There she was: the girl of the Pentabridge Independent, the Christmas−tree doll that Clare had saved from burning. She remembered her name now, Margaret Raines. There were only two full−length sketches of her. He had drawn her sitting on a stile, her hands clasped in her lap, her long plaits uncoiled and hanging over her shoulders. Unlike Anne and Jennifer, this girl was not smiling; he had caught a dreaming, wistful expression.
Clare had spent a long time looking through the sketchbook and still there was no sound of Niall arriving. Suddenly realising how late it was, she stood up to put the book back on the shelf. She stood there with it in her hands, troubled and unhappy. She had the explanation of something in her hands, and yet the explanation seemed only to propound a darker riddle. She laid the book down on top of a similar one, then, yielding to the urgency of her desire to know the ultimate answer, she slid the lower book out and began to study that. It was filled like the first with figure studies, but there was no one here she recognised. There were both boys and girls, and she had no doubt at all that they were the originals of some of the puppets she had seen. She pondered the matter, with the book open at one page covered with sketches of a young woman she had certainly never seen in the flesh and yet who had some significance for her. One detail of the drawings gave her the clue. The girl in one sketch was wearing a housemaid's cap and apron. Finally Clare traced the association: last Christmas Eve she had listened to some talk of the maid the Sterne's had had the previous year. What was her name? Janet. That was it. Niall had used Janet too for a model.
There were a good many loose papers on the top shelf. She lifted some, when she had put the second book back, not with any conscious purpose, but because for some reason she could not bring herself to leave the cupboard until the vague idea bulking in the back of her mind should settle into cognisable shape. She raised the loose sheets idly, and had been looking at them for some moments before she actually saw what they were. Then she realised that she held in her hand the working drawings for some puppets. One was a figure drawn to scale, marked off in squares, with dimensions pencilled in; another was of an arm in sections. She sorted them out: they were the drawings for two complete puppets; they were somewhat smudged and bore every appearance of being constantly handled. They were drawn with very clear definition of line; only the ovals of the faces were blank. Yet Clare was convinced that they were the drawings he was working from now. Indeed, one of the figures needed no features to identify it: Clare could recognise Jennifer at once; and the other—she looked with a curious pity and helplessness at the other, for the features that should fill that blank oval would be her own.
She slipped the papers back and closed the door of the press. Slowly she moved away, down the room towards the door, and there, overcome by dread, she turned and ran down the stairs and out of the house, mortally afraid of meeting Niall.
She did not slow down to a walk until she was near the large flat rock where so often she had lingered with him. She leaned against it now, trying to subdue her fears, and to look at what she had discovered coolly and sensibly. “What on earth is there to be afraid of?” she repeated over and over, aloud. Surely, she reasoned, Niall's own explanation was simple enough. He wanted to make his puppets life−like; no sculptor, surely, would attempt to make a realistic statue without a living model. What was strange or wrong in Niall using as a model anyone he knew who was willing to pose? She clung to that clear, common−sense explanation, shaking off queer amorphous things that were trying to clutch her and drag her from her hold on safety. She shuddered physically and felt the damp chill of the drizzle penetrate her; bewildered and unhappy that Brackenbine should seem so drear and cold to her, she walked on, out through the gates into the public road.
Before she reached the school gates, however, some lineaments of the obscure riddle had become defined; some of her discoveries had classified themselves according to a common feature and showed her that her sense of something dark and dangerous beyond the seeming common sense of Niall's method was not false. She could accept Niall's casual account of making Anne Otterel's acquaintance as substantially true, though she could guess that he had left a good deal unsaid. He had known Anne much better than he had let her believe. His deception there, if it was deception, did not grieve her. Anne Otterel had died before ever she knew Niall. No doubt Anne had been a little in love with him. They would have talked, have laughed and joked together on those summer afternoons when Anne came to sit for his mother. She was not jealous of Anne. She was only sad for her, sad that it had ended as it had. Niall, too, would have been in love with Anne—or at least, strongly attracted. There was no wonder, then, that he had made a puppet in her image. She could even understand, given his extraordinary absorption in his art, that he would find nothing shocking or cruel in making her image appear to live and play when the original was buried in the cold ground.
Clare could see, too, that chance might have thrown Niall and the Pentabridge girl briefly together. Her form−mistress had told the editor of the Independent the one fact that could explain how Niall had met her: Margaret was in the habit of going for long walks alone in the country round Pentabridge. The lonely lane winding round the slopes of Akenshaw Hill would be an obvious attraction to someone who was interested in birds; the gates of Brackenbine stood ajar all the time and there was nothing to forbid a rambler's entrance. Niall would have received a young girl student of Nature with a charming, amused welcome. Clare could see him offering her the freedom of Brackenbine wood; at the same time his observant artist's eye would be learning her face and figure, finding in her a model for a new puppet. Clare recognised frankly now that Niall's art, or hobby, amounted almost to a monomania, so disproportionate as to have squeezed some of the common human feelings, or conventions, quite out of his make−up. A man less intent on his own single purpose would have been more sensitive than to have condemned to the flames that charming little image of a girl whom he had known and who was now dead.
Clare stopped at the gates of Paston Hall, her hands on the cold iron, her eyes on the familiar red−brick jumble of sham Gothic constructions. Some of Niall's puppets had indeed assorted themselves: three of the people he had studied so carefully had one character in common. Anne Otterel, Margaret Raines and the maid, Janet, they had all died, all of the same disease, all within a short time last summer.
9
Clare had come away from Brackenbine with her most urgent task still undone. She blamed herself for the coward haste of her retreat that afternoon. Why could she not have waited for Niall to come? He would have turned up about tea−time. But she knew well that she had not the courage to wait alone with her thoughts, now, in the empty house.
She did not know who at Paston Hall might know that Mrs. Sterne had gone away, and she dared not enquire. She could only wait, trusting that no one would mention the fact to her before the next afternoon. So, somehow, she went through her routine of opening books and appearing to study; but all that evening she was turning over and over the obscure and tangled affairs of Jennifer and herself with Niall, and of Niall with his other models. She could make the facts she knew fall into no sort of significant order, nor point to any acceptable conclusion. All they did point to was a huge, frightening shadow of imminent danger.