by Mary Stewart
The little priest deserted St. Onesimus for a moment to send Stephen a look of surprise. ‘My son, she was dying, and those who are dying—’
‘I didn’t mean in that sense,’ said Stephen hurriedly. ‘I meant the colour of her hair and eyes, and so on.’
‘But mademoiselle here—’ Father Anselm broke off, and addressed himself once more to St. Onesimus. ‘She was fair,’ he said briefly, ‘and she had grey eyes or blue – I cannot tell you which. As to her height, I do not know. When I saw her she was very thin, and she had suffered much from the fever. A dying woman does not look as she has looked in life, my children, and I saw her only at the end. And by candlelight,’ he added.
‘She spoke French to you?’
‘But yes. All the time. Until you told me you were her cousin I had never supposed she was not wholly French. Her name, too, you see …’ He began to chip a gout of candle-grease from St. Onesimus’ pedestal with his fingernail.
‘She was sensible – I mean, she wasn’t delirious when you saw her?’
‘No. She was quite lucid. She knew she was dying.’
‘She knew she was dying?’ said Jennifer softly.
‘That is so.’
‘And she left no message with you, mentioned nobody by name?’
He shook his head.
‘I know,’ she said awkwardly, ‘that you can’t speak of anything said in confession, but you could tell me if she had left a message or mentioned a name, couldn’t you, even if you couldn’t tell me what it was?’
Father Anselm twinkled at her. ‘Yes, I could. But no, nothing of the sort was said. I am sorry, mademoiselle.’ His voice was grave again. ‘She did not, in fact, confess. The end came more quickly than we had expected. Too quickly …’
There was a little pause. Then he looked up at her once more, his bright black eyes shrewd. He said suddenly: ‘Have you seen her papers? Everybody carries papers in France, you know.’
‘Yes, I saw them.’
‘Then,’ said Father Anselm, staring straight at St. Onesimus, ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything else that would identify her beyond doubt …’
When they left him, he was unconcernedly engaged in cleaning a pillar positively swarming with Holy Innocents.
11
Nocturne
Stephen said good night at the convent gate, and Jennifer, hoping a shade nervously that she would not meet Doña Francisca again that night, rang for admittance. She need not have been afraid. She was let in by a young nun she had not seen before, a pleasant-faced girl in the white head-dress of the novice, and crossed the yard with her to the sound of singing from the chapel. The novice led her quickly into the tunnel, then through the refectory, and up the stairs at the far end of the big room. These gave on to a long narrow corridor, lined with doors. At one of these the novice stopped, tapped, and on receiving no reply, opened the door and showed Jennifer in.
The room was as small and bare as might have been expected; there were two beds, two chairs, two chests-of-drawers, and a hassock placed beneath a small picture of the Virgin and Child. The window gave south on to the garden, and, far beyond, soaring miraculously above the darkness, the moonlit snows of Spain.
The novice pointed to the bed near the window.
‘That will be yours, mademoiselle, and that chest-of-drawers has been emptied. I’ve written out for you a little list of meal and chapel times, but’ – she smiled – ‘you mustn’t feel bound to attend the latter. The Reverend Mother was most insistent that you must feel free to come and go as you please.’
Jennifer thanked her, and the girl withdrew, leaving her alone.
She crossed to the window and stood looking out over the garden. Across the wall to her left, through a tangle of night-dim apple-boughs, she could see the graveyard, and the wall that hung its arras of roses and blue convolvulus over the grave. Well, here she was, ensconced in the heart of her mystery, and something, she told herself, must happen soon, For a beginning, anyway, there was Celeste.
