Dorothy Eden (27 page)

“We’ve come across some amazingly interesting stuff,” Lionel said in his courteous manner. “I should think some of the documents haven’t been looked at for a couple of centuries. Hetty has quite a talent for this sort of thing.”

“Why should an American be so interested in the history of an English family?” Hugo asked suspiciously.

“It’s my family now, Hugo,” Hetty replied. She looked at him steadily. “Whether I regret the fact or not.”

“Of course you regret it,” Hugo exclaimed loudly. “A pretty young thing like you stuck with this spectre who makes the servants scream in fright.”

Lady Flora sighed. “You will persist in being melodramatic. It would be more to the point if you inspected the repairs Hetty has already had done. Have you ever expressed your gratitude?”

Now the tyrannical blue eye was fixed on Lady Flora.

“What for? She loves the house, she says, so isn’t it a privilege that she has such a satisfying way of spending her dollars.”

Kitty leaned forward indignantly. “Hugo, you really are the end. Boorish and intolerable. If no one else will tell you that, I will. You can’t go on punishing everyone for your misfortune. We all have a limit to our patience. Lionel and I will soon be leaving here, thank goodness, but the others have to stay. Unless Hetty decides to go back to America, of course. I, for one, wouldn’t blame her if she did.”

Did Hugo look startled? He turned to look at Hetty, showing the undamaged side of his face, the clean handsome profile that was still profoundly exciting.

“But she won’t go,” murmured Julia, almost inaudibly. “Will you, Hetty?”

“No, I won’t. I have no one but Uncle Jonas there. Here I have my husband and the house, and all the things we’re planning to do.”

Hugo swallowed the remainder of his wine and beckoned to Bates to refill his glass. The dark flush was in his cheeks again.

“Did you say your husband?”

“That’s what I said.”

It seemed to Hetty, suddenly, that the brightness in the blazing blue eye could have been from tears. Hugo crying! There was a constriction in her breast. She wondered if he sometimes shed tears sitting in his room alone. She had never before thought of that.

It was the morning after this dinner-table conversation that Hetty came on Julia in Hugo’s and her bedroom, bending over her private desk. She knew that Hugo had gone downstairs, and she had slipped up to see that the room had been tidied for his return. She was thinking of the remark he had made about the servants leaving dust. An unfair remark, but the complaint ought to be checked.

And there was Julia caught redhanded.

“What are you doing?” Hetty asked sharply.

Julia had hastily closed the desk and stepped backwards.

“I was looking for the bill of sale for the filly we bought at Newmarket.”

“In my desk? What would it be doing there?”

“Oh, goodness, I’m sorry. I thought this was Hugo’s desk.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, I did. I had just begun to look. I’ve scarcely touched anything.”

“Don’t you think the library would be a more appropriate place to search? That’s where Hugo keeps his business papers, as you must know.”

Julia raised alarmed eyes.

“Yes, I did know, but I couldn’t find anything there. Since Hugo spends so much time in this room I thought he had probably moved his papers. I do apologise, Hetty. I’m not entirely rational since the horses have begun to leave here.”

Then she was gone before Hetty could make any comment about her being irrational, or very shrewd and calculating. What had Julia really been looking for?

She checked her desk to see what papers or letters were immediately visible. Uncle Jonas’s letters, some from the bank, the one from the American Embassy about the unidentified survivor from the
Lusitania,
and the one Mrs Crampton had written a long time ago enquiring for Hetty Brown. Also, of course, Hugo’s brief and uninformative letters from France. Nothing incriminating, surely. But no one in her position should keep old letters. They might eventually provide the missing clue to a mystery.

Was Julia looking for the answer to what she imagined was a mystery?

The Lord and Taylor letter about the green dress? Did that say anything that could be regarded as suspicious? Or did Julia think there might be love letters from Lionel? Was she looking for some damning evidence to produce to Hugo? She was a mean devious woman and Hetty believed her capable of anything.

The day the last of the horses were led away Hugo got very drunk, and fell down the stairs, crashing like a felled tree. Astonishingly he was not seriously hurt, but he was shaken and his temper not improved. Bates and Hetty helped him upright and got him to a chair where he sat glowering, waiting for the glass of brandy he had ordered Bates to bring. He refused to have a doctor sent for.

