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Feliks hissed: “Fall down, damn you!” and hit him again with all his might.
The policeman fell down, and Feliks hit him again with savage satisfaction.
The man was still.
Feliks turned to the petroleum pipe and found the place where the hose was co
Feliks turned on the tap.
“Before we were married,” Lydia said impulsively, “I had a lover.”
“Good Lord!” said Stephen.
Why did I say that? she thought. Because lying about it has made everyone unhappy, and I’m finished with all that.
She said: “My father found out about it. He had my lover jailed and tortured. He said that if I would agree to marry you, the torture would stop immediately; and that as soon as you and I had left for England, my lover would be released from jail.”
She watched his face. He was not as hurt as she had expected, but he was horrified. He said: “Your father was wicked.”
“I was wicked to marry without love.”
“Oh…” Now Stephen looked pained. “For that matter, I wasn’t in love with you. I proposed to you because my father had died and I needed a wife to be Countess of Walden. It was later that I fell so desperately in love with you. I’d say I forgive you, but there’s nothing to forgive.”
Could it be this easy? she thought. Might he forgive me everything and go on loving me? It seemed that, because death was in the air, anything was possible. She found herself plunging on. “There’s more to be told,” she said, “and it’s worse.”
His expression was painfully anxious. “You’d better tell me.”
“I was… I was already with child when I married you.”
Stephen paled. “Charlotte!”
Lydia nodded silently.
“She… she’s not mine?”
“No.”
“Oh, God.”
Now I have hurt you, she thought; this you never dreamed. She said: “Oh, Stephen, I am so dreadfully sorry.”
He stared at her. “Not mine,” he said stupidly. “Not mine.”
She thought of how much it meant to him: more than anyone else the English nobility talked about breeding and bloodlines. She remembered him looking at Charlotte and murmuring: “Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh”; it was the only verse of the Bible she had ever heard him quote. She thought of her own feelings, of the mystery of the child starting life as part of oneself and then becoming a separate individual, but never completely separate: it must be the same for men, she thought; sometimes one thinks it isn’t, but it must be.
His face was gray and drawn. He looked suddenly older. He said: “Why are you telling me this now?”
I can’t, she thought; I can’t reveal any more. I’ve hurt him so much already. But it was as if she was on a downhill slope and could not stop. She blurted: “Because Charlotte has met her real father, and she knows everything.”
“Oh, the poor child.” Stephen buried his face in his hands.
Lydia realized that his next question would be: Who is the father? She was overcome by panic. She could not tell him that. It would kill him. But she needed to tell him; she wanted the weight of these guilty secrets to be lifted forever. Don’t ask, she thought; not yet, it’s too much.
He looked up at her. His face was frighteningly expressionless. He looked like a judge, she thought, impassively pronouncing sentence; and she was the guilty prisoner in the dock.
Don’t ask.
He said: “And the father is Feliks, of course.”
She gasped.
He nodded, as if her reaction was all the confirmation he needed.
What will he do? she thought fearfully. She watched his face, but she could not read his expression: he was like a stranger to her.
He said: “Oh, dear God in Heaven, what have we done?”
Lydia was suddenly garrulous. “He came along just when she was begi
His face was wooden. She wished he would curse, or cry, or abuse her, or even beat her, but he sat there looking at her with that judge’s face, and said: “And you? Did you help him?”
“Not intentionally, no… but I haven’t helped you, either. I am such a hateful, evil woman.”
He stood up and held her shoulders. His hands were cold as the grave. He said: “But are you mine?”
“I wanted to be, Stephen-I really did.”
He touched her cheek, but no love showed in his face. She shuddered. She said: “I told you it was too much to forgive.”
He said: “Do you know where Feliks is?”
She made no reply. If I tell, she thought, it will be like killing Feliks. If I don’t tell, it will be like killing Stephen.
“You do know,” he said.
She nodded dumbly.
“Will you tell me?”
She looked into his eyes. If I tell him, she thought, will he forgive me?
Stephen said: “Choose.”
She felt as if she were falling headlong into a pit.
Stephen raised his eyebrows expectantly.
Lydia said: “He’s in the house.”
“Good God! Where?”
Lydia’s shoulders slumped. It was done. She had betrayed Feliks for the last time. “He’s been hiding in the nursery,” she said dejectedly.
His expression was no longer wooden. His cheeks colored and his eyes blazed with fury.
Lydia said: “Say you forgive me… please?”
He turned around and ran from the room.
Feliks ran through the kitchen and through the serving room, carrying his candle, the shotgun and his matches. He could smell the sweet, slightly nauseating vapor of petrol. In the dining room a thin, steady jet was spouting through a hole in the hosepipe. Feliks shifted the hose across the room, so that the fire would not destroy it too quickly, then struck a match and threw it on to a petrol-soaked patch of rug. The rug burst into flames.
Feliks gri
In the drawing room he picked up a velvet cushion and held it to another hole in the hosepipe for a minute. He put the cushion down on a sofa, set fire to it and threw some more cushions onto it. They blazed merrily.
He ran across the hall and along the passage to the library. Here the petrol was gushing out of the end of the pipe and ru
There was a noise like a huge gust of wind and the library caught fire. Books and petrol burned fiercely. In a moment the curtains were ablaze; then the seats and the paneling caught. The petrol continued to pour out of the hosepipe, feeding the fire. Feliks laughed aloud.
He turned into the gun room. He stuffed a handful of extra cartridges into the pocket of his coat. He went from the gun room into the flower room. He unbolted the door to the garden, opened it quietly and stepped out.
He walked directly west, away from the house, for two hundred paces, containing his impatience. Then he turned south for the same distance, and finally he walked east until he was directly opposite the main entrance to the house, looking at it across the darkened lawn.
He could see the second police sentry standing in front of the portico, illuminated by the twin lamps, smoking a pipe. His colleague lay unconscious, perhaps dead, in the kitchen courtyard. Feliks could see the flames in the windows of the library, but the policeman was some distance away from there and he had not noticed them yet. He would see them at any moment.