Thunder On The Right (29 page)

"You mean that conscience catches up in the end?"

Jules Médoc said very soberly, "I mean that she must have lived on the edge of hell for a very long time. One cannot violate oneself and not become a place of torment."

There was a little silence, through which the old clock ticked solemnly.

One can say that sort of thing in French, thought Jennifer sleepily, and it doesn't even sound odd. It's true, too. She blinked at Monsieur Médoc with drowsy respect.

Stephen said, "An ugly and reluctant partnership. It was bound to smash itself—and them with it—in the end. And now it only remains for you to take that triptych apart." He smiled. "With great care, of course."

"Care of the most delicate," promised Monsieur Médoc. "This has been a great night's work for me, monsieur, and I shan't lightly forget what I owe to you and mademoiselle." And he sketched a little bow toward Jennifer.

Stephen turned his head. "Awake, Jenny? How are you?"

She put a hand out of the welter of blankets, and his own closed over it. "Lovely and warm." Her eyes sought the couch on the other side of the fire, where a burly, thickset man, who appeared to be the doctor, was still bending over Gillian. Memory stabbed at last through the mists of sleep and weariness, and brought her awake with a jerk.

"How is she, Stephen?"

The doctor had turned at the sound of her voice. He said, before Stephen could reply, "How is she? Lucky. That's what, lucky. All three of you luckier than you deserve."

He moved aside to reveal Gillian, cocoonlike in her wrap-ing of blankets. She looked very pale in the flickering shadows, but her breathing was even, and her eyes were open. She turned her head, and the firelight gleamed on the fair hair. The gray eyes were wide and puzzled. They hesitatedover the doctor, groped past Jules Médoc and Stephen, paused over Jennifer. . . .

Then they widened. They were smiling.

Gillian said weakly, in English, "Why, it's never Jenny?"

After that, things seemed to resolve themselves very quickly. Two of Jules Médoc's men, gruffly supervised by the doctor, carried Gillian in her wrappings to the police jeep which was waiting outside, and the doctor, following them, paused to look down at Jennifer.

"Better get you to bed, too, that's what. And your young man." Then, as Jennifer made a startled movement of recollection, he put up a hand the size of a small ham and waved her back into her chair. "Nothing the matter with him," he said fiercely.

"Knife hardly touched him. Merest scratch. If he tells you otherwise he's malingering." He glowered down at them both. "Lucky, that's what."

Jennifer was holding tightly to Stephen's hand. "Lucky! That and more besides, Doctor! If he hadn't found us . . . Stephen, how did you find the way up to the cascade?"

"Darling, we followed your flashlight." He laughed as she stared at him. "It isn't as mad as it sounds. We weren't very far behind you, you know, and in those places you can see a light for miles. We saw it dodging up the gullies, and then, when we thought we'd lost it, we came on Bussac, and he told us the way."

"Simple, when you know how," said the doctor. He peered down over his glinting spectacles. "Here! What you crying for?"

She wiped her eyes. "I'm not."

He snorted. "Women! Told you she'll be all right. Meant it. Remembers up to that accident. No more."

She struggled to assess this. "The accident? The car smash?"

"That's it. Thinks that's how she was hurt. Told me so." The blue eyes were kind under the fierce white brows. "Retrograde amnesia," said the doctor gruffly, making it clear. "Gap. Complete gap."

"You mean," said Stephen, "that she thinks she's just come around after the car accident? She won't remember the time between?"

"Just told you," said the doctor impatiently. "Gap, that's what. Won't remember any of this. ..." A gesture took in the cottage kitchen, hesitated oddly over the now-shut bedroom door. . . . "Him," said the doctor.

Jennifer stiffened in her blankets, looking at the door.

"May remember later on," said the doctor, "but won't matter so much then.

Stronger. But all for the best now." He opened the door, and nodded brusquely at her. "Lucky, that's what."

The door slammed behind him. But Jennifer did not hear it. She looked across the little silence and met Jules Médoc's eyes.

"Pierre Bussac?"

Stephen said gently, "He died, Jenny. He lived long enough to tell the story, then he died. They brought him down while you were asleep."

"I—see." She turned her head away.

Jules Médoc said, in simple wonder, "You would weep for that one?"

Jennifer looked at him. "I'm sorry he died like that, monsieur. I—I'd have liked him to get away. I suppose that's wrong, but whatever else he did, he did save Gillian.

Once, when Lally Dupre robbed her and left her in the storm, and again tonight. He may have been a murderer, but he loved her in his own way, and I, for one, shall always remember him kindly."

Stephen's hand tightened over hers. "Then so shall I," he said.

Something moved in the corner beyond the couch, a singularly shapeless shadow which turned out, on inspection, to be Father Anselm. He, too, looked tired, but his little black eyes were bright, and he regarded Jennifer and Stephen with great kindness.

"God is very merciful," was all he said, and Jennifer knew that he, too, was talking about Pierre Bussac. Nobody had mentioned the other—that other whose body must be even now washed up, gaunt and black, like a drowned crow asprawl on a rock in midstream.

She said suddenly, "Does the Reverend Mother know?"

