Dorothy Eden (16 page)

With an effort Julia kept her temper.

“The wood of the balcony was rotten,” she insisted. “Paul said so and he knows. Just to prove it, come and we’ll try the other two balconies and see what happens.”

Nita was nervous, or pretended to be so. When Julia recklessly leaned hard against the railing of the balcony leading from Georgina’s room she cried, “Don’t do it. You’ll kill yourself.” But when the railing proved to be quite firm the look of sly pity came back into her eyes. “You see, that one is perfectly safe,” she said.

It was Kate, huddled under the eiderdown, the colour unnaturally high in her cheeks, who protested agitatedly as Julia tested the balcony leading from that room.

“Don’t go out there!” she cried. “I shall never set foot on one of those treacherous things again.”

The railing creaked ominously. Julia found that it gave to the pressure of her body. She drew back, and said triumphantly, “It’s rotten, just as I said. This one would break even with my weight. Kate, we must get the balconies strengthened or taken down.”

Nita refused to be baulked of her triumph.

“I shouldn’t bother, if I were you. I should refuse to live in such a dangerous house.” Her gleaming eyes sought Kate. “Don’t you agree, Kate? Isn’t it better to be too suspicious than not suspicious enough?”

Kate burrowed further under the eiderdown.

“If you think the house is so dangerous, Nita dear, there’s no need for you to stay.”

“Oh, I shall stay,” Nita said. “If only to protect Julia.”

The idea of needing protection was ironic enough, but the idea of Nita being the one to give it to her was even more ironic. But perhaps she had misjudged the girl. The half-ashamed friendliness she had recognised once or twice must exist more strongly beneath her hostility than Julia had thought Nita might be deriving a morbid excitement from the events, but she also seemed sincerely concerned about them.

“Really,” she insisted, “I’d think twice before I’d agree to live here. Horrid, damp, tumbledown old place. Thank goodness Harry never brought me here.”

“Then he used to come here,” Julia said softly. Unexpectedly the colour flamed in Nita’s thin face. She dropped her eyelids, but not before Julia had seen the flash of excitement in her eyes.

“Oh, long ago,” she said carelessly. “As a boy. That’s why Granny is always talking about him.”

“Not since?”

“Not since we were married.”

“But Granny always speaks of him as an adult. As if,” said Julia slowly, “she had known him a very short time ago.” When Nita didn’t speak she went on, “Very old people often don’t remember much about their middle years. It’s their childhood and very recent things that stay in their mind. One would think that she remembered Harry from quite recently.”

She was meditating and was quite unprepared for Nita’s flinging round on her, her face flaming with anger.

“You’re trying to suggest that Harry left me! Well, he didn’t. You’re quite wrong. He never left me to come here. He never left me at all. We loved each other. We were man and wife—always.” She lingered over the last word, and then said it again, with a peculiar finality, “Always. So just stop talking about him, will you? Because I can’t stand it.”

Julia was silent a moment, filled with pity. There was no mistaking now the torment in Nita’s face. She would not shed tears of grief, she would be flamingly angry always.

“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “It’s you, Nita, who shouldn’t stay here. It’s too hard for you, seeing Paul and I happy when you are left like this.”

But Nita had recovered and was her familiar acid self.

“Oh, I wouldn’t grudge you
Paul,”
she said. She placed emphasis on the name, and the look of mocking amusement was back in her eyes. Julia began to wonder if she were quite normal.

But in face of all. that it just wasn’t feasible to imagine that Harry was somehow secretly living at Heriot Hills.

The situation was quite simple. One of the women here was in love with Paul and was being vindictive. As a result there were the letters, the salt in her tea, the moths which she violently hated in her bedroom. All of these things were harmless and intended to be harmless. The broken railing of the balcony was a genuine accident. Paul’s tense behaviour was that of a nervous bridegroom. Nita was desperately unhappy because Paul and Julia reminded her of what she had lost. Davey, being a writer, had a too highly developed imagination. Kate got fussed and upset too easily, and Georgina’s mind was one long fairy-tale.

