Flowers Stained With Moonlight (14 page)

‘What did the lady look like?’ I asked.

‘Tall. Dark. Handsome. And sad.’

Oh, Dora, I knew she was talking about Ellen. Ellen must have been to see Mr Granger, it cannot mean anything else! And he had renewed his promise to leave William
something in his will! Yet he gave her nothing in her despair, and she must have thought …

At that critical moment, I heard a creak; the door of the carriage house was pushed open, and Peter’s face peered around it.

‘We have to be going, Miss Vanessa,’ he said anxiously, and opening the door to its full extent, he led in the champing, stamping horses and began to harness them. I opened my mouth to cry Wait! – and jumped up into the carriage, but I found the place next to me empty. The other door of the carriage swung open. I darted down and looked about, but she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had slipped out the door like a black cat in the darkness, or perhaps she was quietly waiting, pressed against the wall in the shadows. The bag of cabbage and bread had disappeared.

Dora, what an odious man Mr Granger was – rejecting Ellen so cruelly, and his very own child, and leading her on with lies and promises of things in a will he never made. Oh, I’m not surprised he got himself killed, what with all the nasty things he did to people! Why, if there was no risk of an innocent person’s being accused, I would leave him to fate quite happily. ‘I’ve left him something’, he said – who could blame poor Ellen for believing the will was already made? And she did believe it, we know she did. Oh, Dora –
what did she do?

Do help me, Dora, as much as you can bring yourself to!

Your loving sister

Vanessa

Dora darling,

I cannot help jumping whenever the mail is delivered, but I know that you cannot possibly have already received my letter, and talked to Ellen, and answered mine and sent the answer. Yet I cannot rest until I have something from you. I am becoming obsessed with Ellen – but I
must
put her out of my mind until I hear from you, for there is really nothing that I can do! I
must
force myself to adopt the hypothesis of her innocence – would that it should be the right one – and search elsewhere, and as I am here, I have decided to concentrate upon Sylvia and everything I can discover about her. I cannot believe her guilty, but I cannot exclude that she may know something, consciously or unconsciously, or that the murder may be connected with her in some way. And I cannot get that hidden secret out of my mind.

I wanted to be with Sylvia alone. I thought I could get her to speak to me frankly if Camilla was not present. Camilla is a much more decided, less influenceable character, so I hoped to find a moment when she should be away. I can understand her wariness, of course; certainly she sees that her friend is in a dangerous position, and like her mother, she feels she must persuade her that tact and silence is her best defence.

This afternoon, finally, I was lucky: Camilla went to town to purchase sewing materials, and I captured Sylvia mooning about like a lost soul and proposed a ramble with a picnic tea. Mrs Firmin obliged us with a lovely basket, and off we went, Sylvia’s sparkling spirits forming a strange contrast to
the gloomy airs she had been wearing just a few moments before. She carried the basket, swung it as she walked, proposed to show me some of her favourite haunts, and strolled before me along the narrow path between the tall grasses, her hair escaping and blowing, her skirt swinging jauntily, her hat with its wide ribbon hanging back on her neck. The ribbon and her dress were of mourning black, as usual, but set off with a halo of ravishing smiles and winning ways, they seemed positively bright and pretty.

I soon noticed that her mood was not merely cheerful, but positively effervescent, for reasons which escaped me entirely. She blinked, she fluttered, she laughed, she was witty – if I had been a boy, I should have said she was flirting! I responded quite instinctively with a little flattery. No, flattery is an unkind word; I found her quite adorable, and did not trouble to hide it.

‘This place is like an island,’ I said, after we had walked and chatted for quite some time, and were beginning to settle into a shady grove to unpack our picnic. ‘It is so isolated, so free, so lovely.’

‘I wish I could live so forever, far from the outside world,’ she answered. ‘But I’m afraid, Vanessa – I’m afraid because of what happened to George. And because … oh, I shouldn’t talk about this!’

A sombre expression had suddenly come into her eyes. She stopped speaking, and looked at me quizzically. I found myself swept up in an emotional desire to come to her aid which far outweighed my professional desire to learn anything possible from her. I desperately wanted her to
confide in me, but not in order to collect clues. Wordlessly, I took her hand.

‘Vanessa, I haven’t told anybody about this, not a soul. I feel that it would be no use to speak of this to Mother, or to Camilla; they would just tell me it’s rubbish, they wouldn’t understand. But I
must
speak of it to someone! I don’t know what to do. Oh, Vanessa, what it is, is that I … I believe the police actually suspect
me
. Do you think so? Oh, it’s horrible, it’s terrifying! Yes, I’m
sure
they do – they keep hinting it! Oh, how can they, how can they? Why me?’

