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Anne Belinda
Patricia Wentworth
PROLOGUE
John Maurice Waveney came round the turn of the path and looked down into the valley. The side of the hill fell sheer away. A little zigzag track ran to and fro amongst the roots of the great, bare beech trees and dropped at last to the valley.
John Maurice looked at the track, whistled through his teeth, and then made the best of his way down it. Leg or no leg, he wasn’t going to turn back now. He had come to have a look at Waveney, and he wasn’t going back without that look. He climbed down slowly and very carefully, as befitted a man only three days out of hospital. Every now and then he sat down on a beech root and rested.
The year was 1917, and the month was May. After wet, squally weather there had come half a dozen days of pure enchantment. The pale blue sky was so brimmed with the sun that all the shadows looked warm and soft. The valley was the valley of a dream, full of still, golden light and a green mist of breaking leaves. John Maurice looked at it, and found it worth the climb.
He slid the last couple of yards and began to walk rather haltingly along the so-called level, which was not really level at all. The path followed an erratic thread of water, sometimes dammed into a pool, sometimes falling like a single thread from a real waterfall, sometimes burying itself in a little marsh of moss. John Maurice found it very attractive. He drank from one of the baby pools, and felt an absurd secret thrill because he and the stream bore the same name. This was the Waveney. He was on ground which had belonged to his forefathers for more generations than he could count. From this valley Sir Anthony Waveney had gone out to ride with Richard Cœur de Lion on Crusade.
John Maurice wondered whether the Crusader’s helmet was as uncomfortable as his own tin hat. Then he grinned and went limping on his way, singing in a funny toneless whisper:
“Augustus Fitzlucius O’Ryan
Was the loftiest soul on the earth.
His mother was Susie O’Brien,
And his wife was a Jones by birth.”
The path rose abruptly and climbed a sort of rocky bastion, leaving the little Waveney far below. John Maurice was panting when he got to the top. He flung himself down on a drift of beech leaves and looked about him. The blighted path, having climbed all that way up, was now going to climb all the way down on the other side.
He got his breath and observed the view. The rocky cliff on which he lay dropped sheer to the thread of water. Ten feet away the other half of the cliff reared itself, its crumbling face screened by a little birch tree in its first leaf. The sun made the green of it tremble like green fire. How many hundreds of years, how many ages, had it taken for the little stream to cut its way through the rock and leave the twin cliffs parted?
John Maurice had some queer thoughts. He whistled to himself and let his thoughts make pictures for him. The sun shone, and the beech leaves were soft. He watched a spider with long, thin legs run delicately across the red-brown leaves. He heard a thrush begin to sing, and break off with half his song unsung. Someone said, “What are you doing here?”
John Maurice sat up. In front of him, looking down on him from the other cliff, there was a girl of about fifteen. She held a branch of the birch tree aside and looked at him out of dark blue eyes. She had long, falling plaits of dark brown hair. She wore a very much stained brown holland overall; there was a green smudge on one of her smooth, pale cheeks.
“What are you doing here?” she said in quite an accusing voice.
John Maurice scrambled to his feet, made a horrible face, and dropped again to a sitting position.
“Sorry,” he said.
“What for?”
“I forgot about my leg—I have to go easy with it.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Oh, it’s practically all right. I’m going back next week.”
The girl continued to hold back the branch and to look at John Maurice. Her plaits were so long that she had pushed them under the leather belt which held her overall.
“France?” she said. A curious fleeting expression just touched her eyes, her voice.
John Maurice nodded.
“You’re on leave—with your people?”
The curious something came again, and again was gone. John Maurice wondered what it was.
“I haven’t any people.”
“None? None at all?”
“Nary one, except a great-unclish sort of cousin whom I’ve never seen in my life.”
The odd look went away. It was like a cloud going away; the sun shone very suddenly and sweetly. The dark blue eyes brimmed with a smile. The girl said:
“I’m so frightfully glad. Aren’t you?”
“Why? Because I haven’t any relations?”
“Of course.”
“Balmy,” said John Maurice to himself. “Balmy but nice—nice but balmy.” Then he said aloud, “Do you mind explaining why?”
The girl let go of the branch. Then she climbed up a couple of feet and sat down cross-legged on a mossy stone. She had nice slim ankles and terribly shapeless old shoes.
“You said you were going back next week?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you haven’t got any people, it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No, of course not. I mean it doesn’t matter to you if you’re killed.”
John Maurice burst out laughing; there was such an earnest thrill in her voice, the dark blue eyes were so solemn, that for the life of him he couldn’t help it. When he laughed, the girl flushed scarlet.
“Why should it matter to you? I don’t see that it does a bit. I’m not sorry for the people who are killed—not a single bit. They’re all right. I expect it’s all frightfully interesting and exciting for them. I’m not going to waste my time being sorry for them. I don’t care what anyone says; it’s the people who are left—the people who can’t go because they’re too old or too young. How would you like that? How would you like to be a girl at home, when your brothers had gone and you couldn’t go?”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted to be a girl,” said John Maurice candidly.
The long dark plaits jerked with the vehemence of her nod.
