A Suitable Vengeance (11 page)

Within moments, Lynley was alone. A fresh breeze caught the edge of the tablecloth. He fingered the linen, moved a plate to one side, and regarded the ruins of the meal.

He had an obligation to see John Penellin after such a long absence. The estate manager would expect it of him. He would no doubt be waiting for him in the office, ready to go over the books and examine the accounts. Lynley dreaded their meeting. The dread had nothing to do with the possibility that Penellin might bring up Peter’s condition and Lynley’s own responsibility to do something about it. Nor did the dread reflect a lack of interest in the life of the estate. The true difficulty lay in what both concern and interest implied: a return, however brief, to Howenstow.

Lynley’s absence this time had been inordinately long, nearly six months. He was honest enough with himself to know what it was that he was avoiding by coming to Howenstow so seldom. It was exactly what he had been avoiding for so many years either by not coming at all or by bringing with him a troop of friends, as if life in Cornwall were a 1930 garden party with himself at the centre, laughing and talking and pouring champagne. This engagement weekend was no different in design from any trip he had made to Cornwall in the last fifteen years. He had merely used the excuse of surrounding Deborah and her father with familiar faces so that he himself would not have to meet alone the one face in his own life that he couldn’t bear to see. He hated that thought at the very same time as he knew that his stormy relationship with his mother somehow had to be laid to rest during this weekend.

He didn’t know how to do it. Every word she said—no matter how innocuous she intended it to be—merely served as a dredge, uprooting emotions he did not want to feel, producing memories he wanted to avoid, demanding actions he did not possess the humility or the courage to take. Pride was at issue between them, along with anger and guilt and the need to blame. Intellectually, he knew that his father would have died anyway. But he had never been able to accept that simple maxim. Far easier to believe that a person and not a disease had killed him. For one could blame a person. And he needed to blame.

Sighing, he pushed himself to his feet. From where he was on the lawn, he could see that the blinds in the estate office had been drawn against the afternoon sun. But he had no doubt John Penellin was waiting behind them, expecting him to act out the role of eighth Asherton Earl, no matter how little it was to his liking. He walked towards the house.

The estate office had been placed with an eye to its purpose. Situated on the ground floor across from the smoking room and abutting the billiard room, its location made it accessible to members of the household as well as to tenants come to pay their rent.

In no way did the room suggest ostentation. Green-edged hemp matting, rather than carpet, did duty as surface upon the floor. Paint, not panelling or paper, covered the walls upon which hung old estate photographs and maps. From a plain ceiling, iron chains supported two white-shaded light fixtures. Beneath them, simple pine shelves held decades of record books, a few atlases, half a dozen journals. The filing cabinets in the corner were oak, battered from generations of use, as were the desk and the swivel chair behind it. In this chair at the moment, however, sat not John Penellin, who conducted much of his business from the estate office. Instead a thin figure occupied his accustomed place, huddling as if cold, her cheek resting upon her palm.

As Lynley reached the open door, he saw that it was Nancy Cambrey in her father’s chair. She was playing restlessly with a container of pencils, and although her presence instead of her father’s gave Lynley the excuse he needed to be on his way and to put off his meeting with Penellin indefinitely, he found that he hesitated at the sight of the man’s daughter.

Nancy was very much changed. Her hair, once a brown streaked with gold that shimmered in the light, had lost most of its shine and all of its beauty. It hung drearily round her face without style, grazing the tops of her shoulders. Her skin, once blushing and smooth with a cast of freckles making an endearing bandit’s mask across nose and on cheeks, had become quite pallid. It looked thicker somehow, the way skin in a portrait looks if an artist adds an unnecessary layer of varnish and in doing so destroys the effect of youth and beauty he was trying to create. Everything about Nancy Cambrey suggested just that sort of destruction. She looked faded, used up, overwashed, overworn.

