A Song Twice Over (67 page)

He loved her, in his fashion, and had always done so. A light, lilting, effervescent love which, no matter how easily blown about by every passing breeze, could enchant her still.

This morning she had refused it. She would refuse it now, she supposed, should he suddenly appear before her in a puff of golden smoke, in the manner of enchanters. But, nevertheless, what she truly longed for was to be with him now, walking arm-in-arm on the deck of a great ship, sailing into adventure. The Adeanes against the world. And of those Adeanes there had always been an inner wheel, ‘the two of us', a handsome father and daughter, made in the same mould, casting the same glittering shadow.

Her life had lacked colour since he had left it. The realization devastated her. And jumping to her feet, needing to do something, anything, whatever came first to hand, she reached for the wine bottle and found it empty.

‘Have you another?' he said.

She brought it and he opened it for her and filled her glass.

‘This Madeira is a potent brew,' he warned her. ‘You should take care.'

‘I always do,' she snapped.

‘Very well. It is simply part of one's training as an officer and a gentleman to give these warnings when drinking with women. Should they be disregarded one feels entitled, of course, to take what advantage one can and no complaints in the morning. So I have been brought up to believe.'

She was barely listening. Beginning to pace up and down the room, feeling caged and hounded and in the grip of a choking agitation, she could not rid herself of the image of her father, the memories of all that he had been to her until her faith in him had died and she had turned her back. And although that faith had withered far beyond recall she knew now that she would always miss it. Would never feel entirely whole or natural or safe again.

It was unfair.

‘You don't understand,' she said, her thoughts racing so fast that her words, unable to keep pace, seemed to be stumbling over each other. ‘You don't know what it's like to be part of a family. How could you – away at school and in the army –? You don't know how much I – how it was …'

‘How was it?'

She fought against her need to tell him. No. She must stop this and at once before she had stripped herself too near the bone, shown him too much. No. Even through the wine she knew she must calm herself. Must keep what she could of her dignity and her secrets. And it was the reminder of secrets, and her urgent need to distract his attention which made her say recklessly, ‘Let's talk about your father, not mine. How did he happen to lose his money?'

Raising his own glass to his lips and taking a reflective sip the subject did not appear to trouble him.

‘Oh – in a thoroughly commonplace manner. He gambled. He bought the favours of expensive women. He drank.'

‘And your mother?' Had she not been rather more than half-drunk she would not have dared to ask. But now, her head feeling incredibly light and somewhat higher than usual on her shoulders, she did not care for the consequences. Tame and tedious things in any case. And if he chose to make any revelations she hoped they would be shocking enough, terrible enough, to fill her mind with something that was not her father. Or Liam.

He looked at her for a moment with speculation.

‘Ah yes. My mother. You have evidently heard some talk about her. What is it?'

‘That she died …'

‘Quite so. But how?'

‘No one seems to know.' Was she running her head into a noose? Did it really matter? And then, as he got up and came towards her, she felt a whisper – only faint as yet, but persistent – of fear.

‘Shall I tell you?'

‘If you want to.'

He halted a yard away from her. ‘Come close to me, Cara,' he said. ‘I believe one must whisper these things.'

She came, against her will and her better judgement, like a rabbit to a snare she thought angrily, biting her lip. Yet she stood there, nevertheless, and allowed him, without any protest, to put his hands around her neck, the musky heat of him absorbing her as always into his atmosphere, her senses which had been unsteady to begin with, starting now to swim not altogether unpleasantly beyond her reach.

‘It was like this,' he said. ‘She met my father at the head of the manor stairs. He made some accusations which she denied. He put his hands around her throat to squeeze the truth from her – am I hurting you, Cara? No? Good. She continued to deny. He continued to squeeze. Don't let me get carried away by my performance, will you? Since I am his son, after all, and have his blood in me. A violent man. Always a wild look in his eye, like a horse just before it bolts. You know what I mean. My poor mother. She fell dead at his feet. So the parlourmaid said, at any rate.'

