by Mary Stewart
The hand flew up to the bell; pulled it; then clamped down on the rein again beside its fellow, just as, inside the gate, the bell clashed, and the stallion, obedient to the boy’s dropped wrists, shot forward from a fighting stand in one great leap that brought him and his rider flashing out again into the sun. There was a shrill whistle. The other two horses turned, churning the dry earth, trotting out a little ponderously into the stallion’s smoking wake. Then they, too, seeming to receive some stimulus of excitement, threw up their heads and lurched forward at a faster pace, and presently all three swung into the familiar raking gallop that bore them swiftly from sight in a thudding flurry of hoofs.
‘Now what in the wide world,’ said Jennifer, under her breath, ‘can be the matter with you?’
She was recalled to herself by the expiring jangle of the bell still quivering inside the gate, advertising to the convent that its mail had been delivered. Someone would be coming to answer it, and she did not want to be detained again. She hurried to the corner of the wall, and stepped round it just as quick footsteps padded across the dusty courtyard towards the gate.
She waited. She heard the creak of the gate, and the rustle of the package being withdrawn from the box. The hinges complained again. The latch clanged down. The footsteps receded.
Jennifer turned away and hurried down the valley to meet Stephen.
14
Hunt and Storm
The day was stifingly hot. What freshness of rain or dew had fallen on the grass last night was gone, sucked up by an ominously hot sun – ominous because, though the sun stood brilliantly overhead, the sky behind the mountain crests looked dull and thick, and the air moved heavily, as though charged with thunder. The little breeze that ran shining-footed across the bending grasses held the same hot presage of storm.
But Jennifer noticed none of this. She hurried down the hot track through the dust, almost running. It was already past noon, and still there had been no sign of Stephen. If he was late … if he failed to come …
But as she rounded the first bend in the track she saw him, less than a hundred yards away, coming, in spite of his slight limp, at a great pace through the still-quivering haze of dust that the horses had raised. If his face was grimmer than yesterday, she did not notice. She merely called out thankfully and ran the last few yards to meet him.
‘Jenny! Thank heaven! I’ve been—’
But he did not finish. It was almost as if last night’s little scene were being played again, but this time in the pitiless storm-charged sunlight which showed too clearly in her face the white distress that drove her towards him. And this time he knew his rôle.
He put out his hands and took hold of hers. She clung to his comforting grasp.
‘Oh, Stephen, I was afraid you wouldn’t come!’
‘I said I would.’
‘Oh, Stephen—’ She was shaking now. He lifted her hands, still prisoned in his own, and held them against his chest, pulling her towards him.
‘It’s all right, Jenny. I did come. What is it?’
She began to tell him, trembling still, the urgency of communication making her stumble almost into incoherence, of which, in the first minute or so, the only word that stood out to convey anything was ‘murder’ …
It was then that he detached her clinging hands gently, and led her off the dusty track into the shade of the cliff.
‘Now sit down,’ he said calmly, ‘and tell me about it properly – no, wait a moment. I think some wine would be a very sound idea, don’t you? And something to eat? We’ll have our conference over lunch … Here. Down with it … Good girl. Now have a shot at a ham roll; I’ll allow you to talk with your mouth full.’ He took one himself and settled his shoulders back against the rock. ‘Now tell me. Begin at the beginning.’
His matter-of-factness, no less than the steadying draught of wine, had their effect, and Jennifer was able presently to give her tale some sort of shape. He listened in silence, the grimness settling on his face into a sufficiently forbidding expression as he heard of her mad flight up the dark valley on an errand – as was apparent now – so hideously dangerous.
‘And Gillian’s there, a prisoner!’ cried Jennifer. ‘Why she’s being kept there I don’t know, and at present I don’t care. But she’s in danger – tonight … Stephen, this isn’t imagination any longer. It’s sober truth. Stephen—’
His hand fell reassuringly over hers. ‘Yes, Jenny, I know. I’d found out for myself, already. I was worried sick to think what you might have got yourself into the middle of.’
‘You found out something? From the doctor?’
‘No, from the police. I had a chat with my friend Aristide this morning, and without giving anything away I got enough information out of him to make me smell a pretty powerful rat.’
‘Pierre Bussac?’
‘Yes, indeed. King Rat, our friend Bussac. And I found out who Isaac Lenormand was.’
‘Isaac – oh, the letter! Then he has got something to do with it?’
‘Yes. Listen; I’ll be brief. I got it all in the way of gossip, but the gist of it is that your Pierre Bussac is well-known locally as a smuggler – rumour has it that he has his own private and highly dangerous route into Spain. I imagine that’s the “bridge” you heard him refer to. Well, this has never worried anybody much – everybody smuggles in this part of the world; it’s almost respectable. But during the war he started – still rumours this – a different traffic, that of smuggling wealthy people out of the country, away from the Nazis.’
‘You mean Jews and – oh! Isaac Lenormand!’
‘Exactly. Three million francs Isaac paid … big money. Especially as he never got to Spain.’
‘Never got – what d’you mean?’
He said soberly: ‘His body was found washed down the Petit Gave. He’d been shot.’