This extended to her clothes. A shapeless housedress replaced the trendy skirts, jerseys, and boots she once had worn. But even the dress was several sizes too large and it hung upon her loosely, much like a smock but without a smock’s style. It was too old to be a piece of modern fashion, and together with Nancy’s appearance, the dress made Lynley hesitate, made him frown. Although he was seven years her senior, he’d known Nancy Cambrey all of her life, liked her as well. The change was troubling.

She’d been pregnant. He knew that. There had been a forced marriage with Mick Cambrey from Nanrunnel. But that was the end of it, or so his mother’s letter had informed him. And then a few months later, he received the birth announcement from Nancy herself. He responded with a duty gift and thought nothing more about her. Until now, when he wondered if having a baby could have brought about such a change.

Another wish granted, he thought wryly, another distraction. He entered the office.

She was looking through a crack in the blinds that covered the bank of office windows. As she did so, she chewed on the knuckles of her right hand, something she obviously did habitually for they were red and raw, too raw to have arrived at that condition through housework.

Lynley said her name. She jumped to her feet, hands thrust behind her back. “You’ve come to see Dad,” she said. “I thought you might. After lunch. I thought—hoped—to catch you ahead of him. My lord.”

Lynley felt his customary rush of embarrassment at her final two words. It sometimes seemed that he had spent most of the last ten years of his life avoiding every situation in which he might have to hear someone say them.

“You’ve been waiting to see me? Not your father?”

“I have. Yes.” She moved from behind the desk and went to a ladder-back chair that stood beneath a wall map of the estate. Here she sat, her hands curled into tight balls in her lap.

At the end of the corridor, the outer door banged against the wall as someone shoved it open too recklessly. Footsteps sounded against the tiled floor. Nancy braced herself against the back of her chair, as if in the hope of hiding from whoever had come into the house. Instead of approaching the estate office, however, the footsteps turned left at the stillroom and faded on their way. Nancy exhaled in a nearly imperceptible sigh.

Lynley went to sit in her father’s chair. “It’s good to see you. I’m glad you came by.”

She moved her large grey eyes to the windows, speaking to them rather than to him. “I need to ask you something. It’s difficult for me. How to begin.”

“Have you been ill? You’ve got awfully thin, Nancy. The baby. Has it—” He was mortified to realise that he had no idea of the baby’s sex.

“No. Molly’s fine.” Still, she would not look at him. “But I’m eaten by worry.”

“What is it?”

“It’s why I’ve come. But…” Tears rose to her eyes without spilling over. Humiliation mottled her skin. “Dad mustn’t know. He can’t.”

“Then it’s between us, whatever we say.” Lynley fished out his handkerchief and passed it across the desk. She pressed it between her hands but did not use it, controlling the tears instead. “Are you at odds with your father?”

“Not I. Mick. Things’ve never been right between them. Because of the baby. And me. And how we married. But it’s worse now than before.”

“Is there some way I can help? Because if you don’t want me to intercede with your father, I’m not sure what else…” He let his voice drift off, waiting for her to complete the sentence. He saw her draw her body in, as if she were garnering courage before a wild leap into the abyss.

“You can help. Yes. With money.” She flinched involuntarily as she said the words but then went bravely on with the rest. “I’m still doing my bookkeeping in Penzance. And Nanrunnel. And I’m working nights at the Anchor and Rose. But it’s not been enough. The costs…”

“What sort of costs?”

“The newspaper, you see. Mick’s dad had heart surgery a year ago last winter—did you know?—and Mick’s been running the paper for him ever since. But he wants to update. He wants equipment. He couldn’t see how he’d be spending the rest of his life in Nanrunnel on a weekly paper with broken-down presses and manual typewriters. He has plans. Good plans. But it’s money. He spends it. There’s never enough.”

“I’d no idea Mick was running the
Spokesman
.”

“It’s not what he wanted. He only meant to be here a few months last winter. Just till his dad got back on his feet. But his dad didn’t recover as quick as they thought. And then I…”

Lynley could see the picture well enough. What had probably begun as a diversion for Mick Cambrey—a way to make the time at his father’s newspaper in Nanrunnel less boring and onerous—had evolved into a lifelong commitment to a wife and child in whom he no doubt had little more than a passing interest.

