The question silenced Amelia, but she began to put on her so lately discarded bodice.
‘I won’t go if you think I oughtn’t,’ she said.
‘Forward and fast, auntie would call it,’ said the other. ‘I am almost sure she would.’
‘But I’ll keep dressed. I shan’t disturb you. I’ll sit in the dressing-room. I can’t go to sleep while he’s running into this awful danger.’
‘Which he?’ Ernestine’s voice was very sharp. ‘And there isn’t any danger.’
‘Yes, there is,’ said Amelia sullenly, ‘and I mean them. Both of them.’
Ernestine said her prayers and got into bed. She had put her hair in curl-papers which became her like a wreath of white roses.
‘I don’t think auntie will be pleased,’ she said, ‘when she hears that you sat up all night watching young gentlemen. Goodnight, dear!’
‘Goodnight, darling,’ said Amelia. ‘I know you don’t understand. It’s all right.’
She sat in the dark by the dressing-room window. There was no moon, but the starlight lay on the dew of the park, and the trees massed themselves in bunches of a darker grey, deepening to black at the roots of them. There was no sound to break the stillness, except the little cracklings of twigs and rustlings of leaves as birds or little night wandering beasts moved in the shadows of the garden, and the sudden creakings that furniture makes if you sit alone with it and listen in the night’s silence.
Amelia sat on and listened, listened. The pavilion showed in broken streaks of pale grey against the wood, that seemed to be clinging to it in dark patches. But that, she reminded herself, was only the creeper. She sat there for a very long time, not knowing how long a time it was. For anxiety is a poor chronometer, and the first ten minutes had seemed an hour. She had no watch. Ernestine had – and slept with it under her pillow. The stable clock was out of order; the man had been sent for to see to it. There was nothing to measure time’s flight by, and she sat there rigid, straining her ears for a footfall on the grass, straining her eyes to see a figure come out of the dark pavilion and across the dew-grey grass towards the house. And she heard nothing, saw nothing.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the grey of the sleeping trees took on faint dreams of colour. The sky turned faint above the trees, the moon perhaps was coming out. The pavilion grew more clearly visible. It seemed to Amelia that something moved along the leaves that surrounded it, and she looked to see him come out. But he did not come.
‘I wish the moon would really shine,’ she told herself. And suddenly she knew that the sky was clear and that this growing light was not the moon’s cold shiver, but the growing light of dawn.
She went quickly into the other room, put her hand under the pillow of Ernestine, and drew out the little watch with the diamond ‘E’ on it.
‘A quarter to three,’ she said aloud. Ernestine moved and grunted.
There was no hesitation about Amelia now. Without another thought for the ladylike and the really suitable, she lighted her candle and went quickly down the stairs, paused a moment in the hall, and so out through the front door. She passed along the terrace. The feet of Frederick protruded from the open French window of the smoking-room. She set down her candle on the terrace – it burned clearly enough in that clear air – went up to Frederick as he slept, his head between his shoulders and his hands loosely hanging, and shook him.
‘Wake up,’ she said – ‘Wake up! Something’s happened! It’s a quarter to three and he’s not come back.’
‘Who’s not what?’ Frederick asked sleepily.
‘Mr Thesiger. The pavilion.’
‘Thesiger! – the … You, Miss Davenant? I beg your pardon. I must have dropped off.’
He got up unsteadily, gazing dully at this white apparition still in evening dress with pale hair now no longer wreathed.
‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Is anybody ill?’
Briefly and very urgently Amelia told him what it was, implored him to go at once and see what had happened. If he had been fully awake, her voice and her eyes would have told him many things.
‘He said he’d come back,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t I better wait? You go back to bed, Miss Davenant. If he doesn’t come in half an hour …’
‘If you don’t go this minute,’ said Amelia tensely, ‘I shall.’
‘Oh, well, if you insist,’ Frederick said. ‘He has simply fallen asleep as I did. Dear Miss Davenant, return to your room, I beg. In the morning when we are all laughing at this false alarm, you will be glad to remember that Mr Thesiger does not know of your anxiety.’