That was how things were. There was nothing to be seriously concerned about. It would be satisfactory to find out whether Dove or Lily was the author of the letters, but even that was not important. This morning there had been none, so the writer must have decided to give them up.

(But this morning the balcony had collapsed, and no one but Julia had known there was a stranger sleeping in her room.)

Julia resolutely put the niggling thought from her. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

Then she discovered that the pearls Paul had brought her from Timaru were missing.

She knew that she had not mislaid them, because although the contents of the drawer in which she had put them were still tidy they were faintly disturbed, enough to show that someone had most carefully been searching among them.

It was too bad! This last discovery made Julia want to sit down and weep. Was she never going to be allowed to have any peace? Why did someone hate her so much? She pressed her hands to her forehead and forced herself to think logically. Whoever had taken the pearls might have done so out of malice, but could not the reason also have been greed? The pearls were beautiful, and of sufficient value to tempt a thief. Who was likely to be a thief in this house?

Instantly, perhaps unfairly, Julia’s thoughts turned to Lily. She was the one who had the easiest access to the room. She came in to tidy and make the bed. She knew Paul had given Julia the pearls. She may have been jealous, or she may genuinely have wanted to own them. It would be foolish and dangerous to steal things from her future mistress, but she might have succumbed to a sudden temptation.

On the other hand Miss Carmichael, whom no one knew anything about, had spent the night in this room. What was to prevent her from prowling inquisitively among Julia’s possessions and being tempted.

But one could not associate thieving with Miss Carmichael’s open determinedly cheerful face.

What about Dove Robinson? There had been a great deal of confusion in the house after Miss Carmichael’s fall. Anyone could have slipped up unnoticed to Julia’s room.

Even Georgina, in her fumbling absent-minded way, could have prowled. Or Nita, who was so strung-up with her secret emotions, and could have had her own reasons for depriving Julia of a beautiful present.

Or was the thief someone she had never met, someone who lived here and was never seen…

Julia began to shiver. She longed for Paul to come back. She began to dread the long hours until tomorrow afternoon when he would return. Anything might happen, she thought nervously. There might be just some petty upset, or the person who had wanted her to fall off the balcony and who had been thwarted might try another method.

No, no, no! She mustn’t think such unmitigated nonsense. No one wanted her to die, not even a crazily jealous woman.

But perhaps there could be just a little accident that would remove her from the household…

She was not thinking coherently. The uncomfortable night on the couch downstairs, and all the subsequent upsets had made her too tired to think intelligently. But if these crazy ideas were going to continue niggling at her there was only one thing to do, and that was to sit up all night. Then no marauder or mischief-maker could catch her unawares.

A
T HALF-PAST TEN
Julia took all the folded scraps of paper, like little serpents, out of their hiding place in her jewel box, and spread them out on the bed.

When, just before dinner, she had gone down to Davey’s cottage to feed the lamb which was now tethered to an old dog kennel at the back door, she had found a sheet of manuscript paper lying carelessly but ostentatiously on Davey’s desk. On it was written—
Are you sure you love him? Are you quite sure? Think very well about it. Even if you are just a little in doubt, you can depend that it is not love you feel for him.

It was a part of Davey’s book, of course. He had stopped at that point before going out on his duties as a shepherd. It wasn’t even very good, Julia thought regretfully. No one talked quite like that in real life. It had a flavour of melodrama.

However, events in real life sometimes had a flavour of melodrama, also. These anonymous letters spread out on the bed were not part of any book, good or bad. They had really happened. They had not been left lying ostentatiously on a desk to catch her eye, so that she could attribute them to herself if she wished, but had been thrust at her, most deliberately.

Think well before you marry Paul Blaine…Paul Blaine is no good for you…You will never wear that beautiful dress to marry Paul Blaine…

The thick black lettering bore no relation to Davey’s fine upright hand, yet queerly the notes seemed to be all part of the same thing.
Are you sure you love him? Think very well about it…

Julia’s head was spinning. She thought she could hear voices saying the malicious words, chanting them over and over. It was only the wind, of course, and the occasional lost bleating of a lamb. The branches of the silver poplars, with their flickering white leaves, rustled constantly. The night was full of loneliness.

