Thunder On The Right (28 page)

Jennifer went down beside her, clutching at her coat.

She heard a laugh, clear above the water's din, and turned her head.

The woman had a foot on the bridge. Her mouth was a black grin in a white face.

She gripped the slack of her robes in the other hand, and stepped carefully onto the bridge.

The black scree behind her seemed to burst into life, as another, blacker shadow detached itself from the darkness and hurtled down the slope in a welter of rattling stones. There was a gasping shout. A man leaped down the last headlong yards of scree and raced forward in the moonlight. The white light caught the dark hair, the loose-knit body that, but for the limp, moved beautifully. . . .

"Stephen!"

The din of the water drowned Jenny's cry. It was the same soundless, desperate little prayer, but this time the answer was already there....

He shouted again. The noise volleyed sharply from rock to rock, cutting through the steady roar of the water.

Doña Francisca, who was some way out onto the bridge, checked in her careful progress, the wind of the fall tearing her black robes out from her body with such force that she swayed as she turned. Her arms went out for balance, the sleeves flapping, and the loosened skirt of her habit streamed out wet and heavy, dragging at her body. In three great strides Stephen had crossed the empty space of moonlit rock, and was at the bridge. Jennifer heard him shout again.

"Come back, you fool!"

But the woman swung around once more, and, cautious no longer, sprang forward across the bridge toward the girls, knife in hand.

Stephen moved even faster. In one bound he was on the bridge and hurling himself recklessly across it. The woman looked back once, faltered, and then came on, but the thick wet robes hampered her, clinging to her legs. Two more strides, three—and then he lunged and snatched at her arm. He missed, but his hand closed on her sleeve. Somehow she tore it free, and thrust herself forward. Her flying veil whipped him across the face, making him falter and lose way. Whether revenge drove her, or fear, or only the panic desire to escape—or whether reason had finally snapped its chain, they were never to know. It might be she would never have used the knife from which Gillian had fled and from which Jennifer now shrank in terror, trying to cover her cousin's unconscious body with her own. The woman was yelling something. She was on them. Then Stephen's arms came around her from behind, pinioning her in a vicious grip. His hands closed brutally on her wrists, and he dragged her backwards against him.

But her desperate impulse lent her strength. She turned on him, turned even in his arms, her wet wrists slipping in his grasp; she whipped around as an adder turns, and, like an adder, struck. Jennifer saw his body flinch as the knife went home, saw his hold momentarily loosen, saw him stagger, blinded by a flapping fold of the woman's veil as she wrenched the knife high to strike again.

Then, even as she launched the stroke, her foot slipped. Her arms went wide and high, flailing the air like wings. But the momentum of that vicious stroke thrust her on, throwing her past him, tearing her clear of his desperate grasp, propelling her to the very brink of the bridge where she hung poised—it seemed interminably—leaning forward like a diver about to plunge into that dreadful abyss. Her eyes were open, her hands out before her, flailing the empty air, then, with a high, tearing scream, she lurched forward into the ghastly dive, and fell.

One moment she was there, poised like a black evil bird above the starlit spray. The next she had vanished, swallowed by the torrent, and above her vanishing the moon-rainbow wavered a little, and was steady.

He was on his knees beside Jennifer.

"Stephen—oh, Stephen!"

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. But you------"

"It's only a scratch. Later." His hands held her with comforting strength while his eyes went past her to Gillian. He raised his voice above the thunder of the cascade.

"What happened to her?"

"She fell."

"Out of the way then. And hang on to that rock. The fall's filling up. It'll be over us in another ten minutes."

It was true. The rocks that made up the little bridge were all awash. It had not been fancy after all. The cascade had indeed been moving slowly nearer, as the storm rains swelled the source above. And now the edge of the falling torrent scraped, as it were, the inner edge of the bridge, striking and bursting over it in continuous fans of spray. Now and again the frail structure shook to the crash of some wide-flung heavier load of water. The slab where Stephen and Doña Francisca had fought was already under an inch of slithering water.

Stephen braced one foot in a crack, the other against a boulder, and laid hold of Gillian. Jennifer pulled herself to her feet, clinging to the rock.

"I can get back."

"You stay where you are." His voice compelled her. "I'll be back."

And somehow, with a heave and a grunt of effort, he had got Gillian's body over his shoulder, fireman-fashion, had steadied himself by the boulder, and had turned to make his way off the bridge. Jennifer crouched close to the rock, the water pouring now past her legs and slapping down onto her shoulders, cold, cold . . . her whole body seemed to be streaming with the icy water, her hands were dead, her very brain frozen, beaten into numbness by the roar of the torrent and the snow-broth chill of its spray. Stephen had been right. She could no more have made her own way back across the torrent than she could have flown out over the rainbow in the moonlit haze.

So she clung with dead fingers to the rock, and watched with horrified, fascinated eyes as Stephen walked back over the bridge with Gillian slumped across his shoulders like a sack of coal. Only once he staggered, when a jet of water struck him on the shoulder, but he recovered himself straight away and, putting his feet with heavy deliberation down on the streaming slabs of the bridge, he moved stolidly on.

He was there. He was lowering Gillian onto the moonlit rock.

She realized then for the first time that the scree was alive with men. The shadows broke apart, rushing forward and coalescing again as men ran down the scree and crowded toward the bridge. The whole thing had happened at a speed that afterwards she could never quite believe; the others could not have been much more than seventy yards behind Stephen when he reached the bridge, and now as he carried Gillian's inert body to safety, a dozen hands reached to help him. Someone took Gillian from him. Torches flashed. A lantern waved. She was borne swiftly back to a sheltered corner. Men bent over her, knelt. . . .

The others still crowded at the bridge where Stephen was fighting his way out of his sodden coat. Two of the men pushed forward, as if remonstrating with him, but he thrust his way past them, and, once more, set out across that perilous arch, making his steady way toward Jennifer.

She watching him coming. He was a quarter of the way over—halfway, and moving in a cloud, a snow-storm of spray. The stars behind him glittered like ice crystals.

The moon looked shrunken with cold. Jennifer shrank, too, a tiny huddle of shivering flesh and icy bones whose very eyeballs were fixed and aching with the cold. . . .

Then he was beside her, his unfelt touch was on her body. He had the end of a rope in his hand, and he knotted this around her, cursing under his breath as he fought the soaking cord.

He said through his teeth, "You're perfectly safe. They have the other end. Just go steadily. Lx>ok straight ahead."

Her own teeth were chattering uncontrollably. "And— you?"

"I'm all right. Get going."

It was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life, to let go of the rock and walk back across the bridge. The mere act of straightening her cramped body shook her with the new fear of her own weakness, while to assume that her strengthless legs would ever carry her forward was an act of faith of which she felt incapable. . . . But even as she hesitated, panic locking her bones, Stephen's hands, swift and brutal, tore hers from their hold, and swung her around to face the roaring space. She saw rather than felt him seize her icy hands and clamp them on the rope which stretched from her waist to the end of the bridge, its other end held fast by three men. She could see them clearly in the moonlight. One of them grinned and beckoned.

Another got down onto the bridge, one hand outstretched. He was not so very far away.

Not so very far away. . . . Confidence flowed to her along the taut rope, and when, from behind, Stephen's hands impelled her, she began to walk steadily forward, toward that waiting hand....

A few seconds later she had grasped it, and was drawn at last toward the safe rock at the side of the cataract. Willing hands reached for her, strong arms took her and swung her free of the bridge. A babel of questions met her.

But she paid no heed. She twisted in their hands like a wet fish, to watch Stephen balance his way along the dreadful bridge, till he, too, was finally gripped and pulled to safety.

And so for the third time Stephen looked up and saw her running toward him with outstretched arms. And, as is the way of all stories, the third time is the right time, luck's time, winner-take-all time. . . . This was it. The barriers were down, dust in the wind. The sleeping princess was awake, the guarded bower as if it had never been.

