Thunder on the Right

by Mary Stewart

  ‘Call off the dogs! For God’s sake call off the dogs!’ Jennifer shouted it with all her strength towards that blind window.

  The face wavered, and vanished. As if at the touch of a button, the shaft of light switched off, and with a rumble the storm pressed nearer.

  Then the cottage door burst open and the girl ran out. The dogs backed and swerved in front of her, and her shout sent them, tails down, flying through the cottage door. She spared no glance for Jennifer. She flew across the cobbles as if she were winged, and fell upon Bussac, where he still straddled Stephen’s fallen body.

  Jennifer, with a sob that was a prayer, followed her.

  The girl had grabbed one of Bussac’s arms, and was tugging with all her strength to break his grip. Jennifer, with a force she had not known she possessed, laid hold of the other wrist with both hands, and put the whole weight of her body into the strain. She was shouting she did not know what – some incoherence born of terror – and the girl she had called Gillian was shouting too, to Bussac, in rapid indistinguishable French that nevertheless, after what seemed an aeon of screaming time, got through to him through the red mists of murder.

  The dark hands slackened, slipped – and Stephen, twisting like a fish beneath him, had broken the grip and rolled clear.

  He wasn’t dead. Stephen wasn’t dead. Jennifer, who had gone in this last moment beyond fear, thrust Bussac away with all her force, and flung herself to help Stephen. He had rolled, dazedly, on to one elbow, and his breathing was raw and horrible, as if it came from torn lungs, but when he saw Jennifer between him and the other man he made a desperate effort to rise, putting up a hand to push her out of the way.

  Bussac had risen slowly, gulping for breath and shaking his head for all the world like an angry bull. He towered over Stephen who, sick and battered as he was, strove to push himself upright to meet the fresh attack. The red glare was still in the Frenchman’s eyes, and if he had attacked again the fight could have had only one result, but, just as he lurched forward, the girl who had been clinging to his arm gave a low cry, a curious little moaning sound that was no more than just audible, but which nevertheless stopped the man in mid-lunge as a shot stops a charging bison.

  He swung round. She had dropped his arm as he moved forward, and stood now, paper-white, and swaying on her feet. One hand went gropingly to her head. She looked shockingly ill. Even as Bussac whirled with a quick breathless ‘Qu’as-tu?’ she swayed again, put out a hand blindly, and crumpled where she stood.

  Bussac moved like lightning. He caught her before she struck the cobbles, swinging her up into his arms as if she had weighed no more than a doll. Her head hung helplessly, her face ashen in the uncanny light. Then he spoke over his shoulder.

  ‘Get out.’

  Stephen was, albeit unsteadily, on his feet. Jenny, ash-white herself, glanced desperately from him to the unconscious girl.

  ‘Monsieur Bussac—’

  ‘You heard me. Get out.’ He strode for the cottage door. The dogs lurked there in the shadow, red-eyed and uneasy. Jennifer started forward, to be checked by Stephen’s hand on her arm. At her movement one of the brutes snarled viciously, bristling and crouching, then slunk back into the shadows as Bussac reached the door. He went in without a backward glance, and kicked the door shut behind him.

  Jenny, starting forward instinctively once more as he disappeared from view, found herself yet again blocked by the uncompromising square of the cottage door.

  Stephen’s hand closed round her wrist, holding her. She said, unbelievingly, like a child:

  ‘But it was Gillian. It really was Gillian. I know it was …’

  Then futility, like the heavy air, seemed to press down and engulf her. She turned blindly, stupidly, and allowed his unsteady hand to urge her away; back across the cobbles, back down the track, back into the choking blackness of the pine-woods …

  In the far distance, behind the towering immensities of cloud, came the sword-gleam of the first lightning.

