Never Call It Love (13 page)

His
open hand struck her left cheek, rocking her head on the pillow, making dots of
light dance before her eyes.

She
stopped straggling. She felt a painful pressure, and then the sharper, rending
pain of his brutal thrust inside her body. She gave an anguished cry, and
opening her eyes, looked into the dark face close above her own. Then her
eyelids closed. Grimly, helplessly, she endured the hard thrust and withdrawal,
thrust and withdrawal, until the final one left him lying spent and motionless
upon her.

After
a few seconds he rolled away, to lie beside her. Blindly she reached down,
caught one corner of the upper sheet, and drew it over her.

Silence
in the room, except for a sputtering sound as a current of air from the open
window bent the candle flame. She opened her eyes. He lay with his brooding
face resting on an elbow-propped hand. She closed her eyes and said, before she
could stop herself, "Someday I will kill you for this."

"Why?
Because, as the saying goes, you are now
ruined, unmarriageable?" His tone
was mocking. "I am willing to marry you."

A
shudder ran down her body.

"After
all," he went on, "I could use your twenty thousand pounds."

So
he even knew, this Irish devil, the amount of her inheritance. She said dully,
"Will you go now? Or do you still believe I know where you can find my
brother?"

After
a long moment he said, "No, I don't think you are lying about that.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I think that if you'd known what ship he had taken, you
would have told me, in the hope of preserving... What is the phrase for it?
Woman's dearest treasure?"

She
detected a forced note in his mockery, as if he were trying to hold some
emotion, perhaps guilt, at bay. But what good could his guilt do now, she
thought bitterly, what good could anything do? She turned over and buried her
face in the pillow.

She
heard him get out of bed, heard the subdued rustling sounds of his dressing. At
last he said, "Is the key in the back door's lock?"

She
said, her voice muffled in the pillow, "Yes."

"Then
I will go out that way."

She
did not speak.

He
moved down the dark stairs and along the lower hall to the back door. His hand
found the key in the lock, turned it. He closed the door behind him, and under
a moonless sky brilliant with stars, walked over to the bench and picked up the
hat and cloak he had left there. As yet there was no glow of dawn in the east.
When he reached the copse where he had left a roan mare tethered, he looked
down at the house in the hollow. Feeble candlelight still shone from the window
of her room.

He
rode down the country lane to the sleeping village, and then took the wider
highroad that led toward London. That thin fellow, Weymouth, who had
accompanied
her and her mother to the trial each day. Almost surely he was the future
parson that, according to the drunken marquis in Harry's Coffee House,
Elizabeth Montlow intended to marry.

Well,
perhaps they would still marry. She would not be the first nonvirgin bride in
history. And a parson could use twenty thousand pounds as well as any man.

Anyway,
she had deserved what had happened to her, the lying bitch. She had deserved
more than that, after helping that young monster escape. He tried to keep
thinking of Anne Reardon's unrecognizable face as she lay dying. He tried to
think of Christopher Montlow stepping down from the dock, freed by a jury of
Irish-hating Englishmen.

But
another memory kept obtruding itself. A girl with faintly golden skin and clear
gray eyes, smiling up at him as she said, "I live in the country most of
the time. I love to walk, and to ride...."

Pale
light showed along the eastern horizon now. He urged the mare to a faster trot.
To hell with Elizabeth Montlow. And to hell, at least for the present, with
trying to find her brother. Eventually he would deal with Christopher Montlow.
At the moment, all he wanted to do was to get out of England and cross to that
beautiful, tormented island that was his homeland.

***

Elizabeth
had waited several minutes after she heard the back door downstairs open and
close. Then she rose from the bed and stared numbly down at the sheet, stained
with her own blood. Finally she stripped the sheet from the bed, dropped it in
a heap on the floor, and moved to the washstand. With cold water from the
pitcher and a sponge, she bathed herself as best she could. There was a
tin-lined bathtub in one corner of her bedroom. She wished that she could fill
it with steaming water as hot as her body could stand, and then immerse
herself in it.
But she had neither the will nor the strength to kindle a fire downstairs, and
heat water, and carry it back to this room.

Besides,
hot water could not bring her purification, or even the illusion of it. Nothing
could.

She
looked at her reflection in the mirror above the washstand. Despite the dimness
of the candlelight, she could see that her cheek was still reddened from the
blow he had given her. Would it look bruised in a few hours? If it did, pray
God the bruise would fade before her mother saw her, or Donald.

Donald!
Her heart twisted with hopeless grief at the thought of the sensitive, humorous
man she loved. She could not marry him now, not without telling him what had
happened to her. And she dared not tell him. With that implacable fury that
gentle people, once aroused, can display, he would track Patrick Stanford down
and kill him.

And
that must not happen. Donald, at least, must be saved from the tempest of
violence that had battered the Montlows, leaving her brother a fugitive, her
mother anxious and ill in London, and herself, no longer virgin, staring at her
own shock-widened eyes in the mirror. Donald must live out his life in this
peaceful countryside, preaching each Sunday from the pulpit in the village
church, and ministering to parishioners who would honor and love him.

Her
thoughts veered. That kitten, dangling from its noose. Her father was still
alive then. If she had told him about the kitten, would he have dealt with
Christopher in a way to keep him from becoming what he had become? Perhaps.
Perhaps not

Suddenly
she realized the significance of her thoughts. She no longer had the slightest
doubt of Christopher's guilt.

But
she would not think of that tonight, or of anything
else. She must
try, if she could, to find a few hours' oblivion in sleep. But not in that bed,
not even in this room.

