“I am the Honourable Olinda Selwyn, daughter of the late Lord Selwyn, one time Lord Chief Justice of England!”
There was an audible gasp of surprise and the Chief Constable said courteously,
“I remember your father, Miss Selwyn. Will you please proceed?”
“The Earl left the house last night immediately after the remark he made to his mother in this hall and went to the island on the lake,” Olinda said. “I joined him there soon after nine o’clock.”
“How long did you stay with him?” the Chief Constable asked.
“It must have been until nearly two o’clock.”
“And did he come back to the house with you?”
“No,” Olinda replied. “The Earl said that he would remain on the island for some time and then he would go for a walk, perhaps through the woods and up to the statue that stands on the incline high above the house.”
“So you came back alone, Miss Selwyn?”
“I walked back the way I had come,” Olinda replied, “through the gardens until I reached the lawns.”
She paused before she added,
“I stood for a moment looking at the moonlight shining on the house. Then I saw a man climbing out of a window of her Ladyship’s room!”
There was a silence that seemed to hold everyone in the hall spellbound.
“As I watched him,” Olinda went on, “he clambered down the drainpipe at the corner of the house.”
“Surely that was a rather difficult thing to do?” the Chief Constable asked.
“Not for a man who is very athletic.”
“You watched him until he reached the ground?”
“Yes. Then he crossed the lawn and I saw that he carried something wrapped in what appeared to be a white handkerchief. He buried it at the back of one of the flowerbeds.”
“What did he use to do so?” the Chief Constable enquired.
“His hands,” Olinda answered. “Then he crossed the lawn again, opened the catch on one of the library windows with a penknife and stepped inside the house.”
There was a moment’s complete silence. Then Heyman, the Dowager Countess’s maid, gave a shrill cry.
“It was her Ladyship’s jewels he’d taken – the scoundrel! I saw they were missin’, but was too upset to mention it. I thought perhaps her Ladyship had put them away somewhere, but they have been stolen – stolen, I tell you!
“I think you will find them intact at the back of the flowerbed,” Olinda said quietly.
“Did you recognise the man you saw climbing down the drainpipe and burying what I suspect were the jewels?” the Chief Constable enquired.
“Yes,” Olinda answered.
“Will you tell me who it was?”
Olinda looked towards Felix Hanson.
For a moment her eyes met his.
Then he exclaimed,
“Damn you! All right, I took the jewels! I thought no one would miss them. But I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I found her! Dead, I tell you!”
As his voice rang out hysterically, a servant put a telegram into Olinda’s hand.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Olinda walked through the garden and down to the stream that bordered it.
The lawn required cutting and the garden was overgrown except for close to the house.
Old Hodges was good with vegetables, but he had never been, as he put it, ‘one for them flowers’.
Nevertheless the great bushes of honeysuckle and wild roses smelt as sweetly as the few cultivated roses that were blooming in a bed her mother had always tended before she became too ill.
Olinda had laid all the flowers that were in bloom on her coffin and they had brought a patch of vivid colour to the sombre greyness of the village Church.
Now, when she had reached the stream, she sat down on a fallen tree trunk and stared at the water.
But what she saw was the silver surface of the lake at Kelvedon and the grace of the swans as they glided across it.
Always, however hard she tried, her thoughts returned to Kelvedon and the Earl.
Even to think of him was to feel a physical pain between her breasts, which she was sure would be with her all her life.
‘It is over! It’s finished!’ she told herself severely. ‘Why can you not face the truth?’
But she knew that she could never escape from the memory of what had happened and the wonder that he had evoked when he had kissed her.
She went to sleep thinking of it. She awoke and the rapture of it was still with her. All the day it accompanied her wherever she went, a ghost that haunted her and could never be exorcised.
She had not seen the Earl before she left Kelvedon. In the dramatic excitement that had followed Felix Hanson’s confession, Olinda had opened the telegram that the servant had given her.
When she read what it contained, she knew that she must return home immediately.
The telegram had been worded very concisely,
“Please come at once – Nanny.”
She knew that the message would never have been sent unless her mother was very ill.
Even so, after a tiring journey that entailed waiting for over two hours for a train from London to Huntingdon, she had not expected that she would arrive to find that her mother was dead.
She had known as soon as she saw Nanny’s face what had happened and she had stood stricken just inside the front door, her hands going out instinctively towards the old woman.
“Her Ladyship died in her sleep,” Nanny said. “It was a peaceful end. She went as she would have wished to go.”
“Oh, Nanny, why was I not here?” Olinda cried.
“There was nothing you could have done and none of us expected it,” Nanny answered. “The doctor came at the beginning of the week and said that her Ladyship seemed a little better. But he told me yesterday that if she had lived she would have suffered great pain. You would not have wanted that, Miss Olinda.”
“No, of course not,” Olinda agreed.
