We left the lights burning behind as we went into the corridor leading down our wing. The room seemed safer lighted than dark.
Dacia was considering me again. “I suppose I should worry about you coming here more than I have,” she said, suddenly sly. “You could tip over Marc’s applecart entirely if you got Justin back. Because then where would the money come from to pay his debts? Alicia would stop holding him up and the whole jig would be over. Of course Maggie knows this, all right. She’s a smart one. I think that’s why she’s considering marriage with old stick-in-the-mud Nigel Barrow. All that Bahamas money of his would help now, wouldn’t it? And she’d do anything to keep Marc and Justin out of trouble.”
I could not bear to listen any longer. “There’s an old man lying dead downstairs,” I reminded her, “and I don’t think—”
“So what?” Dacia had recovered from her first shock at seeing Old Daniel on the couch downstairs. “People are alive and then they’re dead. It happens all the time. Besides, he was a mean old codger. He used to watch me every time I stepped out on his silly grass chessboard—as though I might hurt it someway.”
I hardly listened because of my own disturbing thoughts. “I keep remembering that I saw him in the chapel ruins this afternoon and that he seemed glad to see me, even though he never liked me. I think he was trying to tell me something. If only I could have understood!”
Dacia paused at the door of her room and swung about. “What do you mean—tell you something?” I could almost see her vivid imagination taking a leap into space. “You mean there’s something more to how he died? More than a wall falling over accidentally?” she demanded.
“I don’t mean anything,” I said. “Don’t be absurd.”
I hurried toward my room, while she spoke to my retreating back, her attention once more upon her own affairs.
“Oh, well, if I lose out here, I can always keep on with my job. I’ll not give it up till there’s solid ground under my feet. So I might as well wish you luck.”
I heard her door creak open and then close before I reached my room. For all my impatience with her, I found that I liked Dacia Keane. I might feel a real sympathy for her if Marc North married her and brought her home to Athmore. Though that seemed unlikely. Marc had never stayed with one girl for very long. His penchant was for playing the field, and I had never seen him with anyone like Dacia before. At least she had her eyes open. If she married Marc, she would know what she was doing—which was more than I could say for myself when it came to marriage.
I reached my room and went in to switch on the bed-table lamp. Then I stood in the eerie blue glow the room generated, sniffing doubtfully. Had someone been smoking in here? I had stopped smoking long ago to please Justin and I had never started again. So why should there be a faint aroma of tobacco in the room?—if that was what it was.
I went to fling a window open and stood huddled in my wool robe, looking out toward workshop and garage. There were no more flames to be seen, but the stench of smoke was thick on the air and I closed the window against it. Undoubtedly this was what accounted for the odor in my room. My hands were cold on the windowsill and I thrust them into the pockets of my robe, remembering again the urgent clasp of Old Daniel’s fingers. Why had there been such urgency in him? What had he meant about the rook’s play and his warning that the king had better watch out? Why should he have mentioned these obvious facts about the topiary game?
I wished I did not feel so uneasy. I wished that my own mind would not go leaping through space just as Dacia’s had done. At tea this afternoon I had asked the woman next to me if she had seen an old man when the tour visited the ruins, and she had told me readily that she had and that he’d seemed frightened. Could there be any possible connection between tonight’s fire and Old Daniel’s death?
But of course that wasn’t possible, since the wall must have fallen upon him hours earlier.
Before I got into bed, I went again to the unbarred tower door, drawn to it uneasily, wondering again at Deirdre’s reaction to room and tower. I slipped behind the bureau and pulled the door open upon darkness and the chill mustiness of damp stone. Above I could see the narrow oblong of a sentry window that had never been intended for use. The circling stone steps between were black and I could see nothing close at hand, yet it seemed to me that some trace of smoke lingered here too, and that it was different from the outdoor smell of the fire. Still—with the fire stench so strong—it was impossible to balance a fainter smoke scent against it and be sure of any distinction.