He held out his arms and she ran into them as if they two had been alone in the darkness, not out in the brilliant moonlight exposed to the grinning gaze of a dozen men. His arms accepted her, he pulled her to him fiercely. Only now, his own barriers crumbling, did he realize how deep and absolute had been his need for her; and in the very moment of fullest realization she was here and she was his; his anchor, his still center, his searing flame, his peace....

He released her, and she stood for a moment in the circle of his arms, blinking up at him. He laughed down at her, but the blaze was still there at the back of his eyes, and she could see the thudding of his heart where the soaked shirt clung to bis body. He was breathing like a runner. He said, "We've an audience, darling. Do you mind?"

She blinked again, and turned her head a little dazedly. The men who had come with him were standing around the two of them, much as cattle will gather in a curious circle around any strange phenomenon that invades their pasture. And twelve pairs of dark eyes watched them steadily, without the slightest trace of embarrassment—watched them, indeed, with approval, envy, and the passionate interest of born connoisseurs.

Mrs. Silver's only daughter flushed, laughed, and turned back into Stephen's arms.

"Mind? Not a bit," she said happily, and lifted her mouth to his again.

Outside, the storm had abated, and the exhausted wind scarcely moved the shutters.

Jennifer, exhausted, too, lay back in a chair by the blazing fire, with the warmth of Dr. Lebrun's brandy lapping through her veins.

The memory of her arrival at Bussac's cottage was as hazy as the dreams that now invaded her. She had a vague recollection of having her soaked outer things torn off her, of being wrapped warmly in dry blankets, deposited in the big chair beside the fire and plied with hot coffee liberally laced with brandy.

She blinked around the too-familiar little room, now decidedly overcrowded by a host of purposefully moving shadows that she took to be the police. But she was beyond worrying or even wondering what was going on. Her eyes drooped again. A sleepy warmth invaded her. Her body in its nest of blankets began to relax as the heat from the fire reached out to her, her muscles one by one slackening toward sleep....

. . . Someone was asking questions, and Stephen's voice, quiet and very tired, was answering them. She opened her eyes again, to see him just beside her, sitting on the floor with his shoulders against the front of her chair and his dark head near her knee. His legs, lamentably clad in crumpled, newly dried flannels, were asprawl across the front of the fire.

He was smoking, talking with a sort of controlled weariness to Jules Médoc, the superintendent from Luz, who, perched on a small stool facing the fire, yet managed to give the impression of presiding in a court of some administrative importance. His black eyes were eager and alive, his gestures sharp and in startling contrast to the heavy, even reluctant movement of Stephen's hand as he lifted the cigarette to his mouth.

He drew on the cigarette almost fiercely, and expelled the smoke like a long sigh.

"So there you have it." With a dismissive gesture he flicked the butt into the fire.

"I've told you all I knew. Most of it was guesswork, but according to what Bussac told you tonight, it was substantially correct. The only thing I couldn't make out was why a man like Bussac should submit to being blackmailed over such a long period.

It wasn't in character. But from what you say, she had more or less cut herself in as a partner."

Jules Médoc nodded. "That's so. It appears that she really did enter the business innocently in the first place. She'd used Bussac once or twice, many years ago, to help her own friends out of Spain. For all I knew it was Bussac who originally helped her own escape. Then she discovered just how much he was making out of the traffic during the Occupation, and conceived the idea of helping him with that and taking her cut. She was in a position, through her Spanish connections, to help him out on the other side ... I mean, if he could hand his 'passengers' over to guaranteed help in Spain, he could count on more 'trade' and in fact charge more. I honestly believe she started the business in good enough faith, and fooled herself for a time that she could touch pitch and not be soiled."

"And when she discovered what had happened to Isaac Lenormand she was too far in to pull out?"

"Perhaps. But I don't think so. I gathered from what Bussac said to us that he'd have been glad if she had. But once she had something 'on' him, she was in a position to demand more. And did."

"And condoned Lenormand's murder in the process?"

Jules Médoc said, "One can't guess how by this time she managed to justify herself to her conscience. I think the greed for money and power had gradually tightened its grip till in the end she couldn't stop. It happens. Demand begets demand. She must still have tried to persuade herself that the end justified the means. Perhaps she was successful, but I don't think so."