Frenchmans Creek - Daphne du Maurier

She took his hand, and laid it against her cheek.

"And all day long you worked upon your ship," she said, "and you sweated, and toiled, and said nothing, and frowned that frown of concentration I have come to understand, and then - when you had finished - what was your answer?"

He looked away from her, towards the open window.

"My answer," he said slowly, "was still the same. That you were Dona St. Columb, wife of an English baronet, and mother of two children, and I was a Frenchman, and an outlaw, a robber of your country, an enemy to your friends. If there is an answer, Dona, you must make it and not me."

He crossed to the window once more, and looked back at her over his shoulder.

"That is why I have asked William to take you to the cove near Coverack," he said, "so that you can decide what you wish to do. If I, and Pierre Blanc and the rest of us, return safely to the ship through this cordon in the wood, and hoist sail without delay, and leave with the tide, we shall be abreast of Coverack by sunrise. I will put off in a boat to have your answer. Should there be no sign of La Mouette by daylight, you will know that something has gone amiss with my plan. And Godolphin perhaps will have at last the satisfaction of hanging that hated Frenchman from the tallest tree in his park."

He smiled, and stepped out onto the terrace. "I have loved you, Dona," he said, "in almost every mood. But mostly, I think, when you threw yourself down on the deck of the Merry Fortune, in Pierre Blanc's breeches, with blood on your face, and the rain streaming down your torn shirt, and I looked at you and laughed, and a bullet whistled over your head."

Then he turned, and vanished in the darkness. She stood still, without moving, her hands clasped in front of her, while the minutes sped. Then at last she realised, like someone who has woken from a dream, that she was alone, and the house was silent, and that she held her ruby earrings and her pendant in her hands. A draught came from the open window, blowing the candles on the wall, and hardly aware of what she did she went to it, and closed and bolted it, and then went to the door leading to the dining-hall, and opened it wide.

There were the plates and the dishes on the table, and the bowls piled high with fruit, and the silver goblets and the glasses. The chairs were pushed back, as though the guests had risen from their supper, and withdrawn, and there was a strange forlorn air about the table, like a still-life picture drawn by an amateur brush, in which the food, and the fruit, and the spilt wine lack life and reality. The two spaniels crouched on the floor, and Duchess, lifting her nose from between her paws, looked up at Dona, and whined uncertainly. One of the men from La Mouette must have snuffed the candles, and then left, in haste, before extinguishing them all; for there were three that remained burning, the grease dripping on the floor, and the light they gave was sinister and queer.

One of them went out, and only two stayed now to flicker and dance upon the wall. The men of La Mouette had done their work and departed. They were creeping through the woods now to the ship in the creek, and their master was with them, his sword in his hand. The clock in the stable yard struck one; a high thin note, like the echo of a bell. Upstairs, unclothed and with their wrists tied, the guests of Navron House would be lying helpless and enraged upon the floor. All except Harry, and he would be asleep, on his back, and snoring, his wig askew and his mouth wide open, for not all the ill-treatment in the world would keep a St. Columb from his bed, when he had supped too well. William must be attending to his own hurt, in his own room, and her conscience reproached her, for she had been forgetting him. So she turned then, to the great staircase, and placed her hand on the rail, when a sound from above made her look upwards to the gallery. And there, staring down at her with narrow, unsmiling eyes, stood Rockingham with a gash across his face, and a knife in his hand.

CHAPTER XX

For eternity it seemed he stood there staring down at her, and then slowly he descended, never taking his eyes from her face, and she backed away from him, feeling for the table, and sat down in her chair, and watched him. He was clad only in his shirt and breeches, and she saw now that there was blood upon his shirt, and on the knife that he held in his hand. She knew then what had happened. Somewhere, in one of the dark passages above, a man lay mortally wounded, or even dead, and it might be one of the crew from La Mouette, or it might be William. This struggle had taken place in silence and in darkness, while she had sat in the salon alone and dreaming, her rubies in her hands. Now he stood at the bottom of the stairs, and still he said nothing, but he went on watching her with his narrow cat-like eyes, and then he sat himself in Harry's chair at the far end of the table, and put the knife down on the plate before him.

When at last he spoke the familiarity of his voice sounded odd in contrast to his altered looks, for the man who faced her was not the Rockingham she had jested with in London, ridden beside at Hampton Court, and despised as a degenerate and a rake. This man had something cold about him, something evil, and from henceforward he was her enemy, wishing her suffering and pain.

"I see," he said, "that your jewels have been returned to you."

She shrugged her shoulders without answer, for how much he had guessed was of little consequence. The only thing that mattered was to know the plan in his head, and what movement he would make.

"And what," he said, "did you give in place of your jewels?"

She began to replace the rubies in her ears, watching him over her arm as she did so. And then, because his gaze was something that she hated now, and could even grow to fear, she said to him, "We have become very serious, Rockingham, all of a sudden. I should have thought this evening's jest would have amused you well."

"You are right," he answered, "it has amused me much. That twelve men could be disarmed and un-breeched in so short a time by so few jesters bears a curious likeness to the pranks we used to play at Hampton Court. But that Dona St. Columb should look upon the leader of the jesters in the way she did - in a way that could mean one thing only - no, that I did not find amusing."