  17

  Entr’acte: con amore

  The pine-woods reached out to engulf them. The trees parted, accepted them into a sheltering darkness. The wood had been quiet before, but now, with the blanket of the storm sagging thickly on to the tree-tops, the silence was charged, heavy, ominous. The carpet of pine-needles sucked at the feet, like a bog, drowning the footsteps; the progress of an army along this track, one felt, would make no more disturbance than a troop of ghosts, a current of air, a sigh. The very noise of breathing was a violation of this silence …

  His breathing, hoarse and raw, ripped horribly at the stillness. He limped beside her, his hand still on her arm, urging her on over the soft, clogging pine-needles, away from danger, away from Gillian, away from that murderous devil …

  Jennifer, hurrying dazedly, obedient to the pressure of Stephen’s hand, checked against it, and half-turned as if in rebellion. Then she stumbled, and the ranked stems of the pines seemed to tilt and recede … to surge forward again outlined in light … to waver, and then right themselves, painfully …

  She was sitting with her back against a tree, where the pines thinned at the northern edge of the wood. Stephen sat beside her. She turned her head, with a long, trembling breath, and looked at him.

  His head was bent, and he was fumbling ineptly in a pocket. He looked both grim and indescribably weary, and there was still a trace of the ugliness that had frightened her in the set of his mouth, marred as it was by the marks of dried blood. His hair was matted and damp on his forehead, and when he put up a hand to brush it back, she saw blood – Bussac’s blood – under his nails.

  ‘Have a cigarette, Jenny.’ She was shocked anew at his voice. It was little more than a thick whisper. ‘No wine … this time … I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen …’ There seemed nothing that could be said. She took the cigarette, and saw with an awful pity how his hands shook. Not only exhausted, she thought; beaten. He – we, are beaten.

  She looked away, downhill through the thinning pines to where the convent crouched under the dark sky, its white-washed walls purple in the lurid storm-light. As she watched, a distant flicker lit it to quivering life, and, seconds later, the thunder trundled itself closer over the mountain-tops.

  Thunder, off. That, too, she thought to herself, but dully and without bitterness – that, too, had to round off the impossible little drama which was even now playing itself out. Her own part in it had been futile enough, and Stephen’s – yes, futile was the word there, too. What had he said to her, only yesterday? Don’t cast me as the hero of your story, Jenny. But she had. She had run to him, had put the burden of her apprehension and fear into his hands, confident that he would not – could not – fail her. The story must have the right ending. The hero, the strong man, the elder brother … he would not let her down. But he had. He had.

  She turned her head and met his eyes.

  And in that moment something happened to her. She saw, beneath the chagrin and weariness of his eyes, that he knew what she had been thinking, and with the knowledge came shame, and some instinct, pricked into being by her pain for him, that in a breath withered the ineptitudes of innocence with which she had deceived herself. Today put on perfection … With her new adult’s eyes she saw it all; that it was she who had done the betraying, the ‘letting-down’, she who had allowed the queerness of the situation to build up in her a set of values as strange as they were worthless. Stephen’s half-casual, half-jesting rejection of ‘heroics’ went, in fact, very deep; he was the kind of highly civilized man who would loathe violence in all its ugly manifestations as he would loathe the plague. That was, in fact, how he would see it, as a plague, a creeping cancer of the modern world – and he would fight against accepting it. Clever, sensitive, gentle … and, however much the paper and celluloid supermen strutted in their invincible physical splendour, it was the men like Stephen, the thinking men – no more than moyen sensuel – who were the true constant.

  He had said
he was no story-book hero. It was true. And it was the measure of the magic of the place that she had been betrayed into accepting that as a confession of weakness. It was, she saw now, the reverse. A story-book hero had by definition no place in life; he battered his way through twenty victorious chapters, faded out on a lustful kiss, and was gone for good. But at the end of this story there was still a new chapter to open. England, Oxford, Cherry Close … herself and Stephen … It came to Jennifer quite clearly and quietly just what the next chapters must contain.

  But first she must give him back himself. Today put on perfection.

  She said: ‘Stephen, dear. Don’t mind so much. Please.’ He did not answer, and she put out a hand and touched his, softly.

  ‘Stephen.’

  He looked away. ‘I lost your game for you, Jenny.’

  She cried out at that. ‘Don’t say that! It’s not fair! I won’t have you say that!’

  ‘It’s true.’

  She turned on him almost fiercely.

