The Silver Falcon (3 page)

‘He wanted to see him,' Isabel had heard herself excusing what they had done. ‘He fretted about the colt. Tim and I thought it would make him happy.'

‘I'm sure you had the best of motives,' Andrew said. ‘But you should have asked me. The excitement has been too much for him. I hate to say this –' he was looking at Isabel as he spoke – ‘but you may have hastened his end.'

Since she told Tim about Charles's illness they had drawn very close. He seemed to understand and to respect her grief. She transferred some of her dependence upon her dying husband to the young and healthy man who seemed so eager to support her. And he loved Charles; Isabel never doubted that. And because she trusted him and had learned to rely on him, she said something when Andrew had gone that she had hardly said to herself.

‘It was cruel of him to say that! He knows I wouldn't do anything to shorten Charles's time by a single second and yet he tried to blame me.' She looked up at him. ‘He's never liked me. He's hidden it in front of Charles but I can feel it!'

‘Don't take any notice,' Tim said. ‘He's just emotional himself and taking it out on you. Forget it. If you ask me, he's too involved with Charles to doctor him. You should have called in someone else. He was damned near breaking down when he came in today.'

She had sounded more bitter than she realized.

‘Call someone else – you don't know Charles! He and Andrew are like twins – he's always calling here. They play golf together, they go off to town together, they shut themselves up in the study for hours. I've always felt that Andrew criticized me. He makes me feel I've got to justify myself; whatever I do where Charles is concerned, it's somehow wrong. I'm too young, I don't understand, it's always done
this
way – Charles wouldn't like it! He goes on, sounding so damned reasonable and trying to be kind, when I feel underneath he hated it when Charles married me!'

‘Maybe,' Tim was soothing; ‘Maybe he's jealous.' He was more concerned with calming the overwrought emotions than with analysing Andrew Graham. ‘Maybe, but don't let it rile you. He's possessive of an old friend, and he can't save him; that probably means he's suffering a lot in his own way. And he isn't hostile to you, Isabel. I'm sure of that. He's a pedantic old bastard and a bit of a mule, but no more than that. Don't let anything he said upset you. You go up and lie down now. I'll call round after evening stables and see how you are. Charles will be all right. And you can believe this.' He lifted her face and made her look at him.

‘If he died tonight you did the right thing. He'd rather go thinking about the Falcon winning at Epsom than any other way. Go on upstairs now. I'll tell Rogers you're not to be disturbed.'

The next morning Charles had rallied; he seemed cheerful and alert, but talking tired him; Isabel sat beside him and read the newspapers aloud. Often he fell asleep, and then she laid the paper aside and just sat quietly with him. He didn't sleep that morning; his eyes were open and he moved in sudden restlessness. He touched her on the arm.

‘No more –' it was said with an effort. ‘Don't read any more.' She bent over him in alarm. His colour had changed; there was a blue shade round his mouth.

The dark eyes looked up at her, intelligence and determination still made them burn.

‘Get Andy, darling. Right away.'

She never stayed in the bedroom when he was being examined; Charles didn't like her watching. She waited downstairs, and it seemed as if Andrew Graham was upstairs with him for hours. She lit a cigarette and then another and wondered whether to call for Tim. She didn't want to see Andrew Graham alone. She waited close to the door and when she heard him coming down the stairs she stepped out into the hall. His face was solemn; he started when she came up to him.

‘Andrew? Is he worse –'

Andrew Graham nodded. She saw that his mouth was quivering slightly. As Tim had said, he was too emotionally involved with this particular patient. He must have seen countless patients die, many of them friends. But there was no hiding the extent of his personal grief for Charles Schriber.

‘I'm afraid so. You must be ready, Isabel. He'll go at any moment. I've given him something and he'll sleep. I've told the nurse to stay with him till he wakes and then call you. I'll be back this afternoon.' He walked on down the hall, his shoulders sagging, his head bent. Isabel hurried after him. There was something unbearably forlorn about him as he left the house. She caught him by the arm.

‘Andy – you've done everything you could – please – try not to be so upset.'

