The Doll Maker

7

One breezy Sunday morning a fortnight or more after she had returned the doll to Niall, Clare was walking round the school grounds when she heard her name called anxiously in a rather weak breathless voice from behind. She turned in some irritation, but the girl who was hurrying to catch her up was one with whom it was impossible to be annoyed. It was Reenie Ford, a Sixth Former and a Prefect, a thin, anaemic−looking girl with short−sighted brown eyes and a habitual expression of high seriousness on her pale face. She was notorious for being conscientious beyond all conscience. The younger girls made fun of her; Clare, while avoiding her when she could, did not like to hurt her feelings. She sighed and left the world of Brackenbine in which her fancy had been straying.

It was a world that had undergone some change difficult to define in these last two weeks. It was as though her visits there had become charged with more secrecy and with the excitement of some impending greater adventure which, turn and turn about, appeared delightful and frightening. Three or four times this fortnight Mrs. Sterne had been away and there should have been no visit, but Clare had gone all the same and spent the afternoon alone with Niall. Neither the danger nor the deceit of that deterred her now. She was in full rebellion, committing the most heinous offense that anyone at Paston Hall, she supposed, could imagine, and she had not a qualm of conscience.

Niall had been hard at work on his carving. Alone with him, she watched and tried to help, feeling humbly grateful and pleased when he asked her to hand him a tool or fetch and carry for him. She would busy herself making their tea, moving happily about the house, up and down to the kitchen, feeling that she was at home at last, loving Brackenbine as she had never loved any house before. Niall was making two dolls; he worked slowly and his method was complicated. There were a good many different parts all to be shaped separately, so that it was difficult yet to see what the finished product would be like.

Sometimes she begged to be shown some of the others—the little actors who had traversed the Captain's park so gaily on that white, frosty night at the beginning of term. But Niall was always evasive, putting her off, as it seemed, merely to tease her, but in the end promising that she should see them all as much as she liked when her own was finished.

Once or twice, now that the afternoons had grown longer, he had put down his tools early and taken her out through the studio skylight to ramble about the steep wooded slope of the hill before it grew dark. There she had had a brief glimpse of the miniature park again, looking down from the top of its perpendicular cliffs. Still, from the one point where he let her look down she could not clearly see the Castle: it was largely hidden by the tangled wood of little trees. There was no way down into the park from the hill, so far as she could see. He would neither tell her how he had worked his puppets from outside on the night of the show, nor let her go through the studio window to explore the park for herself. She wheedled, but all she could obtain was a promise that she should be shown the secret when the new dolls were finished.

She had been with Niall in imagination while she marched with great strides round the school grounds this morning, and Reenie Ford was alarmed at the challenging stare with which Clare met her when she wheeled round.

“Clare!” she said, panting. “I'm sorry, only I couldn't make you hear. You walk so fast. I hope you don't mind me disturbing you—I expect you're thinking something awfully difficult out—but there's something important I want to tell you, and now's a good time.”

There were no other girls about the grounds. The bulk of the school had been marched off to church at Halliwell; Clare was allowed to please herself about going, and Reenie was excused because, having weak ankles, she could not manage the four−mile walk. Not far away there was a seat sheltered from the whisking wind, which was blowing Reenie's long skirt and loose blouse about her like clothes on the sticks of a scarecrow. Clare went over and sat down. She wondered, with an internal groan of boredom, what shocking breach of discipline Reenie could have discovered in the Junior School to demand her intervention.

“What is it?” she asked.

Reenie composed herself and began. She spoke, Clare thought, as if she had learnt her piece by heart, like a policeman in the witness−box.

“It was the night before last,” she related. “Friday, at a quarter to three. Well, of course, that would make it Saturday morning, really. So, yesterday morning at a quarter to three—I looked at my luminous watch and made a careful note of the time—I woke up with my dyspepsia. I get quite bad attacks sometimes in the night, you know, and I always keep some tablets in my drawer. I took four tablets with a glass of water and then I thought that I would pull the curtains across because the moon was quite bright and I thought it would help me to sleep if I darkened the room more. Naturally, I couldn't help looking out of the window, and, do you know? I know you'll scarcely believe me, but it's absolutely true: I saw somebody coming across the grounds, towards the school. At a quarter to three in the morning!” Reenie looked at Clare with tightly−pressed lips and gleaming eyes.