She turned back from the window, wondering anew at the barren look of a room without personal possessions. There was nothing here to give a clue to the character of the owner. The dark cloak hanging behind the door, the string-soled slippers side by side under the chair – this was all. There were not even curtains on the window. No flowers, no pictures except the one devotional one, no books except a small scarlet missal lying on one of the chests-of-drawers. She picked this up, and then, her interest quickening, looked at it more closely. It was bound in scarlet leather, beautifully tooled with gilt, and the pages were illuminated exquisitely with medieval arabesques of gold and green and purple. She turned them reverently, marvelling at the work, until something familiar in her sensation of surprise brought her up short. This had happened before, and recently. In the chapel … the little dim plain building, with its flat white walls, its common windows – and the treasures of Italy and Spain glowing under its rich lamplight.…
And this repeated the effect, this beautiful little thing which lay so carelessly upon the ugly chest-of-drawers. She looked up at the picture of the Madonna and Child, and saw without surprise that the pictured lips were smiling down over the baby with the smile that Murillo had used to light greater canvases than this.
The missal had fallen open in her hands, and the pages had turned of themselves, to leave the book lying open at the first page, the fly-leaf.
On it was written: ‘Marie Celeste, from Maria Francisca, un don en Dios.’
The Madonna smiled.
Then the door opened quietly, and Celeste slipped into the room.
Jennifer, with the book lying open in her hands, felt confused and guilty, as if caught in some questionable act. She smiled at the girl and said: ‘I hope you don’t mind, Celeste. It was such a lovely little book.’
The girl had flushed scarlet, as if with annoyance, but she muttered, ‘De rien, mam’selle,’ and, sitting down with her back turned, began to unfasten her slippers.
Jennifer, eyeing her back dubiously, decided that confidences were more easily extracted in the dark, and said no more. But by the time she had undressed, and had come back from the wash-room, Celeste was curled up in bed, with her face to the wall. If she was not asleep, it was at any rate obvious that sleep was the impression she wished to convey.
Jennifer gave a little sigh to herself, blew out the candle, and got into bed.
She woke to thick darkness, and lay for a moment, vaguely wondering where she was, then, more coherently, what it was that had woken her. The wind? This must have risen all at once, with the coming of the dark, because, though the evening had been still, she could hear now the soughing of the pines, and the intermittent flung rattle of rain against the window.
But it was some slighter sound than this, she knew, that had awakened her; some telling little sound that should not have been …
The door. It had been the quiet closing of the door.
She sat up in bed and strained her eyes in the dark room, then, as things took shape, she saw that Celeste’s bed was empty, and her slippers gone from under the chair. She groped for her handbag and, after one or two fumbling attempts, lit a match and surveyed the room by its small uncertain light. Yes, the slippers had gone, and the black cloak from behind the door … Well, thought Jennifer, the corridors are chilly, and she may, after all, be on a perfectly normal errand. She must not, she told herself, run too eagerly on the trail of her mystery.
The match went out, but as it did so, something that she saw in its last flicker made her sit up straighter and grope again for the match-box. What she thought she had seen – yes, she had been right. Celeste’s white cotton nightdress was flung down across the bed. Jennifer slid out of her own bed and went, cautiously because of the flickering match, across to the chest-of-drawers where, earlier that evening, she had seen Celeste tidily fold away her day-clothes. She opened the drawer. It was empty.
As she reached for the candlestick the second match died, and she sto
od there in the quiet darkness, her mind racing. If Celeste had only gone somewhere else in the convent – say, to Doña Francisca’s room, or, which seemed possible, to the chapel, would she have dressed to do it? Her cloak would surely have provided warmth enough? But if she had gone outside … Jennifer padded across to the window and looked out. In the windy moonlight the dim outline of mountain and forest bulked huge and uncertain; rain was spattering the panes, and low clouds flung their moving and fitful shadows. Then all at once she saw another shadow, a slight black shadow, moving more purposefully across the garden below than the ghost of any cloud. It drifted below the apple-trees, through the gate, and vanished into the deeper darkness of the graveyard wall. Jennifer, leaning out, all at once excited, heard, in a sudden lull of the wind, the click of a latch. The door in the outer wall.
