IV

Before we reached the library floor, Nigel Barrow appeared. He had put on brown corduroys and he was still pulling on a sweater as he ran down the stairs from the opposite wing above.

“What’s up?” he called as he came after us. “I heard shouting, but from my window I can’t see a thing.”

“There’s a fire in the stable area,” I told him.

He hurried past us down the stairs and was out the front door before we reached the lower hall. Below us the great chandelier burned brilliantly, lighting the red and white marble diamonds of the floor to a shining gloss. All the suits of Spanish armor stood along the walls, watching through the slits of their crested helmets. The portrait of John Edmond seemed to watch as well, as though he might step down from his picture at any moment to join us in defense of Athmore. Members of the household staff rushed about in various stages of disarray and confusion, lacking direction.

As we reached the hall, Maggie came in through the outside door, muffled in a heavy gray sweater and warm wool trousers, her gray-blond hair rumpled, her expression one of shocked concern.

“Daniel’s been hurt, Morton,” she called to one of the men. “Do get me first-aid things quickly, and ask someone to ring up Dr. Highsmith.”

At mention of the old man’s name my heart leaped in sudden dread, and I watched anxiously as Justin and Nigel came in from outdoors carrying Old Daniel between them. Justin heard Maggie’s words.

“The phone’s out,” he said grimly. “Someone’s cut the outside wire, I’ve already sent for help.”

“I’ll manage Daniel,” Nigel said. “Take care of yourself, Justin.”

Justin paid no attention, though he looked dreadful. Apparently he had dashed outdoors in his shirtsleeves, and his shirt was torn, his face streaked by sooty smudges, his eyes burning a furious blue in his thin face. But Old Daniel looked worse. Gray and still, with a terrible wound in his skull—a wound that no longer bled. They laid him upon a couch and stood back.

“We found him too late,” Justin said grimly. “There’s nothing we can do now.”

Maggie cried out in alarm. “Oh, no! Justin—where was he? What happened?”

Justin answered in short, clipped phrases, obviously fighting his own grief. “When I discovered the fire, I sent one of the boys through the woods to get help from the village. He took the shortcut by way of the ruins and found the old man where a wall had fallen over and crushed him. He’s been dead a long while, I’m afraid.”

I gasped. “But I saw him there this afternoon. I saw him and he was perfectly all right!”

Justin looked at me and then away. “The wall must have fallen in on him afterward.”

Maggie had dropped to her knees beside the couch where Old Daniel lay. She was trying vainly to bathe his wound, to coax him back to life.

“Look out for yourself, Justin,” Nigel repeated more sharply. “That’s a nasty burn.”

At his words Maggie would have risen to see to Justin, but he waved her back. “Never mind. I’m all right.”

He was not all right. His left sleeve hung in scorched shreds, and beneath it the flesh of his forearm burned an angry red.

“I’ll help with that,” I said firmly, giving him no chance to refuse. Morton had brought the first-aid tray and he pulled up a high-backed chair of Spanish leather for Justin. I found shears in the tray and began to slit the sleeve Justin was attempting to rip from his arm. I felt shocked and confused—horrified by what had happened to Old Daniel since I had seen him this afternoon, yet questioning as well. If I had stayed longer, I might have been there to help him when the wall collapsed. Or he might have been talking to me and nowhere near the wall when it fell.

“He knew those walls,” Justin said, paying no attention to what I was doing to his arm. “He should have had better sense than to get near the one we were going to shore up.”

Maggie relinquished her place to Morton and got to her feet. “What about the fire? Do you know how it started? Are they putting it out?”

“It’s not too bad,” Nigel said quietly. “Just one corner of the workshop seems to be damaged. But why didn’t the dogs bark? What happened to the man on guard?”

Justin answered savagely. “He’s all right now, but he was knocked out by someone who came up from behind. And the outside dogs were drugged. They’re still sound asleep. Only Deirdre raised a rumpus here in the house. That’s what wakened me, so I looked out my window and saw the flames.”

He was giving me a hard time with his arm. “Don’t pull away,” I said. “You can’t hit anyone right now.”

After that he held still, though his head was turned from me, as if in distaste for my nearness. Scorched skin showed that flame had already cleansed the area and there was only need for a loose bandage until the doctor came and treated it properly. I worked as gently as I could, and he did not permit himself to wince.

Once I looked around for Dacia Keane, but she had apparently gone outdoors, and I suspected that she would be in the thick of the excitement.

