Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart
‘That’s dreadful.’ I swallowed. ‘That’s – dreadful, Mrs. Seddon.’
‘Yes. Every car that comes up, he’ll fly out yonder. I’ve seen him do it. It’s lucky there’s not more coming and going than there is, or he’d do it once too often, and end up on the gravel on his head, or else stuck on those spikes like a beetle on a pin.’
I shivered. ‘I’ll watch him,’ I said.
‘You do,’ said Mrs. Seddon.
Fourth Coach
7
A Being, erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward semblance of a man, and not of a monster.
Dickens: Pickwick Papers.
Philippe was already asleep, curled in an extraordinarily small bundle under the bedclothes. The light was still on, and his book had slid to the floor. Something was clutched in his hand, and I drew the sheet aside to see what it was – one of the Queen’s soldiers with the fur hats.
I picked up the book, straightened the bedclothes, turned off the light, and went softly out, taking the unwanted chocolate back to the pantry.
Back in my room, I walked straight through it onto the balcony, letting the curtains fall behind me to cut off the light. The night was calm, and unexpectedly warm. There was still no sign of fog, but I thought that I could see a paler darkness away in the valley’s depths. The damp of spring hung in the air. An owl called below me, down in the woods; called again. Its muted melancholy found too ready an echo in me. I felt tired and depressed. Too much had happened today; and the pleasant things – the morning’s encounter with William Blake, my gay little flirtation with Florimond in the salon – had somehow faded back out of mind and left me with this queerly flattened feeling.
I know what it was, of course. I’d lived with loneliness a long time. That was something which was always there … one learns to keep it at bay, there are times when one even enjoys it – but there are also times when a desperate self-sufficiency doesn’t quite suffice, and then the search for the anodyne begins … the radio, the dog, the shampoo, the stockings-to-wash, the tin soldier. …
I bit my lip and took myself sharply to task. Just because I had had two pleasantly off-duty encounters – not to mention a cosy and entertaining gossip with the housekeeper – I didn’t have to feel let-down and left out when they were over and I had to put in the evening by myself. I didn’t have to stand here glooming at the spring dusk and picturing myself for the rest of my life relegated to the edge of the room, the frame of the conversation-piece.
And what did I want, for heaven’s sake? To retreat on the illusion that Florimond’s courtesy had created, that he and I and Madame de Valmy could share a fireside on equal terms? To be where Madame de Valmy was? Where I might still have been if the thing that happened nine years ago hadn’t happened? Well, that was out, and the sooner I accepted once and for all the fact that the jamboree was over, the sooner I would stop riding this uneasy see-saw of moods and memories.
I turned deliberately and walked along to the southern end of the balcony until I stood above the salon.
The light from the long windows, muted by gold curtains, streamed softly across the loggia and onto the terrace. The bare rose bushes stood out, thorn and twig in a naked mesh netting the light. Their shadows raked away like besoms over the freshly-dug beds. One window had been opened to the mild night, and here the light streamed out boldly, and with it the sound of talk and laughter. I could imagine the spurting glow of the log fire, the gleam of rummers, the smell of coffee and brandy, and cigars …
Goodnight, Miss Eyre … amusement supervened and with it sanity. I grinned to myself as I walked softly back to my own window. If I did have to spend the rest of my life sitting in the corner of someone else’s drawing-room, knitting and wearing black bombazine – whatever that was – then by God it would be the best bombazine. The very best bombazine.
Ignoring the anodynes of book, radio and stockings-to-wash, I got my coat and went out.
I went down the zigzag very slowly, for in the faint moonlight the slope was deceptive, and the slight dampness made the surface slippery. There was a way down through the wood itself – a steep track of alternate step-and-slope that short-circuited the zigzag – but it would have been too dark under the trees, so I avoided it and kept to the road.
The air was very still. Below me, in the valley depths where the river ran, I could see, quite distinctly now, the pale drift of mist. The owl cried again once, very sadly, from the wood. There was a strong wet smell of earth and growing things; the smell of spring … not softness, not balm-and-blossoms, but something harsh and sharp that pierced the senses as the thrust of new life broke the ground. The cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land … yes, that was it. That was it. Not for the first time I was sharply grateful to Daddy for making poetry a habit with me. The best words in the best order … one always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone’s words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Daddy had been right. Poetry was awfully good material to think with.
Something rustled in last year’s beech-leaves and poetry fled as, absurdly, I remembered that there were still bears in France. And boars. And probably wolves. And werewolves and vampires too, no doubt … by mocking myself I got at length safely down to river-level and the bridge to the main road.
The bridge was an elegant affair of the eighteenth century, with carved balustrading that opened in graceful curves towards the river-banks. The mist was thick here, but only in patches. Where I stood it was waist-high, but beyond the parapet to my right it slanted down like a snowbank to lie low over the water, pinned through here and there by spikes of bulrush and the black spars of dead boughs.
The water itself was invisible. The sound of it was dark and deep, a lovely liquid undertone to the night. The owl’s breathy call fell less sadly now, less hollowly through the dim boughs.
