IX

The nightmare was one from which I could not waken. I was caught upon a chessboard, a helpless pawn in a game of life and death, and the green rook was hunting me. That tall rook of green-black yew who had it in his power to destroy the king and end the game.

But this was hallucination and I fought my way back to reality. Hazy consciousness returned, and beneath my back I could feel hard stone. Beyond there was nothing to support me—and only the sky overhead. I knew that I lay upon the narrow ledge of the parapet, with the bricks of a courtyard waiting for me far below. Hands pinned me to the ledge, yet I could not scream, could not free myself of those thrusting hands. Worst of all, a visual haze engulfed me. Nothing was in focus, nothing sharp.

From far away there came a sound of running footsteps coming this way, and I knew helplessly that Nigel must be hurrying to my aid, knew that he would never reach me in time. Then, as my clouded vision began to clear, I looked up into Marc’s face, alarmingly close above me, and knew that Marc’s were the hands that thrust me toward the parapet’s edge and oblivion.

I fought in earnest then, and we struggled together on the rim of danger, Marc thrusting at me while I battled to save myself from going over to certain death far below. Somewhere there was now a high, thin screaming—my own!—and then nothing. Emptiness. Nothing.

Fog swirled about me. Throbbing pain returned. I flung my arms out wildly—and found that it was Justin I fought. The hard parapet was no longer beneath my back. Something soft supported me. All around me swam a cold blue light, and I found that I was looking up into the blue canopy above my bed. I was in my own blue room and Justin was bending over me. When I ceased to struggle and looked at him rationally, he took his hands from my shoulders and stepped back.

“That’s better,” he said. His face seemed dark with an anger which I comprehended no better than anything else.

Maggie stood at the foot of the bed regarding me sadly, shaking her head. “Oh, Eve—how could you attempt a thing like that? Nothing is worth your life—nothing!”

Justin supplemented her words roughly. “I’d have expected more courage from you!”

I looked from his face to Maggie’s, trying to remember, to understand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Marc carried me to the parapet and tried to push me over. I’d fallen and knocked my head and I was too dazed to save myself. Was it you who stopped him, Justin?”

Maggie and Justin looked at each other and I knew they did not believe me.

“It’s true!” I cried a little wildly. “Marc tried to fling me over that parapet wall. I don’t know what saved me, what kept me from going over.”

“Marc kept you from going over, dear,” Maggie said, leaning past Justin to pat my hand reassuringly. “It will all clear up in a few minutes. He wasn’t trying to throw you over. He was trying to keep you from flinging yourself down from the roof.”

There was no convincing her, and I spoke to Justin, still trying to rouse myself fully. “Tell me what you think happened.”

As he spoke, the note of anger deepened his voice. “I came up on the roof because I heard some sort of rumpus going on. Marc shouted for me to help him, and I called Nigel from his end of the south roof. We both rushed over to your side and found you fighting Marc and screaming your head off. It took the three of us to pull you to safety. You resisted being saved with all your might. Luckily you fainted at the crucial moment and we were able to get you downstairs to your bed. Marc has a scratched face to show for his efforts. You’d better get it clear in your mind that he was trying to save you. Nigel and I were both too far away to be of much use when he found you. If it wasn’t for Marc, you’d have gone off the roof. If that’s what you wanted, if you’re that lacking in courage, you’re not the girl I used to know.”

“It’s not what I wanted!” I moaned. “It’s not, it’s not!”

Justin looked at me coldly, and I closed my eyes to shut out a face I hated as much as I loved. Beyond him I could hear Maggie moving about, and remembrance crept slowly back.

“Whatever has happened to this room?” Maggie murmured. “Why is everything in a turmoil, Eve?”

My head throbbed and I put up my hand to feel the bruise that was swelling at my temple. So that part was real, at least. I had tripped and fallen, bumped my head. Then Marc had carried me to the parapet. And before that there had been the rapping on my tower door, the effort to coax me from my room. Perhaps they had expected me to go out by the corridor door, and then Marc would have come down from the roof and searched my room himself. But I had stopped him by going up on the roof, so Dacia had come instead. Then I had gone to the roof for a second time. But how was I to explain any of this to the two skeptics who watched me, one in sorrow, the other in angry disgust?

I tried to answer Maggie with a simple statement. “Someone searched my room for the negative of that picture I took in the ruins of Athmore Hall the day Old Daniel died.”

