“Piffle,” Folie said. “I’m sure the servants would have taken note when they changed the sheets.”
“I suppose so.” Melinda’s lower lip turned sadly downward. She raised her head, looking into the distance along the boundary of the forest. “Perhaps you might—” She paused. “Look.”
Folie looked up. At first she saw nothing against the white sheen the sun threw on the water, but then as she followed Melinda’s gaze, she noticed a shadow moving slowly along the bank beneath the trees. “A deer,” she murmured.
“No...” Melinda had the better eyesight. “No, it is a man.”
Folie squinted. But the stream’s silver glare misted the detail of the woods. “I can’t see him.”
Melinda shook her head. “He’s gone now.” She frowned slightly. “Do you suppose it was him?”
“I couldn’t tell anything.”
“I believe he was there all along,” Melinda said uneasily. “I only noticed him when he moved.”
“Fishing, no doubt.” Folie smiled. “Now wouldn’t that be a typical gentleman for you, fishing for days while his houseguests languish?”
“Let us go in, Mama.” Melinda pushed away from the wall. “I wish to dash a note to Miss Vernon.”
Folie glanced at her. “If you like.”
Melinda swept her skirt up around her ankles. “I’ll race you to the door!” she cried gaily. Her bright hair bobbed beneath her pink and white straw hat as she began to run.
“Unfair! Head start!” Folie picked up her hem and pelted after.
Melinda’s idea of “dashing a note” was to spend three hours crossing and recrossing the pages of her letters to her droves of schoolroom friends. She sat at a desk in the drawing room, framed by a carved pagoda infested with chinamen and peacocks. While she bent her head in silent concentration over her voluminous correspondence, Folie toyed with a cup of tea. Folie had no one to whom she cared to write. Somehow she could not summon the desire to pen a note to the Misses Nunney. What was there to say, after all? “Our rooms are quite pleasant. The house is outlandish, the host a madman, and we see no one but ourselves at breakfast, tea, and dinner. Give my regards to Pussy. (And pray keep her out of my vegetable garden!)”
There had been a time when she had thought of nothing but the letters she would write. Folie gazed out the tall window. The lawn and shrubbery gleamed green, faintly distorted by the glass panes, as cheerful and English as the room she sat in was dim and mysterious with its pagodas and silent Chinamen.
She smiled wistfully, remembering the days she had spent composing her letters to India in her mind, when such simple tasks as mending and polishing the plate had been infused with a new glamour as she thought of how she might describe them to him. This is how I do it, first the whiting with the soft leather—we always use the same piece, as it gets better with time—the coating rubbed in hard and let to dry all dull and gray, and then with linen cloths I wipe it off, and polish round and round, so that a hundred silvery colors begin to gleam through. She had always imagined him looking over her shoulder with great attentiveness as she executed these banal offices—as if he would be interested in such dull things! She had never actually written of those everyday occurrences, of course— but she had narrated her whole day to him in her mind. It had been a way of keeping him with her, walking beside her, a real presence in her world.
She shook her head a little. How she had delighted in discovering some episode that she could actually write about, something that would please and entertain him. Those she had cherished and cultivated, polishing them to as fine a sheen as the silver plate before she ever set pen to paper.
Near the wall of glass-fronted bookcases, a delicate desk ornamented in red chinoiserie awaited the unknown lady of the house. Folie stood up and wandered past the tightly bound new volumes. She paused by the desk, stroking her finger over the glossy, enameled surface. She lifted the stopper on the inkpot and found it full.
Drawing up a chair, she opened the top and took out a pen. The paper was heavy and rich, impressed with a crest and the name of the house. She mended the pen with a silver knife and paused.
Sweet knight, she wrote.
And stared at it. But then she thought, of course I am not going to post this to him. Not to the Robert Cambourne in this house.
To the Robert in her mind she could write what she pleased. She ached to do so. Yearned to write to him, to read his letters again. She had long ago learned not to permit that feeling any room in her heart, or she would lie awake at night and weep for hours.
