What Dread Hand?

by Christianna Brand

  Outside, a little breeze blew and a leaf tapped at the glass of the window pane; and a cock crowed, and faintly, faintly, the grey night skies were a-shimmer with the first pale promise of the dawn.

  So long ago… So long ago… Those others had gone forth and destroyed themselves, the young girl who had lived in an age of innocence, not waiting; the young widow waiting only a little while. But she—she had waited: and now crouched screaming, screaming… ‘Come back! Come back!’ But they did not come back. In all that white, shining, pitiless place there was no movement now, as in that room there had been no sound. Only the shush-shush sigh of the double doors left swinging in their panic flight. ‘Come back! Come back! Don’t leave me here alone! Don’t leave me here alone—with this!’

  But the doors sighed and were still, closing; upon whose frosted panes she could, from within, make out the mirror image—

  8

  Death of Don Juan

  ‘SO POSITIVELY, MY DARLING,’ said Don Juan, ‘this is the last embrace.’ He bestowed it languidly. ‘Tomorrow the announcement of my betrothal goes out to every newspaper in Paris.’

  ‘I shall kill myself,’ she said.

  ‘They all say that,’ said Don Juan. ‘My whole day has been a nightmare of threatened suicides.’ He handed her a tiny ornamental pistol from the table beside the couch. ‘Take this—it may assist you. A memento.’

  ‘A dangerous one?’ she suggested—dangerously.

  ‘Ah, danger! The spice of life. Why else have I lived with a gun always close to my hand? But alas!—those days are over: the jealous husbands enraged, the lovely ladies outraged.’ Or nearly over, he added, laughing, and brushed aside with his left hand, the tiny pistol, to point elsewhere than at his heart; with his right hand he fumbled beneath a cushion. ‘Come, here is something to avert, let us hope, my last threat of peril.’

  A jeweller’s box, its inner velvet raised to take a necklace, with indentations for seven hanging drops; in the box, however, only a single diamond. ‘A family heirloom,’ he said. ‘The Coqauvin “Collar of Tears”. The pendant, you see, shaped like a falling tear.’ And he lifted out the single diamond, tossed aside the empty box, placed the jewel in the palm of her left hand and folded her fingers over it with a kind little pat. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘A souvenir.’

  She sat, still and cold, looking down at the diamond drop in her hand. ‘And the other six?’

  ‘Dispersed,’ he said. ‘In the course of this one melancholy day—dispersed. Souvenirs of the kindnesses of my bachelor years.’

  ‘And the collar itself?’

  ‘Ah, the collar…’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘I will be frank with you, my dear. I had reserved the collar for you—I knew that for you no “tears” would be necessary: you alone would truly shed them. But—well, a lovely creature was importunate; she asked for them so prettily that…’ He shrugged again. ‘And so she has just departed—and with her the collar.’ He added smiling reminiscently that, of them all, she had certainly deserved it.

  ‘She who “deserved it” has the collar. And I—I!—a single stone?’

  ‘You and half a dozen others and none of them has made any complaint. And no one can say,’ he added complacently, ‘that I have not shed tears at parting. Seven lovely ladies—seven diamond tears.’

  ‘You have a heart of stone,’ she said. ‘No wonder you should also shed tears of stone.’ And she opened her fingers and looked down at the diamond, lying like a tiny pool of sorrow in the palm of her left hand; and lifted her right hand, levelled the little gun, and this time pulled the trigger.

  ‘Show Madame la Marquise to my boudoir,’ said Madame la Duchesse de Marlaine. She gave a small, elegant wriggle to adjust the bustle of her dress, glanced in a looking glass to see that her rouge was not too evident, and assumed a welcoming smile. ‘Celèstine, how charming! But, my dear, why so pale?’

  ‘Nonsense, Margeurite, I am no paler than usual.’ Madame la Marquise forced herself to a gossipy tone. ‘I only dropped in to ask you—have you heard the news?’

  ‘The news?’ said the Duchess.

  ‘Don Juan is dead.’

  ‘Le Vicomte Coqauvin? Yes, I had heard. I have, in fact, sent out the children’s governess to gather further details. Is it true he was murdered?’

  ‘Shot through the heart, they say.’

  ‘That must have taken some locating,’ said the Duchess, dryly.

