Victoria Holt (41 page)

“I have been telling you for a long time that I never wanted to see you again and you were insisting that I must. Now, I’m saying I will and you are pointing out the reasons why I should marry someone else.”

“What a perverse pair we are. We’ve changed. It’s been a complete turnabout. You have left the practical schoolmistress in England and I have left that swaggering scoundrel halfway down a mountain. How can people change so much?”

“They don’t. It is just little facets of their characters being revealed. Do you really love me?”

“Do I have to answer?”

“I want a clear answer.”

“Oh. The schoolmistress is not far away. If it isn’t the right answer, take a hundred lines. Of course I love you.”

“Then the matter is settled. You may be the wicked villain with a trace of the Devil in him, but haven’t I always known how to cope with him?”

“Even in the Devil’s Den.”

We were silent. We dared not look at each other for fear of betraying the depth of our emotion. I took his hand and laid it against my cheek.

I said: “Ever since this happened I have been doing a lot of thinking about you and myself, and coming here in the train when I did not know what I was going to find, I understood myself…my feelings…and what I wanted. If I had found you dead, I shouldn’t have cared very much about living myself. I realized that I had never felt so alive, so much in love with life, as when I was fighting with you. I mean our verbal contests. To whip up my defiance of you, that was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I learned how dull and meaningless life would be without that. I suppose antagonism sometimes conceals attraction.”

“You are talking nonsense,” he said. “You are carried away by sentimentality. My dear little schoolmistress is doing what she considers the Right Thing.”

“If you don’t want to hear any more I’ll go.”

“Stay.”

“That sounded like a command.”

“You don’t like commands. You make your own decisions.”

“Yes, and I have decided that I am going to stay as long as I like. You’re going to get well. I’m going to see to that, and the only way I can do it efficiently is by marrying you. There is only one thing which will stop me and that is if you tell me you don’t want me.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “You must wait, Cordelia. You must see what has been done to me.”

“You’ve saved Fiona’s life. Remember that.”

“She won’t thank me.”

“She will in time. Now what do you say?”

“You’d be better off with the banker.”

“Shall I go back then?”

“No,” he said. “Stay. Suppose you married me. How do you know I wouldn’t give you a dose of laudanum?”

“I’ll take the risk.”

“And suppose I murdered you and put you in the fish ponds, or buried your carcass in the Abbey grounds?”

“I’ll take that risk too.”

“Imagine the scandal! Mrs. Baddicombe will have a field day.”

“I’m feeling rather grateful to Mrs. Baddicombe at the moment. I’d be quite happy to provide her with a few items for her repertoire.”

“You won’t be serious.”

“I’m deadly serious. I’m going to see the doctor. I want to know exactly what state you’re in. I’m going to stay here until I take you back with me.”

I hid my face because I was afraid he would see my tears, and when I looked at him there was a kind of wonder and immeasurable joy in his face.

It was not until the spring that I married Jason. By that time he was able to walk with the aid of a stick. I had been with him for three months in Austria. Aunt Patty had gone home after three weeks. She said that she thought I could manage without her and she wanted to see what Violet was up to.

She had been a great help with Fiona, who would not believe that she had been married to anyone other than the romantic hero whom she had always known. He had been tender and loving. I thought how strange that was and I wondered afresh at the complexities of human nature. I supposed that when he was with her he was all she said he was—and yet all the time he was waiting for the opportunity to kill her. I wondered what sort of man he could be to play two such parts with conviction.

There had been a great deal in the papers about the case which was called that of the Satanic Bridegroom. It was revealed that Hans Dowling was the son of a German mother and an English father; he had murdered two women. There was one before Lydia. Evidently it was a method of amassing wealth, for each of the murdered women had left money to him. His big killing was to be that of Fiona and her sister through which he would get not only Fiona’s fortune but that of her sister which would pass to Fiona on Eugenie’s death. It was the prospect of getting Eugenie’s money as well as Fiona’s which had kept Fiona alive. But for that she would have been dispatched long ago.

Jason was my main preoccupation. Together we concentrated on getting him well. There were hours of exercising in which I helped; I was with him all through the days and we often engaged in those stimulating verbal battles which had been a feature of our relationship.

I was happier than I had ever been, once I knew that he was going to recover; and I often marveled that so much happiness could come out of so much that was evil.

Daisy was grieved that I had not returned to school and that a little of the glory of Schaffenbrucken influence was removed from the school’s prospectus; but she made it clear to parents that the young lady who had brought in the Schaffenbrucken influence was to become Lady Verringer, wife of the largest landowner in Devon. And I think she took some comfort from that.

Elsa was extradited and stood on trial in Austria. She had not actually killed, though she was accused of attempted murder and of complicity in murder. She confessed all, which helped Fiona to accept the truth, and she was given a long prison sentence.

There must have been a great deal of talk in Colby and I could imagine what took place in those across-the-counter-parleys in the post office. Daisy wrote to me, most gratified, because no parents had seen fit to remove their daughters.

So we came home and were married in Colby church and the bells rang out on a very different note from that which had heralded my arrival.

Elsa turned out to be an exemplary prisoner and was eventually allowed privileges which enabled her to write a book about her life. It was very revealing.

She explained how she and her family had lived in poverty in the village of Croston in Suffolk. Their mother was thrifty; their father a drunken spendthrift. Before the fire he had worked for the squire Edward Compton and after the Manor had been burned down he had worked only intermittently and eventually had drunk himself to death. At home the children had spoken German and at the village school English so they were proficient in both languages. Elsa and her brother Hans were very close; they used to play together in the burned-out ruins and imagine that they owned such a mansion and lived there in splendor. Hans vowed that when he grew up he would find a way to own such a place and he and Elsa should live there together. It was the constant dream through the hard years of poverty. Hans had become resentful of the rich. He used to go to the cemetery and look at the grave of Edward Compton. “You were burned to death,” he would say. “Serve you right. You had everything. We have nothing. But one day I shall have everything I want…Elsa and I together.” They used to go into the church and stand before the plaques and monuments to the Compton family…It was a vow. He told Elsa that it was a battle between such as they were and the rich. If the rich had to die to give them what they wanted, then die they must.

