An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition (87 page)

Slowly, her face working strangely but her hand steady, Emilie drew it from its hiding place beneath the money.

It was a pistol, and Léon, who had always been desperately afraid of burglars, had on more than one occasion shown her how to use it.

There was always money in the house in Paris, for he banked but once a week, and the safe in which he kept the nightly receipts from 5
Rue de Roi
and his other places of business stood behind a Chinese screen in their sitting room.

‘If you are alarmed by anything you hear, fire at once,’ Léon had instructed her. ‘Bullets are more effective than words.’

Emilie could almost hear his voice beside her. Mechanically her fingers loaded the pistol. Then she looked down at it. There was the same look in her face as had been there twelve years ago when she had set out alone for Paris.

‘Bullets are more effective than words!’

She took up a handful of notes. She did not bother to count them, for she knew now what she must do, then she glanced round the room as if in search of something.

Jeanne had left her dolman trimmed with jet lying over the chair in case she wished to go out during the afternoon. Beside it was her hat, gloves and a little muff of black fur. Emilie walked across the room and picked up the muff. Her hand holding the pistol slipped into it. It was a most effective place of concealment.

Next she set both her muff and the notes she held down on the dressing table. It took her but a moment to place her hat on her head, to pin it securely with its two jet hatpins, to put on the dolman over her dress of silk. Henry Dulton would not be surprised at her re-entering the room with her muff in her hand. She would tell him that she was going out.

Now she was ready. She glanced at herself in the mirror. For a moment she wondered if the stranger who faced her was herself. She had no idea that her face could look so strange or her eyes could shine so venomously.

‘Bullets are more effective than words!’

Yes, she could hear Léon’s voice distinctly. He had known the value of money. She moved across the room, held the muff under her arm for one second as she opened the door, then slipped her hand into it again and entered the sitting room.

Henry Dulton was sitting where she had left him, his legs stretched out comfortably, a cigar between his lips. He made no attempt to rise at her entrance. Fiercely she resented the gross familiarity of his ill manners.

‘Got the money?’ he asked. ‘Good for you! I’ll say that for you,
Madame
– you always deliver the goods.’

‘Yes, I have always managed to do that so far,’ Emilie said, and her voice was quiet and very steady.

‘Count it, will you? I have no wish to give you too much.’

‘Not much fear of that,’ Henry Dulton said jovially. ‘If I know you it’s more likely to be too little. Give it to me.’

His hands reached up for the money greedily. He took the thick wad of francs from Emilie’s hand, balanced them on his knee, and licking the first finger of his right hand, he started to flick through them with a practised air.

‘You have missed one there,’ Emilie said, coming nearer so that she could bend down and touch the notes with her left hand.

‘I bet you I didn’t,’ he replied, but he went back to the beginning, concentrating intently on counting them.

‘Five thousand – ten – fifteen – twenty – twenty five – ’

It was then that Emilie shot him through the temple.

The report of the pistol was deadened by her muff, but nevertheless it sounded to her own ears unnaturally loud. For a moment, after he had toppled forward and then fallen slowly with a dull thud to the floor, she did not look at him, but listened only for the noise of footsteps outside, for the sound of voices of people asking questions, demanding what had happened.

But there was no sound of any sort. Emilie knew exactly what she had to do next. Everything fell into place in her mind as clearly as if she had planned it for a long time. She must gather up the notes, drag Henry Dulton’s body into her bedroom and hide him in the closet.

Later, when it was dark, she and Jeanne would get him out of the hotel.

On every floor of the Hotel there was a wheel-chair left for the use of guests who came to Monte Carlo, not only for the pleasure of visiting the Casino but also for their health. There were special baths to be had under the hotel, and those who were crippled by rheumatism or other complaints could go downstairs in the comfort of a wheel-chair, descending in the luggage lift at the far end of the corridor.

There was a man in attendance on the lift who pulled the rope to make it rise and descend. He was old, inclined to be deaf.

