House of Storms (2 page)

It took the house on Lovelis Island to impress Debra with its real and lasting splendour high on the towering cliffs. Home of the Salvador family, which was an Old Line one backed by substantial securities well able to afford the staff employed inside the great house and outside in the extensive grounds and the stables whose sleek horses were exercised daily.

Debra found it an unforgettable sight to see the horses cantering along the sands of the island beach, the surf churning about their long legs and splashing their silky hides. She longed to join the stable boys who rode them, but as yet she was a very new member of the staff and hopeful that she was going to fit in . . . and meet with the approval of Lenora Salvador.

The atmosphere at Abbeywitch wasn't ostentatious, but there was a solid air of comfort; a timelessness of a house removed from the feverish activity of city life so that at nightfall, there above the thrashing high tide, it had an air of isolation and mystery that soon captured Debra's romantic imagination.

There was nothing brash about the Salvadors. Their strain of Latin blood gave them depth and a suggestion of drama, so it wasn't surprising that one of them should wield a powerful pen while his sister should be an actress. Having seen Zandra Salvador in plays on television, it was exciting for Debra to see her in reality.

Debra's bedroom was on the same gallery as the nursery suite where Jack's baby son was in the care of Nanny Rose Jones. Debra felt grand sleeping in a four-poster with a sprigged canopy and the oaken ambience of her bedroom delighted her in every way.

The double doors of the windows opened upon a stone terrace that stretched to the verge of the cliffs themselves and it enchanted her to stand at the parapet and listen to the sea lashing at the rocks far down in the cove. Bride's Cove as it was called, where the boulders stood taller than a man, where long ago a skiff had slipped in among them and a real man had stepped ashore and found there a girl with the skirt of her dress high above her knees while she sought shrimps in the rock pools. He had swooped, captured her in ruthless arms and swept her off to his ship, and Debra wondered as she stood upon the terrace in the evening, if the girl had struggled very hard.

When alone on the terrace Debra released her long hair from its knot and let it blow in the sea-drenched air. She had ignored the persuasion of other girls and kept her hair uncut. 'It's your one claim to beauty,' her mother always said, brushing it to a nut-brown gloss. 'Your hair is something special. . . see how straight and thick it grows, and exactly the colour of chestnuts.'

Debra's mother had taught her how to plait it into an eight-shaped knot at the nape of her neck where it was held in place by the jewelled pin which Claudia Hartway treasured before she gave it to Debra. It was of real jade, a reminder to Claudia of exciting days when she and her husband had lived in Tokyo. Debra's father had been in the diplomatic service, but when Debra was still an infant a fatal heart attack had struck him down and she barely remembered him.

When Claudia brought her home to England they had been obliged to take in boarders for a living. But Claudia had managed to send Debra to business college, and later on she had met a nice Canadian and had married him with Debra's blessing. From then on Debra started to live her own life, thankful that her mother had found contentment and security.

Debra herself was something of an idealist who suspected that the ideal lover was not a real person but a dream image who was unlikely to materialise in the flesh. She thoroughly enjoyed her work and reasoned that she had plenty of time to fall in love . . . there were so many other things in life apart from the fevers of physical passion, and she was savouring the delight of living on an island.

At night she was lulled off to sleep by the waves breaking on the shore and she grew to love the strange and mournful cries of the gulls, always in tune with the sea whether at high tide when it battered the stony walls of the cliffs, or when it had a more beguiling sound, distant and then near, strong and yet soothing, with the underlying threat of all powerful forces.

It was as if the gulls cried for the girl who had drowned in the water surrounding Abbeywitch. Those on the yacht the night of the party had searched frantically for Pauline and at last they had found her body caught among the rocks of Bride's Cove. The autopsy had proved that the battering of her face and body had occurred before she drowned, and the presence of alcohol in her system had seemed in accord with the verdict, that she had struck her head in falling from the side of the yacht.

It seemed to Debra that the sound of the waves would always remind Jack Salvador of his tragic loss. Only two years married and now he was a widower.