If she truly loved Paul would she find his home so lonely? Julia sat in the middle of the floor, propping her back which ached with weariness against the end of the bed, and thought back over her acquaintance with Paul. There was the first time he had come to Uncle Jonathan’s house, a shy young soldier, lonely and a long way from home. He said his grandmother had told him to come, and he had been grateful for hospitality. Julia remembered how Uncle Jonathan, who had been the strictest of guardians in so far as her friendships with boys had been concerned, had almost thrust her in Paul’s arms. But he had been fair. If he had always remembered that Paul was his beloved Georgina’s grandson he had also formed the highest opinion of Paul’s character. He had given Julia complete freedom and made no comment on the hours she kept. He didn’t keep reminding her, in his slightly acid way as he generally did, that she was only nineteen and at that age a kiss was likely to seem binding for life. Indeed, he had looked as if he expected Paul’s kisses to be exactly that.

But Julia, trying to remember her exact sensations at that first rather inexpert kiss of Paul’s, knew she hadn’t experienced anything but a shy pleasure. None of the tumultuous feelings Uncle Jonathan had seemed to expect had swept through her. Rather, they had come when Paul, after his long silence, had begun writing to her again.

Their love was based on a slender beginning. If Paul had not written to her with such beautiful and sensitive intimacy they would have met virtually as strangers. Her deep delight in his letters combined with the fact of his illness had swept away any surprise that he should have kept such ardent feelings secret for so long.

Now she had no doubt about Paul’s passionate sincerity.

But she herself—was she in love with a dream?

“Paul, I want you here near me!” she whispered. “Now. Show me I love you.”

Outside the trees rustled with a never-ceasing sound. Inside there was only the faint creaking of old tired walls.

Tomorrow when Paul came back she would tell him about the loss of her pearls. She had deliberately kept silence today, for what was the use of making more trouble? No one would tell her the truth. Kate would get hysterical, and Nita would smile in that curious pitying way as she had done all day. Georgina would blame the mythical Harry, and as for Lily—was it chance or insolence that had caused her to wear a small fine string of pearls that evening. She had said she was going over to Dove Robinson’s to play cards. There was no love lost between her and Dove, but one had to do something in the depths of the country. That remark had been made in response to Julia’s polite question as to why Lily was dressed up, her body slim but richly curved in a pale-blue sweater and skirt. When Julia pursued the topic by asking Lily if she liked living in the country she got the enigmatic answer, “Not as much as I thought I would.” And with that she had had to be contented.

Had Lily’s pleasure been spoilt by her arrival? That, obviously, was the implication.

Julia sighed unhappily. It was horrid to be so disliked, and through no fault of her own. She got up from her cramped position on the floor and went indifferently to the mirror. “Why, you’re a pretty thing!” she thought she could hear Paul’s surprised voice, as she looked at her dark tousled hair, her shadowed eyes, her cheeks hollowed with strain. Hadn’t Paul thought she was pretty when he had first known her, she wondered tiredly. In a few days, under these conditions, she would no longer look like anything. She would go to her wedding a sunken-eyed ghost.

Listlessly she picked up her hair brush. She ought to take more interest in her appearance. She could begin now by giving her hair a hundred strokes. Of course, it would scarcely matter if her hair were brushed or unbrushed supposing some accident befell her…

A sudden gust of wind made the whole house tremble. It died away, like waves receding on sand, then rose again, more strongly. At the same instant, as the house shuddered with the wind, there was a sound like a door closing.

Julia softly put down the brush. She tiptoed to her door and endeavoured to open it without a sound. She looked down the stairs into the dark hallway. The wind rose to a thin shriek. It sounded almost like high laughter. The curtains in the room behind her billowed out, although the long windows were closed. There was silence downstairs. No one stirred. It must have been her imagination that a door had closed.

That was when the idea came to her to give Lily’s room a quick search and see if she could find the missing pearls. It was unlikely that Lily would be home before midnight. If she did come in unexpectedly Julia could make some excuse about looking for aspirin or something. That would not be good, but it was worth taking the risk to get at, perhaps, some of the truth.