He drew the car round to the foot of the sweep of stone steps that led to the terrace. Lights winked on, one by one, along the great glazed gallery on the first floor, running the whole length of the house-front. Through the windows they saw a gaggle of people passing slowly, peering round them with stretched necks; earnest elderly ladies, bearded, shaggy young men with pipes, ascetic students in glasses, broad-barrelled country gentlemen with time on their hands and a mild musical curiosity, eager girls peering through their curtains of limp long hair.

  “They’re just taking parties round on a tour of the house,” said Arundale, opening the door for his passenger. “Leave your luggage, I’ll bring it in when I’ve run the car round to the yard. You just trot in and join them. Formalities later.”

  She reached in again for her guitar, all the same, and straightened up to look at the lighted windows above them. The party passing had halted for a moment, all their faces turned up to some painting hung very high on the inner wall. Only their guide faced the windows as she went through her recital; a very young girl, surely no more than fifteen or sixteen, slight and pale, with wings of mouse-brown hair framing a serious and secretive face, a face full of doubts and hesitations and flashes of uneasy animation, as early-April as the weather outside, and her own difficult season. Something in the fine, irresolute features, the set of the eyes and carriage of the head, made the newcomer turn and look again at Arundale; and she was not mistaken, the likeness was there, allowing for the years and the toughening and the entrenchment, though maybe he’d never possessed the possibilities of passion which the girl in the gallery certainly had, and didn’t know yet what to do with.

  “That must be your daughter, surely?”

  His face stiffened very slightly, though he gazed back at her with polite composure. “My niece. Unfortunately my wife… We have no children.” He snapped off the sentence briskly, like a thread at the end of a seam. A sore subject, she was sorry she’d embarked on it, however innocently. She was just wondering how to ride the punch, and whether his voice was always so constrained when he spoke of his wife, when he turned his head to look along the necklace of lighted windows, as willing to evade complications as she, and said in a very different tone: “Ah, there is my wife now, with the next party.”

  She had thought him without passion, but evidently he had one. This was quite another voice, warm and proud and soft, heavy with unguarded affection. No, his wife’s childlessness was only a shared sorrow, not at all a count against her, or a shadow between them. The girl looked up, following his devoted, secret smile, and saw a woman caught for a moment under the full brilliance of one of the chandeliers. She was slender and fair and elegant in a plain dark dress, with pale hair piled on her head, and a swimming, wavering walk that seemed to balance the silvery coils like a conscious burden. Her eyes were dark and large, her colouring richly fair, her face bright and animated almost to the point of discomfort. She talked and gestured and passed, and the medley of students and guests passed after her, consolingly ordinary, unhaunted and content.

  The girl stood fixed, watching her go without a smile, and for some moments without a word. When the pageant had passed she stirred, and moistened her lips.

  “She’s beautiful,” she said at last, with deliberation.

  This time she had said the right thing. She felt the evening filled with the glow of his pleasure.

  “Some excellent judges have thought so,” he admitted, a little pompously, more than a little proprietorially.

  “I have a feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before,” said the girl in a cool, distant voice.

  “It’s quite possible. You’re a ballad-singer. Audrey has some close friends in folk-music circles.”

  The girl with the guitar-case suppressed a faint and private smile. “Yes… yes, I’m sure she has,” she said gently, and turned from him and ran up the stone steps towards the great doorway.

  Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends, was an implacable hater of all humbug, and a merciless judge of all those who seemed to her tainted with its unmistakable sweet, self-conscious odour. At rising nineteen she could afford to be, her own proceedings being marked by a total rejection of falsity. She had weighed up the celebrated Dickie Meurice, disc-jockey, compère and television personality extraordinary, before they had even reached the armoury and his third questionable joke. Give him an audience of twenty or so, even if they were by rights young Felicity Cope’s audience, and he’d have filched them from under her nose within minutes, and be on-stage. Doubtful, rather, if he was ever off.

