“I know! She told us she parted from him where the paths cross. She said she left him there and came on over the stone bridge… She didn’t know where he went afterwards, but she left him there. But she didn’t,” said Tossa with absolute conviction, and very quietly, “Because before she met us she was under that lilac tree. She was there by the river with him. She knows what happened!”

  They looked for her in the libraries, in the drawing-rooms, in the gallery, but she was nowhere to be found. In the end they were forced to go in to the afternoon session without having spoken to her; and at the last moment she slid in from nowhere and took a seat in a dim corner, and sat through the two hours of song and argument and speculation with a pale face and haunted eyes. But that meant that at least they could corner her when the session was over, before she could escape again into whatever lair she used for her private agonies.

  The afternoon meeting ended with a tour-de-force by Liri Palmer, a thirty-five verse ballad without a dull line in it, all about a traitorous nobleman who killed his king and usurped his kingdom, but suffered the pregnant queen to live, on the understanding that if her child turned out to be a boy, he should be instantly killed, but if it was a girl she should be allowed to live. But the queen managed to elude her gaolers for a short time when her hour was near, and hid herself alone in the stables to bear her son. When the wife of one of the courtiers found her there, the queen begged her to exchange her girl baby for the royal boy.

  “ ‘And ye shall learn my gay goshawk

  Right weel to breast a steed.

  And I shall learn your turtle-dow

  As weel to write and read.

  “ ‘At kirk and market, when we meet.

  We’ll dare make no avow

  But: Dame, how does my gay goshawk?

  Madam, how does my dow?’ ”

  Thirty-five verses, all to one unchanging tune, and mounting excitement with every verse. Liri Palmer was an artist, no question of that. It was partly the pure, passionate drama of her voice, and the latent acting ability that enabled her to people her stage with so many living characters, without breaking the melody or distorting the tone; and partly the virtuosity of her accompaniment, which varied with every verse, and produced the rattle of duels and the muted agitation of women’s plotting as fluently as the hammer of hooves or the ripple of rain. They reached the point where the gay goshawk had grown up, and was hunting with his foster-father:

  “ ‘Oh, dinna ye see yon bonny castell

  With halls and towers so fair?

  If every man had back his ain.

  Of it ye should be heir.’

  “ ‘The boy stared wild like a grey goshawk:

  “Oh, what may all this mean?’

  “My boy, ye are King Honour’s son.

  And your mother’s our lawful queen.’ ”

  Tossa looked at Dominic, and her eyes signalled that they must be near the end of the story now. She was next to the wall, and in a quiet corner; she rose softly, and slipped back into the shadows, to circle the room unobtrustively to Felicity’s hiding-place.

  The goshawk had reached his apotheosis, leaping the castle wall and confronting False Foundrage in arms. Not all ballads have happy endings. This one did. The boy killed his enemy, delivered his mother, and took the turtle-dow as his bride. The entranced hush broke, the moment the last shuddering chord of Liri’s strings had vibrated into silence. Under cover of the applause Felicity got up to slide out of the room; and Tossa’s hand closed on her arm.

  “Felicity, come into the little library. We want to talk to you.”

  The tone was quiet and reasonable, but Felicity recognised its finality. Perhaps she had been waiting for someone to take the burden out of her hands, with even more longing than terror. She went with them, stiff and silent, not trying to escape now, except into the deeps of her own being, and even there hoping for little. They, sat her down in a quiet corner of the small library; the cheerful pre-tea din told them where all the others were, and assured them that their solitude here was safe for a little while.

  Tossa laid the spray of wilting lilac flowers in the girl’s lap. “We found these this afternoon. We were looking for you before the session, to show you. These are the same kind you had in your hair yesterday, when we met you. We know now where you’d been. Not just along the path to the bridge. You’d been by the grotto, with Lucien. Hadn’t you?”

  Felicity looked all round her in a last convulsion of protest and despair, and shrank into herself and sat still, her eyes on the flowers. She didn’t try to deny anything.

  “You’ll have to tell us what you know, Felicity. You understand that, don’t you? It isn’t any use trying to pretend you know nothing now. We know you were there.”