I stood still in the centre of the bridge, my hands deep in my pockets, and gazed up at the steeply wooded slope on the other side of the main road. Rank upon rank of pines, I knew, crowded up those rocky heights, with here and there a bare crag jutting through, where in daylight the hawks mewed and circled. Now, in the faint moonlight, the forest was no more than a looming darkness, a towering cloud faintly luminous where the crescent moon feather-edged the rims of the pines. The scent drifted down, spicy and sharp and somehow dark like the pines themselves.
A car was coming up the valley. I heard the sound of the engine grow and fade and grow again as the curving road and the mist cut off and distorted the sound. It came round Belle Surprise, high above the mist, before I saw its lights. I saw them turn then, tilt, and drive down into the darkness, to bend this way and that among the trees, brightening and then blurring as the fog-clouds blunted them. I watched the stems of the trees outline themselves sharply against the light, to reel away like logs tumbling over a waterfall, then swoop back and up into the towering shadow behind the glare where still the tree stems blanched, drifted, and darkened …
Only a late lorry driving up to Soubirous … The headlights went steadily past the end of the bridge, and the mist tossed and whirled in the red of the tail-lamp.
I was turning to go back up the zigzag, when my eye was caught by a tiny light high up among the Dieudonné trees. A minute before it had not been there, but now it pricked through the cloud of pines like a small yellow star.
I stopped and looked up at it. The trees along the roadside were busy in their ghostly dance as another lorry roared up the valley, but that tiny light hung there high above them, warm and steady. No, not a star: a planet, and lived-on at that. It might very well not be William Blake’s little hut at four thousand feet, but somehow I thought it was. I smiled to myself picturing him sitting up there with his bandages and boluses (what was a bolus?) and thermometers in degrees Centigrade.
The second lorry thundered past the end of the bridge.
And the cognac – had he remembered the cognac?
I hadn’t noticed the car travel
It was an easy corner, and he took it fast. The main beam leaped out and pinned me full in the glare. I heard his brakes shriek as they bit metal. I jumped for the edge of the road. The lights lurched and tyres screeched and ripped the tarmac. One yard: that was all the leeway he had. Something grabbed at me; tore. I slipped on the greasy road and fell flat in the gutter under the parapet as the car went by with a foot and a half to spare and screamed to a skidding halt beyond the bridge.
The engine cut. The door slammed. Léon de Valmy’s voice said: ‘Where are you? Are you hurt? I didn’t touch you, did I?’ Quick footsteps sounded on the tarmac. ‘Where are you?’
I had risen to my knees in the wet gutter, and was holding rather hard to the parapet. At the sound of the footsteps and that familiar voice I thought I must have been hit and gone mad. I was blind, too. I couldn’t see anything, anyone. I was blinking in a dazed sort of panic as I pulled myself shakily to my feet …
I wasn’t blinded after all; the mist sank and dwindled and swirled waist-high again as I turned, leaning back for support against the parapet.
Nor was I mad. The man who was striding towards me in the moonlight was not Léon de Valmy, though thirty years ago Léon de Valmy had probably looked exactly like him. As with his father, my first impression of Raoul de Valmy was that he was remarkably good-looking; but where age and illness had given the older man’s looks the fine-drawn, fallen-angel quality he had mocked to me on our first meeting, there was nothing in the least fine-drawn about Raoul. He merely looked tough, arrogant, and (at the moment) furious. It wasn’t exactly the time to judge whether he possessed the charm which his father could apparently radiate at will, though his personality certainly made (this without irony) as strong an impact. But the difference was there again: where Léon de Valmy kept himself banked down, so to speak, and burning secretly, Raoul was at full blaze. And just now he was blazing with something more than personality. He was as shaken as I was, and it had made him angry.
I sat down suddenly on the parapet, and waited. He loomed over me, tall and formidable-looking in the misty moonlight.
Tall, dark and handsome … the romantic cliché repeated itself in my head – so automatically and irresistibly that I braced myself to dislike him on sight.
He said sharply: ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No.’
‘Did I hit you?’
‘No.’
‘Not even touch you?’
I was smoothing my coat down with unsteady fingers. ‘N – no.’
‘You’re sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes. I – yes. Thank you.’
I heard his breath expelled in quick relief. He relaxed and his voice warmed then into anger. ‘Then will you kindly tell me what the bloody hell you were doing standing in the middle of the road in a fog? You came damned near being killed and if you had you’d have deserved it!’
Shock was reacting on me too, and I wasn’t used to being sworn at. I stopped fussing with my clothes and lifted my head to glare straight back at him. ‘It’s not a public road and I’ve a perfect right to stand in the middle of it or sit in the middle of it or lie in the middle of it if I want to! I wasn’t expecting you – at least I’d quite forgotten you were coming and in any case you’ve no business to come at that speed, whether it’s a private road or not!’
There was a fractional pause, during which I had the impression that he was distinctly taken aback. Then he said mildly: ‘I was only doing fifty, and I know the road like the back of my hand.’
‘Fifty!’ I heard my voice rise to a squeak, and was furious. ‘Why, that’s – oh, kilometres, of course.’
‘What else?’
‘It’s still far too fast and there was mist.’