“We’re in the worst possible state,” Nancy was continuing. “He’s bought word processors. Two different printers. Equipment for home. Equipment for work. All sorts of things. But there’s not enough money. We’ve taken Gull Cottage and now the rent’s been raised. We can’t pay it. We’ve missed the last two months as it is, and if we lose the cottage”—she faltered but again drew herself together—“I don’t know what we’ll do.”

“Gull Cottage?” It was the last thing he had expected her to say. “Are you talking about Roderick Trenarrow’s old place in Nanrunnel?”

She smoothed the handkerchief out along the length of her leg, plucking at a loose thread on the
A
embroidered at one corner. “Mick and Dad never got on, did they? And we needed to move once the baby came. So Mick made arrangements with Dr. Trenarrow for us to take Gull Cottage.”

“And you find yourselves overextended.”

“We’re to pay each month. But these last two months, Mick hasn’t paid. Dr. Trenarrow’s phoned him, but Mick isn’t bothered a bit. He says money’s tight and they’ll talk about it when he gets back from London.”

“London?”

“A story he’s been working on there. The one he’s been waiting for, he says. To set him up as a journalist. The kind he wants to be. He thinks he can sell it as a free-lance piece the way he used to. Maybe even get a television documentary made. And then there’ll be money. But for now there’s nothing. I’m so afraid we’ll end up on the streets. Or living in the newspaper office. That tiny room in the back with a single cot. We can’t come back here. Dad wouldn’t have it.”

“I take it your father knows nothing about all this?”

“Oh no! If he knew…” She raised a hand to her mouth.

“Money’s not a problem, Nancy,” Lynley said. He was relieved, in fact, that it was only money she wanted from him and not an understanding little chat with her landlord. “I’ll lend you what you want. Take whatever time you need to pay me back. But I don’t understand why your father mustn’t know. Mick’s expenditures seem reasonable if he’s trying to modernise the paper. Any bank would—”

“She’ll not tell you everything,” John Penellin said grimly from the doorway. “Shame alone will stop her from telling it all. Shame, pure and simple. The best she’s got from Mick Cambrey.”

With a cry, Nancy jumped to her feet, body arched for flight. Lynley rose to intervene.

“Dad.” She reached out towards him. Voice and gesture both offered placation.

“Tell him the rest,” her father said. He advanced into the room, but he shut the door behind him to prevent Nancy’s escape. “Since you’ve aired half your dirty linen for his lordship, tell him the rest. You’ve asked for money, haven’t you? Then tell him the rest so he understands what kind of man’s on the receiving end of his investment.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Isn’t it?” Penellin looked at Lynley. “Mick Cambrey spends money on that newspaper, all right. There’s truth in that. But the rest he spends on his lady friends. And it’s Nancy’s own money, isn’t it, girl? Earned at her jobs. How many jobs, Nance? All the bookkeeping jobs in Penzance and Nanrunnel. And then every night at the Anchor and Rose. With little Molly in a basket on the floor of the pub kitchen because her father can’t be bothered away from his writing to see to her while Nancy works to support them all. Only it’s not his writing he’s taken up with, is it? It’s his women. How many are there now, Nance?”

“It isn’t true,” Nancy said. “That’s all in the past. It’s the newspaper costs, Dad. Nothing else.”

“Don’t make your shame worse by colouring it with a lie. Mick Cambrey’s no good. Never was. Never will be. Oh, perhaps good enough to get the clothes off an inexperienced girl and plant his baby inside her. But not good enough to do a thing about it without being forced. And look at yourself, Nance, a shining example of the man’s affection for you. Look at your clothes. Look at your face.”

“It’s not his fault.”

“See what he’s helped you become.”

“He doesn’t know I’m here. He’d never let me ask—”

“But he’ll take the money, won’t he? And never question how you came by it. Just as long as it meets his needs. And what are his needs this time, Nancy? Has he another lady? Perhaps two or three?”