The Youngest Bridesmaid

by Sara Seale

  “So they do,” he replied, with a little grimace of surprise and affection. “Well, stay awake, Lou—I may have need of your clearer vision. I must go down to the harbor now—time’s getting short. Take a nap till I’m back.”

  When he had gone, however, the desire for sleep went with him. If he came back with no news of Sam and the launch, he would, she knew, set out himself. She had no knowledge of what danger that might involve but she knew that until he was safely home again she would have no peace of mind.

  The force of the wind had lessened, she thought, listening to the now familiar bufferings of the storm. It would, she reflected, beginning to grow sleepy again, be quite strange to have silence once more and the recognizable, intermittent sounds of the island which were no more than a passing assurance of life. She was nearly asleep when the sharp click of an opening and shutting door roused her and she saw that Melissa had slipped into the room.

  “Well!” her cousin observed, moving into the circle of lamplight, “you’ve certainly got what you wanted at last! Piers in a tizzy—even the scatty old girl running round in circles. You should thank your fairy godmother, Cinderella.”

  “Why?”

  “For turning the pumpkin back into a coach of course. The cave idea was a good one, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” said Lou, “it wasn’t. I might have drowned.”

  “Really, darling, that’s a little much. Didn’t your reluctant bridegroom come to the rescue, just as I said?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t send him, as you promised. You never meant to put things right for me, did you?”

  “More pressing matters came up. I was out of cigarettes and a radio battery, but never mind, Lou ... ou ... ou ...”

  Melissa had turned away as she spoke, and her last word could have been distorted by coinciding with a sudden gust of wind, but Lou, realizing with a sense of shock what Piers had probably already guessed, knew her cousin well enough to appreciate that Melissa could not resist a reminder of her own cleverness.

  “You were the voice!” she exclaimed, and for a moment, relief that there had, after all, been nothing supernatural about her ordeal in the cave made her curious rather than angry.

  “I was rather good, don’t you think? I might even have succeeded in driving you away if you hadn’t run into Piers. That was my bad luck,” Melissa said, and a sense of outrage rose in Lou.

  “What a cruel thing to do—what a mean, despicable trick!” she cried. “You’d no intention of talking to Piers—had you? You’d no intention of sending him to look for me. Did you know the cave filled in times of storm? Did you want me to drown?”

  Melissa flung herself into a chair, stretching her arms above her head in one of her deliberate poses of grace.

  “Of course not,” she said impatiently. “And anyway you didn’t, so why the drama? It’s paid off very nicely for you as things have turned out, hasn’t it?”

  “Why did you do it? You’d made enough trouble for me without that, surely,” Lou said, trying even then to find excuses for a prank which could have ended disastrously.

  “I did it for kicks,” Melissa replied, adding with a shrewish bite: “And I did it for the pay-off. I said you’d be sorry for that slap, didn’t I? Sam showed me how.”

  “Sam!”

  “Oh, he wasn’t involved in any plot, poor lamb, he just knew the trick of the echo; all the islanders know it, apparently. There’s a certain spot where you stand outside and speak down a funnel in the rock. I couldn’t see you, of course, Lou, but I bet you panicked more than somewhat. What a pity it was all wasted. I—” Melissa broke off so abruptly that Lou’s horrified attention became diverted. She followed the direction of her cousin’s hastily turned head and saw Piers standing in the doorway.

  “Go on,” he said, “what else had you planned to make a Roman holiday?”

  For the first time Melissa’s assurance deserted her. She wriggled forward nervously in her chair, forgetting her former elegant pose, and tried to bluster things out.

  “Darling, don’t make a thing of it,” she said. “I only played a harmless trick—just for kicks. No one’s a penny the worse.”

  “No?” You seem a little too fond of playing for kicks. Wasn’t that your excuse for running out on me?” He spoke so mildly that she was misled into brashness.

  “Yes, it was, and you should have known it instead of making a fool of my simple little cousin just to get your own back,” she said, flinging a contemptuous glance at Lou, and Piers took two long strides across the room and stood over her with hands clenched at his sides.

