Hunter's Green

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  As we rounded the loop and turned toward the house, Maggie stopped him.

  “Let me out here, will you, dear? I’ve played long enough. I must get back and look up Caryl. She’s probably frantic by now because she can’t find me. No, Eve—stay where you are.”

  The moment Justin braked to a stop, she was out of the car, slamming the door behind her, running across the grassy verge in the direction of the house.

  Justin did not start the car again, but waited for me to follow her. “That was pretty obvious of Maggie. Perhaps you’d like to get out here too?”

  I looked at him, seeing the pale silver streak in his hair, the strong shape of his nose, the firm mouth I remembered too well.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” I said. “Tell me what you’re doing—tell me about the car. It’s been so long—I’m out of touch.”

  For a moment I thought he might put me relentlessly out on the road and drive off without me. The motor still idled and at length he set the gray car into motion. This time he drove more slowly and after a few minutes he began to talk to me. But instead of the technical detail that would be over my head, he spoke of what this car might mean in a wider sense than concerned his personal fortunes. I listened intently, wanting to understand.

  “Whether I succeed with these experiments with fuel or not, there’s more to this car. Everyone’s been afraid to build for safety in the past because the public has rejected such cars. But the ghastly facts of highway slaughter are beginning to get through the hardest heads and there’s a more receptive climate now. What we hope for is a car that will put England into top competition in the world market.”

  Woods and parklands flowed by without haste, so that one could encompass them visually, instead of losing everything in a blur as we’d done when I drove with Dacia. I listened and Justin talked.

  “There was a day when England had command of the world market,” he went on. “But countries, like people, grow old and too set in their ways. We began to lose out to young, more aggressive nations. I suppose this is as it should be. Fortunately, nations can be reborn and we’re not without recent resurgence. But what we’ve accomplished in radar, and with the jet plane and a few other things has to be multiplied all across the board.”

  “There’s another rebirth,” I said, smiling. “There’s a whole fresh, new, young spirit coming to life in England. You have only to think of the Beatles and Mary Quant and the rest—the way they’ve had London popping these days!”

  Justin had relaxed a little as we talked. “I admire these youngsters. They’ve put a few older industries to shame with their eagerness and hard work. They’re doing what they believe in, following their own creativeness, instead of grasping merely for themselves, as too many of their elders are doing. I’d like to think this car of mine may shake things up a bit too—if it gets there in time. Recently these malicious disruptions of my work have set me back. They’ve got to be stopped—and soon.”

  He turned the car into the home stretch. His coolness toward me had not really lessened, even though for a little while he had warmed to his subject. Now silence lay between us again and I sought for some way to break it.

  “What did you make of that wine bottle and the cigarette packets Marc brought you?” I asked. “What do you think they mean?”

  He threw me a startled look. “What bottle? He’s brought me nothing.”

  I tried to explain. “Nigel got suspicious of someone hiding out on the roof and he went up there to search. He found these things and gave them to Marc, who said he’d take them directly to you.”

  The car picked up speed. We rounded the last curve with the wind in our ears, and drew up before the garage.

  “I’ll talk to Marc at once,” Justin said, and barely waited for me to get out of the car before he hurried toward his workshop.

  I climbed the embankment between the row of beech trees and crossed the side lawn. Marc came toward me from the front terrace.

  “So you’ve been out for a ride in Justin’s masterpiece?” His eyes were bright with familiar malice.

  “He’s looking for you now to ask questions about the things Nigel found on the roof,” I said.

  “I’ll talk to him.” Marc was curt. “There was something I had to look after first. I’ve a message for you, by the way. Alicia wants to see you. This evening, if you can make it. Dacia and I will drive you over.”

  I stared at him, astonished at his calm assurance that I would do as she expected. “Why should I see Alicia?” I demanded.

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “What does she want of me?”

  “That’s up to her, but at least I can tell you one thing. She wants you to bring over the snapshot you caught of Old Daniel yesterday before the accident that killed him.”