Her accents were so timidly naive, her horror and distress so genuine, that my heart was lifted on a great wave of protectiveness. It is an odd thing, really; Sylvia calls out tremendously strong feelings in one, yet I cannot identify any precise reason for it. Everything connected with her seems like fluttering shadows; her very presence is strangely elusive. I feel that I am no longer working for Mrs Bryce-Fortescue – my desire to throw off what I perceive as a terrible net drawing inexorably around a silky butterfly has become more of a personal passion than anything else.

‘Even if they do,’ I said warmly, ‘they are wrong, and surely the truth will emerge sooner or later. What happened to your husband is unspeakably dreadful, but once the truth is known, the horror of it will diminish and you must turn to beginning your life anew.’

‘Oh, I wish the whole story would sink into oblivion!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you know, I feel I cannot even grieve properly while all this is going on! I wish I could just be alone somewhere and cry, because George is dead, and after all, he
did not want to die and he was in the prime of life and very busy and enterprising. And … I don’t think he deserved to die, even though he was a very hard man. I have felt sorrier for him these last days than I ever did while we were married. I would like to be like other widows; just to be alone, and to remember the nicest days I spent with him, and that we did have some friendly moments, and cry. But I can’t do it! The police have made it all into a terrifying, grotesque, ugly, sickening farce. Oh, I am afraid, afraid of something frightful and nameless, even though at the same time, I cannot make myself really believe that anything dreadful can actually happen to
me
. The fear is unreal, but it is awful; I cannot sleep nights.’

She flung herself on the grass and covered her face with her hands. Her emotions are so very near the surface. Like a child, she passes easily and instantaneously from one extreme to the other. I settled on the grass near her, meditatively chewing a thick blade of grass with little seeds sprouting from the top of it, and let a moment pass before trying to speak in a calm and distracting manner, belying the tension her words aroused in me.

‘There is a true murderer somewhere, and the police will look for him. If they only had some clear idea of where to start,’ (an image of the Haverhill station flashed through my mind), ‘they would not think about you even for a moment, I am sure. Oh, Sylvia, do you not know anything, anything at all, that might help them in their search? Anything at all that can lead to the truth?’

‘
I
don’t know anything! And if I did, why should I tell them? I hate them!’ she said sulkily.

To save your life, you silly girl,
I thought, but did not say it. Instead, I chose to use conventional words of morality and wisdom, which seemed to me to be more reassuring. ‘Because you, also, need to know the truth about how your husband died,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s as though it would be necessary to set his spirit at rest. Something would remain angry and unsolved inside you, wouldn’t it, if you were never to know?’

‘No!’ she cried, almost choking with emotion, ‘I would prefer it, I think – never, never to know! Oh, Vanessa, I don’t want to know! Just think how horrible, if the person is found and … tried, and
hanged
. Oh, I would feel so sick and guilty – I pray that it will never happen!’

This reaction surprised me. I felt a little stab of worry.

‘Why guilty?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps the murderer is some angry victim of Mr Granger’s business practices, or even just some passing tramp.’

‘Yes,’ she said quickly. ‘Yes, of course … and yet, I would feel guilty of a life … why? I … I …’ Her voice trailed off, but I felt as though her unspoken words rang in the air:
I wished he were dead.
She withdrew into herself in sulky darkness and became stubbornly silent. I began to chatter in order to tempt her to emerge from her shell. ‘It is natural to have such black thoughts in your difficult situation,’ I told her reassuringly. ‘There is something terribly unsettling about a situation which is neither solved nor unsolved. I say it is not unsolved because somewhere, there is one person who knows the truth. My mathematical friends talked to me lately about a mathematical problem like that. Most mathematical
problems are either already solved or not yet solved, but this particular one is special in that it is somehow neither; the seventeenth-century originator of the problem claimed in writing that he had a most wonderful solution, but it has been lost, and no one has ever been able to rediscover it.’

‘Why, didn’t he write it down, the silly man?’ she said, lifting her head a little reluctantly.

‘The solution struck him while reading a book, and he scribbled the result in the margin – but the margin was too narrow to contain the whole proof! It makes the problem a very odd one, for instead of simply trying to solve it, people are forever trying to discover what the lost proof might have been. I have a friend who is making his life’s work out of it – that Mr Korneck who was here a few days ago. I do hope he succeeds.’

