Jason, Veronica

by Never Call It Love

  "Very well. Christopher was not here that Wednesday night. But neither was... was he at our house in town. He spent that night with a Mrs. Frazier-Fitzsimmons."

  "Peggy Frazier-Fitzsimmons? He told you that?"

  "She herself did, also."

  "I wonder how much he paid her to say it You see, I know Peggy."

  Before she could check herself, she said, "No doubt"

  He smiled. "There is one thing I admire about you. Your spirit." His smile vanished. "But if you chose to take that harlot's word, it was only as a sop to your conscience. You knew it was not true."

  She remembered the terrible moment on the witness stand when she had become convinced that she had been tricked, and that her brother, standing pale and tense in the dock, had caused an innocent young girl's death. The memory must have shown in her face, because Patrick Stanford said, in a flat voice, "Yes, you know he is guilty. And you know that in shielding him from the death he deserves, you become guilty of that poor girl's murder, too. Now, which ship did he take? And don't tell me again that you don't know."

  She stood silent, mind working furiously. If there was some way she could distract his attention, grapple with him for the pistol... She could not hope to wrest it from him. But perhaps she could cause it to discharge harmlessly into the floor. And then she would have at least a chance to flee down the hall to the room that had been her father's and lock herself in. There was a brace of pistols hanging on the wall in that room, and powder and shot in a cabinet drawer....

  He said, "Which ship, Miss Montlow?"

  Giving a slight start, she looked past his shoulder to the window, her eyes widening in an expression of surprised joy.

  He turned swiftly to follow the direction of her gaze. Instantly she launched herself at him, and with both hands grasped his right wrist.

  For a moment the pistol pointed floorward. Then, seemingly without effort, he tore his wrist from her grasp. Before she could step back from him, his left arm encircled her body and arms and pulled her close against him, fingers biting into her upper arm. Sick with disappointment and heightened fear, she looked up into his face.

  He said, "You are full of tricks, aren't you?"

  Then, with the pulse beating like a caged wild thing in the hollow of her throat, she saw his face change. He looked down at her for several seconds more before his mouth came down on hers, savage and bruising. His other arm went around her, slanting down across her hips, pressing the entire length of her body tightly to his. She struggled, dimly aware that her movements only excited him the more, and yet frantic to break free.

  He released her, so abruptly that she staggered, and stepped back from her. With the pistol leveled at her body, he said in a thickened voice, "Take off that robe and shift."

  She stood motionless.

  He said, "You will be getting off lightly. At least you will be still alive, not like Anne Reardon."

  Still she did not move.

  "I can knock you onto the bed, you know, and rip those garments off you. But in that case, I might not be content just to rape you. I might choose to have you found as Anne was found, at the foot of a long drop from a window."

  The words "Death before dishonor" flitted grotesquely through Elizabeth's mind. Whoever wrote those words had not been a woman, seeing both death and dishonor looking at her from a man's face, a face flushed with murderous anger as well as lust.

  With numb fingers she undid the sash of her robe, then drew the garment from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Despite the pounding of her blood in her ears, she tried to think clearly. Best not to add more fuel to his rage. Best to submit completely. That way, it would be over sooner. And that way she might live to see daylight.

  She loosened the drawstring at the neck of her night-shift and let the garment slide off her shoulder to the floor. Head drooping, she stood there, feeling his gaze move over her body.

  He stepped past her and with one sweep of his arm flung the upper sheet and the eiderdown quilts to the foot of the bed. "Lie down."

  Not looking at him, she obeyed. Eyes closed, arms at her sides, she had a sense of waking nightmare. She heard a metallic click, and knew that he had placed the pistol on the bureau. After that, rustling sounds told her that he was undressing.

