The Hidden Years (55 page)

The closer she came to the house, the more obvious its
decay became. Distance had lent a veil to its dereliction and she was
almost glad when she eventually reached the valley bottom, and the
garden wall, with its enshrouding band of tangled overgrown trees and
shrubs, hiding everything bar the chimneys from view.

As a child she had been fascinated by this house,
something about its derelict and overgrown mystery appealing to her in
a way which her own immaculate home never had.

Perhaps she was more like her mother than she had known,
she realised. She had seen from the diaries how much a part of her
mother had enjoyed the challenge of taking Cottingdean and making it
into something that was almost purely her own. Her mother was a
builder, she recognised; a creator who enjoyed the challenge of taking
the most basic raw materials of life and constructing something for the
future from them. Take the way she had seen the potential of the sheep
and developed the mill into the prosperous business it was today.

Only someone with vision could have done that. She too,
she saw now, had her own share of that vision, her own specific
talents… not her mother's talents but her own. So why, when
she had come to know herself so well, when she had struggled to come to
terms with all that she was and all that she was not, why, when she had
told herself that she must accept herself the way she
was—that she must like and respect herself before she could
expect others to follow suit, that she must find a way of living that
allowed her to dwell in harmony and peace with herself—was
there still a small part of her that was the child crying and kicking
at her father's door, demanding to be allowed in to his
presence…demanding to be given his love?

Was it something within her that made it impossible for
her to be loved in the way she had once craved? Or was it simply that
she had asked too much, wanted too much… that such an
intensity of emotion was bound to repel anyone at whom it was directed?

Whatever the case, she had long ago learned to repress and
restrain the intensity. After losing Scott she had turned her back on
the deeply emotional side of her nature and concentrated on the
physical, but all too quickly the efficacy of that pleasure had waned,
forcing her to acknowledge that for her there could never be a safe
middle road; that she must either opt for physical and emotional
celibacy, holding herself aloof and distant from all but the most
casual of emotional relationships, or she must commit herself totally
and wholly to the fulfilment of the intensity of her need to love so
completely and utterly. She had learned enough from her relationship
with Scott to be aware of how dangerous that kind of commitment would
be.

She found a gate in the wall and pushed it open. The wood
was rotting and split, the garden beyond it a wild tangle of overgrown
shrubs, knee-high nettles and weeds.

The garden lay under an almost magical veil of
forgottenness, like Sleeping Beauty's castle. She smiled bitterly to
herself as she fought her way through the undergrowth and along the
narrow path.

Daniel was no prince to awaken the house to life with
loving tenderness. Rather he was its destroyer.

Beyond the trees and shrubs lay what might once have been
immaculate lawns but which now resembled an overgrown meadow, the long
grass interspersed with wild flowers and weeds.

The grass was damp, soaking through her jeans, but she had
come too far to go back now. Her arms were scratched from the brambles,
stung by the nettles, and her normally sleek hair had been caught by so
many overhanging branches that she lost her patience and angrily
twisted it into an untidy ponytail with a piece of string she had found
in the pocket of her jeans.

She had approached the house from the side, where the full
dereliction of the ruined Victorian wing with its sprawl of
weed-cloaked remains and blackened timbers yawned eerily out of the
thin whispers of the morning mist.

It was said in the village that, after the fire, those who
had come originally to help put it out returned later, pushing whatever
carts they could find to remove the best of the undamaged bricks, and
that several cottages in the village had sprouted sudden additions.

The sight of the derelict, shattered building always
saddened Sage and she hurried past it quickly, turning her face away as
she rounded the corner of the building, and walked into the enclosed
courtyard to the rear of the house.

Weeds had sprung up between the cobbles of the yard,
windows yawned emptily from both the out-buildings and the house itself.

Someone had placed a large and very efficient padlock on
the heavy wooden back door. Sage studied it for a moment and then
shrugged her shoulders. Quite why she wanted to go inside the house she
really had no idea. Something had driven her here this
morning—some instinct, some need, and she did not intend to
be balked of that need by Daniel Cavanagh's padlocks.

It was a simple matter for her to clamber up to one of the
yawning windows; less simple perhaps to slide her body through its
narrow aperture, but with some wriggling she did manage it, grimacing a
little at the dust marks on her jeans from the stone lintel as she
scrambled down on to the uneven stone floor of one of the sculleries.

The house smelled of damp and decay. An old chair, gaping
holes in its worn cover, the stuffing spilling from them, added to the
air of desolation. As she walked across the floor, Sage closed her ears
to the soft scufflings and squeaks that rustled around her.

In Agnes's day she had visited the house quite often. Her
mother had kept a neighbourly eye on the older woman, and Sage had been
fascinated enough by the house and its occupant to relish these visits.

In those days Agnes had lived mainly in one bedroom, the
kitchen and a small sitting-room. The rest of the house had even then
been falling into a state of disrepair, what furniture there was in the
other rooms enshrouded with white linen covers, which had been referred
to as 'hollands' and which, her mother had explained to Sage, was an
old-fashioned term for the covers used to protect the furniture in
large houses when its occupants were away.

To Sage they had always been reminiscent of shrouds; white
and ghostly and somehow filled with sadness.

Now, as she walked through the sculleries and pantries,
and then the kitchen, she saw that most of the furniture had gone.

No doubt Daniel with his orderly mind wanted the house
cleared before he finally dealt it its death blow.

The Tudor section of the house had a small narrow hallway
with a flight of equally narrow stairs, which Agnes had always referred
to as the servants' stairs. The main hallway was in the Georgian wing
of the building, a pretty oval room, with a delicate marble and
wrought-iron staircase that seemed to float upwards through all four
storeys of the building. Sage remembered how amazed and enthralled she
had been as a child to look up the entire height of the building and to
see a painting on its ceiling enclosed in a delicate oval plaster
frame— a mural depicting what her mother had explained to her
was meant to represent the Greek god Zeus peering down towards the
earth through dark thunder-clouds.

