“ ‘My bird Willie, my boy Willie.

  My dear Willie,’ he said.

  “How can ye strive against the stream?

  For I shall be obeyed.

  ‘Haste, haste, I say, go to the hall.

  Bid her come here with speed.

  If ye refuse my high command

  I’ll gar your body bleed.’

  ‘Yes, I will go your black errand.

  Though it be to your cost.

  Since you by me will not be warned.

  In it ye shall find frost.

  ‘And since I must your errand run

  So sore against my will.

  I’ll make a vow, and keep it true.

  It shall be done for ill.’ ”

  The guitar came crashing in now with the dark themes of the page’s hate and love, and the rapid, rushing narrative of his ride to Lord Barnard’s castle. He swam the river and leaped the wall, and burst in upon the household at table. She had them in her hand, and the instrument sang for her, passionate and enraged beneath the far-pitched thread of her voice stringing in the words like pearls. Oh, God, let her understand what’s coming before he does, let her listen with every nerve. All I want is that she should have time to get her armour on, and be ready for him.

  The page was in the hall now, striding in upon the assembled company. The voice sang full and clear, almost strident to ride over the meal-time talk:

  “Hail, hail, my gentle sire and dame.

  My message will not wait.

  Dame, ye maun to the good greenwood

  Before that it be late.

  ‘See, there’s your sign, a silken sark.

  Your own hand sewed the sleeve.

  You must go speak with Gil Morrice.

  Ask no bold baron’s leave.’

  The lady stamped with her foot

  And winked with her ee.

  But for all that she could say or do.

  Forbidden he wouldna be.

  ‘It’s surely to my bower woman.

  It ne’er could be to me.’

  ‘I brought it to Lord Barnard’s lady.

  I trow that you are she.’

  Then up and spake the wily nurse.

  The bairn upon her knee:

  ‘If it be come from Gil Morrice

  It’s dear welcome to me.’

  ‘Ye lied, ye lied, ye filthy nurse.

  So loud I heard ye lee.

  I brought it to Lord Barnard’s lady.

  I trow you are not she.’

  Then up and spake the bold baron.

  An angry man was he.

  He’s thrust the table with his foot.

  So has he with his knee.

  Till silver cup and mazer dish

  In flinders he gar’d flee.

  ‘Go bring a robe of your clothing

  That hangs upon the pin.

  And I’ll go to the good greenwood

  And speak with your lemman.’ ”

  Her mouth, as always when she attempted these appalling feats, was sour and raw with the myriad voices that spoke through it, and the bitterness that century upon century could not sweeten or abate. There was sweat running on her lips, and until this moment she had not been able to raise her head and rest, letting the guitar speak for her again. Now it sang softly, unalarmed, waiting in serenity, and she cast one urgent glance towards where Audrey sat beside the open window. There was a tension there, something braced and ready and wild, to which her own heart rose with answering passion; but whether it was really more than the tension that held them all was more than she could guess. There was so little time, because the thread of this compulsion rested in her, and she must not let it flag. The sylvan song had been prolonged enough, and here came the ultimate test of her powers, the key verse that must reach Audrey before the rest had time to aim at understanding:

  “Gil Morrice sat in good greenwood.

  He whistled and he sang…

  It had dawned upon George already that for some reason of her own Liri was re-telling the whole story of what had happened here. Perhaps not to the end, for how could any ballad encompass everything that had happened? And this was genuine, no doubt of that. The effort he had to make to tear himself out of its spell for an instant was like tearing the heart out of his body. This girl was marvellous. Listen to her now, the voice light and careless again, and yet with an indescribable overtone of premonition and doom disregarded:

  “ ‘Oh, what mean all these folk coming?

  My mother tarries lang.’

  The baron came to the greenwood

  With mickle dule and care.

  And here he first spied Gil Morrice.