“You know she had cancer?” Nanny asked.
“I suspected it.”
“Therefore it was best that she should die as she did,” Nanny insisted. “You have to be brave. It’s what she’d have expected of you.”
As Olinda stood by her mother’s bedside, she knew that Nanny was right.
It was best that her mother should have died before she suffered the agonising pains that the growth inside her would certainly have caused.
At the same time it was difficult to be brave when someone she loved as deeply as she loved her mother had gone from her forever.
‘First my father,’ she thought, ‘then Gerald and now Mama. I am the only one left!’
There were few relatives to notify of her mother’s death and those there were lived too far away to come to the funeral.
There were two cousins in Cornwall, another in Yorkshire and a few old cronies who had known her father and who kept in touch with Lady Selwyn at Christmastime.
Otherwise there was no one to whom she need write or who would be in the least interested in the passing of a woman they had not seen for years.
It was after the funeral was over that Olinda realised she had to decide her own future.
Her mother’s pension was halved on her death, which meant, Olinda knew, that, as it was mortgaged, it would take four years instead of two to pay off Gerald’s debt.
There would be just enough, she calculated, for her and Nanny to live at The Manor very frugally, provided she could augment the income by earning a little more.
To think of embroidery brought Kelvedon once again vividly to her mind and with it the Earl.
‘He will have no further need of me,’ she had thought when she opened The Times two days after she had returned home and read,
“We regret to announce the death of the Dowager Countess of Kelvedon suddenly at Kelvedon House, Derbyshire, from a heart attack. The Dowager Countess was forty-seven years of age and was before her marriage to the ninth Earl of K
elvedon, Lady Roseline Alward, daughter of the second Duke of Hull. She married the late Earl in 1857 and there is one son of the marriage who succeeded his father as the tenth Earl of Kelvedon in 1893.”
‘A heart attack!’ Olinda said to herself.
That exonerated everyone, even Felix Hanson.
She had, as it happened, believed him when he claimed that he had found the Dowager Countess dead.
He was a philanderer, selfish, unscrupulous and out for what he could get, but he was not the stuff of which murderers are made.
Now, she thought with satisfaction, there would be no scandal, no crime for anyone to answer, no case to be brought before the Justices and the Earl would have everything he wanted.
‘Everything?’ a voice asked her mockingly.
‘Everything!’ she told herself.
She tried to be practical and to use her brain intelligently.
The Earl had turned to her in his desperation because she was a stranger. She had come to his rescue at a moment of complete and utter despair.
She had helped and sustained him, but now her services were no longer needed. He had come into his Kingdom and he could easily dispense with the insubstantial woman he had talked to in the darkness.
It was strange, Olinda thought looking back, how they had always met in the twilight or in the dark.
First of all in the shadows of the Duchesse’s bedroom, then on the island when it had been almost too dark to see each other’s faces. Then under the Goddess of Wisdom when the sun was sinking and again on the island in the moonlight.
‘To him I am just a dream,’ Olinda told herself, ‘and just as easily forgotten.’
She forced herself to talk to Nanny about their future, to try to plan ahead.
Yet she knew that she was listening with one part of her mind for a knock on the door, waiting for a telegram, for a letter, any communication that would tell her that the Earl was still thinking about her!
Perhaps he would be grateful because she had saved him at least for a few hours from the suspicions of the household and of the Chief Constable.
‘They would have discovered the truth without my interference’ Olinda thought, ‘but perhaps he was glad that he did not have to make a formal statement to the Police’
It was only when she was alone in her own room in the darkness of the night that she could no longer think sensibly of what had happened, but must cry miserably because she loved him.
“I love you! I love you!” she would whisper into her pillow and knew that the thought of never seeing him again was so agonising that she wished to die.
*
It was over a week now since she had buried her mother and the Earl had buried his.
There had been no message from Kelvedon and Olinda’s last hope had died.
She watched the stream running over its gravel bottom, which left it so clear that she could see small fish darting amongst the stones.
The sunlight coming through the branches of the trees cast a speckled glimmer on the water.
She remembered how the stars had been reflected in the lake and the golden light had gleamed from the windows of the great house.
The Earl would now be able to give parties at Kelvedon, parties with his own friends and the State rooms would be filled with guests who appreciated their beauty.
The horses in the stables would be ridden, the servants would be busy and the whole place would come alive.
And if it was to be a home, as it should be, then the Earl must marry. Olinda felt a pain stab her at the thought of it and she knew that it had already occurred to him.
Had he not said that he had never thought of the pictures as belonging to him personally, but to his son and the Kelvedons who would come after him?
‘He must have an heir,’ Olinda thought, ‘and Kelvedon needs not just one child but a number of them.’
She thought it was being an only child that had made him feel so intensely about his mother.
He had concentrated all his affection on her and had no brothers or sisters who could have helped him through the shock of learning that she was unfaithful to his father.