  “Get out!” he said. “Get out of here before I administer the sort of kicks you haven’t bargained for. You’ve never wanted me, Melissa—only the satisfaction of making a successful kill. Even that was playing for kicks, wasn’t it? When you’d gone one better than the Joneses you’d have been looking round for something else to relieve the boredom. Get out!”

  “Even you,” said Melissa, her voice a little unsteady, “can hardly put me out into the storm—or can you? Lou—”

  “I,” said Lou with complete unexpectedness, “couldn’t care less. I’ve been pushed around long enough—now it’s your turn.”

  Despite his anger, Piers gave a faint grin, but Melissa looked at her cousin as if she saw her for the first time.

  “Lou, you wouldn’t... you couldn’t...” she exclaimed, sounding genuinely shocked, and Lou snuggled down into the sofa and closed her eyes.

  “I would and I could, and I’m sick of all your playacting,” she said in the tones of someone dismissing a tiresome interruption. “You’re a very worthless person, really, Melissa—I can’t think why I admired you so much. Go away now. I want to talk to my husband.”

  Piers, no less than Melissa, was observing his wife with an air of surprise, but in Piers’ expression a deep tenderness swallowed up the first astonishment, and Melissa saw it.

  “Well,” she said, getting to her feet with less than her usual grace of movement, “that seems to be my cue for exeunt all. I take it that your injunction to get out was a figure of speech, Piers—I would prefer the shelter of my bedroom to the doubtful charms of your island weather. I can’t, with the best will in the world, walk home in traditional fashion with a stretch of ocean to cross.”

  “I don’t care where you go so long as you keep away from Lou and from me. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the mainland no matter what the weather’s doing, and if you’re sick that’s just too bad,” Piers said, and watched her move to the door with that deliberate little swing of the hips which he had once found so provocative.

  He turned with a sense of release to Lou, his anger forgotten, and thought how like a little contented cat she looked, curled up with boneless grace against the cushions; a little cat that had found its niche at last and, like all its species, taken possession.

  He knelt down beside the sofa and dropped a light kiss on her forehead.

  “Lou,” he said, “I have to go out again. I may be gone some time.”

  Her eyes flew open and she looked at him with a flicker of fear. “You’re going after Sam?”

  “The news isn’t good,” he told her gently. “The launch has been found—empty.”

  “Oh, no!” she whispered. It was the culminating horror of the day, the last evil fruits of her cousin’s thoughtless machinations—or perhaps it would not be the last.

  “Piers, you will take care, won’t you?” she said, thinking at the same time what an idiotic thing it was to say. Putting to sea in the teeth of a gale was scarcely on a par with crossing a road safely. He did not, however, seem to consider her request absurd.

  He took her face between his hands and said gravely: “You understand I have to go, don’t you, Lou? The islanders are my responsibility.”

  “Yes, of course. Do you think—do you suppose Sam has drowned?”

  “One can’t possibly conjecture. The launch was drifting close to the mainland, so it’s feasible he may have got ashore, but I must
make enquiries, do what I can. Look after Tibby for me, my dear. She’s taking this hard.”

  “Piers...” she said, her arms going round his neck, “...come back to me...”

  He gave her no verbal reassurances but held her hard against him for a moment. He did not say goodbye, and was gone before she had time to struggle off the sofa.

  She stood by the window for a long time trying to distinguish a moving figure in the darkness, but either her eyes were not keen enough or he had gone down to the harbor another way. Presently she saw the lights of hurricane lamps bobbing to and fro in the distance and then a stronger beam stretching across the black water growing smaller and fainter as the launch drew away from the island. She sent a brief prayer after it and went out to the kitchen to find Tibby.

  III

  The hours of waiting seemed very long. Lou was grateful for any small chore to occupy her mind, and as the evening passed, it became evident that Tibby was not only relinquishing the household reins for the first time, but was incapable of constructive effort. She sat, an old, bent woman, rocking herself and muttering, and Lou caught snatches of ancient superstitions and island beliefs, and every so often invocations to saints with strange Cornish names to work miracles.

