by Ellis Peters
‘I think,’ she said mildly, ‘it is time I said something, before you fall too deeply in love with the idea of Mr Selverer’s guilt. No doubt you’ll come to the conclusion that all women are as unscrupulous as Hero warned you. But I think that won’t surprise you.’
Hans was struggling to catch her eye, signalling alarm and entreaty. She let her hand rest upon his shoulder to hold him still and silent.
‘He was not the last person known to have handled the rapier, Mr Musgrave. I picked it up in the corridor that night. I’d forgotten my fan, and I went back to my dressing-room to get it after I’d sung my aria and made my exit. I have to pass Hero’s door. She told you the truth on one point, at least. The rapier had slipped down and rolled into the corridor, and I kicked it accidentally – those enormous skirts, you know, one’s feet tend to be unguided missiles. So I picked it up and brought it down with me into the wings.’
‘Your prints don’t appear on it,’ said Musgrave, almost indignantly.
‘Chance is so inconsiderate, I am sorry. It’s with no evil intent that Marcellina always wears long black lace gloves. I never even thought how useful they were being.’
‘And why did you pick it up in the first place?’
‘It occurred to me suddenly,’ she said, looking him calmly in the eye and uttering the words without emphasis, ‘to kill Chatrier with it.’
Johnny was on his feet, his hand gripping her arm.
‘Gisela, shut up!’ He turned on Musgrave, who was staring intently, the deep inward gleam of the hunter in his eyes tempered by a certain wild distrust. ‘She’s trying to confuse the issue to cover everyone else, that’s all this is. What she says can’t be true, you know that already. She was in the arbour with Nan before Chatrier was killed, and she didn’t leave it until Tonda screamed and we all came running. You know that – you were there, too.’
‘I didn’t say,’ protested Gisela reasonably, ‘that I killed him. I said I took the sword because I thought of killing him. Oh, no, I didn’t do it.’ She put off Johnny’s hand very gently from her arm.
‘Then what did you do with the rapier?’ demanded Musgrave.
‘I propped it outside the left-hand arbour. When I went on-stage I had to hide in that arbour – but you know all the details of the libretto.’
She smiled; he had told them so often enough.
‘If Barbarina hadn’t got bored and wandered off until the finale, as she very well could have done, I was going to send her to fetch something from my dressing-room. If she’d gone already, then the coast would have been clear for me without any trouble. Then I was simply going to walk out at the back of the arbour, pick up the rapier, and kill Figaro with it. In the darkness of our stage forest it wouldn’t have been difficult to come up behind him – theoretically, at any rate. And the rapier is a very fine piece of eighteenth-century swordcraft, and extremely sharp, as you must know – it’s your Exhibit A. In practice, of course,’ she said, a tremor convulsing her calm face for a moment, ‘I expect I shouldn’t even have found it possible when it came to the point. It didn’t arise, anyhow. Barbarina was still there, and before I got rid of her I felt out at the back of the arbour, where I’d propped the sword, and it wasn’t there. It hadn’t fallen, or anything. It was gone. So I just stayed there with Nan, and didn’t do anything deadly, after all. And I think I was glad.’
‘But if this is true,’ said Musgrave, thin and sharp, ‘anyone could have taken the thing. Any one of you.’
The case was wide open again. Selverer was still a possibility, but not more so than any of the others who darted about backstage in the fevered comings and goings of that last act. And even Truscott himself – he had been in his box just before Susanna embarked on ‘Deh vieni,’ but he had certainly not been there by the time she withdrew into the trees at the end of it. He’d been prowling back and forth all through the performance like a lost soul.
‘Well, not quite anyone,’ said Gisela. ‘I couldn’t, Nan couldn’t, and Tonda couldn’t. But it certainly leaves it rather open.’
Musgrave looked up at her in silence for a long moment, and then asked the final, the inevitable question. She was quite ready for it. The large eyes stared back at him unwaveringly.