I stood utterly still, listening, while an odd tremor ran through me, and my blood began to beat in my ears until it seemed to me that I really heard sounds up there in the dark tower. A creaking that was not the wind, a suppressed sigh that was like a human breath. I thought of the guard struck down at his post and backed hastily from the tower. Before I closed the door, I listened once more, trying to quiet my trepidation—and heard no sound except from far away. That was Justin’s voice calling, and Nigel Barrow answering out in the yard. But nothing closer. Nothing at all. My imagination had always been nervously stimulated by this house, and I must not heed it now. It would be absurd to go running downstairs with a wild alarm that would cause laughter. Besides, if anyone was up there, escape from the roof was too easily possible. From either corridor the back stairs were quickly accessible at this deserted hour of the night. I closed the door and shoved the bureau hard against it. At least the door could not be opened while I slept without a good deal of noise.
I returned to my bed and found that Nellie’s hot-water bottle had lost its comforting warmth. This time I left the bed-table lamp burning, and the blue aura of my surroundings seemed to add to the chill as I lay shivering beneath the covers.
Shivering—and thinking …
Thinking that I had no past, since it was lost to me. That the future was wholly doubtful. That there was only the present. And what was I to do with these few hours that already supped through my fingers?
From far down the hall came strains of music. That would be Dacia again, turning up her record player. She too had a tower bedroom. Had she smelled cigarette smoke in its dark reaches? Had she turned the music up loudly for comfort and company because the house was intimidating her in spite of her gay defiance?
I did not want to hear the beat of Petula Clark’s singing. Those were words I wanted to forget:
For all we know …
But I could not forget. The memory of Justin that I had been trying to hold off returned to engulf me. When I bandaged his burn I had been close enough to him to slip into the curve of his arm, had he offered it. The memory warmed me, and it answered as well the question of what I must do about the present.
Tomorrow may never come …
I put my hands over my ears to shut out the words. I must be honest with myself. Honest about why I was here. There was no time left for subterfuge, for fooling myself because of hurt pride, worn by now to such shabby shreds that I could no longer hold it about me. It was absurd to tell myself that I had come here to make certain that I was no longer in love with Justin North. I was here because I had never stopped loving him, and probably never would. Yet how I had lost him, how we had failed, seemed clear enough—so how could I expect another chance?
During my marriage, before I knew what Justin meant to Alicia, and she to him, I had met her a number of times. Grovesend was part of our social community and could not be ignored. Once I knew, I tried to avoid her—which was not always possible. Remembrance of those encounters with Alicia still made me squirm in humiliation. Only later had I realized how cleverly she baited me and exposed me to ridicule, while always remaining well-mannered herself. More than once she had stung me to sharp response in front of Justin, her attitude one of quiet amusement that anyone so gauche and clumsy as I should play at being mistress of Athmore.
I turned miserably in bed, unhappy all over again because of what Alicia had done to me. At least I would know her baiting for wha
t it was if I had to meet her now. Surely I would be able to smile and keep my temper, retain my poise as well as she.
I lay scowling in the dark, my temper anything but restrained, and once more tried to think honestly about Justin.
He had been furious at the sight of me this afternoon. He had not willingly submitted to my help in bandaging his arm, and he had looked at me strangely afterward—as if I were someone he did not know, someone different from the young girl he had fallen in love with. Was I too different—or not enough different—to win him back? Was all this questioning simply the straw clutched at by a woman when love has already slipped out of her grasp?
Still—Justin had waited. That was the thing which had brought me back. He had not called me, but neither had he divorced me for desertion. And I had at least one advantage over Alicia Daven. One enormous advantage.
I was Justin’s wife.
Having faced the beginnings of truth, I turned over and fell asleep in the wide bed. If anyone crept up and down the tower steps or smoked a cigarette on the roof, I did not know it. I slept soundly until morning came.