  “Licensed clown,” said Tossa fastidiously into Dominic Felse’s ear, as they followed the adoring giggles of the fans into the long gallery. “All he ever goes anywhere for is to advertise the product. I bet he cracks wise in his sleep, and has a built-in gadget to record the level of applause. What’s more, he won’t stop at much in the cause. Watch out, anybody in the business here who has a reputation to lose.”

  “Could be several people in danger, then,” said Dominic critically, eyeing the group that surged amorphously before them, and seeing celebrities enough. And this was only one party of three perambulating the house on this conducted tour. Over by the window shone the cropped red heads of the Rossignol brothers; less vulnerable, perhaps, by virtue of being French, identical twins, and tough as rubber, not to say capable of considerable mischief themselves if they felt like it, but all the same this folk-music business was an international free-for-all, these days, and no one could count himself immune. The new young American, Peter Crewe, stood close to his guide, earnestly following everything she had to say, and turning his bright, weathered face faithfully from portrait to portrait, staring so solemnly that if there was anything to be discovered about the Cothercotts from those calculated approximations, he would surely discover it. Malice might well bounce off such innocence as his, but it might also take a strip of hide with it at every rebound. There was Celia Whitwood, the harp girl – the second witticism this evening had been at her expense, and she hadn’t relished it. And yet this licensed clown, as Tossa called him, could draw the fans after him with a crook of his finger, and have them hanging on his lips ready to laugh before he spoke. An extraordinary force is television for building or destroying public figures, without benefit of talent, desert or quality.

  “I wonder who was the genius who thought we needed a compère for this week-end?” said Tossa, sighing.

  “Somebody shrewd enough to know how to fill the house,” said Dominic simply. “He fetched the fans in, didn’t he?”

  And he had, there was no doubt of that; but not only he, as Tossa promptly pointed out.

  “You think all those kids fawning round Lucien Galt came for the music?”

  “I wouldn’t know, would I?” responded Dominic crisply. “Did you?” The slight edge to his voice, and the faint knife-prick of disquiet that went with it, startled him. He was accustomed to immensely secure relationships in which jealousy would have been an irrelevant absurdity, and the indignities a lover can inflict on himself came as a surprise to him, and an affront. As for Tossa, she wasn’t yet used to the idea that someone could be in love with her, and she wasn’t alert to possible pitfalls; she missed the smarting note and took the question at its face value.

  “Idiot!” she said cheerfully. “Are you lumping me in with that lot? Not that I can’t see their point,” she added honestly, studying the lofty male head islanded among hunting girls. “At least he looks and sounds like a real person. Take his microphone away, and he’s still there.”

  Lucien Galt certainly could not easily be ignored, even thus hemmed in at close quarters by his unkempt admirers. The black head tossed impatiently, the lean, relaxed shoulders twitched, like a stallion shaking off gadflies, and for a moment his face was turned towards the two who discussed him. Dark as a gypsy, with heavy brows and arrogant eyes, built like a dancer, light-framed and quick in movement, intolerant of too close approach, and scornful of adulation as of any other stupidity, he carried his nature in his looks, and took no trouble to moderate its impact. He slid from between the ranks of his fans and put the width of an inlaid table between himself and them, leaning with folded arms and braced shoulders against the damask-panelled wall. He had put Felicity off her stride by the abrupt movement; he caught her eye, and apologised with a brilliant, brief smile that transformed his saturnine face for an instant. And that was the only move he had made to charm, and no more to him than a brusque gesture of politeness.

  He was twenty-three years old, and already an artist on a world scale. In what other field can you climb the peak so fast? Or so suddenly slither all the way down it again and vanish? Or, once vanished, be so completely forgotten?

  “You couldn’t say he went out of his way to please, could you?” whispered Tossa. “He as good as tells them they’re a bore and a nuisance, and they lap it up and come back for more. And just look at the other one, working at it every minute, ladling out the honey like mad. He must just hate Lucien.”