“A pity I didn’t break my neck,” he said.

Hetty, badly shocked herself from fright, lost her patience and exclaimed, “Oh, for heavens sake, I’m sick of all this self-pity. If you won’t have a doctor and only intend to sit here getting drunker, I’ll leave you to it. The boys in the hospital need me more than you do. Perhaps Julia will be kind enough to come and hold your hand.”

It seemed that this was exactly what did happen. When Hetty returned from the hospital, tired and depressed, but no longer angry, she was told that Julia had sat with Hugo for an hour, sometimes weeping, sometimes trying to hearten him. Later she had helped him upstairs.

All the things his wife should have done.

He didn’t come down to dinner that night, and nobody had any new suggestions about what could be done to revive his old cheerful spirit.

“The war is terrible!” Kitty suddenly exclaimed. “If my son ever has to fight in a war like this I’d rather he didn’t grow up. You’re lucky after all, Hetty, not having a son.”

“You really believe that?” Hetty said sadly. She knew now that she never would have a son or a daughter. She was just to be a figurehead, mouldering in company with the old house, for the rest of her life.

Clemency, Clemency, is this your revenge?

“You can share Freddie with us,” Lionel said. But suddenly he seemed too mild, too bland. “When we move we won’t be too far away. Freddie will have his own notions about seeing you.”

“All this Hector and Achilles business,” Kitty grumbled. “At his age he should be interested in Jack and the Beanstalk and things like that.”

“No, I don’t think fairy stories are for Freddie,” Hetty said. “He’s too precocious. Actually, I had been thinking of trying him with Charles Dickens. Do you mind, Kitty?”

“Don’t ask me, ask his father. He’s the one with the literary tastes.”

“Splendid idea,” said Lionel. “We may get a budding young Oliver Twist in the house, of course. But it will liven the place up.”

The experiment was a great success. Freddie listened with rapt attention to the adventures of David Copperfield, begging Hetty not to stop reading. Now that the afternoons were drawing in they made an assignation in the winter drawing room at five o’clock. It was quiet there and they were undisturbed. At least Hetty had thought they were undisturbed until the afternoon she heard a slight sound at the other end of the room, and turned to see the door softly closing behind a tall figure.

“Is that you, Lionel?”

“It isn’t Daddy,” said Freddie. “It’s Uncle Hugo.”

“Uncle Hugo!”

“He comes every afternoon to listen. He sits in that chair where you can’t see him.”

“But why doesn’t he say he’s there?”

“I expect he likes to be invisible,” Freddie said sedately. “Go on with the story, Hetty. You’re wasting time.”

After a lot of thought Hetty decided to say nothing to Hugo about having discovered his presence at the reading sessions. All she did was raise her voice a little so that it would be clearly audible to the listener at the back of the room. The sessions took on significance. Freddie had always been a most rewarding audience, but now she read with an undercurrent of excitement. She found that she liked Hugo being there.

A
UTUMN WAS MAKING ITSELF
felt, with early storms and a sharp drop in the temperature. Leaves began to fall. The wind sighed and moaned round the old house, with ghostly echoes of a thousand past years.

Hetty was finding the grey room chilly and sad. It reminded her too much of the first days of her arrival at Loburn in a state of shock, distress and disorientation. The wind in the trees was like waves breaking. Sometimes it rained with a sound of icy water being flung against the windows. She would wake from a dream, cold and rigid, and full of apprehension. It was then that she thought Clemency stood at the foot of the bed watching her silently. Clemency had never been silent in her lifetime, so how could she stand so immobile now? She must deeply hate Hetty for the warm blood in her veins, the ability to laugh, talk, cry, love…

Half awake and in the lingering throes of nightmare, Hetty wondered if she might be going a little mad. The year had been such an enormous strain. She was so weary of keeping her own counsel, and unbearably lonely.

But you can’t turn back, can you, Hetty? There’s no turning back.
Clemency’s voice was echoing from the nightmare, and a moment later a nudging at her side made her sit upright, screaming. Clemency was there. She was getting into bed with her!

A cold hand on her shoulder pushed her back on to the pillow.

