Darkwater (13 page)

‘Then will you kiss us good night, Cousin Fanny?’ Marcus asked exhaustedly.

‘Of course I will. Don’t I always? Come, Nolly. Into bed with you. You shall have your doll when Ching Mei comes.’

‘Will you watch for her, Cousin Fanny?’

‘No one can see anything in that fog.’ Fanny briskly twitched the curtain into place. ‘Dora, put some more coal on the fire. I’ll sit beside it until the children fall asleep.’

‘Will you blow out our candles, Cousin Fanny?’ Nolly was coming reluctantly to the bedside.

‘When you’re asleep. Not before. I promise.’

‘Will Ching Mei be afraid in the dark?’

Fanny was tucking Marcus in. She said, ‘Ching Mei did a very brave thing coming to England with you. I don’t think she’ll be afraid of a little dark.’ She added offhandedly, ‘Nolly, do you remember leaving your doll in the pagoda?’

‘No, I didn’t leave her there. I had her under my arm all the time. Then we were running up to the house. At least—I think I had her.’

‘Then you’re not sure, so she is down there. Well, she’ll soon be rescued. Dora, you may go now. I’ll be here until Ching Mei gets back.’

Marcus was asleep almost instantly. Fifteen minutes later, just as Fanny was about to blow out the candles, Nolly said sleepily. ‘I hope those dogs didn’t get my doll.’

‘Dogs?’

‘The ones we heard barking. Marcus said they were wolves. Isn’t he silly! Wolves!’

Nolly, too, was sleep, her lashes long and dark on her white cheeks. Neither child stirred when Aunt Louisa came to the door to whisper stridently, ‘Fanny! Your uncle says it’s no use trying to search any more in the dark. He says either the woman will come back, or she’s run away.’

‘Run away!’ Fanny exclaimed in astonishment. ‘She wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing!’

Aunt Louisa was a shadow in the doorway, an enormous domineering bossy shadow.

‘I don’t see how you can claim to know, Fanny, any more than the rest of us how the oriental mind works. I myself have never trusted the woman. I’m perfectly sure she has understood every word we have said. So is your uncle. Now, pray don’t spoil the children by sitting there all night.’

Fanny started up.

‘But is that all that’s to be done about Ching Mei? With a prisoner at large, too.’

‘My dear girl, what do you suggest? That we start dragging the lake in pitch darkness? You may sit up and listen for her if you choose. I for one, am going to bed.’

Aunt Louisa probably didn’t mean to be callous. She just didn’t attach much importance to the safety of one small silent suspicious foreigner, and a servant at that. Uncle Edgar, whose kindness always had a practical element, would be the same. George would think only of discharging his rifle at shadows. So it was left for Fanny to put on her cloak and her outdoor shoes and grope her way across the terrace, past the rose garden, and down the path to the lake.

The wind had dropped. There wasn’t a sound until suddenly the tall outlandish shape of the pagoda loomed up out of the fog and the thin intermittent tinkle of the scarcely-swayed windbells sounded.

She had brought matches. She struck them, one after another, as she went into the pagoda and saw the bamboo chairs and the table where, so long ago, they had had the light-hearted tea party.

She called softly, ‘Ching Mei! It’s me, Fanny. Answer me, if you can.’

The mist formed a halo round the tiny flare of the match. On the lake something made a muted splash. The bells tinkled again, very faintly. There was no other sound, no movement.

Uncle Edgar had been right. There was no use in trying to search in the dark. Ching Mei had obviously strayed out of her way and would shelter beneath a bush until daylight. It was cold, but not dangerously so. She shouldn’t come to any harm.

Reassuring herself with those thoughts, Fanny made her way towards the house. Just beyond the rhododendron bank someone sprang on her, holding her fiercely.

‘There you are at last, you foreign devil!’

‘George! George, let me go at once!’

George’s alarmingly strong hands pressed her head back. He was trying to see her face.

‘George, it’s me! Fanny!’ It was as well she had recognised his voice or she would have been scared out of her wits.

‘Fanny!’ He loosened his hold. The hard substance pressing into her side was his sword, sheathed, thank goodness. Had he had that naked in his hand he could have run her through.

‘I thought you were one of the foreign devils.’

‘Foreign devils?’

‘Russkys, Chinese, what’s the difference? Don’t you know the dark isn’t safe?’

‘I came out to look for Ching Mei. I haven’t been able to find her. Take me back to the house.’

