Wild Island (21 page)

Jemima leant forward and gingerly took the note from the bed. She read the first few words: 'I can't go on —' She had time to think with the beginnings of panic: 'But they'll never believe this, they won't,-Guthrie, Cherry, it's impossible. I'm not like that. I'll tell them. But I won't tell them. It'll be too late. I'll be dead—'

There was a noise behind her on the stairs.

Lady Edith raised the gun. After that, Jemima could never be quite clear about the precise order of events. Lady Edith  levelled the gun straight at Jemima. There was a small click, afterwards she realized that was the safety catch being released. Then:

'Edith, don't shoot!' The cry, loud, frantic, almost a bellow, came from directly behind her. It was Colonel Henry's voice, lut later the noise of his voice and Lady Edith's own cry: 'No, Henry, not you,' would mingle in her memory with the explosion of the gun, thunderous, enveloping, the force of the explosion which seemed to knock her backwards, sideways, but which in fact turned out to be Colonel Henry knocking her sideways, or possibly rushing in front of her or possibly throwing himself at his wife. She would never know for sure.

All she did know was that when all the noise was over - what seemed to be a million years later, but could only be seconds, 
she was picking herself up, stunned but physically undamaged, from the bedroom floor. While Colonel Henry continued to lie there. And Lady Edith-with a terrible scream like a tortured animal, a scream she would never forget - had cast down the gun and was running, running down the stairs and away; her footsteps light, fast, sounded on the gravel flying away. Then there was silence. She was gone.

Still Colonel Henry did not move. Delicately, gingerly she touched his black jacket. It was damp. She opened it up.
A
whole area of the white shirt beneath was stained red, the stain spreading all the time.

'Help, I must get help,' she thought desperately. 'I ought to find someone-but I can't leave him.' She pulled the coverlet off the bed to try and bandage his chest. Then she felt a fain! pressure on her fingers. Colonel Henry's hand was on hers. His lips were moving.

'Poor Edith,' he was saying. She could just hear, 'Poor woman.' Jemima continued to staunch desperately at the wound in his chest.
                                                                                                                                     

Colonel Henry's lips moved twice more before he stopped moving altogether and lay still. The first time he said something like: 'Till my dying day’ - Jemima could not be quite sure, but she hoped he had said that.

Lastly, he said again, 'Poor woman.' Or was it 'Poor women' ? She would never know. She only knew that Colonel Henry died as he had lived, a chivalrous man - in either case.

CHAPTER
21

A Highland farewell

Much much later jemima was aware of someone else coming up the stairs with slow steps and then standing over her. She looked up. It was Ossian Lucas. ‘Is he dead ?' he asked.

Jemima nodded. She had put her little gold mirror to his lips. There was no breath. Then she had closed his eyes gently. She could not bring herself to speak.

'An accident,' said Lucas very firmly, looking at her. 'It was an accident with a gun. You must remember that. We ought to get Father Flanagan and he'll administer the last rites.' Then he said in a softer voice, 'I tried to warn you. I wasn't sure. But I was beginning to suspect. Yet I couldn't believe she would strike again twice in the same way.' There was a pause.

'But to the outside world it was and always will be an accident with a gun.* He repeated in his previous firm tone, 'You must remember that. Close ranks. Protect the family. It's what he would have wanted.'

'Protect the family! Close ranks!' The tears were beginning to pour down her cheeks uncontrollably. 'What about her —' she began. 'It was her, all her—'

'Don't speak,' said Ossian Lucas. 'Not now. Besides, she's gone. Gone for ever. She slipped over the edge of the cliff at the Fair Falls into the pool below. In the fog, you understand.

Clementina thought she saw her actually jump over the edge. Absolute nonsense, of course, but Clementina is so excitable; Father Flanagan definitely saw her slip. He tried to save her. It was a tragic accident like the death of ColonelHenry. That's all.'

'That's all,' repeated Jemima dully after him as if it were a lesson.

She did not stay for his funeral. For after the endless police formalities had been fulfilled and the inquest was over, there was a family funeral.

'What Dad would have liked,' said Ben. No one liked to gainsay Ben now. Besides, he was becoming more authoritarian by the minute. So there would be a piper playing a last lament: a proper Highland farewell.

There was no funeral as yet for Lady Edith because there was no body. The body of the dog Jacobite was discovered floating in Sighing Marjorie's Pool beneath-the waterfall. They assumed that the faithful animal had leapt in after his mistress to try and rescue her. But the black depths of the pool refused to give up the body of Lady Edith, and no corpse was ever recovered from the waters into which she had plunged, to forget what she had done, to immerse herself. Later, perhaps, there would be some form of memorial to her in the church of St Margaret's or a mention of her on Colonel Henry's own gravestone. That too was for Ben to decide.

And Father Flanagan would pray for her, as he prayed for Colonel Henry, and Leonie, and Charles Beauregard, and all sinners in the eyes of God.

Later still, as Ossian Lucas observed to Jemima Shore, driving her to Inverness to catch the night sleeper, the myths would begin to grow up. Like the bracken at Eilean Fas, they would gradually cover up the neglected truth.

'In another hundred years I dare say it will be called Lady Edith's Pool.'

Jemima thought he was probably right. In another century up the Glen, the legend of the devoted wife and mother, dying to save one of her children, or even her husband, would have succeeded the truth of the jealous, covetous murderess.

Already the deliberate covering-up process had begun. Whatever the police thought privately, it was difficult to shake the combined evidence of the Beauregard family, Father Flanagan the parish priest, and Ossian Lucas the local MP.