‘Why? Because I could not tolerate that he should disrupt the lives of others as he once disrupted mine, and go on all his life ruining and hurting people. I don’t suppose you followed up the record of his marriage far enough to find out his wife’s maiden name? A mistake, Mr Musgrave. As you said, the international musical world is not such a large one. She was also a singer from Alsace. Her name was Gisela Salberg.’
For one instant of utter silence they stared at her and held their breath.
‘She’d been very much in love with him,’ said Gisela, low-voiced. ‘You can imagine what it did to her, when he threw her to the wolves to save his own skin, and snatched back even his name from her. Yes,’ she said bitterly smiling, reading the mind that calculated frantically behind Musgrave’s startled eyes, ‘isn’t that a wonderful motive for murder? Better than the one you dug up against Hans, and far better than the one you were trying to foist on to Doctor Hassilt. What a pity, what a pity Nan was with me in the arbour every moment of the time!’
Chapter Five
Musgrave came and went by the stage-door these days, like a member of the company who had rights there; yet most unlike, for wherever he passed a slight chill followed, a stillness and a hush. Hands froze on what they were doing, voices dried up for a moment in contracted throats, heads turned stealthily, stiffly, trying not to be caught at it. He was like walking bad luck, the evil eye on two legs. Mateo, who was Maltese and not quite canny himself, actually marked a thumb-sign surreptitiously on his thigh as the alien went by.
Playing solo in Sam’s box during their lunch hour, they felt him enter, and the cards hung suspended over the table until he had passed. Hero, sitting in with a hand while Stoker Bates shopped for his missus, looked up with the ace poised in her hand, and could not put it down until he had gone past the glass hatch and vanished. It was wrong, it was cruel; he wasn’t even a bad fellow, and yet they all felt leagued against him, drawn into a solid phalanx of enmity as soon as he appeared. Why? Did they really believe one of their own people had killed Chatrier?
Yes, they did. They really believed it. She felt that intensely as she played her card and made her solo. Did they also have clearly conceived ideas about who the murderer could be? When she came to consider it, she was sure that they had; but they were hiding them even from themselves, and no two of them had quite the same theory.
Stoker Bates, by his more than usually protective attitude, favoured herself. She had never thought of it in that light before, and it caused a shudder of mingled horror and gratitude to run down her spine. They would love her even if she’d killed a man! They would close in round her more formidably than ever. Then was that why Sam was following Johnny about so faithfully, more than ever like a devoted guard-dog?
The shadow had withdrawn from them, and the silence went with him. Only Codger, who experienced their fears and forebodings dimly as a tremor of dread shaking his flesh, sat uncomprehending and mute knitting away industriously at Hans Selverer’s blue-grey sweater, his large, confiding and yet unfathomable eyes fixed upon her. She was Johnny’s; in the absence of Johnny himself she represented him, and Codger watched her jealously and lovingly, the sum and symbol of faithfulness.
‘I thought we might be shut of him,’ said Mateo, dark eyes following the sound of Musgrave’s feet along the corridor while his head never turned, ‘once the inquest was over.’
‘He hasn’t found his bit o’ ribbon yet,’ said Sam, shuffling the cards. ‘Likely he never will, and we shall have him running round grey-headed, give him time, like Lord Lovell looking for his bride. That isn’t the way I like the ghost to walk. Your call, Chippy.’
‘Is the inquest over?’ asked Hero, sorting her cards between her fingers with expert speed. ‘I thought they a
djourned it.’
‘They did, love, for a week, but the week was up yesterday. They brought it in murder against persons unknown, like you’d expect.’
‘And it was my sword that killed him?’ Somehow at the back of her mind she’d always preserved a dream-like hope that it wouldn’t be.
‘There was a lot of technical bits about the wound, this wide and that deep, and such and such an angle, and how it penetrated the heart, and all that stuff. But yes, that’s what it added up to. Why, what else were you thinking might have done it?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I just thought you never know. I’d rather it hadn’t been my sword. I don’t think I want it back.’
‘You stop thinking too much about that and too little about the hand you’re holding, or these thugs’ll have the dress allowance out of your pocket. You got a winning streak if you keep your mind on it. Come on, now, call!’