He shook his head. ‘I didn't do enough. If I'd known earlier maybe we could have operated.… You should have called me, Isabel. Whatever he said, you should have called me at the first sign.' He walked away from her, and slowly got into his car and drove away.

Isabel went back inside. Rogers the butler met her in the hall. He was a tall, dignified Negro, who had worked at Beaumont for twenty years, and he had taken some months to accept her after the marriage. She had won first his respect and then his loyalty. He would know, through the strange telegraph that operated among Negro servants, that his master was close to death.

‘Ah saw Doctor Graham come runnin', Mis Schriber – Ah hope nuthin's gone worse with Mista Schriber –'

‘I'm afraid he's dying, Rogers,' Isabel said. ‘Doctor Graham says it can be any time. But he's not in any pain.'

‘Is there anythin' yuh want – anythin' Ah can do for yuh?'

Isabel shook her head. ‘Nothing, thank you, Rogers. We just have to wait with him, that's all. Will you tell the staff for me – I'll be in the study if I'm wanted. Thank you.'

She closed the door, and went over to her husband's desk. There was a big leather address book, and she began to read through it under the letter S. Schriber, Richard. The address was in London. Isabel closed the book and sat still for some time.

Charles had refused to see his son. Andrew Graham had advised her against contacting him. He was never mentioned in the house; there wasn't a photograph of him or evidence of his existence anywhere at Beaumont. Nor of his mother. There was a half-length portrait of Charles in the dining room on one side of the fireplace. On the other was a superb Herring of hunters and a groom. It was obvious that it had replaced the companion portrait of Frances Schriber. She had only asked him about his first wife once. It was the day before their wedding, which was to take place at Beaumont. Her parents had been flown over at his expense, and her mother had expressed surprise that Isabel knew so little about her predecessor. ‘Hasn't he ever talked about her – how very odd. Why don't you ask him, dear? It seems so unnatural not to mention a first wife at all – it's not as if she ran off or anything. The poor thing only died.…'

And so Isabel had asked Charles about Frances. She could remember the incident very clearly, because it was the first time she had seen him angry, and with his anger there had been a sharp withdrawal from her. They were in the drawing room, all gold and white and banked with masses of yellow and white flowers. Charles had decided to get married in his own home, rather than the Episcopalian church, and to throw the house open for a huge reception afterwards.

‘Tell me something, darling,' Isabel had asked him. ‘Were you unhappy with Frances? You never mention her.'

He had stiffened; his arm had been round her shoulders and they were standing together looking at the setting for the ceremony that was to unite them for life. His arm had slipped away.

‘There's nothing to mention,' he said. ‘Why ask about her tonight – it's not exactly appropriate before our wedding.'

Isabel persisted. ‘Yes it is. I'm just about to take her place. I'd like to know something about her. If you were unhappy with her, then I want to know what she did wrong. It might be a help to me.'

‘She did everything wrong,' he said abruptly. ‘And you've got nothing to learn from her. I don't know why the hell you suddenly turn curious. You've never talked about her before.'

‘I didn't want to pry,' Isabel said. ‘But there were hints in the newspapers about a tragic death. I hoped you'd tell me yourself.'

There had been widespread coverage of their engagement. Not all the comments had been kind. There were snide references to the difference in their ages. And one New York columnist had used exactly those words about the first Mrs Schriber. A tragic death. ‘How did she die?' Isabel asked. He had stepped back from her, and there was an expression on his face that shocked her. Not just angry, but cold and hostile, as if she had stepped over a forbidden line.

‘She killed herself,' he said. ‘It was the last thing she could do to try and wreck my life. So now you know, and don't ever ask me about her again. I hope your curiosity is satisfied.' He had turned and walked out of the room. When he came to her room before dinner he brought her a diamond heart-shaped pendant on a platinum chain.

‘My wedding present,' he had said, and taken her in his arms. It was also his way of apologizing. Isabel felt such a sense of guilt for having opened an old wound that she had never mentioned his first wife again.