‘I – see. And what did rumour say about that?’
‘Plainly enough, that Pierre Bussac had murdered him in order to rob him of whatever other valuables he was taking with him into exile. But, of course, there was no proof, not a shadow, and at that time, during the war, no one was going to bother much …’
‘Stephen, it’s horrible!’
He nodded grimly, and reached for his cigarettes. ‘But now they are, it seems, taking an interest in friend Bussac. There are still large sums of money to be earned by smuggling wanted individuals across the border – criminals, Jenny, escaping criminals; men and women wanted for serious crimes – like, for example, those bank-robbers from Bordeaux that they were talking about in the hotel yesterday. The Dupré gang.’
Her face lifted to his, paling as aspen leaves pale in the wind. ‘Marcel Dupré’s sister,’ she breathed. ‘The woman who got away … Could it be?’
‘Why not? She’s completely vanished, according to Aristide. Supposing it was arranged that Bussac should ferry this Dupré girl over the border, and somehow she got wind of Gillian’s coming up here, and wangled a lift. You remember that Gillian’s letter said “We are leaving tomorrow”?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do. I just thought it was a way of speaking about the car.’
‘It may have been. But also it may have referred to herself and her passenger.’
‘And then there was an accident.’
‘Yes. Something happened, we don’t know what, and the Dupré girl somehow changed places with Gillian. Say she grabbed Gillian’s money and papers, and set off for Bussac’s farm, only to collapse at the convent gate. And, afterwards, found it safer to allow the nuns to assume she was Gillian Lamartine, than to admit to being Lally Dupré … only it didn’t matter in the end. She died.’
‘And Gillian is at Bussac’s farm,’ said Jennifer in a tight little voice, half of triumph, half of apprehension.
He glanced at her. ‘It seems so.’
She drew in her breath. ‘And it’s because she’s seen the Dupré woman, and knows she came up here, that Bussac’s keeping her prisoner!’
‘Hardly. Why should
he? Lally Dupré’s dead now and – no, it doesn’t quite hang together. Besides, it’s Doña Francisca who wants Gillian put out of the way, not Bussac, according to what you said.’
She pushed back the soft hair from her face with a sharp, nervous movement, and got to her knees, making as if to rise. ‘We’ll sort it out later. Just at the moment the only thing that matters is getting Gillian out of this, safe! The police—’
But he did not move. He was frowning thoughtfully at the smoke that spiralled up between his fingers. ‘No, Jenny. I don’t somehow think the police are going to listen very hard.’
‘But – what I heard last night! Those plans to murder Gillian!’
His eyes lifted briefly. ‘There’s only Aristide Celton at Gavarnie. By the time we’ve got through to Luz or Pierrefitte, explained everything, made our depositions – probably in triplicate – that Doña Francisca, the bursar of the Convent of Notre-Dames-des-Orages, plans to murder a woman who’s already officially dead …’ He gave a hard little laugh. ‘Jenny, dear, don’t you know your France better than that? If I accused you last night of inventing Grand Guignol, what the hell d’you think the police are going to say?’
The little silence seemed edged with the threat of storm. A lizard flicked on to a stone and then lay still, a delicately etched curve of dark jade, a Chinese ornament perfect in its artifice except for the tiny pulsing of the throat against the hot stone.
Jennifer said, in a small unemphatic voice: ‘Then we’ve got to stop it by ourselves.’
He turned his head. At the movement the lizard flickered out of sight, and the stone lay hot and bare between them. He looked gravely at her.
‘Oh – yes, we’ll stop it. And it shouldn’t be too hard, Jenny. In spite of the Grand Guignol set-up – mountain-valleys, murder, and mysterious goings-on in the convent – I don’t think it’s a case for heroics.’ He paused. ‘Or even the police. I still think it would be a mistake to get mixed up in what doesn’t concern us – and Pierre Bussac’s activities, however villainous, decidedly do not.’
‘But Gillian—’
‘Oh, yes. She concerns us. In fact the whole affair boils down quite simply to that: to get Gillian safely away from Bussac’s farm, and take her home with us.’ He hesitated. ‘And if that can be done quietly – without dragging in the police and accusing Bussac and that woman of felony – so much the better.’ He smiled at her expression. ‘Too unheroic by half, Jenny? Don’t I measure up?’
She flushed. ‘It isn’t that. It’s just that – well, if they are felons—’
‘We have a duty to do something about it? Perhaps. But think a minute’ – his hand dropped lightly over hers – ‘if we rush into this with guns blazing, God knows what we may start, and Gillian’s in the thick of it. If we can get her out of it by negotiation, as it were, don’t you honestly think that would be better?’
‘Of course. But can we?’
‘I think so. I’m beginning to get a glimmering – the craziest glimmering – of an idea as to what she’s doing up at the farm – though no ideas as to why … And it makes me feel that our first move is obviously to go up there.’
‘What about Bussac?’
He grinned. ‘He won’t be there. I saw him as I came up, away over the hill with a mule. That’s why we’re going straight away.’
