Prince of Secrets (27 page)

‘Susanna has told us how brave you have been, my dear,' said Jack, from where he stood by the hearth. ‘We are both so sorry that we should meet you for the first time in such sad circumstances. You know, I'm sure, that the rift between us was no wish of ours, but it is what his mother and I did, unintended though it was, which caused it. You may imagine how we felt when Susanna met us at Southampton and told us what had happened.'

Dinah saw that Jack's eyes on her were calm and gentle,
and thought, Cobie has been kind to me, so often, and he has looked at me with an expression exactly like that on his face. What a strange mixture he is. I'm sure that if I could make him know how much I wanted him to recover, and that we are going to have a baby, he would wake up.

She opened her mouth to begin to tell Jack so, when the door opened, and the head nurse ran in. ‘Oh, Lady Dinah, you must come. Mr Grant has taken a turn for the worse!'

Dinah paled. ‘I'll be with you immediately,' and then, to Jack and Marietta, ‘You must come with me, both of you. Who knows what might revive him?'

It was a desperate hope, she knew, and knew it even more when she entered Cobie's room. They had propped him up on even more pillows, but he was not conscious. His face was grey, and his breathing was shallow.

She ran to his bed, ignoring everyone, and threw herself on her knees beside it. She took his hand and said frantically, ‘Oh, Cobie, Cobie, don't die, don't leave me. Your father and mother are here, and—' she told him again, because she knew that he had not heard her before, but that perhaps he might this time ‘—and we're going to have a baby, oh, you do want to see the baby, don't you, my darling? Don't leave him without a father.'

She heard Marietta's sharp intake of breath, saw Jack's face, a rictus of pain, and flung her arms around Cobie, starting to cry for the first time, with abandoned desperation, for she felt the tide beginning to take him inexorably away.

In the dream of life in which Cobie had lived since he was shot, and to which he had returned when he had fallen asleep again, he was dimly aware that someone had been talking to him and telling him something important. What, he wasn't quite sure—only that the someone was a woman, and her voice had been loving.

At first his dreams had been unhappy, but gradually as he had lived and relived them, they had become less and less so. It was as though re-experiencing them had purged him. The last time that he had recalled Belita it had been in love, and not in shame and guilt.

He was now back in the New Mexican desert. A moment ago he had been a wild boy again, riding through the dawn with Underwood's gang, the day after they had robbed and blown up the train, singing the endless verses of ‘The Old Chisholm Trail'. Then the gang had disappeared, and the desert had changed.

No longer was the sky variegated, filled with banners of light.

The mountains were losing their hues which had ranged from scarlet to mauve, to grey to ochre, and the desert itself had lost its colour. Suddenly he was no longer riding, but was walking with giant strides towards the mountains, black now, with jagged edges. A great light was rising in the sky, and he was making for that, and peace.

Nothing, he was determined on that, would stop him this time from reaching and embracing the light, becoming one with it. He remembered that a voice had called him back once before, but not this time! He would not allow it.

All the same the woman's gentle loving voice was with him, calling his name again, plaintively. This time she was not below him, but behind him. He would tell her to go away.

He turned, away from the light, and looked back. It was Dinah. She was standing there, dressed as she had been at Moorings, with the lost look on her face. She was carrying a baby, which reached out one fat hand towards him.

Her voice said in his head—not that he really had a head, any more than that Dinah and the baby was really there with him—‘Unfinished business, Jacobus Grant.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No.'

‘Yes,' said Dinah. The baby merely chuckled, and waved its hand again.

‘No,' and he turned his head to see that the light was still rising; when he looked back, Dinah and the baby were beginning to fade. They were becoming pale shadows of the reality he was about to lose.

Cobie knew—how did he know?—that if he didn't soon look towards the light again, it would disappear, but if he did, he would never see his child, or Dinah, again.

‘Unfinished business,' came whispering to him across the desert.

‘No,' he said again, but this time his denial was feeble.

