Captains and the Kings

by Taylor Caldwell

  Chapter 37

  Bernadette was still in bed, a mounded figure in pink silk and lace, her hair in curlers, her flat round face reddened with food, her eyes hostile and vindictive as she looked at her daughter. But she smiled, the flesh heavily moving on its bones. As usual the coverlet was sprinkled with the crumbs of her breakfast, and a few coffee stains. She was still chewing a small creamy pastry and her lips were richly smeared, glossy with fat. "What on earth is so important, at this hour?" she asked, and reached for her coffee cup, at which she drank thirstily. She licked her fingers and wiped them on the satin brocade cover. "Annie, I wish you wouldn't wear a riding habit so often. It looks so mannish." She called Ann Marie "Annie" because it humiliated the girl and derided her, as if she were an inconsequential servant impudently climbing up from the kitchen. She sighed gustily. "Of course, with your figure all prettiness is wasted, unless the bosom is padded with handkerchiefs." "Mama," said Ann Marie, and sat on the edge of a gilt chair near her mother. Bernadette saw that the girl was internally agitated, and. she stared at her, at her fine pale face, long and slim, and at the sherry-colored eyes and tightly braided hair. She looks, in some way, like my mother, thought Bernadette. "Mama, I must talk to you," said Ann Marie. There was a white line on her upper lip and Bernadette, who never missed anything, saw it. "Talk, then," said Bernadette, and yawned vastly. "I've wanted to talk to you about this for a long time," said Ann Marie, beginning to sweat in her habit yet feeling cold. Her voice trembled. "About what?" said Bernadette. She laboriously lifted herself on the pillows and squinted at her daughter. "What is the matter with you? You seem about to faint. Is your news so terrible?" She laughed derisively. "What could happen to you here in Green Hills, you moping about the house and riding and gardening, like a withered spinster? At your age. I was a married woman at that age, with children. Of course, we can't expect that of you. Perhaps you want to go into a nunnery like your addle-headed aunt, Regina. She looked at Ann Marie's hands. She said, "Hasn't anyone .told you that you do not wear riding gloves in the house? Take them off." The big gaudy room was full of hot sun and a hotter breeze. Ann Marie looked at the hovering maid, avid for gossip. "I'd like to be alone with you, Mama," said the girl. Bernadette was immediately interested. She waved her fat arm at the maid and dismissed her, and the woman left reluctantly. Bernadette reached for another pastry, examined it, frowned, bit it tentatively, then devoured it, making smacking noises almost sexual in the hot quiet. "Go on," she said to her daughter, who was looking down at her hands, now bare. Ann Marie said in a low voice, "I am going to be engaged, Mama. Today." Bernadette sat up in a flurry. "No!" she exclaimed. "Is it possible? Who, for Heaven's sake? Robert Lindley, who has been haunting this house, or Gerald Simpson, or Samuel Herbert or Gordon Hamilton?" Her eyes were elated, glinting, opened. "Robert Lindley!" she cried. "When did he propose and why didn't you tell me? He is a great catch--for someone like you, Annie, a great catch!" She marveled. This stick of an ugly girl, who never touched the paint pots for her lips or curled her hair or showed interest in clothes and had no social graces! Who would want her? But then, men were peculiar. They had the oddest tastes. O, God, thought Ann Marie. Please help me. Her lips felt cold and damp. She said, "None of them, Mama. It is someone else." "Well, tell me!" shouted Bernadette. "Must I drag it from you? Or is it someone impossible, someone without a penny or family, who will disgrace us?" Her face darkened to crimson, and animosity danced in her eyes. "Ma, it is someone of family, and money," said Ann Marie. Had the sun been clouded? Why was it so chilly in here, this hot day? "Good! Excellent! What is his name? For God's sake, girl, speak up." "Someone I have loved all my life," said Ann Marie, and heard herself stammering. She looked at her mother now, imploring, hoping for kindness and mercy and affection. "Mama, it is someone you do not like. But we love each other. No matter what happens, we are going to be married. we have talked of this for three years." Bernadette was angry. "I can't imagine myself disliking any young man of family and money! What's wrong with you? I am just amazed that such a gentleman would want you--if he does--and it's not all your vaporish imagination, Annie. You've talked of it for three years, and never told me? Is that respectful to your mother? Or, does his mother object to the match?" Her anger deepened. "If he is independent, what does it matter if his mother objects? Your father is a match for anybody." "I know," said Ann Marie. "And I feel that Papa will not object. he likes the young man. But, you don't, Mama. That is why I am here now, to tell you." Bernadette swore, as roughly as her father had sworn. "If you don't tell me at once, my girl, I will lose my mind. 