Star Creek

by Pamela Kent

  She put both hands behind her hair and lifted it, resting her head against them in an extraordinarily graceful attitude, which revealed the almost childish slenderness of her bare arms.

  “You don’t have to look so surprised,” she remarked. “I saw you arrive, and I think you saw me, too. I was at the window while you were doing your tour of the grounds.”

  “The window in the unused wing?”

  “Yes; but it does happen to be used. It’s my wing. I live in it.”

  “And you? Who are you?”

  The slim hands crashed down on the piano keys, and created a jangling discord.

  “Does it matter?” she said, with a remote and mysterious smile. “Except that I have a right to be here, and I doubt very much whether you have. I’m sorry about all that mess I made in your room, but it annoyed me to see you so well settled in. And that perfume you use—that bottle you brought from Paris, I believe!—it used to be my favourite perfume.”

  Helen stood very still and stared at her. She made a little helpless gesture with her shoulders.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said.

  The other woman smiled again, quite amiably. She went round the room searching for cigarettes, and when she found them on an occasional table she began to search for matches.

  “I used to have a lighter,” she explained in a casual manner, “but since I nearly set fire to the house one night they don’t let me have one any more.” She inhaled greedily as her cigarette got really alight. “Oh, I mustn’t complain. I have most of the things I want, and if I don’t get them I ask for them. But a lighter is important, isn’t it? ... A lighter, or matches.”

  She looked rather oddly at Helen.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Do you smoke?” She thrust the box towards Helen. “Do help yourself.”

  But Helen shook her head.

  “Not—not now, thank you.”

  The golden-headed beauty shrugged her shoulders.

  “Are you one of those irritating creatures without any vices? You look as if you might be ... or I shouldn’t think you’ve got very many! Which is lucky for Roger, I suppose! It would be too bad if he’d had to extend his protection to some unprincipled young thing who might get ideas in her head and dig in her hooks. After all, Roger’s terribly rich, and although he isn’t susceptible he’s kind. You’ve probably found that out already for yourself.”

  Helen could actually feel herself stiffen.

  “If you’re suggesting that I’m here to get all that I can out of Mr. Trelawnce...” she began, but the other waved her cigarette in the air casually to deny anything of the kind.

  “Oh, no. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Pearce thinks you’re very nice, and she told me when you first came that she was sure you were quite safe. We wouldn’t have to worry about you. And now that I’ve actually come face to face with you I’m sure she’s right.”

  “I still don’t understand what you’re doing here,” Helen said, her stiffness affecting her whole body. “I haven’t the least idea who you are.”

  “Haven’t you? Do you mean to tell me Perry hasn’t told you—?”

  “If you mean Mr. Trelawnce’s cousin...”

  The door burst inwards, and an agitated Mrs. Pearce stood there, wiping her hands on a neat check apron as if she had been interrupted in some household task. Her face was a little pale, and her eyes had a watchful, cautious look.

  “You know this is out of bounds for you,” she said with a sort of gentle firmness to the woman in the faded pink dress.

  The wonderful, brilliant blue eyes regarded her with amusement.

  “Of course it is, Pearcy dear,” she answered. “But I have to do something sometimes that will cause you a little anxiety. And I was curious to meet Miss Dainton...” She looked the other girl up and down with an expression that revealed the fact that, although partially satisfied about her, she had not yet arrived at a fixed opinion of her. “She’s pretty, isn’t she? Not as pretty as I am, of course, but pretty enough. And she seems to have quite nice manners. She must have been properly brought up, and she’s not a bit Frenchified. The most discreet use of make-up, and I like that dress she’s wearing...”

  She went forward to touch it and examine the material, but Mrs. Pearce deserted her position near the door and got between them immediately.

  “Now, now, dear,” she said quickly, cajolingly, “be :a good girl and go back to your room! You know Mr. Trelawnce wouldn’t approve at all if he knew you were in here!”

  A bright and brittle laugh answered her. And then a note of disdain invaded the clear voice.

