The world is remorseless, vast, inexorable in its operations – and Tancred needs protection from it.
Her lips moved as she walked briskly down the street and hailed a taxi with her umbrella. He needs me, she whispered. He needs me. He needs me.
The thought gave her wings.
She was on her way to correct her mistake. Her one folly. It was imperative that she remove the one obstacle to their happiness. What she had done, she would undo.
‘St John’s Wood,’ she told the taxi driver. ‘Place called the Villa Byzantine. I’d be happy to direct you. Or perhaps you know it? It is the most striking house. Like something out of a fairy tale.’
At the conclusion of their last meeting, Tancred had told her that his editor had contacted a Professor Goldsworthy – an authority on European royalty in exile who apparently knew everything there was to know about the Bulgarian royal family and life at the palace in Sofia between the wars – and asked him to take a look at what Tancred had written so far. Tancred had said he would send all his notes to Professor Goldsworthy by the end of the week – electronically – as an attachment.
The news had come to Winifred as a shock. She realized that Goldsworthy would see at once that Miss Hope’s ‘reminiscences’ were nothing but brazen fabrications. Goldsworthy was sure to say that, to the best of his knowledge, no such person as ‘Miss Hope’ had ever existed. Poor Tancred would be made to look an incompetent fool. Even though it was all Miss Hope’s fault, some blame would invariably attach to him. His publishers – the immeasurably insignificant Fleur-de-Lis Press – might start questioning Tancred Vane’s integrity, the trustworthiness of his previous royal biographies. They might decide they didn’t want to commission any more books from him. Poor Tancred would be distraught, devastated. Royal biographies were his life!
No. She couldn’t allow any of that to happen. She needed to undo the damage. She would certainly make a clean breast of what she’d done – nothing but a full confession would do! She would explain to Tancred – humbly and apologetically – the exact reason she had acted the way she had – but she would do it in her own time. Not under duress. Not as a result of ‘exposure’. She would confess to Tancred after they had been married a month or two, perhaps. Yes. She was sure Tancred would understand. Of course he would understand. To love was to forgive.
Tancred loved her.
But the book – that so-called biography – had to disappear first.
She intended to make it look like an accident. One of those unaccountable calamities. Writing was known to disappear from computers without a trace. She had heard the most incredible stories. Viruses were often blamed for it. The Trojan Horse. The Bayley Bitch. She laughed. Such outlandish names!
She also intended to take the notebook in which Tancred had recorded everything she told him – all those preposterous stories she had made up! The notebook would also disappear without a trace. She would burn it, then scatter the ashes.
Winifred had no qualms about what she was going to do.
‘I think someone’s interested in you,’ the taxi driver said, his eyes on the mirror.
‘You are absolutely right. Someone is interested in me. I regard myself as an extremely fortunate woman,’ Winifred said happily. She didn’t quite hear what the driver said next – something about a car tailing them?
That was an odd little episode last night, she thought. She had to admit she didn’t quite know what to make of it. Hugh and Antonia were a highly civilized couple of the kind she and Tancred would be very soon. Hugh and Antonia seemed to suspect Miss Hope of beheading Stella. It was Hugh who had voiced the suspicion. Although Antonia had said nothing, it was clear her mind was working along the same lines.
One had only to look at them and one immediately knew how close they were, how alike. Two minds with but a single thought. Like her and Tancred. One didn’t often come across couples that moved in such perfect harmony. Perhaps when she and Tancred had been imparadised in one another’s arms, as Milton so aptly put it, they would become best friends with the Paynes? They had so much in common! They could visit the theatre together, then dine at Le Caprice or the Ivy. They would have the most interesting and stimulating conversations about literature and the arts and the crowned heads of Europe.
Hugh had such a straight nose and such steady blue eyes. She had noticed at once not only his fine features, but also the lineaments of intellectual power, even of nobility. She also liked the way he parted his hair. It was of course Hugh’s intelligence that had impressed her most. Hugh simply bristled with ideas. Not a common feature of military men, she reflected, certainly not of majors. The only thing that bristled in the majors she had once known was their moustaches! Winifred laughed and pretended to cough when she saw the driver glance at her curiously.
Hugh was very much the gentleman scholar type. She could see his finely boned head bent over an outsize edition of the OED, a magnifying glass in his hand, though he would look equally good on the moor. On the moor he would be clad in a Victorian shooting jacket in heavy blue and grey tweed, belted and with four patch pockets with the flaps buttoned down, a light blue shirt, red tie (the only vaguely rakish element in his attire), dark grey corduroy trousers and black gloves. Hugh would be surrounded by adoring dogs and of course he would be smoking his pipe.
Well, if she had not already been spoken for, she might have fallen for Hugh. Winifred smiled. Cliches had a comic charm of their own!
Would Tancred be jealous if he suspected her of falling for another man? Tancred seemed always so terribly preoccupied with his literary efforts, forever in a world of his own, but Winifred felt certain he would become jealous if she were to give him cause to be – not that she ever would!
She remembered how, on entering the Villa Byzantine for the very first time, she had stood inside the hall that smelled so sweetly of beeswax, rose petals and lavender, how she had spread out her arms and thought, I have arrived.
As a matter of fact, Hugh and Antonia were right to suspect Miss Hope of having killed Stella. Winifred nodded to herself. She wouldn’t put anything past that faded spinster with her phoney pince-nez and her Ivy Compton-Burnett hairnet.
Miss Hope was already guilty of deception on a grand scale. Miss Hope’s accounts of life at the royal palace in Sofia were nothing but a figment of her warped imagination. A farrago of lies. Miss Hope had blended fact and fiction – like the story of Prince Cyril’s affair with a cabaret singer. Well, Cyril had had an affair with a cabaret singer called Victoria – one of many – but he had never actually had her living in a lodge in the grounds of his brother’s palace.
There had been no lodge, as Tancred had so cleverly discovered. And of course Prince Cyril had never had a son called Clement – or Clemmie, as Miss Hope insisted on referring to him. Prince Cyril had never played with a samurai sword, nor had he been an Edgar Wallace aficionado. Miss Hope had made all that up. Miss Hope was nothing but a delirious fabulist, a serial liar.
Winifred had given the matter very careful consideration and reached the conclusion that it wouldn’t be inappropriate if it was Miss Hope herself who undid the damage she had done. The architect who constructs a poor edifice should do the demolition job herself. Why should Winifred do somebody else’s dirty work?
Besides, Miss Hope needed to be punished. Yes. Miss Hope had become too big for her boots. Miss Hope was turning into a proper nuisance. Miss Hope seemed to have got it into her head that Tancred was in love with her. Call me Catherine, indeed!
Winifred looked into the mirror. Miss Hope’s carefully arranged white hair was as stiff as a wig, her hairnet was in place, the lines on either side of her mouth were deeper than ever before, which suggested that not only age but her sins as well had finally caught up with her, only this time she was wearing her gold-rimmed half-moon glasses, not the pince-nez with the black ribbon.