'An awful lot of deaths,' said the Kilbronnack constabulary dourly, and later higher police officials echoed the same sentiment. There were enquiries, and doubts, and statements. But in the absence of evidence to the contrary, in the end the verdict was accidental death - on both of them.

After the inquest, Jemima wired Cherry that she was taking the night sleeper south, and wanted to be met (after her experiences which no doubt had been fully reported in the southern press - the family picnic which went wrong and ended in a double tragedy). But she preferred the welcome of a discreet and anonymous chauffeur from Miles and Miles. She made it quite clear in her telegram that the attentions of Guthrie Carlyle would not be well received at that hour in the morning. There would be time for Guthrie - later that day. Or perhaps the next day. Anyway, there would be time for Guthrie in the office, when they were planning the new series, slightly ahead of schedule owing to the abrupt curtailment of her holiday. The trouble with Guthrie was that he was so young. Or did he just seem young to her - now ?

She did not want an acolyte. She wanted - she had wanted – she stopped these thoughts. The new series: she would concentrate on that. It was work, not sleep, which had always knitted up the ravelled sleeve of her own particular care.

She received the offer of another set of attentions before she left the Glen. Ben Beauregard paid her a state visit at the Castle, where Jemima had been offered a bed and had accepted a temporary refuge. Ben too seemed a bit young; although Jemima realized afterwards with surprise that they were very nearly the same age.

In a roundabout and graceful manner he attempted to discover whether such attentions would be welcome. Equally gracefully she indicated they would not. At the end of the conversation, Jemima exclaimed impulsively:

'I think you really need someone who would care about land above all else. Or any way understand the feeling. I could never do that-not feel it, not understand it’  She paused and said in a softer voice, 'In any case, should you not take on Clementina ?'

'One way or another, I'll have to take her on,' Ben said musingly. He did not seem put out by Jemima's rebuff. She remembered the scene in the Castle when the girl had taunted him with 'pretty, pretty cousin Clementina’. She thought - in the end - he would take her on. She had once compared Clementina to Rosalind, also a dispossessed heiress. In the end Rosalind had married her Orlando, another victim of a family feud. This Rosalind had found her Orlando. And they would be happy.

She gazed at his handsome, heavy, sombre face so like yet so unlike his father's. At least he would be happy with Clementina, and with her money, and their castle. Gradually the memory of the past would fade - the memory of his mother, her brother. Clementina would be happy, and have children, a clutch of sons perhaps, the pattern repeating itself - or at least she would be as happy as any woman could be in this man's valley.

Then Ben broke it to her that one woman at least intended to be very happy there.

'Rory and Hurricane Sophie - did you guess? Of course it's a dead secret, more than ever now. As it was, the dreadful snobbish Duchess of Cumberland nearly had a fit when she heard the news and she's the one who controls all the money which will go to Sophie one day from her rich Dutch relations. Roman Catholic! Non-royal! A younger son! They've had to promise to wait till Sophie is twenty-one. And now - well, the only thing to be said is that Sophie is even more obstinate than her mother and for some extraordinary reason she's mad about Rory, so I dare say she'll get her own way in the end.

'I'm going to give them Eilean Fas, by the way. Unbelievably, Rory actually wants to live there, says it's his boyhood dream, and the past makes no difference. The whole of the Highlands is stained with bloody dramas, he said, Eilean Fas no more than anywhere else. Myself,' Ben paused, 'I'd rather die than live there, as you can imagine. But I suppose if anyone can exorcize the ghosts of the Wild Island, it's Hurricane Sophie...'

So Rory had achieved his dream after all. If he could not achieve it one way, he would achieve it another. And he had kept every option open; he had evidently never abandoned his courtship of the spritely Hanoverian princess, while at the same-time leading the forces of romantic Stuart reaction on behalf of his secret followers. He had even managed to gratify both parties with the same bold if empty gesture, by making threats against Princess Sophie's personal safety in the name of the Red Rose. The publicity thus generated had been thoroughly welcome on all sides. A very determined if not exactly single-minded man. Or as Bridie Stuart had said long ago, deep.

'Father Flanagan's idea of a mission at Eilean Fas really isn't on - under the circumstances,' Ben added vaguely. 'I've told him I'll do something about it as soon as possible.' But Jemima lad a feeling that the day of Father Flanagan's much-desired mission up the Glen would still be long in coming.

At Inverness Station there was another enormous placard in red letters: 'A Highland Farewell to HRH Princess Sophie of Cumberland.' But on this occasion no one, not the Red Rose in mourning, nor some newly formed Black Thistle, had chosen to deface it.

Jemima Shore thought: Unlike Princess Sophie, I won't be coming back to the Highlands. But she was glad that for someone at least Eilean Fas retained, and would always retain, its magic aura of Paradise.

For her the magic was gone. She knew, as she rocketed south in her sleeper, that it was gone, vanished, gone for ever. The very colours of her memories were not the bright clear colours of the Wild Island in sunshine, but other darker shades of regret a loss.

Paradise was not for her. She would not seek it again.

The sleeper swayed and rattled, and the rails beneath the carriage seemed to be carrying out a kind of elaborate quadrille which kept her from falling into unconsciousness, exhausted as she felt. After a while, she put one hand into her handbag to find the ever-present paperback thriller. Her fingers closed unexpectedly on a small cold object. Jemima brought out instead the enamel box which Colonel Henry had given her on the morning of her birthday. She read once more the message held aloft on the lid by two cupids:
Remember Me.

Yes, she would remember him. Jemima Shore fell asleep still clutching the little box in her hand, so that when she awoke in England, the cold enamel had become warm. But her cheeks were quite wet; she must have been crying in her sleep, a thing which had never happened to her before.

 The End