Dorothy Eden (58 page)

‘Yes, I thought that myself after this afternoon,’ Prissie said. ‘I’m sorry I showed it to him, but I thought it was so cute. The funny thing is he seemed to mind it more shut in the cupboard than when he could see it.’

‘We’ll burn it,’ said Brigit, her arm tightening round Nicky. No use two people in this house having nightmares, she about falling off her horse and Nicky about a harmless wooden doll.

‘Seems to me a lot of fuss about nothing,’ said Fergus. But he was good-humoured again, and he swung Nicky on to his shoulders, saying, ‘What did this oracle used to say to you, anyway?’

‘She said she’d know when I told lies. She had a sort of cackling voice.’

‘Well, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either. You can’t go around making up things about being assaulted by people who don’t exist. But never mind. Prissie, bring the witch doll and we’ll have a bonfire. Everyone can watch her burn.’

The fire was laid in the fireplace in Brigit’s room, and it only needed a match set to it to produce flames that soon licked round the macabre figure of the doll laid across the top of the kindling. Sarah danced with delight. But Nicky pressed closer to Brigit and didn’t want to look at all.

‘Clementine was really there,’ he insisted in a very low voice.

‘Where, darling?’

‘In the park. She had black hair, and—and a red dress.’

But the pedlar doll crackling on the fire had black hair and a red dress, too. Brigit said soothingly. ‘She won’t be there again. You forget all about her.’

The fire had burned low when, much later, Fergus came in to say good night. For a little while he talked in a light amusing way about what had happened at dinner.

‘Aunt Annabel had apparently been stalking a stray cat in the park, and she came in looking far more witchy than that old doll we burnt this afternoon. Uncle Saunders shouted at her through the whole of the meal. He’s got some new hiding-place for the housekeeping money, and he’s sure this one will defeat her. Guy looked at Prissie all the time—I don’t blame him, she looked very attractive.’

‘And who did you look at, darling?’ Brigit asked, her fingers entangled caressingly in his hair.

‘I looked at you. You were sitting opposite me, smiling. I could see you all the time.’

Brigit caught her voice. ‘You’re as bad as Nicky.’

‘Oh, no, I only see the pleasant things.’

Then they were silent, and the fire hissed a little, the flames burning lower. The shadows in the room grew deeper. The bedposts were like straight black trees. Brigit watched Fergus’s face, seeing the arrogant lift of his chin, the long straight nose, the lean cheeks, the faint shine of his hair.

‘What will the weather be tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Fair.’

‘You always say that.’

‘It always is when I fly. I’ll be back on Tuesday.’

‘Perhaps I’ll be walking by then.’

Fergus laid his head on her breast. His hair was against her chin, soft, thick, familiar.

‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry. Take this rest while you can. Say perhaps Tuesday week.’ His fingers were so tight round hers that she almost had to cry out.

Then the last flame of the fire went out, and the shadows leaped on them. Nurse Ellen, suddenly appearing and switching on the light, said briskly, ‘Visiting hours over. The patient has to get some sleep,’ and Fergus had his light-hearted face on again.

‘Certainly, nurse. Especially since she is to walk so soon.’

When Fergus had gone Brigit, buoyed by his words, again made the futile attempt to move her legs. How
could
they be so numb and responseless? It didn’t make sense.

‘Nurse, did that one move ever so slightly? Watch.’

Nurse Ellen watched, her eyes kind and attentive. Then she calmly went on with her task of smoothing the bed and tucking Brigit in.

‘If it didn’t today it will tomorrow. Sleep well, ducky.’

She really thought she would sleep. She was more than two-thirds down the comfortable dark well of unconsciousness when the tiny whispering voice awoke her.
‘Don’t be so hopeful. It’s a waste of time. You’ll never walk again!’

She lifted her head in a panic. The voice seemed to come from the direction of the fireplace. It had had a cackling sound, as of an old old woman. The pedlar doll. Nicky’s remark that she had a cackling voice. Oh, no, no, she wasn’t sharing Nicky’s imagination. She had been dreaming. The voice from the fireplace had been part of her dream. The pedlar doll was in ashes, and it wasn’t true that she would never walk again. Of course it wasn’t true. Resolutely she settled to sleep again.

It was much later when she was wakened by the moon on her face, and when she thought she heard the high-pitched whispering voice again reiterating her doom,
‘You’ll never walk again …’

But she was sorry about her panicky ringing of the bell, waking Nurse Ellen who needed her night’s sleep. Although it was nice to be reassured by so practical a person and told that all she had heard was Aunt Annabel’s cats.