She leant her elbows on the table, and cupped her chin in her hands.

"And so?" she asked.

"And so in a flash I understood much that had puzzled me since my arrival here last night. That servant of yours, a spy of course of the Frenchman's. The friendliness between you, that you knew he was a spy. And those walks of yours, those wanderings in the woods, that elusive look in your eye that I had never seen before, yes, indeed, elusive to me, to Harry, to all men but one man, and I have seen that man tonight." His voice was low now, scarcely above a whisper, and all the time he looked at her with hatred.

"Well," he said, "do you deny it?"

"I deny nothing," she answered.

He picked up the knife from his plate, and began tracing lines with it upon the table, as though abstracted.

"You know," he said, "that you could be imprisoned for this, and possibly hanged, should the truth come out?"

Once again she shrugged her shoulders, and did not answer.

"Not a very pleasant ending, for Dona St. Columb," he said. "You have never been inside a jail, have you? You have never smelt the heat and the filth, you have never tasted the black broken bread, or drunk the water, thick with scum. And the feeling of a rope about your neck, as it tightens, and chokes you. How would you like that, Dona?"

"My poor Rockingham," she said slowly, "I can imagine all these things far better than you can describe them. What is your object? Do you wish to frighten me? Because you are not succeeding."

"I thought it only wise," he said, "to remind you of what may happen."

"And all this," she said, "because my lord Rockingham fancies I smiled upon a pirate when he asked me for my jewels. Tell your story to Godolphin, to Rashleigh and to Eustick, to Harry even - they will say that you are mad."

"Possibly," he said, "with your Frenchman on the high seas, and yourself sitting at your ease in Navron House. But supposing your Frenchman was not on the high seas, supposing he was caught, and bound and brought before you, and we played with him a little, as they played with prisoners some hundred years ago, Dona, with you for audience. I rather believe you would give yourself away."

Once again she saw him as she had seen him earlier in the day, a sleek cat crouching in the long grass, a bird between his claws, so padded, so soft, and she realised, her memory streaking back to the past, how she had always suspected in him some quality of deliberate and cruel depravity which, because of the foolhardy lightness of the age in which they lived, was well concealed.

"It pleases you to be dramatic," she said, "but the days of the thumb-screw and the rack are over. We no longer burn our heretics at the stake."

"Not our heretics perhaps," he said, "but our pirates are hanged, and drawn, and quartered, and their accomplices suffer the same fate."

"Very well," she said, "since you believe me an accomplice, do what you wish. Go upstairs, and unbind the guests who supped here tonight. Wake Harry from his drunken slumbers. Call the servants. Fetch horses, fetch soldiers and weapons. And then when you have caught your pirate, you may hang us both side by side from the same tree."

He did not answer. He stared at her across the table, balancing the knife in his hand.

"Yes," he said, "you would suffer that, would you not, and be proud and glad. You would not mind dying now, because you have had, at last, the thing you wanted all your life. Is not that true?"

She looked back at him, and then she laughed.

"Yes," she said, "it is true."

He turned very white, and the gash on his face showed vivid red in contrast, altering the shape of his mouth, like a strange grimace.

"And it might have been me," he said, "it might have been me."

"Never," she said, "that I swear. Never in this world."

"If you had not left London, if you had not come down here to Navron, it would have been me. Yes, though it were from boredom, from idleness, from indifference, even from disgust, it would have been me."

"No, Rockingham… never…"

He got up slowly from his chair, still balancing the knife in his hands, and he kicked the spaniel away from under his feet, and he rolled his sleeves above his elbow.

She rose too, gripping the sides of her chair, and the murky light from the two candles on the wall flickered down upon his face.

"What is it, Rockingham?" she asked.

Then for the first time he smiled, and he pushed back his chair, and laid one hand on the corner of the table.

"I believe," he whispered, "that I am going to kill you."

In a moment she had flung a glass of wine, close to her hand, straight in his face, and for half a second it blinded him, while the glass shivered to fragments on the floor. Then he made a lunge towards her across the table, but she eluded him, reaching for one of the heavy chairs beside her, and she lifted it, and sent it crashing amongst the silver and the fruit on the table, the leg of it striking his shoulder. He breathed quickly, with the pain of it, and hurling the chair from the table to the ground, he held his knife poised an instant, high above his shoulder, and threw it from him, straight at her throat. It struck the ruby pendant around her neck, cracking it in two, and she felt the cold steel slip away from her, pricking her skin, catching itself in the folds of her gown. She fumbled for it, sick with horror and with pain, but before she could seize it he was upon her, one hand doubling her wrist behind her back, and the other pressing her mouth in suffocation. She felt herself falling back against the table, the glasses and the plates crashing to the ground, and somewhere beneath her was the knife which he wished to find. The dogs were barking now, furiously excited, imagining this was some new sport designed for their amusement, and they leapt up at him, scratching with their paws, so that he was forced to turn a moment, and kick them from under him, releasing the pressure of his hand upon her mouth.