by Ellis Peters
He picked the two cases out of the air casually as they came down, and stowed them under his arm. A moment later Neil was beside him.
‘Where are we going to make for now? We’ve got to get these people under cover somewhere for the night. You don’t happen to know roughly where we are?’
‘Not even roughly. But I do know there were lights below there, so there must be a village. It looked quite close, but the way down may take some finding. Let’s hope they’ve heard us come down. If they have, they’ll be out looking for us. Come on, we’d better get ’em moving.’
The bowl of meadows, high towards the passes over the ridges, showed now as a faint shape in the murk. Smooth under the heavy snows, the great white slopes curved upwards all around them. It was not difficult to find the one downward incline; and if there was indeed a village, somewhere down there it must lie. In just such a lofty bowl as this the cattle and pigs from a village might be pastured through the summer; but if there were huts here they were entirely under the snow now. However, shapes and planes took on significance as their eyes grew used to the faint, veiled darkness. All the lines of the inclined bowl drew down into one descending point, as the veins of a leaf into its stem.
‘This way,’ said McHugh, clambering and thrusting clumsily down into the gully and marshalling his flock after him. They followed mutely, shivering with cold and shock, but clinging tenaciously at his heels. They would not always be so united.
The way down to the village, obscured by drifts and invisible and treacherous everywhere, might have taken them three or four hours unaided, though in summer it must have been about half an hour’s brisk walking. But they were fortunate. After half an hour of painful and cautious progress, exhausted, wet, chilled to the bone, they halted for the third breather, and McHugh cupped his hands about his mouth and hallooed down towards the dark valley; and faintly and clearly from the distance came an answering shout. A quarter of an hour later they saw the moving lights winding upwards to meet them.
Large, steady figures, thick as boulders, loomed out of the night. In the light of the first lantern they saw a bearded face, a great white-toothed grin. Miranda heaved a sob of weariness, and illogically began to cry. Laurence put his arm round her shoulders, and said soothingly: ‘It’s all right, Mother, everything’s all right now.’
‘Grüss Gott!’ said the smiling mouth gently, in a voice that seemed to come out of the roots of the mountains, and quick eyes looked them over, counting. ‘Alles?’
‘Alles,’ said McHugh, wiping his streaming face. ‘Gott sei dank!’
‘Gott set dank! Kommen Sie mit,’ said the voice, ‘da unten ist unser Dorf, da können Sie ruhen.’
CHAPTER III
The statutes are precise. No way is known of circumventing them.
Act 1
Oberschwandegg was a couple of dozen beetle-browed houses clustered about a tiny triangular open space and a short street, as many enclosed yards full of stock and fodder and firewood, a minute church with an onion dome on top of a little tower, and outer walls with a batter strong as a fortress, and one sprawling inn, the Horse in the Meadows. It sat securely in the one level space in the valley, which for the remainder of its length rushed precipitately downhill towards Bad Schwandegg thirteen kilometres below.
The track that joined them was hardly ever passable except on foot or by mule, being narrow, jagged, and forked like a lightning flash among its rocks. In winter it could not be tackled on skis without considerable risk even in good, sound snow, and under a big fall it was sealed altogether, sometimes for two or three weeks at a time. They were used to it; they made provision accordingly every autumn. At a pinch they could do very well without posts, police, and all the other amenities of modern life which were cut off with the outer world. In any case they made little enough use of them even when they were available. Most of what they wanted they found at home, even wives.
The village sat rooted firmly on its mountain shelf, waist-deep in snow, drifts leaning here and there against the shutters of upper windows. It had snowed heavily and ceaselessly ever since it began at about three o’clock of the previous afternoon, on a veering wind that had taken everybody by surprise; and at six o’clock this evening it was snowing still. The one telephone line was down, somewhere below there, out of reach. The track was already snowed under, metres deep. Oberschwandegg was an island in the sky. Later, if the temperature dropped considerably and brought sharp enough frost, the fall might stop for some hours; but the sky was full of it, and before morning it would be falling again.
