The Shrouded Walls (21 page)

My limbs seemed to freeze.

A shape, muffled in some long pale garment, had emerged noiselessly from the dark passage and was crossing the landing to the stairs. Presently it reached the hall and disappeared. From far away came the faint click of a door opening and closing.

I wondered where it had gone, but dared not speak for fear of breaking that immense silence. We went on waiting. And then at last the door opened far away and closed again and the next moment the pale shape emerged into the hall and came silently up the stairs towards us.

I might have been carved out of stone. My limbs were quite still and the only moving organ in my body was my heart which seemed to be banging against my lungs with an alarming intensity. I was aware only of thinking: this is a murderer walking to meet his victim. And; I am the person he intends to kill.

The figure reached the landing. There was nothing then except the shallowness of our breaths as we waited motionless by the slightly parted curtains.
A moment later the shape had passed us and had begun to move down the corridor towards our rooms. It carried a gun, one of the guns used for shooting game, a gun such as the one which had killed Robert Brandson.

“Follow me,” Axel’s order was hardly louder than an unspoken thought. “But not a sound.”

He moved forward noiselessly.

The door of our apartments was open. I saw a flicker of white enter the bedroom and for a moment to obscure the light of the single lamp burning by the window. Someone seemed to be asleep in the bed, but the light was uncertain, a mere dim glow from the table several feet away. And then as I watched, the figure in white raised the butt of the gun and began to bludgeon the shapeless form in the bed.

My hand flew to my mouth, but even as I stood still in horror I saw the door of the dressing room open slowly, and as Axel reached the threshold Charles Sherman stepped out to stand opposite him across the room.

The white figure with the gun ceased the bludgeoning, having no doubt realized as suddenly as I did that the figure in the bed was an illusion, a clever trap.

There was a moment when time ceased and the scene became a tableau. Then at last: “So it was you who killed my father, Alice,” said Axel, appalled.

She did not scream.

All I remember now is the great stillness, the silence as if the whole house were suffocated by the shrouds of the mist outside. Even when Alice dropped the gun and began to move, she made no noise but seemed rather to glide across the floor, her white robe floating with an eerie grace so that it seemed for one bizarre moment that she was a ghost, a mere evil spirit seen on Hallowe’en. The gun fell softly onto the bed and made no sound.

Both men stepped forward simultaneously, but Alice was too quick for them; as I watched I saw her hand flash out towards the dresser, grasp a small phial which stood forgotten among the ornaments and wrench off the cap with a quick twist of her strong fingers before raising the phial to her lips.

It was the potion Dame Joan had given me, the potion overlooked by both Axel and myself in the distraction of Alexander’s arrival the night before.

Alice drank every drop. Even as Axel shouted her name and sprang fo
r
ward to stop her she had flung the empty phial in the grate, and after that there was nothing any of us could do except stare at her in shocked disbelief as she smiled back into our eyes, then the poison gripped her like a vice and she fell screaming towards the death which she had first intended for me.

I had never heard a human being give such screams or twist her body into such contorted shapes. I stood watching, transfixed with horror, unable to move; and then suddenly all the world heeled over into a bottomless chasm and I did not have to watch her any more.

For the first time in my life I fainted.

Eight

“She substituted that potion, of course,” said Axel. “Dame Joan wouldn’t have given you poison without Alice egging her on, and Alice did not even know you intended to see her mother that day. But later when her mother told her about the potion Alice must have seen a chance to dispose of you and so she substituted a jar of poison. Then when you apparently ignored the potion and remained alive she must have decided to club you to death by force—especially after she had heard the contents of the confiscated letter you wrote to Alexander and knew you believed Mary and were convinced Rodric was innocent of the crime. You were a great danger—not so much to her, but to Vere who was a more obvious suspect. So you had to be killed, quickly, before you could make any further attempts to display your suspicions to the world.”

It was on the afternoon of the next day. We were in our own private sitting room and outside beyond the window a pale November sun was shining across the sweeping expanse of the Marsh. Downstairs Alice was laid out in the horrible yellow morning room where Mary had lain before her burial, and Vere was still shut in the room with his wife as if his poor grieving presence could somehow bring her back to him from beyond the grave.

“I ought to have realized that Alice, not Vere, was the murderer,” I said. “If your father was killed because he was threatening to expose Vere’s association with Delancey’s smuggling, Vere could hardly have killed him because he didn’t know his father had found out the truth. When I overheard that conversation between Vere and Alice it was Alice, not Vere, who knew that Rodric had denied being involved with Delancey and had accused Vere of being the guilty one, and Alice who knew that Mr. Brandson more than half believed Rodric despite his earlier conviction that Rodric was guilty. I suppose that after Alice dragged Mary out of the saloon and pretended to go to the nursery to see the children, she must have slipped back to the saloon to eavesdrop on the entire quarrel. Then she would have realized that to save Vere from serious trouble she would have to kill Mr. Brandson before he could act on his suspicions, and then would have to try to make a scapegoat of Rodric.”

