The Hidden Years (13 page)

Oh, dear God, please keep him safe, she whispered. Please
keep him safe.

Lizzie and Edward paid two more visits to view the
rhododendrons but Edward could tell that her heart wasn't in it. He
wanted to ask her if something was wrong, but shrank from doing so.

Since he had been wounded, he had become acutely sensitive
about his physical appearance, about the destruction of his manhood. He
recognised Lizzie's compassion for him and sometimes at night when he
couldn't sleep he ached bitterly to be a whole man again and not an
empty shell of one, incapable of arousing a woman to any emotion other
than pity.

Most of the women who worked at the hospital only
reinforced his awareness of his physical disabilities—only
with Lizzie did he feel anything approaching ease. Her patent innocence
meant that she did not look at him with the same mixture of pity and
contempt with which he felt the others viewed him.

Now he sensed that she was different,
abstracted… lost in some private world of her own, but it
didn't occur to him to associate this sudden change in her with the
visit of his cousin.

Edward and Kit had never got on, even as boys. As the
elder, Edward had nevertheless grown up knowing that he was the less
favoured. Kit was the one who would eventually inherit Cottingdean and
not him. Edward was the one who loved it… who ached for it
when he was away from it, who begged his parents to be allowed to spend
his holidays there… but ultimately Cottingdean would belong
to Kit. He had tried not to feel resentful, but perhaps this would have
been less hard if Kit had shared his love for the house and its land.

Cottingdean had been in their family since the time of
Charles II. Their ancestor—penniless, landless,
titleless—had supported Charles throughout his exile, fought
and played at his side, and when Charles had been finally placed on the
throne he had offered to reward him with a title and the exalted
position of a Gentleman of the Bedchambers. Knowing how much it would
cost him to maintain such an exalted position, instead of accepting the
King's generous offer, he had asked that instead Charles allow him to
marry the widow of a Cromwellian supporter.

The King, suspecting a love-match, had given his consent
and had then been astonished to discover that the woman in question was
plain and well into her thirties.

Plain she might have been, but she had provided her first
husband with five healthy daughters, and the rich and well-tended
flocks of sheep that grazed on the lands that had been her dowry from
her parents.

Philip Danvers had reasoned that a woman so evidently and
bountifully fertile could well provide him with the sons he wanted, and
the rich pastures her first husband had carefully nurtured during the
years of the Protectorate would yield far more profit than an empty
title.

The widow had no option but to accept this second husband
with as good a will as she could muster. It was the King's command that
she marry his friend. She was under no illusions; Cottingdean was a
rich property to a man who owned nothing but the clothes on his back
and the sword at his side. Oh, no, she knew quite well why she was
being married, and it was not to provide her lusty new husband with a
bedmate.

Thus it came as something of a surprise to discover how
attentive her new husband was in bed, and continued to be even after
the birth of their first and then their second son.

Philip Danvers had quickly realised that his plain, dull
wife, whom he had married for her wealth and for sons, had a sensual
gift that many a courtesan would have welcomed and flaunted, and
because he was a man with a sense of humour, he laughed to himself
sometimes in the privacy of their bedchamber while they rested in one
another's arms, sated and relaxed, and when she asked him why he would
tell her that it was because, in giving her to him, the King had given
away one of the rarest treasures in his Kingdom.

It was not of his ancestors, however, that Edward was
thinking as he sat motionless in his wheelchair, staring into space,
but of those generations as yet to come… as yet unborn. Kit
would marry and one day produce sons who would inherit Cottingdean, and
he hoped they would love and cherish it as he had always longed to have
the right to do.

Now, though, he was forced to admit that even if his
father had been the elder… even if he had inherited, he
would never be able to father sons for the house. Almost violently he
clenched his hands and wished as he had wished so often that he might
find the courage to end this dull misery that was his life.