‘Christie.'

‘While the cook appears to have seen things quite otherwise. He took her by the shoulders to
shake
out the truth, not squeeze it – like this – and then, when he had it and could not bear it, he picked her up and threw her over the gallery rail down into the hall. A drop quite sufficient to kill anybody. According to cook. Although there was the groom, of course, who … Are you not enjoying this, Cara?'

‘No.
You
are.'

His hands slid down her arms and then, arriving at her wrists, lingered a moment and let her go.

‘Then come close to me again, since you can hardly stand up on your own it seems, and I'll whisper another version into your ear. Will you come?'

She came, entering his atmosphere like crossing a threshold, a different air to breathe, a slower pulse beat, a captivity her arms were suddenly too heavy, her body too lethargic to resist. An enchanter – this man – of a different kind to her father.

An enchanter nevertheless.

‘They were a turbulent pair,' he said. ‘You may not have found her beautiful for she was very much a Covington-Pym. And since I very closely resemble him you would obviously not have thought him handsome. They were cousins and had the same nature. Passionate. Uncontrolled. Or mad, according to who is telling the story. It is the nature of both the Goldsboroughs and the Covington-Pyms. They lost their heads easily. They were both prone to the kind of killing rage which drove you, not too long ago, to attack my poor boy Oliver. But what lit the spark for my parents was jealousy. It became the essence of their life together. Monumental battles. Followed by extravagant reconciliations. They needed their jealousy. It added a spice – a dash of flavour. It occurs to me that they may have found lovemaking difficult without it. And so they manufactured it. I am ready to swear that she was never unfaithful to him either by word or deed.'

‘And he?'

‘Oh – only casually as men are from time to time. Mainly to hurt her so she could hurt him back and they could have their orgy of reconciliation – hours, my dear, and days locked up together behind her bedroom door. A little habit which had always had the servants muttering that he might have killed her. Well – on the day she died it is quite true that they met at the head of the stairs. But what the parlourmaid did not remember was that she had chased him up from the stableyard – had been lying in wait for him there, it seems, to menace him with a dressage whip which he had really been obliged, poor chap, to take away from her. Somewhat by force, one imagines. So the groom's tale that he beat her to death has
that
much foundation. Yes, he did have his hands on her throat at one stage and he did shake her. Probably because he couldn't see well enough, at the time, to slap her with any accuracy, having so much blood in his eyes. Oh – did I forget? She'd cut him rather badly, down in the stables, with her whip. One gash across the forehead and another from eye to chin. The reason for it all seems scarcely important. She had been flirting, to tease him. Or he had been flirting. Or both. She broke free and aimed a blow at him. He ducked. She stumbled. She was wearing a riding-habit with a trailing skirt. I think it likely that she caught her foot in the hem. You may remember that the stairs at the manor are steep and were uncarpeted in our day. The hall is stone-flagged and was uncarpeted too. And possibly she was frailer than she seemed. Most of us tend to be. So – he may have been responsible for her death but he most certainly did not intend it. It broke him, of course. He vowed, then and there, to kill himself in order to join her, and no doubt she would have handed him the pistol to do it with had she been able. Regrettably he chose the very slow method of drink and all that goes with it. A sad story. Of which I have given you the most accurate version possible. Since I was present, of course, down below in the hall, home from school for the holidays, hiding and watching as children in violent households tend to do.'

‘How old were you?'

‘Fourteen.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘For me? Make love to me, then, and heal my scars.'

She stiffened and tried to pull away from him, finding his sudden change of subject coarse and offensive. For she had seen the figure of that fourteen-year-old boy very clearly, watching in the shadows, letting the storm break over his head, thinking perhaps that if this was the love of adult man for adult woman then he would be better off without it. Worrying, even, in case these same mad emotions might be lurking somewhere in him. She had been feeling sorry for that child and now, opening her eyes to the mocking, callous, entirely haughty and entirely passionless man before her she was aware only of her only folly. How could she even be sure that he had told her the truth.

