Death in the Castle (11 page)

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, and lingered upon the question.

He sighed and straightened himself and stood for a moment, half-bewildered. How could he keep her here? How could he explain—but what had he to explain? His glance fell upon his briefcase, dropped when he came in and forgotten. He crossed the room and, hesitating, opened it.

“I have some photographs I brought to show Sir Richard,” he murmured. “You might like to see them, too.”

He came to the table where she stood watching him. He spread them before her. “They’re Connecticut. The landscape isn’t too different from England, as you see—a bit more rugged, perhaps—rocks and stone walls. The castle was to stand on this low hill above the river, the forest in the background. … There’s the sketch. I made it myself, imaginary, of course.”

He shuffled several sketches. “Here it is, the great hall. … Pretty good since I hadn’t seen it, don’t you think? Even to the chandelier—”

She saw the castle there in Connecticut as though it were a dream in a far country. The great hall was full of strangers, Americans, gazing up at the beamed ceiling. They were sketched in, tiny figures, blank faces.

“That chandelier,” she said suddenly, “it isn’t just a chandelier. You’ll have to be careful about people standing under it. It makes me shiver to think of it.”

“Why?” he asked.

“It’s dangerous,” she said in a half whisper. “It has a voice, Lady Mary says. ‘I’ll drop it—I’ll drop it.” She imitated a faint far-off voice with a Scottish accent.

“Ah, don’t laugh,” she cried, when she saw him smile. “Lady Mary insists she’s heard it.”

At this he laughed aloud, diverted. “What an attraction for the tourists! And have you heard this voice?”

“No, but I’ve seen the chandelier shiver and shake until the crystals sing!”

“You’re not serious!”

“Perhaps I am—”

“Come now—look into my eyes and tell me the truth!”

He seized her by the shoulders, still laughing. She was half laughing, by now, but before she could reply they heard the strong steps of booted feet and Sir Richard stopped in the doorway and stared at them. John Blayne dropped his hands and Kate stepped back.

“I’ve just put an idea to Mr. Blayne,” she said.

“Indeed!” Sir Richard did not change his expression.

It was not enough to placate him, she could see, and she hurried on. “I suggested that he consider again the idea we had at first—to make the museum here, you know, Sir Richard.”

Sir Richard lifted his heavy eyebrows, came in and stood beside them. “And what did he say this time?”

She glanced at John Blayne. “He refused again—not yet, anyway.”

Before John Blayne could speak, Lady Mary entered. She had changed her tweed suit to a long gown of pale gray satin with a ruff of white lace and had touched her cheeks with rouge, a lovely, fading rose.

“Wherever have you been, Richard?” she inquired in her sweet childlike voice. “I’ve been fearfully worried about you. And what are you doing here? And in your riding things at this late hour? It’s nearly time for dinner and Wells will be cross if we’re late. We’re dining in the small hall, Richard.”

Sir Richard went to her and lifting her hand he kissed it gallantly. “I was about to look for you, my dear, to tell you I was home. Meanwhile, it seems, Kate has been bravely taking care of Mr. Blayne while you and I deserted the field. They’ve lighted all the candles because it’s grown so dark they couldn’t see each other. And Kate has made a proposal to him.”

Lady Mary screamed delicately. “What? You’re mad, Richard!”

Sir Richard put up his hand. “No, no—don’t jump to conclusions! She proposed merely that he accept our original idea and bring the paintings here. The castle would become the museum where it stands, as we understood from the first.”

“A splendid idea,” Lady Mary said. “It always was. I can’t think why you gave it up, Mr. Blayne.”

John Blayne looked from one to the other of these three. Fantasy, he thought, dream people living in another age! How to bring them into reality! He began to speak slowly and clearly.

“Lady Mary, Sir Richard … and …” He looked at Kate and away again. “I wish I could agree that the idea is a good one, Lady Mary … it isn’t, I’m afraid. The castle is too out-of-the-way here. It’s not even on the tourist route from London.” He hesitated a trifle awkwardly. Kate had turned away but Sir Richard and Lady Mary were looking at him with painful intensity. He must not hurt them! He went on, haltingly.