I dared not think about Old Daniel now. I tried to be as impersonal as Justin, and attend solely to what I was doing, forgetting the man whose arm I bandaged. Instead, I found myself consumed by an unwanted tenderness. All too well I remembered the shape of the long-fingered hand I touched. I remembered the way that hand had once smoothed my hair, my shoulder, and how roughly it had shaken me. I knew the very line of his jaw as he looked away from me, knew the way his brown hair grew at each side of his head, with that light streak cutting through above. All these were part of me, part of my knowledge of him, whether I liked it or not. His pain was my pain and I could not work this close to him unmoved. Fire and death must be dealt with in good time, but for the instant I was aware only of my husband and the fact that he had been hurt.

Not until I was through did he finally look at me, and then with a curious expression, as if I were some species he could not comprehend, someone whose very existence he questioned.

“Thank you,” he said in a surprisingly subdued tone. “I’ll go back to the stable now and see what’s happening. I heard the town fire equipment arrive a little while ago.”

I watched him cross the hall, but before he reached the door, Marc came in from outside, pushing the orange-clad Dacia ahead of him. He was as soot-streaked as Justin, and he looked thoroughly keyed up—yet as though what had happened did not altogether distress him. That he was annoyed with Dacia was evident at once.

“What a bloody little fool you are!” he said, shoving the girl through the doorway. “Pulling a trick like that! If I hadn’t fished you out you might be dead of smoke poisoning by now.”

“But I wanted to see!” Dacia wailed. “There were still flames and I’d never been that close to a real fire before.”

“Getting close to a real fire can be dangerous,” Maggie said tartly.

Dacia swung about, her great brown eyes alive with excitement. “But that’s what I like, Mrs. Graham—the danger! How can anyone be really alive except when there’s danger?” Her gaze fell suddenly upon the body of Old Daniel on the couch, where Morton was drawing a sheet over him. Her color blanched. “Ow! Who’s that?” she cried.

Apparently Marc did not know about Daniel. He crossed the room and jerked back the sheet. “What’s happened here?” he demanded.

Maggie told him and he heard her out, his expression stony. I remembered that Marc and Old Daniel had never been friends. As a boy Marc had constantly teased the old man about the topiary garden and Daniel had never forgiven him. Now, at least, Marc might have shown some compassion, some feeling, but he only turned and spoke again to Dacia.

“Do go back to bed, will you, darling? You’re not needed down here.”

Maggie put her hands to her face. “What can be happening to us? We’ve never had so much trouble at Athmore!”

“Not for a few hundred years, anyway,” Justin snapped. “Old Daniel’s death is a miserable accident. I blame myself for that wall. But the fire was set. And I don’t know why. There’s apparently been no attempt at theft. All these things have been nuisance interruptions, though why anyone should have it in for us—”

“My brother’s a trusting bloke,” Marc interrupted mockingly. “It never occurs to him that it might be to the interest of others to interfere with what he’s doing.”

“Don’t talk rot.” Justin was impatient. “I’m not that important. Not yet.”

Dacia had paid no attention to Marc’s efforts to send her upstairs. She was staring at them all, wide-eyed and still over-exhilarated. “It’s just like in the films! I saw a flick in London last week—with spies trying to get hold of the secret formula, and—”

“Do shut up, darling,” Marc said, regarding the girl with amused tolerance.

Maggie spoke to her across the room. “Do as Marc says and go back to bed, Dacia. You too, Eve. I’ll stay with Daniel and wait for the doctor.”

“And I’ll keep vigil with you,” Nigel said, and drew up a chair for himself.

Justin spoke to his brother. “Come with me, will you? I want another look before the police come.”

At once Dacia was at Marc’s elbow. “Do let me come too!” she pleaded, but Marc shook his head and gave her a quick, light hug before he pushed her in the direction of the stairs. Over the top of her head he cocked a whimsical eyebrow at me and I turned away. Justin was watching, and I did not want to exchange so much as a look with his brother.

When the two of them went outside, I said goodnight to Maggie and Nigel and started upstairs. At once Dacia came clattering after me.

“Fancy you coming here at this very time!” she said, her boots clacking up the steps beside me. “Whatever brought you back, anyway? Nothing’s going to switch Justin in his tracks now, you know. In fact, it’d better not. Not with all that money of Alicia Daven’s coming in so handy.”