  Combing his yellow hair…”

  The word, the unexpected, the impossible word, had passed George as it had been meant to do, drawn away before his mental vision in the tension of the story. But suddenly as it slipped away from him he caught it back, and the stab was like a knife-thrust into his consciousness. “My mother…”

  My mother!

  What did she know, and what was she about? How could she know? This couldn’t be accidental, it couldn’t be purposeless, and it couldn’t be wanton. What Liri Palmer did was considered and meant, and he doubted if she ever took anything back, or regretted much.

  He cast a quick glance round into every corner of the room, but everywhere the tension held. She had them all in her hand.

  “ ‘No wonder, no wonder, Gil Morrice.

  My lady loved thee weel.

  The fairest part of my bodie

  Is blacker than thy heel.

  ‘Yet ne’er the less now, Gil Morrice.

  For all thy great beautie.

  Ye’ll rue the day ye e’er were born.

  That head shall go with me.’ ”

  The rage and grief of the accompaniment remained low and secret, hurrying bass chords suppressed and stifled. For a few moments she let her instrument brood and threaten, and looked down the room. Inspector Felse was sitting forward, braced and aware. Beside him Lucien was shadowed and still, very still; there was no way of knowing, with all her knowledge of him, what he was going through now. After all, it was not Lucien she was trying to reach.

  But there was a movement now in the folds of the half-drawn curtain at the last window. Audrey’s little solitude lay in comparative light, but the curtains were of heavy brocade, and lined, there would be no shadow to betray her. Softly she got up from her place, and softly, softly, with infinite caution, she slipped back step by silent step from her chair, towards the unlatched window. Audrey had understood.

  Now cover her, whatever happens. Don’t let any of them look round, don’t loose their senses for an instant. Cry out and cover her with the steely shriek of murder and the savagery of mutilation:

  “Now he has drawn his trusty brand

  And whatt it on a stone.

  And through Gil Morrice’ fair bodie

  Has the cauld iron gone.

  And he has ta’en Gil Morrice’ head

  And set it on a spear.

  The meanest man in all his train

  Has gotten that head to bear.

  And he has ta’en Gil Morrice up.

  Laid him across his steed.

  And brought him to his painted bower

  And laid him on a bed.

  The lady sat on castle wall.

  Beheld both dale and down.

  And there she saw Gil Morrice’ head

  Come trailing to the town…”

  The clamour of violence died into the lamentable threnody of death. The guitar keened, and the voice extended into the long, fatal declamation of that which can never be put right again. The tension, instead of relaxing, wound itself ever tighter until it was unendurable. The singer’s face, sharpened in the concentrated light upon her, was raised to look over the heads of her audience. The lady was at the window, easing it silently open, melting into the outer air.

  And this might well have been her voice, if things had gone differently, high, reckless and wild, as she came down from her tower to welcome her lover, her life laid waste about her for ever:

  “ ‘Far better I love that bloody head.

  But and that golden hair.

  Than Lord Barnard and all his lands.

  As they lie here and there.’

  And she has ta’en her Gil Morrice

  And kissed him cheek and chin.

  “I was once as full of Gil Morrice

  As the hip is of the stane.

  ‘I got ye in my father’s house

  With mickle sin and shame…’ ”

  To the last moment Audrey kept her face turned towards the singer; and as she slipped back through the window the freer light found her face, and showed Liri its white and resolute tranquillity, and the already irrelevant tears on her cheeks. The two women who loved Lucien exchanged one first, last glance of full understanding and acceptance, that paid off all the debts between them.

  The spell-binding voice soared in fearful agony to cover the moment of departure:

  “ ‘I brought thee up in good greenwood

  Under the frost and rain… ’ ”

  Audrey was gone, lost to sight at once, across the blind end of the terrace, and down the steps.

  George felt the boy beside him strung tight to breaking point. He saw the bright lines of Liri’s face drawn silver-white in the light of the lamp on the dais, the huge eyes fixed and frantic. Something was happening, and yet nothing was happening, not a movement anywhere in the room, she wouldn’t let them move, that long, strong hand of hers that plucked the strings was manipulating them all like marionettes, the generous, wide-jointed fingers that drummed a funeral march on the body of her instrument held them nailed in their places.