‘Not for a minute, Fanny.’ His arm had tightened round her again. He was pushing the hood of her cape back from her face. ‘I never have the chance to get you alone like this.’

He had kissed her before she could turn her face away, a hard bruising greedy kiss that filled her first with revulsion, then with furious anger. It was the first time she had been kissed. Her first kiss, and it had to be like this! Her eyes stung with angry tears. She wrenched herself free and resisting an impulse to beat and claw at George, she made herself stand still and face him in the darkness.

‘George Davenport, if ever you dare to do that again, if ever you dare—’

‘I told you the dark wasn’t safe,’ George muttered, but the fire had gone out of his voice. Inevitably, the anger in Fanny died, too. She knew how he would look if she could see him, shamefaced, bewildered, sulky, his slowed brain trying to understand the violence that leapt in him.

He wasn’t safe, Fanny was thinking uneasily. And yet the inevitable pity was filling her. It wasn’t his fault that he had become like this. Somehow one had to have patience until he got better.

‘I’m sorry if I hurt you, Fanny. Truly, Fanny, I wouldn’t hurt you.’

‘I’m telling you, George, if ever you do that again I believe I could almost kill you.’

‘But you wouldn’t, would you, Fanny. You only kill enemies, not friends. So stay my friend, Fanny, and you’ll be safe.’

Back in her room, Fanny found Nolly’s Chinese doll lying face downwards on her bed. She stared at it in stupefaction. Had she absent-mindedly put it there herself? Or had Nolly forgetfully dropped it? Anyway, there it was, the culprit.

It was a very small and innocent toy to have caused the death of one old Chinese woman.

F
OR THE GARDENER’S BOY
found her in the morning lying among the water-lilies in scarcely eighteen inches of water. She had been battered about the head. Whether she had been drowned, or had died of those brutal blows, it wasn’t possible to say.

But it was clear her death was no accident. There seemed little doubt what had happened. In her search for Nolly’s doll she had encountered the escaped prisoner. He, as Sir Giles Mowatt confirmed, was a desperate and dangerous man. He couldn’t risk the alarm being given, and had attacked his innocent discoverer violently. A stronger person might have survived his blows, but Ching Mei was a small old woman with fragile bones. She had had no chance.

It was all very tragic, and the search for the prisoner was redoubled. All the comings and goings, men on horseback and on foot, kept Nolly and Marcus at the windows, full of interest, and they even seemed to believe Fanny’s story that Ching Mei had suddenly grown too homesick to stay with them. She had crept away quietly last night to catch the train to London, and a clipper ship to China.

‘Will she write to us?’ Nolly asked. ‘She can. I’ve taught her how to write letters.’

‘Then perhaps she will, later.’

‘That means in years and years,’ Nolly said dispassionately, her nose pressed against the window pane. ‘Oh, Marcus, do look at that dog with the white tail. That will be mine. You can have the black one.’

‘No, I want the one with the white tail.’

‘You’re a silly baby, wanting it just because it’s mine. You can have the black one.’

‘I want the white one!’

‘Then very well, you can have the white one, and it’s got great big teeth and it will bite you in half!’

‘Nolly!’ Fanny exclaimed, as Marcus burst into the inevitable loud sobs. ‘That wasn’t very kind. Tell Marcus you’re sorry.’

‘Why should I? He always wants my things. He will have to be careful, Papa says, or he will have no mind of his own.’

It was easy enough to see that Nolly’s quarrelsome mood came from taut nerves, but that didn’t make the task of restoring peace any easier. The child was uncannily intuitive. How much did she guess, or know? Her next question froze Fanny’s blood.

‘Cousin Fanny, why didn’t Ching Mei take her sandals?’

‘I expect she did.’

‘She didn’t. Not her best ones. They’re in the wardrobe wrapped in tissue paper. She kept them for feast days and long journeys. That’s why I know she hasn’t gone on a long journey.’

Fanny thought of Ching Mei’s lonely journey, and it was all she could do to answer quietly, ‘Then perhaps one day she’ll come back. In the meantime neither of you must worry because I will take care of you.’

She thought the hideous day would never end. The mist had turned to rain, and this had obliterated any tracks the fugitive might have left.

If he had been this way…Fanny was doing her best to shut out of her mind the episode with George in the dark garden last night. Had she been the first unprotected woman he had sprung on, in his obsession about a foreign enemy?

