Dorothy Eden (23 page)

“Arabia, why do you think you are in danger?” Cressida asked.

“I don’t think it, my child. I know it. Doesn’t the whole house breath it?” She waved her ringed hands and her tiara slipped sideways. “Vultures! Vultures, all of them!” At the apparently familiar word Ahmed jerked his head out of his feathers, muttered bad-temperedly, and settled himself to sleep again.

Then Arabia gave her brilliant smile and patted Cressida’s hand soothingly. “After tomorrow it will be all right. Just keep your courage until then. Oh, I have faced worse situations than this. There was the time in Tibet when my husband and I were taken prisoner by a hostile tribe of Mongols. Have you ever lived on sour goat’s milk? No, of course you haven’t. Death, in comparison, is a trifling affair. And even with the sheik there were moments when death was preferable to dishonour.” This last cryptic statement Arabia did not go on to elucidate. She straightened her tiara with a quick tilt, and went on talking, the dam of her two days’ silence and solitary imprisonment broken, and life even in retrospect, became irresistibly glamorous.

Cressida kept her eyes on the clock. At one stage she heard the thin wailing of Mr. Moretti’s violin—he was playing his favourite elegy once more—and several times she heard quick footsteps, Dawson’s, she surmised, on the stairs.

At ten o’clock she stopped the flow of Arabia’s reminiscences and said, “It’s time you got some rest, you know. What about me making you some hot chocolate?”

“That would be delightful, my dear. How thoughtful of you.”

“But I want you to come down and have it in my room. After all, you’ve never really visited me there.”

“In your room?” Arabia’s eyelids fell, covering her thoughts.

“It will be a little change for you,” Cressida continued brightly. “You haven’t been out of these rooms for twenty-four hours. Now—if you don’t come I’ll think you’re suspicious of me too.”

Arabia started up.

“Not of you, dear child. No, no, I couldn’t bear that, too. Very well, we will go to your room and drink hot chocolate. Yes, it will be a change for me.” She was vigorously shaking off her secret fear. “Just look, will you, my dear, and see that there is no one about. I dislike everybody in the house knowing my movements. Ahmed, beautiful one, you must stay here and keep watch. There, you will be quite safe, my pretty.”

The Stanhopes’ door, Cressida discovered, was safely shut. The door of the ballroom was also shut and through it came the distant murmur of voices. Cressida could identify Jeremy’s, but no other one.

She reported that the coast was clear, and found Arabia at her side, suddenly all eagerness and excitement.

“My dear, such a clever idea!” the old lady was whispering. “They won’t think to look for me there. Come, quickly now! Not a sound.”

It was all a gigantic joke. The wardrobe in the bedroom was shut, safely concealing the pathetic, mustily-sweet dresses that once had been worn so gaily and confidently by the dead Lucy. Arabia sat on the red velvet couch, a tipsy-looking queen now, with her tiara once more tilted over one ear, and laughed with the glee of a child.

“Outwitted!” she said in her hoarse whisper. “Such a brilliant idea.”

Was it true, then, that everything she did was a game? Her exultation in this one seemed to suggest that that was true. The locked doors, the torn-up notes, the roses with their sinister card… Sometimes, of course, mere games would grow anaemic and boring, so occasionally they were invested with danger. The mock-poisonings, the suffocating wardrobe…

In the tiny kitchen, out of sight of Arabia, Cressida dissolved the white tablet in the hot milk. Then she mixed the chocolate and brought it in. The old lady took the cup and sipped with enjoyment.

“You didn’t want that tasted to see if it were poison?” Cressida commented.

“My dear child, no!”

“Then why is poor Miss Glory so suspect?”

“The woman’s a fool.” Arabia drank again, sinking deeper into the comfortable couch, her tiara resting crazily on her left ear. “Vultures!” she ejaculated startlingly in. her deep tones.

Cressida sat at her feet, adoring her picturesqueness, her unexpectedness.

The old lady’s heavily ringed hand rested a moment on her head.

“Once Lucy used to do that,” she said, and it was the first time she had voluntarily mentioned Lucy’s name for two days.

“Arabia! Lucy did marry Larry, didn’t she?”

The hand slid away. “Yes, she married him.”

“Didn’t you approve of him?”

“Approve of him? Oh, yes. He was a nice lad. Not equal to Lucy, perhaps. I was afraid of that. But I gave her a beautiful wedding.”