V
Nellie came into my room, red-cheeked and smiling, to look at me as if I were a lazybones. She set her tray on the bedside table with a determined, cheery “Good morning” and went to start the fire.
“It will be a warm, fair day,” she said. “But I remember you feeling cold in the mornings. We’ll get you strengthened up again soon, but for now you shall have your fire.”
I propped myself onto one elbow and sipped my tea strong, with no hot water or milk added. I could remember how I had hated to be thus awakened in the old days. “I don’t want any tea!” I used to wail to Justin. “Why can’t they just let me sleep?” But of course Justin wanted his tea early when he was driving off to London. I’d had only Athmore ahead of me, and nothing at all that I really wanted to do. Oh, I could learn to garden and to help run a house that did not need me to run it. I could accompany Maggie on her round of good deeds. I could visit other country families. But where was the world I had hoped for in all this? Worst of all, where was Justin? I had ached with my lonesome loving—while he had gone off to his machines and his formulas, his experiments, forgetting me for a good part of the time.
Would it be different now? What had I to offer except the fact that I was three years older than when I’d married him, and, hopefully, three years more mature?
“Drink up now, or your tea will be cold,” Nellie said, and I returned to face the present.
“Is there any word about the fire last night?” I asked.
The girl looked around at me from the hearth, her determined air of good cheer falling away. “I didn’t know a thing till I came this morning, Miss Eve. But everyone’s running on about how some madman has it in for Mr. Justin. It’s cruel, that’s what it is. And him working so hard and trying to do something for England.”
“Oh?” I said. “Is that what he’s trying to do? I thought he was working on a new car.”
Nellie moved back from the fire as the kindling took hold, and brushed up the hearth, talking to me the while.
“It’s that in part, Miss Eve. I mean he’ll need a new sort of engine for the car, won’t he—if it’s a new fuel he’s to come up with?”
A new fuel? So this was the hush-hush secret Miss Davis was being so mysterious about. Apparently it was common knowledge below floors.
“What sort of new fuel?” I prompted.
She moved about the room, pulling back draperies, opening a window to freshen the room, in spite of the hearth fire. “Oh—we’d not be knowing about that. Something that won’t poison the air or burn up a car if there’s an accident—that’s what they say. A car that will be a lot safer all around. That would be fine, wouldn’t it—for all of England?”
If Nellie was right, and Justin was really developing such a car, then this was very big news indeed. I had heard him discuss ideas along this line in the past, but in his experimental work for the company he had always been put at other things. Now, apparently, he had taken leave of absence to do something on his own. And someone was trying to stop him, or at least delay him.
“You’ve heard about Old Daniel’s death, haven’t you?” I asked. “Has there been any more news about that? Do they know whether it was really the wall that crushed him?”
She nodded sadly. “It was the wall, all right. It toppled over on him fair and square. Morton says the police came last night and again early this morning to have a good look at the place. The old man should have had better sense than to go near that wall. He knew it was dangerous. Oh—that reminds me, Miss. I’ve brought your pictures. My Jamie did them up for you last night—prints and all. We made free to look at them, and you’ve got some snaps of the very place where the wall fell down. And one snap of Old Daniel standing there.”
This was a surprise, and I sat up in bed and took the packet of pictures she handed me. In my hurry to catch scenes I wanted to remember, I had not realized that Old Daniel was about, or that I’d turned my camera on him before the roll was finished. I sorted quickly through the snapshots and found the one with the old man standing in the shadow of a large bush. So lost was he in leafy shade that it was no wonder I had not noticed him. This last glimpse of him alive was saddening, and I wished again that I had understood what troubled him.
Once the fire blazed properly, Nellie came to my bedside to regard me with approval. “It’s good to have you back at Athmore, Miss Eve. You never used to stand by and take the old ways just because they’ve been old ways for a hundred years. You stirred things up a bit when you were here.”
I smiled at her. “I’m afraid a lot of my sentences in those days began, ‘In America we …,’ and everyone tired of that quickly. What a bore I must have been.”
