“Do you mean the dungeons are under this tower?” Arletta asked him.
“Most of them. There is one that has a trap door, which swings down to leave a huge hole in the floor.”
“I have heard about those sorts of traps,” Arletta said, “and I think they are very cruel.”
“One Duc de Sauterre in the seventeenth century had a crueller trap than anybody else,” David continued as if it was something to be proud about. “When he pulled the lever, the victim fell through a trapdoor into a cage that was embedded deep in the bottom of the river where he drowned.”
Arletta reckoned that this was against all the rules of war whereby there was always the chance that prisoners could be exchanged or ransomed when the war was over.
The idea of dungeons and traps made her shudder and she commented,
“Don’t let us talk about it, David, and quite frankly I don’t wish to see your dungeons.”
“They are a long way beneath us,” David said cheerily, “so there is no reason to think about them unless you hear the ghosts of those who died groaning, as the servants think they do.”
“I have not heard or seen any ghosts since I have been here,” Arletta stated firmly, “and I am now convinced that all the talk about them is just foolish superstition.”
She then proposed that the children should go to the aviary to feed the birds and, as they were delighted to do so, they hurried off down the passage where she had seen the Duc and the Marquise the previous evening.
Although she told herself that it was none of her business, she could not help thinking of the two of them together and the way that the Marquise had insisted to the Duc that she loved him.
As the children ran from cage to cage giving the birds the seeds and fruit they enjoyed, she wondered if, when the Duc made love to a woman, he looked as bored and cynical as he did at other times.
Then she told herself that it was very immodest for her to think about such thoughts.
Yet, because in his own way he was so outstanding and different from any man she had ever seen before, it was impossible not to think about him.
“I would like to have a little bird of my own,” Pauline was saying. “I could have it in a cage in the schoolroom and listen to it singing.”
“You will have to ask your uncle if you can have one, but I can see no reason why not.”
“I am sure Uncle Etienne will say ‘no’,” Pauline looked worried.
“There is no harm in trying,” Arletta replied.
“He was very nice to me today,” David volunteered.
“Who was nice to you?” a voice asked from the doorway.
Arletta looked round and felt her heart sink.
Comte Jacques had come into the aviary when she had hoped that they would be free of him for a time.
As if he felt that he had to answer the Comte, David said,
“I was talking about Uncle Etienne.”
“Why was he so nice to you?” the Comte enquired.
“Mademoiselle and I went riding with him. He took us to the old Chapel in the wood and it was very interesting.”
David spoke almost defiantly, as if he expected the Comte to say that it had been nothing of the sort.
Instead the Comte looked at Arletta in what she thought was a strange manner before he said,
“So my estimable cousin has been pleasant, has he indeed, despite the fact that you are English?”
It was what Arletta had thought herself, but there was no need for Comte Jacques to emphasise it.
It was something he would doubtless talk about to the Duchesse in such a way that she would put a very different construction upon it.
“I think,” she said in a cold rather repressive voice, “that Monsieur has accepted that it is essential for David to speak English properly before he goes to an English school.”
“And, of course, he is extremely fortunate in having such an attractive, charming and intelligent teacher.”
Arletta sighed to herself.
She found it very irritating that the Comte went on paying her compliments and was, she was sure, still expecting to persuade her to accept his invitation to go to Paris.
He naturally had no idea how insulting it was to her, not being the Governess that he thought her to be.
It was something he would never have thought of suggesting if he had known her real identity and he would not have dared to put such a ‘proposition’, as he called it, to a French girl with a protective family behind her.
“I think it is time we returned to the schoolroom,” Arletta turned to the children.
“All right,” David agreed.
Pauline was taken reluctantly away from the birds, still repeating that she wanted to have one of her very own.
The Comte did not speak as Arletta, holding Pauline by the hand, left the aviary.
Yet she knew that he was watching her and she could feel his eyes almost as if they were boring their way through her white skin.
‘He is increasingly tiresome and I have no wish to have anything more to do with him,’ she told herself.
Equally she recalled the revolver that she had locked away in a drawer in her bedroom and knew how glad she was to have it.
There was no one else for dinner except the Comte and once again the Duc was pleasant and, Arletta thought, exceptionally interesting.
She found herself discussing with him the pictures in the Château and realised that he was surprised she knew so much about art.
It was with difficulty that she refrained from telling him that in Weir House there was a collection of family portraits that was noted as being one of the finest in the whole of England.
As the Duc had so much to say, the Comte was surprisingly quiet and, when Arletta took Pauline away upstairs, she felt, although she was not sure, that he looked at her resentfully because she had ignored him.
There was certainly an expression in his dark eyes that she did not like.
