Henry appeared at dinner that evening, in a more forthcoming mood, apparently, than on the day before. He apologised for avoiding his guests earlier in the day, explaining that when he started work he found it difficult to break off. Giles agreed with him. His own work was largely creative, and though he knew very little of the processes of art, he was reasonably well-informed and well-read. The new conversation at the meal reached a far more interesting level than that in the library had done. Only Susan and Miriam took no active part in it. The former was rather too obviously avoiding any contact with Giles. The latter was equally obviously put out by losing her place at the centre of notice.
“You are very silent, Susan,” she said, presently, cutting across the general talk. “Your walk doesn’t seem to have done you good. I hope you have not caught a chill.”
“I enjoyed the walk,” answered Susan, without enthusiasm, “and I never catch chills.”
“I’m sure I shall,” replied Miriam, “if we go on having arctic conditions, in August.”
“It seems to us marvellously warm in the house,” said Phillipa, hoping to check a further list of complaints. “You should try a wet day on the yacht.”
“God forbid!” Miriam exclaimed, too loudly.
“I certainly should,” Giles broke in. “I’ve had too many passengers on board in my time, hating every minute of it, and wishing they hadn’t imagined they were born seamen.”
Miriam had attained her object. She had broken Henry’s short ascendancy, and she had turned all the attention to herself. Both Phillipa and Susan, watching their host, saw the quick flash of anger in his pale eyes. Afterwards he sank again into apathy. The meal continued, with desultory conversation among the women. None of the men said much.
When they had finished breakfast the next day, Giles proposed to his crew that they should visit Tréguier that morning, have lunch there, see the cathedral, do their shopping, and stay away from the house until the afternoon.
Tony and Phillipa understood his predicament. He wanted to avoid Miriam, and he had somehow fallen foul of Susan.
“Because she thinks he’s been knocked all of a heap again by Miriam’s fatal charms,” Phillipa told her husband, when Giles had left them. “Obvious situation. Silly misunderstanding. Giles will probably let the whole thing slide. I wonder what there really was between them? I mean, what parted them?”
“Between Susan and Giles?”
“No, darling. Don’t be so dim. Between Miriam and Giles. We shall never know. He’ll never tell us, and she would only tell lies.”
“You don’t have a very exalted idea of our hostess.”
“I think she’s a prize-winning bitch.”
“Possibly. She’s a damned attractive woman.”
“Tony! You can’t mean that!”
“Oh, yes, I can.”
Phillipa went off to her room to get ready for the day’s outing. There was a bus, Giles had said, from outside the post office in Penguerrec. They must leave in ten minutes if they wanted to catch it.
In the Marshalls’ bedroom, Francine and one of the maids were making the bed. They finished it quickly and the girl went away, but the old woman moved to the door and shut it.
“I would like to speak to Madame,” she said, gravely.
“Oh, yes? I have to catch a bus. I am late already,” answered Phillipa, in her rather halting French.
“Madame understands what I say?”
“Yes, yes.”
Phillipa put the finishing touches to her make-up, and began going through the contents of her handbag.
“I will not keep Madame a moment,” said Francine. “Only to say that Monsieur Armitage upsets Madame Davenport. That makes Monsieur Henri very unhappy.”
Phillipa was suddenly furious. What right had this woman to say such things? To criticise Giles, of all people.
“Monsieur Armitage had no idea he would meet Madame Davenport here,” she said, indignantly. Her instinct had been to say nothing, but Francine was impressive. She was not someone to be ignored. And Giles had told them she had been with Henry since his childhood.
“I wonder,” said Francine, calmly, “if that can be true.”
Phillipa snatched up her bag and made for the door, but Francine’s solid figure stood there, blocking her path. As she came up to her the old woman put her hand into the large pocket of her apron and pulled out a folded leather photograph frame. She opened it and turned it towards Phillipa.
“Madame keeps this in her room,” she said.
Phillipa pushed it away.
“Then put it back there!” she protested. There was much more she wanted to add, but her French was not equal to it.
“Let me pass,” she said, fiercely, instead.
Francine made way for her. She watched her hurry away down the passage. Then she looked again at the photograph in her hand. A younger Giles, a younger Miriam, faced one another from the two sides of the case. Francine closed it and put it back in her pocket.
“What a pity,” she said to herself, “that they did not marry.”
The visit to Tréguier gave the party from Shuna much-needed relief. In spite of the gale, now beginning to blow out, they enjoyed it in the holiday spirit befitting a cruise abroad. Giles was disappointed that their meal had to be eaten inside the hotel, instead of under a gaily-striped umbrella among the magnificent hydrangeas. But the food was as good as ever, and it was largely on account of the food, he explained, that he brought his boat to France so often. They went back to Penguerrec on the bus feeling refreshed and happy.
