Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart
‘I don’t quite know,’ I said, not very truthfully. Then I relented. ‘But I’m often in Thonon on a Friday afternoon and – look, for goodness’ sake … isn’t that your bus? The driver’s getting in! Go on, run! Is this yours? And this? … Goodbye! Have a good weekend!’
Somehow he dragged his paraphernalia up from the floor, lurched, with rope and rucksack perilously swaying, between the crowded tables, thrust his way through the swing door I grabbed and held wide for him, then waved a hand to me and ran. He reached the bus just as the driver’s door slammed, and the engine coughed noisily to life. Then wedged – it seemed inextricably – on the narrow steps of the bus, he managed to turn and wave again cheerily as the vehicle jerked and roared away.
Feeling breathless myself, I waved back, then turned hurriedly to cross the road to where my own bus waited. But before I could step forward a big car slid to a halt beside me with a soft hush of wet tyres. A Cadillac. My heart, absurdly, began to race.
The door was pushed open from inside. His voice said: ‘Going my way?’
He was alone in the car. I got in beside him without a word, and the car moved off. It swung round the corner of the square where the Soubirous bus still stood beside its lamp, and turned into the tree-lined street that led south.
It was odd that I hadn’t really noticed till now what a beautiful evening it was. The street lamps glowed like ripe oranges among the bare boughs. Below in the wet street their globes glimmered down and down, to drown in their own reflections. He hangs in shades the orange bright, like golden lamps … and on the pavements there were piles of oranges, too, real ones, spilled there in prodigal piles with aubergines and green and scarlet peppers. The open door of a wine-shop glittered like Aladdin’s cave with bottles from floor to roof, shelf on shelf of ruby and amber and purple, the rich heart of a hundred sun-drenched harvests. From a brightly-lit workmen’s café nearby came music, the sound of voices loud in argument, and the smell of new bread.
The last lamp drowned its golden moon in the road ahead. The last house vanished and we were running between hedgeless fields. To the right a pale sky still showed clear under the western rim of the rain-clouds, and against it the bare trees that staked the road stood out black and sheer. The leaves of an ilex cut the half-light like knives. A willow streamed in the wind like a woman’s hair. The road lifted itself ahead, mackerel-silver under its bending poplars. The blue hour, the lovely hour …
Then the hills were round us, and it was dark.
Raoul was driving fast and did not speak.
I said at last, a little shyly: ‘You’re back soon. You haven’t been to Bellevigne, then?’
‘No. I had business in Paris.’
I wondered what kettles of fish he’d (in Mrs. Seddon’s unlikely idiom) been frying. ‘Did you have a good time?’
He said ‘Yes’, but in so absent a tone that I hesitated to speak again. I leaned back in silence and gave myself up to the pleasure of being driven home.
It was not for some time that I – absorbed in my dreaming – noticed how he was driving. He always travelled fast and there was a slickness about the way the big car sliced through the dark and up the twisting valley that demonstrated how well he knew the road; but there was something in his way of handling her tonight that was different.
I stole a glance at his silent profile as we whipped round and over a narrow bridge that warped the road at right-angles. He had done nothing that was actively dangerous; in the dark we would have had ample warning of an approaching car, but we were skirting danger so closely that it now occurred to me a little sickeningly to wonder if he were drunk. But then our headlamps swung across a curve of rock overhanging a corner and in the meagre light that was reflected back into the car I saw his face. He was sober enough; but that something was the matter was quite evident. He was frowning at the road ahead, his eyes narrowed in the flying dark. He had forgotten I was there. It seemed quite simply as if something had put him into a bad temper and he was taking it out on the car.
‘What were you doing down in Thonon?’ The question was no more than a quid pro quo, but he spoke so abruptly out of the silence that it sounded like an accusation, and I jumped and answered almost at random.
‘What? Oh, it’s my afternoon off.’
‘What do you usually do on your afternoon off.’
‘Nothing very much. Shopping – a cinema, anything.’
‘You go out to friends sometimes?’
‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘I don’t know anyone. I told you when we … I told you on Tuesday.’
‘Oh. Yes. So you did.’
We had run into another shower, and big drops splashed and starred the windscreen. The car slewed overfast round a sharp bend in the road, and rubber whined on the wet tarmac. The headlights brushed a brilliant arc across a wall of rock. Reflected light swirled through the car, showing his face abstracted, still frowning. He hadn’t once so much as glanced at me. He was probably hardly aware of who it was he had in the car. So much for Cinderella.
I sat quietly beside him and nibbled the bitter crusts of commonsense.
We had gone two-thirds of the way to Valmy before he spoke again. The question was sufficiently irrelevant and surprising.
‘Who was that chap?’
I was startled and momentarily at a loss. I said stupidly: ‘What chap?’
‘The man you were with in Thonon. You left the café with him.’
‘Oh, him.’
‘Who else?’ The phrase, brief to the point of curtness, made me glance at him in surprise.
I said shortly: ‘A friend of mine.’
‘You told me you didn’t know anyone hereabouts.’
‘Well,’ I said childishly, ‘I know him.’
This provoked a glance, quick and unsmiling. But he only said: ‘How is Philippe?’
‘All right, thank you.’
‘And you? No more mishaps?’
‘No.’
My voice must have sounded subdued and even sulky, but I was having a fight to keep it level and unbetraying. Pride had joined forces with commonsense, and the two were flaying me. The phantoms of those idiotic dreams wavered, mockingly, in the dark … I don’t know quite what I had expected, but … that man, and this: the change was too great; it was unnerving.
I was also making a grim little discovery that frightened me. The dreams might be moonshine, but the fact remained. I was in love with him. It hadn’t been the wine and the starlight and all the trappings of romance. It hadn’t even been the charm that he’d been so lavish with that night. Now I was undoubtedly sober and it was raining and the charm wasn’t turned on … and I was still in love with this cold-voiced stranger who was making futile and slightly irritated conversation at me. At least I’d had the sense all along to try and laugh at my own folly, but it was no longer even remotely amusing.
I bit my lip hard, swallowed another choking morsel of that bitter bread, and wished he would stop asking questions that needed answering. But he was persisting, still in that abrupt tone that made his queries – harmless enough in themselves – sound like an inquisition.
It seemed he was still curious about William Blake, which, in view of my promise to say nothing, was awkward.
‘Who is he? English?’
‘Yes.’
‘He took the Annecy bus, didn’t he? A climber?’
‘He’s climbing from Annecy this weekend.’
‘Staying there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know him in England?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Then he’s been to Valmy?’
‘Not that I’m aware of.’
‘Is he staying hereabouts for long?’
‘Look,’ I said, concerned, ‘does it matter? What’s the inquisition for?’
A pause. He said, sounding both stiff and disconcerted: ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware I was trespassing on your private affairs.’
‘They’re not private. It’s just – I ?
He threw me an odd look. ‘Didn’t want to tell me what?’
‘Oh – nothing. Look,’ I said desperately, ‘I don’t want to talk. D’you mind?’
And now there was no doubt whatever about his mood. I heard him say ‘God damn it,’ very angrily under his breath. He wrenched the Cadillac round the Valmy bridge and hurled her up the zigzag about twice as fast as he should have done. The car snarled up the ramp like a bad-tempered cat and was hauled round the first bend. ‘You mistake me.’ Still that note of barely-controlled exasperation. ‘I wasn’t intending to pry into what doesn’t concern me. But—’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ I must have sounded nearly as edgy as he did, shaken as I was, not only by his anger and my failure to understand it, but by a humiliation that he couldn’t guess at. ‘I expect I’m tired. I trailed about Thonon for a couple of hours looking for some dress-material – oh!’ My hands flew to my cheeks. ‘I must have left it – yes, I left it in the café. I put it on the ledge under the table and then William had to run for the bus and – oh dear, how stupid of me! I suppose if I telephone – oh!’