‘I hate you,’ said Amelia gently, ‘and I am going to see what has happened. Come or not, as you like.’
She caught up the silver candlestick and he followed its wavering gleam down the terrace steps and across the grey dewy grass.
Halfway she paused, lifted the hand that had been hidden among her muslin flounces and held it out to him with a big Indian dagger in it.
‘I got it out of the hall,’ she said. ‘If there’s any real danger. Anything living. I mean. I thought … But I know I couldn’t use it. Will you take it?’
He took it, laughing kindly.
‘How romantic you are,’ he said admiringly and looked at her standing there in the mingled gold and grey of dawn and candlelight. It was as though he had never seen her before.
They reached the steps of the pavilion and stumbled up them. The door was closed but not locked. And Amelia noticed that the trails of creeper had not been disturbed, they grew across the doorway, as thick as a man’s finger, some of them.
‘He must have got in by one of the windows,’ Frederick said. ‘Your dagger comes in handy, Miss Davenant.’
He slashed at the wet sticky green stuff and put his shoulder to the door. It yielded at a touch and they went in.
The one candle lighted the pavilion hardly at all, and the dusky light that oozed in through the door and windows helped very little. And the silence was thick and heavy.
‘Thesiger!’ said Frederick, clearing his throat. ‘Thesiger! Hullo! Where are you?’
Thesiger did not say where he was. And then they saw.
There were low seats to the windows, and between the windows low stone benches ran. On one of these something dark, something dark and in places white, confused the outline of the carved stone.
‘Thesiger,’ said Frederick again in the tone a man uses to a room that he is almost sure is empty. ‘Thesiger!’
But Amelia was bending over the bench. She was holding the candle crookedly so that it flared and guttered.
‘Is he there?’ Frederick asked, following her; ‘is that him? Is he asleep?’
‘Take the candle,’ said Amelia, and he took it obediently. Amelia was touching what lay on the bench. Suddenly she screamed. Just one scream, not very loud. But Frederick remembers just how it sounded. Sometimes he hears it in dreams and wakes moaning, though he is an old man now and his old wife says: ‘What is it, dear?’ and he says: ‘Nothing, my Ernestine, nothing.’
Directly she had screamed she said: ‘He’s dead,’ and fell on her knees by the bench. Frederick saw that she held something in her arms.
‘Perhaps he isn’t,’ she said. ‘Fetch someone from the house, brandy – send for a doctor. Oh, go, go, go!’
‘I can’t leave you here,’ said Frederick with thoughtful propriety; ‘suppose he revives?’
‘He will not revive,’ said Amelia dully, ‘go, go, go! Do as I tell you. Go! If you don’t go,’ she added suddenly and amazingly, ‘I believe I shall kill you. It’s all your doing.’
The astounding sharp injustice of this stung Frederick into action. ‘I believe he’s only fainted or something,’ he said. ‘When I’ve roused the house and everyone has witnessed your emotion you will regret … ’
She sprang to her feet and caught the knife from him and raised it, awkwardly, clumsily, but with keen threatening, not to be mistaken or disregarded. Frederick went.
When Frederick ca
me back, with the groom and the gardener (he hadn’t thought it well to disturb the ladies), the pavilion was filled full of white revealing daylight. On the bench lay a dead man and kneeling by him a living woman on whose warm breast his cold and heavy head lay pillowed. The dead man’s hands were full of the green crushed leaves, and thick twining tendrils were about his wrists and throat. A wave of green seemed to have swept from the open window to the bench where he lay.
The groom and the gardener and the dead man’s friend looked and looked.
‘Looks like as if he’d got himself entangled in the creeper and lost ’is ’ead,’ said the groom, scratching his own.
‘How’d the creeper get in, though? That’s what I says,’ it was the gardener who said it.
‘Through the window,’ said Doricourt, moistening his lips with his tongue.
‘The window was shut, though, when I come by at five yesterday,’ said the gardener stubbornly. ‘’Ow did it get all that way since five?’
They looked at each other, voicing, silently, impossible things.