'Why are you so secretive? I hate secretive people, but you were always sly. Speak up!" A thick numbness rose in Ann Marie's throat, and she was terrified. Her mother looked so--imminent. So fat, so gross, so threatening. Be brave, she said in herself. What can happen to me, except her rage? She can't kill me Don't be such a mouse, Ann Marie, such a quaking fool. She tried to meet Bernadette's eyes. The room dimmed all about her. Her lips were cracking. Her bones felt as if the}' were breaking, one by one. "It's Courtney," she whispered. "Who?" said Bernadette. She craned forward, as though suddenly deafened, her big breasts spilling over her belly. "Courtney, Mama." Bernadette could only stare at her daughter. The dark blood began to recede from her face, leaving it like wet dough. Her eyes sank in her fat so they were hardly visible. Her lips turned livid. She began to heave as if smothering, her fat body shaking. Heavy clefts appeared about her mouth, and in her forehead. her nose became very white, sunken between her cheeks. "Are you out of your mind?" she asked, and her voice was hoarse. "Your uncle! You must be demented." She looked sick. "Mama," said Ann Marie, and then stopped. Her mother's aspect of shock, of incredulity, frightened her even more. She at last could say, "I know you don't like him, or Aunt Elizabeth. But we love each other. We are going to be married." It was out now, and she tried to look at her mother but Bernadette's appearance was growing more dreadful every moment. "It doesn't matter what anyone can say," the girl continued through her parched throat. "we are going to be married." Bernadette let herself sink slowly back onto her pillows, but her eyes never left her daughter's face. She studied her. She said, "I think the law will have something to say about that." She was incredulous again, and now her easy rage was loosed within her. "What are you talking about, you idiot! He is your uncle!" "Not really, Mama." Why was her own voice so weak, so placating, like a child's? "Just my adoptive uncle. There is no impediment to our marriage. He is only the adopted son of my grandfather. I know you've re- seuted him all these years, because your father adopted him. It--it was not kind. He had nothing to do with it." But Bernadette was still staring at her as at something that could not be believed. She seemed to have lost speech, she who was usually so voluble. Then an evil spark began to grow in the depths of her eyes, and she sucked her lips in and out and watched her daughter, and the glazed look she wore after dinner at night spread over her face, but crackled now, webbed, like old china. "Does Elizabeth Hennessey know about this?" she asked, and Ann Marie did not recognize that voice for a hideous elation lay under it, a breathless excitement, a secret and almost uncontrollable jubilation. It fascinated Ann Marie, even while her fear grew. "No, Mama. But Courtney is here this morning, and he is going to tell her." She hesitated. "He wanted to come here with me, later, to tell you, too." Bernadette spoke softly and viciously, and looked at a distance. "He will never dare to come here again. So, he is going to tell his mother, is he? I should like to be there when he does!" Ann Marie felt herself draining, withering away. "Mama," she said, "we don't care what others will say. We are going to be married." (If she could only stop that dreadful vibration in her legs and arms! ) "Oh, I don't think you are, I really don't think so," said Bernadette and now she turned her jumping eyes on her daughter again. "I don't think the law would like it." "Mama, you said that before. What has the law got to do with it? There is no legal impediment, and Courtney now thinks there is no religious one, either." "Oh, he does, does he?" Again Bernadette was smili
