by Mary Stewart
I didn’t answer. The other thing was there in front of me still, a black questioning between myself and God. Con’s voice seemed to come from a long way away, like a voice on the wireless, heard from next-door through a wall. Irrelevant. A nuisance only, meaning nothing.
The horse threw up his head as Con took a step nearer. ‘So it was Adam Forrest, was it? Adam Forrest? Christ, who’d have thought it? What fools we all were, weren’t we, and a damned adultery going on under our very noses?’ All at once his face wasn’t handsome at all, but convulsed, thinned, ugly. ‘And when you heard the wife was dead, you came back, you little bitch. You saw your chance to get me out, by God, and carry on your dirty little affair again into the bargain!’
That got through. ‘That’s not true!’ I cried.
‘So, you wouldn’t look at me . . . I thought there was someone, I thought there was. Your grandfather thought it was me you were meeting, but you wouldn’t look at me, would you, Annabel. Oh no, it had to be Forrest of Forrest Hall, no less, not your cousin, who was only good enough to work for you . . .’
Suddenly, stupid and half fainting (as I suppose I was) with fatigue and shock, I saw what all this time I had never even guessed: a cold rage of jealousy. Not, I am sure, because Con had ever really wanted me, but simply because I had never wanted him. It had been bad enough that I had pushed him aside without a glance, but to prefer another man . . . And the discovery of that man’s identity had scored his vanity to the bone. And at that same moment, in that disastrous moment of clarity that had come too late, I saw, too, why Con had told that preposterous lie about the child: out of simple vanity. Everybody in the district had known I would have none of him. After I had gone, his moment came. He had been my secret lover. Grandfather’s anger was a small price to pay for his own satisfaction.
He took another step forward. ‘I suppose you thought he’d marry you?’ His voice was cruel. ‘Was that why you came back? Was it? He’s married money before, and you’re well worth it now, aren’t you? What was the game, Annabel? What have you been playing at? Come on, let’s have it. You’ve been playing some game with me, and I want the truth.’
He had come right up to the loose-box bar. Rowan was standing quietly now, head low, and tail still. But his ears moved with each inflection of our voices, and where I leaned against his shoulder I could feel the tiny tremors running up under his skin, like little flickers of flame.
‘But Con . . . Con . . .’ It was like groping through fog; there had been something I had to tell Con today: something about the money, that I didn’t want it, and never had – that he could have it, just as he had planned, and I would take Mother’s money, and go . . . Something else, too: that I had torn up his ‘confession’ to me, and that he was free to destroy mine, with its useless signature, ‘Mary Grey’ . . . But above all, that he could have the money; that I was glad to let him have it for Whitescar, because Adam and I . . .
I turned my head into the horse’s neck. ‘No, Con . . . not now. Not any more now. Just go away. Go away.’
For answer, he came closer. He was right up at the loose-box bar. He had one hand on it; in the other he still held the horseshoe.
‘You’ve made a fool of me all this time, so you have.’ The low voice was venomous. ‘Do you think I’d trust you now, with what you know about me? All that crap you talked about leaving the place, making over the money – what the hell were you playing at? Stringing me along, so you could hand me over? Or contest the Will?’
I said wearily: ‘It was true. I wanted you to have it. And you did get Whitescar.’
‘How do I know even that was true?’ he asked savagely. ‘You told me, yes, but why should I believe a word you say?’
‘Oh God, Con, not now. Later, if you must . . . if I ever speak to you again. Go away. Can’t you see . . . ?’
‘Can’t you see?’ asked Con, and something in his intonation got through to me at last. I lifted my head and looked hazily at him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken enough risks over this, and I’m taking no more. I take my chances where they come, and I’m not missing this one. Lisa’ll give me all the alibi I’ll need, and there’ll be nothing to prove. Even clever little Annabel isn’t infallible with a young, wild brute like this . . . The Fenwicks said he was all over the yard with you at Nether Shields, and they won’t stop to think he’s so flat out he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ As he spoke, he was lifting the loose-box bar. ‘Now do you understand?’
