A Suitable Vengeance (13 page)

“Kill…you…” She was sobbing for breath. She aimed an ineffective blow at his face, attempted to smash her knee into his groin.

He filled his hand with her short, wet hair, hauled her head back sharply, and punched her. The blow and those that followed it resounded hollowly against the cliff. In defence, she lashed out at him, succeeding in getting her hands round his throat. Her fingers dug into his knotted veins and twisted. He ripped her hands away, catching her arms once again. But she was too quick for him this time. She turned her head and sank her teeth into the side of his neck.

“Jesus!” Brooke released her, stumbled back up onto the beach and sank into the sand. He held his hand to the spot where Sidney had bitten him. When he brought his hand away, it showed red with his blood.

Freed, Sidney struggled out of the water. Her dress hung on her body like a sodden second skin. She was coughing, wiping at her cheeks and her eyes. Her strength was spent.

It was then that Brooke moved. With a ragged curse, he leaped to his feet, grabbed her, and threw her to the ground. He straddled her body. He filled his fist with sand and ground it into her hair and across her face. On the rock above, Peter and Sasha watched curiously.

Sidney squirmed beneath him, coughing, crying, trying ineffectually to push him away.

“You want physical,” he grunted, pressing one arm down against her neck. “You really want physical. Let’s have it, hmm?”

He fumbled with his trousers. He began to tear at her clothes.

“Simon!” Deborah cried. She turned to St. James. She said nothing else.

St. James understood why. He was incapable of movement. Enraged. Unafraid. But most of all crippled.

“It’s the cliff,” he said. “Helen. For the love of God. I can’t manage the cliff.”

CHAPTER

7

L
ady Helen cast only one look at St. James before she reached for Deborah’s arm.

“Hurry!”

Deborah didn’t move. She stood with her eyes fixed powerlessly on St. James’ face. When he began to turn from them both, she put out her hand as if she would touch him.

“Deborah!” Lady Helen grabbed Deborah’s camera, dropped it to the ground. “There’s no time. Hurry!”

“But—”

“Now!”

The panicked words spurred Deborah to action. She ran with Lady Helen for the path. They began the steep descent to the cove, mindless of the dirt and the dust that rose round them like smoke.

Beneath them on the sand, Sidney fought off Justin Brooke with the kind of renewed strength that is born of terror. But he was getting the better of her, and his previous fury was fast developing into sexual arousal and sadistic pleasure. Clearly, in his mind, Sidney was about to get what she had wanted all along.

Lady Helen and Deborah reached him simultaneously. He was a good-sized man but no match for the two of them. Especially since Lady Helen was driven by a fair amount of rage herself. They threw themselves upon him, and their confrontation was over in less than a minute, leaving Brooke splayed out on the ground, panting for breath and groaning from several furious kicks to his kidneys. Sidney, weeping, dragged herself away from him. She cursed and pulled at her shredded dress.

“Whoa. Oh, wow,” Peter Lynley murmured. He took a new position with his head pillowed on Sasha’s stomach. “Some rescue. Huh, Sash? Just when things were getting good.”

Lady Helen flung her head up. She was out of breath. She was streaked with dirt. Her entire body was trembling so badly she wasn’t sure if she would be able to walk.

“What’s the matter with you, Peter?” she whispered hoarsely. “What’s happened to you? This is Sidney.
Sidney!
”

Peter laughed. Sasha smiled. They settled themselves more comfortably to enjoy the sun.

Lady Helen listened at the heavy panels of St. James’ bedroom door, hearing nothing. She wasn’t quite certain what she had expected from him. Anything beyond brooding solitude would have been out of character, and St. James was not a man who generally acted out of character. He wasn’t doing so now. The stillness behind the door was so complete that had she not seen him to this very room two hours before, Lady Helen would have sworn it was unoccupied. But she knew he was in there, damning himself to isolation.

Well, she thought, he’s had enough time to flagellate himself. Time to rout him out.

She raised her hand to knock, but before she could do so, Cotter opened the door, saw her, and stepped into the corridor. He gave a quick, backward glance into the room—Lady Helen could see that the curtains had been drawn—and shut the door behind him. He folded his arms across his chest.

Had she been given to mythological allusions, Lady Helen would have dubbed Cotter Cerberus then and there. Since this was not her bent, she merely squared her shoulders and promised herself that St. James would not avoid her by posting Cotter to guard the gates.

“He’s up by now, isn’t he?” She spoke casually, an enquiry from a friend, deliberately overlooking the fact that the room’s darkness indicated St. James was not up at all and had no intention of getting up any time soon. “Tommy has a Nanrunnel adventure planned for us tonight. Simon won’t want to miss it.”

Cotter tightened his arms. “He asked me to make ’is excuses. Bit of pain this afternoon. The ’eadaches. You know what it’s like.”

“No!”

Cotter blinked. Taking his arm, Lady Helen pulled him away from the door, across the corridor to a line of quarry windows which overlooked the pantry court. “Cotter, please. Don’t let him do this.”

“Lady Helen, we got to…” Cotter paused. His patient manner of address indicated that he wished to reason with her. Lady Helen wanted none of that.

“You know what happened, don’t you?”

Cotter avoided answering by taking a handkerchief from his pocket, blowing his nose, and then studying the cobblestones and fountain in the courtyard below.

“Cotter,” Lady Helen insisted. “You do know what happened?”

“I do. From Deb.”

“Then you know he can’t be allowed to brood any longer.”

“But ’is orders were—”

“Damn his orders to hell. A thousand and one times you’ve ignored them and done exactly as you please if it’s for his own good. And you know this is for his own good now.” Lady Helen paused to consider a plan he’d accept. “So. You’re wanted in the drawing room. Everyone’s meeting there for sherry. You haven’t seen me the entire afternoon, so you weren’t here to stop me from barging in on Mr. St. James and taking charge of him after my own fashion. All right?”