‘I could see the way quite well and that car sits down on the corners like a broody hen.’ He was beginning to sound amused, and that made me angrier.
I snapped: ‘Broody hen or no, it very nearly ran me down!’
‘I’m quite aware of that. But I would hardly expect to find anyone standing on the bridge at this time of night—’
He stopped and then went on, the amusement now clear in his voice: ‘I’m damned if I see why I should have to stand here defending myself for not having run you over! Perhaps now you’ll be good enough to tell me why you consider you’ve a perfect right to stand – or was it lie down? – in the middle of this particular private road? This is my – this is the Valmy estate, you know.’
I was busy wiping my muddy hands on a handkerchief. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I live here.’
He made a little movement of surprise, and I saw his eyes narrow on me in the moonlight. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you’re not one of the, er –?’
‘Servants? In a way,’ I said. ‘I’m Philippe’s governess.’
‘But,’ said Raoul de Valmy, slowly, ‘they told me she was to be an English girl.’
I felt as if he had dealt me a sharp blow in the stomach. For the first time I realised that the whole of the exchange had been in French. Literally thrown off my balance as I had been, I had answered him without thinking in the tongue that he had first used.
I said feebly: ‘I – I forgot.’
‘You are English?’ he said, in a tone of great surprise.
I nodded. ‘Linda Martin, from London. I’ve been here three weeks.’
His voice was a little dry. ‘Then allow me to congratulate you on your progress, Miss Martin.’
But this second shock had shaken me quite out of all composure. The dry note in his voice was so like Léon de Valmy’s that I found myself saying, in a taut little voice that was pitched a shade too high: ‘You must know perfectly well that I haven’t learned all my French in the last three weeks, Monsieur de Valmy, so don’t add insult to injury by baiting me as well as knocking me down!’
This was palpable injustice and I half-expected the annihilation I deserved. But he merely said: ‘I’m sorry. And now do you feel recovered enough to move? I shouldn’t keep you here talking any more. You must have had a nasty shaking. We’ll get you into the car and I’ll drive you up to the house.’
Like his father, he knew how to disarm … I found myself obediently sliding off the parapet to my feet, while he put a steadying hand under my elbow.
‘I’m all right,’ I said.
But when I tried to move towards the car I found that my knees were very shaky still, and I was thankful for his support.
He said quickly: ‘You’re limping. You are hurt.’
I found myself reassuring him. ‘Not by you. I slipped and fell when I tried to jump out of the way. It’s only a bumped knee or something. Honestly, that’s all.’
He said, sounding worried: ‘Well, I think the sooner I get you up to the château and find you a drink, the better. You’ll have to get in by the driver’s door, I’m afraid. The other one’s rather difficult of access just at present.’
This was, I saw, only too true. The big car, in swerving to avoid me, had skidded slightly on the damp tarmac, and run up onto the right-hand verge of the road beyond the bridge. The verge at this point was a muddy grass bank, mercifully not very steep, but quite steep enough to cant the car at a crazy-looking angle.
I looked at it guiltily, and then up at Raoul de Valmy’s impassive face.
‘I – it isn’t damaged, is it?’
‘I don’t think so. Would you rather wait on the road while I straighten her out, or had you better get in and sit down?’
‘I think if it’s all the same to you I’ll sit down.’
‘Of course.’ He opened the nearside door. I got in – with just a little difficulty, as my knee was undoubtedly stiff, and got myself somehow past the wheel and into the passenger’s seat. He leaned into the car and groped in the darkness under the dash. There was a click, and the headlamps flashed on, so that just in front of the car the first bend and slope of th
He didn’t even glance at it. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. He slammed the door and went round to the back of the car.
I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of that looming rock-wall, and lay back in the deep seat, relaxing as well as I could. The car was very big and very comfortable, even tilted as it was at that odd angle. It smelled faintly of cigarettes and expensive leather. I opened my eyes again. In the light reflected back off the rock ahead the bonnet gleamed long and black – plenty of horses under that, I thought, and remembered Mrs. Seddon’s description: ‘As long as the Queen Mary and a horn like the Last Trump.’ I wondered what Raoul de Valmy’s lucky number was …
I settled my shoulders back in the luxurious seat. The shaky feeling had almost gone. Suddenly out of nowhere I remembered something I had once heard at the Constance Butcher – a piece of servant-girls’ lore which had amused me at the time and now came back with an added point. If you ever get run over, be sure and pick a Rolls-Royce … Well, there was something in that, I reflected … and a Cadillac was perhaps not a bad second choice, especially when it had as good a driver as Raoul de Valmy at the wheel. Now that the first shock had subsided I realised perfectly well how near I had been to being badly hurt, through my own silliness. Moreover it was no thanks to me that Monsieur Raoul’s expensive Cadillac hadn’t smashed itself against the parapet.
I became aware that Raoul de Valmy was still behind the car. I peered back through the swirls of mist to see him bending over a rear wing, while torchlight moved slowly over the metal. I bit my lip, but before I could speak he had straightened up, switched off the torch, and come swiftly round to the driver’s door.
He slanted a quick look at me as he slid in beside me. ‘All right?’ I nodded. ‘We’ll soon get you home. Hold tight.’