“Of course you didn’t. No one ever does.”
John Maurice looked at her with amusement, and something else. She was a pretty kid—this from the height of his twenty-three years. Comic too, with her solemn eyes, and the smudge on her cheek, and her earnest assurance that his being killed wouldn’t matter in the least. The whole thing tickled him; but he was young enough to feel a little aggrieved.
“That’s all very well, you know. There’s something a bit chilly about feeling that no one’s going to care a blow.”
“That can’t be helped.” But she frowned a little and her colour rose. “Haven’t you got anyone, really?”
He shook his head.
She had locked her hands about her knees—long, slim hands, very brown; they looked strong. There was a queer little mole between thumb and forefinger on one of them; it was shaped like a heart. It caught John Maurice’s eye as he shook his head.
“Not a soul. The cousin would be rather bucked than otherwise.”
The dark blue eyes took on a deeper shade of earnestness.
“I should be sorry—I should be sorry about anyone,” she said. And as she said it, a distant “Cooee” came floating down the valley.
“That’s for me,” said the girl.
She unclasped her hands, stood up, and scrambled down the rough face of the cliff. She jumped the last few feet, began to run, an
d then, turning, looked up at John Maurice.
“I promise I’ll be sorry,” she said.
CHAPTER I
The car drew up in a drizzle of rain, and a young man sprang out. He stepped over the tortoise-shell cat which lay asleep on the top step of the village shop, and penetrated to the counter. To the left there were saucepans and trousers; to the right some marled bacon and two mouldy cauliflowers; overhead a ham, some balls of tarred twine, a packet of flypapers, and a miscellaneous collection of leather straps.
The young man banged on the counter and whistled between his teeth. Mr. Murgleton emerged, smoothing his grey whiskers and blinking his greenish eyes; he had the air of a dissipated elderly mouser.
“I want to know the way to Waveney Hall. I’d be awfully obliged if you could tell me how to get there.”
Disappointment lent austerity to Mr. Murgleton’s voice.
“Up the ’ill and second to the left.” Then he added, “There ain’t no one livin’ there.”
“There’s a caretaker, isn’t there? I was told there was a caretaker.”
Mr. Murgleton gazed morosely at the fly-papers.
“There’s Mrs. Mossiter,” he conceded, “and her daughter—and her daughter’s babby, for that matter.” He sniffed, and the village spirit asserted itself. “It’s time someone took the place in ’and. A year since Sir Anthony died, and nothin’ seen to nor kep’ up—goin’ hall to bits is wot I should say if I was talkin’ to the King ’isself, or to Sir John Waveney. May I ask if you know ’im?” The green eyes blinked inquisitively.
John Maurice Waveney did not answer the question. He had no desire to be hailed as the returning heir; he wanted to see the old place without any fuss and to make up his mind whether he wanted to live in it. He therefore backed away from the counter, scratched the back of the tortoise-shell cat’s head, said “Second to the left and up the hill? Thank you very much,” and went out humming:
“Cassidy was a gentleman,
Cassidy said to me—”
The rest was lost in the whirr of the starter.
The second turning to the left was a narrowish lane. It went up a hill, and then came down again. At the very bottom there were great stone pillars and high iron gates. The pillars were covered with moss. The gates were shut.
John got down and opened them. They swung very stiffly on rusted hinges. He got back into his car and went slowly up the drive. No new gravel since the year one; weeds everywhere; trees unlopped and cluttered up with dead boughs; bushes untrimmed; and again weeds, and weeds, and weeds.
“Cheery sort of home-coming!” said Sir John Waveney with imperturbable cheerfulness.
The car slid out from under the dripping trees, and he saw Waveney, all grey in the rain. Even so, it gave him an odd, romantic thrill. The oldest part of the house was out of sight. What he saw was what Maurice Waveney had seen when he brought his cousin Claude there as a bride in the year of the French Revolution—a Queen Anne front with a terrace before it. But in Maurice Waveney’s time the door had stood open for his welcome, and there had been firelight and candlelight in the rooms. Now every window showed shuttered or curtained, and the only light came from the weeping sky.
John got out and pulled the iron bell with a will. He could hear it ring; and presently he could hear the sound of the ringing die away. He pushed his hand down into his pocket, took out a folded paper, and rang again. Once more he heard the distant echoes die. He had rung a third time, when the door opened. A stout woman with a gloomy expression looked past him at the rain.
“I have an order to view the house,” said John.
He unfolded his slip of paper and proffered it. Mrs. Mossiter looked at it morosely.
“What’s this?” she inquired.
“An order to view. It’s all right—signed by Sir John Waveney’s solicitors.”
“The house isn’t to let,” said Mrs. Mossiter, adding as an afterthought, “Not that I’ve heard of.”
“It’s really all right. You’re Mrs. Mossiter, the housekeeper, aren’t you?”
“I’ve not heard anything at all about the house being to let.” There was suspicion and resentment in every note of the heavy voice.
“Well, it isn’t to let yet. But it may be, in certain circumstances; and I’ve an order to view,” John was cheerful, but a shade impatient.