Franz Mehlert eyed the sagging clouds, counted over his swollen household, newly increased by eight unexpected guests, and reckoned his stores adequate for a month. It was unlikely that they would be cut off as long as that.
All the same, it was going to be a difficult Christmas. Eight out-of-season guests were a profitable present from heaven, though he would not have chosen to acquire them in quite this way; but these eight, fresh from a funeral and all too plainly with nothing in common among them but their expectations from the dead, had brought no blessings into the house in their salvaged baggage. Not even the simple blessing of gratitude for their lives. Or if they had, they had mislaid it overnight.
Susan, in flight from Miranda’s querulous company, would have agreed with him heartily. She tried the door of the small private dining room, only to come upon Trevor Mason and Dr Randall still feverishly outbidding each other over a chessboard and tea laced with rum. Trevor’s long, nervous fingers were clenched in his thick iron-grey hair, and his hollow, mobile, comedian’s face was sad.
‘Without saying she was anything but shrewd herself,’ he was saying, ‘I can really claim that she owed her fortune to me. I know how considerable it is. I should, I built it for her. I remember she once said to me—’
Susan closed the door again hurriedly. She had no wish to be drawn into that contest either as referee or audience. They were like jealous children, each of them waiting confidently for a compliment from the dead which would floor his opponent for the count, and each of them ready to take it hideously to heart and grieve over it for life if he did not get it. It wasn’t only in her youth, it wasn’t only in her lifetime, that Antonia had known how to drive men crazy.
In the little glassed-in terrace room over the street someone was playing the piano very softly to himself, and singing in a slightly husky, hesitant voice. She recognised one of the Loewe songs Antonia had frequently included in her recitals. ‘Süsses Begräbnis’ (‘Sweet Repose’). Did Antonia enjoy sweet repose now? After a lifetime of mischief it seemed a dull prospect for her. Surely there was a cat left somewhere for her to toss in among the pigeons.
Laurence looked up quickly as the door opened, scowling suspiciously over the piano, but his face cleared a little when he recognised Susan. He even smiled, though in a preoccupied way. He was not really a bad-looking young man when he smiled.
‘Oh, hullo!’ He finished the accompaniment meticulously, looking down at his rippling fingers from under lowered lashes. ‘You’ve heard there’s a real Christmas dinner laid on for us tonight? Liesl’s just putting the finishing touches to the tree. What a pity we’ve got nothing to put under it. What would you like for Christmas?’
Susan closed the door behind her and crossed the room to lean on the upright piano. The eerie reflected light from the snow poured in through the glass wall and glowed along the pale panelling. I know, she thought, what the rest of you would like, but thank God that doesn’t involve me.
‘You know what I’d like?’ he pursued clairvoyantly, his hands still busy. ‘You’d never guess! A beautiful cor anglais! It was always the horn I really wanted to play. I hated the piano right from my first lesson, and I always shall.’
‘I can hardly believe that,’ said Susan, surprised, ‘or you wouldn’t play it so well.’
‘Oh, why not? You don’t have to love things to be good at them. You can master anything if you really have to.’
; ‘And you had to?’ She could imagine it, though it had never occurred to her to wonder about him until now. She saw a sullen but subdued little boy sitting reluctantly at the piano hour after hour, with his mother persistent and dogged at his elbow, nagging at him if he tried to sneak away a minute too soon, and probably rapping his knuckles with her steel knitting needles if he played a wrong note.
‘What do you think?’ He looked up suddenly into her face, an indignant flush on his cheekbones, as though he could read her thoughts, and see only too clearly the picture she was seeing. ‘My mother couldn’t see any future in the horn. You can’t use the horn to accompany rich old sopranos who may, if you’re good, leave you a lot of money.’
There was a moment of astonished silence, while he glared challengingly at her, and she looked back at him without a word to say. Then he shrugged, and gave her a grudging smile. ‘Oh, it’s all right, I can’t blame you for feeling that way. I couldn’t very well help knowing it, you know. And anyhow, it’s true. I was groomed for that job for years.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Susan with surprised sympathy, ‘you haven’t enjoyed it.’
