Dorothy Eden (24 page)

Your devoted Ambrose

Samantha! The name was screaming in her head. Sammie, Sammie, Sammie!

Sammie was a
woman.

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING
Mrs Stone’s shabby canvas travelling bag was also fished up from the lake, and in it, as well as her few clothes, were the fur tippet and the jewels, a ruby brooch, and ear-rings, and a garnet necklace that Amalie had missed.

‘Remorse!’ the sympathetic police sergeant said, echoing Lady Malvina. ‘She must have took the things to spite you, Lady Mallow, even though she only meant to fling them in the lake. But you should have reported the theft.’

‘I didn’t want trouble,’ Amalie whispered. ‘My husband and I had already been through so much.’ She raised her eyes appealingly. She looked pale and fragile. For the first time since Sarah had known her she was dressed very simply in a grey dress with a fichu of lace.

‘And you employed her out of kindness, you say. Although she talked so desperate-like?’

‘What could I do? What would you have done?’

‘I’d have sent the baggage packing,’ the sergeant said brusquely. But it was quite clear that Amalie had won his sympathy.

Everyone had to be questioned as to whether Mrs Stone had been observed at the lake that evening, but no one had seen her, and Lady Malvina’s evidence as to her wild flight was for a previous evening. But significant, nevertheless.

‘Out of her wits,’ the sergeant commented succinctly.

It was obvious that he personally intended to waste little sympathy on the dead woman, poor insignificant wretch of no importance compared with these good people at the Hall. He was certainly not going to give any credence to the far-fetched idea that if someone had helped Mrs Stone to tumble into the lake they were likely to pack her bag with valuables and throw it in after her. There was the diamond ring on her finger, for instance. The wretched woman might have wanted to die with a small touch of grandeur, but it was more likely that she was filled with panic and remorse, being neither able to return the ring nor dispose of it without arousing suspicion.

But enquiries would have to be made as to her identity, and family, if any. The inquest would be postponed until this information was available.

The sergeant looked surprised when Sarah, at the end of her own short cross-examination, asked, ‘What was Mrs Stone’s first name?’

‘I’ve never heard it, miss. But we’ll find it out. Though what would you think that had to do with it?’

‘Nothing, sir. It would just’—Sarah succeeded in looking confused—‘make her seem more of a person.’

Betsey said that the light had burnt all night in the library, as if the master had not gone to bed. And neither had the mistress, nor Polly, the kitchenmaid, going down at five o’clock, had seen her coming from the library, weeping, Polly said, her hands pressed to her face. It was terrible, as if that poor Mrs Stone might have been a loved relation. ‘And she did put on all those airs,’ Betsey commented significantly.

When the police had left the next morning Blane sent for Sarah to come to him in the library.

His face was bleak and forbidding. It wore the expression of a man who would brook no interference in his affairs. Sarah had glimpsed this look the night he had leant over her in London when she had fallen down the stairs. But after that he had been careful to keep it hidden. Now, apparently, he no longer thought it necessary to keep up a façade.

‘Miss Mildmay, why were you meeting this man Brodie down by the lake?’

‘Meeting him!’

‘Come! None of that wide-eyed innocence. It doesn’t suit you. You’re a clever woman.’

‘But I’d never seen James Brodie in my life. I haven’t the slightest idea who he is. I thought he admitted he was looking for some poaching.’

‘With a strange degree of honesty that I don’t trust.’ His hard searching eyes were on Sarah. ‘So you swear you’ve neither seen him nor heard of him before?’

James Brodie was a stranger, wasn’t he? Sarah was not lying when she denied knowing him.

‘Then what the devil
were
you doing down at the lake? My wife, it appears, has been haunting it morbidly, for fear this woman had carried out her threat. But that can’t have been your reason, Miss Mildmay. You knew nothing of that. Or did you? I’m damned if I know what you’re up to.’

Sarah’s voice was cool with dislike.

‘Then why don’t you dismiss me, Lord Mallow, if you find me so unsatisfactory?’

‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘Can’t?’

‘Then shall I say “won’t”?’

She couldn’t escape his intent disturbing gaze She thought that if he took one step towards her she would have to run away. Or stay to be kissed again in that violent over-mastering way.

‘Miss Mildmay, will you just assure me that you weren’t meeting a lover?’

‘A lover! Good heavens, no!’

