by Mary Stewart
‘She’s been up here tonight as well?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what have you done with her? Let her go to tell her story?’
There was a fractional pause. The blade gleamed steely by the thin hand. Jennifer’s whole body shook to the thudding of her heart. The darkness was alive and vibrant with her terror; it seemed as if they could not fail to feel it. Then Bussac said slowly: ‘There was no point in keeping her. She’d already told it.’
The woman made a sharp little sound, and her teeth gleamed as she bit her lower lip. ‘Then – I can’t stay here either. I don’t want to face an inquiry. I can’t. You must know I can’t.’
He said unpleasantly: ‘Then that’s just too bad for you. You should have thought of that before you blackmailed me into giving you half my takings. You should have stopped to consider that you were making yourself equally guilty – and that there’d come a time when diamond could cut diamond, Doña Francisca!’
He, too, had moved right up to the table. He was leaning across it towards her, and his face came into Jennifer’s range of vision, dark, formidable, with a look in the black eyes that Jennifer had seen before – the same flash of naked ferocity on which he had attacked Stephen, but this time without either fear or uncertainty to cloud it. This – it was patent – was no longer the angry brute that Doña Francisca had been used to hold at bay; this was a dangerous animal all at once very sure of itself. As their glances met and locked she must have seen this, for her gaze widened as if in surprise, and she drew back a little, shifting her ground.
‘You’re talking nonsense. Equal guilt! It was never the same, never! It’s just that I don’t choose to face an inquiry, and perhaps have to return what I’ve purchased with your money!’
He gave his hard little laugh. ‘Yes?’
She said fiercely: ‘They can’t touch me! All I did was take the money from you, a common criminal – a murderer, and use it for good! For good! I took nothing for myself! It was for the house of God!’
‘That’s as may be, but you knew where I was getting it. You knew I was helping criminals, and murderers, to escape. You were condoning murder, Doña Francisca …’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘They call it being accessory after the fact, don’t they?’
Her nostrils quivered to a sharp breath, and the thin lips thinned still further. Jennifer, through her terror, could not help a sharp thrill of elation at seeing her thus out-faced and brow-beaten. She leaned forward again with one of her swift striking movements, her face sharp in the lamplight. ‘All the same, Pierre Bussac, we’re in this together. Diamond can cut diamond both ways, my friend! I’ll not sit here waiting for the police while you walk out and leave me! … You’ve got to take me with you!’ Her voice dropped to a thin urgent whisper. ‘I know the way you go,’ said Doña Francisca. ‘Take me with you – to Spain …’ And something that might have been sorrow plucked at the strings of her voice.
But Bussac, if he heard it, paid no heed. He laughed in her face. ‘Not on your life!’ he said. His hand went again to the wick of the lamp. ‘Now get out. You’re wasting my time, and I’ve still – something – to do before I go.’
The Spaniard straightened with a jerk, and the old fierce look of contempt was back in her face. ‘Then go, fool! After all, what have I got to fear? I can swear I took your money innocently – as a salve to your conscience! There’ll be a scandal, but such things pass, and I – I am who I am! You will be gone, and who’ll believe that whey-faced English girl!’ The hooded lids lifted, and her eyes gleamed hard as onyx. ‘And I’ll see you’re hunted, Pierre Bussac! Even in Spain, my friend, I can reach you! In Spain, I am still somebody, I and my family! You will see, Pierre Bussac, that I still have teeth!’
There was a smile in his voice. ‘If you mean the letter from Lenormand, you might find the teeth have been drawn.’
There was a pause. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘That.’ There was a rustle of paper, a quick gasp. Then she said rapidly: ‘That’s only one piece. I’ve got—’
‘No doubt. But is half a letter any use – without its signature?’
‘Where did you get it? Give it me!’ Her hand flashed, quick as a snake, but just as quickly he whipped the paper back out of her reach, and laughed again. ‘Oh, no, you don’t! This is my passport to freedom, Señora, and my warrant for your good behaviour! You can try your Spanish tricks if you will, but I warn you that as sure as you try to trace me, I’ll bring you down as well. And if you think you can prove yourself an innocent party to my – trade, shall we call it? – you’d better think again. Accessory to murder, my fine madame! There’s a witness to where this letter was hidden—’
‘That proves nothing! It wasn’t in my possession!’