  Felicity melted suddenly from her frozen stillness and began to shake uncontrollably. She linked her small hands together before her, and gripped until the slight knuckles were blanched like almonds.

  “Yes,” she whispered, the word jerking out of her like a gasp of pain. She looked up at Tossa in desperate appeal, and asked in a small level voice: “What happens to people who’re accessories before the fact? Of murder, I mean? Supposing someone caused someone else to kill a person, but without meaning to?” Her face shook, and as resolutely reassembled its shattered and disintegrating calm; she wasn’t crying, and she wasn’t going to cry. What was the use now? “Or suppose they did mean to, but never really believed it could happen? What do they do to people like that? Do you know?”

  They looked at each other over her head, shaken to the heart.

  “I think,” said Dominic, with careful, appalled gentleness, “we’d better go into the warden’s office and wait for my father. You’ll have to tell him, you know. We don’t matter, but we’ll stay with you, if you want us to. It’s him you have to tell. You go and sit in there with Tossa, and I’ll go and find him.”

  CHAPTER VI

  « ^ »

  YOU TELL IT,” said George reasonably. “You know what happened, and nobody’s interested in tripping you up or trying to make you say something you don’t want to say. Just tell us exactly what happened, and don’t be afraid that we won’t understand. Yes, Tossa’ll stay with you. Don’t worry! You’ll feel better when you’ve told us all about it. Take your time. We won’t interrupt you.”

  They were all in the warden’s office together, the door safely shut, the room quiet and confidential, nobody to worry them or interfere with the desperate sympathy of their communion. Felicity sat shrunken in the arm-chair, her hands tightly clasped; the pressure seemed to help her to concentrate a mind which otherwise might fly apart from pure over-strain. Tossa sat beside her with an arm laid round the back of the chair, ready to touch the child or let her alone as the need arose. Nobody would have suspected that Tossa had so much patience and forbearance in her, least of all Tossa herself; but then, it had never been called into use until now. Dominic sat withdrawn on a rear corner of the desk, willing to remain unseen and unnoticed as long as possible; he was hardly more than an extension of Tossa at this moment.

  “Lucien went out alone into the grounds yesterday afternoon,” George prompted gently, “and then you went out on your way to look at the swan’s nest, and saw him ahead of you, and you ran and caught him up. Tossa and Dominic saw you go down towards the footbridge together. Go on from there.”

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” said Felicity, in a voice small, hard and clear. Now that she had reached the point of speech there were going to be no prevarications; there was even the faintest note of revulsion in her tone for this too fastidious consideration. She straightened her slender spine, and looked fairly and squarely at what confronted her, and didn’t lower her eyes. “I didn’t care a damn about the swan’s nest. There is one there, of course, but I wasn’t going out to look at that, I was just following Lucien. I watched him go out, and then I went after him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to get to know him really, properly, and for him to get to know me. Because I loved him. I do love him! I did, in a way, even before I ever saw him in the flesh, and as soon as I saw him I knew it was love. I knew I was the right person for him, and so I went straight for my objective, and I was sure he couldn’t help but feel the same way.”

  Carefully, nobly, they all sat without stirring a muscle or drawing a hastened breath, nothing to suggest amusement, censure, or surprise. But Felicity knew her grown-ups, even those who were only a few years ahead of her. Faint, proud colour rose in her cheeks. She looked George fiercely, if wretchedly, in the eyes, and said with dignity:

  “People think that at fifteen one has no deep feelings. They forget about girls like Juliet. It just isn’t a matter of age. And in any case women are always much more mature and formed than men of the same age, and much more likely to recognise the real thing when it happens to them. Look at Tatiana, in Eugene Onegin. She was the young one, and he patronised and talked down to her, and treated her like a child, and wouldn’t take her seriously, but she was right, all the same, and he lived to find it out when it was too late. And this was… rather like ‘Onegin’ over again. Lucien just didn’t realise how important it was, what was happening to us. He didn’t want anyone then, I suppose. He surely didn’t want me. He didn’t try to send me away, he only walked on and took no notice of me. We went along the ride there, on the other side of the river, and then we came to that gate, and he pushed it open and went on down to the grotto. He sat on the bench in there, looking at the river, and I sat by him and tried… I wanted him to understand, not to make a terrible mistake, but he didn’t understand at all. He was like all the rest, he thought I was just a kid. It was ‘Onegin’ all over again.”