‘Unfinished business,' sang the fading voice.

What I tell you three times is true.

The sentence was written in letters of fire in the sky. No sooner had it appeared, than it disappeared. The light disappeared with it.

This time he said, ‘Yes!' The desert vanished, and he was travelling down a tunnel towards a light, not the bright sun which had been in the sky, but a small dim one. When he reached this light it was as though he was being pulled through a door which was almost too small to allow for his passage.

Once through it he was in his own room, in bed, with Dinah's arms around him. She was sobbing, and her tears were wetting his cheek.

All that had happened to him in the limbo in which he had lived since Sir Ratcliffe Heneage had shot him disappeared like clouds blown out of the sky and dispersed by a great wind.

He tried to sit up, but found that he was too weak to do so. He whispered—and his voice shocked him, it was so feeble— ‘Dinah, why are you crying?'

‘Relief,' she replied. ‘When I came in, Cobie, I thought that you were dead.'

He looked beyond her to see his father and mother standing by the door. What could they be doing here? Why was he in bed? And so feeble? His head was swimming.

‘Jack! Marietta! Is it really you?' he whispered again. They stared at him—it was as though the lost years which had divided him from them since he had gone to the South West had never been.

‘How did
I
get here?'

Dinah said, ‘Oh, Cobie, don't you remember?'

He looked puzzled. He remembered leaving the courtroom. He remembered turning to speak to Dinah—and then, nothing. There had been a light…

Why was Dinah still crying? He wriggled a little, and tried to sit up, but fell back again, asking plaintively, ‘Why am I so weak, so suddenly?'

Dinah said, ‘Oh, Cobie, have you no idea of what happened to you? Sir Ratcliffe shot you on the steps outside the courtroom. You have been here, unconscious, or semi-conscious, ever since. That is why you feel so feeble,' and she began to cry again.

She seemed to be shedding all the tears which she had held back since that dreadful morning.

‘And Mother and Father?'

It was his mother who answered. She had come over to the bed, had seated herself on a chair by it, and was holding his other hand, the one Dinah wasn't holding. She kissed him on the cheek, and yes, it
was
as though he were a boy again.

‘Susanna asked us over some weeks ago. We arrived in England early yesterday. She told us the dreadful news—that you had been shot—and then brought us here to see you straight from the boat. We were with Dinah when the
nurse ran in to tell us that she thought that you were…very ill. In danger.'

She gave a great sob. ‘She was wrong, but for a moment, we all thought that she was right—until you responded when Dinah called your name.'

He knew that there was something he ought to be remembering, but the harder he tried, the more elusive the memory was. He gave up. Trying to remember made his head hurt. There was something else he ought to ask, and memory did not elude him this time.

‘Did Walker arrest Sir Ratcliffe?' he asked Dinah abruptly. He had to know that even before he came to terms with his father and the mother who were treating him as though he were their beloved child again.

Dinah thought very carefully of what she ought to say. She must never let him find out that one by one he had told her all his secrets—that was something for her to know and never to reveal.

She must never say anything that would betray that she knew that Walker had been due to arrest Sir Ratcliffe for murdering the three poor children. After his sudden death the authorities had said nothing about his guilt, preferring to avoid the scandal which the revelation of it would have created.

But she was not supposed to know of Sir Ratcliffe's guilt.

So she looked confused, and asked, ‘Arrest who? The man who shot Sir Ratcliffe dead? He was killed from ambush after he tried to kill you. No one knows who did it.'

Cobie, his faculties rapidly returning, would have bet good money that he knew who had done it. Instead, after a pause, for it pained and tired him to talk, he said hoarsely, ‘Well, that saves the expense of a trial, I must say. We ought to give a testimonial to whoever did it.'

This was so much like the normal Cobie, and not like the
pale wraith who lay on the bed, that all his hearers looked happy.

His father came over, and said mildly. ‘Do you think I could join in the celebrations now that you are back with us? I promise not to cry!'