ng and exultant. "So, he doesn't know, does he? I hope his mother is telling him right at this minute. I've waited a long time for revenge on that trollop, and now it has come. That trollop, who seduced my father into marriage to give her brat his name, and miner Let her suffer now as she has made me suffer, she and that precious son of hers." Ann Marie stood up, and held to the back of her chair. "Mama, I am meeting Courtney soon." Bernadette, again staring at her, licked the corner of her lips and a speculative and gloating look filled her eyes so that they sparkled as they had done in her youth. She seemed, for all her stare, to be coming to a decision. Then she said, "How far has this gone, my girl? How far beyond kissing and hand-holding?" Ann Marie's pale face turned scarlet and her face quivered. "Mama," she said. Watching her closely for a moment Bernadette began to nod her big head over and over. "Very well. You are not a' strumpet like his mother." What shall I do? she asked herself. Let her go and have him tell her, himself, ashamed and degraded? She tasted the thought and smiled. But she could not wait for later developments, and to hear it from the mouth of this silly chit. She 439 studied Ann Marie. The maternal instinct was not entirely stifled in her though she disliked the girl and was jealous of Joseph's love for her. Well, she would have a little revenge on Joseph, too, when he saw his daughter's grief. It was a mother's place to warn and enlighten her daughter, she thought with sudden virtue, and made her face grieved and even a little sympathetic. "Sit down, Annie," she said. "You will need support when I tell you what you must know. Sit down, I say. Don't stand there gaping like a dying fish. There, that's better." The girl sat again on the edge of the chair, her feet planted firmly as if preparing for flight. Bernadette folded her hands together like one about to pray and rested them on one fat knee. "We all thought to spare that Hennessey woman, for the sake of her child, and her own good name. We were wrong. We should have blazoned out the truth from the very beginning, so my daughter would not have come to this pass." "What, Mama?" the girl whispered. She leaned forward. "That Courtney Hennessey is indeed your uncle, my brother, my half brother, if you will. His father was your grandfather--m¢father. Now, what have you to say to that, Miss?" She waited, brutal eyes fixed on her daughter. Ann Marie did not move for a full minute, but her young face grew gray. Then she put her hand to her cheek as if it had been struck violently. Her tawny eyes had widened, dimmed. "I don't--" she began, then coughed. Bernadette waited until the strangling sound stopped. Pity was not completely dead in her. After all, this was her daughter, and now her old smoldering anger against Elizabeth deepened into fury. "You mean you don't believe it, Ann Marie?" She reached out and put her hand on the habit of the girl. "Yes, I agree it is frightful, but it is true. Your father knows. I think that is why he is coming home tonight--to help you. Courtney Hennessey had no name before my father gave him his, and he was born a year before my father married his mother. She had political influence. She forced him. We held our peace for the sake of my father's reputation. After all, he was a senator, and scandal would have ruined him." Now her fury blazed out. "She seduced him while my poor mother was still alive! She tried to make my father leave my mother! She came to this house, this very house, and broke my mother's heart so she died that night. I was there. I heard it all. She was already in a delicate condition, the drab." She began to cry, snuffling, and the tears were sincere and acid with hatred. " Will there be no end to the misery that woman has caused this family? First my father, then my mother, then me, and now my daughter." She thought of Joseph, and her tears came faster, but of Joseph and Elizabeth she dared not, even now, speak. "I wish she were dead." I don't believe it, I don't believe it, Ann Marie was thinking almost prayerfully. Dear God, it can't be true, can it? Mama is lying to me; she is always lying. But why would she say such things? Bernadette lifted her streaming face and gazed at her daughter and there was genuine sorrow on it, if only a little, as well as fury. "Ann Marie, my dear child, you have been as wronged as your grandparents were wronged, and I, and I was only seventeen when it happened--when she killed my mother. She took my mother from me, and then my father, and all she had to offer was a brat born out of wedlock!" Ann Marie stood up, that stunned gray look deepening on her face. Then, very slowly, horror brimmed her eyes and she shuddered and she held her cheeks with her hands as if mortally stricken. "We almost eloped--last Easter," she muttered, and shuddered again. "And that would have been incest," said Bernadette. "Thank God you were spared that, and this family, and all the shame and notoriety. No decent man would have married you after an incestuous marriage had been annulled. You would be worse in his eyes than a doxy. A doxy like Elizabeth Hennessey." Ann Marie's face now expressed nothing at all but a dazed absentmindedness. She put on her gloves and took up her crop. She looked about her at the room, and she could smell coffee and toast and bacon and heavy scent and heat and hot