Prisoner of Love (13 page)

“Don’t question me!” he interrupted savagely. “It seems you find it impossible to leave an attractive man alone for five minutes, even in my waiting room.”

“That isn’t true!” she cried, utterly aghast at the suggestion. “You ought to know it isn’t. You ought to
know
!”

He turned away without looking at her, and she was left to stare after him, hardly believing he could have made such a vicious statement even in angry condemnation of her “breach of etiquette," as he put it. Then suddenly, she felt sorry for Julius.

Looking at him standing there, ravaged by his own thoughts and ugly suspicions, she had seen the flaw in him at last. He was viciously and uncontrollably jealous.

She supposed she had come to the truth gradually, but it was only now that she had admitted it, and there was nothing she could do, nothing she could think of, to combat it.

During the next few weeks she was provided with ample proof that she was right. When they entertained he was constantly watchful of her, and when they were being entertained she found it necessary to guard her every
w
ord and look. Even the most ordinary gestures of friendship or liking were instantly suspect, and the final humiliation came one evening during a theater party when he refused to go on to a nightclub for supper because he considered that she had been paying undue attention to their bachelor host.

What am I to do, she thought, enduring his possessive kisses when they had returned to Harley Street. What can I possibly do to convince him how wrong he is?

“When you get up,” Julius said the following morning, “I want you to pack. We’re going to Dunraven.”

“But—there’s Lance,” she protested. “He’ll be breaking up in a week, and he expected us all to travel to Scotland together.”

“He’s quite old enough to travel by himself,” Julius said frigidly. “We can’t regulate our lives to suit Lance. You mollycoddle the boy!”

They traveled back to Scotland the following day, after Laura had explained to Lance as best she could in a letter why they were going on ahead. Julius’s patients, she wrote, had to be attended to, and that meant Blair.

Coldly Julius told her of his plans.

“I mean to stay at Dunraven, at least till the spring,” he said when they were driving swiftly westward at the end of their journey. “I have resigned my appointment at the hospital, but I shall still keep my Harley Street connection, and of course continue to take private patients up here.”

“Will there be enough?” Laura asked. “And will you be able to get the nursing staff?”

“I don’t think I shall need to worry unduly about a nursing staff,” he decided. “These people are hardly invalids, and one reliable S.R.N. in residence should be enough. I myself will be there in a supervisory capacity.”

“I wish you would let me help,” Laura offered once again. “I could do relief duty, Julius—”

“No,” he said, firmly and decisively. “Don’t ask again, Laura. I have made up my mind about that.
”

Dunraven had come into view far beneath them as they sped along the coast, and to Laura it looked suddenly cold and unfriendly standing out there at the end of the causeway, its high wall isolating it like—a prison.

She thrust the word from her, but she knew that it would persist in her mind so long as Julius continued to view her every action with mistrust and suspicion. In the end, she thought, this ungovernable jealousy of his will spoil his whole life. It could, she knew, even ruin his brilliant career.

Morag came to the open door and she waved to her, feeling a first suggestion of warmth as the Highlandwoman took her hand and looked smilingly into her eyes.

“What news, Morag?” she asked. “I thought we would find the whole glen covered in snow!”

“Not yet,” Morag answered. “We’ve had a mild winter up till now, but, then, we never do have the worst of our weather up here much before the end of January. The
faoilteach
we call it—those angry days we are sure of getting before the spring comes again. There’s snow, though,” she added, “on the top of Suilven. An old man with a white cap on his head he is!”

Looking at the mountain Laura remembered Blair and his half-laughing promise to Lance before they had gone away. Had he been climbing much, she wondered, and was he really fit now? All but cured?

She had not long to wait for her answer. Blair came to Dunraven the following day.

“Thought I’d better report,” he explained as Julius shook his hand
rather stiffly. “It’s about
Northern Bird
,”
he added. “I’m not altogether happy about that mooring of hers. She took a terrible pounding in a gale we had about a fortnight ago. She would be better down here in the lee of the island if you mean to keep her in the water all winter.”

Laura came into the room at that moment and he looked up and met her eyes.

“Blair!” she exclaimed, her own eyes shining, “you look wonderfully well! Julius’s cure has worked!”

“I’m hoping so,” he said, taking her outstretched hand. “But what have you been doing with yourself? Slimming?”

She looked away from his gently
probing gaze.

“I think one rushes about in London more than one realizes," she said. “I didn’t know I had become so thin.”

“I didn’t say that! I suggested that you had lost a little weight.”

“When you have finished discussing the effects of these weeks of separation,” Julius put in sarcastically, “perhaps we can come around to the future. I don’t intend to keep you much longer at the lodge, Cameron,” he added. “I feel that the cure may have worked. I shall have to decide, of course, after I have seen Nurse Scyler’s report.”

“Of course,” Blair agreed. “She has been a most reliable watchdog, by the way. Nothing escapes her eagle eye!”

“She is a person I can trust,” Julius said. “I have known her for some time.”

“So I understand,” Blair laughed. “I've never seen such a high pedestal, Julius. The woman worships your very name!”

“I think she realizes that I demand perfection.” Julius got up and crossed to the window overlooking the narrow strip of water between the island and the shore. “We’ve got time to go and look at
Northern Bird,
I think,” he decided. “I suppose she should have been laid up for the winter, but I thought we might have used her again in September, and then the whole thing escaped my memory. I had other and more important things to think about,” he added as he led the way to the door.

