Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  The moment they had gone, Susan swung the door shut and ran to the chest. She picked up the camera and then stood looking uncertainly about the room. Was there anything else? Any other object that would speak to her as she had felt the camera would? There seemed to be nothing and she went to the closed door and stood very still, listening for any sound she might catch from the hall beyond. All seemed to be quiet.

  She opened the door cautiously. No one was in sight. The door of Mara’s room stood closed. Moving almost stealthily, Susan hurried along the hall and down the stairs to the landing. At the newel post in the entry hall below Mara stood waiting for her. The flush had vanished from her cheeks and she was very pale. Her eyes went at once to the camera.

  For an uneasy instant Susan wondered if she might try to take it from her, but her entire purpose had been keyed to this moment. She would not be stopped or delayed. She went down the stairs with all the stubbornness and determination of her father and passed Mara without a word. The other woman did not try to stop her, and she went directly to her father’s study and closed its door behind her.

  The room seemed empty and strange without his familiar figure behind the great desk. But this was where she wanted to be, and she must be here when he was not present. There was no key by which she could lock Mara out and she could only hope that the woman would not follow her here. Quietly she seated herself on a small footstool in one corner, the camera in her hands. Even the choice of the footstool as a place to sit seemed right, and part of a pattern in which she now seemed to move without volition or choice.

  Her father had been right in what he had said today about the camera. She had indeed told him of dropping it and breaking the lens. He had summoned her into his study to lecture her on the subject of being more careful with her possessions. He had told her to sit on this very stool—which had been just her size. She could remember the way she had stared at the pattern in the carpet while he talked to her about her increasing carelessness.

  She had been upset, but had not then been filled with paralyzing alarm. Indeed, she had been more uncomfortable listening to his words than she had been frightened. Mainly she had been sorry about the camera, which she had treasured, and hopeful that he might mend it or buy her a new one.

  It developed quickly that he intended nothing of the kind: “When I was a boy,” he said, “and I broke something out of carelessness, I was told that I must either mend it myself or do without. I believe we’ve come to the place where this rule must be applied to you, Susan. I’m afraid you must now mend your camera yourself or go without.”

  His words were a blow, but still not terrifying. She sat hunched upon the footstool with tears in her eyes, wondering if she could move him to pity so that he would relent. But she knew this was not likely. When the telephone on his desk rang, he picked it up calmly enough. Neither of them had known that the call would change everything in life for them, that afterwards nothing would be the same again.

  She remembered watching him a little resentfully, waiting for the call to end, so that his attention could return to her. But it had not. His face had blanched and his voice turned cold as he answered the person on the wire. She could recall the very words he had spoken, but who it was she never knew—a friend? a business acquaintance? the police?

  “What you are saying is impossible. I have no uncut diamonds in my possession. Neither here nor in Johannesburg.”

  The man on the other end of the wire went on and Susan saw her father’s expression grow strained and grim as he listened. When he hung up the phone he touched the bell that summoned the maid and sent her to find Claire. He looked so coldly formidable that Susan edged her stool into a corner and sat very still so that he would not notice her and vent his anger upon her.

  How well she remembered her mother coming gaily into the room. She was wearing a flowered green dress, the color of ferns, and in her hair a white rose. Then she had seen her husband’s face and the smile had left her own. This was when the time of terror had begun.

  Coldly Niklaas told her that, thanks to a lead from some outside source, his house in Johannesburg had been searched and a cache of uncut diamonds had been found there. What, he demanded, could she tell him of this? Claire began to weep and deny, but Niklaas persisted in cold accusation. When she would not answer, he left his desk and took her by her soft plump shoulders, shaking her until she went limp in his hands. Limp and ready to admit everything. Yes, she had managed to take the stones when she was working for the company. She had not wanted to give them up. They had meant safety and security, no matter what happened. And diamonds were so pretty, so fascinating.

  Neither had noticed the child in the corner, withered by the cruel anger, the accusations, and the rising voices. The telephone began to ring again, but Niklaas ignored it. He flung Claire from him roughly, so that she fell against the desk and bruised her arm. She had shown Susan the blue mark later as evidence of his cruelty. He had almost stepped on Susan, cowering in her corner, before he saw her. Then he had shouted at her to get out of this room and stay out. She had no business here. She was to leave at once!

  Terrified, Susan fled from the room and upstairs, the camera still clutched in her hands. All her small world that was bounded so securely by her parents had been shivered into fearful splinters by those angry voices downstairs. Wounding splinters that pierced her spirit as glass might have pierced her flesh. Her father detested her, that was clear. He had looked at her with hatred in his eyes, and her mother had done nothing to come to her aid. Her mother, giving in to an excess of wild weeping, had forgotten she existed.

  Her own room upstairs was lonely and the camera in her hands reproached her. The conviction was growing in her young mind that she had brought all these terrible things about when she had wickedly broken the camera her father had given her. For a while she sat on the bed in her room turning the small black box this way and that, wondering how she could fix the broken lens. If only she could mend it and make the camera work again, then surely her father would stop hating her and stop hating her mother. Her mother would stop crying and there would be no more angry words shouted between them.

