Justine Elyot (29 page)

‘Not at all,’ mumbled Edie, placing the skirt beside the blouse on the grass.

‘One of my lovers said it, back in the days when I was permitted a little vulgarity. Back in my theatrical days. I had a great many lovers, Edie. Doesn’t
that
shock you?’

‘It is none of my business,’ said Edie.

‘Tell me – you’re very pretty. Are you a virgin?’

Edie’s look of outrage was not feigned. The question was extremely rude and unexpected.

‘Surely not,’ continued Lady Deverell. ‘I don’t believe you can be. Tell me about your lover.’

‘Your Ladyship,’ said Edie in a low, pleading voice. ‘I am going back to the house now.’

‘You are not.’ Lady Deverell’s easy, teasing manner changed in an instant. ‘Get your clothes off. I’ll deal with my own underwear. You’re coming swimming with me.’

‘I’ve told you, I can’t swim.’

‘And I’ve told you, I can teach you. Chop chop.’ She clapped her hands, then lifted her camisole over her head.

Edie’s fingers moved reluctantly to her apron strings, then the buttons of her dress.

‘Are you sure nobody can see us?’ she asked, looking around her through the thick greenery.

‘Not a soul. I’ve often bathed here naked, especially when I needed to get away from stuffy old Hughie. Which is most of the time.’

Edie felt a pang of sympathy for Lord Deverell. Try as she might to feel charitable towards her mother, she could not find her likeable. Of course, there were reasons for it – there had to be. She must have been ill-used indeed to have constructed such a hard shell around herself. All the same, Edie could wish that she might try to break through it.

‘There now,’ said Lady Deverell, beaming upon Edie’s nudity with a look both benevolent and rapacious. ‘Let’s dip our toes in.’

Her Ladyship was even more splendid unclothed. Her flesh, dappled by sunlight, was generous and beautifully unmarked by time. She was a little broader about the hips than she might have been in her youth, but she was none the worse for it. Her stature and poise made her seem larger than she was, an Amazon goddess in her natural surroundings. Beside her, Edie felt meagre and plain. It was hardly surprising Charles had wanted to start an affair with her, whatever his motivations. She was simply the most stunning woman Edie had ever seen.

She followed her mother into the green-tinged water. It was deliciously warm, despite the shade, and the river weed brushed sensuously against her toes, winding its way around them.

Lady Deverell turned to face her and spread her arms wide, displaying her breasts to their best advantage.

‘Isn’t this heaven?’ she exclaimed. ‘The lake, the sun, just you and me, no men to spoil it all.’

‘Will Lord Deverell be back today?’ asked Edie.

Lady Deverell lowered her arms and fidgeted with her hair.

‘I don’t think it likely,’ she said.

‘I hope Mary will be found.’

‘I don’t think that very likely either.’

The way in which she spoke the words cast a sudden chill over Edie.

‘Why … not?’ she asked.

Lady Deverell’s answering smile twitched at the corners.

‘We have quarrelled,’ she said. She waded forward and took Edie’s elbow. ‘Come on. Let’s go deeper.’

The water lapped around Edie’s knees, then her thighs, finally submerging her to the waist.

‘I hope the quarrel was not too serious,’ said Edie in a small, fearful voice.

‘Oh, I’m afraid it was. Very serious. I know you’re too polite to ask me what it was about; would you like me to tell you?’

Edie was not sure. Her heart was pounding wildly and she felt sick. Suddenly it seemed very important that she should get back to the shore.

‘Would you?’ Lady Deverell prompted. ‘Perhaps you might like to guess. Go on. Guess.’

‘I … can’t.’

‘I’m sure you can.’ She wrapped her hand tightly around Edie’s wrist, tightly enough to bruise. ‘Go on.’

‘Ow! Charles. Sir Charles,’ she blurted.

‘That’s right. Sir Charles. It seems somebody had left my husband an anonymous note in his valise. I wonder if you’d know anything about that?’

Lady Deverell bent, pushing her face close to Edie’s.

‘Heavens, no! I know nothing about a note. I wouldn’t, truly, I would never …’

‘Such a little innocent. Such a little slut.’

A heavy slap landed on Edie’s cheek, stunning her so that she staggered backwards. But Lady Deverell still held on tight with her other hand, making escape impossible.

Edie looked desperately towards the shore, but the unearthly peace and stillness prevailed.

