Chapter Eighteen

THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO QUESTION OF SLIPPING back quietly, even if we’d planned to, because nearly everybody was around the house and stable yard. Imogen and Midge were scattering food for the chickens, Dulcie sitting on a bench in the shade watching them, Kit reading at the other end of the bench. Midge saw us first and in her surprise threw a handful of feed so wide that the chickens cackled their annoyance and went sprinting after it, scrawny legs scissoring.

‘Well, what have you two been doing?’

Then she went red, realising that the question implied a lot more than she’d intended. Meredith said he’d fallen in a stream and I’d pulled him out. It was less than a complete answer but at least it broke the awkward silence.

‘Alan’s out looking for you,’ Imogen said, her voice carefully neutral. ‘He’s ridden the cob down to the town.’

Meredith sat down on the bench between Dulcie and Kit and started unlacing his boots. He was obviously waiting for me to break the news.

‘We’ve seen Nathan,’ I said.

‘Where?’ The question came explosively from Midge. More chicken feed went scattering.

‘Up on the fells, on the way to Skiddaw.’

‘Why didn’t you bring him back with you? What did he say?’

‘He didn’t seem to want to talk to us,’ Meredith said. ‘In fact, he ran away.’

They were all staring now, even Dulcie.

‘Are you sure it was Nathan?’ Kit asked.

We both nodded. I felt desperately tired all of a sudden. The clothes I’d been wearing for twenty-four hours were itchy with sweat and bits of grass and heather. I told the others I was going to change and walked through the arch to the stable yard and upstairs to our loft. I wasn’t surprised to find Midge following me.

‘Nell, what really happened? He must have said something.’

I took off my boots, peeled off the clinging wool stockings. My feet were pale and wrinkled from being damp so long.

‘No. He didn’t want to talk to us. Meredith nearly killed himself trying to catch up with him.’

‘But what’s he doing? How’s he living out there?’

‘I think he’s been building himself fires and he must have taken some food with him, or maybe he’s been catching rabbits with snares. You know how practical Nathan is.’

Blouse and knickers joined the stockings in a pile on the floorboards. They’d have to be washed under the pump later. I stood in petticoat and chemise, poured water from the ewer into the basin and started sponging myself.

‘So all the time we thought he’d gone off and left us, he was only a few miles away,’ Midge said.

‘Seven or eight miles perhaps. Not far, anyway.’

‘Far enough. So that he could get here quickly if he wanted to, but we wouldn’t know he was there. It all makes sense after all, doesn’t it Nell?’

Midge’s mind moved fast, not just in mathematics, but this surprised me. So did her calmness, if she’d been thinking along the same lines as I had.

‘What exactly?’

‘We were all surprised when he went off without saying a word to anybody. I admit it hurt me but he really had no choice. It meant if the police or somebody from the coroner came back to ask more questions, we could honestly say we didn’t know where he’d gone.’

She sounded remarkably cheerful about it. Maybe we weren’t thinking along the same lines.

‘Why wouldn’t he want to answer questions?’

‘Surely you’ve worked it out, Nell. He was terribly nervous when the two policemen were here even though they didn’t ask him anything. You must have noticed.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Nathan’s no good at lying, is he? Can’t act at all. So if they’d started asking him questions he’d have let out everything he knew and he simply couldn’t let that happen.’

‘Why not?’ I stood, sponge in hand, terrified of what she was going to say.

‘Please Nell, don’t start another ethical discussion.’

‘I wasn’t…’

‘That’s the whole point, you see. Nathan’s not a philosopher like the others. You said yourself, he’s practical. He looks at some situation, works out what the results will be in real life and if he doesn’t like the answer he does something about it. In this case, he doesn’t want to see somebody he knows hanged for murder.’

She said it as calmly as if she’d worked out a mathematical equation. Suddenly, I dreaded what she was going to say because up to that point there had been something that I hadn’t even let myself think about. In my mind I heard Meredith’s voice saying ‘Either don’t start or go as far as it takes you.’ I turned away, not letting her see my face and tried to keep my voice calm.

‘You think the Old Man was murdered?’

‘I’m as sure of it as you are, and the fact Nathan’s gone off like that means he’s sure of it too. He must have seen or heard something that night that he doesn’t want the police to know about. So he’ll probably stay out on the fells until the inquest is safely over and there’s a verdict of suicide.’

