Rose in Darkness Read Online Free Page A

the door. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.’ He stood in the lighted entrance, one hand already lifted to shoot the bolt behind her. ‘Be seeing you!’
    ‘I dare say you will,’ she said. ‘In the News of the World. ’ And stepped out into the rain and opened the nearside door and shifted across into the driving seat. The overhead light, automatically switched on, illuminated the beautifully finished interior; it was a very expensive car. He looked it over with interest till she reached across and slammed shut the door and the light went out.
    ‘Well, goodnight then, love!’ he called again; and the headlights sprang on and the engine purred and she drove off slowly and then faster—faster—faster—away from the warmth and the light, away from security, along the lonely road.
    And straight across the path of the speeding car—the great tree fell.

3
    P HINEAS DEVIGNE LIVED UP at the top of the steep incline which gives Wren’s Hill its name: a rather beautiful one-storey house which he resolutely refused to call a bungalow. Nanny came through from her sitting-room as he stood in the hall peeling off his soaking wet raincoat; smelling of cold cream and tightly belted into her pink woollen dressing-gown with its tasselled cord: a big woman not improved by a heavy greying moustache. ‘Well, so you’re home?’
    Usually it irritated him intensely: what was one supposed to reply? But tonight—tonight there was a sort of glow within him that he could not quite place, not like any of the minor glows that had, of necessity, for the past year or so punctuated his life; and he only said, holding out the wet mac, ‘I’d better hang this somewhere to drip.’
    If he had been Ena, Nanny would have been all cluckings of distress, urging on him hot drinks and cossetings. But Ena had gone where her faithless little heart had led her and he had custody of Ena Meena; and the one person Nanny loved more than Ena was Ena Mee. She bore within her an unceasing resentment against a law that would take away a child from its mother, however ill behaved, and hand it over to a mere man. And what fun those bygone days had been! - with Mummy so naughty and indiscreet, all those secrets and coverings-over and the little rewards of teas and even lunches in places Mr Devigne never even heard about, and exciting little gifts that were not to be shown to him! She was living with a very rich gentleman now, Mummy was, and many a chat she had with Nanny over the ‘phone when His Nibs was working at the hospital or up in London, in Harley Street. She took the wet mackintosh, however, ungraciously. ‘I’ll hang it to drip in our bathroom, over the bath. It’s warm in there, it’ll dry out for the morning. And gimme that flah from your buttonhole, I’ll throw it down the lav.’ Our bathroom was hers and Ena Mee’s. ‘I s’pose you don’t want a hot drink?’
    ‘No thank you, Nanny, I think I need something a bit stronger.’ He tossed his soaking wet gloves on to the umbrella stand. ‘Some storm!’
    ‘Well, fancy going out on such a night, anyway, just to the cinema!’
    ‘I’d have had to go and see Mrs Dawkins at the Fox. And anyway,’ he pointed out mildly, ‘it wasn’t nearly so bad when I started.’ He glanced over in the general direction of Ena Mee’s room. ‘She wasn’t upset by it?’
    ‘What, by you going off for the evening?’
    ‘By the storm,’ he said with an edge to his voice.
    ‘No,’ said Nanny. ‘Nanny was with her. Even if she didn’t have her Mummy,’ she added with a significant sniff. But as he turned away without reply towards the dining-room and a decanter, she enquired, apparently placating: ‘Well, how was the picture?’
    ‘Quite good,’ he said, briefly, unrelenting.
    ‘Sari Morne came up to expectations, did she?’
    ‘Yes, she was fine.’
    ‘Funny she died out. Lovely film that was, her in that Italian place. That bit’, said Nanny craftily, ‘where she runs up them