Lisa
Page 25
He stood again and walked over to her, his eyes shadowed in the last glow of the long summer twilight. “Yes, I’m frightened — I’m terrified. I’m like a horse that’s been beaten too much and spoiled. I don’t want to love again, can you understand that? I want no single solitary part of it. I gave everything once, and was torn to pieces for the giving. I don’t ever want to be in a position to go through that yet another time. I would go mad if I had to bear so much again.
“I said once we were all tainted, Lisa, and so we are. We are all afraid to love. Perhaps for different reasons, but afraid none the less. So Eric goes whoring, and Carrie tries uselessly to slake her need for love with her body.”
“You knew. You knew all along.” Lisa was appalled.
“Yes, I knew. Did you really think Toby was the first? She has a way with her, she does. I wanted Toby to leave in order to save him. Once she even tempted me. Poor Matthew didn't stand a chance. She showed him realms of physical love he never knew existed, and there was a time, the time of his wife’s and children’s deaths, when she could have told him to drown himself in the Thames, and he’d have hurried to do it. Do you know “La Belle Dame Sans Merci?” Well, Keats knew all about love like that, and it wasn’t long before Matthew was palely loitering just like the knight in Keats’ poem. So he proceeded to drink himself to death.”
Lisa was just beginning to see what loving was all about, and it was impossible for her to understand a fear that would make a human being turn away from the glory and the splendor that were bursting her heart. She shook her head.
“I was so sure of myself with you,” Jarrell went on bitterly. “I was going to take the place of the father you never had and be so safe and secure in just being fond of you. I could see you light up this dark accursed house and send the unmentionable creatures scurrying for cover. But then there came the pain. When a limb that has gone to sleep wakens, there is exquisite agony, and there wasn’t one of us here, even Mrs. Lewis, who wasn’t touched by it. We had been so marvellously safe in our dark little holes, and had made our accomodations with reality. Then you came along and insisted on showing all of us what we were missing, how poverty-stricken our dark little burrows really were.” He rubbed a hand wearily across his eyes. “Nothing will ever be the same for us again. Have done with it now, Lisa — get out before someone can’t stand it anymore and decides to destroy you to keep from having to live.”
“I’m glad I flushed you from your burrow, and no, I won’t have done,” she flashed back at him. “Why, you’re no better than Cynthia, any of you, as good as taking to your beds and eating yourselves to death. You’ve been hiding long enough, all of you, for all the good it’s done you.”
“Easy for you to say,” he pointed out. “I’d like to talk to you ten years hence.”
“You make me sick.” She was really angry now. “What kind of love is it that destroys? Love should celebrate life, not deny it. What would your Ellen think of you now, skulking here in this mausoleum and looking for excuses to drink too much? And what would she think of your throwing over your work because everything didn’t go right? I’m sure she never thought she was marrying a coward.”
“Coward, is it?” he retorted, stung. “Do you have any idea what it took to make me work on your hand that I knew I could do so little with? Do you know how I had to grovel for some operations at Guy’s? — I, who used to have them begging me, young as I was. There wasn’t a surgeon in England and damn few anywhere else who could do as much with a smashed arm or leg as I could.”
“And you gave all that up because a few went bad and a chit of a girl didn’t like her nose,” Lisa said quietly. “You don’t realize, do you, that you didn’t fail with me. You gave me my hand as surely as if you had had a brilliant surgical success; you made me not ashamed of it anymore. It wasn’t your Ellen dying that was the tragedy, it was your giving up. She’d never have had you quit because of her, would she now?”
“The worst,” Jarrell said slowly, “was when I couldn’t call her face to mind anymore. I could only see the sightless stare, the marvellous hair a tangle of blood and dirt ... I could hear her, but I couldn’t see her. And then I couldn’t even hear her. It was only when I was drunk that I could bring her back to me. Now I don’t have as much as that. This time it wasn’t Ellen I kept seeing.”