The woman never spoke. She sat there in the white ring of her crinolined dress like a broken white rose. But her arms were round Thesiger and she would not move them.
When the doctor came, he sent for Ernestine who came, flushed and sleepy-eyed and very frightened, and shocked.
‘You’re upset, dear,’ she said to her friend, ‘and no wonder. How brave of you to come out with Mr Doricourt to see what happened. But you can’t do anything now, dear. Come in and I’ll tell them to get you some tea.’
Amelia laughed, looked down at the face on her shoulder, laid the head back on the bench among the drooping green of the creeper, stooped over it, kissed it and said quite quietly and gently: ‘Goodbye, dear, goodbye!’ – took Ernestine’s arm and went away with her.
The doctor made an examination and gave a death-certificate. ‘Heart failure’, was his original and brilliant diagnosis. The certificate said nothing, and Frederick said nothing, of the creeper that was wound about the dead man’s neck, nor of the little white wounds, like little bloodless lips half-open, that they found about the dead man’s neck.
‘An imaginative or uneducated person,’ said the doctor, ‘might suppose that the creeper had something to do with his death. But we mustn’t encourage superstition. I will assist my man to prepare the body for its last sleep. Then we need not have any chattering woman.’
‘Can you read Latin?’ Frederick asked. The doctor could, and, later, did.
It was the Latin of that brown book with the Doricourt arms on it that Frederick wanted read. And when he and the doctor had been together with the book between them for three hours, they closed it, and looked at each other with shy and doubtful eyes.
‘It can’t be true,’ said Frederick.
‘If it is,’ said the more cautious doctor, ‘you don’t want it talked about. I should destroy that book if I were you. And I should root up that creeper and burn it. It is quite evident, from what you tell me, that your friend believed that this creeper was a man-eater, that it fed, just before its flowering time, as the book tells us, at dawn; and that he fully meant that the thing when it crawled into the pavilion seeking its prey should find you and not him. It would have been so, I understand, if his watch had not stopped at one o’clock.’
‘He dropped it, you know,’ said Doricourt like a man in a dream.
‘All the cases in this book are the same,’ said the doctor, ‘the strangling, the white wounds. I have heard of such plants; I never believed.’ He shuddered. ‘Had your friend any spite against you? Any reason for wanting to get you out of the way?’
Frederick thought of Ernestine, of Thesiger’s eyes on Ernestine, of her smile at him over her blue muslin shoulder.
‘No,’ he said, ‘none. None whatever. It must have been an accident. I am sure he did not know. He could not read Latin.’ He lied, being, after all, a gentleman, and Ernestine’s name being sacred.
‘The creeper seems to have been brought here and planted in Henry the Eighth’s time. And then the thing began. It seems to have been at its flowering season that it needed the … that, in short, it was dangerous. The little animals and birds found dead near the pavilion … But to move itself all that way, across the floor! The thing must have been almost conscient,’ he said with a sincere shudder. ‘One would think,’ he corrected himself at once, ‘that it knew what it was doing, if such a thing were not plainly contrary to the laws of nature.’
‘Yes,’ said Frederick, ‘one would. I think if I can’t do anything more I’ll go and rest. Somehow all this has given me a turn. Poor Thesiger!’
His last thought before he went to sleep was one of pity.
‘Poor Thesiger,’ he said, ‘how violent and wicked! And what an escape for me! I must never tell Ernestine. And all the time there was Amelia … Ernestine would never have done that for me.’ And on a little pang of regret for the impossible he fell asleep.
Amelia went on living. She was not the sort that dies even of such a thing as happened to her on that night, when for the first and last time she held her love in her arms and knew him for the murderer he was. It was only the other day that she died, a very old woman. Ernestine who, beloved and surrounded by children and grandchildren, survived her, spoke her epitaph: ‘Poor Amelia,’ she said, ‘nobody ever looked the same side of the road where she was. There was an indiscretion when she was young. Oh, nothing disgraceful, of course. She was a lady. But people talked. It was the sort of thing that stamps a girl, you know.’