‘Abundance!’ she said, rallying valiantly.
‘Make it!’
She made it. It looked as if the wool fund, where her winnings invariably ended up, was going to be in pocket as a result of Stoker’s shopping expedition. She had to take their money if she won, it was a matter of honour.
‘Who d’you reckon he thinks done it?’ asked Mateo, low-voiced, jerking his head after the enemy.
‘I wish I knew. Mate, I only wish I knew.’
‘He’d like to think it was Miss Salberg, only he can’t because the young ’un was with her the whole time. And he’d like to think it was Johnny, if he could prove Johnny knew about this bloke being the bastard who did the dirty on her years ago, but he can’t. And he’d like to think it was the maestro, only he was tinkling the blooming continuo until the balloon went up. And he’d like to think it was his lordship the Count, only he didn’t get the right sort of rise out of him when he sprang it on him Chatrier was this other fellow. Or any two of ’em or any three of ’em in conspiracy,’ said Chips morosely, collecting tricks with a large brown hand that was minus the upper joints of three fingers, ‘he’s not fussy. And I’m not saying Johnny might not have felt like doing it, for that matter, if he’d known.’
‘Shut up about it,’ said Sam, drawing hard at his foul old briar, that gurgled and plopped like the crater of a small boiling geyser, ‘and deal the last hand. It’ll have to be the last. You lot o’ layabouts have got to get old Astro-what’s-her-name’s flying machine assembled before to-morrow morning’s rehearsal, as well as three major shifts tonight. And it’d better work, too! Our Queen of the Night’s in a bad enough temper already since she ain’t been speaking to Miss Gennoni. If that thing drops her we’ve all had it!’
They played out the hand, and went off wrangling about the drop of the cards. Hero lingered still, sitting by Codger’s side and stroking out the curling grey-blue sleeve that dangled from his needles. She talked to him softly and sadly, her heart not quite in it; and he made the low, loving, animal noises that were as near as he could get to speech.
She was watching the glass hatch and listening for the click of the stage-door opening.
Hans had hardly spoken to her for six days, and never once asked her to go out to lunch with him. He was kind and correct, and a little distant, and impossible to pin down; and she felt in her heart that she’d made a hash of it again, and made him dislike her for life. It seemed she could have had a gentle, sexless intimacy with him, and she hadn’t been satisfied with that; and now all she’d got in its place was complete rejection. He just didn’t like spoiled, self-willed girls. He’d take care of them if they’d got themselves into a spot, but not out of love or even liking, only because he was the conscientious sort. And be glad to drop them as soon as he could. Small blame to him, either.
Sam patted her shoulder, and said: ‘Stop fretting, kid, it can’t go on for ever. Mr Nosey Musgrave’ll get tired and go away, just give him time.’
‘Sam,’ she said, letting her head rest gratefully against his hip, ‘Johnny couldn’t really have done it, could he?’
‘Who am I to say who could and who couldn’t do things? We all could, very likely, if the chips happened to fall a certain way. But what’s better than couldn’t – Johnny didn’t. You keep hold o’ that, and never mind anything else.’
‘Oh, Sam! And it’s all my fault, isn’t it? I’m no good to Johnny, and I’d be no good …’
She didn’t finish it, because she had caught back Hans Selverer’s name in time; and she never heard Sam’s indignant abuse and reassurance, because the click of the stage-door slamming open had brought her to her feet instantly, eyes brightening wistfully, ears pricked.
The step was the right step. She was out of the door and walking nonchalantly along the passage before Sam could blink away the dazzle of enlightenment.
‘Oh, hallo!’ said Hero brightly, slowing her step and continuing to occupy almost the centre of the corridor, so that he should not be able to pass her politely, and speak briefly, and hurry on.
‘Hallo!’ said Hans perforce, curbing his pace to hers because there was no way of escape. The small, constrained frown did not leave his brow, but it shook for a moment, as though he would have liked to smile, and dared not. He was stiff and, she felt, wary. He kept his chin up and his eyes forward as though it might be dangerous to look at her. Taking no chances, she thought dolefully. But she tried her best.