“Castles belong to a certain era, I suppose. They were necessary once, when a man had to build his own fortress. Today—well, fortresses don’t protect any longer. They’re rather like the Great Wall of China, where the people feared the enemy from the north. Now the enemy comes from the sky or the earth or the sea. We’re surrounded! So the castle becomes a museum piece in itself, wherever it stands, in the old world or the new. The new world needs it more, perhaps—lacking a history of its own. Anyway, in this curious compressed world today, history belongs to everyone, everywhere.”

Sir Richard rejected all this with a wave of the hand. “Socialism! My castle belongs to me, Mr. Blayne. Let us stay by the facts, if you please.”

John Blayne turned to face him. “Very well—you shall have the facts, Sir Richard. My lawyers have investigated. Even with the castle open to the public for a year, one day of every week, you have cleared two hundred dollars or thereabouts. Let’s see—that’s about eighty-seven pounds. How many people? A few hundreds—enough to support an inn, I suppose, but not a castle. I’ll be honest with all of you. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to bring great works of art here, at immense cost, where no one would come to see them? … It wouldn’t be fair—now would it?—to rob a new country like mine, whose people are hungry for art and beautiful things, by taking its treasures away and putting them where they couldn’t be enjoyed by everybody.”

He gazed at their faces and saw only uncommunicating gravity.

“Or am I wrong?” he inquired.

Lady Mary replied brightly to this. “What’s wrong, pray, with an exclusive museum? It would be nice to have only people with clean boots. Put the idea to your father.”

Sir Richard drew off his riding gloves. He was smiling now but vaguely, as though he were not listening, his eyes glazed and remote. He had withdrawn himself from them all. “Quite—quite,” he murmured. His eyes fell on Lady Mary. “I see you’re ready for dinner, my dear. You look very pretty. I expect Philip will soon be down. We’ll join you in a few minutes. … Mr. Blayne, it’s time to dress for dinner.”

He left the room with dignity and after a moment John Blayne followed. He felt helpless. What could he do except leave them to their fate? And so he might have done, he realized, had it not been for Kate, so young and beautiful a creature whose fate and future were involved somehow with this ancient castle and the three dreamlike old creatures who inhabited it and would not leave it. As it was, what would become of her?

“Sit down, Kate,” Lady Mary commanded when they were alone.

She sat down as she spoke in the great carved oak chair beside the chimney piece and folded her hands in her lap. She felt lost and alone. She, the mistress of Starborough Castle, was not being told what was really going on. Where had Richard gone riding for hours? Why had Kate been talking alone with the American? Who was plotting what, and she not told anything? The afternoon had been torturously long while she sat crocheting and in unbearable, tedious anxiety. Wells had been too agitated and irritable to question because of a guest for dinner and at last she had dressed half an hour too early, on the pretext that this gown, which she had not worn since she had been unable to afford her own maid, was difficult to get into alone.

“Now, Kate,” she began. “What have you been saying to this young man?”

Kate sank on the hassock at Lady Mary’s side. “I really said nothing, my lady, except that I do wish he’d just have the museum here as we wanted from the first.”

“Quite absurd to think of it, as I now see him,” Lady Mary said impatiently. “He’s not the sort of person who could be at all happy here.”

“Why not, please?”

“An American? Besides, Kate, I don’t think
they
would like it, you know—it would he so restricting to
them
to have an American about all the time, not to mention other Americans coming here, even in small numbers.
They’d
be quite put out. I shouldn’t like to answer for the consequences. After all,
they’ve
been here much longer than we have, and
they
can’t be ignored.”

Kate reached for Lady Mary’s hand, a slender nervous hand, delicately veined, restlessly moving. “Dear,” she said, “are you quite sure you do hear
them?
It isn’t just—dreaming? I sometimes think you live too solitary a life here, shutting yourself away even from the tourists.”

Lady Mary withdrew the hand. “Certainly I hear
them!
And it’s not only I, Kate. You remember what I told you about Richard’s mother. She came here as a bride and the very first night in the castle, although simply nobody had told her about
them,
when she came downstairs to dinner she asked Richard’s father who the lovely lady was at the top of the stairs. And old Sir Richard answered quite calmly, ‘Ah, you’ve seen her! She was lady-in-waiting to a queen, and she was murdered by a groom who fell in love with her.’ Certainly I don’t dream, Kate, and it hurts me very much to have you doubt me.”

