“I was looking for someone too.” She was evasive, not coy. “But she isn’t here.”
“How strange,” he commented. “Say, if the offer is still open, might I take that seat after all?” It was and he did.
Dermot never took his eyes off her, watching her all the while. Her long slender fingers that would fit so well nestled between his own.
“I’ve been worried about you,” he began, gravel in his throat. With the first words out there didn’t seem to be anything he couldn’t tell her, and he wanted to tell her it all. He stood up again suddenly, uncomfortable, straight and upright, trying to force the words out, finding the flickering candle in his hands and not knowing what to do with it.
“Of course you were worried, silly!” she chided him with good humor. “That’s what’s meant to happen.” He wasn’t sure what she meant. She explained. “You missed me and I missed you too, but everything’s going to be all right.” Dermot’s chest burned. Her smile dropped for a moment. “You weren’t really going to leave tomorrow, were you? You wouldn’t leave me here all alone?”
“I didn’t want to leave you...”
They were quiet together for a moment. Dermot struggled inside. Should he explain?
“How is your mother doing?” He needed to change the subject.
“Tolerably well. I left her in her room. All she talked about was you.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Pride doesn’t come naturally to you, Mr. Ward. She’s a fan.”
He let that sink in. “And Grand-mère?” He used her familiar title, to Simonne’s amusement.
“Even Madame too.” He choked when he heard it. “Are you all right? I think she secretly admires someone who is willing to tell her off,” she continued, “not that she’d actually say so.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said, remembering. “You should have stuck around and heard her tonight after you left the room. She doesn’t want me here. She made that very clear.”
“I got the update. You’re a guest. Be nice is all. See how it is in the morning.”
“When is your wedding to Robert Crevel?”
Simonne’s mood dropped. It was the first time Dermot had mentioned it, but eventually she spoke. “Do you remember when we went out riding together, Mr. Ward? Out to the old abbey and the tree?” Dermot nodded. “It’s your choice, Simonne, that’s what you said. I may marry whomever I please. You said that when we went out riding together. Don’t you remember that?”
It was the veneer of a question, her heart gift-wrapped in a subtle appeal. She floated it delicately, launched it like a paper ship, conscious of the waves and winds that threatened it, but willing it to sea. This, of course, was what had consumed her, rendered her these past few days, the question she had to settle before all else came to be. Her chin lifted, her glossy eyes rose to meet his steady face, and with her heart laid out on the line she willed Dermot to speak.
Gentlemen dread such moments, insensitive beasts that they are – thick-skulled by nature, and blind to feminine subtlety. Dermot was no exception and was hampered by masculine incommodity. The best of men might recognize their deficiencies, a few tread water, and some even learn to swim. Dermot had ten years in coal mines and on battlefields, a poor apprenticeship for games of the heart. He floundered in his uncertainty and missed the life ring she’d thrown. “That’s what I said. You do what you want.” And he unwittingly broke her heart. Her paper ship slipped beneath the sea, and he knew that somehow he had hurt her.
Something had gone wrong. Something had changed. He didn’t know what or why. It was a long time before the cold draft of the hallway blew the mood away.
“Why are you really here?” she asked eventually.
“Simonne,” he said; he didn’t want to lose her. “Will you listen if I tell you something strange?”
The men she had known who went to war did not often talk about their experiences, and never before had such things come like this, firsthand, into her own ear. She’d had crumbs only, secondhand wisdoms, occasionally the letters other women cared to share. In those redacted pages, things were always fine within the army: “Don’t worry, we’ll all be back soon,” “I miss you lots,” “I love you and the family.” Platitudes, consoling words, and too much reassurance. But always there were whispers. Around men from the war she had felt like an intruder in a place she did not belong, but here with Dermot she was now his guest in a land she had scarcely imagined.
At first he had leaned back against the wall as he relayed his story, resting his arms across his chest. He blew out his candle lest all the light fade, and at some point he returned to sit beside her. Simonne squirreled in against him, her head lying on his shoulder, as she listened to the tale that emerged.