‘So you think he’s shielding a murderer and you don’t mind?’

‘Oh, I’m sure we’re all in favour of justice in the abstract. But it’s a different matter, isn’t it, when you think of a living, breathing human being you actually know being taken out one morning and … oh, just think about it.’

‘I am. But the Old Man was a living, breathing human being too.’

She touched my arm as if I needed consoling. ‘Yes, I know. And somehow it makes it worse thinking of anybody doing it just for money. But I’ve been thinking about that. Perhaps when you’ve got somebody besides your self to worry about, you care about having enough money more than when it’s just you.’

‘You think that’s how Nathan sees it?’

‘I’m not sure he’ll have thought about it even that much. But he’s so loyal, you see. If he likes somebody, he has to protect them and that’s all there is to it.’

I felt sick, my mind racing back over all the things I should have noticed.

‘So it’s all right then,’ I said. ‘He stays out on the hills and next week I tell my story to the inquest about how the Old Man tried to kill himself, then we all go on as if nothing had happened.’

‘Nell, please don’t get angry with me. I hate the thought of that as much as you do. But think about what the Old Man would have wanted. He thought it was his baby, after all. Would he want her to give birth to it in a prison cell, then have it taken away from her so that they could hang her? How could that do him or anybody any good?’

I breathed, ‘Dulcie Berryman.’

‘Yes of course Dulcie Berryman. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? You must have suspected that before any of us.’

I said nothing, weak with relief, and let her go on talking.

‘Only I don’t think we should say anything to Imogen about this. She doesn’t like Dulcie, does she?’

‘No.’

She said she’d leave me to change and went clattering happily down the stairs, pausing only to ask if we shouldn’t leave some food out where Nathan might find it. Better not, I said. Then I undressed completely, lay down on the hay pallet under a sheet and slept dreamlessly for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon.

*   *   *

I woke around four o’clock feeling better. The panic that had come over me in the talk with Midge was because of reaction to all that had happened the day before. Her logical mind was on the right track and she’d got there even without knowing about the fish scales or the dropped note. But there was a thought I didn’t want to come into my head again and the only way to keep it out was to find some certainties in this maze. One certainty at least was that Dulcie Berryman knew more than she was saying.

As I rummaged for clean clothes and got dressed I wondered whether to discuss what I was going to do with Meredith and decided against it. I was my own woman still and nothing that had happened the night before changed that. It was a relief to have got it over, after all the talking and reading and thinking, and to wake up in the same world as the same person. A little bit of my mind was appalled at what I’d done and expected retribution but that was primitive and superstitious and could be disregarded. On reflection I was still pleased with myself and perhaps that was why I now felt capable of tackling Dulcie. Brushing tangles out of my hair, I thought I should have done it before. There were excuses, of course – her own habit of silence for one thing, her age for another. From early twenties to mid or late thirties is a big gap and politeness to one’s elders was something taken for granted, even in my unconventional upbringing. But there’d been something else about Dulcie from the start that silenced us and I recognised at last what it was. As I pinned up my hair I said to myself, ‘The sex question’ and laughed to the empty loft. Dulcie had done it quite a lot and didn’t regret it. Even before we knew about the baby it was there in the way she stood and looked, in the pad of her bare feet and the smell of her bed. It had disturbed all of us in our different ways, women and men. Well, since yesterday, I’d paid my entrance fee and joined that sisterhood. Somehow that made it easier to talk to Dulcie, even though it had nothing to do with what I needed to talk about.

I took the note out of yesterday’s skirt and went downstairs, through the arch and across the yard to the kitchen, meeting nobody on the way. Even the hens were dozing in the heat. The porch was full of the usual clutter of tack, with the carriage whip where I’d left it and a pair of the Old Man’s riding boots still there, as if he’d walk out any moment and put them on. The door to the kitchen was half open. Inside a few slow-moving flies circled in a shaft of sunlight and under them Dulcie sat at the kitchen table scraping carrots. That should have been somebody else’s job under our new arrangements but she didn’t seem to mind. She had an enamel bowl of earthy water in front of her, a pile of carrots and a tin colander beside her.

‘Dulcie, may I talk to you?’