“What picture?” Justin demanded. “What are you talking about?”

I told him then. Told him of asking Nellie to have the film developed, of discovering in one of the prints a blurred figure that might or might not be Old Daniel. I did not tell him what Alicia had said about Maggie, nor did I betray my wild notion that it might be Alicia herself.

Justin was impatient, unimpressed. “Why should anyone care about such a picture? Aren’t you jumping to far-fetched conclusions?”

Since that was exactly what I’d done, I did not argue. My head hurt and I felt too dizzy to cope with the puzzle of the picture.

“I don’t know!” I wailed. “I don’t want to think about it now!”

To my surprise, Maggie came to my aid. “Of course you don’t, dear. You’re upset and confused—and it’s not necessary to think of anything except rest and sleep. Come along, Justin. Don’t torment her now.”

He stood beside my bed and looked at me without sympathy. “Will it be necessary to place a guard at your door to watch you?”

I turned my head from side to side on the pillow and felt warm, self-pitying tears upon my cheeks. Denial was useless. These two had decided against me and they would believe nothing I tried to tell them. So I had better be angry, rather than sorry for myself.

“She’ll be all right now, I’m sure,” Maggie said, resolutely cheerful again. “I’ll go make you a cup of tea, Eve dear. And if you like, I’ll give you one of my capsules to help you sleep.”

The last thing I wanted was drugged sleep. They were both moving toward the door and I propped myself on one elbow.

“I don’t want any tea! But I won’t stay in this room alone. There’s no bolt on the tower door, and if you leave me I won’t stay.”

Again they exchanged looks, Maggie despairing, Justin impatient.

“I’ll send Deirdre in,” Justin said curtly. “She should do well enough as nursemaid, if you must have one.”

He went to the door and whistled. A moment later Deirdre came bounding down the corridor and through the door, as though she had been waiting, not far away.

“She doesn’t like this room,” I said. “I tried to bring her here yesterday, and there was something about it that bothered her, so she wouldn’t stay.”

But even Deirdre belied my words. Nothing about the room seemed to trouble her now. She came to the bed and put her forepaws upon it, thrusting her head forward to lick at my cheek in tender solicitation.

They left me then, apparently satisfied that I would stop my silly objections to the room, and at the same time be prevented from doing any harm to myself with Deirdre on guard. When the door closed after them I put my cheek against her rough coat and clung to her.

“How can I make them believe me?” I cried. But Deirdre had no answer. She merely licked my cheek again to show that she believed me.

Justin had never been able to abide weaklings, and now he believed that I had done something unutterably weak and unforgivable. The bruise on my temple made my head throb, and after a time I got up and bathed it and took aspirin. The lump was tender, but no longer swelling. When I went back to bed, Deirdre stretched herself on the floor nearby, watching until I fell asleep.

There were only a few hours left till daylight and I slept them through, thoroughly exhausted. When I wakened, Deirdre had been let out, and Nellie was moving about my room, picking up my scattered possessions, putting things to rights. A cheery fire burned in the grate.

A fire in the grate!

I sat up and waved a frantic hand at the coal scuttle. “Nellie—you didn’t—?”

“No, Miss Eve, I didn’t,” she said, coming toward the bed with a troubled smile. “Here you are, then. I found your wallet in the coal scuttle and I didn’t think you meant it to be burned.”

She produced it from her apron pocket, wiped off coal dust with a cloth and placed it beside me on the coverlet. Nellie had the gift of natural tact and having returned the wallet to me, she went on with her task of putting my room to rights, as though there was nothing remarkable in its state, or in my hiding my wallet in a coal scuttle.

When I had reassured myself as to the presence of the negative in its pocket, I finished the tea Nellie had brought me. Once, as she worked she turned toward the bed, holding something up in both hands.

“Why’s this here in your room, Miss Eve?”

The object she held seemed to be a spear or lance, and at sight of it further memory swept back. The weapon had been dropped on the roof near my tower door last night. Twice I had struck it with my foot, and the second time I had picked it up. I must still have been clutching it when Marc carried me to the parapet, and someone must have brought it downstairs and forgotten it in my room.

“It’s not mine, Nellie,” I said. “I don’t go in for jousting.”

“Oh, it’s not the jousting sort, Miss. You’d never lift one of those. Looks more like a cavalry lance—I’ve seen some in the weapons collection downstairs.”

