“Take this one – William Henry Cothercott the third. He looks like Byron turned bandit, I know, but he hadn’t a line of poetry or an act of violence in him. He made a pile out of the early railway boom, and he had some ships that weren’t too particular whether they carried slaves or not, when other cargoes didn’t offer, but that’s the worst we know about him. They even started collecting more curious things than harpsichords, just to give the impression they were a lot of romantic damned souls. There are some very naughty books you won’t get shown, but I doubt if they ever really read them. And all these rapiers and knives and things, here along the wall – those are part of the effect, too, just theatrical props. That fan – you wouldn’t know it had a dagger in it, would you? And this silver-headed walking-cane – look! The head pulls out, like this…” She showed them, in one rapid, guilty gesture, six inches of the slender blade that was hidden inside the ebony sheath, and slid it hurriedly back again. “Straight out of ‘The Romantic Agony’,” she said, purely for Lucien’s benefit, to show him how well-read she was, and how adult. “Only it doesn’t mean a thing, they were still nothing but stolid merchants. Not a mohawk among the lot of ’em. They never stuck so much as a pig.”
“And yet somebody put the devil in this house,” said Lucien with detached certainty.
“Maybe somebody here among us,” suggested Dickie Meurice, turning the famous smile on him, “brought that aura in with him.”
Lucien turned his head and looked him over again at leisure, without any apparent reaction. He knew who he was, of course. Who didn’t? He had even worked with him on two occasions. It couldn’t be said that he had ever really noticed him until now, and even now he wasn’t particularly interested. In such a narrow gallery, however, you can’t help noticing someone who is so full of quicksilver movement without meaning, and makes so much noise saying nothing. Lucien, when not singing, was a dauntingly silent person, and spoke only to the point.
“I doubt it,” he said indifferently. “This is built-in. More likely to have been the architect. What was he like? Who was he? Do they know?”
“His name was Falchion. Nobody knows much about him, there are only two other houses known to be his work. We think he must have died young. There’s a story,” said Felicity, recklessly improvising, and looking even more passionately truthful and candid than usual, “that he was in love with one of the Cothercott daughters. That one… ” She pointed out, with deceptive conviction, the best-looking of the collection, confident that no one would notice that she belonged to a later generation. “She died about the time the house was finished, and he was broken-hearted. They used to meet in this gallery while he was working on the features in the grounds, and she’s supposed to haunt here.”
She had Lucien’s attention, and she didn’t care whether he knew she was lying or whether he believed her. Maybe it would be even more interesting to be seen to be lying. In many ways this whole set-up was a lie, even though Uncle Edward was a genuine scholar and a genuine musician, devoted and content with his sphere. In a sense, only what was utterly and joyously false had any right to exist in this setting, phantasms were the only appropriate realities in this shameless fantasy.
“She comes in daylight, not at night,” said Felicity, loosing the rein of her imagination, but holding fast to Lucien Galt’s black and moody stare. “She comes to meet him, and she doesn’t know she’s dead, and she can’t understand why he never comes. She’s still in love with him, but she’s angry, too, and she’s only waiting to meet him again and take it out of him for leaving her deserted so long…”
“She’s making it up as she goes along,” said Tossa very softly in Dominic’s ear. “What a gorgeous little liar!”
“It’s this place,” Dominic whispered back. “It would get anybody.”
“Has anyone actually seen her?” asked Peter Crewe, round-eyed.
“Oh, yes, occasionally, but it only happens to people in love.” Felicity turned, and began to pace slowly and delicately towards the great oak door at the end of the gallery; and they all caught the infection and walked solemnly after her, their steps soundless in the deep carpet. “You may be walking along here some day, just like this, going to put fresh flowers in that stone vase there on the pedestal. Not thinking about anything like ghosts. With the sun shining in, even, though it could be just at dusk, like this. And you’re just approaching this door when it suddenly opens, and there she is, confronting you…”
And suddenly the oak door opened, flung wide by a hand not accustomed to doing things by halves, and there she was confronting them indeed, with head up and eyes challenging, a tall, brown, imperious girl with a great plait of dark hair coiled like an attendant serpent over one shoulder, and a guitar-case in her hand.
Felicity rocked back on her heels, startled into a sharp and childish giggle of embarrassment. The procession at her back halted as abruptly, with a succession of soft, clumsy collisions, like a Bank-Holiday queue of ambling cars suddenly forced to brake sharply. It would all have been a little ridiculous, but for the composure with which the newcomer marched into the gallery and looked them over, undisturbed and unimpressed. Her glance passed over the whole group in one sweep, riding over their heads and rejecting all but the tallest. She found Lucien, alert, dark and still against the wall. There she fixed, and looked no farther.
Tossa, watching from the fringe of the group, literally saw the flash and felt the shock as their eyes locked, and her fingers reached for Dominic’s sleeve. The tension between those two set everyone quivering, even those who were too insensitive to understand why. And yet they could hardly have maintained a more stony assurance, calmer faces or stiller bodies. Only for the briefest instant had the daggers shown in two pairs of eyes now veiled, and cool. The girl’s face wore a newcomer’s polite, perfunctory smile, she was looking clean through Lucien and failing to see him, she had excised him from her field of vision. But the pressure of Tossa’s fingers, alert and excited, directed attention rather to Lucien himself. So far from crossing the stranger out of his notice, he was staring at her frankly and directly, trying to see deep into her and read some significance into what he saw; but if he was getting much information out of that closed and aloof face, thought Tossa, he must be clairvoyant. The glint in his eyes might have been alarm, or animosity or, curiously, elation. He might, for that matter, be the kind of person who would find a certain elation in the promise of a stand-up fight.
The instant of surprise and silence was gone almost before they had recorded it. The girl with the guitar turned to Felicity, and was opening her lips to speak when the high, self-confident voice of Dickie Meurice gave tongue smoothly and joyously:
“Well, well, well! Just look who’s here!” And he danced forward with arms outspread, took the girl’s hands in his, guitar and all, and pumped and pressed them enthusiastically. Her dark brows rose slightly, but she tolerated the liberty without protest.
“Hullo, Dickie, I didn’t know you were going to be here.”