A Dark and Stormy Night (14 page)

‘My dear lady, I am unsure what “grandstanding” means, but I presume you imply that I am seeking attention. I do assure you, nothing could be further from the truth.'

‘Oh, for Pete's sake, come off it. Sure you're looking for attention, and at this point, I have to tell you it's not becoming.'

‘Dorothy.' He dropped the pose. ‘Do you really think I'd risk my life – or worse, my career, if I broke a leg or something frightful like that – for a publicity stunt? I'm the only one who could possibly go for help, and I mean to try it.'

‘But why? We'll get out of here eventually, with no death-defying heroics.'

‘Laurence Upshawe could die without medical attention. He's a nice chap. I'm the only one who might be able to help.'

I simply could not speak. I had thought Mike a facile, shallow, if amusing, poseur. Now he was prepared to risk everything for someone he barely knew.

I moistened my lips. ‘You're not planning on doing it now, are you? We're going to have a storm.'

‘That is precisely why I need to do it now. If we get more rain, the river will rise still more and might flood to the north, too. It's very near it now. I was just warming up a bit when you came in, but I fear, dear lady, I must bid you adieu. There is no time like the present. If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly. And other assorted clichés. Unfortunately I fear I shall have to wear shoes. Clumsy, but necessary. Where did I . . . ah, yes. You will excuse me, won't you?'

He was out of the room before I could recover. ‘Mike, wait! You can't . . . Mike! . . . I'm coming with you!'

But an ageing woman with artificial knees is no match for a young man, fit and trained as a dancer. By the time I found my way to the stairs and reached the front door, Mike was already loping across the front lawn toward the wood. I saw him leap several downed trees with careless grace before I turned drearily back to the house. I couldn't catch up with him. I couldn't deter him. That beautiful man was running with foolish gallantry to his death, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. I went upstairs to find Alan.

He was asleep, but he woke instantly at the sound of my voice. ‘Dorothy! You're crying! What's happened?'

I hadn't known I was crying. I mopped up with the handkerchief he gave me, and said, ‘It's Mike. He's gone on a fool's errand, thinking he can save the world – or us, at least. Alan, he's going to drown, and I couldn't lift a finger to save him!'

Long before I finished Alan had swung his feet off the bed and slipped into his shoes, and was looking for his overcoat. ‘Where has he gone?' he asked crisply.

‘To the river. Near the bridge, I suppose. He was taking off through the wood, the last I saw him. I couldn't catch him, Alan! He can run like a deer.'

‘If he thinks he can swim that river, he is indeed going to drown, the bloody fool.'

‘He isn't going to swim it. He's going to jump it.'

Alan turned on me a look of sheer astonishment, and then was out the door and racing down the stairs, calling for help as he went.

The sky grew darker still, and I heard a distant menacing rumble of thunder like the tympani in the Brahms Requiem, low, inexorable, ominous. I looked out the window to watch the storm come, the tears again running unheeded down my cheeks.

The men were all back in less than half an hour, drenched to the skin and shivering with cold – and without Mike. I went downstairs to meet them.

The admirable Mr Bates had prepared a large pitcher of hot toddies, while upstairs Mrs Bates was lighting bedroom fires and slipping hot-water bottles into beds. Hot baths were still impossible to organize, and I worried about Alan catching cold.

They all changed as quickly as they could. Everyone was running out of clean, dry clothes, but I had no doubt the Bateses would somehow manage to wash – and dry – whatever was needed. Downstairs again, in front of the roaring kitchen fire with hot cups in their hands, they told the story.

‘We never saw him,' said Jim. ‘It had started to rain by the time we got to the river, and the visibility was pretty bad. We found the place where he jumped, though.'

I tried to speak, to ask the question, but found I could make no sound.

Alan took up the narrative. ‘It was only the place where the marks of his shoes were pressed deeply into the bank on this side. Or the mark of one shoe, rather. He tried a broad jump, evidently.'

‘A
grand jeté
,' I murmured. ‘And . . . on the other side?'

There was a silence. Then . . . ‘Nothing,' said Alan.

