The full moon shone its silver light on them. Devenish released her hand, saying gently, ‘I would never coerce you, madam. You may return to the drawing room as soon as you wish. Now, if it pleases you.’
He had suddenly become ashamed of using his iron will to bend her to do as he wished. He might have known that he had deceived himself—as she had—for Drusilla, released, suddenly realised that he had not, after all, compelled her to do his bidding. She had come of her own free will, but had needed to persuade herself that she had not!
But that was not it, either. Rather from the moment that he had taken her hand they had become mentally one and as she had surrendered her separate self to him, so he had done the same to her in return. Freeing her hand had made them two again.
‘No,’ she told him, ‘you did not coerce me. Ask me your question. I will answer you freely.’
‘I don’t want to distress you by raising the matter, but it is important for me to know. You mentioned to me not long ago that your late husband had spoken to Mr Harrington about the use of the road at the back of Lyford House and which leads to the Abbey. Tell me, how friendly were you and your husband with Mr Harrington?’
It was an odd question and she could not read him and know why he had asked it, for their rapport did not extend to that. It was an exchange of feelings, of emotions, not of words and facts.
She said slowly, ‘We met as neighbours do in a small village. We dined together. I had the impression that in the last six months of his life Jeremy and Mr Harrington became much closer together than they had been before. After he spoke to him about the use of the road, I believe.’
Drusilla stopped. Something else struck her of which she did not speak to Devenish. It was after that meeting that Jeremy had changed so much. His last unhappy months of life had coincided with his growing friendship with Mr Harrington.
Devenish did not know exactly what she was thinking—he was only aware that she was greatly disturbed.
‘You have remembered something else?’ he ventured.
To tell him, or not to tell him? She had told no one else. Why should she trust him? Because they shared something strange? Was that enough?
She said, slowly again, ‘No one but myself knows how much my husband grew away from me—and his other friends—in the last months before he died. The change in him began about the time he sought out Mr Harrington. I thought at first that it was because he was beginning to share his radical views—but it soon became plain that he did not.’
She stopped and smiled tentatively at Devenish. His face was stern in the moonlight. ‘This sounds very weak and woolly, namby pamby almost. You had best ignore it.’
Devenish shook his head. ‘No, I would not dare to judge you so harshly. You knew your husband well, I am sure, and I know your judgement to be sound, surprisingly so for one so young, cut off from the world of consequence and power.’
He fell silent again and they stood for a moment, looking across the obscured view.
‘And that is all?’ Drusilla said, at last. ‘You have no further questions for me? May I ask why you wish to know about such an odd and unimportant matter?’
Devenish took her hand in his again, turned it over and kissed its palm. ‘Perhaps because I might not consider it unimportant? Perhaps because I wish to know of the relationships which exist between the people among whom I have come to live. Or, perhaps, mere idle curiosity.’
‘Oh, no!’ It was Drusilla’s turn to shake her head. ‘Do not deceive me, m’lord. Curious you may be, idle never!’ She spoke quickly to try to deny the effect that his kiss had had on her.
How strange that even the lightest touch from him caused her body to vibrate and shiver. She had been married to a man whom she thought she had loved and who had said that he loved her, and his touch had never moved her as Devenish’s did.
If he knew of his effect on her, he did not betray it. Only, as once before, he bent his head to kiss her, not on the eyelids this time, but on her mouth. It was a tender kiss, with nothing demanding about it.
But, involuntarily, as he broke away from her, Drusilla gave a little moan. It was as she thought—he was seducing her, slowly and painlessly, gaining an inch every time they met, and leaving her feeling desolate, as though a light in her life, briefly lit, had been immediately extinguished.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have been alone again, and long enough for the gossips to begin to weave their webs. When we return I shall retire immediately, pleading that country air wearies me more than town air does. Better that you leave when others do. Fortunately our rooms are in different wings, and I gather that Miss Faulkner sleeps in an anteroom to yours. That should serve to silence gossip.’
Drusilla, as usual, could not resist the urge to tease him, ‘Is it my reputation—or yours—m’lord, of which you are so careful?’
He stopped dead and caught her around the waist. ‘Hussy,’ he growled into her ear, ‘you know that I have no reputation to save. Do not tempt me, or you will be in the same case.’
It was her turn to break away from him. ‘So, m’lord, let us return at once, as you bade me. As it is, dear Cordelia Faulkner will reproach me.’
Which, of course, she did. Drusilla bore her admonitions patiently, saying gently that her stroll with Devenish had been perfectly innocent, that only fools would engage in violent love-making on a terrace outside a busy drawing room and she and Devenish were not fools.
She said nothing of Devenish’s question about Jeremy, although later she spent a few moments wondering what could have provoked it.
Devenish shared with the great Italian thinker Machiavelli the belief that our life is governed by equal mixtures of planning and chance, and that what is sometimes better—and sometimes worse—is that chance can alter all our careful plans.
Chance had led him to the signet ring under the altar and chance was to do him yet another favour. Afterwards he was to wonder what might have happened if he had not been plagued with sleeplessness after he had retired. He had dozed fitfully for a little time before waking some time after midnight. Sleep eluded him so completely that even picking up a book and beginning to read—his favourite stratagem to defy insomnia—did not help him.
