“Why have you brought me here?” he demanded, roused and resentful. “I thought we were going to the police station at Comerbourne.”

  “I don’t remember that we mentioned exactly where we were going. Inspector Felse has been working from here, and this is where we shall find him.” Rapier got out of the back seat, and locked the car upon the two who remained; not that he thought the boy would try to make a break for it now, but, there was no point in leaving him even the meagre opportunity. The sergeant climbed the back stairs, and let himself into the warden’s office.

  George looked up from the report he was compiling, short as yet of a few details, a date or two, a name, but by this time essentially complete. “Well, how did it go?”

  “No trouble,” said Rapier complacently. “He’s below in the car.” He laid his notebook on the desk, and flicked through the close pages of shorthand. “There you are! He insisted on making a statement, didn’t seem able to rest until he had in all in order. I’ll send it up to you as soon as I can get it typed. He’s made a full confession.”

  “Ah,” said George, with a faint smile that Rapier found, in retrospect, more than a little puzzling. “Yes, I thought he might.”

  “He says Arundale attacked him, and he killed him in self-defence. You won’t have any trouble, he’s filled in all the details, and they all fit.”

  “Oh, yes, I quite thought he’d make a good job of it.” The smile was still present, wry, private and sad, and yet understandably touched with the pride and satisfaction of a man whose judgement has been vindicated by events. “And what about Mrs. Arundale?”

  “She has nothing to do with it. I will say that for him, he went out of his way to make that clear. He hardly knew her. He says he used her name to shock the kid, because he knew she was jealous of her, anyhow, and the kid must have gone and told her uncle. Oh, he’s made your case for you.”

  “All right,” said George, “bring him up.”

  Rapier went back down the staircase and unlocked the car, dropping the keys into Price’s hand. “Ready for you now, Mr. Galt. Up the stairs, that’s right.”

  Lucien heard the distant, starling clamour from the great drawing-room, and reared his head in a wild gesture of mingled ardour and revulsion. “But they… do they know about this?” He climbed the tight spiral flight, tensed and suspicious, his ears stretched. They surely couldn’t know. The high-pitched din was eager and innocent, untouched by death.

  “You’d better ask the inspector that. In here.”

  Lucien entered the warden’s office, and the door was closed quietly behind him.

  George rose from behind the desk. “Sit down, Mr. Galt. You must have made very good time. I was reckoning on this final concert being over, or nearly over, by the time you arrived.”

  It was like coming into a familiar room which had been emptied of its furniture, and was no longer familiar. All the echoes were wrong, all the tones distorted so acutely that Lucien felt his balance affected, and spread his feet aggressively to grip reality more firmly. Even in the car he had this feeling of disorientation, but now it went over him as acutely as panic, and left him sick and frightened. He had made a detailed statement admitting his responsibility for the death of Arundale, why wasn’t he under arrest? Even if his escorts from London had been instructed only to deliver him safely to the man in charge, here, presumably, was the man in charge, and still nothing seemed to be about to happen. He gripped the back of the chair that was offered him, and stood taut and distrustful, his eyes roving the room.

  “I don’t understand. Why did I have to come back here? Was that fair? I haven’t made any trouble for your men, I’ve co-operated as well as I can, I’m not disputing anything I’ve done. So why…?”

  “Sit down,” said George.

  It wasn’t worth arguing about; Lucien sat. George came round the desk and sat on the front corner, looking his capture over with interest. Black as a gypsy, strung fine as a violin, a slender, dark, wild creature, with arrogant eyes shadowed now by grief and fear, and a hypersensitive, proud mouth that was ready to curl even at this moment. Like his picture, but even more like the picture his friends and enemies had built up of him for the man who had never set eyes on him until now.

  “I’ve made a statement,” said Lucien. “It should clear up everything for you. I suppose he has to transcribe it, or whatever. I don’t know what more you want.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. I want another hour and a half of apparent normality here. After that we can be as businesslike as you please.” He saw the tired eyes question doubtfully, and smiled. “Mr. Galt, I believe you’ll have a certain sympathy with our concern for this place. It may not be perfect, what it does may not go very far, or be very profound. But with all that, it is a pretty remarkable institution. It brings music, and what’s more, knowledge and desire of music, to people who’ve perhaps never really experienced it before. If its appeal fell off as the result of a scandal and a notorious case, or if its enemies – oh, yes, anything that can be called cultural has always more than enough enemies – if its enemies got an effective weapon to use against it, it might be killed for good, and that would be a real loss. There’s going to be publicity, inquest and trial can’t be avoided. There’s going to be a bad period; but if we can minimise the effect as much as possible, Follymead may survive. That’s why I want to take no action whatever until this course has dispersed. The next can be called off without too much backwash. So let’s at least wait until the house is empty to-night, before we start talking in terms of guilt and arrests.”

  After a brief and dubious silence Lucien said slowly: “I’m not sure what it is you want of me.”

  “I want you to give me your word not to try to get away, just to wait and behave normally until the party has left.”

  Lucien moistened his lips. His eyes kindled suddenly into a slightly feverish glitter. “This is a straightforward concert for the finish?”

