The Youngest Bridesmaid

by Sara Seale

  Go away ... way ... way ... it wailed. He doesn’t love you ... he doesn’t want you ... Give back ... ack ... ack before it’s too late ... ate ...

  “Who are you?” shouted Lou. “I don’t believe in ghosts—well, not really.”

  I am the voice ... I am the voice of the drowned to warn you ... ou ... ou ... Lou ... ou ... go away, ... he doesn’t want you ... Rune doesn’t want you ... you’re just a come-by-chance ... ance … go away ... way ...

  Reason deserted Lou. All Tibby’s tales and warnings came back to choke her with terror and she began stumbling round the cave in a last desperate attempt to trip the trickster in whom she no longer believed, but there was no one there. The altar stone concealed nothing but slime and grotesque fossils which might once have been living creatures, the walls had no hidden recesses and the pool was black and evil-looking but unruffled. She sank down on the wet stones, beginning to grasp the frightening, uncontrollable sobs of panic, waiting like a trapped animal for the voice to speak again and, like an animal, afraid to move. But the voice did not speak, and after a long time she summoned up enough courage to shout a challenge.

  “Are you there? Have you finished?” she called, but only her own voice came back to her.

  She was by now so incapable of coherent thought that she imagined that if she moved the voice would return to stop her, that somewhere an eye must be observing her, that if she remained very still and perhaps prayed, the evil presence would go.

  It was a fresh sound, however, that finally roused her to action, the sound of water slapping against rock, the swift little advances and withdrawals of a steadily moving stream which had not been there before. Lou became aware that the stone floor of the cave on which she had been sitting for so long was no longer slimy but otherwise dry. Water was lapping over her ankles and knees, and she got hurriedly to her feet, only to sink down again with a cry of agony as cramp attacked her legs. As she sat there frantically trying to massage back the circulation she looked towards the passage opening and saw, with a totally different kind of fear, that water was pouring through. She remembered Piers telling her, with a certain degree of scorn for her early fears, that the cave never filled, except in times of storm. But this was a time of storm, and the tide had been coming in. Was she then to drown like that poor girl of the legend? Was this the manner in which she must give back what she had stolen?

  “But I’ve stolen nothing!” she shouted, returning suddenly to sanity by reason of a more tangible terror. “And I’m hanged if I’m going to climb on to that beastly altar stone and wait meekly for death ... I’ll drown fighting if I have to drown at all!”

  There was no one to hear the foolish bravado of her shouted defiance, but the sound of her own voice helped to restore her nerve. She struggled once more to her feet, ignoring the aches and pains that still shot through her legs, and splashed clumsily towards the passage and began to fight her way out. Sometimes the water was only around her ankles, sometimes well above her knees as she stumbled over the rough, uneven ground. Often she fell, wrenching her ankle so badly at one point that she thought she would be unable to go any further.

  She remembered that Melissa had promised to send Piers to find her if she went to the cave, and remembered, too, that she had told herself, with more sense than she now appeared to possess, that most likely she would wait in vain for a deliverer who never came. It was all the more astonishing, in the circumstances, to hear his voice shouting above the wind as she at last reached the entrance to the passage and the blessed daylight, and saw Piers tall figure splashing through the boiling surf, now up to the foot of the cliffs. He must have passed the entrance to the cave without a second thought, for he was walking away from her.

  “Piers!” she screamed after him. “Oh, Piers, come back!”

  He turned at once and came back at a run, his oilskins flapping, his hair wild in the wind and his dark face a curious mixture of alarm and anger.

  “Good God! You haven’t been in the cave, have you?” he demanded, catching her by the shoulders with hands that shook a little.

  “Why didn’t you come in to find me?” she asked, aware suddenly how narrowly he had missed finding her at all. “Melissa s-said she’d send you.”

  “What the hell’s Melissa got to do with it? I haven’t seen her since lunch,” he replied roughly, and shook her until her teeth chattered. “You senseless bloody-minded little idiot! Don’t you realize that in another quarter of an hour or so you wouldn’t have got out at all? Why should you suppose I should think of looking for you in there?”