I could think of no reason for its use on the roof, unless someone had indeed carried it as a weapon.

At least I felt stronger now, and the bruise on my temple did not throb as it had last night.

“Will you do one more thing for me?” I asked Nellie. “Do you suppose your husband could make an enlargement from one of the negatives he developed for me?”

“Sorry, Miss Eve, but he’s sold off his enlarging equipment,” she reminded me. “If you like, I can take it to the village for you and have an enlargment made.”

I handed her the negative. “That’s fine, Nellie. It’s very important, as you can guess, since I hid it where I did.”

“I’m going on an errand for Miss Maggie soon,” she said. “So I can do this at the same time.”

“Don’t show it to anyone, please,” I begged her. “Not even Miss Maggie. Take care of it yourself, and pick it up for me when it’s ready. Will you do that?”

She wrapped the bit of film in a clean handkerchief and slipped it into an apron pocket. “I’ll see to it myself, Miss. And I’ll tell no one.” She did not go back to her work, but stood beside the bed, her look downcast, her manner hesitant.

“I can’t tell you what happened,” I said. “I don’t think I can face explanations this morning. I mean about the room and—and all that.”

“You needn’t say a word,” she told me quickly. “It’s just that I think you should know the talk that’s going ’round. Miss Dacia started it. When I brought her tea this morning she was already up and dressed—early for her. She seemed nervous and jumpy as a flea, and she kept bouncing around, bursting out with all sorts of wild things.”

“About me?” I said.

Nellie nodded, flushing. “Miss Eve, I hate to repeat what she said, but she told me you got so despondent about Mr. Justin wanting to get a divorce and marry Miss Alicia, you tried to throw yourself off the rooftop last night. She said it was just luck that Mr. Marc was on guard up there and he was able to pull you back in time and call for help when you fought him.”

I closed my eyes, enveloped by an old and familiar sense of being hunted down by lies, of being chained and made helpless by plausible untruths until I was a ready target for the hidden enemy. I had not felt this for a long time, but I knew the feeling from old nightmare.

Nellie’s hand touched mine and I opened my eyes to find her patting me gently.

“There now, Miss. Don’t you look like that. I told Miss Dacia a thing or two right then and there. Maybe I didn’t mind my manners as I should, but I let her know straight off that I didn’t believe the shocking things she was telling me. You know what I said? I said, ‘Miss Eve is a fighter. She’d never go for doing a thing like that, and whoever says so is making up something that’s wickedly wrong.’”

I squeezed her hand gratefully. “Thank you for standing up for me. Was she angry with you?”

“No—that’s the funny part. She stopped bouncing around and got very quiet—like she was thinking about something. Then she said that was how she felt about you too. She didn’t think you were the quitting sort, even when quitting was sensible. And no matter what Mr. Marc said.”

I felt a small rush of gratitude toward Dacia. I might have known it was from Marc that this story stemmed. Dacia wasn’t to be wholly trusted because she had to look after Dacia first, as she readily admitted. Yet there was a basic honesty about her, even in her self-interest.

“You and Dacia are perfectly right, Nellie,” I told her. “I didn’t try to throw myself over that parapet last night. Nor did I make a shambles of this room myself. Will you go on believing that, please, until I get all this figured out?”

“Of course, Miss. And if they start talking belowstairs I’ll give them a piece of my mind—you can count on that.”

I knew I could, and I watched her affectionately as she drew back the draperies upon a gray and rainy sky. When she had given my room a few last touches she returned to my bed.

“Why don’t you rest awhile this morning, Miss Eve? There’s nothing you need be up and doing in this drizzle. Things will look better for a few more hours of rest. Meanwhile I’ll take care of the picture for you. Never fear.”

Deirdre slipped through the crack of the door the moment Nellie opened it, and came to my bed to wish me a joyful good morning. Then, finding that I did not mean to get up right away, she stretched herself before the fire, her head upon her paws, her round brown eyes fixed on me unblinkingly. Her presence, at least, gave me a sense of comfort if not safety. The old feeling of being hunted, with my destruction as the inevitable goal, was growing stronger than ever. Its origin lay in the past, but Athmore was making it real.

