Fire, Burn! Page 8

  Even as he deposited that burden face-up on the table, between the sets of dim and unsteady flames, he heard another brass key chatter and tremble at a keyhole. The lock snapped shut as Flora turned it—not one second too soon.

  He could hear the double-doors of the ballroom burst open. Though it was a trifle muffled in the locked dining-room, the babble rose so loudly that he could make out no distinguishable word. Afterwards it seemed to swirl down the passage towards the stairs.

  Cheviot went to the far and narrow side of the table. There he faced Flora, whose back was pressed against the door. The sight of a corpse in that dim-lit place seemed to wrench her further towards a snapping point of nerves. Yet she was drawn forward, irresistibly and in spite of herself.

  He did what had to be done. Facing her across the table, weighing the pistol in his hand, he raised his head and looked her in the eyes.

  “Now, Flora,” he said quietly.

  7

  “For Too Much Love Doth Lead—”

  FLORA SHRANK BACK.

  “Now … what?” she asked.

  “There are certain questions to ask you, my dear. Wait!”

  He held up his hand before she could speak. His head had begun to ache, and there was a dull nausea in his throat.

  “Please remember that I shielded you. I would never have reminded you of this, Flora, never once thought of reminding you, if it weren’t to show you can trust me.—In the past, Flora, you and I have been lovers.”

  “Jack! For heaven’s sake! Don’t say it! What if someone should overhear?”

  “Very well. But wait again!” he insisted. “And for God’s sake don’t think me mad or drunk”—here her eyes flickered briefly—“in what I do say. When I first met you tonight, in the carriage at Great Scotland Yard, what did I do?”

  “Jack!”

  “What did I do?”

  Flora tossed her head and turned partly away.

  “You—you put your arms around me, and your head in my lap, and talked a vast d-deal of nonsense. And you said I was a picture out of a book.”

  “Yes. So I thought, at the time.”

  “You—thought?” said Flora, and backed away.

  Through his brain, in a flash, loomed the vivid colours of face and gown in the folio at the Victoria and Albert Museum. “Lady (Flora) Drayton, widow of Sir Arthur Drayton, K.C.B. H. Fourquier, 1827.”

  “Flora, I’m no ladies’ man. I could never even have touched a strange woman unless actually, somewhere at the back of my mind, I knew she was no stranger at all.”

  “You and I? Strangers?”

  “I didn’t say that. All this evening I have had a belief growing to a certainty. Somewhere, maybe in another existence, you and I have been just as intimate as we are today.”

  Then Cheviot made a short, sharp gesture.

  “That’s all,” he said curtly. “I tell you only to explain to myself, as well as you, why I act as I do. But don’t lie to me. This pistol.” He held it up. “How did you come by it?”

  Flora, it was evident, had been through too many changes of mood that night. His new and abrupt tone, striking like a whip, carried her past exhaustion. It held her rigid, hardly trembling at all.

  “How did you come by it, Flora?”

  “It—it belonged to my husband.”

  “Hence the initials, A.D., carved in the gold lozenge?”

  “Y-yes!”

  “Why did you bring it here tonight?”

  Her utter amazement, he decided, could not have been feigned.

  “Bring it here? But I didn’t! I never did!”

  “Listen, my dear.” He spoke gently. “Other women may have brought fur muffs to this dance. But not a woman is carrying one in the house. Why do you carry yours?”

  It was as though he had asked a question to which the answer was so plain, so blatantly obvious, that she could find no words for a reply.

  Instead Flora threw the muff on a Chippendale seat. She thrust out her right arm, pointing and pointing again at the gaping rent in the glove where a seam had burst across the top of the hand. Her mouth worked before she could attain speech.

  “When I was waiting for you in the carriage, and you were with Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne, I put on these gloves. The—the seam split then. So I hid my right hand. When you said we were going to Lady Cork’s, I was obliged to wear the muff. Did you not see how I held out my left hand to Freddie Debbitt? Or gave you the list of jewels with my left hand? Or kept the other hand hidden whenever I could?”

