Nine Coaches Waiting (11 page)

"What's this? Did I hear something about a bumper catching you."

I said: "It's nothing."

"Miss Martin and I," said Raoul, smiling, "met-rather abruptly-down on the Valmy bridge."

His father's eyes went to the torn hem of my frock; went lower to a laddered stocking and the stain of a muddy graze on my leg. "You mean you knocked her over?"

I said quickly: "Oh, no, nothing like that. I fell down and bumped my knee, that's all. Monsieur Raoul didn't touch me. It-"

"That tear wasn't done by falling down. That stuff's been ripped. Was that done by that damned great car of yours, Raoul?"

Temper flicked suddenly, patently, through the words, like a whip. For a moment I was reminded of the way I had heard him speak to Philippe, pilloried beside the yellow-brocaded chair, and, damn it, Raoul was-what? thirty? I felt myself going hot with embarrassment, and glanced at him.

But this was not Philippe. He merely said, unruffled: "I imagine so. I had only just noticed it. I was abasing myself when you came in." He turned back to me. "Miss Martin, I really am most terribly sorry-"

"Oh, please!" I cried. "It was nothing. It was my own fault! "

Monsieur de Valmy said: "What were you doing down on the bridge at this time of night?"

"I went out for a walk," I said. "It was damp in the woods so I went down the road."

"What happened?"

Raoul began to speak but I said hastily: "I stopped in the middle of the bridge. I was going to turn back and I stood for a minute or two listening to the water. It was a silly thing to do, because there was a drift of mist there over the river, and Monsieur Raoul ran slap into it. But I'd forgotten he was coming."

"Forgotten?"

I looked at him in faint surprise. Then I remembered that the conversation in the salon had been in French. I said steadily, hoping my colour hadn't risen: "Mrs. Seddon told me this evening that he was coming."

"Ah. Yes." The dark eyes were unreadable under the heavy black brows. He looked at Raoul. "And then?"

I said quickly: "So of course Monsieur Raoul didn't see me -he couldn't have seen me till he was just about running me down. It was entirely my own fault and I'm lucky to get away with a bruise and a torn frock. If it was the car that tore it that's all it touched, honestly. The bruise I got myself by slipping and falling in the gutter."

Léon de Valmy was still frowning. "That's a bad corner…, as we all know." The cutting-edge was back on his voice. "Raoul, if you must come up that road on a night like this-"

Raoul said gently: "I have already told Miss Martin how sorry l am."

Something sparked inside me. My employer had a perfect right to catechise me, but not to make his son look a fool in front of me. And I'd seen a little too much of his tactics tonight already. I said hotly: "And I have explained to Monsieur Raoul that the fault was mine and mine only. So please may we drop the subject? It isn't fair that he should be blamed. If he'd been any less brilliant a driver I'd have been killed!"

I stopped. I had seen the faintest, least definable shade of amusement in Raoul's face, and in his father's something that was, less mistakably, anger. He said smoothly, but with the edge still on the carefully pedantic words: "A brilliant driver should not have to call upon his skill to that extent at such a dangerous corner."

Raoul smiled at him and said, very pleasantly: "The corner was relaid last autumn… by the Bellevigne estate, remember? And are you sure you're qualified to criticise my driving? You forget that both roads and cars have altered considerably since you were last able to drive."

In the sharp little silence that followed I saw the lines round Léon de Valmy's mouth deepen, and the white hands moved on the arms of the chair. He said nothing. Raoul smiled lazily down at him. No, this was not Philippe. No wonder he'd been amused when I wild-catted to his defence. I thought, with an absurd rush of pleasure:
that for Philippe, Monsieur the Demon King!

Raoul turned to me and said easily: "Are you sure you won't have something sent up to you, Miss Martin?"

"Quite sure." I looked from one to the other a bit uncertainly. "Goodnight, Monsieur de Valmy. Goodnight, Monsieur Raoul."

I went quickly upstairs, leaving the two of them together.