  The mattress gave slightly under his weight He was sitting on the bed's edge. Don't fight him, she warned herself, don't fight him. Still with her eyes tightly closed, she felt his fingers seize a handful of her hair outspread on the pillow. Not moving, she endured the bruising pressure of his mouth upon hers. But when she felt his naked weight on her breast, felt his legs trying to thrust her legs apart, her body forgot her mind's command to submit. She fought, trying to free her arms to strike him, trying to turn her head so as to sink her teeth into his bare shoulder.

  His open hand struck her left cheek, rocking her head on the pillow, making dots of light dance before her eyes.

  She stopped straggling. She felt a painful pressure, and then the sharper, rending pain of his brutal thrust inside her body. She gave an anguished cry, and opening her eyes, looked into the dark face close above her own. Then her eyelids closed. Grimly, helplessly, she endured the hard thrust and withdrawal, thrust and withdrawal, until the final one left him lying spent and motionless upon her.

  After a few seconds he rolled away, to lie beside her. Blindly she reached down, caught one corner of the upper sheet, and drew it over her.

  Silence in the room, except for a sputtering sound as a current of air from the open window bent the candle flame. She opened her eyes. He lay with his brooding face resting on an elbow-propped hand. She closed her eyes and said, before she could stop herself, "Someday I will kill you for this."

  "Why? Because, as the saying goes, you are now ruined, unmarriageable?" His tone was mocking. "I am willing to marry you."

  A shudder ran down her body.

  "After all," he went on, "I could use your twenty thousand pounds."

  So he even knew, this Irish devil, the amount of her inheritance. She said dully, "Will you go now? Or do you still believe I know where you can find my brother?"

  After a long moment he said, "No, I don't think you are lying about that. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think that if you'd known what ship he had taken, you would have told me, in the hope of preserving... What is the phrase for it? Woman's dearest treasure?"

  She detected a forced note in his mockery, as if he were trying to hold some emotion, perhaps guilt, at bay. But what good could his guilt do now, she thought bitterly, what good could anything do? She turned over and buried her face in the pillow.

  She heard him get out of bed, heard the subdued rustling sounds of his dressing. At last he said, "Is the key in the back door's lock?"

  She said, her voice muffled in the pillow, "Yes."

  "Then I will go out that way."

  She did not speak.

  He moved down the dark stairs and along the lower hall to the back door. His hand found the key in the lock, turned it. He closed the door behind him, and under a moonless sky brilliant with stars, walked over to the bench and picked up the hat and cloak he had left there. As yet there was no glow of dawn in the east. When he reached the copse where he had left a roan mare tethered, he looked down at the house in the hollow. Feeble candlelight still shone from the window of her room.

  He rode down the country lane to the sleeping village, and then took the wider highroad that led toward London. That thin fellow, Weymouth, who had accompanied her and her mother to the trial each day. Almost surely he was the future parson that, according to the drunken marquis in Harry's Coffee House, Elizabeth Montlow intended to marry.

  Well, perhaps they would still marry. She would not be the first nonvirgin bride in history. And a parson could use twenty thousand pounds as well as any man.

  Anyway, she had deserved what had happened to her, the lying bitch. She had deserved more than that, after helping that young monster escape. He tried to keep thinking of Anne Reardon's
unrecognizable face as she lay dying. He tried to think of Christopher Montlow stepping down from the dock, freed by a jury of Irish-hating Englishmen.

  But another memory kept obtruding itself. A girl with faintly golden skin and clear gray eyes, smiling up at him as she said, "I live in the country most of the time. I love to walk, and to ride...."

  Pale light showed along the eastern horizon now. He urged the mare to a faster trot. To hell with Elizabeth Montlow. And to hell, at least for the present, with trying to find her brother. Eventually he would deal with Christopher Montlow. At the moment, all he wanted to do was to get out of England and cross to that beautiful, tormented island that was his homeland.

