#mlletina | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sincerelybluevase · 3 years

Text

Careful, Madam Chapter Seven

A/N: Here it is, the final chapter! Thank everyone for being so patient with this one (the first chapter was published in June 2020, insane how time flies) and for the lovely comments; they mean a lot to me! For a gorgeous preview made by @thegirlisuedtobe, click here. Tagging @alice1nwond3rland, @need-not, @mlletina, @msmaryadmitrievna, @solattea, @halewynslady.

Maxim was the first to speak. “Steady, Mrs Danvers. You wouldn’t want to shoot me.”

Mrs Danvers did not waver. She held the gun steady. Not a muscle in her face moved so that she seemed hard and resolute to me, marble-made. “Let go of Mrs de Winter, sir.”

He released my arm with a theatrical motion, raising splayed hands in mock surrender.

“Come to me, Madam.”

I went so quickly I nearly stumbled. I wished to clutch her arm, to feel the reassuring solidness of her long lean limbs, but I was afraid of what might happen; I didn’t want to set off the gun by accident.

Maxim looked at us with hatred. His face had turned cold and masklike with it. “Now what?” he asked. “You’ll shoot me, Mrs Danvers?”

“I will if you force me, sir,” she said.

“And then what, Mrs Danvers? What happens then? Have you thought about that? Should you kill me, you will hang; the law won’t take pity on you for being a woman. They’ll string you up by that thin neck of yours until you are dead.”

“They won’t if they know what you are, sir.”

“And what am I?”

She glanced at me, at my reddening cheek. “A murderer and a wife-beater.”

He laughed coldly. “That’s no reason to shoot me, now is it, Mrs Danvers? I think you and I and the law can all agree on that.”

“It is if you provoked me, if you threatened your wife and unborn child, sir.”

The laughter petered out. Still he smiled, showing his sharp canines. “You’d have to aim well then, Mrs Danvers, and kill me with one shot, because if you leave me well enough to talk, you’ll be done for. Who do you think the police and lawmen will believe: me, a gentleman with an impeccable reputation, or you, a mad, old, sexually-frustrated maid with unnatural tendencies?”

I wished to speak so I could defend her, but fear held me in its grip, petrifying and silencing me.

Mrs Danvers set her jaw and tightened her grip around the gun. “I’m a good marksman, sir. If I aim to kill, I shall.”

“Perhaps,” Maxim jeered, “but are you certain? And are you absolutely certain that, even if you kill me, you won’t go to prison? They’re harsh places, prisons. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a cold, damp room, with only a strip of sky to remind you of what lies outside?”

Still Mrs Danvers held the gun steady, her joints seemingly locked into place. “Here’s what men like you don’t understand,” she said softly, “I gave the best years of my life to your first wife; I’m willing to lay down what years remain to me for your second.”

My love for her made a pain rise in my throat. I swallowed against the tears. I looked at Maxim, thinking he would refute her or curse at her. He did no such thing. Instead, he began to yawn, making a great show of it, his mouth opened so wide I could see the fillings in his molars. When he was done, his eyes watered. He brushed the tears away with a fingertip, then turned to me. “You shall stop this nonsense right now,” he said. He spoke as if I was a naughty child.

I shook my head. I could not speak.

A vein at his temple began to throb. I could see it jump around under the skin, writhing like a worm. “Oh, but you shall. You shall stay here, with me, and we shall forget this moment of madness. Mrs Danvers shall have to go, of course, no sane man would keep a housekeeper who pulled a gun on him, but I shan’t press charges. I’ll even give her a good reference. A woman with her qualities can work for any fine family in England. But you, my little darling, shall remain here, by my side, as my wife and the mother of my children.”

“No,” I whispered.

“No? What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I don’t want to stay.”

He laughed in disbelief. “You don’t want to stay? Do you understand what you’re saying? Before you met me, you had no friends or kin, money, no prospects. You were an old lady’s plaything, her little whipping boy. I raised you up out of darkness. I gave you a name, a house, a reputation to uphold. Without me you have nothing and you are no one, just a grubby little schoolgirl with bad nails and a name no one can spell. Do you hear me? You are nothing!”

“She won’t be nothing. She’ll be my mine,” Mrs Danvers said.

With a roar, Maxim lunged at her. She pulled the trigger, but he knocked the gun out of her hand. The shot went wild, the bullet damaging one of the plaster leaves on the ceiling, causing crumbs to rain down dryly. The gun fell to the floor, skidded, came to rest not a step away from me.

Maxim punched Mrs Danvers in the face, once, twice, thrice. Her head snapped back. She staggered. Blood poured down her mouth and chin. She made a soft choking sound, coughed. Drops of blood flew from between her lips.

“Stop!” I meant to scream it, but it came out as a whisper.

Again Maxim struck her. This time she stumbled and fell, her skirts billowing around her like black sails. He bent over her and continued to beat her. His fists came down on her face and throat again and again and again, dull slaps of flesh against flesh.

“Maxim! Maxim, stop! You’ll kill her!” I screamed. The sound carried, though for all the good it did, I might well have kept my tongue; Maxim continued to brutally, systematically beat Mrs Danvers. She tried to sit up to fend him off, but he pushed her down. Again she rose, again he beat her down.

As a child, I had witnessed our cat playing with a mouse. It would let it run, only to smack it down with its paw before it could get away. The mouse didn’t stand a chance, yet it persisted hopelessly, just as Mrs Danvers would persist in trying to sit up until she could rise no more.