  “Get out of my way, Pearce, and don’t call me ‘dear’,” she requested icily. Her slim figure had the air of a Grand Duchess as she drew herself upright, and withdrew about a foot from any contact with the housekeeper. She even dusted down the front of her dress with beautifully cared for, slender, white hands as if afraid that it had already been slightly sullied. “I’m not your ‘dear,’ and I never will be ... and if you’re afraid for Miss Dainton you don’t have to be. I’ve already made up my mind that I like her, and I’ll bet Perry does, too. I’ve seen him hanging about the house once or twice since she came here. It’s Perry you ought to start watching.”

  “You know very well Mr. Trelawnce doesn’t encourage Mr. Perry’s visits here,” the housekeeper returned somewhat sourly.

  “All the same, I advise you to keep him away from her...” pointing at Helen.

  Mrs. Pearce said cautiously over her shoulder to Helen:

  “Go away and leave us, Miss Dainton, please. I’ll get Mrs. Trelawnce back upstairs to her quarters.”

  “Mrs. Trelawnce...”

  “But you can call me Valerie,” Mrs. Trelawnce told her smilingly. “Val if you prefer it. My husband does—”

  Mrs. Pearce looked at her appealingly, and Helen hastily left the room. Nimo, the dog, followed her awkwardly, as if he, too, had been somewhat unceremoniously dismissed.

  Helen made her way up to her own rooms, and once there she discovered that the mess had been cleaned up, and her bedroom and the bathroom were as trim as new pins once more. The flagon of perfume that she had cherished was missing from her, dressing-table, but she told herself that it didn’t matter, and, in any case, she was in such a confused state of mind all at once that it seemed to her that nothing, for some curious reason, was any longer of any tremendous importance.

  She had made the discovery that Roger Trelawnce was married, that he kept his wife incarcerated for some reason in a wing of the house that was generally supposed to be unlived in, and that wife, in addition to being exceptionally beautiful, wore the sort of dress one of the housemaids might be justified in discarding, although she also wore jewellery that was probably valuable to go roaming about the grounds in the heat of the afternoon.

  Helen felt shocked, and slightly stunned, as if someone had given her a smart blow on the head while she wasn’t looking. She was pacing up and down over the carpet in her sitting-room when Mrs. Pearce came knocking on the door, and looked in to reassure her about the return of the escapee.

  “I’m sorry you had that experience, Miss Dainton, she said. “And Mr. Trelawnce would be very sorry, too. But we do our best to keep her in. She’s perfectly harmless, of course, only a bit naughty sometimes. I think she gets restless ... especially when she knows Mr. Trelawnce is away.”

  Helen looked at her a trifle coolly.

  “Well, that isn’t really very surprising, is it?” she remarked.

  The housekeeper looked a trifle uncomprehending. “Perhaps not,” she agreed. “But I don’t mind telling you, Miss Dainton, that I find her a bit of a handful at times. It wasn’t so bad while we had the nurse, but she left about a fortnight before you came here, and there didn’t seem much point in replacing her. She’s quite well, you see, and I’m able to cope ... or I am most of the time. And one of the girls helps me out sometimes. But unfortunately Mrs. Trelawnce took a dislike to Rose, who was the
most dependable.”

  “What is wrong with her?” Helen enquired bluntly. Mrs. Pearce shrugged.

  “I suppose you could say it’s nerves ... and the aftereffects of the shock, of course. And then she was always one for the gay life ... I mean, she drank quite a bit, and that sort of thing.”

  “I see,” Helen said.

  Mrs. Pearce’s look was still a little uncomprehending, as if she was not certain that she did see.

  “We try to keep her off it...” by which Helen understood, that she meant the ‘drink.’ “It isn’t good for her, you see.”

  “Yes; I do see,” Helen answered.

  Mrs. Pearce looked vaguely resentful.

