Thunder on the Right

by Mary Stewart

  To Jennifer, pausing and blinking against the rock-face at the bend of the gully, it seemed as if the great force were pouring out of the high night sky. Then, with one of those sudden changes of mountain-storms, a rack of cloud, lifted over the wind, laid bare a swimming and luminous moon, so that to her bemused eyes it was now as if the waterfall fell in a long white thunder, straight from the pool of the moon itself.

  The gully now etched itself sharply, black and white in the moonlight. On either side towered the cliffs, stark and bare; ahead, and as stark, loomed the great barrier of rock over which the torrent poured like an arras. To right, to left, ahead, the place seemed impassable.

  But above, like an arc of shadow across the torrent’s face, she saw the road to Spain. A dreadful little bridge of rock, fallen from the sides of the gully, and wedged into a nightmare arch that wavered insubstantial in the starlit spray. Behind it fell the cascade in a steady thunderous sheet of white, to smash itself in fury on jutting ledge and fallen rock, then to leap, in a hundred spouts of roping and whirling water, into the bellowing black pool at the bottom of the gully.

  She blinked again. Yes, there it was. Beside the cascade, at the end of that unbelievable bridge, wavered through the edge of the spray a tiny light. A lantern. It moved, swaying a little, its uncertain nimbus of yellow light dimming and shifting as spray burst and smoked in front of it.

  She was there. Gillian was there. Waiting.

  Jennifer ran on, with a prayer tasting bitter as the rain and sweat upon her lips.

  She had actually begun the steep final scramble that led up to the level of the ‘bridge’ before it occurred to her to wonder what on earth she was going to say to Gillian.

  Gillian had, after all, last seen her as the victim of Bussac’s anger in the cottage kitchen – an accomplice of the police, and an obstacle to their safe flight from France. How would she receive Jenny’s apparent inclusion in Bussac’s plans for that flight?

  She paused, fighting for breath, leaning against a high step of rock which barred her way, and looked upwards. The path seemed to smooth itself out in the moonlight, a deceptively easy ladder of rock rising straight up to the cascade; Jacob’s ladder, propped against the moon …

  She rubbed her burning face with her coat-sleeve, as if to wipe away the crowding fancies of exhaustion, and, fixing her eyes on the lantern’s point of light, began the last stage of her climb.

  The lantern stayed where it was, swaying a little as its bearer moved. But steady enough. Gillian was still there, safe. The Spanish woman could not have reached her yet. So far, so good … But how in the wide world was Jennifer going to persuade an excusably distrustful Gillian to cross the cascade with her instead of waiting for Bussac? How to get her away from a danger which she obviously could not suspect?

  The strain and terror through which she had passed, the actual physical exhaustion she was now fighting, had left no room or capacity for reasoned thought. It was only as she hauled herself, sobbing and almost done, up the final few feet of the climb, that the simple truth came to her, with all its implications.

  Bussac would never take Gillian into Spain. The man was either dead or dying. What was certain was that, as far as Gillian was concerned, Bussac was out of the game. The issue lay, quite simply, between Jennifer and the Spaniard. All she had to do was to hide herself and Gillian from Doña Francisca until she could get her safely down to help and civilization – and England. There was no question of crossing that dreadful bridge. In the darkness, in the black gullies and crevices of the bare mountain, a troop of men could hide with perfect ease. She could spin some tale to Gillian …

  She dragged herself up the last steep little pitch of rock, and went forward at a stumbling run towards the lantern’s light.

  Gillian had put the lantern down near the edge of the water; its yellow gleam shimmered steadily, glassed in the wet slab on which it stood. Now and again spray spurted from the torrent’s edge and burst across the light in a comet’s-tail of sparks. She herself was nowhere to be seen.

  Jennifer ran forward, to drop on her knees by the lantern, shielding its light with her body from the way pursuit would come. Then a dark figure detached itself from the blackness of an over-hang near by, and Gillian’s voice, clear above the thunder of the cascade, cried: ‘Quoi donc, mam’selle?’

  Jennifer was fumbling with the lantern, gasping: ‘Quickly, Madame Bussac! Put this out. We’ve got to hide!’