“She succeeded very well in some respects,” Axel observed wryly. “Rodric had left his gun in the library after the quarrel; the weapon—the perfect weapon for involving Rodric—was waiting for her as soon as she herself entered the library. When Rodric left, my father went upstairs to talk to Esther to discover how much she knew, and while he was gone Alice must have entered the library from the saloon, picked up the gun and waited for him to return. Perhaps she waited behind the door and struck him as he came into the room ... I suppose it was this use of force that made me think of the act as a man’s crime. I never stopped to consider that Alice with her broad shoulders and strong arms was physically quite capable of committing the murder.”

I was piecing together the remaining fragments of information in my mind. “Ned must have come into the hall from the stables soon after that,” I reflected. “He told me he knocked on the library door and received no reply. By that time Mary would already have returned to the drawing room after running after Rodric to the stables
...
Esther was upstairs in her apartments, and—” I stopped, blushed, looked away.

“—and my father found me with her when he stormed upstairs to see her after his quarrel with Rodric.” I sensed he too was looking away. He was standing very still, as if absorbed with the pain of memory. “I’ve never felt so ashamed in all my life,” he said after a pause. “It certainly served to bring me to my senses with a jolt, but then even before I could begin to apologize to my father and beg his forgiveness he was murdered.”

The bitterness and regret in his voice was unmistakable. In an effort to turn to some other aspect of the situation I said in a rush: “Axel, what
did
happen to Rodric? I suppose Alice really must have killed him?”

“Yes, of course she did. I would assume he returned to the house—strictly against my advice, of course, but then he always was reckless—to confront Vere, whom he suspected, and try to force the truth out of him. He probably went to Vere’s apartments but found not Vere, as he had hoped, but Alice, who was unable to resist the temptation to kill him to preserve the fiction that Rodric was a murderer who had met his just end in the Marsh. After all, how much more convenient to have a corpse for a scapegoat than a live protesting innocent man! I presume she caught him unawares and stunned him; he did not suspect her, remember, and so wouldn’t have been anticipating such a thing.”

“But what did she do with his body?”

“I wondered about that for a long time. In the end I made a thorough search of the attics and found a leather bag which I had often seen Alice use to take presents from Haraldsford to her mother. I wondered why Alice no longer used it, and then on examining it I saw that the interior was bloodstained. After searching the attic further I found an old meat cleaver from the kitchens under a loose board in the floor and I began to grasp what had happened. Even then I still didn’t think that Alice had dismembered the body and taken it piece by piece to be buried in her mother’s patch of land at Haraldsford; I suppose I didn’t think a woman could be capable of such a gruesome task. I merely thought Vere had found the discarded bag in the attic and used it to convey the dismembered body to some remote section of the Marsh. When I showed the cleaver and bag to Charles Sherman yesterday it didn’t occur to him either that anyone but Vere could have been responsible. But we underestimated Alice.”

“So Rodric’s body
...
” I recoiled from the idea.

“
It may not be buried in Dame Joan’s herb patch, but I shall most certainly suggest to the authorities that they look there before assuming the body to be buried in the Marsh. No matter how many journeys Alice made to her mother’s cottage, her visits would never have given rise to suspicion. What more natural than that she should call on her mother? It would have been the easiest way for her.”

I shuddered.

“Of course Alice was also responsible for Mary’s death, I think there can be no doubt of that. It seems reasonable to assume that she obtained a phial of poison from her mother whom she visited with the child after church that morning, and then later put the contents of the phial in Mary’s cup of tea. I should have remembered that it was Alice who suggested having tea after dinner, and it was Alice who left the room in person to order the tea, ostensibly to spare the servants on a Sunday but in reality no doubt to get the phial from her room. And I should have remembered too that it was Alice who poured out the tea when it arrived. But I didn’t remember. I was too busy suspecting Vere.”

“I wonder if Vere read my letter which you left in the library to trap him,” I said. “I suppose he did read it and then went straight to tell Alice and to ask what he should do.”

“He must have done,” Axel agreed, “for Alice was a country girl—she could barely read and could only write the most elementary words which she needed in maintaining the household accounts.”

“Then perhaps Vere did realize that she was guilty—perhaps they agreed together that I should be killed.”

“No, I’m certain Vere wasn’t involved to that extent. I’ve talked to him, and I’m convinced of his innocence. Alice never made him an accomplice because she was too busy trying to protect him: from my father, from Rodric, from Mary, and finally from you.” He stood up and moved over to the window to stare out over the Marsh before adding abruptly: “I didn’t think you’d be in any danger at all when I brought you to Haraldsdyke.” He was facing me again, moving back towards me. “I still think you wouldn’t have been in any danger if you had been accustomed to behaving as a conventional young girl might be expected to behave, but since you have this remarkable talent for seeking all possible danger and running headlong towards it—”

I laughed at this. “No, Axel, that’s not fair! I was only puzzled and curious.”