“That was how I met him, your uncle,” Dermot said – he’d been talking for a while. “Of course, Arthur could be a pain in the ass, but I liked him very much. We got along. We ended up serving together over the next few months.” Once more he fell silent and reflective, as was his pattern of speaking. “Then came the salient.”
“The salient?” She didn’t understand.
“The fronts hardly moved the whole time, but every now and again you’d get a bit of land that stuck out into ‘their’ bit, or God help you, the other way around. Holding a piece like that let you spot your guns better, let you snipe at their sides. If we had such a place, we’d pour men into it before an attack. It let you flank them or even cut them off... if you managed to hold onto it. That bit of land was called a salient, and it was highly prized on either side. We were digging out from one of these ahead of a big attack. That’s when it happened.”
She reached out a hand, a gesture of gratitude, and he took it willingly and warmly and with all his blunt, blind heart.
“You think I protected you, that I helped you, that I was looking after you and so perhaps I can be counted on?” But he wasn’t asking her a question. “I... I care for you a lot, Simonne, more than anyone I’ve known. I truly do.” Somehow now it was easier to say these things, and his words spilled out like water from a punctured canteen. He squeezed her hand lightly. “Do you remember the library?” He smiled as she glowed brighter with every word. “Even then I knew something was... different.” He still couldn’t pin it. “Something had changed in me.”
She remembered every moment, relived them now, but couldn’t speak or acknowledge anything lest her heart give her away.
He risked a glance down at her, but she was silent and looked straight ahead. He wasn’t sure if this was a good sign... still, when the charge is sounded and you go over the top, there is only one way forward. Dermot soldiered on.
“So I thought you were special, and I liked you a lot, and I hoped that you liked me…” He coughed, buying another moment. “Then with everything that happened... Pierre... the mill... the only thing that scared me was the thought of losing you. I already knew what I felt for you, Simonne, and I had to keep you safe.
“The thing is,” he went on quickly, heading off the objections he was certain would come, “the thing is, I’m not very good at protecting people I care about. To those who need me...” She looked up at him now, hearing the change in his voice, the resignation and fear. “I’m not. You couldn’t ever trust me, Simonne, and that was why I agreed to leave. One day I would fail you, just like I failed your uncle, and I couldn’t let that happen.” She was crying! “Oh, I’m sorry, Simonne! What is it I’ve done now?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” His words had opened her and the happiness had spilled over, straining until she had thought she might burst. She squeezed his hand back, as he’d done to hers, and she knew in the core of her very being that they would never again be apart.
He did care for her, she knew it, and she loved him madly back; desperately, pleadingly, teasingly, helplessly. In her whole life she had never known anything like it, and she swore to herself that she’d never let it leave and she would never give it up. Whatev
er he was talking about they’d sort out together. There was no other way.
She turned her chin up to look at him, her curls falling loose, her lips trembling, eager to feel his touch. But he was haunted. His smile was gone. “Dermot, my darling!” she pleaded with him. “Whatever is it that you mean?”
He composed himself. “I’ve never told this to anyone,” he began. He had her undivided attention. Whatever would come now of it, she would forever know the truth. And so Simonne heard of the tunnel hole and the shell that went astray. Heard of the men that were trapped beneath the earth. Heard of the dead men below. Heard of Arthur and Dermot digging free from out of that grave. Heard of the escape that was met with disaster – of the guns and the clouds of gas. Of how her uncle was left bleeding and wounded. How Arthur sat wheezing the poisonous air while Dermot ran away.
“In the end we got him out, back down the tunnel and out the other end, but by then it was useless... The doctors wouldn’t even treat him, the push had started you see, the place was littered with men.
“I got him in an ambulance that was heading further away, but there was nothing to be done for him. He died in terrible lingering pain, and that was how I lost my friend.” He wiped his eyes, ashamed and embarrassed and, more than anything, terribly sad.