“Somebody in the grounds?” Clare repeated slowly. “Last Friday night? It couldn't have been.”

“That's what I said to myself,” Reenie nodded. “But I put my spectacles on immediately and had another look and there was no doubt about it. Somebody was walking up to the school from the direction of the big beech−tree by the wall. But you don't have to rely on just my evidence. I was so surprised—I must admit I was frightened too—it moved, you know, furtively—I woke Elsie up. Elsie Butterfield, you know. We share a room.”

“And Elsie saw it too?”

“Yes. Yes, well...” Reenie was a little less confident. “Just a glimpse, I think, because it had got to the corner of the building by then, and it sort of slunk round, close to the wall. But Elsie did say she saw it just before it disappeared, and she was quite awake then.”

“I think the pair of you must have been dreaming,” Clare said flatly. “There's nowhere where anybody can possibly get into the grounds except perhaps by the gardener's cottage, and then Williams's dog would have raised Cain.” Clare could assert that with confidence. They had always given the gardener's cottage a wide berth in their night prowlings long ago. “Have you asked Williams whether he heard anything that night?”

“No,” Reenie replied. “We haven't said a word to anybody yet. We discussed whether we should report it to Miss Linskill, but I thought it ought to be done through you as Head Prefect, and Elsie agreed.”

Clare was relieved. “That was sensible. After all, there's probably a perfectly simple explanation. I can't believe anybody would be trying to burgle Paston Hall.”

“That's what Elsie said. Though there is the tennis cup in the Hall. But I don't think this was a burglar, you see, it was the figure of a girl!”

“A girl!”

Reenie looked very gratified at the astonishment in Clare's voice. Clare had been preparing herself to hear the description of a man—the one man who had his night rambles on the other side of the wall and who, Reenie's tale had made her fear, might have extended them now. But a girl—

“Yes,” Reenie said, “a girl, or a woman. But I think it was a girl because she had a grey coat on, just like a school coat, and she was bare−legged, unless she was wearing flesh−coloured stockings—I couldn't be sure of that; but it was a short coat. She hadn't a hat on and I think her hair was light, though the moonlight may have made it look like that. It was short, anyway. I wish I could give a better description, but being so surprised, you see, and not having my glasses on at first, and then her slinking round close to the side of the building...”

“Which way did she go?” Clare asked sharply.

“Round the end of the East Wing, you know, turning round the corner of the gym, towards the Prefects' Room....”

Clare jumped suddenly to her feet.

“Good Lord!” she cried in dismay. “What a fool I am!”

Reenie goggled up at her blankly and Clare recovered her wits.

“Look here,” she said, lowering her voice and throwing all the importance she could into her tone. “I've suddenly remembered something that may have a bearing on this— something that had clean gone out of my mind until just now. Will you and Elsie keep absolutely quiet about this? Not mention it to another soul for a day or two? Just let me see if my idea's right or not. We may make asses of ourselves if we blab it out before doing our own bit of sleuthing.”

“You mean you've got a clue?” Reenie asked.

Clare was already moving away. “It may be—of a sort; I must check it first.”

She hurried back to the school building, ran up to her room, slammed the door and threw open her cupboard. There she began hunting through an untidy pile of papers, old exercise books, loose notes and letters—letters from her mother and father and from old friends departed from Preston Hall. She could not help exclaiming with impatience as she searched, accusing herself fiercely of her own negligence and stupidity. It took her ten minutes to find what she was looking for: five or six pages of a letter stuffed back into the envelope and left largely unread.

She had received it soon after the beginning of term, from Helen Gray who had left school at the end of the previous summer term. Helen had written a gossipy letter about her Christmas holiday in Switzerland and about her settling down to a job in London. It had all seemed a little remote and unreal to Clare then, dwelling as she was, heart and soul, in Brackenbine, and she had not persevered in deciphering all the vile scrawl of ill−shaped, uncertain characters sloping in every possible direction. She had meant to read it all at greater leisure, and she had simply forgotten it. Now, one passage through which she had skimmed, picking out the more legible words, had come vividly back, shocking her like the blow of a hand on her cheek.