Lisa put a hand on his arm. “We’ve missed tea long since,” she said quietly. “Come to dinner tonight, will you? To please me? I know what Teddy meant to you, the child you never had; I saw your face when you said goodbye to him. But he’s getting better now, Mark. You can let your conscience be.”
In the near darkness he reached out and gently ran his hand down her cheek. “You can almost make me believe that the earth is new again.”
She turned away and took a box of matches from the desk, striking one and lighting the lamp. This time it was her hand that shook. “I looked up the poem by Matthew Arnold about there being neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”
“And?” The soft light made his face look younger, and she could see how he must have looked when he married Ellen.
“You didn’t tell me the stanza began, ‘Ah, love, let us be true to one another!”
Suddenly he smiled. “Yes, I’ll come to dinner, and with time we’ll see. I have to be honest with you, that is the most I can promise now. After all, you mightn’t in the end enjoy the prospect of one day pushing me around in my wheelchair — I’m sure to be an irrascible old man.”
It’s going to be all right, she thought. It’s really going to be all right. She raised her eyes from the lamp to his face, but just past the corner of his shoulder caught a sudden movement. There at the window was the face of the spectral Tatty, dishevelled hair trailing down one cheek, features white and distorted.
Lisa backed away, pointing. “She’s there again. Dear heaven, she’s come back!”
The apparition at the window vanished, but not before Jarrell, who had swung around at Lisa’s first change of expression, saw it and with an oath threw the two halves of the window wide open and leapt out into the dark after it, running across the garden toward the stables. Lisa sat on the window sill and swung her legs over, dropping into a flower bed. As best she could, she picked up her skirts and ran in the direction Jarrell had disappeared.
“Be still, dammit!”
His voice guided her, and she came upon him kneeling astride an indistinct form. “So it wasn’t a ghost.”
“No ghost this,” he said rather unfeelingly, “only a very smelly old woman.”
“Where’s my ’Enry?” the creature whined. “Wat’ve you done with my ’Enry?”
“How the devil would I know about your Henry?” Jarrell demanded. “What makes you think he’s here?” He got up off the woman but held fast to her arm.
“She knows,” Tatty pointed at Lisa, “don’t you, dearie? ’E come after you, and you’ve got ’im locked up sommers, ain’t you?” Tatty’s tone sounded almost pleading.
Lisa shook her head. “I’ve not laid eyes on him since I left your house. Why would he be here? You should have fled as far away from here as ever you could. Killing me wouldn’t help him; the police already know everything.”
“Ah, not quite everything, my dear.” Tatty’s voice was sly, and Lisa realized that the woman was half-demented. Tatty turned to Jarrell. “You wouldn’t want your family in prison, now, would you, doctor?”
“What do you mean?” demanded Jarrell.
“Wouldn’t you just like ter know?” Tatty replied. “Ask yer sister why ’Enry might ’ave come. If this one,” indicating Lisa, “don’t know where ’e is, she knows right enough. And if you don’t let me go, it’s prison fer me all right, but prison fer others, too.”
Jarrell took his hand from her arm and stood up. “You know you’ll have to come with me to Dunwiddleston,” he said. “I don’t know what my sister had to do with this, but you and Price are badly wanted by the police.”
“Why would she give him money?” Jarrell asked, incredulous.
“Why? Well, Ay see no reason not ter tell you, you can give it ter us easy as she can. She first came ter me wanting ter get rid of a child, like all of them. Rich and poor, they all get inter the same fix. I give ’er ergot and tansy, same as the rest, but wasn’t she back again saying it didn’t work? So we put ’er on the table, ’Enry and me, and slipped the stick ter ’er. Smooth as butter, that’s wat. Smooth as butter. Ay never figured ter see ’er again.”
Jarrell was looking sick, and Lisa herself found it all but impossible to imagine the handsome, elegant Carrie Stephens sprawled out on that bloody storeroom table.
“Wat’s the matter? We never ’ad trouble except fer just a few, and they begged us ter do it. You doctors make me sick, you do, with yer ’igh and mighty airs. Let the woman pay, you say, but it takes two ter make a baby, don’t it? And wat do the man pay, eh, tell me that?”