Until my mother’s death the nightmare had never touched me. Even in the following three years until I was ten, I had remained free of it. Lena White had come to cook and keep house and take care of me, and I loved her dearly. Lena’s skin was brown and her heart was big enough to ignore and forgive my own pale epidermis. Her prejudices were of a different sort. She hated all forms of dishonesty, and, as she said, she didn’t care if it was pink or green or purple.

With Father and Lena and me—so comfortable together—I found it hard to understand that my father might be lonely and that a girl like Janet could offer him nearly all he needed to make his life complete again. Lena tried to make me understand before she left, and so did Father. He had always believed in calm reason when dealing with a child. So he explained to me carefully that loving Janet did not mean that either of us would stop loving my mother. In a lifetime there were many loves. Like mine for Lena, which I could easily see took nothing away from love for my mother. Janet was a new and different love and she would make our lives happier and richer. I did not see why we needed to be made happier when we had Lena, but I loved my father a great deal and I wanted very much to please him. Besides, Janet was a pretty young thing, very neat and shining, and always smelling lovely. So I wanted to please her too. Since I did not have to think of her as a mother, I would not mind doing that.

I like to believe that I tried. And perhaps Janet tried too, though I know now that her world was my father and that she had no room in it for loving another woman’s child. Her prejudices were larger and less noble than Lena’s, and I believe she must have harbored a consuming jealousy of my mother that she could not help.

Somehow things went quickly wrong between us, though trouble remained beneath the surface for a time, since neither of us said a word to my father. I had my own solution, I had not slept with my teddy bear, Jumby, for years, but I dug him out of the mothballs in my mother’s old trunk and began to take him to bed with me every night.

For some reason the sight of Jumby upset Janet more than anything else I did. It was true that he had been moth-infested at one time, that he was missing one shoe-button eye, and had a generally grimy look about him. His rather gray stuffing was leaking out in several places, and he offended Janet’s strict sense of cleanliness. She said he was germy and unsanitary, and she complained to my father about him. But not even Father’s reasonable remarks about my being too old for teddy bears moved me to give Jumby up.

Matters dragged along in a more or less uneasy state for some weeks after I had unearthed my old companion. Then one day I came home from school and Jumby was gone. He was not waiting cheerfully for me on my bed, nor was he under it, or among any of my playthings. I searched for a long while before I went to Janet. She explained to me with kind patience that it wasn’t possible for me to go on sleeping with a dirty old thing like that, and he had been carried away by the rubbish man that morning and could not be retrieved. The invisible hunter had made his first kill! The scene I created must have been dreadful. Perhaps pressure had been building up in me for some time and Jumby’s horrible fate tore off the lid. I flew at Janet like a demon child. I kicked and scratched and screamed, until she finally got me into my room and locked the door upon me. In my bedroom I laid about me with a will for a few minutes, breaking what came to hand, and kicking things into damaged confusion. This vented my rage, but did not ease my pain. When my father came home I was sodden with weeping, and totally unable to speak coherently or listen to cool reason.

Janet was in tears too. She had dabbed iodine on her scratches, which rather emphasized their appearance, and Father had needed to comfort her for a while before he came to deal with me. He found me sullen and uncooperative. I wanted Jumby back. No other solution was possible. Also I discovered that Janet’s account of all that had happened, including her own part in it, took certain liberties with the truth. Liberties that were, of course, in her favor. I did not know how to fight her methods.

During the next few days a falsely contrite Janet brought me a huge new teddy bear, far handsomer than Jumby had ever been. He was a lie too. I put him head down in my wastebasket every day for two weeks, and came home from school each afternoon to find him waiting on my bed in Jumby’s place, with an idiot grin on his disgustingly clean face. I behaved so badly over this that Father often ended up comforting Janet for my behavior, and condemning me. Finally I took that white plush beast to the beach with me one day, buried him carefully in the sand where the rising tide would find him, and returned home empty-handed, to announce that he had been washed out to sea.

Janet had to be comforted again. Father spanked me, and I hated them both.

My grandmother, whom I dearly loved, was almost helpless with arthritis by this time, and could not come to my rescue by taking me herself. In the end the only solution was to send me away to school. I went gladly enough. I had lost my father, and Janet was not to be endured, so school could not possibly be worse.

It was really much better in a number of ways. There was always someone in school to whom I could give an all-enveloping love. It might be some teacher who was kind to me, or even some older girl who looked upon me as a little sister. These in turn became the object of my smothering affection. I tried to absorb each new object with my love, demanding of them an equally blotterlike affection in return. When each abandoned me, it confirmed my secret conviction that no one could really love me because I was, underneath, a kicking, screaming monster who did not deserve to be loved.