  “Because of Melissa,” she repeated, stupidly, and burst into tears. “Piers—I heard the voice,” she sobbed incoherently. “It said I was to give back what I’d stolen—I was to go away—you didn’t want me—Rune didn’t want me. It was the voice of that poor drowned girl...”

  The roughness went out of his hands and his voice alike and he held her against him, smoothing her wet head with gentle reassuring fingers.

  “All right, Lou, it’s all over now ... you’ve had a bad dream, but it’s all right now. Come along home,” he said, and she clung to him tightly.

  “You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m making it up, but there is a voice—Tibby’s right.”

  “I believe you believe it, darling, but that’s another story. You’re all in, aren’t you?” he replied, and she gave a little sigh.

  “You’ve never called me darling before,” she said, able to be astonished even in the midst of her distress, then remembered last night and the monstrous accusation she had thrown at him which had hurt him so bitterly.

  “Piers,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said what I did last night—I shouldn’t have believed Melissa.”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” he replied a shade grimly. “Still, I’m beginning to think I’ve been a bit bedevilled myself. I too should have known better than to listen to your cousin’s fairy tales.”

  “Fairy tales are only for children—grown-ups shouldn’t believe them. I don’t believe in mine.”

  “You’re all mixed up, my poor dear, and it’s no wonder. Whatever you thought you heard in that infernal cave has shaken you up, hasn’t it? What on earth made you go there?”

  “To make my peace, perhaps—to bargain with the gods or whoever they are in there. But if Melissa didn’t tell you, why were you looking for me, then?”

  “Because you’d been out a long time and tides are tricky in times of storm. I thought at first you’d been crazy enough to go with the launch.”

  “Didn’t you know? Your irresponsible cousin persuaded Sam to go to the mainland for cigarettes and a radio battery. I ask you—risking life for a radio battery!”

  “Piers, no! Was it safe? Will he be all right?”

  “Oh, Sam’s a good enough seaman, though he’s no right to use the launch without permission, and if it’s damaged I’ll have the hide off that selfish little bitch. I’ll have the hide off her anyway after this. Did she know you were going to the cave?”

  “She suggested it. You don’t think—you couldn’t think she meant me to drown!”

  “No, I don’t think that, but I’m beginning to have certain rather unpleasant ideas about your voice. Perhaps you didn’t imagine it, after all. Come on, my dear, if we stay much longer we’ll get caught by the tide.”

  He had to help her, for her twisted ankle was too painful to stand much more walking, and presently he picked her up and carried her, slung across his shoulder like a sack. She was too exhausted to try to work out for herself the implication in his last remarks; she only knew she was safe, that his uncomplimentary references to Melissa hadn’t sounded much like those of a man in love, and that he had addressed her as darling as if he had meant it.

  By the time he had reached the house she was half asleep, and after that things seemed to happen with bewildering unexpectedness. Piers gave curt orders, and Tibby, unfamiliar in the role of comforter, hastened to obey. Lou barely recognized her old enemy in the woma
n who, with painfully working face and trembling hands, ministered to her needs like the nanny of her imagination. Tibby’s distress was, of course, for Sam, the ewe lamb who had filled Piers’ empty place in her strange, barren affections, but it was pleasant all the same to be of temporary concern and, in her turn, bring what comfort she could to the old servant.

  “Don’t worry, Tibby,” Lou said shyly, while she submitted to a harsh and vigorous towelling after a bath which had been almost too hot to bear. “Piers says Sam is an excellent seaman, and it’s not far to the mainland, is it?”

  “ ‘Tes the vanity of it—the sinful vanity, putting a soul in peril for a passing fancy,” Tibby said, and her lapse into the island idiom was proof of her disturbance. “Sam should have known better, ‘tes true enough, taking the boat and all, but she flattered him with her serpent’s tongue, dared him, for sure, to risk his life for trash.”