  All quite predictable, thought George sadly, but quite innocent. And yet something happened down there that wasn’t innocent, and she knows it, and is forcing herself towards it inch by inch. But he didn’t prompt her again. However she delayed, however deviously she approached what she had no intention now of softening, it couldn’t be long in coming. Only a quarter of an hour or so later, Tossa and Dominic had met her coming back towards the house.

  For the first time it occurred to him as a serious possibility that Felicity had killed Lucien Galt with her own hands. Her situation must have been disastrous enough, and her disillusionment bitter enough, and a moody and impatient young man, getting up to prowl along the waterside without a thought for the love-sick child who meant no more to him than a persistent mosquito, would have been a very easy victim indeed. All that talk, faithfully reported by Dominic, about accessories before the fact, about causing somebody else to commit murder, without meaning to, all that might be mere talk at random, fending off the horrid fact itself. Or so he would have been tempted to believe, if this had been any other girl but Felicity. Felicity didn’t talk at random, didn’t toss about terms like “accessory before the fact” without knowing only too well what they meant. Her solitude had been peopled from books, and her vocabulary, at least, was an adult’s. No, wait for the truth to emerge, don’t anticipate. She didn’t push him. Nothing so simple.

  “I told him,” she said, moistening her lips, ‘that I wasn’t a child, and he couldn’t solve anything by telling me to run away and play, I told him outright that I loved him, and he’d better think carefully before he threw away what he might never be offered again. And I said I’d prove it in any way he chose, because there wasn’t anything he could ask me that I wouldn’t do for him.”

  She looked at her locked hands in faint surprise, suddenly aware for a moment that the tightness of their grip was hurting her. She relaxed them a little, and they remained steady at first, and then began to shake; the thin fingers clamped tight again and held fast.

  “And then he turned on me,” she said in a precise, drained voice, “quite suddenly and viciously, and said: ‘All right, then, prove it. If you’re ready to do anything, then do this for me. Go and find Mrs. Arundale, tell her where I am, and tell her I’ve got to talk to her alone. Got to,” he said. “Ask her to come to me as soon as she can, he said, and I’ll be waiting for her here. And give her my love!’ ”

  The brief silence hung blankly expectant, shocked but still braced for greater shocks, waiting for what was to follow. This was brutal enough, but no more than they might have expected; and yet there was something in the air that warned them that here the path twisted, and the place of their arrival, when they reached it, would be very far from where they had reckoned on finding themselves. The faint click of the door-latch drawing back hardly seemed to break the stillness; only the distant babel from round the tea-trolleys, gushing in through the opening door, made them all turn their heads sharply.

  Audrey Arundale stood in the doorway, her eyes large and startled in her pale face, looking from one to another of them without comprehension, but with a remote and immured intelligence as piteous in its way as Felicity’s.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you weren’t alone. I’ll come back later.” And she was actually withdrawing, her eyes fixed upon George, when he called her back. Of course she had heard her own name. What was the point of shutting her out now? In any case, she had a right to hear this, it might even be helpful to have her there, to watch the impact of her presence on Felicity, and of Felicity’s words on her.

  “Don’t go, Mrs. Arundale! If you’re free, please stay. I think you should be present at this.”

  “If you think I ought to,” she said, her eyes opening wider; and she closed the door quietly, and sat down in the chair Dominic hurriedly drew out for her from behind the desk. Felicity had given her one long, unreadable look, and returned to the painful contemplation of her own rigid hands.

  “But if you don’t mind, I should be glad if you’d make no comment or interruption until Felicity has finished what she has to tell us.”