‘You mustn’t blame my mother too much,’ he said rather stiffly. ‘She’s always been poor, and since I was nine she’s had to fend for herself and me. It took a lot of scraping and saving to educate me, though you may not think much of the end product. It warps your thinking if you’re not careful. Even when my father was alive he wasn’t a good provider, and he didn’t treat her too well. I was always determined not to take over where he left off. So I couldn’t kick, she had the drop on me every time.’ He flexed his fingers ruefully, and began to play the introduction to ‘Frühlingsglaube’. ‘Even now I can’t afford to stop practising. I’m out of a job.’
It seemed silly to avoid mentioning Antonia’s money any longer; it was a reality, and so was his honest claim on it. ‘You surely won’t have to worry too much about a job,’ said Susan directly, ‘once the will’s settled.’
There was no doubt about it, this boy was hypersensitive on the subject of his prospects from that quarter. He gave her one quick, dark look, and frowned down at his fingers again more blackly than ever. ‘I don’t want her money. No, that’s a lie, too. I should like to be well off, who wouldn’t? But I’d rather she left it to a cats’ home than have it willed to me as pay for putting up with her humbly for three years. I don’t want to be paid! She paid me quite generously while she was alive. I earned that, and I got it.’
‘Look!’ said Susan, her chin on her fists, ‘why did you stay with her?’
He snatched back his hands furiously, and glared up at her with hazel eyes fierce and yellow as a cat’s. ‘I know damn’ well why you think I stayed with her!’
‘You don’t know anything of the kind! I don’t know myself, that’s why I’m asking you. But you’re not going to tell me it was for love.’
‘No, it wasn’t! I didn’t love her. But I did like her, believe it or not. And I respected her, too. She was an old demon, but hell, she could sing! She could sing most lieder singers off the stage, even at seventy-six, and that was only the wreckage of what she had been. I wouldn’t leave a woman who could sing like that, not until she threw me out. She made accompanying worth my while.’ He slammed down the lid of the piano with a challenging crash. ‘But you won’t believe that!’
‘Yes, I will,’ snapped back Susan, herself astonished to find it true, ‘I do. I’ve always known you were a real musician, she wouldn’t have kept you on if you hadn’t been. But I’d believe you just as willingly if you’d just tell me things, instead of hurling them at me like grenades.’
He stared at her for a moment with a confused face, half ashamed and half resentful, and then he bounded to his feet, grinning, and reached a hand for hers across the piano. ‘Come and have a drink! Quick, before my mother comes and winkles me out of here to smarten myself up for dinner. She won’t look in the bar, she’d feel it wasn’t quite nice for her to be seen in there.’
He was too late. Miranda’s high-pitched voice, at once imperious and querulous, was calling his name from the foot of the stairs. ‘Oh, God!’ said Laurence, clutching a handful of his straw-coloured hair. ‘I knew I’d never get by in a sweater. She’s a great one for keeping up standards. Now what’ll I do?’
‘Better go. We’ll have the drink after dinner.’
‘That’s a date?’
‘That’s a date. Maybe we could sneak out for a breath of air if it stops snowing. I could do with one.’
‘I know just how you feel,’ said Laurence heartily, and grinned at her and fled, closing the door gently to preserve her solitude for her; apparently he really did know just how she felt. Why on earth, she thought, doesn’t he smile more often? He could be quite attractive.
She waited until the hall was quiet, and then went up to her front room on the wooden verandah to put on a pretty dress for the party. After all, it was Christmas Eve. The wreath with its red ribbons and coloured candles hung in the hall, from Frau Mehlert’s kitchen a warm scent of vanilla sugar and baking pervaded the whole house, and Liesl had put in a great deal of thought on dressing the table for them and decorating a second little tree. And they had already received their Christmas presents; they were alive, that was cause enough for celebration, surely.