I had no wish to discuss my life with this avidly curious girl and I hurried up the stairs. She kept pace with me, her chrysanthemum-shaggy head close to my shoulder.

“You’ve given Marc a dreadful fright, you know,” she confided brightly. “Though you mustn’t let him guess I tipped you off. Of course he’s got good reason to panic, what with owing money up to his ears. It would be a nice mess if Justin decided he had to stay married to you, after all, wouldn’t it? Imagine me marrying old Marc and taking on all those debts! Maybe that’s what he’s got in mind. I wouldn’t put it past him. Not that I blame him. After all, it’s everybody for himself first, don’t you think?”

I climbed the stairs in silence, glad enough to have her chattering about herself instead of me.

“Of course I know I won’t be sitting on top forever,” she ran on. “Not as a model, anyway. Though there’re some people who say I’ve got something that’s especially me, so I can be somebody on my own account, once the Twiggy craze dies out. Right now I’m her type and they’re playing that up. But I do want to be me—not an imitation of somebody else.”

This revelation accounted for quite a bit, I thought. Her hair, which looked as though she had taken the kitchen shears to it, might very well be the creation of someone like Vidal Sassoon in London. She was certainly the type for the current craze, with her slight, straight body and blank little face on which nothing much had as yet been written. Even her huge expressive eyes only expressed her youth and eagerness to be alive. As for Marc’s debts, they were nothing unusual. Justin had long ago despaired of keeping a tight rein on him, and Maggie had been foolishly indulgent.

We reached the top landing of the stairs, and I walked briskly toward the double doors into the long gallery. Dacia bounced beside me, rather like a puppy whose blunders were persistent but good-natured. I wondered how old she was. Seventeen, perhaps?

For all her open curiosity about me, she seemed willing enough to overlook my lack of response to her hints and questions. She shrugged it off and ran to a wall of the darkened room to touch a switch.

Two lighting fixtures on either side of the central doors came to life, while the rest of the long hall remained shadowy and dim.

“Ooh, what a hideous place!” she cried, wrinkling her nose in disrespect.

I had to agree. This was a room I had never liked. Down its entire length the walls were ornately paneled in carved wood that had darkened over the years until it was almost black, and everywhere there were gloomy hints of the Gothic touch. There was Gothic in the arches above the doors, at the highest point of the window frames, even in the panel carving. The ceiling was a vast, ornate pattern of linked plaster rings, and there were two enormous stone fireplaces at either end. Tall chairs from some doge’s palace marched stiffly along the walls, with console tables, or low upholstered benches set at intervals between. Here and there down its length hung portraits of lesser members of the family, with the pale and sad-eyed Mr. Dunscombe facing the stairway doors. I nodded in secret greeting to this unhappy first son-in-law of Mrs. Langley’s. Dacia wasn’t looking.

“What’s a room like this good for?” she demanded, flinging her thin arms wide to encompass its great space, while her orange coat stood out stiffly about her. “With everybody here claiming to be so poor—and all this to keep up! Not that they seem poor to me. They manage to have somebody work on the grounds, and there are servants for indoors. It looks pretty posh, I’d say. Maybe I make more in a year right now than Justin does, but I don’t live like this. Wouldn’t know how. What’s the point, anyway? It’s all out of touch, that’s what it is!”

I had felt something of the same thing when I had lived here. Dacia was right and it was out of touch—if you reckoned that the modern world was what counted most. But perhaps I had a bit more perspective and knew more of Athmore history, than Dacia did. I could not remember without being moved some of the things Justin had told me, so there was an ambivalence in me toward the house.

Dacia took a few steps into the huge room. “Imagine! All this space and nothing to do with it. It’s a bit spooky, don’t you think—with horrible, dark woodwork, a miles-away ceiling, and that ghostly Mr. Dunscombe staring from the wall! Why don’t they hang him in the green-velvet room where he belongs?” Dacia looked suddenly aghast at her own words and then giggled. “Oops!—no pun intended. I suppose that’s where he really hanged himself, isn’t it, so that wouldn’t do. But just think—you could be up here screaming your head off and nobody’d hear you. It must’ve given you the shivers when you first came. How did you get used to it, anyway?”

“I never did,” I said shortly and started toward the door to our corridor in the north wing.

She came after me, doing a saucy dance step in her high boots. “That’s what I’m afraid of. What if I marry Marc and he brings me here? I’d perish of the dark and the way every ancestor in the lot would look down their noses at me. As they must have done with you. Is that why you ran away?”