She nodded and went on scraping. The blade of her knife was worn to a crescent with years of use and re-sharpening. I drew out a chair and sat facing her.

‘There’s something I want to know. I’m not going to the police with it and it’s done now in any case, but if we don’t know what really happened we’re going to go on wondering for the rest of our lives.’

The knife made a little rasping sound, whittling the dirty brown of the wet carrot into glowing orange. Her big amber-brown eyes were fixed on me, her hands so well accustomed to what they were doing that she didn’t need to look at them.

‘I wish now that I’d never known about it,’ I said, ‘but you can’t unthink things, you have to go on.’

She dropped the scraped carrot into the colander and dunked another one in the bowl. I took the note out of my pocket and smoothed it out on the table.

‘This was meant for you, wasn’t it?’

She read without touching it, head tilted sideways, muddy water drops from the carrot falling on the table, spreading into wood made soft-grained by scrubbing. After a long time she looked up at me, raised and lowered her head.

‘Where d’you find it?’

‘He dropped it climbing in. He wasn’t a burglar, was he?’

Another nod. It was all so much easier than I’d expected that I felt off balance, like pushing on a door that opens too easily.

‘Arthur Mawbray?’

‘Did he tell you?’

‘I’ve never met him, apart from seeing him in the stable yard. It was Arthur Mawbray?’

Another nod. She started rasping the carrot, but slowly now, looking down at her hands.

‘And he’s the baby’s father, isn’t he?’

Her head came up, frowning now. ‘Who says that?’

‘Somebody was writing anonymous notes to the Old Man about it.’

‘You allus get blatherskites. He didn’t believe them.’

‘He wasn’t sure. I think the Old Man tried hard to believe it was his because he wanted it to be, but he knew in his heart it wasn’t.’

‘It made him happy. Is there awt wrong in that? Anyway, nobody can prove or disprove who the father of a baby is. Not all the slape and slippery lawyers in the world can prove that.’ She was beginning to get angry.

‘No, and the Old Man acknowledged the child in his will. Did he tell you he was going to do that?’

Another nod.

‘And Arthur Mawbray knew that too?’

‘I told him.’

‘And now he’s asking for money from you. Why?’

‘Because he needs it, I suppose.’

‘Did he suggest killing the Old Man before he could change his will?’

‘What?’ The carrot thumped on to the table and her mouth fell open. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘There’s a lot of money involved, thousands of pounds. Perhaps Arthur Mawbray decided that since the Old Man had tried to kill him it was fair enough to return the compliment.’

‘Compliment? I don’t understand a word you’re saying. He never killed anybody. Nobody killed anybody.’

‘The Old Man didn’t do that to himself. He couldn’t have.’

‘He could do anything once he’d set his mind to it. Nearly anything.’

She stared down at the carrot then up at me, as if she couldn’t make sense of either of us any more.

‘You going to talk to the lawyers about this?’

‘No, but on one condition.’

I was surprised at my own brutality. I’d no intention of saying anything to any lawyer but was ready to use the threat of it, desperate that my idea of Arthur Mawbray should become reality.

‘What’s that?’

‘I want to talk to Arthur Mawbray.’

‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘No, but you know where he’ll be on Saturday, that’s tomorrow. The usual place, he says in his note. He was here last Saturday too, wasn’t he, when the dogs were barking?’

‘Yes.’

‘Take me with you when you go to meet him. I promise not to say anything to anybody else until I’ve talked to him.’

She sat with her hands on the table. They were neat pink hands with shiny little fingernails like sea shells, amazingly unroughened by her hard work. I felt touched by them, almost ashamed of myself.

‘All right. Tomorrow night, when it’s getting dark. But he never killed anybody. He’ll tell you himself.’

It was rabbit stew again for dinner, with plenty of carrots. Dulcie behaved just as she always did, apart from not looking at me.