She looked quickly over the pages to find the passage:

“Simply marvellous time at [illegible]... last holiday for donkey's years ... drudging in an office now... bookkeeping. Me!!!” Clare dropped the pages on the floor. Now she had it, on the last page.

“Should have told you we met Judy at [quite illegible]. Great fun, she and I and our cousin Harry, and of course, three of us all from Paston Hall, because Jennifer was with us too, we spent a lot of time reminiscing about the Prison House and the Ghoul. Do you know we both said the best things we ever did were those midnight picnics we used to go on, with you and Pamela and the rest of our gang. Jennifer said she couldn't believe you ever did such things because you were such a serious and dignified person. It seems nobody ever discovered our way out. Jennifer didn't know about it till I told her....”

Clare spelled all this passage out now carefully for the first time. She pushed the pages back in the envelope. Clearly the secret of the Prefects' Room window had been blown wide open since Christmas.

She considered Jennifer Gray, Helen's younger sister. She was in the Fourth Form and would be fifteen now, she supposed. Clare knew her by sight because she was a conspicuously good−looking girl among a uniformly dowdy lot of Middle School kids. She had naturally−curling, light−brown hair bobbed short, large blue eyes, and a figure that had somehow escaped the gawky stage of development and passed straight from baby chubbiness to a soft and supple grace. Of her character Clare knew next to nothing; she had only an impression, from remarks overheard among the Prefects, that Jennifer was pert, rather spoilt and insubordinate. She might Well be adventurous enough, also, to put to the test what Helen had told her about the ease with which one could climb out of school.

If that were so, Clare sympathised and was inclined to do nothing about it. She might persuade Reenie Ford that the shape she had seen at an eerie hour of the setting moon was a ghost, or—with sudden inspiration—Miss Geary. There was no reason why one of the teachers shouldn't walk in the grounds at any hour she chose, and Miss Geary was known to sleep badly. That would carry conviction. But then, regretfully, she saw that she would have to do something about the incident. While she remained at Paston Hall a private exit would have its uses. If Jennifer and a whole gang of Fourth Formers took to using it they would sooner or later be found out; there would be the father−and−mother of a row, and the end of it would be that Miss Sperrod would have the Prefects' Room window barred as all the other ground−floor windows, except those in the Sanatorium, were. Clare saw nothing for it but to catch Jennifer or her friends in the act and somehow put a stop to their excursions without letting the secret spread any further than it had done.

So, on fine nights during the next week she kept vigil alone in the Prefects' Room. Three nights passed without result and Clare began to be anxious: Reenie was obeying the injunction to silence most conscientiously, but it was obvious that she would very soon want to know what Clare was doing about her 'clue'. There was little risk of Elsie Butterfield saying anything. She was a fat, sleepy, unobservant girl, interested in nothing but bed, mealtimes, and the date of the end of term. Clare was sure she had not even seen the prowler when Reenie woke her.

She caught Jennifer on the fourth night. She had kept awake in her own room until nearly one o'clock, judging it sounder strategy to take her quarry as she came in rather than intercept her on her way out, when she might produce some more or less acceptable excuse for being downstairs and deny any intention of going out of school. The other nights Clare had watched she had found the fastening of the window in place; still she had waited for an hour or two on the off−chance that she might observe something. This night she found the window−catch undone.

It was a cloudy night, but not raining. She had brought her torch with her in order not to have to switch on the lights, which might be seen shining out across the lawn. She settled herself in the most comfortable of the Prefects' easy−chairs in a position blocking the route from the window to the door, and waited.

She was not very concerned about the shock she might give Jennifer. An adventurer must expect alarms, and there was an even chance that she would have some companions. Clare felt the humour of being on the side of law and order and smiled in the darkness, anticipating the fun of telling the whole story to Niall.