  “ ‘Oft have I by thy cradle sat

  And fondly seen thee sleep.

  But now I go about thy bier

  The salt tears for to weep…’ ”

  In the changing temperature of the evening the normal small dusk wind arose, as suddenly as was its habit here over the open sward. It took the unlatched window and swung it wide against the curtain, seized the folds and set them swinging. A chill draught coursed along the wall, and fluttered the skirts of gold brocade at every window embrasure.

  George heard and felt the abrupt, cold whisper from the outer world. He came to his feet with a leap, lunged silently along the wall, and whisked round the curtain to the open window, now swinging fitfully in the fresh currents of air.

  Far down the slope of grass he saw the fair head receding. The curtain shook, and he, too, was gone, down the steps and after her in a soundless run. And Lucien, the thread of his passionate concentration broken by the sudden movement beside him, came out of his dream to the sharper and more personal pains of the real world. She saw him rise, and felt the belated shock of knowledge and realisation sear through him; but there was nothing she could do, as he groped his way blindly after George, except sing on to the end, prolong the postlude, cover the slight, the very slight disturbance, and make those few who had noticed it forget it had ever been.

  “ ‘And syne she kissed his bloody cheek

  And syne his bloody chin:

  ‘Oh, better I love my Gil Morrice

  Than all my kith and kin.’

  ‘Away, away, ye ill woman.

  And an ill death may ye dee.

  Had I but known he’d been your son.

  He’d ne’er been slain for me.’ ”

  Five minutes more, to preserve the integrity of the course, and nobody, certainly not the professor, would dream of filling in with something smaller after this monstrous tour-de-force. Liri knew her worth. But don’t let them go yet, hold them fast, keep them from looking out of the windows yet, tie their feet from following. She didn’t know what she had done, but she knew there must be no interference with it now, no well-meaning onlookers, no witnesses to tell the story afterwards.

  She raised the volume and passion of her instrument to a crisis of anguish, improvising in a galloping rhapsody that bore the fortunes of Lord Barnard and his lady and Gil Morrice racing to ruin together, away down the wind and into the distance of antiquity, where old hatreds and old agonies lay down together between the four lines of a ballad verse as in a bed, and slept, and dreamed. The threnody sobbed away beneath her fingers, diminuendo, and died on a mere breath, one muted quiver of a single string.

  She felt the sweat cold on her forehead and lip, and the silence came down on her stunningly, like the fall of a roof. It seemed to last for a long time, while she could hardly breathe or stir for weakness; and then a sigh like a gust of wind went through the room, and they were all on their feet roaring and clapping together, and Professor Penrose had his old arm round her shoulders and was shaking her in a joyful embrace, while out of the contortion of her mouth that passed for a smile she was howling at him over and over, under cover of the din:

  “Get them away, quickly! Get them out of here… get them out… get them out!”

  After they were gone, with all that merry racket of cars and voices and horns, like a wild hunt of the twentieth century – and some of them still singing – the house was awesomely quiet. So quiet that it was hard to remember that somewhere downstairs some dozen or so resident staff still remained, few of them ever seen by visitors.

  Celia Whitwood had tucked her harp lovingly into the back of the huge old car she drove, and set off westwards for home with Andrew Callum as a passenger. The Rossignol twins and Peter Crewe had clambered gaily into the station wagon, bound for the London train, and after them the professor, embracing his inevitable notes and leaving behind in his bedroom the same case of recording tapes he had forgotten at Comerbourne station on Friday evening. Even Dickie Meurice was gone with him, edged competently and civilly into the transport by the deputy warden, with his consuming curiosity still unsatisfied. From his front seat, for once in the audience, he had not seen Lucien appear or Audrey disappear. To him it was only a matter of time, of a little patience, and Lucien’s arrest was a pleasurable certainty. Let him go, let him sit and gloat in town, waiting for the flare headlines he was never going to see. He had never been of much importance; now, in this immense calm after the whirlwind, he was of no importance at all.