“Go on,” Jarrell said impatiently. “Surely you know that no one will prosecute her for that.”
“Ah, but she come another time, she did,” Tatty went on. “And this time she wanted sommat else. She ’ad this ’ere list of ’erbs she wanted, but she didn’t fool me. There was only one she was really interested in, the deadly nightshade. She said it was fer making ’er eyes look bigger, but Ay knew better.”
The blood drained from Jarrell’s face, leaving it white as paper. “She got belladonna from you?” he whispered, horrorstruck.
“That she did. She didn’t know we had family in Dunwiddleston, and she didn’t know Ay knew who she was, neither. When Ay ’eard ’er ’usband died from poison, Ay asked old Ames wat kind of poison, and ’e told me atropine, which made me think on where that deadly nightshade Ay sold ’is wife went to.”
“But why would she kill him?” Lisa protested. “He was drinking himself to death anyway.”
“Who knows?” Tatty answered, shrugging. “’Appen she wanted ’is money quick like, or ’appen ’e found out sommat about ’er.”
“The fire,” Jarrell said in a dead voice. “You don’t suppose the fire wasn’t an accident after all?”
“How could anyone know the mother would rush in and be burned to death?” Lisa asked.
“If you were the mother, wouldn’t you rush in to rescue your children in a fire?” Jarrell demanded.
Lisa had no answer. Hanging Tommy would be nothing after that. A new thought burst upon her, that if Carrie Stephens were guilty of murdering a woman, two children, and her own husband, why not Cynthia? But why kill Cynthia?
Jarrell’s mind had run on the same tracks. “Could it be that Cynthia knew something? She didn’t come, though, until well after Matthew’s death. Eric was living at Hartsite then, perhaps he would know.”
Lisa was the first to notice the red glow on the trees. “Mark! The stables! The stables are on fire!”
15
As they approached the stables, running, they could see the tongues of flame that had burst through the roof on the barn side and called attention to themselves as far away as the dark garden where Jarrell and Tatty and Lisa had been talking. Carrie Stephens stumbled out of the storage barn, coughing, her hair dishevelled and hanging part down her back.
“Get Eric out!” she cried. “Eric and Toby are fighting — get him out! They broke the lantern — ”
Jarrell raced into the barn, followed by Lisa. Toby was swinging hopelessly, great blows that Eric dodged easily, and his face was a mask of blood with runnels of tears down the cheeks. Eric himself had a large bruise on the side of his jaw, but was otherwise unmarked. Silently, viciously, he was cutting Toby’s face to ribbons, ignoring entirely the smoke and billows of flame consuming the hay and burning up the wooden supports to the roof beams and beyond.
“Are you mad?” Jarrell shouted, grabbing Eric by the shoulder and yanking him around. “Get the horses out before the whole building goes!”
Eric’s eyes blazed silver — bright, unseeing — and he snapped Jarrell’s head back with a blow of his battered fist.
“I’m not Toby, you fool,” Jarrell snarled, and delivered an openhanded slap that resounded even above the crackle of flames and the whickering and hoof thumping of the restless frightened horses.
Eric’s expression changed, dropped its lost, mad look and became sane once again. He rubbed the side of his face and grinned ruefully. “You always could take me, couldn’t you, Mark?” He obviously still hadn’t completely taken in the situation.
“Get Christian out! Do you hear me, Eric? Get Christian out!” He didn’t even wait for Eric’s answering nod, but shoved an empty grain sack at him and ran around to start on the other horses.
Lisa had led the bewildered, blubbering Toby to the watering trough and washed off his face that was already swelling badly. “Come on, Toby, we’ve got to get the horses,” she insisted, and unbuttoned and pulled off his shirt, handing it to him. “Blindfold them and lead them out, Toby. Please? For me?”