Her mind went, as usual, to Brackenbine. She could open her reveries of Niall at will and find ever new wonders and joys, like turning the pages of some marvellous book. Two hours passed and she was unconscious of any tedium. She looked at her watch by the dim light of her torch shining through her fingers and saw that it was ten to three. The longer Jennifer was out the less likely it seemed that she would be alone; there must be more fun than solitary mouching round the grounds to keep her so long out of bed. Clare prepared to deal with a gang.

It could have been no later than three, however, when she sat up, alertly listening to footsteps outside. Soon there came a scuffling and scratching at the window. Clare listened critically; she and her companions in old days had taken infinitely more precaution and had been much better burglars than this. A gust of fresh, cold air blew on her and someone jumped down into the room very close to her. She rose and switched on her torch, speaking quietly as she did so. Her heart smote her at the great sob of fear she heard.

In the first flash of her torch she had recognised Jennifer Gray, and a glance at the window behind her revealed no one else. Clare lowered the beam of her torch, and keeping carefully between Jennifer and the door, gave the girl a little time to recover.

“Is there someone else with you, Jennifer?” she asked then, in a low, kindly tone.

Jennifer's voice was wildly unsteady. She was almost crying with fright, but her fright began to change to anger as she answered.

“Someone else? Where? There's nobody else! Why are you trying to stop me? What do you mean by jumping out at me like that? What right have you got to spy on me?”

“Calm down a bit,” said Clare. “If you go climbing out of school at night you know somebody will ask questions if they spot you. And don't shout. Nobody else knows you're out but me, and there's no need to wake the whole school up.”

“I don't care!” Jennifer retorted, lowering her voice all the same to a furious whisper. “I hate the whole lot of you! And you—you —you've got no right, Clare Lydgate...”

“I don't care a hoot what you do, you little ass,” said Clare coldly. “You can stay out catching pneumonia all night as far as I'm concerned, but don't you realise there are other Prefects? I'd better tell you that someone saw you coming in last Saturday morning and reported it to me. You can thank your stars they didn't tell Miss Linskill first.”

Jennifer advanced to her, standing in the pool of light that fell from the torch. She had regained almost complete control of herself now, and when she spoke again her tone was defiant.

“I don't believe you!” she said. “Nobody's seen me. Nobody knows but you, and I know how you know. You're trying to stop me, but you won't. You can't frighten me with Miss Linskill. Tell her! Tell Miss Sperrod! Then see what I can tell them about you. Perhaps you think I couldn't tell them a few things about you going to Brackenbine?”

“Brackenbine?” said Clare sharply. “What's that got to do with it? Everybody knows I go to Brackenbine.” “Yes? Over the wall? At night?”

The vindictive sneer in the girl's voice so roused Clare that she could have slapped her. She controlled herself and said in a hard tone:

“What do you mean? What nonsense are you talking?”

“Oh, you can lie,” said Jennifer, coolly impudent. “You would, of course. You'd have to. But there's no need to lie to me. I know.”

“Know what? If you have the cheek to stand there and tell me to my face that I go over the wall to Brackenbine when I can perfectly well go round by the road every day, I don't know whether you're a bigger fool than you are a liar.”

“All right,” said Jennifer. “I'm a fool, am I? Well, perhaps you can deny that you went over the wall the first Saturday night after the beginning of term? Perhaps you can deny that they were your tracks I saw in the snow the next morning?”

“Tracks in the snow?” Clare gave a scornful sniff. “You'd better invent some better tale than that.”

Her scoffing infuriated Jennifer. Her whispered reply was venomous. “Invent? I'll tell you what you've seen. Perhaps you haven't seen little horsemen through a window? Perhaps you haven't seen someone they all think is dead, alive and riding in a coach? Perhaps you haven't seen people bound by their hair to trees for disobeying him? Perhaps your left ear doesn't smart sometimes? Perhaps you don't dream?”

Clare fell back against the table. The beam of her torch wavered as her hand trembled violently. Jennifer seemed to have frightened herself by her own outburst; Clare heard her breath coming in sobs and noticed, for all her own distress, that the other girl's legs were trembling. Her legs were bare beneath her short grey coat and she had a new scratch on one knee. Clare watched the red line shudder as the muscles twitched uncontrollably.

