The Five-Minute Marriage

by Joan Aiken

  “Well, no matter! Where—where is Mr. Gareth?”

  “He and Mr. Fitz is in the library, miss. Shan’t I tell ‘em you’re here—or take you where you can change—”

  “No, first lead this good man to a fire—I can announce myself! And then if you could have somebody fetch my bag, which—which is in Mr. Mordred’s carriage—”

  Looking somewhat bemused at these odd directions, Fidd hobbled off, followed by the driver.

  Delphie walked without hesitation to the library door, and opened it.

  She walked into what seemed like a scene of debauch. Gareth and Mordred were seated, facing one another, at the center table. Both looked decidedly the worse for drink. They were in shirt sleeves, and Gareth’s dark locks were much disarranged. Between them were upward of half a dozen bottles, mostly empty, some lying on their sides. More bottles lay on the floor. By the light of several guttering candles, Delphie could see that Gareth’s face was unusually flushed, his eyes bloodshot. Mordred, on the contrary, was very pale, and his eyes seemed to glitter unnaturally in the flickering light. He looked, thought Delphie, quite as evil as she had for some time believed him to be: evil and rapacious. He had been staring down at the great flashing ring on Gareth’s right hand. His expression did not change when Delphie opened the door, though he pressed his lips tight together. Then, ignoring Delphie completely, he said to Gareth,

  “Make haste! Finish that bottle! It’s time for our wager!”

  But Gareth had turned and was gazing at Delphie in bewilderment. It was plain that he was very drunk indeed.

  “My God!” he said, gripping Mordred’s arm across the table, and pointing with his other hand. “She’s come again! Or is it her ghost? She’s all wet and dripping—like last time—only then it was t’other one—fell—fell in moat—like Great-uncle Lancelot!”

  “Stuff!” said Mordred briskly—it was apparent to Delphie that he was not nearly so drunk as Gareth, perhaps not drunk at all. “You are fancying things—seeing visions, my boy! Nothing is there. Come along—let’s go up!”

  “Gareth!” said Delphie, but Gareth, looking at his cousin in a puzzled manner, inquired,

  “Up? Up where?”

  “Do you not remember? Our wager?”

  “Gareth!” exclaimed Delphie again, but Gareth, urged by Mordred, had risen shakily to his feet.

  “Wager—yes, wager,” he mumbled. “Never refuse—honorable wager. Can’t quite—quite remember—terms of it though—”

  “Gareth!” cried Delphie, quite desperately now, for his cousin was guiding his rather staggering progress toward the far end of the library. She moved after them, and said, “Gareth, can you hear me? Can you understand me?”

  “Did she not speak?” Gareth said in a troubled voice. “Are you certain you don’t see her, Fitz? She did look devilish like Cousin Delphie. Only wet—wet as a herring!”

  “You’re a trifle foxed, old fellow, that’s all,” said Mordred.

  “Drunk—drunk as a wheelbarrow,” agreed Gareth, swaying.

  “You did this to him!” said Delphie furiously to Mordred. And to Gareth she cried,

  “Don’t trust Mordred, Gareth! He means harm to you—I am sure of it! I am sure of it! Do not be taking part in his wager!”

  “Can’t refuse honorable wager,” said Gareth stubbornly.

  “Of course you cannot,” said Mordred. “Come along, old fellow—up the stairs—when you start talking to your visions it means you’re a bit bosky and it’s time for bed.”

  Running forward, Delphie tried to reach for Gareth’s hand, but Mordred pushed a table in her way and then half pulled, half hoisted Gareth up a short flight of stairs that led to an upper gallery in the library. The stair had a gate at the foot, which he locked after passing through it, pocketing the key, so that Delphie was cut off from them.

  “Gareth! Don’t go with Mordred!” she called. “He means mischief.”

  But they had passed through a door above, and disappeared from view.