  Because of her enormous need, the answer came to her quite simply and clearly. It would take a very special sort of glass to make a lens, and it was possible that she knew where there was just such a piece she might use. Moving on tiptoe, without a sound, she ran into her mother’s room and prodded with her fingers in the powder bowl. The stone was still there.

  Now, so many years later, the grown-up Susan crouched on the footstool as the child had done, and her hands trembled as she opened the camera. Like Mara upstairs, she peered into the box. It was black inside and empty. There was nothing there. The film holder had long been lost and the camera was useless. She shook it hard as Mara had done and something shiny fell out in her lap. She picked it up and held it on the palm of her hand. It was only a piece of the broken lens.

  Then she reached her fingers deep inside the box and felt behind the shutter. Nerves prickled at the back of her neck. Fumbling in her haste, she managed to pry up an end of sticky material that ripped loose when she pulled it. Stuck to her fingers was a strip of black mending tape that had been stuck crossways behind the shutter. Again her fingers searched and found the second crisscross of tape. When she pulled it loose something came with it, adhering to the material. Held in place as it had been by the covering of almost invisible black tape, it had lain hidden all these years. Susan stared in fascination at the stone she held in her hand.

  It was colorless and transparent, perhaps an inch or more in length and somewhat less in thickness, cut in an oblong shape. In the shadowy room it lay lusterless upon her palm with none of the shimmer of a diamond. But diamonds, of course, once freed from the darkness of the inner earth where they were born in fire, could live only upon light.

  She walked to the French doors and stepped through them. Bright daylight flooded the terrace. When she held out her hand the Kimberley Royal spr
ang magically to life. Light splintered into bright rainbows in its depths and glinted blue fire from the very heart of the stone. Yet it was a fire without warmth, and the stone was cold in her hand. It seemed to her a stone of evil omen and she was unable to suppress the quiver that touched her skin to gooseflesh.

  Returning to the shadows, she sat in her father’s chair with the camera before her on the desk. She could remember everything now. Men in uniform had come to the house and her father had gone away with them. There had been no time to show him the mended camera after all, so the bad fortune held, the evil she had done did not end. Her mother had cried endlessly, while the child, Susan, sat in her room and stared at the mountain until it seemed to lean menacingly toward her. Perhaps if she stared long enough, it would tip over and crush her—which was, no doubt, what she truly deserved.

  So much she remembered!

  How heavy the diamond seemed now in her hands, colder than any other stone, leaving her as chill as the stone itself.

  There had been a further outburst from her mother when Claire had found the stone missing from her powder bowl. But she had not known whom to accuse or where to turn without betraying herself. She had questioned her daughter tearfully, but Susan by that time had been too frightened to confess what she had done. Besides, this was something for her father to see. Only he would understand about the camera.

  She knew now why her mother had fled from Africa. Claire had been afraid that she would be the one to go to prison, and that was something she could not face. But Niklaas had taken her guilt upon his own shoulders and his “confession” had left her free to do as she pleased. The fact that the Kimberley was missing had not come to light until years later as far as the public was concerned. And in the meantime Claire had urged forgetfulness upon her daughter. “Forget, forget,” her mother had said. “Don’t try to remember what happened there.” And Susan, confused, frightened, guilt-ridden almost to the point of illness, had drawn a merciful veil across her memory. Only now and then through the years had the veil fluttered, lifting away from the terror it had hidden. Whenever she dropped something or broke even the most trifling object, the gossamer shield would tremble, allowing incomprehensible fears to flow through her.

  The sickness and hurt were back again in this moment, magnified many times over, though the guilt sense had faded. Her hurt was for her father now and all her love. She understood her mother’s guilt and her father’s innocence. Only that disturbing thing she had seen in the flower market stood unexplained in her mind, and because of what had happened in the past she would not now accept that without giving him a chance to answer for himself.

  Distant voices sounded in another part of the house and she wondered if he had come home. She would wait for him here and when he came in she would give him the stone. He had paid for it with his own fortune. It belonged to him now. But more than that, she would tell him the things she had remembered and she would tell him what she had seen in the flower market.

  Steps sounded in the hallway outside the door, but the footfall was firm and decisive, not the slightly shuffling sound of an elderly blind man’s step. She had just time to slip the diamond into her handbag and click the camera shut before the door opened and Dirk came into the room.

  There was an electric excitement in him, she saw at once. Something had happened to him that she did not understand and it made her wary. He swooped down upon her and pulled her out of the chair and into his arms.

  “I have missed you!” he cried, his cheek against her bright hair.

  When he kissed her she waited for the melting to run through her, and the familiar warm response of her blood. But nothing happened. Only the wariness remained and a resistance to his arms. He sensed her lack of response and dropped his arms from about her, but he offered no reproach.

  “I went home first,” he told her, “and then phoned here. Mara said you were in the house, so I came right over. I wanted to surprise you.” His eyes searched her face keenly. “And I see that I have.”

  “You should have let me know, so I could be at the airport to meet you,” she said, trying to cover whatever she might have betrayed. “I’m just home from the drive around the Cape with my father.”

