Thunder on the Right

by Mary Stewart

  ‘Then what is the mystery?’ demanded Celeste.

  ‘Look,’ said Jennifer wearily, ‘there isn’t any mystery, as far as you’re concerned. The questions that we – the Englishman and I – have been asking are purely our own affair. They do touch Madame Lamartine’s death, but they do not touch you. I swear it. Now, will that do?’

  But Celeste was still smouldering. ‘I nursed her,’ she said stubbornly, ‘and I was with her almost till she died. It does touch me. I have a right to know what you suspect.’

  Jennifer grabbed at the last rags of her patience, and pulled them round her with dignity. She said quietly: ‘I can’t tell you, Celeste. If you won’t accept my other assurances you’ll just have to accept this fact. I can’t tell you anything – tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’ The girl’s voice went up on the word, and she sat forward, her body tense and shaking, her eyes brilliant. Jenny recognized with horror the symptoms of rising hysteria. She said quickly: ‘Listen, my dear—’

  But the girl paid no attention. She leaned forward on the bed, head out-thrust and eyes accusing, and cried again: ‘Tonight? Yes, tell me that, madame l’anglaise? What is happening tonight? Why do you look like that, with your face white and your hands unsteady and your eyes – yes, your eyes waiting?’

  Jennifer said sharply. ‘What on earth d’you mean?’

  ‘All day you’ve been like that,’ cried Celeste shrilly. ‘I’ve seen you! Prowling and watching, and wondering about us – I’ve seen you! Oh, yes, I watched you, too! And now tonight … What are you waiting for? What are you watching for out of the windows? What are you looking for in the valley – tonight?’

  ‘Celeste, for heaven’s sake—’

  Celeste shouted it at her: ‘Is it the police?’

  There were steps in the corridor outside, the soft-slippered footsteps of a nun. Jennifer came to her feet, shaking.

  ‘Hold your tongue, you damned little fool!’ New terror grating on nerves already raw had brought her, too, nearer to hysteria than she realized, or she would never have spoken like that. But the brutal words had an effect. Celeste gasped and shrank down on the bed, and when she spoke again, though her voice was still shaken and hostile, it was lower.

  She said, almost triumphantly: ‘I was right, you see! Luis said the Englishman had seen the gendarme this morning, and that he’d gone off for the police tonight. So you needn’t try to fob me off by telling me there’s nothing wrong!’

  ‘I didn’t say that! I said it didn’t concern you!’

  Celeste slipped off the bed, and faced her. Her eyes gleamed in the candle-light.

  ‘But it concerns the convent, mademoiselle, and it is not right that you, a foreigner and an intruder, should bring trouble on us like this. I shall not let you, I!’

  ‘Celeste, where are you going?’

  The girl turned, her hand on the latch.

  ‘You say it doesn’t concern me, mademoiselle … that may be so – but there are those whom it will concern!’

  Jennifer started forward. ‘No, Celeste! You are not to bother the Reverend Mother—’

  ‘Reverend Mother?’ Celeste flung another of her burning looks over her shoulder as she turned away. ‘I’m not going to the Reverend Mother! It’s Doña Francisca who’s concerned, and we’ll see how you answer her, madame l’anglaise!’

  She wrenched open the door.

  Jennifer’s leap was purely instinctive. In one shattering moment the situation had changed: where it had been merely exacerbating it was now thoroughly dangerous. So she took drastic measures without a second thought. She leaped across the little room and gripped Celeste by the arm. She pulled her away from the door and kicked it shut.

  The girl whirled to face her, quick as a cat.

  ‘Let me go!’

  Jenny, panting, tried to speak calmly. ‘Listen to me, please!’

  ‘Let me go!’ The girl began to struggle wildly, wrenching her arm out of Jennifer’s grip and hurling herself once more against the door. As she clutched the latch Jennifer’s hand clamped down over hers and held it hard.

  ‘Let me go!’ Celeste gasped and sobbed, writhing against the door in Jennifer’s grasp. ‘I’ll tell … Doña Francisca …’ Beyond the door footsteps sounded once more. A latch clicked somewhere. ‘Let me go!’ And Celeste drew in her breath for a scream.

  Jennifer said desperately: ‘To warn that murderess?’

