Thunder On The Right (18 page)

Jennifer gasped and shrank in Stephen's arms. He held her still and close, her head pressed into his shoulder.

"It's all right, Jenny. It'll pass."

"Should we—I mean, the trees------"

"It's all right," he said again. "It's going."

As he spoke, the lightning drove down again, with a crash as if Roland's great sword Durandel itself were splitting the mountains wide again.

"The crack of doom," said Stephen. Then, as he felt her shiver, "That was away beyond the wood, Jenny. It's going fast."

She lifted her head from his shoulder., "Toward the farm." She shivered again.

"Frightened? There's no need."

"Not of that. The other thing. The Gillian thing. We—we shouldn't have forgotten it like that: I didn't mean that I didn't care what happened to Gillian. I only------"

"Darling, nobody imagines you did."

She lifted scared eyes where tears still clung. "The thunder, You called it the crack of doom. It was like that; all day It's been like—something waiting, waiting in the wings to pounce. Disaster. An evil omen, Stephen. And the evil's happening, now,"

"Not yet"

She said, on a little sob, "But it will. We can't stop it."

"No?"

There was a new note in his voice which made her blood tingle. She pushed away from him, her hands against his chest, her eyes searching his face. The change there was startling enough. Fatigue, depression, pain—all these had vanished, as if on the tail of the now retreating storm. The marks of his defeat were still there, bruises, cuts, ugly smears where blood and sweat had dried crustily, but he was smiling, and his eyes were steady and confident and—yes, excited.

She said sharply, "You're not to go back there! You're not to!"

He laughed, then pulled her to him and kissed her. "I don't propose to—though the way I feel now, I could turn friend Bussac inside out with one hand!" He put a hand under her chin, and tilted up her face, still smiling. "Your magic, Jenny . . . talk about moving mountains! I could shift the whole range, by God, before breakfast, and wash my hands, saying—how does it go?—'
Fie upon this quiet life, I want work!'"

He got quickly to his feet and reached a hand down to her.

"You and the thunder between you, sweetheart, have cleared the air! There's a way out of your precious melodrama yet, if we'd only brains enough to see it!"

He slid his hands up to her shoulders, and shook her gently. "Don't look so stricken, my darling. This isn't going to be a tragedy after all! Listen."

Away among the peaks to the south the thunder crashed once more.

"Thunder—on the right," said Stephen. "There's your omen, Jenny, and not on the sinister side.
Thunder on the right
—the best of omens! A happy ending!"

She found herself smiling back, with a quite illogical lift of the heart.

"All right," she said, "let's go and move those mountains. Only—we'd better be quick."

Not wishing to be seen approaching the convent by the track leading directly from the farm, they turned downhill, keeping within the borders of the wood.

The way down between the pines was steepish, but the thick, dry pine needles made it safe and easy. Everywhere underfoot the mat of dead stuff gapped and broke to show curved croziers of pale green stems butting their way up into the light. Here and there wax-white orchids nodded above the finished star of leaves, slender taper-lights clustered over with the fragile swarm of tiny wings. Occasional shower drops from the melting hail spattered down, shaking the tiny swarms to life, and the rich tarry smell of the pines thickened in the warm air.

Stephen reached a hand to help Jennifer over a fallen pine.

"The first mountain we move," he said, "and it may well be difficult—is the police."

"The police? But you said they wouldn't listen. You said there was no evidence------"

"My God, isn't my face evidence? Things are a little different now, my dear. We've seen and identified Gillian ourselves, and in any case, now, I can insist that the man is at least interviewed about this." He touched his damaged cheek.

"But—oh, Stephen, there isn't time! I do agree about the police, and I don't see what else we can do, but surely it's not going to help! All we've done is warn Bussac, and frighten him into acting straight awayl"

"I know." His voice was grim. "I haven't forgiven myself for that yet, though I suppose the fat was in the fire as soon as he recognized you. And there was a chance that he'd accept our bargain and let us take Gillian off bis hands. At least, I thought so, until I saw her."

"What d'you mean?"

He shot her a look. "You haven't guessed?"

"Guessed what?"

He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. "It must have occurred to you that Gillian wasn't—isn't—exactly a prisoner."

"Of course it did. I haven't had time to think it out properly, but I suppose with him and the dogs about, she couldn't have got very far anyway—oh!"

"Exactly. The dogs did as she told them. And so," added Stephen meditatively, "to some extent, did Pierre Bussac. . . ."

Jenny said uncertainly, "Perhaps she and Bussac's wife------"

He said, "She is Bussac's wife."

She gasped and turned, and would have tripped if his hand had not shot out to steady her.

"Careful there. I'm sorry, and I don't understand it any more than you do, but it's true. There's nobody else at that farm with him. She is 'Madame Bussac' "

"She can't be! It can't be truel You've guessed wrong, Stephen!"

"No. You forget, Jenny, I've met her before."

"You
what?
When?"

"I told you. I was painting once, early in the morning. I must have been quite near the farm without knowing it, on the far side of the hill. I'd walked over from Gavarnie—

it's quite incredibly lonely over there, and very bad walking; I doubt if anybody goes there in a hundred years or so. ... Anyway she—your Gillian—must have gone out early, too. She came on me suddenly, and I don't know which of us was the more startled. She shied away at first, looking quite scared, but I spoke, and we talked for perhaps five minutes. No more. She still seemed uneasy, and eventually hurried off.

But it was certainly the girl you called Gillian, and just as certainly she told me she was Madame Bussac, and lived over here."

Jennifer said, fastening half-dazedly on the one word that seemed to make sense,

"You said she was 'scared'?"

"Perhaps that's too strong a word. Uneasy, apprehensive— she must have known Bussac wouldn't want her to be seen. I doubt if she ever told him about the encounter."

She put a hand to her head. "And she wouldn't come away with us. ... She didn't know me, either. Of course, it's a few years since we met, but I'd have sworn it was Gillian."

"Oh, yes, it was Gillian."

She turned bewildered, almost panic-stricken eyes to him. "But I can't believe it! It gets crazier and crazier!" Her voice rose with a quiver of hysteria. "The whole damned valley's crawling with girls who look like Gillian!"

He put an arm around her shoulders, and turned her toward the edge of the trees.

"Come on, darling. Out of the wood." The arm tightened momentarily, and he smiled down at her. "Another omen. . . . And don't panic, sweetheart. It's mad, but not that mad; there's still only one Lally, who's dead, and only one Gillian, who's alive—and likely to remain so."

They had reached the edge of the wood, out of sight of the convent, emerging from the heavy scented twilight of the pines into the thundery darkness of the open valley.

The storm center had moved to some distance now, but the sky was still low and dark, and in the intermittent electric flicker the mountain-shapes snowed a curious light olive-green, lighter than the indigo clouds beyond them. The lower meadows and slopes shone paler still, stretching ghostly and frostlike where the shower had left its evanescent hoary glimmer. Dark sky, pale mountains, phantom-gray meadows

... it was like looking at the negative of the normal daylight picture, a magically inverted landscape through whose pale foreground drove the sharp ink-black furrow of the Petit Gave.

They were out in the open now, and the meadow grass, stiff with its bedded hailstones, crunched and rustled under their feet.

"Something else I told you," he said. "Remember? I told you Madame Bussac didn't like my pictures. She preferred photographs." "Well?"

"What's the main difference," said Stephen, slowly, "between a painting and a photograph?"

"I don't get it. Why? I suppose one's, oh, a mechanical reproduction of the thing as it is, and the other------" Then she caught her breath. "No. No, it's not that. Is it that one's black and white, and the other's in—color?"

"Yes, indeed. Perhaps color doesn't mean very much to Madame Bussac," said Stephen. He glanced down sideways at her. "Not any kind of proof in itself, but under the circumstances a very sufficient pointer. I think we can call it conclusive. I mean the whole damned valley can't be crawling with
color-blind
girls who look like Gillian, can it?"

"No." But her smile was strained. "All right, it's Gillian, married to that man. And where does that get us? She's alive, but—for how long? Oh, God, Stephen, it's like a nightmare, and just about as sensible!"

"Think, darling! The fact—weird though it is—that she's married to Bussac, does guarantee that,
as far as Bussac's concerned,
she stays alive! As far as Bussac's concerned. Think back to the conversation you overheard last night. Didn't you tell me that Doña Francisca was forcing him to take some course that would result in Gillian's death, and that he was passionately refusing?"

"Y-yes. Yes, I did."

"And the way he acted just now, wasn't it a repetition in a way of the same scene?

He knew he ought to let her go, for bis own safety's sake, but he didn't want to. Did she act as if he frightened her? On the contrary; I'd have said he was fond of her, and that squares with his reactions both to me and Doña Francisca."

Jennifer said in a tight, flat little voice, "When did he marry her?"

"I—what?" He was patently at a loss.

"
When
did he marry her?"

He was silent.

She said, "Unless they were married in Bordeaux before she even came here, there hasn't been much time, has there? And they weren't. When she wrote to me the night before she left Bordeaux, she was still planning to enter the convent." She kicked at a tuft of grass, and the melting drops flew from it in flashing arcs of spray. "Father Anselm didn't marry them either, or he'd have told me."

He said, gently, "I know. I'm sorry, Jenny."

"Last night," said Jenny, not looking at him, "that woman was cursing him for wrecking their plans for—for lust. That squares, too, as you put it, doesn't it?

Obscene bete,
she called him, and
animal
------"

He gripped her arm. "Steady there. Whatever Gillian's up to, it's her affair. All that matters to us is her safety, and this affair with Bussac, whatever it is, is a guarantee of just that. He'll not hurt her. I'd stake my life on that, and it's one reason"—he smiled ruefully—"one reason why I came away from the farm when I did. No, the real danger to Gillian lies in another direction.'*

"Doña Francisca?"

"Our gentle Francisca. To put it bluntly, as long as Gillian's above ground, and therefore traceable by us or the police, there's the danger of an inquiry starting about the identity of the body in the graveyard."

"But even if they proved that that was Lally Dupre, there's no evidence that Doña Francisca knew anything about it! She said herself that she'd lose nothing but her private income."

"Exactly. And Bussac gave some indication, didn't he, of just what that would mean to her? There's big money involved, Jenny—it's fifteen years since Isaac Lenormand's three million francs were paid over, and in fifteen years there'll have been a fair amount of traffic, one way or another, over Pierre Bussac's private bridge. Damn it, what did that El Greco cost? Even if she got it cheaply in the general muddle of the war, when Rembrandts went for nothing and Botti-cellis lay about in barns—no, the loot those two have been handling is something more than pin money. Big money, ambition, love of power and fear of scandal . . . that spells danger to me, Jenny. She won't relinquish her dreams very easily, if your account of her is true. And to keep those dreams she has to keep Bussac, and get rid of Gillian—
somehow
."

Jennifer gave a little shiver. "Love of power . . . yes, that's her all right . . . that lean and hungry look . . . like someone burning up inside. I wouldn't like to get between her and anything she dearly wanted."

"Gillian has," said Stephen soberly.

They had rounded a shoulder of the mountain meadow, and now the convent lay close below them. He stopped, frowning thoughtfully down at it.

"Look at it from Bussac's angle," he said slowly. "Somehow—never mind the hows and wherefores—he has got Gillian there, living with him willingly as his wife. Your inquiries make Doña Francisca tumble to the fact that it is Gillian, and not Lally Dupre. She urges him to put her out of the way before you recognize her and start a fuss which can only end in exposure for both Bussac and herself. Bussac refuses—or at any rate would like to refuse. . . . Then we turn up. We recognize her.

We offer to take her away and nothing said. Bussac refuses again."

He lifted his head, and his gaze rested, still unseeingly, on the long flank of the hill behind the convent. "Now, how is he placed? Whatever Doña Francisca does, it's obvious that we will go straight to the police. And though we can't get him over Gillian, as she's apparently staying with him of her own free will, we are bound to start an inquiry that will lead to Lally Dupre, and through her to Bussac's criminal connections. Add Doña Francisca's threats to this, and what decision d'you suppose Bussac will come to?"

"In his place," said Jenny, "I'd disappear myself."

"And so would I." He looked at her gravely. "As I see it, friend Bussac will light out at the earliest possible moment along his private route to Spain. With Gillian."