The China Governess

1 The Elopers-1

1

The ElopersIn the expectant greyness which was only just less than the night’s dark a c**k crew twice. Instantly, from the rise behind the wayside station a second rooster answered him, and with this unearthly sound, the whole ritual of daybreak began.

In the red sports-car which was pulled up on the lane’s verge below the station drive, the two young people who were asleep in each other’s arms moved drowsily. The girl’s lips were still against the cheek of the young man beside her and she completed the kiss which sheer weariness had interrupted before she opened her eyes. “Oh no,” she protested sleepily. “No. Not morning yet, surely?”

“Julia!” The boy was all over awake at once, his eyes bright as the lids flickered open. He returned her kiss joyfully and glanced down at the watch on his wrist; his forehead crumpled and he sat up. “So much for our careful planning! We’ve slept for two solid hours and the train will be here in fifteen minutes. Oh hell! You’ll have to go down to the Keep alone. Do you mind?”

“I feel as if I shall never mind anything ever. It may wear off but it hasn’t yet,” she said blithely. She was kneeling up on the seat and he put his arms round her waist and hugged her. “But if I’m to get your car under cover by daylight I’d better go now, which is a bit heart-rending . . . you’re sure Nanny Broome really is a hundred per cent on our side?”

“Completely.” His voice was muffled as he rubbed his face against her chest with weary longing. “I telephoned before I collected you. Anyhow, she’s almost my foster-mum. She’s always on my side.” He sat up to look at her seriously. “I gave her the full details. I told her what we had in mind.”

She met his eyes squarely, her own round and grave.

“Was she scandalised?”

“Lord no. She was thrilled to bits.” He shivered slightly. “And so am I.”

“Me too.” Julia was just visible in the cold light. She was a very pretty girl: not very tall, but slender, with fine bones and hair so dark as to be almost black. Her skin was thick and white and unpainted and her bright blue eyes and determined mouth echoed her father’s considerable personality. He was Anthony Laurell, head of the Laurell light engineering empire and youngest self-made tycoon in Britain and one of the most interesting characters in industry. Julia was just eighteen, warm and gay as a lamb, and every detail of her cared-for, well-dressed appearance acknowledged that she was somebody’s very precious only child. At the moment she was absorbed, peering down into the shadowed face raised to her own.

“Your smile is like lace,” she said.

“Lace?” He was hardly flattered.

“Decorative.” She was entirely serious. “It sort of trims you up and makes you glorious.”

“You’re idiotic,” he muttered through his kiss. “Sweet and certifiable and I love you, I love you, God! I love you. Darling, I’ve got to catch this dreary train back to London but tonight . . .” His voice broke with a disarming helplessness which pinked them both like a sword. “Tonight I’ll come back and find you and damn everybody else in the world.” He pushed her firmly away and climbed out of the car.

“Timothy.”

“Hello?” He swung round in the fast growing light and she saw him for the first time all over again. He had a rangy body, a distinctive, characterful face, grey arrogant eyes, and a wide thin mouth whose lines could curl and broaden like copperplate handwriting. He was twenty-two and all the panoply of masculine physical charm which had earned him a host of admiring contemporaries, even in the Oxford where they both were students, was at its freshest and best. To see all this giddy power and splendour helpless before her was a part of the enchantment which bound her and she caught her breath before it.

“I don’t want you to go back to London!”

“Nor do I, lady! But I’ve got to. I’ve got to see your old man and have it out with him. His trip to Ireland made it possible for me to get you away and safe down here while I talk, but we can’t just clear out into the blue.”

“Why not?” She was coaxing. “Honestly, I don’t care any more about anything in the world except being with you. Two months ago I’d rather have committed suicide than upset Daddy or got in the newspapers. Now I just can’t care.”

The young man put his hands on either side of her face and looked down at her like a child with a treasure.

“You go on thinking just like that and leave the rest to me,” he said earnestly. “But I can’t face the thought of you and me being turned into a nice Sunday ‘read’ for halfwits. It was foolhardy and inconsiderate of your old man to call the whole thing off suddenly, just when his own invitations to the engagement ‘do’ were out, and he must have known that the gossip hounds would be down on us like a blight. I must talk to him. He can’t have so much against me.”

“He hasn’t. I told you I don’t know why he suddenly vetoed the marriage, but he liked you and he liked your background and was impressed by the degree and the sports record and . . .”

“Then why? For God’s sake?”

“It was something to do with a letter he got from Miss Kinnit.”

“From Aunt Alison?” He was staring at her. “Do you know what was in it?”

“No, or I’d have told you. I only knew it came. I didn’t mean to mention it.” The dusky colour appeared in her cheeks. “She was so nice to me. I thought she approved.”

“She does. She’s a funny, cold old thing but terribly kind—after all she and Eustace are my only family and she was delighted about you. They keep teasing me about you being the deb of the year. This must be some completely idiotic misunderstanding. I’ll go and put it right. Wait at the Keep and love me.”