  Considering she had never set eyes on either of the pair before, it was a fairly penetrating observation; but all Dominic noticed at the time was the easy way the name Lucien came to her tongue. The popular music world deals in Christian names, of course, and there’s no particular significance in it; still, he noted it, and was annoyed with himself for the resulting smart. Ever since he’d brought his girl home from Oxford with him for the Easter vacation, to meet his parents for the first time, he’d been discovering in himself nervous sensitivities he’d never suspected before, like broken nails forever ready to snag in the fine threads of this most difficult of all relationships. It wasn’t doing his vanity any good.

  “Theirs is a cut-throat world,” he said sententiously. “Still, he looks as if he can stand it.”

  “Oh, I should think he’s pretty tough,” she agreed serenely.

  “With a name like that,” said Dominic, involuntarily rubbing the sting, “he’d have to be.” Who knew better than he did the hard training to be derived in early schooldays from having an unusual and provocative name? As if being a policeman’s son wasn’t enough in itself to keep a boy on his toes!

  “From what I read somewhere, he was brought up in an orphanage, right from a baby. His parents were killed in the buzz-bomb raids on London at the end of the last war. They say he thinks the world of his home, though, and goes back there regularly. Not at all a deprived child type. And yet you never know,” said Tossa thoughtfully, “maybe that does account for the way they say he is.”

  “I haven’t been reading him up,” said Dominic patiently. “How do they say he is?”

  “Oh, like he looks. You-be-damned! Terribly independent, won’t compromise, won’t pretend, a real stormy petrel. The way I heard it, his agent and the recording people, and all the ones who have to work with him took to calling him Lucifer instead of Lucien.”

  Lucifer leaned with folded arms against the wine-coloured damask panelling of the long gallery, under the carved black ceiling and the Venetian chandeliers. Rankly dramatised Cothercott portraits hung cloaked and hooded about him, the expensive, perilous and eclectic accumulations of generations of Cothercott collectors were elegantly displayed along the walls at his back, their often lovely and sometimes repulsive furniture fended off teen-age girls from too close contact with him. The dark, rich, Strawberry Hill colours, the heavy gilding, the assured and lavish use of black, all framed him like one of the family pictures. He looked at home here, and in his element, a little sinister, a little dangerous, treacherously winning, like the house itself.

  “Now you can’t,” Dickie Meurice was saying persuasively, his incandescent smile trained at full-tooth-power on the warden’s niece, “you really can’t ask us to believe that all these characters were models of industry and virtue. Just take a look at ’em!” He waved a hand towards the family portraits deployed along the wall, and indeed half of them did look like romantic poets and half like conspirators. Even the ladies appeared somewhat overdressed in conscious merit, as though they had something to hide. “Every one of ’em straight out of the wanted file. There ought to be profiles alongside. Don’t tell me they got the fortune that built this pile out of honest trade.”

  “Ah, but I think that’s just what they did,” said Felicity with animation, “and just what they didn’t want you to believe about them. They much preferred to put up on their walls something that looked like degenerate aristocrats who’d never done a day’s work in their lives.”

  She had abandoned her usual recital already, derailed by Meurice’s facetious comments, and begun to indulge her own suppressed feelings about this formidable place; but it wasn’t at Meurice she was looking, and it wasn’t for him she was lighting up like a pale, flickering candle, her serious grey eyes warming into brilliance. She gazed wide-eyed at Lucifer, leaning there against the wall with his dark brightness dulling the painted faces on either side of his head, and her small, grave face reflected his slight, sardonic smile like a mirror. She was the teen-age fan with a temporary and precarious advantage, and she was using it for all she was worth, bent on catching and holding his attention now or never, and reckless as to how pathetically she showed off in the attempt. She had begun this tour, as on all the other similar occasions, very poised, very grownup, a world-weary sophisticate aged fifteen and a half, but the first time he had looked at her the shell had begun to melt, and let in upon her all the hurts and all the promises of the untasted world of maturity, and from the time that he had smiled at her she had thrown away everything else and bent herself to make an impression. Once for all, and now or never. She hated being fifteen, but she wouldn’t always be fifteen. She looked rather more, she hoped, even now. And he was only twenty-three himself. She knew all about him, he’d been written up lavishly since he became famous, and she hadn’t missed a single article about him if she could help it.