*   *   *

Not much happened on the Saturday. It was thundery, headachy weather and Imogen, Midge and I spent some of it attending to our clothes, washing blouses and underthings in buckets in the yard with cold water and hard soap, then rigging up our own washing line to dry them. Usually this would have been a splashy, girlish time with gigglings and harmless banter. Now Imogen and I were treating each other with careful politeness and Midge hardly said a word. I noticed her glancing up to the fells now and again and guessed she was thinking about Nathan. When we needed to borrow soap or clothes pegs from the kitchen I let Midge do it. I was in no hurry to face Dulcie again before the rendezvous in the evening. I’d told nobody about that, not even Meredith. I’d been tempted, but I’d made a promise to Dulcie. Besides, he might have turned anxious and protective and that was the last thing I wanted from him. When we met going about the yard or at mealtimes we behaved normally to each other I think. Or perhaps we didn’t. It was like one of those terrible opening scenes in an amateur drama when the producer appeals to the bit-part players, ‘Just behave normally’, so of course they do anything but.

It was a relief when the evening meal was over – cold ham, hot potatoes and cabbage – and everybody went their various ways, Alan and Robin to see to the horses, Imogen and Midge to the loft with armfuls of dried clothes, Meredith and Kit strolling up the drive in the last of the sun. I offered to help Dulcie with the clearing up as an excuse to stay with her in the kitchen when everybody else left. We worked in silence, she swirling plates and cups in a bowl of greyish water, I stacking them on a rickety wooden rack to dry. The light went from the kitchen early because of the walls round the yard so it was dusk by the time we’d finished but we didn’t bother to light the lamps. She dunked the last cup, emptied out the water and dried her hands on the whitish apron she was wearing.

‘Are we ready then?’

I nodded. She took off the apron and arranged it over the back of a chair to dry.

‘Have a look and see if anybody’s around.’

I looked out into the yard and up the drive and came back to report that nobody was about. Dulcie licked her lips and smoothed a hand over her hair. She was nervous, Dulcie of the creamy calm.

‘Better be going, then.’

Outside it was still more light than dark, with some clouds in the west. We went quickly through the arch into the stable yard, across it to the gateway on the far side. It creaked when we opened it and Dulcie caught her breath, but nobody came.

She said, ‘He won’t like me bringing you.’

‘Tell him you had no choice.’

We went side by side down a little track to the paddock at the back of the house where the two cows grazed. They raised their heads and ambled up to Dulcie. She pushed them gently away. We walked on across the paddock, Dulcie looking over her shoulder sometimes. As we got near an unkempt hedge on the far side a dark figure came out from under the trees.

‘I’ll tell him first,’ Dulcie said and broke into a run, stumbling on the cow-trampled earth. I kept striding close behind her, not wanting to give them time to work out a plan of action. I heard her say. ‘There’s somebody with me. She’s one of the people staying. She made me bring her.’

‘Hello Mr Mawbray,’ I said. ‘My name’s Nell Bray. I picked up the note you dropped the other night.’

My voice sounded a lot more confident than I felt. He made a sound something between a snort and a nervous giggle and took a step towards me. Even in the half-light his hair was as yellow as straw. It wasn’t a bad-looking face, a little weak about the chin and the eyes narrow, though that might have been with the effort of getting a good look at the stranger in the dusk. The broad forehead was very like his father’s.

‘Moy name ain’t Mawbray. Oi’m Diggory, Dick Diggory. What be you wanting with me?’ The rustic accent wouldn’t have fooled a baby.

‘If you go on trying to talk like that, you’ll get very tired of it. I know you’re Arthur Mawbray because Dulcie told me. I’d guessed in any case.’

‘Oh.’

The look he gave Dulcie was bewildered rather than reproachful. He was off balance and I had to keep it that way.

‘I told Dulcie I had to speak to you because you’re both in very serious trouble. It’s up to you what you do about it, but people have guessed and you haven’t got much time.’

I said ‘people’ because I wasn’t fool enough to let him know that I was the only one. My idea was that they’d probably run away together and I shouldn’t try to stop them. It wasn’t a carefully worked out ethical position, just revulsion at the idea of Dulcie’s pink hands with their sea-shell nails being strapped behind her one morning in a cold shed after a walk across a prison yard.

‘It was a joke. We didn’t mean any harm.’ He looked about my own age but he sounded like a schoolboy.

‘Joke!’

‘Well, he had tried to kill us, after all. He deserved worrying a bit. Anyway, we wouldn’t have let them hang him or anything. If the police had arrested him Dulcie would have got word to me and I’d have popped up right as ninepence, wouldn’t I, Dulcie?’

‘So all the time he thought he’d killed you, you were hiding?’