wool and hot silk, and her stomach turned over. She went quickly towards the door. "Where are you going?" Bernadette cried after her. "I don't know," the girl said, in a dim voice. "I really don't know." She stopped at the door like one bemused in a strange place, and uncertain where to go next. Her profile was as sharp as white stone. Then she had gone. Bernadette called after her and got out of bed in a sweltering flurry of lace and silk, but Ann Marie had disappeared. Kevin was in the stables when his sister approached at a stumbling run, her habit skirt dragging unheeded in the dust, her hat askew on her head, her face agape and blank. Kevin had just returned from his ride. "Hey" he called to his sister. "What is all the hurry?" But Ann Marie, as if she did not see or hear him, was stammering to a stable boy. "Is my horse--Missy--is my horse ready?" She had begun to pant. Her nostrils were dilated and her eyes had a crazed expression. Kevin was suddenly frightened. He had never seen Ann Marie like this before, so distracted, so quietly frantic, so ghastly of color. He put his hand on her arm. She appeared not to be conscious of his presence. Her slight breast was rising and falling rapidly, as if she had been running for miles. "Ann Marie!" he almost shouted in her ear. She started away from him then, and cringed, but she did not look at him. The stable boy was bringing her horse and offering his hand to assist her. She sprang up into the saddle and Kevin was aghast at her face. He watched her wheel the horse and race off, her skirt billowing in the breeze she created. He said to the stable boy, "Quick! Bring out my horse again." Ann Marie was only a distant little cloud of dust now. Kevin leaped into his saddle and galloped after his sister, and he knew the first real fear of his somewhat stolid young life. Something had happened to his sister, and she had seemed out of her mind. Courtney Hennessey, riding to meet Ann Marie, had given long and wretched thought to what he must tell the girl. He held back his own pain, which would devour him if he let it, so that he could concentrate on the alleviation of pain in Ann Marie. He could only tell her the oldest story, or lie, of all, that he was interested in another girl now, whom he had met in Boston, and that he knew, at last, that his love for Ann Marie had been the love of a brother for a sister, and not real attachment. Banal, banal, he cursed to himself. Perhaps he could say that it would be "years" before they could, marry, and that she must not wait for him, and .then he would quit law school and go abroad for a year, thus putting him behind Rory and extending his studies. Then, abroad, he would not write to Ann Marie. He might even stay longer, until his acute grief and despair subsided. He might try to convince her he was a scoundrel, unfit to touch her hand. Very melodramatic, he told himself with contempt. He could dearly see her stricken face, her suffering eyes, and hear her stammered questions. He knew that above anyone else in the world, even her father, she loved him, dung to him like a child. He tried to tell himself that she was young, that his long absence would cure her of him, that she would meet some other man. But as for the truth, he could never tell her that. He knew how fastidious she was, how revolted she would be, how appalled. There was also his mother to consider who should not be shamed at this time in her life. It seemed incredible to him, and nightmarish, that he was in fact a true Hennessey, and not only by adoption. He had
loved his father, but now he hated him. One conscienceless man could destroy numerous innocent lives in one heedless and lustful moment. Tom Hennessey had done this, to his wives, his son, his granddaughter. God knows how many others he had injured during his career. Hundreds, thousands, perhaps. Courtney knew much about politicians, and much about his father. He did not see the warm quiet pasturage he rode over, nor the green leaves of trees so brilliant that they appeared newly varnished, nor did he see the quail rising at his passage nor the way the grass bent and glistened nor the little pools of red and yellow and white wild flowers among the trees and in small hollows, nor did he hear the rustle of any wing or the cry of any bird. The hills beyond were radiant in the sun, green and violet and purple, and the small river that ran from them through the pastures trembled and rippled in silver splashed with blue and lemon shadows. Distant white farmhouses stood in an air so pure that they seemed built of shining marble, their red roofs glowing in the light. But Courtney saw none of this. It was irrelevant to his pain and had no meaning for him. The polished blue sky had no consolation; its very luster was a mockery, and