“I don’t doubt you, my lady. It’s just that I myself can’t see
them
—or hear
them.”
She rose and stood beside Lady Mary.

“That means you do doubt them,” Lady Mary retorted, “for if you believe in
them
you see
them,
or at least hear
them.
I do assure you, when I’m alone
they
make themselves known to me—put it that way.”

“You don’t actually see
them?”

“I do see
them,
as clearly as those candles burn there on the table. Yet if you blow the candles out, quite possibly you might think they were never lighted, mightn’t you? Or couldn’t be lighted? They look dead until someone lights the flame. Well, that’s how it is. When I’m alone, I concentrate for a moment, sometimes for half an hour, and I think about
them
and
they
feel me thinking and then
they
come out of the shadows.
They’re
there all the time, but
they
must be felt before
they
can be seen or heard.”

She looked down at Kate wistfully. “Does that seem impossible to you?”

“Nothing seems impossible,” Kate said softly. “I believe you. Have you ever talked to Sir Richard about
them?”

“Of course,” Lady Mary said. “Many times.”

“And does he believe in
them?”

“It’s not a matter of belief with him,” Lady Mary said. “It’s a matter of seeing.”

“If he sees
them,
why doesn’t he speak of
them
as you do?” Kate asked.

“Perhaps we don’t see the same ones,” Lady Mary leaned to whisper. “What if he sees only bad ones?”

She looked over her shoulder and Kate saw a strange look of terror on her gentle face.

“Lady Mary, what’s the matter, my dear?”

She seized Lady Mary’s hands and held them in her own. They felt cold and limp and she chafed them. Lady Mary looked at her vaguely and answered, still whispering.

“I told Richard only yesterday that I thought there was a king in the castle, because the voice in the chandelier sounds as if it might be dear King John’s voice. It’s said he had a very strange high voice. And Richard said, yes, there was a king in the castle, but he looked at me so… so … darkly, somehow, that it couldn’t have been the same king. … Perhaps he even saw one of the headless ones. I don’t know. … I’m glad I see only the good ones. They’re the ones that stay near me and want to help us.”

“What did you say then, my lady?”

“I said, ‘Richard, you do see
them
after all!’ And he said—and this was odd, Kate—very odd! He said, ‘How would you like to be a queen?’ ”

“What did he mean?”

“Just that be didn’t want to talk about it, I suppose. Whenever I want really to talk about
them,
he always talks about something else, to put me off. Oh dear—he can be very tiresome!”

She freed her hands gently from Kate’s clasp and was silent for a moment before she began again. “Kate, I know that
they
can help us if
they
will.”

“How?” Kate asked.

She was troubled by the conversation. All her life she had known that Lady Mary believed in these others who had lived in the castle and until now she had accepted the possibility of the persistence of the dead beyond life. England was an old country, crowded with history, and the castle was a symbol of the past. The bridge across the moat had been drawn up in many a fierce battle against Dane and Norman, and kings had found refuge here, princes been murdered, and queens taken to bed by their secret lovers. The castle was a storehouse of passion and revenge and ambition, retreat and inspiration. Whatever men and women had needed, they had created in their time. Only now, when the world had somehow got mixed into one great bewildering confusion, had the castle ceased to have meaning except for the handful of people who lived in it, of whom she was one.

And did she really live here? That telephone this afternoon from another world, that loud, commanding, arrogant voice of an American, how like the voice of an enemy it had seemed in the silent library, enclosed in book-lined walls—books that nobody read! Then was it the voice of life and today and a world from which she was hiding? No, not hiding! They needed her here in the castle, those two old dreamers whom she loved. Oh, if only she had been a man, she could have really helped them! Instead, being a woman, she did not know what she believed. Perhaps she had avoided knowing. She had neither seen nor heard the dead but then she was busy and young and strong. Lady Mary was often ill and spent hours alone or with Sir Richard, and he could alternate between calm good spirits, subdued and but a ghost of what in his youth must have been a charming gaiety, to moods of deep gloom, when he withdrew into himself or even disappeared for hours together. At such times Lady Mary was haunted with vague distress until he returned again. It had been a long time since there had been guests at the castle and it was true that when the public came, Lady Mary shut herself away from them in her private rooms to wait until they were gone.