The Ghost Writer

PART 2

Some two months later, at about three o'clock on a warm spring afternoon, Cordelia was sitting at her accustomed windowsill high above the lane, affecting to read but really watching out for a visitor. Though the lane was already in deep shadow, she herself was bathed in sunlight so dazzling she could scarcely see beyond the forecourt. But, as she was doubtless aware, it also enhanced the creamy whiteness of her dress, and the lustre of her thick fair hair, which she had washed only that morning. She had learned from Mr Weatherburn's clerk that the trust would be represented by young Mr Beauchamp', whom she hoped to charm into letting her bring out more of the pictures. Uncle Theodore had obligingly taken Aunt Una and Beatrice up to London for the day, and so she had the house entirely to herself.

Beatrice had declined, predictably enough, to hear anything about the business from Cordelia: Uncle Theodore, she declared, had told her all she needed to know. She would not even enter the room in which 'Cordelia's paintings', as she insisted on calling them, were stored. (Aunt Una, too, had declined to view them, but only because of the stairs; she had recently moved her bedroom from the first to the ground floor.) Aside from the familiar pain of rejection, Cordelia had been forced to admit to herself that she was relieved; she could not help feeling proprietorial about the room. Unlocking the door and letting herself in when no one else was around still gave her a childish thrill of pleasure, like rediscovering a secret hiding-place. She felt perfectly at home there, especially in the mornings when the room was bright with sunlight. Indeed the more time she spent in it, the harder it became to think of the contents as the property of the trust. She was eager to set out some of the furniture as it might have been thirty years ago, when her grandmother first visited Henry St Clair's studio, but thought she should at least ask before doing so. In the meantime she had cleaned the windows, and dusted and swept as thoroughly as she could without disturbing anything.

A figure emerged from the shadows at the end of the lane and crunched across the gravel. A man-a young man-though he did not look in the least like a lawyer, for he wore a blue open-necked shirt and had a small canvas bag slung over his shoulder. But when he caught sight of her, he waved so cheerfully that she could not help waving back, or bounding down the four flights of stairs despite Aunt Una's warnings about loose carpets and broken necks, so that she opened the front door a little out of breath.

His attire looked even more informal at close quarters. The blue shirt was distinctly faded; he had on brown corduroy trousers and battered brown walking-boots in need of polish. As well as the knapsack, he had a khaki greatcoat, with rows of brass buttons embossed with eagles, draped over his arm. He was slender, not much taller than Cordelia herself, with reddish-brown curly hair, a ruddy complexion, and a long, humorous face which lit up with an irresistible smile at the sight of her. She felt an immediate attraction, and a strange, slightly unnerving sense of familiarity; as if some inner voice was saying, I know you, even though she knew she had never seen him before.

"Miss de Vere? I'm Harry Beauchamp, from Weatherburn and Hall."

"Oh yes, do come in. But you must call me Cordelia."

"Then you must call me Harry. You are-this is a delightful house. You would never guess it was here. I thought I must have got your directions wrong, until I came out of the wood and there you were in your window, waving down at me."

"You waved first, I think. Will you have some tea?"

"I should love some, but might we look at the pictures and things first? If you've time, that is. Then I'll feel I've earned it."

"Oh yes, I've lots of time," said Cordelia, blushing slightly at her own eagerness. "Come this way. I must say, you don't look at all like a lawyer."

"So my uncle-he's Hall, you see-is always complaining. You told our clerk it was a bit of a muddy walk from the station, so I thought it would be all right-I say, I hope you don't mind."

"Oh no, not at all, I was hoping you wouldn't be someone stuffy"

"To tell the truth," he continued as they set off down the hall-he moved, she noticed, with a slightly uneven gait, rolling a little to the right-"I'm much more interested in pictures than I am in the law. That's another reason Uncle Timothy despairs of me. I wish I could say I'm here because I know something about pictures, but to be honest it's because he thought even I couldn't make a mess of checking things off against an inventory and asking you to sign a few papers."

"Well I'm glad," she replied, "because I care for the pictures, and I hope you will too."

As they started up the stairs, she saw that his left knee did not bend properly, so that he had to check himself momentarily at every second step in order to swing his leg up to the next.

"Legacy of the war," he said, as if in reply to her unspoken question. "Entirely ignominious, I'm afraid. I was late getting back to barracks one night, and took a spill on my motorcycle. Spent the rest of the war on crutches, doing staff work in London. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be here. None of my friends are. From before, I mean."

"Yes. I lost-we lost our father, a month before it ended."

"How awful. Makes it worse, somehow, to have come so close… sorry, tactless thing to say,"

"No, not tactless, it's true. I don't think truth ever hurts-well it shouldn't, anyway" she added, thinking of Beatrice.

"I say, who's this?" he exclaimed as they reached the landing and stopped in front of the portrait.

"Imogen de Vere, my grandmother."

"It's very fine. Very fine indeed. Who was the artist?"

"Henry St Clair-don't you know the story?"

"You mean this belongs to the trust? Good God. No; all I've read is the deed. A very odd bequest… quite mad, if you don't mind my saying so. Why on earth…?"

"Yes, I think he was mad. And bad." Repressing a temptation to pour out the whole story, she said almost nothing about Imogen, confining herself to Ruthven de Vere bankrupting St Clair "in a fit of madness" and hiding away the pictures. Harry Beauchamp listened attentively while studying the portrait. Once or twice he glanced at Cordelia, as if comparing faces.

"So really," she concluded, "morally, I mean, they belong to Henry St Clair, though I know the law doesn't agree."

"No, unfortunately-but I see what you mean. The more I look at this, the more I feel I should have heard of him. Extraordinary eyes

… may we see the others?"

Though the room was now familiar, she still could not cross the threshold without a shiver of anticipation. Ushering her first visitor through the door-especially one as personable as Harry Beauchamp-prompted an additional frisson, and she was not disappointed in his reaction. He began by making a slow circuit of the room, moving from picture to picture, while she watched from the doorway, remembering her own progress that first wintry afternoon. So absorbed was he, by the time he passed her and began a second circuit, that he might have been walking in his sleep. At last he stopped before the first of the "exorcisms"-the solitary figure hastening through the moonlit wood-and turned to face her.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I had no idea… until I saw that portrait, I was expecting a roomful of amateur watercolours or something of the sort. But these are quite remarkable. This, for example, reminds me a lot of Grimshaw-do you know him?-No, he's not much thought of these days. Went in for moonlight in a big way. Fine painter. But there's a menace about your man here…"

"He called them exorcisms," said Cordelia, coming over to join him. "For his melancholia."

"I see… Now this-" moving on to another moonlit scene-"why, it's a sort of joke!"

To the untutored eye, there was nothing comical about it. The upper half of the canvas showed a tall, gaunt house framed by a tracery of bare branches. Orange light shone from an upstairs window, accentuating the dark outlines of the casements in a way that gave an unnerving impression of bared, grinning teeth. Leaves and twigs were strewn thickly over a flagged path: the place had an overgrown, desolate air. The path led down, by way of a series of steps, to a gateway between stone pillars. But there the semblance of normality ended, for just beyond the pillars, the ground ended in a sheer, vertical fall of rock, plunging to infinite depths. Flagstones hung precariously over the lip of the precipice, which ran like a jagged tear right along the front wall of the house. Torn earth and foliage gleamed in the moonlight.

At first, the precipice that dominated the lower half seemed almost featureless. Cordelia had gazed at it before, without discerning anything more than vague outlines. But now impressions began to form, as if her eyes were growing accustomed to the dark. She was looking into the mouth of a great cavern, thronged with dim figures which might or might not have been human, their eyes materialising into tiny points of reddish light, as if reflecting the fiery glow in the window far above.