alien. One small part of his consciousness remarked in bitter wonder why the world should be so lovely and the thoughts and circumstances of man so terrible, as if man were a dark intruder and rejected by every leaf and sound and petal, not only with contempt but with laughter and indifference. Now the green earth began to rise as the horse climbed up the side of the low hill towards the woods at its summit, and the sun heated Court- ney's face and shoulders and he felt nothing but the black coldness in himself. His head was bent. Over and over he considered various stories he should tell Ann Marie, and all of them were full of bathos and insincerity and sounded cruel. But, like his mother, she should be protected from the truth. Any lie was better than that. He could see her face, so poignant, so trustful, so timid, so fearful of hurt, so anxious to please. It was not a beautiful young face, but it had more than beauty for it was without malice or slyness and above all it was not stained by life. It had a certain angelic and dispassionate quality, without human experience to mark it. He could see her eyes, sherry eyes full of clarity and brightness, reflecting back her thoughts which were never murky. Now he must throw misery into that face and quench those eyes and he did not see as yet how he could do it. How could such a soul and such a face have been born of Bernadette and Joseph Armagh, and how could she, by God, have been descended from Tom Hennessey? Once Tom Hennessey had said of his dead wife, Katherine: "She was most unfortunate. She was a born fool." He had said this to Elizabeth in the hearing of her son and Elizabeth had not replied, to Courtney's memory, for he had been very young then. Now Courtney wondered about Katherine Hennessey and he considered that it was very possible that the young Ann Marie, in her innocence and trust, must resemble her grandmother, who had apparently not been able to stand fast in the world in which she had found herself and had had no protection. For such as Katherine and Ann Marie the world was a savage strange place full of monsters, and inevitably they were destroyed. He reached the top of the hill and it lay in a luminous silence with the deep low woods just beyond. Here and there on the rough ground lay small stones and small boulders and between them grew tiny pink flowers and green leaves, frail with life, and Courtney thought again of Ann Marie. They grew there in gentle courage, but he knew that their roots were feeble and once plucked they died almost immediately. He looked about him and he was all alone and below him lay the shining land from which, he knew now, every man was exiled and had been exiled since the beginning of time. The Garden was not really for man. His natural home was crepuscular and shadowy, full of stealthy footsteps, thorny ways and the glimpse of deadly enemies from behind every rock. It was a place of ambush, and flashes of distant fire and the rattling and roar of dead and blasted trees, and earth on which nothing living could grow and have its being. Man's natural habitat was hell, and not this world. Its voice was clangor and discord and shouts of hate, the thunder of arms and death, and its random illumination was lightning. No wonder that everything innocent ran from man as from a Fury, knowing it had been condemned, by an inexplicable God, to be dominated by this liar and this murderer for no fault of its own. Courtney was a skeptic, but now he found his spirit in revolt against a God who could have perpetrated the race which was a blasphemy and a curse under the sun. It was easier to believe in Lucifer than in a God, .and much more credible. tie knew that these thoughts came from the necessity to wound and destroy something innocent and good, but they seemed all the more filled with verity for that. The woods were deep and meshed and filled with old dead leaves and moss and vines, and some of the trees were virgin timber with low boughs tangled together. No sound came from the woods, and nothing except a scent of fecund decay and a cool aromatic breath of dampness. The trail Courtney and Ann Marie took bypassed the woods and wound about them, and then descended again to the land below. Sometimes Ann Marie would bring a basket for mushrooms growing in the woods, or arbutus in the spring, or glossy chestnuts in the autumn. Courtney bent his head almost to his horse's neck as if the weight of pain was too heavy for him. Nothing that his mother had told him had lessened his love for Ann Marie. In fact, it was heightened for now it was forbidden and he knew that never again would he come up this hill and never know again what he had known before. He heard the swift pounding of hoofs rising from the other trail which led up the hill and his