She knew that once again she would pile the furniture in front of her door and sleep with the little Russian revolver under her pillow.
However, because it had been an active day, she did not lie awake worrying about the Comte or anybody else, but fell asleep soon after she had climbed into her bed.
*
She was dreaming that she was riding a very large horse when suddenly she came back to consciousness aware that something had disturbed her,
Her thoughts immediately went to the Comte and she lay in the darkness listening and wondering if what she had heard was an attempt by the Comte to open the door.
She wondered whether in the morning she should ask the housekeeper for another key or suggest that a bolt be fixed, which would prove just as effective.
She knew exactly what the Duchesse would say and told herself that she could not bear to think of how it would be whispered amongst the staff and how they would look at her speculatively as if it was her fault that the key had disappeared.
‘I will manage as I did last night,’ she determined.
Actually it had needed a considerable amount of strength to drag the chest of drawers again in front of the door, but it was certainly preferable to knowing that everybody was talking about her.
Now for some seconds there were no more sounds and, thinking that she must have been mistaken, she turned her head sideways on her pillow ready to go back to sleep again.
Then suddenly she heard a cry that was quite different from the sound that she had expected and, although it was not very loud, it was a sound like a shriek of pain.
It flashed through her mind that this came from the ghosts that David had talked about so much and was what she had been told to expect to hear ever since she had slept upstairs in the tower.
Just for a moment a sense of fear seemed to invade her whole body and, as the shriek came again, she closed her eyes as if she was afraid that an apparition would suddenly appear in front of her in the darkness.
Then, as she trembled and was as
hamed of the fact, her common sense told her that whatever the servants might say, as a rule ghosts do not make noises or speak.
Now the shriek was repeated and as she listened Arletta was almost certain that it came from some small animal.
The cry grew worse and more persistent and she told herself that it must be a rabbit or a cat that had been caught in a trap.
It was impossible to ignore it, so she sat up in bed and lit the oil lamp, which she had blown out when she was ready to go to sleep.
She realised that the sound came from the West window of her room, which looked out over the fields towards the woods.
Because the cries were continuing and now seemed to Arletta to be even more agonising, she jumped out of bed and opened the window as wide as possible.
She leaned over the sill, which was the thickness of the tower walls, to look out.
The river was directly beneath her on this side of the tower and she knew that there were some trees and shrubs on the other side of it before the open fields.
Now she realised that the sound was coming from directly below her, in fact at the foot of the tower and, although it was impossible to see, she was sure that some animal was caught in a trap.
‘Perhaps I could release it,’ she reflected.
She realised that the only way to do so would be to go to the bottom of the tower where the dungeons were situated.
‘It would be better to wait until morning when it is light,’ she told herself.
Then she knew, as the shrieks continued, that it would be impossible for her to sleep knowing that some poor creature was suffering so intensely.
She wondered if it would be possible to find one of the servants and tell them what was happening.
But she had a feeling that they would not be particularly interested as long as it was not a human being who was crying out in such agony.
‘I should be sensible and forget it,’ she told herself.
But she could not.
Resolutely she first lit the candles on her dressing table and then put on the blue satin negligée that the maid had placed over a chair.
As she buttoned it down the front, Arletta realised that it had a pretty lace-trimmed pocket on one side of it.
She thought that if she could see the animal in the trap from one of the windows it would be kinder to shoot it than let it suffer.
Her father had always said that when a hare, a fox or even a dog had been caught in a gin trap, which was a particularly cruel trap, there was no chance of saving their legs, which would have been broken and the flesh lacerated and the quicker they died the better.
Arletta hated the idea of killing anything, but she knew that it was far kinder than to let the animal continue to screech in agony.
She therefore put her hand under the pillow and drew out the little Russian revolver and slipped it into the pocket of her negligée.
As she pulled the furniture away from the door, she knew that if she carried one of the candles, the draughts that blew through parts of the Château might cause it to be blown out, so she picked up the oil lamp.
She went slowly down the twisting stairs, lighting her way with the lamp and, when she reached the corridor, it was easy to see her way by the candles in their silver sconces.
There was nobody about and, having reached the ground floor, she continued down a narrow staircase, which she reckoned, although she had not been there before, led to the dungeons.
She had taken only a few steps when a voice behind her asked,
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”
She was startled so that the oil in the lamp swung a little precariously before she turned round.
It was the Duc who stood above her at the entrance to the stairway and, because for the moment she could not speak, he asked again,
“What are you doing at this time of night and why are you going down to the dungeons?”
He was still wearing the evening clothes that he had worn at dinner and Arletta was immediately conscious that she was wearing a negligée and her fair hair was falling over her shoulders as he had seen it once before.
As she looked up at the Duc, she saw that the expression on his face was not exactly one of anger, but, she thought, of suspicion.