She didn’t really want tea, but Nurse Ellen, a cheerful figure in her red flannel dressing-grown, insisted on making it. She said she wanted some herself, and it was lucky Brigit had woken. She was so kind that one could not help relaxing and feeling comforted. Besides, it was nice to lie awake for a little while and think of Fergus sleeping in her old room upstairs, lying in his familiar posture with his face buried deep in the pillow and his fair hair black in the moonlight. She could even pretend drowsily that everything was as it used to be and she was deliberately staying awake, waiting for him to return from a night flight.

The scream from the passage followed by the crash of breaking china dispelled her dream in a moment of icy unreasonable terror.

She tried frantically to sit up in bed. It was only Nurse Ellen tripping over one of those wretched cats, she told herself. Oh, why, why was she so helpless!

A moment later Nurse Ellen, flushed and breathless, appeared in the doorway.

‘It’s all right, ducky, don’t get fussed. I’ve just seen Mrs Hatchett’s ghost and I’ve dropped the tea tray. Such a mess. It’s my first ghost. No wonder I’m in a state.’

‘Are you sure it was a ghost?’ Brigit asked incredulously.

‘He was a little man in a brown suit. I just saw him down the end of the passage. I screamed and he sort of faded away. Oh dear, now I’ve roused the whole house. That’s Mr Templar calling.’

There was no doubt that it was Uncle Saunders. His voice came echoing down the stairs.

‘What’s going on down there? Who’s prowling about?’

Nurse Ellen gave Brigit a resigned glance.

‘That foghorn would wake the very dead.’ She began to giggle. ‘It’s daft, really. Wait till I explain.’

She disappeared, and presently there was a hubbub of voices in the passage, Uncle Saunders’s testy questions dominating everybody’s. In a moment of silence Aunt Annabel’s soft protest, ‘It wasn’t Renoir because he was with me,’ had a chance of being heard.

Uncle Saunders’s gigantic scoffing voice dismissed her.

‘The time Renoir looks like a little man in a brown coat I’m prepared to live in trees and eat nuts. Fergus, what are you doing with that torch?’

‘Just having a look round. There might have been a prowler.’

‘First time he’s ever been out of the basement.’ That was Mrs Hatchett’s excited voice. ‘I thought it was only my room he inhabited. Probably been a murder or something there once. Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking about it, and then I open my eyes and see him standing there, so meek-like, and I don’t really think he’s a murderer. I think he’s just lonely.’

‘Well, I wish he’d keep his loneliness in the basement,’ Nurse Ellen said. ‘Made me spill all the tea.’

‘Course he might prowl up here and no one’s noticed him before,’ Mrs Hatchett reflected.

‘What is it, everybody?’ That was Prissie’s voice. Obviously she was hanging over the stair railing, for her voice came floating down with a far-off sound.

‘Nothing to alarm you, my dear,’ boomed Uncle Saunders.

‘Nurse thinks she saw a ghost,’ quavered Aunt Annabel.

‘Mine,’ said Mrs Hatchett possessively. ‘Did he have the hat with the curly brim and a sort of pin-spot cravat?’

‘I’d call it a scarf,’ Nurse Ellen said flatly. ‘And it was too dark to see spots.’

‘Yes, that’s him. He tries to look sinister, but he isn’t a bit, poor lamb.’

‘Go back to bed, Prissie,’ said Fergus with a note of protectiveness in his voice. ‘You’ll catch cold. I’m looking for this sinister prowler, real or unreal. He won’t do you any harm.’

Prissie gave a far-away excited laugh. ‘Oh! One doesn’t really believe in ghosts, does one?’

The chatter went on for several minutes, then Fergus, who had obviously been doing a tour of the house, returned saying, ‘There’s no sign of anyone. Everything looks all right. If anyone got in it could only have been through the downstairs cloakroom window. Isn’t that locked at night?’

‘It should be,’ Uncle Saunders said testily.

‘Well, it isn’t. But I’ve locked it now. So you can all go safely to bed. Is my wife disturbed, nurse?’

‘She’s awake. I was making her tea. Dropped it all over the carpet.’ Nurse Ellen’s voice was rueful. ‘First time I’ve seen a ghost.’

‘They don’t do you no harm, dear,’ Mrs Hatchett said earnestly.

Fergus’s step came to Brigit’s door.

‘Darling, have you been frightened by all this?’