Instinct had understood for me, where my failing sense did not. I shrank away from Rowan’s shoulder, and came back against the cold iron of the manger. Behind me I heard tiny stirring sounds in the straw, as the sleepy kittens searched for their mother. I believe that the only coherent thought in my mind was that Con mustn’t be allowed to find them . . .
He was in the box with us. I couldn’t have moved if I had tried; and if I had tried, I couldn’t have got away. The scene seemed to have very little to do with me. The stable was curiously dark, swimming away into an expanding, airy blackness: it was empty, except for something that moved a little, near my shoulder, and Con, coming slowly towards me with some object held in his hand, and a queer look in his eyes. I thought, but not with any sense of its meaning anything to me: he can’t kill me in cold blood. Funny! he’s finding it difficult. I wouldn’t have thought Con would even have hesitated . . .
His hand moved out, in slow motion, it seemed, and took me by the wrist. At that same half-conscious level I knew that he wanted to frighten me into moving, screaming, running, fighting – anything that could spark off in him the dangerous current of violence. But all I could hear was my brain, repeating the words which, since that morning, it had repeated over and over again, like a damaged record: ‘It would be easier to be dead . . .’
I must have said it aloud. I saw the blue eyes widen and flicker, close to mine, then the hand tightened on my wrist. ‘You little fool,’ said Con, ‘he’s not dead. I only said that to make you give yourself away.’
The light caught the edge of the horseshoe as he lifted it. The horseshoe: this was why he had picked it up. He had intended this. This was why he came down, alone. He had lied about Adam. He was not yet a murderer. This was the truth.
Then I screamed. I wrenched violently away from him, to get my wrist free. The movement brought me hard up against the colt’s side, and jerked an oath from Con as he dropped my arm and tried to throw himself clear.
But he wasn’t quick enough.
As I went down into the whirling blackness under the colt’s belly, I heard the high scream of the horse like a grotesque mimicry of my own, saw the hoofs flash and strike as he reared straight up over me . . . and then the red gloss of blood where, a moment before, Con’s blue eyes had stared murder.
They told me later that they heard the scream of the colt above the engine when they were still half-way across High Riggs.
Adam wasn’t with them. He, like Con, had not waited. When the horse screamed, he was already at the yard gate, and twelve seconds later he burst into the stable to find Con, thrown clean from the box by that first tremendous slash of the forehoofs, lying in his own blood with, oddly, a loose horseshoe three yards away; and in the box Rowan standing, sweating, but quiet, with me sprawled any how right under his feet, and his nose down, nuzzling at my hair.
He must have let Adam into the box to pick me up.
I remember, as in a darkened dream, swimming back through the mist to see Adam’s face not a foot from my own. And it was only then that I accepted Con’s last statement as the truth.
‘Adam . . .’
He had carried me out of the loose-box into an adjacent stall, and he knelt there, in the straw, with my head against his shoulder. ‘Don’t talk know. It’s all right. Everything’s all right . . .’
‘Adam, you’re not dead?’
‘No, dear. Now lie quiet. Listen, there’s the Land-Rover coming down the hill? It’s all over. You’re quite safe. Donald’s all right, did you know? Just lie stil
l: the doctor’s coming with them, there’s nothing we can do.’
‘Con’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘He – he was going to kill me.’
‘It seems he nearly succeeded,’ said Adam grimly. ‘If it hadn’t been for Rowan, I’d have been too late.’
‘You knew?’
‘I guessed.’
‘How?’
‘God knows. The old radar still working, I suppose. When the Fenwicks turned up, they all set to work and got the cellar walls made as safe as possible, and that beam shored up, then I came out from under, and Mrs Fenwick – she’s tiny, isn’t she? – managed to creep through into the cellar to fix Donald up temporarily, till the doctor came. Your cousin was still around, then. Someone had said you were making straight back for Whitescar, to warn Lisa Dermott about beds and so forth. Then the doctor arrived. He couldn’t get under the beam, of course, so everyone’s attention was concentrated on getting Donald out; and in the general confusion of coming-and-going in the dark, it was some time before I noticed that Winslow wasn’t there any longer. It was only then that I realised that I’d given you away to him, and I’m afraid I didn’t even stop to wonder if this might have put you in danger. I just had a strong feeling that it was high time I came down here. As it was.’