‘I must pray that he will find love – real love,’ Olinda told herself, ‘and that his wife will give him children to grow up at Kelvedon.’
Although she wanted the Earl’s happiness, it was impossible not to feel agonised when she imagined another woman in his arms.
He would kiss her and he would evoke in her the wonder and rapture that she herself had felt when he kissed her.
Because she could not help it, the tears came into Olinda’s eyes and ran down her cheeks so that the sunlight on the stream was blurred and she could no longer see the water clearly.
“Can you really be crying, Olinda?” a voice asked.
She started to her feet, but, because her tears blinded her, it was difficult to see who was standing near her and whom she had not heard approach.
Then the light was there, the brilliant light that had enveloped them both when he had kissed her and it illuminated the Earl so that even through her tears he seemed to come to her in a burst of inexpressible glory.
She stood looking at him until, without really realising that she had moved, she was in his arms and he was holding her close against him.
She felt as if everything that had frightened her and which had made her unhappy and insecure vanished at his touch.
She was safe.
He was holding her!
Then his lips were on hers and they were lost to the world.
There was the wonder, the indescribable ecstasy, the glory and the magic she had known before and she was no longer herself but a part of him.
His kiss was more compelling, more wonderful than it had been when he had kissed her outside the garden door.
Now, because of what she had suffered, it was like moving from the depths of despair onto the top of the mountains which she had said were impossible to climb and she was touching the horizon she had never thought to reach.
He kissed her until she could no longer think, but could only vibrate to a music that came from the sky and from her heart.
When at last he raised his head, the Earl said in a voice that was unsteady,
“My precious! My sweet dream! I have been longing for this moment!”
“I – thought you would – never come,” Olinda whispered. “I thought you – would no longer – want me.”
Her words were incoherent because it was difficult to speak.
But she thought as she looked up at him that she had never seen him look so happy.
“Not want you?” he asked incredulously. “How could you ever imagine such a thing?”
“You have – everything – now.”
“Everything but you,” he replied. “And you are essential to my happiness, as you must know.”
“Am – I?”
The Earl held her closer.
“What has happened to your instinct?” he asked. “That wise little instinct that helped and guided me and made me believe that I could do anything, even manage to preserve Kelvedon without any money.”
He paused to look down into her eyes.
Then he said,
“I do believe, that with your help, I could have done it.”
“Of – course you – could!”
“But not without you.”
Then he was kissing her again, kissing her with long slow, possessive kisses that seemed to draw not only her heart from her body but also her mind and her soul and make them his –
Later they sat side by side on a fallen tree trunk.
“I could not get away before,” the Earl explained. “There were so many matters to see to, so many relations who came to the funeral and would not leave as quickly as I would have liked.”
He paused and knew without Olinda asking the question what she wanted to know.
“My mother had apparently suffered with her heart for some time,” he said in a low voice. “The doctor had war
ned her not to exert herself and on no account to become emotionally upset”
He paused before he went on,
“He had treated her for many years and knew how dangerous and depleting her anger could be.”
“You did not know this?” Olinda enquired.
The Earl shook his head.
“My mother would never speak about her health. She thought it made her seem old and anyway, as you know, I had been away for two years.”
There was a note in his voice as if he blamed himself and Olinda said quickly,
“You would have done no good if you had come back sooner and I think it was the way, had she been given the choice, your mother would have wished to die, while she was still beautiful.”
“That is true,” the Earl agreed, “but, if she had died twenty-four hours sooner, she would not have suffered from Hanson’s perfidy or my stupidity.”
Again the pain was in his voice and Olinda’s hands tightened on his.
“You are not to blame yourself,” she said. “You have to be sensible about this and realise that it is all for the best. Your father would not have wished you to be shut out from your inheritance.”
“It is no use regretting,” the Earl agreed. “You must help me to look forward, Olinda.”
“You know I want to do that,” she said softly.
“But because I shall always feel partly to blame for my mother’s death,” the Earl said, “I have been generous where Felix Hanson is concerned.”
Olinda looked at him enquiringly and he went on,
“My mother had written him a cheque for eight thousand pounds. He admitted that she had intended to cancel it, but I told him that he could keep the money.”
“I am glad you did that,” Olinda said.
“He has also taken away the motor car my mother gave him.”
He smiled spontaneously as he added,
“That was not a very generous act on my part. I dislike motor cars. I so much prefer my horses.”
“So do I,” Olinda agreed.
“They are waiting for you to ride them.”
She gave a little sigh of sheer happiness and turned her face against the Earl’s shoulder.
“There are so many things for us to do together, my darling,” he said. “But most of all I want to talk to you. I never thought to say that to a woman, but there is so much to discuss, so much perhaps to argue about in the future, that we shall never be bored even if we spend a great deal of our lives at Kelvedon.”
A Dream from the Night Page 14
