"Staying there?"
"Yes."
"Did you know him in England?"
"No."
"Oh. Then he's been to Valmy?"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Is he staying hereabouts for long?"
"Look," I said, concerned, "does it matter? What's the inquisition for?"
A pause. He said, sounding both stiff and disconcerted: "I'm sorry. I wasn't aware I was trespassing on your private affairs."
"They're not private. It's just-I-I didn't mean… I didn't want to tell you…" I floundered hopelessly. He threw me an odd look. "Didn't want to tell me what?"
"Oh-nothing. Look," I said desperately, "I don't want to talk. D'you mind?"
And now there was no doubt whatever about his mood. I heard him say "God damn it," very angrily under his breath. He wrenched the Cadillac round the Valmy bridge and hurled her up the zigzag about twice as fast as he should have done. The car snarled up the ramp like a bad-tempered cat and was hauled round the first bend. "You mistake me." Still that note of barely-controlled exasperation. "I wasn't intending to pry into what doesn't concern me. But-"
"I know. I'm sorry." I must have sounded nearly as edgy as he did, shaken as I was, not only by his anger and my failure to understand it, but by a humiliation that he couldn't guess at. "I expect I'm tired. I trailed about Thonon for a couple of hours looking for some dress-material-oh!" My hands flew to my cheeks. "I must have left it-yes, I left it in the café. I put it on the ledge under the table and then William had to run for the bus and-oh dear, how stupid of me! I suppose if I telephone-oh!"
His hand had moved sharply. The horn blared. I said, startled: "What was that?" "Some creature. A weasel, perhaps."
The trees lurched and peeled off into darkness. The next corner, steeply embanked, swooped at us.
I said: "Do you have to go so fast? It scares me."
The car slowed, steadied, and took the bend with no more than a splutter of gravel.
"Did you tell him about the shooting down in the beech- wood?"
"What? Who?"
"This-William."
I drew a sharp little breath. I said clearly: "Yes, I did. He thinks that probably you did it yourself."
The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult. He didn't speak. The devil that rode me spurred me to add, out of my abyss of stupid self-torment: "And I didn't know that I was supposed to account to my employer for everything I said and did on my afternoon off!"
That got him, as it was meant to. He said, between his teeth: "I am not your employer."
"No?" I said it very nastily because I was afraid I was going to cry. "Then what's it to do with you what I do or who I see?"
We were on the last slope of the zigzag. The Cadillac jerked to a stop as the brakes were jammed on. Raoul de Valmy swung round on me.
"This," he said, in a breathless, goaded undertone. He pulled me roughly towards him, and his mouth came down on mine.
For a first kiss it was, I suppose, a fairly shattering experience. And certainly not such stuff as dreams are made on… If Cinderella was out, so decidedly was Prince Charming…
Raoul de Valmy was simply an experienced man shaken momentarily out of self-control by anger and other emotions that were fairly easily recognisable even to me. I say "even to me" because I discovered dismayingly soon that my own poise was a fairly egg-shell affair. For all my semi-sophistication I emerged from Raoul's embrace in a thoroughly shaken state which I assured myself was icy rage. And certainly his next move was hardly calculated to appease. Instead of whatever passionate or apologetic words should have followed, he merely let me go, re-started the car, opened the throttle with a roar, and shot her up the slope and onto the gravel sweep without a word. He cut the engine and opened his door as if to come round. I didn't wait I whipped out of the car, slammed the door behind me and in a silence to match his own I stalked (there is no other word) across the gravel and up the steps.
He caught up with me and opened the big door for me. He said something-I think it was my name-in an undervoice sounding as if it were shaken by a laugh. I didn't look at him. I walked past him as if he didn't exist, straight into a blaze of light, and Léon de Valmy, who was crossing the hall.
He checked his chair in its smooth progress as I came in, and turned his head as if to greet me. Then his eyes flicked from my face to Raoul's and back again, and the Satanic eyebrows lifted, ever so slightly. I turned abruptly and ran upstairs.
If it had needed anything else to shake me out of my daydreams, that glance of Léon de Valmy's would have done it I leaned back against the door in my darkened bedroom and put the back of my hand to a hot cheek. There was blood bittersweet on my tongue from a cut lip… Léon de Valmy would have seen that too. The whip flicked me again. Not only my face, my whole body burned.
I jerked myself away from the door's support, snapped on the light, and began to tug savagely at my gloves. Damn Raoul; how dared he? How dared he? And Léon de Valmy-here the second glove catapulted down beside the first-damn Léon de Valmy, too. Damn all the Valmys. I hated the lot of them. I never wanted to see any of them again.
On the thought I stopped, half-way out of my coat.
It was more than possible that I wouldn't have the chance. The Demon King didn't have to be en rapport with me to guess what had happened tonight, and it was quite probable that he would take steps to dismiss me.
It didn't occur to me at once that, if there were any hint of trouble, Raoul would certainly tell his father the truth, that I had been kissed against my will, and that since for the greater part of the year Raoul was not at Valmy to trouble the waters I would probably be kept on.
I only know that as I hung my coat with care in the pretty panelled wardrobe I felt depressed-more, desolate-at the prospect of never seeing any of the hated Valmys again.
My lip had stopped bleeding. I put on fresh lipstick carefully, and did my hair. Then I walked sedately out and across my sitting-room to the schoolroom door.
I opened it and went in. The light was on, but no-one was there. The fire had burned low and the room had an oddly forlorn look. One of the french windows was ajar and the undrawn curtains stirred in a little breeze. On the rug lay an open book, its pages faintly vibrant to the same draught.
Puzzled, I glanced at the clock. It was long past time for Philippe's return from the salon. Madame de Valmy would be upstairs, dressing. Well, I reflected, it wasn't my affair. On this night of all nights I wasn't going to see why he was being kept late below stairs. No doubt he would come up when his supper did.
I was stopping for a log to throw on the fire when I heard the sound. It whispered across the quiet room, no more loudly than the tick of the little French clock or the settling of the woodash in the grate.
A very slight sound, but it lifted the hair on my skin as if that, too, felt the cold breath from the open window. It was no more than a voiced sigh, but, horribly, it sounded like a word…
"Mademoiselle…"
I was across the schoolroom in one leap. I ran out onto the dark balcony and turned to peer along the leads. To right and left the windows were shut and dark. From behind me the lighted schoolroom thrust a bright wedge across the balcony, making my shadow, gigantic and grotesque, leap and posture before me over the narrow leads.
"Philippe?"
The ends of the balcony were in deep darkness, invisible. I plunged out of my patch of light and ran along past the windows. The balcony floor was slippery with rain.
"Philippe? Philippe?"
That terrible little whisper answered me from the darkest corner. I was beside it, kneeling on the damp leads. He was crouched in a tiny huddle up against the balustrade.