  ‘It’s not true! You lost nothing! If I’d done as you told me and stayed behind it wouldn’t have happened that way. And he’s twice your weight, and you’d hurt your shoulder, and besides—’

  ‘Besides?’

  ‘You’re lame,’ she said in a small voice.

  The word dropped between them into a little silence. Then he heard a tiny sound, and at last looked at her. She was crying. The tears starred her lashes and spilled on to her cheeks. His heart twisted in his breast, but he did not move.

  ‘Jenny. Oh, God, Jenny, don’t I’m sorry. Gillian—’

  She said: ‘It’s not Gillian. It’s just that I – I can’t bear you to be – hurt any more. Not for anything. Not – you.’

  He said shakenly: ‘Oh, my darling …’ And then she was in his arms and he was kissing her at last, but gently, her tear-stained lashes, her mouth … ‘My lovely Jenny. My love.’

  The pine-trees stirred high above them, the dark boughs sighing with the far-away hollow soughing of the sea-waves in a shell. Lightning stabbed nearer. A shower of hail raced up the slope and over the crested woods, its million tiny ghost-feet pattering and galloping overhead like a wave sweeping the shingle. As it ebbed into silence the lightning stabbed again: a flash, a crack, and then at one stride the storm was in the valley; the growl and roar of thunder rolled and re-echoed from the mountains on either hand, and the sword of the lightning stabbed down, and stabbed again, as if searching through the depths of the cringing woods for whatever sheltered there.

  Jennifer gasped and shrank in Stephen’s arms. He held her still, and close, her head pressed into his shoulder.

  ‘It’s all right. Jenny. It’ll pass.’

  ‘Should we – I mean, the trees—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said again. ‘It’s going.’

  As he spoke, the lightning drove down again, with a crash as if Roland’s great sword Durandel itself were splitting the mountains wide again.

  ‘The crack of doom,’ said Stephen, then, as he felt her shiver: ‘That was away beyond the wood, Jenny. It’s going fast.’

  She lifted her head from his shoulder. ‘Towards the farm.’ She shivered again.

  ‘Frightened? There’s no need.’

  ‘Not of that. The other thing. The Gillian thing. We – we shouldn’t have forgotten it like that: I didn’t mean that I didn’t care what happened to Gillian. I only—’

  ‘Darling, nobody imagines you did.’

  She lifted scared eyes where tears still clung. ‘The thunder. You called it the crack of doom. It was like that; all day it’s been like – something waiting, waiting in the wings to pounce. Disaster. An evil omen, Stephen. And the evil’s happening, now.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  She said, on a little sob: ‘But it will. We can’t stop it.’

  ‘No?’

  There was a new note in his voice which made her blood tingle. She pushed away from him, her hands against his chest, her eyes searching his face. The change there was startling enough. Fatigue, depression, pain – all these had vanished, as if on the tail of the now retreating storm. The marks of his defeat were still there, bruises, cuts, ugly smears where blood and sweat had dried crustily, but he was smiling, and his eyes were steady and confident and – yes, excited.

  She said sharply: ‘You’re not to go back there! You’re not to!’

  He laughed, then pulled her to him and kissed her. ‘I don’t propose to – though the way I feel now, I could turn friend Bussac inside out with one hand!’ He put a hand under her chin, and tilted up her face, still smiling. ‘Your magic, Jenny … talk about moving mountains! I could shift the whole range, by God, before breakfast, and wash my hands, saying – how does it go? – “Fie upon this quiet life, I want work!”’

  He got quickly to his feet and reached a hand down to her.

  ‘You and the thunder between you, sweetheart, have cleared the air! There’s a way out of your precious melodrama yet, if we’d only brains enough to see it!’

  He slid his hands up to her shoulders, and shook her gently. ‘Don’t look so stricken, my darling. This isn’t going to be a tragedy after all! Listen.’

  Away among the peaks to the south the thunder crashed once more.

  ‘Thunder – on the right,’ said Stephen. ‘There’s your omen, Jenny, and not on the sinister side. Thunder on the right – the best of omens! A happy ending!’

  She found herself smiling back, with a quite illogical lift of the heart.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s go and move those mountains. Only – we’d better be quick.’

