Slamming the big doors shut, he saw in the instant before they closed that several cars had pulled into the circular driveway where Jessica waited for them near the bronze sundial on the flagged terrace.
Eric sagged against the doors, his breathing shallow in the sudden silence.
Yes, Boniface had lost but it wasn’t, in truth, his fault. Everything he had wanted and worked for lay smashed in pieces around him, and there would soon be an even greater price to pay, the vulgar curiosity of jurymen, the humiliating contempt of a judge.
If only Maud hadn’t lied to him and betrayed him. Boniface had had the brains and nerve, the style and the imagination, to conceive and bring this off, the flash of courage in a pinch, yes, and the grace to savor the rewards.
She had been on the little bitch’s side all along, the two of them against Boniface.
With a smile in his voice, he called out, “Maud?”
He saw that the library was dark, and knew that Maud had pinched out the candles. Moving cautiously, he slipped through the arched doorway, freezing when he heard the delicate sound of glass breaking, falling in a tinkling cadence to the floor.
Not a window, he thought, the sound was too fragile. He knew then where she was — in the study adjoining the library. And he knew what she had shattered.
Crouching, Eric ran forward and dropped behind a fan-backed chair. He needed illumination now, to tell him where she was hiding. Raising his gun, he fired twice into the embers of the fireplace, the bullets slamming into the smouldering logs and bringing them alive, creating spurting bursts of flames in whose spreading glow he saw Maud’s dark figure run through the door from Dalworth’s study into the library.
Eric swung the gun and fired two shots at her. A scream burst from Maud’s lips. When she dropped from sight, he stood and walked deliberately toward the illumination thrown up by the glowing logs, so thoroughly avenged, so sensuously elated that he never even heard the next shot that sounded, and hardly felt the bullet that ripped into his body and sent him spinning to the carpeted floor.
With an hysterical moan, Maud stepped from behind draperies and ran through the dark library, stopping only to fling the ornate dueling pistol aside and to stare for an instant in horror at her husband’s carved and motionless features.
And then, heart pounding like a frantic drum, Maud ran on into the great hall and with clawing fingers unbolted the doors and flung them open, flinching as the wind and rain stung her face.
She saw cars parked on the gravel crescent, lights spearing the darkness, men and women climbing from them and running toward Jessica. A white bandage caught the light and she saw Kevin O’Dell with the others— The Irish groom, she thought, with another stab of betrayal. They had lied about that to her, O’Dell was all right, and Jessica had known it. On one car a blue light flashed and Maud saw there were officers standing near it in wet black slickers, carrying rifles.
Maud started down the rain-slick steps, calling plaintively to Jessica. “Please, please, help me! Jessica! Tell them it’s not time for me to die—”
Maud cried out to Jessica again, screaming the words now, begging her to listen, but the scene was suddenly like a nightmare, a dreadful, paralyzing dream filled with stark, uncaring people — no matter how much you begged them for help or pleaded for mercy, no kind hand reached out to unlock that terrible door...
Her sandal slipped, her ankle turned, and she fell to her hands and knees, gasping at the impact of the cold, stone steps. Pain streaked through her bruised hands. As tears started in her eyes, she saw that one of the figures below had turned a powerful flashlight on her, and all of them were waving and gesturing. She could see mouths opening and closing in white faces, but their words were lost in the winds.
Then Maud realized that they were not pointing to her at all, but toward something behind her in the darkness. When she turned and looked up the steps, Eric stood there in the double doors of the mansion, a dark wetness gleaming against his white shirt, his face twisted with agony, and his arm extended toward her, the candlelight in the hall reflecting in the wet pavement and on the silver filigree of the gun.
But after an instant that seemed stretched to an eternity, Eric Griffith staggered and fell forward to his knees, the hand holding the gun dropping slowly an inch at a time toward the ground. He was staring at her, she saw, his eyes bright points of malice in his white face.
After a straining instant, he shook his head wearily. When his eyelids began to close, Maud laughed with relief, the sound mingling with the driving rain, because she remembered then what Jessica had prophesized — had promised her — that Eric would die before her — and Maud’s laughter was an astonished accompaniment to the unfolding of that prophecy.
And what was the rest of it?... that he would somehow give her a release.
It was all coming true, she thought, as Eric fell forward on the wetly shining terrace, his gun-hand slamming against the flagstones in what seemed like a last gesture of frustration and defiance, the long fingers clenching in a gesture of fierce rigor mortis.
Maud heard the crack of the gun through a rill of thunder, but it wasn’t until she felt the wet stones against her cheek that she realized she had been shot, and she knew that because she was surprised in a hurt and childish fashion by the intensity of the pain.
As she began to lose consciousness, she lay very still, watching the blood from her wound mingle with the rain water on the steps of Easter Hill. Maud tried to laugh but that hurt too much. She pressed her lips tightly together and let the laughter surface only in her mind where it seemed to circle with the sound of excited, springtime birds.
What amused Maud so strangely in her last moments of awareness — Constable Riley was beside her then, hand gentle on her shoulder, she was aware of that, too — was the superb irony of Jessica’s second prediction, the prediction that Eric would somehow bring her freedom from the fear of death, which he had done (oh, yes... oh, yes) by freeing her from life itself...
Jessica stood alone, the flash of visions still gleaming in her eyes, her face illuminated by the sinister play of lightning above the trees. She stared back at the gray facade of Easter Hill and at the slack figures of Maud and Eric Griffith sprawled on the terrace below it.
Jessica’s lips began to move slowly as she said a fated farewell to the innocent child she had once been. And then she found herself speaking aloud, her eyes shining, her voice soft and clear.