Victoria Holt

by The Shivering Sands

  Time passed slowly. It was five minutes after the half hour, and it was unlike Godfrey to be late, for I had discovered him to be the most punctual of people. I smiled, visualizing him leaving the vicarage and being detained by Mrs. Rendall.

  The minutes were passing. Ten minutes late. How unlike him. I had no premonition of danger until I smelt that fearful acrid smell of burning. Even then I thought at first that it was something outside. I attempted to open the window but the bolt had grown rusty and I couldn’t move it. Then I heard the crackle of flames and I knew that the fire was not outside but inside the cottage.

  I went through to the communicating room and saw—though this did not strike me immediately—that the door to the stairs was shut, although I had left it open. I went to it and seized the handle, but I could not open the door.

  Then the full horror of the situation came home to me. The door was locked. Someone had been in the cottage when I entered it or followed me in, had crept up the stairs while I was looking out of the window, and locked me in…and then that person had set the cottage on fire.

  I hammered on the door. “Let me out!” I cried. “Who’s there?”

  I ran to the window and desperately tried to open it. I could not but it would have been no use if I had. I could never have got through it. There was a broom propped up in a corner. I tried to break through those leaden panes but it was not easy to do so.

  There was now a haze of smoke in the room and I began to cough and splutter. I could feel the heat below my feet. This was no accident. Someone had deliberately locked me in and set fire to the cottage.

  Godfrey! I thought. But no…never, yet the note had come from Godfrey. I had been lured to this place to meet him. I couldn’t believe it. Not Godfrey.

  I picked up the broom and through the sheer force of horror smashed one of the little panes.

  “Help!” I cried. “Fire!…Fire!”

  There was no response to my plea—only silence out there.

  I went to the door…that heavy studded door which had so pleased Roma. I hammered on it. I turned the handle and shook it. But the horrible fact remained. I was locked in a burning cottage. Locked in!

  I ran back to the window and shouted. I came back to the door and shook the handle. I could scarcely see now for the smoke was so thick that it was suffocating me.

  Then my heart leaped with joy for I heard a shout from below.

  I shouted out: “Here. I’m up here.”

  Then the smoke and the heat were too much for me…I felt the overpowering suffocation.

  Suddenly it seemed I was not alone. Something was wrapped about my face. Urgent hands were pulling at me.

  “Quick! Run! Run with me. I can’t carry you.”

  It was Alice’s voice. Alice’s hands…and I was being dragged through such heat that it was almost unbearable.

  ***

  I was lying in the cool air and I heard voices.

  “You’re all right. You’re all right.”

  Then I was being lifted into a carriage I presumed, for I vaguely heard the distant clop-clop of horses’ hoofs.

  ***

  “If it hadn’t been for Alice, heaven knows what would have become of you,” said Mrs. Lincroft.

  I was in bed; the doctor had seen me, given me a sedative and Mrs. Lincroft orders that I was to sleep.

  Alice had seated herself by my bed, like my good angel, determined that having saved my life she would continue to protect it.

  “All you have to do is rest,” went on her mother. “You’ve had a nasty shock.”

  So I obeyed and lay there thinking of Godfrey’s note and of Roma walking out of the cottage and never coming back…and of my being lured there and locked in that I might die.

  Godfrey! I thought, and saw his face and it was Napier’s face…and they were both standing over me, laughing at me. “Trust no one,” said a voice in my mind. “No one at all.”

  Alice whispered, “It’s all right now, Mrs. Verlaine. It’s all over now. You’re safe in bed.”

  ***

  Alice was the heroine of the hour. She even looked exalted. But it was not only that; her eyebrows were a little singed and her left hand slightly burned where she had beaten out the flames which had caught my dress.

  “She showed admirable presence of mind,” said Mrs. Lincroft, her eyes full of tears. “I’m so proud of my little girl.”

  Alice said: “I didn’t do anything that anyone else wouldn’t do. I was going over to the vicarage to get my history book which I’d left there. I wanted it to do my homework. What a blessing that I’d left it behind that morning. And I saw the cottage was on fire so I ran to look…and then I heard Mrs. Verlaine shouting…”

  John Downs, one of the gardeners at Lovat Stacy, had been in the neighborhood too. He had heard Alice shout that there was a fire and he had run after her to the cottage, but he would have been too late to save me, although he helped when he saw Alice dragging me from the place.

  “Just in time,” everyone was saying it.

  “My word, that Mrs. Verlaine has had a lucky escape. As for young Alice Lincroft, I reckon she deserves a medal.”

  I was suffering from shock and kept in my bed for several days although otherwise I was not hurt. I had come through the fire miraculously. Alice had saved my life.

  She sat by my bed during those days as though guarding me. I would awake from my troubled dozes to see her serene face at my bedside. She glowed; she was clearly delighted with the part she had played in my rescue. Who would not have been?

  But there were other matters to consider.