  Not wishing to be seen approaching the convent by the track leading directly from the farm, they turned downhill, keeping within the borders of the wood.

  The way down between the pines was steepish, but the thick dry pine-needles made it safe and easy. Everywhere underfoot the mat of dead stuff gapped and broke to show curved croziers of pale green stems butting their way up into the light. Here and there wax-white orchids nodded above the finished star of leaves, slender taperlights clustered over with the fragile swarm of tiny wings. Occasional shower-drops from the melting hail spattered down, shaking the tiny swarms to life, and the rich tarry smell of the pines thickened in the warm air.

  Stephen reached a hand to help Jennifer over a fallen pine.

  ‘The first mountain we move,’ he said, ‘and it may well be difficult – is the police.’

  ‘The police? But you said they wouldn’t listen. You said there was no evidence—’

  ‘My God, isn’t my face evidence? Things are a little different now, my dear. We’ve seen and identified Gillian ourselves, and in any case, now, I can insist that the man is at least interviewed about this.’ He touched his damaged cheek.

  ‘But – oh, Stephen, there isn’t time! I do agree about the police, and I don’t see what else we can do, but surely it’s not going to help! All we’ve done is warn Bussac, and frighten him into acting straight away!’

  ‘I know.’ His voice was grim. ‘I haven’t forgiven myself for that yet, though I suppose the fat was in the fire as soon as he recognized you. And there was a chance that he’d accept our bargain and let us take Gillian off his hands. At least, I thought so, until I saw her.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  He shot her a look. ‘You haven’t guessed?’

  ‘Guessed what?’

  He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. ‘It must have occurred to you that Gillian wasn’t – isn’t – exactly a prisoner.’

  ‘Of course it did. I haven’t had time to think it out properly, but I suppose with him and the dogs about, she couldn’t have got very far anyway – oh!’

  ‘Exactly. The dogs did as she told them. And so,’ added Stephen meditatively, ‘to some extent, did Pierre Bussac …’

  Jenny said uncertainly: ‘Perhaps she and Bussac’s wife—’

  He said, ‘She is Bussac’s wife.’

  She gasped and turned, and would have trip
ped if his hand had not shot out to steady her.

  ‘Careful there. I’m sorry, and I don’t understand it any more than you do, but it’s true. There’s nobody else at that farm with him. She is “Madame Bussac”.’

  ‘She can’t be! It can’t be true! You’ve guessed wrong, Stephen!’

  ‘No. You forget, Jenny, I’ve met her before.’

  ‘You what? When?’

  ‘I told you. I was painting once, early in the morning. I must have been quite near the farm without knowing it, on the far side of the hill. I’d walked over from Gavarnie – it’s quite incredibly lonely over there, and very bad walking; I doubt if anybody goes there in a hundred years or so … Anyway she – your Gillian – must have gone out early too. She came on me suddenly, and I don’t know which of us was the more startled. She shied away at first, looking quite scared, but I spoke, and we talked for perhaps five minutes. No more. She still seemed uneasy, and eventually hurried off. But it was certainly the girl you called Gillian, and just as certainly she told me she was Madame Bussac, and lived over here.’

  Jennifer said, fastening half-dazedly on the one word that seemed to make sense: ‘You said she was “scared”?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s too strong a word. Uneasy, apprehensive – she must have known Bussac wouldn’t want her to be seen. I doubt if she ever told him about the encounter.’

  She put a hand to her head. ‘And she wouldn’t come away with us … She didn’t know me, either. Of course, it’s a few years since we met, but I’d have sworn it was Gillian.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it was Gillian.’

  She turned bewildered, almost panic-stricken eyes to him. ‘But I can’t believe it! It gets crazier and crazier!’ Her voice rose with a quiver of hysteria. ‘The whole damned valley’s crawling with girls who look like Gillian!’

  He put an arm round her shoulders, and turned her towards the edge of the trees. ‘Come on, darling. Out of the wood.’ The arm tightened momentarily, and he smiled down at her. ‘Another omen … And don’t panic, sweetheart. It’s mad, but not that mad; there’s still only one Lally, who’s dead, and only one Gillian, who’s alive – and likely to remain so.’