"Extraordinary, isn't it?" said Harry. "You know, that house is pure Grimshaw, and yet-look at this." He indicated something that Cordelia had taken for a hairline crack in the canvas: a thin, forked line of pure white darting across the mouth of the cavern.

"Lightning, wouldn't you say?" he continued. "Mad Martin to the life."

"I'm afraid I don't-"

"Sorry, I shouldn't call him that. John Martin. Early last century. It was his brother who was mad, poor chap. Huge apocalypses-I saw one in a sale not long ago. It went for ten pounds; I'd have bought it myself if I had anywhere to hang it. But putting them together like this, it's a sort of comedy of excess. Remarkable execution. And what are these?"

He moved on to a series of canvases, all seemingly versions of the same scene: a water-bird's-eye view of a dense forest of reeds along a riverbank, done in deep greens and browns and flashes of silvery light, painted so that the reeds looked as tall as trees. Lurking amongst them were a number of dark, mottled purplish shapes which might have been crustaceans, or jellyfish, or the shadows of creatures hovering above the frame. Cordelia could not tell what they were, and yet they drew her eye: whenever she tried to focus on some other aspect of the scene, there was a disconcerting impression of movement among the reeds.

"These don't remind me of anyone," said Harry. "Are you sure they're by the same… well, here's his signature, anyway. Extraordinary. And this-" turning to a picture, at least four feet by two, of pairs of naked lovers floating in a firmament of blue, dozens or even hundreds of them, some no larger than gnats, but all intricately detailed-"looks like somebody else entirely. But here's his signature again… did you say he might still be alive?"

Moving away from the lovers, who were making her blush, Cordelia told him everything she could recall about Henry St Clair, without mentioning the affair. Not, she realised, because she would actually mind Harry Beauchamp knowing about it, but because it seemed too intimate a topic, alone in the house together; and she was having quite enough difficulty with her colour already.

"You know," he said thoughtfully, "rather than hanging them here and there around your house-though that would be quite all right; the deed doesn't say that everything has to be kept in the same room-you could make a sort of exhibition in here, or in another room, if that suited you better. The stuff in the middle could go somewhere else, if you've space for it, and then… just imagine if Henry St Clair is still alive. And if we were able to find him. At least he could come and see his pictures, and know they were safe-though not for ever," he added, his expression darkening. "But if we could find him-I mean just supposing there'd been something illegal about the way your grandfather bought up those debts, we might just be able to save the pictures and… I say, I'm terribly sorry, I've no right at all…"

"No, no, please go on, this is a wonderful idea. But… surely you're not supposed to try and save them?"

"Oh no," he said cheerfully. "My uncle would sack me on the spot, if he heard me talking like this. But the pictures are more important, don't you think? There's nothing in the trust that actually prohibits us from trying to find him; and besides, I'd be doing it in my own time, not the firm's. If you approve, that is."

"Oh yes, absolutely," said Cordelia, restraining a wild impulse to throw her arms around him.

"Then-er, could I come back, do you think, for a longer look? There's bound to be something here that will help us… it would have to be on a weekend, if that's all right…"

"Oh yes, absolutely," she repeated, blushing more than ever. "And you could easily stay, there's loads of room. I know my uncle won't mind."

"Wonderful… would this Saturday be all right then?"

"Oh yes, absolutely, perfect… gosh, do excuse me for a moment," she blurted, and ran from the room.

What is happening to me? she thought as she splashed her burning face. Despite their relative isolation, she had fended off the attentions of enough young men to think of herself as entirely level-headed in these matters. She had never met anyone so attractive, or so interesting, as Henry-no Harry Beauchamp; it was such a relief not to have to apologise for liking books and paintings, and the limp didn't matter at all, she wasn't so keen on dancing or tennis that she couldn't happily… You must stop this, you don't even know he likes you, she reproved herself. But her heart refused to listen, and she hastened back along the corridor, to find him examining an imposing black folio volume which he had evidently extracted from the materials heaped in the middle of the floor.

"I hope you don't mind," he said, "but this looked interesting. Have you ever opened it?"

"No, I didn't like to touch any of those things."

"Well, as the trustees' representative," he said, with a charming smile, "I'm delighted to inform you that you can look at anything you like, whenever you like. There's nothing in the deed that says you can't."

He had also unearthed a tall wooden stand, like a portable lectern, on which the folio was now resting. It was, she saw, no ordinary book, but a stack of boards or plates of some kind, sandwiched between thick hide covers and secured by a tarnished metal clasp. There was no lettering visible anywhere on the cover or the spine.

He tugged at the clasp, but it would not budge.

"I can't see any keyhole," he said. "Must be a trick to it… ah, that's got it… damn."

The catch sprang open with a loud snap and he recoiled, with drops of blood forming across the fingers of his right hand.

"Shall I get you a bandage?" she asked, with concern.

"No, it's only a scratch." He wrapped his handkerchief around the injury and picked up the book, which was evidently very heavy.

"Can we take it out on to the landing? I think we may need the room."

He carried the book outside, and set it down on the floor. "Here, let me," she said. Heedless of dust, she knelt beside him, opened the cover, and lifted out something that looked like a blue frieze made up of interlinked panels. It had to be done very carefully, because the panels seemed to unfold from the bottom of the pile, so that she had to carry the whole gradually diminishing bundle across the landing, with Harry following as the work extended.

At first the panels seemed more or less identical: nothing but surging, blue-grey water, viewed from just above the surface of the ocean so that entire sections were filled by the slope of a single wave, streaked with foam, and occasional glimpses of a low, swirling sky. The sections themselves appeared to be made of very thin board covered in cloth, the hinges so carefully wrought that, as the work extended across the floor, the joints were scarcely visible. But as the scene unfolded, a lurking presence just below the surface began to reveal itself: a long, pale shape, distorted and sometimes hidden by the seething water, but becoming more palpable with each new opening.

Behind what appeared to be the final opening was another panel, secured by two small sliding clips. She released it and recoiled, stifling a cry of horror. The face of a drowned man, life-size, teeth bared, eyes wide open and staring, glared up at her. Water poured from his open mouth as a wave bore him upwards; his hair was thickly matted and choked with seaweed. The lurking shape beyond resolved itself into glimpses of naked torso, trailing limbs, and a dead-white hand, its outstretched fingers grasping at emptiness.

A young man's face: or so she thought at first. But when she moved to look more closely, the drowned mans expression altered. Not only his expression, but even the shape of his face, which seemed to age as she leaned further over the panel until it had mutated into that of an old man, gaunt and toothless and quite bald: the "hair" was all seaweed; only the agony was the same. She leaned back again, and the transformation reversed itself.

"Remarkable feat of trompe-l'oeil, " said Harry, crouching awkwardly beside her, "Something in the paint, I think; see the way it catches the light from different angles?" He moved back along the length of the frieze, examining it closely.

"Look at this."

She saw that he had freed a blank page, like a flyleaf, which had evidently been sticking to the back cover. Inscribed on the endpaper beneath, in archaic black lettering, was "The Drowned Man".

"Interesting. You can't see it-or you'd be very unlikely to-until after you've seen the work itself?' he went on. 'And you know, this is the only thing I've seen so far with a title."

"Do paintings have to have tides? I mean, is it a rule?"