He would take little notice of an invalid, wrapped in rugs and perhaps a shawl, accompanied by two elderly women. Besides the lift was unlit and only as they passed the gas brackets on each floor would whoever sat in the wheel chair be illuminated. They could slip out of the hotel by a side door. The gardens of the Casino were but a stone’s throw away. No one would be interested in three elderly people taking an evening walk.

They would lay Henry Dulton amongst the flowering shrubs and it was more than likely that his body would not be discovered until the morrow. She would leave the pistol beside him.

Suicides in Monte Carlo were invariably hushed up by the Police and the authorities. There were too many people in the world already decrying the vice of gambling for them to invite further comment by the newspapers.

Henry Dulton was of no importance except to himself.

Emilie drew a deep breath, then she bent down and took up the notes as they lay sprawled over the hearthrug. The ugly wound in Henry Dulton’s temple was bleeding and without flinching she wiped away the blood which would have dripped on to the carpet.

Slowly and with the utmost composure she went into her bedroom, put the notes away in her jewel case, and took off her hat and dolman. She laid her muff down on the chair exactly where Jeanne had left it, then having opened the door of the closet, she went back into the sitting room. As she did so, she heard a clock strike the half hour.

Henry Dulton would be unable to keep his appointment.

8

Mistral was worried and unhappy. She was not quite certain why except that she sensed that something was wrong though she could not find a reasonable explanation for the feeling. When she and Jeanne returned from their walk that afternoon, Aunt Emilie had met them at the door of the sitting room and said sharply,

‘You will go to your bedroom, Mistral, and stay there until either Jeanne or I fetch you. Is that understood? You are not to leave it until you are told to do so.’

‘Yes, Aunt Emilie,’ Mistral had replied. But – is anything the matter?’

‘Kindly do as you are told without argument or idiotic questions,’ Emilie answered, and abashed Mistral had gone to her room and closed the door.

For some time she sat wondering what she could have done to incur her aunt’s anger, yet ponder as she might over her movements of the morning, there was nothing that she could find which might be construed in any way to be upsetting or annoying.

At length, having removed her mantle and bonnet and put them away in the wardrobe, she wandered round the hotel bedroom looking at the curtains, the elaborate bedspread and the French furniture, wondering why, when everything in itself was so charming, the whole effect seemed somehow bare and unwelcoming. Then the explanation came to her.

It was, of course, because unlike most people she had no possessions of her own to leave about – no photographs to arrange on the chest of drawers, no ornaments, boxes or little knick-knacks with which most women surround themselves. The dressing table contained only the plain wooden brush she had used at the Convent, a comb and a jar of hand ointment which Jeanne had given her. It was, she told Mistral, a grease she made every winter because Aunt Emilie often suffered from chapped hands.

But one pot of hand balm could hardly be counted an ornament and Mistral, contrasting her own room with Jeanne’s, knew that the latter was far more homely. Photographs of Jeanne’s great-nieces and nephews stood on the mantelpiece, a shell box held her hairpins, a china tidy with a motto written on it for her combings. The table by her bed contained besides her Missal a statue of St. Anthony, her best Rosary of ivory and silver beads, which she only used on Saints’ Days, and an embroidered spectacle case, which had been a Christmas present over twenty years ago. There were pieces of Normandy pottery, a pincushion fashioned into a glass slipper, a lucky elephant from India, and a needlework picture of the Holy Family, which went with her everywhere. There was no doubt about it, Jeanne’s bedroom, wherever it might be, would always be individual.

What was wrong with hers, Mistral thought, was that she had nothing personal with which to surround herself.

Even as she thought of it, the memory came to her of those long years at school when she had longed so often and so passionately for someone to love her, someone to care for her individually.

The Nuns had been kind and they had taken an unceasing interest in all their pupils, but it was impossible not to realise that their hearts were given to God, that first and foremost in their affections, in their loyalty, and indeed in everything they did came He to whom they had vowed their service.