She did not consciously decide what to do; indeed, she could never afterwards say how she came, hastily but adequately dressed, to be letting herself out of that same door a very few minutes later. As she shut it softly behind her, and paused in the shelter of the wall with the wind plucking at her coat, she was telling herself that she was a fool. In this darkness, and with that start, Celeste would be already well out of sight and sound. Whatever she had hoped to discover – and on this point she was far from clear – it could not be discovered on a night like this.
Then, unbelievably, as a fragment of torn cloud, racing high, laid bare a patch of wet starlight, she saw it; it was barely seventy yards ahead of her, a hurrying black figure, bent against the wind, its cloak bellying like a sail.
Thankful now for the noisy darkness, Jennifer stole from the doorway and set off in pursuit.
The wind was not strong, but it came in flying gusts that took away the breath and made balance uncertain on the rocky path. Celeste headed, at a remarkable speed, straight up the side of the valley towards the edge of the pinewood belt, and soon she and her pursuer were plunged into its still and inky depths. Here the wind, faded to a far sighing overhead, did not impede progress any more; now it was the thick felting of pine-needles that silenced their going. But it was dark, a deep, velvet, heavy darkness that would have confounded Jennifer in a moment, had it not been that the path, running straight through the belt of pines, showed a glimmer of the paler night at its end, like the light at the end of a tunnel. As she hurried, almost running along the soft dry track, she caught a glimpse of her quarry outlined momentarily against a patch of lighter sky, before the figure turned to the left, and was blown on a gust of rain out of her sight.
When she reached the edge of the wood, she found, indeed, that the path turned sharply up the hill to the left, joining a widish track that ran up the mountain-side south of the pine-belt. Up this crude track Jennifer stumbled, not thinking coherently about where this was leading her, or what she was going to do, but simply determined to find out where Celeste was going, so secretly and so fast. Any lead into her mystery, however tenuous, was to be followed.
And this midnight sortie was, surely, mysterious enough? So she held the damp skirts of her coat above her knees, and toiled through the gusty rain, hoping fervently that Celeste was still moving ahead of her, and not awaiting her in the lee of the next rock.
Presently, however, she was reassured by the sight of the shadowy figure against the skyline above her, as it gained the summit of the track. A minute later Jennifer, too, breasted the last steep little rise, and stopped short.
The figure had vanished. But there, ahead, and a little to the right of the track, was a light. A little cluster of buildings huddled in the shelter of a low rock-face, and in the central building a wide chink of light glowed between rattling shutters. Somewhere a chain clashed, and a dog growled, and then fell silent.
So this was where Celeste had come. And Jennifer, with the memory of something Stephen had said, felt suddenly tense and excited, as if she were at last on the edge of discovery.
‘There’s a man lives in your valley,’ he had told her, ‘at a farm above the convent; he’s called—’ What had he been called? Bussac, that was it; Pierre Bussac … She said the name to herself, staring at the lighted window, and then started as yet another memory hooked itself on to the name. The waiter at the hotel – he had mentioned Pierre Bussac too; Pierre Bussac, who had been down in the village on the night of the bad storm, three weeks ago. The night that Gillian’s car had crashed into the Gave, and Gillian—
Jenny was trembling violently. It need not mean anything, of course, but if instinct were any guide, it did. And having come so far, fear or no fear, she was going to finish her mission. She had to find out, if possible, what was Celeste’s business with Pierre Bussac. She began to edge forward across the short wet turf towards the lighted window, taking care not to cross the narrow path of light it threw, and moving cautiously because of the dog. The wind, with its accompaniment of creaking doors and rattling shutters, must have disguised her progress effectively, or else the dog was used to nocturnal visitations, for it did not hear her, or at any rate it gave no warning.
She softly crossed the weedy strip of rough cobbles below the window, and, pressing herself well back against the wall to one side of the frame, craned her head till she could see in through the crack in the shutter.
And got her second surprise of the evening.
It was not Celeste, the black figure which was advancing into the lamplit room of the cottage, shaking the raindrops from the voluminous folds of its cloak.
It was the Spaniard, Doña Francisca.