  Liri sat in a deep chair in the gallery, her eyes half-closed, exhaustion covering her like a second skin. She saw the growing dusk take away the small possessions of the Cothercotts one by one into shadow, the fan that concealed a dagger, the empty place where the sword-stick had hung, the silver-chased pistols, the miniatures on ivory; and then whole pieces of furniture, the love-seat with its twisted arms, the spinet, the inlaid cabinets, the entire end of the long room. Darkness crept in upon her, and was welcomed. She seemed to have been there alone for so long that it was strange to hear a movement in the room with her. It could have been Felicity’s fictional ghost; but it was only Tossa Barber, sitting just as quietly on a high-backed chair by the library door.

  “It’s only me. It’s all right,” said Tossa simply, “I’ll go away when they come.”

  “I don’t mind. I thought everybody’d gone.”

  “We have to wait for Mr. Felse. We’re driving back with him, if… ” She let that fall. Nobody knew when George would be ready to go home. “Dominic went down to see if he… to find them…” Every sentence flagged into silence. All they were really doing was waiting.

  It must have been nearly eight o’clock when they heard the first footsteps crossing the terrace, the clash of the window-latch, a heel on the sill, stumbling, uncertain. Two people, the second closely following the first, but never touching him. A hand reached over an oblivious shoulder to the light-switches at the end of the gallery, hesitated, and chose the single lamp that made only a faint pool of radiance in a corner of the twilit room. Nobody said anything; but Dominic caught Tossa’s eye, and Tossa rose softly and slipped past Lucien Galt, who neither saw nor heard her, Dominic took her hand, and drew her away with him, and Lucien and Liri were left together.

  He saw her, and his eyes came to life in the shocked grey mask of his face. He pushed himself off from the doorway, and walked into her arms without a word, and without a word she opened them to him. He slid to his knees at her feet, and she held him on her heart, along with the chill and the dank smell of the river; and she knew where Audrey had gone. After a while he stopped shivering, and locked his arms tightly round her body, and heaved a huge sigh that convulsed them both; and neither he nor she would ever know whether it was of grief at his loss, or involuntary relief at this vast and terrible simplification of his problems, or both, and in what measure.

  “I called to her,” he said presently, in a voice drained and weary. “She was on the parapet. I wanted to tell her that we… that you and I… that we didn’t care, that it didn’t matter any more…”

  “It wouldn’t have been any good,” said Liri. “It did matter to her.”

  No, it wouldn’t have been any good, even if she had listened to him. How can you convince a person like Audrey Arundale that she no longer has to sacrifice everything to respectability, to public reputation, to what the world will say? What’s the good of arguing with her that her parents are dead now, and Edward’s dead, and the people she has left simply don’t look at values that way, simply won’t care, that they would welcome her back even after years of prison, and damn the world’s opinion? How do you set about convincing her of that, when she’s been trained to subdue everything else to appearances all her life? She couldn’t be expected to change now. This way there wouldn’t be any murder trial, there needn’t even be much publicity of any kind. The police are not obliged to make public the particulars of a case which is closed to their satisfaction, when the person who would otherwise have been charged is dead, and the public interest wouldn’t be served by stirring up mud. They simply say the case is closed, no prosecutions will be instituted as a result of it, and that’s the end of it. General curiosity only speculates for a very short time, till the next sensation crops up. This way everything would be smoothed away, everything hushed up, everything made the best of, just as it had always had to be. Maybe they’d even succeed in getting an open verdict on Edward’s death, and the locals would evolve improbable theories about a poacher or a vagrant surprised in the park, and hitting out in panic with the nearest weapon that offered. Audrey wouldn’t care. Audrey had observed her contract and her loyalties as best she could to the end. Edward would have wished it.