Felicity stood transfixed with pure astonishment, her hands raised to touch the cheek-bones his fingers had just quitted. Her eyes, huge with wonder, stared unrecognisingly at the face in the glass. Her lips moved very faintly, shaping distantly and incredulously the word “beautiful.”
The sudden rush of feet outside the door, the rap of knuckles on the wood, never penetrated her stunned senses. Even when the door opened upon Liri Palmer’s roused face and glittering eyes, with Dominic close to her shoulder, Felicity only turned like a creature in a dream, still lost to every shock but one.
“Can you come?” Liri’s blue stare fixed urgently upon George. “There’s something I want to show you.” She had bitten back, at sight of Felicity, the blunt announcement she would otherwise have made. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you, but it’s important.”
Her voice was mild, but her eyes were imperious. Liri’s maturity extended to sparing the children; or perhaps she was merely concerned with keeping them from under her feet.
“Felicity was just on her way to dinner,” said George, and started her towards the door with a gentle push between the shoulder-blades. She went where he urged her, obediently, like a sleep-walker. They moved aside from the doorway to let her pass, and she looked back for a moment with eyes still blind to everything but the distant vision of her own beauty, incredible and yet constant. She trusted George. There had been very few adults in her young life whom she had been able to trust.
“Thank you! I’ll try… I’ll do what you said.”
“Good night!” said George.
“Good night!” said Felicity remotely, and wandered away with a fingertip drawing and re-drawing the line of her cheek-bone and jaw, which George had found beautiful. Beautiful! She followed the beckoning word towards the dining-hall and her duty. She was enlarged, she contained and accepted even her guilt, even her inability to erase it. She had something to live for, so unexpected that it loomed almost as large as the death she had precipitated.
As soon as she was gone they all three came into the room and closed the door carefully after them. He should have known that where Dominic was, Tossa also would be.
“Well?”
“I’ve found the body,” said Liri, point-blank.
It couldn’t have been anything else, of course; he had seen it in her braced and motionless excitement. So there wasn’t going to be any blessed anticlimax, any apologetic reappearance. They had a body, they had a crime. And Follymead had the prospect of ruin. George looked at the dusk leaning in at the window, at the clock that showed five minutes past the dinner hour, and reached into the desk drawer for his torch.
“Where is he?”
“Caught in a fallen tree in the river. Below the stone bridge, in the wild part. I’ll take you there.”
“We ran into Liri at the top of the stairs,” said Dominic, “and she told us. I hope that’s all right. You’re going to need somebody, if only to run the errands.”
“That’s all right. Anybody keeping an eye on him now?”
“Dickie Meurice,” said Liri, her voice suddenly shaken out of its calm by the surrender of her responsibility, as her legs shook beneath her for a moment. “He wasn’t with me… he just showed up. I told him to stand by.”
“Good! Tossa, you run across by the footbridge, will you, and find Lockyer, and tell him to meet us downstream. Tell him to bring some ropes down with him. And an axe or a hatchet, something we can use on the tree.”
“Right!” said Tossa, dry-mouthed with excitement, and whirled and ran.
“Come on, then,” said George. “Lead the way, Liri.” And they followed her out across the terrace, and down the slope of turf towards the distant stone bridge.
It took them half an hour to get him ashore, and not a word was said in all that time but for the brief exchanges that were necessary to the job in hand. If they had tried to hack away the driftwood that held him before they had a line on him, he would have escaped them again, for once dislodged, the flood would have taken him headlong downstream out of their hands. It was Dominic, as the lightest weight among the men present, who clambered out barefoot on the swaying barrier of branches, and secured a rope round the shoulder that just broke surface, cased in sodden tweed that was now of no colour at all but the river’s mud-brown. The driftwood under him dipped where he ventured too far; the ice-cold darkness rushed over his feet and tore at his balance. He thought of nothing as he worked; his mind had shrunk into his numbed hands.
“All right, come ashore.”
George reached a hand to retrieve his saturated son. Lockyer carefully took in the slack of the rope, and tested it with a gradual pull downstream; the arm that was all they could see of the dead man rose languidly along the surface, like the arm of a man turning in his sleep, but the body did not float free.
George looked along the tangled arms of the tree, and found the one that pinned the body in its clenched fist, half out of the water. “All right, we’ll bring him in branch and all, it’ll make a useful brake. Meurice, give me that hatchet.”
Dickie Meurice handed it eagerly. He would not for anything have forfeited his place here. He was only guessing, of course, but if his guess was right the pay-off would be worth a little discomfort.
“And the other rope.”
There was still a cloudy daylight out on the open sward, but here among the trees they had to peer to see even one another. The girls stood well back on drier ground, their faces two pale, still ovals in a green monochrome. Nobody had tried to send them away. What was the use of banishing Liri, who had been the one to find this pathetic thing they were trying to bring ashore? In any case, she would not have gone. She stood silent and intent, and her composure was impenetrable.
George climbed out himself this time. There was no need to go so far that his weight would be a handicap. He made the coil of rope fast round a fork in the branch, and passed the ends back to Dominic’s waiting grasp.
“Give him a hand, Meurice. Everything may come loose with a rush when this gives.”
He hacked at the branch, below the fork where the rope was secured. The wood was still green and young, clinging to life; it took him a few minutes to chop his way through it.
“Dig your heels in, it’s going.”
They had heard the first ominous cracking, and were braced and ready. The whole branch suddenly heaved and turned like a live thing, tossing the body momentarily out of the water, and dropping it again in a flurry of dirty foam; then the tangle of wood broke loose from its moorings, and would have surged out into midstream at once, but the two ropes, drawn in gradually hand over hand, coaxed it sidelong into the bank. Torn foam seethed through the lattice of sodden leaves. George scrambled back to the muddy ground, and helped them to draw him in, and disentangle him from the tree. Ankle-deep in cold spill-water, they hoisted the dead weight clear, and laid him on the higher ground padded with last year’s leaves and starred with this year’s late anemones.