  ‘Then you knew him, Margeurite?’

  ‘I knew his reputation. And the Duke, when he was alive, was acquainted with him—le Vicomte has dined here. But not, of course since—A woman so recently a widow has to be careful.’

  ‘Especially a young, rich and beautiful widow,’ said Madame la Marquise.

  ‘Almost as careful as a young, rich and beautiful wife,’ agreed the Duchess. She added: ‘Is it true that you’ve been trying to buy a diamond from Solange Vivante? Her maid told my governess—’

  Madame la Marquise became even paler than before. ‘That governess of yours, Margeurite! Nothing escapes her.’

  ‘An invaluable creature,’ said the Duchess. ‘But alas!—she will be leaving me soon—she is going to be married. Her young man is even now in Paris, waiting to take her away. Meanwhile, however, my dear—about Solange Vivante?’

  ‘Well, yes, Margeurite, it’s true that she has this single stone—a diamond drop, shaped like a tear. I happen to have one very much like it—’

  ‘Have you indeed?’ said the Duchess.

  ‘—and I thought they would make a nice pair…’

  ‘I had no idea,’ said the Duchess, ‘that Solange possessed such a gem. She showed it to you?’

  ‘Not exactly showed it. I—I dropped round to see her, to discuss the murder, just as I’ve dropped in upon you, Margeurite; and by the purest chance—only Solange, of course, won’t believe me—I went into her dressing-room to borrow a handkerchief and just happened to notice this diamond—’

  ‘If people will keep their jewels in their handkerchief drawers,’ agreed the Duchess, ‘they simply ask to be discovered.’ She enquired before the other could comment: ‘And were you successful?’

  ‘Successful, Margeurite?’

  ‘In borrowing a handkerchief, my dear.’ She flung out a hand towards her own bedroom. ‘If you want one of mine, by all means help yourself. But alas!—you will find no diamond “tear” and, in fact, since they seem of a sudden to be all the rage, I begin to covet one myself. I suppose, as you were not able to make up the pair, you wouldn’t sell me yours?’

  ‘Sell mine? Margeurite, I could not dream of it. You will understand,’ said Madame la Marquise uneasily, ‘a family jewel…’

  ‘Oh, I understand—perfectly,’ said the Duchess. ‘But then—of what family?’

  But the governess had returned and now presented herself before their ladyships, face blanched, eyes popping. ‘Compose yourself, girl,’ said the Duchess. ‘You look like a demented hare. What is all this excitement?’

  ‘Oh, Madame la Duchesse, please excuse me, but after all, it is exciting! Everyone is talking about it. And having met him here, here in this house—’

  ‘Having gaped at him one day in the hall, Mademoiselle, as the manservant showed him out—’

  ‘—having seen him, at any rate, with my own eyes—’

  But Madame la Marquise could no longer contain her impatience. ‘Come, Mademoiselle!—what news?’

  ‘He was found by his valet this morning, my lady. He had dismissed the man for the whole day, he said he would be—entertaining. Entertaining several ladies, he said, and for the last time; and he kissed his fingers and blew the kiss into the air—many kisses; and then he laughed—’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Duchess, but her mouth was stiff. ‘So it was for the last time. What else?’

  ‘And so he was found, my lady. He was lying on the couch in the salon, the couch where—where they say he…’ She broke off in confusion. ‘There was a jewel box beside him, empty. The vale
t says it was one that held a necklace—a diamond collar with seven large hanging drops.’

  ‘And so?’ said the Duchess, not looking at Madame la Marquise.

  ‘Well, and so, Madame, Don Juan was dead. He may have died at any time—no one admits to having seen him after the valet was dismissed, about midday. He had been shot many times, but the first shot had killed him.’

  ‘With what weapon?’

  ‘With his own, Madame, or so they suppose—it is missing from his room. A small pearl-handled pistol. He kept it always on the table beside the couch.’

  ‘It wasn’t there last night,’ said the Duchess, and broke off quickly, her hand clapped to her mouth, staring, wide-eyed at Madame la Marquise.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Madame la Marquise; and clapped her hand to her mouth and stood staring back.

  ‘Goodness!’ exclaimed the little governess: and stood staring at both of them.