"Well, not a rule, but its rare to see a whole collection without any. And-" he crouched down, moved awkwardly back along the length of the work, and began to fold up the panels, examining the back of each one as he did so-"apart from being the only one with a tide, it's the only thing so far without a signature. At least, I cant find one."

He laid the frieze out for a second time.

"What do you think that means?" she asked.

"Well… it certainly looks like his work, speaking on a very brief acquaintance, of course. But the book itself, the whole thing, apart from the actual design, looks far too old. Eighteenth-century, I'd have said, though I've never seen anything quite like it. Could he have found it blank, I wonder? Painted his own design, added his tide

… but then why didn't he sign it?"

He fell silent, staring at the drowned man's contorted features.

"And you're really sure you'd like me to come back, and try to find out some more about him?" he said at last, as if to the drowned man.

"Oh yes, absolutely."

"I'm glad-No, please, let me."

He began to fold the panels away again. When he had got them all together and secured the clasp, he bore the heavy volume back into the room, and replaced it reverently on the lectern. As if it were a prayer book, she thought, but her unease was swept aside by the warmth of his smile as he asked, "And now, does your offer of tea still stand?"

"Of course. Would you like to look around for a little and then come downstairs?"

"No, do let me come and help-well, at least talk to you while you make it."

The kitchen, unlike many of its kind, was bright and cheerful, its walls crowded with pots and pans and crockery. French windows opened onto a flagged courtyard, with an expanse of grass and shrubbery beyond. She made Harry sit at the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the room, and took down an apron, thinking, he may as well get used to seeing me in it. The words passed through her mind so naturally that it took several seconds for the implication to surface.

"I say, this is very jolly," said Harry, "Er-do you do everything for yourselves?"

"We do all our own cooking, since Mrs Green died. She was our housekeeper for ever and ever, practically one of the family. Molly-a girl from the village-comes in to help with the washing and cleaning; and Mr Grimes does the garden."

She answered his questions almost mechanically while she worked, shaken by the speed with which her emotions had run ahead of her. Yet it did no good to tell herself, But I hardly know him, or, We've only just met: already she felt as if they had been intimate for a long time. She carried the tray out to her favourite seat at the far edge of the lawn, where she learned that he had grown up in Plymouth and had one sister, who was now married and living in Canada. His father had died before the war; his mother five years ago; he had lived in London ever since, and was sharing rooms with a friend in Coptic Street, close by the Museum. He was just thirty years old, and-according to every indication she could divine-quite unattached. Her own history seemed to lead quite naturally into that of her grandmother, and so, while the shadows lengthened around them, she came to tell him almost everything she knew about Imogen de Vere and Henry St Clair and the evil that had overtaken them, and the strange story of the bequest, praying, every so often, that Uncle Theodore was giving Beatrice and Aunt Una dinner in town. Though it was after sunset before Harry Beauchamp said reluctantly that he supposed he really must be getting along, the air was still warm as she walked with him to the station, where they continued talking through the open window of his carriage until the train pulled away from the platform.

Cordelia was quite unable to conceal the fact that something momentous had happened, and before Harry's return she had confided her feelings to her aunt and uncle (though not to Beatrice, who, to her immense relief, would be spending the weekend in London with an old friend from school). To distract herself during the interval, she spent a great deal of time in the room with the pictures, thinking about how Henry St Clair's studio might have looked when he was painting her grandmother's portrait in the summer of 1896. Uncle Theodore, with some misgivings, despite her assurance that the trustees would not object to the bequest being housed in two adjacent rooms, agreed to let them store some of the furniture in the empty bedroom next door. He was plainly troubled, not only by her having formed an attachment to the lawyer representing the trust, but by her determination to-in her own phrase-restore the studio.

"I just feel this is something I must do," she said to him, struggling to explain why it seemed so important. "It will be-it will be like Henry St Clair painting his exorcisms. The room has always been left as Ruthven de Vere would have wanted it-everything cluttered in a heap and shut away in the dark. If we make it look as if-well as if Henry could come back and work in it-light and airy and clean-then de Vere will have lost his power over us."

"But my dear-you don't expect him back, do you?"

"If we can find him-I mean if he is still alive, yes. Don't you think it would be wonderful? And then we would have undone some of the wrong my grandfather did him. Just to restore the studio will be a start."

"I fear that only trouble will come of it. This Henry Beauchamp-"

"Harry, uncle-"

"Harry, then-seems to be taking a very cavalier view of his responsibilities to the trust. If we lost-that is to say, if you lost your income through some breach of the trust-well, we should have to sell this house."

"I know Harry would not put us at risk, uncle; you will see for yourself when you meet him. And please, please promise me that you will do your very best to like him."

"I shall, my dear, for your sake. But I wish you would leave that room alone."

Walking back with Harry from the station on Saturday morning, Cordelia was quite overcome with shyness; he too seemed ill at ease, and she performed the introductions wishing she had never said a word about him. Though she could tell he was making a good impression upon her aunt and uncle (she had intimated to Harry that the subject of the pictures had best be left until later on), her discomfort grew worse in their presence, so much so that she was compelled, several times during lunch, to hide in the kitchen on the pretext of arranging dishes she had actually prepared beforehand.

Yet as soon as they entered the studio, their intimacy was restored as completely as if no time had passed since they left it four days ago. Harry seemed to understand, without her having to explain any further, exactly why she wanted to restore it, and to agree entirely with her intuition as to what ought to go where. And he did not try to prevent her from lifting things, but worked alongside her on equal terms. Getting covered in dust and grime while hauling furniture about also helped to disguise her renewed attraction to him; it was natural that her colour should be high, and that they should touch frequently; and as the afternoon went on, she felt increasingly certain that all of her feeling was returned. At one point she caught herself thinking that if they were to marry and live in London, the pictures would go with her. A few moments later, Harry had remarked, seemingly out of the blue, "of course if you were ever to move to London, the pictures would come with you; you could have a room like this, you know, your own private gallery, and invite people to see them. There's nothing in the trust to prevent it." He spoke with such warmth that she felt sure his thought was running beside hers.

By the end of the day, they had sorted through everything that had been stacked in the centre of the floor. The bed now stood beneath the windows; Cordelia had been amazed to discover that the bedding, despite thirty years in storage, had escaped the attentions of moths, silverfish, and damp, and was only a little musty. She had placed the table and two upright chairs between the bed and the door, and a small sofa against the wall to the right of the doorway. An empty easel stood in the middle of the room, with Henry St Clair's palette-tray attached to it. The tubes of colour had, of course, long since dried up, but she set them out anyway, along with his brushes and palette knives and other implements. Some of the unfinished or scraped-out pictures, along with pieces of board and canvas and framing were still stacked along the other two walls, so that it would look as much as possible like a real working studio.

They had made a preliminary selection of about twenty finished paintings for display, so that the pictures would no longer be jammed together. Cordelia had wanted to consign all of the exorcisms to the room next door, but Harry persuaded her that even the darkest aspects of his vision ought to be represented, and so several of the night scenes remained, along with "The Drowned Man", resting on its lectern in the corner opposite the door.

With everything swept and polished, and light filling the room, she felt that the malignant spirit of Ruthven de Vere had at last been banished for good. They had looked through every box and bundle and found nothing sinister; other than bedding and linen, the various boxes and bundles yielded only more painting materials, including a set of carpenters tools, presumably for fashioning frames. Aside from "The Drowned Man", the only object that Cordelia had felt slightly uneasy about retaining was a box-or rather a cube, since there seemed to be no way of opening it-made up of panels of dark polished wood, about fifteen inches square. It was not very heavy, and clearly hollow. The panels gave slightly when you pressed them, and if you rocked it to and fro, you could hear-at least Cordelia was half-persuaded she could hear-a very soft rustling noise. But it was so elegantly made that she decided to keep it in the corner nearest the sofa.