  People came to see me, among them Napier and Godfrey. Napier’s eyes haunted me long after he left. He looked so fearful, and the memory was like a dose of healing medicine. Godfrey came too. Godfrey…He too was full of concern but I remembered when I saw him that it was due to his note that I had gone to that cottage.

  He sat by my bed and I said to him: “Why did you send the note?”

  “What note?” he asked.

  “The note asking me to meet you at the cottage.”

  He looked helplessly about him.

  “It’s been a terrible shock to poor Mrs. Verlaine,” said Mrs. Lincroft. “The doctor says she should rest for some days. She gets…nightmares. Anyone would.”

  Godfrey looked bewildered and when I pressed about the note he changed the subject.

  ***

  In less than a week I was recovered although I still dreamed of the cottage and as I slipped into unconsciousness I would often imagine I was in that upper room…locked in…while below a monster lurked waiting to destroy me. Sometimes I called out in these dreams and would awake in a cold sweat of fear.

  The doctor said it was natural. I had had a terrible shock but my nightmares would diminish. In the meantime I should try not to think about my ordeal in the cottage.

  I had looked for the note and could not find it but I asked Godfrey again for an explanation.

  “I wrote no such note,” he declared.

  “But I saw it. It was the reason I went to the cottage.”

  He shook his head.

  I went on in exasperation: “It was addressed to me and it said as far as I remember: ‘Dear C. Will you come to the cottage at 6:30 tonight? I have something important to tell you. G.W.’”

  “I should never have written such a note.”

  “Then who did?”

  He stared at me in horror. “Where is this note?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I may have left it in my room. I may have put it into my pocket. But I can’t find it now.”

  “A pity,” he said. “But you know my writing.”

  “It’s the first note you’ve ever written to me. But I’ve seen your writing of course, and it didn’t occur to me that you hadn’t written it.”

&nb
sp; “Caroline, if someone forged my handwriting…”

  “If?” I demanded. “Are you suggesting that there was no note?”

  “No…no…of course not.” He was a little embarrassed. “But…if…I mean someone must have sent that note to get you to the cottage.”

  “That inference is obvious.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It could mean,” I said, “that I am marked down as the next victim.”

  “Caroline!”

  “Well, I should have been, but for Alice.”

  He nodded. “But, my dear Caroline, it’s…it’s frightening!”

  “I agree with you,” I said coolly, for I could not forgive him for merely hinting that I might have imagined that note. “Roma…Edith…and now myself. Where is the connection? Is it because the person responsible for these two disappearances knows that I am trying to find the reason for them?”

  “But who knows that you are doing this?” he asked. “I am the only one who does. You don’t think that I…”

  I laughed and was almost immediately sober. “But, Godfrey, someone is trying to kill me. What can I do?”

  “You could go away from here.”

  “Go away!” I visualized my lonely life, shut away from Lovat Stacy, not knowing what was going on in that house which had become the background of my new existence. I knew that whatever happened I did not want that.

  “I shall not go away,” I said vehemently. “I’ll take special care and the next time I receive a note suggesting a meeting place I shall insist on confirming it in the presence of witnesses.”

  “For heaven’s sake do.”

  “Godfrey, I do wonder how that note came to me…”

  “And in my handwriting…at least with my initials.”

  A cold sensation made me shiver uncontrollably. Where was the note? I was sure I had not destroyed it. I believed I had left it in my room. And there was the mystery of the locked door. Alice had said she had thought it was hard to open; she thought there was something strange about the handle.

  “But,” she had said, “I was so frightened that I didn’t take much notice of it. I only knew I had to get Mrs. Verlaine out. I just forced the door open. I can’t remember it clearly. Once I got into the cottage I kept saying to myself: ‘I’ve got to get Mrs. Verlaine out…’ and I don’t even remember running up the stairs.”

  Everyone said that was understandable in the circumstances, and that the door had become jammed possibly, after all the rain we had, and finding it difficult to open I assumed it was locked which it obviously could not have been. I had panicked, was the general opinion, although no one said this. I had believed myself to be locked in a burning cottage; it was enough to make anyone get into a panic.

  And the cause of the fire? Roma had used paraffin oil with which to cook and there was a drum in the outhouse which had obviously contained the remains of her supply. The theory was that a tramp had been sleeping in the cottage and left a pipe or cigarette smoldering somewhere. Fires could start easily enough.

  “Tramps,” said Godfrey. “It’s the answer. And do you remember that day you thought you saw a shadow at the window? That could have been one of them and he hid himself in the outhouse when we came out.”

  It was a plausible explanation, but somehow I did not believe it. I was certain the incident had been cleverly and diabolically planned.

  If I mentioned this people would say I was letting my imagination run away with my common sense. Godfrey felt this, I was sure; and if he, who knew I was Roma’s sister and had come here to investigate her disappearance thought that, how much more readily would others, who did not know that there was a special reason for my being here.

  I knew that but for Alice I should have been burned to death—murdered as my sister and Edith, I was certain now, had been before me.