As she picked her way through rooms thick with cobwebs and
dust, filled with stale damp air, trying not to look at the betraying
stains on the walls and ceilings, trying not to notice rotting
panelling and damaged stucco, she wondered if the mural was still there.

It was… True, the once magnificently
storm-laden clouds had now turned a uniform leaden grey, the paint
flaking off in places. True, Zeus's once proud features had become
obscured and faded. True, since she had first set eyes on this mural
she had visited Italy and seen the magnificence of Michelangelo's
breathtaking Sistine Chapel. But perhaps your first awareness of
something that was to motivate your whole life was like your first
lover… Something you never forgot, something you always
remembered with affection and tenderness, something you cherished in
your heart with loyalty and love.

She might cherish her awed reaction to her first
realisation that someone, a person had actually painted Zeus and his
clouds on the ceiling, but she certainly did not cherish any memories
of her first lover. Not in the way she would have done if
Daniel…

She tensed immediately like someone trying to clamp down
on intense physical agony, the ceiling blurring as she fought against
what she was feeling.

She started to climb the stairs, trying to concentrate on
her physical movements to blot out the enormity of her thoughts.

At first-floor height, a narrow oval gallery encircled the
hallway. A corridor led off it to the bedrooms, its style repeated on
the second floor. Sage paused at first-floor level, noticing how much
of the balustrading was missing… how dangerous and uneven
the floorboards were. Plaster and dust covered the floor, and no matter
how carefully she placed her feet every time she moved she sent up
choking clouds of dust. The closer she got to the mural, the more she
was aware of its destruction. Paint was peeling away from the plaster
in thin soft sheets. Daniel would need to do nothing to destroy
Zeus—time and neglect had already done his work for him.

She felt tears sting her eyes. Suddenly all she wanted to
do was to escape from the house and its forlornness.

She turned on her heel and started back down the stairs,
coming to an abrupt halt near the bottom, the breath hissing out of her
lungs, as she saw Daniel Cavanagh standing below her in the hall
watching her.

'What are you doing here?' she demanded aggressively,
masking her own shock.

He looked up at her and then said with deceptive calm,
'Well, I'm not trespassing.'

Sage stared at him, felt herself flush as guiltily as a
schoolgirl, saw him come towards her, and, without knowing why, took an
instinctive step backwards, losing her balance as she stepped on to a
piece of fallen plaster.

She heard Daniel call out sharply and warningly. As she
stumbled she reached for the balustrade, only she missed it and with
nothing to hold on to… nothing to stop her fall, she
plummeted through space and down towards the marble floor.

She heard herself cry out, closing her eyes automatically,
tensing her body for its impact with the floor, but instead she felt
hard fingers grab hold of her, heard the savage rush of breath that
left Daniel's chest as he caught hold of her, heard him curse with what
was left of that breath as he dragged her free of the plaster and
debris which were showering down around them.

'You little fool, couldn't you see those stairs weren't
safe?' Daniel was shouting in her ear.

The shock of her near accident had made her lightheaded.
'Is that what you're going to claim when you raze it to the ground?'
she flung at him.

She then gasped as he literally lifted her off her feet
and shook her, saying angrily, 'You stupid woman, don't you understand?
You could have been killed.'

She already knew that, and her stomach was still twisting
nauseously with that knowledge, and yet she still fought it and him,
saying mockingly, 'So what? It would have let you off the hook,
wouldn't it? Pity you didn't think about that before rushing in to play
Sir Galahad.'

'My God.'

She could feel the bite of his fingers into her skin, even
through the protection of her sweater, wincing at their crushing
strength. She felt faint and sick and more vulnerable then she could
remember feeling in a long time.

There was something sticky and hot on her face, and as she
raised her hand to touch it her fingers came away stained with blood.

'It's all right,' Daniel told her roughly, one hand
leaving her arm to push her fingers away. 'It's only a scratch.'

She jerked back from him as he reached out to touch her
skin, her eyes reminding him in their ferocity of an eagle's. There was
dust on her skin, and with her hair tied up in that ponytail she looked
as young as she had done the first time he had seen her. Emotions he
had thought he had long ago taught himself not to feel boiled up inside
him. She could have been killed, could have been lying there on the
floor under that crushing burden of wood, plaster and metal, her face
as white as it had been the night she had come to him and…

Sage didn't like being so close to him. It stirred up too
many memories. She was having to fight too hard to stop herself from
simply letting go and leaning into him… on to
him… From…

'You've always got to fight, haven't you, Sage?' she heard
him challenging her. 'You've always got to prove how tough you are. How
independent, how invulnerable, and how you enjoy it… You
just love putting us down, don't you? Do you know what they call you
behind your back, when they've finally managed to crawl out of your
bed? They say that for all your sexual skill, for all your experience
and your inventiveness, at heart you're a real balls-breaker, and as
destructive as hell.'

She went white and then red, not knowing why she should
feel this raging, searing pain, not knowing why she should care what he
thought of her, not knowing why she felt this helpless, crippling,
endless pain, only knowing that she had to hurt him back, to kick out
at him… to retaliate and wound him as cruelly as he had done
her.

She tried to break free of his hold and, when he wouldn't
let her go, said bitterly, 'Then it's just as well that you turned me
down all those years ago, isn't it? Trust a man like you to protect his
precious machismo…'

'A man like me.' He was furious with her and showing it.
'You don't know the first thing about me,' he told her.

'And you don't know the first thing about me,' she flung
back.