Kit had made it plain to him that there would be no
sanctuary for him at Cottingdean. He had even talked of selling up,
damn him… of living permanently in London, as though
Cottingdean was nothing more than a burden he wished to be rid of. How
he resented him for that. How he almost hated him for it!

'Sage,
I'm awfully sorry to interrupt you, but Alexi is on the phone and he's
insisting on speaking with you.'

Sage stared so blankly at her that for a moment Faye
wondered if she had actually heard her.

The large, comfortably upholstered chair which had
replaced Edward's leather chair when Liz had taken over the library had
been pushed away from the desk, and when she had opened the door Sage
had been curled up in the chair, her knees drawn up into her body, a
silky wing of hair falling across her face, so deeply absorbed in what
she was reading that for a moment Faye had been reminded of that much
younger and far more vulnerable Sage she had known when she herself
first came to Cottingdean.

Now, though, as Sage raised her head, the illusion was
shattered and Faye wondered to herself if Sage actually knew how very
commanding and autocratic she could look when that cool, distant
reserve shuttered her expression.

'Alexi?' she queried now, almost as though the name meant
nothing to her.

She glanced involuntarily at the open diary she was
holding and Faye felt a tiny flutter of apprehension stir in her own
stomach. What was in the diaries that was so compelling that Sage was
still here reading them hours after she had first walked into the room?
The fire had burned low in the grate, and, apart from the pool of light
cast by the reading lamp on the desk, the room was heavily shadowed;
sombrely shadowed, Faye thought, shivering in a faint stirring of
unease.

'Yes. He was most insistent about speaking with
you… Oh, and when you didn't come out for your evening
meal—we didn't like to disturb you—I rang the
hospital . again. Liz is still holding her own…'

Holding her own… Sage slowly closed the diary,
wincing as she felt pins and needles prickling her legs. She had been
curled in her mother's chair in a semi-foetal position for so long that
her body had gone numb without her even noticing it.

She glanced at her watch, half shocked to discover it was
gone midnight, and remembered that she had intended to ring Alexi at
eleven, thinking that by that time she would have had more than enough
of her mother's diaries with their clinical, businesslike description
of how she had run her life.

The reality couldn't have been a greater contrast to what
she had expected. In some ways she found it hard to believe that the
girl who had written so openly and painfully in the diaries, pouring
out her deepest emotions and vulnerabilities, was her mother. Even more
astonishing was that her mother had wanted her to read them.

Would she in the same circumstances have been able to
sanction such an intrusion into her past, into her life?

Perhaps if she had thought that she might be
dying… if this might be her last chance to reach
out… to explain.

She shivered suddenly. When Faye had interrupted her she
had been so reluctant to stop reading, so very reluctant that initially
she had resented her intrusion… but now, sharply, she didn't
want to read any more, didn't want to…to what? What was she
afraid of discovering?

'Alexi,' Faye reminded her diffidently.

Poor Faye. No doubt Alexi had been extremely rude to her,
demanding that Sage be brought to the phone. Alexi was a very demanding
man; despite his veneer, inwardly he still believed that man was
infinitely superior to woman and that it was woman's duty to pander to
man's needs and desires.

'I'm sorry, Faye,' she apologised now as she stood up,
replaced the diary in the desk drawer and automatically locked it.

As she had anticipated, when she picked up the receiver
Alexi was seething. 'You said you'd ring this evening,' he challenged
her. 'Where were you?'

Sage had an obstinate streak in her make-up which she
herself considered to be a childish flaw and one which she had long ago
mastered, but abruptly it resurfaced as she heard the arrogant
challenge in Alexi's voice. Suddenly those things which initially she
had found amusingly attractive in him began to grate.

'I said I'd
try
to ring you, Alexi,'
she corrected him flatly. 'As it happens, I've been too busy. I'm sorry
I had to break our date at such short notice…'

She could tell he was fighting to control his breathing
and with it his temper, and she felt a brief resurgence of mocking
contempt.