“Yes,” said Cressida softly. “I saw the photograph.”

“The photograph?” Arabia stirred. “You found out too much, minx.”

“Mr. Mullins had it. He thought I should find it, but I don’t know why.”

“Albert Mullins!” Arabia’s voice was just slightly blurred. “A loyal friend, indeed. But he pried, too. Everybody pried.”

“Why shouldn’t they have? Arabia, if Lucy were married to Larry, why did it matter about the baby?”

“What baby?”

Cressida looked up into Arabia’s shrouded eyes. She took the empty cup and put it safely down.

“But of course you know about the baby. You told me. That was why Lucy died, you said.”

“Did I say that?” Arabia’s voice was vaguely astonished. “My dear, I tell so many stories. All those about the sheik—not strictly true, you know. My husband would not have permitted—”

“The baby, Arabia. Lucy’s baby. We’re talking about that.”

“I had a piece of blue wool,” Arabia said dreamily. “I unravelled it. All of it. It has no shape any more. It’s finished. Over. You gave it to me,” she said accusingly.

Cressida leaned forward. Oh, why had she given Arabia the tablet so soon? The old lady was almost asleep. Who would have thought it would work so quickly. But without it, would Arabia have talked at all?

“Arabia! Open your eyes! Tell me why Larry died. Please! It’s important.”

“Larry!” the old lady said thickly. Suddenly she lifted her arm in an attempt to shield her eyes, as if she were deeply, desperately afraid. The next instant it was too heavy for her to hold. It slipped to her side, her head dropped and she was asleep.

Cressida gently removed the tiara from the carefully dressed grey hair. Then she eased the sleeping figure into a recumbent position. Arabia looked very grand lying there, in her rich dress, the jewels sparkling around her neck and blooming on her knotty fingers. Her ugliness was noble, majestic. With all her love of drama, she had never created more than now, as she lay sleeping in her carefully preserved grandeur on Cressida’s couch, while outside, perhaps upstairs, perhaps in the marble-floored hall, the danger she feared so much lurked.

The fog had turned to rain. Cressida could hear it whispering against the window, and a wind, too, rattled the frames intermittently. The streets were quiet, only an occasional footstep or a fast-moving car passing.

The house, too, was quiet. What was everybody doing?

Mrs. Stanhope and Dawson would have gone to their virtuous beds, but even in sleep, their ears would be standing out attentively. Miss Glory, poor Miss Glory with her obscure disillusion in her face, might be pottering in the kitchen, but more likely she, too, would be lying in her narrow bed in the corner of the ballroom beneath the elaborately carved ceiling. Mr. Moretti, safely out of the house, would have forsaken his elegies and be playing light-hearted dance music; Jeremy—he was the mystery. He was up to something. But now Cressida’s trust in him was complete. She knew that she would obey him, no matter what extraordinary thing he told her to do.

She carefully shut all the doors into this room, prudently turning the key in the one leading into the hall. Then, wakeful but relaxed, she sat down to wait. She was not afraid. Arabia, she thought, had been the prankster, the malicious practical joker, and Arabia was safely here, sound asleep and harmless. So what had she of which to be afraid?

Hush! Was that someone walking overhead in Arabia’s rooms? Cressida listened intently. She thought she could hear furtive footsteps. Was there someone prowling through Arabia’s rooms, expecting to find a defenceless old woman there? No, all was silent again. There hadn’t been anyone. She had imagined it. It was only the intermittent bump of the window frame in the wind, the gusty sound of rain.

Arabia breathed heavily and rhythmically. Cressida turned out all the lights except the one over the fireplace. The shadowed room made her drowsy. It had been a long, exciting day. She was more tired than she had realised. It was safe to sleep. Quite safe. Jeremy was up to something, but he knew what he was doing. There was nothing to worry about.

And then Ahmed gave a small disturbed squawk! It was little more than a hoarse grunt, but the sound was horrifying in the silent house. Cressida watched to see if Arabia would stir, roused by her pet’s familiar voice. But she made no movement, and now there was silence upstairs, too, as if Ahmed had not been frightened, but merely grumbled in his sleep.