After she had bathed, and put on a dress of apricot silk which especially suited her colouring, she went downstairs to fetch her uncle and show him what they had done. Harry, now clad in a surprisingly elegant suit, had come down before her and was chatting to Uncle Theodore as if they were old acquaintances.

It was close on sunset, and in the fading light the transformation seemed even more remarkable; it really did feel as if they were stepping back thirty years. The illusion grew stronger still as Cordelia lit the candles she had already arranged. There was no electric light in the room; St Clair's belongings had been stored here long before the house was electrified, and Theodore had preferred not to disturb them. It occurred to her, as her uncle stood contemplating the results of their labours, to ask him if he recalled seeing electric lights in the restaurant in Soho on that dark winter afternoon.

"No, my dear, I don't think I did. In fact I'm sure there were none; I remember a gas-lamp on the wall. Electric light was still a luxury, you know; they would have been far too poor. And you're sure," he added, to Harry, "that the trustees would approve of this?"

"Entirely sure, sir. After all its our-that is to say, your-duty to ensure that everything is well cared for, and this could only be seen as an improvement."

Uncle Theodore asked several more questions along these lines, and seemed reassured by the replies, which encouraged Cordelia to make the request that had been shaping itself in her mind.

"Uncle… would you mind terribly if we were to bring Imogen's portrait in here and put it on the easel? We could have another key made-I don't think Beatrice would care, she never looks at it-so you could come in and see it-I mean, any of the pictures" (remembering she had told Harry nothing of her uncle's love for Imogen de Vere) "whenever you like."

"You don't have to ask my permission, my dear; it's for you to decide. But why do you want to?"

"I shan't unless you approve, uncle. I'd like to because… because then the room would look just as it did before."

"Before?" he prompted.

"Well, before everything went wrong," she floundered, realising this was delicate ground.

"I see… You can't undo the past, you know."

"I know that, uncle. I just feel it would be the right thing to do."

"Well my dear, I shall trust your feeling, and accept your offer of a key."

She could tell that he was uneasy, but felt sure of persuading him once the portrait was back in its rightful place. One of Henry St Clair's luminous daylight visions could take its place on the landing.

At dinner that night, Harry insisted upon acting as her assistant, and between them they made a game of waiting upon her uncle and aunt. In Cordelia's private bestiary, her aunt had always been, in the nicest possible sense, bovine: large, placid, gentle, utterly without malice or guile. She could not walk very far, these days, because her legs tended to swell, and her heart was not strong. But tonight she wore her best dove-grey silk, and beamed upon Harry as if he and Cordelia were already engaged. Uncle Theodore brought out a couple of bottles of his best wine, and as the evening unfolded it seemed to Cordelia that everything in the room took on a deeper and richer glow. Harry and her uncle did most of the talking; she was perfectly content to sit and gaze at her beloved, bathed in a radiance so entrancing she felt she had never seen candlelight before.

Given that Henry St Clair's entire property had been seized without warning, they had expected to find papers, letters, perhaps even a diary. Harry-to his uncle's displeasure, as he cheerfully acknowledged-had spent much of the interval inquiring after the painter, without result: no one in any of the established galleries or salerooms had ever heard of a St Clair, let alone seen the man himself. Nor, thus far, was there indication that he might have continued working under another name. They began their search of his belongings with high hopes; but late on Sunday afternoon they were compelled to admit defeat. There were no books, no keepsakes, no photographs, no papers of any kind. The sole clue to his identity was his signature on the paintings.

"I don't understand," said Cordelia, when they had put away the last box and returned to the studio. "If they let him keep everything personal, why not his painting things?"

"I think," Harry replied, "that de Vere" (Cordelia had told him that she disowned her grandfather) "must have destroyed everything of that sort."

He was standing at the lectern, examining the face of the drowned man, as he had done several times that morning it seemed to hold a particular fascination for him. By leaving off the clasps that secured the last panel, he could display the final opening without having to lay out the rest of the work.

"But then why would he leave everything else?"

"Well… madness aside, it does look as if he removed anything that might have given us a clue to St Clair's whereabouts. Which suggests to me that he wanted to make sure nobody did find St Clair. So perhaps there was something illegal in the way he got hold of the pictures…

"And suppose… suppose you hadn't been interested, just left them locked up; then in due course the whole lot would have been burned by the trustees without anyone ever having seen them. De Vere really would have managed to erase all trace of St Clair's existence. 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'…"

He paused, still gazing at the drowned man's face.

"But even now, if we could only find him-and somehow I feel sure he's still alive-we could change that, and perhaps save his pictures as well For ever, that is."

"I see what you mean," said Cordelia. "But supposing we did find him, and it turned out that everything really did belong to him, the income would stop and my uncle would have to sell this house. I'm not saying we shouldn't try-we must do what's right-but it will make him terribly anxious. He loves Ashbourn-so do I-and I should hate to be the cause of his losing it."

It crossed her mind that her uncle and aunt would not always be here-and what would happen to Ashbourn after that?-but this was a train of thought she did not want to pursue.

"On my reading of the deed that wouldn't necessarily follow, not at all. Besides, St Clair would surely be happy to see his pictures here; he wouldn't want to do anything to harm you, of all people. And to recover possession of the pictures, he would have to bring an action against the trust, which could be very costly. No, my idea is that we would look after them for the life of the trust, but if we could establish St Clair's claim, then we ought to be able to persuade the trustees that the pictures couldn't be burned; if they went to the nation, nobody could be accused of profiting from the change."

It seemed to Cordelia that this chain of reasoning depended on a great many "ifs", but she was too delighted by "we would look after them" to care. Warm scents of blossom drifted in through the open window, where she was perched, in her usual fashion, on the sill with her feet upon the counterpane of the bed. The portrait of Imogen de Vere, serene and luminous as ever, rested upon the easel as if the artist had just laid down his brushes. Yes, she thought, we really have banished the last of the evil; the intended curse has turned out to be a blessing. Without the pictures I would never have met Harry; now this room will be our special place until we have a house of our own. Harry had accepted Uncle Theodore's invitation to join them again the following weekend, so eagerly that she really could not doubt it

… and perhaps, one day soon, they would find Henry St Clair and bring him here, and show him that his work had not, after all, been lost. If only Imogen were still alive, everything would be perfect. It was a pity, too, that Henry St Clair had not painted a self-portrait; but she could picture him so vividly, it scarcely mattered. He would have looked very like Harry… who was once again absorbed in contemplating "The Drowned Man", moving his head in the way that caused the face to metamorphose from youth to age and back again.

"What is it that fascinates you so?" Cordelia asked.

For a second or two, when he looked up, he seemed not to know who she was.

"I don't know… it draws me, that's all. The way it changes… it's like being reminded of something, and not being able to remember what it reminds you of…"

He folded away the panel and closed the cover, and seemed to come fully awake again.

"Shall we go for that walk now?" he asked. "There's still plenty of time before the evening train."

"Oh, yes," she said eagerly, and the uneasy moment was forgotten.