Very slowly Mrs. Mossiter stepped back and made room for him to pass into the hall. She reminded him of a brindled bulldog who had bitten him years ago in Durban—the gloomy eye, the same waddling dignity, the same air of having encountered the dregs of creation.
“The dining-room,” said Mrs. Mossiter, turning to the left and throwing open a door.
John peered into the darkness. With every shutter closed, the dining-room was just gloom and the corner of a dining-table. Mrs. Mossiter trod heavily to the window, opened two inches of shutter, and let in a spectral greyness.
The late Sir Anthony had had a lively taste in carpets. Even in this grey light, John found a scarlet ground lavishly patterned in Reckitt’s blue a trifle crude. The long dining-table stretched away into the shadows. Dark panelled walls looked down upon it.
Mrs. Mossiter closed the shutter with a click. John backed out into the hall, which seemed quite light and cheerful in comparison.
“The droring-room,” said Mrs. Mossiter.
She had waddled past him with her bulldog gait and preceded him into another closely shuttered room. When a little ray of light had been admitted, John Waveney felt himself invaded by a most unwonted depression. All the chairs were in shrouds, and the chandelier in the middle of the room in a horrible white cotton bag that made it look like the carcase of something hung up in a butcher’s shop. A drugget hid the carpet. He tried to fancy the room with its white panelling all lit up, or with the sunshine slanting in through the long window that looked to the west. He strode past Mrs. Mossiter and opened another shutter. Falling rain, and low clouds, heavy and black with more to come.
He turned from the window.
“Beastly day to see a house, isn’t it? I expect you find it a bit lonely. I say, who’s that?”
On the right of the fireplace hung a portrait of Claude Waveney in a white dress.
“Lady Waveney—wife of Sir Maurice, fourth baronet—taken just after her marriage,” said Mrs. Mossiter. “That’s Sir Maurice on the left.”
John looked with interest at his great-great-grandfather and his great-great-grandmother. Claude Waveney held herself gallantly and looked straight out of the picture with steady blue eyes. Sir Maurice gloomed a little from his side of the fireplace; he had not taken kindly to having his portrait painted, but he made a very fine figure of a man.
They left the drawing-room and went from room to room, a pilgrimage at every moment more dismal. The kitchen, with its bright fire and a younger edition of Mrs. Mossiter crawling on the floor after a fat, rebellious child, alone had a human air. Of anyone less forbidding, John would have craved a cup of tea. As it was, he left the kitchen regretfully and followed his guide to the upper storey.
By the time he had inspected half a dozen bedrooms, all darkened until they suggested funerals, John was quite certain that he couldn’t ever live in the place. And yet all the while something in him wanted to live in it.
At the end of a long corridor they came into the room which had been Claude Waveney’s. The window looked out across the garden to the wooded valley into which John had climbed painfully nine years before. He thought back to that stolen visit whilst he was at home wounded. He remembered the bright warm day, the crystal thread of the Waveney breaking over the stones and losing itself in moss, the funny earnest kid who had promised to be sorry if he was killed.
He stared into the soaking rain, and strangely, suddenly, his mood darkened. He hated this place of which he was the unwanted, unwelcomed heir—hated it, and felt it draw him as if it would never let him go. It was not so much that the place was his as that he belonged to the place, and whether he loved it
or hated it, it had a hold on him which no other place had ever had or could have. He swung round, and his look startled Mrs. Mossiter; it was so bleak.
Without paying any attention to her, he walked down the room, pausing by the foot of the big four-poster bed, which still carried a heavy obsolete canopy of crimson damask. The walls of the room were of the same dark crimson, faded almost everywhere to a shade between brown and magenta. Over the mantelpiece a sharp oblong of deeper colour caught the eye. John looked at it and, still looking, spoke shortly:
“There was a picture there. What’s happened to it?”
Mrs. Mossiter bridled. But she answered: “There’s pictures in the house that goes with the house, and there’s others that don’t.” The note of impertinence became a little clearer as the sound of her own voice heartened her.
John turned on her.
“And this picture?”
“It don’t go with the house”—she gave back a step—“it belongs to Lady Marr.”
Marr—yes, one of Sir Anthony’s daughters had married Nicholas Marr. But why on earth had this Mossiter woman looked so furtive all at once?
“What picture is it? Has it been taken away? Has Lady Marr taken it?”
The questions followed each other so sharply that Mrs. Mossiter found herself answering quite respectfully:
“No, sir—not yet, sir.”
“Where is it?”
John was persistent, partly because his mood was an overbearing one, partly because the woman’s sullenness had irked him from the beginning.
“Where is it?”
“It don’t go with the house.”
“Is it in here? The dressing-room? Is it in the dressing-room?”
Her face changed; she looked startled, then sullen again. John walked to the dressing-room door and threw it open.
It was a good-sized room, but it looked small because the furniture was so large. A mahogany wardrobe covered one wall from ceiling to floor. A huge, dark tall-boy confronted the wardrobe. The very washstand was immense, holding a hideous double set of Victorian crockery. There was a boot-cupboard that would have held the shoes of a family.
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