A week went by before Debra received word that Mrs Lenora Salvador requested her company for tea in the solar at three o'clock that afternoon. It sounded more like a summons than an invitation, but Debra had been expecting something of the sort. Upon her arrival at Abbeywitch she had been informed that Madam was in the throes of one of her migraines so they had been kept from meeting.

Now the summons arrived and Debra braced herself for the confrontation. She knew from Nanny Rose that since the departure of Jack Salvador's regular secretary there had been two replacements, but neither of them had met with his mother's approval. Debra was warned that Lenora Salvador was a difficult and demanding woman and it might be to her advantage to appear meek and mild if Debra hoped to find acceptance.

'I'm not going to be intimidated by her,' Debra rejoined. 'I'm here to work as an editor not to be a doormat.'

Nanny Rose laughed and looked Debra up and down in her neat black skirt and pin- tucked shirt. 'I grant there's something a bit different about you from those others. A bit of class, I'd say. Madam's bound to notice, you mark my words.'

The solar was used as a sitting-room during the summertime, a boldly curving room with a range of wide windows and a barrelled ceiling. A table beside the hostess was attractively laid for tea.

'Do come and sit down, Miss Hartway.' Slanting dark-brown eyes appraised Debra as she crossed the room and sat down. 'You've met my daughter Zandra, have you not? Prob¬ably on the stairs as she's been coming and going? Zandra rarely walks if she can run, and rarely sits if she can pace about, preferably with a cigarette in her hand.'

Zandra was doing both those things as her mother spoke. She was tall, fashionably lean in culottes and a loose silk shirt, with dark shin¬ing hair that fell in a scroll to her shoulders, framing the sculptured planes of her face. Her eyes were like her mother's, with the slant to them that gave to their faces an individual look.

Those eyes flicked Debra up and down. 'So you're the latest in a line of adoring typists? Another female from a bedsitter who sits up half the night devouring my brother's chunky books—you'll be in for a real thrill when the video deal goes through, won't you? I guess you've heard that his best books are going to be filmed?'

'There was mention of it at Columbine,' Debra replied, her hands sedately folded in her lap as she met Zandra's rather insolent gaze. 'Your brother has a large following, Miss Salvador.'

'I'm not a Miss,' Zandra snapped. 'I'm di¬vorced.'

'I'm sorry,' Debra politely murmured.

'Don't be, he was a silly ass with a beard and I should have heeded Mama's warning that he was no good for me. It's a family failing, both Jack and I turned a deaf ear to Mama when it came to choosing our soul mates. Tell me, have you met the precious infant?'

'Yes.' Debra smiled. 'He's very charming, and very forward for his age, so his nanny informs me.'

'He takes after his mother,' Zandra drawled.

'That will be enough,' Lenora reproved her daughter. 'Do you take cream or lemon in your tea, Miss Hartway?'

'Cream would be nice, thank you.'

'You don't need to watch your figure, eh?' Zandra was giving Debra a rather narrow look through the smoke of her cigarette which was clamped into a holder so the nicotine wouldn't stain her fingers. 'You look younger than the other typists who came here after Miss Tucker took to her heels following a scrap with Mama, which, incidentally, Jack is going to be furious about because he got on well with the old duck.'

'I couldn't possibly allow her to stay.' Lenora handed Debra her cup of tea, which wafted its fragrant aroma from a bone-china cup in an equally fine saucer. 'She called me an old witch! She accused me of making that silly Pauline's life a misery, and I did nothing of the sort! It merely irritated me, having to endure her chatter and the cheap music the girl was addicted to. And her clothes—she simply had no style, no finesse! When Jack was thinking of in marrying her, I just do not know!'

'Mama, you're not that old,' Zandra said in a teasing tone of voice. 'She was curvy and blonde and she got under Jack's skin.'

'He didn't have to marry her,' Lenora held a plate of tiny triangular sandwiches so Debra could take one or two. 'When I think of some of the delightful girls he's known, especially Sharon Chandler. My heart was set on Sharon for a daughter-in-law, and Jack knew it! In¬stead he had to go and marry that uneducated little dancer from a musical show, and I could have told him straight away that it was doomed; a man of Jack's powers in harness to that Sindy doll with her whispery voice!'