His hand had moved sharply. The horn blared. I said, startled: ‘What was that?’
‘Some creature. A weasel, perhaps.’
The trees lurched and peeled off into darkness. The next corner, steeply embanked, swooped at us.
I said: ‘Do you have to go so fast? It scares me.’
The car slowed, steadied, and took the bend with no more than a splutter of gravel.
‘Did you tell him about the shooting down in the beechwood?’
‘What? Who?’
‘This – William.’
I drew a sharp little breath. I said clearly: ‘Yes, I did. He thinks that probably you did it yourself.’
The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult. He didn’t speak. The devil that rode me spurred me to add, out of my abyss of stupid self-torment: ‘And I didn’t know that I was supposed to account to my employer for everything I said and did on my afternoon off!’
That got him, as it was meant to. He said, between his teeth: ‘I am not your employer.’
‘No?’ I said it very nastily because I was afraid I was going to cry. ‘Then what’s it to do with you what I do or who I see?’
We were on the last slope of the zigzag. The Cadillac jerked to a stop as the brakes were jammed on. Raoul de Valmy swung round on me.
‘This,’ he said, in a breathless, goaded undertone. He pulled me roughly towards him, and his mouth came down on mine.
For a first kiss it was, I suppose, a fairly shattering experience. And certainly not such stuff as dreams are made on … If Cinderella was out, so decidedly was Prince Charming … Raoul de Valmy was simply an experienced man shaken momentarily out of self-control by anger and other emotions that were fairly easily recognisable even to me. I say ‘even to me’ because I discovered dismayingly soon that my own poise was a fairly egg-shell affair. For all my semi-sophistication I emerged from Raoul’s embrace in a thoroughly shaken state which I assured myself was icy rage. And certainly his next move was hardly calculated to appease. Instead of whatever passionate or apologetic words should have followed, he merely let me go, re-started the car, opened the throttle with a roar, and shot her up the slope and onto the gravel sweep without a word. He cut the engine and opened his door as if to come round. I didn’t wait. I whipped out of the car, slammed the door behind me and in a silence to match his own I stalked (there is no other word) across the gravel and up the steps.
He caught up with me and opened the big door for me. He said something – I think it was my name – in an undervoice sounding as if it were shaken by a laugh. I didn’t look at him. I walked past him as if he didn’t exist, straight into a blaze of light, and Léon de Valmy, who was crossing the hall.
He checked his chair in its smooth progress as I came in, and turned his head as if to greet me. Then his eyes flicked from my face to Raoul’s and back again, and the Satanic eyebrows lifted, ever so slightly. I turned abruptly and ran upstairs.
* * *
If it had needed anything else to shake me out of my day-dreams, that glance of Léon de Valmy’s would have done it. I leaned back against the door in my darkened bedroom and put the back of my hand to a hot cheek. There was blood bitter-sweet on my tongue from a cut lip … Léon de Valmy would have seen that too. The whip flicked me again. Not only my face, my whole body burned.
I jerked myself away from the door’s support, snapped on the light, and began to tug savagely at my gloves. Damn Raoul; how dared he? How dared he? And Léon de Valmy – here the second glove catapulted down beside the first – damn Léon de Valmy, too. Damn all the Valmys. I hated the lot of them. I never wanted to see any of them again.
On the thought I stopped, halfway out of my coat.
It was more than possible that I wouldn’t have the chance. The Demon King didn’t have to be en rapport with me to guess what had happened tonight, and it was quite probable that he would take steps to dismiss me.
It didn’t occur to me at once that, if there were any hint of trouble, Raoul would certainly tell his father the truth, that I had been kissed against my will, and that since for the greater part of the year Raoul was not at Valmy to trouble the waters I would probably be kept on.
I only know that as I hung my coat with care in the pretty panelled wardrobe I felt depressed – more, desolate – at the prospect of never seeing any of the hated Valmys again.
* * *
My lip had stopped bleeding. I put on fresh lipstick carefully, and did my hair. Then I walked sedately out and across my sitting-room to the schoolroom door.
