Never Call It Love (37 page)

The
knot of people parted at her approach. She stared down at the sprawled
figure—the soaked breeches and coat, the waxen face with its pale-lipped wound,
no longer bleeding, along the left temple, the fair hair matted with sand. She
had no doubt that he was dead. And yet, as she dropped to her knees beside him,
her first emotion was not grief for Christopher, but anguish for her mother and
his, that frail woman who felt, not just love for her son, but blind adoration.

A
hand touched her shoulder. Someone said, "I am sorry, madame."

She
looked up. It took her several seconds to recognize the thin, middle-aged white
man standing beside her. Armand Montreux, one of the two deputies of the
island's police commissioner. She asked, even though she already knew the
answer, "He is dead?"

Montreux
hesitated, and then answered, "I fear it is of a certainty, madame,
although it is the duty of the
commissaire
and the surgeon to pronounce
him so. Someone has gone to fetch them."

"How...?"

"Bertrand
here found him." The deputy looked at a tall
young black man, who ducked his
head shyly. "He came down at dawn to fish, and saw Monsieur Montlow's body
being washed ashore."

"How
did it...? What do you think...?"

The
deputy said, after a moment, "Perhaps he was not quite himself last night,
and fell from the wharf."

Not
quite himself. Her numbed mind made the translation. Stupefied with drink.

"Perhaps,"
Montreux went on, "he received that head wound when a wave washed him
against a piling, either before or after he drowned."

It
was the kindest explanation. No doubt that was why Montreux had made it. But it
could not be the true one. If Christopher had washed against a
barnacle-encrusted piling, there would be more lacerations on his waxen face.
Instead, there was just that one straight-edged gash.

Almost
as if she had been there, she saw the two shadowy figures on the dark wharf,
saw a raised hand bring the pistol barrel down on Christopher's temple, saw him
fall—already dead, or at least too stunned to save himself—into the black water
below.

She
said, "His coat..." One side of its skirt had fallen away from his
body, so that she could see the lining. Gray muslin patches, awkwardly
stitched, almost hid the dark blue satin. Her hand reached out.

"Best
not to touch him," Montreux said, "until the
commissaire
arrives."
He added, embarrassment in his voice, "One would say, madame, that there
is money sewn into his coat."

Patrick's
money.

She
felt hands under her armpits. "Please, milady," Jeanne Burgos said.
"Please let us take you home."

Elizabeth
allowed herself to be drawn to her feet.

***

Around
eight that night she sat in the parlor, hands clasped rigidly in her lap, face
almost as white as her
dead brother's had been. She heard the muffled clop of hooves on the road and
then along the drive beside the house.

Before
noon, a note from the commissioner had arrived, expressing his sympathies and
telling her that Monsieur Montlow's body was at the hospital, which also served
as the small community's morgue. She could claim the body tomorrow after
"certain official matters" had been attended to.

Aside
from reading that note, she did not know what she had done that day except wait
for Patrick. Patrick, who had murdered her brother, come back to the house, and
actually lain down beside her in their bed.

The
rear door opened. Footsteps in the hall. "Elizabeth?"

She
got to her feet and said in a voice she would not have recognized as her own,
"I'm in here."

He
appeared in the doorway, his dark face looking bleak but controlled. She said,
"Did you get your money?"

She
could tell, by the widening and then the narrowing of his eyes, that he had not
expected her to greet him with that question. "The commissioner will
release it to me when I call at his office."

She
said, in a thick voice, "I have always known there was hatred and violence
in you. Who could know that better than I? But until now I did not know that
you were also a coward."

He
said slowly, "What in God's name are you talking about?"

"You
could have shot him, and then surrendered to the commissioner. Nothing much
would have been done to you. After all, he had stolen your money. But you did
not want to take the responsibility for his murder. And so you struck him down,
and then pushed him—"

"Stop
that! I was on the other side of the island looking
for him last
night. And today I went down to the cove to see if—"

"Liar,"
she said quietly. "Liar and murderer."

"Elizabeth,
for God's sake! If I had done what you think I did, wouldn't I have recovered
my money before I pushed him into the sea?"

Because
she had known he would say that, she had had all day to think of her answer.
"Perhaps you did not know it was sewn into his coat. Or perhaps you did
know, and left it there so you could say to everyone what you have just said to
me. Your money was still in his coat, and so you could not have been the one
who killed him.

"Or
perhaps," she went on, her voice thickening, "you hated him so much
that for the moment you forgot about your money. All you wanted was to kill
him. And you did, and then you came back here and got into bed beside me—"

"Elizabeth!"

He
took a step toward her. She shrank back. "Don't touch me. How can you
think I would ever let you touch me?"

He
looked at her bleakly for a long moment. This was how he had thought it might
be. From now on the body of that unspeakable degenerate would he between them,
an uncrossable barrier.

"Very
well. If that is what you prefer. I will never touch you again."

His
footsteps went back along the hall. She stood rigid until she heard him ride
down the drive and turn toward the town. Then she slumped into a chair and sat
huddled against the backrest, hands covering her face.

Something
had happened to her time sense during the past dreadful hours. Now she did not
know whether fifteen minutes had passed, or twice that, before she became aware
of the hot, heavy silence in the room, broken only when some insect struck
against the jalousies. Nor did she
know how long it was after that that
she became conscious of her terrible aloneness.

Suddenly
the pendulum of her emotions swung. What if Patrick had told the truth? Without
her knowing it, Christopher could have made other enemies since coming to this
island. Or, if he had been last night in one of those grog shops or brothels on
Harbor Street, he could have become embroiled in a drunken argument with some
soldier or merchant sailor, someone who had followed him out into the night...

Patrick
had said, "I will never touch you again." Had he also meant that he
would never see her again?

