by Ellis Peters
Their only son was busy mending agricultural machinery and driving tractors for an erratic but effective native mission in India, and had just welcomed to the same service his future wife, fresh from an arts degree and a rushed course in nursing. And what Tossa was going to make of the Swami Premanathanand’s organisation was anybody’s guess, but arguably she would fall completely under the spell of its gentle but jolting founder, as Dominic had done, and lose herself in his hypnotic ambience. George thought of them, and was lifted out of his despond. He withdrew to the study of his morning’s professional mail in better heart.
He was halfway through compiling an up-to-date précis when Bunty looked in, unastonished as ever, and announced: ‘Miss Rossignol wants to talk to you.’ Bunty vanished on the word, and Charlotte, small and trim and magnificently self-possessed, at her most French, came sailing in upon him from the doorway. She looked very determined, and very young.
‘Now this,’ said George, ‘is a pleasure I wasn’t expecting. Come and sit down, and tell me what I can do for you.’
‘You can tell me,’ said Charlotte, looking up intently into his face, ‘whether you really meant what you implied last night. Because I’ve been thinking along the same lines, and not liking it at all. And then, if you don’t mind, and it isn’t top secret, you can tell me what you know that I don’t know about my great-uncle Alan.’
CHAPTER NINE
« ^ »
By late morning the diggers had exposed the broken roof of the flue, and half the arch of its slightly damaged neighbour, for a distance of about six feet, and were setting to work in earnest to remove the shattered brickwork and lay bare the channel below. Since this process involved moving sacred relics, and it was a life-and-death matter to Paviour that they should not be damaged or allowed to fall into disorder, both he and Bill Lawrence were now employed, not so much fully as frantically, in trying to label and number everything that emerged, and laying out the materials of the arch in the grass, aside from the affected area. Barnes, out of pure good-nature and some reviving interest in archaeology, lent a hand under Paviour’s irritable and anxious direction, but even with three pairs of hands they had all they could do to keep pace. Gus Hambro had taken over one of the small sheds attached to the museum, where there was a sink and a water tap, and removed himself there with all the minor trophies of the first day’s work, and with sleeves rolled up, and an array of small nailbrushes for weapons, was carefully washing off the corrosion of soil and dust from dozens of little objects, most of them derisory: fragments of red glaze, one segment of cloudy glass from the lips of a jug, a plethora of animal bones, two plain bone hair-pins and one with the broken remnants of a carved head, and the single interesting item, a bronze penannular brooch with coiled ends to the ring. A boring job, but a vital one. He had good reason to want to be first in discovering and studying whatever there was to be found, but so far the result was disappointing.
It was a little past noon when the door of his shed opened, and Lesley looked in.
‘Lunch prompt at one,’ she informed him, and came to his elbow to examine the trifles he had laid out on a board beneath the window. ‘Dull,’ she said, sadly but truthfully. ‘Do you need any help?’ There was still a heap of grimy objects awaiting his attentions, their nature almost obscured by layers of soil grown to them like rust.
‘I shouldn’t. You’ll get terribly dirty.’ And after a moment’s hesitation he asked what he had been wondering all morning. ‘What happened to Charlotte? I haven’t seen her around at all today.’
‘I know. She went off after breakfast in my car. She said she wanted to see somebody in town, but she promised to be back for lunch. I offered to drive her wherever she wanted to go,’ said Lesley, frowning thoughtfully down at the little bronze brooch, ‘but she wouldn’t let me, so I saw she didn’t want company. Only two days, and you know, I really miss her. I’ve just got used to having somebody to chatter to, a rare luxury here. Stephen doesn’t chatter, or understand being chattered to. Stephen converses. When he isn’t being totally taciturn, that is.’ She laughed suddenly, recognising how fluently she was illustrating her own theme. ‘You see? Failing Charlotte, someone else gets sprayed with words. You don’t mind being a stand-in, do you? All the others are far too busy, and you can at least go on brushing bones while you listen.’
‘You don’t know,’ he said, ‘where she was going?’
