The Will and the Deed Read online

  She had, as a matter of fact, been quite fond of the old woman, but she was not going to confess to any such weakness. The air was already heavy with other people’s professions of devotion and grief.

  ‘You’re quite sure she had plenty to leave,’ said Neil; but he relaxed again, and sat back beside her with a slightly wry grin.

  ‘It seems to be taken for granted. She must have made a fortune in her younger days, and I know how shrewdly she handled it when she had it. Even discounting,’ said Susan with a smile, ‘some of the wilder legends. Since we’ve been in Vienna I’ve heard half the scandalous reminiscences of the operatic stage from 1910 to 1940, and she seems to have been involved in most of them.’

  ‘Or she liked to pretend she was,’ said Neil sceptically.

  ‘She liked it, all right. But some of the stories came from women who would have been only too glad to pinch the lead from her if they could. And did you ever see photographs of her in her prime? She was lovely. As beautiful and fresh as a girl, and as imperial as the women she specialised in. I can see why nobody could touch her as the Marschallin. And I can really believe her private life was the procession of blue-blooded lovers they say it was. The biggest sensation seems to have been during the First World War, when one of those independent archdukes who were still hanging on to precarious little German principalities went completely overboard for her, and is supposed to have smuggled his family’s ancestral diamonds abroad and given them to her. He refused to go back home, and they deprived him of his rights and titles, and he died in exile, leaving Antonia in possession of about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of crown regalia. Or so they say!’

  ‘Oh, the Treplenburg-Feldstein affair, that old chestnut,’ said Neil disdainfully. ‘I thought that was forgotten. I remember picking it up from somewhere years ago, and my old man knocking it decidedly on the head. Do they still believe in it?’

  ‘Carl Ludwig was kicked out, that’s certain. He died in Nice.’

  ‘So did many another of the wilting royalties who’re supposed to have had affairs with Antonia. But I’ll believe in the diamonds when I see them. I suppose they’ll be digging up all those old scandals now that she’s dead.’

  ‘Sunday newspaper stuff? Miranda won’t like that.’

  ‘It won’t poison the money for her,’ said Neil cynically. ‘She’ll be able to convince herself it’s her duty to take it.’

  ‘Are you giving me advance information, after all?’

  ‘No, just a general observation.’ He laughed, meeting her eye. ‘How on earth did a sister of Antonia’s come to have such a respectable daughter? Even by a gentleman farmer, God help us! A rank bad one, by the way. He failed. And then she had to marry another of the same breed! Some women never learn.’

  Susan drew breath upon a sudden grudging instinct of sympathy for Mrs Quayne. ‘No wonder she attached self and son to Mrs Byrne like leeches, and determined to stick it out to the bitter end.’

  ‘“As her only relatives,”’ murmured Neil, and shut a hand warningly on her arm as she let out an irrepressible giggle. ‘Sssh, I see the black veil twitching.’

  Miranda’s mourning was indeed of a ceremonious completeness. It had made Susan reflect, as they climbed aboard, that by rights the plane ought to have black plumes mounted above the nose, and crepe streamers trailing from the tail. She was opening her mouth to say so, in a conspiratorial whisper, when she uttered a loud gasp instead, and clutched at the arms of her seat with both hands, for its comfortable support had just dropped from under her. She had hardly noticed how their placid progress had been shaken, in the last ten minutes, by little lurches and steadyings and checks. Here came the first abrupt drop, and the equally unpleasant recovery, saluted by several startled gulps.

  ‘My God, that was sharp!’ Neil kept his steadying hold upon her arm, and leaned across her to peer out of the window at the sky where dusk and stars should just have been replacing the clearing film of cloud; but the cloud had thickened and folded in on their passage in convolutions of leaden grey, and the gathering darkness had come more abruptly than it should have done, and was full of turbid movement. ‘Weather’s changing. Looks like snow, and big snow, too. It’s blown up suddenly.’

  ‘Whereabouts are we? Do you know?’

  ‘Well past Munich. Should be only half an hour or so to Zurich. May be a bit longer on the journey if we’re going to be up against head winds, though. Are you all right?’

