Cordelia

by Winston Graham

  He wouldn’t let her go until she’d promised the time and the place tomorrow.

  Then she left him and tiptoed through the garden and across the lawn, up to the door of the french windows to the library. The room was in darkness as she slipped in. She bumped into a chair unexpectedly in her path, reached the door, which was ajar.

  The hall, of course, was lighted. She was about to pick up her skirts and run to the stairs when Mr Ferguson came out of his study. She slipped back from the door, listening to his footsteps, his breathing coming nearer.

  Then they passed, the drawing-room door opened, and he went in.

  This time she came out more boldly, trying to hide her trembling hands, and safely reached the stairs.

  She was in love for the first time in her life. All the old alarms were jangling; and conscience and deeply grown beliefs, her own reason; but the voices were muted, for the moment they could not get at her in the old way.

  And supporting the new rule were all the little niggling insurrectionary thoughts: Brook, Mr Ferguson, Margaret, Dan, diaries, doctors, whispered scandal.

  As she sat the next night in her bedroom by the light of a single shaded candle watching the clock creep towards eleven, she knew that this next meeting was a sort of watershed in their affairs. She’d no thought of immorality; but to go down to meet a man in the garden late at night would be accepted by everyone as the equivalent thing.

  The clock, her father’s clock, reached the hour and faint whirrings began in its inside, the tongue on the face quivered, but it all ended in silent frustration like a man trying to speak who has lost his voice.

  She got up and put a velvet dolman over her dark dress, snuffed out the candle. Then she opened the door, which creaked slightly, and peered out. All in darkness except a faint light under Mr Ferguson’s door. Reading in bed.

  Slide out, closing the door, silently down the stairs. In the library the french windows were bolted. Stand on a chair to reach the upper bolt. A sibilant rusty screech. When she got down she sat breathless on the chair a few seconds, listening. All quiet.

  She opened the windows and squeezed out, pulling them to behind her. The night was overcast and very warm. The clouds were right down on top of the house, and it was so still she could hear a night moth fluttering somewhere among the leaves. She took two steps down, and a few across the short-cropped grass. Then from among the shrubs a figure rose, and in a second she was in his arms.

  Just the fact of his being there seemed to set her at rest.

  ‘You’re trembling,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Are you cold, my sweetheart? There now, we’ll change that.’

  ‘No – it’s not that— Let’s get farther away.’

  She led a groping way towards the walled garden. There was no need to hide in the greenhouse tonight. It was so dark they could scarcely see each other.

  They sat on a garden seat under one of the cordon pears.

  Something restrained him tonight, made him hold off. In five months he’d come to understand her a little – and had grown himself in the understanding. This thing that he had embarked on so lightly had run him on to unexpected shoals. Last night he had been beside himself with joy that he had carried the strongest defences. Tonight an unusual self-doubt prevented him from pressing the victory.

  They talked in low voices and again she was glad to talk. He told her more about his life, and she told him more of hers. For the first time in eighteen months she had a confidant. Pride had kept her silent with her own family. But Stephen she was able to tell about Frederick Ferguson, about Margaret’s death and the secrecy surrounding it, about the peculiarities of her daily life in Grove Hall. Merely to speak of them was half the battle.

  He kept holding the dolman round her, but there was no chill in the air. They talked on and on, content to exchange confidences, not aware of the passage of time.

  After a while the night seemed to lighten and they saw each other more clearly. When at length she asked the time he peered at his watch and saw it to be nearly one. He quickly lied, telling her it was just after twelve, but that was bad enough, and she rose at once to go. So after a while she left him, giving a promise to meet him again the following night.

  She crept back and into the library; a last touch of fingers and he was gone, irretrievably gone, and she was alone; the upper bolt of the french windows gave a faint screech; then through the library and stealing up the stairs; no breath but the lightest, her heart thumping; to her door; the light under Mr Ferguson’s was out; asleep, that great figure in bed; and Uncle Pridey and Aunt Tish and eleven servants; only herself creeping, and outside in the darkness Stephen walking, walking back across country to his own home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning she had a letter from Brook, one of the first he had ever written her. It was unexpectedly affectionate. Brook’s life was the life of the imagination; being apart from her gave that imagination scope and he was happy in expressing it. She felt like a thief.

  In the afternoon she was due to visit her family, but Mr Ferguson wanted her. The old man was home for dinner at twelve-thirty and drove her back with him to the works. There for the first time she attended one of the meetings at which the heads of the departments were present. Mr Ferguson introduced those she had not already met and she sat between him and Simnel at the table, listening to all that was said. Stolid, broad-spoken men in shabby velveteen jackets, they were self-conscious in her presence, as she was in theirs, but he took no notice of that. At the end he told them his reason for having her there, that sometimes in the future it might be necessary for both Mr Brook and himself to be absent, and if that were the case Mrs Brook Ferguson would be his personal deputy. He praised her very highly and she was acutely uncomfortable under it. What, she thought, if I got up and said: ‘You may think I have a head for business, but do you happen to know that I’ve lost it over Stephen Crossley; I’m infatuated like any other silly woman; you see all the other people are right and you are wrong: women are not to be trusted’?

