Artist Jennifer Silver has come to the picturesque, secluded Valley of the Storms in the French Pyrenees to meet with a young cousin who is about to enter the convent there -- only to discover that the young woman has died in a dreadful car accident. Or did she? Lies abound in this strange and frightening place, but seeking the truth could lead Jennifer to her own violent death.

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Thunder on the Right

Chapter One

Academic Overture

The Hôtel du Pimené, Gavarnie, takes its namefrom the great peak of the High Pyrenees inwhose shadow, at early morning, it lies. Beyondthe palisade of trees shading its front courtyardruns the road from Lourdes; behind the hotel andbelow it, in a gorge of the rock on which it is built,roars and tumbles the River Gave, on its wayfrom the high corrie of the Cirque to the slow,winding courses of the Low Pyrenees. Thedining-room windows give on to this little gorge,so that anyone sitting at table may look straightdown on to the damp slabs of the bridge thatleads to the skirts of the Pic du Pimené.

At one of these windows, on a blazing fifth ofJuly, sat Miss Jennifer Silver, aged twenty-two,eating an excellent lunch. This was not her firstvisit to France, and she was savoring that heady sense of rediscovery which that country wakesperpetually in her lovers. And the little diningroom, with its chattering cosmopolitan crowd, itsexotic smell of good food and wine, and the staggeringview from its windows, presented a cryquite astonishingly far from Oxford, which wasJennifer's home ... Perhaps, however, not such avery far cry after all; for, from the next table,where sat two middle-aged women, tweeded andbrogued in defiance of the lovely southern morning,came snatches of a conversation whichsmacked decidedly of the newer alchemy.

"My dear Miss Moon" -- a morsel of truite maison,exquisitely cooked, waved in admonition onthe end of a fork -- "gravity separation of lightand heavy constituents, as you know, is believedto be essential to the production of such banding.That shown by these particular rocks appears tobe of the rhythmic type, the small-scale rhythmictype."

"I quite agree with you, Miss Shell-Pratt." MissMoon dug into her trout with the dogged efficiencyand artistic appreciation of a bulldozer."Indeed, as Steinbascher and Blitzstein have it intheir admirable Einführing in die Ursprünge derMagmatiten durch Differenziationen, the troctolites... "

But here the waitress, a pretty dark-haired Bordelaisewithout a word of English, brought thecroquettes de ris de veau à la Parmentier, the pommes de terre sautées, and the petits pois en beurre, andJennifer, not unnaturally, missed the remainder offascinating exchange. She was making again thewonderful discovery that simple greed is one ofthe purest of human pleasures. The food on thejourney had been pleasant and adequate, but littlemore; this, she thought, helping down thesweetbreads with a mouthful of topaz-coloredwine, was a sufficiently promising start to a holidaysomewhat oddly conceived. . . . She rememberedGillian's letter in her pocket, and theslightest of frowns crossed her face. That couldwait: she had resolutely refused to worry duringthe ten days since she had left Oxford, and shewas not going to begin now that she would soonbe seeing Gillian herself.

But, all the same, as the meringue Chantilly succeededthe sweetbreads at her table, and the hypersthenegabbros succeeded the troctolites at thenext, her mind began, in spite of herself, to turnover the events which had led up to her arrivalthis morning in the little Pyrenean hotel.

Jennifer, whose father was the Bullen Professorof Music at Oxford, had lived most of her lifeat Cherry Close, the lovely old house whosehigh-walled garden backs on to St. Aldate's,right under the bells of Christ Church. She wasan only child, but any loneliness she might havefelt came to an end when she was seven, for thenher half-French cousin Gillian, who lived in Northumberland, came, on the sudden death ofher parents in one of the first air raids of the war,to live with the Silvers. She was with them for almostsix years, a welcome answer to Mrs. Silver'sproblem of finding what she would havecalled "a suitable companion" for Jennifer. Atthe end of the war Gillian married one JacquesLamartine, who had been stationed with theFree French near Oxford, and soon after left Englandbehind for the headier climate of Bordeaux,her husband's home.

So Jennifer at thirteen was once more alone atCherry Close. She attended, daily, a small expensiveprivate school near her home, and was sentfor a final year to an even more expensive finishingschool in Switzerland. This latter adventurebeyond the walls was the only one which Mrs.Silver, with her unswerving devotion to the standardsof a fading age, would have tolerated. Onewas "finished," one came home, one was broughtout, one was suitably married ... this had alwayshappened in Mrs. Silver's world and she hadnever thought beyond it. If Jennifer herself hadany ideas about her own future she never mentionedthem. She had always been a quiet child,with a poised reserve that her mother mistook forshyness, and a habit of accepting life as it came,happily and with a characteristic serenity thatMrs. Silver (herself voluble and highly strung)found insipid. Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almostcomplete misunderstanding.

Professor Silver knew his daughter rather better.It was he who at length insisted (emergingbriefly from a Bartokian abstraction to do so) thatsince she was coming home to live in Oxford shemight as well pursue some form of study. Mrs.Silver, abandoning her delightful -- and, sheknew, impossible -- dreams of drawing rooms,was brought finally to agree, finding some consolationin the fact that Jennifer chose to study artrather than one of the more unwomanly of thesciences.

So Jennifer came home again to attend artschool and live at Cherry Close. It was not to besupposed that those high walls would be left longunstormed, for Jennifer at eighteen was growingvery lovely indeed ...

Excerpted from Thunder on the Right by Mary Stewart
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