Beatrice came home the next day. Though Cordelia strongly suspected Uncle Theodore of taking her aside and enjoining her to be on her best behaviour, Beatrice betrayed no awareness that anything out of the ordinary was afoot; she did not even ask what had become of Grandmama's portrait. Walking back from the station with Harry the following Saturday morning (now with her arm in his; the lane was obligingly slippery after several days of rain), Cordelia warned him that her sister was inclined to be cool and distant, so that he must not be hurt if she seemed aloof, or even hostile. But on this occasion, Beatrice behaved quite out of character; her normal self-possession vanished when she was introduced to Harry, and she became quite bashful and tongue-tied. At lunch, Cordelia noticed that her sister was very pale; she ate almost nothing, and spoke even less than usual, but followed the conversation intently, her eyes darting constantly between Harry and Cordelia. And then, as she helped clear the table, Beatrice surprised her sister still more by asking, quite humbly, whether she might be allowed to come up to the studio with them to see the pictures.

Not wanting to appear ungenerous in front of Harry, Cordelia agreed, hoping she would have seen all she wanted in fifteen minutes. But Beatrice stayed nearly two hours. She asked so many questions, and listened so attentively to the answers, that before she left she had elicited much of what Uncle Theodore had revealed two months before. Yet she did not seem to be making a set at Harry. Her behaviour throughout was that of a young girl grateful for the attention of an admired older sister and her accepted suitor. She praised Cordelia's arrangement of the studio, and admired the pictures one by one, displaying every appearance of genuine curiosity, until, despite her suspicions, Cordelia began to wonder if perhaps she did not know her sister nearly as well as she had imagined.

Beatrice seemed especially interested in "The Drowned Man", at whose face she gazed intently for some time before asking Harry to explain how the strange metamorphosis between youth and age might have been achieved. While they were talking, Cordelia, who was standing a little way behind them, found herself glancing from Beatrice to the portrait-as Harry had done that first afternoon with her. It was not a likeness in the ordinary sense-Beatrice's face was narrower, her eyes differently shaped, her hair a smoky brown rather than copper-coloured-rather, something in the carriage of her head, an aura, an atmosphere. Cordelia felt as if a veil had been lifted, not from the portrait but from Beatrice, who was listening with her whole attention to what Harry was saying, intent, receptive, with no trace of her usual watchful self-awareness. But for the most part, she addressed her questions to Cordelia while Harry watched and listened, becoming visibly more perplexed as he saw how much of the family's history was new to Beatrice. As he said to Cordelia later, when she had finally got him away for a walk in Hurst Wood, if he had not known otherwise, he would have sworn that she and her sister were the best of friends.

That evening, Beatrice (who usually preferred them to take turns at the cooking) offered to help Cordelia prepare the meal, and did so with perfect amiability. But then she came down in a striking dark blue gown which Cordelia had not seen before. Perhaps she was simply obeying her uncle's instruction to be on her best behaviour-but it seemed to Cordelia that Harry's eyes were straying rather too often in her sister's direction, and she lay awake most of the night, alternately fearing the worst and hating herself for giving way to jealousy and suspicion. On Sunday morning during another walk in the wood (Harry insisted that exercise was good for his injured leg, and refused to coddle it), she fought down the impulse to tell him just how uncharacteristically Beatrice was behaving, observing instead, "My sister is very beautiful, don't you think?"

"Indeed she is," he replied, "almost as beautiful as you", and with that he kissed her-or perhaps she had kissed him, she was not quite certain, afterwards-in a way that left her in no doubt as to his feelings for her.

A casual observer would have concluded, as the week went by, that Beatrice was reverting to her usual manner. The hoped-for reconciliation did not eventuate; each day she seemed a little more withdrawn, but it was a different sort of retreat: preoccupied, abstracted, self-forgetful. It was as if the wall between them had finally collapsed, only to reveal that there was no one on the other side. Her demeanour throughout Harry's next visit was so much more constrained that he asked Cordelia several times if he had done anything to offend Beatrice. Cordelia could only assure him he had not; her intuition of the cause was not something she wished to confide to anybody, least of all him.

Beatrice remained, so far as Cordelia could tell, in this melancholy frame of mind for the next few weeks, as summer approached and Harry's weekend visits became a settled thing. Then, early in June, Beatrice went up to London to spend a few days with her friend Claudia in Bayswater. On the evening of her return to Ashbourn, she announced to her uncle and Cordelia (Aunt Una had already retired to bed) that she wanted to learn type-writing, with a view to earning her living in London.

"Miss Harringay's academy in Marylebone will take me, and Claudia's mother has said I am welcome to stay with them. I can go up to town on Monday morning and come back each Friday. I wish to earn my living, especially now that Cordelia will soon be married-"

"He hasn't asked me yet."

"I'm sure he will, very soon. And then you will need the money from the pictures-"

"No I shan't," said Cordelia sharply. "Uncle knows that the income will stay with him; he has cared for us all our lives, and I shouldn't dream of taking a penny of it."

Cordelia and her uncle had already spoken of this. He wanted her to take at least her share of the income when (as everyone now assumed) she and Harry were married, but she had declined absolutely. The securities in which the trust's capital was invested had declined in value, reducing the income to less than four hundred a year, only just enough to maintain her uncle and aunt at Ashbourn with the extra help they would need if she and Beatrice were to leave. She loved Ashbourn, and did not want to see it sold, any more than her uncle did. Of course now that Beatrice would be leaving… it came to her suddenly that her ideal would be to live here with Harry, and that when, as must eventually happen, Ashbourn descended to her and Beatrice, she might be able to use the income to buy out Beatrice's share of the house. But then Harry was very much attached to London, and if, as she hoped, he were to give up the law, and seek a position in one of the galleries or auction houses, it would be even less practical for him to leave.

"Beatrice was just saying, my dear, that it will cost three guineas a week, all in all, for her to attend this academy; and that the training will last about twelve weeks. So the question is, whether you approve?"

"If you mean about the money, uncle, it is for you to say; speaking for myself, of course I approve."

"We can just afford it," said Theodore, "but we shall have to make some economies."

"Then let us make them," said Cordelia. It struck her as she spoke that Beatrice would be only a mile or two from Harry throughout the week, while she would be very much tied to Ashbourn by the need to look after her aunt. But it was too late to call back the words, and besides, it was only for three months; though of course, if Beatrice were then to find work in town, could she really leave her aunt and uncle to manage alone? Cordelia tried her best to appear enthusiastic for the rest of the evening, but these depressing speculations followed her up to bed.

Cordelia had always imagined a proposal of marriage as a sort of magical transformation: one minute, perhaps, you were still wondering whether he really did care for you; the next (provided you adored him) you were the happiest woman on earth. By the time Beatrice announced her intention of leaving home, Harry was talking as if their future together was already a settled thing; of what "we" might do with the pictures in "our" house in London, for example; or how wonderful it would be if Henry St Clair should reappear and become "our" friend; and so forth. He would say these things quite unselfconsciously, but despite constant encouragement he had not come to the point of proposing, and she had not liked to ask him directly.

Oddly enough, it was Harry's continuing fascination-she was beginning to think of it as an obsession-with "The Drowned Man" that brought about their betrothal. Whenever they were in the studio, and he was not actively engaged in conversation, or studying one of the other pictures, he would begin to drift towards the lectern, there to sink once more into half-mesmerised contemplation, swaying slowly back and forth. She was reminded of the way in which she used to lose herself in her grandmothers portrait; but to lose yourself in the face of a corpse, locked in its final agony, with bloodshot eyeballs straining from their sockets, and weed and water flowing in and out of its gaping mouth… It was all the more troubling because, when she ventured to distract him, she would sometimes detect a flash of irritation, even hostility, before his features resumed their normal cheerful cast. Away from the studio, he would agree that his fixation might be unhealthy, but she could tell that he did not like to speak of it. The face reminded him of something, he would repeat, something he felt sure would help him in his search for Henry St Clair, if only he could draw it to the surface. But many hours of concentration seemed to have brought him no nearer to understanding what that something might be. She had asked him twice if he thought it might be a despairing self-portrait, painted after he had lost Imogen. Possibly, he replied, but that was not what drew him to it. Nor, thus far, had his inquiries around the galleries, or his researches in Somerset House, Chancery Lane, the Reading Room of the British Museum, and other repositories of records and documents, yielded the slightest trace of Henry St Clair's existence.