Susan was in the hall when they got back. In his present confident mood Giles decided on the spot to settle their difference.
“Haven’t you been out today?” he called to her as she turned, after greeting them, to go upstairs.
“No. Miriam needed me.”
“But you’re free now, aren’t you?”
“I think she’s asleep. She had a very bad night.”
“Then you need some air, and I need some exercise after sitting in that bus, and eating a colossal meal. Get your things on and come down to the river to see if Shuna is all right.”
“Why wouldn’t she be?”
“Don’t argue, girl. Skipper’s orders.”
She gave him a brief smile, and began to rummage in the big cupboard in the hall.
“Bother,” she said, flapping through the coats that hung there. “My mac must be upstairs.”
“Borrow. There are hundreds available.”
“I don’t think Miriam would mind if I wore hers. She won’t be going out.”
She pulled on gumboots and the mackintosh and joined him at the door.
They walked away from the house in silence, taking the main path into the woods. Giles had made up his mind. He would end the nonsense, here and now.
“Eight years ago,” he said, looking straight ahead down the path, “I was engaged to Miriam. She wrote to me a fortnight before the wedding to say it was off. I couldn’t believe it, at first. I knew she liked making scenes, but they had always ended happily. They never lasted long. This time there was no scene. She refused to see me.”
“Oh, no!”
“What d’you mean, oh, no? That she didn’t behave like that? Or that you don’t believe any of it?”
“Neither. Miriam told me this morning that you had been engaged, but you broke it off, and had been sorry ever since.”
Giles swore fiercely.
“You believed her?”
“I didn’t know what to believe. She … you …”
“You are thinking of yesterday. When you came into the room. Do you know what I was about to do?”
Susan reddened.
“I was not going to kiss her, you little clot; I was going to shake the hysteria out of her, if I shook her head off.”
Susan exploded into laughter: Giles joined in, and for some seconds neither could speak.
“Seriously, though,” said Giles, at last, with an effort, “I swear it happened as I’ve said; eight years ago, I mean. It amazes me now to think I didn’t see the snags at that time. They stick out a mile. I suppose she really isn’t quite normal.”
“Poor thing,” said Susan, also recovering her gravity. “She seems to exist by making herself miserable.”
She paused, and then asked shyly, “Did you really not know she lived here?”
“Certainly not. Why do you think I might have known?”
“Henry thinks you did. He thinks Miriam asked you to come.”
“Good God! Did he tell you so?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
He wondered if he were seeing too much. Miriam had hinted at a close relationship between this girl and her cousin. All the more reason for discarding such a suggestion.
“He is wrong,” he exploded. “You are all wrong. Milling about these caves of suspicion and suggestion and beastliness! I swear she was the last person I expected, or wanted, to see. I wish I’d gone into Lézardrieux, instead of this place. I would have, if the wind hadn’t been just right for coming here.”
“Poor Giles,” she said, not teasing him, but with full adult understanding.
“Susan!”
He took her hand and held it, and they walked on together, not speaking until they came out of the. trees and saw the river below them, and Shuna, swinging up and down on a heavy swell, but lying safe to her anchor, with the ebb rushing past her.
“She doesn’t give a damn,” said Giles, proudly, and Susan, with an unreasonable pang of jealousy, knew there would always be two women in his life, and one was Shuna.
He dropped Susan’s hand and went forward to the top of the stage, looking up and down the river.
“The dinghy seems to be bumping your launch a bit,” he said. “I’ll slip down and fix it.”
“Do you want any help?”
“Probably not. But come down if you like. The ladder’s as slippery as hell, and stinks of river mud and fish, but not to worry.”
He went down rapidly to the lowest stage, while Susan followed, moving rather clumsily in her rubber boots, because they tended to slip on the iron rungs. Giles did not wait to help her. He seemed to take it for granted she could look after herself.
“Does Henry go out much in the launch?” he asked, as Susan joined him.
“When the weather is good, yes. We’ve been for several trips since I’ve been here. He likes fishing, which I find rather boring. But there’s plenty of excitement otherwise.”
“How?”
“He knows all the little channels between the rocks. He was brought up here, apart from school.”
“I know.” Giles thought of his own scared entry down the main channel, and laughed. “That’s why he wasn’t much impressed by our coming in in the fog. He could do it himself, blindfold, I suppose?”
“I expect so,” Susan agreed, and added, “I don’t like the launch much, anyhow. I’d rather sail.”
“Do you sail?”
“No. But I want to.”
“You’d better come round to Lézardrieux with us, when we do manage to get off.”