  For a few moments, Madame la Marquise could not imagine who Mademoiselle Brune might be: nor why—for she proved to be the Duchesse de Marlaine’s governess—such a person should want to see her.

  Mademoiselle Brune soon enlightened her. ‘I come to make my adieux, Madame.’

  Well really! ‘You are leaving Paris?’ said Madame la Marquise, coldly. One could only trust that the Duchess’s chef and femmes de chambre were not also departing—would they too make a round of farewells to her ladyship’s friends?

  ‘For England, Madame. I am going to be married.’

  ‘I trust you will be very happy,’ said Madame la Marquise. Without enthusiasm, however; to be happily married, let alone living in wedlock, in England, must surely be a contradiction in terms.

  Mademoiselle Brune was more sanguine. But… It was all so much a matter of money nowadays. Her Englishman’s family were enquiring about her dowry. Life as a governess had not been very rewarding…

  ‘No doubt, Mademoiselle. But what has all this to do with me?’

  Once again Mademoiselle Brune enlightened Madame la Marquise. A little—shall we say, collection?—among the Duchess’s friends. Already, for example. Mademoiselle Solange Vivante had been most generous…

  The tear-shaped diamond reached the Duchess that evening, by hand, with a request for its price by return. Madame la Marquise found herself suddenly in urgent need of money—and did not care, apparently, to approach her husband for it.

  The Duchess put the diamond away—though not in her handkerchief drawer—and sat for a long time in deep thought. Then she sent for the governess. ‘So, Mademoiselle, before your departure to England—a little blackmail?’

  ‘Madame will not give me away,’ said the governess; and it was not a question.

  ‘Of course not,’ said the Duchess. She looked Mademoiselle Brune in the eyes. ‘After all, I have the diamond—two diamonds, in fact, for I have already been approached by Mademoiselle Vivante—’

  ‘At my suggestion,’ said the governess. She looked back, just as squarely, at the Duchess. ‘One hears that Clara Malheure, the opera singer, was wearing a new diamond during the first act, tonight. And she was—they also say—a friend of le Vicomte Coqauvin.’

  ‘With what wings,’ said the Duchess, ‘does an item of gossip fly to those little pink ears of yours!’ And she rang for her maid. ‘My cloak and a veil. I am going to the Opera, for the last act. Tell the nurse to take over the children; Mademoiselle Brune will accompany me.’

  Madame Clara’s role seemed hardly so exacting as to account for her prostration in tears on the couch of her dressing-room. Astonishment revived her, however, when Madame la Duchesse de Marlaine was announced. ‘Madame! An honour!’

  ‘I will keep you only a moment, Madame. I came merely to ask you about the diamond you wore tonight. I wonder, is it by any chance for sale?’

  ‘For sale?’ cried Madame Clara, outraged. ‘For sale? This diamond, Madame, was given to me by a friend. A friend who is now—who is dead, Madame.’

  ‘And murdered at that?’ murmured the Duchess, sympathetically.

  ‘Very well—le Vicomte Coqauvin: I make no secret of it. He gave it to me—I forget just when,’ said Madame Clara casually. ‘Some time last week. I never saw him again; you find me desolated…’

  ‘At any rate, Madame, the pendant is not for sale?’

  Madame Clara looked round the shoddy dressing-room and a gleam of longing lit her red-rimmed eyes. But she put her hand to her throat and held the diamond tight. ‘It is not for sale.’

  The Duchess bowed to necessity. She rose. ‘A tragic business. His own pistol too, one hears.’

  ‘He kept it always on the table by his couch,’ ventured Mademoiselle Brune.

  ‘It wasn’t there last night,’ said the Duchess; and clapped her hand to her mouth and stared: and waited.

  Madame Clara did not fail her. ‘Yes, it was,’ she said; and, stricken, stared back.

  The governess did not immediately follow my lady from the dressing-room. A modest compliment upon Madame’s performance, a diffident hope that in the near future more prominent roles might reward so remarkable a talent—Madame Clara ground her fine teeth behind lips forced to complaisant smiling—a respectful farewell. Mademoiselle Brune was departing for England.

  Madame Clara trusted Mademoiselle would be happy and waited with unconcealed impatience for her to go. What a gaffe, blurting it out before she could stop herself!—that it had been last night that she had been there, the very night of his murder. How fortunate that neither of them—the Duchess or the governess—had apparently noticed its significance! ‘Well, Mademoiselle, I will not keep you. Good wishes for your happiness.’