  The girl’s body stiffened in her hands; went still. The sobbing breathing seemed to stop. Jennifer let go of her and moved away. She felt sick and dazed. She sat down on her bed and looked at the floor. The stub of her cigarette lay where she had dropped it, lazily smouldering. She put her foot on it and squashed it out.

  Celeste said: ‘What do you mean?’

  Jennifer looked up reluctantly to meet her eyes. She was still standing against the door, but this time there was no conscious drama in her attitude. Nor did she look beautiful. Her face was pinched and sharp, her body huddled bonelessly back against the door, as if only the door held it from falling.

  Her voice was small and toneless, like a child’s. She said: ‘You’ll have to tell me now, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jennifer. ‘Yes, I’ll have to tell you now. You’d better sit down.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  Jennifer looked away from her, out of the dark window, down the valley where the storm wind blew across the bending grasses. No light, no movement. But she felt too tired, now, to worry.

  Celeste said from the door: ‘Go on.’

  Jennifer, with a little sigh, began to talk …

  It had been, perhaps, a mistake to talk to Celeste in the first place, but one that could hardly be avoided. Inevitable, too, had been the blurting out of the final terrible accusation. And, that once uttered, the third disastrous step had to be taken. If Jenny was at all conscious of the risks attendant on smashing an idol in front of its worshipper, she had borne too much that day to apprehend fully the danger of the step she had been forced into taking. Exhausted herself by the storms of the day, she avoided looking at her companion, and, keeping her voice impersonal and her eyes on the darkness beyond the window, she told her story.

  She spoke flatly and uncompromisingly, talking of the gentians, of her own surprise, of mistrust and uneasiness deepening through suspicion to certainty. She told of the letter she had found behind the triptych, of her determination to investigate the riddle of her cousin’s death, and, finally, she told of the midnight flight up the mountainside, and what had happened there.

  ‘And what my cousin’s doing there, I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t matter: I’ll know soon enough. What does matter is that your Doña Francisca’s in it – in it up to the neck, and it’s something so dangerous that she’ll stop at nothing to keep us from asking questions. And I stood there and heard her, plain and clear, blackmailing Pierre Bussac into murdering my cousin Gillian …’

  Then she looked up, and anything more she might have said was frozen on her lips.

  The girl was crouching against the door, still as an animal, and her skin was like wax in the candle-light. The flesh of cheek and temple seemed to have shrunk, sharpening her features into an ugly mask. The great dark eyes were blank, like the eyes of a ghost.

  Jennifer’s heart twisted; she leaned forward and spoke urgently: ‘Don’t look like that, Celeste! My dear!’

  The lips moved to a thin whisper. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘I – yes, it’s true. But—’

  ‘Do – you – swear – to – me – that – it’s – true?’

  ‘Celeste—’

  ‘Do you swear it?’

  Jennifer said woodenly: ‘I’m not sure about the blackmail, but the other—’

  ‘The murder. You heard it?’

  ‘Yes, I heard it.’ She stirred and put out a hand. ‘I – I’m sorry, Celeste. I can’t tell you how sorry. I wish you’d never had to know.’

  ‘I’m glad I know.’ The whisper was
barely audible, and Jennifer glanced sharply at her. She said uncertainly: ‘I think the Reverend Mother – you’d better let me take you—’

  ‘No.’ Celeste straightened herself, quickly, and reached for the cloak which lay across her bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Jennifer sharply.

  But, without replying, the girl opened the door and was gone like a wraith down the dark corridor.

  19

  Tragic Overture: stringendo

  The candle-flame, streaming sideways in the draught, was ripped off by the slam of the door. The smell of smoking wax wound through the darkness.

  Jennifer said, ‘Oh, God!’ on a dreary little sob of apprehension and flung herself towards the door, blind hands groping. The blank surface met her, defeating her urgent fingers. Her hands slid over it, patting, touching, slithering, for an agony of moments before they found the latch.

  She wrenched the door open, and ran out into the corridor, making blindly for the head of the refectory stairs.

  ‘Celeste!’ she called, in an urgent undertone. ‘Celeste!’

  But the girl had already vanished. And where she had gone Jennifer did not care to guess, but it could only be towards disaster. She plunged down the stairs at an increased speed, towards the oblong of dim light which was the refectory door.