Of course I grew up eventually—more or less. I learned to see Janet as she was and I looked back with greater understanding of my own behavior. I learned that I must stop blaming myself and stop making such strenuous demands for reassurance upon those I happened to love. Boys did not care for that sort of thing, I found out quickly, and I managed to work out a near-convincing act for myself. I found I could fling myself emotionally into the pursuit of various causes and occupations. I was bright and busy and my interests were real enough and rather earthshaking—or so it seemed to me. It began to appear that I had stopped falling into hopeless crushes. I carried my bluff along on dates and watched myself sternly.

Then I came to England. I met Justin North—and everything that had gone before paled by contrast. My well-practiced bluff convinced Justin of an Eve who existed only partially, and he had his own self-delusions as well. Once, in the months that followed, I asked Maggie desperately why he had married me, what he could possibly see in me, and she had said something strange: “Perhaps he sees what is really there, Eve, if you’d just give yourself a chance.” That had shaken me.

But before then we went on our honeymoon in Greece. Among the moonlit ruins of Delphi I began to realize for the first time that I was truly loved and valued. The small monster seemed lost in the past, and I began to seem a real person, even to myself. A young woman possessed of dignity and self-confidence—all those lovely things I had bluffed about.

Then we came home to Athmore and I discovered that my husband was also in love with a good many things outside myself. Against the competition of his devotion to his work, my new self-confidence began to falter. There was Alicia, besides, whose existence I could not cope with. And there was Marc with his clever little tricks. Since I had a genius for doing the wrong thing under stress, I managed to destroy my chance for happiness much more expertly than anyone else could have done for me. That Marc helped this along was incidental.

The chain of events which had started at Athmore had never stopped moving in the wrong direction. Now that I had returned, they simply picked up their old momentum. But now my conduct must be different. As a young bride I had defended a pride that must be preserved at all costs—even if everything else was shattered. Without pride I was nothing. Or so I had always thought. Now, however late, I was beginning to see how stupid it was to demand that I be loved for myself, exactly as I was, and without any disturbing changes. Of course everyone wanted that. It was always more comfortable to insist on a love that demanded little effort. Being lovable seldom entered into it because that took a great deal of hard work. Besides, I could always point out that Justin was not particularly lovable and that he had no intention of changing.

But I could do nothing about Justin—except love him. I could only manage me.

Deirdre, who had returned to doze on the hearth, yawned widely and opened her eyes, waiting for my summons. I held out my hand and she came at once to nuzzle her long nose against my palm.

“There are things to be done,” I said, and tossed back the covers.

Deirdre waited by the fire until I was bathed and dressed. I did not want to be trapped inside by the rain, so I picked up my trench coat, folded a plastic hood into the pocket, and carried the coat with me when I left my room. Deirdre trotted beside me down the long corridor in the pale light of a rainy morning.

We walked through the long gallery and I had only a slight nod for Mr. Dunscombe, who had done no better than I in solving his problems. I went down the stairs, my hand on Deirdre’s neck, like some Athmore lady of old walking out of a portrait with her hand on the neck of an Irish wolfhound. The incongruous picture this evoked made me smile and I began to relax a little. I was anything but a proper Athmore lady, and such dramatizing was better left to Alicia Daven. Any changes I managed need not take so theatrical a direction.

One truth which I must face was simple. I was undeniably jealous of Alicia. This was a human enough failing, for which I must forgive myself. But at the same time I had to learn to keep that very jealousy under control. The one primary truth that mattered was that I loved Justin, though whether he wanted anything I had to offer was still doubtful.

What else was true?

Marc had some reason to want me dead. It was a frightening truth that last night he had tried to kill me. Could this be because of Old Daniel? What if it was Marc in the snapshot I had taken? Marc, who had once destroyed the key figure in Daniel’s topiary garden and whom Daniel would ever after connect with the rook, no matter how often Justin “confessed.”

But this was only speculation. It was not necessarily the truth. Last night had been real and I knew what had happened to me then. Now I must learn why.

There was still one person who might help me. Nigel, too, had been on the roof last night, and while Nigel was an uncertain quantity, what he could tell me might count for more than Marc’s lies, Maggie’s blind devotion, or Justin’s scorn.