  “Yes. Until half past six. Then they all go home.”

  “Is Liri taking part?”

  “Yes, Liri’s taking part.”

  He thought of her head bent over the guitar, the great braid of hair coiled on her neck, the suave curve of her cheek and the intent, burnished brow, and of the voice achingly pure and clear and passionate. He thought of a future blank with confinement and solitude, where the voice could not penetrate.

  “If you’ll let me sit in on this concert, all right, I give you my word I won’t cause you any trouble.”

  He didn’t believe there would be any response to that offer, he was sure they’d never risk him among the crowd.

  But Inspector Felse had got to his feet briskly, and swept his papers into a drawer.

  “Agreed, if you don’t mind my company. And in that case we’d better go in, hadn’t we? They’ll be starting any minute.”

  From her place among the artists, Liri saw them come in.

  The lights were already dimmed, the hum of voices was becoming muted and expectant, and it was time. There at the back of the great room people moved about gently in obscurity, settling themselves, changing their places, finding comfortable leg-room. For once Professor Penrose came a little late to his place, and in haste, having taken too long a nap after tea; but for that the programme would have begun before the padded door at the back of the room opened again, and her attention would have been on the singers, and not on the two late-comers. As it was, she was gazing beyond the last rank of chairs in the shadow, beyond even the walls of the room, when the opening of the door caused her to shorten her sights, and return to here and now. And the person who came in was Lucien.

  Her heart turned in her, even before she saw George Felse follow him into the room, and edge along after him behind the audience, to a seat against the wall. So they had him, after all. He wasn’t used to running from things, and he hadn’t run fast enough, and now they had him, back here where the thing had happened that never should have happened, the wasted, meaningless thing in which she still couldn’t believe. She felt the walls closing in on her, too.

  And yet if he was under arrest, what was he doing here? There seemed to be no constraint upon him, even if the inspector had come in with him, and taken a seat beside him on the elegant little gilt and velvet couch against the tapestried wall. They sat there like any other two members of the audience, she even saw them exchange a few words, with every appearance of normality. What was happening? There was something here that was not as it seemed to be, and she could not make out what it was, or whom it threatened.

  She looked to the inspector for a clue, but his face was smooth and reserved and quite unreadable, there was no way of guessing what was going on in the mind behind it. If she had gone in terror of the obvious end, now she found herself equally afraid of some other eventuality beyond her grasp. Why bring a prisoner here into this room? She could understand that the police might prefer to get all these people out of here before they took decisive action, but even so, why bring Lucien to the gathering?

  A hand jogged her arm. The professor’s insinuating voice begged her winningly: “Your legs are younger than mine, lass. Run and fetch my notebook for me, will you? I went and left it in the warden’s office before tea, and forgot to collect it again.”

  His notebook was a joke by that time. He couldn’t talk without it open before him, and yet he had never been known to consult it for any detail, however abstruse.

  “You’ve never needed it yet,” protested Liri, her eyes clinging to the distant pair at the back of the room, lost now in an even dimmer light. Someone had turned out the strip-lights over the pictures. “You’re not likely to start tonight.”

  “There has to be a first time for everything. Go on, now, like a good girl.”

  And she went, impatiently but obediently, flashing to the doorway and running along the corridor. Her heels rang on the polished wood with a solitary and frightening sound, for outside the great yellow room the house hung silent and deserted. Nothing now was quite real, so much of her mind laboured frenziedly with this crisis she could not comprehend. She pushed open the door of the warden’s office, which for the past three days had become an extension of police headquarters, while the house went about its blithe business oblivious of all evil. The massive folder of the professor’s notes lay on a walnut table near the window. She tucked it under her arm, and turned to the door again, and then as abruptly turned back, and crossed to the desk.

  Would he leave anything, any unconsidered trifle, where she could find it and make sense of it? She had to know; there was a feverish pulse beating in her blood that insisted it was imperative for her to know.

  She put down her portfolio on the desk, and began trying all the drawers one by one, but they were fast locked. She should have guessed that. There was nothing here for her.

  But there was. Her eyes fell on it as she straightened up with a sigh from her useless search. There it was, propped against Arundale’s rack of reference books, eye to eye with her, the half-plate photograph of a young girl in a white party-dress. She had never seen the living face joyous like this, but she knew it at once, as she knew the little silver disc that hung round the girl’s neck on a thin chain.

  Lucien’s medal, the one he had worn ever since she had known him, long before he met Audrey Arundale. The one thing that had been his father’s. And yet here it hung round the neck of the sixteen-year-old Audrey, how many years ago, how many worlds away?

  Now she did understand. Intuitively, without need of details or evidence, she understood everything. Yes, even why Lucien was sitting there among the audience in the dressing-room, under no restraint, though he surely expected arrest afterwards. Liri knew better. She knew what was going to happen afterwards; she knew what went on behind George Felse’s unrevealing face.

  She caught up the portfolio and slipped from the room, to run like a wild thing through the silent libraries, and along the corridors to the warden’s private quarters. But there was no one there. The lights were out and the rooms deserted. And she must go back, she couldn’t hunt any farther. Too late now to make any amends, too late to look for Audrey, too late to warn her. A minute more, and someone else would be out hunting for her.