  Cheviot stared at her.

  “And that’s all?” he demanded.

  “All?” echoed Flora, as once before that night. “All?”

  “You didn’t, for instance, use the muff to conceal this pistol?”

  “Oh, God, no!”

  “All this, Flora, about a split seam in a glove? Couldn’t you have worn the glove as it was? Or simply taken off both gloves in the house?”

  Flora was regarding him with something like horror.

  “Wear a burst glove in the ballroom? Or, worse still, appear there with no gloves at all?”

  “But—!”

  “To be sure, had you danced with me as I wished, your left hand would have hidden it and not a soul would have seen. But otherwise?” Her voice rose in a despairing cry. “Oh, my dear, what’s come over you?”

  Pause. Cheviot turned away.

  The dying candle-flames fluttered with a watery hiss. Their broken gleams showed the cages, covered and silent, containing what Lady Cork had called birds “almighty exotic and wonderful.” He could discern only outlines of the dining-room, with its big portraits and its glimmer of silver.

  He hated that dim, quivery light. It made even Flora seem ghost-like. But he remembered, with a shiver, that he spoke to a woman out of another age; an age with a code of special social customs as inflexible as once were the laws of Rome.

  As he turned back, they regarded each other for an instant without comprehension on either side.

  “You don’t believe me?” Flora asked incredulously.

  “Yes! Yes, I believe you!” he answered honestly. “But how did this pistol get into the house?”

  “She borrowed it.” Flora looked briefly at what was on the table, and averted her gaze. “More than a fortnight ago.”

  “Miss Renfrew borrowed it? Why?”

  “For Lady Cork, she said. You can’t have forgotten that affright of burglars near a month gone? When three houses in this neighbourhood were robbed?”

  “I—no.”

  “That odious woman said Lady Cork feared nothing at all. She said there were no men in this house except the manservants; and Lady Cork would defend herself if need be. I know nothing of such things; I hate them! But Miriam found the pistol, among Arthur’s possessions, in his own chamber. There was—a pouch of bullets, and a powder-flask, and a little ramrod. That horrible woman went away with them. And now, she’s dead.”

  “Flora, what I am trying to understand …”

  “And not believing me!”

  “Yes! I believe you. But I want to understand how the pistol came to be concealed in your muff, and dropped out immediately after—”

  “Dearest, dearest, it was not the pistol that—that killed her!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it had been fired long before she died. It had been fired when I found it.”

  “What?”

  “I found it in the passage. That’s true!”

  Whereupon Flora nerved herself for a pleading of effort.

  “Jack, don’t be vexed with me. I’ve been awfully patient. I’ll tell you what you like.” Her voice was high. “But I can’t endure longer to be questioned with that woman there before me. With her eyes and mouth open, as if she still wanted to bite.”

  Half-blinded with tears, Flora ran for the door. She could not see the key. Her fist beat helplessly at the door.

  Without a word Cheviot circled round the table and was beside her. Shifting the pisto
l to his left hand, he put his arm round her. Flora, relenting even when she sobbed, nestled her head against his shoulder.

  “I had not thought,” he said. “The passage should be empty now. We can go to Lady Cork’s boudoir. Gently, now.”

  He unlocked the door. They slipped out, Flora moving away from him. Cheviot relocked the door from outside and pocketed the key.

  And straightway they came face to face with someone else.

  Along the passage, from the direction of the stairs, hurried a girl whom he had seen somewhere before, and recently. She was carrying, rafter clumsily, a large plate high-piled with cold meats and also a glass of champagne.

  The girl’s silk gown was of dark blue, the skirts swaying wide as she moved. Forget-me-nots were twined in her thick light-brown hair. When she raised startled eyes, which were hazel in colour and set wide apart above a short nose and wide mouth, he recognized her.

  She had been dancing with the arrogant Captain Hogben when the two of them collided with Cheviot in the ballroom. She was the girl who …

  Clearly she had not expected to find Flora here, and she stopped short. Flora sharply turned her back on both of them.

