Wow, as an anon reminded me yesterday on tumblr, it's been a month since I updated this! I'm seriously so, so sorry and if anyone is still waiting for this then I take my hat off to you. I've had a lot going on these past few weeks with school and I lost my grandmother two weeks ago. At the same time, my mum fell down the stairs so I've had quite a bit to do at home, as well as at school, which kept me really busy (and tired). So yeah, there's the end of my crappy excuses so here's the chapter you've been waiting for. Enjoy!
NINE
Clove's hand trailed listlessly on the car frame. Her mind was fuzzy; she couldn't quite remember what had happened, back at the studio. Maybe there had been a gun. There are certainly been red. But what was red? Red fabric? Red paint? She wasn't quite sure.
Oh, but what did it matter? She wanted to laugh aloud. Nothing mattered any more. She was with Cato and he was with her, just as they were meant to be, just as they always would be. That was all that mattered now.
They were skirting around the edge of the city, Clove noticed, as the blurs of colour flitted past her eyes. Good. That was good, she thought. Less people would see them. They'd get away quicker. That was all that mattered, she thought to herself, all that mattered. Good. She closed her eyes again.
Suddenly, Cato swore out loud and the car jerked. Clove's eyes snapped back open. 'What's wrong?' she asked, adrenaline sweeping through her blood, pumping behind her head.
'Police,' Cato said, grimly. On the steering wheel, his knuckles were white with the tension. 'Tailing us.'
Clove glanced in the wing mirror; sure enough, she could see the flashes of the black police cars, about four of them, all following her and Cato, about ten cars away from them on the road. Thinking quickly, she reckoned it would only be a few minutes or so before they were caught. Unless…
Suddenly, Clove jerked out her arm and grabbed the wheel. The car swerved violently and Cato yelped, his grip slipped. With all her might, Clove yanked the wheel to the left and the car ran off the road and down a side road, bumping off the concrete and onto a grittier track behind some trees.
'Fuck.' Cato exhaled loudly and wrestled the wheel back out of Clove's hands and into his own. The car steadied and he pulled the gear back and they continued hurtling across the back road away from New York. 'Why did you do that?' Cato asked her, through gritted teeth.
Clove ignored him, instead she twisted in her seat and looked behind them. 'They've not followed us,' she reported. 'It'll take them a while to track us now.'
'We've brought ourselves a bit more time,' Cato said, in awe.
'I have,' she retorted.
He looked across at her. 'You sound more like you.'
The words made Clove's stomach twist but she tried not to show it. 'I've always been me,' she replied. Cato's smile cut her like a knife.
'Of course you have been.'
The chill of the night was beginning to seep into Clove's skin and she felt goosebumps prickle up over her bare arms. She shivered, as the motorcar zoomed through the night, and rubbed fiercely at her shoulder blades. She felt strangely calm now; the cold, and sudden adrenaline rush, had cleansed her. The events of that evening were very clear to her, but she took them matter-of-factly. I shot a man. He is dead. I killed him. The whole thing seemed to made queer sense so she continued to calmly think it, a faint smile on her lips. It didn't matter though, not anymore. Cato and I are going to be together.
If she said it enough times, maybe it would come true.
Cato could feel every heartbeat he took, banging against the inside of his skin. His head was thudding too, the blood hammering around his brain seemed to be pressing into every nerve of his body. He was afraid.
'Are they getting closer?' he asked.
Clove was still twisted in her seat, her dark hair flying as the car zoomed along the road, watching the winding space between the sky and the earth for the tell-tale lights of the police motorcars.
'No…yes!' she cried and Cato saw, in the wing mirror, over the horizon, that a beam of yellow light was following them. It was still far away, but even as he watched it was drawing nearer. Cato gritted his teeth.
'Hold on,' he said and Clove gripped tightly at the door handle. Together, they were flying, soaring, along the roads, hell bent on escaping from their tormentors. Cato wished they could really fly; if he could just push the car hard enough maybe that would do it – the wheels would lift off the tarmac and into the air and they would be free, free to go and live their lives alone and unaffected for ever.
'Cato, stop!'
Clove's horrified cry sent Cato's foot down to the brake faster than he'd expected. They both jerked forward as the wheels screeched to a halt.
'What?' he asked her, panicked. 'What, what is it?'
In answer, Clove raised her hand to point ahead of them. Just as behind, Cato could see a thin ray of light just peeping over the top of the horizon. Inwardly, he groaned and a hot flush ran from his head to his feet as be began desperately thinking of a way out.
'Where can we go?' he asked aloud.
'I don't know,' Clove whispered, nibbling at her fingernails.
'Shit, shit,' Cato muttered, tapping his own nails on the steering wheel.
They had come to a halt on a bridge about five miles out from New York. The countryside around them was eerily quiet, not even the hoots of an owl or scurry of a vole in the undergrowth could be heard. The bridge was a fairly old fashioned one; none of the modern metal of the inner city, no, this one was fully wooden, with a wide, flat handrail. The river running under the bridge was dark and foreboding, and, as Cato got out of the car, was at least forty feet below the bridge. The valley here was unusually deep and it made Cato shiver to look down into the oblivion.
'There's a little ledge down there,' he motioned to the right of the bridge, keeping an eye on the lights of the cars ahead of them. They were getting closer. 'If we ran…'
'If we ran,' Clove said, hoarsely, 'they'd catch us.'
'Not if we…'
'They'd catch us,' she repeated, running her hand through her tangled hair. 'And you know it.'
Breathing heavily, Cato paced up and down the bridge, running his hands through his hair. The lights were getting closer.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I've failed.'
'No.' Clove was out of the car and hurrying towards him. 'No. It's all my fault.'
'Don't say that,' he hissed fiercely, reaching out to draw her into him. She was shivering. 'It's not your fault. Never say that.'
