Thunder On The Right

by Mary Stewart

Genres: Action & Adventure; Literary Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

From one of our most beloved authors, Mary Stewart, comes a thrilling tale set in a France as beautiful as it is deadly, perfect for fans of Agatha Christie and Barbara Pym.

High in the rugged Pyrenees lies the Valley of the Storms, where a tiny convent clings to the beautiful but lonely mountainside. Jenny Silver arrives seeking her missing cousin, and is devastated when she learns of Gillian's death following a terrible car accident. But Jenny's suspicions are aroused when she's told the blue flowers ornamenting her cousin's grave were Gillian's favourite. Jenny knows Gillian was colour-blind – and so starts her mission to uncover what really happened to her.

The growl and roar of thunder rolled an re-echoed from the mountains and the sword of the lightning stabbed down, and stabbed again, as if searching through the depths of the cringing woods for whatever sheltered there.

(P)2019 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

The Hôtel du Pimené, Gavarnie, takes its name from the great peak of the High Pyrenees in whose shadow, at early morning, it lies. Beyond the palisade of trees shading its front courtyard runs the road from Lourdes; behind the hotel and below it, in a gorge of the rock on which it is built, roars and tumbles the River Gave-de-Pau, on its way from the high corrie of the Cirque to the slow winding courses of the Low Pyrenees. The dining-room windows give on to this little gorge, so that anyone sitting at table may look straight down on to the damp slabs of the bridge that leads to the skirts of the Pic du Pimené.

At one of these windows, on a blazing fifth of July, sat Miss Jennifer Silver, aged twenty-two, eating an excellent lunch. This was not her first visit to France, and she was savouring that heady sense of rediscovery which that country wakes perpetually in her lovers. And the little dining-room, with its chattering cosmopolitan crowd, its exotic smell of good food and wine, and the staggering view from its windows, presented a cry quite astonishingly far from Oxford, which was Jennifer’s home … Perhaps, however, not such a very far cry after all; for, from the next table, where sat two middle-aged women, tweeded and brogued in defiance of the lovely Southern morning, came snatches of a conversation which smacked decidedly of the newer alchemy.

‘My dear Miss Moon’ – a morsel of truite maison, exquisitely cooked, waved in admonition on the end of a fork – ‘gravity separation of light and heavy constituents, as you know, is believed to be essential to the production of such banding. That shown by these particular rocks appears to be of the rhythmic type, the small-scale rhythmic type.’

‘I quite agree with you, Miss Shell-Pratt.’ Miss Moon dug into her trout with the dogged efficiency and artistic appreciation of a bull-dozer. ‘Indeed, as Steinbascher and Blitzstein have it in their admirable Einführung in die Ursprünge der Magmatiten durch Differenziationen, the troctolites …’

But here the waitress, a pretty dark-haired Bordelaise without a word of English, brought the croquettes de ris de veau à la Parmentier, the pommes de terre sautées, and the petits pois en beurre, and Jennifer, not unnaturally, missed the remainder of this fascinating exchange. She was making again the wonderful discovery that simple greed is one of the purest of human pleasures. The food on the journey had been pleasant and adequate, but little more; this, she thought, helping down the sweetbreads with a mouthful of topaz-coloured wine, was a sufficiently promising start to a holiday somewhat oddly conceived … She remembered Gillian’s letter in her pocket, and the slightest of frowns crossed her face. That could wait: she had resolutely refused to worry during the three days’ journey from Oxford, and she was not going to begin now that she would soon be seeing Gillian herself.

But, all the same, as the meringue Chantilly succeeded the sweetbreads at her table, and the hypersthene gabbros succeeded the troctolites at the next, her mind began, in spite of herself, to turn over the events which had led up to her arrival this morning in the little Pyrenean hotel.

Jennifer, whose father was the Bullen Professor of Music at Oxford (his Sixty-eight Variations on the Fifth of the Thirty-three Variations by Beethoven on a Waltz by Diabelli was, you will remember, the sensation of the Edinburgh Festival of 1954), had lived most of her life at Cherry Close, the lovely old house whose high-walled garden backs on to St. Aldate’s, right under the bells of Christ Church. She was an only child, but any loneliness she might have felt came to an end when she was seven, for then her half-French cousin Gillian, who lived in Northumberland, came, on the sudden death of her parents in one of the first air raids of the war, to live with the Silvers. She was with them for almost six years, a welcome answer to Mrs. Silver’s problem of finding what she would have called ‘a suitable companion’ for Jennifer. At the end of the war Gillian married one Jacques Lamartine, who had been stationed with the Free French near Oxford, and soon after left England behind for the headier climate of Bordeaux, her husband’s home.

