The Lady in Gray

by Patricia Oliver

  Lady Marguerite wrinkled her nose in distaste. “1 do wish you had not told me that, Sylvia. You have quite destroyed all my ro- mantical notions of the adventuresome life.”

  “Well, Captain Ransome destroyed mine with his gruesome details of life under the Jolly Roger, which is not at all as I had imagined it. But to answer your question, Aunt, the portrait is progressing very well. Another week should see it finished.”

  This was not strictly true, Sylvia knew, since there still remained the addition of Hercules in the background. She dared not mention the old horse for fear of disrupting the pleasant atmosphere of the tea-table, but she was determined to include the horse as originally planned.

  To this end, she sent a note over to the Castle the following morning, cancelling the afternoon sitting. “I believe there will be less friction if his lordship discovers the presence of Hercules as a fait accompli,” she told her aunt at breakfast.

  “1 fear you may be a little premature, my dear,” Giovanni remarked as Hobson sliced a second helping of ham and served it to the sculptor. “I was down in the stables yesterday, and that Hercules of yours is still more dead than alive. Evans tells me the beast eats enough for three ordinary horses, but has not gained more than an ounce or two. I hardly blame Longueville for refusing to go down in history in the company of such a bone-setter.”

  “He has not refused,” Sylvia corrected him. “That was part of our initial agreement.”

  “You are too harsh, dear,” her aunt remarked. “If the horse is as ugly as Giovanni says, perhaps you should reconsider your agreement, Sylvia.”

  Later that morning, as she stood beside Hercules’s stall, watching the old horse ravenously devour a double ration of oats, Sylvia wondered if perhaps she should listen to her aunt’s counsel. The nag was truly decrepit, and she suddenly felt a pang of pity for the earl, which she ruthlessly repressed as soon as she recalled his unflattering comments about her age and breeding.

  His arrogant lordship would learn what it was like to be insulted, she told herself, surprised at her desire to get even. Hercules would be her instrument, but she would wait until he was slightly more presentable.

  Faced with a free afternoon, Sylvia decided on impulse to take her sketching pad and paints out to the cliffs again. Something drew her to that tragic spot where so much mystery still lingered. Did anyone but the unfortunate countess really know what had happened that moonlit summer evening in that isolated stone hut? Had she really written that so-called suicide note discovered there? And if not, who had?

  Her head filled with these and other enigmas, Sylvia was startled when Puffin came to a stop some distance from the edge of the cliff. She had discovered during her first expeditions to the stone hut that the pony could not be persuaded to go a step farther. It was as though he came up against an invisible wall, and no amount of scolding could make him budge.

  Sylvia could not blame him. She herself had ventured down to the stone hut only twice in all the years she had lived at White- cliffs, but never inside, and the heavy pall of tragedy that hung in the air around that small, dark hut had made her skin crawl. She had imagined that evil haunted the place, but her common sense told her that any evil that had existed there ten years ago was long gone. If some terrible, violent act had been committed against the young countess in that hut, as the local villagers still believed, Sylvia refused to credit the rumors of the earl’s guilt.

  Turning Puffin off the main track, Sylvia drove the little trap up a shallow incline and stopped in the shade of a copse of storm-bent hawthorns and a scattering of old oaks. Leaving the pony to doze in peace, she set up her easel under a cluster of scraggly pines that afforded some protection from the sun. From this vantage point, she could clearly see the door to the hut, facing towards the rough- hewn steps leading up to the cliff road.

  As was her custom when beginning a new work, Sylvia set up her canvas and sat motionless for a long period, scanning the scene in front of her, her eyes noting every detail that might be relevant to her interpretation of the subject, and those that were not.

  After about ten minutes an uneasy sensation assailed her. From where she sat, she could see without being seen. Assuming that the sprawling gorse bushes and stunted trees were there ten years ago, it was entirely possible that prying eyes might have witnessed the comings and going at the stone hut on the cliff. And if they had, such a witness might just as easily have been driven by prurient curiosity or violent intent, she realized, her heart beating wildly as the possibilities unfolded in her vivid imagination.