On the Saturday after Beatrice's announcement, Cordelia and Harry were once more in the studio, at his instigation. He wanted to look again at one of the waterscapes (as she liked to call them) to see if he could establish where it had been painted. To Cordelia this was no more than a pleasant game of speculation; without benefit of tide it was plainly impossible to identify any location, even on the remote chance that the place was one you had visited yourself. But she agreed readily enough, hoping she could lure him away for a walk in the wood before "The Drowned Man" could ensnare him. It was a perfect summer afternoon outside, and there was a particular spot she had in mind; a grassy bank beside a stream where they had lain side by side and he had fallen asleep, so that by insinuating herself closer she was able to embrace him while he slept. And then when he had woken he had kissed her for quite some time before saying that perhaps they ought to think about getting back. Although she loved him for being so protective of her virtue, she would happily have stayed there for ever; it was like receiving the keys to paradise, and then being told you could only go there for a few hours every week.

The room diagonally below that in which Henry St Clair's pictures were stored had been "Harry's room" from the first; his things were scattered around it, and throughout the summer his khaki greatcoat had remained on the hook behind the door. Theodore's bedroom was at the other end of the same first-floor corridor (one of the intervening rooms being that in which Grandmama's things were still gathering dust, undisturbed). The two girls slept on the next floor up; Cordelia next to her favourite sitting-room, and Beatrice about half-way along the corridor. To reach Harry's room undetected, Cordelia had only to tiptoe past her sisters bedroom, along the landing and down the staircase, carefully avoiding the treads that creaked. Several times now, always while he was away during the week, she had stolen into his room at night, wrapped herself in his khaki greatcoat and curled up on his bed, wishing she had the nerve to do so when he was actually there. Really there was nothing to prevent her (Uncle Theodore was a heavy sleeper) except the fear that Harry would be shocked, and think her "fast". And why should he not? A well-brought-up girl was not supposed to creep into a young man's bedroom in the middle of the night, however passionate her longing to see, and touch, and above all embrace him: the most startling thing about these newly discovered desires was her inability to feel ashamed of them.

The Picture Harry wanted to study hung immediately to the left of the doorway: the rippling waterway, bearing a few small boats in the foreground, a dim green promontory in the distance, the great sweep of the sky overhead. He had said several times that he was sure he had been somewhere exactly like this; but today's scrutiny brought him no closer to deciding where.

"Shall we go now?" Cordelia asked. "It's much too beautiful to stay indoors."

"Yes, of course," he replied, moving towards the lectern, "I'll just…"

"Please don't. Wouldn't you rather be…?" She broke off, not wanting to sound imploring.

"Yes, of course," he repeated. But his feet carried him another pace closer.

"What is it that draws you?"

"I must…" His voice sounded muffled, as if by a strong wind.

"No, you must not. Please look at me. "

He turned, reluctantly, to face her. Again she had the eerie impression that he did not recognise her. "Like a man defeated by his craving for drink"-that was what de Vere's valet had said. She was suddenly afraid of him, and then very angry.

"I think you care more for that hideous face than you do for me. It is enslaving you, and you know it, and yet you… you would rather look at a corpse…"

Tears choked her, and she ran from the room and down the stairs. But then to her relief she heard footsteps echoing across the floorboards, followed by the irregular rhythm of Harry's tread as he too began to descend. She did not look back, however, but continued on down, praying she would not meet anyone, especially Beatrice, out through the kitchen door and around into the lane, out of sight of the house. There she waited until he caught up with her, gasping out apologies and assurances of devotion, and took her in his arms.

"I am so sorry," he said a little later. "You're quite right; it's bad for me; we'll put it away in the other room and I shan't look at it ever again."

"I'm sorry too, I didn't mean it. Only, I wish you would tell me-what do you see? what do you feel?-that compels you so?"

"I can't… it goes, like a dream, when you wake in the night and you're sure you'll never forget, and then in the morning it's gone… all you can remember is that you meant to remember, and can't."

Cordelia suspected that he was withholding something, but from there they progressed to the grassy bank beside the stream, where they lay down and embraced as she had hoped, and where, a little later, he asked her to marry him, and the drowned man was quite forgotten.

On a stifling, overcast evening towards the end of summer, Cordelia was once again watching from her old place in the upstairs window, waiting for Harry to appear at the turning of the lane. A scrawled note in yesterdays post had told her he would be arriving late on Friday, some time between five and seven-thirty, depending on when he could get away from the office.

The day had been exceedingly hot, the sun too fierce to venture out in; it had been a relief, at first, when the clouds came over. But still the heat pressed down like a blanket. The air was heavy with the perfume of the climbing roses on the porch below, mingled with that of a dozen different flowers, scents of foliage and bark and leaf-mould, warm stone and woodwork and paint still soft from the heat of the sun. She turned once more to look at the clock on the mantelpiece. Eight minutes past six.

For the first few weeks of their engagement, Harry had seemed perfectly content. A long spell of fine weather had enabled them to spend a great deal of time out of doors, including several paradisal hours on the riverbank. But even then, the intervening days had passed very slowly indeed. With Beatrice in town all week, Cordelia was effectively tied to Ashbourn, partly for reasons of economy, and partly because Aunt Una, after visiting a London heart specialist, had been ordered to avoid exertion, and rest for several hours every day. And since the house had no telephone, and Harry was, as he cheerfully conceded, hopeless at letters, she would usually have heard nothing from him since the last farewell.

He was also constitutionally incapable of catching a specified train, being always liable to slip into the Museum, or a saleroom, "just for five minutes" and emerge an hour and a half later. And then at Hurst Green he might be drawn into conversation with the stationmaster, or someone he met in the village street, and lose track of yet more time before he came into view of the house, waving as enthusiastically as ever. So she had got into the habit of settling herself with a book in the upstairs window at the earliest possible time, though she seldom did much reading. Her imagination was too active, her emotions too keen; and all too often, especially once the expected hour had come and gone, morbid anxieties would begin to flit about her mind. The train has been delayed. He has accepted another invitation and forgotten to tell me. He has simply forgotten. He no longer loves me. He has met someone else. There has been an accident The train has crashed. He is injured… he is dead. I shall never see him again… all in the most vivid detail. It was like waving away midges at twilight: as fast as you drove one off, another would dart in and stab, on and on interminably, until they were banished by the familiar wave and greeting from the lane below.

For those few perfect weeks, that first embrace had seemed to her the purest essence of joy: she would twine herself around him, only wishing she could hold him close enough to annihilate all distinction between them. Until-she could not say exactly when; the more she brooded upon where the first shadow had fallen, the further back it seemed to stretch-she had become aware that his passion no longer matched her own. She had tried persuading herself that he was merely embarrassed by excessive displays of ardour in public, but even since she had learned to be more restrained, he was likely to say "Here, steady on, old thing", and glance nervously up at the windows. And then he had begun to say such things in private. Her conviction that she must be perfectly, blissfully happy had carried her along, as if she had set out for a walk on a cloudless day, too absorbed to notice the fine, tell-tale streaks of vapour overhead, the gradual weakening of the light, until quite suddenly she had looked up, and shivered, and realised that she had been cold for a long time.