  ‘I can take it, unless it gets very bad.’ She felt the plane lurch from under her again, and rock and shudder as it came up, and suddenly the warning sign above the cabin door flashed. ‘Looks as if he thinks we’re in for it, we’re being told to buckle ourselves in.’

  They groped for their seat belts, and were tossed about so maliciously for a few minutes that they had difficulty in bringing the links together. By the time Susan had the webbing drawn tight, and her weight braced back in the seat against the next plunge, there was sweat dewing her forehead, and she was breathing with the unnatural, measured caution of incipient airsickness. She caught herself at it, and closed her eyes; by now she knew all the simpler aids to relaxation, but they didn’t always work. The next moment the slashing of whips across the window close to her face made her open her eyes again quickly. All that was to be seen of the outer world was a dull-grey, whirling darkness that streamed in diagonal lines down the window, first in flakes of melting snow, then in engraved lines of ice. All the voices had fallen silent now. Everyone gripped at the firmest support he could find, and rode the paroxysms as best he could. Even Miranda was silenced.

  They seemed to be flying into a strong northwest wind, and a very large and highly charged concentration of cloud. And they must be already over mountain country. Those few degrees’ rise in the temperature were going to cost them a nasty passage into Zurich, and maybe a long one, too.

  After perhaps a quarter of an hour of hanging on grimly and going where they were thrown there was a lull, or what seemed to them a lull after all they had suffered. Susan opened her eyes cautiously, and unclamped her jaw. Neil was unbuckling his belt. He caught her eye on him, and gave her a somewhat pallid smile of reassurance. ‘I’m going in to speak to McHugh, see how things are going.’ It was the first intimation she had had that there might be something seriously wrong; unasked reassurances often have the effect of revealing the starting seams of security. She watched his lurching progress up the aisle with anxious eyes. The doctor, on whose tough, desiccated body this violent motion seemed to have little effect, spoke to him as he passed. Miranda stretched out an arm across her son to pluck at his coat, but he saw it in time and eluded her clutch. The narrow metal door opened and sucked him in.

  The motion had become violent again by the time he reappeared, and no one had a hand to spare for grabbing at him. The rolling luggage rack had tossed down coats and scarves and small bags upon the heaving bodies beneath, and the windows were opaque with compressed ice. They anchored themselves grimly by whatever afforded a nail-hold, and waited for it to end; there was nothing else for them to do.

  Neil held himself upright by the backs of the rocking seats, and yelled above the confusion: ‘Keep your belts fastened and no smoking! Sorry about this! Hope we’ll make Zurich inside half an hour, but nobody expected this change of wind. Caught the met. offices on the hop. Taken us a bit off course, he says.’

  Off course – a northwest gale – southeastwards off course, thought Susan, seeing the map of Europe within her tightly closed eyelids. Farther into the mountains of the northern Tyrol, or that little tongue of Germany that probes down towards the Arlberg. She thought of the knife edges of alpine rock invisible in thickly falling snow, and stopped feeling airsick, having worse things on her mind.

  Dimly she heard Miranda’s voice for a second, shrill with indignation: ‘Disgraceful! What’s the use of having meteorological offices? Ought to do better than this—’ Then there were minutes of comparative calm, in which she was aware of Ne
il’s weight dropping back into the seat beside her, and comparative silence but for the wind and the lashing of the snow, so that for the first time she caught the strange note of the engine, with that intermittent cough in it.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, I’m all right.’

  ‘Good girl!’ His voice was low; he leaned closer so that she should not fail to hear him. ‘I’m going to move over across the gangway. Don’t worry, I’ll be keeping an eye on you if anything happens.’

  She opened her eyes long enough to take stock of the seat he indicated, and observed that it was beside the emergency door. ‘We’re in trouble, aren’t we? What’s he going to do, try and put us down?’ Her voice was quite composed. When it came to the point there was no sense whatever in being anything but calm; it didn’t mean she wasn’t frightened.

  ‘Nothing else for it. One engine’s packed up on him, and he’d have the devil’s own job to get us far on the other in this.’

