. Verlaine?”

  “The desire to please a father, the desire to make amends, to forget old enmities.”

  “You are sentimental. No one would believe it to look at you ... except me of course. You look so coolly on the world ... so it seems. But I could see that underneath it all you’re as sentimental as—as—Edith.”

  “There’s no harm in sentiment.”

  “As long as you don’t smother the truth with it. It’s like pouring treacle over a suet pudding. You can’t see anything but the treacle.”

  “You were telling me about Harry.”

  “Oh ... Harry! He had debts. Blue blood doesn’t pay debts, does it? But money does. I had the money. Perhaps William didn’t want it to go out of the family. Did you think that was the reason? But you couldn’t know that, could you? William said wait, and he wouldn’t give his consent until I was twenty-one. Two years to wait. So we were betrothed. We had a dinner party to celebrate it. Isabella was there. She wasn’t married to William then. There was an orchestra on the dais where the piano is now. We danced, Harry and I, and he said: ‘Two years will soon pass, my darling.’ It did pass and at the end of it I’d lost Harry because he’d met a girl with more money than I had, who could pay his debts without delay and it seemed the need was pressing. She wasn’t as pretty as I was, but she had so much more money.”

  “Perhaps then it was all for the best.”

  “What do you mean... all for the best?”

  “Since it was the money he wanted, he might not have been a good husband.”

  “That’s what they tried to tell me.” She stamped her foot. “It’s not true. I would have married him. He would have loved me most then. Harry just wanted life to be easy. He would have been happy with me if they’d let him marry me in the beginning. I’d have had my babies...” Her face puckered; she was like a child crying for a coveted toy. “But no,” she cried fiercely, “they stopped me. William stopped me. How dared he! Do you know what he said? ‘He’s a fortune hunter. You’re better without him.’ And he looked prim and virtuous, as though Harry was bad and he was so good. He—why, I could tell you...”

  I was looking at her so sadly that she smiled and her vehemence was stemmed. “You have a kind heart, Mrs. Verlaine,” she said, “and you know what it means to lose a lover, don’t you? You suffered too, didn’
t you? That’s why I talk to you. I had a ring ... a beautiful opal ring. But opals are unlucky, they say. Harry, couldn’t bring himself to tell me, and I was nearly twenty-one and I fixed the wedding day and the presents started to come in. And then ... one day ... I had the letter. He couldn’t face me, he could only write it. He’d been married for months. I ought to have defied my brother and run away with him when he first asked me. William broke my heart, Mrs. Verlaine. I hated him. I hated Harry too for a while. I took the opal ring and I threw it out to sea ... and then I took my paints and painted Harry’s face on the walls. Harry’s face ... horrible ... horrible ... horrible ... but it comforted me.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could say.

  “You’re truly so.” She smiled at me sadly. “But don’t you say things are forgotten. They are never forgotten. I shall never forget Harry. And I shall never forget Beaumont. My darling Beau ... I felt happier when he was born. He took to me right away. He always wanted Auntie Sib. I let him use my paints and he liked that. He was always with me, he was sunny natured and so beautiful. Beau! We naturally called him that because his name was. Beaumont. But it meant something too. It meant that he was beautiful.”

  “So you had your consolation.”

  “Until that day... the day he was murdered.”

  “It was an accident. It could have happened to any two boys.”

  She shook her head angrily. “But this was Beau ... my lovely, beautiful Beau.” She turned to me suddenly: “There’s something in this house ... something bad. I know.”

  “A house can’t be bad,” I said.

  “It can if the people who live there make it so. There are bad wicked people in this house. Be careful.”

  I said I would and because I felt she was going to begin an attack on Napier and that if she did I should be forced to defend him, I said I must go.

  She consulted her watch and nodded.

  “Come again,” she said. “Come and talk to me. I like talking to you. And don’t forget ... one day I have to paint a picture of you.”