Gus stood motionless, afraid almost to breathe for fear Lesley should turn away from him in a new access of revulsion, and face the window before that long, stilted, pathetic figure had vanished out of range. It was pure luck that her back had been turned to the light; she had seen nothing. His palms were still clamped with involuntary force on either side of her body, he would have felt any stiffening, any tremor, and she hung fluidly and heavily against him, like draped silk. And Paviour had walked clean out of the frame of the window and out of their sight.
It almost hurt to unclamp his grip on the girl, and separate himself from her, and he did it with infinite care not to offend by the separation as he had offended by first touching her. ‘I’m sorry!’ he said constrainedly. ‘I never meant to scare you.’
She turned aside from him at once, as soon as he released her, reached automatically for her brush and towards the dingy pile of relics awaiting attention. She moved with economy and resignation, and looked curiously calm, as though her recent experience had left her in shock.
‘I’m sorry, too. I never thought you did. It simply happens to me. I panic. I can’t help it.’
He wondered if he should tell her, if she needed to know. He thought not. She was better off as she was. Her innocence would be impregnable; she had nothing to fear.
‘I’d better go,’ she said, almost naturally, and put down the brush. ‘I’ve got to see to the lunch.’
She made very little sound, departing, because the door was open, and she moved as lightly as a kitten in her soft walking shoes, so nicely matched to her boyish, slim style in slacks. But he knew the moment when she left, without looking round from his automatic operations on one more fragmentary ivory pin, by the slow, settling tranquillity she left behind her.
Lunch was a minor nightmare only because nothing whatever happened. It cost him an effort to reassemble his stolidly innocent face before he need appear; and then, when he was reasonably assured that his façade was impervious, he had to meet Charlotte head-on at the door.
He had never seen her look quite so un-English or so serenely formidable. There was no wind, and the curled plumes of black hair deployed across her magnolia cheeks might have been lacquered there, they were so steely and perfect. Also he had never realised until that moment how small and slender she was, almost as tiny as Lesley. His mind started involuntarily measuring her waist, and the exercise led on to other highly speculative considerations concerning the resilience of her bones and the scent of her hair, should she ever find herself in his arms, due to an emotional miscalculation on his part and a panic reaction on hers. He failed to imagine it adequately. She didn’t look the type. But then, neither did Lesley.
‘I missed you,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘You’ve been gone all morning.’
‘I had a call to make in town, on personal business,’ she said coolly. ‘I hope you managed to divert yourself even without me.’ And her thick, genuine, loftily-arched black brows went up, and the eyes beneath them flashed a golden gleam of amusement at his proprietary tone. During the past two days he had given her very little cause to suppose that he attached particular importance to her presence. ‘Any interesting discoveries?’
She was referring only to work in progress, and he knew it, and yet every word she said seemed to find a way of probing between the joints of his armour with prophetic force. The defensive reaction she set up in him made him tongue tied when he would most gladly have been fluent; he felt that if he turned his back on her she would see, clean through the tweed of his jacket, the prints of two small, splayed hands, soiled from brushing trivia, clamped against his shoulder-blades.
‘If you like,’ she said generously, ‘I’ll be your runner this afternoon, and ferry the bits and pieces up to you.’
‘Do,’ he said, cheered and astonished. ‘I’d like that.’ Charlotte darting in and out would be an insurance policy second to none. Against Lesley? When he stood back to consider the incident he couldn’t seriously persuade himself that she was likely to come near him again of her own will, however perversely she desired to let off steam. Against himself, then? He flinched from considering it, but it remained a strong possibility.
‘We’d better go in,’ said Charlotte, only slightly disturbed by his uncharacteristic fervour. ‘I’m hungry.’
So they went in. And lunch was the nadir of normality, without an original thought or a perilous suggestion to enliven it. The confrontation through the glass of the window might never have taken place.
By that hour the police had already segregated certain sections of brick and tile marked with recent scars, a few curved shards of pottery from a jar, and covered from injury a small area of flooring within the flue, with its dust still displaying the faint but positive print of the base of just such a ceramic jar. There had been no gold coins in the detritus. No doubt the last of them had been removed in haste after the murder of Gerry Boden. Only the single one from his purse remained to testify.
On Saturday evenings Bill Lawrence, that ambitious and scholarly young man, had an extra-mural class in Moulden. Which meant that the general invitation to dinner issued at lunch by Lesley raked in only Gus Hambro in addition to the curator’s household. Bill had generous license to come along for coffee afterwards, however late, but his class was timed to finish only at nine-thirty, and since it met in the rear clubroom at ‘The Crown’ it was long odds against the argumentative local savants consenting to go home before closing time, so that his attendance was at best only hypothetical. Moreover, Bill’s own attitude was decidedly ambiguous; nobody had to tell him that his commitments were well known, and invitations issued accordingly. He knew when he was, or was not, wanted.
Not that Bill was missing anything, Gus thought, before the evening was half over. The pretence that everything was normal, that they were a party of congenial people enjoying a social get-together, had become downright oppressive, as if everyone was working a little too hard at it. They had an afternoon of unremitting labour behind them, and perhaps were too tired to make a good job of keeping up appearances. Paviour had grown so brittle that he looked as if the least jolt might send all his joints jangling apart; and though Lesley’s extrovert lightness of heart was beyond suspicion, it was rapidly becoming unbearable in this context. All very well for her in her innocence, but Gus was in a very different case. Worst of all, there was no chance whatever of making any real contact with Charlotte, and it was exasperating to have her sitting there opposite him, so near and so inaccessible, watching him with the black, acute gaze of a sceptical cat, pupils high-lighted in gold; a look that asserted nothing, merely observed and analysed, stopping short of judgement only, he was afraid, out of indifference.
As soon as he decently could, and on the plea that they were all tired—to which Lesley frankly assented, eliding a yawn into an apology—he excused himself and withdrew to make his way home. He was glad to be alone, and made the most of the ten-minute walk to his bed, taking it at leisure.
It was a restless, luminous night, the kind that late April sometimes casts up between frosts, mild, starry, with a laggard and minor moon. The shape of Aurae Phiala came into being gradually as he walked, looming largely on his right hand, a series of levels marked out by a series of verticals, standing bones of masonry rearing from long planes of turf.
She came silently out of the unregarded spaces on his left, and stood in his path, a small, compact figure quite still and composed; not making any demands upon him, except by being there. He knew which one she was, though the two of them were very much of a build.