“Oh, Dermot!” Her words were wet with tears.
“I didn’t help him. I’m sorry, Simonne. I didn’t have the courage and I ran from it. I let him die, that’s what I did.”
“No, no!” She admonished him, kissing him, “You did your best!”
“Maybe I did,” he agreed, fighting down the pain, “but that’s just it. I think it was my best, and it wasn’t nearly good enough.” She shook her head, rejecting the notion. “No, Simonne,” he refuted her. “I know. I didn’t go because I was getting him help, I went because I wanted to... I went because I was scared. That’s who I am, Simonne! Don’t think I’m anything I’m not. Don’t think I’ll be able to protect you through thick and thin, because when the moment comes, when it’s do or die, I leave my friends behind.”
“No, no!” she insisted. “You tear yourself up for that?” She was riled, insistent, impassioned in her speech. “How many would have lasted half as long as you did? How many would have had the nerve and the fire to do everything that you did, to look on what you saw? You gave your all – your all! For your men and for my uncle. That is all anyone can ask, my love. That is all anyone can expect.” She bruised him with the force of her convictions. Her lips were close to his.
“But it wasn’t enough. I’ll never be forgiven. Simonne, how can I trust myself to take care of you when I failed that test?”
“Pooh to that!” she said sharply. “I can take care of myself. And if it’s forgiveness you want, Arthur would forgive you, I’m certain.”
“No, he wouldn’t.” Dermot shook his head.
“So sure?” she said slyly. “Have you asked him, then?”
There was a turn to the corner of her mouth and a twinkling in her eye. Something that the night’s emotions failed to explain away.
“I have something more to tell you. My last secret, I promise, Simonne. You won’t believe me, but it is true. He came back to me. Arthur did. He came back to me after the war. I can see him, Simonne. I saw him dying, and he came back. He asked me to come to the Manor with him, and I don’t think that I’m mad.”
“You can see him? You mean, entirely in the flesh?” It wasn’t the reaction he had expected; she was curious, not incredulous in the least.
“Uh... well, he sort of glows in faded colors. And he doesn’t walk through walls.”
“That’s amazing! And are there any others?”
“Others?”
“No others?” She gave him a very strange look. “That’s OK,” she said, “don’t worry. We’ll have lots of time to talk about it.”
“Arthur’s disappeared,” he explained.
“They do that sometimes.”
This didn’t entirely reassure him. “I’m worried about him, that’s why I came to look.” A thought crossed his mind. “Who was it you were looking for up here?” He repeated his earlier question.
Simonne fidgeted and squirmed, hesitant to answer him, but then things were different now. This man who held her hand could really understand her, was someone who had risked his life for her, was someone who liked her for who she was, and needed her help too. Simonne was sick of making stories; she’d been lying all her life.
“I was looking for Élise Beauvais.”
“The witch?” He shrank back. “Why on earth would you think she was here?”
“Because, Dermot... I followed her.”
23
Fall of the House of Malenfer
It was morning. Dermot was avoiding packing up his things. Running steps passed by his door, and raised voices conveyed alarm. Curiosity persuaded him out to the hallway where a squabble could be heard coming from the entry hall, two stories below. Dermot went to the staircase to look.
“No, it isn’t so! It’s a lie!” Was that Émile’s voice? A scrum of men were pushing below, but Dermot was too high to see who. He took the stairs two at a time.
“Greedy bastard!” The warped figure of Gustave pointed violently. Dermot saw him lash out at the twin and strike the young man a blow. “How could you?” A second punch landed true while Émile was being held by others. “He did it!” someone shouted, and the maids were screaming now. Émile slipped and went down hard in the middle of the debacle.
Some tried to shield him. Others kicked him when he was down. Dermot, taking the stairs three at a time, was close, almost among it, and everyone was shouting. Berthe grabbed onto Gustave’s arm to stop his rough abuse; she pulled him back, entreating him to do no more, but the Malenfer footman was raging.