No one had any appetite for dinner. Rose had somehow contrived a pot roast. Under normal circumstances it would have smelled delicious. Now I found it nauseating.

The rain kept up all night, drumming on the roof, as menacing as the tympani/thunder. I suppose in the end I slept.

FIFTEEN

‘
T
his is beginning,' I said to my husband in the morning, ‘to remind me of
And Then There Were None.
Only they were ten, to start with, and we were thirteen. Now two of us are gone, two are in bed, one is keeping a deathbed watch. Who's next, I wonder?'

‘You're getting morbid, and your arithmetic is at fault. We started fifteen, if you count in the Bateses.'

‘Oh, they certainly count,' I agreed reluctantly. ‘But I was thinking of the . . . the above-stairs crowd, if that archaic term can be allowed.'

Alan just grunted. He hates unresolved problems, and the weekend had produced nothing but. Coils within coils, as Pat had said. No wonder he was a bit testy.

The vicar conducted a simple church service that morning for anyone who wanted to attend. It would have been nice to do it in the old cloisters, but they were unsafe, as well as freezingly cold and wet. The rain had stopped, or had paused, rather. More was certainly to come. We gathered in the library instead, for Matins and an abbreviated Eucharist.

Sunday, November 5. The day I had been so looking forward to, with fireworks and all the trimmings. No mention had been made, naturally, of the aborted festivities, but they were on everyone's mind, I was sure. When one is enmeshed in crises, the mind hunts, almost frantically, for trivialities to fret about instead. I tried to pray for a resolution to all our disastrous difficulties, but found myself wondering wistfully if the display would have been truly spectacular.

After church Jim went to the cloisters with his tools. If escape was impossible, at least he, with the other men, could keep on with repairs to the house. Alan told me to stay away. He almost never issues a command, but this time he had sense on his side. ‘The roof could cave in, Dorothy. It's extremely touchy work, and I don't want you and your dodgy knees anywhere near it. See if you can keep the other women in the house, as well.'

I argued that if it was all that dangerous, he and the others shouldn't try it either, but I knew it was a lost cause. The gentleman's code of honour, the laws of hospitality, centuries of unwritten rules about the way an Englishman should behave – I could never win against those odds. So I left him to it and, in the perverse spirit of biting down on the aching tooth, started off on a walk through the wood to the river.

It was a thoroughly unpleasant day, not actually raining but threatening to at any moment. All the colours of the world seemed to have faded to gray and brown, and the most depressing shades of both. The floor of the wood was sodden and slippery with fallen leaves, which made the footing uncertain. More than once I wished I had brought my cane, but I was too stubborn to go back for it. I kept seeing Mike, yesterday, leaping through the wood like a fawn – or a faun. After one nasty near-fall, I picked up a fallen branch to use as a stick, but it was rotten and crumbled the first time I leaned on it. After that I went more carefully, picking my way and testing each step. I should have followed the drive instead. At least my knees hurt hardly at all; there was that to be thankful for.

I smelled the river before I saw it, and when I came upon it I gasped. The placid stream of three days ago was an angry, pulsing, living thing, boiling and foaming, terrifying in its mindless intensity. It had not yet risen above its banks, but it was visibly rising and would surely breach soon.

Walking toward the drive, I tried to find the place where Mike had attempted his crazy, quixotic leap, but it was hopeless. I should have realized that the rain would have washed away every trace. I had hoped, foolishly, that I might be able by daylight to see what the men last night had not, some sign that he had, however improbably, reached the far bank. There was nothing.

I said a little prayer for a lost dancer. Maybe someday someone would compose a ballet for him, along the lines of Debussy's Drowned Cathedral –
Le Danseur Englouti
. But someone else would dance the role.

There was something hypnotizing about the angry, ceaseless, rushing water. I couldn't take my eyes off it, and I could feel myself drawn to the brink. If I watched it much longer, I knew, I would go mad, or jump in, or . . . something. My mind and senses numbed, I fled back to the house.

The men were still at it in the cloisters, cutting up the tree that had fallen through, clearing away broken glass, shoring up the roof where it threatened to fall in. I went close enough to take a look, though I knew I mustn't get in the way. The destruction was pitiful to behold, but I could see signs of progress. John Bates was working like a demon, everywhere at once, giving precise orders which everyone seemed to obey. I didn't know what his work had been before he came to the Moynihans, but he clearly knew what he was doing.

