Stephen had half-turned, and was waiting.
‘All right, mignonne?’
His voice was warm and strong and normal. The pallor of his fear for her had gone, and he looked confident and a little grim. She smiled at him.
‘Yes. Truly, Stephen. I’m fine.’
The hazel eyes mocked her, gently. ‘Fragile little blossom. But seriously, Jenny, I—’ He paused, then said abruptly: ‘I wish you’d stay behind.’
‘Oh, Stephen, no! You can’t ask me to do that!’
‘I’d be happier if you didn’t come.’
‘Why on earth? It’s not dangerous. Bussac—’
‘I’m not thinking about Bussac. He’ll not be there. It’s just that I’ve a feeling the interview may be – distressing, and I’d rather you weren’t in on it.’
‘Surely it’ll be easier if I’m there? I mean, Gillian—’
‘I – suppose so.’ He looked at her doubtfully. ‘It’s only that … damn it, Jenny, I know you’ve done wonders so far, but you’re not used to this kind of thing.’
‘Who is?’ said Jennifer, not unreasonably. ‘Melodrama in the High Pyrenees? Come off it, Stephen; we’re both amateurs.’
He grinned. ‘Maybe. But I wasn’t brought up in cotton-wool.’
‘And I was?’ She spoke without rancour. ‘So what? You’re surely not going to suggest that I go back into that beastly convent and just wait, are you?’
In spite of the light tone, something very like panic frayed the edges of her voice, so that Stephen glanced quickly down.
They were there, clear in her face, the faint but definite stress-signals. Serenity had gone; her eyes were dark with shadows, her mouth too firmly controlled. His heart gave a little jerk of pity and tenderness. The guarded bower of Cherry Close was a very long way away …
He said, ‘All right. As you say, it may be easier with you there. But I’d as soon have seen you safe in out of the storm, in both senses of the word.’
‘More cotton-wool?’
He grinned. ‘It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t look so confoundedly fragile. Come if you must, but don’t blame me if you get wet.’
‘I shan’t,’ said Jennifer, and followed him past the convent walls towards the distant gloom of the pine-woods.
Round them, as they went, the sunlight seemed to thicken almost palpably, and the thunder-charged air sagged heavily on grass and scree. Away to the north the great storm-cloud mounted and darkened, and its indigo rim reached out to suck down the sun.
15
The Bartered Bride
The farm cottage was silent, shut, and apparently deserted, but as Stephen and Jennifer approached it across the weedy cobbles they saw a mule standing tethered outside one of the sheds. Its coat was dark with sweat, the hair on its belly tagged with points of damp.
Stephen stopped, and shot out a hand to grip Jennifer’s arm.
He said, under his breath: ‘Damn and blast. That means he’s come back. Jenny, for God’s sake will you get away out of this? Quickly!’
But it was too late. A man had already emerged from one of the ramshackle buildings, and was making for them, bucket in hand. It was the big dark man of last night’s adventure; Pierre Bussac, mountaineer and … murderer? Jennifer, rooted to the cobbles where she had played the listener last night, could only hope, through her dismay, that the Frenchman would not realize who she was.
The sunlight, cut across by a threatening shape of cloud, fell slanting straight into his eyes, so that, dazzled for a moment as he emerged from the dark byre, he took three or four steps forward before he saw them. He paused at sight of them, scowling uncertainly at Stephen, who had moved in front of Jennifer.
‘What the devil do you want?’ he asked roughly.
Stephen said: ‘You’re Pierre Bussac?’
There was no direct reply to this, but merely a roughly dismissive, ‘You’re wasting your time,’ in the thick Southern accent that had baffled Jennifer the night before. She realized with relief that the man had taken Stephen to be a tourist seeking his professional help as a guide. He added sourly: ‘I’m not taking any more up this summer. Didn’t they tell you that in the village?’