‘Charlotte? She didn’t say, so naturally I didn’t ask her. Lend me that bigger brush, I can be whisking the top dirt off these things. I’m no use down there, and there’s half an hour or so before I need go back to the kitchen.’
She fell in companionably beside him, and went to work removing the worst of the encrustations from still more inevitable bits of bone and animal teeth. ‘Graveyard exercise, isn’t it? Like Mr Barnes, I dream of digging up another Mildenhall treasure instead of a cow’s incisors, but it’s never likely to happen to me.’
She had leaned nearer to him, to drop the despised tooth into the sink, and she felt the slight tension that stiffened the arm she brushed against. She drew back a distinct pace, and kept that distance; but he knew that her eyes were on him, in no sidelong glance, but regarding him widely and directly. The challenge to turn and look as straightly at her was irresistible. Greenish-blue like the off-shore sea under sunshine, her disconcerting eyes were laughing at him, though the rest of her face was mild and grave.
‘I suppose Bill’s been warning you about Stephen and me,’ she said quite placidly.
She had set the key, he might as well follow.
‘Shouldn’t he have done? I understand you warned him yourself.’
She shrugged. ‘Just as well to know where you stand, don’t you think? I don’t suppose it came as any great surprise to you. Only the very unintelligent could help wondering about us. And you’re not very unintelligent. Are you?’
‘I’m wondering that myself,’ he said.
‘The door’s open,’ she said, smiling. ‘Anyone’s welcome to walk in. And you could walk out any moment you pleased.’
‘Quite. But why, if it’s like that, did you walk in? And stay in?’
Perhaps by that time he should have been feeling that the conversation had got out of hand, but he had no such feeling. On the contrary, it was proceeding in perfect control, and not a word had been said on either side without consideration and intent.
‘Because I’m a person, too,’ she said, sparkling with angry animation. ‘He’s jealous—all right! But I’m alive and gregarious and talkative, and I’m damned if I’m going to change my nature because he sees more in everything I say or do than I ever put into it. Let him fret that I’m disloyal, if he has to, just as long as I know I’m not. It isn’t as if I had any reason to be afraid of him, you know. A gentler, more attentive old idiot never stepped. No, when I went about virtuously warning nice, harmless young men like Bill to keep clear, it was all out of consideration for his peace of mind. Now I’m considering mine. I’m what he married. Why should I suppose I’d be doing him a favour by changing into something else? So I’ve given up the practice. I’m staying the way I am.’
The invitation to equal candour was proffered, palpable on the air. He accepted it. For some reason it would have seemed perverse to refuse it.
‘Why he married you,’ he said briskly, ‘is no mystery to anyone. Given the chance, that is. Why was he given the chance? That’s the puzzler.’
She had put down the shard of Samian ware she had been brushing, and the brush after it. She leaned with one hip against the edge of the sink, her back half-turned to the window, the better to face him; and even her sea-green eyes had stopped laughing now.
‘Because his timing was right. Because he came as such a nice change after the young, handsome, dashing, cold-hearted bastard who’d dropped me into the muck the minute it suited him, and put me off love for life. Or so I thought then. Jilted, I tell you, is no word for what happened to me. And there was Stephen trotting in and out
of the office with his little manuscripts, looking rather distinguished and being terribly anxious and patient and kind. So I told him what I hadn’t told a soul besides, and he did everything possible to comfort me and make it up to me—as if anyone could! And one of the nice things he thought of was to ask me to marry him. It looked good to me—really, then, it looked like the answer to everything. So I married for what was left, since I’d finished with love. For security, and kindness, for a respectable position, and a crash barrier against all the young, handsome, dashing, frosty-hearted bastards left in the world. The world stopped, and I got off, and that was marriage. And look at me now!’
It was an unnecessary instruction; he was looking at her very intently and steadily, and at a range of scarcely more than a foot. She had turned until she was confronting him squarely, leaning back a little against the stone sink, her hands, grubby from the clinging soil, childishly held up beside her shoulders, with widespread fingers, to avoid dirtying her cashmere sweater. Her short fair hair quivered and seemed to erect itself as if electrically charged, in the small, freakish draught from the window behind her, and through some trick of the fitful sunlight. She had set the pace in all these improbable exchanges, and whether she had now far outdistanced her own intention there was no knowing; but there was no point in trying to turn back, and there might, at least, be something to be gained by following through. For one thing, he doubted very much if she would have revoked on her bargain, even now.