‘Yes. When he started letting off that bloody … excuse me, that shotgun in the dark, me and my mates naturally hit the deck. We crawled away and somebody said it would have served the old b … the Old Man right if he really had killed somebody. Well, I knew I’d be in a bit of trouble with my father anyway if it all got out so I thought I’d make myself scarce and my mates put the word round that he’d shot me. We didn’t mean any harm by it.’

‘And you didn’t mean any harm deceiving him about Dulcie and the baby?’

A long silence. He’d been standing his ground up to then and sounding confident. Now he took a step back into the shadows and his voice went hurt and gruff.

‘Why did you want to tell her about that, Dulcie?’

‘She didn’t need to,’ I said. ‘The gossip’s all round the town. I suppose the idea was once the Old Man was dead and the baby born, you’d share the money.’

‘It’d be the baby’s money, wouldn’t it?’

‘So you knew about it, then?’

‘He told Dulcie what he’d put in his will, and she told me.’

‘Because it was your baby?’

Another silence then, ‘Yes.’

‘But you were quite prepared to let him think it was his?’

Dulcie said, ‘He was that pleased about it. His merry-begot, he called it.’

‘Merry-begot?’

‘That’s what we say round here for the wrong side of the sheets. He was as happy as when one of his mares falls pregnant. And we’d been sleeping in the big bed together and … and cuddling up and he was a lish enough man considering his age so…’

The picture came into my mind of Dulcie and the Old Man in the big four-poster.

‘Then he started getting anonymous letters saying the baby was somebody else’s. Did he discuss them with you?’

‘No, he didn’t.’

‘But you could tell he was having doubts. Even I could tell that.’

‘The day with the mare?’

‘Yes. So you and Mr Mawbray decided you had to do something about it before he found out the truth?’

‘It wouldn’t have mattered once he’d acknowledged it,’ Arthur Mawbray said. ‘Once he’d held it in his arms and acknowledged it, it would have been his. That’s the law.’

And he a magistrate’s son. Yet he’d brought out this piece of rural primitivism with what sounded like total conviction.

Dulcie backed him up. ‘Arthur was away anyway. It was just a case of him staying away a few months more until the child was born and the Old Man had got him in his arms and everything would have been all right.’

‘You weren’t far away, were you Mr Mawbray? You were seeing Dulcie regularly.’

‘Not regularly, just sometimes.’

‘Often enough to come up with a plan at any rate. Once he started thinking the child might not be his you had to do something quickly before he changed his will. Dulcie knew the Old Man was walking round outside most nights, guarding his horses…’

‘We never meant any harm to the horses!’

‘… so while she was keeping an eye on him it would be an easy enough matter for you to catch the horse and get his tack. It must have been you I heard down in the tack room. I think you waited with the horse just on the far side of the gate to your father’s land. He’d see the horse, come through to take it back, then you hit him on the head and tied him into the saddle. Whether he was already dead by then…’

While I’d been talking, he was trying to stop me, inarticulate sounds at first then ‘no’ repeated louder and louder. Now his hand closed round my arm in a crushing grip and started pumping it up and down.

‘No, no, no. What are you talking about? You’re mad.’

Dulcie called to him to stop, but he got his other hand on my shoulder and twisted me round so that he was shouting into my face.

‘You’re calling me a murderer? You’re saying I did that to him?’

‘Yes, and the police know it too.’

Not true, but all I could think of to protect myself. As the shock of it hit him his grip went slack and I managed to pull away from him. I took a few steps back, expecting him to come at me again, but he suddenly sank down into a sitting position on the ground, head on his knees and arms clasped round them, rocking backwards and forwards, keening ‘no, no, no’. His collapse horrified me more than the attack. Surely this wasn’t the way murderers were supposed to behave.

Dulcie moved first. She came forward and put both hands on his shoulders, staring at me over his bent head.

‘If the police think they know it, they’re wrong. He couldn’t have done it. He wasn’t here.’

If she’d sounded angry it would have been less convincing. She just stated it as a fact, her fingers kneading the sides of his neck like a mother with a fretful child. Arthur stopped keening but his head stayed bent.

‘He’ll tell you himself in a while. You can’t expect him to be thinking straight after what you said to him.’

After a few minutes he got himself clumsily upright but stayed in contact with her, arm against arm.

