In Pale Battalions (18 page)

“You have not asked the question most people put to me.”

“Which is?”

“Am I the woman in the picture?” She glanced towards me, capturing and confronting the direction of my gaze.

“And are you?”

“What do you think, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know.”

“She is beautiful, is she not? And cruel also. Is that how my husband thought of me? Is that how you think of me?”

I looked at her in the long suspension of an absent smile. “It might be.”

She clicked her tongue in teasing mockery. “You disappoint me.

I had expected you to be more decisive.” She tossed back her head and walked away towards the window. I watched her go, saw the material of the gown flex and slide around her hips as she moved, heard the faint hiss of the mobile fabric slip into my furtive mind and knew my indecision to be more appalling than she could guess.

She stopped between the window and the bedroom door and looked back at me. “What do you know of me, Lieutenant?”

I grasped at a chance to restore my dignity. “More than you might think, your ladyship.”

She smiled. “That I doubt. The loose wife of an elderly hus

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band throwing herself shamelessly at every young man who crosses her threshold. Isn’t that how it is?”

“That is for you to say.”

“But you have been saying what you thought about it all the time you’ve been here—to my husband, to Leonora, to that dotard Charter. Why stop now?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come, come. Why not admit it? You’ve been taken in by the false purity of Leonora and the hallowed memory of John’s mother: the whole sham of family honour we practise here.”

“Is it a sham?”

“What do you think? The ghost of that woman drags her good works round this house till I’m sick of the sound of her name. And what did those works amount to? What you call shameless in me I call honest.”

Her bosom was heaving with controlled anger at all the reasons why she stood condemned, but did she know how right she was?

Did she know the truth about Leonora? I dared not ask. I could only fend off my sense of guilt with an accusation of my own. “I know all about you and Mompesson, Lady Powerstock. If there’s corruption in this house, it’s in this room.” She laughed. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Then I was angry. I advanced across the room towards her. “I’m here at your invitation.” I stopped a few feet from her.

“No. You’re here to prove you’re more than just a peeping Tom, more than just a carrier of tales.”

“Then why did you ask me?”

“To see if you’re half the man Ralph Mompesson is.”

She stood between me and the light, between me and reason.

Before I knew what I was doing, I had taken a step towards her and raised my hand to strike. But before I could strike, the gloating defiance in her eyes had stopped me. My hand fell to her shoulder, where the silken gown curved around her neck. It was too much—too lusciously late—for me to refrain. I slipped my hand inside the gown and cupped the large, firm breast beneath in my palm. I felt the nipple stiffen between my fingers. Then Olivia smiled and loos-ened the sash at her waist. The gown fell open: she was naked beneath. I saw my own hand fastened on her left breast and knew the 120

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horror I felt could not eclipse the pleasure I took from her offered flesh. She knew it too: the knowledge aroused her more, I sensed, than my touch ever could.

“Perhaps, after all,” she said softly, “I’ve underestimated you.

Perhaps you’re more than half a man.”

“We’re going to have to find that out,” I replied, my voice husky with nervous anticipation. I took my hand from her breast and slipped the gown off her left shoulder. The material glided, with fashioned leisure, round her back and, as she straightened her right arm, slid to the floor. She stood naked before me, the mature curves and lingering bloom of her body drawing me past the last moment when I might have called a halt.

“Then follow me.” She spoke the words softly: only her smile revealed the pleasure she took from being able to command me.

She turned away and pushed open the door to the adjoining room: I could see the bed within, drawn back in readiness, as I should have known it would be. But I spared the fact little thought. My mind feasted instead on the vision it could not resist: Olivia Powerstock, stripping my desires barer than her own unfettered flesh, padding slowly across the carpet away from me towards the bed where I would certainly follow.

She reached the bed, propped one knee on the coverlet and looked back at me. On her face was the expression she had worn in Bartholomew’s picture, the picture I understood now for the first time. The knowledge of her baseness was not enough. Still our minds succumbed—and our hands reached out to trace—the curving line of her propped thigh and proffered hip and half-turned back and profiled breast. I moved towards her.

As I crossed the threshold, a reflection of the room behind me slid across my gaze in the cheval-glass by the window. It was no more than a movement, no more than a passing shape, in the mirror’s image, but yet wrong, at odds with what it should have been. I stopped in my tracks, watched for the split-second it took to resolve into a clear, discordant vision. The door from the passage—which I had certainly closed—stood open. And in its portal, framed and stern and staring straight at me, was Hallows. Only a flash, only a snapshot, of what might have been. Yet there he was. Captain the Honourable John Hallows, my dead friend, my forever absent host, stood watching me, expressionless but all-seeing.

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I cried out and wheeled round. There was nothing. There was nobody. The door was closed—or closing. Who could say the handle was not still faintly stirring? Not I. Not then. I’d dreamed vividly and violently enough of the war to know what tricks the mind could play, yet it had seemed, however momentary, a dreadful certainty that he was watching me and seeing what I was afraid to confront in myself.

I raced across the outer room and flung the door open. There was nobody there, no trace or sound in the passage that might have been a person. I closed the door and leant against it, feeling my heart pound and sweat start out on my forehead. The vision had told me what my reaction confirmed: in the house that had once been his home, I was Hallows’s friend beyond any other tie. For me to give in to the senses’ snares of that treacherous place was to betray him as well as myself.

“What’s the matter with you?” Olivia came out of the bedroom behind me, her face as hard as her voice, sternly fastening a hastily gathered robe about her waist.

“I can’t . . .” I looked towards her but could not continue. The anger in her expression was moving swiftly towards contempt. She had seen nothing—beyond a sudden loss of nerve. I tried again. “I can’t . . . I can’t stay.”