Her spontaneous astonishment seemed to satisfy him. He relaxed and all at once looked desperately tired. And haunted. As if Mrs Stone’s death were pressing on him.

He had gone to London to meet someone called Sammie in response to a badly-written letter saying,
Fancy, I thought you was dead.
But Sammie had meant to see him, not in London but here, and instead had encountered Amalie. And two days later Amalie was saying, ‘That will be the end of it.’

Sarah only had to stay here preserving her secret knowledge until Ambrose returned.

Mrs Stone had died by drowning certainly enough, but not of her own accord. Amalie knew. Blane knew. Probably Soames knew, since Amalie had wanted him dismissed. Someone in this house had helped the woman to die.

Perhaps, without waiting for Ambrose, she should tell these things to the police. She should relate the burning of Mrs Stone’s bonnet, and the way Blane’s hair had shone with rain that night. And Amalie’s morbid haunting of the lake.

But she knew she would do none of this. Not because it was better for Ambrose to return with the strange jigsaw of suspicions pieced together and made coherent, but because just now Blane had demanded to know in his hard angry voice whether she had been waiting for a lover. And she had indignantly denied it as if she had no lover. Not even Ambrose.

The only comforting thing was that Titus was unaware of what had happened. It was carefully kept from him, although he sensed the subdued atmosphere in the house, and particularly Lady Malvina’s unaccustomed quietness.

‘Aren’t you going to play with me, Grandmamma?’

‘Not now, Titus. I’m a little tired, a little old today.

‘Did you dance too much last night?’

‘Yes, my little love.’ Lady Malvina pounced on the child and hugged him to her, hiding the tears that slid down her crumpled cheeks. ‘We all danced too much.’

‘Poor little grandmamma. Then may I sit on your lap and tell you a story?’

Lady Malvina’s eyes sought Sarah’s.

‘How can he look so like my own son, and yet not be—’

‘Not be what, Lady Malvina?’

‘Blane was never gentle like this. Never thoughtful and loving. Miss Mildmay, I worship this child.’

Sarah didn’t know how to answer the desperate unspoken plea in the old woman’s eyes. Don’t let everything end! it said. Don’t let them say this isn’t my grandson!

‘Grandmamma! You’re holding me so hard!’

Lady Malvina nuzzled her face fiercely into the boy’s smooth dark head.

‘I’m being an old bear again, an old grizzly. But grizzlies don’t frighten you any more, do they, my pet?’

Titus leant trustfully against her.

‘Not when it’s you, Grandmamma. I love you.’

But that night Titus had his nightmare again. Someone was walking in his room and had blown out his light, he said. Sure enough, when Sarah reached him his light was out, but that may have been due to the candle wick guttering in the wax.

‘It was Sammie,’ Titus insisted, in his sleep-blurred voice.

Sarah’s heart stood still.

‘Who is Sammie?’

‘I don’t know. I heard someone say Sammie one night. Is it the mouse again, Miss Mildmay?’

‘There’s no mouse and no Sammie,’ Sarah said firmly.

She held the trembling little boy in her arms, and thought she heard a door shut somewhere in the house. Again, that may have been the wind banging a shutter. The atmosphere was oppressive and uncanny. She almost fancied Mrs Stone, upstairs at her sewing, had left her work for a few minutes to prowl about the house.

For if she were the Samantha Ambrose had mentioned, she had come to this house for some explicit purpose.

Whatever had woken Titus had infected her with its intangible fear

She found she couldn’t keep silent, waiting for Ambrose, after all. It might not be safe.

She waited until they were all at the lunch table the next day, and then said conversationally,

‘I’m sorry to say that Titus had that strange nightmare again last night.’

‘What nightmare?’ Blane asked sharply.

‘He thinks someone called Sammie comes into the room and blows out his light.’

There was no doubting that brief moment of suspended breathing. Then Lady Malvina said, ‘Sammie? I’ve not heard this before, Miss Mildmay. Who is Sammie?’

‘I haven’t the least idea, Lady Malvina. But I did wonder if by any chance Mrs Stone’s name was Sammie.’

‘What an extraordinary idea!’ Amalie said sharply. ‘Whatever gives it to you, Miss Mildmay?’

‘Only that the first time this happened was the night Mrs Stone was here.’

‘But you’ve always complained about Titus’s nightmares.’