  How much of the jumbled folk-lore assimilated since coming to Rune Tibby believed in it was hard to guess. She had not, thought Lou, seriously credited the legend of the Druid’s Cave, using it for her own purposes just as Melissa had done, but the unfamiliar Cornish saints seemed real enough, and although Piers and Sam became confused in the old woman’s mind until they merged into a single personality, Lou herself had apparently not lost her identity.

  “You’m mistress here now, missis, you’m what he needs, and he knows it,” Tibby kept saying. “You’m a good maid, a loving maid, and Tibby was wrong to harm you—mortal wrong. ‘Tes a judgment on me if Sam’s taken.”

  “You haven’t harmed me, Tibby,” Lou said gently, understanding that for Tibby, young Sam Smale had taken the place of the nursling who had grown beyond her jurisdiction. “You were jealous for another bride, that’s all, but she’ll be gone soon.”

  “Gone—aye, Miss Blanche went long ago. Her was never meant for Rune, nor for Sam.”

  “Piers, not Sam.”

  “Yes, Sam’s dead.”

  “We don’t know, Tibby. There’s always hope, and Sam’s a good seaman.”

  “He never should have listened to that Jezebel—tempting the spirits for her fancy trash,” said Tibby strangely, then suddenly began to talk quite rationally. She went back into the past, it was true, but her speech was perfectly coherent, and Lou could not know that she herself, curled up on the hearth in a dressing gown, brought back the old nursery days with merciful obliteration of the present.

  She told Lou tales of Piers’ childhood, dwelling reminiscently on trivial incidents which, until now, she must have almost forgotten, bringing to life a time when the Merricks were ordinary, simple people not yet gilded by the dazzling trappings of wealth and fortune. Listening enthralled, as she would have to any bedtime story of improbably good fortune, Lou began to have another picture of her husband, the picture of a boy who, thrust suddenly into a world of make-believe no less unexpected than her own, had later sought to escape from his loneliness in the freedom and power that riches could bring him.

  “His father died too soon, you see,” Tibby said, still rocking gently, “and Piers came too young into the inheritance. Tes natural, I suppose, for a young man to let money go to his head for a time, but Piers never squandered, even then. He liked to play with power, maybe, and the world soon taught him that other folks are venial.”

  “Why do you tell me this, Tibby?” Lou asked.

  “Because,” Tibby answered, “for all the heartless change in his marriage plans, I think he’s chosen right. Yes, missis, I know I gave you no welcome when you came, but my thoughts were mazed with the old ties ... Piers never found love because he never looked for it. Women to him were easily come by, and when it came to settling down it was a case of selection and no more. A man, you see, can marry from a sense of duty to the future, and not miss the best that’s been withheld, but a woman ... a woman needs more, and gives more. You’ve already given your own heart, haven’t you, missis?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lou simply. “It isn’t difficult to learn to love Piers here on the island.”

  She scrambled to her feet and limped over to the window to look out. There seemed to be a lull in the storm and the almost forgotten household sounds were loud in the sudden stillness, the ticking of clocks, steam hissing from pots and kettles on the range, and the familiar monotonous creak of Tibby’s rocking chair.

  “It’s gone quite suddenly,” Lou said. “Could it mean the storm’s dying?”

  “When the tide’s on the turn the weather can change,” Tibby answered indifferently. “You’m right, though, ‘tes surely quieter. You’d best eat something, missis.”

  Lou had no appetite for food, but it seemed best to encourage the old servant’s return to normality by acquiescing. Melissa, too, could hardly be left to go supperless to bed, but Lou had to prepare a tray and take it up herself. Tibby’s hostility which, it would seem, like her strange affections, had to be directed somewhere as an outlet, was focussed now on the guest.

  “There’s stew in this pot; take her a bowlful of that,” she said, beginning to bustle round the kitchen again. “I’ll have something more tasty for you when you come back.”

  Lou ladled the stew into a bowl, sniffing it suspiciously, and Tibby, catching her in the act, gave a harsh chuckle.