From the embankment above there was a clatter as the signal fell and her arms closed round him possessively.

“I’d still rather you didn’t go. I’ll hold you. I’ll make you miss the train.”

He released himself gently. “Please don’t,” he said gravely but with great sweetness, his lips close to her ear. “You hurt too much. Too much altogether.” And turning from her he ran up the slope into the half-light which was already throbbing with the noise of the train.

Julia sat listening until the engine had shrieked away into the fields once more and then with a sense of desolation she let in the clutch and drove away through the back roads to where the village of Angevin lay hidden in the Suffolk folds.

She avoided the turning to the single main street of cottages and took, instead, the upper road which wound through the fields to a pair of neglected iron gates leading into a park so thickly wooded with enormous elms as to be completely dark although their leaves were scarcely a green mist amid the massive branches.

The trees grew near to the house, so close in fact that they obscured it from the north side and she had to use the headlights to find the squat Tudor arch which led into the paved yard. As she passed it a yellow-lit doorway suddenly appeared in the shadowy masonry and the angular figure of a woman stood silhouetted within it. She came running out to the car.

“Mr. Tim?”

“No.” Julia was apologetic. “It’s only me I’m afraid, Mrs. Broome. We got held up and I left him at the station. You knew he was going back to London, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Until tonight.”

There was an indescribable note of satisfaction in the brisk voice which startled Julia as well as reassuring her, and the newcomer went on talking. “He told me all about it on the telephone and what he didn’t tell me I was able to put together. There isn’t much Mr. Tim hides from me.”

It was a strange greeting, neither hostile nor effusive but possessive and feminine and tremendously authoritative. Julia was only just sufficiently sophisticated not to be irritated. “What about the car? I don’t think it ought to stand out where it can be seen, do you?”

“No Miss, I certainly don’t and I’ve given my mind to that, all night nearly. I think it should go down to the little piggy brick house. I’ll show you where.”

She stepped into the empty seat and pointed to an opening on the further side of the yard.

As she settled down beside her Julia noticed that she was trembling with excitement, and her round face turned suddenly towards her showed patchy red and white. Margaret Broome was a woman of perhaps fifty but her coarse hair was still fair and her light brown eyes were bright and shiny as pebbles in a brook. Her gay green cardigan was buttoned tightly across her chest and she folded her arms against the cold.

“It’s all overgrown but if you drive slowly you’ll make it,” she hurried on. “I slipped down last evening to make sure we could get in. It’s the old summerhouse at the end of the View. We used to call it the piggy house when Tim was a baby, after the little pig’s house that was built of brick you know.” She was unself-conscious in her nursery talk, matter of fact rather. “Nobody goes there now. It’s too far for anyone in the house but right in front of the windows, so no one’s going to hop in there courting from the village. Here we are. See, I propped the doors open. You drive straight in.”

It was a little ornamental temple with a tessellated floor and pillars, designed perhaps as a music room in some far off Victorian age of extravagance.

The panelled double doors had lost much of their paint but they were still stout and the car lights revealed the usual summerhouse miscellany piled in spider-infested confusion against the far wall.

“There,” said Nanny Broome, hopping out with the agility of a girl, “now we’ll shut and lock the doors on it and no one will be a penny the wiser. We must hurry though, because it’s nearly light. Come along miss, stir your stumps.”

The nursery way of speaking flowed over Julia, amusing and reassuring her without her realising that she was receiving a treatment whose technique was as ancient as history. She hurried obediently, helped to close the doors and then followed the angular figure round the side of the building to the broad terraced path which led up the slope to the front of the Keep. As she looked up and saw it for the first time from this vantage point she paused abruptly, and the older woman who was watching her exploded in a delighted giggle. In the pink light of dawn, with the long shafts of sunrise cutting through the mist towards it, the Keep at Angevin was something to see.

At that moment it was a piece of pure visual romance, inspired and timeless. Much of its triumph lay in the fact that it was an unfinished thing. The original family who had begun to build a palace to outrival Nonesuch had died out before they had put up little more than the gateway, so that the actual structure which had come down to posterity retained the secret magic of a promise rather than the overpowering splendour of a great architectural achievement.

Two slender towers of narrow rose-pink brick, fretted with mullioned windows, were flanked by three-storied wings of the same period, all very carefully restored and remarkably little spoiled by the Victorian architect who had chosen to build the summerhouse at this magnificent point of vantage.

“How staggering it looks from here!” Julia was almost laughing. “When I came to the houseparty at Christmas we didn’t get as far as this so I never saw it from this angle. I know why Timothy calls it his castle.”

“It is his castle.” Again the satisfied and possessive warning note jarred on the younger woman. “When he was a tiny boy in the war, he and I used to sneak out here in the very early morning mushrooming, and I used to tell him about the knights riding in the courtyard, jousting and saving ladies and killing dragons and so on. He loved it. All the kids have it now on telly,” she added as an afterthought. “Do you ever see it? Ivanhoe.”