  “Of course,” said Audrey, “I won’t say anything.” Her voice was light and plaintive, as though the weight of events was too much for her, and she had lost the thread; but her behaviour would always be gentle, coherent and dignified. If there was something tougher and shrewder, and altogether more passionate, beneath that bland, bewildered and charming exterior, she had it under absolute control.

  “Go on, Felicity. I’m sorry if we’ve broken the thread for you.”

  “It’s all right,” said said bleakly, “I can’t lose my place. I wish I could. Well, that was what Lucien said to me. And it was so cruel and so wicked, and I was so terribly hurt, that I just looked right back at him and said all right, I would. And I walked away from him, and away from the grotto, and latched the gate after me, and came straight up to the house. That was when you met me.” She flashed one grey glance towards Tossa. “And Uncle Edward and Aunt Audrey were still sitting over their coffee in their sitting-room. So I delivered Lucien’s message.”

  Something vengeful was still left in the thin voice of hopeless despair and regret. At first they didn’t understand fully; she saw the faint, cloudy questioning in their eyes, and made full and patient explanation.

  “Word for word, just like he’d given it to me, I recited it aloud in front of both of them. I said: ‘Aunt Audrey, Lucien’s down at the grotto by the river, and he says he’s got to talk to you alone, and will you please go down to him there as soon as you can, and he’ll be waiting. And I was to give you his love’.”

  In the instant of horrified comprehension the silence was absolute. Then Audrey Arundale’s long, elegant hands made a sudden abortive motion of protest and pain, groping forward along the arm of her chair; her fair head arched back, and speech came bubbling into her throat, but never reached her lips. George gave her a sharp glance and a warning frown, and she subsided into her old apparent calm, even sighed the worst of the passing tension out of her soundlessly, and continued watching her niece with nothing in her eyes but a grieved and helpless sympathy.

  “I see,” said George, in the most impersonal of voices. Possibly, Felicity had wanted to shock, not wantonly, but to ease the burden of her own horror, and to reassure herself that this crisis of hers was indeed something large and dreadful, even by adult standards, and not a triviality of childish spite of no significance to anyone but her. That would make her anguish even sharper by making it pointless. She needn’t have worried on that score, he thought ruefully. What was done to her was a truly cruel and ferocious thing, and what she did in return was large enough even for a Shakespearian woman scorned, or one of those ballad heroines whose wrongs and revenges Liri Palmer sang.

  “And then?” he said, in the same neutral tone.

  “They sat there staring at me like stones, both of them. It was terribly quiet, you can’t imagine how quiet. And then they both turned, ever so slowly, and stared at each other, and Uncle Edward got up, and put his coffee-cup down on the table very carefully, as if it was full and might spill over, but it was empty. He thanked me, and told me I could go. You know? Just as if I’d come to say tea was ready. So I did. I went out and closed the door, and left them there.”

  “And you knew then,” asked George, “what you’d done?”

  “I knew what I’d done. I’d even meant to do it, and yet in a way I hadn’t, but by then I couldn’t undo it. You can’t, you know. The very next minute is too late. I wanted somewhere to hide, so I went up into the turret and on to the roof, the side where I couldn’t see or hear anything from the river. I stayed there until tea, hoping nothing would happen, hoping everybody’d appear as usual. But Lucien didn’t come. And then I knew I’d done something terrible, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I was afraid to.”

  She raised her eyes to George’s face, and from behind the windows of her glass prison he saw her staring out at him in awful panic, while her slight body sat demure and still.

  “It’s all through me,” she said with terrified certainty, “that Lucien’s dead, and Uncle Edward’s on the run.”

  Audrey uttered something between a gasp and a cry, and put up her hands to her face. Her eyes appealed wildly to George. How could this child possibly know about Edward being missing? Nobody had known but the three of them, George, Henry Marshall, and Audrey herself. And now Felicity brought out this flat, fearful pronouncement as though its certainty was not in question. George shook his head at her, just perceptibly, and she clutched at the hint of reassurance with unexpected quickness of apprehension. Of course, Felicity was merely drawing an inference which seemed to her self-evident, not speaking from knowledge at all. Audrey sat back wearily, one hand shading her face, her long-drawn, aching breaths shaking her whole body.