Prisoner of Love

by Jean S. MacLeod

  Laura spent the afternoon on the terrace with a pile of mending, which had to be done before Lance returned to school. She sat with her back to the sea wall, sheltered from the wind, and presently Julius came out to stand beside her, looking down at her busy fingers as she plied her needle. She felt that she dared not stop working in case he should see the trembling of her hands, the sudden nervousness that his presence always caused her these days. Her nerves were well on the way to becoming frayed by the constant tension they lived under, and she wondered how long they could go on like this.

  “I won’t be back to dinner, Laura,” he said. “I’m going over to have a word with the local doctor about Cameron.”

  Her head came up, for a moment she seemed paralyzed, unable to speak. “A second opinion, you know,” he shrugged. “It’s always safest in the long run.”

  “Safest?” She echoed the word, her lips suddenly gone dry. “Why, Julius?” she demanded. “Why?”

  “In case of accident.” His voice was low-pitched and deliberate. “One can’t be too careful, and these local fellows feel flattered at being consulted.”

  “But—what good will it do?” She tried to keep her voice from rising hysterically. “What real help can the local doctor give you with Blair?”

  “None really, at this stage. I fancy, though, that it’s always best to keep them in the picture.”

  He turned away, and she wanted to rise and run after him, forcing him to make a fuller explanation of his visit, but her limbs felt frozen. Wasn’t this what Julius had done when Helene was so ill? Hadn't he “kept the local man in the picture” so that it was easy enough to procure the death certificate when he wanted it?

  Oh, no! No! Her hands flew to her face, pressing against her ears as if to shut out the terrible accusation she had just made in her heart. Zachray believed that Julius had killed Helene, but not this way! Not murdering her in cold blood!

  Was what he had done so very different, though? Helene had been frail and weak and broken-hearted in this cold north country, and Julius had subjected her to the humiliation of his jealousy and the terror of his love. He had kept her virtually a prisoner, and in the end she had escaped him, but only through death.

  Putting her work away, she went to find Morag. Morag who was sane and sensible and whose conversation was always so completely down-to-earth. But even Morag had condemned Julius’s handling of Blair’s case, she remembered.

  “I’ll take up Doctor Cameron’s tray,” she said when Morag had set out Blair’s meal. “We’ll be alone, Morag, if Lance doesn’t come back from Garvie. Will you take yours with me?”

  She could not bear to be alone. She was losing her courage as well as her sense of proportion, she supposed.

  When she went into his room Blair looked considerably brighter. “Chicken broth à la Morag, veal, potatoes and spring cabbage, if you can cope!” she announced cheerfully.

  “Put it down,” he said, “and come and talk to me.”

  She swung the bed-table, across his knees.

  “No effort to eat, no conversation!” she declared firmly. “We’ve got to defeat the germ.”

  “I wonder if that’s all,” he said.

  She looked at him sharply.

  “Of course,” she said. “You’re brighter today—quite perky, in fact!”

  “I ought to be able to get on to my feet,” he said. “I've had almost a year of this nonsense.”

  “It takes time.” She was trying to assure him and herself. “The relapses haven’t been nearly so frequent lately, and each attack may be gradually lessening until soon we will have forgotten how long it was since you had one.”

  He looked at her oddly.

  “I hope so,” he said, and suddenly he was no longer listless. “I’ve got to get away, Laura,” he said. “I’ve thrust myself on you and Julius for far too long.”

  Her heart seemed to turn over and lie still. What did he suspect? Did he know what Julius was doing? Yet his decision to go might be quite a normal one. She could not argue against it, because suddenly she knew that this was the one way out.

  “Yes, Blair,” she said in a voice that seemed to hurt her throat. “You ought to go.”

  He looked up at her in the rapidly waning light while something seemed to die in his eyes. All the blue had gone out of them, and they were slate-gray and expressionless when he finally turned his head away.

  “I’ll give you your injection when you’re ready,” she said, “and then perhaps you’ll be able to sleep. Julius left it ready.”

  She turned to the tray where the hypodermic syringe was lying between the folds of a small towel, and as she picked it up her eyes were full of tears.

  Oh, Blair! she whispered in her heart, Blair, my dear, my very dear—this is goodbye!

  Until she could blink the tears away she stood with her back to him. She knew that he was watching her, saying his own silent farewell, perhaps, because in the morning he would tell Julius his decision.

  When she had swabbed his arm she pressed the needle home, trying to look professionally cool and failing miserably, she supposed.

  “You’ll sleep,” she said unsteadily, “till the morning.”

  He did not answer, and she went back to the washbasin to clean the syringe. As she did so she caught sight of a small ampoule lying on the edge of the table. Curiously she picked it up. It was empty, and she knew it had contained omnopon.

  Swiftly she crossed to the bed.

  “Blair,” she asked as steadily, as casually as she could, “have you ever suffered pain—severe pain? Ever in one of these attacks?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  Had Julius anticipated pain? Because omnopon was a pain-killer. The individual doses in which it was prepared were small and safe, but it could, in time, suppress the regulation center of the brain and stop appreciation of fact, because it contained morphia.