  “My cousin’s spoilt,” Lou said, feeling in duty bound to make excuses for Melissa, and Tibby snapped back, with a last, ungentle flick of the towel:

  “Aye, like her mother before her. Miss Blanche had the same pretty ways, the same disregard for others.”

  “But you loved her, didn’t you, Tibby?”

  “Loved? No, we was more like mazed, all of us—young Mr. Robert Merrick as he was then—Piers because she smelt nice and promised the first woman’s love he had known, and I because I was past my first youth even then and never man nor maid had looked at me twice.”

  Lou stood in humble stillness, unconscious of her nakedness or Tibby’s hard gaze slowly softening as it rested on her young, pliant limbs. Three people, caught up in a dream, she thought, just as she herself was caught now.

  “Is everything just make-believe?” she asked, and the old woman smiled, the difficult, unwilling smile of someone unused to capitulation.

  “Life is what you make it,” she replied. “And dreams don’t last. Mr. Piers maybe knew what he was doing, after all, when he picked you for his bride. Pleasure him, missis—don’t be afeared of all that lordly act he puts on. He’s always liked to play big.”

  Lou would have liked to embrace Tibby, but felt it was too early yet to take liberties which might be misunderstood. She reached instead for her dressing gown, and turning too quickly on her injured ankle, was reminded by the sudden pain of her ordeal in the Druid’s Cave.

  “Tibby—” she said, knowing that here, at last, was someone who would believe her story, “I heard the voice. Piers thought I was dreaming or imagining, but I heard it distinctly. It warned me, just as you said—the voice of that drowned girl.”

  Tibby’s reaction was unexpected. No sly triumph at the vindication of her prophesies came into her face, only a puzzled look.

  “Of what did it warn you?” she asked.

  “To go away—to give back what I’d stolen— another man’s mate, it said—your very words.”

  “H’m ... m ... now that’s a strange coincidence. Did it say Piers loved another?”

  “Yes, it did. Tibby, how do you know these things? It wasn’t—it wasn’t you playing tricks on me, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t me, missis,” Tibby replied a shade grimly, “though my words were used.”

  “You mean there is no voice?”

  “Oh, aye, according to legend. Some believe and some don’t, and it was a long time ago.”

  “Even so, you tried to scare me, didn’t you?” Lou said accusingly. “You wanted to drive me away. You wanted my cousin in my place.” Even as she spoke, it seemed strange that she could accuse her enemy so brashly.

  “Because she was his rightful bride, and because I saw Miss Blanche in her ... ‘tes lonely here on Rune ... strange thoughts come in the dark nights ... and ghosts. I had thought with Piers marrying Miss Blanche’s daughter to slip back down the years, you see, and then he brought you here and it was as if I’d been tricked.”

  “I see,” Lou said gently, wondering for a moment if Piers had not been right when he had remarked so casually that his old nurse was getting senile, then suddenly she understood. Tibby was only another victim of make-believe. Living alone for months at a time, perhaps, on this island, she had woven her own fantasies out of the past because all her life reality had only come to her through others.

  She stretched out a hand to touch the woman’s face with tentative solicitude, surprised to feel the moisture of tears.

  “If you’d accept me now, Tibby,” she said shyly, “we can still make the dreams come real—some of them. You—you would like nurseries again, wouldn’t you?”

  Even as she spoke Lou felt herself flushing scarlet. What right had she to think of nurseries when her husband held her at a distance and Tibby herself had schemed and prevaricated over the marital bed from the beginning?

  Tibby observed the blush with a sardonic eye, thinking no doubt, Lou reflected with embarrassment, that Piers’ come-by-chance bride was getting inflated ideas of her prospects, then that unfamiliar, reluctant smile began to twitch at the corners of the woman’s thin lips.

  “Happen you’ll suit, at that,” she said, and someone hammered loudly on the bathroom door.

  “What in hades are you two up to?” Piers’ voice demanded irritably. “You’ve been in there long enough in all conscience. Lou, you should be in bed, and I want to bandage that ankle. Can I come in?” He opened the door without waiting for permission, observed his wife’s heightened color, and a look on Tibby’s face that he had not seen since his nursery days, and grinned.