I went to seek out a like expert.

I found her, as usual, in the library, this time absorbed in a bound volume of
Punch
. ‘Your tastes are catholic, I see.'

‘“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale the humour in these pages”', said Pat. ‘Are you seeking company or reading material?'

‘Neither. Pat, something has to be done. This can't go on.'

She put down her book and gave me her full attention. ‘I agree, in principal. The men are working it out in sweat or prayer. What do you suggest we do?'

‘I want you to do what you do best. You're a solicitor. Are you also a . . . is it a barrister, someone who goes to court?'

‘Yes, barrister, and yes, I am. In a village there isn't a lot of scope for that sort of thing, but in London, before I moved back here, I was a pretty good trial lawyer, as I believe the term is in America.'

‘I thought so. Now, look. There is only one person who knows anything at all about what went on the night Dave Harrison died, and she's locked up in her room upstairs refusing to talk to anyone. I want you to make her talk.'

Pat said nothing for a full minute. Then she rose, removed her reading glasses, and said simply, ‘Yes. I think I might be able to do that.'

I followed her into the kitchen.

‘Rose,' she said, ‘I thought I'd take a cup of tea up to Mrs Harrison. Please don't bother about it – I'll make it – but I'll need your passkey for her door. Let's see – third on the left after the small landing, isn't it?'

Now if I'd made that request, Rose would probably have insisted on taking the tray up herself. Pat, with her inborn self-assurance, got her own way. In a few minutes we were heading up the stairs to Julie's room.

Pat handed me the tray while she unlocked the door. She didn't bother to knock.

Julie was not in bed, as I had expected, but was sitting slumped in an armchair in the bay window. They had moved her from the isolated suite she had occupied with Dave to one nearly at the west end of the house. It faced the front, so she had a good view from the bay window of the cloister and the work going on there. She didn't look up as we entered, but pointed and said in her whiny voice, ‘Look at that, Reverend. It'll cost a fortune to fix that part of the house, let alone the rest. Why, there won't be anything left by the time they get done—'

At that point she looked up and saw us, and screamed. ‘What the hell are you doing in here? Out! Get out!'

‘I don't think so, Mrs Harrison,' said Pat calmly. ‘I've brought you some tea. We need to talk.'

‘I don't want any tea! I don't want to talk to you! You had no right to come bustin' in here. I – I'll sue.'

‘Well, there you are, then. You
are
talking to the right person. I'm a lawyer, and I never lose my cases.' She had moved a little table closer to the chair, and I set the tray down on it. Pat poured out the tea, then took a small flask from the pocket of her slacks. ‘This is good for shock,' she said gravely. ‘I think you'd better have a little. You've been through a lot these past few days.'

Julie's eyes lit up at the sight of the amber liquid Pat poured into the teacup, and she offered no more protest. I've never been sure if it was the drink or Pat's air of intelligent sympathy that opened Julie's previously sealed lips. Or maybe she was just tired of her own company. At any rate, once she started talking, the torrent flowed like the river in spate.

‘Lady, you ain't just whistlin' Dixie. Let's go visit your sister, he says. Have a nice European vacation, he says. And it's turned out to be nothin' but trouble, right from the get-go. My snooty sister and her snooty husband and their run-down old house, and all too good for the likes of us.' She took a healthy swig of the heavily laced tea. ‘Dave, he says we can talk 'em around. Money talks, he says, and when they find out how much money they could make, they'll be draggin' us to the lawyers for the papers. Hah!' Another swig, and the cup was empty. ‘Treated us like dirt, tried to throw us out, and then changed their minds and said we had to stay here. We don't gotta put up with this, I told him. I don't care what they say, they're up to something. Stands to reason there's a way out of here, storm or not. They just don't want us to find it, damned if I know why. Dave, he says they're tryin' to put us off the place, makin' out like it's a dangerous place to live and that. So we took off, lookin' for the secret way out. Thanks very much, don't mind if I do.'