‘Oh, the ponderous Prussian? He seemed to be rather sweet on Mother, didn’t he?’ she said, smiling. Then she frowned. ‘I used to think George was sweet on Mother when I was a girl. No one could have been more surprised than I was when he asked to marry
me
– except Mother herself, perhaps.’

‘What did you think, when that happened?’ I asked, a little tentatively, for we seemed to be returning to dangerous ground again – ground involving suffering, and perhaps feelings of shame or humiliation which people will not easily admit to. But the need to speak out, now that she had once begun, appeared to be too strong to resist.

‘I thought he was old,’ she answered abruptly. ‘I thought I was too young, and I didn’t want to marry at all. But
Mother convinced me that it was a good idea. If I married George, we would have no more worries about money, and about the house. The house was falling into ruin; George helped Mother with it after we married. Mother would be destroyed if she had to abandon the house. I used to love it dearly, too; all the delightful memories of my childhood are here.’

‘It is exceptionally lovely and charming,’ I agreed. ‘Do you not still feel deeply attached to it?’

‘No, I have changed. Marriage changed me. I think I came to feel that the price to pay was too great, that no house can be worth such a price, and now I am weary of the whole thing, and would see it sold or even abandoned without much regret. I let Mother convince me at the time – I felt she was staking her whole life on it … and … I felt something else, I think. I’ve never said this to anyone before; not even to myself, perhaps. But I’m sure Mother had thought that George would perhaps some day propose to her. He was always about the house, you know; he was much more with Mother than with me. I don’t know if she was disappointed when he asked for me, or surprised – or perhaps, they planned it all together. How little I know her, even now! She knows me much better than I know her. She always seems to obtain what she wants from me. She never said a word to me about the marriage that was not perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable and justified, but thinking back, it’s as though I dimly felt an echo of some terrible despair, as though if I let her down by refusing, some extraordinary calamity would descend upon us all.
I turned away from that fearful thing. I was afraid to see more of it, so I accepted what she wanted. It was as though we worked together to keep a great, ferocious black bear locked into a dark cage where no one could see it; I saw it so little that I had no clear idea what it looked like, yet somehow I knew it was there, and that Mother knew it well. How badly I am expressing everything!’

‘No, it is extraordinarily well expressed,’ I answered quickly. ‘I realise as you speak how little people ever allow themselves to talk about anything. How rare it is, for instance, for anyone to give a picture of their marriage which is anything other than perfectly rosy.’

‘Rosy! I would have to lie, indeed, if I could give even the slightest tinge of rosiness to the two years I spent with George. I didn’t treat him well, I didn’t, I couldn’t. Oh, Vanessa – I can say it now – I couldn’t bear him! I felt a terrible aversion to him, and he saw it clearly, although I never said it in words, of course. He was very angry – I believe that perhaps he even suffered, if only in his pride, but he was such a hard man, used to having his own way in everything, that I could never feel sorry for him. If only I could have, perhaps I would have changed. He never stopped exerting a great ceaseless pressure on me; that was the way he was in all things, in his life, in his business. He built slowly, without haste, pushing inexorably in the direction he wanted. It was unbearable to see him, sometimes. It’s against nature to be so!’

‘What did he exert pressure about?’ I asked naively.

‘To get what he wanted, always that. And from me, he wanted – oh, he wanted to own me,’ she answered, blushing
slightly, and fell silent. Then, after a pause, she continued, ‘It was strange; he succeeded in everything sooner or later, and perhaps he would even have succeeded in that. I reasoned with myself that he probably would, sooner or later. And yet, somehow, he couldn’t really touch me. I didn’t have to resist him; I didn’t need any strength of will, I was just myself, and somehow, that was enough. He said I was cold, but he was wrong. I’m not cold. But he repelled me. In the last months he was very angry with me, he even threatened me with things … I was frightened, and yet not really frightened. It was strange; I really felt that he couldn’t touch me. And yet, perhaps he would have, in the end. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘No,’ I agreed, although in my mind, I wondered at Sylvia’s natural preference not to think about whatever troubled her, rather than to make any attempt to master it. ‘You did not deserve such a marriage, no one does. It was a great mistake to accept him – and for him, a great mistake not to see what made you accept.’

‘Oh, he saw how things were; I never hid anything. But he believed he could overcome everything. Men always do.’

‘Oh, Sylvia, I’m sure they don’t, not always! All marriages are not like that! You are so young; you will fall in love, and marry again.’

‘No!’ she replied with emphasis. There was a strange light in her eyes. ‘I’ll never marry again, that’s as certain as the fact that I’ll die one day!’