  ‘But why are you here? Pierre said—’

  ‘Pierre’s coming later. He was stopped. He sent me to warn you. I’m no enemy of yours, you know. I explained things to him after you’d gone. I want to help. Now, put this out!’

  There was something in tone, in face, in shaking desperate hands, that gave their own command. Gillian stooped, found the screw and turned it. The warm little light ebbed and died away into the chilly clair-obscur of white moon and black mountain.

  ‘Where’s Pierre?’ demanded Gillian.

  ‘He can’t come yet. We are to hide now, and make our way down to him later. We—’

  ‘Is he in danger?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jenny truthfully. ‘We must go back.’ She stood up and caught her cousin’s arm in an urgent grip. ‘Come now – straight away. We must find cover.’

  Gillian turned immediately towards the cleft of shadow where she had hidden before. Jenny, snatching up the dead lantern, followed, with a little sob of thankfulness at the ease with which her thin story – no story at all – had been accepted. Gillian turned again and reached out a hand.

  ‘Venez donc,’ she said. ‘We can get up here—’

  She stopped and stiffened, staring beyond Jenny’s shoulder. Jennifer whirled.

  From somewhere above them, from the tumble of new rock where the landslide had been came a rattle of dislodged stones. Then across a patch of moonlight came a shadow, black, swift, shapeless, with a dark cloak blown round it.

  ‘Here’s Pierre!’ cried Gillian, and ran out again into the clear moonlight.

  Afterwards, Jennifer could never quite say what happened next.

  She herself dropped the lantern with a crash, and jumped forward. She saw Gillian’s face, lifted in the moonlight, change from expectancy to bewilderment, from bewilderment to apprehension, to fear, to terror. She saw Doña Francisca coming down the scree towards them like some great evil bat, the knife gleaming in her hand. Then at sight of Jennifer, she screamed: ‘You! I knew it! You!’

  With a swoop like a great black bird of prey, she plunged towards them down the break-neck scree.

  And Gillian turned, with a little sob of fear, and ran straight out across the face of the cascade, as if the slender arch of fallen rock were a highway bridge, and the uncertain moonlight the glare of noon. Without knowing quite what she did, Jennifer turned and followed her.

  To the right, the great thundering wall of water, shutting off the light; to the left, the roaring drop to the black pool … the bridge itself was only a scramble of rocks fallen and flung by some convulsion of the mountain across the dreadful gap of waters. It seemed to shake with the roar of the fall; the tilted rocks streaming black and treacherous under the fans of intermittently flung spray.

  And across this terrible bridge Gillian fled, with Jenny at her heels. They were out in the centre now; poised, it seemed, precariously in space above a great hanging cloud of moon-tinted spray, on which the shadow of the bridge trembled like a darker rainbow. The noise was terrific. Was it only fancy, or was the torrent pressing closer and ever closer to the bridge? Every few seconds some great shining fan of water leaped out, slapping down on the slabs. Jets of foam shot down like twisting white ropes, to smash at their feet and fray off into glittering fringes that fumed down to thicken the rainbow haze. The torrent crowded closer. The rocks streamed. Gillian was two-thirds of the way over, scrambling up a tilted boulder sleek with sliding water. Jenny, clinging below her, glanced back.

  Doña Francisca had reached the bridge. Had paused there,
daunted, possibly, by the sight of that fearful crossing. She was shouting something inaudible, but she made no move.

  Beside Jennifer came, faintly, through the bellow of the water, an echo of the cry.

  She whipped round, just in time to see Gillian gain the top of the boulder, then slip, slither for a moment with frantically clutching arms flung over the streaming rock, and fall back on to the slab where Jenny stood, to lie inert and limp, her body wedged precariously between the rocks, and her head hanging helplessly over the outward drop.

  Jenny went down beside her, clutching at her coat.

  She heard a laugh, clear above the water’s din, and turned her head.

  The woman had a foot on the bridge. Her mouth was a black grin in a white face. She gripped the slack of her robes in the other hand, and stepped carefully on to the bridge.