Next day all traces of mist had gone, and the trees moved lightly in their Lenten green. Since the winds of March had whipped some of the buds into tiny leaf, our favourite walk had been the way through the woods that stretched northwards down the valley, and this afternoon we went that way again.

We started down the path that short-circuited the zigzag. For all its steepness it was not bad walking, as the path itself was ribbed across with sunken logs to give a foothold, and the occasional flights of steps were in good repair, with wide flat treads scored and clear of moss. Here and there the path crossed a trickle of water; sometimes the bridge was only a step, a slab of stone over a mossy trough where water chuckled; but in places some streamlet had cut deeply through the rock into miniature cascades, spanned by sturdy little bridges no more than two planks' width, with a single handrail of untrimmed pine.

It was on these bridges that Philippe loved to linger, gazing down at the ferns and grasses swaying in the wind of the cascade, and counting what he fondly imagined to be the fish attempting to leap up the spray. This afternoon we hung happily together over the biggest of the pools where fingers of bright sunlight probed the ferns and made an iridescent bloom of fine spray.

"There," said Philippe, triumphantly. "
Voilà,
did you see her? Beside the stone there, where the waves are! "

I peered down at the whirling pool some fifteen feet below us, "I can't see anything. And it's not
her
,
Philippe."

"It was. Truly it was. I am seeing her-"

"I'm sure you are. But a fish isn't
her
, it's
it.
"

"A trout is her in French," said Philippe firmly. It was a great source of pride to him that my French was worse than his English.

"No doubt," I said, "but not in English. Oh, look, there's one, Philippe, definitely! I saw her-it jump!"

"Four." Philippe knew when to pursue his triumphs and when to hold his tongue. "Four and a half, because I do not know if that shadow is a
truite
-trout, or a shadow." He gripped the rail and leaned over, peering eagerly down.

"Let's go on," I said. "If it's still there when we come back, it's a shadow. Let's go down into the big wood again."

He turned obediently off the bridge onto the wide level path that led along the hillside deeper into the trees. "All right. To look for wolves?"

"
Wolves
?"

He was trotting ahead of me. He turned, laughing. "Mademoiselle, you sounded quite frightened! Did you think there were really wolves?"

"Well, I-"

He gave a crow of laughter and a comic little skip that shuffled up last year's dead leaves. "You did! You did!"

"Well," I said, "I've never lived in a place like this before. For all I know Valmy might be crawling with wolves."

"We have got bears," confided Philippe, in the tone of one inviting congratulations. He looked earnestly up at me, "We truly have. This is not a
blague
.
Many bears of a bigness incredible." His scarlet-gloved hands sketched in the air something of the dimensions of an overgrown grizzly. "I have never seen one,
vous comprenez
, but Bernard has shot one. He told me so."

"Then I hope to goodness we don't meet one today."

"They are asleep," said Philippe comfortingly. "There is no danger unless one treads on them where they sleep." He jumped experimentally into a deep drift of dead leaves, sending them swirling up in bright flakes of gold. The drift was, fortunately, bearless. "They sleep very sound," said Philippe, who appeared to find it necessary to excuse this failure, "with nuts in the pocket, like an
écureuil.”

"Squirrel."

"Skervirrel. Perhaps you prefer that we do not look for bears?"

"I would really rather not, if you don't mind," I said apologetically.

"Then we will not," he said generously. "But there are many other things to see in the woods, I think. Papa used to tell me of them. There is chamois and
marmottes
and the foxes, oh, many. Do you think that when I have ten years-"

"’When I am ten'."

"When I am ten years I can have a gun and shoot, mademoiselle?"

"Possibly not when you're ten, Philippe, but certainly when you're a bit older."

"Ten is old."

"It may be old, but it's not very big. You wouldn't be of a bigness-I mean you wouldn't be big enough to use the right gun for a bear."

"Skervirrels, then."

"Squirrel."

"Skervirrel. I could have a small gun for skervirrel when I am ten?"

"Possibly, though I should doubt it. In any case, it's what they call an unworthy ambition."