  She seemed to be reciting all these in her mind from the storehouse of her memory, going back to her early teaching, yet, even now, half rejecting what it might reveal. She had no real proof that she had just injected a dosage of omnopon—no real proof!

  But if she had done? If she had done, she thought desperately, Julius was using her—fiendishly—as the instrument of his diabolical treachery! It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t possibly be true! She felt the perspiration breaking along the line of her upper lip and her mouth going dry as she crossed to the bed a second time. Did Blair know? Had he guessed, and was that why he had made up his mind to go?

  He was almost asleep now. She could not rouse him. She must wait. But how long? A desperate panic seized her as she stood there, knowing that she could do nothing now until the effect of the injection had worn off.

  Slowly she went from the room, going down to the hall to find Lance waiting there.

  “How is Blair?” he asked.

  “He’s—asleep.” She followed him through to the dining room. “Blair will be leaving soon, Lance,” she said dully.

  “Going away?” Lance looked as if the possibility had never occurred to him until now. “But not too soon—not before the beginning of term, surely?”

  She forced a smile.

  “You’ve only one week of the holidays left,” she pointed out while her mind was still busy with thoughts of Blair. “It has gone so quickly.”

  “Do you think Blair will stay till next week?” Lance asked anxiously, and then, brightening: “We might even be able to travel back to London together. That is, if Julius hasn’t planned anything else.”

  “I don’t know what Julius’s plans are,” Laura said in a constricted voice, her hand tightly clasped under the table. “I—he may decide to remain here.”

  “Anyway,” Lance said, “I hope we’ll be able to have one more trip on Northern Bird, before I go. D’you think Blair will be well enough for that? Inside a week, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Laura repeated. “It’s all so uncertain, Lance. This germ must be something
the doctors don’t really know about. Blair doesn’t seem to be responding to the treatment as quickly as he should—”

  “But he’s so tough!” Lance pointed out defensively. “Between these bouts of fever he’s as fit as can be.”

  “Yes,” she agreed unsteadily, “that’s the baffling thing.”

  “Well, I suppose if Julius can’t think up a cure, nobody can,” Lance said loyally enough. “He’s terribly clever, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Laura said, “terribly.”

  Morag came in, and they spoke of his visit to Garvie Lodge during the meal.

  “Golly!” he exclaimed when Laura had poured out their coffee, “I’m tired! All that sun and wind up there on the moor was grand, though,” he added. “Zachray MacKellar says I ought to be a farmer when I start to work.”

  “Would you like that?" Laura asked, already half prepared for the answer she received.

  “It would be all right, but I think I’d rather go to sea.”

  “Well, bed’s more convenient at the moment!” Laura laughed. “Up you go. I won’t be very late, either.”

  She felt exhausted by the day’s happenings, wondering if Julius would mind very much if she went to her room before he got back. He was already late, but perhaps he had found congenial company in the local doctor. She had never met Doctor Dumbreck, but she knew that he was greatly liked and much respected in the neighborhood. Would Julius and he have anything in common? She could not think so because, from what she had heard of him, John Dumbreck was a simple man. There was nothing oblique about him, nothing secretive, it would appear.

  Standing outside Blair’s bedroom door, she listened but could not hear any movement. The drug had done its work.

  “Goodnight, Lance!” she called as she passed her brother’s room, but he was already asleep, the sound, natural sleep of the very young, she thought with a catch of fear at her heart.

  If only Blair could sleep like that...

  All in the house was quiet, and in the sleeping world outside there was only the eerie, distant cry of an owl foraging somewhere among the trees. Yet Julius had not returned.

  Suddenly, inexplicably, Laura wanted to rush from her room down the wide staircase and bar the outer door. It was never locked in the ordinary way, but tonight she found the need to shut herself in. Her jarred nerves kept her awake, listening to the clock at the head of the stairs striking the hours and half hours, beating the passing of precious time into her tired brain. In a week, perhaps day or two, Blair would be gone.

  At some point she must have slept, dozing off into unconsciousness to be awakened by a sound that was no definite sound, a vague awareness of movement in the corridor outside her door.

  Trembling, she rose and stood listening, but the sound was not repeated. Then, drawing on her dressing gown, she went quickly to Blair’s room.

  The door stood ajar, and in the dim circle of yellow light thrown by the bedside lamp she saw Julius. His fingers had closed over Blair’s pulse and in his other hand he held a hypodermic syringe.

  For a moment of disbelief she stood frozen where she was, and then she thrust the door open and crossed the room in half a dozen swift strides. Blair was still unconscious.

  “He has had his injection, Julius!”

  In the silence she did not recognize her own voice. It had sounded high-pitched and uncontrolled, filling the room with hysterical sound, although she had tried to keep it level and authoritative.

  Julius turned from the bed. The light was behind him, but she could see the narrowed eyes and the teeth bared in a smile that was like a snarl.

  “Allow me to know what I am doing, Laura,” he said, so calmly that she stepped back a pace.

  “You’re killing him! You’re killing him!” she cried before she could stop herself.