He got to his feet, and put down a hand to her, pulling her up. She said eagerly: ‘If Madame Bussac’s there on her own, we can surely deal with her!’
He was looking down at her somewhat oddly. ‘If I’m right,’ he said slowly. ‘I hope we can.’
‘What d’you mean?’
He laughed, avoiding the question. ‘I told you I wasn’t a story-book hero. I don’t particularly want to face King Rat, but I don’t mind his wife. She’s a friend of mine.’
‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten. She’s one of your painting critics.’
‘That’s it. The one who prefers photographs.’ He turned to pick up his haversack. ‘And that brings me back to the crazy idea I was telling you about. I think – what the devil?’
From above a sharp sound had interrupted him. A puff of dust spurted from the cliff-top. Something moved …
‘Look out!’
He was on her in one leap. There was no time to get out of range. She felt herself whirled up into his arms, crushed there as he swung round with his back to the cliff and his body blocking the danger from her.
There was the whisper and hot smell of dust. The falling boulder whistled down, struck …
It crashed into the rock where Jenny had been sitting, and smashed into a dozen vicious missiles. Ricocheting fragments flinched and whined round them. She felt Stephen’s body jerk once, and as one arm fell away from her the other tightened in a momentary agony, so that she almost cried out. Her face was jammed against the rough tweed of his coat. A button was biting into her cheek. Her bones seemed to crack in his grip.
All at once it was over. A pebble flipped almost contemptuously on to a rock beside them; another came tapping harmlessly down on to her hand. Nothing else moved.
But, like a mocking echo from the top of the cliff, came another rattle which made her flinch again, then stiffen.
It was the retreating rattle of hoofs.
He still held her.
‘Stephen!’
Fear edged her voice as she pushed herself back in his encircling arm, and lifted her head to look at his face.
‘Stephen, you’re hurt!’
A shudder went through him, so swift and sharp that it was as if he winced from another blow; then he seemed, with an equally rapid and violent effort, to gather himself together. The blank expression left his eyes, and he looked down at her. His face was very white.
‘Jenny. Oh, my God, Jenny, I thought – are you all right?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes. But what about you?’
‘I’m O.K.’
‘Sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
She looked at him. ‘Don’t lie to me, Stephen. You were hit. I felt it.’
‘Only a bump on the shoulder, I promise you. It’s done no damage.’ He flexed his right arm cautiously, wincing a little. ‘Bruises, that’s all.’
‘Honestly? You – you looked ghastly, Stephen.’
‘Did I?’ He smiled a little. ‘Pure fright. If that damned rock had fallen a bit straighter—’
‘Or if you hadn’t jumped right under it to push me out of the way,’ said Jenny. She shook dust out of her skirt and looked up at him with grave eyes. ‘Not so unheroic, Stephen; don’t belittle yourself, my dear. That should have hit me.’
He grinned at her. The colour was coming back into his face, though a trace of pain still showed itself in the line of his mouth. ‘I live for others,’ he said lightly, then gave a quick upward look. ‘Let’s get out from under, shall we?’
‘You don’t think there’s more coming down?’
‘I don’t think so. But it’s as well to be out of range.’
Jenny said: ‘He’s gone, anyway.’
He looked at her sideways. ‘You heard it too?’
‘Oh, yes.’
He made no comment, but said, as they reached the safety of the track: ‘I think we can take the time to wash ourselves. It’ll improve our morale, and I’m covered with dust.’
‘Is there anything left to drink?’
‘Half a bottle of vin topaze; and it’s intact.’
The water was ice-cold and refreshing, the wind blandly heartening. Afterwards they climbed the grassy slope from the river back to the track in silence. The sun still glared down, hot and still, but, to the south, a slate-grey bank of cloud was slowly building itself up behind the mountain crests. What breeze there had been had dropped, and the air lay hot and heavy on the slopes. The green of the grass had deepened to a sultry olive, and even the papery heads of the mountain-everlastings failed to stir in any breath of air.
They reached the track, both pausing when they had gained it to glance, almost involuntarily
, up at the cliff-top, which now showed nothing at its crest but the weight of the darkening sky.
Jennifer said: ‘Those horses—’
‘Horse. There was only one.’
She looked at him. ‘The boy, Luis.’
He said nothing, but his eyes narrowed speculatively on the point from which the rock had fallen.
‘Why, Stephen? He was awfully queer with me this afternoon, but why – that? You say you know him. Where does he come in?’
He shrugged, and then winced, so that she looked at him with renewed anxiety. ‘Your shoulder is hurt, Stephen.’
He said, almost impatiently: ‘It’s nothing. Come on, let’s go.’
He set off up the track, his limp perhaps a little more pronounced than usual. She followed, biting her lip, almost grateful now for the prospect of the action to come, leaving as it did not time to think too carefully about what had just happened. Attempted murder? Even for Luis, with his instinct for the spectacular, it had been a pretty dramatic effort. To use the hills themselves as his weapon … As she glanced back it touched her again, that feather-light finger of fear; the same shadow-tip of panic’s wing that had chilled her yesterday when she hurried between the waiting hills towards the Dark Tower …