‘I know what you and he have been up to,’ she snarled. ‘Everyone knows.’

‘I didn’t mean it,’ said Edie, the words rushing out, wrenched from her by fear. ‘I didn’t mean to. It just happened.’

‘It just happened. But you knew what he meant to me, and I suppose you wanted him all to yourself, you little bitch.’

‘No,’ sobbed Edie. ‘I didn’t write any note. Please believe me. You must believe me. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. I made him break it off with you because I didn’t want you to get hurt …’

‘What?’ Lady Deverell almost released her grasp, tightening it at the last minute, just as Edie thought she might slip free. ‘You made him break it off with me? You made him?’

‘I was scared Lord Deverell would find out,’ said Edie, and then she could say no more as Lady Deverell kicked her viciously off her feet and assisted the work of gravity by pushing her down beneath the surface of the water.

She breathed in water and weed, her ears rushing, her vision black with panic. She did everything she could to fight against the other woman’s superior strength, eventually succeeding in cresting the water again, coughing and spluttering so that she thought her lungs might burst.

‘You don’t understand,’ she gasped. ‘You’re my mother.’

At that, Lady Deverell released her grip and fell to her knees on the lakebed. The water was now around her collarbones and she pressed wet hands to her face and moaned.

‘No, no, no, it isn’t true. It isn’t true. It can’t be true.’

‘It is true,’ said Edie, trying to sound gentle, but she had no control over anything now. ‘My father is Angus Crossland.’

Slowly, Lady Deverell removed her hands from her face, peeking out at Edie. She looked terrified, like a cornered animal seeking a way out.

‘And you have come here to punish me? You have come for your revenge?’

‘No. Oh, dear God, no.’

‘He sent you? Your father?’

‘He does not know I am here.’

Lady Deverell took several deep breaths, her eyes fixed on the willow canopy above, and Edie seized her opportunity to edge out of her reach.

‘I had wondered,’ said Lady Deverell at last. ‘But I did not dare … you do have such a look of me. I did wonder … but I didn’t dare …’ She continued in this vein for a few moments more, as if trying to fix the sense of the words in her head.

‘I only wanted to see you,’ said Edie, her eyes filling with tears that she couldn’t check. ‘I only wanted to know you. I never meant you any harm or … anything but goodwill.’

‘Your father doesn’t know you’re here?’ repeated Lady Deverell, seeming to be out of her wits and rambling. Edie worried that her latest revelation had tipped her mother’s already fragile mental state over a precipice. Should she have kept quiet? But no! Her life had been threatened.

‘Who knows this?’ demanded Lady Deverell. ‘Who have you told?’

‘N-nobody,’ said Edie, not wanting to bring the subject of Charles back up.

‘But you mean to tell? You mean to tell Lord Deverell, perhaps? You have come here to ruin me.’

‘I swear, I have not.’ The tears were falling fast now.

‘I will not be ruined. I have everything I came here for – except Charles, and I’ll have him again. He and I, and the Hall, and everything I have lived for. I won’t have it taken from me. I won’t.’

She advanced upon Edie, who turned to the shore and tried to run through the thick, resistant waters. She stumbled and fell forward into the rich green warmth. She felt a strong hand on her shoulder, pushing her down, then the same hand on her head, holding it under the water. She had seen, just for a second, just when she opened her mouth to scream, the flicker of movement in the trees ahead of her, but now all was dark. Roaring darkness, a body that would not work in the way she needed, everything closing in on her, entering her, roaring darkness.

She came to and she was not in heaven, nor was she in hell.

She was lying in some grass, still naked, wet and weed-covered, with a shadow over her. When she opened her eyes, she saw that the shadow belonged to Charles, whose own eyes were wide and face pale. His clothes clung to him, sodden, and his hair was plastered in weeds.

‘I did not drown,’ she whispered.

‘Not quite,’ he said.

‘Where is …?’ Edie tried to sit up and look around her, but Charles hushed her and laid her back down.

‘Not terribly gentlemanly but I had to knock her out.’ He nodded a little way further over in the glade. Lady Deverell lay sprawled nearer the lake’s edge.

‘Did she mean to …?’

‘Kill you? It certainly looked that way from where I was standing.’

‘Charles, I think she has gone mad.’

‘I don’t care what’s happened to her. Let’s get you somewhere safe.’