  She was sure from the expression on Mordred’s face that he had no intention of seeing Gareth tamely to his bed. But where were they going? She shook the gate at the foot of the library stair. It rattled, but held against her. Foiled, Delphie ran out of the library and up the main stairs to the hall above. Turning right, in the same direction as that in which the library lay downstairs, she ran along a passage, groping her way in the meager light cast from behind her by a lamp on a table near the stair head. She opened a succession of doors, but all, from the darkness and enclosed smell within, seemed to lead into disused bedrooms. At last she achieved her object and found herself in the gallery, looking down at the dying candles and flickering fire of the library below. There was the stair with the locked gate. But this was where the two men had been. Where were they now?

  Returning to the corridor, Delphie heard the great front door slam, and voices in the hall. Was that Elaine arriving? But she ignored the voices. This was no time to worry about Elaine.

  She sniffed the air like a bloodhound, and then turned to her right, following the faint flavor of brandy which hung in the stuffy passage behind the departed pair. Listening intently she thought she could just distinguish the faint sound of a door slamming somewhere ahead. A lightning flash momentarily illuminated the whole length of the corridor ahead: it was empty, but the slam had been a long way off. Delphie picked up her sopping skirts and ran to the end. She opened a door, and, by another flash, discovered that it gave onto a flight of stairs, again leading up. Here, too, she thought, she could faintly discern the aroma of brandy.

  Where could they be going? To the servants’ quarters? The attics? At the top of the stairs she stopped, casting about. A passage ran both ways. And then, in the distance, glinting in the lightning flash, she saw something that lay on the floor. Through the velvet dark that followed the flash, blanketing her eyes, she made her way along until her foot struck the object. Stooping, she picked it up. Its outline was familiar; after a moment’s concentration she recognized it: a little curved, gold-inlaid tortoiseshell snuffbox belonging to Gareth. She had often seen him use it. So they had passed this way. Now where? She paused, uncertain, for there were several more doors here, and no whiff of brandy to guide her. Then a cold damp touch of air on her cheek gave her a lead; in the next flash of lightning she noticed a small door which stood a crack ajar as if, when recently closed, the latch had failed to hold. She opened it, and instantly smelt the wet air above, heavy with the rank, acid smell of rain-soaked leads and old roofing tiles. Another short flight of steps led up to a kind of parapet, where she stopped, nervously gripping the stone balustrade, afraid of where she might be, until the next flash of lightning should come to guide her.

  When it came, she could see that the aged mansion’s roof was like a moonworld all around her. The slates flashed almost white in the electric glare from above—towers and battlements stood up like rocks, with their crenellations etching a jagged line across her eyeballs against the livid blue of the luminous sky beyond. When the dark fell again, the ridges of different roof sections lay across her remembered vision in a series of broken parallels. What a strange, huge region! How would she ever dare explore it, in this intermittent light? But the two men were out there somewhere. She knew it—had known it all along, she felt now; somehow she had understood in her bones that when Mordred referred to the wager, he had a scheme in his mind related to that other affair of long ago, the duel on the roof between Lancelot and Mark.

  But where had they gone? Another flash helped her to memorize the contours of the area close to where she stood: the small door through which she had emerged had brought her into a kind of flat, leaded valley, between four rising ridges. Nervously she began to climb the pent of a ridge, and, as she had hooked her fingers over its angle, another flash suddenly revealed the two men, about fifteen yards away from her, moving behind a great outcrop of twisted, sloped, bent, crow-stepped, intricately piled chimney stacks. Somehow Delphie managed to scrambl
e over the peak of her ridge; then she waited, afraid to venture farther until she was certain that the ravine of an inner courtyard did not lie between her and her quarry.

  Another flash came, and again she followed, surmounting yet another ridge—yet another—skirting around a gable, feeling her way among a jumble of slate and stone. Now she saw the men again—rather nearer; they seemed to have come to a stop, on a flat open place with nothing beyond it but darkness. She caught a voice—Mordred’s—saying:

  “Best take that off—wouldn’t wish any accident to overtake the family ruby—!”

  Now the two men were standing close together, comparing, it seemed, the lengths of objects which they held; then they turned and walked apart, pacing, measuring. Gareth still swayed drunkenly, as if blown by the wind—it seemed incredible that he had managed to stagger so far through this wilderness. He must have been buoyed up by the irrational sense of balance that sometimes carries drunkards along paths narrow as tightropes and beside the verge of precipices.

