A Suitable Vengeance

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley prolonged the moment before he crossed the green to join her, taking pleasure in a study of her movements. He savoured her presence. He had no fondness for the tender angst of being in love with a woman who was six thousand miles away. So Deborah's absence had created anything but an easy time for him. Most of it he had spent with his mind fixed upon when he would next see her on one or another of his quick trips to California.

  But now she was back. She was with him. He was fully determined to keep it that way.

  He crossed the lawn, scattering pigeons who were pecking about in search of crumbs from afternoon lunches. They took hasty flight, and Deborah looked up. Her hair, which had been pulled back with a haphazard arrangement of combs, tumbled towards freedom. She muttered in exasperation and began to fuss with it.

  'You know,' she said by way of greeting him, 'I always wanted to be one of those women who're described as having hair like silk. You know what I mean. An Estella Havisham type.'

  'Did Estella Havisham have hair like silk?' He pushed her hand away and saw to the snarls himself.

  'She must have. Can you imagine poor Pip falling for someone who didn't have hair like silk? Ouch!’

  ‘Pulling?'

  'A bit. Honestly, isn't it pathetic? I lead one life and my hair leads another.'

  'Well, it's fixed now. Sort of.' 'That's encouraging.'

  They laughed together and began gathering her belongings which were scattered on the lawn. She'd come with tripod, camera-case, a shopping-bag containing three pieces of fruit, a comfortable old pullover, and her shoulder-bag.

  'I saw you from my office,' Lynley told her. 'What are you working on? A tribute to Mrs Pankhurst?'

  'Actually, I was waiting for the light to strike the top of the scroll. I thought to create some diffraction with the lens. Utterly defeated by the clouds, I'm afraid. By the time they decided to drift away, the sun had done so as well.' She paused reflectively and scratched her head. 'What an appalling display of ignorance. I think I mean the earth.' She fished in her shoulder-bag and brought out a mint which she unwrapped and popped into her mouth.

  They strolled back towards Scotland Yard.

  ‘I’ve managed to get Friday off,' Lynley told her. 'Monday as well. So we're free to go to Cornwall. I'm free, that is. And if you've nothing planned I thought we might. . .' He stopped, wondering why he was adding the verbal apologia.

  'Cornwall, Tommy?' Deborah's voice was no different when she asked the question, but her head was turned away from him so he couldn't see her expression.

  'Yes. Cornwall. Howenstow. I think it's time, don't you? I know you've only just come back and perhaps this is rushing things. But you've never met my mother.'

  Deborah said only, 'Ah. Yes.'

  'Your coming to Cornwall would give your father an opportunity to meet her as well. And it's time they met.'

  She frowned at her scuffed shoes and made no reply.

  'Deb, it can't be avoided for ever. I know what you're thinking. They're worlds apart. They'll have nothing to say to each other. But that isn't the case. They'll get on. Believe me.'

  'He won't want to do this, Tommy.'

  'I've already thought of that. And of a way to manage it. I've asked Simon to come along. It's all arranged in fact.'

  He did not include in the information the details of his brief encounter with St James and Lady Helen Clyde at the Ritz, they on their way to a business dinner and he en route to a reception at Clarence House. He also didn't mention St James' ill-concealed reluctance or Lady Helen's quick excuse. An enormous backlog of work, she'd said, promising to keep them busy for every weekend over the next month.

  Helen's declining the invitation had been too quick to be believable, and the speed of her refusal, in combination with the effort she made not to look at St James, told Lynley how important absence from Cornwall was to them both. Even if he had wanted to lie to himself, he couldn't do so in the face of their behaviour. He knew what it meant. But he needed them in Cornwall for Cotter's sake, and the mention of the older man's possible discomfort was what won them over. For St James would never send Cotter alone to be wretchedly enthroned as a weekend visitor to Howenstow. And Helen would never abandon St James to what she clearly visualized as four days of unmitigated misery. So Lynley had used them. It was all for Cotter's sake, he told himself, and refused to examine the secondary reasons he had - even more compelling than Cotter's comfort - for arriving at Howenstow with a surfeit of companions.