"Pla
ȋ
t-il?"
He was still jigging along slightly in front of me, laughing back over his shoulder, his face for once flushed and bright under his scarlet woollen ski-cap. He said cheekily: "English, please."

I laughed. "I meant that it's a shame to shoot squirrels. They're charming."

"Char-ming? No, they are not. They eat the young trees. They cause much work, lose much money. The foresters say it. One must shoot them."

"Very French," I said dryly.

"I
am
French," said Philippe, skipping gaily on ahead, "and they are
my
trees, and I shall have a gun when I am older and go out every day to shoot the skervirrels. Look! There's one!
Bang!"
He proceeded, with gestures, to shoot down several squirrels very loudly, singing meanwhile an extremely noisy and shapeless song whose burden was something like:

Bang, bang, bang,

Bang, bang, bang,

Got you, got you,

Bang, bang, bang.

"If you don't look where you're going," I said, "it'll be you who'll-look
out,
you silly chump!" Then three things happened, almost simultaneously. Philippe, laughing back at me as he jigged along, tripped over a tree-root and fell headlong. Something struck the tree beside him with the sound of a hand smacking the bark, and, a fraction later, the sharp crack of a rifle split the silence of the woods.

I don't know how long it took me to grasp just what had happened. The unmistakable crack of the gun, and the child's body flat in the path… for one heart-stopping moment terror zigzagged like pain through my blood. Then even as Philippe moved the significance of that sharp smack on the tree's bole struck me, and I knew he was not hit.

I found myself shouting into the silent woods that sloped above us: "Don't shoot, you fool! There are people here!" Then I was beside Philippe, bending over him, making sure…

The bullet had not touched him, of course; but when I looked up and saw the hole in the tree just above where he lay, I realised how nearly he had been missed. The silly little jigging song that had tripped him up had saved his life.

He lifted a face from which all the bright gaiety and colour had gone. There was mud on one thin little cheek and his eyes were scared.

"It was a gun. Something hit the tree. A bullet." He spoke, of course, in French. This was no moment to insist either on his English or my own false position. In any case he had just heard me shouting in French at the owner of the gun. I put my arms round him and spoke in the same tongue. "Some silly fool out with a rifle after foxes." (Did one shoot foxes with a rifle?) "It's all right, Philippe, it's all right. A silly mistake, that's all. He'd hear me shout and he'll be far more scared than we were." I smiled at him and got up, pulling him to his feet. "I expect he thought you were a wolf."

Philippe was shaking, too, and I saw now that it was with anger as much as fright. "He has no business to shoot like that. Wolves don't sing, and in any case you don't shoot at
sounds.
You wait till you can
see.
He is a fool, and imbecile. He should not have a gun. I shall get him dismissed."

I let him rage on in a shaken shrill little voice, a queer and rather touching mixture of scared child and angry Comte de Valmy. I was scanning the slopes of open wood above us for the approach of an alarmed and apologetic keeper. It was quite a few seconds before I realised that the wood was, apparently, empty. The path where we walked ran between widely-spaced trees. Above us sloped some hundred yards of rough grass-an open space of sunlight and sparse young beeches, where brambles and honeysuckle tangled over the roots of felled trees. At the crest of the rise was a tumble of rock and the dark ridge of a planted forest. Nothing moved. Whoever was at large there with a rifle had no intention of admitting the recent piece of lunatic carelessness.

I said, my jerking heart shaking my voice a little: "You're right. He shouldn't be allowed out, whoever he is. You wait here. Since he won't come out I'm going to see-"

"No!"
It was no more than a breath, but he caught hold of my hand and held it fast.

"But Philippe-now look son, you'll be all right. He's miles away by now and getting further every second. Let me go, there's a good chap."

“No!”

I looked up through the empty wood
,
then down at the small pinched face under the scarlet cap. "All right," I said, "we'll go home."