  She was angry with them both because they had chosen this day of all days to show their affection and trust.

  In the evening Mr Ferguson was out at a lecture. This was something she’d not expected and it was ten-thirty before he got home. As always the house must wait up for him, so that servants were moving about until half-past eleven, and Mr Ferguson did not close his door until a quarter to twelve. Midnight came before she stood on the lawn wondering, half hoping, half fearing that Stephen had gone.

  He came up like a shadow behind her as she crept past the laurels.

  ‘Delia.’

  ‘Oh … I thought …’

  They moved off towards the walled garden.

  ‘I daren’t come before.’

  ‘Something went wrong? I could tell by the lights.’

  She whispered explanations as they went. Rain was dripping from his hat and cloak; he said he had been afraid to stir from near the window lest he miss her; it must have seemed an endless ninety minutes, but he was not in the least perturbed about it, as Brook would have been. She loved his high spirits, his unreserved welcome. Obstacles didn’t seem to depress him; he took them all as part of the fun.

  Tonight they sheltered in the greenhouse, and something about the situation brought them closer to each other. They laughed together at the discomfort, and he kissed away her laughter and put his arms under her arms and held her tight so that he could feel the beating of her heart. Later they talked, and he told her easily that he had sought out Dan Massington at his dub that day and pumped him about his sister. (He didn’t confess that he’d done it once before, before the séance.) It all came down to something about sleeping tablets. She’d died quite suddenly, and the doctor had asked some questions about the number of sleeping tablets she’d been given. That much Dan knew but no more, but, Stephen gathered, he hadn’t learned even this until after the funeral.

  ‘Dr Birch is a great friend of the Fergusons,’ said Cordelia.
‘I can’t understand it – why should he say anything unless there was very good reason?’

  ‘Why bother your head, my sweetheart? Aren’t we wasting time on it when we could be talking about ourselves?’

  ‘It’s important to me, Stephen,’ she said. ‘ In a way I can’t quite explain.’

  ‘Well, shall I go and see the old man about it for you?’

  ‘Heavens, no! Not on any account.’

  ‘I’m glad of that, for I shouldn’t have liked the job.’

  Used by now to the endless cosseting of Brook, she was afraid he would catch a chill from his damp clothes, but he laughed at her. Brook was due back on Saturday; they had one more evening like this if they chose to take it; then it meant every sort of contriving.

  When at last she rose to go it was with the promise that she should see him again tomorrow in the garden at eleven. She said she would pray for a fine night. He patted her hand and said far better pray for a dark one.

  They reached the french windows and kissed and separated, and she turned and gently pushed the window. It did not move. She pushed again. A dreadful sick fear turned in her heart. She put her finger-nails to the nick in the wet wood.

  He came up behind her. ‘Well, and what’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s – locked …’

  She stood there while he tried the door cautiously himself. She stood there with the cold perspiration breaking out on her face and hands. She saw that he couldn’t move it. She looked about and saw the stone steps and sat on one of them. The dark night suddenly began to move round her.

  He was again beside her.

  ‘Don’t give up. It’s a mere detail. We shall find another way in.’

  She put her face in her hands. ‘So someone saw me …’

  ‘It doesn’t follow at all. Someone will have come round and found it open. D’you know of another way in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the ordinary windows?’

  ‘All the ground-floor windows are closed and locked at night by Hallows.’

  He stood up and stared through the rain, his hands on his hips.

  ‘It’s a big house to be secured against a burglar. I would take a bet it’ll not be hard. Aren’t there pantries and things?’

  ‘I think they all have gratings.’

  ‘Well, we can see. Tell me what other doors there are.’

  She tried to take a grip on herself. She could see it all: Frederick Ferguson’s stony face, Brook’s incredulous hurt, the whispering servants, her father and mother, Hugh Scott, Teddy, all her new friends. Her love for Stephen was suddenly tainted by the peering eyes of the world.

  She told him about the back quarters. But she warned him of the servants sleeping overhead and of the horses and of Bob and Mrs Tomkins sleeping in the room above the stables. He urged her to go back to the greenhouse while he looked around, but she wouldn’t move.

  While he was gone she took the shawl from round her head and let the rain fall on her face and hair. It helped, cooling the warmth which had followed the sickly sweat. Her steadying reason began to work. If someone had seen her, then she was lost in any case – unless one could invent a string of lies to fit the case: and at once her brain set about inventing them. No one had seen Stephen; she had felt ill and gone out into the garden– She pulled her mind away from its ready deceits. If no one had seen her, then might she not be able to spend the night in the greenhouse and slip in unobserved in the morning?

  He came back frustrated, and at once she put her idea: that he should go home and that she should– He shook his head.

  ‘The very last thing. Far better for you to come home with me and then we could face it out together.’

  She shrank from this proposition, which he put on impulse, and he was privately relieved that she did so. The last thing he really wanted at the moment was a resounding scandal and a blow-up with his father.

  It was a pretty problem but he was not downhearted yet.