  ***

  Elizabeth had waited several minutes after she heard the back door downstairs open and close. Then she rose from the bed and stared numbly down at the sheet, stained with her own blood. Finally she stripped the sheet from the bed, dropped it in a heap on the floor, and moved to the washstand. With cold water from the pitcher and a sponge, she bathed herself as best she could. There was a tin-lined bathtub in one corner of her bedroom. She wished that she could fill it with steaming water as hot as her body could stand, and then immerse herself in it. But she had neither the will nor the strength to kindle a fire downstairs, and heat water, and carry it back to this room.

  Besides, hot water could not bring her purification, or even the illusion of it. Nothing could.

  She looked at her reflection in the mirror above the washstand. Despite the dimness of the candlelight, she could see that her cheek was still reddened from the blow he had given her. Would it look bruised in a few hours? If it did, pray God the bruise would fade before her mother saw her, or Donald.

  Donald! Her heart twisted with hopeless grief at the thought of the sensitive, humorous man she loved. She could not marry him now, not without telling him what had happened to her. And she dared not tell him. With that implacable fury that gentle people, once aroused, can display, he would track Patrick Stanford down and kill him.

  And that must not happen. Donald, at least, must be saved from the tempest of violence that had battered the Montlows, leaving her brother a fugitive, her mother anxious and ill in London, and herself, no longer virgin, staring at her own shock-widened eyes in the mirror. Donald must live out his life in this peaceful countryside, preaching each Sunday from the pulpit in the village church, and ministering to parishioners who would honor and love him.

  Her thoughts veered. That kitten, dangling from its noose. Her father was still alive then. If she had told him about the kitten, would he have dealt with Christopher in a way to keep him from becoming what he had become? Perhaps. Perhaps not

  Suddenly she realized the significance of her thoughts. She no longer had the slightest doubt of Christopher's guilt.

  But she would not think of that tonight, or of anything else. She must try, if she could, to find a few hours' oblivion in sleep. But not in that bed, not even in this room.

  She picked up her nightshift and slipped it over her head. Carrying the candle, now burning low in its holder, she went down the hall to her mother's empty room.

  CHAPTER 11

  The next day was ironically bright and springlike. As if in the grip of a bad dream from which she could not awaken, she moved about the garden and the silent house, clearing dead leaves away from around the pale green shoots of early daffodils, removing ashes from fireplace grates, polishing furniture that already shone. With dull thankfulness she had seen that her cheek was not badly bruised. Surely her face would appear quite normal when next she saw her mother and Donald.

  Donald. What would become of her and Donald? For the first time she realized what people meant when they spoke of one's thoughts going around like a squirrel in a cage. Her thoughts of Donald were like that. She could not marry him without telling him what had happened to her, and, for his own sake, she dared not tell him that Therefore, she would not marry him. But what reason could she give him—except the one she dared not tell—— for breaking their betrothal?

  Late in the afternoon she found one small bit of comfort. She went into her father's library, with its hundreds of volumes relating to everything from astronomy to zoology. From a top shelf she took down a book, a medical treatise, in a badly worn leather binding, and carried it over to the window. The book had been written early in the last century. The print was fine, the style crabbed, and the involved sentences sprinkled with Latin phrases. Nevertheless, she finally found the sort of passage she was looking for: "Protolinus to the contrary, it be seldom, albeit not unknown, that impregnation results from coitus primus of a virgin."

  It be seldom. At least there was one thing she would be spared—Protolinus to the contrary. Fleetingly, as she placed the book back on the shelf, she wondered who Protolinus had been.

  There was no letter from Christopher that day, or the next, or the next. That must mean that he had not taken a ship bound for some nearby port across the English channel. Instead, he must have sailed on one of the other ships Patrick Stanford had mentioned, a vessel bound for the West Indies or for North America. Sometimes she gave a thought to her brother, picturing him on a storm-tossed vessel in mid-Atlantic, and wondering if he still had some of the money she had given him, or had lost it to thieves, or on a toss of the dice. But most of the time her thoughts had no room except for her own dilemma.