  I gaped. “How does she know there is such a picture?”

  “When you tell Dacia, you tell the world,” Marc said wryly.

  Somehow I did not like this. Alicia’s interest in this chance picture gave me an eerie, unsettled feeling in which there was a vague sense of threat.

  “Why is Alicia interested in the picture?” I asked. “It’s only a blurred snapshot which may or may not be of Old Daniel.”

  “May not be?” Marc was quick. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean anything except that it isn’t possible to tell who is in the snapshot. In any case, why should Alicia care?”

  He shrugged. “She didn’t confide in me. Sentimental reasons, perhaps. The old man was devoted to her, you know. She used to flatter him over that topiary monstrosity, and he made no bones about thinking she ought to be mistress of Athmore.”

  I knew this was true, but I doubted that Alicia possessed much sentiment in her character.

  “You’d better see her,” Marc said softly.

  I thought of the rook’s play. My distrust of him was increasing. “Why?” I said again.

  Again he made that slight motion of shrugging. “Easier for everyone if you do. And it won’t hurt you.”

  The desire to know what Alicia wanted, to know the reason for her interest in my chance snapshot, was stronger than my reluctance to meet her again. I did not care one way or another whether I eased anything for Marc, but I wanted to know more about her interest in the picture.

  “All right, then. I’ll see her tonight, if she wishes. And if Dacia is coming with us.”

  Marc cocked an amused eyebrow at me, but I sensed his relief. For some reason he had been worried lest I refuse.

  “At least this will be interesting to watch,” he said and went off toward Justin’s workshop.

  The terrace was empty and I crossed it to the front door. The Hall of Armor stretched bleakly on either hand, far more chill than the sunny air outdoors. I wondered, as I often had, where the Spanish bones lay that these helmets and breastplates once covered.

  As I climbed the stairs Mrs. Langley’s worldly-wise gray eyes seemed to watch me from her portrait. She had been a far more gifted and imaginative woman than any of her daughters, but she must have been greatly beset by the difficult problems provided by them. I wondered how she had met those problems, what courses of action she had taken. Yet all the while it was my own course that concerned me. As Maggie had said, Alicia was the enemy and it was time to stop running from her and meet her face to face. She must not find me the same easily routed and quickly humiliated girl she had met in the past. This morning she had routed me again. Tonight it must be different.

  Halfway up the curving flight the beautiful Cynthia regarded me with a veiled gaze, pouting a little. After Mr. Dunscombe had taken himself conveniently out of the way, Cynthia had become Lady Stanhope and moved away from Athmore for good, which must have given her mother a certain welcome respite. This time as I passed her picture I gave her look for look, as though it were Alicia herself with whom I crossed glances.

  From the upper banister a voice came down to me. “That Cynthia was the worst of the lot, wasn’t she?” Dacia said. “Look
ing down her nose and all that. I keep wanting to tell her off properly. Though perhaps that look is only to hide how scared she was. What with all that knocking on her door late at night after her husband was dead. She must have been glad when Sir Gerald came along and took her away. And I’ll bet her mum was glad to see her go.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I agreed as I climbed the last flight and stood beside Dacia, looking down at the great array of portraits, almost three stories high.

  “Wonder if they’ll add Alicia to the lot someday,” she said slyly: “She’s beautiful enough. But she’s a phony.”

  I caught her up at once. “What do you mean by that?”

  Dacia could be slippery when she chose, and she wriggled away from the question.

  “I’d rather see you up there, if you must know. Are you going to Grovesend tonight?”

  “I’ve told Marc I would,” I said. “Providing you’ll be there too.”

  She giggled softly. “I know what you mean. Oh, I’m not jealous, never fear. I know where I stand with old Marc. But he’s told me about you and him in the old days.”