  Alas, said Mademoiselle Brune, that one’s happiness these days should so much depend upon material things. The English were scornful of a poor governess’s dowry…

  Madame Clara’s diamond reached the Duchess by hand the next evening as she sat among the ormolu and Sèvres in her exquisite salon, entertaining her cousin, la Princesse Charitée de Blanc. ‘A jewel I bought from some second-rate little singer. Poor Coqauvin left it to her—or so she says. What a shocking thing that was! With his own weapon too, I’m told.’

  The Duchess’s children were present, in their best bibs and tuckers, to pay their respects to their cousin, Charitée, and accept a bedtime bon-bon; Mademoiselle Brune, of course, in attendance. And Mademoiselle in the excitement of the moment quite lost her head and forgetting in whose august presence she was, burst out, ‘They say it always lay on the table by his couch.’

  ‘It wasn’t there last night,’ said the Duchess.

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ said the Princess.

  ‘A dud?’ signalled the governess to Madame la Duchesse, over the royal head.

  Or not? They discussed it later that night. ‘You had better visit her just the same,’ said the Duchess. ‘She will not refuse to see you: she is noted for her charity—so aptly named! Sound her out very carefully. If she has the diamond, she is bound to pay with it—she hasn’t a soul these days, poor dear, and her family jewels were all sold long ago…’

  But the Princess had no diamond; trembled, turned pale, hardly troubled to deny a past affair with the dead man, but allowed the governess to depart unsatisfied. And the Duchess’s dear friend, Madame Romain, proved a failure also, and one or two more; but la Vicomtesse Lachasse came across with no trouble at all and la Comtesse du Jean and Madame de Gris… And at last a day came when the Duchess could say, weighing the glittering hoard in a hand already heavy with rings, ‘That is the last. Now I have them all—all seven of Don Juan’s “tears”. And you, Mademoiselle, half a dozen times their value in cash—no inconsiderable dowry for a poor little governess. You will be rich.’

  ‘I have earned it,’ said the governess, not without spirit.

  ‘Oh, certainly and I don’t grudge it to you. All I wanted was the seven “tears” and no suspicion attaching to myself of—’

  ‘—of blackmail,’ said the governess.

  The Duchess stiffened a little. �
�That word on your lips, Mademoiselle, might well prove double-edged. And I see no cause for you to make yourself disagreeable. Our task is done, our partnership at an end. You have your money and may depart from the scene. And I have the seven diamond drops.’

  ‘And your revenge,’ said the governess.

  Now the Duchess sat very still indeed—very still and remote. She said at last, and there was ice in her voice: ‘What do you mean?’

  The little governess trembled but she stuck to her guns. Greed had grown rampant in her heart from the seeds which, but a brief few days ago, a slip of the tongue had implanted there. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that you wanted the seven jewels, not for what they mean to you but for what they meant to them—to his other women. They dared to compete with you for his favours, but the prizes shall not remain in their hands. And since you have bought them without concealment—“unaware” of course, of the reasons they were offered for sale—you may flaunt them round that white neck of yours for all to see.’

  The Duchess laughed—if you could call it laughing. ‘Are you suggesting that I was a mistress of the Vicomte Coqauvin?’

  And the governess laughed also—if you could call it laughing; and mimicked: ‘It wasn’t there last night,’ and clapped her hand to her mouth and stared in insolent imitation. ‘Poor fools!—so obsessed with their own slips that it never occurred to them to ask you, “How do you know?”’

  ‘The answer to that is simple: what I said was a trap.’

  ‘Not the first time,’ said the governess.

  This time the Duchess really laughed. ‘My poor girl, you over-reach yourself. I was not conducting an affair with Monsieur Coqauvin.’

  ‘Then where did you get the seventh diamond?’ said the governess; and she pointed to the glittering drops in the Duchess’s hand. ‘Madame la Marquise, the opera singer, Mademoiselle Vivante, the Mesdames Lachasse, du Jean and de Gris. Six ladies, Madame—six diamonds. So where did you get the seventh?’

  The Duchess, slowly, with a white forefinger, segregated a single stone. ‘It is true that I came by one of these without your assistance.’