  “There’s nothing in it that would harm, a babe,” she said, and Lou let out a little sigh of thankfulness that at last the old woman seemed to have accepted her on equal terms.

  “You did doctor those potions you gave my cousin, to keep her here, didn’t you, Tibby?” she said casually, and Tibby sniffed.

  “Aye, I did,” she admitted defiantly. “‘Twasn’t meant at the time in spite for her, but it pleases me now to think of the vomiting she endured to stop on the island.”

  “You’re a wicked old woman,” Lou said, picking up Melissa’s tray, and both of them exchanged a smile of mutual respect and liking.

  Melissa was not in her own room, but across the passage in Lou’s, tearing clothes off their hangers and throwing them into suitcases, the mink coat clung across her shoulders, stoles and fur jackets bunched over her arm. Lou stood in the doorway watching her, the tray in her hands, and Melissa swung round guiltily.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, sounding relieved. “I thought at first it might be Piers.”

  “Piers,” said Lou gravely, “is out in the boat looking for Sam. You don’t seem to care, Melissa, that your trivial needs may be costing lives.”

  “What utter tripe! Sam shouldn’t have gone if it wasn’t safe, and Piers had no need to go chasing off like a distracted hen.”

  “You have no sense of values, have you? You couldn’t care less what happens so long as you get your favorite brand of cigarettes.”

  “Really, darling, you’re all making a frightful fuss about nothing, and your high-minded husband was damn rude to me. I’m well out of this marriage if it means playing second fiddle to this ghastly island, and you can keep the much publicized Piers Merrick with my blessing.”

  “Thank you,” Lou replied politely. “What are you doing with my clothes?”

  “Your clothes! I’m helping myself to some of my own trousseau, that’s all,” snapped Melissa. “I’m going to have something out of this half-baked plan of Blanche’s to get herself out of a jam, and you promised me the mink, anyway.”

  “The mink was a hostage for good behaviour,” Lou said with deceptive mildness. “Even you can hardly claim to have played fair. In any case, Piers will have the final say in what you take away tomorrow. For myself, I couldn’t care less.”

  Melissa eyed her doubtfully. Little Cousin Lou who had been of no consequence in their lives for so long l
ooked as dim as usual standing there in her dressing gown holding a tray like a schoolgirl dispatched on an errand, but there was something about her all the same that gave a belated warning for caution.

  “Lou—you’ve always been generous,” she began, her voice softening to the wheedling tones which once had had easy power over her cousin. “You have only to say the word to Piers and he’ll eat out of your hand. You’ve got him where you want—or didn’t you know?”

  Lou’s patience snapped, and with it the good manners she had been trying to hold on to.

  “Don’t you realize, you bitch, that he may not even come back? That while you’re standing here trying to bargain for a few furs and anything else you can get, I’m nearly out of my mind for Piers’ safety?” she shouted, and banged the tray down on the nearest table with such violence that Tibby’s stew splashed into Melissa’s face. “Here’s your supper, and I hope it chokes you! There’s no convenient drug in it this time to make you ill, and if there were I’d see you’re on the launch tomorrow if it’s the last thing I do, and I hope you are sick—sick as a dog—!”

  She began to run down the stairs, forgetful of her injured ankle until the sudden pain slowed her down and she reached out to the banister for support. The unfamiliar force of her own feelings had shocked her, not only into fresh anxiety for Piers, but the frightening realization of how easily murder might be done in the heat of the moment. She could, she thought, clinging shaking to the banister rail, have choked the life out of her abominable cousin without remorse.

  Somewhere in the house a door banged in the wind, the stove in the hall gave out an acrid belch of smoke and Tibby’s voice called suddenly from the kitchen.

  “Missis ... missis ... the launch is putting in. They’re back ... or one of ‘em is ...” Her voice faltered on the last words, and Lou sped down the dimly lit passage to the kitchen, ignoring her aching ankle.

  Tibby stood, gaunt and erect at the window. “See,” she said, pointing, as Lou joined her. “Lights ... voices ... the storm has surely lessened that you can hear the voices ...”