Roots of Evil(79)

Alice had been staring through the flap of the canvas, trying to see in which direction they were going, and she had barely registered that there was someone in the jeep. She turned sharply, but even before she had tensed her muscles to hit out, strong hard hands came out to snake around her wrists.

‘What a hellcat you are,’ said Leo Dreyer, keeping her hands tightly imprisoned in his. ‘Didn’t you expect to encounter me?’

Alice had expected it at some stage but she still felt as if she had received a blow across the eyes. She glared at him. In the closeness of the jeep’s interior he was thinner and more severe than the young man she had known, and he was wearing a monocle with a thin black cord on it. It ought to have made him slightly ridiculous – foppish and effete – but it did not.

She said in Lucretia’s disdainful voice, ‘So you know who I am?’

‘Of course. Ever since Alraune.’

So it had been Alraune who had betrayed her and led to Conrad’s capture. Alice gestured to the motorbikes and the soldiers. ‘All this seems somewhat excessive. Have you really sent your soldiers scouring the streets for me, purely because Conrad preferred me to your sister all those years ago?’

Dreyer’s eyes were still on her, the left monocled eye hugely distorted, and Alice tried to look away, but could not. He said softly, ‘My dear, I would have scoured far wider places than Vienna to find you for what you did that night.’

The truck had gathered speed, and he loosened his tight grip on her wrists and leaned back against the vehicle’s sides. But Alice could feel the coiled tension within him, and she knew that if she made the smallest move to escape he would pounce.

‘After you left my father’s house that night…’

‘After you threw me out of your father’s house,’ said Alice at once.

‘…Nina became ill,’ said Dreyer, as if she had not spoken. ‘She cried for all of that night and all of the next day. She made herself sick with crying, and then she became hysterical. We began to fear for her sanity, and we called a doctor to her – he gave her bromide but for days she was overwrought to an impossible degree. She was always highly-strung, of course. She lived on her nerves.’

Alice, who had always considered Nina Dreyer a spoiled, self-willed show-off, thought this sounded more like the tantrum of a child demanding attention, but did not say so.

‘At first she seemed to recover,’ said Dreyer. ‘But then we discovered that she was becoming reliant on the sedatives. She took more and more of them, and then, after a few months, she began to take cocaine – it was considered fashionable to do so in the set she moved in; it was considered modern and chic.’

Alice, who knew about the fashion for cocaine among rich young things and about the so-called Snow Set, but who had never taken cocaine herself, remained silent. They were travelling very fast now, but several times she caught the glare of what looked to be bonfires in the streets, and the sounds of people crying or shouting, and of running feet. She would have liked to peer out through the canvas to see what was happening – certainly to see where the jeep was heading – but she would not give Dreyer even this small satisfaction.

‘Eventually, of course, the cocaine ruined her,’ said Dreyer, apparently oblivious to what was happening outside. ‘She began sleeping with men who would get the stuff for her; later she stole – jewellery from her friends, to start with. Twice she faced criminal charges – we thought that might pull her out of the habit, but it did not. After that she forged my father’s name on cheques. Little by little she turned into a desperate and haggard harpy.’ He glanced at her. ‘And the worse she became, the more I hated you,’ he said.

There was a bad moment when Alice was back in the days of the Vienna household, remembering that this was the master’s son, and that she should remember her place and be respectful and obedient. But Lucretia, with imperious annoyance, said, Rubbish! This is a bully and a brute, and I owe him nothing and I refuse to be cowed by him.

So when she finally spoke, it was the baroness who said, ‘This is all utter nonsense, Leo.’ Yes, call him Leo, remind him that you’re equals these days. ‘You’re behaving as if we’re living inside a Victorian melodrama,’ said Lucretia. ‘All this absurd talk about having your revenge on the woman who wronged your sister—It’s like something out of East Lynne.’ This sounded satisfyingly disdainful, but inside she was panic-stricken. I’m cooped up with a powerful man who hates me and who’s almost certainly taking me to some miserable prison camp, and I’m telling him he’s behaving like a Victorian villain! I wonder if I’m entirely sane at the moment?

‘I’m extremely sorry for what happened to Nina,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t my fault that she became a drug addict. I didn’t steal Conrad from her, in fact I had no idea your father had intended him to marry her.’ A pause. ‘I will admit that I behaved less than well that night, but plenty of girls lose a lover and survive. Nina had looks and money and position. And a doting family.’ She leaned back in the jeep and studied him. ‘Back then I told a roomful of people that you had tried to seduce me and that I refused to be seduced. Surely you aren’t still resentful of that, Leo? Such a small event, wasn’t it? Or perhaps it wasn’t a small event to you. Perhaps it was important to you.’