He lifted her into his arms and carried her away from the lake, across the grounds of the Hall.

Edie was hazily aware of her nudity but too shell-shocked to let it trouble her. She buried her face in Charles’s chest and tried to shut the world out.

***

Once inside the Hall, he gave brusque instructions to one of the footmen to find Kempe and have him drive to fetch the police, then he took Edie to his rooms and laid her on his bed.

When he seemed to be leaving the room she propped herself up and called after him in dismay, but he had only gone to run her a bath.

‘What happened?’ he asked once he had returned and seated himself on the edge of the bed. ‘Why did she do it?’

‘I told her she was my mother. She thought I had come here for some kind of revenge. Oh, Charles. What will happen to us all?’

Charles took her hands.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, squeezing them. ‘But I will be by your side, whatever it might be. I love you and I think you love me and that will give us what strength we need. Yes?’

She nodded, her eyes leaking tears again.

‘You’re going to have her arrested,’ she whispered.

‘She tried to kill you.’

‘But did she? Do you really think? Or was she just trying to warn me?’

There was sympathetic pain in Charles’s eyes as he answered, ‘Darling, you are still trying to make excuses for her. I understand that you desperately want her to be something else – a loving mother, a wronged woman. But she is who she is. Unscrupulous and self-centred beyond your comprehension.’

‘It can’t be that way. It just can’t.’

‘Come and lie in the bath, my love. Try not to think of it. I need a bath too – that pond weed clings to everything.’

He helped her to her feet and led her into the bathroom, where he shut off the taps and found towels in the linen cupboard.

For the second time that day, they sat in the bath together, but this time there were no lazy caresses or teasing kisses, just a profound, silent connection between them as they tried to manage their galloping thoughts.

‘I didn’t die,’ said Edie, speaking into the steam. ‘So they wouldn’t hang her. They wouldn’t, would they?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Can’t we put the police off?’ She twisted around to face Charles, pleading. ‘Your family name will be dragged through the mud. Wouldn’t you rather …?’

‘Keep it a secret?’ finished Charles with bitter relish. ‘That’s what this whole mess is about, isn’t it? Secrets. Lies. Pa will hate me for it, but I’ve had enough of secrecy. From now on, everything in my life is going to be decent and above board.’

‘The perfect revenge,’ she said.

‘No.’ He clamped his hands over her upper arms. ‘No, Edie. No. She hurt you. That’s what this is about. She hurt you and I can’t have her doing it again. You can think the worst of me if you like, and, if what I’m doing now drives you away, then so be it. At least you’ll be safe. That’s all that matters.’

Edie searched his face for any signs of bluster or insincerity and found none.

There were no more questions to ask herself. He loved her, beyond doubt.

She laid her head back on his shoulder and started again the work of collecting her emotions. A loud knock at the door interrupted her.

‘Sir, please, sir.’ It was the voice of the footman Charles had detailed to find Kempe to fetch the Kingsreach police.

‘What is it, Rivers?’

‘May I come in, sir?’

‘I’m afraid I’m in the bath.’

‘But it’s rather important, sir. I could stand outside the bathroom door.’

‘All right, come in. What’s happened?’

Edie sat upright in the bath, dreading that Lady Deverell had come to and done something awful. She gripped Charles’s wrist as if it might spare her the worst of what might be.

‘I went to find Kempe in the garage, sir.’ The footman’s voice was nearer now, just beyond the bathroom door. ‘But he had already gone with the car.’

‘Damn,’ said Charles. ‘Well, there’s nothing for it but for you to go to Kingsreach on horseback.’ Under his breath, he added, ‘Why wouldn’t pa have telephones installed, the ridiculous old dinosaur? I’ll make him do it.’ Raising his voice again, he said, ‘Tell them there’s been a serious incident and Sir Charles must see a senior man immediately. Or – oh, hang it, I’ll go myself.’

He rose from the bath, shedding water all over Edie.

‘No, no, sir, that’s not all of it,’ said the footman anxiously. ‘He left a note on his workbench, sir. He didn’t put it in an envelope or anything, so I’m afraid I read it …’

Charles wrapped himself in a towel and peered out through a crack in the door.

‘What? Give it here.’

He snatched the piece of paper and read it, brow darkening as his eyes darted downwards.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he exclaimed, crumpling it in his fist.