This, too, was so like Jack that his wife and son began to laugh together, and if Cobie's laugh was a feeble one, then the fact that he could laugh at all made his family happy.

Their laughter broke the ice completely, and Dinah suddenly remembered poor Mr Van Deusen, who had lived in the library, waiting for his friend to recover. She sent a nurse to tell him the happy news that Jake had come out of his coma, or whatever it was, which had afflicted him, and was now waiting for the doctors to confirm that he was over the worst.

Two days later, after he had slept again, had been fed and been reconciled with the parents from whom he had been so long estranged, Dinah came in to find him awake and restless.

‘I thanked Hendrick,' he said bluntly, ‘even though he pretended to be unaware of what I was thanking him for. Did Walker harass him at all?'

‘No,' Dinah said. ‘Of course, he questioned him, and everyone else who had been involved in the action, but he could find nothing to suggest that any of them had shot Sir Ratcliffe. I believe they searched Hendrick's home. Sir Ratcliffe was killed by a bullet from a Colt .44, the inspector said. I think he, and everyone else, was relieved that someone unknown did their job for them, rather than the hangman. Think of the scandal if they had had to try him for attempting to murder you!'

‘Yes, I suppose he did,' said Cobie drowsily. He was still
very weak and tired, but the doctors had prophesied a quick recovery, now that he was over the worst. He had seen his mother and father again, and his mother had told him how devotedly Dinah had nursed him.

‘Why, at the end, the doctors said, when you were so ill, she wouldn't allow anyone else to nurse you, she was so determined to look after you herself!'

Cobie watched his young wife while she moved around his room, talking to and directing the nurses, thoroughly in charge of him and everyone else. It was difficult to believe that she was not yet nineteen.

He also thought that her determination to be alone with him when he was delirious might have had as much to do with what he might have been saying when he was not fully conscious, as for his bodily welfare! He wondered how many of his secrets he had told her, and decided that he was never going to know, for she was plainly determined not to reveal to him what she had learned.

He was not going to ask her…

He should have trusted her more—she was the true daughter of her strong-minded father, and he would try never to deceive her again. She was brave enough to know the best—and the worst—of him.

More than that, she had saved him twice by using her intelligence and her iron will. First of all at Markendale when she had so cunningly hidden the diamonds after discovering them in the faulty box. If she had not done so, he would have been sitting in a prison cell by now—and Linfield would have killed Walker.

Secondly, she had twice called him back from his rendezvous with death. It had been Dinah's voice which had reminded him that he had unfinished business on earth and must return to complete it.

Hendrick had said to him only that morning, ‘That wife
of yours is a treasure, Jake, and treasures need guarding. I never thought that you would marry a woman who is your equal in every way, and she so young. If you ever hurt her, I shall be after you with a shotgun, so be sure to do your duty by her!'

Well, he would do that and more. He would give her the unstinting love which he had never thought to give any woman.

Dinah was coming over to him now, love and compassion written on her serene face. She was saying solemnly, ‘Are you well enough, Cobie, to stay awake until I have finished speaking?'

‘Depends upon what you wish to tell me,' he said naughtily.

Yes, he was rapidly turning back into himself, Dinah noted joyfully.

‘Well, it's something I think that you would like to hear. Are you listening?'

He opened one wicked eye. ‘Always to you, Dinah.'

‘Very well. Here it is, then. We are going to have a baby! There!'

‘We are? When? Oh, Dinah, I've been careless. You're so young. It will be too much for you!'

‘That it will not. Now behave yourself and lie still. What do you want, a boy or a girl, or would you prefer twins?'

An echo reverberated in his head.

‘That's odd, Dinah. I could have sworn that you told me we were having a baby before—and that you mentioned twins. Did you?'

Dinah stared at him. She remembered telling him of the baby when everyone thought that he was dying, when his breathing was shortening, and the mask of death, as the nurse had said, was settling on his face. He must have heard
her, after all, and that was the moment when he had changed, when his eyes had opened, and he had known her.