  “If I were you,” I said dryly, “I wouldn’t believe too much of what Marc tells you about the so-called old days. I was there too, you know, and I was never, as you put it, his girl friend.”

  For some reason she looked crestfallen. “You mean that part wasn’t true at all? Of course I know Marc tells a lot of whoppers but then—so do I.”

  “That one was certainly a whopper,” I agreed.

  “Well, it’s too bad in a way.” She cocked her head on one side as we walked toward the north wing. “I’d have felt a bit set up, you know, to think he’d settled for me instead of you.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Oh—that you’ve got looks and education—and you know how to do the proper thing. Besides, you believe in something. I don’t believe in anything except getting Dacia what Dacia wants.”

  “If you see all that in me, perhaps I’m a phony too,” I said ruefully. “But I wish you’d tell me what you meant about Alicia being one. I’d like to be armed with whatever I need to know before I see her tonight.”

  Dacia wrinkled her snub little nose in scorn. “Well—you know—she has family and loads of good breeding, but all the same, somewhere deep down she’s a fake—though I don’t know exactly what’s wrong. It’s just that I can smell that sort of thing a mile. I’ve had a lot of practice. You’re the one who’s a lot more real, even though sometimes you haven’t much sense. The way you keep cutting off your own nose. But at least you’re not pretending anything. But that’s enough from me. After all, I have to play Marc’s game, don’t I?”

  “So this is Marc’s game too?” I said. “Why? What does he get out of it?”

  “Only his life, so to speak,” said Dacia airily. “If Alicia decides to turn the screws it’ll be all over for Marc.”

  We reached our corridor and I heard music blaring through the open door of Dacia’s room. There was no point in pursuing the subject of Marc, since I would not get very far with Dacia.

  “You’ve a record player?” I asked.

  “No—tape recorder. I like to pick up things from the telly, and sometimes from Radio Caroline. The pirate stations aren’t as stuffy as B.B.C. When I saw Petula Clark on telly doing that one, I took it off on tape so I could play it again. Do you like the song? It makes me ever so sad—all about tomorrow never coming. It will be that way for us one of these days, won’t it—the time when tomorrow never comes?”

  “Let’s hope not for a while,” I said and went on to my room with the music wailing after me, more prophetic than I liked. All my tomorrows were bound up with Justin, and it was likely that they had already been cut off.

  It was nearly time for one o’clock luncheon, and as I washed, combed my hair, freshened my lipstick, I thought over the events of the morning. The same troubling questions still nagged at me—whether the man in my snapshot was really Old Daniel, and why Alicia Daven was interested in seeing the picture. Tonight I must discover exactly what Alicia wanted.

  I opened the bureau drawer and took out my handbag, felt inside the zippered pocket where I had put the picture. My fingers found nothing. Downstairs the gong that summoned Athmore to meals began to sound, but I paid no attention. I carried my bag to the bed and dumped out its contents.

  The picture was not there. Someone must have come into my room to search for it and had taken it away. The theft answered one question that had been haunting me. Old Daniel could not have been the man in the picture, or no one would have cared. What I had snapped mattered to someone. Mattered so much that the picture had been filched from my bag. By someone who did not want me to show Alicia the snapshot when I went to Grovesend tonight? If such a person had reason to fear the existence of a picture, what might he fear from me—since I’d been in the very spot where the picture was taken. This was a new and completely unsettling thought.

  Once more I removed my suitcase from the wardrobe closet and looked for the packet of pictures and film Nellie had brought me. This, at least, was where I’d left it. I opened the paper folder and took out the negatives. One by one I held the squares of film up to the light, discarding each until I came to the one that showed me the chapel stones of Athmore Hall arching against the sky, and shrubbery with a human figure fading into it. I would not be able to show Alicia the printed picture tonight, but I still had the negative. Now, more than ever, I wanted the answer to her interest in the picture. I could not believe it stemmed from any sentimental affection she might have felt toward Old Daniel.