Finally he rose, and dressed himself country-style in the clothes he had worn to visit the crypt. He would tire himself by taking a walk in the Abbey grounds. He put on his lightest shoes in order not to disturb his fellow guests.
Thus equipped he made his way down the backstairs. Much to Rob Stammer’s amusement, he always learned the geography of any house he visited—a hangover, he told his friend, from the days in wartime Spain when such knowledge might save his life. Tonight he used it to avoid meeting anyone.
He let himself out of the Abbey by opening a window in the small porch at the back entrance and climbing through it.
Outside the air was balmy. A light breeze was blowing. He walked away from the house, turning once to see that no lights were visible in any of the windows. When he reached the lake he sat down on one of the rustic benches by it and gazed thoughtfully at the starry heavens, identifying the constellations and trying to imagine the immense distances of space.
Sleep began to claim him, but it would not do to be found in the morning, lying across a rustic bench in the open. He gave a little snorting laugh, remembering a time when the bench would have been more comfortable than—
He stopped that line of thought. He refused to remember those days. They were long gone. He began to walk back towards the Abbey.
Devenish never knew why he changed his mind at the last minute and decided to visit the Abbey church before he returned to his room. He had been in the open as he rested by the lake. Here, all was darkness. Trees clustered in and around the ruined building, so that he was forced to pick his way carefully so as not to trip over truncated pillars and fallen masonry.
For a time he looked about him, trying, as Lady Cheyne had suggested, to visualise what the church must have looked like before the R
eformation had destroyed it.
Curiosity satisfied, tiredness claiming him, he turned to go. Then, as he reached the remains of the far wall over which he had to step to take the path to the back door, he heard a noise behind him.
He turned, to see that the noise was the creaking of the trapdoor to the crypt as it was lifted to allow three men to climb out into the open. His hair stood up on the back of his neck. Some primitive instinct held him silent and still, lost in the shadow cast by the trees and the house wall.
The trapdoor replaced, the three men stood together. One, by his height, was Leander Harrington. The other two were harder to distinguish, standing as they were, half in shadow, until one of them moved away from the others. It was George Lawson.
Harrington spoke to him, and in the clear night air his voice, though low, was audible to Devenish’s keen ears.
‘As I expected, nothing untoward for him to see. An expedition for nothing.’
‘Not for nothing. Besides, how can we be sure he knows nothing? How came he to speak so of the Devil—and in such a knowing fashion?’
An owl, perched on the house roof, gave a sudden cry and swooped downwards. George Lawson started back and echoed the bird’s call in his fright.
Harrington said reprovingly, ‘Tut, tut, you are too fearful. There’s naught to be worried about. He suspects nothing. I spoke to him later. The fellow is a shallow fool for all his title. It was unfortunate that he should light on that one word when that stupid bitch started to prattle about visiting the crypt.’
The third man spoke at last, and his voice was agitated—all its usual cheerfulness missing. ‘We should be careful—in case he is not so innocent as he looks. No more meetings until he has left the county.’
It was Toby Claridge speaking—and of what? Why was the crypt so important?
Harrington said brusquely, ‘Nonsense. You start at flies. And it’s time we left. Fortunately we have no wives to miss us.’
He said something else in an even lower voice which set them all laughing and they moved away, not to the back of the house, but to the side, leaving Devenish alone in the shadows considering what he had overheard.
Wherein lay its significance? The three men plainly disliked his speaking publicly of the Devil, were fearful that he had seen something that he shouldn’t have done in the crypt, and were accustomed to meeting frequently there.
There were three problems connected with finding an explanation which might make sense of all this. For the life of him he could not imagine why they should be disturbed by his speaking of the Devil. As for what he might have seen in the crypt, what could it possibly be? It could not be Jeremy Faulkner’s signet ring, for they had not mentioned it, and judging by the place in which he had found it, he doubted whether they knew it had been there.
And finally, why should they stop meeting because of what he might have thought he knew about them and, as a rider to that, why were these meetings secret and held in the crypt?
But if they were holding meetings there it would explain the fresh candle grease on the altar for they would need light to see by when they met.
One explanation might be that they were members of a drinking club, using the crypt because it amused them—but in that case, why Lawson’s heavily expressed fear and why the secrecy?
Devenish gave a great sigh as he silently negotiated the backstairs which he had reached in his musings. And his final thought, before at last he climbed into bed again, was, had all this odd behaviour anything to do with the missing girls and young Faulkner’s mysterious death? And if so, what?
His major difficulty in solving these mysteries lay in the fact that he dare not show his own interest in them overmuch for fear of alerting those responsible who might—or might not—have some connection with Leander Harrington and his two friends. He was working in the dark in more ways than one, and not for the first time.
Sleep was long in coming, and when it arrived, proved a traitor, since it brought him no real rest. For the first time in several years he had a recurrence of one of the nightmares which had plagued him since his early adolescence.