I let Deirdre out the back way, and hung my green coat on the rack near the door—a portentous gesture, though I did not know it at the time. Then I went into the Wedgwood dining room to eat a sketchy breakfast, so preoccupied that not even the coffee disturbed me. When I had eaten I stood for a time looking out the long windows which overlooked the garage area. Through the beeches I could see Justin moving about, wearing a wet gray mac. I moved to the rear windows that looked out upon the topiary garden.

That fateful phrase kept running through my mind: Rook’s play. Last night the rook had moved again—though not to place the king in check. Not even to attack the opposing queen. Whatever the game, I was no more than a hunted pawn, with more powerful pieces moving about me, ready for the kill. Pawns were easily dispensed with when they got in the way—the least useful man on the board. That is, unless a pawn could steal its way to the opposing line and emerge as a stronger piece—perhaps even as a queen. There was little hope that it would last the game, if pursued by another piece.

The chessboard imagery was too apt for comfort and I found the view more depressing than ever. Even the pervading color of everything outdoors depressed me. There is nothing more green than country England during a springtime rain. Trees and lawns and shrubbery blurred into an enveloping green aura that was too insistent for comfort. One longed for a flash of strident color to relieve the green intensity.

Abruptly I had my wish. Dacia’s orange coat added a neon note as she ran among the topiary chessmen and bounced up the rear terrace in her high boots. She saw me at the dining-room window and waved to me as she ran. A moment later she bounced into the room, slicking down rain-streaked hair, divesting herself of the wet orange coat.

“Are you all right?” she demanded at once.

There was no need for evasion with Dacia. Direct attack might startle her into response.

“As right as I can be, considering that Marc tried to push me over the roof parapet last night,” I said.

Dacia’s eyes could seem as round and as brown as Deirdre’s—and more unblinking in their stare. “So that’s your story! You know what Marc claims, don’t you?”

“Why does he claim it? Isn’t that the point? If I knew why, then perhaps I’d have a clue to go on.”

“Perhaps he’s claiming the truth. After all, you were off your noggin last night when he found you. So it could be you didn’t know what was really going on. Anyway, I have to stand by what he says, don’t I? I have to help him, however I can.”

“To the extent of searching my room last night?” I said. “It was you, of course. Or Marc.”

Dacia stared at me for a moment longer, then whirled to the sideboard and helped herself to a piece of dry toast which she piled with marmalade.

“I didn’t need to search,” she said. “I would have, but it was already too late. Whoever it was made a bloody mess of your room, didn’t he?”

“Then it was Marc,” I said flatly.

“He claims not.” Dacia seemed uncertain for a moment before she brightened. “But we did work out a lovely scheme, didn’t we? At least I thought so, since most of it was my idea. The way poor Mr. Dunscombe is supposed to rap on your tower door at night made me think of it. So Marc got a long lance from the armor collection and then he reached down the stairs in the tower to bang on your door with the heavy end of it. We wanted you to skip out of your room in fright. Only you fooled us and came up to the roof, so that he barely got out of your way. What a carry-on, wasn’t it? And after all that, we were too late to do your room because somebody else had beat us to it.”

“Who?” I said.

Dacia shrugged. “I’m wondering about that myself. Maybe you’d better figure out who that picture might hurt the worst—and why.”

As if I had not been wondering. The why was Old Daniel’s death, of course. The old man had been frightened, and because of what had happened to him someone was desperate to hide his identity—or hers. Whoever I’d caught in my picture must have been waiting there, hidden. And Old Daniel knew he waited—and had tried to warn me with a cryptic message that I had not understood at all.

I left Dacia to her nibbling and went upstairs. It was Nigel I must talk to now.

I found him in the library, deep in a red leather armchair beside a fire that burned in a vast stone fireplace. Stretching upward above his head long window panes gave upon green daylight, and rain clattered incessantly against the glass. He saw me coming toward him down the room and closed his book, his expression guarded. He too would know what was being said about me, so perhaps it was hopeless to talk to him. But I had to try.

I dropped into an opposite chair and leaned toward him earnestly. I did not want to be put off.

“You were on the roof last night?” I began without preliminaries.

He set his book aside and nodded gravely.

“Do you believe that I tried to kill myself?”

He continued to study me with that grave, faintly guarded look, not answering.

“Did you see what happened?” I prodded him.

“I saw some of what seemed to be happening,” he said.