  This time I put the square of film into a pocket in my billfold, and took my handbag with me. For the moment I would say nothing to anyone about the missing picture. Let the hunter, whoever it was, be left wondering whether I had discovered the theft. A sudden intuitive picture flashed through my mind. I could see the castled green figure of the rook waiting on his square—waiting patiently to make the move which had been denied him for so long. As I went downstairs to join the others for luncheon I found that I was shivering.

  VIII

  Grovesend was a small but elegant eighteenth-century house tucked away in its own small forest and shielded from the outer driveway by an enormous rhododendron hedge. The family which had commissioned Robert Adam to build it was long gone and its descendants scattered. Late in the last century a branch of the Daven family had purchased it, and it had arrived at last in Alicia’s hands. With the inheritance left her some years before, she had renewed the house to something of its original charm and beauty.

  I had visited Grovesend several times during those innocent days when I had not known about the past relationship between Alicia and my husband. After I knew, I had stayed away as far as possible.

  The night was dark and gusty and the great hedge tossed in the wind as Marc drove the red Mercedes around the barrier it made. We left the car and went up the walk to the lighted foyer. The lines of the house had a delicate splendor, for all its small size, yet it was a hidden house—secretive, I’d always felt—as though Alicia had some need to hide away and draw her surroundings close in about her. Which was a strange thought, considering that she had taken over the public management of the Club Casella in London and, as Maggie had said, was often there in person to play hostess.

  Dacia touched my arm impishly as we went up the steps. “Wonder what Alicia’s got to hide,” she murmured, and once more I felt a kinship with her.

  “Maybe there is something, at that,” Marc said. “You get the feeling of being tight and snug in her club in London, too. We’ll have to take you there one of these nights, Eve. Can’t get in without a card, so you’ll need an escort.”

  I hardly listened because of the tension I’d begun to feel. Too often in the past I had accepted the disadvantage to which Alicia put me, but this time I must not let this happen. I knew the stakes, if not the game she played. Tonight she must not rout me.

  A maid opened the door and we st
epped into the small classic foyer, from which a sitting room opened. Voices came from the adjoining room and the maid threw an uncertain glance toward the door as she invited us to remove our wraps. As we stood there a man’s voice reached us, the words slightly accented, mocking in tone and hardly respectful.

  “I’ll be leaving when I’m ready. So perhaps you will have to endure me till then. There is more to be done, as you very well know.”

  “Oh-oh!” said Dacia softly. “Trouble!”

  The maid darted into the sitting room to announce us, and if Alicia answered her visitor, we did not hear what she said. The man came through the door as we hesitated—a black-haired man with a long, bony face from which dark Spanish eyes challenged us all with a bold glance.

  “How are you, Leo?” Marc said. “Still drinking manzanilla these days?”

  The fellow gave Dacia a stare of appreciation and then looked at me, awaiting an introduction.

  Marc offered none. “Better not leave your bottles around behind you,” he said.

  So this was Leo Casella, the man who had frightened Caryl Davis—and Marc seemed to suspect that it was he who had left that bottle on the Athmore roof. I wanted to stop the man, say something to him, but he had already pushed past Marc with a mocking glance and was gone through the door.

  “Does Justin know—?” I began, but Marc gave me a quick shake of his head. “Not now. Don’t stir up matters you don’t understand.”

  Alicia waited for us near a fireplace where coal burned briskly in the grate. She was standing, not watching us directly, but through the gilt-framed mirror which hung above the mantel against a pale gray wall. It seemed to me that she was, if anything, more beautiful than she had been two years ago. Tonight her mass of fair hair was piled high upon her graceful head and she wore a chiffon gown of palest gold that flowed to the tip of her slippers and left her arms bare. She looked as ageless as those classic women remembered through the sculptures of Greece. Her blue eyes, reflected in the mirror, were bright and her color seemed heightened, as if from her recent exchange with Leo Casella, who had once owned her club and was now its manager.