Father Anselm nodded soberly. "I have been to the convent. In fact, I was already on my way when the police caught me up. The girl, Celeste------"

Jennifer sat up sharply, then grabbed at her blankets as they slipped, and gripped them to her, staring with shocked eyes at the little priest.

"Celeste!" she cried. "How dreadful! I'd forgotten all about her! Oh, dear! I'm sure she was running away to Luis, and------"

"So she was," said Father Anselm, "so she was. And the boy brought her straight to me. 'You will look after her for me,' says he, solemn and proud. 'She is to be my wife, and I will have no talk in the village. So I leave her with you.'
Alors
, there she is, asleep at my house, and today she goes back to the Reverend Mother's care while she prepares for her wedding. You, my child"—he was looking down at Jennifer and now there was the ghost of a twinkle—"have slept a long time. Look."

He went past her to the window, and, reaching up, pulled open the shutters. The pale light of early morning filled the room, killing the small glow of the oil lamp, and picking out with chilly clarity the evidence of last night's terrible little story. There was the clutter of broken china and scraps of food where Jennifer had torn the cloth from the table; there the charred fragments of a rag soaked with blood and brandy; there on the floor by the table leg a dark, irregular stain. . o „

Stephen exchanged a swift look with Médoc and got, albeit stiffly, to his feet. He stood between Jennifer and the telltale disorder of the room.

"And we," he said cheerfully, "haven't been to sleep at all. And here's the jeep coming back." He looked down at her and spoke soberly in his own language. "It's over, Jenny. Whatever's happened, it is over, my darling, and the best thing we can do is to go away and go to sleep. That's not callousness, it's common sense. For us, it's over. Tragedy always has a dreary aftermath, but we don't have to wait. You and I and Gillian—we move on."

"Yes," said Jennifer. They smiled at each other.

The jeep roared up the hill outside, changed gear, and rattled to a halt on the cobbles. Jules Médoc got up, stretched, and grinned at them both. "You're lucky, that's what," he said.

They sat in a coign of rock, high above the valley, where the smooth turf washed up to their feet like a small sea, afoam with tiny flowers. Below them the convent lay, white-walled in the sun. Nothing moved in the valley but the stream that glittered over sun-drenched boulders, and, tiny in the distance, a chestnut horse that gently carried his rider across the grass into the shadow of the convent wall.

Once again, chill and silver through the hot blue air, the convent bell began to ring.

Jennifer, without turning her head, put a hand out, and, instantly, Stephen's met it.

For a few minutes more they sat there, gazing down the empty valley....

There came from behind them the sound of voices, of boots on rock, of voices polite in academic altercation. . . .

Around the bluff they came, sturdy, solemn, untiring, with rucksacks on their backs and hammers in their hands; Miss Shell-Pratt and Miss Moon. Their eyes were bent on the ground as they passed, their tongues were going busily. Their rucksacks were full to the brim, no doubt, with little pieces of rock that they were prepared to cart back at enormous trouble to Cambridge, there to put them away in compartments labelled
Paragneiss or Ultrametarnorphic Orthogneiss
or even—this was a counsel of despair—No. 99. S.E., V. des O: Pyr.: (?).

They approached, talking vigorously.

"The schistosity," said Miss Shell-Pratt, "plane or linear ..." A green lizard flashed across the rock and was gone. A great black-velvet butterfly alighted on a wild lupin.

. . "Plane or linear," insisted Miss Shell-Pratt, peering at the rock, "as Gotterhammer explains in his notes to
Grundkomplex des südôstlichen Pyreneengebietes
. . . ."

Here her eyes ran absently across Jennifer and Stephen, and she paused, to identify them almost immediately with a subdued air of triumph. "Ah! Miss Silver! Mr.

Bridges!"

"Masefield," said Stephen, who had risen.

"Ah, quite so." Miss Shell-Pratt had the air of one who takes lesser cultures in her stride. She gestured largely. "An interesting area, don't you think?"

"Oh, decidedly."

"A lot to do," said Miss Moon from behind her companion. And indeed her gaze had already moved on beyond the group toward the next rib of exposed rock, to pass on, with what was perhaps a shade of dismay, to the towering shapes of the ridges beyond. "A
lot
to do," she repeated, and looked down uncertainly at the very small hammer in her hand.

But Miss Shell-Pratt was made of sterner stuff. She became brisk. "Yes, indeed!

Plenty of work there!
Most
interesting! We must be getting along. Come on, Moon."

They strode down the slope.

Stephen put down a hand, and pulled Jennifer to her feet.

He put an arm around her, and they stood for a while, looking down from the shoulder of the bare mountain at the green and golden valley below.

"The enchanted valley," said Jennifer softly. "Paradise. . ."

The small flowers stirred at their feet. The lizard slid back to lie on his stone, a crescent of living jade. The butterfly swayed on the yellow lupin beside them. Faint, but clear, Miss Shell-Pratt's voice floated back to them. "The felspars," she was saying firmly, "are allotriomorphic toward the biotite, augite, and hornblende. . . ."

The lizard vanished. The butterfly flew away. Cambridge, after all, had had the last word.