  The refectory was empty too, but a ghostly smell of warmth and food still hung about it. A single lamp, high on the wall, dealt a small uncertain light. The door into the tunnel was open, swinging in the wind, and the tunnel itself was filled with the cold and moaning sounds of the storm. The heavy arras across the chapel door was swaying, as if someone had just brushed through … of course. The chapel. That was where Celeste would be. For the torn ship, the harbour …

  Jennifer, with her hand already on the arras, stopped, hesitating between pity and relief. But even as she wondered what to do, the decision was made. Doña Francisca’s voice said, sharply: ‘Where are you going?’

  Every nerve in Jennifer’s body jumped and tingled. Her hand jerked away from the arras as if the stuff were electrified. Then she realized that the voice came from beyond the arras, inside the chapel.

  It had happened, then. Celeste, whether by accident or design, had run straight into the arms of the bursar.

  Jennifer pulled the edge of the arras aside slightly. One leaf of the door it masked was shut. She slipped through into the heavy darkness between the curtain and the door.

  She peered into the chapel, her heart thudding.

  The chapel was not lit for service, but a couple of lamps glowed on the walls, and in various nests and niches in the aisles the pyramided tapers glimmered. The sanctuary lamp glowed a clear and steady red, and in the side-chapel a smaller one hung like a still ruby.

  Under this stood Celeste, rigid and upright. Doña Francisca, interrupted at some task about the little altar, faced her. Through the dusky incense-laden air wove and flickered an organ fugue of Bach, as Sister Marie-Claude, in her little enclosed loft, played on unawares.

  Jennifer stayed, frozen, in the shelter of the arras, her mind a whirl of horror and indecision, when, through a thin phrase of music, she heard Celeste speak. She spoke in a cold hard little voice that Jennifer had not heard from her before.

  She said: ‘That’s what I came to tell you. I’m going away from here, señora, now, tonight, and I’m never coming back again. Never again, do you hear me?’

  The bursar stared at her as if she had run mad.

  ‘Celeste! What are you talking about? Are you ill? My child – my dear child—’

  She took a step towards the girl, but Celeste, without moving, said clearly: ‘Get back from me. Don’t you dare touch me.’

  ‘Celeste!’ The hard voice sounded stupefied, then it quickened with anger. ‘How dare you speak to me in that manner? Are you mad? Do you know who you’re talking to?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The answer was gentle as death, and every bit as cold. ‘You are Doña Francisca, the person that all these years I thought I loved. That’s all finished. No, don’t touch me. I’m trying to explain why I had to come and say good-bye … because of all those years, because I can’t quite forget’ – her voice quivered, and she said on a note of horror – ‘even tonight, that you were good to me in your own way.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  Jennifer, her hand flying to her dry throat, saw the Spaniard stiffen, saw the black eyes narrow in the candle-light.

  ‘What are you talking about, Celeste? Why “even tonight”?’

  For the first time the girl moved; only her hands, which clutched whitely at the folds of her cloak, but the gesture was a curiously powerful one. She said, her voice hardening: ‘That gets you, doesn’t it? It’s true, then. It’s funny, but I knew it was, straight away, as soon as she told me.’

  Doña Francisca spoke very softly. ‘Who told you, Celeste?’

  ‘The English girl. You wouldn’t expect me to stay here, would you, after what I heard?’

  Then the woman moved like a striking adder. Her long hand shot out and grabbed the girl by the shoulder. She said, on a hiss: ‘What does she know?’

  Celeste did not move. ‘Murder,’ she said softly …

  Through the silence the music poured, remote, angelic.

  Then Celeste, with a swift violent movement, wrenched her shoulder from the Spaniard’s grip, and the cloak pulled aside as the thin cotton of her blue dress ripped and tore. She lashed at the older woman’s clutching hand with a vicious fist, and her voice, subdued still automatically to quietness in that building, came in a whisper that was more shocking than a scream: ‘I’m going now! I’m going from you and your fine talk and your pious ways! I’m going out now to my lover – aah! you didn’t know that, did you? I’ve a lover I’ve been meeting, for weeks and weeks, out on the mountain there – you’d call it sin, no doubt, Doña Francisca! Sin! Maybe it is! I don’t care! If it is sin, it’s better than your kind of holiness!’ She had backed away as she spoke, towards the south door, and the rich candle-light flickered and shimmered over her. She paused in the doorway, and the contempt that had stiffened her face like frost broke and melted, crumpling into tears. She opened her lips to speak again, but no sound came. She turned away blindly and wrenched open the door.