  “You were not downstairs,” the girl in blue blurted out. “I had thought to bring you …”

  She glanced down at the plate and the glass, which suddenly clattered together so that the champagne splashed over.

  “My papa-says-I-talk-too-much-and-indeed-it’s-true-though-I-have-no-wish-to-intrude-my-company-where-it-is-not-desired-oh-dear.”

  All this rattled out, naïvely, as though in one breath. The girl in blue thrust plate and glass at him, so that he was compelled to take them whether he liked it or not.

  “It was most kind of you, Miss—Miss—?”

  There was no time to return her curtsey with a bow. Blurting out, “You-have-forgotten-me-oh-dear-Hugo-Hogben-will-be-furious,” she left him and went scurrying away down the stairs, her brown curls flying out.

  Cheviot, now laden with a plate of cold meats and in his other hand a champagne-glass, with a pistol hanging on one finger by its trigger guard, contemplated the stairs in a way the girl might not have understood.

  She had been struck with consternation only when she saw Flora. Presumably it was not usual for men to walk about openly carrying firearms at a ball. Yet the girl in blue had first looked straight at the pistol; and she had shown no surprise.

  No surprise at all.

  His professional instincts, possibly, were overdoing it. He might see meanings where there were no meanings at all. But he would have pondered the matter, when he joined Flora in Lady Cork’s boudoir and closed the door, if he had been given any opportunity to ponder at all.

  For Flora whirled on him, her beauty heightened and coloured by blazing rage.

  “Did you do this most deliberately?” she asked in a suppressed voice.

  “Do this? Do what?”

  “As if you didn’t know!”

  “Flora, what in hell are you talking about?”

  “Do you try to make me jealous? And sting and hurt me forever and forever?”

  “I still don’t under—!”

  “Not a ladies’ man,” she mimicked, flying in. “No! If you mean you don’t ogle and strut and wear scented whiskers like some of them, I grant it. But what’s your reputation, pray? Even that horrible Renfrew woman, for one. And now little Louise Tremayne. Her!”

  “Louise Tremayne? The girl in blue? Is that her name?”

  Flora, at such apparent brazenness, was past speech. Viciously she struck up at him with her open palm. The blow had little force, but it whacked and smarted across his cheek.

  Cheviot did not move. In him, born of an obscure yet fierce jealousy of a dead husband about whom he knew nothing at all, there surged up an impulse to whack her across the face in reply. If both his hands had not been laden, he might have done it. Flora saw it in his eyes, and was terrified.

  “I told you once before,” he said with outward calmness, “that I never even set eyes on Miss Renfrew before tonight. Why should you imagine I had?”

  Flora flung away the question, ignoring it.

  “Damn her!” she cried, stamping her foot. “Damn and blast her!”

  Even these mild expletives, in Flora’s sweet voice, sounded as incongruous as though she had uttered a string of obscenities. And she rushed on.

  “Jack, how old are you? Yes; I know already. But how old are you?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “And I’m thirty-one!” said Flora, as though this were middle age or even senility. Her tone changed. “Didn’t you see the woman’s expression? Tonight? On the stairs? When those dreadful young men ran past her? And she looked straight at you, and said—”

  “But she—”

  Their voices clashed. Another notion, which might have helped him much, darted through Cheviot’s mind but vanished in emotional turmoil.

  “I’ve never been unfaithful to you,” said Flora. “After all that’s happened between us, you know that. You can’t help knowing it. No other man has ever …”

  Her voice trailed away. She could not help taunting him and stabbing him with that provocative, alluring smile.

  “Except, of course,” she added, “my husband.”

  “Then damn and blast him!”

  “Jack!” She spoke out in mock astonishment and concealed pleasure. “You’re not jealous of Arthur?”

  “If you must have it, yes.”

  “But, darling, that’s absurd! He—”

  “I don’t want to hear anything about him, thanks!”