“You were also a constant source of anxiety to me, my dear,” he retorted. “However, be that as it may ... by the way, how exactly did you manage to escape from that locked room? When I found you in the attic with Charles Sherman, I very nearly killed you myself out of sheer exasperation!”

I described my escape meekly.

“You amaze me,” he said, and he was not angry any more, I noticed to my relief, only amused. “I can see I shall never be able to place you safely under lock and key again.”

“I hope,” I said, “that the need to do so will never arise.”

He laughed, caressed my cheek with his finger and leaned forward to brush my lips with his own.

“Am I forgiven for my multitude of deceptions and evasions and, I very much fear, for frightening you on more than one occasion?”

“You leave me no alternative,” I said demurely, determined to make him endure the pangs of conscience for as long as possible. “Besides, why didn’t you trust me?”

“Did you trust me?” he said, and he was serious now, the amusement gone. “Wasn’t I merely a stranger to you? Didn’t you consider yourself merely bound to me by ties
born
of convenience? Can you honestly tell me you loved me enough to merit a confidence of such magnitude?”

I could not look at him. I fingered his hand which rested on mine and stared down at the carpet. “Did you expect me to love you straight away?” I said painfully. “You didn’t love me. I was a mere child to you. And still seem so, no doubt.”

His hand covered mine now and closed upon it. “Your only childishness lies in your lack of perception,” he said. “If you were older you would have perceived all too clearly that from the beginning I found you exceedingly attractive. However, I tried to hold myself apart from you as often as possible because I sensed from your questions before our marriage that you disliked the idea of extreme intimacy. It was, after all, a marriage of convenience, and although you were benefiting to a certain extent by consenting to it, I was certainly benefiting just as much from your consent and I wanted to make things as pleasant for you as possible, at least for a time.”

I remembered my tears at Claybury Park, my loneliness and distress.

“I merely thought you didn’t care.”

“I cared more than I would ever have dreamed possible,” he said, “and soon came to care even more than that. When I found you with Ned at Rye,
I knew I cared more than I had ever cared for anyone in my life before. The bitter part—the ironic part—was that having for the first time in my life experienced this depth of emotion, I found it increasingly evident that you were not attracted to me. I seemed to fancy you looked too long and often at Ned, and then there was that business of the potion—”

I was consumed with shame. My cheeks seemed to be afire. “Did you see me leave Dame Joan’s cottage?”

“Yes, and knew at once why you had gone there.”

I stared miserably down at his hand clasped tightly in mine.

“My dear, if you really feel—”

“I feel nothing,” I said rapidly, wanting only to repair the harm I had done. “It’s all past now—I never want to see another potion again.”

He was silent, wondering, I suppose, if this meant that I cared a little or was merely recoiling from the sordidness of the incident and my narrow escape from death by poisoning.

“It was only because I was frightened,” I said. “Frightened of you, frightened of the unknown, frightened of the world. But that’s all gone now. I’m not frightened any more.”

He was silent still, but his hand relaxed a little. I looked up and saw his withdrawn expression and longed to smooth it from his eyes.

“I wish we could go away,” I said impulsively. “I wish we didn’t have to stay here. I’m sure I shall never sleep soundly in our bedroom again for fear of seeing Alice’s ghost. And the house is so gloomy and oppressive when winter closes in and the mist thickens over the Marsh. I hate it.”

“I hate it too,” he said frankly to my astonishment. “I always did. I never intended to stay here long—the only reason for my return was to clear Rodric’s name and bring my father’s murderer to justice. After that I intended to give up the estate by deed of gift to Vere’s son Stephen and appoint Vere and the Sherman brothers trustees until the boy comes of age. That will mean Vere can live and work on the estate he loves while the Shermans can curb his more extravagant tendencies. And Vere will be happy in the knowledge that the estate will belong to his son and heir outright. I thought that was the best solution.”

“Oh yes indeed!” I tried not to sound too pleased. Stifling my immense relief at the prospect of escape from Haraldsdyke and life in the country I added hesitantly: “But where will we ourselves go? What is to happen to us?”

He smiled at me and I saw he knew what I was thinking. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” he said softly, “that you’re much too beautiful to be incarcerated in the depths of the country where no one can see you. I think
I’ll take you to my town house in Vienna, my dear, to the city I love best in all the world, and you shall make a sparkling, glittering entrance into Viennese grand society.”

“Well, that’s all very well,” said Alexander plaintively when I told him the news later, “but what about me? I shan’t be able to come and visit you in the holidays.”

“You’ll only be at school for a little longer,” I pointed out, “and after that you shall come and visit us in Vienna.”

“But Vienna
...
well, I mean, it’s rather foreign territory, isn’t it? Are you sure you’ll be all right?”