I went straight back to the vicarage.
I had to find some way of letting him know I was there and by good luck one of the frightened little maids was polishing the brass knocker so I did not have to knock.
“Mrs. Rendall is in the still room,” she volunteered.
“It’s all right, Jane,” I said, “I just want to go up to the schoolroom. I’ve left some music.”
I went upstairs, where Godfrey was giving a lesson in Latin. He was alert as soon as he saw me.
The girls looked at me in surprise. I knew they missed very little.
“I’ve left some music, I think,” I said, and went across the room to the drawer where I kept a book of elementary studies.
“Can I help you?” Godfrey was beside me, his back to the girls.
I fumbled with the book and taking a pencil wrote on it: “Graveyard in ten minutes.”
“Is that what you’re looking for?” asked Godfrey.
“Yes, I’m sorry to have interrupted the lesson. Only I did need this.”
I went out of the schoolroom, aware of their eyes following me. Down through the hall, quickly, lest Mrs. Rendall emerge from the still room, and out to the graveyard to wait.
In less than ten minutes Godfrey was with me.
“Perhaps I’m being over-dramatic,” I said, “but I’ve remembered something. When I came here and stayed a few days with Roma, they were piecing the mosaic together. It was too precious to move, Roma said, and she had some of her people working on it. I was supposed to be helping…doing nothing important, of course, but it was to give me an interest.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, dispelling all my doubts that what I was telling him was important.
“Well, that mosaic was a part of this pattern, I believe. In fact I’m almost sure of it.”
“We’ll have to look at it,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“If any piecing together was successful it would be in the British Museum. We must take the first opportunity of looking at it.”
“When can you go?”
“There’d be comment if I took a day off at the moment. What about you? You’ve been here some time and haven’t had a day off have you?”
“No, but…”
“I shan’t rest until one of us goes.”
“I believe Mrs. Lincroft is taking the girls to London to buy dress material some time soon.”
“There’s your opportunity. You go up with them and while they buy material you go into the Museum and see if you can find that mosaic.”
“All right,” I said. “If I get the opportunity before you do, I’ll go.”
“We’re getting somewhere,” said Godfrey, his eyes gleaming with excitement. He returned to the schoolroom and I hurried back to Lovat Stacy where I met Mrs. Lincroft in the hall. She said: “You’re later than usual.”
“Yes. I had to go back for this.” I flourished the book and it slipped from my fingers. She picked it up for me and I was aware of “Graveyard ten minutes” written on the cover. I wondered if she had seen it.
The girls were excited as we traveled up on the train.
“What a pity,” said Alice, “that Sylvia couldn’t come.”
“She would never be allowed to choose her own material,” put in Allegra.
“Poor Sylvia! I feel sorry for her,” said Mrs. Lincroft; and she sighed. I knew she was thinking of the births of Alice and Allegra—highly dramatic and unorthodox both of them; and, yet she had managed to give them a happier home than Sylvia’s conventional one. I thought of her remark about the slippery stone and I thought: That woman has done everything she can to make up for her lapse.
“Poor Mrs. Verlaine,” went on Alice. “She isn’t going to buy material for a new dress.”
“Perhaps she is,” said Mrs. Lincroft.
“She is going to the British Museum,” added Allegra, eying me with speculation. I felt vaguely uncomfortable because I had not told them I was going to the British Museum. “I heard you say so to Mr. Wilmot, Mrs. Verlaine,” added Allegra.
“Oh,” I stammered, caught off my guard. “I thought I’d look in there. I used to live near and go in quite a lot.”
“Because your father was a professor,” went on Alice. “I expect he made you work very hard which is why you are so good at the piano.” She looked at Allegra who said: “I should like to go to the British Museum. Let’s all go.”
I was so dismayed that I could find nothing to say for a few seconds. Then I said: “I thought you were all eager to choose your new materials.”
“There’s always plenty of time, isn’t there, Mamma?” put in Alice eagerly, “sometimes we go into the Park. But I’d rather go to the British Museum.”
Mrs. Lincroft said: “I don’t see why you shouldn’t have an hour or so there. When did you propose to go, Mrs. Verlaine?”
“Oh please, I don’t want to force this on you.”
“It can scarcely be said to be forced,” she replied with a smile. “I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll go straight to the Museum and then we’ll have luncheon at Brown’s Hotel and afterwards choose the material and catch the four-thirty train home.”
Thus was my frustration complete but there was worse to come. While I sat back in my seat watching the fields and hedges skim by I was trying to think of some way of diverting their desires from the British Museum, but I dared not seem too disturbed. How had Allegra overheard my talk with Godfrey? We must have been careless.
At length I realized that there was nothing to be done but take them along with me to the Museum, where I must try to lose them and find my way to the Roman section alone.
Luck was against me that day. We had alighted from the cab which took us from the Station to the Museum when a voice called me by name.
“Why…surely…yes it is…Mrs. Verlaine.”
Fortunately I was a little ahead of my companions so I moved quickly toward the speaker whom I recognized immediately as a colleague of my father’s.
“A bad business that of your sister,” he said, shaking his head. “What was it all about?”
“We…we never discovered.”
“A great loss,” he said. “We always used to say that Roma Brandon would go even farther than your parents. Poor Roma…”
How resonant was his voice. Mrs. Lincroft was near enough to have heard every word, but the children did not seem to be listening. Alice was standing with her back toward me pointing out something on the road to Allegra. But Mrs. Lincroft must have heard.
“You must look us up sometime. Same address.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks.”
He had lifted his hat, bowed and moved off.
Mrs. Lincroft said: “I’ve never been in this place before. We don’t take advantage of our museum, do we?”
My heart was beating fast. Perhaps she had not heard. Perhaps I had imagined that his voice was unusually resonant. She had not been so close as I thought her and her mind was on the material for the girls’ dresses.
“No,” I said and there was a nervous laugh in my voice. “We don’t really.”
“We are taking advantage now.” Alice had come up with Allegra. “How solemn it all is! How important!”
They walked beside me exclaiming as they went. I thought of the old days when I had come here so frequently, when my parents had believed that the greatest treat any child could enjoy was within these walls.
I had escaped them. I had left them all poring over an illuminated manuscript dating back to the twelfth century while I sped silently over those stone floors and here I was where I had been so many times with Roma.
I asked one of the guides where I could find any of the Roman relics from the Lovat Stacy site and I was directed immediately.