  Above their voices rose an inhuman screech.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” screamed the macaw on the perch behind Flora. Its coloured plumage fluttered up, like the devil in a swamp, as it rattled and scraped and tried to fly.

  Back on Cheviot rushed the knowledge of where he was: in the pink boudoir, with a problem before him but also with the eternal Eve to put her arms round his neck and distract him. He set down plate and glass on the tortoise-shell table beside Lady Cork’s wing-chair.

  But he kept the pistol, transferring it to his right hand with his finger round the trigger. The fire in the grate had gone out. The room was growing cold.

  “Flora, this must stop.”

  “What must?”

  “Don’t pretend. You know perfectly well. Sit down there.”

  Flora sat down in the wing-chair, though her fingers tightened hard on its sides.

  “Oh, Jack, must we—?”

  “Yes. We must. You tell me Miss Renfrew borrowed this weapon, on behalf of Lady Cork, over a fortnight ago. Did you see it, or hear anything of it, between that time and tonight?”

  “Good heavens, no! Anyway, I’ve only seen the wretched thing two or three times in my whole life.”

  “Tonight, you say, you found it in the passage. When and where did you find it?”

  “Well! You sent me,” Flora retorted, with an accusing note on “you,” “to procure a list of all Maria Cork’s jewels from Solange. Solange is terribly clever; she could remember every one; but she can’t read or write, so I wrote the list. Afterwards I returned and gave it to you without coming into this room. Don’t you recall?”

  “Yes? And then?”

  Flora threw out her arms, but again gripped the edges of the chair.

  “Afterwards,” she said, “I sat down in one of those teakwood chairs by the little tables, and awaited you. Just as I said I should do.”

  “Which chair? Which table?”

  “Oh, how can I remember? Stay, though; I do! It was the same chair by the same table where later you—you hid that pistol under the lamp with the hollow base.”

  “Good! Go on!”

  “I had nothing to do but worry and perplex my head. You caused it. I’m not stupid and I’m not a rattle, you know. You would speak of nothing but the ridiculous bird-seed; yet all the time you were apprehensive, all of a dither. You asked questions about money, jewels, thieves. You ordered me to get
that list of jewellery, but wouldn’t say why you wanted it. Darling, I knew something dreadful had happened, or would happen.”

  “Go on!”

  “Well! Presently I glanced down on the carpet, just under the table. I saw something golden. It was shining. I thought it must be a bit of jewellery, or the like. But, when I bent down to look closely, I saw what it was.”

  “You recognized the pistol?”

  “Yes! Oh, God, yes! With Arthur’s initials on that diamond-shaped plate?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I daren’t touch it. I was afraid it was loaded and might go off. I pushed it out from under the table with my foot.”

  “And then?”

  “I saw it had been fired. Look at it now! The hammer is down. Look at those burst bits of metal and paper under the hammer. That’s what you call the percussion-cap, isn’t it? Yes! And I saw it had been fired, and couldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “What did you do then?”

  Flora braced herself and looked up at him.

  “I picked it up,” she said clearly, “and hid it inside the lining of the muff.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I …”

  Her voice, hitherto so sweet and clear and firm, died behind shaky lips. She looked down at the pink-and-green-flowered carpet, and hesitated.

  “Why, Flora? That’s the whole crux and point of what happened—No, hold on! When you picked up the pistol, how did you pick it up? Can you show me? If you’re afraid to touch it, I won’t press you.”

  Again she looked up.

  “No, of course I’m not afraid to touch it!”

  “Then show me.”

  He held it level, gripping the trigger-guard underneath. The palm of Flora’s hand went over the top, across the fallen hammer and part of the barrel, her fingers gingerly holding the wooden stock underneath. She held it for an instant; then drew back.

  “Thank you, Flora. When you held it like that, was the barrel (that’s this part) was the barrel warm?”

  “Warm? No. At least, it didn’t seem so through my glove.” Though she could not read his mind, she could sense his every mood. “Jack! What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing at all. Afterwards you put the pistol inside the muff?”