I took a deep breath. Nigel, at least, was leaving room for doubt.

“Will you tell me about it, please? Tell me, starting with the first out-of-the-ordinary thing you noticed last night.”

He considered this for a moment. “The first unusual occurrence was a racket on the roof diagonally opposite from the tower where I was posted,” he said. “I believe this happened shortly after Maggie went downstairs.”

“Maggie!” I echoed. “Was she up there last night?”

“Only for a short time,” he said. “We walked up and down together for a while. It was a spectacular night with the wind blowing clouds across the moon. But Maggie got bored and chilled after an hour or so, and went downstairs.”

“Through the tower in your room?” I asked.

He seemed surprised. “No. I suppose she went down through the tower that opens into the green-velvet room—the entrance nearest her part of the house. It was dark and I didn’t really note the way she went.”

“Go on,” I said. “Tell me the rest.” Maggie’s earlier presence on the roof was surely of no consequence to later events, since she was already downstairs by then.

He went on to tell me how he had heard the clattering sound which I had made the first time I had kicked the lance Marc had left on the roof. But there had been no answer to his shouted challenge. Marc, who was supposed to be on guard in that section of the roof seemed to have disappeared. Nigel had seen off-and-on lights from Dacia’s tower, probably due to a door opening below, and had supposed that Marc had gone down there. For a time everything was quiet. Then the clattering sound was repeated, followed a few moments later by the impact of someone falling. Almost at once Marc had shouted for help, Justin had come running up from the green-velvet room to call out in turn, and Nigel had left his tower to join him, running across the rooftop to where Marc was struggling with me at the parapet. They had both helped Marc in pulling me to safety and Justin had carried me downstairs, while Nigel stayed on to guard the roof. The rest of the night had been uneventful, and there had been no trouble on the ground either.

“Tell me what you thought when you saw Marc struggling with me,” I said when he finished. “Did you really believe I was trying to fling myself off the roof?”

“You were putting up a fight, let’s say.”

“A fight for my life! Couldn’t you tell it was that?”

He answered me carefully. “Do I know you well enough to judge? Mustn’t I take the word of those who know you better?”

I leaned back in my chair. It would be no use to accuse Marc again. Nigel would believe me no more than did the others. Only Marc knew the truth, and he would not even tell Dacia. Why should he want me dead? We might dislike each other, but I was no threat to Marc. What he had attempted seemed too violently extreme for any cause I could guess.

Rain continued to strike the windows of the library with an endless rattling. Nigel and I sat together in the glow of the fire, listening to the sound. Once he reached tentatively toward his book and I roused myself to ask another question.

“Did you know that someone searched my room last night while I was on the roof? This is the second time. A snapshot I took the other day was stolen first. This time the search must have been for the negative of that picture. But I hid it well enough so it wasn’t found. Nigel, have you heard anything? Have you any idea what is going on?”

Again there was hesitation, in which I sensed uneasiness. “Only what I’ve heard from Maggie,” he said at last. “She seems upset about the existence of this picture because someone has hinted that she might be in it. Though why that should matter I can’t see.”

“That’s nonsense, of course,” I assured him. “I have a better idea about who my camera may have caught. Nigel, was Old Daniel afraid of someone? Have you any idea why he went to see Alicia Daven the day before he died?”

“Aren’t you striking out a bit wildly in all directions?” Nigel asked. “Alicia has always been clever about making friends with Athmore help, and Old Daniel was no exception. There’s no reason why he might not go to see her.”

“This was more than that,” I said. “I really believe it was more. I think she was trying to use him in some way. And of course she’s been using Marc too.”

“You’re beginning to see ghosts around every turn,” Nigel told me dryly.

I paid no attention. It wasn’t Alicia in the snapshot, I thought. It was not Maggie either—but Marc. Speculation or not, I kept returning to this as the answer.

“Was there a good deal of antagonism between Old Daniel and whoever cut the rook out of the topiary chessboard that time when Marc and Justin were young?” I asked.

Nigel was clearly surprised by this new turn I had taken. “Do you mean Justin? No, of course the old man felt no antagonism toward him. He was devoted to him and forgave him completely.”

“But everyone seems to think that no matter what Justin said, Marc was the guilty one. So Old Daniel must have thought that too and disliked him all the more for it.”

“Isn’t this more wild guesswork?” Nigel said.