But it had a foothold now. She had allowed herself to dream of those days when he had been real and hers. She frowned hard at the crest on the paper.
Perhaps a pretend letter would put it to rest again. Just a mock letter, a little fantasy of her own.
I confess I am somewhat intimidated by the dignity of your stationary, she wrote beneath the embossed crest. To be quite candid, I am intimidated by you! I do not believe this dark fiendish gentleman who claims your name can possibly be the Robert Cambourne who purchased an elephant for its homing instinct. So I shall simply put him out of my mind and write to my own true Robert, my dearest Robert—oh my friend, you cannot know how I have missed you and missed you. I know that you were right to cease writing to me; how foolish we were, and yet I never found it in my heart to regret. Not truly. I have always cherished you as my own somehow. It is as if I took a wrong turn somewhere, some random day when I might have walked on the left side of the street and run into you, but instead I turned right, or dallied too long over breakfast, or stayed to hem a skirt. And so I missed you forever.
How am I to convince this stranger, this sham Robert, that he must let us go to London directly, and finance our sojourn there at that?
I must say that this empty mansion seems a prodigious waste of money that might be put to excellent use in firing off Melinda in style. No doubt a servant or two would hardly be missed if we should take them with us, and the cost of the candles alone must pay for that town house in Hans Crescent. I should be so pleased to see her suitably engaged—there is nothing more in life I wish for. Perhaps I seem quite the pushing Mama, but this is so very anxious a time—her whole life’s happiness depends upon her choice now. How well I know that! I do not think I was very wise in these matters; perhaps I have not told you how it came about that I married Mr. Hamilton. I cannot say that I was forced by any wicked stepmother, although it is true that I had no mama to advise me, or perhaps I might have waited a little longer. My mother died before I had any memory of her, and my father when I was seven, and so I was brought up as a young lady by a pair of rather jolly uncles and a good strict governess; I loved them very dearly but they were so old and life in Toot seemed so flat, and no one ever dreamed of a London season—or perhaps they were just too kind to mention that without beauty or funds or a noble lineage I could hardly expect to take there.
And in truth I should not claim that some unfortunate fate led my feet wrong and caused me to miss you, sweet knight, for no young gentlemen ever do come to Toot to be run into, whether one walks on the left or the right or parades down the very middle of the only street in town. So I was nearly seventeen and very anxious that I would become an old maid like the Misses Nunney, when Mr. Hamilton happened to mention that I was quite passable when I smiled—and there you have it.
I am determined that Melinda shall not make the same—I will not be so harsh as to call it a mistake—but that she shall not suffer a day’s qualm over her choice. She simply must have a London season.
A deep booming sound made Folie look up. She and Melinda glanced at one another.
“Oh...it was only that a door slammed,” Melinda said, as a faint wash of air ruffled their papers.
Before Folie could answer, angry shouts echoed from the great hall. The words were indistinct, impossible to comprehend amid the sounds of a rough scuffle. Melinda jumped to her feet. “Whatever could it—”
“Wait!” Folie cried, lif
ting the desk cover and tossing her letter inside as Melinda ran out the door. “Melinda, you come back!”
She caught up with her stepdaughter at the foot of the stairs. Melinda stopped with her hand on the carved head of the creature that coiled its way down the banister. She was staring at the ruckus in the staircase hall, where the butler and a strapping footman were bodily ejecting what appeared to be a bundle of rags with arms and legs.
For just an instant, the intruder’s face was visible, unshaven and wild, a long strand of white hair hanging between his eyes. He glared toward the stairs and screamed, a garbled pleading that sent chill fingernails down Folie’s spine. He screeched again, and this time she heard a name in the sound; she heard “Robert!’’ in his drawn-out howl, or she thought she did. The men were shoving his face against the door frame; he clawed for a hold and lost it as they pushed him out. The butler hauled on the big door. It boomed shut again, closing out the sounds of the commotion, leaving only dying reverberations in the hall.