“I’d love to,” she said, eagerly. But as they turned from the boats to go back up the stage, she said sadly, “I expect Miriam would find some excuse to stop me, though.”
“To hell with Miriam!”
“It never works out like that. She brings the hell to you.”
“How right you are.”
On the way up the hill, Giles stopped, pointing to a narrower track on the left.
“This was where Miriam waylaid me,” he said. “Is it a short cut?”
“Yes, in a way,” Susan answered.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it is actually shorter, but it brings you out at a door in the old stable wall, and unless you have the key, you have to walk right round the wall to the front of the house.”
“I see. There is only one key?”
“I don’t know that. But I haven’t got one.”
“Let’s go up it, anyway. I like exploring.”
“Actually, it’s Miriam’s favourite path in the woods. There is a clearing with a seat and a view. The seat is a sort of war memorial, to the local resistance movement. The Germans had officers billeted in the château. They disappeared from time to time, I believe. And then local people were taken and shot.”
“Even in Penguerrec?”
“Everywhere, wasn’t it?”
They turned into the path and walked up, in single file, Susan leading.
The clearing, as a beauty spot, Giles found disappointing. It was much overgrown with rank grass; the view, through a gap in the trees, of the distant village of Pen Paluch was restricted. Moreover, the seat was not well placed to enjoy it, for it raced down, instead of across, the clearing. He also noticed that the seat was slightly tilted, for one of the flat iron rings, like feet, that stuck out from its base at either side, was raised from the ground. He pointed all this out to Susan, as they stood at the edge of the grass, looking about them.
“I never noticed that,” she said. “I think I’ve been here only once. Henry showed it to me soon after I came. He told me it was a favourite haunt of Miriam’s. She never talks about things like that, herself.”
“Far too ordinary,” said Giles.
She looked at him, puzzled and sad.
“You almost hate her now, don’t you?”
“No,” he answered, turning his face away from her. “No. Myself. For wasting so many years on a sentimental memory. For not letting myself grow out of it. Till now.”
Turning to her, he saw her eyes fill with tears.
“Darling,” he said, under his breath.
Before Susan could recover from the surprise of this address, they were both roused by a voice calling to them from the opposite side of the clearing. They turned their heads quickly, and saw Henry, standing among the trees.
“We’ve been down to look at Shuna,” Giles shouted, cheerfully, while Susan started to walk, almost to run, across the grass.
It happened without any kind of warning. Giles saw the girl hurry on to a rough patch of ground, covered with broken branches. He saw her stumble, beginning to fall forward. He heard her terrified shout as the ground gave way under her feet. And then, even while she was disappearing from view, he leaped forward.
From where he had been standing he could not now have seen her, but he covered the space between them in a few seconds, and saw her mackintoshed arm, thrown across one log stouter than the rest, which had its ends firmly fixed on either side of a great hole in the ground.
He flung himself down beside the gap, wondering if his added weight would take them both into whatever depths lay beneath. He reached for her arm, and took it in a firm grip at the wrist. Down the hole he saw her white face lose its look of mad terror.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “But I don’t know how firm it is where I am. Can you bring your other hand up?”
Without speaking, she did so, and he grasped that wrist, too, in his free hand. Then he began to wriggle slowly backwards, drawing her to the edge of the hole.
“You’ll have to let go the log,” he ordered, when progress stopped.
“No. Half a minute.” Her voice was faint, but resolute. “I think I can get my foot on the rock.”
“Rock?”
“Yes. It’s rock all round me. There’s hardly any earth. Can you give me a pull? A hard one?”
“No. I’m the wrong way round. I daren’t try to get up.”
“All right. Just hold on, and I’ll do the pulling. Let me have my right hand.”
Unwillingly he began to shift his grip, but he felt her fingers close on his arm with a firm clasp. A second later she came up out of the hole. He let go her other wrist to grasp at her shoulder, and she fell forward on top of him.
For a few moments they lay still, panting. Then Giles freed himself, got up and lifted her to her feet. She did not faint or cry, only stood, leaning against him, shivering.
“We must get back to the house,” he said, gently, but did not take away his supporting arms.
“Henry. What happened to Henry?” was all she managed to say. And then, “My teeth won’t stop chattering.”
Henry. Giles had forgotten him. What had the blighter been doing, not to help them? He had been standing there, on the other side of the clearing. He must have seen Susan fall. But he had vanished. He had not helped. He had just gone away.
And then Giles saw him, in company with another man, running from the direction of the château. They carried a long coil of rope between them.
“Don’t hurry!” Giles called to him. The sharp sarcasm in his voice brought Henry to a dead stop. He came on again slowly. As he drew close, Susan lifted her head, but she did not move, and Giles still held her close.