We were hurrying back the way we had come. I still held Philippe's hand. He clutched at me tightly. I said, still shaken and angry: "We'll soon find out, Philippe, don't worry, and your uncle’ll dismiss him. Either he's a careless fool who's too scared to come out, or he's a lunatic who thinks that sort of thing's a joke, but your uncle can find out. He'll be dismissed you'll see."

He said nothing. He half-trotted, half-shuffled along beside me, silent and sober. No skipping now, or singing. I said trying to sound calm and reasonable above the blaze inside me: "Whatever the case, we're going straight to Monsieur de Valmy.”

The hand tucked in mine twitched slightly. "No."

"But, my dear Philippe-!" I broke off, and glanced down at the averted scarlet cap. "All right, you needn't, but I must. I'll get Berthe to come and give you some five-o'clock and stay with you till I get back to the schoolroom. I'll ask Tante Héloïse if she'll visit you upstairs instead of making you go down to the salon, and then we'll play Peggitty till bedtime. How's that?"

The red cap merely nodded. We trudged on in silence for a bit. We came to the bridge where we had counted the trout, and Philippe walked straight over it without a glance at the pool below.

The blaze of anger licked up inside me again. I said: "We'll get the stupid criminal fool dismissed, Philippe. Now stop worrying about it."

He nodded again, and then stole a queer little look up at me.

"What is it?"

"You've been talking French," said Philippe. "I just noticed."

"So I have." I smiled at him. "Well, I could hardly expect you to remember your English when you were being shot at like a
skervirrel
could I?"

He gave the ghost of a little smile.

"You say it wrong," he said. "It's
squirrel.”

Then, quite suddenly, he began to cry.

Madame de Valmy was alone in the rose-garden. Early violas were already budding beside the path where she walked. There were daffodils out along the edge of the terrace. She had some in her hands.

She was facing in our direction, and she saw us as soon as we emerged from the woods. She had been stooping for a flower, and she stopped in mid-movement, then slowly straightened up, the forgotten daffodil trailing from her fingers. Even at that distance-we were still some hundred yards away-she must have been able to see the mud on Philippe's coat and the general air of dejection that dragged at him.

She started towards us.

"Philippe! What in the world has happened? Your coat! Have you fallen down? Miss Martin"-her voice was sharp with real concern-"Miss Martin, not another accident, surely?"

I was breathless from the hasty ascent, and still angry. I said baldly: "Someone shot at Philippe in the wood down there."

She had been half-bending towards the little boy. At my uncompromising words she stopped as if she had been struck.

“Shot… at Philippe?"

"Yes. They only missed him because he tripped and fell. The bullet hit a tree."

She straightened up slowly, her eyes on my face. She was very pale. "But-this is absurd! Who could… Did you see who it was?"

"No. He must have known what had happened, because I shouted. But he didn't appear."

"And Philippe?" She turned shocked eyes to him. "
Comment ça va, p'tit? On ne t'a fait mal?"

A shake of the red cap and a quiver of the hand in mine were the only answers. My own hand closed on his.

"He fell down," I said, "but he didn't really hurt himself. He's been very brave about the whole thing." I didn't feel it necessary to insist in front of the child that, but for the tumble, he would probably now be dead. But Madame de Valmy understood that. She was so white that I thought she would faint. The pale eyes, watching Philippe, held a look, unmistakably, of horror. So she did care after all, I thought, surprised and a little touched. She said faintly: "This is… terrible. Such carelessness… criminal carelessness. You-saw nothing?"

I said crisply: "Nothing. But it shouldn't be too hard to find out who it was. I'd have gone after him then and there if I'd been able to leave Philippe. But I imagine Monsieur de Valmy can find out who was in the woods this afternoon. Where is Monsieur, Madame?”

"In the library, I expect." She had one hand to her heart From the other the daffodils fell in an unheeded scatter. She really did look dreadfully shocked. "This is-this is a dreadful thing. Philippe might have-might have-"

"I think," I said, "that I'd better not keep him out here. Will you excuse us from coming down tonight, madame? Philippe had better have a quiet evening and early bed."