  ‘Does he even know where we are?’

  ‘Somewhere over the Bregenzer Wald, he reckons, not all that far off course. But he says we’d never make Zurich.’

  She thought of the rocky outlines of the Vorarlberg, and understood; as well try to land an aircraft on the top of a steeple. ‘What does he reckon the chances at?’

  ‘Didn’t ask him. I figure they’ll be higher if we all leave him alone. Hang on tight, and be ready to move quickly if we do get down intact.’

  Gradually they were losing speed and height, she could feel the changes in her ears. The spasmodic note of the engine was louder and more ominous in the moments of relative quietness. Sometimes they seemed almost to hover, and the abrupt downward plunges came more horribly after these lulls. Sometimes the wind caught them broadside and rolled them dizzily, and sometimes met and brought them to a shuddering check from which they recovered groggily, like a sick animal. They could see nothing of the outside world now, the windows were sealed. How much could the pilot see? Once, as they groped their cautious way downwards, feeling for the right trends in the wind channelled and goaded by the mountains, he found a break in the murk just in time, and lifted them clear of a rock wall against which they would have smashed themselves like a gnat hitting a windscreen. Then even more gingerly down again, feeling outwards with quivering senses, and knowing that only luck, not knowledge or skill alone, was ever going to get them safely out of this.

  When it came it was brief, and curiously anticlimactic; terrifying, but gone before she had time to experience it fully. Among the heights of the Vorarlberg there are large and comparatively tranquil meadows, and villages within reach of them. The one McHugh found was ample, but dangerously exposed, and he had trouble getting round into the wind, and lost more way then he would have liked, so that there was a horrible moment when the gale brought him up almost standing, and threatened to overturn the aircraft and drop it belly-up into the snow. All they knew of it in the passenger cabin was the sudden tense, shuddering stillness, the sidelong heave of the wind, and then the forward plunge that brought them out of danger. Twenty seconds later they ploughed almost gently into the snow, nose-down.

  They were flung headlong left and right, the belts dragging at them agonisingly. The plane heeled once and righted itself, emptying the left-hand rack over their helpless bruised bodies. A series of sickening, grinding lurches, bumping deep into the drifts, the nose bowed and the tail rose a little, and swung uneasily up and down. Then, miraculously, everything was still. The engine had stopped. They could hear the howling of the wind and the steady, malevolent slashing of the snow; the outer world was still there. They were alive.

  The pilot came hurtling through the door from his cabin like a gust of wind, capless, streaked with sweat, dragging on his coat as he came. He plunged between the chaos of bodies and bags and magazines, and the ghastly debris of airsickness, towards the emergency door, waving an arm at Neil as he came.

  ‘Open her up! Come on, everybody, out of here, bloody quick! Steady, don’t shift the weight back too suddenly.’

  He was a big young fellow, and his own weight had been enough to transfer the plane’s precarious centre of gravity. The swinging tail settled downwards gently, and stayed down. He felt its solidity, and stamped the settling weight cautiously lower into the encasing snow.

  The lever of the emergency door had yielded to Neil’s thrust, a narrow oblong of night loomed open before them, and snow whirled in and spattered their faces, thick, soft snow, the kind that seals up whole valleys behind thirty-foot drifts, and when the thaw comes too quickly brings down mountainsides with it.

  ‘You and you!’ roared the pilot, still indisputably in command of his aircraft and all who breathed in it, and he reached a great hand for Laurence Quayne’s shoulder and dragged him forward from his mother’s quivering embrace. ‘You’re the youngest and heftiest. Get on down there and field this lot. Go on, drop! What are you waiting for, the bloody tank to blow?’

  They heard the voice of authority and obeyed it. Surprisingly, Laurence was the first to go. He leaned out from the doorway, took a very brief glance below, and jumped. They heard a muffled shout from the darkness, and then Neil went after him. McHugh cast one glittering glance round his remaining charges, pallid, unkempt, green with shock and sickness. The doctor was small, but tough, intact and already known to him.