She
picked up her nightshift and slipped it over her head. Carrying the candle, now
burning low in its holder, she went down the hall to her mother's empty room.

The
next day was ironically bright and springlike. As if in the grip of a bad dream
from which she could not awaken, she moved about the garden and the silent
house, clearing dead leaves away from around the pale green shoots of early
daffodils, removing ashes from fireplace grates, polishing furniture that already
shone. With dull thankfulness she had seen that her cheek was not badly
bruised. Surely her face would appear quite normal when next she saw her mother
and Donald.

Donald.
What would become of her and Donald? For the first time she realized what
people meant when they spoke of one's thoughts going around like a squirrel in
a cage. Her thoughts of Donald were like that. She could not marry him without
telling him what had happened to her, and, for his own sake, she dared not tell
him that Therefore, she would not marry him. But what reason could she give
him—except the one she dared not tell—— for breaking their betrothal?

Late
in the afternoon she found one small bit of comfort. She went into her father's
library, with its hundreds of volumes relating to everything from astronomy to
zoology. From a top shelf she took down a book, a medical
treatise, in a
badly worn leather binding, and carried it over to the window. The book had
been written early in the last century. The print was fine, the style crabbed, and
the involved sentences sprinkled with Latin phrases. Nevertheless, she finally
found the sort of passage she was looking for: "Protolinus to the
contrary, it be seldom, albeit not unknown, that impregnation results from
coitus
primus
of a virgin."

It
be seldom. At least there was one thing she would be spared—Protolinus to the
contrary. Fleetingly, as she placed the book back on the shelf, she wondered
who Protolinus had been.

There
was no letter from Christopher that day, or the next, or the next. That must
mean that he had not taken a ship bound for some nearby port across the English
channel. Instead, he must have sailed on one of the other ships Patrick
Stanford had mentioned, a vessel bound for the West Indies or for North
America. Sometimes she gave a thought to her brother, picturing him on a
storm-tossed vessel in mid-Atlantic, and wondering if he still had some of the
money she had given him, or had lost it to thieves, or on a toss of the dice.
But most of the time her thoughts had no room except for her own dilemma.

On
the fourth night after Patrick Stanford's devastating visit, she sat huddled
before the fire in the side parlor, and forced herself to face the fact that
there simply was no way out. If her problem was to be solved before the day in
late June set for her wedding, someone or something outside herself would do
the solving. In the meantime, she would be like a shipwreck survivor on a raft,
drifting nearer and nearer jagged rocks, and hoping that some miraculous
reversal of the current would save her.

The
next morning there was a letter from Donald. His uncle was to celebrate his
seventy-fifth birthday in two weeks, and wanted him to stay on until then. She
had never dreamed that a time would come when she could
welcome
Donald's continued absence. But now his letter seemed to her like a temporary
reprieve.

Early
in the afternoon several days later, a carriage Stopped out in the narrow road.
With mingled gladness and anxiety, Elizabeth watched Mary Hawkins get out, and
receive the two portmanteaus the driver handed down from the box. Then Mrs.
Montlow got out of the carriage, and both women moved toward the house. Afraid
of what her mother might read in her face, she stretched her lips into a bright
smile before she opened the door.

She
need not have worried. Mrs. Montlow was too taken up with thoughts of her son
to search her daughter's face. As soon as she was inside the door, she asked,
"Has there been word from Christopher?"

"Not
yet."

"Where
is
the child?" With distracted fingers she untied the ribbon bow
beneath her chin and handed her bonnet to Hawkins. "He's dead. I know he's
dead!"

"Mother!
Unless he went to France or the Netherlands, it is far too early for us to hear
from him. It would take him weeks to get to America or the West Indies, and
weeks more for his letter to reach us."

After
a moment Mrs. Montlow said, "I suppose that is true. And I suppose,"
she went on broodingly, "that the poor child has tried to get as far away
as possible from that black-hearted devil."

Elizabeth
said in a strained voice, "Do you want to go upstairs, Mother? Or would
you like me to bring you some tea in the side parlor? No, no, Hawkins. I can
attend to it The water is already on the boil."

As
the spring advanced, sunlight alternated with gentle showers. The daffodil
shoots surrounding a maple's huge trunk in the garden unfurled their first
blooms, and on the tree itself fat buds along the branches waved like strings
of coral beads against the tender blue sky. Elizabeth tried
to find some of
her usual delight in greening grass, and drift of cloud across a spring sky,
and song spilling down from larks that circled above newly planted fields. But
she found taking joy in the earth's renewal difficult. And before long it
became impossible, because a new fear haunted all her waking hours.

She
tried to tell herself the fear was absurd. The strain of the past few months
had been enough to upset any woman, not only in mind and spirit, but in bodily
functions. Besides, there was the reassuring phrase in that tattered old
book....

On
a Saturday afternoon, unable to find more household or garden tasks to occupy
her, she began to walk along the road to the village. She was about a third of
the way there when she saw, with joy and terror, that Donald was walking toward
her. He called her name, and quickened his pace. When they reached each other,
his smiling gaze went over her face. Then he took her in his arms. "Oh, my
dearest, how I have missed you!"

"And
I have missed you," Elizabeth said, and then, to her dismay, burst into
tears.

His
arms tightened around her. "Elizabeth, Elizabeth. I should not have stayed
away so long."

She
said, between sobs, "It's just... just that everything... has been
so..."

"I
know. Even though you were my brave girl all during the trial, I know it must
have been a terrible strain for you."

With
his handkerchief he dried the tears from her face, and then kissed the lips
that were trying to smile. Hands clasped, they moved back down the road toward
the Hedges.