Elsa remembered the night she had gone with Hans to the ruins and he had looked at the moon and made a very solemn vow. It was the full moon…the Hunter’s Moon. He had said, “I am the hunter. I am hunting for that which I intend to have and when I have it, dear sister, I shall share it with you.” Then he had gone into the church and there solemnly announced his intentions. It was a saying between them: “Remember the night of the Hunter’s Moon.”

Elsa had been pledged to help him. She had been frightened after the first killing, which had been in Norway, but it had been carried out without a hitch. The marriage, an accident in the mountains, a grieving bridegroom who collected the wife’s money and passed on. The first had brought small rewards and he had decided to look higher. Then he had heard of Schaffenbrucken—one of the most exclusive and expensive schools in Switzerland. All the young ladies there would be in their midteens…marriageable. And they devised their plan.

It was interesting to read about it and something of Elsa’s character came through in the book. She was fond of people; she liked gaiety and laughter; it was incredible that such a person could lightheartedly contemplate murder.

She made it clear that they had both made damning mistakes. Her brother had made his when he had not found out enough about my expectations and had in a moment of thoughtlessness given me the name of Edward Compton. He had an almost mystic belief that he was going to succeed in my case because we had met at the time of the Hunter’s Moon. It seemed to him a significant time; and that had made him overconfident and so…careless. She had made her mistake in staying at the school when she discovered that by an odd quirk of fate I was there.

“It was one of fate’s mischievous tricks,” she wrote, “that we should have chosen a school in which one of our intended victims was working.”

She and her brother used to pick the wild flowers which grew among the ruins of Compton Manor. They read of the properties of these plants both healing and otherwise. They discovered that many of those which people regarded as ordinary flowers could produce deadly poisons. They had embarked on a career of murder and they might need poison. They learned that foxglove contained digitoxin and though it could be used medicinally, in large doses it could be fatal; the leaves and seeds of the yew contained a deadly toxin; the various fungi growing in woods could produce death. Elsa became expert and distilled the juices, and tried them on animals to test their effectiveness.

“Strangely enough,” she wrote, “I liked Eugenie. She was one of my favorites among the girls, but when I had to get rid of her I didn’t think of her as Eugenie. She was just an object who was stopping our getting the mansion we had dreamed about. Hans said he felt the same. He didn’t dislike his victims. He was quite fond of them and even when he committed the act of killing he did it in a cold-blooded aloof sort of way. There was no malice in him toward his victim; it was just part of his grand scheme that they should be removed.”

It was a revealing document. It explained so much about which we had hitherto wondered. I could not, of course, understand Elsa. But then who does fully understand another human being?

Two years after my flight to Austria Teresa married John Markham. She was then nineteen. She was married from Moldenbury for her parents were still in Rhodesia. She adored him and was supremely happy. I was sure it was a perfect marriage, for if John had ever thought of marriage with me—which I believe he had—and if he had been disappointed when I married Jason, he would accept what had happened and find happiness elsewhere. He was the sort of man who would be successful in anything that came his way and that would include his emotional life. He would be the same good-humored, loving and tender husband to Teresa as he would have been to me. He was just what Teresa needed.

But all this was some time ahead.

For the time there was my own marriage and the joyous realization that Jason and I were the sort of people who could never have been really happy with anyone but each other.

How we laughed at the excitement in the town. The marriage had completely superseded the great murder mystery which had touched the school.

Memories were revived.

“What about his first wife? Does that schoolmistress
kno
w
? And then there was that Mrs. Martindale. He’s a one, he is. Well, didn’t they say the Verringers had the Devil in them?”

We laughed at the gossip. I was rather glad of it. It showed me and Jason without a doubt that I was ready to accept anything for his sake. I wanted him to know that and to go on remembering it.

It was round about Christmas time, two years after our marriage. We were the proud parents of a son by that time.

Jason was very anxious that we should go to London.

“You can shop,” he said. “There must be lots of things you want.”

I was not averse. I had an excellent nanny for young Jason and I had no qualms about leaving him.

When we arrived at the London house, Jason said he wanted to take me to the theatre for there was a play he particularly wanted to see. I was amused when we arrived to see that it was
East
Lynne
and when I glanced at the program the names seemed to rush up at me. “Marcia and Jack Martindale. Together again in their original roles.”

The curtain went up and there she was. The Lady Isabel.

I don’t know how I sat through the play, and afterwards we went backstage to see her and Jack.

“Miraculously risen from his watery grave,” I said.

“Oh, he’s a survivor,” replied Marcia dramatically.

We told her about the speculation in Colby about her departure, which she thought was highly diverting. So did the hardy Jack.

“I tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll pay a call this Christmas. Won’t that be fun, Jack? We’ll ride through the streets and show all those dear old gossips that we are still on earth.”

They did. Marcia insisted on showing Jack Rooks’ Rest and going to visit her dear little baby on the moor.

We were delighted to see their departure and we laughed a great deal about them.

“They’ll act their way through life,” said Jason.

“I’m wondering what Mrs. Baddicombe will have to talk about now.”

“I’m rather sorry in a way,” he said, “I always used to say to myself, She must love me a great deal to marry me when there’s this cloud of suspicion hanging over me.”

“Well, now you can tell yourself that there was never any reason to doubt it.”

“No. And yet it never ceases to amaze me. There’s a great deal you don’t know about me.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “I shall look forward to improving my education.”