And at that he turned, hunching one shoulder as if in dismissal. But his movement had brought him within sight of Jennifer, hugging her obscurity behind Stephen’s back. He glanced, stared, his black suspicious gaze burning swiftly over her, taking in the pale-gold cap of hair, the tan-golden skin, the full-skirted frock of green cotton that she wore.…
The black eyes stared, widened. There was a clang as the bucket slipped from his unheeding fingers and struck the ground, tilting and overturning with an almost slow-motion unreality. He made no move to stop it. The dull clank of its fall brought two dogs running, but they stopped their rush as the thick stream of milk spread on the cobbles, and stayed behind their master, bristling a little and eyeing the strangers with snarling suspicion.
Bussac knew who she was; that much was obvious. And mixed with the anger in his eyes was unmistakably a shade of fear. His glance wavered, shifted, dropped, and then – irresistibly – he looked back at the closed cottage door.
But only momentarily. The faint clinking sound of the fallen bucket, as it rolled in an arc at his feet, seemed to recall him with a jerk. He stooped to pick it up, swore viciously at his dogs, and then turned back to Jennifer and Stephen with his self-command apparently unimpaired.
He said, flatly: ‘I’ve no time to spend talking. I’ve told you I’m doing no more guide’s work.’
He would have turned away again, but Stephen’s voice doggedly stopped him: ‘Just a moment … It isn’t about making a trip that I want to see you, as I think you realize now, Monsieur Bussac: I want to talk to you.’
Bussac smiled, not pleasantly. ‘I don’t have to listen.’
Stephen said quietly: ‘No. But I think you’d better listen, Monsieur Bussac. Or would you rather we went away now and discussed it with the police?’ He took out a cigarette and lit it, eyeing the other man across the flame. ‘Or – say – Doña Francisca?’ he added gently.
It was as if the name were a hawk – a storm-hanging vulture, thought Jennifer – the edge of whose shadow could strike the creatures below it into just this immobility. The man went still. His eyes held Stephen’s. There was fear in them again, and along with it a new element that was difficult to determine – the kind of desperation that springs from an overwhelming and dreadful futility.
He said, licking dry lips: ‘All right. I’ll listen. What did you come here for? Who are you?’
‘I don’t matter,’ said Stephen, ‘but I think you already know mademoiselle here. I saw you recognize her. Doña Francisca described her to you last night, didn’t she? She told you, didn’t she, that mademoiselle wasn’t satisfied that her cousin was dead, and might come up here to inquire after her?’
‘Last night? Doña Francisca? What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t bother to hedge. You were overheard.’
The black eyes flicked to Jennifer, then back to Stephen. There was a glitter in them, but all he said was ‘So?’
Stephen eyed him levelly. ‘So I suggest we don’t waste any more time. Mademoiselle’s cousin is her, Monsieur Bussac, and we’ve come to get her!’
The atmosphere was suddenly electric. The sun had vanished now behind the towering bastions of cloud, and the air hung heavy and purple over the motionless pines. Away in the distance they could hear the first mutter of the storm.
Bussac straightened his great shoulders. ‘I’ll not listen to this any longer. You’re talking nonsense – lies!’ He made a fierce gesture that sent the dogs swerving back from his heels. ‘You can get out, d’you hear? Go on, get out, you and your woman too! What if I do know who she is, and the story she’s telling? What if Doña Francisca did come here last night to warn me she’d be sneaking about my place? I’m telling you both, there’s nobody here but me and my wife, and we don’t like strangers in these parts.’
He swung on Jennifer with so menacing a look that she stepped instinctively back. ‘As for you – your cousin’s dead and buried – d’you hear me? Dead and buried, and you’ve got no call to go scrabbling about the grave. So get out of here before I set the dogs on you!’
Stephen spoke sharply: ‘One moment, Bussac! You can bluster all you like, but you know – and we know – that it’s all bluff.’ He added in a reasonable tone of voice: ‘Listen to me for a moment – no! I assure you it’s worth your while to do so! We know that mademoiselle’s cousin is here, just as we know that you’re up to your neck, you and that woman at the convent, in a dangerous game. What it is I don’t know, and believe me, Monsieur Bussac, I don’t care!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ The man came a threatening step nearer, his dogs at his heels.
‘What’s it to us,’ said Stephen, without moving, ‘what’s it to us what happened to Lally Dupré?’
Pierre Bussac stopped as if he’d been shot. The breath whistled through his nostrils.