He had been equally reticent about his son. A trouble from the start. No damned good for anything. There had been a paternity suit in New York, with an internationally famous model claiming that Richard Schriber was the father of her baby daughter, which Isabel remembered reading about, before she ever came to Beaumont. The suit had been dismissed, but it exposed an unattractive lifestyle in which money and sex played the main parts. Richard was a disappointment, and a waster. But he was still Charles Schriber's only son.

Isabel was also an only child; her circumstances couldn't have been less similar, except that her parents were disappointed in her, and in their way, equally distant. Her father was a remote, but pleasant man, so immersed in his academic life that he scarcely noticed his daughter; her mother was equally absorbed by the university, its politics, its staff and its students. She had more time to spare for some shy first-year student than for Isabel. Intellectually she had been their inferior; intelligent without being academic, she was less interesting to her parents than other people's clever children. She had grown up shy, but independent, sensing that she was tolerated rather than loved. Even her first love affair, with a young don in her father's college, had gone unnoticed by either of them. They had seen her married to Charles, whom they didn't pretend to understand, and hurried back to Oxford to live their own lives. An occasional duty letter and a present at Christmas was all the contact Isabel had had with them since. And yet if she had been ignored in a time of crisis, much less mortal illness, she could imagine her own sense of personal hurt. It was easy for Andrew Graham, who obviously disliked the younger man, to dismiss Richard Schriber as having no right to know about his father's illness.

Less understandable but excusable for Charles himself to reject him; Isabel knew him well enough to suspect that pride could play a major role in his decision not to see his son. There was no possible excuse for her to listen to either of them and deprive Charles's son of the chance to make peace with his father before he died.

She picked up the telephone and sent the cable to the London address. Very short and direct. ‘Your father is dying. Please come immediately. Your stepmother, Isabel.'

She decided not to tell anyone, not even Tim Ryan, what she had done. The hours passed; Andrew Graham came again. They stood by Charles's bed and the nurse reported that he hadn't woken since the morning. Andrew didn't disturb him.

‘He's sleeping peacefully,' he said. ‘There's nothing to be gained by rousing him. This may be the way he'll go.' He went downstairs and Isabel took over the nurse's vigil. She sent a message to Tim Ryan not to come up that night. She wanted to be alone with Charles.

She had decided to leave England after her second love affair. Her father cultivated writers. It was one of his friends, a self-important intellectual nearing forty, who persuaded Isabel at twenty-two, that what she needed to make life interesting was a mature lover like himself. The relationship had been as bogus as the writer's books. Isabel had gone to America, less to escape than to find some direction in her life. She had worked in New York for six months and then drifted southwards with a girl she had met. The job as a temporary secretary to Charles Schriber came through an agency in Freemont.

She had never seen a stud before; the thriving business side was fascinating enough, but from the beginning her employer had involved her with the horses. Isabel hadn't learned to ride as a child; her parents despised the purely physical activities and had no rapport with animals. It was Charles's suggestion that she should learn, and one of his lads was given the job of teaching her. She had worked very hard for him in the first weeks, but it didn't seem to matter how many hours she stayed in the office, because he took her with him round the stud, came to watch her riding lessons, criticized and praised her when she began to make real progress and inexorably involved her with every aspect of his horses. Isabel discovered two things about herself in those first weeks at Beaumont. She was physically brave and she was more at home in the new world of men and horses than she had ever been in the cloisters of Oxford.

People seemed to like her; she responded to the friendliness of the staff at the stud. She wasn't sure when Charles's courtship actually began. She was invited to sit in with Tim and Geoffrey Oliver, who managed the stud, in the evening drinking session, and found herself playing hostess to his friends. There was no suggestion that he was fatherly towards her; no greater contrast to her own desiccated parent could be imagined than the dynamic, powerful, older man, with his exuberant masculinity. When he asked her to marry him she had been at Beaumont for less than three months. For a man of such personal pride that it bordered on arrogance, his proposal had been touching. If she could accept someone so much older, and trust him to make her happy, he would spend the rest of his life in doing exactly that. When he kissed her, the two men who had come and gone in her life were less substantial than shadows. She loved him and she felt in the most poignant way that she had found her home.