heart pounded with torment in answer. He thought he heard following hoofs, but dismissed the idea as an echo. Then all at once Ann Marie and her young mare burst up before him, as if jumping from the ground, and Courtney tried to smile and he lifted his hand. But Ann Marie reined in her horse so suddenly that the mare half-reared then fell back, whinnying in indignation. Ann Marie sat straight and high in her saddle, and her habit was lifted by a light wind, but she had lost her hat. She sat there and looked at Courtney and then he said to himself with a kind of terror, She knows! He saw her face, convulsed, frightfully white and sunken, and he saw the horror in her eyes and the leaping despair and the agony. She looked down upon him and seemed to recognize him as something not of her world, not of her life, but threatening and indescribably catastrophic. It was a disastrous face that confronted Courtney. "Ann Marie!" he cried, and spurred his horse to approach her. But she swung her mare about and in an instant she had plunged wildly into the woods, the terrified mare crashing and stumbling, rising and falling in the uneven terrain. Before Courtney could even reach the edge of the woods the girl and the horse had disappeared, leaving only echoes behind them, and smashing sounds. She will be hurt in there, she will die in there, thought Courtney, and got off his horse and his legs shook under him. He could feel the blood driving to his heart, and cold sweat rushed out over him, and everything took on the sharp brightness and sharp shadows of nightmare and dread. He heard a shout; he hardly heard it as he ran for the woods, and then he heard his name called, and he halted. Kevin, on his own horse, had arrived. Kevin swung down and flung aside his reins, and ran to the other young man. "Where the hell is she? Where's Ann Marie?" he shouted. "I followed her up here. She was tiding like mad!" Even then Courtney could take thought. He said, "She just rode up, and then--then her mare bolted into the woods. She didn't say a word. Nothing." "Jesus," said Kevin, and they both listened for a moment to the distant breaking and tearing sounds. Kevin's face was horrified and desperately alarmed. Big though he was, and somewhat clumsy when in a house, he ran with Courtney to the woods and they pounded into them, and were immediately drenched with dank coolness and dimness. Kevin lurched like a great black bear, native to this element, apparently lumbering but moving with sure speed, dodging tree trunks and low hanging limbs, sometimes sinking into small natural pits, jumping over stones, wading through old pungent leaves, pushing aside brush, leaping over fallen trunks, and arousing, in his passage, cries of dismay and panic from the hidden creatures who had been stricken into voice and movement by this impetuous intrusion. Courtney, who had considered himself more agile than this bulky youth, found himself p
anting behind him, falling once in a while, tearing his clothing on brambles and thorns, bruising and ripping his flesh, staggering against an unseen trunk in the dimness, spraining muscles in his ankles and legs, and panting and sobbing aloud. Kevin wasted no breath on shouts and calls. His eye followed the crushed path of his sister's horse, and the branches which still swayed after her flight. He heard Courtney behind him but did not look back. tie was like a battering ram in that green and sullen dimness, that twilight of entwined trees. He splattered through a little rill, and then ran faster, as if gaining new strength and Courtney almost lost him. The smell of the woods, disturbed and aroused for the first time in years, flowed about the young men, acrid, bitter with fungus, and the effluvia of many things which had died in those hidden places and under those wet black leaves and in that watery moss. Something was shrilling and screaming at a distance, and Kevin stopped a moment to listen, and then ran in that direction, with Courtney fast upon him. Now Kevin's strength and speed increased. He plunged into thickets instead of pulling them aside with his hands, which were now bleeding. He stopped only once to call, .... Ann Marie! Where are you!" Only the awful shrilling answered him, a disembodied plea, and Courtney came abreast of him and he saw the young man's broad and deadly white face like a ghost in the duskiness and the fear in his dark brown and starting eyes. "It's her horse," he said to Courtney. And he ran on again, with Courtney at his heels. Then Kevin stopped so suddenly that Courtney fell against that big brown back, started to fall and had to catch the heavy muscular arm of the youth. There was a hot anguish in his right ankle, as if it were broken and his shoes were filled with water. He looked over Kevin's