  Deborah was inspecting the silver letters on the Yard's revolving sign. She said, 'Simon's to go?'

  'And Helen. Sidney as well.' Lynley waited for her further reaction. When there was none other than the smallest of nods, he decided they were finally close enough to the single area of discussion which they had long avoided. It lay between them, unspoken, putting down roots of potential doubt which needed to be extirpated once and for all.

  'Have you seen him, Deb?'

  'Yes.' She shifted her tripod from one hand to the other. She said nothing else, leaving everything up to him.

  Lynley felt in his pocket for cigarette case and lighter. He lit up before she had a chance to admonish him. Feeling weighted down by a burden he did not wish to define, he sighed.

  'I want to get us through this, Deb. No, that's not quite true, is it? We need to get through it.'

  'I saw him the night I got home, Tommy. He was waiting up for me in the lab. With a homecoming present. An enlarger. He wanted me to see it. And then the next afternoon he came to Paddington. We spoke.'

  That's all was left unsaid.

  Lynley tossed his cigarette to one side, angry with himself. He wondered what it was that he really wanted Deborah to say, and why he expected her to account for a relationship with another man that had spanned her entire life, and how on earth she could ever begin to do so. He disliked the belief that was eating at his confidence, a gnawing conviction that somehow Deborah's return to London had the power to nullify every word and act of love that had passed between them in the last several years. Perhaps, hidden beneath the most troubling of his feelings, was the real reason he was determined to have St James with them in Cornwall: to prove to the other man once and for all that Deborah was his. It was a contemptible thought.

  'Tommy.'

  He roused himself to find that Deborah was watching him. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to tell her how he loved the way her green eyes were flecked with bits of gold, the way her skin and hair reminded him of autumn. But all of that seemed ridiculous right now.

  'I love you, Tommy. I want to be your wife.'

  That, Lynley decided, didn't seem ridiculous at all.

  Part Three

  BLOOD SCORE

  4

  Nancy Cambrey scuffed her feet along the gravel drive that wound from the Howenstow lodge to the great house. She sent up delicate puffs of dust like miniature brown rain-clouds. It had been an unusually dry summer thus far, so a greyish patina of grime dressed the leaves of the rhododendrons that lined the roadway, and the trees arching overhead seemed not so much there to provide shade as to trap the heavy, dry air beneath their boughs. Out from under the trees the wind whipped round from Gwennap Head on its way into Mount's Bay from the Adantic. But where Nancy walked the air was still as death, and it smelt of foliage burned to cinders by the sun.

  Perhaps, she thought, the heaviness pressing so uneasily upon her lungs was not really born of the air at all, but was instead a child of her dread. For she had promised herself that she would speak to Lord Asherton the first time he came on one of his rare visits to Cornwall. Now he was coming.

  She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt limp, its ends brittle. In the last few months she had taken to wearing it pulled back with a piece of plain elastic at the nape of her neck, but today she had given herself a shampoo and left her hair to dry, hanging straight and simple, bluntly cut round her face and shoulders. It didn't feel right. She knew it didn't look right, unattractive and unflattering wh
en once it had been a source of bashful pride.

  How your hair shines, Nance. Yes. How it had.

  The sound of voices up ahead made her pause and squint myopically through the trees. Vague figures moved near a table set out on the lawn where an old oak provided a substantial area of shade. Two of the Howenstow dailies were at work there.

  Nancy recognized their voices. They were girls she had known from childhood, acquaintances who had never quite become her friends. They belonged to that collection of humanity who lived behind the barrier which she had erected between herself and others on the estate, barring her from intimacy with the Lynley children as effectively as with the children of the tenants, the farmers, the day workers, and the servants.

  Nowhere Nancy, she had labelled herself, and her life had been an effort to carve out a singular place where she might belong. She had that place now, nominal at best, but decidedly her own, a world circumscribed by a five-month-old baby daughter, Gull Cottage, and Mick.