  “And with John Cornish?” he said.

  He reached past her across the desk and picked up the camera as she watched him uneasily. Her father must know before anyone else that she had found the stone. She had no intention of telling Dirk. He looked into the box almost idly and dropped it back on the desk. Had Mara told him of her sudden appearance in the room upstairs and of how she had taken the camera down to the study? But, though Mara had looked into the box, the black tape would have kept her from seeing anything. There was nothing she could have told Dirk except that his wife had carried away the camera.

  “Are you ready to go up the mountain?” Dirk asked, still smiling in that oddly elated way.

  “Up the mountain?” she echoed. “Now?”

  “Why not? There’s plenty of daylight left and the cars are running. I noticed on the way over. Remember—I promised to take you up there the very first thing when I got home.”

  “I’ve made one trip today,” she objected feebly. “It’s not as important as all that. Let’s go tomorrow.”

  “It’s important to me,” he said, and she knew that the imperious mood when he would not be balked in his most trivial wish was once more upon him.

  She shook her head helplessly, aware that opposition would only stiffen him in his purpose, yet not knowing what else to offer. She had no heart for the mountain now. She wanted only to sit at this desk and wait until her father and John Cornish came home.

  “Of course we’ll go now,” he said. “You’re dressed for it with low-heeled shoes, a warm coat, and slacks for climbing. Besides, we may not have time for this again.”

  There was an air of triumph in the puzzling words that made her stare at him.

  “I’ve something to tell you,” he said. “But let’s get started first. We can talk about it at tea on the mountaintop. Come along, darling.”

  He held out his hand and took a step toward her. Then he paused, looking down at the carpet to see what he had stepped on. Lifting one foot, he examined the sole of his shoe. Susan watched as he peeled a black strip of sticky tape from the leather. Instead of discarding it, he turned it about in his fingers, studying it as if it had something to tell him.

  Quite suddenly Susan was frightened. She did not want him to suspect that she had found the diamond or that she carried it in her bag. She did not know how he would take the discovery of so much wealth that her father did not know existed. What if he tried to persuade her not to tell Niklaas? She forced her fascinated gaze from the bit of black stuff in his fingers and stood up, her handbag flung carelessly by its strap over her shoulder, as if it could not possibly hold a fortune.

  “All right,” she said. “Since you’re in the mood, let’s go up the mountain.”

  He dropped the strip of tape into an ash tray and linked his arm through hers. “Good girl! We’ll be up on top in no time at all. I’ll show you the greatest sight in the world, and I’ll tell you my news.”

  What did it matter? she thought. It would be better to make the trip up the mountain and get it out of the way since he wanted to go. Safer, really, than to sit here behaving in a way that was clearly odd, waiting for her father to come home.

  Dirk called upstairs to Mara to tell her where they were going and they went out together to his car.

  22

  Once they were on their way she felt a little better. Now that she had given in to what he wanted, he was in a gay mood—cheerful and amusing and affectionate. If she had not been carrying a fortune in her handbag, she might have felt more at ease with him.

  They left the car in the parking place at the foot of the cable house and went up the long flight of stairs inside the building. A car was about to leave and when Dirk had bought tickets, they hurried to join the group going through the door. On th
e walls of the cable house were huge pictures of British royalty visiting the top of Table Mountain—pictures of the younger princesses Elizabeth and Margaret coming down the steps from the landing platform with their mother, the Queen.

  In the tunnel-like room there was a steady clanking of cable machinery, and ahead people were packing themselves into the small car. The guard had a South African accent, dropping his h’s and blurring his syllables as he performed an obviously routine task. The holiday visitors to the mountaintop were a gay lot, the girls ready to laugh, the men showing off just a little.

  There were small end seats in the car, but no one wanted to sit down. Part of the fun was to look out the windows as the car went up the mountain. Dirk was the last one in behind Susan. The door closed and the car slid gently away from the platform and began its smooth climb up the cable to the top. No one seemed to mind the fact that passengers leaned dizzily out the open windows. When Susan looked down at the steepening rock cliffs below she was glad to have Dirk’s arm firmly about her.

  She inched her handbag more securely up the shoulder away from the window and kept a hand upon its clasp. The thought of dropping the Kimberley Royal down a mountainside or of having her pocket picked made her feel quite hollow.

  How small the car seemed against all this spread of nearby rock and distant hills and ocean. Even the tawny head of the Lion, with the sun dipping toward it, was left below as the car swept upward, its tiny shadow moving along the cliffs below. Murmurs from the passengers made Susan turn in time to see the sister car coming down, carrying its waving human freight. If only she could catch a little more of this holiday spirit and fill the queer hollow within, still the fearful shivering that had begun as the car moved up the mountain. It was not the height that frightened her, and the diamond was perfectly safe in her bag, so she was not sure why she trembled.

  The trip took only a few minutes. As the car reached the final steep rampart of rock, Susan looked out dizzily to see a girl and boy in shorts and cleated boots, ropes tied about their waists, as they sought for toeholds in the sheer precipice. Again the quiver ran through her. Rock climbing, certainly, would never be for her. This ascent in a suspended car was quite enough.