The Hidden Years (36 page)

It was David, dear, kind, thoughtful David who came to her
rescue, not touching her, and yet somehow comforting her with his
presence at her side as he smiled warmly at her and asked what she
thought of the Catesbys' garden.

Faye did not like it. There was something hard and
unappealing about the rigorously pruned and arranged rose-beds, the
earth bare and weedless beneath the soulless display of, to her,
over-hard blooms, the roses themselves set out with mathematical
precision.

'I don't like it,' she confessed to David. 'It seems
so… so regimented.'

'Good girl,' he approved. 'My mother is going to like you.
She hates this kind of garden. Wait until you see the gardens at
Cottingdean.' He smiled at her again, and the strangest sensation raced
through her body, a combination of warmth and gratitude… an
awareness of him as a person… as a man… a
tentative, hesitant need to lean towards him, to touch the smiling
curve of his mouth so that she could capture the wonderful essence of
his smile.

As she stood there staring at him, completely overwhelmed
by the unexpectedness of her feelings, Jeremy Catesby joined them.

'Well, well. Saint David and his devoted handmaiden. What
a charming picture. So… innocent and
unworldly…and of course so misleading. I really do admire
you, David. I must say I think I would fight a trifle shy of a young
woman with Faye's past. After all, as they say, there's no smoke
without fire. Do you have much contact with your stepfather these days,
Faye?'

David heard the small sound that tortured her throat, saw
the way her skin turned livid and then white, felt the shock-waves that
burned through her body…felt her panic and fear and reacted
instinctively to them, closing the distance between them, guarding
her… protecting her.

'You
do
know about Faye's past,
don't you, David?' Jeremy continued with merciless pleasure. 'Or is it
a little secret she has kept from you? Shall I tell him for you, Faye?
I can understand your embarrassment. To have laid claim to virginity so
determinedly and so solidly makes it very difficult for you to admit
that, not only are you not a virgin, but you've already had one
pregnancy terminated. She's quite a bundle of surprises, you know,
David. Sleeping with her own stepfather, and then getting him sent to
prison for it… Even her own mother rejected her, and no
wonder…it's enough to make anyone turn away in disgust.
Seducing her stepfather and then—'

'No…no… no!'

In the distance Faye heard someone screaming, the sound
beating into her head until she ached for it to stop…until
her whole body vibrated to the appalling agony of that unearthly sound
of another human being's pain.

The garden, with its garish, hard colours, twisted
violently around her, pain exploding inside her, as the world turned
into a fierce ball of red and black agony, a fire dragon with gaping
jaws that devoured her into its darkness.

'Faye… it's all right. It's all right
now…'

She opened her eyes. She was sitting in the passenger seat
of David's car, or rather half sitting in it and half lying on David's
lap. His cool hand rested on her forehead, gently stroking her skin,
while the other hand monitored the frantic pulse in her wrist.

'David…'

She swallowed automatically as saying his name burst
against the rawness of her aching throat.

'David…'

'Are you all right…?'

Faye raised her head and stared out of the car window.
There was a man on the other side looking back at her. There was
something familiar about him, although it took her several minutes to
place him.

The surgeon from the hospital… Her heart leapt
in shock. Liz… something had happened to Liz. Still confused
and half in shock, she didn't stop to analyse that he could not have
come in person to talk to her about Liz, that he could hardly have
known where to find her.

'Mrs Danvers… are you all right?'

She opened the window, her movements made awkward with
haste and shock. He had wrenched her so brutally out of the past that
for a moment she had been totally disorientated.

'Liz… my mother-in-law…'

Alaric Ferguson realised instantly what she was thinking
and cursed himself for interfering. Why on earth hadn't he simply left
her alone? It was so unlike him to intrude on someone's else's privacy,
but he had been worried about her.

'No—no, there's nothing wrong,' he assured her.

Nothing wrong…then why…?

He could almost feel her withdrawing from him, her eyes
shadowed and wary.