Still snuffling, Toby shambled off toward Pearl’s stall to obey. Jarrell, stripped to the waist, was already leading a shivering, prancing Cleo out, her eyes covered with his shirt. He tied her to a tree well clear of the stableyard and started back for David. Lisa tore a large piece of her petticoat off and went in to Dancer, who was moving from side to side in his stall. She clipped the rope on his halter and tried to lead him out, but he balked, wild-eyed. She folded the piece of her petticoat into a wide strip and fastened it to a cheekpiece of the halter and across his eyes. This time he came with her out of the smoke, sparks snapping and glowing in his mane, and she tied him beside Pearl and Cleo. She could hear a thunder of hoofs against stall walls and knew Eric was having trouble with Christian. She saw just opening Jonathan’s stall door when she heard a loud crack and the scream of a horse. She was Jarrell, who had just tied David with the others, run toward Christian’s stall, but she made herself stay and put on Jonathan’s blindfold to lead him out.
When she had tied the sorrel beside David and Samson, she ran toward Christian’s stall, which was belching smoke. Jarrell and Toby were standing helplessly at the stall door looking in when Lisa joined them. Eric was sitting on the straw with Christian’s great head cradled in his lap and tears running down his face. The horse’s hindquarters were smashed under a large supporting beam that had burned through and fallen from the ceiling. Little flickers of fire still snaked along the wood.
“Get a gun!” Eric shrieked. “For God’s sake, get a gun!”
“The gun is in the top left hand drawer of my study desk,” Jarrell told Lisa quietly. “Get Mrs. Lewis to give you the key. I’m going to try to talk Eric out before the whole roof goes.”
As Lisa ran toward the house, she could hear Carrie Stephens crying hysterically, “Eric! Eric! Oh, Eric darling, please come out. I’m sorry, truly I am. I only meant to make you jealous. You know I love only you and always have ... ”
The sobbing pleas went on but were mercifully blunted by distance. Crossing the garden, Lisa met Mrs. Lewis, who had only just seen the fire. Together they went back to the study for the gun.
“Do hurry,” Lisa urged as Mrs. Lewis unlocked the drawer. “The roof will go at any minute, and Eric won’t leave until he’s put Christian out of his misery.”
They raced down to the stables again to find a strange tableau. Jarrell was behind Carrie Stephens, forcibly holding her back from entering the stall where Eric was still holding Christian’s head. The horse had his eyes closed, and it was hard to tell if he were even still alive. Carrie was out of her mind, shrieking incoherently and struggling against Jarrell’s hold.
Eric, the tears still shining on his fa
ce, was saying, “We never should have buried the old fraud here, Carrie — we cursed the place. He couldn’t have proven we killed Matthew, though, could he? It never ends. You begin killing, and it goes on and on.” His eyes were silver again and flicked to Lisa. “Give me the gun, Lisa, there’s a girl. I told you you should have come away with me.”
But before she could come forward and hand him the weapon, the roof gave a final groan and collapsed with a crash of cinders and blackened lumber that buried entirely the place where Eric was sitting. With an oath, Jarrell pushed Carrie away from him and tried to pull pieces of wood from the wreckage, but they wouldn’t come free. Lisa stood as if in a trance. She could see nothing of Eric but a hand and forearm with a trickle of flame consuming the loose shirtsleeve. Something bright and gay and laughing in her died then, and the tears began running down her face.
“Mama! Mama!” she cried, then turned to Carrie. “Oh, Miss Jarrell, where have you been? Mama and Nicky, they’re burning, they’re burning! Save them, Miss Jarrell, save them! Papa, Papa, where are you?”
Carrie Stephens’ face had gone even whiter, and the rest of them stopped trying to uncover Eric and were staring at her, shocked and wildeyed as the frightened horses. Someone took the gun from Lisa, and Jarrell held her as he had when they had uncovered the hand at the farm. This time it was a dark horse and rider that snatched her from the flames, but instead of thundering down the empty, echoing corridors of her dream, she was being held safe. Gradually she became aware of her surroundings once again, of the snapping and popping of the fire, of the smell of smoke and the warm male flesh smell of Jarrell's bare shoulder. Her fast breathing stilled.
“All right now?” he asked her, stepping back and tilting up her chin to look at him.