‘I didn’t even know it had happened until two days afterwards.’ He sounded sulky now rather than fearful. ‘I got back here and met Dulcie by the gate as usual and she told me.’

‘Where had you been?’

‘Out in the boat.’

‘What boat?’

‘The Eastern Light, fishing boat out of Maryport.’

‘What were you doing there?’

He stared. ‘Fishing.’

Dulcie explained, ‘It’s what he likes doing, only his father won’t let him.’

‘He wanted me to go into the army like he did. I wouldn’t have minded the fighting but then there was all the rest of it, shouting orders and standing in line and so on. I ran away once, only he brought me back. He said he’d disinherit me. Never mind the inheritance, I told him, just set me up with a nice little fishing boat and I won’t bother you again. That was fair enough, wasn’t it?’

He looked at me as if the answer to that was as important as whether he’d killed a man or not. Now I’d got him, I felt a deep disappointment in him. The belief that young Mawbray was still alive had created a picture of him in my mind: ruthless, intelligent and sinister. One thing I could certainly rule out now was intelligence. Stupidity is one of the most difficult things for a clever person to act convincingly and every tone of his voice and movement of his body told me I was face to face with the real thing. But stupidity can be dangerous too.

‘So you needed money?’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘Enough to kill for it?’

‘I expect a lot of people would if they thought they could get away with it. Only I didn’t. I’ve told you, I wasn’t here.’

‘Maryport isn’t far away.’

He stared, ‘Do you know anything about tides?’

‘Only that they go in and out.’

‘You ever tried to row a boat in from a long way out at sea against the tide?’

‘No.’

‘Well, take it from me it’s true what Dulcie told you. What day of the week did the Old Man die?’

I told him it was the night of Thursday the twelfth. He wrinkled his broad forehead, working it out.

‘All right, that was the night before that we took the Eastern Light out on the night tide. We stayed out all night and came in with nets pretty full when the tide turned in the morning. Even if I’d taken the tender, I couldn’t have gone out in the boat and rowed myself back and got here before daylight, could I?’

When he talked about boats there was a confidence and maturity in his voice that wasn’t there otherwise. Dulcie gave me one of her sweet smiles as if that cleared up everything.

‘If you really went out that night,’ I said.

‘I’ve told you.’

‘You’re sure it was that night? It took you a while to remember.’

‘You don’t go by clocks and calendars if you work at sea. It’s tides and winds and when it gets light or dark, the things that matter.’

‘So you can’t be sure what night it was you went out?’

He ran a hand through his hair and looked appealingly towards Dulcie, waiting for her to rescue him.

‘Mr Morrisey would know what night you were out,’ she said.

He picked up the cue. ‘Mr Morrisey, of course he would. You ask Mr Morrisey. He’ll tell you.’

‘Who’s Mr Morrisey?’

‘My skipper. He owns the Eastern Light.’

‘Where can I find him?’

‘You go down to Maryport and ask the first person you meet. Everybody knows Mr Morrisey.’

A local character, I supposed, or as otherwise expressed, local rogue. Either Arthur had come equipped with an alibi or Dulcie was in the process of making one for him, as calmly and efficiently as she jointed rabbits for stewing.

‘I’ll speak to him, then.’

‘You do that, and when you have you go and tell the police what he told you.’

He sounded confident now, almost happy. I wasn’t, because I had a problem. If they hadn’t already stewed up his alibi – and it was possible that they hadn’t – I needed to get to the obliging Mr Morrisey before they did. But Maryport was about fifteen miles away and it was already nearly dark. Even if I ran all the way down to the town and managed to catch a late train to the coast, assuming there was one, I wouldn’t get there before most people had gone to bed.

‘So that’s all right then,’ he said. The tone was dismissive, almost cocky.

Short of making a citizen’s arrest on suspicion of murder, which wasn’t worth even considering, there was nothing I could do.

‘Goodnight,’ I said. And had to bite my tongue to stop myself adding something bitter and useless. The fact was that they’d won and though I’d never wanted to hang them I was furious for being so much at a loss. As I went back up the field I thought I heard Dulcie’s soft laugh from the darkness behind me, but it might have been one of the cows snuffling. I sat on a bench outside the house and about half an hour later she came back, walking heavily as if tired, and let herself in at the kitchen door. If she saw me there she gave no sign of it.