‘If it’s that bad,’ he said deliberately, ‘why do you stay with him? The world’s still there, if you want to get on again.’
‘There’s an awful lot of time around, too,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting. I can afford to wait.’
‘For the right moment?’
‘Or the right man,’ she said.
It was said quite impersonally, almost to herself, but with such abrupt desolation and longing that he was filled with an entirely personal dismay on her account, and instinctively put out his hands to take her by the waist and hold her fast while he found something, however fatuous, however inadequate, to say to her. She was turning slightly away from him when he took her forcibly between his palms. He felt her whole body convulsed by a huge tremor of revulsion and panic, and was distressed into a sharp cry of pity and protest.
‘Lesley—don’t! My God, I never intended…’
She came to life again, her flesh lissom and warm. She twisted to break free, and he held on only to try and reassure her before he let her go, for it was like holding a cat unwilling to be held, the boneless body dissolving between his hands. She reached out to the rim of the sink, to have a purchase for forcing him off, and her fingers missed their grip and slid into the turgid water. She fell against him, drawing breath in deep, transfixing sighs, and suddenly she was silk, clinging with both hands. Her head was against his shoulder, her face upturned close beneath his, with wide-opened eyes and parted lips.
He kissed her, and the passive mouth flowered and burned, in shocked, involuntary acceptance. He felt her hands close on his back, pressing convulsively.
Over her shoulder he saw through the window the whole sweep of grass suddenly inhabited by a single approaching figure, looming large against the driven clouds and gleaming sun, and the distant, skeletal walls. He saw the brisk stride broken and diverted, only a dozen yards away; he saw the long, narrow body lean back, waver and halt. There could be only one reason for such a dislocation. The glass before him had been recently cleaned, and the noon sun shone directly into it. Paviour, coming hopefully up from the dig with a new bouquet of trophies in their plastic sacks, had clearly seen the tableau in the shed.
There was a strange, brief pause, while they hung eye to eye, across all that distance, and perfectly understood that there was now no possibility of disguising their mutual knowledge, that it could only be publicly denied and privately accepted. Then, wheeling to the left with a sudden, jerky movement, Paviour walked away towards the house, still clutching his little plastic sacks. Probably he had forgotten he was holding them.
Gus stood motionless, afraid almost to breathe for fear Lesley should turn away from him in a new access of revulsion, and face the window before that long, stilted, pathetic figure had vanished out of range. It was pure luck that her back had been turned to the light; she had seen nothing. His palms were still clamped with involuntary force on either side of her body, he would have felt any stiffening, any tremor, and she hung fluidly and heavily against him, like draped silk. And Paviour had walked clean out of the frame of the window and out of their sight.
It almost hurt to unclamp his grip on the girl, and separate himself from her, and he did it with infinite care not to offend by the separation as he had offended by first touching her. ‘I’m sorry!’ he said constrainedly. ‘I never meant to scare you.’
She turned aside from him at once, as soon as he released her, reached automatically for her brush and towards the dingy pile of relics awaiting attention. She moved with economy and resignation, and looked curiously calm, as though her recent experience had left her in shock.
‘I’m sorry, too. I never thought you did. It simply happens to me. I panic. I can’t help it.’
He wondered if he should tell her, if she needed to know. He thought not. She was better off as she was. Her innocence would be impregnable; she had nothing to fear.
‘I’d better go,’ she said, almost naturally, and put down the brush. ‘I’ve got to see to the lunch.’
She made very little sound, departing, because the door was open, and she moved as lightly as a kitten in her soft walking shoes, so nicely matched to her boyish, slim style in slacks. But he knew the moment when she left, without looking round from his automatic operations on one more fragmentary ivory pin, by the slow, settling tranquillity she left behind her.
Lunch was a minor nightmare only because nothing whatever happened. It cost him an effort to reassemble his stolidly innocent face before he need appear; and then, when he was reasonably assured that his façade was impervious, he had to meet Charlotte head-on at the door.
