“Yes, I heard you, my dear. And I have nothing with which to reproach myself. Stoker and I are very good friends.”
“I can imagine,” she said, her mouth thinning with real bitterness.
“Not that good,” I amended. “But we have known one another for some time and we work together.”
“You work?” Her eyes were narrow and suspicious.
“Certainly. You didn’t imagine I wanted the glasswings for my amusement, did you? I am developing a vivarium in central London to be associated with the museum that Stoker and I are establishing. It will be the work of a decade or more, but we are confident.”
There was a reluctant interest in my work, I could see, but she smothered it swiftly as she turned back to herCestrum. “That doesn’t account for you seeing him. Like that.”
“Naked? My dear Mertensia, how very Puritanical of you. I thought Catholics were supposed to be more broad-minded about such things. There is no shame in the human form, particularly Stoker’s. His is especially well sculpted.”
Her hand jerked and a lush blossom fell to the grass. “Damn,” she muttered. She turned to me again. “I meant because of your engagement to his brother.”
“Oh,that. Well, I suppose it will do no harm to confess that my betrothal to Tiberius is a fiction. He thought it unseemly for us to travel together otherwise. He said it was because Malcolm was rather conventionalabout such matters, but I suspect it was more to annoy Stoker than for any other purpose.”
“You really aren’t engaged to Tiberius?”
“Shall I vow on something? I haven’t a Bible at hand, but perhaps my word would do.”
“I believe you,” she said finally. “And I think I know why Tiberius would have made up such a story. It isn’t because of Stoker or religion. It is because of Malcolm. They have always been competitive with one another, ridiculously so. Malcolm’s bride disappeared, so Tiberius appears with a beautiful fiancée. It is a way of keeping score,” she explained.
“How very childlike men can be,” I observed.
“Frequently,” she agreed. She put aside her secateurs and rummaged in her pocket, withdrawing a slender dark brown cigarette. She lit it, scraping a lucifer on the stone bench. She drew in a deep breath of sharp smoke and handed the cigarette over to me. I took it, pulling in enough smoke to blow an elegant ring.
“Oh! Will you teach me how to do that?”
“Certainly.” I spent the next quarter of an hour explaining the mechanics of the smoke ring and guiding her. Her first few efforts were lopsided, but the last was even prettier than mine.
“You are a natural,” I told her. She ground out the cigarette on the sole of her boot.
“I miss this,” she said. “It has been a long time since...” She trailed off and I knew she was thinking of Rosamund.
“You were school friends with Rosamund, weren’t you?” I asked. “It must have been a dreadful shock when she disappeared.”
She shook her head. “The shock came earlier.” She looked at me, her dark gaze resting a long moment on my face, assessing. In the end, she decided to trust me, at least a little. “I thought we were friends, truly. I was so happy when it was arranged that she should spend the summer with us. I had had so little company here. I loved Malcolm’s friends, butto have a companion of my own...” She let the rest of the sentence hang unfinished in the air. “But she was different. I saw it as soon as she arrived. There was something hard about her. The posts she had taken were difficult. She was worn and tired and a little more.”
“A little more?”
“Angry. Nothing so obvious that you could put your finger on it, but it was there. A sort of edge to her. She was careful never to make any remarks in front of others, only me. But she would sit here on this bench and look around and I knew she was plotting something.”
“What sort of something?”
“To marry my brother and make herself queen of the castle,” she told me flatly. “I ought to have realized it sooner. We had talked about the castle when I was at school with her. Our dormitories were arranged with the girls two to a bed, and Rosamund was my bedmate. We would lie awake, long after the others had fallen asleep. I was too homesick to go to sleep. So I talked about the castle and she encouraged it. I told her all the legends, the giant, the Three Sisters, the mermaids and Spanish sailors. And I told her about Malcolm, how he was the loveliest brother imaginable. I think I made him out to be a bit of King Arthur and Siegfried and Theseus all in one. I quite adored him,” she said with an apologetic little smile. “Younger sisters often do. And I didn’t realize what it must have sounded like to a girl with Rosamund’s meager prospects. I was lonely for a castle and a wonderful big brother, and all she had was that bare room at school and the extra chores she had to do as a scholarship pupil. I never realized it was cruel.”
“You were a child,” I reminded her.
“A fanciful one. I spun her stories and she believed them as much as I did. In the end, she helped me run away. She gave me the little bit of pocket money she had and she lied for a whole day, telling the headmistress that I was abed with a stomachache. She got into terrible trouble. She was lucky not to be expelled. Malcolm helped with that,” she saidwith a vague smile. “He was so horrified that I had run away from school and so relieved I had made it home unscathed. Poor darling! He was so terribly young for such responsibility and not very good at being a guardian. Lucian was running mad at his school and there I was, halfway to getting my best friend expelled. He did the only thing he knew how—he threw money at the headmistress until she agreed to keep Rosamund on. Rosamund had only a glimpse of him that day when he went to settle things, but it was enough. She made up her mind then and there to live in our castle one day and to marry the prince who had appeared as if out of nowhere to save her.”
“He must have made quite an impression upon her,” I said.
“He did indeed. I am not surprised. To someone like Rosamund, who had known only the stings of privation and no real ease in her life, Malcolm must have seemed like a revelation. He was courteous and wealthy. He represented security, and when he stepped in like a figure out of myth to arrange her future at the school, she idolized him just a bit.” She broke off with a small smile. “I know it seems ludicrous that Malcolm could form the focus of a young girl’s fantasies. To me, he is so very ordinary. But he is not a bad-looking fellow, and Rosamund was so determined to see him as a hero. I think she was quite surprised to finally come to the island and find him a very regular sort of person.”
“Was it a long time between your leaving school and her visit here?”
“Oh, years,” she told me. “We kept in touch, after a fashion. I am a haphazard correspondent, but Rosamund wrote the first of each month, without fail. When she finished school, she had to take employment. There was never any question but that she would have to support herself. She wrote of her employers, her duties, her circumstances. At first, she was wildly entertaining about it all. She wrote with a sort of archness and made it seem like a lark. But as she changed posts and never quite found a place that suited her, she had to take smaller wages, less congenial employers. The tone of her letters changed. Finally, shedecided to go out to India, but she was not due to take up her post for some time. It seemed the perfect opportunity to let her come to the island for a little rest.”