  “Poor Mr. Trelawnce, it isn’t fair to him, but he never really complains. He’s very patient, which is more than a lot of men would be in the circumstances. The other night, for instance, we had quite a time with her. She was in one of her tempers, and it was much as I could do to keep her from going for him and clawing his eyes out. Luckily, the sedative I gave her worked fairly quickly.”

  “That was the night when I thought I heard someone scream?” Helen stated rather than asked, feeling still more shocked—in fact, profoundly shocked—although still in a fog as to why Mrs. Trelawnce should be confined to a wing of the house instead of being looked after in a private nursing-home, or something of the sort. She could only deduce that it was because Roger Trelawnce was anxious to keep her under his own roof, where he could see her often.

  Mrs. Pearce nodded.

  “I was afraid she was going to be really violent that night,” she admitted. “She’d heard all about you being in the house, and I thought that would cause trouble ... at least, it could have caused trouble. But apparently she’s taken to you.”

  She looked relieved.

  But Helen was in a state of complete bewilderment, and she felt very far from relieved, and very much concerned.

  “Do you think I ought to stay here if it’s going to prove disturbing to Mrs. Trelawnce?” she asked. “After all, I have no right to be here. I could go away...”

  But Mrs. Pearce looked startled at the very idea.

  “Oh, no! Mr. Trelawnce wouldn’t like that!” she declared. “He feels responsible for you, miss. He was a great friend of your father, wasn’t he?”

  “They were friends,” Helen agreed, but she started to pace up and down the room almost agitatedly.

  “Look here, miss,” the housekeeper said, plainly wishing earnestly that such a situation hadn’t arisen, and that it wasn’t her job to cope with it, “you don’t want to get any wrong ideas in your head. This is a big house, and when Mr. Trelawnce gives his word he always keeps it. If he told your father he would look after you then he will ... and he’d be upset if you deprived him of the opportunity to repay some sort of debt. Of course, you don’t have to stay here indefinitely, but I know he’d like you to remain here a little longer. As I said, he feels responsible for you.”

  But Helen stood holding on to the back of a chair and trying to make up her mind. She now felt that she was an intruder who was intruding in a very tactless way indeed.

  Mrs. Pearce remembered something that she had to do in a hurry, and she excused herself.

  “I must go, miss. And. you don’t have to worry about Mrs. Trelawnce. She won’t touch your things in the future, and she probably won’t mind your staying here one bit ... now that she’s actually seen you.” She looked a little contemptuous. “She’s very conceited, you know. She thinks she’s a great beauty, and she called you pretty, didn’t she? I don’t think she’ll bother about you, miss!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ALL the same, Helen felt she could not remain inactive at Trelawnce Manor, now that she knew the position there, without seeking the advice of someone ... someone apart from Mrs. Pearce, who was so involved, and probably very devoted to her master, if not so devoted to her unfortunate mistress. So she decided to get out the car and drive over and have a word with Colonel Wince, who was the only responsible person—apart from the Rector’s sister—she had any acquaintance with in the district.

  And as Colonel Wince was a personal friend of Trelawnce, as well as a man of mature years, she thought he was the one to seek out.

  She knew, roughly, where he lived, and it was not more than five miles from Trelawnce. It was closer to the sea than the Manor, and the house had a crumbling beauty about it that appealed to her. In the westering light of a June evening it looked as if it had had a spell laid on it, and the spell was on everything that surrounded it, including the dark blue, gently heaving sea at the foot of the green-clad cliffs near the edge of which the house was placed.

  As she turned her car in at the main gates and proceeded up the short drive to the house she wondered what she was going to say to the Colonel when they came face to face, and how she was going to open up the subject of her sudden uneasiness.

  But she need not have worried. Colonel Wince was delighted to see her—or he appeared delighted. And as he had just said goodbye to another visitor she wasn’t interrupting anything vital, like the service of an evening meal.

  The other visitor was Tom Broad ... and Helen saw him making his escape by means of a rear gate as she drove up the drive. The Colonel came to greet her as soon as her car stopped, and he led her into the main living-room of his house and insisted that she made herself thoroughly comfortable in a deep armchair, while he went to a side table and poured her a drink.