Although no smile touched Cotter’s lips, his nod signalled approval. “Right.”

Lady Helen watched him walk off in the direction of the main body of the house before she returned to the door and entered the room. She could see St. James’ form on the bed, but he stirred when she closed the door so she knew he wasn’t asleep.

“Simon, darling,” she announced, “if you’ll pardon the ghastly use of alliteration, we’re to have our collective cultural consciousness raised with a Nanrunnel adventure tonight. God knows we’ll have to fortify ourselves with seven or eight stiff sherries—
can
a sherry be stiff?—if we’re going to survive. I think Tommy and Deborah are well ahead of us in their drinking, so you’ll have to be quick if we’re ever to catch up. What will you wear?”

She walked across the room as she was speaking, going to the windows to pull back the curtains. She arranged them neatly—more to stall for time than to see to their proper hanging—and when she could find no reason to continue fussing with them, she turned to the bed to find St. James observing her. He looked amused.

“You’re so obvious, Helen.”

She sighed in relief. Pitying himself had never really been the question, of course. Hating himself was more likely. But she saw even that may have spent itself after their moments alone on the cliff when Deborah had taken Sidney back to the house.

Would Brooke have killed her or just raped her
, St. James had demanded,
while I watched from up here like a useless voyeur? Quite safe, uninvolved. No risk incurred, right? It sounds like my whole life
.

There had been no anger contained in his words, only humiliation, which was infinitely worse.

She had shouted at him.
No one cares about it! No one ever has but you!

She spoke only the truth, but that truth did nothing to mitigate the fact that his own caring about it so unforgivingly was a permanent scar on the fragile surface of his self-esteem.

“What is it?” he was asking her now. “A darts tournament at the Anchor and Rose?”

“No. Something better. A sure-to-be-dreadful performance of
Much Ado About Nothing
, put on by the village players on the grounds of the primary school. In fact, it’s a special performance tonight in honour of Tommy’s engagement. Or so, according to Daze, the rector said when he came to call today, complimentary tickets in hand.”

“Isn’t that the same group—”

“Who did
The Importance of Being Earnest
two summers ago? Darling Simon, yes. The very same.”

“Lord. How could this current production match Nanrunnel’s gallant bow to Oscar Wilde? The Reverend Mr. Sweeney waxing eloquent as Algernon with cucumber sandwiches sticking to the roof of his mouth. Not to mention the muffins.”

“Then what do you say to Mr. Sweeney as Benedick?”

“Only a fool would pass that up.” St. James reached for his crutches, swung himself to his feet, balanced, and adjusted his long dressing gown.

Lady Helen averted her eyes as he did so, using as an excuse the need to pick up three rose petals which had fallen from an arrangement that sat on the shelf of a cheveret to one side of the window. They felt like small pieces of down-covered satin against her palm. She looked for a rubbish basket and thus circumvented an open acknowledgement of St. James’ primary vanity, a need to hide his bad leg in an attempt to appear as normal as possible.

“Has anyone seen Tommy?”

Lady Helen read the meaning underlying St. James’ question. “He doesn’t know what happened. We’ve managed to avoid him.”

“Deborah’s managed as well?”

“She’s been with Sidney. She saw to her bath, got her to lie down, took her some tea.” She gave a brief, humourless laugh. “The tea was my profound contribution. I’m not sure what effect it was supposed to have.”

“What about Brooke?”

“Can we be so lucky as to hope he’s taken himself back to London?”

“I doubt it. Don’t you?”

“Rather. Yes.”

St. James was standing next to the bed. Lady Helen knew she should leave the room to give him privacy to dress, but something in his manner—a meticulous control too brittle to be believed—compelled her to stay. Too much remained unsaid.

She knew St. James well, better than she had known any other man. She had spent the last decade becoming acquainted with his blind devotion to forensic science and his determination to stake out ground upon which he could build a reputation as an expert. She had come to terms with his relentless introspection as well as with his desire for perfection and his self-castigation if he fell short of a goal. They talked about all of this, over lunch and dinner, in his study while the rain beat against the windows, on their way to the Old Bailey, on the stairs, in the lab. But what they did not talk about was his disability. It had always represented a polar region of his psyche that brooked no one’s intrusion. Until today on the clifftop. Even then, when he had finally given her the opening she had long awaited, her words had been inadequate.

What, then, could she say to him now? She didn’t know. Not for the first time did she wonder what sort of bond might have developed between them had she not left his hospital room eight years ago simply because he asked her to do so. And to obey him then had been so much easier than taking the chance of walking into the unknown.

Still, she couldn’t leave him now without attempting to say something that gave him—even in small measure—back to himself.

“Simon.”

“My medication is on the counter above the wash basin, Helen,” St. James said. “Will you fetch me two tablets?”

“Medication?” Lady Helen felt a quick surge of concern. She didn’t think she had misread his reasons for locking himself away in his room for the afternoon. He hadn’t been acting as if he was having any pain at all, despite Cotter’s admonition to her earlier.

“It’s just a precaution. Above the wash basin.” He smiled, a flicker that passed across his face and was gone in an instant. “I take it that way sometimes. Before instead of during. It works just as well. And if I’m to put up with Mr. Sweeney as a thespian for an evening, I ought to be prepared.”

She laughed and went to get it for him, calling back into the bedroom, “Actually, this isn’t a bad idea. If tonight’s production is anything like the other we saw, we’ll all be popping pain killers before the evening’s through. Perhaps we should take the bottle along with us.”

She brought the tablets back into the bedroom. He had gone to the window where he was leaning forward on his crutches, looking out at the southern view of the grounds. But she could tell from his profile that his eyes registered nothing.