“Oh no, Miss Eve!” Nellie denied. “I like Americans. I’d like to go over there someday for a visit. And I don’t see why you might not do some things in a way better than us.”
I had noticed before in England—and in other places too—that often the working classes seemed more warmly friendly and less inhibited in their behavior toward the stranger than the more reserved upper classes. Fortunately for me, the working classes were very much “with it,” as Dacia would say, in today’s England.
“You’re a darling,” I told her. “But I’d like to learn more about Athmore as it is, instead of trying to turn everything upside down the way I used to.”
“Anyway, we’ve got someone new doing that,” Nellie said wryly. She rolled her eyes as she had done yesterday and nodded toward the hall. “Her nibs down there. Wait till you see her—skirts up to here, and sometimes red tights over those long legs. Colors enough to put your eye out! My man’d not let me in the door if I came home dressed like that.”
“This is the country,” I reminded her. “In London that’s what you see on the streets every day, and only the tourists give it a second look. All this is supposed to be waking England up.”
“I’d sooner stay asleep,” said Nellie. She picked up my tray to carry it to the door.
“Wait a moment,” I said. “Nellie—tell me something. Would anyone be likely to come into this room smoking a cigarette while I was downstairs during the excitement last night?”
Her rosy face sobered and she stared at me with frightened eyes. “Oh, no—not already! I thought maybe he’d stay away, what with you being an American and all. What would he want with you?”
“He?” I echoed. “Whoever do you mean?”
“That one from the green-velvet room,” Nellie said. “He’s taken to smoking cigarettes, he has—though how he manages that, I can’t know.”
I sat up in bed. “Nellie! You’re not talking about poor Mr. Dunscombe who’s supposed to haunt that room, are you?”
She cast a nervous look around, as though some shadowy figure might appear at her elbow, and put a finger to her lips. “Hush, Miss, do! These days he gets about. I’d swear he’d been in here yesterday before I came to mak
e up the room for you. I smelled the smoke just as plain. And it’s logical he’d come here, isn’t it? After all, his wife moved into this very room while Mr. Dunscombe was still alive. They say her lovers could come to her easily across the roofs and down that tower there. Though of course the green-velvet room that Mr. D. moved to is a tower room too, and they say he came across the roof and caught her one night. Sometimes there’s a knocking here—just like he’s still trying to get in.”
None of this ancient legend troubled me. But a ghost who smoked cigarettes was something else.
“Have you told Miss Maggie about the smoke?” I asked.
Nellie nodded vigorously. “I have indeed. But she says I’ve always been afraid of dark corners at Athmore, and it’s time I grew up. I don’t think she took me serious. But when I—” She broke off abruptly, as though she had said too much, and went to the door with her tray.
“Wait,” I said. “Don’t stop. What were you going to tell me?”
She seemed to turn something over in her mind. “It’s just that—that Mr. Marc was there, and I think he believed me. He didn’t speak a word, but he looked like he was thinking hard about what I’d said and didn’t much care for it. In fact, he went off in a hurry before Miss Maggie was finished with me.”
I wondered what Marc had done to follow through, and whether Justin knew about this. Since a secret enemy was abroad at Athmore, this should be looked into.
Nellie transferred the tray to one hand and opened the door before I could ask more questions.
“I’ll start your bath for you, Miss Eve. Nice and hot the way you like it. Her nibs—Miss Dacia, that is—sleeps for ages every morning. We’re supposed to be a rest cure for her right now, you know. Ran her to a frazzle, they did in London—poor skinny little thing. So Mr. Marc brought her here for fresh air and some feeding up. He’s home on holiday too, from that art gallery place where he works. But what rest she’s getting. I can’t see—the way she stays up half the night. Anyway, you can take as long as you like with the bath. Mr. Nigel’s on the other side of the long gallery, in the front room, so you and Miss Dacia are here by yourselves.”
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