I shivered, and a muscle in his arm tightened. ‘I thought, when I heard you scream, that I’d come just too late.’
He bent his head, and kissed me. The things he said to me then, in the straw of the dusty stable, with the smells of meal, and the sweating horse, all around us, and the damp of the lodge cellars still on his coat, and Con’s body lying there in its own bright blood under the raw electric light, were the sort of thing that one only says when one’s controls have been violently lifted. They are not for re-telling, or even for remembering in daylight. But they belonged to that night of terror and discovery, when both of us had had to be driven to the very edge of loss, before we could accept the mercy that had saved us and allowed us to begin again . . .
Then the Land-Rover roared into the yard, and Adam lifted his head and shouted, and the world – in the persons of the doctor, the Fenwicks, and a couple of strangers who had come down with the doctor when they heard of the accident at the lodge – bustled in on our tragic little Eden.
Adam neither moved, nor let me go. It was as if those early months of lies and subterfuge were suddenly, now, to be purged and forgotten. He knelt without moving, holding me to him, and, as they exclaimed with horror, and the doctor got down beside Con, told them precisely and in a few words what had occurred. Not the attempt at murder, never that: simply that Con (who had come down ahead of the rest to give Lisa and me the good news) had, not realising the danger, walked into the loose-box, tripped, and startled the colt, which had reared back and accidentally caught him with its forehoofs. And I – explained Adam – had fainted with the shock.
‘And this shoe?’ Mr Fenwick had picked it up and was examining it. ‘He cast this?’
I had been slow to grasp the significance of Con’s choice of weapon. Adam, I saw, got there straight away. If he had noticed the thing earlier, he would no doubt have removed it. He said steadily: ‘It doesn’t look to me like one of Rowan’s. It must have fallen from a nail. Was it in the box? Maybe that was what Winslow tripped over.’
The farmer turned the shoe over in his hand. It was clean. He glanced at Rowan’s forefeet, which were (mercifully) out of my sight. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘likely enough,’ and put the thing up on a window-sill.
It was late next afternoon when Julie and I walked up through the fields towards the old lodge.
The air was fresh and sparkling after the storm, the light so clear that each blade of grass seemed to stand separately above its shadow, and there were wild flowers out along the roadside where yesterday there had been only dusty and yellowed turf. We let ourselves out of the gate marked WHITESCAR, and stopped there, looking at the wreckage of the lodge and the ivy tree.
Even this, the day transformed. The great cloud of oak-boughs with their golden leaves as yet unfaded, the dark trails of ivy, the pink roses still rioting over what remained of the stone-work – these, in this lovely light, clothed the scene in an air of pastoral, even idyllic melancholy. Last night’s near-tragedy might never have been.
But there were the marks of the tyres where I had turned the car: there, a few of the timber-props still lying; here, most telling of all, the clearing that the Fenwick boys had had cut through the part of the tree that blocked the roadway, to let the ambulance through.
Julie and I stood looking at this in silence.
‘Poor Lisa,’ I said at length.
‘What will she do?’ Her voice was subdued.
‘I asked her to stay, but she’s going home, she says. I suppose it’s best. What’s done is done, and we can only try to forget it.’
‘Yes.’ But she hesitated. I had told her, now, the story of my conspiracy with Con and Lisa, and also the truth of what had happened last night. ‘I still don’t really understand, you know.’
‘Who ever does understand what drives a man to murder? You know what he thought last night, of course? He only had my word for it that Grandfather had left Whitescar to him, and when he discovered that I really was Annabel, he couldn’t imagine that I’d have stood by and let Grandfather will it away from me. Then he realised that Adam had been – was still – my lover. I believe he had an immediate vision of my marrying Adam and settling here. I doubt if he took time to think anything out clearly; he just knew that I was in a position to contest the Will if it was in his favour, and even to arraign him for trying to get money by false pretences.’
‘I see.’ She gave a little shiver. ‘What I can’t make out is why he didn’t just let the beam down, last night? He could have done, so easily. It would have killed them both, but I don’t believe he would have cared.’
