Du Maurier, Daphne (23 page)

The carriage rattled on along the Bodmin road. There were still three miles to cover before the tall chimneys of Jamaica Inn broke upon the skyline, and those miles were the wildest and most exposed of all the long one-and-twenty that stretched between the two towns.

Mary wished now that she had gone with Francis Davey. She would not hear the wind in Altarnun, and the rain would fall silently in the sheltered lane. Tomorrow she could have knelt in the church and prayed for the first time since leaving Helford. If what he said was true, then there would be cause for rejoicing after all, and there would be some sense in giving thanks. The day of the wrecker was over; he would be broken by the new law, he and his kind; they would be blotted out and razed from the countryside as the pirates had been twenty, thirty years ago; and there would be no memory of them any more, no record left to poison the minds of those who should come after. A new generation would be born who had never heard their name. Ships would come to England without fear; there would be no harvest with the tide. Coves that had sounded once with the crunch of footsteps on shingle and the whispered voices of men would be silent again, and the scream that broke upon the silence would be the scream of a gull. Beneath the placid surface of the sea, on the ocean bed, lay skulls without a name, green coins that had once been gold, and the old bones of ships: they would be forgotten for ever more. The terror they had known died with them. It was the dawn of a new age, when men and women would travel without fear, and the land would belong to them. Here, on this stretch of moor, farmers would till their plot of soil and stack the sods of turf to dry under the sun as they did today, but the shadow that had been upon them would have vanished. Perhaps the grass would grow and the heather bloom again where Jamaica Inn had stood.

She sat in the corner of the carriage, with the vision of the new world before her; and through the open window, travelling down upon the wind, she heard a shot ring out in the silence of the night, and a distant shout, and a cry. The voices of men came out of the darkness, and the padding of feet upon the road. She leant out of the window, the rain blowing in on her face, and she heard the driver of the carriage call out in fear as his horse shied and stumbled. The road rose steeply from the valley, winding away to the top of the hill, and there in the distance were the lean chimneys of Jamaica Inn crowning the skyline like a gallows. Down the road came a company of men, led by one who lept like a hare and tossed a lantern before him as he ran. Another shot rang out, and the driver of the carriage crumpled in his seat and fell. The horse stumbled again and headed like a blind thing for the ditch. For a moment the carriage swayed upon its wheels, rocked, and was still. Somebody screamed a blasphemy to the sky; somebody laughed wildly; there was a whistle and a cry.

A face was thrust in at the window of the carriage, a face crowned with matted hair that fell in a fringe above the scarlet, bloodshot eyes. The lips parted, showing the white teeth; and then the lantern was lifted to the window so that the light should fall upon the interior of the carriage. One hand held the lantern, and the other clasped the smoking barrel of a pistol; they were long slim hands, with narrow pointed fingers, things of beauty and of grace, the rounded nails crusted with dirt.

Joss Merlyn smiled, the crazy, delirious smile of a man possessed, maddened, and exalted by poison; and he levelled the pistol at Mary, leaning forward into the carriage so that the barrel touched her throat.

Then he laughed and threw the pistol back over his shoulder, and, wrenching open the door, he reached for her hands and pulled her out beside him on the road, holding the lantern above his head so that all could see her. There were ten or twelve of them standing in the road, ragged and ill kept, half of them drunk as their leader, wild eyes staring out of shaggy bearded faces; and one or two had pistols in their hands, or were armed with broken bottle, knives, and stones. Harry the pedlar stood by the horse’s head, while face downwards in the ditch lay the driver of the carriage, his arm crumpled under him, his body limp and still.

Joss Merlyn held Mary to him and tilted her face to the light, and when they saw who she was a howl of laughter broke from the company of men, and the pedlar put his two fingers to his mouth and whistled.

The landlord bent to her and bowed with drunken gravity; he seized her loose hair in his hand and twisted it in a rope, sniffing at it like a dog.

“So it’s you, is it?” he said. “You’ve chosen to come back again, like a little whining bitch, with your tail between your legs?”

Mary said nothing. She looked from one to the other of the men in the crowd, and they stared back at her, jeering hemming in upon her and laughing, pointing to her wet clothes, fingering her bodice and her skirt.

“So you’re dumb, are you?” cried her uncle, and he hit her across the face with the back of his hand. She called out and put up an arm to protect herself, but he knocked it away and, holding her wrist, he doubled it behind her back. She cried with the pain, and he laughed again.