The question was rhetorical. By now she expected no answers. She simply rushed on, letting her voice go ringing a bit shrilly down the room—challenging the ancient echoes with her here-and-now approach. I felt a twinge of unexpected pity for her. She was right, as I very well knew. The house would no more welcome her than it had me. It would have as little taste for Bow Bells as it had for America.

Dacia swung about as we reached the corridor door and flung both arms wide again, as if she dared the room to snub her. “Never mind! If I come here, I’ll give the old digs a surprise or two. What a place this would be to hold a fashion show! Marc could bring some of my friends from Carnaby Street and we could get into our mod clothes and give the house the shock of its life. What do you think?”

I had to smile at her eagerness, and at the impertinent tilt of her boyish head. Three years ago I had given the house a few shocks myself—but Dacia’s shocks would be shriller and more colorful, though perhaps no more shattering. Mine had been on the quietly stubborn side, but they had smashed things up in the course of a year anyway. Mainly they had smashed up what had existed so tenuously between Justin and me. I had only wanted his love, but he could not accept me as I really was and keep on loving me.

We left the lights burning behind as we went into the corridor leading down our wing. The room seemed safer lighted than dark.

Dacia was considering me again. “I suppose I should worry about you coming here more than I have,” she said, suddenly sly. “You could tip over Marc’s applecart entirely if you got Justin back. Because then where would the money come from to pay his debts? Alicia would stop holding him up and the whole jig would be over. Of course Maggie knows this, all right. She’s a smart one. I think that’s why she’s considering marriage with old stick-in-the-mud Nigel Barrow. All that Bahamas money of his would help now, wouldn’t it? And she’d do anything to keep Marc and Justin out of trouble.”

I could not bear to listen any longer. “There’s an old man lying dead downstairs,” I reminded her, “and I don’t think—”

“So what?” Dacia had recovered from her first shock at seeing Old Daniel on the couch downstairs. “People are alive and then they’re dead. It happens all the time. Besides, he was a mean old codger. He used to watch me every time I stepped out on his silly grass chessboard—as though I might hurt it someway.”

I hardly listened because of my own disturbing thoughts. “I keep remembering that I saw him in the chapel ruins this afternoon and that he seemed glad to see me, even though he never liked me. I think he was trying to tell me something. If only I could have understood!”

Dacia paused at the door of her room and swung about. “What do you mean—tell you something?” I could almost see her vivid imagination taking a leap into space. “You mean there’s something more to how he died? More than a wall falling over accidentally?” she demanded.

“I don’t mean anything,” I said. “Don’t be absurd.”

I hurried toward my room, while she spoke to my retreating back, her attention once more upon her own affairs.

“Oh, well, if I lose out here, I can always keep on with my job. I’ll not give it up till there’s solid ground under my feet. So I might as well wish you luck.”

I heard her door creak open and then close before I reached my room. For all my impatience with her, I found that I liked Dacia Keane. I might feel a real sympathy for her if Marc North married her and brought her home to Athmore. Though that seemed unlikely. Marc had never stayed with one girl for very long. His penchant was for playing the field, and I had never seen him with anyone like Dacia before. At least she had her eyes open. If she married Marc, she would know what she was doing—which was more than I could say for myself when it came to marriage.

I reached my room and went in to switch on the bed-table lamp. Then I stood in the eerie blue glow the room generated, sniffing doubtfully. Had someone been smoking in here? I had stopped smoking long ago to please Justin and I had never started again. So why should there be a faint aroma of tobacco in the room?—if that was what it was.

I went to fling a window open and stood huddled in my wool robe, looking out toward workshop and garage. There were no more flames to be seen, but the stench of smoke was thick on the air and I closed the window against it. Undoubtedly this was what accounted for the odor in my room. My hands were cold on the windowsill and I thrust them into the pockets of my robe, remembering again the urgent clasp of Old Daniel’s fingers. Why had there been such urgency in him? What had he meant about the rook’s play and his warning that the king had better watch out? Why should he have mentioned these obvious facts about the topiary game?

I wished I did not feel so uneasy. I wished that my own mind would not go leaping through space just as Dacia’s had done. At tea this afternoon I had asked the woman next to me if she had seen an old man when the tour visited the ruins, and she had told me readily that she had and that he’d seemed frightened. Could there be any possible connection between tonight’s fire and Old Daniel’s death?

But of course that wasn’t possible, since the wall must have fallen upon him hours earlier.

