Black Plumes Read online

  It did not make a very convincing story, but if Bridie was unimpressed he did not show it. He noted down the facts on the back of an old envelope without comment.

  "Now," he said at last, "when ye looked through the window what did ye see?"

  "David and Robert talking." She had told this lie before and it came glibly.

  Bridie's pencil hovered over the page, and beneath their deep arches his eyes were thoughtful.

  "You're certain ye saw both men?"

  "Yes."

  "Just talking?" "Yes."

  He sighed and replaced the envelope.

  "Ah well," he said, "I'll not be keeping ye, Miss Ivory. Thank ye for your help. By the way," he added as she turned towards the door, "there's one wee point I forgot to mention when I was telling ye how the deceased met his death. There was a contusion on the back of the poor chap's head and another on his chin. The one on his chin was likely made by a blow from a fist an' was delivered with such violence that there's a likelihood that the assailant's hand was damaged. Now, during this week you've seen Henry Lucar who's missing. Have ye noticed any mark on his hand?"

  It was such a highly improper question from a police officer that she saw the trap, and for once Divisional Detective Inspector Ian Alexander Bridie was. as he would have said himself, "jolly well too clever by half, no question about that."

  "No," she said so coolly that he was not sure if she was controlling herself by a superb effort or merely registering disapproval of his methods of interrogation. "I'm afraid I haven't. It's hardly a thing I should have noticed."

  Bridie resigned himself to this defeat philosophically, as was his temperament.

  "Likely not," he agreed and waited slyly until she was half out of the door before he added briskly, "he's in the house now, ye know. Came in forty minutes stuce and went straight up to your sister—excuse me, half sister."

  Frances turned in astonishment.

  "Lucar?" she demanded.

  "Oh no." He watched her carefully as he spoke. "He's still away, the deliriously silly fellow. I was speaking of your fiance, Mr. Field. Haven't you seen him this morning':" I thought it was odd him coming and asking directly for Mrs. Madrigal and odder still that she should see him. Ah well, I'll not detain ye. You'll be anxious to get away to him, no doubt. Never concern yourself about me. I'll just be in and out all the day most likely."

  8

  It is quite possible to cross a yard, enter a house and climb up two flights of stairs without being conscious of movement. Had Frances arrived outside Phillida's door by magic carpet she could not have been less aware of the journey. Petrifying terror had taken possession of her. At that time she had no jealousy. Had that most degrading of the emotions had any place in her make-up then she would never have burst in on them so unceremoniously. At that moment she was only afraid for David, afraid for him and of him and of her ignorance concerning him. She did not even knock but wrenched open the door and went straight in, coming to an abrupt halt halfway across the plum-colored carpet.

  By daylight the room's modern opulence was faintly offensive. Stripped wood and regency colors combined to give it a somewhat overpowering elegance. David and Phillida were caught in their pose like figures on a canvas, vivid against the rich, warm background. They sat on either side of a narrow walnut table, with the gilt telephone between them. Phillida's green house coat was in quilted satin and its train spread out behind her where the deep pile of the carpet had caught the silk. Her long bare arms were stretched out across the wood, her head between them bowed in an abandonment of misery. David held her wrists, his hands looking solid and masculine against the transparency of her skin. He was half out of his chair, an arrested picture of compassionate eagerness.

  It was only for an instant, of course. Before the door had closed he was on his feet, his hands in his pockets and his uncomfortably handsome face grave and embarrassed, while Phillida sat up slowly and looked at the newcomer with great drowned, pale blue eyes. Nobody spoke. There was a full minute of complete silence, during which Frances realized firstly that there was some sort of emotional crisis going on, secondly that they had some secret from which she was excluded and finally and most shatteringly that there was no earthly reason why these things should not be. After all, she had no proprietary claim on David. Their engagement had been an act of courtesy and obviously did not entail fidelity.

  The sensation of disappointment and loneliness which swept over her was so salutary that it startled her into her senses and she grew slowly crimson.

  "I'm terribly sorry, you two," she began. "Shall I get out, or..."

  Her voice died. They were neither of them looking at her but were both eying the telephone with the same degree of fascinated interest. As they watched it began to ring.

  Phillida put out her hand and picked up the receiver. She was green. Her mouth was stiff and unmanageable and she closed her eyes.

  "Yes?" she said huskily.

  Frances stole a glance at David. He was watching the other woman with a grimace of apprehension with which one motorist observes another approaching a dangerous accident.

  "Yes?" said Phillida again, the word scarcely articulate. "Yes... It's me... Phillida. Oh, my dear, don't... don't bother.... What? Oh, I am. I am, I am...." The last word was a cry, and a long pause followed while the instrument crackled excitedly. "When?"

  The fear in her voice startled both listeners. Her eyes had opened and were wide and ugly.

  "So soon? I see... Yes, I'm glad. Of course I'm glad. Of course I am. Of course... Good-bye... Darling, goodbye...."

  The instrument clicked but she did not replace it, but sat staring stupidly in front of her. In the end it was David who took the telephone from her and put it back on its stand.

  "You didn't tell him," he said accusingly.

  She shook her head and began to cry. He turned away from her and strode down the room, jingling the money in his pockets with a nervous irritable gesture so different from his usual lazy manner that Frances was bewildered.

  "You ought to have," he said over his shoulder. "It was the only possible thing to do. When does he get here?"

  "On Thursday." Phillida whispered the words as if they bad been a pronouncement of doom.

  "A day after Meyrick? My God, suppose something happens and they meet on the train and the old man tells him."

  "Don't, David, don't. Don't, I can't stand it. I can't, I can't, I can't!"

  The last word was drowned in a storm of passionate crying. She Hung herself across the table and wept with a complete abandonment which was horrible, and, if it had not been so distressing, ludicrous.

  David paused abruptly in his restless wandering and, going over to her, he put his hands under her arms and lifted her up.

  "Stop it," he said sharply. "Stop it. Phillida. Stop it, did you hear? Pull yourself together. Lie down on this couch thing and pull yourself together. It's the only thing to do."

  He put her down gently on the day bed and, taking an eiderdown from the foot, threw it over her.

  "Sleep," he said. "You'll want to in a minute, after all that. Sleep, and for heaven's sake get a little courage."

  It was considered brutality, expedient in the circumstances. Mrs. Madrigal's hysteria dies away, to give place to quiet weeping. She lay with her face hidden and her hair sprawling over the silk pillows. For a moment the man remained looking down at her. Gradually his own tension relaxed, the careless smile returned to his eyes, and his wide mouth twisted with compassion.

  "Poor old girl," he said. "God knows I'm sorry."

  She did not move, and presently he turned away towards the door. Frances genuinely thought he was unaware of her own presence altogether. Throughout the whole extraordinary scene, which had lasted scarcely five minutes, he had never once looked in her direction, but now, on his way to the door, he thrust out an arm and collected her, holding her tightly and sweeping her out of the room with him.

  "God, what a time to come barging in!" he sai
d as he closed the latch behind them.

  The remark was so easy and so friendly and yet so immeasurably adult than any expression of her own reactions that she was both taken off her guard and comforted.

  "I'm sorry," she began diffidently. "I had no idea..."

  He took his arm from her shoulders and pushed her head gently on to one side with the flat of his hand.

  "Come off it, ducky," he said. "For the love of old Uncle George and Fourteen Exotics come off it. This isn't the time. That was 'Dolly' Godolphin. Just before you made your entrance the telephone people had announced that a personal call from him to Phillida was due at any moment. Hence the tension. God knows where he was ringing from. I forgot to ask the poor girl. Basra, perhaps, since he's due in the day after tomorrow. Let's go out and have a drink. I need it if you don't."

  "No, I don't think I will, not at the moment."

  "Why not? My good girl, you can't hang about this ghastly house day in and day out. It's unhealthy. It'll get on your nerves. You'll get hysterical. Let's get out of this, if only for ten minutes. It'll mean that the lad from the police station who follows me about with such dog like devotion has to air his boots again, but I don't see why we should worry about him."

  "Are they following you already?" She spoke involuntarily and he raised his eyebrows in genuine astonishment.

  "Darling, you're all white and positively tremulous. Isn't that nice? You flatter the old man and make him feel silly. Go and put your hat on. Remember every second saved in the operation means another half inch in the vine tendrils growing round my heart."

  He was only half laughing at her and there was a suggestion of unusual color on his high cheekbones. They were standing on the big dim landing together, surrounded by the closed doors behind which drama, growing every hour, was gathering force and momentum. Frances was very much aware of it all, dark and emotional, mysterious and quite unbearable.

  "No," she said definitely. "No, David, I don't want to.

  He put both hands on her shoulders and looked into her face. Afterward she could never make up her mind if his curious half-smile was mischievous, derisive or as oddly shy as it seemed at the time.

  "Marry me this afternoon?" he said and waited for incredulity to appear in her eyes

  It came and he laughed, letting her go instantly.

  'Why?" Frances was still young enough to put the question in spite of the tension of the hour.

  He grimaced at her. 'The iodine-stained hand," he said. "By the laws of England no wife can give evidence against her husband. You asked for it, sweetheart. Now will you come out to lunch?"

  It was in the grill room of the comfortable old Biarritz, with its geraniums, its Turkey carpet and its blessed atmosphere of sensible bonhomie, that the little incident occurred. David was buttonholed in the foyer by a man who was obviously a stranger to him, and Frances went on into the restaurant alone. Bertram, the headwaiter, who made a fortune by greeting every client as if he had been in the service of his family since boyhood, had found her a table near the Piccadilly windows, and she had just settled herself when she saw a familiar face coming down the room towards her at the head of a procession. It was Margaret Fisher-Sprigge with a covey of her cronies fresh from one of their eternal meetings. She raised her head and smiled as one does smile at the acquaintance of a lifetime and caught the full gamut of the changing expressions on the haggard parrot face. She saw the first formal grin, the wave of startled recognition, the deep Hush of embarrassment and the quick snap of the mouth and hardening of the eyes as the face set into the stony mask which is impenetrable. Mrs. Sprigge passed on.

  It was the first time in her life that Frances had been cut and she knew suddenly that it would not be the last. The polite phone calls which had kept the entire house busy on the day before had been curiously infrequent this morning since the papers had come out. She was sitting stiffly at the table, her ears burning, when David came up. He looked irritated.

  "A damned reporter," he said as he sat down. "I nearly gave him a signed confession and the commissionaires hat. Have they been much of a nuisance at the house?"

  "No. The police see them."

  "Oh, of course. Cod bless the laws of libel and contempt of court. What's the matter with you?"

  She told him and he listened with a faintly apprehensive expression which she had not seen in him before.

  "Where is she?" he said at last, looking round. "That old trout in the wide awake? Never mind about her. Think of her in the nude." He grinned at her and, leaning forward, laid a hand over hers. 'There's nothing like it," he said earnestly. "When insulted by a fish think of it skinned. It takes the edge off anything."

  He was treating her like a child, she saw, and she wondered why she did not resent it. It was not a very pleasant meal nevertheless. They were served with suspicious alacrity, and Frances, already self-conscious, thought she noticed a corresponding embarrassment beneath his determined good humor. He did not refer to Phillida, and Frances found that she did not want to broach that particular subject, although it was certainly one which needed an explanation.

  At last, as the coffee arrived hard on the dessert, and a couple of apologetic waiters hovered anxiously waiting for them to finish it, he pushed a cigarette case towards her and eyed her under his lashes.

  "'Dolly' home on Thursday," he said softly. "There are storms ahead. Duchess. Button down your sou'wester and keep your chin in."

  "What do you mean?"

  He leaned hack in his chair and regarded her uncomfortably. He was still smiling superficially, but his round eyes were serious and compassionate. He sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

  "Damn all the trouts," he said unexpectedly. "Where were you when 'Dolly' was around before?"

  "In Switzerland most of the time, finishing my education. I met him of course."

  "Of course," he agreed absently. "You won't have forgotten him. A colorful bird. I never met a chap with more life or more romance about him. This sensational return from death is typical. The story itself was so terrific, and this cap to it supplies just the right touch of the supernatural to make it like him."

  They were both silent for a while, remembering the story of Godolphin's death which had moved the world. It had been the Scott incident over again. The three white men with a handful of natives had been forced back by impossible conditions when they were in sighting distance of their goal, the avalanche-mined lamasery of Tang Quing, perched precariously on the side of a peak which had been rendered well-nigh unclimbable by the disaster. It had been a perilous retreat. Robert was already ill and the natives were frightened and refractory. The crowning tragedy had come when Godolphin smashed his shinbone while negotiating a particularly awkward drop. For two days they had struggled on, carrying him between them down the narrow, broken track. On the third night they had camped on the edge of a snow field, and in the darkness Godolphin had disappeared. There was nowhere for him to have gone save out into some snow-filled crevasse, and it was a miracle how he could have dragged himself even so far. The natives lost their heads in superstitious terror, and finally the two remaining white men, their shouts unanswered, realized that exploration was suicidal and had been forced to accept his gesture and to struggle on alone.

  David shook his head.

  "Astounding," he said. "A miracle, and so like him. Things are not so hot, lady. Not at all so hot."

  Frances sat up. The meal and the change of atmosphere had restored her perspective, and she was exasperated by him.

  "Never mind about Godolphin," she said vehemently. "Surely that's the least of the problems! You've let Phillida work you into a flap about a silly sentimental situation which might be tragic and exciting in ordinary circumstances, but new it's purely idiotic. Don't be insane. Don't be blind. I know Phillida wasn't in love with Robert, which is a mercy, but even she doesn't seem to realist that somebody's killed him and that Lucar has run away, but... but the police don't seem to be as interested in him as they ought to b
e."

  She broke off, looking at him her eyes shining with helpless anxiety.

  "Can't you see, you silly romantic ape, they're interested in you?"

  He sat very still, staring at her with no expression on his face at all, and it came back to her with a sudden stab that this was how he looked when she had seen him from the yard... no expression at all and looking down.

  When he did speak he made the last remark she could have expected. It was penetratingly true and quite unpardonable.

  "Jealous, ducky?" he inquired.

  Frances got up. Afterward, when she had forgotten the intolerable nervous strain of the preceding twenty-four hours, she wondered at her lack of control.

  David caught up with her as she crossed the road to turn down into St. James's. He did not speak but dropped into step at her side, and they strode on in bitter, suspicious silence through the lazy crowds, past the ancient and expensive little shops where single pairs of riding boots, solitary pictures and astonishingly extravagant neck ware are displayed to attract the fastidious of two continents, and so on into the gracious quietude of Sallet Square.

  A small army of cameramen caught them as they passed the doorway of the empty house on the corner, and they fled together from it, Frances white with misery and apprehension and David grasping her arm and thrusting her forward, his thin mouth narrowed and his eyes dark. There were several stragglers in the square, silent, mildly Inquisitive figures in the dim November gloom who were kept discreetly on the move by a bored police constable. One woman remained in Frances' memory to the end of her days. She stood on the curb, a vast, shapeless figure in a last year's hat, carrying a shopping basket and watching with greedy yet oddly apathetic eyes the shrouded windows of 38, which, like well-bred faces, had nothing to show the world of the wretchedness of fear within.

  Miss Dorset met the two in the hall, and the pathetic expression on her face, with the pinched red nose and the watery eyes, broke in upon their private crisis with relieving urgency. Her story was simple and disastrous. Meyrick was held up in Brindisi. The one eventuality which is always possible in Eastern travel but which is somehow never envisaged had occurred. A case of yellow fever had developed on the plane, and the entire company, passengers and crew, had been clapped into quarantine at the Italian port. There was nothing to be done and no help for it. Meyrick was a prisoner for a fortnight at least.