“Stop it! Stop!” Dermot bellowed as he pushed into the milieu. He forced himself through the tightly packed group till he stood over Émile’s bruised body.
“What is the meaning of this?” It was Madame’s voice. “What is going on? Berthe?”
The fray divided like a playground fight at the sound of the school bell.
“Madame, your pardon. I don’t know how, but it’s true. It happened and it’s true!”
“What are you wittering about, woman? What can have possibly happened to cause this unsightly... riot?” She looked most disapprovingly on the disorder. Men in the hall straightened their coats and passed fingers through out-of-place hair.
“We were cleaning this morning, Madame,” Berthe pronounced, “and we were into Émile’s room, begging your pardon, seeing as how it was the day we do those parts of the house. It’s his brother’s satchel is what we found, Madame, is what I’m saying. The rent bag! The one that was stolen. He had it!”
As proof to her words, the housekeeper lifted the leather traveling pouch. It was an old worn thing with a wide long strap; she brandished it like a trophy. At its sight a gasp went up, for there were few embroiled who knew. They had been drawn, like Dermot, by the disturbance but were not aware what they were spectators to. “Pierre’s rent bag, Madame,” she repeated. “We found it hidden in Émile’s own room!”
Dermot recognized the bag; he recalled it strung across the youthful chest of the cockish young Pierre. He’d seen it last on that fateful morning as Pierre had ridden off. By now, and with Dermot’s aid, Émile had gotten back onto his feet. He might have been Pierre returned but for the absent jaunty grin. The rent bag in Émile’s room? Dermot didn’t comprehend.
An enraged Gustave took up the cause just as Berthe had finished speaking. “He took Pierre’s bag!” he accused, “and the money’s in it still!” The footman dug out a fistful of notes to the general dismay of the room. “He had it hidden!” he riled, brandishing the money. “A thief and a murderer besides!” The accusation invoked shouts of dismay and anger in equal measure.
“Enough of this theater!” Madame shouted them quiet.
Dermot helped Émile to his feet. Simonne came to his side and
volunteered her handkerchief; Émile was cut on the side of his cheek.
“Pierre’s bag in your room, Émile? What is the explanation?”
“I don’t know,” the battered Émile managed to speak. “They say it was, but I don’t know, it couldn’t have been there!”
“The girls work together, Madame,” Berthe clarified. “And I was right there behind them. We were doing all those rooms at that end of the house, it was just routine as always.”
“I didn’t know it was there!” Émile objected.
“None of us brought it in, Madame, none of them girls did – it was there when we got there, hidden it was! Oh, Émile, what have you done?”
“Nothing. I’ve done nothing. How could you think that of me?”
“Liar!” The ringside jury brewed up.
“I dread to think, Madame!”
“It couldn’t be there,” Émile repeated, but it seemed that he doubted himself.
“He wanted it all!” Gustave bellowed. “He’s a black-heart villain! A lifetime in the stables, then a Malenfer overnight? How else does he come by the money? It’s his brother’s blood that’s on that bag! Cain here coveted Abel!”
“No! Never!” Émile said desperately as the crowd again boiled around him.
“Mad with greed he must have been. He thought he’d become almighty!”
“No!”
“The desire for wealth proved too strong. He didn’t want to share it!” Gustave lunged in to strike again, but this time Dermot blocked him.
Émile howled wildly at the room, pummeled by such accusations.
“It’s nonsense!” Dermot shouted out, but the twin seemed sore afflicted.
“Take Émile up to the library and see he doesn’t leave there. The rest of you get back to work. Berthe, I would speak privately.”
The to-do broke up. Young Émile was shepherded off by two unsympathetic workmen. Berthe looked very unhappy. Madame now recognized her overdue guest as her staff dispersed around her. “Nobody goes home today until you’ve been given permission.” She said it loudly enough for all to hear. “That means you too, Mr. Ward,” she continued coldly. “Until we have this figured out, you will kindly delay your departure.”
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