  “No gin with it?” he enquired, in surprise, as he set the glass of lemon squash in front of her. “Not even a dash of gin?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, thanks. I’m afraid I don’t drink very much.”

  Colonel Wince smiled.

  “Don’t apologise. It’s a change to meet a young woman like yourself who isn’t afraid to be thought that she isn’t ‘with it’ if she doesn’t do all the things most young women do nowadays. Most up-to-date young women, that is.” He sat down near to her, in another deep armchair, and the evening light fell caressingly across them and the rest of the rather shabby furniture that filled the pleasant, panelled room. “I’ve a niece who shares a flat with a friend in Chelsea, and she shocked me when she came to stay with me recently. Her accounts of the sort of life she leads and the kind of people she mixes with and for whom she throws ‘parties’ at the flat made me convinced I’m a born ‘square.’ I don’t mind a young woman having a drink, but when the drink flows...”

  He shook his head disapprovingly.

  “It doesn’t seem quite right, somehow,” he said. “Not to me, anyway.”

  Helen thought of Valerie Trelawnce, who at one time, no doubt, had also gone in for somewhat hectic parties—if Mrs. Pearce was to be believed—and she wondered what Colonel Wince secretly thought of her. In order to explain away her presence as quickly as possible, and to give him some idea of why she had called, she made an apparently casual remark.

  “Anything carried to excess usually indicates a lack of security. But I wouldn’t have thought anyone fortunate enough to have Trelawnce Manor for their background would feel insecure. In fact, quite the opposite.”

  Colonel Wince, about to cut the end off a cigar, looked at her sharply.

  “You mean Valerie?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “You’ve met her?”

  “By accident,” she admitted, “this afternoon. I don’t think she was meant to go out on her own, but I saw her in the grounds. And afterwards we had a little conversation.”

  “I see,” he said, very slowly and thoughtfully. He lowered the cigar-box that contained about half a dozen others, and instead he picked up a pipe and began to stuff it with tobacco. She could tell that the pipe was an old friend, and he probably derived from it quite a lot of consolation in moments of need, and was able to think more clearly and remain alert when he had it in his hand. “What kind of a line did the conversation take? And was she quite normal, or did she appear a little strained?”

  “She
was quite normal, and the conversation was very rational, only it was interrupted by Mrs. Pearce. I don’t think she thought we ought to be left alone together for long.”

  The Colonel looked as if he agreed with Mrs. Pearce.

  “Tell me,” he said, cramming tobacco into the bowl of the pipe, and pressing it down with his little finger, “had you no idea that there was anyone like Mrs. Trelawnce living at the manor? Didn’t Roger let you into the picture at all? I must admit I advised him to do so when I heard you were coming, for I felt reasonably certain you’d bump into one another before long. There’s nothing much wrong with Valerie nowadays, and I’ve known for some time that she was getting restless. It really is a most unusual situation—keeping her shut up like that.”

  “I agree,” Helen said. She fingered her glass of lemon squash, and looked down into it. “But of course, it’s none of my business, and I haven’t any real right at Trelawnce in any case. No right at all.” She looked at him anxiously. “that’s why I’ve come to see you, Colonel Wince. I thought perhaps you would be willing to advise me, to let me know what I ought to do. In the circumstances—circumstances, I give you my word, about which I knew nothing—ought I to continue to accept Mr. Trelawnce’s hospitality, or ought I to go back to Paris? I don’t want to behave impetuously, because he’s so kind, but I don’t want to be a nuisance to him. Not in any way!”

  The Colonel puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. Her voice was so earnest—her whole attitude so anxious—that he regarded her with what she would herself have described as a mild form of perplexity.

  “I don’t think I quite understand you, my dear,” he replied at last. “In what way could you be a nuisance to Roger?”

  She made a little gesture with her hands, and her face flushed faintly.