  25

  Appassionata

  The black scree behind her seemed to burst into life, as another, blacker shadow detached itself from the darkness and hurtled down the slope in a welter of rattling stones. There was a gasping shout. A man leaped down the last headlong yards of scree and raced forward in the moonlight. The white light caught the dark hair, the loose-knit body that, but for the limp, moved beautifully …

  ‘Stephen!’

  The din of the water drowned Jenny’s cry. It was the same soundless, desperate little prayer, but this time the answer was already there …

  He shouted again. The noise volleyed sharply from rock to rock, cutting through the steady roar of the water.

  Doña Francisca, who was some way out on to the bridge, checked in her careful progress, the wind of the fall tearing her black robes out from her body with such force that she swayed as she turned. Her arms went out for balance, the sleeves flapping, and the loosened skirt of her habit streamed out wet and heavy, dragging at her body. In three great strides Stephen had crossed the empty space of moonlit rock, and was at the bridge. Jenny heard him shout again:

  ‘Come back, you fool!’

  But the woman swung round once more, and, cautious no longer, sprang forward across the bridge towards the girls, knife in hand.

  Stephen moved even faster. In one bound he was on the bridge and hurling himself recklessly across it. The woman looked back once, faltered, and then came on, but the thick wet robes hampered her, clinging to her legs. Two more strides, three – and then he lunged and snatched at her arm. He missed, but his hand closed on her sleeve. Somehow she tore it free, and thrust herself forward. Her flying veil whipped him across the face, making him falter and lose way. She was yelling something. She was on them. Whether the fury of revenge still drove her, or only the panic desire to escape – or whether reason had finally snapped its chain, they were never to know. Jennifer, crouched over her cousin’s body, was actually wincing backwards from the sweep of that terrible knife when Stephen’s arms came round the woman from behind, pinioning her in a vicious grip. His hands closed brutally on her wrists, and he dragged her backwards against him.

  But her desperate impulse lent her strength. She turned on him, turned even in his arms, her wet wrists slipping in his grasp; she whipped round as an adder turns, and, like an adder, struck. Jenny saw his body flinch as the knife went home, saw his hold momentarily loosen, saw him stagger, blinded by a flapping fold of the woman’s veil as she wrenched the knife high to strike again.

  Then, even as she launched the stroke, her foot slipped. Her arms went wide and high, flailing the air like wings. But the momentum of that vicious stroke thrust her on, throwing her past him, tearing her clear of his desperate grasp, propelling her to the very brink of the bridge where she hung poised – it seemed interminably – leaning forward like a diver about to plunge into that dreadful abyss. Her eyes were open, her hands out before her, flailing the empty air, then, with a high, tearing scream, she lurched forward into the ghastly dive, and fell.

  One moment she was there, poised like a black evil bird above the starlit spray. The next she had vanished, swallowed by the torrent, and above her, vanishing, the moon-rainbow wavered a little, and was steady.

  He was on his knees beside Jennifer.

  ‘Stephen – oh, Stephen!’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. But you—’

  ‘It’s only a scratch. Later.’ His hands held her with comforting strength while his eyes went past her to Gillian. He raised his voice above the thunder of the cascade. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She fell.’

  ‘Out of the way then. And hang on to that rock. The fall’s filling up. It’ll be over us in another ten minutes.’

  It was true. The rocks that made up the little bridge were all awash. It had not been fancy after all. The cascade had indeed been moving slowly nearer, as the storm-rains swelled the source above. And now the edge of the falling torrent scraped, as it were, the inner edge of the bridge, striking and bursting over it in continuous fans of spray. Now and again the frail structure shook to the crash of some wide-flung heavier load of water. The slab where Stephen and Doña Francisca had fought was already under an inch of slithering water.

  Stephen braced one foot in a crack, the other against a boulder, and laid hold of Gillian. Jennifer pulled herself to her feet, clinging to the rock.

  ‘I can get back.’

  ‘You stay where you are.’ His voice compelled her. ‘I’ll be back.’