'I'm sorry, I shouldn't have intruded. I thought perhaps
you were ill…'

'A headache,' Faye told him shortly. It wasn't, after all,
untrue.

'I'm sorry. Perhaps a cup of tea…? There's a
place a few yards down the road, and I have it on good
authority—my mother's—that it serves excellent tea.'

Faye opened her mouth to refuse. The last thing she wanted
to do was to sit politely with this stranger drinking tea. She ought to
be on her way home—it was getting late. She shivered.

Alaric saw the look in her eyes and cursed himself under
his breath. She obviously thought he was trying to pick her up. Was
there no end to the vanity of women? he wondered cynically.

Without any surprise at all he heard her saying quickly,
her voice high and strained, 'Thank you, but no… I must be
on my way. My daughter will be wondering where I am.'

But not where she had been. He was too used to the
traumatic effect mental illness could have on the people closest to its
victims to question the state in which he had seen her leaving the
house. But, since it did affect her so badly, what was she doing here
alone? He paused for a moment, torn between irritation and
concern…not specifically for her. If she was stupid enough
to think he had been trying to pick her up, then… Then what?
She didn't deserve his concern… his compassion?

Was it something within himself that was causing this slow
brutalisation of his humanity, or was it simply a symptom of the malady
of modern-day life?

Faye watched him, wishing he would go away. He had seen
her at her most vulnerable and unprotected; that made her feel
threatened and frightened. By what appalling coincidence had he had to
be driving past the gate just as she'd opened it?

She heard him saying stiffly, 'Well, if you're sure you're
all right…'

'I'm fine,' she lied. Why didn't he just go away? Couldn't
he see she didn't want him there?

He tried one final time. 'You know, if you're
not… not feeling well, it might not be wise for you to
drive…'

Faye seldom lost her temper, but she was on the verge of
doing so now, a backlash against the pent-up anxiety and fear, an
emotional and unreasoning reaction that made her eyes flash and her
body tense.

'You're Liz's doctor, not mine,' she told him bitingly. 'I
don't need your advice…'

'And you don't want my company. Fine. I'll leave you to
it.'

She could see that he was angry too, and guilt touched her
momentarily as she watched him walk away.

Alaric had driven several miles before he realised that he
was exceeding the speed limit. He slowed down automatically, trying to
unclench his taut muscles. Stupid woman… and stupid him for
trying to help her. God, did she really think if he had found her
attractive he wasn't capable of letting her know it with a little bit
more finesse?

If
he found her
attractive… He scowled to himself, not wanting to admit his
contradictory feelings towards her. After all, he barely knew the
woman. Barely knew her at all…

Sage
frowned. She had intended to spend the morning working on some
preliminary sketches for one of her commissions. Her reputation for
innovative work had not been gained overnight, and she could not afford
to completely abandon her work, no matter how much she would have liked
to spend the time on other things.

Such as reading her mother's diaries. She put down her
pencil but did not reach for a fresh one. What was it about the diaries
that made them such compulsive reading?

Reading them was like opening a door into an unknown
world… The world of her mother as a young woman…
as an equal with problems and pressures to which she herself could so
easily relate. Why, when she had never been able to get close to her
mother, was she now discovering that beneath the label of 'mother' and
'devoted wife' which she had pinned to her there was a fellow woman,
someone for whom she could feel compassion and understanding? Did her
mother know how much was revealed in her diaries? Not through the words
themselves, but through the awareness that was coming to Sage of the
feelings of the less central characters. Had her mother known then how
very deeply dependent on her Edward was—that he loved her
even if that love could never have any physical reality?

She stared at her drawing-board. She had been commissioned
to provide her own interpretation of a suitably Italianate
seventeenth-century garden on the walls of a newly built extension to
house a swimming pool. Nothing particularly adventurous; she suspected
these particular clients simply wanted the cachet of telling their
friends that they had commissioned her. It should have been easy, but
for some reason the formal avenues and statuary refused to form beneath
her pencil and instead she was drawing cottage garden borders,
overflowing with a wanton tumble of flowers, set against a backdrop of
crumbling mellow brick walls.