  She went back to the yellow drawing-room, back to her place on the dais. She gave the professor his notes, which of course he would not need or use. It was no use now; there was no way of reaching her. Liri raised her eyes and looked carefully over the array of attentive faces, little moons in a mild twilight. Those two at the back, side by side on their crazy little gilded perch, looked improbably at ease. The professor was talking about the summing-up of all that they had experienced together, the relationship of folk-music to the wider and deeper field of music itself. Presently the Rossignol twins were singing, two angelic voices, eerie and sweet.

  The long range of windows that led out on to the terrace brought the dim and cloudy day in upon them in tints of subdued violet and green. Not even dusk yet, not by a couple of hours, and yet the low and heavy cloud hung like a pall, turning this after-tea hour into night.

  The most distant of the long windows, down there at the back of the room, stood ajar. A while ago they had all been closed. The last chair at the end of that row, certainly empty then, was occupied now. Someone had come in by the window, and moved the chair aside into the embrasure, drawing a fold of the heavy curtains round it to screen her from at least half the room. A dead black dress, the sheen of pale, piled hair.

  Edward Arundale’s widow, still chatelaine of Follymead, had come to the final concert. They were there in the same room together, there was only about fifteen yards of air between them, and yet they could not communicate.

  Or was there still a way? That curious conversation with Felicity had started a tune running in Liri’s head, and it would not be quieted. It plagued her with reminders of the rogue page who tossed just such an apple of discord in among Lord Barnard’s household “where they were sat at meat.” The verse ranged through her head, in the light of what she had just learned, with a new and terrifying aptness. If they talked to her, they could talk to another person, one, the only one except George Felse and Lucien Galt, who knew the whole story, and would recognise only too well the full implications. She might still misunderstand; but that had to be risked. Liri could not leave her to step over the edge of the pit without so much as reaching a hand to her. Whatever her own wrongs, she owed Audrey that and more. She was indebted to her for a world, and she could make so little repayment now.

  Liri folded her hands on her guitar, and waited. She knew now what she had to do.

  CHAPTER XI

  « ^

  PAST SIX O’CLOCK. The darkness was purplish, thundery, the air still as before a storm. It must be her turn soon. Why had the old man kept her until last?

  “And now for Liri. She promised to sing us ‘The Queen’s Maries’ in the full text, which is by way of being a marathon performance, so I’ve reserved enough time for her to do herself justice. But now she’s whispering in my ear that she’d like to change her choice. It’s a woman’s privilege. So I’ll leave any introduction to Liri.”

  “I thought,” she said, clearly and quietly, “that everyone knows the story of Mary Hamilton, and there are so many fine stories that very few people know. I warn you, this is a marathon performance, too, but I hope you won’t find it dull. I’d like to sing the ballad of ‘Gil Morrice.’ Anybody know it?”

  Thank God, nobody did. She knew the proud, proprietary emanations of those who find themselves one up on the rest, and here there was nothing like that, only pleased expectancy. It’s still true, people love to be read to, to listen to stories. Even those kids who are so with it that they’ve completely lost contact with most of it – “it” being the total body of mental and spiritual fulfilment and delight, the mass of music, the body of books, the entire apparition of art – even they will shiver and thrill to this blood-stained tragedy, though they won’t recognise their excitement as something dating back into prehistory. They’ll think it’s because this is “folk,” of all the odd labels. This is human, which is more than being folk.

  “Here goes then. ‘Gil Morrice’.”

  She curled over the guitar, felt along its strings with a sensuous gesture, and raised her face, filling her lungs deep. The guitar uttered one shuddering chord, and that was all. She began in the story-teller’s level, lilting voice:

  “Gil Morrice was an Erle’s son.

  His name it waxed wide;

  It was not for his great riches

  Nor for his mickle pride.

  But it was for a lady gay

  That lived on Carron side.”

  So much for the introduction, and straight into the story. The guitar took up a thin, fine line of melody, low beneath the clear voice, that had as yet no passion in it, but remained a story-teller, uninvolved, unwrung:

  “ ‘Where shall I find a bonny boy

  That will win hose and shoon.

  That will go to Lord Barnard’s hall

  And bid his lady come?

  ‘And you must run my errand, Willie.

  And you may run with pride.

  When other boys gae on their feet

  On horseback ye shall ride.’

  ‘Oh, no, oh, no, my master dear.

  I darena for my life

  I’ll not go to the bold baron’s

  For to tryst forth his wife.

  ‘But oh, my master dear,’ he cried.

  “In greenwood ye’re your lane.

  Give o’er such thoughts, I would you rede.

  For fear ye should be ta’en.’ ”

  The guitar had enlarged its low comment, the thick chords came in rising anger. A stillness began to bud in the centre of the audience, and opened monstrous petals in the gloom. A little more, and she would know she had them; but whether she had Audrey she had no way of knowing. The pulsing excitement of the telling took her like a trance. She heard her own voice deepen and grow harsh, and she had done nothing at all, issued no orders: