Drop of the Dice (31 page)

Lance watched me as I took it out.

‘Lance!’ I cried. ‘You!’

‘Who else? Don’t tell me you are in the habit of receiving such gifts from others?’

‘It’s quite beautiful,’ I said, and I immediately thought of the coat and those unpaid bills about which Lance was so nonchalant.

‘Put it on,’ he commanded.

I did so. It transformed me.

‘Let’s have a look at you,’ he said. ‘Ah, I knew it. It brings out the green in your eyes.’

‘But, Lance, it’s terribly expensive.’

‘Only the best will do for you, my darling,’ he answered promptly.

‘You shouldn’t…’ I wanted to say that I should have been more pleased with something which had cost less, but I couldn’t, of course.

‘A bit of luck at the tables,’ he said.

‘You should keep your winnings to set against your losses.’

‘Losses! Don’t talk of losses. It’s a word I don’t much like.’

‘Nevertheless it exists…’ I stopped. There I was lecturing him again. Perhaps this anxiety over his gambling was making a shrew of me. I went on: ‘Lance, I love it. It’s beautiful and it is wonderful of you to give me such a present.’

I wore the necklace that evening. It looked magnificent with a white brocade gown.

Jeanne fingered it almost lovingly when I put it on. ‘It’s the most beautiful necklace I ever saw,’ she said. ‘Sir Lance knows what is elegant. You would think he was…’

‘A Frenchman,’ I added. ‘I’m glad you approve of my husband, Jeanne.’

‘I do not like that others like him too much.’

She was referring to Aimée. Would she never get over her dislike of my half-sister! ‘She has a beautiful brooch given her.’ Her lips were pursed in disapproval because it was Lance who had given her the brooch.

‘It is Christmas, Jeanne. A time for giving.’

Jeanne continued to express her disapproval as she brought out the bezoar ring from its case and gave it to me to slip on my finger. She had treated it with great respect since she had heard it had once belonged to a Queen.

She could not take her eyes from the necklace.

‘It is beautiful,’ she said. ‘Think what it stands for. It is worth a flower-shop in the Rue St Honoré.’

‘Worth a flower-shop!’

‘I mean if it were sold… You could buy a flower-shop in the heart of Paris for what that’s worth.’

‘Oh Jeanne,’ I said reproachfully, ‘you make me feel as though I’m walking round with a flower-shop round my neck.’

I was to remember that conversation later.

It was a strange Christmas without the family and I was rather glad when it was over. There was far too much gambling and my thoughts were at Enderby with Damaris and Sabrina.

It was a harsh winter. We stayed in London where the weather was slightly less rigorous, but even there there were several days when the frozen snow remained piled high against the houses and we were unable to go out.

The thaw set in at the end of February and at the beginning of March I received a letter from Priscilla.

I didn’t want you to risk the roads [she wrote], but I do think you should come down as soon as you can manage it. Damaris is worse. The rheumatism seems to have affected her heart. I think you ought to come, dear. She longs to see you, but she would not let you know for fear you might risk the roads, and she did not want that.’

I showed the letter to Lance. He was loath to leave London now. He had had several invitations to people’s houses and I knew that he was looking forward to them. Moreover, his presence was required on the country estate. On the other hand he did not care for me to make the journey alone.

I said: ‘I shall be all right. I must go, because there is an urgency in Priscilla’s letter. I shall have the grooms with me.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

I was pleased that he wished to do so and then I wondered what I would find at Enderby. Damaris was clearly very ill indeed. If she were to die—and I had an overwhelming premonition—I must think of Sabrina and I knew that I could handle whatever was awaiting me better if I were alone.

When Lance was there Sabrina held aloof. There was some absurd but passionate resentment in her jealous little heart and it was directed against Lance solely because she believed he came first with me.

I said: ‘I don’t know what I’m going to find there. It will be depressing, I am sure. Sabrina is a very unhappy child at this time. Lance, I do believe I can handle this best alone.’

He understood at once. Perhaps he was relieved. Morbid situations did not appeal to him. He liked everything to be pleasant. ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘But if you want me to go with you, you have only to say so.’

‘I know,’ I said gratefully. ‘And thank you, Lance.’

Jeanne insisted on coming with me. I should need her, she said. And I was glad of her company. ‘And Sir Lance,’ she went on, ‘he will stay behind?’

‘I have told him that is best.’

She shook her head. ‘He should go with you. You should not leave him alone with…’

She did not continue and I did not ask her to.

So on the last day of March I set out for Enderby.

Although I had known that Damaris was seriously ill, I was unprepared for what I found.

It was indeed a house of mourning. Damaris was dead when I arrived. Her heart had weakened during the first attack of rheumatic fever when she was young and this return of the disease had been too much for her.

When I stepped into the house I had the feeling that it was content because this was its natural state. Happiness, gaiety, merriment did not rest comfortably at Enderby. The house had become alive again; it had come into its own—evil, menacing, haunted by tragedies of the past.

In a small room on the first floor stood the coffin. The room was darkened for the curtains had been drawn across the windows. Lying there in the light of two candles, looking young and beautiful with the lines of pain wiped from her face, lay Damaris. She wore a white cap of fine Brussels lace and I could just see the top of the shift in which they had laid her out, with lace at its neck. She looked so peaceful there; remote from all the harassments of life. Damaris was at rest; but what of those whom she had left behind?

Jeremy was a man who had lost his way and despaired of ever finding it again. He looked like a ghost. Smith told me that he neither ate nor slept. He did not seem to be able to realize that she had gone.

‘I dunno,’ said Smith. ‘When she came it changed everything. She was an angel, that’s what she was. And now she’s gone to the angels… if you believe in that sort of thing. They’d have done better to let her stay. Angels could do without her. Mr Jeremy can’t. She’s gone. That means everything will change back. I don’t know, Miss Clarissa. I don’t know at all. There’s the little nipper. What’s to become of her?’

‘We’ll sort something out, Smith,’ I said. ‘Never fear.’

Sabrina had not come to greet me as she had in the old days. I asked Nanny Curlew where she was.

‘Nobody can do anything with that child, these days,’ she told me. ‘She’s shut right in on herself. Doesn’t seem to want anybody.’

I found her at last. She was in one of the attics sitting under an old table pretending to read.

‘Hello, Sabrina,’ I said. ‘Did you know I was coming?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, and looked down at her book.

I crawled under the table and, sitting beside her, put my arm about her.

‘I thought you’d be glad to see me. Aren’t you?’

‘I don’t mind.’

I started to get out from under the table but she made a half-move towards me. ‘She’s dead now,’ she said.

I went back and sat close to her.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I haven’t got a mother now.’

‘Dear Sabrina, you have us all. You have your grandparents… your great-grandparents… and here am I.’

‘They all think I killed her.’

‘They don’t.’

‘They don’t
say
it but they
mean
it, and I did, didn’t I? It was because she pulled me out of the frozen pond.’

‘That was an accident, Sabrina.’

‘I made it an accident and Papa hates me.’

‘Of course he doesn’t.’

‘Why do you say that when you know he does? Why do people always tell lies? We ought to tell the truth.’

‘Of course we should, and we do. Your father does not hate you.’

‘You tell lies,’ she said. ‘You needn’t. I don’t mind if he hates me. I hate him too.’

I put my arm round her and held her fast. I kept saying: ‘Sabrina, Sabrina, my dear little Sabrina.’

Suddenly I felt her clinging to me. I thought she was going to cry and I knew it would be good for her if she did. But she didn’t. Instead she said in a small voice: ‘Stay here, Clarissa.’

I stroked her hair. ‘I’ll look after you, Sabrina,’ I said.

After that she did not avoid me and I felt I had made progress.

I went to the Dower House. Poor Priscilla was weighed down with grief. Damaris had been her favourite daughter. I don’t think she ever understood my mother. Carlotta had, throughout her life, been exotic and dramatic. But Damaris had been the quiet and affectionate home-lover, the daughter every woman wants—kind, generous, unselfish in the extreme, the one who gives all she has to give without thought of self-gratification. Dear, loving, simple Damaris was no more; she had gone, leaving behind so many who mourned for her, whose lives had become poorer without her, people who needed her.

