Bride of a Stranger (Classic Gothics Collection) (19 page)

Tentatively she approached the question, fearful that she would be thrust back into the nightmare of dread that she had just left. A dread that was filled with fear only because it involved the man who had just left her; the dread that there was no one else who could possibly be guilty.

Who else? There must be someone. Ben perhaps? The overseer had been drawn to the quadroon. If she had spurned him he might have taken her life. Or Octavia? But why? Octavia was loyal to Justin and took an intense interest in his affairs, but would she murder to protect him? Helene? She had threatened to have Belle-Marie whipped and she had been wandering the grounds in an emotional state the night the quadroon died, but would she have committed murder? Could she have killed as an act of revenge delayed ten long years? Could Helene, acting with the diabolical cruelty of some mythological goddess, have killed the loved one of her son because her son had killed her own lover? Oh, surely not. Berthe then, but that quiet, pallid woman, intent on her husband’s memory would have been no match for the bold and primitive Belle-Marie. On top of that she had no reason. Her son, Edouard? The same thing applied to him, no reason. In fact, no one in this house had anything to gain by the three deaths.

Something at the back of her mind tried to struggle forward, but though she stared at the wall before her as it turned crimson with the light of the setting sun, she could not draw the memory from the recesses of her own consciousness.

So absorbed was she in her thoughts that she hardly noticed when the color drained from the sky and the gray shadows of evening crept into the room.

For a time, Octavia’s great black cat lay across her knees, purring. She could not remember the last time she had noticed him, and she smoothed his fur, glad of his company at that moment, his quiet companionship a welcome accompaniment to the day’s end. But when the drifting smells of supper being cooked drew him toward the kitchen, she did not try to keep him.

IT MAY HAVE been a half an hour later when Berthe slipped into the room carrying a small glass on a hand tray.

“Ah, you are better,” she said, her eyes moving over Claire’s face, noting the clearness of her eyes. “No one told me.”

Claire smiled at the surprise on the woman’s voice. “I’m not sure anyone knows,” she replied in a voice that she was startled to find much weaker than her usual tones. “I seem to have just gotten rid of my muddled head, and I don’t believe that I have fever now at all.”

“That is good,” Berthe said, nodding with a thoughtful expression in her eyes.

“I have been lying here wondering where Octavia is. This seems to be the first time I have awakened that she was not near.”

“Very true. She has stayed by you night and day. Now she is indulging in a much-needed rest. I confess I helped her. I put a bit of laudanum in her cordial, and suggested that she lie down. She was exhausted, quite done-in, and I’m sure she will thank me for it.”

A spasm of disquiet seized Claire, then was gone as quickly as it had come. “What has become of Justin? He was here a little while ago, and it can’t be too long until time to dress for supper?”

“I saw him walking toward the cemetery, my dear, to visit his father’s grave. You know how close Justin was to his father. We had some rain yesterday. There will be repair work to be done, a new grave, you know? Helene is in her room sleeping, too, though there was no need for me to give her a sedative. She has shown me the door. She insists that I drive her to distraction and give her the migraine. But at least she is certain to remain behind her door. My son has gone to the neighbors. I, myself, gave him the message. It will be some little time before he returns, but I hope we need not wait supper on him. So you see? All is quiet. We are alone, and it is time to tidy up the last details.”

She held out the tray as she spoke, and before her last words had registered, Claire had taken the small glass into her hand.

“Details?”

“Don’t trouble yourself, Claire, dear. Just drink your medicine, there’s a good girl.”

“I don’t feel ill anymore. I don’t want it.” It smelled strongly of laudanum mixed with wine, medicine she remembered taking several times these last few days, but she could not bring herself to drink it.

“Never mind what you want. It is good for you.”

Berthe’s cryptic statements, the intent look of her eyes, her unusually purposeful manner, sent a shiver of alarm along Claire’s veins. She remembered the other times that poison had been served to her in her room. When she raised the glass to her lips, she barely touched them with the liquid.

“Drink it down now,” Berthe insisted.

Claire made a face and her gaze rested on the vase on the table beside the bed, a vase containing a large, spreading bouquet of honeysuckle and wild roses.

“Nothing that is good for you ever tastes good. You must drink it.”

Once more Claire raised the glass to her lips, then she went still, her head tilted, a listening expression on her still features.

“What is it?” Berthe exclaimed. “Is it Justin?” She hastened to the french door and pulled aside the curtains.

Her ruse had worked. Quickly, noiselessly, Claire tipped the glass into the vase. It filled to the brim, leaving a small amount of liquid in the glass. As Berthe turned back she hastily put the glass once more to her mouth then brought it down with a shudder.

“That is all I can stand,” she told the other woman, holding out the glass with closed eyes. It could be that she was behaving in a ridiculous panic. Surely now that Belle-Marie was dead there was no longer anyone who would have reason to harm her? But someone had killed Belle-Marie. And since she really did not want the cordial, she was glad that it reposed in the vase. It would do no harm to the porcelain, and Berthe’s feelings would not be hurt by her refusal to take the medicine from her hand.

Berthe stared at the glass, then made a faint movement with her shoulder before accepting it with a part of her attention still on the window.

“Was it not Justin? I could have sworn—”

“I didn’t see him. You must have been imagining things again. Just lie back now, Claire, and wait. You haven’t been at all well. In truth I am amazed to see you so bright.”

Claire thought of Justin and the way he held her in his arms, and she smiled.

“In fact,” Berthe went on, taking a seat in the slipper chair that had been pulled up beside the bed, “you seem to be quite your old self, but still you cannot get too much rest. I will just sit here with you until you drop off.”

She wished the woman would go and leave her in peace. The fact that she intended to stay a while troubled her, though she could not have said why. “You needn’t sit with me if you have other things to do,” she said, hiding her uneasiness. “It isn’t as if I were truly ill.”