“I didn’t go right down, Henry,” she said. “Giles got me out.”
There was a dull note in her voice that Giles did not like. She must have suffered more shock than she was showing at present.
“You seem to have had a landslide or something,” he said to Henry. “The rain, perhaps.”
“No.” Henry seemed to have some difficulty in speaking. The other man, in a blue labourer’s blouse, said nothing.
“What d’you mean?”
“It should be covered. There is a cover.”
“It was covered with branches, unsecured at the ends, and a thin covering of earth and grass. Luckily one of the branches neither broke nor slipped, and Susan got her arm over it as she fell. Otherwise …”
Henry was staring into the hole.
“It goes down sheer for fifty feet,” he said. “Then on in a rough tunnel, not so steep, for a quarter of a mile. It comes out at the entrance to our little creek, at low tide. At high, the last bit is under water.”
“You know this place?”
“Of course. It has always been here.” He turned to his companion and spoke to him in the Breton dialect. The man grunted and began to move in and out of the trees beside the clearing.
Susan stood away from Giles. She had stopped shivering, but she was still very pale. Her arm, the one that had taken her weight as she fell, was beginning to ache at the shoulder. She wondered if she had injured the joint, for when she tried to lift her hand to her hair, she found she could not do so. With an effort she said to Henry, “Is this the place where smugglers used to come up in the old days? And where they took kidnapped Germans down to the sea in the war? Francine tells ghastly stories about that.”
“Yes. This is the place.”
The man came back presently. Henry appeared to give him some detailed orders, for presently he lifted his beret in acknowledgement and. went off towards the house. Henry shouldered the coil of rope.
“You have hurt your arm, Susan,” he said. “Can you walk back?”
Giles pulled off the scarf he was wearing round his neck.
“Let me make you a sling,” he offered. But Susan had turned away.
“Of course I can walk,” she said, shortly, moving ahead of the two men. They fell in behind her, Giles last, and soon reached the house.
“I would prefer you not to tell Miriam what has happened,” Henry said, in the hall.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Susan answered. “I have some sense.”
“You’ll have to account for that arm,” said Giles. “Do let me fix it in a sling.”
“I’ll use one of my own scarves,” said Susan, quietly, but with meaning. He understood, and admired her quick wits as much as he enjoyed their mild conspiracy.
“Thank you,” Henry said, aware again of Susan’s injury. “Is there anything … I mean, do you want anything …”
“Give the girl a good stiff drink!” Giles burst out, harshly, “and stop nattering about your wife.”
He checked at once, furious with himself for having spoken in this way. “I beg your pardon,” he said, stiffly, and moved off towards the stairs. Susan looked at him as he passed her. Her eyes were clouded and she did not speak. He went upstairs to find his friends.
Tony and Phillipa heard his story with some dismay and great astonishment.
“How could the cover get off the entrance hole?” Tony asked.
“Did Henry actually say it had a cover?”
“He did. And he certainly ordered the gardener chap or whatever he was, who came along with the rope, to look for something. He went about with his nose to the ground, obviously searching.”
“Then it must have been taken off deliberately?”
“Quite deliberately.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“I’ll tell you. That seat was not in its proper place.”
“Come again.”
“The seat, the memorial seat, was in a postion where it did not command the view through the gap. I thought this was peculiar at the time. It ought to have been over the top of the hole.”
“Can you be sure?”
“Quite sure. When I was clinging on to Susan, moving back slowly, and sticking my toes into the ground as I moved, I struck up against something solid, and hooked my instep round it. I had a look at it just before we left the clearing. It was a short iron rod, fixed upright in the ground, with a screw thread at the top. There was another on the other side of the hole. The seat has rings at the side of the base. I don’t mind betting they fit over those rods with a nut to screw down over them. I’ll have a look tomorrow. But I expect the seat will be back over the hole by then.”
Phillipa was horrified.
“A deliberate trap?” she said, incredulous. “Someone laid a trap for … someone?” she ended, lamely.
“Fun, isn’t it?” Giles said. “There was a fifty foot drop, as Henry so kindly told us.”
“It can’t have been meant for Susan,” said Tony.
“I hope not. Or for me. No one knew we would use that path. But Henry appeared very smartly at the precise moment it was about to happen. I don’t remember him calling out any warning. But that could mean several things. Perhaps he was there because he thought I was with Miriam. Perhaps he thought she was with me, coming up the path. Susan was wearing her mackintosh.”
“And hat?” asked Phillipa.
“No hat.”
“Then he couldn’t have mistaken her for his wife.”
“The hair, you mean? All the same, the clearing is a favourite spot of Miriam’s.”
“It doesn’t look too good for Henry,” agreed Tony.