There was nothing to do but flee. I turned away from her withering look, opened the door and ran blindly down the passage.

I needed a drink—badly. I went down to the drawing room and poured myself a large Scotch. It didn’t help much. Nor did a walk in the garden. The clouds were bunching and darkening again, presaging another stormy night. When I saw Cheriton heading towards me across the park, it made up my mind to return to the house.

I entered by the conservatory, hoping to see nobody, but, as I made my way along the corridor past the billiards room, Thorley hailed me through the open door.

“Fancy a frame, Franklin?” he asked. He was pacing around the table, potting balls aimlessly.

I stepped inside the room. “Sorry. Can’t stop.”

He chuckled grimly. “Know what you mean.” He missed a corner pocket. “Know just what you mean.”

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“Do you?”

“Oh yes.” He stooped over the cue again, then abruptly straightened up. “Hear that?”

I listened. Faintly, through the high, blind-hung windows of the room, came the noise of a car engine. I knew at once it was Mompesson.

Thorley smiled and slammed the cue into the rack on the wall.

“It’s our American friend. Time I made myself scarce.” He paused as he reached where I was standing by the door. “I don’t suppose . . .

No. Forget it.” He walked quickly out.

I trailed after him and made for the back stairs. I had no wish to meet Mompesson. Already, I could hear a door slamming somewhere and Lady Powerstock trilling a greeting. Less than an hour before, she’d been . . . But my mind staved off the thought. What was the good of it? She’d taken from me my self-respect, but not yet all my honour.

I kept to my room till seven o’clock, wondering whether to obey Leonora’s note or just quit that benighted house. The thought was a delusion: I knew all along that I would stay long enough to take up the veiled offer of a kind of truth. When the clock struck seven, the key was in my hand.

I made my way to the wing of the house, confident in my assumption that Olivia would be downstairs, entertaining Mompesson over aperitifs: the coast was clear. I don’t know what I expected to find in the observatory. I think I had no idea. I think speculation had been erased by experience. Perhaps I hoped against hope that Leonora would have left evidence to exonerate herself; even, in some absurd way, to exonerate me.

I climbed the stairs in silence, reached the door and slid the key into the lock. And the door creaked slowly open on its hinges: it wasn’t locked at all.

Three steps led up to the observatory proper: a tall, narrow, hexagonal room with full-length windows beneath the copper roof that supported the weather-vane. An elegant brass telescope stood in the centre by a low stool. Otherwise, there was a cupboard, a small square table and a battered armchair: nothing beyond these sparse furnishings and scattered charts and pencil stubs to offset the

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impression of neglect that hung in the musty air. Not that the contents were what made the place, so much as the panorama it commanded, riding like a ship’s look-out on the back of the house and facing the surrounding fields and hills while the garden and grounds stretched themselves out beneath. Away to the west the setting sun was obscured by banks of cloud. Nearer to hand, I could look across between slender chimneys to rows of windows along the back of the house or down into the garden to see Cheriton still wandering the lawns amidst strewn leaves and rose blossom; the wind twitched at his greatcoat collar and rattled the glass in the observatory window. At night, it would have been a fine cockpit for viewing the stars. Now, at twilight, it was ideal only for studying Meongate.

And that—I began to think—was why Leonora had named such a time.

I pondered her note. “If you wish to understand what is happening in this house . . .” Where was understanding to be found in an abandoned observatory? It seemed to make no sense.

Then I looked at the telescope. Strangely, the glass was not capped. Stranger still, it was not trained on the sky, but angled down towards the house itself. I touched the shaft: it had been locked in position.

I leant forward and looked through the eyepiece. Sure enough, the telescope had been focused—and then locked—on one of the windows at the rear of the house on the upper floor. I peered closer.

It was Mompesson’s room. He stood by the window, in a dark dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and gazing out at the garden, for all the world like a man relaxing after a bath. This, I told myself, could not be all I had been brought there to see.

It wasn’t. He looked round suddenly and seemed to say something, either to somebody else in the room I couldn’t see or to somebody who had knocked at the door. Then he turned back and ground out his cigarette in an ashtray on the windowsill: the gesture seemed exaggerated, somehow symbolic, as if for the benefit of another.

He propped himself against the sill and looked back into the room. I could see his lips moving, but still there was no glimpse of his interlocutor. The angle of the view meant I could only see about a quarter of the room; again, I questioned what the telescope had been trained on. Why Mompesson’s window? Elaborate proof of 124

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Lady Powerstock’s infidelity? If so, it was wasted on me and, besides, Mompesson might at any moment join his companion in the obscured remainder of the room. The likelihood was that I would soon be looking at an unattended window.

As if to confirm this would be so, Mompesson pushed himself off from the sill and walked towards the centre of the room. But his companion came to meet him before he had gone far—and it wasn’t Lady Powerstock. Leonora, dressed for dinner in a black evening gown, came into my view. She had known precisely when I should go to the observatory because she had planned what it was that I would see there. Mompesson paused by her right shoulder and took her arm as if to lead her elsewhere, but she stayed where she was and looked directly up towards me. She could not see me, of course, but she knew that I was there. And in her face I could imagine I read the message: “Now you have your answer.” Mompesson jerked at her arm—painfully, to judge by her expression—yet still she did not move. He turned and spoke to her and she replied without looking at him. Her gaze was still to the window, angled fixedly towards me.

Mompesson stood behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders with no sign of gentleness. Again, there was an exchange of words. Then he began to unbutton the back of her dress, slowly, with an air of leisure, almost of familiarity. When he’d finished, he tugged the garment free at either shoulder. Leonora stood still and expressionless as it fell in folds about her feet, yet her gaze remained fixed in my direction.

What followed was frightening in its very inevitability, in its involvement of me—a mere observer—as a kind of participant.