“Oh, no. But you must allow me to do this. I have nothing more to do.”

Claire subsided, and quiet descended over the room. Darkness was growing outside, filling the room with dim shadows. It was time for the lamps to be lit, but Berthe made no move to do so. For herself, she did not mind. There was nothing she wanted to see. She thought of Octavia and Helene and Edouard and Justin and also of Berthe who sat beside her bed and the way their lives had become entangled in these past few weeks. It was inevitable that they should, and yet there was something fascinating about the way the course of lives could be changed by a trivial incident. If Edouard had never used the knife on Justin’s face she would not be lying here, and, in all probability, Gerard Leroux would not have died. Marcel would not have been paralyzed, Helene would not be the lonely and embittered woman she was. It was frightening, and yet, comforting, to realize that nothing in life depended only on herself. She could not control her destiny alone, but then neither did she have to bear the whole responsibility for the course it took.

“Claire?”

Her concentration was so great that it was a moment before she answered. “Yes?”

“I thought perhaps you had fallen asleep.”

“No,” she said hesitantly, her voice soft.

“Well, I’m sure you will,” Berthe said, getting to her feet. She moved across the room in the dark, and Claire thought she was leaving. Then she heard the grate of the key in the lock.

“Berthe?”

She heard the rustle of the woman’s clothing as she turned and moved back toward the bed.

“Poor Claire. It is hard. But you see, you should never have married Justin.”

“What do you mean?” Claire asked, ignoring the trace of sadness in the woman’s voice. She had nearly, in that quiet interval, persuaded herself that her alarm was for nothing, but now it returned in full force, and she closed her hands tightly on the covers to keep herself from crying out.

“Why shouldn’t I tell you? You won’t live to repeat it. Already the overdose of laudanum I have given you is deadening your senses. Soon you will rest in the sleep that knows no awakening—but just listen to me. I grow poetic. How droll.”

That quiet voice. How well it lent itself to irony.

“Berthe—”

“Soon now Justin will return. When he walks through the door I will throw this knife I have in my sleeve and it will bury itself in his heart. When I arrange the body, it will appear that he plunged it into his own breast after administering the drugged wine to you. A tragic tableau, don’t you think? But Justin’s past and his personality lends itself so well to such a gesture.”

“No one will believe it,” Claire whispered, then added, “least of all Octavia.”

“I grant you she will find it hard. But it is easy to further blacken the character of one who is already black enough. Added to that, you and he have shown such signs of distress lately. Besides, murder with suicide has happened time and again in history, why not once more? Then, what else is there for them to think? That it was I? Can you conceive of anything more unlikely? All these years of being meek and pitiable, accepting charity and harsh words alike. But it will be worth it when my son inherits Sans Songe. The meek, you will remember, inherit the earth.”

“You will never be able—to kill—Justin.”

“You think not? It takes no great strength to throw a knife the way my own Gerard taught me so many years ago. It takes only nerve and a certain dexterity of the wrist. When Justin enters this room from that outside door he will present a perfect target. He will never know what struck him.”

“You can’t do this.”

“I would not have had to, were it not for you,” she said, reasonably, as she moved to the washstand. “So you see it really is all your fault, a fact I have been trying to impress upon you these last few days when I could see you alone.” She took a tinderbox from her pocket and proceeded to light a single candle. The room slowly came to life with the dim illumination, and Claire stared at Berthe, trying to see if there was any difference in the woman’s colorless face and figure. There was little that she could see, except for a glitter in her small eyes and the sureness of the smile that was set on her pale lips.

“Justin,” she mused, “so very obliging of him to take the blame for his uncle’s death. I never expected that, or that he would set out to destroy himself with drink, duels, and dissipation when society turned against him. He was doing a masterly job of it, and I quite thought he would succeed until he married you.”

“And now you want us both dead.”

“But, of course, for Edouard, my son. Is that so hard to understand? He and I have lived off the charity of this family too long. My husband helped make this plantation. He worked just as hard as Marcel. But Marcel was the elder, the one with the money and influence, the one who received the grant of land from the Crown when they arrived from France. And so my Gerard got nothing. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for Justin, who is not even a legitimate heir, to have everything while my son has nothing!” Her voice had risen, until she was almost shouting.

“What?” Claire asked, unable to make sense of the last diatribe.

“Are you so shocked? Don’t you know Justin was not Marcel’s son? He is Octavia’s by-blow. It was for her and her child’s sake that Marcel brought Helene, that common woman, fifteen years his junior, into this house. He brought her here to put a good light on Octavia’s shame and to provide himself with an heir just to keep my Gerard from inheriting as he should have!”

“I think,” Justin said, his voice quiet, but carrying a definite note of menace, “that you had better explain.”

In their preoccupation, they had failed to hear Justin approaching. Now he stood in the doorway.

Berthe made a quick movement to bring the knife from her sleeve into her hand. It gleamed as it slid into view, but though Claire uttered a cry of warning, the woman did not throw it. She seemed more intent on the damage she could do with her tongue. Still, she was wary. As if to keep him in perspective, she fell back a step.

“Don’t order me, Justin. I have no qualms about killing you. You stand in the way of my son, but you are also to blame for what I have become. Your father, your real father, died leaving Octavia alone and unwed. Marcel took Helene to wife. She was of good family but poor, and so Marcel, a well-to-do bachelor, was a matrimonial prize, even if he was nearly old enough to be her father. Helene agreed to pretend to be your mother—the prospect of a trip abroad was the bait, I believe. They lived for a time in England, but the weather was bad for Marcel’s health, so they went to Portugal. They would have preferred France, but it was too unsettled there. The three of them lived in seclusion in a small town on the coast until you were born, then they returned with you in Helene’s arms.