If the police sergeant were to see Amalie now, Sarah thought irrelevantly, he wouldn’t think of her as a fragile nervous little creature. Her face wore a look of extraordinary belligerence and animosity.

‘Not this particular one, Lady Mallow. No one used to blow out his light. And indeed it was blown out last night.’

‘Surely the wind,’ said Blane, speaking for the first time. ‘The window was open, I imagine. Anyway, the child’s much too big to require a night light. And as far as Mrs Stone goes, no one knows her first name, not even the police as yet. So how, pray, could Titus?’

‘Unless she told him,’ Sarah murmured.

Amalie gave an incredulous laugh. ‘You mean she’d creep in there late at night and tell my son her first name! What farfetched nonsense! Anyway, Sammie is a man’s name.’

Sarah looked at her plate.

‘It could be short for Samantha,’ she said.

Again there was that tiny bubble of silence. Again it was broken by Lady Malvina saying practically,

‘The thing to be disturbed about isn’t the name of this mysterious prowler—if there is one—but that Titus is being alarmed. I don’t like that at all.’

‘Titus has always had nightmares!’ Amalie exclaimed. ‘Just as he’s always been travel sick. He’s a nervous delicate child. I can’t think what the fuss is about. If you’re nervous yourself, Miss Mildmay, you have only to say so and we’ll find someone less susceptible to the wind in the night. And I quite agree with my husband that the boy is old enough not to require a night light.’

Lady Malvina looked perplexed. She had just contrived, in a slightly fuddled way, to analyse Sarah’s implications.

‘But Miss Mildmay, you aren’t talking sense, you know. For if this Mrs Stone is by any chance called Sammie, or Samantha, it’s certainly not her going into Titus’s room at night. How can it be when she’s dead?’

‘I merely meant that it might have been her the first time, and now if Titus is disturbed he imagines it’s the same person disturbing him.’

‘I believe Miss Mildmay is suggesting that her ghost walks,’ Amalie said drily.

Blane, who had again been silent, suddenly pushed back his chair.

‘Tomorrow Titus shall return to London.’

His statement was an order. Sarah was startled, but not as startled as the other women.

‘Oh dear, I shall miss the boy,’ said Lady Malvina. ‘Do you mean this, Blane?’

‘Of course he doesn’t mean it,’ Amalie exclaimed. She was trying to look at her husband indulgently, and failing completely. Sarah had an odd feeling that under her calm there was both panic and hate. ‘Titus can’t go back to fogs and damp. He’ll instantly be ill again. Besides, my love, it was you who said his fancies mustn’t be pampered.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Surely you’re not suggesting he must be sent away because of this unfortunate tragedy. Why, he knows nothing of it and isn’t likely to. And, if you ask me, Miss Mildmay has made such curious suggestions that one wonders how much of the nightmare was Titus’s.’

Blane looked directly at his mother. He behaved as if Amalie hadn’t said a word.

‘Perhaps you’d like to go with him, Mamma. He’s grown fond of you, I believe.’

Lady Malvina’s face softened.

‘Why, of course. If you’re insisting on his going. What about Miss Mildmay?’

‘Miss Mildmay will stay here.’

‘Blane, what are you talking about?’ Amalie exclaimed. ‘The woman is Titus’s governess. Do we pay her to have a holiday in the country without her charge?’

Blane met his wife’s anger with his hard level gaze.

‘Miss Mildmay will be required at the inquest. That’s why she stays.’

‘Why will she be required more than Mamma?’

Blane sighed and began a patient explanation.

‘Because, as I understand, you sent for Mrs Stone at five o’clock that afternoon and dismissed her, telling her she could stay until morning but that she must be out of the house by daylight. Isn’t that so?’

Amalie nodded.

‘Miss Mildmay says she took some sewing up to Mrs Stone at seven o’clock that evening when she was in her room. After that time no one else appears to have seen her. So if everyone is speaking the truth you can see that makes Miss Mildmay a very important witness. She was the last person to see Mrs Stone alive.’

Amalie sprang up.

‘Then I shall take Titus to London myself.’

‘I think not.’

‘Am I a prisoner here?’

‘If that’s the way you want to look at it.’

Amalie was not acting any longer. Her face had gone very sallow and wore an expression of extraordinary malevolence.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to be a prisoner anywhere. I’ll show you that. What you seem to forget is that Titus is mine. And I shall do exactly as I please with him.’