‘No? Life in a convent’s a bit communal for that, isn’t it? But I wouldn’t mind betting it’d pay to dig a bit deeper where this was found!’
Her breath hissed in a sharp little gasp. He gave his rough laugh. ‘That bites deep, doesn’t it? Your little cache, your private hoard, your fine power-house of money stolen from me … including, of course, half of what Dupré’s lot paid – in notes stolen from the Bordeaux bank, damn them, and the number of every one published in the police record!’
‘No!’ It was little more than a breath. Her eyes were black pits in a grey face.
He said: ‘It’s true. I found out tonight. Corentin heard it from Aristide Celton.’ His teeth showed. ‘So you’d better hurry back to your treasure-chamber, hadn’t you, before the flics find it – or maybe our little witness has taken them there already?’
‘No!’ This time the word was a scream, with some quality in it that turned the listener’s blood to ice. The woman’s breath was coming now in short gasps. She was almost crouching, and sweat gleamed thickly on her face in the lamplight. There was something more than fear and anger in that drawn and furious mask … to Jenny, watching in sick fascination, came hauntingly a phrase that hitherto she had dismissed as fancy. Possessed with devils … this woman was so possessed, driven by the demons of that devouring will-to-power from which springs all human tragedy. And now the dream of power was dissolving into mockery, slipping like dust through her hands.
Her hands …
Her hands moved, as if blindly, on the table-top. Her right hand touched the knife that lay beside it. Still blindly, it groped, closed … The knife shivered in her grip like a guttering flame.
Bussac had turned his head away. He was putting out the lamp. The lighted wick dwindled, faded, dimmed to an amber thread. Then it sank into darkness, and the firelight took possession of the room. The woman was a black shadow across the red glow. The knife was invisible.
She came round the table behind him. The rich silk rustled. She caught his arm.
‘You can’t go like this.’ Her voice was hoarse and strange, almost pleading. ‘You can take me. You can—’
‘You? You can go to hell, my lady.’ And he laughed. ‘Now go your own way to damnation, and leave me to go mine!’
And he pulled his arm away with a rough movement that sent her staggering.
She reeled back against the table’s edge with a cry. There was a moment of silence, then, on a shuddering breath, she began to speak, still in that hoarse strange voice, a stream of soft, thick, unemphatic Spanish that brought Bussac swinging round to face her.
And as he turned, she leaped for him.
She was on him. The two shadows flowed together, towered grotesquely. Something glinted, flashed home with a small thickening thud. A curse, a gasp, and the locked shadows fell apart as Pierre Bussac crumpled where he stood, and went down in the firelight to lie at his murderer’s feet.
She stood there for a long moment, like something stricken, black and immobile against the firelight. Then she moved slowly, stiffly backwards, to stand gazing down at him. The red light glared on her face and made flame of the knife in her hand.
And Jennifer saw.
She saw the saliva crawling, like the track of a slug, down the
side of the woman’s chin. She saw the thin mouth split open like a crack in rotting wood. She saw the eyes.
The woman lifted her head and looked slowly round the cottage kitchen. Her gaze hesitated on the door of the room where Jennifer lay.
And as she looked, some stray gust of the storm-wind, rattling the shutters, breathed a draught across the kitchen, and the door swung open a little further. The faint glow of the fire probed the shadows. The door creaked yet more widely. The woman was gazing straight at her now: the cruel firelight leaped and flickered to catch the gleam of her terrified eyes.
She shut them, hardly breathing, hardly living.
The door creaked again.
Something in its desolate sound must have spoken of emptiness, of a deserted house with a dead man on the floor and a woman fleeing alone into the bare mountains …
With a sound like a tiny moan of pain, Doña Francisca turned and leaped for the outer door.