Poor Alexi, he must want her very much if he was prepared
to tolerate her defiance. But his tolerance wouldn't last very long or
go very far. She had no illusions; Alexi desired and intended to
dominate her, to subjugate her if he could. In bed he would be a
powerful, commanding lover, and ultimately a selfish one. He would have
no doubts or hesitancy about his prowess; her eagerness for his
lovemaking, her desire to please him sexually would be things he would
expect as his due. Oh, at first he would be prepared to indulge and
coax her, but once he was sure of her…

It was a game she had played so often before…
and yet suddenly she was tired of it, sickened by it just as though she
had suffered a surfeit of a once favourite food, her nausea tinged with
faint self-disgust.

Why? Because of the innocent outpourings of a girl so
naive, so trusting that to read them had brought into sharp focus the
girl she herself had once been and the woman she now was?

Or was it simply that the times and their low-key sexual
climate, their caution, their emphasis on separate contained lives
geared for high materialistic achievement, were at last beginning to
have their effect on her?

Whatever the reason, she suddenly knew that she was bored
with this game she was playing with Alexi, and with that knowledge came
a faint twinge of self-dislike because she knew that she would have
gone to bed with him, probably simply to prove to him that in bed or
out of it he couldn't dominate her… certainly not because
she was overwhelmed by physical desire for him. Which made her stop and
think, and try to remember the last time she had felt like
that… the last time she actually wanted the man rather than
merely the act of sex, as a means of demonstrating her power over
him…and over her mother, and the strict morality with which
she had seemed to live her life. Was that what it had been all
about…the men, the sexual freedom…? Had it
not
just been because, having loved so desperately and then lost that love,
she had turned herself into a woman for whom sex was simply an appetite
which she appeased whenever the need seized her? Was it an outright act
of defiance, chosen deliberately to shock and hurt her mother?

'Sage, are you still there?'

Now Alexi wasn't bothering to control his irritation. Once
that would have made her smile, the small secret triumphant smile that
she knew drove her lovers mad, but now she merely dismissed the
knowledge that she had annoyed him, as uncaringly as though it meant
nothing to her… which it didn't, she realised tiredly.

Suddenly there was an unpleasant taste in her mouth, a
tiredness in her body and her mind, a weariness with her life and
everything it embraced.

'Yes. I'm still here, Alexi,' she responded. 'I'm sorry if
you're annoyed. I should have rung you, but—'

'It isn't your telephone call I want, Sage. It's you,
you… here with me… filling my bed, the way you've
been filling my mind. You know I want you, Sage, you know how good we'd
be together. Let me come down there now and drive you back to London.
Your sister-in-law told me that your mother's condition is stable. You
can do nothing for her down there…here you would be closer
to the hospital, in any case. Let me take care of you, Sage. You know
how much I want to…'

How caressing his voice was, low and deep, soft as velvet,
and how he knew how to use it, she acknowledged absently.

'No, I'm sorry, Alexi, that's impossible. I'm needed here.'

Or rather
she
needed to be here, she
acknowledged. Admitting it was like discovering a small piece of grit
on an otherwise smooth surface, irritating…
challenging… absorbing… so absorbing that she
missed what Alexi was saying to her.

Suddenly she was irritated both by him and by herself. She
didn't want him; she had probably never really wanted him. The contrast
between her own behaviour and that of the young untried girl in the
diaries was sharply painful. Whatever else her faults might be, they
did not include self-deception. She was, she realised, measuring
herself against her mother, just as she had done so often during her
formative years, and once again she was discovering how far she fell
short of her mother's standards and achievements, how far she fell
short of her own ideals.

She didn't want Alexi, so why was she playing this
unnecessary and unrewarding game with him?

'It's no use, Alexi,' she told him flatly, 'I'm not coming
back to London tonight, and, even if I were, it would be to sleep alone
in my own flat. Find someone else, Alexi. The game's over.'