  Might not the murderer—if indeed there had been a murder committed in the hut that summer night—have crouched here in this very spot where she now sat, his heart beating even as hers did, his eyes watching for the right time to descend on his victim?

  Sylvia suddenly felt very exposed, vulnerable, and alone. The sun shone warmly above her, but she sensed a chill where no wind blew. Where was Rufus? she wondered. That dog was never about when she needed him. She cast a glance down the slope, searching for the black and white shape of the collie rooting about in rabbit holes. Nothing moved in the still afternoon.

  And then she heard a twig snap, and her blood froze.

  The hairs on her neck rose as she thought of the phantom lady in white who rode across these moors in the moonlight.

  Nonsense, she told herself firmly. Phantoms do not tread on twigs. Much less in full daylight.

  No, there was somebody standing behind her in the grove of hawthorns. Watching her.

  Sylvia clearly felt that gaze on her back.

  The absolute stillness of the afternoon wrapped itself about her like an invisible embrace. Feeling suffocated, Sylvia gasped for breath, her eyes fixed unseeing on the empty canvas before her. Her mind reverberated with echoes of her recent thoughts. Who had used this very spot to spy on the countess? Had he been a peeping Tom? Or something much more dangerous? Had he returned for some inexplicable reason? Was she herself in danger?

  The possibility of danger jerked Sylvia out of her trance. She was behaving like a veritable ninny, scared of her own shadow. Suddenly she remembered what her old Nanny would tell her when she woke up screaming, convinced there was a monster under her bed. “Get up and look, child,” she would say, standing beside Sylvia’s bed in her voluminous flannel night rail, her night cap perched rakishly on her gray head. “You will find that monsters only exist in the imagination, dear.”

  Her courage bolstered by this comforting memory of her childhood, Sylvia stood up and turned around to face down this particular monster.

  Nanny would have been proud of her, she thought, staring at the man standing at the edge of the copse. Anyone less monster-like than mild-mannered George Connan Sylvia could scarcely imagine.

  “I d-did not m-mean to s-startle you, my lady,” he stammered, obviously more than a little startled himself. “I d-did not expect .. . that is to say, 1 was unaware that anyone w-would be here.”

  “Well, you did startle me,” Sylvia cut in ruthlessly. “1 am not accustomed to people sneaking up behind me. And besides, 1 am trying to work,” she added, gesturing at the empty canvas, “and interruptions are not welcome, let me tell you.”

  If that rebuff did not convey the message that his presence was de trop, Sylvia was prepared to try something even more explicit. Connan’s sudden jerking movement distracted her, and Sylvia noticed that the scholar was clasping a modest bouquet of wildflow- ers in his hands.

  She stared at him, her frown dissolving, and he smiled nervously.

  “They are for the countess,” he mumbled, as though embarrassed at being caught in some shameful act. “She did so love flowers, you know.” He glanced down the hill towards the hut. “I always bring her some when I can get away from the shop.”

  “How kind you are,” Sylvia murmured, struggling to connect this dry little man with such a grand romantic gesture.

  “Oh, no, my lady,” he stammered, embarrassment making his cheeks pink. “It was all
the poor countess’s doing, you see. She was so perfect in every way. We all adored her. Each in his own way, of course.” He paused, and his glance wandered again to the stone hut in the distance. “But I was always her most loyal admirer. Her ladyship knew she might trust me with her most intimate thoughts, and she often did.”

  “Not everyone, Mr. Connan,” Sylvia corrected him. “Someone did not adore her quite as much as you seem to think, if local rumors have any validity at all.”

  Connan fixed his pale blue eyes on her, and Sylvia thought she detected hostility in them. “If you are referring to the local belief that Lord Longueville took matters into his own hands, my lady,” he said stiffly, “I fear you are mistaken. He was the cause of her unhappiness, that I cannot deny. The dear lady told me so herself. And his lascivious friends from London—a more Godless group of rogues it would be hard to imagine—only added to her despair, always fawning upon her, following her, importuning her with their lewd suggestions. That I witnessed with my own eyes. Why, even his lordship’s brother, a young lad barely down from Oxford—it was pitiful to watch him. And as for that precious cousin of his”— Connan’s face twisted into a moue of disgust—“I hope 1 never see such unbridled debauchery again.”