  And somehow, with a heave and a grunt of effort, he had got Gillian’s body over his shoulder, fireman-fashion, had steadied himself by the boulder, and had turned to make his way off the bridge. Jennifer crouched close to the rock, the water pouring now past her legs and slapping down on to her shoulders, cold, cold … her whole body seemed to be streaming with the icy water, her hands were dead, her very brain frozen, beaten into numbness by the roar of the torrent and the snow-broth chill of its spray. Stephen had been right. She could no more have made her own way back across the torrent than she could have flown out over the rainbow in the moonlit haze.

  So she clung with dead fingers to the rock, and watched with horrified, fascinated eyes as Stephen walked solidly back over the bridge with Gillian slumped across his shoulders like a sack of coal. Only once he staggered, when a jet of water struck him on the shoulder, but he recovered himself straight away and, putting his feet with heavy deliberation down on the streaming slabs of the bridge, he moved stolidly on.

  He was there. He was lowering Gillian on to the moonlit rock.

  She realized then for the first time that the scree was alive with men. The shadows broke apart, rushing forward and coalescing again as men ran down the scree and crowded towards the bridge. The whole thing had happened at a speed that afterwards she could never quite believe; the others could not have been much more than seventy yards behind Stephen when he reached the bridge, and now as he carried Gillian’s inert body to safety, a dozen hands reached to help him. Someone took Gillian from him. Torches flashed. A lantern waved. She was borne swiftly back to a sheltered corner. Men bent over her, knelt …

  The others still crowded at the bridge where Stephen was fighting his way out of his sodden coat. Two of the men pushed forward, as if remonstrating with him, but he thrust his way past them, and, once more, set out across that perilous arch, making his steady way towards Jennifer.

  She watched him coming. He was a quarter of the way over – half-way, and moving in a cloud, a snow-storm of spray. The stars behind him glittered like ice-crystals. The moon looked shrunken with cold. Jennifer shrank, too, a tiny huddle of shivering flesh and icy bones whose very eyeballs were fixed and aching with the cold …

  Then he was beside her, his unfelt touch was on her body. He had the end of a rope in his hand, and he knotted this round her, cursing under his breath as he fought the soaking cord.

  He said through his teeth: ‘You’re perfectly safe. They have the other end. Just go steadily. Look straight ahead.’

  Her own teeth were chattering uncontrollably. ‘And – you?’

&nb
sp; ‘I’m all right. Get going.’

  It was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life, to let go of the rock and walk back across the bridge. The mere act of straightening her cramped body shook her with the new fear of her own weakness, while to assume that her strengthless legs would ever carry her forward was an act of faith of which she felt incapable … But even as she hesitated, panic locking her bones, Stephen’s hands, swift and brutal, tore hers from their hold, and swung her round to face the roaring space. She saw rather than felt him seize her icy hands and clamp them on the rope which stretched from her waist to the end of the bridge, its other end held fast by three men. She could see them clearly in the moonlight. One of them grinned and beckoned. Another got down on to the bridge, one hand outstretched. He was not so very far away.

  Not so very far away … Confidence flowed to her along the taut rope, and when, from behind, Stephen’s hands impelled her, she began to walk steadily forward, towards that waiting hand …

  A few seconds later, she had grasped it, and was drawn at last towards the safe rock at the side of the cataract. Willing hands reached for her, strong arms took her and swung her free of the bridge. A babel of questions met her.

  But she paid no heed. She twisted in their hands like a wet fish, to watch Stephen balance his way along the dreadful bridge, till he, too, was finally gripped and pulled to safety.

  And so for the third time in the story Stephen looked up and saw her running towards him with outstretched arms. And, as is the way of all stories, the third time is the right time, luck’s time, winner-take-all time … This was it. The barriers were down, dust in the wind. The sleeping princess was awake, the guarded bower as if it had never been. He held out his arms and she ran into them as if they two had been alone in the darkness, not out in the brilliant moonlight exposed to the grinning gaze of a dozen men. His arms accepted her, he pulled her to him fiercely. Only now, his own barriers crumbling, did he realize how deep and absolute had been his need of her; and in the very moment of fullest realization she was here and she was his; his anchor, his still centre, his searing flame, his peace …