  The black cloak swirled round her like a cloud. One moment she was there, held in the glancing light against the shadows of the great door. Then she was gone, and the draught from the outer night made the candles bow and stream along the air.

  The chapel door, framing a square of black and wind-ridden night, swung heavily, once, twice.

  Doña Francisca stood there for a long moment, rigid in that queer bird-like stance, the clutching hand that the girl had struck aside still reaching out, claw-like, towards the blank doorway. The other was against her breast, a taut fist clenched on the rubied cross. It was as if some malignant sorcery had stricken her to a statue of wood, old, dark wood, with the deep lines of the sunken face scored heavily by some primitive craftsman.

  Even when she moved the illusion was not dispelled. Slowly, like the arms of a doll, whose limbs fall with their own weight, her arms dropped to her sides, and hung there, the hands twitching loosely. Something else dropped like a falling spark … the cross, its chain snapped in that convulsive grip, flashed to the carpet, to be quenched in the shadow of the silk robe. She had not noticed. That carved face was expressionless still, the eyes hooded over like a vulture’s.

  Then, slowly, the dark gargoyle of a face turned towards the door where Jennifer hid.

  ‘The English girl …’ said Doña Francisca softly, and came straight towards her.

  Jennifer was not conscious of having moved at all, but before the Spaniard had taken more than two paces in her direction she had dived out of her hiding-place like a bolting rabbit, and was running down the echoing tunnel towards the garden. The darkness closed round her, but a glimpse from some half-shuttered window showed her the way. It had stopped raining, but the sounds of her flight were
drowned by the wind that still roared in the trees. Above her head the apple-boughs tossed whistling leaves; the little orange-trees swayed like blown dandelion-clocks as she ran between them and, wrenching open the iron gate, dived through into the darker shelter of the close.

  Her plunge into the dark had been a purely instinctive one, but she realized, through her panic, as she stumbled across the wet mounds of the graveyard, that she had been right. She must make straight for the farm, and Stephen. She must warn them – but Jennifer did not attempt to persuade herself that she was flying to warn Stephen and the police. She was running, for the third time, into the sheltering comfort of Stephen’s arms. Reason had caught up with instinct; however he might deny himself the rôle he was, quite simply, the hero of any scene that Jennifer played in. And Jennifer had no doubt at all as to the kind of scene she was involved in now. If ever murder had looked out of anyone’s face, it had looked out of the Spanish woman’s as she turned to find her quarry.

  Her quarry … But if the storm hid Jennifer’s flight from the hunter it also effectively drowned the noise of pursuit.

  Doña Francisca could not have seen her go; nor was it at all probable that she had heard anything. She might still be on her way up to the corridor above the refectory to look for ‘the English girl’ – but she might also, even now, be sweeping after her prey like a blacker shadow through the black graveyard … Jennifer’s outstretched hands met soaked and tossing leaves, where the roses swung in a curtain over the wall near the outer gate. Her hair whipped wet and blinding across her eyes. Thorns tore at her groping hands and wrists, and dragged at the skirts of her coat, catching at her like claws. Something struck her heavily on the arm, and she hit back a cry of terror, only to realize that it was the gate, swinging open in a squall of wind.

  She plunged through it out on to the bare mountain side.

  To Bussac’s farm. Stephen would be there, Stephen and the police from Luz and Gavarnie. Stephen …

  She could see better now that she was clear of the convent walls and trees. She ran up the grassy track towards the pine-woods, sobbing for breath, driven headlong by terror which gained on her even as she fled. She raced on into the path of the storm with never a backward look. As she came above the level where the convent buildings afforded protection, the storm seized her, driving her before it as if she had no more weight than a wisp of cloud. Her shoes slid on the slippery turf; twice she stumbled and fell to her knees, so that her hands were grazed and her coat torn and filthy; but neither falls nor the unheeded pain of bruises checked for a moment her headlong speed, and the impelling storm, thrusting against her as against a sail, drove her like a small scudding ship up the steep way towards the woods. It threw her, half-blinded, almost straight against the column of the first sentinel pine, then she was swallowed by the silence of the wood, which lopped off the roar of the storm behind her as a cliff shuts off the sounds of the sea.