She shivered in fact, though there was nothing chill about the present evening. The house was completely silent. Aunt Una would be lying down in her room; Uncle Theodore was no doubt reading in his study; Beatrice had not yet returned from town. Her lessons at Miss Harringay's were normally over by two o'clock each Friday, and she was supposed to come straight home. But perhaps Harry had got in touch, and suggested she travel down with him, though this had never happened before. At Uncle Theodore's insistence, Beatrice had always taken the first train up each Monday morning, rather than returning with Harry on the Sunday night. Theodore had told Beatrice, when she. began at Miss Harringay's, that he wanted her to impose as little as possible upon her friends in Bayswater; but Cordelia suspected that he had understood how she would have felt to see Beatrice and Harry setting off together, and was grateful to him. She had not realised until too late just how much she was giving up for Beatrice's sake. The four happy years she had spent at Ashbourn since leaving school now seemed to have vanished in a sort of contented sleep; she too wanted to be out preparing to earn her living, as she meant to do when they were married; and in London she could have seen Harry every day.

Beatrice, to do her justice, had not once suggested that Harry should escort her. Her manner towards him had grown still more constrained, but that was capable of more than one interpretation. Cordelia had not been able to stop herself asking Harry, every so often, whether he had seen anything of Beatrice in town; he always assured her he had not; but on the other hand, he had never asked whether she thought he ought to, which suggested he knew better than to ask. And once she had begun to doubt the strength of his feeling, her anxieties had multiplied and swarmed. Until, after tossing and turning for hours on the previous Saturday night, she decided to go down to the kitchen and make herself some cocoa (and perhaps, if she felt bold enough, look in at Harry while he slept). As she approached the room in which they had stored the remainder of Henry St Clair's belongings, she saw light shining from beneath the door.

Unlike the studio, which had its own special lock, this door opened to the same key as all the other rooms in the corridor. Had somebody left the light on? But why? She had not entered the room for many weeks; not since they had put away "The Drowned Man" and turned the key on it. She listened, holding her breath. No sound came from within, but it seemed to her that there was a very faint, rhythmic pulsation in the pool of light around her feet. Which would be worse: to look and see, or lie awake with her imagination running wild? She took hold of the handle and softly opened the door.

Harry-still fully dressed, though it was two in the morning-stood facing her over the lectern, swaying slowly back and forth. She had last seen it in the far corner, draped in a cloth. Now it stood in the centre of the floor, directly beneath the light. If he had glanced up, their eyes would have met, but his entire attention remained fixed upon the lectern. She could see the glitter of his shadowed eyes, and it seemed to her that he was very faintly smiling. She waited, willing him to look at her, until the suspense became unbearable.

"Dearest?"

The rhythm of his breathing faltered like that of a sleeper on the verge of waking, but his concentration did not waver. How long had he been creeping in here at night? Dust was already thick upon the floor, and on the furniture, and yet the lectern, what she could see of it, looked spotless.

She took another step into the room, her hand still on the doorknob. But the hem of her dressing-gown caught on an empty frame and brought it clattering to the floor.

His head jerked up. For a dreadful moment, he glared as if he had come face to face with his worst enemy; he seemed to be gathering himself to spring. Slowly, recognition returned; now, he looked like her imagination of a burglar caught red-handed. He lowered his eyes, closed the panel, and slunk out from behind the lectern.

"I… I must have been sleep-walking," he muttered.

"Please don't lie to me. If you must look at it, at least trust me enough to tell me so."

"I didn't want you to know;"

"To know what?" she cried.

But his reply was cut off by the sound of footsteps padding towards the room. It was Beatrice, a green dressing-gown thrown over her nightdress.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing," replied Cordelia. "Harry-thought he heard a burglar, that's all. I'm sorry we woke you."

"Yes," said Harry. 'Er-false alarm. Sorry. Anyway, good-night both." He kissed her hastily, and made for the stairs.

Cordelia lay awake until dawn, then overslept, and came down very late with a headache. A contrite Harry immediate proposed a walk in Hurst Wood-something he had not done for weeks-and they set off towards the riverbank. He hadn't exactly been lying about the sleep-walking, he explained as they walked along; he had fallen asleep in the armchair in his room, and dreamed that he was looking at "The Drowned Man", and in the dream he had seen, at last, what the face had been trying to tell him. Then he woke, still with the sensation of understanding, but the substance had gone. And so he had taken his key and gone upstairs, hoping to recapture it.

"And did you?" she asked, longing to believe him, but not quite convinced.

"No… I thought… but no. I lose myself in it, and then-then it goes, like that dream, when something calls me back."

"When I knocked over the frame, you looked as if you hated me." Her voice quivered as she spoke.

"I am so sorry… I was not myself"

"Then who were you?"

He glanced at her uneasily. "I meant, I didn't know what I was doing."

She stopped in the middle of the path, put her hands on his shoulders, and turned him towards her.

"Harry, look at me. There's no burden, nothing I wouldn't happily bear for your sake. But I can't marry you if you won't trust me,"

He threw his arms around her and launched into a stream of apologies. He had learned his lesson; they would lock "The Drowned Man" away in a stout box and she could keep the only key of it, if she liked, but in any case he would never, never look at it again; he loved her, adored her, could never live without her… all very gratifying, but at the end of it she was no closer to understanding the cause of his strange compulsion. And when they reached the riverbank, she found herself drawing back from his kisses, and searching his face for the absolute assurance his words had somehow failed to provide, while her headache grew worse and worse until she was compelled to return to the house. Neither aspirin nor rest would subdue the pounding in her head, and by the time she came down again he was gone, leaving only a note to say that he had not wanted to disturb her.

The following afternoon, Cordelia went up to the storeroom and carried "The Drowned Man" and its lectern back to its former place in the studio. If he could not resist it openly… she did not know what would follow, only that she could not bear the idea of his creeping back to it in the night; and besides, her uncle held the only other key to the studio.

The day was cool and bright; a light breeze came through the open window, causing one of the pictures hanging on the opposite wall to sway and tap very lightly against the panelling. She finished sweeping the floor, then turned the easel so that it faced the light, sat down on the bed, and tried to lose herself in the portrait. Glowing, vibrant, perfectly composed, Imogen de Vere regarded her with intimate understanding. It struck Cordelia, not for the first time, that an observer might easily assume that the portrait was to her what "The Drowned Man" was to Harry. She had spent another restless night, and much of the day, brooding upon the possible causes of its power over him. Was it related, somehow, to his unflagging determination to locate and befriend Henry St Clair? Harry had yet to uncover a single scrap of evidence beyond what was stored in these two rooms, but his conviction that St Clair was alive and, as it were, waiting for Harry to knock on his door, remained unshaken.

It would have been better if they had left everything alone; this had all sprung from her idea of restoring the studio. She had felt so certain that the evil had been banished… but then she did not-did she?-truly believe in the power of curses. Not on a sunny afternoon like this, and besides, it made no sense. De Vere had not painted "The Drowned Man"; St Clair had. And even if you believed in-the sort of thing that came to you, lying awake in the dark, recalling, all too vividly, the story of de Vere's last days-there was nothing else in the room that could possibly…

Except the polished wooden cube in the corner at the foot of the bed.