  10

  It took me some weeks to recover from the shock of my experience. Everyone was most concerned for me, which was flattering, but I just could not rid myself of the notion that one of these people who now enquired so solicitously after my health, had deliberately tried to kill me. But I kept my thoughts to myself; I pretended to accept the theory that a tramp’s carelessness had started the fire, that it had probably been smoldering in the outhouse for hours and, by some trick of fate, had burst into a conflagration embracing the lower part of the cottage some five or ten minutes after I had entered the place and gone upstairs; and the door had not been locked, merely jammed. That was the comforting theory.

  I avoided Napier. I could not bear to look into his face for fear I should read something there which I dreaded. I kept thinking of our meeting in the copse and it haunted my dreams.

  Mrs. Lincroft suggested that I take a little time off my duties.

  “You will recover all the quicker,” she said. “It was a horrible shock. And it won’t hurt the girls to miss their music lessons for a while. They can, in any case, do their practicing.”

  I myself found a great solace in the piano. I would sit by the hour playing Chopin and Schumann and trying to stop my thoughts going back over those nightmare moments when I had realized I was trapped in the cottage. One day I heard the girls discussing the fire. Allegra was leaning her elbows on the table looking dreamily into space. While I sorted out my music I listened to them.

  “You’ll write a story about the fire, I expect,” said Allegra.

  “I’ll read it to you when it’s ready.”

  “All about a gallant rescue,” said Sylvia. “I wish I could do a gallant rescue.”

  “I know,” mocked Allegra. “You’d like to rescue Mr. Wilmot from a burning cottage. You’d have to find another…because that one’s no good now.”

  “It’s odd,” mused Sylvia. “Mamma was saying it was odd…”

  “Well,” mocked Allegra, “it must be odd then.”

  “…that there were two fires. The chapel in the copse and the cottage. That’s two isn’t it?”

  “Your mathematics are improving,” said Allegra. “Full marks for a correct calculation. Two it is.”

  “I’m only saying it’s a coincidence and so it is. Two fires and two disappearing ladies. I think that is very strange.”

  “Two ladies?” queried Allegra.

  “Don’t say you’ve forgotten the archaeologist,” said Alice.

  Sylvia whispered: “And there were nearly three.”

  “But Mrs. Verlaine didn’t disappear,” pointed out Alice.

  “Suppose no one had known she had gone to the cottage and she had just been found there. There would have been three ladies then.”

  “But they would have found her…remains,” said Alice.

  A hush fell on them because they had become aware of me.

  ***

  I was standing by the Stacy vault in the graveyard when Godfrey came to meet me. It was no use meeting in the church during his organ practice now; we had been discovered and Mrs. Rendall was apt to send Sylvia either to call him or to sit and “enjoy” the music.

  “Sylvia has always loved organ music,” Mrs. Rendall had said. “I think it would be better if she studied the organ rather than the piano. She certainly doesn’t seem to be making much progress in that direction, though she does work hard. Perhaps Sylvia is not at fault and if people are more interested in other things, it may not be surprising that their pupils suffer.”

  Although since the fire, her attitude—like that of everyone else—had been gentler toward me, because of Godfrey’s interest in me, she had added me to her many targets for attack, and because he and I were aware of this and knew the reason for it, the possibilities which could arise from our friendship were stressed.

  As he came toward me, wending his way through the gravestones, the sun on his hair, I thought how good-looking he was—not handsome, it was true, but there was great charm in his expression wh
ich came from the character within I was sure, and I thought how fortunate I was to have found such a friend. There was no doubt that friendship between us was growing at a great pace.

  The incident of the fire had brought us even closer together and I found his concern for me most touching. He was particularly disturbed because I had gone to the cottage in response to a note which was supposed to have come from him. That, in my opinion, was the most alarming aspect of the affair. I had been lured to the cottage.

  I had told no one but him about the note, and although his reaction when he had first heard of it was that I had had a shock and had imagined it, he was now perturbed. I persuaded him to say nothing; I thought it possible that the person who had written that note might betray knowledge of it in some way; but no one did. As for Godfrey he was constantly urging me to go away because it was clearly unsafe here. I could take a holiday, stay with his family. They would be delighted to have me.

  “And what about Roma?” I demanded.

  “Roma is dead, I feel sure of it. And if she is, nothing you can do will bring her back.”

  “It’s something I have to find out, no matter…”

  He understood but he continued to be very uneasy. So was I. I had developed a habit of looking over my shoulder constantly whenever I was alone. I made sure that my door was locked every night. At least I was on my guard.

  Now Godfrey was smiling as he saw me. “I escaped the watch dog,” he said. “It is believed that I have gone to play the organ. Little is it known that I’m skulking about the graveyard in the company of that teacher of music who has failed to turn Sylvia Rendall into Clara Schumann.”

  “You’re looking pleased with yourself this morning.”

  “It’s rather good news.”

  “Can it be shared?”

  “Certainly it can. I have had a living offered to me.”

  “So you’ll be leaving.”

  “You look alarmed. How delightfully flattering. It’s not for six months. Ah, now you look relieved. Equally flattering. A great deal can happen in six months.”