As
Jeanne and Jules led her back to the cart that morning, she had been vaguely
aware that, next to a vacant anchorage where for the past week a Portuguese
merchantman had lain, men were loading rum barrels aboard an American ship.
What if it was due to sail with the next tide? And what if Patrick, after
obtaining his money from the commissioner, had gone aboard it?

She
tried to reason the thought away, but then panic overcame her, and she stopped
even trying to reason. She knew only that she must try to find him. She ran
down the hall and snatched a lantern from its hook beside the kitchen door.
Hands shaking, she struck a flint. Then the lantern cast a swinging swath of
light over the graveled path as she ran back to the stable.

Only
minutes later she drove the gig across the town square. Light shone from the
inn's open double doors, and farther along the street, from the windows of the
commissioner's office. Was Patrick in there? She dared not take the time to
find out. Perhaps even now that American merchantman was lifting anchor.

She
started down that sloping street where no respectable woman ever ventured
except to or from some ship, and only then with an escort. She was halfway down
the street when she reined in. There in front of a grog shop,
tethered to a
hitching post, was Patrick's bay gelding with the white forehead blaze.

As
she got out of the gig and crossed to the grog shop's open door, she did not
even see the men and women on the sidewalk, staring at her in astonishment.
Just inside the doorway, she halted, dimly aware of yellow lamplight, of the
smell of rum and tobacco smoke and cheap scent, of the raucous sounds—loud male
voices, shrieking feminine laughter—which gradually died as person after person
in the low-ceilinged room caught sight of her.

As
yet, Patrick had not done so. He sat at a table, laden with a half-filled bottle
and three glasses, against one smoke-blackened wall. Two women sat with him, a
thin brunette of about thirty-five, and a much younger and quite pretty blond.
Although Patrick, somber gaze fixed on his almost empty glass, seemed unaware
of it, the blond had her arms wrapped around his neck and was whispering in his
ear.

For
a moment Elizabeth felt dizzy with relief. Then she experienced something else,
a surge of irrational anger at the blond woman. Aware that she trembled, she
walked toward the table.

Patrick
looked up. An almost ludicrous expression of shock came into his face. He got
to his feet so abruptly that the clinging girl lost her balance and nearly fell
from her chair.

"Elizabeth!
What in God's name…"

He
came around the table, seized her arm, hustled her out into the night. On the
sidewalk, he tossed a coin to a bystander, a wizened little man with graying
dark hair. "Take my horse to the livery stable." Then he was in the
driver's seat of the gig, with Elizabeth beside him, He wheeled the vehicle
around, and with a lash from the whip, sent the pony trotting up the slope.

He
did not speak as they rattled across the square and passed the stretch of
houses beyond. Then, as they moved
between the two walls of black jungle,
he demanded, "What did you plan to do? Denounce me to the assembled
riffraff as a murderer?"

She
began to weep. "I was afraid yon were gone. I was afraid I would never see
you again."

It
took him a moment or two to realize the significance of her words. Abruptly he
reined in. He caught her to him, kissed her mouth that tasted of tears, and her
throat As she clung to him, fingertips digging into his wide shoulders, she
felt all her emotions of the past few hours—the fear and the bitterness and the
hatred—give way to her need for this man's lovemaking.

He
said, in a thickened voice, "We'll go home now."

Afterward
Elizabeth often wondered if their child had been conceived that night.
Certainly, never before had she been so abandoned in her response, so open to
him. Afterward, too, she felt shocked at the realization that their frenzied
lovemaking followed only hours after Christopher's death. It was as if the very
ending of his sorry existence had made her poignantly aware of her own living
body, and of its need for the man who held her.

When
at last they lay quiet, he said, staring into the darkness, "You know,
don't you, that perhaps I can never prove to you that I told you the truth
earlier this evening?"

"Yes."
In the absence of any sure knowledge about Christopher's last moments on earth,
there would always
be that dark question in her heart. Then she said, "But I will believe you
without proof. I will believe you because I
must
believe you."

He
drew her head onto his shoulder and stroked her hair. "Then that will
suffice."

In
those latitudes, funerals could not be delayed. The next afternoon, Christopher
was buried in the little public graveyard, two miles from the center of town,
where those not of the Catholic faith were laid to rest. No clergyman was
present, but Colin had persuaded a gaunt-faced man from Boston, a ship's
carpenter and an elder of the Plymouth church, to read the Twenty-third Psalm
beside the grave. When she and Patrick had deposited Colin at the inn and then
returned to their own home, Elizabeth sat down and wrote to Donald Weymouth,
telling him that Christopher had died "by drowning," and asking him
to tell her mother.

Two
weeks later, unable to find anyone who would admit even to seeing Christopher
the night he died, the police commissioner and the town surgeon, who was also
the coroner, gave as their verdict that Christopher Montlow had met "death
by misadventure."

As
the weeks passed, bringing a return of the rains that drenched the island for a
few hours almost every day, and bringing a quickened tempo to the island's
social life, Elizabeth felt relieved that the etiquette of bereavement forbade
her and Patrick taking part. She did not relish the thought of idle chatter at
the morning coffees and endless talk of war at the evening parties. It was chiefly
a naval war now. The English, resigned to the eventual loss of the colonies,
now used their battle frigates to harry the French along the North African
coast and in the Caribbean. As yet, no English men-of-war had appeared in their
particular part of the far-flung West Indian archipelago. But she could imagine
the talk at those parties, the women expressing their fears, the men gallantly
reassuring
them that they need not trouble their lovely heads, because the French fleet,
although usually invisible beyond the horizon, patrolled ceaselessly to protect
Haiti and its neighboring islands. No, just as well to be away from such talk.
Just as well to live quietly with Patrick, and wait with what patience she
could muster for a letter from Donald or her mother.