  Sylvia listened to this litany of depravity with amazement. Con- nan’s version differed so radically from the captain’s cynical account of what had happened at the Castle that summer that she felt baffled. Was it possible, she wondered, for a female to be both goddess and witch? The young Countess of Longueville had certainly succeeded in dazzling the unsophisticated scholar into placing her on a pedestal, but had she been saint or sinner to the other gentlemen in the earl’s house party?

  Staring into Connan’s pale, hostile eyes, Sylvia remembered her aunt’s words as they drove over to the dowager’s dinner party the other evening. All that glitters is not gold, Lady Marguerite had said, borrowing from Mrs. Rawson’s endless store of folk wisdom. She could well believe that the scholar had been bewitched into believing what he wanted to believe about his ideal woman. For him she had glittered, an unobtainable star in a world where he did not belong. But for the others? Was it not possible that—to borrow another of Mrs. Rawson’s sayings—where there is smoke there is fire?

  Abruptly Connan ducked his head, pushed through the overgrown brushes, and marched off down the slope, his back rigid, presumably with disapproval of her lack of sympathy for the countess.

  Sylvia sat down again at her easel, but her hands were idle. She watched Connan descend the shallow stone steps and approach the hut with a reverence that struck her as incongruous given the violence that had transpired there. The poor man was obviously obsessed, but could obsession lead to violence? she wondered. The kind of violence that had come to be associated with the countess in the minds of the locals. If one believed that obsession leads to madness, it was a possibility she had not considered before.

  Recalling the hostility in Connan’s washed-out blue eyes, Sylvia felt a sudden premonition that the mild-mannered scholar had not told her all he knew about the death of his idol.

  An hour later, Sylvia had put these disturbing thoughts aside and was absorbed in her preliminary sketch of the new work when she was again interrupted by someone approaching through the copse. This time the intruder made no attempt to conceal his approach, so when the figure emerged from the shade of the trees, Sylvia had swiveled round to face him.

  To her surprise, the new arrival was Tom Gates, the earl’s agent.

  Gates came to an abrupt halt when he saw Lady Sylvia, and the startled expression on his face told her that he had not expected to find her there.

  Not having had much opportunity over the years to exchange more than the barest civilities with Gates, Sylvia was immediately struck by the agent’s manly bearing and rugged features. Unlike Connan’s faded blue gaze, the agent’s eyes were a deep, azure blue, and reflected an intelligence far beyond his station.

  The fanciful notion flashed through Sylvia’s mind that here was living proof of those improbable plots she had so often encountered in popular romantical novels in which the totty-headed heroine runs off with the under-gardener, or one of her father’s footmen. She had always pooh-poohed such aberrations, but upon closer inspection, Thomas Gates caused her to reassess her opinion. In spite of his modest coat, homespun breeches, and muddied boots, the agent embodied all the masculine traits calculated to turn the heads of any fictional schoolroom chit with more hair than wit.

  Sylvia felt the pull of his presence herself. Had she been ten years younger, she thought wryly, it was not inconceivable to think she might have done something incredibly stupid herself.

  But that was beside the point. The point to remember was that the lovely countess had been ten years younger. Was it not possible—perhaps highly probable—that the impressionable lady had forgotten herself so far as to flirt with the handsome agent? Tom Gates did not strike Sylvia as the kind of man one would mock with impunity. And surely any hint of flirtation from his employer’s wife would be considered a mockery of the worst kind.

  “Good afternoon, my lady,” the agent said, his voice low and respectful, yet hinting—at least to Sylvia’s sensitized ears—at forbidden intimacies in the husky echoes that hung in the air between them.