shoulder, and then it was as if everything deafened about him, and died. Missy, the mare, lay sprawled near a tree, which she had struck, her legs threshing the air, her long neck outstretched, her teeth glimmering in torture, her eyes rolled up. And near her lay the broken body of Ann Marie, almost lost in that obscurity, for her habit was nearly the color of it, and she did not move nor utter the slightest cry. Kevin saw all this. He saw that the writhing mare's hoofs would soon strike his sister and he ran to her and huddled down and pulled her free and safe. She was like a flaccid doll in his hands, her hair tumbled about her in a brown veil, her arms hanging loosely. Her habit was shredded and ripped. "O God, no," said Courtney aloud, and ran to Kevin, who was gently lowering his sister to the ground again. The fearful shrilling of the mare was louder; her screams sent wing echoes through the woods, and answering cries. The two young men bent over Ann Marie and Courtney brushed her hair from her face and for the first time he saw that the hair on her skull was matted and black and streaming with blood. They knelt on their hands and knees above the girl, their breath loud and raucous in the cool dusk. They could see her girl's face, still and closed and shut, the tawny lashes on her white cheeks, the blood beginning to darken her forehead and temples. Courtney fumbled for her pulse, and then he burst out into the first tears he had shed since he had been a child. "She is alive," he said. "We can't move her. Kevin, run down to the house and bring people up here to help us." His voice was so quiet in contrast with his tears and his expression, then Kevin looked quickly at him. "We'll need a carriage and a door and blankets, and send someone for a doctor so he'll be there when we bring her down." "Tell me again," said Kevin, and he looked at Courtney with such a face that the other man flinched. "What happened to my sister?" "I don't know. We always met there. We were to meet this morning. She had arrived just before you. She said nothing at all to me, though I spoke to her." Courtney caught his breath, let it out slowly. "Then the mare turned--she must have been frightened by something, skittish, she was always skittish, and she ran into the woods with Ann Marie. That is all. You came right at once." "I saw her in the stables," said Kevin, and he spoke precisely through his big white clenched teeth. "Something was wrong with her. It was as if she had seen or heard something--in the house, or had been told something. Do you know?" Courtney cursed furiously. "Damn you, go for help, for doctors! Why are you just kneeling there and staring at me? I know nothing, except that her horse bolted. Get along now, or she'll die here. I'll stay. For Christ's sake, can't you see she's badly hurt, you glowering idiot? Do you want her to die while you jabber away?" "I'll find out," said Kevin, in an ominous voice. "I don't believe that horse bolted. I believe Ann Marie deliberately spurred her into these woods, for just this very thing." He jumped to his feet and ran off the way he had gone and Courtney could hear the noisy slogging of his running feet. Now Courtney was alone with the unconscious girl, whose head was bedded in a heap of moss. She did not move. She lay as if already dead, so small, so rumpled, so silent and so still, so battered and torn and bleeding. The horse shrilled and screamed nearby and Courtney cried out in total anguish, "For God's sake, be quiet, Missy! For God's sake!" But the horse threshed and shrieked and rolled in her own agony, her burnished brown hide streaming with blood. Courtney wanted more than anything else to lift Ann Marie in his arms, to hold that bloody little head against his chest, to speak and kiss and comfort. But he was afraid to cause more damage. He could only squat and lean over the girl whom he loved so devastatingly and with such terrible longing. He lifted one of her little slack hands. It was cold and lifeless. He pressed it against his mouth, his cheek, and he murmured, "Ann, Ann Marie. O God, what is wrong, my darling? Why did you do this? Who drove you to this?" He smoothed her fingers over and over, hoping for a little warmth, for a little response, but that ivory silence did not stir nor those eyes open. Shadows filtered over her face, which was diminishing, slackening. The lips parted, but not to speak. Courtney listened for her breath, his ear close to her mouth, his hand on her wrist. The breath was short and light, the pulse like a frantic thread. The long aureate lashes lay unmoving on her cheeks. Her young breast hardly rose or fell. "Who did this to you, Ann Marie?" said Courtney. "Who could have driven you to this? For you knew, didn't you? Someone told you. Who, my