Mary Stewart: Nine Coaches Waiting

"You don't have to. I understand."

"I don't think you do. I was told, you see, told flatly that you were in it, along with your-with the others. Bernard had said so to Berthe. He told her that you had done the shooting in the wood. I imagine he realised, even when he'd gone so far, that he'd better not own to that. And he may have thought you would condone the murder once you saw the advantages of it. I didn't believe it, even when she told me flatly. I couldn't. But the rest was so obvious, once I knew about… them, I mean, and there was nothing to prove you weren't in it with them. Nothing except the-the way I felt about you."

I paused, straining my eyes to see his expression. He seemed a very long way away.

I said: "I don't expect you to believe it, Raoul, but I was fighting on your side. All the time. I've been through a very private special little hell since Tuesday night. You called it a 'damnable exercise', remember? Everything conspired to accuse you, and I was half silly with unhappiness and-yes, and doubt, till I couldn't even trust my own senses any more… Oh, I won't drag you through it all now; you've had enough, and you want to be done with this and with me, but I-I had to tell you before you go. It was simply that I couldn't take the chance, Raoul! You do see that, don't you? Say you see that!"

He jerked the gloves in his fingers. His voice was quite flat, dull, almost. "You were prepared to take chances- once."

"Myself, yes. But this was Philippe. I had no right to take a chance on Philippe. I didn't dare. He was my charge-my duty." The miserable words sounded priggish and unutterably absurd. "I-was all he had. Beside that, it couldn't be allowed to matter."

"What couldn't."

"That you were all I had," I said.

Another silence. He was standing very still now. Was it a trick of the mist or was he really a very long way away from me, a lonely figure in the queerly-lit darkness? It came to me suddenly that this was how I would always remember him, someone standing alone, apart from the others even of his own family. And, I think for the first time, I began to see him as he really was-not any more as a projection of my young romantic longings, not any more as Prince Charming, the handsome sophisticate, the tiger I thought I preferred… This was Raoul, who had been a quiet lonely little boy in a house that was "not a house for children", an unhappy adolescent brought up in the shadow of a megalomaniac father, a young man fighting bitterly to save his small inheritance from ruin… wild, perhaps, hard, perhaps, plunging off the beaten track more than once… but always alone. Wrapped up in my loneliness and danger I hadn't even seen that his need was the same as my own. He and I had hoed the same row, and he for a more bitter harvest.

I said gently: "Raoul, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have bothered you with this just now. I think you've had about all you can take. What can I say to you about your father, except that I'm sorry?"

He said: "Do you really think I would have shot him?"

"No, Raoul."

A pause. He said in a very queer voice: "I believe you do understand."

"I believe I do." I swallowed. "Even the last twenty-four hours-with the world gone mad and values shot to smithereens -I must have known, deep down, that you were you, and that was enough. Raoul, I want you to know it, then I'll go. I loved you all the time, without stopping, and I love you now."

Still he hadn't moved. I turned back towards the chateau. I said: "I'll leave you now. Goodnight."

"Where are you going?"

"Someone'll take me to the Villa Mireille. Your Uncle Hippolyte asked me to go there. I-I don't want to stay at Valmy."

"Get into the car. I'll take you down." Then, as I hesitated: "Go on, get in. Where did you think I was going?"

"I didn't think. Away."

"I was going down to the Villa Mireille to look for you." I didn't speak; didn't move. My heart began to slam again in slow painful strokes.

"Linda.” Under the quiet voice was a note I knew.

"Yes?"

"Get in."

I got in. The mist swirled and broke as the door slammed.

Swirled again as he got in and slid into the seat beside me. It was dark in the car. He seemed enormous, and very near.

I was trembling. He didn't move to touch me. I cleared my throat and said the first thing that came into my head. "Where did you get this car? Roulette?"

"Écarté. Linda, do you intend to stay at the Villa Mireille for a while with Philippe?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought things out yet. I'm awfully fond of him, but-"

Raoul said: "He'll be lonely, even with Hippolyte. Shall we have him with us at Bellevigne?"

I said breathlessly: "Raoul. Raoul. I didn't think-" I stopped. I put shaking hands up to my face.

"What is it, sweetheart?"

I said, very humbly, into my hands: "You mean you'll still… have me?"

I heard him take a quick breath. He didn't answer. He turned suddenly towards me and pulled me to him, not gently. What we said then is only for ourselves to remember. We talked for a long time.

Later, when we could admit between us the commonplace of laughter, he said, with the smile back in his voice: "And you've still not made me own it, my lovely. Don't you think it's time I did?"

"What are you talking about? Own what?"

"That I love you, I love you, I love you."

"Oh, that ."

"Yes, damn it , that.”

"I'll take a chance on it," I said. And those were the last words I spoke for a very long time.

And presently the car edged forward through the mist and turned north off the Valmy bridge.