  “Good afternoon, Gates,” she replied, ignoring the absurd fantasies that appeared to have taken over her brain. “I hope you do not intend to shoot that gun off around here,” she added, noticing the shotgun slung over his shoulder. “I can guarantee that there are no rabbits within range. Rufus has seen to that.”

  “No, my lady.” Again Sylvia was struck by the cultivated tone of the husky voice. Could the countess—evidently experienced in such things—fail to be impressed by the obvious masculinity of the handsome agent? Sylvia did not think so, but she balked at speculating on the outcome of such a confrontation.

  “I come up here periodically to see that the lads from the village are not trespassing,” the agent continued. “The cliffs here can be treacherous.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the stone hut.

  “Well, no one has been up here all afternoon, except Mr. Con- nan,” Sylvia remarked, settling herself once more before her easel.

  “Connan was here, was he, now? Bringing his flowers, no doubt. As if the poor thing has any use for such trumpery wherever it is she is paying the price of her sinful ways.”

  Sylvia should not have been surprised that the agent knew of Connan’s little tribute to the countess, but it was the edge of sarcasm in his voice that caught her attention. Gates’s conviction that Lady Longueville had been a sinner placed him together with Captain Ransome in the opposite camp from Connan.

  Interesting, Sylvia thought to herself, returning to her sketching after Gates had taken his leave. For a few moments she watched the agent’s broad shoulders ripple under his coat as he strode purposefully down to the hut, following the identical path taken by his rival. Rival? The word had slipped into her consciousness quite innocuously. But its presence raised an intriguing question. Had these two men—so different in character and appearance—been rivals for the attention of the glittering female who had more than likely mocked both of them?

  And if so—Sylvia finally dared pose the logical question—had one of these men turned to violence?

  Idly she glanced at the hut, her pencil arrested in midair. Gates was descending the steps hewn in the rock. He walked over to the window ledge where Connan had deposited his floral offering, and Sylvia felt the agent’s anger flowing up the hill to where she sat Brusquely Gates snatched the modest bouquet and, clutching it roughly in one hand, disappeared round the comer of the hut.

  For several minutes Sylvia sat there, her easel forgotten. What was the man about? she wondered, repressing the mad urge to rush down the hill and peer round that comer.

  A stifled giggle jerked her back to sanity, and she whirled to find Timmy Collins standing behind her, barefoot, wearing a jacket too small for him and breeches several siz
es too large, apparently salvaged from one of the sailors who periodically washed up on the Cornish coast.

  The lad gestured at the hut, as the men before him had done. “Old Gates is at it again, is ’e?” At Sylvia’s frown, he elaborated. “Always the same thing with those two, milady. Two dogs with the same bone, me brother Danny calls ’em.” He paused to grin at her through the gaps in his teeth.

  “What are you jabbering about, Timmy?” Sylvia demanded, although she thought she could guess.

  “The countess,” Timmy responded, his tone indicating that he found her wit severely impaired. “They were both of ’em after ’er, ye see, milady. But she laughed at ’em be’ind their backs, ye might say.”

  “What does Gates do with the flowers?” Sylvia demanded, ignoring the bluntness of the boy’s speech.

  Timmy looked at her with all the condescension of youth. “Throws ’em into the sea, ’e does, milady. Always ’as, since the very beginning, Danny says.”

  Sylvia sensed that she was on the brink of discovering part of the mystery. “And how does Danny know all this?” she inquired, holding her breath in anticipation.

  Timmy waved a grimy hand nonchalantly. “ ’E used to come up ’ere that summer, that’s ’ow. Sit ’ere and watch ’em come and go. Or climb one of the oaks in the Park overlooking the summer ’ouse, or climb into the bell tower in the chapel. One of ’er ladyship’s favorite places, that chapel. Cool and dark it was.” The lad let out another giggle. “Our Danny could tell ye stories to curl yer ’air, milady.”

  “1 wish he would tell me those stories,” she said impulsively, putting aside all prudence and modesty. If what Timmy said was true—and there was no reason to doubt him—Danny might know who was with the countess that last, fateful evening of her life.