There was gloom at Eversleigh. Carleton was confined to bed and Arabella was in a state of acute anxiety because of his health. The death of Damaris was a blow which she was not strong enough to sustain at this time.

It was indeed a house of mourning.

It was an April day, a week after her death, when Damaris was buried in the graveyard attached to the church, where generations of Eversleighs had been laid to rest.

I shall never forget the dismal tolling of the bell as the pallbearers carried the coffin into the church. I kept Sabrina’s hand in mine; she was very quiet and her beautiful eyes were enormous in her pale face.

When we stood round the grave and listened to the sound of the clods of earth falling on the coffin, the child shrank close to me and I put an arm about her to comfort her. She turned away from the gaping grave and buried her face in my skirts.

I dared not look at Jeremy, who was as a man in a dream. I saw that Smith was close beside him and I was grateful to Smith. He had looked after Jeremy in the past and would do so now.

Back at the house we partook of some refreshment—ham, beef and little pies with mulled wine. In the great hall the company was assembled—a quiet, sad company. They talked of Damaris’s many virtues. It is the custom at funerals to praise the deceased’s accomplishments and gifts—but in the case of Damaris the compliments were deserved.

How we should miss her! This house would not be the same again. I realized that it was her presence which had dispersed that air of menace.

Jeanne had said it was not a happy house; now it seemed to me that it was haunted by malevolent ghosts.

The guests had departed and silence fell on the house. Jeremy went to the room he had shared with Damaris and shut himself in with his grief.

I suggested to Sabrina that we walk round the gardens for an hour and she agreed to come with me. She was silent for a while and then she began to talk about the funeral.

‘My Mama is down there in that big hole in that box,’ she said. ‘It was a nice box, with shiny woods and a lot of gold on it.’

‘Brass,’ I said.

‘Gold’s better than brass. But you can’t bury gold, can you? It costs too much. The gravestones look like old women… men, too… wrapped in grey cloaks.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘A little.’

‘When it’s night they stop being stones and turn into people.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘I heard them talking.’

She meant the servants. I knew they gossiped together and several of them were sure Enderby was haunted.

‘And,’ went on Sabrina, ‘the graves open and dead people come out of their coffins.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘They dance on the graves and if anybody goes there when they’re dancing they catch them, and won’t let them go. They take their hearts and everything and keep them for themselves. Then they’re alive again and the other one is dead.’

‘Where on earth did you hear such gruesome tales?’

‘I won’t tell.’

‘You made them up.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Sabrina,’ I said, ‘it’s nice to be with you. The two of us together. Do you think so?’

‘It would be, if…’

‘If what?’

‘Just if,’ she said.

I fancied the old Sabrina was returning. She laughed a little. I thought: She’s getting over it. She’s only a child really.

I stayed for three weeks in that house of mourning and during that time the sadness did not diminish. Jeremy nursed his grief. He was the sort of man who concentrates his main affection on one person and that person had been Damaris. His wife had been the centre of his life, and his love for her, his need of her, was so intense that nothing else could encroach on it. His wife would always come first, and although he would have been fond of his children, they would always have taken second place in his affections; and he. was a stern disciplinarian. He had wanted a son and Damans had always hoped to give him one. The miscarriage had been a bitter disappointment but was of secondary importance compared with the loss of Damaris. When she had died he had lost his will to live and his was not the temperament to allow him to adjust to a new set of circumstances. Nor did he make any effort to do so, and because Sabrina’s wayward, thoughtless act had brought about the tragedy he remembered it whenever he saw her. I knew it would be well for Sabrina to keep out of his way. She knew it too, poor child, and robbed of her mother, whom she had deeply loved, found no one to whom she could turn but myself and Nanny Curlew.

I should have gone back to London but I did not feel I could leave Sabrina in this unhappy state. So I stayed on and spent as much time as possible with her and I was rewarded by occasional glimpses of the child she used to be.

Then came the night when she was missing.