  Mick. Michael Cambrey. University graduate. Journalist. World traveller. Man of ideas. And husband of Nancy.

  She had wanted him from the first, eager to bask in his charm, to relish his looks, to hear his conversation and his easy laughter, to feel his eyes upon her and hope to be the cause of their animation. So when she went on her weekly visit to his father's newspaper to check over the bookkeeping as she'd done for two years, when she found Mick there in place of his father, his invitation to linger and chat for a bit had been welcome.

  How he loved to talk. How she loved to listen. With little to contribute save her admiration, however, how simple it had been to arrive at the belief that she needed somehow to contribute more to their relationship. And she had done so - on the mattress in the old Howenstow mill where they'd spent an entire April making love, starting January's baby.

  She'd given little thought to how her life might change. She'd given less thought to how Mick himself might change. Only the moment existed, only sensation mattered. His hands and mouth, his hard male body insistent and eager, the faint salt on his skin, his groan of pleasure as he took her. The knowledge that he wanted her superseded any reflection upon the possible consequences. They were insubstantial.

  How different it was now.

  'Can we talk about it, Roderick?' she'd heard Mick say. 'With our money situation being what it is, I hate to see you make a decision like this. Let's talk about it when I get back from London.'

  He'd listened, laughed once, replaced the telephone receiver, and turned to find her shrinking back from the doorway, a flame-faced eavesdropper. But he wasn't concerned by her presence. He merely ignored her and returned to his work while above them in the bedroom little Molly wailed.

  Nancy had watched as he tapped on the keys of his new word processor. She heard him mutter and saw him pick up the manual to read a few pages. She didn't cross the room to speak to him. Instead, she wrung her hands.

  With our money situation being what it is .. . They didn't own Gull Cottage. It was merely a rental, let to them on a monthly basis. But money was tight. Mick spent it too freely. The last two rental payments hadn't been made. If Dr Trenarrow intended an increase now, if that increase were added to what they already owed, they would sink. And, if that happened, where on earth could they go? Certainly not to Howenstow where they would have to live in the lodge on her father's angry charity.

  'Linen's gotter 'ole in it, Mary. Brought another?'

  'Not with. Set a plate down on't.'

  "Oo the 'ell's gonna sit squat in the middle of the table, Mar?'

  Laughter drifted Nancy's way as the dailies shook out a crisp white tablecloth. It billowed from their hands, caught in a sudden gust of wind that managed to find its way through the armour of the trees. Nancy raised her own face to it, but it captured a patch of dead leaves and dust and flung them up at her so that she tasted fine grit.

  She lifted a hand to brush at her face, but the effort drained her of strength. Sighing, she trudged on towards the house.

  It was one thing, of course, to talk of love and marriage in London. It was another to feel the full range of implications behind those easy words when she saw them spread out before her in Cornwall. By the time she got out of the limousine that had met them at the Land's End airstrip, Deborah Cotter was feeling decidedly light-headed. Her stomach was churning as well.

  Because she had never known Lynley in any way other than in her own environment and upon her own terms, she hadn't thought about what it would mean to marry into his family. She knew he was an earl, of course. She'd ridden in his Bentley, been to his London house, even met his valet. She'd eaten off his china, drunk from his crystal, and watched him dress himself in his hand-tailored clothes. But all of that had somehow fallen into a category of behaviour which she had conveniently labelled How Tommy Lives. None of it had ever affected her own life in any way. However, seeing Howenstow from the air, as Lynley circled the plane twice over the estate, had served as the first indication to Deborah that life as she had known it for twenty-one years faced potential - and radical - alteration.

  The house was an enormous Jacobean structure built in the shape of a variegated E with its central leg missing. A large secondary wing grew in reverse direction from the building's west leg and to the north-east, just beyond its spine, stood a church. Beyond the house clustered a scattering of outbuildings and stables, and beyond these the Howenstow park spread out in the direction of the sea. Cows grazed on this parkland amid towering sycamore trees that grew in abundance, protected from the sometimes inclement south-western weather by a fortuitous natural slope of land. At the perimeter of all this, a skilfully crafted Cornish wall marked the boundary of the estate proper, but not the end of the Asherton property which was, Deborah knew, divided among dairy farms, agriculture, and abandoned mines that had once provided the district with tin.