He had never seen her look quite so un-English or so serenely formidable. There was no wind, and the curled plumes of black hair deployed across her magnolia cheeks might have been lacquered there, they were so steely and perfect. Also he had never realised until that moment how small and slender she was, almost as tiny as Lesley. His mind started involuntarily measuring her waist, and the exercise led on to other highly speculative considerations concerning the resilience of her bones and the scent of her hair, should she ever find herself in his arms, due to an emotional miscalculation on his part and a panic reaction on hers. He failed to imagine it adequately. She didn’t look the type. But then, neither did Lesley.
‘I missed you,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘You’ve been gone all morning.’
‘I had a call to make in town, on personal business,’ she said coolly. ‘I hope you managed to divert yourself even without me.’ And her thick, genuine, loftily-arched black brows went up, and the eyes beneath them flashed a golden gleam of amusement at his proprietary tone. During the past two days he had given her very little cause to suppose that he attached particular importance to her presence. ‘Any interesting discoveries?’
She was referring only to work in progress, and he knew it, and yet every word she said seemed to find a way of probing between the joints of his armour with prophetic force. The defensive reaction she set up in him made him tongue tied when he would most gladly have been fluent; he felt that if he turned his back on her she would see, clean through the tweed of his jacket, the prints of two small, splayed hands, soiled from brushing trivia, clamped against his shoulder-blades.
‘If you like,’ she said generously, ‘I’ll be your runner this afternoon, and ferry the bits and pieces up to you.’
‘Do,’ he said, cheered and astonished. ‘I’d like that.’ Charlotte darting in and out would be an insurance policy second to none. Against Lesley? When he stood back to conside
r the incident he couldn’t seriously persuade himself that she was likely to come near him again of her own will, however perversely she desired to let off steam. Against himself, then? He flinched from considering it, but it remained a strong possibility.
‘We’d better go in,’ said Charlotte, only slightly disturbed by his uncharacteristic fervour. ‘I’m hungry.’
So they went in. And lunch was the nadir of normality, without an original thought or a perilous suggestion to enliven it. The confrontation through the glass of the window might never have taken place.
By that hour the police had already segregated certain sections of brick and tile marked with recent scars, a few curved shards of pottery from a jar, and covered from injury a small area of flooring within the flue, with its dust still displaying the faint but positive print of the base of just such a ceramic jar. There had been no gold coins in the detritus. No doubt the last of them had been removed in haste after the murder of Gerry Boden. Only the single one from his purse remained to testify.
On Saturday evenings Bill Lawrence, that ambitious and scholarly young man, had an extra-mural class in Moulden. Which meant that the general invitation to dinner issued at lunch by Lesley raked in only Gus Hambro in addition to the curator’s household. Bill had generous license to come along for coffee afterwards, however late, but his class was timed to finish only at nine-thirty, and since it met in the rear clubroom at ‘The Crown’ it was long odds against the argumentative local savants consenting to go home before closing time, so that his attendance was at best only hypothetical. Moreover, Bill’s own attitude was decidedly ambiguous; nobody had to tell him that his commitments were well known, and invitations issued accordingly. He knew when he was, or was not, wanted.
Not that Bill was missing anything, Gus thought, before the evening was half over. The pretence that everything was normal, that they were a party of congenial people enjoying a social get-together, had become downright oppressive, as if everyone was working a little too hard at it. They had an afternoon of unremitting labour behind them, and perhaps were too tired to make a good job of keeping up appearances. Paviour had grown so brittle that he looked as if the least jolt might send all his joints jangling apart; and though Lesley’s extrovert lightness of heart was beyond suspicion, it was rapidly becoming unbearable in this context. All very well for her in her innocence, but Gus was in a very different case. Worst of all, there was no chance whatever of making any real contact with Charlotte, and it was exasperating to have her sitting there opposite him, so near and so inaccessible, watching him with the black, acute gaze of a sceptical cat, pupils high-lighted in gold; a look that asserted nothing, merely observed and analysed, stopping short of judgement only, he was afraid, out of indifference.