Nevertheless, the party was not a success. Miranda came down in a fashionable black dress, and its shapelessness hung upon her shapelessness dejectedly. She wore her usual three-row necklet of seed pearls, and her mouse-grey hair was as rigidly waved as ever. Laurence had allowed himself to be bullied into a dark suit, and the scowl was back on his brow, though now it looked more like apprehension than ill temper, and perhaps the look of roused determination on his mother’s face had a great deal to do with it. Thwarted in her evident design to secure the seat next to Neil Everard, she placed herself firmly opposite to him across the table, and Laurence seated himself dutifully beside her. Or was it rather that he wanted to be where he could whisper in her ear or lay a hand on her arm at need? She looked as though she might need to be restrained before the meal was over.
But it was the memory of Antonia that presided over the table like an incalculable ghost. Her hand was on every one of them. Richard sat silent, buried in his own thoughts. After years of love and understanding he needed no demonstration of her favour, nor could anything she might have left him replace what he had lost. But the rest! Susan could feel the threads of tension and speculation tightening between them before the carp was on the table. No wonder Laurence was making free with the wine.
‘She was a wonderful woman,’ said Miranda firmly, taking the conversation out of Trevor’s hands before he had time to conclude his latest recollection of the deceased. ‘No one knows it better than I, I lived on the closest terms with her. She had great qualities. But one should not let the truth be obscured – I’m sure Aunt Antonia herself would be the first to confess that she was not perfect. One had to admit that she could be capricious at times, even inconsiderate. She had been used to taking everything as her right, of course, she couldn’t realise how much she exacted from other people in effort and devotion.’ She drank deliberately, her eyes upon Neil. ‘Could one rely on gratitude from such a person? I can’t help wondering.’
Laurence muttered: ‘Mother, not tonight!’
‘Yes, dear, tonight. After all, this is a simple matter of business. It can’t matter to Mr Everard whether it’s discharged here or in London. And he’ll surely understand that it’s of great importance to us. We’ve lost our home and our livelihood, we shall have problems and expenses waiting for us when we get to England, and we’re not wealthy, why pretend we are? I gave years of my life to her, I have a right to expect some consideration in return. And so has my son, Mr Everard, after all his services to her, though I think she never fully appreciated how great his contribution was.’
‘Mother, please! Damn it, I was paid well enough—’ He was writhing and glowering, but maybe he was speculating, too.
At any rate, he let himself be ridden over.
‘Be quiet, Laurence, and let me speak. I’m not asking any special favours, Mr Everard, only that this uncertainty shall be ended. We are Aunt Antonia’s only relatives and her closest friends—’
‘Some of us might question if the two are necessarily the same thing,’ said Trevor Mason tartly.
‘As a matter of fact, I was speaking of all of us here, Mr Mason. Or at least, of Mr Hellier and Dr Randall. Your relationship with her was of course a business one—’
‘And yours was not?’ he said drily.
‘I say that all the people who were closest to Aunt Antonia are here now, and since there’s no help for this delay, and we don’t know how long it may go on, I think we all have a right to know exactly where we stand. Mr Everard, I appeal to you, should not the will be read now, tonight? We have to make plans for the future, and how can we when we have no idea what our resources are to be?’
‘It’s a matter for you people,’ said Neil austerely. ‘Since we were all going home there seemed no point in dealing with it until my uncle could handle it himself in London. But certainly the situation’s changed now. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here, and it might very well be better to clear up any doubts. What do the rest of you think?’
Dr Randall lifted his shoulders. ‘It’s a matter of indifference to me, now or later, as you like.’
Richard came out of his dream long enough to look round at them all vaguely, as though they were the unreality. ‘Do as you think best, my dear boy, I don’t mind.’
‘The sooner the better,’ said Trevor succinctly.
‘Susan?’
‘Doesn’t concern me,’ said Susan cheerfully, helping herself from Liesl’s dish of almond cakes.
‘Oh, yes, it does. You’re mentioned in the will, too.’