  Faced with the concrete, undeniable reality that was Tommy's home - no longer an illusory setting for the weekend house-parties she had overheard discussed by St James and Lady Helen for so many years - Deborah's mind became taken up with the risible notion of herself -Deborah Cotter, the child of a servant - moving blithely into the life of this estate as if it were Manderley with Max de Winter brooding somewhere within its walls, waiting to be rejuvenated by the love of a simple woman. Hardly an act in her line, she thought.

  What on earth am I doing here? The entire situation felt like a dream, with chimerical elements stacking one upon the other. The flight down in the plane, the first viewing of Howenstow, the limousine and uniformed chauffeur waiting on the airstrip. Even Lady Helen's light-hearted greeting of this man - 'Jasper, my God! So sartorially splendid! The last time I was here, you hadn't even bothered to shave' - did little to allay Deborah's qualms.

  At least nothing was expected of her on the drive to Howenstow other than to admire Cornwall, and she had. It was a wild part of the country, comprising desolate moors, stony hillsides, sandy coves whose hidden caves had long been used as smugglers' caches, sudden lush woodlands where the countryside dipped into a combe, and everywhere tangles of celandine, poppy and periwinkle that dominated the narrow lanes.

  The main drive to Howenstow shot off from one of these, canopied by sycamores and edged by rhododendrons. It passed a lodge, skirted the park, dipped beneath an ornate Tudor gatehouse, circled a rose garden, and ended before a massive front door above which a hound and a lion battled resplendently in the Asherton coat of arms.

  They got out of the car with the usual jumble that accompanies an arrival. Deborah favoured the building with a single fleeting look. It appeared to be deserted. She wished that were the case.

  'Ah. Here's Mother,' Lynley said.

  Turning, Deborah found him looking not towards the front door, where she had expected to see an excessively well-dressed Countess of Asherton standing with one white hand extended limply in welcome, but towards the south-east corner of the house where a tall, slender woman was striding towards them through the shrubbery
.

  Deborah could not have been more surprised at the sight of Lady Asherton. She was wearing old tennis clothes, with a faded blue towel flung round her shoulders. This she used vigorously to wipe perspiration from her face, arms and neck. Three large wolfhounds and a gangling young retriever bounded at her heels, and she paused, wrested a ball from one of them and threw it with the skill of a bowler to the far side of the garden. She laughed as they disappeared in frantic chase after it, watching them for a moment before joining the party by the front door.

  'Tommy.' She spoke pleasantly. 'You've had your hair cut a bit differently, haven't you? I like it. Very much.' She didn't touch him. Instead, she gave embraces to Lady Helen and St James before turning to Deborah and continuing to speak with a rueful gesture at her tennis clothes. 'Forgive my appearance, Deborah. I don't always greet guests so decidedly un-turned out, but frankly I'm lazy, and if I don't take my exercise at the same hour every day I manage to find a thousand excuses for not taking it at all. Tell me you're not one of those dreadful health fiends who jog every morning at dawn.'

  It was certainly not a welcome-to-our-family salutation. But, on the other hand, it wasn't the sort of clever greeting that managed to mix requisite courtesy with unmistakable disapproval. Deborah wasn't sure what to make of it.

  As if she understood and wanted to get them through the first moments as smoothly as possible, Lady Asherton merely smiled, squeezed Deborah's hand, and turned to her father. Throughout the exchange Cotter had been standing to one side. In the heat, sweat sheened his face. He was managing to make his clothes look as if they'd been made for a man several inches taller and much heavier than he.

  'Mr Cotter,' Lady Asherton said. 'May I call you Joseph? I'm only too delighted that you and Deborah shall be part of our family.'

  So here was the standard welcome. Wisely, Lynley's mother had saved it for the person she had intuitively known would most need to hear it.