  ‘Which is your room?’

  ‘It’s on the first floor round the corner.’

  ‘Is the window open?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s no way up.’

  ‘Let me see where it is.’

  He led her round to the west side of the house. Her bedroom was above the dining-room. ‘Glory be, that’s easy! There’s ivy and a drainpipe– I used to climb twice as far as that at school every Saturday night of my life. Are all three windows yours?’

  ‘Yes. Well, the far one is our dressing-room.’ She caught his hand. ‘I’d rather take the other risk.’

  ‘Away with you. It’s nothing. Which is the best window to open?’

  ‘The dressing-room, I think. The sash works easiest.’

  He asked her for particulars of the plan of the house and then he was gone. She saw him take off his shoes and put his cloak and hat over them. Then he tested the drainpipe and began to climb.

  He seemed to take it for granted that the french windows had been locked by someone unsuspectingly. She, knowing the household better, did not believe anything of the sort.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was not difficult for a young and energetic man. The ivy was thick at the bottom and the thin exploratory strands at the top were just tenacious enough to give him hand-holds. In three or four minutes he was at the dressing-room window, one hand over the ledge, and groping for a firm grip inside the room.

  He found it and was able to release his other hand; with that he slowly slid the window up far enough to get in.

  Now the difficult part. His eyes were used to the dark, but even so there was the danger of knocking over a table or sweeping something off a chair. She need not have told him this was her room; some perfume she used hung in the air.

  He crept across it and found the door of the bedroom shut. It creaked when he opened it and he stared round the larger room. A dark object lay nearly at his feet and he picked it up: it was her dressing-gown which had fallen from behind the door. He fingered it affectionately before dropping it on a chair.

  But there was some alien presence here too. Things about the room bespoke the accustomed presence of a man. Stephen didn’t like that so much. Brook had somehow been a nonentity in his mind.

  With this in his thoughts he was not so careful as he might have been opening the outer bedroom door, and the catch clicked with a noise to wake the dead.

  Half in and half out of the room, he stared round the square landing, half expecting a light to go on under one of the other doors. But the landing remained in darkness. There was a little wind, and he did not dare to leave the door unlatched. He felt behind it and down came something which felt like an underskirt to drop on the floor and prevent a bang. Then he groped for the stairs.

  Somewhere not far away someone was snoring. He couldn’t tell the sex of the snorer, but the sound was reassuring and brought a mischievous picture to his mind. The English commercial baron in his provincial castle, snoring his head off, secure in the knowledge of locked and bolted doors, while the despoiler, the worm in the bud, the thief in the night – he didn’t underestimate the names he would be called – crept at his leisure about the stronghold.

  Once on the ground floor, he felt more sure of his way. No one slept downstairs, and he knew how the house was planned. They had arranged to meet at the french windows, but now, over-confident, he made his first mistake and chose the wrong door.

  It was a much smaller room, and he guessed at once it was Mr Ferguson’s study. He was about to back out again when he heard someone breathing.

  Frozen, expecting to hear a voice or to feel a hand on his shoulder … But the breathing went on. He hesitated, peering, not able to see anything. Curtains drawn. Mr Ferguson’s breathing; its heaviness unmistakable. He was asleep.

  But for how long asleep and how soundly?

  The door had made no noise as he opened it: now with infinite care and patience he began to close it again, holding it to with his nails while he slowly released the handle. />
  It was shut.

  He turned and moved to the other door, sweating a little now, but did not open it. There might be some other trap in here. Quick thinking and new thinking.

  He moved across the hall to the front door, feeling with his fingers. Two accursed bolts and a key. They would all screech like devils in torment.

  Into the dining-room. Here, he remembered, was a low window looking on the lawn. He tried the catch and it moved easily. He opened the window and vaulted lightly out.

  Then he ran round the house.

  He found her where he had left her.

  ‘Thank Heaven!’ she breathed, standing up. ‘But did you get in? I’ve been trying to think, to–’

  ‘In easily. But there’s one little small sort of complication.’ He explained it.

  She was steadier now. While he was away she had steeled herself to meet the worst. This very nearly was the worst. He had evidently heard her leave and followed her down.

  ‘No, no; who says so? Anyway, for the moment he’s asleep like a babe. Can you get in through a window? The dining-room window.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They reached the dining-room. He climbed in first. She followed. It would have been easy if they had not been so afraid of the smallest noise.

  Inside he caught her to him. ‘Listen, sweetheart. Rely on me. Don’t be afraid. Go straight to bed and get up tomorrow as if nothing in the world had happened. I’ll be round in the evening before dark. Can you arrange a signal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you can get out as usual make no signal. That clear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If things are all right but you can’t get out, what then?’

  ‘I’ll put a handkerchief – my dressing-room window.’

  ‘Right. And if things are wrong and you can’t get out, two handkerchiefs?’

  ‘Yes.’ They repeated the arrangement. Then he kissed her and left.

  His last words were: ‘Don’t worry your head, now. There’ll be no footprints on the flower-beds. I’ve all night to do it. Get out of those wet things and go to bed. Good night.’