The Rich Are with You Always (65 page)

  "Not in my books, Dan," she said, absolutely unmoved by his appeal. "In my books, red ink is thicker than blood. The most I'll do for you is to promise it will take me fifteen minutes to find the gendarmes and tell them. And don't thank me. I'd do the same for a fox or any other vermin I intended to kill."

  "
Thank
you?" he echoed. A hard glint came into his eyes. "No, I won't thank you." He pulled out a pistol.

  At that moment the door opened. A young girl, about seventeen, soberly dressed in dark blue with white cuffs and a collar, almost nun-like, stood transfixed in shock as she took in the scene. Daniel was the first to recover. He grabbed the girl and jerked her toward him. She drew breath to scream but he put a hand over her open mouth and then pointed the gun at her neck. The intended scream turned to a strangling noise in her throat.

  "Now, Nora," he said, "if you fail to do as I say, I will shoot her. You will go and get me some food and you will tell everyone to keep away from these stables this evening. Here"—he shook the girl—"is my
laisser-passer
to Blainville.
Parlez
anglais?"
he asked the girl.

  She shook her head inside his grip; only her terrified eyes showed above his hand.

  Nora sighed wearily and began to walk toward the door. "You'd best shoot her at once then, Daniel. I've never seen her in my life—she's nothing to me. I'm going to the gendarmes."

  "I mean it!" he screamed, cocking the hammer.

  "I know you do. I never doubted it. You were born a fool. Kill her and you'll not get out of this town. Run now and you've a chance. But I would never expect you to do the sensible thing."

  Daniel flung the girl from him, almost between one of the horse's feet. She rolled quickly out of the way, and then began to vomit. Once again Daniel had the gun pointed straight at Nora.

  "I'll kill you if you go," he said. "I will."

  She looked steadily at him, frankly puzzled. "Now you do surprise me. I'd have thought the death you'd planned for yourself was on a barricade or leading a charge on the militia. But now it'll be Daniel Telling who had his shaved head guillotined into the sawdust one cold morning for a squalid family murder in a tavern stable. Your comrades will want to forget you. Still, you'd best be quick about it because I'm off."

  She walked straight to him and, to her own surprise as well as to his, kissed him quickly on the cheek; she felt the gun shaking against her breast. "Goodbye, Daniel. Fifteen minutes."

  Outside was the ordinary, everyday, evening world. She looked around, knowing that the gun was now levelled at her back, wondering what in all that ordinariness would be the last thing she happened to see. The cobbles seemed to shimmer. She heard but did not feel her feet upon them. She was halfway over the yard and still no shot had come.

  "Nora!" His anguished voice.

  She stopped and turned. He had the gun pointing in her direction but it shook like an ill-adjusted machine. "Don't make me do it," he cried.

  "Make you?" she sneered. "I couldn't even make you mend a door!" She turned and began again to walk, convinced now that he was going to shoot but thinking he would almost certainly miss her.

  Before she had reached the corner, where the carriageway turned under the arch and out into the street, she heard him give a little strangled cry of despair. Then came the sound of his running feet on the cobbles. She walked on without pause.

  There was a sudden unbelievable stab of pain in her side as he pistol-whipped her in passing. She had to stop then to fight the flying black oblivion that began to crowd her from all around. She had to fight to breathe—and every breath was agony.

  "Monsieur Gaston, Monsieur Gaston? Monsieur Gaston…!" the young girl stranger, now standing in the stable doorway, yelled across the yard.

  By magic, Gaston was at Nora's side and, still racked with the pain, she staggered back indoors, supported by him. He sent the groom from La Gracieuse for the gendarme and one of the maids for Dr. Grumble.

  The doctor, being nearer, came first, his wheezing announcing his impending arrival.

  "Kicked by a horse?" he asked as soon as he saw the redness and the swelling.

  "Someone threw something heavy at me there."

  "Well, you can bless your steel stays it's not broken in two, but there may be a slight fracture. We'll bind you just in case."

  The binding was very constricting and left her rattling in her corsets like a ripe nut in its shell. But it seemed to ease the pain—or to spread it and make it less acute. He left her with some opium to ease it further.

  Daniel had thirty minutes' start by the time the gendarme could see her. The fact of her injury and the girl's story removed any possible suspicion that she had played a part in furthering her brother's escape. She wondered, then and later, whether he had done it deliberately, as a sort of perverted act of kindness.

  It would not have pleased Daniel to find that the authorities were not particularly interested in him as a revolutionary hero on the run. His name was on no list that they had received. Only the fact that he had assaulted her and caused bodily harm made them pursue the case at all. She did not tell them where he was to leave the coast that night; it was the same instinct that would lead her to let any fox get well away from a piece of covert.

  "Somewhere Cherbourg way, I expect," the gendarme said. "Good riddance."

  How Daniel would have hated that envoi!

  When the man had gone, Gaston showed in the young girl in blue.

  "Mademoiselle Clébert?" Nora asked. "I felt sure it was you. How are you now?"

  "Much better, thank you, Madame Stevenson." She was even paler than she had looked out in the stables, but her hand did not shake and she was composed again.

  Nora explained what had happened while the girl nodded solemnly, not showing any surprise. "I cannot promise you such excitements every day, mademoiselle—if you are still interested in the position."

  
"Mais oui, madame!"
The girl was astonished that that should even be in question. More than anything, Nora liked that tough cheerfulness, unflustered and self-possessed.

  She described the job to the girl in as much detail as she could. As lady's maid, she would be found in all clothing, bed, and board, would travel with Nora, would have all the privileges of an upper servant, including dining in the housekeeper's parlour. Among the servants, only the housekeeper would be her superior. Nora proposed a six-month trial period. The usual maximum wage for a girl in such a post was twenty-five pounds—or six hundred and forty francs—a year, but in view of the girl's youth and inexperience, she would receive only fifteen—three hundred and eighty-four francs. If she proved satisfactory, an increase would not be unreasonably delayed.

  "Thank you, Madame Stevenson," the girl said. "That will all be adequate. May my mother come to interview you tomorrow morning?"

  For a moment Nora was surprised. Then it struck her that in reversed circumstances, she would wish to do exactly the same, and that the mother's concern was an additional recommendation for the daughter. It made her think suddenly of what facilities they could offer the girl.

  "How often do you go to Mass?" she asked.

  "Never!" the girl said. "I am
protestante
!"

  When she had gone, Nora asked Gaston if he had not said that the mother was housekeeper to the bishop—and did he mean the Roman bishop?

  "The mother"—Gaston smiled—"is a cook supreme. In France, dogma has its limits!"

  Everything was to the mother's satisfaction next morning, so after an early lunch and with despairing pleas from Dr. Grimble not to go, Nora and the girl set off with Honorine and the groom for the long and this time painful ride back to La Gracieuse. Nanette showed almost no emotion on parting from her mother and the home of all her seventeen years. It did not square true with the way she had vomited in the stables. Nora took the liberty of asking why she had done that.

  "Oh," she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. "It was his hands. The taste. They were so dirty."

  Of all the epitaphs she had ever devised for Daniel, that seemed the most fitting.

Rodie suggested she should stay a further week, not only to help her rib to heal but also to let Danielle, her latest maid, grudgingly admitted to be "quite good," teach Nanette some points of being a lady's maid. It amused Nora to see Rodie standing eavesdropping outside the door, getting more and more annoyed at what she was hearing and eventually thrusting in saying, "No no no. It's not right. Like this. I'll show you!"

  On the second day of this extended visit, she had a fat letter from home. Winifred explained it in a covering letter.

The permanent residents of Maran Hill were at their daily walk in the West Park one day last week when what should they see but a hare, which ran away. All and sundry gave chase but, they being without canine assistance, to wit: viz Tip and Puck, the hare was abandoned, pro tern. But what should happen that selfsame afternoon when, lessons being done for the day, the newly formed Maran pack of harehounds (the said Tip and Puck, a fine couple recently entered) under their master Sir John Stevenson, M.H.H., resplendent in his outdoor clothes, and first whipper-in Caspar, likely clad, as ditto second whipper-in Clement, and followers including the vivacious and charming Miss Winifred Stevenson in a glorious white summer dress with wide straw hat and blue silk band to match, driving the pony cart with her troublesome sisters, Abigail and Hester, who do not yet understand the glories of the chase, and sundry other followers, among whom Aunt Sarah in a new summer dress of pale blue with pretty posies and a cream bonnet and shawl in blue foulard stripes and tassels, which occasioned most general approval and acclaim—what should happen, I say, but that the hare was nowhere in evidence and could not be started no matter where the pack drew.

Most masters, faced with such a dire quandary, would have gone home, hiding his disappointment in manly good spirits. But Sir John is made of finer clay. Thinking the morning's surprise might have sent the quarry to the East Park for the day, he cunningly divided his entire pack into two equal halves and sent them around by the southern and northern hedges. He stationed the charming Miss Winifred Stevenson at the gorse patch, between East and West parks to block the doomed creature's return, and himself went to draw from the east. Picture the poor hare's miserable despair! Surrounded from every quarter of the compass, he sees advancing upon him two ferocious hounds bent on his destruction from north and south, while the dashing Master sternly denies him the east. Piteously, he looks westward to where the lovely Miss Winifred bars his way. Perhaps there he will find one spark of tender compassion? Alas, it is not so. Her heart of ice is fixed as constant as the polar star. He is doomed! He is doomed! But no! The pack closes in and the two hounds, misunderstanding the entire nature of their business there, fell to fighting one with the other. While this diversion was in the course of proceeding, the quarry slipped away. Such was its infinite cunning that, throughout the entire chase, the said hare was not once seen by huntsmen, hounds, field, nor following. A worthy opponent for another day!

N.B. The Maran Hunt has taken for its motto:
De nihilo nihil, in
nihilum nil posse reverti
(Persius), which, for our dear Mama's sake, we translate: From nothing nothing can proceed, and nothing can be reduced into nothing.

  [To this Sarah had added, in pencil:] No prizes are offered for guessing the name of the writer! Caspar is in bed with a cold—the next piece of news tells you where he got it:

We append a sketch by our Artist of the latest state of the ingenious waterworks now under construction in a corner of the walled garden. Following an amazing demonstration of the well-known method of how to "puddle" a canal by the great John Stevenson Senior, the world's foremost contractor, thus rendering it impervious to water, his children have determined that the benefits of hydraulic civilization should be carried to the farthest corners of the walled garden, where there is a new tap installed for the farm stables. Under the direction of Sir John Stevenson, they have devised an ingenious network of sluices, aquifers, spillways, traps, and pounds, which, with Great Labour, they have dug, extending from the wall to the cooking apples.