It was clear that I would get no more help from him than from anyone else. My speculation was only an effort to throw out different trails in the hope that one of them would lead to real answers. But if the answer to the puzzle was to be found, it was growing increasingly clear that I must find it myself. And until I saw the blow-up of the negative I had entrusted to Nellie, I had nothing to go on. Waiting made me edgy. All of a sudden there seemed to be so little time.

I thanked Nigel and moved away, leaving him to pick up his book, while I wandered the length of the library to where a glass case stood beneath the portrait of Margaret Athmore.

Maggie Graham, I remembered, had been named after Margaret, and I recalled trying to find some resemblance between the two—though Maggie herself said there was none. Perhaps the resemblance was inner. Maggie was possessed of just such courage and of as great a loyalty to Athmore, though she was, I suspected, a less gentle person than Margaret Athmore had been.

Now, however, as I paused before the portrait, I found myself remembering the first time I had stood in this place, before this very lady, moved to tears and revealing what I felt. I had looked into the glass case which held the stained and faded dress Margaret had worn when John Edmond died in her arms, and Justin stood beside me. He had believed in my love for Athmore—and he had kissed me. The trouble was I had believed in it too—thoroughly and romantically. Even now the story was a part of my own heritage because of my grandmother’s tales, but it had not carried me through to make Athmore my real home.

I turned from the case, drawn almost without volition to the door that opened from the library into the north-wing corridor. This was a hallway I knew far better than the one above, which I now occupied. The first door across on my left opened into the room Justin and I had once shared. I did not want to set foot in that room again. It was the next door that interested me. With Justin outdoors, I could surely be forgiven for looking into what had once been my small, elegant dressing room.

The knob turned beneath my hand and the door opened upon echoing gloom. I knew where to find the wall switch, and as I touched it two bracket lights near where my dressing table had stood flashed on—to show me utter emptiness.

Nothing remained of the furnishings I had so lovingly chosen. Not a mirror, not a picture, not the chaise longue where I had sometimes napped. The rug had been rolled up and placed against one wall, the draperies removed, with only bare shades left at the windows to shut out the light.

My banishment from Athmore was complete. Why I should have expected anything else I did not know. Of course Justin would free himself of unwanted memories by removing every reminder of me from this room adjacent to his.

I stepped softly across the bare floor, noting that the wallpaper at least was the same. Once its pale yellow had seemed like early spring sunlight, with tiny wildflowers blooming across it. The paper still looked as clean and unmarred as it had when Justin had first approved my choice. I put out my hand where there was nothing to touch. Here against this wall my dressing table had stood with its folding mirrors and glass top. But the wall carried no memory of its being. It had not stood there long enough to leave a shadow. Here where the lovely painting of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi had hung, not a mark remained to tell of it. The picture which Justin had bought for me when we were in Greece had hung here too briefly to be remembered. The room was empty, as my entire being seemed empty. It was a shell without life.

I moved on about the room. Where a closet had been built into one section I opened the door. My suits and dresses had once hung upon this rod and there had been a rack for my shoes, plastic hatboxes on the shelves overhead. Now there was nothing. Nothing except a dark square that leaned against the back wall. I touched it and knew it was a picture. Curiously I drew it out, pulled up a shade and carried the picture into the light.

The glass was intact over a painting that showed the lovely columns and the remaining platform of Apollo’s Temple. Behind rose the ruins of Delphi, with great shining cliffs above, and an eagle wheeling high in the clear bright air.

I sat cross-legged on the floor of the empty room and held the picture before me. We had walked up that stone way which curved across the foreground, Justin and I. We had explored these ruins by sunlight and when the moon was bright. We had walked among these very stones hand in hand, with our lives before us, and more happiness in our possession than we had ever dreamed possible. We had talked to each other endlessly, and each had taken time to listen and to care. Perhaps all lovers did that in the beginning. When the stories grew old, it was new and shared experiences they discussed. But our stories had aged, and our shared new life had scarcely begun before it was ended. What was there to talk about after Delphi?

The glass felt cool beneath my fingers, but the colors of the picture glowed warm and clear as the sunlight of Greece, banishing gray stones and green Athmore rain, restoring the past, denying the empty room about me.

I heard footsteps in the corridor and recognized them. Yet I could not move. I could not so much as raise my eyes from the warmth of the picture as Justin came through the door I’d left ajar and walked into the room.