“You’ll come to heel if I kill you first,” he said. “Do you think you can stand against me, with your monkey face and your damned impudence? And what do you think you do, at midnight, riding on the King’s highway in a hired carriage, half naked, with your hair down your back? You’re nothing but a common slut, after all.” He jerked at her wrist, and she fell.

“Leave me alone,” she cried; “you have no right to touch me or speak to me. You’re a bloody murderer and a thief, and the law knows it too. The whole of Cornwall knows it. Your reign is over, Uncle Joss. I’ve been to Launceston today to inform against you.”

A hubbub rose amongst the group of men; they pressed forward, shouting at her and questioning, but the landlord roared at them, waving them back.

“Get back, you damned fools! Can’t you see she’s trying to save her skin by lies?” he thundered. “How can she inform against me when she knows nothing? She’s never walked the eleven miles to Launceston. Look at her feet. She’s been with a man somewhere down on the road, and he sent her back on wheels when he’d had enough of her. Get up—or do you want me to rub your nose in the dust?” He pulled her to her feet and held her beside him. Then he pointed to the sky, where the low clouds fled before the scurrying wind and a wet star gleamed.

“Look there,” he yelled. “There’s a break in the sky, and the rain’s going east. There’ll be more wind yet before we’re through, and a wild grey dawn on the coast in six hours’ time. We’ll waste no more of it here. Get your horse, Harry, and put him in the traces here; the carriage will carry half a dozen of us. And bring the pony and the farm cart from the stable; he’s had no work for a week. Come on, you lazy drunken devils, don’t you want to feel gold and silver run through your hands? I’ve lain like a hog for seven crazy days, and by God, I feel like a child tonight and I want the coast again. Who’ll take the road with me through Camelford?”

A shout rose from a dozen voices, and hands were thrust into the air. One fellow burst into a snatch of song, waving a bottle over his head, reeling on his feet as he stood; then he staggered and fell, crumpling onto his face in the ditch. The pedlar kicked him as he lay, and he did not stir; and, snatching the bridle of the horse, he dragged the animal forward, urging him with blows and cries to the steep hill, while the wheels of the carriage passed over the body of the fallen man, who, kicking for an instant like a wounded hare, struggled from the mud with a scream of terror and pain, and then lay still.

The men turned with the carriage and followed it, the sound of their running feet pattering along the highroad, and Joss Merlyn stood for a moment looking down upon Mary with a foolish drunken smile; then on a sudden impulse he caught her in his arms and pulled her towards the carriage, wrenching the door once more. He threw her onto the seat in the corner, and then, leaning out of the window, he yelled to the pedlar to whip the horse up the hill.

His cry was echoed by the men who ran beside him, and some of them leapt onto the step and clung to the window, while others mounted the driver’s empty seat and rained at the horse with sticks and a shower of stones.

The animal quivered, sweating with fear; and he topped the hill at a gallop, with half a dozen madmen clinging to the reins and screaming at his heels.

Jamaica Inn was ablaze with light; the doors were open, and the windows were unbarred. The house gaped out of the night like a live thing.

The landlord placed his hand over Mary’s mouth and forced her back against the side of the carriage. “You’d inform against me, would you?” he said. “You’d run to the law and have me swinging on a rope’s end like a cat? All right, then, you shall have your chance. You shall stand on the shore, Mary, with the wind and the sea in your face, and you shall watch for the dawn and the coming in of the tide.

You know what that means, don’t you? You know where I’m going to take you?”

She stared back at him in horror; the colour drained from her face, and she tried to speak to him, but his hands forbade her.

“You think you’re not afraid of me, don’t you?” he said. “You sneer at me with your pretty white face and your monkey eyes. Yes, I’m drunk; I’m drunk as a king, and heaven and earth can smash for all I care. Tonight we shall ride in glory, every man jack of us, maybe for the last time; and you shall come with us, Mary; to the coast….”

He turned away from her, shouting to his companions, and the horse, startled by his cry, started forward again in his stride, dragging the carriage behind him; and the lights of Jamaica Inn vanished in the darkness.

It was a nightmare journey of two hours or more to the coast, and Mary, bruised and shaken by her rough handling, lay exhausted in the corner of the carriage, caring little what became of her. Harry the pedlar and two other men had climbed in beside her uncle, and the air became foul at once with the stink of tobacco and stale drink and the smell of their bodies.