12
Enigma
This, then, would be the explanation of how she had stumbled so easily across her quarry’s trail. Celeste, as she had thought, must, by the time Jennifer had reached the garden gate, have been well started on her furtive journey. On the other hand, Jennifer realized with a slight quickening of the breath, she herself must have almost followed Doña Francisca out of the convent. Whether the bursar was ignorant of Celeste’s pilgrimage, or whether something was arranged between them, Jennifer could not, of course, guess, but for the moment she was fully determined, if possible, to hear and see what was going on in the cottage kitchen.
She pressed closer, straining her ears through the flurries of the wind.
Doña Francisca had taken off her cloak, and flung it down across the table which stood in the centre of the little, low-raftered room. She stood facing the flickering light of the fire, talking rapidly to someone just outside Jennifer’s range of vision.
Jennifer, to her chagrin, found that she could hear practically nothing of what was being said: the French was rapid, and the wind snatched at the sound and whirled it away in the whines and rattles of the night. But one thing was plain, that Doña Francisca was furiously angry. Her face, more drawn and sick-white than ever, was consumed from within by a passion of anger that frightened Jennifer, and made her picture that night-flight up the mountain as the avenging rush of a fury.
She had stopped speaking, apparently on a snapped question. From somewhere beyond Jennifer’s sight, near the fire, came an inaudible reply, in a man’s sullen growl.
Then, in a sudden lull of the capricious wind, the woman’s voice came clearly, and what she said was significant enough to set Jennifer’s blood tingling.
‘… her cousin,’ said Doña Francisca, ‘asking questions. I fobbed her off, but she was thoroughly suspicious, and now she thinks she’s got this proof that she’s right. She’ll not let go.’ Her voice rose sharply. ‘What’s more, she’s staying at the convent, and if I can’t think up some tale that’ll satisfy her—’
The man muttered something, but Doña Francisca lashed back as quickly as a striking snake.
‘But can’t you see what you’ve done, you fool? You stupid, lustful fool!’ The epithets came clearly, barbed with contempt. ‘Obscène bête! Animal! Can you not see what you may have lost? If she—’
The wind took the rest, but now Jennifer, by straining a little further, could see the woman’s companion, who had taken a quick step forw
ard, and stopped, growling something which, again, she could not hear. She saw a powerfully built man of perhaps forty-five, with the dark secretive face of the Pyrenean peasant. Black eyes scowled under thick straight brows; the nose was straight too, the mouth hard and angry-looking. It was a face that might, in its harsh animal way, have been handsome, but the man’s whole being was disfigured by his anger and hatred. Eyes and mouth were sulky and cruel with it, and passion betrayed with its violence every movement he made.
Facing him, Doña Francisca looked all the more patrician, her thin high-bred face, with its gleaming fanatic’s eyes, betraying no fear of his angry approach, only, as he moved closer still, a faint distaste. She began to speak again, her mouth biting off the words as if they were twisted and tinged with acid. But, although Jennifer nearly fell through the window in her attempts to hear, the wind defeated the voice almost completely.
‘… Only one thing to do, and you know it! Who knows how long this English girl will choose to stay, prowling about? She’ll come this way – ça se voit – and she’s bound to see her cousin!’ The listener shut her eyes and leaned against the wall, while the night rocked round her with a roaring that was not of the wind; a roaring that subsided slowly with her own heart-beats into a lull where that bitter voice was still speaking: ‘What you’ve done was folly in any case, but now, it’s suicide! Comprenez, imbécile, le suicide!’
The man said something in reply, but his voice was pitched so low that to Jennifer it was all but inaudible. Doña Francisca hardly paused for him, but flung her mordant contempt again into his face, and this time there were threats patently mingled with it. Jennifer strained her ears to catch the torrential French:
‘Vous feriez bien de vous rappeler.… Don’t forget, Pierre Bussac, what I’ve got in my possession! You should know by now that you can’t play this sort of game on your own! There’s only one thing to do, and you know it – you’ll get rid of her!’