They stood together, intertwined and whole, listening for the hum of the motor engines closing in on them. The hairs on Clove's bare arms were prickling against Cato's shirt as he held her to his chest, resting his cheek on hers. The world was quiet.
'No,' Clove whispered again, her words muffled into him. She struggled away from him. 'No! It's not going to happen. They're not going to take you away from me.'
'Clove?' Cato tried to grab her hand but she slipped out of his grasp like a silver fish in the moonlight. 'Clove? Where are you going?'
She was moving towards the handrail, her back straight, her hands falling by her sides. Frantically, Cato moved forwards to pull her back. From far away, he heard a voice yell 'Stop! Police!'
'Hold my hand,' she commanded and, automatically, Cato reached for her. She took his hand with an iron-like grip and propelled herself up and onto the flat wood of the handrail. Cato yelped and put his hands up to catch her, but she was steady.
'What are you doing?' he asked her, raspingly.
'Come up with me.' Clove gave a tug at his hand and Cato followed her up, his body acting in response to her touch, nothing more. His arms instantly went to around her waist, pulling her close, more to steady himself than anything else. He could see her clearly now, her dark eyes glinting in the half light of the moon, her freckles as mysterious to him as the stars.
'You're beautiful,' he murmured, brushing her hair away from her face.
'They're getting closer,' she said in reply. Then, 'Do you love me?'
'What?'
'Do you love me?' she asked again, urgency tugging at her tone. 'Answer me!'
Did he love her? That was the question. He loved the way she kissed him. He loved her eyes, her nose, the curve of her cheek under his palm. He loved the harshness in her laugh, the way she twisted in bed with her hands spread out before her. He loved her feistiness, her ferocity, her fever for life. But her? As herself? Was any one person able to love someone with so much to them?
Yes.
'I love you,' he muttered into her hair and when he said it, it was true.
At either ends of the bridge, the police cars had come to a grinding halt and, in slow motion, Cato could hear doors slamming and voices yelling. There was the click of bullets sliding into a revolver.
'We're going to be together,' Clove whispered to him. 'You and me. Forever.' Her words soothed him, wrapped him up in a gossamer duvet and held him there, drifting.
Then, Clove's hand around his middle was pulling and their bodies were tipping, their feet losing grip on the handrail. Cato wanted to yell out, tell her no, stop, no, not this, but his throat had closed up and he couldn't. The shouts of the police were very faint now, another world away. As Cato's feet fell from under him, he was flying, soaring, untouchable. Then they were falling, he and Clove, Clove and him. They were one person, one body, one being. Her breath was hot on his skin and her form pressing down on his own. When they hit the surface of the river, the water almost seemed to part for them, allowing them entry. Cato's neck was jerked back and he felt hot, blinding pain sweep through his bones as he sank, Clove still wrapped around him, into the cold of the water.
Forever, Cato thought to himself, before the river rose up to wrap itself around him and there was nothing left to think.
I suppose you want to know what happened next. People always do; it's an odd part of human nature. When children read 'happily ever after', they always ask 'what came after that?'. And so we continue, though out our lives, asking: what came after that?
No bodies were ever recovered. The police went back the morning after to try and scour the riverbanks for a sign, a symbol. A corpse. But nothing was ever found and the case had to be closed. Closed, at least, in the eyes of the law. For the people the tragic couple, who had floated out to sea wrapped in one another's arms never to be found again, had left behind, the story was far from over.
The Beauchamps sold up their plush mansion on the Hudson and moved to California. Afterwards, Enobaria would claim it was for the fresh air for her chest, but her voice, quavering when she declared it, betrayed her. They had left because the memories and cameras were too much to handle.
Andrew Maxwell was haunted, haunted by the things he had said and things he hadn't said. Alone in New York, his new family sitting quietly at the house in the country, he saw his eldest son everywhere he looked and, in him, he saw his first wife. But he didn't have long to brood. In the autumn of 1929, just as the Cato and Clove story was dying down, a new whirlwind hit New York, in the form of the Wall Street Crash, an event that would continue to shape world history for many decades to come. The Maxwell Corporation was hit hard by the Crash, and with it so was Andrew. As America was plunged into a Great Depression, he suffered one of his own. The business went under and Andrew was forced into an early retirement. He went back to the house in the country and sat in his library, staring out at the changing leaves on the oak tree outside his window. He barely noticed his wife leave, late into the winter, taking with her a trunk full of clothes and one of the good bedside lamps. He continued to be haunted.
Orwell took early retirement as well, after his services were no longer required in the Maxwell household. He left America and went to live with his sister in the mountains of Switzerland. The land there suited him. There were no roads, no skyscrapers, just open hill and lots of green. He sent postcards back to the younger Maxwell children, Connie and Thomas. He drank goat's milk and photographed the picture-perfect red houses with white paintwork. He tried to forget the past.
But there are some things that can never be forgotten, however hard you try. That summer was one of them; for Orwell, for Andrew and his children and the Beauchamps. It was branded into their memory and each felt a certain amount of guilt for the tragedy that had brought the summer to a close. And a tragedy it was, a beautiful tragedy. Cato and Clove, though gone, were still there, in the memories of those they had left behind. They were still young and beautiful, in those memories, and that was how they would stay.
Cato and Clove. Clove and Cato.
Forever.
As you may have guessed, that was the final chapter *wipes a tear from my eye*! All that's left to say is thank you, thank you, thank you! for sticking with me, reading this crap and leaving so many gorgeous little reviews for me that have sometimes been the only thing I've smiled at all day. It has meant the world to me, it honestly has. Without you I don't think I'd have finished this at all. I hope you've liked this story as much as I have liked writing it. Maybe leave me a review one last time? I love you all,
Isabelle xxx