  On the fourth night after Patrick Stanford's devastating visit, she sat huddled before the fire in the side parlor, and forced herself to face the fact that there simply was no way out. If her problem was to be solved before the day in late June set for her wedding, someone or something outside herself would do the solving. In the meantime, she would be like a shipwreck survivor on a raft, drifting nearer and nearer jagged rocks, and hoping that some miraculous reversal of the current would save her.

  The next morning there was a letter from Donald. His uncle was to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday in two weeks, and wanted him to stay on until then. She had never dreamed that a time would come when she could welcome Donald's continued absence. But now his letter seemed to her like a temporary reprieve.

  Early in the afternoon several days later, a carriage Stopped out in the narrow road. With mingled gladness and anxiety, Elizabeth watched Mary Hawkins get out, and receive the two portmanteaus the driver handed down from the box. Then Mrs. Montlow got out of the carriage, and both women moved toward the house. Afraid of what her mother might read in her face, she stretched her lips into a bright smile before she opened the door.

  She need not have worried. Mrs. Montlow was too taken up with thoughts of her son to search her daughter's face. As soon as she was inside the door, she asked, "Has there been word from Christopher?"

  "Not yet."

  "Where is the child?" With distracted fingers she untied the ribbon bow beneath her chin and handed her bonnet to Hawkins. "He's dead. I know he's dead!"

  "Mother! Unless he went to France or the Netherlands, it is far too early for us to hear from him. It would take him weeks to get to America or the West Indies, and weeks more for his letter to reach us."

  After a moment Mrs. Montlow said, "I suppose that is true. And I suppose," she went on broodingly, "that the poor child has tried to get as far away as possible from that black-hearted devil."

  Elizabeth said in a strained voice, "Do you want to go upstairs, Mother? Or would you like me to bring you some tea in the side parlor? No, no, Hawkins. I can attend to it The water is already on the boil."

  As the spring advanced, sunlight alternated with gentle showers. The daffodil shoots surrounding a maple's huge trunk in the garden unfurled their first blooms, and on the tree itself fat buds along the branches waved like strings of coral beads against the tender blue sky. Elizabeth tried to find some of her usual delight in greening grass, and drift of cloud across a spring sky, and song spilling down from larks that circled above newly planted fields. But she found taking joy in the earth's renewal difficult. And before long it became impossib
le, because a new fear haunted all her waking hours.

  She tried to tell herself the fear was absurd. The strain of the past few months had been enough to upset any woman, not only in mind and spirit, but in bodily functions. Besides, there was the reassuring phrase in that tattered old book....

  On a Saturday afternoon, unable to find more household or garden tasks to occupy her, she began to walk along the road to the village. She was about a third of the way there when she saw, with joy and terror, that Donald was walking toward her. He called her name, and quickened his pace. When they reached each other, his smiling gaze went over her face. Then he took her in his arms. "Oh, my dearest, how I have missed you!"

  "And I have missed you," Elizabeth said, and then, to her dismay, burst into tears.

  His arms tightened around her. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth. I should not have stayed away so long."

  She said, between sobs, "It's just... just that everything... has been so..."

  "I know. Even though you were my brave girl all during the trial, I know it must have been a terrible strain for you."

  With his handkerchief he dried the tears from her face, and then kissed the lips that were trying to smile. Hands clasped, they moved back down the road toward the Hedges.

  "Have you heard from Christopher?"

  "Not yet."

  "Then no wonder you are so distressed! But try not to worry, my darling. Wherever he is, he is all right"

  "Yes," Elizabeth said.

  CHAPTER 12

  Misty Paris sunlight, filtering through the lace curtains at the long windows of the Left Bank house, struck highlights from Madame Yvette Cordot's auburn hair. She sat at the dressing table in her boudoir, wearing a yellow silk peignoir, and smoothing powder on a face that had the relaxed, dreamy look of a woman newly risen from a bed shared with a lover.

  Half-reclining on a gold brocade chaise longue, Christopher watched her from narrowed eyes. He would have to come to some new arrangement with her, and right away. His money was running low.