  ‘Give me a hand with the women, sir,’ he said briefly, and drew Miranda between them into the doorway. There was a certain toughness about Miranda, too. She made not a sound, and wasted no time in hesitation. When they told her to drop, she dropped. Only when she found herself floundering in three feet or more of snow did she utter a sharp yell, and even then it had more of rage in it than complaint.

  Susan leaped after her; the two men below caught her between them, and the shock of the cold gripped her to the waist and made her gasp.

  ‘Get away from the hulk,’ cried McHugh, motioning peremptorily; and confused with snow and darkness, in a formless world which as yet they could not even see, Miranda and Susan took arms and struggled laboriously through the drifts to a safe distance. The first of the men was being lifted bodily out of the doorway and held clear of the aircraft’s side. They recognised the shape of Richard Hellier.

  ‘Easy with him, the old chap’s had a knock on the head. Case fell on him – a bit dazed, but all right. Ready?”

  He was hardly heavier than Susan; they received him into their arms gently, and Susan waded back to meet him and draw him aside. He let her take his arm, and followed where she led with the silent docility of shock or concussion. Looking back, she saw that they were all out now. McHugh came last, his coat flying about him. They gathered shivering in a close little knot, well apart from the plane, and drew breath at last.

  ‘Close thing,’ said McHugh, and swiped a coat sleeve across his forhead. ‘Everybody all right?’

  There was no time yet for recognising the existence of cold or discomfort; to be alive was to be all right. They said that they were, with no dissentient voice, until Richard, suddenly stirring out of his daze, shivered and clapped a hand under his arm. ‘My briefcase! Where did I leave my briefcase?’ His voice, that beautiful, resonant voice which for ten years now, since it had lost its full range and tone, had resolutely refused to sing, even in private, held a childish distress and dismay. ‘I’m sorry, but I must go back. I left my briefcase behind.’

  McHugh put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘You can’t go back in there now. Nobody’s going to disturb your things, but we can’t risk fetching them yet. Got to find somewhere to spend the night, and get you under cover. We’ll collect everything later, don’t worry.’

  ‘No, I can’t leave it. You don’t understand, I can’t go without my briefcase—’

  ‘If it had been going to take fire it would have done it by now,’ said Neil abruptly. ‘I’ll go and fetch his briefcase, why not? It won’t take a minute.’

  McHugh considered, looking back at the grotesque hulk lying in the sn
ow, its shape already obscured by the steady, smothering fall. ‘Well, I don’t think anything will happen now. We’re through the worst. All right, if you want to, I’ll come and give you a shoulder to get up.’

  ‘I’m exceedingly sorry,’ said Richard contritely, in that dazed, punctilious voice of shock. ‘So stupid of me to leave it behind. Please don’t take any risk—’

  McHugh patted his arm reassuringly. ‘I don’t think there’s much risk now. The landing was touch and go, but we’ve got off lightly. You hang on here a minute.’

  Neil had struck out ahead of him into the snow-field, trekking back by the wavering pathway they had cut through the drifts, wallowing and falling and rising again. The aeroplane lay half-veiled in the slanting fall. It seemed to have settled lower already, for the silting flakes were climbing its flanks steadily, and settling in a smooth wave within the open doorway. Neil was the lighter weight of the two. McHugh gave him a back to reach the step, and waited, shivering now in reaction, as he vanished into the darkness within. He was invisible for some minutes. After a while, tired of inaction, McHugh measured the distance to the doorway. It was not so difficult; on his best form he could get up there without troubling anyone for a hoist. He made a leap for it, got a firm grip of the edge, and hauled himself steadily up until he could get a knee over the sill.

  ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you find it?’

  The pencil-thin shaft of light from Neil’s pocket torch played over a huddle of fallen raincoats, and the corner of the open briefcase. He was just thrusting back the splayed contents and snapping the catch upon them.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it. Burst the thing open when it was pitched off the rack. I hope everything’s there, or the old boy will probably refuse to budge. Get below and I’ll drop it to you. I’m going to bring my own, too, now I’m here.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the old girl’s will,’ said McHugh cheerfully, dropping back easily into the snow. ‘Can’t leave that around unguarded, with all these potential heirs about. All right, throw it!’