He said: ‘What do you know about Dupré?’
Stephen eyed him blandly. ‘I know nothing – if you’ll do what I’m proposing you should.’
Pierre Bussac waited, still as a rock, his handsome head sunk a little between his shoulders, his dark eyes unreadable. They flickered once – towards the cottage door – then fixed again on Stephen.
‘Well?’
Stephen said, pleasantly: ‘We might strike a bargain, Pierre Bussac. Let me repeat that your affairs are no concern of ours except as they touch mademoiselle’s cousin. All we care about is her safe delivery into our hands. Now, I gather that her presence here is an embarrassment, perhaps even a danger, to you and your’ – he looked down at the cigarette in his hand – ‘your partner. I’m proposing that you let us relieve you of this danger, now.’
The man’s eyes flickered and he appeared to hesitate.
Stephen said: ‘Now, Monsieur Bussac. And we’ll remove her from the district as quickly and privately as we can, and nothing said.’
Something struggled in Bussac’s eyes, some dark glint of passion or fear or urgency, underlined with something that might – had it not seemed absurd – have been shame. His gaze fell from Stephen’s queerly. The hand which he put up to drag the shirt away from his throat was trembling.
Stephen pressed home his apparent advantage. ‘You understand me?’ he said, smoothly and urgently. ‘The police – Dupré – Doña Francisca – they don’t come into this. All we want is the girl, safe and sound.’ His voice sharpened. ‘I’m offering you a bargain, man – a good one. We’ll relieve you of the evidence, ourselves, Monsieur Bussac, now. When that woman comes up tonight your – your lodger will have vanished, and by this time tomorrow she’ll be half-way to England. And “Madame Lamartine” stays buried – and no one will ever find Lally Dupré! … What about it? What d’you say?’
But what Bussac might have said they were never to know, for even as he lifted his head, his great shoulders stiff, his hands clenched into fists, there came an interruption – dramatic enough in itself, but rendered positively theatrical by the threat of the approaching storm.
Behind Bussac the door of the cottage opened. A solitary beam of yellow light, spilled somehow through the piled clouds, stabbed steeply across the cobbles to spotlight the woman who stood there.
She was slim and fair, and she had grey eyes. From where she stood, faced by the beam of light, she could not see Stephen and Jennifer, and she spoke straight to Bussac’s back.
‘It’s going to rain,’ she said. ‘You’d better come in, hadn’t you?’
Across Bussac’s startled oath as he turned, across the nearer growl of the thunder, cut Jennifer’s cry.
‘Gillian!’
16
Discord: con forza
‘It’s Gillian!’ cried Jennifer again, and started across the cobbles.
And then everything seemed to happen at once.
At that first cry of wild and incredulous joy, the fair girl in the doorway started and stood rigid, the words freezing on her lips. Her eyes, wide, and very clear grey, met Jennifer’s in a single startled look, then, as Bussac’s oath ripped out, she shrank back into the shadow of the cottage doorway.
‘Gillian!’
Jennifer ran towards her, hands outstretched. And the cottage door slammed in her face.
As she recoiled, Bussac moved. With another oath, whose violent meaning there was no mistaking, he seized Jennifer by the arm, and dragged her back from the door. The hand bit into her arm, and she cried out. Stephen leaped forward, his cigarette whizzing like a tiny meteorite down into the runnel of milk that seeped, bluish, between the cobbles. Bussac, thrusting Jennifer violently aside, swung to face him.
It is doubtful whether Stephen meant to do more than surprise the man into releasing Jennifer, but any choice of action was now brutally torn from him. For Bussac, head low and fists swinging, attacked like a crazed thing.
Jennifer, bruised and sprawling on the cobbles, had a momentary and flashing vision – as if the eye of a camera had clicked open and shut – of the male musk-ox, horns down, charging his enemy; charging danger, while his females stood protected at his back … but of course (she scrambled, confused and shaken, to her feet) it was not Stephen who was the enemy and Bussac the protector; it was the reverse. Bussac had Gillian a prisoner in his beastly little cottage, and Stephen and she must get her away. Now.