There was only one thing to do. I bent down and took hold of the gun. It was still cool despite Mrs Danvers’ grip. I raised it and found it surprisingly heavy for its size; it almost slipped out of my clammy hand. With one eye closed I aimed the gun at Maxim, but I was shaking and dared not fire for fear of hurting Mrs Danvers.

I brought the gun to my temple instead. “Maxim, look at me,” I shouted. “I’ll kill myself! I’ll kill myself and your unborn child if you don’t stop!”

He looked over his shoulder. His face was spattered with blood, his lip curled into a snarl. He let go of Mrs Danvers’ dress, causing her to thud to the ground, and came to his feet. “Don’t!” he said. “Don’t you dare!” He stumbled to me, his hands outstretched to wrest the gun from me.

I pointed the gun at him, closed my eyes, and shot.

All of this happened many years ago. My life now is very different from the one I led at Manderley. I’ve said goodbye to England and now have no estate to call my home, no husband to lord over me. Here, my name means nothing, and my face, once plastered over every English newspaper, is just another face, easily forgotten. No one need know that I once was the second Mrs de Winter, the one who everyone knows because she killed her husband. An act in which she was justified, of course, since he had murdered his first wife and now wished to kill her, too, before putting a bullet through his own brain, but that never made the case any less sensational. Whenever I think of it – which, when I am honest, is seldom but still too often for my taste – I can’t help but smile wryly. After all, there is a cruel sort of irony to the whole affair; Maxim killed Rebecca to safeguard Manderley’s reputation, but her murder proved to be the first link in a chain of events that would lead to a nationwide scandal. If I close my eyes, I can still see the reporters pressed against the gates, pen and notepad in hand, clamouring to see me.

There are no reporters in my new life. They do not know where I am, and to the local ones I am of no interest. I live in a cool little cottage, painstakingly paid for with the money I earn with my drawing lessons; I have given away everything I inherited upon Maxim’s death, for I never desired his money even before it became tainted with murder and madness.

Every day is much the same, but that I don’t mind. There’s comfort in familiarity, safety in routine, and after all that we’ve lived through, Danny and I have a certain hankering for comfort. Besides, raising a child together provides plenty of challenges and excitement, we’ve found.

Dear Danny. She’s wonderfully patient with me. I fear I am not always easy to live with. For all my efforts, I’ve not been able to banish the past completely. It still inhabits and possesses a part of me, one that I can fight when awake but must succumb to in slumber, so that, at night, I walk the grounds of Manderley once more. In my dreams, the house and grounds have fallen victim to rot and ruin. The lawn has gone to seed, sickness has turned the chestnut tree into a bleached husk, and the rhododendrons have reared to the fantastic heights of fairy-tale briars. The house itself sags to the side, its walls pockmarked by sour rain, the windows dirty and broken.

But for all its neglect, it is not uninhabited. I do not talk of the birds and bats roosting in the rafters, nor of the mice living underneath the floorboards and the silverfish who slowly eat away the wallpaper.

The library, with its masculine smell of leather and smoke and newspaper ink, is his domain in death as it was in life. There, he paces up and down, up and down. All that pacing has worn the carpet to threads. Each night I must go to him. It does not matter that I am unwilling; my mind and feet betray me, and take me to him. He knows that I am coming and awaits me with impatience, smoking cigarettes in quick succession, littering the ground with ash and butts. His face, once so handsome in a peculiar, medieval way, is ruined by the shot that killed him. It turned his left eye to pulp and smashed the orbital bones to pieces so that the area around the eye is curiously dented.

There must have been no time for Maxim to realise my betrayal; the bullet bored itself into his brain, killing him instantly. The Maxim of my dreams, though, gives me an amused, cruel little smile. Then – just as my life has become routine, my dreams have, too, and so this next moment never varies – he opens his arms to me. I don’t want to, but I must step into his embrace. He pulls me close to him until my head rests against his chest, against the fabric of his tweed jacket turned sodden by blood and the jelly leaking from his burst eye.

“My little love,” he murmurs as he strokes my hair, his breath stinking of the grave, “you didn’t think you’d ever be free of me, now did you? I shall never let you go.”

It is then I wake, gasping and sobbing.

Danny aims to soothe me, kissing my face and folding her long arms around me. I cling to her so tightly it must hurt. She’s no longer as strong as she used to be. No one would be after what Maxim did to her. He damaged her left eye to the point of blindness. During the years, it has turned milky white. She has taken to wearing a velvet eyepatch over it to keep out the light, for even the flame of a candle upon her left eye can trigger a mighty headache. Even covered up it pains her, but she never complains.

She holds me well after the shaking has subsided, kissing my hair. I kiss her throat in return, her chin, her cool sweet mouth. I always hesitate when I reach the scars Maxim left on her face. He embossed her cheek with his signet ring, the M and W intertwined. Yet whenever I hesitate, she brings her mouth to my ear. “No need to be careful, Madam,” she whispers, and then I know.

I have someone in this world to call my own.

I have someone to love.

#my fanfic #danvich #rebecca #rebecca fanfic #rebecca das musical #one day i shall write a fic in which Maxim is actually like his musical counterpart and not an evil moustache-twirling psycho #but in this one he's a lot more like his book counterpart

16 notes · View notes