The following morning Blair, with the help of Callum and one of the other patients from the lodge, brought
Northern Bird
into the small natural basin behind the island. It was a precarious journey and a great deal of skill was needed in handling her in the shallower water, but Blair revelled in the adventure.

Julius, watching the whole procedure from his study window, said that it would be a great pity if Blair should suffer a relapse at this stage.

“You can’t mean that he could become desperately ill again?” Laura exclaimed unguardedly. “It would be terribly unfair. He has so much to live for!”

Her husband turned to look at her with a small, questioning smile in his eyes.

“Has he told you what he hopes for in the future, then?” he asked. “I sometimes wonder if he feels it impossible to confide in me.”

“I don’t think he’s been looking at the future very closely,” Laura answered uncertainly. “After all, he wasn’t too sure about it, was he? About there being any future at all.”

“No,” Julius mused, turning back to the window, “that’s true.”

When Lance joined them at the end of a week Laura felt far more settled and content. She set about her preparations for Christmas and the New Year with a fresh awareness of happiness she did not try to explain to herself, and each day found Blair Cameron working with equal happiness under her kitchen window.

He had decided to overhaul the yacht, which was safely up on stilts with Lance chipping away at its barnacles that had gathered below the waterline. Callum was busy mixing paint and varnish in the boathouse under the causeway.

It takes so little for happiness, Laura thought. So little!

Two days before Christmas Julius made the suggestion that they should climb Suilven.

“Won’t it be dangerous at this time of year?” Laura asked.

“There’s no snow to speak of,” Blair said. “We could even take you along with us, if you feel like coming!”

Julius looked up.

“Why not?” he asked unexpectedly. “It isn’t a difficult climb.”

“You’re all out of your mind!” was what Morag said when Laura told her what they proposed to do. “People come up here and they think they know about our Scottish mountains, but they don’t! They’re treacherous and bleak, snow or no snow, and I’m surprised at a man like Doctor Cameron not putting a stop to such nonsense.”

“But, Morag,” Laura objected, “Doctor Cameron has climbed all over the world.”

“I’
m not worrying about that,” Morag returned. “He should know better when he’s up here.”

Both Julius and Blair laughed Morag’s warning aside, and Lance declared that it would “make” Christmas for him even to get halfway to the summit. What a lot he would have to tell his schoolfellows!

They set out early in the morning in heavy boots and windbreakers, Julius carrying a length of stout rope around his waist and Blair suitably armed with a small ice-axe in case it might be needed on the higher slopes.

It was a wonderful morning, and when they parked the car at the foot of Suilven the sun was almost hot on their backs. Laura could not believe that it was December, yet she knew that in a day—within an hour, even—the whole face of the countryside could be changed.

Almost as if he had read her thoughts, Blair said:

“Don’t worry. Neither Julius nor I would have brought you if we hadn’t been sure about the weather.” He held her gaze for a moment. “It’s a wonderful experience, Laura—climbing a mountain in the sun!”

Laura turned to find Julius looking at them, but this time there was no anger in his eyes. He looked curiously withdrawn, aloof almost, as if the present held no great interest for him, yet she knew that he was an enthusiastic climber, a mountaineer of no mean ability.

“Conditions couldn’t be better!" Blair said, looking up into a cloudless sky. “It’s almost like a summer’s day.”

They began to climb up through the line of birch and alder that skirted the mountain and on over an ear of rough scree before they reached the first pinnacles of rock that would test their skill.

“We’ll rope together for safety’s sake," Blair suggested, and Julius uncoiled the rope, watching Blair knot it securely about Laura’s waist. When their hands inadvertently touched, he looked away.

“You next, Lance,” Blair said. “Sorry, old fellow, but I must insist,” he added when Lance made a face at him. “It’s all of us or nothing, and we must make sure about Laura.”

“O.K.!” Lance agreed. “Is Julius going to lead?”

“Yes, I think so.”

The next half hour was a tremendous experience for Laura. She had never done any hazardous climbing before, but she felt safe and assured, plodding on up with the rope stretching behind and before her. When they attacked a difficult stretch Lance or Blair was invariably by her side, encouraging and helping her, and she began to feel the exhilaration of these high places and the stimulation of success.

They stood once or twice to admire the view, but not for long, because it had become colder, although they had not yet touched snow.

“We won
’
t go up to the snow line,” Blair said. “There’s only one really difficult stretch before we reach the plateau. That will be high enough for the view we want. We’re coming to it now,” he added. “Don’t worry about it, Laura. It’s not nearly as bad as it looks.”

Laura raised her eyes to the gaunt rock face above her. It seemed as though there could be no way past it, and then she saw the dark corrie on its side, with a sheer drop beneath it of several hundred feet.

Fear, sudden and uncontrollable, took possession of her for a split second, but the others were moving on, confident in their attempt to scale the side of the corrie and arrive safely on the narrow plateau above it.

After that, concentrating on finding the exact holds used by Lance, she forgot her nervousness and was at the top before she knew it. She belayed the rope around a conveniently jutting boulder, and the three of them stood side by side to watch Blair make the ascent.

What went wrong she never quite knew. There was a rattle of stones, a sickening, slithering sound of metal on rock. She saw Blair’s tall figure in the bright blue anorak suddenly tilt, then she closed her eyes for one desperate instant as the rope took the full weight of his fall.

When she opened them again she saw it, taut and vibrating, going down into obscurity. Then, before she or Lance could speak or move, there was the swift flash of steel in the sunlight. Julius had slipped out his knife. One swift hack at the rope would have been enough, but as the knife came down to send Blair hurtling into space, Lance had thrust out his hand.