23
Night on the Bare Mountain
A deserted house; a dead man on the floor, and a woman fleeing alone into the bare mountains … If it had been nightmare before, this was the very stuff of horror. Melodrama? That term with its attendant irony, belonged to another lifetime, where such things didn’t happen. This had happened. This was real. She was in it; now; here.
She lay, her body one shivering ache, her mind beaten into numbness, her eyes fixed in a sort of fascination on the huddle of the murdered man. This was real. This was happening. To her, Jennifer. Here and now.
She had forgotten about Stephen and the long break-neck road from Luz; she hardly, even, thought about Gillian and the knife following her through the darkness; she lay in a kind of vacuum of fear, in what would have seemed a suspension of time itself but for the clock that steadily flicked second after second out into the dark well of the little room.
With that same empty creaking, like the scream of a mouse in a deserted wainscot, the door inched wider. A log broke, sending up spurts of yellow flame, little probes of light that fingered the crumpled body on which her helpless vision centred. The door squeaked again, with another ghostly movement that breathed cold pimples up her spine. The fingers of firelight plucked at the dead man till you could have sworn he was moving …
He was moving.
Jenny’s head jerked sideways on the pillow, her eyes strained till the eyeballs seemed to crack in their sockets. Her body went rigid. She held her breath, her whole being concentrated in a new ache of terror on the body that lay huddled half on its face on the kitchen floor.
He was moving. As she watched, held in the nightmare-helpless grip of her bonds, there was a tremor of the hunched shoulders and a perceptible movement of the man’s head. And now a hand moved; it quivered against the flagged floor, then spread, stiffly, in pain, and dragged its flattened way in under his body, as if to clasp the wound the knife had made. There was the sound of a sharp, gasping little breath, which whistled suddenly through clenched teeth, while the man’s body went still again, hunching itself round its hurt as a hedgehog curls to protect its tender parts.
Then he seemed, from some source, suddenly to gather strength. The other hand went down, and he lifted the upper part of his body, slowly, until it was clear of the floor. For a very long time, it seemed, he stayed there, stretched rigid, shoulder muscles bulging, frozen into a grim arabesque of pain and effort, then he got one knee beneath him, and lifted himself with a grunt of pain. For a moment it appeared as if the effort had been too great; he lurched forward, and might have fallen again but for the leg of the table, which struck and held his shoulder. Instinctively, it seemed, a hand shot up to grip the table-top and with an effort that even to watch brought the sweat pricking between Jenny’s shoulder-blades, the man had pulled himself upright, and was leaning over the table, doubled on to his fists, breathing with ragged hurtful gasps.
And there he stayed without movement other than the convulsive clapping of a hand to his injured side, and the distressed heaving of his fight for breath, while the clock in the corner ticked gently on, and the small noises of the fire held the quiet kitchen, infinitely more compelling than the fitful roar of the storm without. And still the man stayed there, leaning on his hand, and Jenny lay stiff in her bonds and watched him, and the wind plucked at the shutters and then raced on up the gullies and into the clefts of the bare mountains, like a dark vengeance pursuing Gillian …
Pierre Bussac lifted his head. Slowly his body straightened, one hand still clamped to his side. The other groped blindly among the debris on the table, stirring up a clatter of crockery whose homely domestic note sounded oddly in the charged silence. The searching hand found; clenched. He shook his head sharply, once, as if to dispel the last of the rack of pain. Then, still slowly, with a sort of terrifying deliberation, he lifted a knife from the table and turned towards the bedroom door.
This part of the nightmare had happened before. Once before she had shrunk in her bonds as she watched him approach the bed where she lay. But there comes a point where terror anaesthetizes itself, a point beyond which it has no more effect. And Jennifer, mercifully, was beyond terror now. She simply lay still, her back arched stiffly away from the bed, as if in resistance to the blow that was coming. Her eyes flinched from him. That was all.
He had paused to lean against the door-post, his big body blocking out the firelight. His breathing was rapid and harsh. He seemed to stay there interminably, a shadow of menace, before he gathered himself with a visible effort, and came forward, faltering only a little, across the room.
