His own plan was already awry. At best he must wait, and if he had to wait too long the moon would be up, and the risks more than doubled. The place was right, his judgement confirmed, the woman was there. But the time was ill-guessed, for her gaoler was there with her.
Chapter Eight
You brought me here,” she said, “now get me hence as best you can.”
In the narrow, bare room which had once been Hynde’s counting-house, the small flame of the saucer lamp barely showed them to each other. He had flung away from her, and stood in the far corner, his back turned, his head bowed into the forearm he had braced against the wall, his other fist driving uselessly and painfully against the timber. His voice emerged muffled, its helpless rage degraded into a feeble waiclass="underline" “How can I? How can I? There is no way out now!”
“You could unlock the door,” she said simply, “and let me go. Nothing could be easier.”
“For you!” he protested furiously, and swung about to glare at her with all the venom of which his nature was capable. It did not amount to much more than self-pity. He was not a venomous man, only a vain and foolish one. He wearied her, but he did not frighten her. “All very well for you! And I should be finished, damned
thrown into prison to rot. Once out, you’d denounce me and take your revenge.”
“You should have thought of that,” she said, “before you snatched me away, you and your rogue servant. You brought me here to this sordid hole, locked in behind your wool bales, without comfort, without decency, subject to your man’s rough handling and your insolent pestering, and do you expect gratitude? Or even mercy? Why should I not denounce you? You had best think hard and fast. You will have to release me or kill me at last, and the longer the delay, the worse will be your own plight. Mine,” she said bitterly, “is already bad enough. What has become by now of my good name? What will my situation be when I go back to my own house and family?”
Vivian came back to her with a rush, flinging himself on his knees beside the rough bench where she had taken what rest she could, and where she sat now erect and pale, her hands gripped together in her lap, her skirts drawn close about her as though to avoid not only his touch, but the very dust and desolation of her prison. There was nothing else in the room but the broken desk where once the clerk had worked over his figures, and a stone ewer with a chipped lip, and a pile of dust and debris in the corner. The lamp stood on the end of the bench beside her, its light now full on Vivian’s dishevelled hair and woeful face. He clutched at her hands imploringly, but she withdrew them so sharply that he sat back on his heels with a great gulp of despair.
“I never meant such mischief, I swear it! I thought you had a fondness for me, I thought I had only to get you to myself a while, and it would all be agreed between us
Oh, God, I wish I’d never begun it! But indeed, indeed, I did believe you could love me
“No! Never!” She had said it many times in these past two days, and always with the same irrevocable coldness. He should have recognised from the first utterance that his cause was hopeless. But he had not even been deceiving himself into the conviction that he loved her. What he coveted was the security and comfort she could bring him, the payment of his debts and the prospect of an easy life. Perhaps even the pleasure of cocking a snook at his parsimonious father - parsimonious at least in Vivian’s eyes, because he had finally tired of bailing his heir out of debt and trouble. Oh, no doubt the young man had found the prospect of marriage with her pleasurable in itself, but that was not the reason he had chosen that particular morning for his bid. Why let half a fortune slip through your fingers, when with one bold stroke you might have the whole?
“How have they accounted for my vanishing?” she asked. “Is the worst said of me already? Have they been looking for me at all? Am I thought dead?”
One faint spasm of defiance and spite passed over Vivian’s face. “Looking for you? The whole town’s turned upside-down looking for you, the sheriff and all his men, your cousin and half your workmen. Not a house but they’ve visited, not a barn but they’ve searched. They were here yesterday, towards evening. Alan Herbard and three of the garrison with him. We opened the doors to them, and showed the baled fleeces, and they went away satisfied. Why did you not cry out to them then, if you wanted rescue from me?”
“They were here?” Judith stiffened, chilled by this spurt of malice. But it was the last, he had done his worst, and could not maintain it long. “I never heard them!” she said with resigned bitterness.
“No.” He said it quite simply now, all his resistance spent. “They were easily satisfied. The room is quite forgotten, and all those bales shut out sound. They never questioned. They were here again this afternoon, but not asking for the keys. They’d found the boat
No, you might not hear them. Would you have cried out to them if you had?”
It was a meaningless question, and she did not answer it, but she gave it some thought. Would she have wished to be heard calling for help, and haled out of this mean prison, unprepared, dusty and stained, compromised, piteous? Might it not have been better to be silent, and make her own way out of this predicament? For the truth was that after the first confusion, indignation and alarm she had never been afraid of Vivian, nor in any danger of giving way to him, and now she would welcome as much as he would a solution which would smooth out of sight all that had happened, and leave her her dignity and integrity independent of any other soul. In the end he would have to release her. She was the stronger of the two.
He ventured a hand to clutch at a fold of her skirt. The face he lifted to her, seen clearly thus close and lit by the yellow flame of the wick, was strangely vulnerable and young, like a guilty boy pleading in extenuation of some heinous fault and not yet resigned to punishment. The brow he had braced against the wall was smeared with dust, and with the back of his hand, sweeping away tears or sweat or both, he had made a long black stain down his cheek. There was a trail of cobweb in the bright, fair, tangled hair. The wide brown eyes, dilated with stress, glinted gold from the spark of the lamp, and hung in desperate appeal upon her face.
“Judith, Judith, do me right! I could have used you worse
I could have taken you by force...”
She shook her head scornfully. “No, you could not. You have not the hardihood. You are too cautious - or perhaps too decent - both, it may be! Nor would it have benefited you if you had,” she said starkly, and turned herself away to evade the desperate and desolate youth of his face, with its piercing reflections of Brother Eluric, who had agonised in silence and without hope or appeal. “And now here we are, you and I both, and you know as well as I know that this must end. You have no choice but to let me go.”
“And you’ll destroy me!” he said in a whisper, and sank his corn-gold head into his hands.
“I wish you no harm,” she said wearily. “But it was you brought us to this, not I.”
“I know it, I own it, God knows I wish it undone! Oh, Judith, help me, help me!”
It had come to that, the bleak acknowledgement that he had lost, that he was now her prisoner, not she his, even that he was dependent upon her to save him from the trap he himself had set. He laid his head in her lap and shook as though with cold. And she was so tired and so astray that she had lifted a resigned hand to lay upon his head and quiet him, when the sudden tearing, rushing slither of sound outside the shutters at her back caused them both to start and freeze in alarm. Not a loud sound, merely like some not very heavy weight sliding down and ending in a dull fall into grass. Vivian started to his feet, quivering.