‘Not frightened.’ Brigit slowly unclenched her hands. ‘Mrs Hatchett has had this ghost for years, but no one else has ever seen him. We always thought she imagined it.’

‘I should think she does, too,’ said Fergus. ‘I’m afraid this might have been a burglar. Someone was careless about locking up tonight. But apparently Nurse Ellen startled him in time. I don’t think there’s anything missing.’

But there was something missing. In the morning the maid, Lorna, reported that the Dresden shepherd and shepherdess had been shifted. When they couldn’t be found it had to be assumed that Nurse Ellen’s apparition had really been a burglar. A little later, with loud indignant cries, Uncle Saunders found that the gold angel, that was as fat as a young thrush, was gone also. The burglar, disturbed by Nurse Ellen, had not had time to take more.

It was Prissie who made the surprising discovery that Nicky’s coat with the fur collar, left in the downstairs cloakroom to dry after getting wet in a shower yesterday, had also vanished.

T
HE POLICE HAD TO
be notified, of course, and during the morning a young constable came and took careful notes. Fortunately both the angel and the Dresden figures were covered by insurance, and the loss of Nicky’s coat was negligible.

‘Poor man, he must have had a large family,’ Mrs Hatchett said. Her sympathies were entirely with the burglar, for she could not be convinced that he had no affinity with her unearthly visitor. It was possible, she was even telling herself, that ghosts liked objects of art, and had to clothe their children.

Uncle Saunders mourned the days when they could afford a butler and then of course no downstairs window was ever left unlocked. Now the house was going to rack and ruin. Aunt Annabel patiently inquired how it could be expected to do anything else, with only a cook-housekeeper, one maid, and a daily.

‘Money doesn’t come off trees,’ Uncle Saunders shouted irately. ‘And if it did the Government would take it, royal mint or not. I tell you, existence is practically impossible nowadays.’ Suddenly he pounced on Aunt Annabel. ‘I suppose you left that window open for one of your deuced cats.’

‘Oh, no, I didn’t, Saunders. They have their sand-box in the studio.’

‘An indoor toilet?’ Uncle Saunders’s voice was scathing. ‘Pampered creatures. Well, let’s look at the Stock Exchange reports. If the insurance company pays up, and mind you, I don’t expect them to, no one does anything they don’t want to nowadays, I might invest in—let me see—Guy, what do you think of these Bolivian oil things?’

Brigit’s mind kept running foolishly on the scarf motif. It had been a red-and-white-spotted scarf that had caused her fall from her horse, and now there was this discussion about the scarf the burglar had worn, Mrs Hatchett insisting that it had been the distinctive cravat, green with a pin-spot, and Nurse Ellen saying only that his throat and chin had been muffled by some sort of scarf.

Brigit was sure now that what had originally woken her had been the burglar prowling along the passage, and that the voice she thought she had heard saying, ‘You’ll never walk again,’ had been sheer imagination. She was almost, like Mrs Hatchett, sympathetic towards the burglar for having provided a normal explanation for what had been a nightmare.

Strangely enough, Prissie was the one who was most upset. She was deeply grieved and angry about the loss of the gold angel. ‘I adored it,’ she said. ‘I should think stealing that would bring anyone bad luck.’

‘It was probably stolen in the first place from some church,’ Brigit said. ‘It’s only poetic justice about a hundred and fifty years too late.’

‘Oh, you,’ Prissie exclaimed in sudden impatience. ‘You don’t appreciate any of these lovely things.’

‘Perhaps I don’t,’ Brigit agreed. ‘Perhaps I like best what I can get for myself, even if it’s quite simple.’

It seemed to her that Prissie’s eyes fleetingly held pity or contempt. At least, for that moment, they were no longer young. They were adult and shrewd.

‘If it’s your inheritance I don’t see why you shouldn’t like it.’

When Brigit didn’t answer at once she went on almost belligerently, ‘Anyway, I adore it all. I can just lap up luxury.’

Brigit noticed that when Prissie was disturbed or upset she always fingered the locket round her neck. It was as if it were her talisman. What had she got in it?

‘Prissie, that extraordinary story you told the children about your royal blood isn’t true, is it?’

Prissie flung back her head and seemed momentarily to gain height. All at once she had a curious hauteur. Then abruptly she burst into youthful giggles.

‘Not exactly. But almost.’

‘What do you mean by almost? Either it’s true or it’s not true.’

Prissie smiled with engaging sweetness.