‘Have a nice lunch?’
She disliked that as soon as it was out; it sounded too much like a reproof for not asking her to join him. But what else was there neutral and safe to talk about while they went through the difficult approach steps? My God, what we’ve come to, she thought dismally; we even talk about the weather.
‘Yes, thank you. And you?’
‘Johnny had it brought in to-day, nobody can get him away from the sets for next year’s Rosenkavalier. He’s up there with Mr Fawcett now, they’ve got all the little pieces out, moving and assembling them like kids with a toy train. They’re nice!’ said Hero, warming into a flush of hope and pleasure. ‘Would you like to go up and see them?’
‘I would, of course – but – not now, perhaps. Franz wants me for just half an hour, and then I must go back into town. Perhaps tomorrow.’ His voice was careful and gentle, feeling its way painfully, trying not to hurt. He still did not look at her.
‘But Franz is up there, too, he’s as bad as Johnny. He wants everything different. They always fight about sets.’
They had reached the shadowy corner at the end of the corridor. She turned her face up to him gallantly, but the smile had never given her more trouble. His arm touched her breast inadvertently for an instant, and she felt him shrink from the contact.
‘I – no, not now, Hero. Excuse me!’
She turned squarely to face him then, a faint flush of returning indignation colouring her cheeks.
‘All right, I know. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pushed you into having to say it. You don’t want anything to do with me off-stage. I can understand it, but … I just hoped … I know it’s all my fault,’ she said, ‘and I know what you think of me, but I thought at least we might try making the best of it. I am trying—’
‘Hero,’ he said agitatedly, ‘you don’t know! I don’t blame you. How could you think—?’
He wrenched his head aside to break the compulsion his eyes felt to devour her too openly.
‘To-morrow,’ he said desperately and not very coherently, and slipped past her and went up the stairs as fast as dignity would let him, and perhaps a little faster.
The sets for Figaro came out of store after a fortnight’s banishment, and were assembled ready for the smooth transitions on which the deck crew of the Hellespont prided themselves.
Johnny prowled the wings from piece to piece, his eye all the time on Musgrave, who lurked in the orchestra pit, desultorily pulling the first act design to bits and reassembling it nearer to his heart’s desire. He made no attempt to pass unnoticed, there was nothing stealthy about him; sometimes Johnny wondered if he really came in t
he hope of discovering anything new about the death of Marc Chatrier, or whether his monomania had fettered him for ever to the only opera house to which he had ever had completely free access. It was a nightmare thought, that they might have him for ever, the voice of something too extreme to be called criticism, something close to disintegration.
‘—all that ring-o’-roses round the arm-chair, that’s a pure comedy convention. You ruin it by all this realism – having an elaborate love-seat really big enough to hide in. It’s too heavy-handed. And the realistically darkened pine-grove in the last act – all those commedia del arte characters in disguise don’t really have to carry conviction.’
‘They do in this theatre,’ said Johnny, his pulses tingling again at the thought of the darkness in that pine-grove. But for that insistence on conviction Marc Chatrier would have been still alive. A little more light, and no one would have dared.
‘You’re taking Mozart out of his world.’
‘All worlds belonged to Mozart,’ said Johnny. ‘All inhabited worlds, anyhow. The word is universal. And you know what?… That’s why he vanished. His body couldn’t be in one place. “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.” The lad’s everywhere.’
‘I always understood that as meaning the loss of the dewdrop,’ said Musgrave with his faintly superior near-smile, threading his way between the angular, silent music-stands.
‘You would!’ said Johnny. ‘It’s one of the fundamental divisions of humanity – like warm people and cold people, and people who eat the top of their iced-cake first and those who save it till last.’
He was out of sight of his antagonist at that moment, the defence in depth of the standing sets between them. He stood under the arched entrance of the left-hand arbour, where Nan and Gisela had retired that night of the tragedy, and inadvertently given each other the firmest alibi possible. A series of flat washes on canvas under full light, a magic of branches and deep shadows by stage lighting, and within, light or dark, this framework of stiffened canvas and hessian on two-by-four.