So Jennifer at thirteen was once more alone at Cherry Close. She attended, daily, a small expensive private school near her home, and was sent for a final year to an even more expensive finishing-school in Switzerland. This latter adventure beyond the walls was the only one which Mrs. Silver, with her unswerving devotion to the standards of a fading age, would have tolerated. One was ‘finished’, one came home, one was brought out, one was suitably married … this had always happened in Mrs. Silver’s world and she had never thought beyond it. If Jennifer herself had any ideas about her own future she never mentioned them. She had always been a quiet child, with a poised reserve that her mother mistook for shyness, and a habit of accepting life as it came, happily and with a characteristic serenity that Mrs. Silver (herself voluble and highly strung) found insipid. Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almost complete misunderstanding.

Professor Silver knew his daughter rather better. It was he who at length insisted (emerging briefly from a Bartokian abstraction to do so) that since she was coming home to live in Oxford she might as well pursue some form of study. Mrs. Silver, abandoning her delightful – and, she knew, impossible – dreams of Drawing-rooms, was brought finally to agree, finding some consolation in the fact that Jennifer chose to study Art rather than one of the more unwomanly of the sciences.

So Jennifer came home again to attend Art School and live at Cherry Close. It was not to be supposed that those high walls would be left long unstormed, for Jennifer at eighteen was growing very lovely indeed. She had been a plainish child, with the promise of beauty in the fine bones of the face, and the silken texture of the straight, pale-gold hair. Now the promise had been fulfilled, and Mrs. Silver anxiously girded herself for battle against the impecunious and ineligible hordes of students with whom Professor Silver thoughtlessly filled the house. But she need not have worried. Jennifer was as unconscious of – or indifferent to – their admiration as even her mother could have wished.

That is, until she met Stephen Masefield.

He had come up a little late, having already done his National Service, and having had the ill fortune to do part of it in Korea, where he had been wounded. It was a full year after his return to an English hospital before he was reckoned fit to take up the life so brutally interrupted. He was twenty-one, and full of a bitter sense of time wasted, and power perhaps atrophied with the laming of his body. He flung himself at his music as if it were a beloved enemy, and over his spasmodic, almost savage brilliance, Professor Silver alternately nodded and swore.

From the first Stephen monopolized Jennifer. There seemed to be nothing remotely lover-like about the relationship that Mrs. Silver watched with an anxious eye; Stephen seemed to have neither the time nor the energy to waste in love-making, and the idea did not appear to have entered Jennifer’s head. What none of them realized was that the serenity of Cherry Close, and the unruffled sweetness that was Jennifer’s main characteristic, were both acting on Stephen like powerful drugs. He himself, immersed in his all-other-excluding music, was only dimly conscious of his need for her; Mrs. Silver, her fears allayed both by her daughter’s silence and Stephen’s preoccupation, dreamed of a more eligible future and stopped worrying.

Until the night of the last Commem. Ball, when Mrs. Silver, hurrying down at the sound of the taxi – it would never have occurred to her to give Jennifer a key – opened the door upon a tableau that sent her heart down into her fur-trimmed slippers.

There was Jennifer, a lovely ghost in silver-white, with one foot on the bottom step, and her head turned back towards Stephen, whose hand was on her arm, detaining her. Mrs. Silver could not see Jennifer’s face, but she could see Stephen’s, and what she saw there made her open the door wide and gather her daughter with a pretty show of ceremony into the lighted safety of the hallway. Stephen, declining with rather less ceremony her invitation to come in and drink coffee à trois, turned on his heel and walked away down the dark street.

Next day he was gone – gone with a brilliant First in his pocket, off to Vienna for a further two years’ study, while Mrs. Silver hurriedly re-planted the briars round her sleeping princess, and Cherry Close, emptied of Stephen’s disturbing presence, gradually sank back into its old bell-haunted peace. Two years ago …

Jennifer was brought sharply back to the present as the waitress whisked away her empty plate. At the next table, she could hear, the hypersthene gabbros had given way to the olivine gabbros, the orthopyroxene to olivine and clinopyroxene; at her own, the meringue Chantilly was replaced by grapes, peaches, and five kinds of cheese. Jennifer sighed, shook her head in genuine regret, and asked for coffee.

‘Have it with me,’ suggested a voice.

She looked up in surprise. A man who, from his table in a corner remote from hers, had been steadily watching her throughout the meal, had now risen and approached.

He was perhaps some twenty-six years old, tall and brown-haired, with a thin face and sensitive mouth. His eyes were of a vivid, long-lashed hazel. There was about his movements an odd loose-jointed abruptness that seemed to hint at some intense nervous drive within, but for all that he moved well, with a certain grace that his slight limp did nothing to mar. He was a singularly attractive young man; more than that, he looked like a man who would some day matter. There was nothing of success-hunting ruthlessness in his face; the impression was due to some expression in the brilliant hazel eyes which belied the gentleness of the mouth.