Bussac, with a tearing grunt, had broken Stephen’s hold, and the two men flung apart. They stood, glaring and breathing heavily, the space of air between them already quivering with the next attack. Bussac rushed – another bull-like rush – and Stephen side-stepped, but not neatly enough. The other’s fist caught him above the heart, and then the two were locked again, in a horrible battle of straining muscles and grunting animal breaths.
Jennifer turned and ran for the cottage door.
But she had reckoned without the dogs. As she reached out an arm towards the door-latch, the foremost of the two flung himself straight at her hand. She snatched it back with a cry of terror, and the dog’s body crashed into the door. She whirled to face them, her heart thudding, her mouth dry with fear, and backed against the wall to meet the next attack. But it did not come. The dog which had fallen had recovered itself from its sprawl on the cobbles, and now crouched two paces away, snarling its hate over a hurt paw. The other wove restlessly back and forwards, just out of kicking distance. Jennifer stayed where she was, crucified by her fear against one of the open shutters that hung between the cottage window and the door. The bodies of the two men, locked together, lurched and swayed within a few feet of her. Helpless, she stood and watched, her breath caught in her throat with a dry sobbing, and she gripped her underlip between her teeth to stop herself screaming …
In common with most civilized young women, Jennifer had never before seen men fighting hand to hand. Nor had she pictured such a fight as being in any way like this. This was no clean, hard-hitting tussle between villain and gallant hero of the kind to which romance and the cinema have accustomed us; it was a thoroughly dirty and shocking business, a grunting, swaying, battering fight with no holds barred, and Jennifer sickened as she watched.
And Stephen seemed to be getting very much the worst of it. Both men were soaked with sweat; Bussac’s shirt was black with it, and clung to his back, outlining the bulge and strain of the great muscles beneath. Stephen’s face was streaked and greasy-looking, and there was an angry mark on his cheek-bone. His mouth was open and ugly, and blood was running into it from the bruise on his cheek. The breath rasped, short and hard, in his throat, and, as Jennifer watched, appalled, there came from him a small sound, at once furious and desperate, as Bussac’s grip shifted, and his knee came up in a blow that is against the rules in any language. Stephen twisted to avoid it, and the driving knee glanced along his thigh; at the same moment he thrust with a vicious and unskilful short-arm jab at the other man’s throat. It missed, an
d cracked harmlessly enough on Bussac’s collar-bone. But the Frenchman, seeing it coming, had winced from it, and this movement, coupled with Stephen’s own ungainly twist of the body, set the two staggering, locked as they were. Then Stephen trod in the blue treacherous slime of the spilled milk, and went down heavily, with Bussac on top of him.
Jennifer turned her head away at the impact, shuddering back against the window-frame. It rattled against the wall, and, like a bigger and more terrible echo, came the rattle of the approaching thunder. A small herald of hot wind ran whispering along the tops of the pines, and the steep shaft of sunlight dimmed and shifted and then brightened again, so that the heaving, struggling bodies on the ground, half in and half out of the single pool of light, suddenly took on the unreality of a moving picture. The sobbed breathing, the scrape and shuffle of bodies on the ground, the guttural noises of pain and effort, seemed to be coming from far away, like effects supplied from behind the old flickering screen. Stephen’s face, its angles high-lighted with sweat, jerked into the light, like a head horribly disembodied by a guillotine. There were hands at his throat now, and he was tearing at them – dark hands with hairy backs. Thin threads of bright blood crawled among the hairs, where his nails had ripped. They looked like the fantastic scarlet veins in some anatomical drawing, painted outside the flesh … the dark fingers moved, ever so slightly, and the scarlet threads gleamed suddenly like silk, and ran together in a thick red bangle across the wrists …
Jennifer screamed. She turned her head away from where Stephen was being strangled in the pool of light, and screamed again. Behind her, in the dim little room beyond the blank glass, there was a slight movement. She strained her head round to look, and one of the dogs snarled softly … but she could see. She could see the other girl’s face, white in the darkness behind the blank glass. The white face moved again, swam forward, was pressed against the window, the wide grey eyes staring out into the storm-purple afternoon. They lit on Jennifer, within a yard of the pane; on the brutes holding her at bay; on the ominously locked bodies beyond …