Nevertheless, Cressida kept visualising the dark room, its brilliant colours extinguished, and imagining a prowler bumping into a standard lamp, stumbling over a cushion on the floor, inadvertently clinging to Ahmed’s perch. Someone who did not mean to put on a light, who preferred to be in the dark…

Perhaps Arabia’s intuition of danger was not imaginary after all. Cressida moved a little nearer to the unconscious figure, protectively. Now the silence lasted a long time. Cressida had been in a half sleep, aware vaguely of the rain, and the hoarse breathing beside her, but of nothing else, when she started up, hearing the front door open and click shut. There were brisk footsteps across the hall. Another door opened.

That was Mr. Moretti home from his night-club. Surely he was home early tonight. Yes, it was scarcely midnight. Usually it was three or even four o’clock before he came in. Did that mean anything significant?

But there had been nothing furtive about his return. He had come in in his usual manner, and almost instantly his arrival was followed by Mimosa giving his plaintive high-pitched miaow in the hall.

That, thought Cressida, her heart beating rapidly, meant that Jeremy’s door was open, and Jeremy—what was he doing?

Nothing, apparently, for the minutes went on and the house remained silent once more.

Cressida’s sudden overpowering tiredness made her impatient and irritable. If something were to happen, why didn’t it happen? In a moment she would go out and find Jeremy, and demand to know—

Oh!
There was the furtive footsteps upstairs again. This time Ahmed did squawk with loud abandon, and Arabia awoke.

She cried in a dreadful voice, “Lucy!” and struggled to her feet. There she stood swaying, trying to keep her heavy eyelids open, a look of nightmare horror on her face.

“I must go up,” she said thickly. “I must face her.” She began to stumble towards the door.

Cressida ran to prevent her. She gripped the old lady’s arm. “No, Arabia! You mustn’t go upstairs. Jeremy said you mustn’t.”

Arabia, with a magnificent effort of will, was throwing off her drugged sleepiness. She flung up her head and looked at Cressida from hooded haughty eyes.

“And what right has Jeremy to forbid me to go to my own rooms? This is not Jeremy’s affair. It is mine and my daughter’s. Leave go of me, please. I must face her.”

“Arabia, Lucy isn’t upstairs! It’s someone else?”

But Ahmed had squawked again, and Arabia had flung off Cressida’s detaining hand and made for the door.

“Courage!” she was hissing to herself. “Courage!”

There was nothing Cressida could do but follow the suddenly strong and purposeful old figure to the stairs.

“Arabia, Lucy isn’t up there. She’s dead. You’ve told me yourself.”

There was a sudden stifled scream from the direction of Arabia’s rooms. Arabia paused. Her eyes went glassy. She gripped the stair post.

“Hurry!” she said, but now it seemed as if she could no longer persuade her legs to move. She looked imploringly at Cressida. “Lucy is killing somebody. It’s meant to be me. She’s making a mistake. Tell her, quickly.”

This isn’t real, Cressida was thinking numbly. Arabia is having a nightmare caused by that sleeping pill. Lucy isn’t upstairs killing anybody. And Jeremy said I was not to leave Arabia.

But who had screamed?

And against her will her feet were carrying her up the stairs.

She had got no farther than half a dozen steps when a voice, high-pitched and feminine, rang shockingly-through the house.

“A-aa-h! Yah! Poisoner! Jezebel!”

Then there was a flurry of footsteps, a bump on the floor as of someone springing out of bed, and again the flying footsteps. Suddenly someone screamed. It was not the voice that had spoken first. It was another voice, shrill, long-drawn in an access of terror. Then there came an awful thudding down the stairs, the beautiful curving marble stairs that were Arabia’s pride, as someone tripped and fell.

Cressida, flattened against the banisters, was paralysed. She could not have moved forward to catch that hurtling figure, even had the fall already not done a major injury.

In the split second that followed, everyone seemed to be there, Mr. Moretti, still in dinner jacket, Dawson, halfway down the stairs, a huddled almost childish figure in his pyjamas, Miss Glory in a tightly wrapped dressing-gown, with her grey hair surprisingly done in elaborate curls, and Jeremy beside Arabia, both on their knees bending over the still figure of Mrs. Stanhope.

She was smaller than her son Dawson and even more childlike. Her heavy glasses had fallen off, or she had not been wearing them, and her colourless pointed face was no longer owlish but thin and foxy, the lips drawn back a little, the eyes half open.

As Jeremy put his hand to her breast she gave a little shudder and lay still. He bent closer. Then he raised his head. He looked straight at Mr. Moretti, whose open mouth disclosed the dark cavern of its interior.

“Get a doctor,” he said curtly. “But I think it’s too late to do anything for your wife.”