The Judgment: A Broadmoor Biography
Yes, a villainous-looking brute, as you say, sir; and I thank the Lord he’s got all he earned, and more. Sometimes the beggars has grit and more pluck than some folk like to see in such vermin, but some of them ain’t no more spunk nor a mouse. I love pluck myself, though; if a man’s good he’s the better for it, and if he’s had be ain’t none the worse. Most of them as come here commit crimes through their madness; but it wasn’t that way quite with him, and yet here he is at Broadmoor.
Do you know, he’s almost the only one here I never felt a bit of pity for – and you’ll feel the same, see if you don’t when you’ve heard all about him.
Now don’t you be interrupting me by asking me how I know this and that and the other. I got it all out of the evidence only I pieced it together, so as to tell myself how it all happened.
He’d always been a regular bad one, he had – and the Lord only knows what he hadn’t done in his time – but he’d never been lagged for anything more than thieving, till he met with a cleverer chap than him, and together they did more than one bad night’s work, I know. Well, this other chap, he found out somehow that there was something about a certain house in a certain village that made it worth while for him to hang around there above a bit.
‘It’s a first-class job,’ says he to our man here. ‘If we pull it off, it’s idleness and the fat of the land for the rest of our born days. Are you on?’
‘I’m on,’ says our man, like the brute he is, never so much as asking what it is he’s on in.
This house was called Chudleigh Abbey, and it seems it was an old house, all over ivy and creepers; and an old lady lived there with a young nephew and a pretty niece. Of course you guess there must be some sort of love-making when a young man and his pretty cousin live under one roof. So there was, so there was. And their sort of love-making was the marrying sort. The question was popped, and the day was named, and then my young sir must needs get the family diamonds out of the bank to see how his sweetheart looked in them! He thought she looked sweetly in them, you may be sure, and he gave them to her to keep, just telling her not to let anyone know she’d got them till he’d got a safe to keep them in. So she takes them up to her room, and she hides them. Now, he thought, and she thought, no one knew about them diamonds; but I don’t need to tell you, sir, that valuable stones don’t change their addresses without its being known somehow to more than one and more than two. And amon
g those that knew were our man and his mate.
Well, they meant to have the diamonds, and they laid their plan. And there was two things made their plan easy to work. First, the young lady slept in a room at the far end of a long passage with no-one near her. It was the oldest part of the house, and she liked it, because it was ‘so romantic’. You know what young ladies be, sir! Next, the young gentleman, what always slept at home, was to sleep at the inn the night before the wedding. You know, sir, it’s a custom with gentlefolks. So the plan was that on the night before the wedding, when there was only the women in the house, our man was to climb up the ivy and creep into the young lady’s room and take the diamonds.
‘It’ll take me some time to find where she’s hid them,’ he says to the other chap, ‘so I’d better make the girl safe first.’
It was decided that our man was to go right away for a week, so that there mightn’t be any suspicion, and when he came back his mate would meet him at a certain place and hour and tell him if any change was wanted in the plan. If his mate didn’t meet him he was to go to the house at once.
So he climbed up one night and filed the window-bars nearly through, and got all ready, and then he went away.
After a week he came back.
It was a very dark night. He waited a quarter of an hour by the old wall, but no-one came, so he took his knife in his teeth, and climbed up the ivy, going very slow and quiet. The bars were just as he had left them. He took one out very gently, and laid it down and got into the room. It was very, very dark, and smelt of scent and camphor like a chemist’s shop. He listened for the girl’s breathing to guide him to the bed, but he heard nothing. Presently, feeling about, his hand touched the bed-post. Then he wraps his red cotton handkerchief round his hand, to put over her mouth, and he takes his knife in the other hand, and feels for her face … and pulls the sheet off her neck … She never moved, and it was done in a minute! Then he lays down his wet knife on the bed, and strikes a match quite at his ease to look for the diamonds.
He lights a candle that stands by the bed-head, and then sees the bed and what’s on it, and he gives a yell that fetches every soul in the house awake, and he goes off then and there stark raving, screaming mad. The sight of what he meant all along to do? Not it! Conscience? Not a bit of it! Sheer fright at the sight of what he’d done and hadn’t meant to do.