Jennifer’s eyes lifted, and widened on him, while a wave of colour ran up into her cheeks, and then receded, leaving her marble-pale.

She said, on a note of unbelief: ‘Stephen!’

He smiled down at her, and pulled out a chair. ‘Jenny … may I?’ He held out his cigarette-case and if it was a trifle unsteady she was in no condition to notice.

‘But – Stephen! What in the wide world are you doing here?’

‘Holidaying. I’ve been here for a few days already.’

‘But – here?’

He misunderstood her deliberately. ‘Oh, not at this hotel. In Gavarnie. I’m lodging rather more humbly than this at the Épée de Roland, but I sometimes eat here.’

She took a cigarette almost dazedly. ‘Stephen, what an extraordinary coincidence!’

‘Isn’t it?’ His tone was so smooth that she glanced at him warily, to see him watching her with amusement – and something else – in his eyes.

She said uncertainly: ‘Well, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it’s not. I thought it was time I saw you again, that’s all. I’ve come straight from Oxford.’

‘Did Mother – did they know you were coming here?’

A smile touched his mouth. ‘I made it fairly clear, I think.’

She said irrelevantly: ‘You’ve changed.’

The smile deepened. ‘You mean I’m not so easily frightened away as I was?’

Colour stained her cheeks again. ‘No, of course not! How silly! But—’

He prompted her gently. ‘But?’

‘I did think you might have called to say good-bye that time,’ she said, not looking at him.

‘I did.’

Her eyes lifted. ‘Did you? When?’

‘Fairly early, on the morning after the ball. Your mother said you were still in bed so I had to go without seeing you. I sent you good-bye. Weren’t you told?’

She shook her head without speaking, and at the bleak look that touched her face he felt anger lick through him again as it had done that morning two years ago, when he had gone impulsively back to Cherry Close, hoping for he didn’t quite know what. Perhaps a short half-hour with Jennifer before his train left …

But it was Mrs. Silver who came to him in the big music room, and proceeded to explain exactly why it was undesirable for him to see Jennifer that morning – or, in fact, ever again. She did it unanswerably, charmingly, cruelly … she dealt in the kindest possible way with his lack of means, uncertain prospects and, finally, with the undoubted instability of the musical temperament … Stephen was too unhappy and too angry to appreciate the delicacy with which this last was touched on by the Professor’s wife, with one hand resting gracefully on her husband’s big Steinway grand, and one eye, figuratively speaking, on his study door …

There was no fighting back. There was too much truth in what she was saying, and besides, Stephen was not himself fully aware of what it was he wanted. He only knew that last night the realization that he would not see Jennifer again for two years had overwhelmed him like the wave of a bitter sea. The promised years in Vienna, till then a golden dream, presented themselves all at once as years of exile, years of drifting alone on the tossing waters of uncertainty, away from the still and quiet centre of his life. Jennifer … But if he was only just aware of his own feeling in the matter, he was miserably unsure of Jennifer’s. The revelation last night should have been a beginning; it had come, instead, at the end … So, because he had to – and because he had a train to catch – Stephen accepted the plain, killing common sense of what she said to him, went to Vienna, and wrote once a week to Jennifer – long, sprawling, conversational letters, mostly about his work – letters that an elder brother might have written, and that Mrs. Silver certainly might have read …

By the end of the two years’ exile there was no doubt whatsoever in Stephen’s mind as to what he wanted – had to have, if he was ever to be whole and at peace again. It would have taken a dozen mother-dragons far better armed than Mrs. Silver to keep him from seeing Jennifer and making the beginning denied him two years before. But he did not even have to do battle; that had already been done by Professor Silver, to whom his wife, agitated by the news of Stephen’s coming, had appealed. Stephen, once again facing a parent in the big music room, found himself dazedly listening to Professor Silver talking about his prospects in an entirely different manner … There would be, it appeared, a vacancy which Professor Silver was pretty sure Stephen could fill … would see, in fact, that he did fill …

Stephen came to with a jerk, and said warily: ‘Here, sir?’

‘Undoubtedly.’ Professor Silver’s eyes glinted. ‘The other place,’ he added, ‘would not be at all the kind of thing that Jennifer is used to.’

And Stephen, still in a daze, had eventually found himself out in the street, with the Gavarnie address in his pocket, and the Professor’s final injunctions ringing in his ears: ‘You need a holiday, don’t you? What’s against going up there? Have you enough money? Good; well, good luck. She’s in London just now, with an aunt, but if I were you I’d get straight to Gavarnie and meet her there. You’ll both of you stand a much better chance off the home pitch, as it were. But – go carefully, my boy. I don’t think she’s quite the fragile little blossom her mother thinks she is, but don’t rush your fences.’