  “The lamb lying down with the lion, I observe,” he said. “Tibby, you old faggot, it’s about time, too, you had a change of heart!”

  “You’ll need a change of heart yourself, Mr. Piers, before you start calling me names to my face,” Tibby retorted, but his grin only grew wider.

  “Haven’t I always called you names to your face?” he replied, then his mood altered abruptly. “Sam should have been back by now. I’m a bit worried.”

  Tibby said nothing, but Lou saw her hands trembling as she began picking up towels and hanging them on the hot rail to dry.

  “What’s the time?” Lou asked anxiously.

  “Gone six. I’ve a good mind to take the second launch and make a recce.”

  She looked at him with eyes widened in alarm.

  “But that’s crazy!” she exclaimed. “What’s the sense in risking two boats—two lives, perhaps? Sam may have got held up on the mainland with the weather—or anything. Piers—”

  He took her hands, holding them with kindly reassurance but also with firmness.

  “I’ll give him another half-hour,” he said, “but after that you musn’t try to keep me. I have a responsibility to my islanders, you see. Understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, remembering Melissa’s taunts about king-of-the-castle games. But this was no game, and Rune no toy to satisfy a rich dilettante’s whim. This unpredictable stranger, she knew now, was the real Piers Merrick, and at last she understood what he had meant when he had told her that in bringing her to his island he was paying her a compliment.

  II

  Lou stubbornly refused to go to bed. Her hot bath and Pier’s dose of brandy would have warded off a chill, she said, and she refused to be packed off, upstairs until there was news of Sam. She did not add that if Piers fulfilled his intention of making a search himself, she could not endure the hours of waiting lying inactive in her bed, but he probably guessed, for he gave in without argument and his smile was tender as he tucked her up on a sofa by the fire in the living room.

  “Where’s Melissa?” she asked, discovering with surprise that this was the first moment she had missed her cousin.

  “Keeping out of my way, I imagine. I’ve had no time, as yet, to deal with that young woman,” he replied a trifle grimly, and she glanced up at him through her lashes. It was, she thought, very gratifying to hear that irritable note in his voice directed, for a change, at her glamorous cousin.

  “You must be fair to Melissa,” she said, however,
striving for fairness herself. “She wouldn’t have had any idea of the danger when she talked Sam round. She’s so used, you see, to young men fetching and carrying for her.”

  His expression, she thought, was suddenly rather odd, and when he replied, the old impatience was back in his voice.

  “You really do ask for it, don’t you, Cinderella?” he said, and made her feel foolish at once. “Here you are, defending a girl who has no loyalty to you, and expect me to be fair to her. What did you mean, incidentally, when you said Melissa would send me to the cave?”

  “We’d planned it—at least she had, only at the last minute I said I wouldn’t. She—she was going to—”

  “Going to what?”

  But Lou could not go on. He had told her that he had not seen her cousin since luncheon, so it was clearly impossible that Melissa had straightened out the tangle. She and Piers, thought Lou, remembering now with embarrassment the things she had said to Tibby, were no nearer a tacit understanding than they had been. She had, she supposed, read too much into his concern for her. It was only the same responsible concern which he felt for Sam.

  “Tell me, Lou, this voice you heard—was it female?” he asked, and she gave him a puzzled frown, wondering why he should return to a subject he had dismissed as imagination. The warmth and the sense of security, the pleasant aftermath of her frightening experience in the cave had almost persuaded her that she had dreamed the whole thing.

  “I couldn’t tell,” she replied sleepily. “It was a disembodied voice—like the weird sound effects one sometimes hears on radio. Did I dream it, after all, Piers?”

  “Not to worry,” he said, looking down at her with a quizzical twitch of one eyebrow. “You’ve never quite woken from your original dream, have you?”

  “Oh, yes, I have,” she said, suddenly wide awake. “You must get out of the habit, Piers, of thinking of me as Cinderella. There comes a time when fairy tales outlive their uses.”