‘How can you talk about
that
,' she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust, ‘when you've just been talking about your mother? And did it really scar you?' She doubted it.

‘Make love to me, and see.'

That
again. She had been making love to him for years. She told him so. Smiling, his arms still around her, his whole body around her somehow it seemed, he shook his head. ‘No, Cara. You have been lying in my bed making the movements I taught you and what you hope to be the right noises. You have been satisfying my desires and very nearly killing yourself sometimes in the effort to stop me satisfying yours. And why? For whom are you saving yourself now, my love? They have all gone. You haven't realized yet, have you, that you are quite free.'

She did not feel free. Crushed, perhaps. Bewildered. She felt his arms release her. ‘Stay close to me,' he said. She stayed, the whole length of their bodies touching, a weakness and a trembling in her legs and her stomach, from the wine she supposed, her wits with their razor edges feeling as if they had been lulled half to sleep, coaxed into a deep languor where only the things of the body, the natural things that would happen as they happened, counted.

No need to think. She had reasoned too deep and too often and what good had it done her? Why not suspend those painful, busy probings of the mind and, on this strange night, allow her senses to run amok? For even though he was not the enchanter she wanted she knew there was sorcery in him, of its own sombre kind, nevertheless. Why deny herself? For whom? At least it would be something.

She lifted her head and looked straight at him. ‘No,' she said. ‘I have no desires.' But her whole body was trembling now as he began to touch it, beginning, despite herself, to purr beneath his stroking hands like a cat basking in unexpected sunlight.

‘Use me,' he said, his breath in her ear. ‘If you think of yourself as an instrument of my pleasure then think of me as the instrument of yours. I ask you again, Cara – for whom are you saving yourself now?'

No one. He had not said ‘Who else wants you?' but the ugly words, having entered her mind, lodged there for a moment until the wine and the heat of his breath, the overwhelming release of her own pent-up desire, swept them away.

She had never imagined him in her bed. She had thought of Daniel there, far more often and more recently than had been good for her. Once she had thought of Luke. Never Christie. She did not think of him now. She gave herself, spreadeagled on her own narrow mattress with a frenzy in which her mind had no part at all. From which, indeed, her thinking self stood entirely apart, shaking its head and wringing its hands no doubt, in shame and anguish, had she cared to look. She did not. During four years of varied and prolonged sexual experiences with this man she had starved her body so thoroughly of pleasure that now its avidity, its curiosity, its sheer, honest appetite came as a shock to her, leaping and pouring out in so fierce an overflow that she seemed likely, she thought, to drown. Yet she rose to the surface, entwined like seaweed all around him, clinging with every hungry inch of skin until her first orgasm crashed over her, uncoiling her and leaving her gasping.

It must be the wine.

‘It's not over yet, Adeane. There's my share to think of now.'

Oh
that
. She was fully acquainted with his pleasure and now, her body still quivering with the memory of her own, she simply hoped it would not take long. Yet as his rhythms quickened she felt herself joining them, clinging and coiling again, a hard little knot of desire still left inside her for him to unravel, its strands suddenly breaking loose, shooting apart, threading her whole body fiercely with joy.

‘Well done, Adeane,' he said. ‘I always knew you for a sensuous woman. Tell me – will you ever call it “oh
that”
again?'

She slept for a while. The wine, of course. And woke in a panic, not knowing how long she had been asleep, nor what the time was, although she did not like the look of those pale grey patches behind her curtains. There was no wine in her now and here she was with a man in her bed and her women likely to arrive at any moment. Was that a factory hooter? Good God. Odette would be … But no. Odette would
not
be waking Liam and taking him to school, would
not
come hurrying in, a little out of breath, without knocking. No longer. Madge Percy though, who had a sharp eye and a busy tongue.