Mistral was deeply religious, but she also wanted human love, human understanding and the knowledge that she belonged. She felt the loss of this most in the holidays when all the other girls, excited and chattering of their plans, had gone to their homes and she had been left at the Convent with only two other pupils to keep her company.

One was a child whose mother and father were in Africa, and the other had no mother, but her father was Governor of Devil’s Island, where she visited him only once every three years. But deprived as the other two girls were of holidays at home, they had at least relations who wrote to them, parents who gave them presents on their birthdays, at Christmas and Easter, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins to whom they could pour out their hearts in long letters and who sent them loving messages in reply.

Mistral wrote dutifully to Aunt Emilie every week, but sometimes three or four months would pass before she would get a letter in return. Then it was brief, telling her no news of any kind or description. In fact, the letters were almost identical in that they invariably commanded her to work hard, to apply herself more fervently to her lessons and to do exactly what the Nuns told her.

As Mistral did all these things automatically, she found her aunt’s letters bitterly disappointing, although invariably she experienced a sudden thrill when she saw a letter addressed to herself set out on the table where the girls received their post.

If Aunt Emilie’s letters were few and far between, her visits were even more so. Perhaps once a year she would journey to the Convent, talk with the Mother Superior and later walk in the garden alone with Mistral. Aunt Emilie’s visits were almost as disappointing as her letters. Every sentence she spoke seemed to Mistral to begin with The Reverend Mother tells me that you could do better in – ’

‘The Reverend Mother suggests that you should learn – ’ The Reverend Mother and I think that you are now old enough to begin – ’

It was lessons, lessons, lessons all the time!

Mistral, who looked forward to her aunt’s visits with an almost overexcited eagerness, would find herself shrinking back into her shell of reserve, that same reserve which enabled her to conceal her feelings of utter loneliness from the other girls.

Sometimes at night, when she was alone in her little narrow bed in the dormitory, she used to pretend that her mother’s arms were round her, that she was telling her all the things she thought and felt and that her mother was listening, understanding and sympathising.

Once, hearing sobs from the bed next to hers, Mistral had got out to comfort the miserable girl.

‘What is the matter, Yvonne?’ she asked in a whisper, for they were not supposed to talk after lights were out.

‘I want my mother!’ Yvonne had wept. ‘I want my mother!’

Mistral had soothed her as best she could and tucked her up, then she had crept back, cold and shivering, into her own bed. For the rest of the night she could not sleep. She, too, wanted her mother! She could understand what Yvonne was feeling only too well, but Yvonne’s mother was not far away, a real tangible person, living in a home to which Yvonne would return in three months’ time, and which in a few years’ time, unless she wished to get married, she need never leave again.

It was a very empty thing, Mistral thought in the darkness, to have neither home nor parents, no place that one could call one’s own, no one who cared whether one was ill or well, happy or unhappy, joyful or sad.

It was not often that she let herself dwell on her own loneliness, she was too sensible for that and was also happy by nature. But now she thought it had been an undercurrent to her whole childhood. Always she had a felt a little apart from other girls. They had so many experiences to exchange, treats to which they had been taken during the holidays, the excitements of riding, bathing, skiing or travelling.

More than this, they had an indissoluble link in common they were all part of a family. They could talk of their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. They could complain as they often did, of parental authority.

‘My mother won’t let me go to dances, she says I’m too young!’

‘My father is terribly strict – ’

‘They could also boast of their families’ possessions or exploits – and this was an endless diversion. The size of their houses, their father’s wealth, their mother’s jewels, their sister’s beaux, their brother’s success with girls were all subjects for which they could take personal credit.

Mistral would listen to them, then creep away by herself. There was nothing she could contribute to the conversation. For her the whole world was bounded by the tall grey walls of the Convent.

Fortunately she was able to read. At times she thought that if it had not been for the books lent to her by Father Vincent her restlessness might have got beyond control. But Father Vincent was wise. He was her Confessor and he realised the seething undercurrents which were apparent sometimes behind the clear frankness of Mistral’s eyes.