It was much heavier than she remembered-of course, Harry had helped her lift it-and though there was no discernible rustling this time, she thought that something moved or shifted very slightly inside it as she set it down on the bed. You could not tell which way up it was supposed to go, if there was a right way: the six side panels looked exactly the same. Each had been overlaid with a plain strip of polished wood-cedar or mahogany, she thought-around the outside, so that the actual panel was recessed, with an elaborately carved rosette, about the size of a florin, in the centre. As she turned the box from side to side, she found herself coming back to one particular rosette, until it occurred to her to count the carved petals. All of the others had twelve petals; this one had thirteen. Gingerly, she tried pressing, and then twisting the rosette, and felt it turn very slightly. What might it be? Surely nothing could still be alive in there? A vision of huge, veinous eggs had her leaping away from the bed, almost knocking over the easel. Should she call her uncle? He would tell her, quite rightly, to leave it alone. Yes: put it back in the corner, or better still, lock it away in the room next door. But already those eggs had begun to hatch in her imagination. What if it sprang open, like a jack-in-the-box, as soon as she picked it up? Far better to leave it for Harry to move next Saturday; but that would mean five days of picturing monstrous spiders swarming about the studio, for the lid might fly up as soon as she locked the door…

An altercation of blackbirds in a nearby oak subdued these fearful visions sufficiently for her to seize the broom. Without giving herself time to think, she twisted the rosette with, her other hand as far as it would go and sprang away again.

A dark line had appeared along the edge of the panel. She waited, straining to listen over the thudding of her heart, but nothing more happened. Holding the broom at arms length, she tried to work the bristles into the crack, but her hand trembled so violently that she dislodged the panel completely, and it slid down onto the bed.

Nothing came out. Edging closer, she saw that the top of the box was tightly packed with crumpled-up sheets of newspaper. She began to dislodge these with the broom, which compelled her to move closer to the box as she worked down through the layers of packing until she began to uncover something green-a hard, rounded object about the size of… a turkeys egg… wrapped in a fine emerald green velvet cloth

… no, an emerald green gown, she could see from the stitching… and the thing inside couldn't be an egg, because it had a dome-like protuberance at one end, with some sort of spike, perhaps, beyond that, and when she tapped it very lightly with the broom handle she could hear a muffled ringing sound. Gently, she prised up the bundle so that it lay on top of the packing. Whatever was inside could not weigh very much. She tapped with her fingers; too hard to be an egg. It felt like glass.

She lifted out the bundle, set it down on the bed, and began, very cautiously, to unwrap it. The object had been placed inside the waist of the gown, with the rest of the fabric folded around it. Not liking to reach inside, and trying not to stand too close, Cordelia began to lift the gown away. But her hands were seized by a sudden tremor; the thing slid out very suddenly, and before she could stop it, rolled off the edge of the bed and smashed to fragments. All she retained was the impression of something like a distended electric light bulb, with long thin tubes or spikes of glass at both ends. There was one of the broken-off glass spikes, with a needle-like wire emerging from the end of it… and part of another; and a small square of thin dark metal, curved like a curling leaf,… and a third fragment of glass tubing, connected by wire to another metal square, the same size, but flat, and silvered like the back of a mirror.

Her curiosity was blotted out by the realisation of what she had done. They could lose the income, and the house; and Harry, for all his loyalty, was the last person she could tell. She must wrap up the fragments, put everything back in the box, and pray that nobody ever opened it again. As she moved to drape the gown over the bed, she saw that it was, undoubtedly, the gown that Imogen de Vere was wearing in the portrait.

And now she would have to sweep up all of the broken glass, and bundle it up in the gown… which she found she was holding so as to measure it against herself; it looked exactly her size. Though terribly crumpled, it was only a little musty. And the jagged edges would tear the velvet… no; she could not. The packing had been so flat, when the lid came off; it had surely never been disturbed. She draped the gown across the bed and unfolded one of the pieces of paper. The Times. Friday, 3rd December, 1896. Which would have been, from her recollection of her uncles narrative, either just before, or shortly after Henry St Clair's things had been seized by the bailiffs.

But he would never have treated the gown with such contempt, assuming Imogen had left it at the studio. This was de Vere's work… all the more reason not to do his bidding. That green dress she had not worn for ages would do perfectly well to wrap the fragments. Meanwhile, it struck her that the safest place for the gown would be in the closet in Grandmama's room, which she had not entered since the day Papa had caught her wearing the veil; nor, so far as she knew, had anyone else. But if Uncle Theodore happened to go up to his room, two doors along from Grandmama's… she decided to hide the gown in her own closet for the time being, and wait until the coast was clear.

When she had swept up the glass and got the lid back on the box, she came downstairs and established that her uncle was dozing in his study. Then, without quite knowing why, she went back up to the first floor and let herself quietly into her grandmother's room.

Dust swirled as she crossed the floor and drew open the curtains. The stale, musty air was still warm from the previous day's heat. The furniture seemed to have shrunk; the swing mirror no longer towered over her. A faint odour of camphor greeted her as she opened the closet door, along with a vivid memory of playing at ghosts with Beatrice. Several dresses hung from the rail, all in sombre colours, and all "sensible", like the stout shoes on the floor. Imogen, she reminded herself, had arrived here in the clothes she stood up in. What had happened to the magnificent wardrobe she must have had at Belgrave Square? Her jewels? Books, letters, keepsakes? De Vere must have sold or destroyed everything else.

As she wandered about the room, Cordelia was struck by the realisation that her habit of thinking of Imogen de Vere and Grandmama as two separate people was in no way fanciful. Whether or not he had caused the illness-"his spittle burned like acid", she recalled Uncle Theodore saying-Imogen de Vere had died to the world, and perhaps even to herself that night, and woken as Grandmama, condemned always to wear a veil… which Papa must have returned to the bottom drawer of the press, for there it was, laid out exactly as she had seen it last.

Breathing again the scents of camphor and some sort of salve or balm, mixed with the faintest hint of another fragrance, Cordelia felt a sudden powerful urge to put it on, and for the second time in her life, she drew the black veil over her head and turned towards the mirror.

The verse about seeing in a glass darkly came to her. No wonder she had given herself-and Papa-such a fright. Her dress looked strangely incongruous below the veil, as though her own head and shoulders had been replaced with those of another person whose outlines could be glimpsed, in the stronger light from the window, floating in a black mist of gauze.

A floorboard creaked in the corridor outside. She drew off the veil and held her breath, listening, but there was no further sound beyond the faint thudding of her heart, and when she opened the door cautiously and looked out, the corridor was empty. Feeling that it would be safer in her own room, she folded the veil and carried it upstairs, where she hid it away in her closet, beside the emerald green gown.

The mantel clock chimed the half-hour. The clouds had sunk even lower, merging into a uniform, leaden grey like the underside of a fog-bank which hung, seemingly motionless, just above the treetops across the lane. If he had arrived on the six o'clock train, he would surely be here by now; there would be at least another hour to wait.

Why could he never be on time? She would have run all the way from Bloomsbury to Victoria rather than sacrifice an hour in his company. Suddenly angry, she slid down off the window-ledge and made for the stairs. She would walk as far as the village, just in case, and then circle back to the stream, where she could at least bathe her feet in cool water.

The light beneath the trees was very dim; there was still not a breath of wind. She had gone about a hundred yards when she heard the sound of voices, and stopped beneath the deeper shadow of an oak.

Harry and Beatrice appeared at the next turning, some thirty yards away. They were walking slowly, close together and deep in conversation. Should she wave, or call out? As they approached, still without seeing her, though she was dressed in white-the same creamy-white sleeveless dress she had worn that first afternoon-Cordelia began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. They had come within a few paces when she stepped out into the middle of the lane.

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