So here he was, sitting in silence, watching her averted profile, and painfully conscious of the two-years’ gap that must be bridged, of all the things that must be said and that he must school himself not to say – yet. And Jennifer, carefully studying the end of her cigarette, felt the silence drawing out between them, not the easy silence of companionship that used to be theirs, but a pause charged with some new and disturbing element that she did not understand. What had happened? Why had he looked angry? And – why had he come? Her heart began to beat lightly and fast, but her face was shuttered, and she gave no sign. How could she, until he spoke more clearly? And Stephen, watching her, sensing some uncertainty in her, shut down even harder on his own hopes and desires.

Impasse …

Then through the silence tramped the capably shod feet of Miss Shell-Pratt and Miss Moon, as they left their table and proceeded, still talking busily, towards the lounge.

‘How were they bedded?’ Miss Moon’s eager query rang out almost directly above Stephen’s head as they passed his chair. ‘Horizontally or vertically?’

Miss Shell-Pratt was brusque. ‘Vertically, Moon, vertically. And the bedding was much disturbed.…’

The dining-room door clashed behind them. Stephen had swung round and was staring after them, with a bemused expression that made Jennifer begin to laugh.

‘What in the wide world was that about?’

‘Geology, Stephen, just geology! I’ve been listening to it the whole of lunch-time. You can have no idea of the excitements of geology!’

‘So it would appear.’ He got to his feet. ‘It sounds an extraordinary science. I suppose they do it at Cambridge. Come on, Jenny, let’s get out of here; I want to stand you a liqueur.’

The lounge was crowded, but they found two chairs in a cool corner, and Stephen ordered drinks. Around them the conversation surged in an exciting hubbub of languages and accents. Three Frenchmen just beside them were absorbed in a passionate discussion of a recent bank robbery in Bordeaux, a party which had visited the Cirque that morning was showing off to a party which was to visit it that afternoon, two Swiss climbers were comparing experiences with a French boy, while, still at Jennifer’s elbow, the troctolites were having it all their own way.

‘… Not been up to the Cirque yet? Then don’t hire a mule from the man with—’

‘– A colourless amphibole—’

‘– Who murdered the bank clerk. It was the Dupré gang all right. They got Marcel Dupré, but the woman – his sister, wasn’t it? – she got away—’

‘… I tell you the wretched mule tried to trot—’

‘– Up a sheer face of four thousand feet—’

‘– With a red-spotted troctolite—’

‘– But they’ll catch her, you mark my words … unless she’s over the frontier already …’

‘Thank God,’ said Stephen at last. ‘Here come the drinks.’

The waiter, with a tray laden with drinks, was weaving his practised way between the tables, managing with the expertise of the French professional to waste no time whatever and yet appear to take a vital interest in the subjects dear to his clients’ hearts. He threaded his way swiftly through the conversation, shedding the drinks as he went, with a technique that bespoke much practice in this kind of inverted potato-race … Pernod, messieurs? Yes, it was a disgrace, that robbery. The papers said one of the criminals had hanged himself in his cell. Tant mieux … Madame? Cinzano? Indeed yes, Paul Lescaut should keep his mule under better control. It was the grandmother of the devil, that one … Messieurs? Your Dubonnet – a guide? The best was Pierre Bussac, but he was not often in the village; in fact, he had not been down with his mule since – let me see, yes, it was the night of the bad storm, three weeks ago; but if monsieur wished to arrange for a guide there was Robert Vrillac … Mesdames? Vichy water … ah, yes, there were rocks hereabouts, no doubt; he had certainly been told so …

He escaped with some relief to Stephen’s table, and set down the benedictines with the air of one who had brought the good news to Aix against considerable opposition. Benedictine, monsieur … merci, monsieur … and he hoped the pictures were going well? With an air of subdued triumph he slid away.

‘How in the world did he know that?’ demanded Stephen.

‘What did he mean?’

‘Only that I mess about with water-colours as a hobby. It’s rest and recruitment of the spirit, and what you’d probably call comic relief.’

‘I wouldn’t! I might even admire them. I know all the right things to say. I never knew you sketched, Stephen!’

‘I’ve never dared to tell you, my dear. Well, I’ll await your expert judgment. … And meanwhile, I gather, you’ve come to see your cousin?’

She nodded, but a shadow touched her face, so that he said quickly: ‘What is it, Jenny? Is there something wrong?’

‘N-no. That is, yes, Stephen. I’m worried about her.’

‘Would you like to tell me?’

‘Yes. You never met Gillian, did you? She married Jacques the year the war was over. He had something to do with the wine trade; they had a nice house in Bordeaux – I once stayed with them there – and they were very happy. Then a few years ago Jac. . .