The landlord had worked himself and his companions into a state of wild excitement, and the presence of a woman amongst them brought a vicious tang to their enjoyment, her weakness and distress acting pleasurably upon them.

At first they talked at her and for her, laughing and singing to win her notice, Harry the pedlar bursting into his lewd songs, which rang with immoderate force in such close quarters and brought howls of appreciation from his audience, stimulating them to greater excitement.

They watched for the effect upon her face, hoping that she would show some sign of shame or discomfort, but Mary was too tired now for any word or song to penetrate her. She heard their voices through a haze of exhaustion; she was aware of her uncle’s elbows thrust in her side, bringing another dull ache to add to her pains, and with throbbing head and smarting eyes she saw a sea of grinning faces through the smoke. What they said or did hardly mattered to her any more, and the longing for sleep and forgetfulness became a torment.

When they saw how lifeless she was, and dull, her presence lost its flavour; even the songs lost sting, and Joss Merlyn fumbled in his pocket and produced a pack of cards. They turned from her at once to this new interest, and, in the momentary lull that blessed her, Mary shrank closer in her corner, away from the hot, animal smell of her uncle, and, closing her eyes, she resigned herself to the movement of the swaying, jolting carriage. Her fatigue was such that full consciousness was no longer part of her; she was swinging in a trance land across the border. She was aware of pain, and the rocking carriage wheels, and in the far distance a murmur of voices; but these things moved away from her and not with her; she could not identify them with her own existence. Darkness came upon her like a boon from heaven, and she felt herself slip away into it; and so was lost. Time had nothing to do with her then. It was the cessation of movement that dragged her back to the world; the sudden stillness, and the cold damp air blowing upon her face through the open carriage window.

She was alone in her corner. The men had gone, taking their light with them. She sat motionless at first, fearing to bring them back and uncertain what had befallen her; and then, when she leant forward to the window, the pain and stiffness in her body were intolerable. A weal of pain ran across her shoulders where the cold had numbed her, and her bodice was still damp from the rain that had soaked her early in the evening. She waited a moment and then leant forward again. It was still blowing hard, but the driving rain had ceased, and only a thin cold mizzle pattered against the window. The carriage had been abandoned in a narrow gullyway with high banks on either side, and the horse had been taken from the traces. The gully appeared to descend sharply, the path becoming rough and broken. Mary could not see more than a few yards in front of her. The night had thickened considerably, and in the gullyway it was black like a pit. There were no stars now in the sky, and the sharp wind of the moors had become a boisterous thing of noise and bluster, trailing a wet fog for company. Mary put her hand out of the window and touched the bank.

Her fingers came upon loose sand and stems of grass, sodden through with the rain. She tried the handle of the door, but it was locked. Then she listened intently. Her eyes strained to pierce the darkness ahead of her, down the sharp descent of the gullyway, and borne up to her on the wind came a sound at once sullen and familiar, a sound that for the first time in her life she could not welcome, but must recognise with a leap of her heart and a shiver of foreboding.

It was the sound of the sea. The gully was a pathway to the shore.

She knew now why a softness had crept upon the air, and why the mizzle of rain fell on her hand lightly, with a tang of salt. The high banks gave a false feeling of shelter in contrast to the bleak wilderness of the moors, but once away from their deceptive shadow the illusion would be lost and the tearing gale cry louder than before. There could be no stillness where the sea broke upon the rockbound shore. She heard it again now, and continually; a murmur and a sigh as the spent water gave itself to the strand and withdrew reluctantly, and then a pause as the sea gathered itself for a renewal of effort—a momentary fragment in time—and then once more the thunder and the crash of fulfilment, the roar of surf upon shingle and the screaming scatter of stones as they followed the drag of the sea. Mary shuddered; somewhere in the darkness below, her uncle and his companions waited for the tide. If she could have heard some sound of them, the waiting in the empty carriage would have been more bearable. The wild shouting, the laughter, and the singing with which they had fortified themselves for the journey would have been a relief, however loathsome; but this deadly quietude was sinister. Business had sobered them, and they had found work for their hands. Now that her senses were her own again, and her first fatigue cast aside, Mary found inactivity impossible. She considered the size of the window. The door was locked, as she knew, but with straining and wriggling she might yet attempt to squeeze her body through the narrow frame.