“Stop that noise. I’m not a ghost.” Hugo’s voice. “I’m coming in with you. Do you mind?”

“N-no.” She whimpered with suppressed sobs. “Hugo, you scared me. Put the light on.”

“No. No light.”

Of course, there was his distorted face, his maimed body, both more acceptable in the dark. Or so he must think. But feeling his heavy body forcing its way between the sheets beside her, and knowing by his breath on her cheek that the crooked mouth was inches from her own, she began to shake uncontrollably.

“Don’t cringe! For God’s sake, don’t cringe from me!”

“I’m—not.”

“Then kiss me.”

The angry autocratic voice was turning her into a puppet. She moved towards him, making herself feel for his lips.

This is what you have to do, Hetty.
Clemency again.
This is part of your debt to me …

She thought she would shudder again when their flesh touched, but he lay so unexpectedly still, letting her lips nudge and caress his, that the sensation lost its eeriness and became rather pleasant. She kissed his unmarked cheek, and then, with temerity, let her lips touch the wrinkled and fading scar, finding to her own surprise that she felt no revulsion.

His arms tightened round her. In the darkness, she couldn’t see whether his good eye, the one that blazed such anger and bitterness, was open or shut. She explored, and felt the bristling eyebrows, the thick soft eyelashes. Gently, a feeling of sensuousness spreading through her, she kissed the closed eyelid, and heard his breath go out in a long sigh.

She remembered fleetingly their frenzied, tense, almost impersonal, love-making so long ago, and realised that the slow stirring in her body, the quiet growing rapture, and his own trembling, naked against her, were utterly different. He was being so disciplined. So unexpectedly thoughtful, waiting for her, waiting to be certain that she was not reluctant or disgusted. And she had thought him impotent. She gave a little gasp of laughter.

“All right?” he whispered.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”

“You didn’t think it would be all right?”

“I want to feel your leg.” Her fingers found and dwelt on the roughened skin of the stump. “There. Now I know all about you. You haven’t any more secrets.”

He pressed hard against her, crushing her in his grip.

“I’ve been wanting you for days.”

“You never told me.”

His voice was gruff. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to bear me.

“Hugo, oh, you fool. All this time wasted.” She spread her legs. Her voice came deep and sensuous. “And what on earth are we waiting for now?”

In the dawn, with the room lightening, Hugo stirred. Hetty had scarcely slept, although she had had half-dreams that Clemency, watching them from the end of the bed, wasn’t a malevolent ghost after all.

But with the daylight some of Hugo’s uncertainties had returned. He moved away from Hetty, saying that he didn’t suppose she particularly enjoyed the sight of him.

“Actually,” she said thoughtfully, raising herself on her elbow to trace the scar on his cheek with her fingertip, “I think you look rather distinguished. I’ve thought so for some time. But I didn’t want to pander to your vanity by telling you. You used to be a very vain man.”

“I know. An arrogant sod.”

“I like you better the way you are now. With your honourable wounds. And this subject is now closed. It’s never to be raised again.”

“Remarkable girl,” he murmured, drawing her down beside him.

“But I think you’d better go back to your room if you don’t want the servants talking. Effie will be here with my morning tea tray shortly.”

“Dammit, let them talk. You’re my wife.”

Hetty was suddenly uncertain herself.

“Hugo, I can’t make up to you for your horses, not being able to hunt, all the things you’re deprived of.”

“Can’t you?”

“Well, can I?”

“You might try. I always did admire you enormously, you know.”

“Admire?”

“I’m not one for pretty speeches.”

“But you loved Julia. Is that what you’re telling me?

“A long time ago. She had a marvellous seat on a horse. But now she’s got a bit shrewish. And I look at you.”

Hetty’s voice roughened.

“Who told you that you couldn’t make pretty speeches? Anyway, if we’re being frank I ought to tell you I thought I was falling in love with Lionel.”

“You wouldn’t have for long. He’s a nice chap but a featherweight.” Hugo lifted his head off the pillow, so that she could see the strong thick column of his neck. “A woman like you needs a man to dominate her a bit. I knew that when I first met you in New York.”

The warning finger touched her. Was she never going to be able to relax?