  “Stop!” shouted Delphie. “Gareth, come back! Mordred, I can see you! Don’t shoot!”

  But they were ignoring her, they were on the other side of a drop filled with crisscrossing walls, exhibited like actors on a stage. They stood braced, each in the same attitude, one leg forward, one back, in the posture of archers, each pointing a pistol.

  The light went suddenly, and then came back again, a huge leaden glare, throwing every shadow as distinct and sharp as if it had that instant been traced out in wet black paint. The lightning seemed to hover in the sky for a dreamlike spell of time—perhaps ten seconds in reality; the crack of the pistols was drowned by a huge roll of thunder which followed, but Delphie saw the red flash from one of them—Mordred’s. Another blaze of light an instant later showed Gareth fallen and rolling toward an edge of blackness—and it showed Delphie something else, too: Elaine Carteret, white-faced, glaring at Mordred, half a dozen paces away from him.

  She heard Mordred exclaim:

  “How the devil did you get up here? I expected t’other one—not you!”

  “Nurse Durnett told me the way up—she guessed what you would be at. You murderer! You vile murderer!”

  “Well, really, m’dear, it is only what you yourself intended. You said so! Now, where the devil did I lay that ring?” He stooped, searching about; by the light of the next flash, Delphie saw Elaine violently strike his head with the pistol butt. He staggered and fell backward over the edge into darkness, and she flung the pistol after him. Then, stooping also, she snatched up something and ran away, climbing the roof ridges with the speed of a lizard, vanishing over a distant series of sierras.

  But Delphie began with slow and careful labor making her way in the opposite direction, toward where she had seen Gareth last. Four—five lightning flashes—and she must be nearly there; now she was on the wide flat expanse of lead roof where they had stood, and could see that beyond a low parapet, only an inch or two high, there lay nothing but black space. Trembling, she levered a bit of rubble out from between the bricks of a chimney stack and tossed it away into the dark; she thought she heard a splash. Did the moat lie down there?

  By the next flash she confirmed that it did: she could see the outer bank, and a few heads of water lilies, closed for the night into black spearheads, outlined against the silvered water. The lightning had shown her something else—a pistol, Gareth’s, it must be—lying farther back from the edge than she had expected, in a dark pool of some liquid. Blood?

  She waited for another flash and then ran to where the pistol lay. Surely, she thought, if Gareth fell backward—that way—then he might not have gone into the moat? Dropping to her hands and knees she crawled gingerly to the parapet, which here described a right angle; felt it with her fingers, and waited for the next flash to come. When it came, she looked down, and found that she was overlooking a kind of gulley—vertical on one side, sloping on the other, where a narrow peak of roof was contained between two square towers. And below her, not six feet away, jammed in the acute angle between roof and wall, lay Gareth’s body. It was about six inches back from the drop to the moat—if he had fallen sideways, rather than backward, he must certainly have gone over the edge.

  In the next lightning flash, Delphie stared about her with agonized speed, trying to learn everything that she could of the geography around her—the angles, verticles, and horizontals of her situation in relation to that of Gareth.

  Yes—there! If she went back, and then to her right, quite soon came a point at which the roof peak below her was not so very far down from her own level. She could climb down to it, and then make her way diagonally across its slope to the crack where Gareth’s body had been caught.

  She began to move in the dark, feeling her way around the shallow parapet—found where it turned to the right, followed that—presently another flash showed her that she had already come too far and passed the highest point of the roof peak. Patiently she crawled back, scrambled on hands and knees over the parapet, and let herself backward down the four feet or so onto the ridge below. This, in darkness, was frightening; she hoped she had not mistaken the spot. No, here was the ridge—now down the slope ... and presently, she felt the vertical wall with her right hand. Now, forward again—inch by inch, this time, for Gareth’s body must be within a few feet and she must not risk jolting or nudging it; there! She had found his hand with hers, groping; she grasped his wrist. Bracing herself with one foot on the slope and one pressed against the wall, she exerted all her strength to pull him backward; began to despair; pulled again, and felt his body move a little.