love, who, my dearest love?" Then he knew. There Was no one else who could have told the girl the truth but her mother, Bernadette. Her father was not due until tonight. There was no one else but Bernadette. Ann Marie had "spoken" to her mother after all, in spite of warnings. She was like a child lying there in the woods, stricken and alone, thrown down, abandoned, mortally hurt, seeming to sink deeper, moment by moment, into the black leaves which were her bed. Courtney bent his head and touched her cheek with his own and he cried as he had never cried before, and something burned and shifted and lusted in him and he knew the deepest and most murderous hatred he would ever know. He heard his own voice, stammering, mumbling aloud, "How could anyone do such a thing to this child? How could anyone be so monstrous? Who had the hate to kill like this, ruthless, gleeful, deliberate? Didn't that woman know what you really are, my darling, a defenseless little girl, harmless, wanting only to love and be loved? O my God, Ann Marie, how I love you! Don't die, my darling. Here I am, Courtney. Don't leave me, little love. I never wanted anything in the world but you, Ann Marie. Do you hear me? Don't die, don't leave me. If I can only see you sometimes-- it'll be enough. Enough for my whole life." His incoherent words mingled with the screaming of the dying mare, and the flutter and chatter in the trees. His voice rose, senselessly, frenzied. "Ann Marie! Where are you? Come back, come back to me! Don't leave me. His shaking hands smoothed her hair, felt her blood on his fingers. She was growing cold. He took off his jacket and covered her, tucking the collar under her chin gently like a father. He rubbed her hands, held them between his sweating palms. He did not know the precise moment when she opened her eyes and looked at him clearly, knowing him, but when he finally realized throngh the red haze of his grief that she was conscious he thought he would collapse with joy. He saw that she was even smiling a little, her white lips curving in the sweet smile he had always loved. "Courtney?" she said. He held her hands tighter. He bent over her more closely. He looked into her eyes. "Ann Marie?" he whispered. "Oh, Courtney," she said, like a child, but not like a child who knew her world had been destr
oyed about her. "Where am I? What are we doing here?" Her voice was feeble but steady and bewildered. She tried to look about her then winced with pain, and moaned. But she turned to Courtney again. "What happened to me, Courtney?" She did not remember. Concussion, thought Courtney, and was grateful. "Missy bolted. Don't move, love. Kevin has gone for help." Her child's forehead was gently wrinkling in a frown. "Missy? Bolted? She never did that before. I don't remember even riding her. I don't remember--" "It doesn't matter, Ann Marie. Nothing matters but that you are alive. Help will soon be here. Kevin's gone for it." "Kevin? How did he know we were here?" She sounded girlishly interested. "He--he decided to join us. Don't worry about it, dear. It isn't important. I'm here with you. You'll be all right, my love, all right." She looked at him trustfully. Her hands were a little warmer. He bent over her again and he kissed her softly on her mouth, and her chill lips moved in response, and her fingers tightened on his own. Her eyes were so clear, so unharmed, and even in that duskiness he could see himself reflected in the amber of them as he had so seen himself many times before. "Dear Courtney," she said. "I love you, Courtney." Then he saw a strange thing happen. He saw his reflection retreating, moving backwards, becoming smaller and smaller in the iris of those steady eyes. Now he was but the tiniest of faces in that iris, and that face dwindled and wavered and then became a shapeless speck, and then was gone. "Ann Mariel" he said. But she was looking at him starkly now and with full knowledge, and without a movement or a change of expression she uttered the most awful groan, and it seemed to rise not from her lips or throat but from some vital part in her body. She dosed her eyes and murmured, "Mama told me." She was silent. He called her name frantically over and over, but she did not respond and he did not know if she heard him or had fallen unconscious again. There was nothing now but the screams of the tormented horse and the frightened response from the trees and the effluvia of decay and the fungus small and a faint creaking among the trees, and a growing dimness in which all things were dissolving. Courtney lay down beside the girl and had her hand and he wished he could die there with her or that neither of them need ever again know what they had learned this day, but would awaken as if from a nightmare they had dreamed together.