'Mama,' Zandra murmured, 'she is dead, and after all she was Jack's choice and even if you didn't care for her, I'm sure he did.'

Debra listened to the enlightening conver¬sation and ate her sandwiches, which had a delicious salmon spread inside them. As Nanny Rose had hinted, the marriage which had produced young Dean had not been approved of by Jack Salvador's family, and even though Lenora doted on the boy she had despised his young mother.

Poor Pauline . . . Debra now had an image of her, a curvacious, child-like blonde who had danced for a living until meeting the famous writer of fine novels who, because of his lone¬ly profession, would have found the young showgirl amusing and diverting and probably seductive.

Debra could well imagine the reaction when Jack Salvador had walked into the house with her . . . maybe he had carried her over the doorstep in the traditional way, only to be met by the snobbish disapproval of his mother! A widow very unlike Debra's mother, whose years of toil and unselfishness had paid off when she had met the charming, middle-aged man to whom she was now married.

Although Lenora Salvador was a beautiful, elegant and well-preserved woman, it seemed that a second chance at love had eluded her. She was like a diamond, Debra thought, a little too hard and cutting. As her daughter had reminded her, Pauline was dead, and in dying she had left her husband so grief-stricken that he had gone off, no one knew where, in order to try and recover from the loss of his pretty wife.

'Can't I tempt you to a cake, Zandra?' Lenora extended a plate with a selection of cream cakes on it. 'You used to love eclairs when you were a schoolgirl.'

'And look what all that cream and chocolate did to me.' Zandra waved the cakes away from her. 'I was such a podge that I got left out of all the most exciting activities at school and it hurt like hell. I swore I'd never be fat again— however I feel sure Miss Hartway won't say no to a sweet and creamy cake.'

'I'm afraid I shall,' Debra contradicted her. 'I haven't a sweet tooth, as it happens.'

'You do surprise me,' Zandra drawled. 'Miss Tucker lived on cakes and chocolate bars; she really believed in tucking into sweet things, a compensation, don't they say, for being an old maid?'

'I really wouldn't know, Miss—Salvador.' Debra's hesitation went unnoticed. It would have been impolite not to address her by name, and the actress's married title was not known to her.

'You've a boy-friend, then?'

Debra shook her head. 'I don't think it would worry me to be single.'

'You have to be kidding!' Zandra looked scornful. 'It's true that men are hard to live with, but at the same time it's hard living without them. Maybe you don't attract them, eh?'

Debra's eyes dwelt on the sculptured face with the ironic and rather discontented mouth, an actress with a brittle kind of brilliance, as if her heart was never fully involved in anything she did. Never having been poor, she hadn't been tempered in the anxious fires of wonder¬ing where the next meal was coming from. Her success, Debra decided, was based on her appearance rather than her innate talent... it was her brother who had the more expressive and worthwhile gifts.

Zandra was reading Debra's thoughts in her large eyes, the kind with such a mixture of colours there was no telling their dominant colour until she was aroused to temper, when they turned green. A scowl darkened the classic face of Jack Salvador's sister.

'I suppose you think you're damned smart,' she snapped. 'And I suppose you keep your angel wings fastened down with sellotape?'

'Zandra,' exclaimed her mother, 'you do say the most astonishing things at times. Miss Hartway looks a sensible young woman to me; neat and clean, with sensibly arranged hair. Not every girl wants to be chased all the time.'

'Are you going to be chaste instead, Miss Hartway?' Zandra mocked. 'Quite frankly I wouldn't want your job on a gold plate; I'd go out of my mind having to type all those words, all those pages, with Jack suddenly deciding to make changes in the text. He isn't the easiest man in the world to work for, you know.'

'I expect he's a perfectionist where his work's concerned,' Debra murmured. 'His books reveal it.'

'Enthralled by his books, are you?'

'I certainly admire them,' Debra admitted.

'You'd better not get enthralled by Jack him¬self, isn't that so, Mama?'

'I've no intention—' Debra felt herself flushing at the very idea.

'All our intentions are good ones to start off with.' Zandra frowned moodily, as if recalling her marriage. 'Have you worked for our kind of family before?'