I opened it and went in. The light was on, but no-one was there. The fire had burned low and the room had an oddly forlorn look. One of the french windows was ajar and the undrawn curtains stirred in a little breeze. On the rug lay an open book, its pages faintly vibrant to the same draught.
Puzzled, I glanced at the clock. It was long past time for Philippe’s return from the salon. Madame de Valmy would be upstairs, dressing. Well, I reflected, it wasn’t my affair. On this night of all nights I wasn’t going to see why he was being kept late below stairs. No doubt he would come up when his supper did.
I was stopping for a log to throw on the fire when I heard the sound. It whispered across the quiet room, no more loudly than the tick of the little French clock or the settling of the woodash in the grate.
A very slight sound, but it lifted the hair on my skin as if that, too, felt the cold breath from the open window. It was no more than a voiced sigh, but, horribly, it sounded like a word … ‘Mademoiselle …’
I was across the schoolroom in one leap. I ran out onto the dark balcony and turned to peer along the leads. To right and left the windows were shut and dark. From behind me the lighted schoolroom thrust a bright wedge across the balcony, making my shadow, gigantic and grotesque, leap and posture before me over the narrow leads.
‘Philippe?’
The ends of the balcony were in deep darkness, invisible. I plunged out of my patch of light and ran along past the windows. The balcony floor was slippery with rain.
‘Philippe? Philippe?’
That terrible little whisper answered me from the darkest corner. I was beside it, kneeling on the damp leads. He was crouched in a tiny huddle up against the balustrade.
Or rather, where the balustrade had been. It was no longer there. In its place was merely the workman’s ladder I had wedged that very day across below the unsteady coping. Beyond this frail barrier was a gap of darkness and a thirty-foot drop to the gravel and that terrible line of iron spikes. …
My hands were on him, my voice hoarse and shaking.
‘Philippe? What happened? You didn’t fall. Oh, God, you didn’t fall … oh my little Philippe, are you all right?’
Small cold hands came up and c
I had him in my arms, my face against his wet cheek. ‘Are you all right, Philippe? Are you hurt?’ I felt his head shake. ‘Sure? Quite sure?’ A nod. I stood up with him in my arms. I am not big myself, but he seemed a feather-weight, a bundle of birds’-bones. I carried him into the schoolroom, over to the fireplace, and sat down in a wing-chair, cuddling him close to me. His arms came up round my neck and clung tightly. I don’t know what I was saying to him: I just hugged and crooned rubbish over the round dark head that was buried in my neck.
Presently he relaxed his stranglehold and stopped shivering. But when I tried to stoop for a log to put on the fire he clutched me again.
‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly, ‘I’m only going to build the fire up. We must get you warm, you know.’
He suffered me to lean forward, throw some faggots onto the sullen fire, and stir it until some little tongues of flame crept up around the new wood and began to lick brightly at it. Then I sat back in the chair again. It seemed to me that the reassurance of my arms was of more importance at that moment than bed or hot drinks or any of the remedies that would follow shortly. I said gently: ‘Was it the car, Philippe?’
That little nod again.
‘But I warned you the stone was loose. I told you not to go galloping along there, didn’t I?’
He said in a voice that sounded thinner and more childish than ever: ‘I heard the horn. I thought … Daddy always used to … on the drive … to tell me he was coming …’
I bit my lip, then winced. Of course, the horn. I remembered that arrogant blare on the zigzag. I had seen nothing on the road. It had merely been part, no doubt, of the flare of temper and excitement that had driven Raoul to kiss me … and driven Philippe out into the darkness, running in a stubborn, passionate hope to fling himself against the rotten stone.
I said, as much to myself as him: ‘I’d no idea the coping was as dangerous. It only seemed to move such a little. I thought it would hold. Thank God I put the ladder across. Why I did … oh, thank God I did!’ Then a thought struck me. ‘Philippe, where was Berthe? I thought she was with you.’