‘Nice child,’ said Marion speaking out her thought. And then, ‘Aunt Emmeline will be in a fuss.’
‘I rang her up.’
Hilary came and sat down on the hearth-rug with her hands locked round her knees. Her short brown hair stood up all over her head in little curls. She was lightly and childishly built. The hands locked about her knees were small, hard, and capable. Her mouth was very red, with a curving upper lip and rather a full lower one. Her skin was brown, her nose a good deal like a baby’s, and her eyes very bright but of no particular colour. When she was excited, pleased, or angry a vivid carnation came up under the clear brown skin. She had a pretty voice and a pretty turn of the head. A nice child, with a warm heart and a hot temper. She would have cut off her head for Marion Grey, and she loved Geoffrey like the brother she had never had. She set herself to thaw Marion out and make her talk.
‘I had an adventure in my wrong train. First of all I thought I’d got shut in with a perfectly mad lunatic, and then she turned out to be a friend of yours, darling.’
Marion actually smiled, and Hilary felt a throb of triumph. She was coming out of it, she was. She proceeded to make her adventure as thrilling as possible.
‘Well, you know, I just rushed into the train because of seeing Henry – ’
‘Oh – ’ said Marion.
Hilary nodded with vigour.
‘Looking about eleven feet high and too purposeful for words. I should think he’d just been seeing his mother and she’d been telling him what an escape he’d had, and how she’d been quite sure from the very beginning that I wasn’t at all suitable and would never have made him the sort of wife she had been to his father.’
Marion shook her head reprovingly. Hilary made a face and hurried on.
‘When I think that I might have had Mrs. Cunningham for a mother-in-law it gives me a creep all down my spine. What an escape! I expect my guardian angel arranged the Row on purpose to save me.’
Marion shook her head again.
‘Henry won’t expect you to see very much of her.’
Hilary flushed scarlet and stuck her chin in the air.
‘Henry won’t?“ she said. ’How do you mean, Henry won’t? We’re absolutely, finally, and completely disengaged, and I don’t care what he expects or doesn’t expect. And you’re not letting me get on with my story, which is most adventurous and exciting. And the only reason I said anything at all about Henry was because I’ve got a nice open nature and I had to explain why I bolted into a completely wrong train and didn’t notice where I was until we were well on the way, and then I found it was a corridor train, so I knew I’d done something silly. And when I asked the woman in the corridor corner where we were going, first she said Ledlington, and then she clasped her hands and said she’d recognised me the minute I got into the train.’
‘Who was she?“
‘Darling, I don’t know. But you ought to be able to place her, because it was you she really wanted to ask about. And at first I thought it was just curiosity, because she let on that she’d seen me with you in court – it must have been the afternoon Aunt Emmeline crocked up, because that was the only time I was there – and of course I just boiled, and got up to go and find another carriage, because ghouls make me perfectly sick. And then I saw she wasn’t a ghoul.’
‘How?’ Marion ’s voice was strained.
‘She caught my coat, and I could feel her shaking. She looked most frightfully unhappy and sort of desperate – not gloating like a ghoul. And she said she only wanted to know how you were, because she’d always liked you, and – and things like that.’
It came over Hilary rather late in the day that it would really have been better to stick to Henry as a topic. She had bolted for the second time with a rather similar result. The story of her adventure wasn’t really calculated to bring Marion out of her mood, but she would have to go through with it now, because Marion was asking insistently,
‘Who was she?
‘I don’t know, darling – I told you I didn’t. I really do think she was a bit batty, because she talked in the oddest way. There was a man with her. He went along the corridor just about the time I came to – after seeing Henry, you know. And she said awfully queer things about him, like thanking God he’d gone, because she’d been hoping and praying she’d get a chance of speaking to me. She was most frightfully worked up, you know, twisting her hands about and clutching at her collar as if she couldn’t breathe.’
‘What was he like?’ said Marion slowly. She was leaning her head upon her hand, and the long fingers hid her eyes.
‘Well -rather like Aunt Emmeline’s Mrs. Tidmarsh -you know, the one who comes in and obliges when Eliza has a holiday. Not really, but a sort of family likeness – that all-overish look and awfully respectable – and the way she called me miss all the time. I’ve known Mrs. Tidmarsh do it twice in a sentence, and I’m not at all sure this poor thing didn’t too.’
‘Middle-aged?’
‘Born that way. You know how it is with Mrs. Tidmarsh – you simply couldn’t think of her being a baby, or young. Like her clothes – they never get any older, and you can’t imagine their ever being new.’
‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ said Marion Grey. And then, ‘What did she want to know?’
‘About you – how you were – whether you were all right – and – and about Geoff – ’ She hesitated. ‘ Marion, she did say one awfully queer thing. I don’t know whether I ought – ’
‘Yes – tell me.’
Hilary looked at her doubtfully. That was the worst of getting into a wrong train, you never knew where it was going to take you.
‘Well, I expect she’s balmy really. She said she’d tried to see you whilst the Case was going on. She said she gave him the slip and went round to where you were staying, but of course they didn’t let her in. But she said something like “If they had” under her breath – I didn’t quite catch it, because she was all choky and shaky, but that’s what it sounded like. No, it was, “I didn’t see her,” and then, “If I had,” or something like that. She was so worked up that I can’t be sure.’
Hilary’s voice became uncertain and faded away. Something had happened to the atmosphere. It had become strange, and the strangeness came from Marion, who had not moved and who did not speak. She sat there with her hand over her eyes, and the strangeness flowed from her and filled the room.
Hilary bore it as long as she could. Then she unlocked her hands and scrambled up on to her knees, and at the same moment Marion got up and went over to the window. There was an oak chest which made a window-seat, the deeply panelled front towards the room, the top littered with green and blue cushions. Marion swept them to the floor, opened the lid, and came back with a photograph-album in her hand. She did not speak, but sat down and began to turn the leaves.
Presently she found what she was looking for, and held the page for Hilary to see. It was a snapshot taken in a garden. A rose arch, a bed of lilies with sharply recurved petals, a tea-table; people having tea. Marion smiling out of the picture – an elderly man with a heavy moustache.
Hilary had never seen James Everton, but every line of his face was most sickeningly familiar. All the newspapers in England had been full of him and his photograph a year ago when Geoffrey Grey was being tried for his murder.
Geoffrey wasn’t in the picture. That was because he was taking it, and Marion ’s smile was for him. But there was a third person, a woman leaning over the tea-table setting down a plate of scones. Like Marion, she faced the camera. She had a plate in her right hand, and she looked as if someone had just spoken to her or called her name.
Hilary gave a little gasp and said,
‘Oh, yes – that’s her!’
CHAPTER THREE
There was a pause. Hilary looked at the photograph, and Marion looked at Hilary with a faint bitter smile.
‘That is Mrs. Mercer,’ she said – ‘James’ housekeeper.’ She took the book back and laid it open on her knee. ’Geoffrey might have got off if it hadn’t been for her. Her evidence tipped the scale. She cried, you know, all the time she was giving it, and of course that went down with the jury. If she’d been vindictive or hard, it wouldn’t have hurt Geoff half as much, but when she swore with sobs that she’d heard him quarrelling with James about the will, she damned him. There was just a chance they’d believe he’d found James dead, but she finished that.’ Marion ’s voice left off on the edge of a break. After a moment she said in a curious, wondering tone, ‘I always thought she was such a nice woman. She gave me the recipe for those scones. She seemed to like me.’