It flashed through her mind that he thought she was meeting somebody surreptitiously, perhaps the Comte, in the dungeons.
Quickly, because she was embarrassed, she answered him,
“There is an animal caught in a trap, monsieur, and it is screaming in pain. It woke me up.”
“An animal?” the Duc repeated.
“Yes, monsieur, it is directly below my window in the tower.”
“And you say you cannot sleep?”
“I was asleep, but I realised that I could not ignore it when it was in such agony.”
Arletta felt that she was explaining herself badly and thought for a moment that he did not believe her.
Then he said,
“If that is so, we must certainly do something about it. Let me take the lamp from you.”
He came down the stairs, which were wider than those at the side of the tower.
He took the lamp from her hand and then went ahead, holding it high so that it lit the way.
Down, down they went and, as Arletta followed the Duc below ground, she felt that he must think her very foolish.
When the stairs came to an end and they were in a circular chamber having the same dimensions as the tower above, she was aware of heavy iron doors that must be the entrance to the dungeons.
It was then, almost to her relief, that she heard faintly the screams that had awakened her and knew that the Duc must hear them too.
He was standing in the centre of the chamber waiting for her to follow him down the last few steps.
He turned his head towards the sound that Arletta had spoken about and said,
“It obviously comes from here.”
He opened the door of one of the dungeons and now the noise as it echoed round the stone walls seemed almost deafening.
The dungeon was very small and was just high enough for a man to stand upright in and there was a window just below the stone ceiling, which was heavily barred with only an inch between each of the bars.
Arletta could see that even in the daytime the window was too small to let in very much light, but this was where the sound was coming from.
Holding the lamp as high as he could, the Duc moved to the window and, as Arletta followed him, she saw that tied to one of the iron bars was an animal struggling to free itself and screaming as it did so.
For a moment it was just something dark, which made it difficult to determine what it could be.
Then, as the Duc shone the light on it, Arletta saw that it was a small cat with black and white fur.
It was little more than a kitten, but old enough to make an almost deafening noise and the Duc looked at it for a long moment before he asked her,
“Hold the lamp for me while I release it.”
“It will fall into the river,” Arletta said quickly.
“I think it will save itself if it is freed,” he replied.
She took the lamp from him and he struggled to undo the knot of the cord that fastened the cat’s leg to the iron bar.
Because it would have been impossible to have squeezed the cat through the bars, Arletta knew that two people must have been involved in torturing the wretched animal in such a hideous manner.
She could not see the Duc’s face because he had his back to her, but she realised perceptively that he was very angry.
‘It must have been somebody in the Château who has done this,’ she surmised.
She wondered if the Duc would find out who the culprit was and what punishment he would inflict upon him.
It seemed to take a long time before he finally pulled the string into the dungeon and as he did so the cat gave a shrill scream and it fell down into the river or against the foundation stones of the Château.
> But whichever it was, after it had vanished there was silence and then the Duc turned towards Arletta.
She saw that he was frowning and she asked,
“Who could have done anything so cruel?”
“That is what I would like to know,” the Duc said ominously.
“I will tell you who it was,” a voice came from the doorway.
They both turned round and as they did so the Duc took the lamp from Arletta as if he wanted to see who had spoken.
To her astonishment it was Comte Jacques.
“You know who tortured this wretched animal?” the Duc demanded harshly.
“I did,” the Comte volunteered. “It was a ‘sprat to catch a mackerel’. But what a surprise! My bait, a very effective one, has captured not one fish but two!”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” the Duc snapped, “but you can tell me when we get out of here.”
“That is where you are mistaken, my dear cousin,” the Comte replied. “You are not leaving here, not for a moment or two. I think you will understand what I mean when I tell you that I have my hand on the lever of the trapdoor.”
The Duc stiffened and Arletta felt as if her heart had suddenly stopped beating.
She saw now that, exactly as David had described it, just inside the dungeon there was a lever and the Comte’s right hand was resting on it as he himself was standing in the round chamber at the door of the dungeon.
He had only to exert a little pressure on it and the floor would open beneath them and they would fall down into the cage at the bottom of the river where they would drown.
It all flashed through her mind.
At the same time she thought that she must be dreaming and what was happening could not be true.
“What are you talking about, Jacques?” the Duc asked again.
Now he was speaking quietly and deliberately slowly, slightly drawling his words.
“I think you understand, my dear cousin or at least you should by now,” the Comte asserted, “that I have no intention of allowing you to be involved with a young woman, however attractive and however fascinating.”
“I have no idea what you are saying to me,” the Duc reacted sternly, “and I suggest we leave this very unpleasant, cold damp place and talk sensibly outside.”
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