“It’s the little room next door I’ve given you. Lady Marian and her husband are beyond, and Captain Jeremy and Mrs. Duke and Miss Taverner opposite.”
She stood aside to let Jane enter a small room almost entirely taken up with a very large double bed. It was lighted, like the bathroom, by a wall-lamp which diffused a warm oily smell. It was a forbidding little room. A battered chest of drawers painted mustard yellow, a tarnished looking-glass standing on it, two chairs, and a shabby washstand, were all the furniture. There was a huge flowered ewer in a small plain basin. Half a dozen rickety hooks behind a yard or two of limp chintz supplied the only hanging accommodation. The window curtains of the same material swayed in an unseen draught. The pattern of the carpet had long ago been obliterated by dirt and age.
Eily shut the door and said,
“It’s no place for you at all. John said to tell you that.”
Jane had so much of the same feeling herself that she found this rather undermining. She put out a quick thought in the direction of the hundred pounds, and said with spirit,
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you? What’s the difference?”
Eily said in her pretty, mournful voice,
“He doesn’t like my being here.”
“Then why do you stay?”
“I can’t be leaving Aunt Annie.” A pause, and then after a dreadful sigh, “I’d not dare. He’d have me back.”
Then, before Jane could say anything at all, she was gone, opening the door and slipping out without any sound.
CHAPTER 9
Jane was drying her hands, when there was a knock on the door. As soon as she said, “Come in!” Jeremy was in the room. He shut the door, came up close, and said,
“We’re just staying as we are. I suppose you’re getting into a dress.”
“I thought I’d better.”
“All right-hurry! There’s a little room half way down the stairs-I’ll meet you there. Don’t take too long over the face- it’s quite good as it is.” And then he was gone again.
Jane hung up her suit on two of the hooks behind the limp curtain, improved the face, slipped on a grey dress with an amusing rose-coloured curlicue coming down off the left shoulder, and went down to the little room on the half-way landing.
She found Jeremy walking up and down like a hyena in a cage.
“Why do women take hours to do the simplest things?”
“Darling, they don’t. What is it?”
“What is what?”
“Why the assignation?”
“I had to see you.”
“You are seeing me.”
“Jane-what were you talking about to Jacob Taverner?”
“Gramp’s bedside stories.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said there was one about a passage from the shore.”
“Was there?”
She nodded.
“What did Jacob say?”
“Wanted to know where it came out this end. So I said I didn’t suppose Gramp knew and sheered off. And then Eily came in with Castell.”
Jeremy said, “Look here, he asked me the same sort of thing. Did my grandfather tell me stories about the old place-if he did, what stories?”
“What did you say?”
“I spread a fairly thick fog.”
She dropped her voice to a whisper.
“What did your grandfather say?”
“Lots of things. What did yours?”
“That’s telling.”
“Aren’t you going to tell?”
“Not unless you do-and not here-not now.”
“Why not?”
They had been standing quite close together, his arm half round her. Now he drew away frowning.
“Because I don’t like this place. You’ve no business to be here.”
“Jeremy-really!”
“Jane, we’ve got to clear out tomorrow. We ought never to have come.”
“Yes, darling-you’ve said all that before. Do you know, I’ve got a sort of feeling that I might get bored if you don’t stop soon.”
He gloomed.
“There are worse things than being bored. If ever I saw a bad lot in my life, it’s that fellow Luke White. The man Castell is an offensive bounder, and that girl Eily looks scared to death. I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s something shady, and we’re leaving tomorrow.”
Jane opened the door and walked out. Jeremy had all the makings of a trampling bully, and she had no intention of being his door-mat.
She said, “Good-bye, darling,” and waited for Florence Duke who was coming down the stairs. She had caught only a glimpse of her when they arrived, and she had thought there was something odd about her colour. She couldn’t very well turn pale, but the heavy red in her cheeks had a curious undershade of purple. She now wore a remarkable garment of very bright red silk profusely patterned with pink and green. It was rather tight and rather short, and it had seen fresher days.
As they went down the stairs together, a cloud of strong pungent scent accompanied them. Jane was just thinking that she really preferred paraffin, when Florence said under her breath,
“Do I look all right?”
Jane took in the heavy untidy hair, the overdone make-up, the dress, the shoes with their tawdry buckles, and said the only thing that it was possible to say.
“Oh, yes.”
She wouldn’t have found it convincing herself, but it seemed to go down all right with Florence. She put a large coarse hand with bright fingernails on Jane’s arm and said, her deep voice lower still,
“I’ve had a most awful turn.”
“What sort of a turn? What can I do for you?”
Florence shook her head.
“Nobody can’t do anything. That’s the way when you’re in a fix. You get yourself in, and you’ve damn well got to get yourself out-nobody can’t do it for you.” She stood on the bottom step but one and swayed a little. “Oh, gosh-why did I have to come!” Jane thought, “She’s tight. We are going to have a jolly party-”
Florence gazed at her with tragic eyes and swayed. Jane said briskly,
“Those cocktails were much too strong. We’ll feel a lot better when we’ve got some food inside us. There’s the gong now. Come along and see how Cousin Annie cooks.”
The dining-room was opposite the lounge. Dark panelling rose to within a foot of the ceiling, which was crossed by massive beams. Above the cavernous hearth a wide brick chimney-breast ran up. It supported an irregular trophy composed of old flintlocks, bayonets, and heavy horn-handled knives. There was a long table covered with a coarse linen cloth. Someone had set a tankard full of evergreens half way down the narrow board. For the rest, the service might have been described as rag-tag-and-bobtail-here and there a heavy silver fork or spoon amongst cheap electroplate, old knives worn down to a point and three inches of blade, the flimsiest modern glass mixed up with half a dozen old cut beakers. The chairs were as mixed-rush-bottomed, Windsor, common kitchen. There were places laid for nine, with Jacob Taverner at the top of the table in a massive old chair carved with lions’ heads. A lamp hung down from the central beam and made of the table and the people round it an island of light.
They took their seats-Marian Thorpe-Ennington on Jacob’s right, and Florence Duke on his left; Geoffrey Taverner beyond Lady Marian, then Jane; Jeremy opposite Jacob at the end of the table, with Freddy Thorpe-Ennington on his right; and beyond him Mildred Taverner, leaving an empty place between her and Florence Duke which was obviously destined for Al Miller whenever he happened to arrive.
Luke White served them with soup in a variety of odd plates, and after the first spoonful Jane was aware that Fogarty Castell had made no vain boast of their Cousin Annie’s cooking-the soup was a dream. She looked across the table anxiously to see whether Florence was getting it down, and was a good deal relieved to find that she was. If the rest of the dinner was anything like up to this sample, there would be no need to worry any more about the Smuggler’s Dream.