  Dragging, panting, and gasping, she presently had him as far back from the edge as it was possible to move him, on this level, right against the back wall of the gulley. Would it be feasible to pull him up the slope of the roof, and then hoist him from its peak onto the level above? Looking up, the next brilliant flash, Delphie thought not. The roof itself was a steep slope, five or six feet high; then there would be the vertical lift of another three feet; and Gareth was a tall, muscular man. He was too heavy. She did not think she could manage it. But at least he was away from that awful edge!

  Now, with trembling, eager hands, she felt for his pulse—and found it, to her amazement, solid, firm, steady as the tick of her metronome. He was alive, at least! Perhaps not even badly hurt? In her astonished relief at this almost unlooked-for good fortune, Delphie burst into tears.

  “Oh my dear, mad, crazy creature!” she sobbed. “How could you have been such an idiot as to let him entice you up here?”

  Gingerly, carefully, when the next flash of lightning came, she began looking over him to find, if possible, where he was wounded. Where had all that blood come from? But to her perplexity she could find no trace of blood on him; his clothes seemed intact—so far as she could make out, there was no bullet hole anywhere to be found.

  After a while she began to conclude that he must have staggered and fallen backward into the gully just at the instant when Mordred’s pistol was discharged. What a strange piece of good fortune! For if Gareth had not fallen so, and Elaine therefore supposed him dead, she would not have taken her revenge by striking Mordred; since the latter had fallen outward Delphie felt certain that he must have gone straight down into the moat. He must have been killed, and she was disposed to think that the world was very well rid of him. As to Elaine—she was of small importance; Delphie’s entire concern at present was to see that Gareth should be prevented from rolling or falling until he should have recovered consciousness.

  It was possible, she concluded, ruefully, that he was merely in a drunken stupor; no doubt when he did come to he would have the most atrocious headache, and would believe himself at death’s door. In the meantime, all she could hope to do was keep him warm, which she did by edging him into the angle of roof and wall, and huddling herself against him. (Any slight awkwardness she might have felt as to this necessary precaution was dispelled by the fact that she herself, in her soaked velvet and damp
cambric, was excessively cold, and needed all the warmth she could find.)

  An hour or two went by. Slowly, the storm began to abate. The intervals between the lightning flashes grew greater. The thunder was no longer a deafening crack overhead, but had dwindled to a gentle mumble, far away in the distance. Then the clouds began to drift apart; at last, a half moon was revealed, gently illuminating the strange, angular world in which they were perched.

  Delphie looked at Gareth and confirmed again, with infinite relief, that he was not dead, not even fainted, she thought, but just heavily asleep, in a kind of brandy-soaked coma.

  She began to wonder if she could wake him. For it was decidedly cramped and uncomfortable in their triangular niche. Perhaps she could go off to summon help—but no, it would be too dangerous to leave him unguarded. He might wake, or half wake, and make some incautious movement.

  “Gareth!” she said hopefully. “Gareth, you odious wretch! Wake up! Pray wake up! It is too cold to be perching here like a pair of swallows!”

  But Gareth slept obstinately on, snoring somewhat. Since he must be quite as cold as she, besides suffering from the effects of a heavy fall and God knows how much brandy, Delphie with difficulty removed her damp pelisse and spread it over both of them. Then she began waiting for dawn: at least five hours more, she reckoned dejectedly.

  By slow, insensible degrees, her eyes closed. Then she, too, was asleep.

  16

  Delphie opened her eyes to a blaze of sunshine. She felt quite warm, but cramped and damp; like some creature hatching out of an egg, she thought confusedly. Then she saw Gareth’s face, close to hers, looking down at her in a puzzled manner.

  “I daresay I am dreaming still?” he confided. “I have certainly had some very singular dreams during the night. If I am not dreaming—what the devil are you doing here?”

  Now Delphie realized that his arm was around her, and that her head was, in fact, pillowed on his shoulder. She blushed slightly, and said,