  He turned toward the light with a pitying smile, laying the syringe down on the table beneath it. Laura saw that it was empty.

  “You can’t do this, Julius!" She tried to reach him, to beat at him with her clenched fists. “You’ve got to let him go. He is going. He wants to go!”

  He took her by the arm and led her to the door.

  “Hysterical fool!" he said. “Did you imagine that I would kill him?”

  What then? What? With the power he had he could destroy Blair in some other way. Was that it? Under the pretense of an experiment, and with Blair’s full cooperation in the first place, he could be experimenting in a different way, making sure that his patient’s nerves and health suffered irreparable damage in the process.

  And Blair had found out just in time.

  Slowly, without knowing how she moved at all, she walked back to her room, stunned by the suspicion and unable to reason or think clearly until dawn broke and the long streamers of light chased the moonlight from the bay.

  Perplexed, half-crazed and wounded by her love, she tried to take up the threads of ordinary living because of Lance and the need to present a sense of balance until Blair could get away.

  Julius made no reference to the scene in the bedroom. It almost seemed as if he had forgotten it, and he accepted Blair’s decision to end the experiment with at least a pretense of regret.

  “I hope you will seek other advice, Cameron,” he suggested magnanimously, “although who I am to send you to at this stage I have no idea. Blount, in America, perhaps. Would you like me to write to him?”

  Was he the complete hypocrite, Laura wondered, or was this his way of removing Blair to a safer distance, hoping, knowing, perhaps, that he would never come back?

  Within a week Blair was up and about again.

  “Nobody could be more glad than me!” Lance gloated, able to express himself with a freedom not permitted to Laura. “I’ve got one day left! D’you think Julius would let us take Northern Bird over to the Islands?”

  “I don’t know,” Laura said, feeling her heart turn to lead as she thought of parting with Blair. “You could ask him.”

  “Blair would want to go. I know he would,” Lance decided. “He’s quite fit now, Laurie, isn’t he? And we’re going to travel down to London together on Friday!”

  So much had been arranged, Laura thought. Escape for Blair and adventure ahead for Lance.

  For herself? She could not think about that. There was nothing between her and Julius now, no feeling, no tenderness. All the bonds were gone—the bonds that had never really existed except in her own mind. Her marriage lay at her feet, broken beyond repair. The vows she had made that day in the London church were less than nine months old. They still rang clearly in her heart, the promise she had made to love and honor Julius “till death us do part.”

  Could they, she wondered, start again? Was it possible to pick up the pieces, to try to make something out of their life together? But how? How?

  To her surprise Julius appeared quite willing to spend Lance’s final day at Dunraven afloat. It was Blair who seemed to hesitate, looking doubtfully up at the sky to the north before they cast off, but he said nothing to spoil their enjoyment. He did suggest, however, that they should limit their course to the mainland lochs, sailing southward down the coast of Wester Ross and perhaps crossing to Skye, if there was time.

  Julius, however, decided to go in the opposite direction. He had a mind, he said, to take a look at Cape Wrath, that barren, savage promontory facing the limitless Arctic wastes where beetling cliffs and craggy pinnacles fell sharply to the sea, echoing and resounding endlessly to the fury of waves.

  Callum came down from the lodge early, and as they rowed out to Northern Bird she saw him look up at the sky as Blair had done earlier. He spoke to Blair in the Gaelic, but after a while he nodded, as if he had accepted the situation mainly because of some assurance or other which Blair had been able to give him.

  There was a brisk breeze blowing from the west and they reached Scourie before noon. Laura felt that she could have stayed forever in this lovely little township with its gentle, guardian mountain and the silences of a great forest shutting he
r in, but Julius wanted to press on to Kinloch Bervie.

  The wind had freshened considerably by the time they rounded Handa Island, and they felt the full force of it as they battled their way north. Long before they had reached Loch Bervie Laura saw Blair’s brows come together in concentration, and quite soon they could feel the strong pull of the tides, the endless struggle of the waters where Atlantic and Arctic met.

  The sky, too, had lost much of its morning blue. A peculiar, Hazy grayness crept in from the west and the wind began blowing treacherously.

  Blair, who had been watching the sails, went back to speak to Julius.

  “But we’re within hailing distance of the Cape!” Laura heard her husband objecting. “What’s the matter, Cameron? Are you afraid?”

  She did not hear Blair's reply. It was low and constrained, but when he came back along the deck his jaw was set tightly.

  Julius called him back to take the tiller as they sailed into the loch. In the quiet, sheltered water in the shadow of Foinaven it was easy to forget the fury of the sea outside. The flat green southern shore of the loch was a riot of wild flowers on this early spring day, and birds sang everywhere. Soon, however, there was an almost ominous silence and Blair said half reluctantly:

  “We ought to get back. It’s nearly three o’clock.”

  He took the yacht out, and almost at once they were met by a changed wind. It blew with increasing force from the northeast, and his eyes narrowed to consider the dwindling horizon as he put the tiller hard over.

  “What the devil are you about?” Julius demanded close at his elbow. “We’re going north!”