“It was him!” Melinda whispered. “Mama—that man in the woods!”
“A poacher, perhaps,” Folie said bravely. “The men will deal with it. Let us go up to our rooms. It’s almost time to change for dinner.”
“A poacher?” Melinda’s fingers were white as she pinched one hand inside the other. “Breaking into the house?”
Folie mounted the stairs, taking her arm. “Come, what will you wear tonight? The apple green?” Clothing could always be depended upon to divert Melinda’s attention.
It worked. Melinda gave the door a dubious glance and turned with a shaky sigh. “What difference can it make what I wear?” she asked fretfully. “There is no one to see me.”
“Thank you so much! I am someone!”
“Well, but you are my mother.”
Folie gathered her skirt as she paused at the landing. “Humpf!” she said, and bounced ahead with a great show of indignation, hiding a little burst of pleasure at being so unequivocally installed in that category.
FOUR
Robert paced his room with a ferocious drive, pressing his fists to the walls when he met them as if he could shove through them and escape. The sound of the beggar’s howl would not leave his brain.
“You’re dead,” he muttered. “Damn you. God damn you, don’t come back!”
Phillippa’s harrying was horrible enough—he could not endure more. If his father had returned from hell to pursue him, Robert thought he must kill himself. But there was no release there either. Perhaps being alive was all that kept the precarious barrier between, kept them from consuming him now, dragging him down into their black, strangling inferno.
And there was Folie to hold him here—his Folly—he heard her voice, too. Soft and bright and unafraid; he wanted her so much that he froze, body and soul, when he saw her. All he heard coming from his mouth were biting replies to her common courtesy. He knew she was puzzled. She must think him utterly demented.
He laughed at the ceiling. Of course he was demented— dead people haunted him, confusion followed him, he could not go out into the open day. But he did not want her to know. He had reclaimed his reason once; his mind had slowly cleared on the passage from India, mired in tropical doldrums, a leisurely drift around Africa that had taken ten months. It was there that he had begun to remember. To realize that Phillippa was dead. She was truly dead; only a demon that haunted him and not a living nightmare at his side. And as he grasped that, he began to recall other things, to recollect his roving in the bazaars and his haphazard inquiries, his notes and diaries. Small things—ashore in Zanzibar, some flutter of silk, some particular way the lamplight fell on a stranger’s turban would bring to him the memory of a Delhi shoe-stall, drinking chai in the back. He thought that was the night he had gone mad.
The more lucid his mind became on the ship, the more he could recall of his derangement: There had been visits from guuruus, some that Robert recognized and some that he didn’t. Phillippa had been there—but Phillippa was dead. She had murdered his dog; someone whose face he could not see had held Folie’s letters over a fire and threatened to kill her.
He leaned his head into his hands. Even at his most rational, he was not certain what had been real and what delusion. It was all dream-like, horrific. He did not even know how he had gotten out of Delhi to the coast.
On the ship he had been safe and sober. He thought he had escaped to England, to sanity—but at Solinger, Phillippa and distraction had found him again.
No doubt demons preferred the overland route, he thought blackly.
And now his father. He was certain it had been his father’s voice. He reached abruptly for the bell rope and rang it.
After several long minutes, he rang it again. This time he got an answer, a breathless footman, his coat pocket half torn away. “Beg pardon, sir!” he said. “We just had to give old Sparkett the heave; he’d somehow got himself all the way inside the front hall! Mr. Lander’s on his way up directly to speak to you.”
“Sparkett?” Robert asked warily.
“He’s harmless, sir,” the pink-cheeked servant confided. “Has spells, you know.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, aye, he’s been on the village charity since me mother was a girl. Mad as a March hare, she always says, and feeds him the odd potato pie. We don’t like to handle him rough, sir, but in his bad spells there’s not much else can be done.”
“You are certain it was him?” Robert asked sharply.