Before I got into bed, I went again to the unbarred tower door, drawn to it uneasily, wondering again at Deirdre’s reaction to room and tower. I slipped behind the bureau and pulled the door open upon darkness and the chill mustiness of damp stone. Above I could see the narrow oblong of a sentry window that had never been intended for use. The circling stone steps between were black and I could see nothing close at hand, yet it seemed to me that some trace of smoke lingered here too, and that it was different from the outdoor smell of the fire. Still—with the fire stench so strong—it was impossible to balance a fainter smoke scent against it and be sure of any distinction.

I stood utterly still, listening, while an odd tremor ran through me, and my blood began to beat in my ears until it seemed to me that I really heard sounds up there in the dark tower. A creaking that was not the wind, a suppressed sigh that was like a human breath. I thought of the guard struck down at his post and backed hastily from the tower. Before I closed the door, I listened once more, trying to quiet my trepidation—and heard no sound except from far away. That was Justin’s voice calling, and Nigel Barrow answering out in the yard. But nothing closer. Nothing at all. My imagination had always been nervously stimulated by this house, and I must not heed it now. It would be absurd to go running downstairs with a wild alarm that would cause laughter. Besides, if anyone was up there, escape from the roof was too easily possible. From either corridor the back stairs were quickly accessible at this deserted hour of the night. I closed the door and shoved the bureau hard against it. At least the door could not be opened while I slept without a good deal of noise.

I returned to my bed and found that Nellie’s hot-water bottle had lost its comforting warmth. This time I left the bed-table lamp burning, and the blue aura of my surroundings seemed to add to the chill as I lay shivering beneath the covers.

Shivering—and thinking …

Thinking that I had no past, since it was lost to me. That the future was wholly doubtful. That there was only the present. And what was I to do with these few hours that already supped through my fingers?

From far down the hall came strains of music. That would be Dacia again, turning up her record player. She too had a tower bedroom. Had she smelled cigarette smoke in its dark reaches? Had she turned the music up loudly for comfort and company because the house was intimidating her in spite of her gay defiance?

I did not want to hear the beat of Petula Clark’s singing. Those were words I wanted to forget:

For all we know …

But I could not forget. The memory of Justin that I had been trying to hold off returned to engulf me. When I bandaged his burn I had been close enough to him to slip into the curve of his arm, had he offered it. The memory warmed me, and it answered as well the question of what I must do about the present.

Tomorrow may never come …

I put my hands over my ears to shut out the words. I must be honest with myself. Honest about why I was here. There was no time left for subterfuge, for fooling myself because of hurt pride, worn by now to such shabby shreds that I could no longer hold it about me. It was absurd to tell myself that I had come here to make certain that I was no longer in love with Justin North. I was here because I had never stopped loving him, and probably never would. Yet how I had lost him, how we had failed, seemed clear enough—so how could I expect another chance?

During my marriage, before I knew what Justin meant to Alicia, and she to him, I had met her a number of times. Grovesend was part of our social community and could not be ignored. Once I knew, I tried to avoid her—which was not always possible. Remembrance of those encounters with Alicia still made me squirm in humiliation. Only later had I realized how cleverly she baited me and exposed me to ridicule, while always remaining well-mannered herself. More than once she had stung me to sharp response in front of Justin, her attitude one of quiet amusement that anyone so gauche and clumsy as I should play at being mistress of Athmore.

I turned miserably in bed, unhappy all over again because of what Alicia had done to me. At least I would know her baiting for what it was if I had to meet her now. Surely I would be able to smile and keep my temper, retain my poise as well as she.

I lay scowling in the dark, my temper anything but restrained, and once more tried to think honestly about Justin.

He had been furious at the sight of me this afternoon. He had not willingly submitted to my help in bandaging his arm, and he had looked at me strangely afterward—as if I were someone he did not know, someone different from the young girl he had fallen in love with. Was I too different—or not enough different—to win him back? Was all this questioning simply the straw clutched at by a woman when love has already slipped out of her grasp?

Still—Justin had waited. That was the thing which had brought me back. He had not called me, but neither had he divorced me for desertion. And I had at least one advantage over Alicia Daven. One enormous advantage.

I was Justin’s wife.

Having faced the beginnings of truth, I turned over and fell asleep in the wide bed. If anyone crept up and down the tower steps or smoked a cigarette on the roof, I did not know it. I slept soundly until morning came.