  “Take this one – William Henry Cothercott the third. He looks like Byron turned bandit, I know, but he hadn’t a line of poetry or an act of violence in him. He made a pile out of the early railway boom, and he had some ships that weren’t too particular whether they carried slaves or not, when other cargoes didn’t offer, but that’s the worst we know about him. They even started collecting more curious things than harpsichords, just to give the impression they were a lot of romantic damned souls. There are some very naughty books you won’t get shown, but I doubt if they ever really read them. And all these rapiers and knives and things, here along the wall – those are part of the effect, too, just theatrical props. That fan – you wouldn’t know it had a dagger in it, would you? And this silver-headed walking-cane – look! The head pulls out, like this…” She showed them, in one rapid, guilty gesture, six inches of the slender blade that was hidden inside the ebony sheath, and slid it hurriedly back again. “Straight out of ‘The Romantic Agony’,” she said, purely for Lucien’s benefit, to show him how well-read she was, and how adult. “Only it doesn’t mean a thing, they were still nothing but stolid merchants. Not a mohawk among the lot of ’em. They never stuck so much as a pig.”

  “And yet somebody put the devil in this house,” said Lucien with detached certainty.

  “Maybe somebody here among us,” suggested Dickie Meurice, turning the famous smile on him, “brought that aura in with him.”

  Lucien turned his head and looked him over again at leisure, without any apparent reaction. He knew who he was, of course. Who didn’t? He had even worked with him on two occasions. It couldn’t be said that he had ever really noticed him until now, and even now he wasn’t particularly interested. In such a narrow gallery, however, you can’t help noticing someone who is so full of quicksilver movement without meaning, and makes so much noise saying nothing. Lucien, when not singing, was a dauntingly silent person, and spoke only to the point.

  “I doubt it,” he said indifferently. “This is built-in. More likely to have been the architect. What was he like? Who was he? Do they know?”

  “His name was Falchion. Nobody knows much about him, there are only two other houses known to be his work. We think he must have died young. There’s a story,” said Felicity, recklessly improvising, and looking even more passionately truthful and candid than usual, “that he was in love with one of the Cothercott daughters. That one… ” She pointed out, with deceptive conviction, the best-looking of the collection, confident that no one would notice that she belonged to a later generation. “She died about the time the house was finished, and he was broken-hearted. They used to meet in this gallery while he was working on the features in the grounds, and she’s supposed to haunt here.”

  She had Lucien’s attention, and she didn’t care whether he knew she was lying or whether he believed her. Maybe it would be even more interesting to be seen to be lying. In many ways this whole set-up was a lie, even though Uncle Edward was a genuine scholar and a genuine musician, devoted and content with his sphere. In a sense, only what was utterly and joyously false had any right to exist in this setting, phantasms were the only appropriate realities in this shameless fantasy.

  “She comes in daylight, not at night,” said Felicity, loosing the rein of her imagination, but holding fast to Lucien Galt’s black and moody stare. “She comes to meet him, and she doesn’t know she’s dead, and she can’t understand why he never comes. She’s still in love with him, but she’s angry, too, and she’s only waiting to meet him again and take it out of him for leaving her deserted so long…”

  “She’s making it up as she goes along,” said Tossa very softly in Dominic’s ear. “What a gorgeous little liar!”

  “It’s this place,” Dominic whispered back. “It would get anybody.”

  “Has anyone actually seen her?” asked Peter Crewe, round-eyed.

  “Oh, yes, occasionally, but it only happens to people in love.” Felicity turned, and began to pace slowly and delicately towards the great oak door at the end of the gallery; and they all caught the infection and walked solemnly after her, their steps soundless in the deep carpet. “You may be walking along here some day, just like this, going to put fresh flowers in that stone vase there on the pedestal. Not thinking about anything like ghosts. With the sun shining in, even, though it could be just at dusk, like this. And you’re just approaching this door when it suddenly opens, and there she is, confronting you…”