She stared, fighting hard against an anguish that was melting her very bones. Never had she felt at once such desolation and such fear. It was not only that a whole solid, happy world had collapsed: if the world of Brackenbine had dissolved suddenly and left nothing but the drab emptiness that existed before, she could in some fashion have endured that sorrow; but in collapsing, it had opened a dreadful gulf from which unspeakable things came clambering out at her.

She shuddered and struggled free of the clutching things. She lifted the torch, and gripping Jennifer's shoulder with her other hand, looked into her face. The younger girl's eyes were wide and terrified. It seemed to Clare that only now was she realising the full horror of what she had said. Faced with that white, appalled look, Clare found some shreds of courage and common sense among her own ruins. First she held her torch close to Jennifer's cheek and brushed back the thick hair from her ear. She saw there, in the lobe, a tiny puncture. It appeared in the torchlight like a little spot of angry red inflammation.

She gave the girl a weak little shake. “Oh, Jennifer,” she whispered. “You should not.... You don't know what you've done. I—I understand what you've seen. It's not real. Do you understand? It's not real. It's a bad sort of game. I know I didn't understand at first myself, either. But I do now. I know him better than you. I'm older than you. You must believe me. You must promise me that you won't go there again, ever. Promise!”

“Not go again?” Jennifer cried so wildly and loudly that Clare in alarm laid her hand over her mouth. But the younger girl calmed down quickly. She spoke again in a desolatingly miserable voice. “I don't know. I can't trust you. You might be saying this just because you're jealous. It was all so lovely before. Even—even when he told me about you I didn't mind. I wasn't jealous.”

“Listen,” Clare implored, almost choking with grief. “I'm not jealous either. I'm trying to help you. Oh Jennie, you know Helen and I were good friends. You know she and I first found this way out. You can trust me, can't you? I'm trying to save myself as well as you. I shall have to go again myself—in the daylight. I can do that. It's safe for me. But you must promise me not to go there again at night, ever! Promise me, for Helen's sake!”

“Don't tell Helen.” Jennifer had lost all trace of defiance; she was crying a little. “Please don't tell anyone. Oh, please don't try to stop me now. I must go. It's my only happiness now. It's all I have to live for, to be with him. I wanted to be bound. I wanted to have my ear pricked and be his slave. I can't disobey him now. I can't, I can't.”

Clare put her arm round her. “I know,” she said, and she felt the tears on her own cheek. “I know what it feels like. It has broken my heart now that I know the truth. But it's not all you have to live for. Don't let him make you believe that. There's Helen, and your mother and father. He—he won't care for you long. He's playing with you like a doll. What he's shown you isn't real. It's all a play.”

“That's not true!” Jennifer gasped. “And I don't care. I want him to play with me.”

Clare looked round the dark room in despair. She could find no human argument to combat the spell whose power she knew so well herself. She was not free herself. She knew that had Niall appeared at the window then she would have fled to him instinctively as to a refuge, as a miserable and lost puppy to its master. But to feel this child as abjectly enslaved and to have from her the disillusion and the shattering revelation of how she had been beguiled, strengthened some tiny part of Clare's spirit that had never yet completely yielded to the spell. She faced the proof of his power and of his purpose that now came flooding in on her and found in some stirrings of pride and indignation the courage to oppose him.

“Listen!” she whispered. “When have you to go again?” “The night after tomorrow,” Jennifer whimpered.

“Look,” said Clare. “I shall go to Brackenbine tomorrow. I shall ask him to tell you the whole truth about his puppets and the game he plays with them. I'm not trying to stop you seeing him. I won't breathe a word of this to anyone. I'll shut Reenie up somehow. Don't be angry with me, Jennifer, dear. I know you love him. And I expect he cares for you much more than he does for me. I haven't seen so much of him really. I really do go there to study with his mother. I haven't seen him alone very many times. Now you must go to bed. We must both go. We shall be worn out in the morning.”

She fastened the window, then led Jennifer to the door with her arm about her shoulders. The younger girl was silent, but when, as they parted, Clare asked her again to be friends, she felt Jennifer nod her head against her shoulder and press her arm.