‘No. But he wanted Donald alive . . . and besides, you were there, watching. It wouldn’t have been so easy. And Adam’s death would only have solved one problem: mine solved them all. Whether I’d told the truth about the Will or not, Con stood to gain by killing me. There was the money, too, remember. He wasn’t sure of anything, but he wasn’t risking failure at that stage, and the chance was too good to miss. I said Con was never afraid to chance his arm.’
‘With me, for instance, that night by the river?’
‘I think so.’
We were silent for a while. Then she touched my arm. ‘Why do you look like that?’
‘I find it very hard not to blame myself.’
‘Blame yourself?’ cried Julie. ‘Annabel, darling, what for?’
‘I can’t help feeling that what happened last night was partly my fault. If I hadn’t been so tired and stupid – and if Con hadn’t shaken me to pieces with that lie about Adam – I’d have managed to make him see I wasn’t hatching plots to do him out of Whitescar. Or if I’d seen him earlier – or even if I hadn’t tried to be so clever in the first place, and come back here to outplay him at his own game—’
‘Stop this!’ She gave my arm a little shake. ‘Be sensible, for pity’s sake! All the trouble and violence there’s been, has come solely from Con! He’s to blame from first to last for what happened last night, you know he is! He went down to the stable with the intention of murdering you, just on the chance that you might do him some harm! Yes, it’s true, and you know it. Even if you’d been fit to talk to him, do you suppose he’d have listened? Not he! And as for deceiving him over the Mary Grey business, whose fault was that? If he hadn’t frightened you to death eight years ago you’d never have dreamed of trying it! And if you hadn’t thought he was a danger to Grandfather and me – which he was – you wouldn’t have come at all. Oh, no, honey, let’s have no nonsense about blaming yourself. Come off it!’
‘All right.’ I smiled at her.
‘Advice from Aunt Julie.’ She squeezed my arm lightly, then let it go. ‘Tit for tat. I took yours, so you take m
ine. Forget all about it just as soon as you can; it’s the only thing to do. We’ve an awful lot to be thankful for, if you ask me!’
‘Yes, indeed.’ I tilted my head back and looked up where the young oak-leaves glowed golden against the deep blue sky. ‘Do you know what I’d like to do, Julie?’
‘What?’
‘Rescue that blessed oak crossbeam from under this mess when they clear it up, and have something made of it, for Whitescar. Something we’ll both of us use, a small table, or a bedhead, or even just a shelf for Adam to keep the stud trophies on, and the cups I got for riding.’
‘Why not? It seems a pity to let it rot underground. It saved them both. Keep a bit for me, too.’ She smiled a little. ‘I dare say there’ll be room for an ash-tray or two in our London rooms. What about the tree that caused all the trouble?’
‘The ivy tree?’ I walked across to where it lay in its massive wreckage. ‘The poor old tree.’ I smiled, perhaps a little sadly. ‘Symbolic, do you think? Here lies the past – all the lies and secrecy, and what you would have called “romance” . . . And now it’ll be cleared up and carted away, and forgotten. Very neat.’ I put out a gentle hand to touch a leaf. ‘Poor old tree.’
‘I wish—’ Julie stopped and gave a little sigh. ‘I was just going to say that I wished Grandfather could have known that you and Adam would be at Whitescar, but then he’d have had to know the rest, too.’
We were silent, thinking of the possessive, charming old man who had delighted in domination, and who had left the strings of trouble trailing behind him, out of his grave.
Then Julie gave a sudden exclamation, and started forward past me.
I said: ‘What is it?’
She didn’t answer. She climbed on to what remained of the parapet of the old wall, and balanced there, groping into the fissure that gaped wide in the split trunk of the ivy tree. Somewhere, lost now among the crumbling, rotten wood, was the hole which the foolish lovers of so long ago had used as a letter-box. It was with a queer feeling of déjà vue that I watched Julie, slight and fair, and dressed in a cotton frock that I might have worn at nineteen, reach forward, scrape and pull a little at the rotten wood-fragments, then draw from among them what looked like a piece of paper.