But surely, surely, what Uncle Edgar, the police, and Sir Giles Mowatt said was true. The prisoner was desperate. In his previous escape from Wandsworth he had bound and gagged a housewife in her kitchen, and stolen bread and half a leg of lamb. There would very likely be more acts of violence in lonely dwellings on the moor before he was recaptured.

One had to believe it was the prisoner who caused Ching Mei’s death.

Fanny realised this even more after she had sought out George in the billiard room, and found him in one of his quiet and contented moods.

‘Hullo, Fanny. Come to have a game with me?’

‘No, I haven’t time. I must stay with the children.’

‘Can’t the servants do that? What about the Chinese—oh, but she met with an accident, didn’t she? I forgot for the moment.’

Were servants really of such little importance to him as human beings, or hadn’t it penetrated his mind that Ching Mei was dead? Watching him place the balls with skill, his handsome face completely absorbed, Fanny was genuinely bewildered.

‘George, you do remember being in the garden last night?’

‘When I bumped into you? Sorry if I scared you. I was only fooling.’

‘
Fooling
!’

‘Lord, Fanny, you don’t think I’d kill a woman, do you? I thought you were the escaped prisoner, until I got my hands on you. Knew then you were a woman—skirts and things.’

‘George!’ Fanny breamed. ‘Ching Mei wore trousers.’

‘What’s that got to do with it? Dash it, Fanny, you don’t think I go about fumbling an oriental!’

The horror in his voice was convincing. He looked so affronted that Fanny almost found the situation comical. She compressed her lips. She found herself longing to laugh, light-heartedly, carelessly, at anything. Laughter seemed a very long way away.

‘No, you save those favours for an English woman,’ she said with asperity. ‘And I won’t have it, George. I told you last night.’

George looked abashed. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Lost my head. Guess the opportunity won’t come again. If it does—can’t promise—’

At this moment it was impossible to imagine George a murderer, he was merely lovesick and embarrassing. But his moods changed, and he was, perhaps conveniently, unable to remember. Sometimes he was still pursuing Russians. Asking him questions got one nowhere at all.

To Amelia, the day had been intolerable. She had had to spend most of it alone, for Mamma was with Papa, talking first to Doctor Bates, and then to the hastily summoned police. Grandmamma, on an occasion like this, was someone to be avoided. She would have been talking about omens and portents, and probably that ghastly bird in the chimney. And Fanny wouldn’t let Amelia come into the nursery, because she had foolishly wept (not for the strange little Chinese woman, but from shock and depression, and curious strung-up state of expectation), and her eyes were still reddened.

‘I won’t have the children upset,’ Fanny had said. ‘They think their amah has gone back to China, but they’re quick enough to guess anything. Anyway, why are you crying?’

Amelia sniffed and mopped at her eyes.

‘Fanny, you’re getting altogether too bossy. Mamma says so, too. And why must you spend all day with the children? I need some companionship as well.’

‘But, Amelia, they’re so little!’

Amelia pouted.

‘Then they don’t understand this terrible thing. I do. I can’t bear to be alone. I keep thinking—’

‘Thinking what?’ Fanny asked curiously, seeing Amelia’s furtive and frightened eyes.

‘That that dreadful man might break into the house. You know—that a curtain might draw back and there he would be.’

‘Oh, Amelia, darling! Hunted people like him don’t come into houses. They hide on the moors, in caves, under hedges. He’ll be miles away by now. Sir Giles says so.’

‘I wonder where,’ said Amelia fearfully.

The day, of course, did end. Even dinner was over. Only Amelia and Lady Arabella had stayed downstairs afterwards. Lady Arabella had fallen asleep by the fire, and Amelia unable to face the thought of her bedroom all alone, stayed at the piano, picking out tunes, singing a little, but only halfheartedly. To cheer herself up, she had put on her best blue silk, and tied blue ribbons in her hair. She had expected Mamma to scold, but no one, not even Papa, had made any comments, or seemed to notice her. It had been a horrible day, and thank heaven it was almost over.

A log fell with a muffled crash in the big fireplace. Lady Arabella didn’t stir. Amelia gave an exclamation of exasperation and bad temper. She brought her fingers down on the keys with a resounding chord, but still Grandmamma, sunk deep in her slumber, didn’t wake. Something made a pecking sound at the window behind her. A bird? A branch of the wisteria climbing the wall? Amelia turned and stared fascinatedly at the drawn curtains.