Her mother's garden, she recognised irately.

Perhaps she ought to do something else, she acknowledged,
staring at her drawing in disgust.

The problem of the new road was nagging at her. With so
much heavyweight influence balanced against them, it was hard to see
how any campaign the villagers mounted could be successful. Taking a
more distant view, it was obvious that the road must go somewhere, and
must cause some havoc wherever it eventually went.

In the case of Cottingdean, though, the road could avoid
the village altogether if it was diverted across the marshland beyond
the water meadows, thus looping its way around the village instead of
straight through it.

The cost of such a detour would be a major factor against
it; it wasn't just the extra length of road required, it was also the
fact that the marsh would have to be drained, and adequate foundations
built, all of which would cost a great deal of money.

She got up, frowning, and walked round to her mother's
desk, picking up the file she had prepared.

In it were various clippings her mother had assembled,
dealing with other rural objections to various building programmes, one
section relating to those which had succeeded and another to those
which had failed. The former was depressingly thin in comparison to the
latter, even though in these far more enlightened and ecologically
aware times people were fighting harder to protect their environment.

Sage had bought herself a large-scale map of the whole
county and she had copied an outline of this on to black paper, putting
in only the major towns and existing motorways. She grinned to herself
as she unrolled it and pinned it to her drawing-board. At school the
major complaint against her was that she had a good brain, but was lazy
about using it. Privately she considered that her teachers had been
equally at fault, since theirs had been the inability to motivate
her… Once motivated, once challenged… She
grimaced a little over her own turbulent and sometimes difficult
personality, knowing how often her enthusiasm had been aroused by
something only to wane just as quickly until she had taught herself,
forced herself to grimly follow through and complete a project, no
matter how arduous and dull. Before then her life had been littered
with unfinished detritus of hundreds of rejected interests.

It was the fatal flaw of her character, this inability to
follow things through, to stick to one course, and it had only been
once she had tasted the pleasure of actually completing a set task that
she had begun to fight free of its taint.

She had changed so much in these last few
years… Matured. She grimaced to herself—in some
ways perhaps but not in others; inside parts of her still held all the
rebellious disorderliness of the old Sage.

Sage… what a name to choose for her…
Had her mother done so in the hope that her name might influence her
wayward personality? Hardly. She could not have known then what a trial
she was going to be to her…

Had she welcomed her conception, her birth in the same way
as she had David's? David… who was not after all Edward's
child… but who had been so greatly loved by both her mother
and by Edward. Not, she was learning, because of his
parentage… but because of the person he was.

She had often wondered if her father's detachment from her
had been caused by the manner of her own conception. If the fact that
she had been a child born of one of modern medicine's very early
miracles, rather than through the mystery of the physical union between
two people, had been responsible for this… She must have
been wanted at some stage for her parents, especially her mother, to
have allowed her to be conceived…

Sage moved restlessly around the room, frowning as she
came to rest in front of the windows that overlooked her mother's
favourite part of the garden.

There was no sun today, the sky a soft English grey which
seemed to melt perfectly with the equally muted colours of her mother's
flowers.

She had stood in front of this window many, many times.
Normally staring mutinously out of it while listening to yet another of
her mother's reasoned and calm lectures on one or other of her
failings, and yet today it was as though she was seeing the garden for
the first time, marvelling at the perfect blending of lilacs, pinks,
blues, and whites, marvelling at how on earth her mother had ever found
the time to plan such a perfection of colour and form, and not just the
time but the knowledge as well. Her mother was an incredibly gifted
woman. Strong and determined when it came to her business, cutting
through red tape and waffle with the precision of a skilled surgeon,
and yet somehow at the same time refraining—as Sage knew she
herself had never learned to do—from bruising tender male
egos.