Once he turned his head back, as if listening, and she saw the sideways gleam of his eyeballs. Then his shadow fell over her. She felt his hand groping, gripping her wrists. He pulled her over on to her side, jerking at the rope that bound her. The cold line of the knife slid between her hands and the rope. It sawed viciously at the bonds.
‘Marie,’ he muttered thickly. ‘She’ll have gone after Marie. …’
The ropes slackened, parted, fell away. As he thrust the kitchen knife under her ankle-bonds Jennifer reached numbed hands and managed to rip away the ghastly gag. She spat out the rags with which her mouth had been stuffed and passed a dry and bruised tongue round a mouth that felt unmentionable, fighting back a wave of nausea. She began to chafe the blood back into her wrists.
Bussac muttered in that thick slurred voice: ‘She’ll get … Marie.’ He hacked at the rope, but the knife was blunt, and his hands were unsteady. Jennifer tried to say, ‘Give it to me,’ but failed to make any sound but a little croak. She leaned forward and took the knife from his unresisting fingers, and sawed afresh at the now-fraying rope that bound her ankles. Bussac straightened himself.
‘Marie …’ he said again, and lurched like a drunken man back across the little room and into the kitchen.
And then Jennifer was free. It could not have been so very long that she had lain there – those aeons of terror-filled time – because the rope had not yet deadened her limbs. Her feet tingled, and her body ached, but she got up from the bed with little more than a slight giddiness, and walked with a reasonably steady gait into the kitchen after Bussac.
He turned from the table, with a chipped cup in his hand, and she caught the heady reek of brandy.
‘Got to go,’ he said thickly. ‘You’ve got to help. I’m hurt. That damned Spaniard hurt me. You’ll have to help. Here.’ He sloshed more brandy into the cup and held it out to her. She took it without hesitation, and gulped a mouthful. It’s sour pungency bit and burned her sore mouth, then ran like fire down into her body. She gasped and shuddered, and drank again, and this time the spirit pierced her like a new life, hot and red, that licked through her veins till it tingled in her finger-tips and set her body glowing.
She managed a hoarse, breathless whisper: ‘Yes. She ran out with the knife. She looked crazy enough to do anything. Which is the way? Tell me the way to go.’
‘You’ll never find it. It’s my own … secret way. I’ll have to show you …’
But his hand was still clamped against his side, and in the glimmer of firelight his face looked sunken like that of a dead man.
Jenny said, on a little sob: ‘Oh, dear Lord … Where did she hit you? Let me see.’
‘Let be, woman,’ he said roughly. ‘There’s no time.’
She said sharply: ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ll not get fifty yards like that.’
She thrust him down into a chair, and he went, unresisting. She pulled open his coat and ripped away the shirt, which was slimy and matted over a place that showed black and oozing in the firelight. It was a small wound, with the dark blood slowly gathering and swelling, to trickle sluggishly from its lip as the water gathers and then drips from a leaking tap.
If she had gone beyond fear, she was also past feeling shock. Quickly and calmly, as if she had treated knife-wounds every day of her life, she tore an unstained piece from the shirt, tipped brandy over it, and gently dabbed the edges of the wound clean.
Pierre Bussac did not move, but his hand clenched sharply, once, and stayed close.
‘The Englishman,’ he said in that blurred, painful voice, that yet held a hint of irony. ‘We could … even … do with him. Perhaps he … did get … transport.’
‘He had a horse. Luis’s.’
He gave the ghost of a laugh. ‘That won’t get him very far.’
‘The stallion,’ said Jenny shortly.
He made a little movement, as if of surprise. ‘That one? He must be … a man … after all.’
‘Man enough,’ said Jenny through her teeth, ‘to get lamed in his country’s service, where others spend their wars at home making money out of robbing refugees and murdering them.’
She flung the brandy-soaked rag on the fire, where it flamed to vivid blue light.
It showed a gleam of amusement in his eyes, overlying both anxiety and pain. She shot him a glance of reluctant respect. A brave brute, this. King Rat? No, Stephen had been wrong. A man, take him for all in all …
‘You’d better shut up,’ she said crisply. ‘You’ll need all the strength you’ve got.’