He was an eleven-year-old child again, running down the back street of a northern town to escape his pursuers. He clutched a stolen penny loaf to his ragged chest. It would serve to prevent his mother and his little brother, Ben, from starving. He managed to feed himself by picking up stale and unwanted food, left over from the daily market in the little town’s centre.
The three of them were quite alone in the world. Six months earlier his father had been accidentally killed in a tavern brawl. The boy whom Hal had been remembered his father as a big jolly man whom he had adored. In his waking life he knew only too well that Augustus Devenish had, in reality, been a feckless and careless fool and spendthrift who had embraced ruin like a mistress—and taken his family down with him.
But now, Devenish was in the lost past. He was small, always hungry, Hal again, who knew nothing of who and what his father had been and how he had come to end his wasted life in a dirty alehouse, leaving his young son to turn into a thief in order to survive. Hal had been driven to steal small sums of money, and scraps of food to stave off his family’s final destination—the workhouse.
Until she had grown too ill to work, his mother had been employed as a sempstress, making delicate baby clothes for the wives of the wool merchants whom the long wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century had made rich.
Breathless, and relieved that he had evaded capture and prison once again, Hal arrived at the tenement where the Devenishes rented two rooms in the garret. He ran swiftly up the stairs, dodging the landlady who shot out of her kitchen, demanding to know when she might expect the rent to be paid.
‘It’s two weeks overdue,’ she howled after him.
He ignored her, reached the garret and pushed open the bedroom door, panting, ‘I’m back, Mama, I’m back.’
He received no answer. His mother was sitting up in bed, holding small Ben in her arms. He had been born after his father’s death. She looked at him with lacklustre eyes, the marks of recent tears on her face.
‘What is it?’ He ran over to the bed.
His mother, white-lipped, muttered, ‘He’s gone, Hal. Ben’s gone.’
He did not at first know what she meant. ‘Gone?’ he echoed, ‘how can he be gone? He’s here. I can see him.’ He loved his little brother dearly, played with him, held him, washed and changed him when his mother had become virtually bedridden.
She took his hand to hold it against the small cold face. ‘He died, Hal, shortly after you left. It’s my fault. I had so little milk, and he was never strong. God has taken him. Better so, perhaps.’
‘Then damn God,’ he cried, the loaf falling unheeded to the bare wooden floor.
‘No, Hal, you are not to take on. It is God’s will, and we must obey it.’
‘I won’t, I won’t.’ He took the little body in his arms and said fiercely, ‘He’s not dead. He’s only cold, I’ll warm him. He’ll be better soon.’
But he knew that it was useless. His mother held her arms out to them both and said, ‘I’m going, too, Hal, before long. I shall have to disobey your father. I cannot leave you all alone in the world, to be sent to the workhouse.’
He had no notion, then, what she meant by saying that she would disobey his father: he was to learn that later.
He only knew that the worst had happened—or, perhaps, not the very worst: that, too, was to come later. It was at this point that he always woke, sitting up, the tears running down his face, for he was still back in the past, mourning the lost little brother who would never walk and run with him.
‘I’ll teach him his letters when he grows a little,’ he had promised his mother, for until his father’s money had run out they had lived in a better part of town and he had attended an academy for young gentlemen. Sometimes he saw them on the way to school, laughing and talking, rosy and well fed, carrying their books. When he did so he always ran
down a side street, or shrank into a doorway so that they might not see the ragamuffin which he had become.
Devenish recovered himself. He reminded himself that small Hal was long gone, that he had become a man of power and consequence, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he would always remember his harsh past was difficult to judge.
Apart from his growing friendship—if that was the right word—with Drusilla Faulkner, the rest of Leander Harrington’s house party was something of an anticlimax for him. Nothing occurred which might suggest secret or strange goings-on of any kind. Indeed, so bland was the conduct of all the party that Devenish might have supposed them to have been a convocation of Methodist ministers on holiday.
True, Lady Cheyne was as eccentric as ever, and George Lawson had developed a habit of sidling away if he found himself in Devenish’s vicinity. Toby Claridge, on the other hand, sought him out rather than otherwise, although when he was alone with Drusilla he continued to warn her of Devenish’s possible perfidy.
He only did this once in Giles Stone’s hearing, for Giles immediately squared up to him, bristling at all points, the picture of youthful aggression. ‘I wonder at you, Sir Toby, slandering Devenish behind his back. It is not the action of a gentleman. I dare say you would not care to repeat it to his face. Too dangerous.’
Toby’s laughter at such impertinence held a hint of fear. It was only too likely that blunt and tactless Giles might repeat his words to Devenish. And then, what? Pistols at dawn, perhaps, bearing in mind m’lord’s reputation. Toby was not sure that he agreed with Leander Harrington’s dismissal of Devenish as a shallow fool. He made certain he did not risk himself again by being frank in front of Giles.
It was left to Drusilla to reprimand her brother for his plain speaking. ‘After all,’ she ended, ‘Toby only seeks to protect me.’
‘From Devenish?’ Giles began to laugh. ‘Not by the way he looks at you, Dru. He respects you.’
It was Drusilla’s turn to laugh. ‘You offer me that from your great experience of life and love, Giles?’
The Devil and Drusilla Page 11