The young man gave a shrug and slight laugh. “Oh, aye, sir, I’d never mistake old Sparkett! Known him my life long.”
Relief and mortification surged inside Robert, bleeding into an unreasoning anger. He held it checked, turning away to the window. “He must be kept off the grounds. He’ll frighten the ladies.”
“Aye, sir!” the footman agreed vigorously. At a scratch on the door, he added, “That’ll be Mr. Lander.”
Robert scowled. “Let him in,” he said coldly.
He turned back as the butler was dismissing his subordinate with a jerk of the chin. The door closed.
“You’re to see to the security of the place!” Robert took a quick step toward Lander, and the butler almost imperceptibly drew himself up and back.
“I beg your pardon for this incident, Mr. Cambourne!” he said tightly. “It will not happen again, you have my word.”
“My God, this Sparkett devil was inside the door.” Robert stood still, willing the anger into coolness, into control.
Lander watched him; they faced one another like vigilant mongrels.
“Do you understand the danger?” Robert demanded. “No one is to come into the grounds, no one is to come through the gates. No one!”
Lander’s jaw was stiff. “Perhaps if you would give me a fixed idea of the nature of this danger, sir.”
Robert glared at him. He turned suddenly away. “It is not a fixed danger,” he exclaimed. “You must watch for it from any quarter!”
“But you expect someone to attempt the grounds, Mr. Cambourne?”
“I am not—” He swung back again. “I don’t know.” Lander gave him a steady look, a look that filled Robert with shame and fury. “Just do the job I employed you to do,” he exclaimed in a low voice. “Watch!”
“Yes, sir,” Lander said.
Robert wanted to warn Folie to take care, even here under his protection. But he could no more explain to her what to fear than he could to his servants. He should not have brought her here at all; he saw that now. What use was his protection? He himself was the danger. Lunatic—he had thought for a while that he was sane, that in England all was well, that he could bring her near—then just as she had arrived, he had fallen again into this abyss.
He should send her away. If there was a real menace, he had only brought her to the center of it. He must tell her to go. Already he had avoided her for days, avoided food and drunk only water to clear his brain. He was safe when he did not eat or drink; safe, but slowly killing himself. He w
alked into the library with his blood pounding in his head, dizzy with tension.
It was empty. He stood at the door, looking at the two writing desks, both abandoned with the pens and ink left unheeded to dry. A bolt of fear seized him, but he managed to think his way through it, remember that he had heard the two ladies go up the stairs, heard Folie’s voice through his father’s ringing in his ears.
He stood in the silent library, thinking of her voice. It was lower and lazier than he had expected, soft even when she was annoyed. In her letters she had seemed breathless sometimes, excitable and happy. She was so much more a quiet gentlewoman in life—he wondered if she had changed, or if it was a misinterpretation he had made, seeing more than was real.
On one of the writing desks, letters were stacked neatly, waiting to be folded. He did not read them, but he could see Miss Melinda’s signature on the top sheet. The other desk held only a stack of blank stationary, a pen and an inkwell. But a white curve of paper dangled out from under the lid.
There was writing on the sheet. He looked down at his cuffs, at his hands, feeling oddly embarrassed.
Of course he should not read it. She never wrote him anymore; he had told her not to write, and she had not. A wave of intense longing swept over him, a physical ache to be back in Calcutta on the hot verandah, the fan swinging with its slow squeak above him, her letter held between his palms as if it were a small bird.
Just to see her handwriting again—the way the words slid up to the right even though she ruled her paper like a careful schoolgirl, the faint double period after each sentence—he only wished to see it.
He lifted the lid of the desk. The paper swept to the floor, and he stooped to pick it up.
Sweet knight.
He made a faint sound as he straightened, a hungry laugh. He could not even look at the page again; he was afraid the words would be different. Folding it carefully, he slipped it inside his coat. Like a pi-dog that had snatched a morsel from the bazaar, he left the library quickly, retreating to safety with his prize.