A Suitable Vengeance

by Elizabeth George

  'Isn't that the same group—?'

  'Who did The Importance of Being Earnest two summers ago? Darling Simon, yes. The very same.'

  'Lord. How could this current production match Nanrunnel's gallant bow to Oscar Wilde? The Reverend Mr Sweeney waxing eloquent as Algernon with cucumber sandwiches sticking to the roof of his mouth. Not to mention the muffins.'

  'Then, what do you say to Mr Sweeney as Benedick?'

  'Only a fool would pass that up.' St James reached for his crutches, swung himself to his feet, balanced, and adjusted his long dressing-gown.

  Lady Helen averted her eyes as he did so, using as an excuse the need to pick up three rose petals which had fallen from an arrangement that sat on the shelf of a cheveret to one side of the window. They felt like small pieces of down-covered satin against her palm. She looked for a rubbish-basket and thus circumvented an open acknowledgement of St James' primary vanity, a need to hide his bad leg in an attempt to appear as normal as possible.

  'Has anyone seen Tommy?'

  Lady Helen read the meaning underlying St James' question. 'He doesn't know what happened. We've managed to avoid him.'

  'Deborah's managed as well?'

  'She's been with Sidney. She saw to her bath, got her to lie down, took her some tea.' She gave a brief, humourless laugh. 'The tea was my profound contribution. I'm not sure what effect it was supposed to have.'

  'What about Brooke?'

  'Can we be so lucky as to hope he's taken himself back to London?'

  'I doubt it. Don't you?' 'Rather. Yes.'

  St James was standing next to the bed. Lady Helen knew she should leave the room to give him privacy to dress, but something in his manner - a meticulous control too brittle to be believed - compelled her to stay. Too much remained unsaid.

  She knew St James well, better than she had known any other man. She had spent the last decade becoming acquainted with his blind devotion to forensic science and his determination to stoke out ground upon which he could build a reputation as an expert. She had come to terms with his relentless introspection as well as with his desire for perfection and his self-castigation if he fell short of a goal. They talked about all of this, over lunch and dinner, in his study while the rain beat against the windows, on their way to the Old Bailey, on the stairs, in the lab. But what they did not talk about was his disability. It had always represented a polar region of his psyche that brooked no-one's intrusion. Until today on the cliff-top. Even then, when he had finally given her the opening she had long awaited, her words had been inadequate.

  What, then, could she say to him now? She didn't know. Not for the first time did she wonder what sort of bond might have developed between them had she not left his hospital room eight years ago simply because he asked her to do so. And to obey him then had been so much easier than taking the chance of walking into the unknown.

  Still, she couldn't leave him now without attempting to say something that gave him - even in small measure -back to himself.

  'Simon.'

  'My medication is on the counter above the washbasin, Helen,' St James said. 'Will you fetch me two tablets?'

  'Medication?' Lady Helen felt a quick surge of concern. She didn't think she had misread his reasons for locking himself away in his room for the afternoon. He hadn't been acting as if he was having any pain at all, despite Cotter's admonition to her earlier.

  'It's just a precaution. Above the washbasin.' He smiled, a flicker that passed across his face and was gone in an instant. 'I take it that way sometimes. Before instead of during. It works just as well. And if I'm to put up with Mr Sweeney as a thespian for an evening I ought to be prepared.'

  She laughed and went to get it for him, calling back into the bedroom. 'Actually, this isn't a bad idea. If tonight's production is anything like the other we saw, we'll all be popping painkillers before the evening's through. Perhaps we should take the bottle along with us.'

  She brought the tablets back into the bedroom. He had gone to the window where he was leaning forward on his crutches, looking out at the southern view of the grounds. But she could tell from his profile that his eyes registered nothing.

  The sight of him like this negated his words, his polite co-operation, and the lightness of his tone. She realized that even his smile had been a device to cut her off completely, while all along he existed, as he always had done, alone.

  She would not accept it. 'You might have fallen,' she said. 'Please. Simon darling, the path was too steep. You might have been killed.'

  'Indeed,' he answered.

  The cavernous Howenstow drawing room did not possess the sort of qualities that made one feel at home wandering through it. The size of an overlarge tennis court, its furniture - an aggregation of antiques positioned in conversational groupings - was scattered across a fine chenille carpet. Walled with Constables and Turners and displaying an array of fine porcelains, it was the sort of room that made one afraid of moving precipitately in any direction. Alone, Deborah carefully picked her way down its length to the grand piano, intent upon examining the photographs that stood on top of it.

  They comprised a pictorial history of the Lynleys' tenure as the Earls of Asherton. The stiff-backed fifth Countess stared at her with that unfriendly expression so predominant in the photographs of the nineteenth century; the sixth Earl sat astride a large bay and looked down at an unruly pack of hounds; the present Lady was robed and gowned for the Queen's coronation; Tommy and his siblings frolicked through a youth of wealth and privilege.

  Only Tommy's father, the seventh Earl, was missing. As she noticed this, Deborah realized that she had seen his likeness nowhere in the house, in either photograph or portrait, a circumstance she found decidedly odd, for she had seen several pictures of the man in the townhouse Tommy occupied in London.

  'When you're photographed to join them, you must promise me you'll smile.' Lady Asherton came to meet her, a glass of sherry in her hand. She looked cool and lovely in a cloudy white dress. 'I wanted to smile, but Tommy's father insisted that it wasn't done and I'm afraid I caved in quite spinelessly. I was like that in my youth. Most appallingly malleable.' She smiled at Deborah, sipping her sherry and moving from the piano to sit in the embrasure of a window behind it.

  'I've so enjoyed my afternoon with your father, Deborah. I talked incessantly, but he was quite gracious about it, acting as if everything I said was the height of wit and sense.' She turned her glass upon her palm and seemed to be watching how the light struck the design cut into the crystal. 'You're very close to your father.'

  'Yes,' she answered.

  'That's sometimes the way when a child loses one parent, isn't it? It's the mixed blessing of a death.'

  'Of course, I was very young when my mother died,' Deborah said in an attempt to explain away the distance she had not been able to ignore between Tommy and his mother. 'So I suppose it was natural that I would develop a deeper relationship with Dad. He was doing double duty, after all. Father and mother to a seven-year-old. And I had no brothers or sisters. Well, Simon was there, but he was more like . . . I'm not sure. An uncle? A cousin? Most of my upbringing fell to Dad.'

  'And you became a unit as a result, the two of you. How lucky you are.'

  Deborah wouldn't have called her relationship with her father the product of luck. Rather it was the outcome of time, paternal patience and willing communication. Saddled with a child whose impetuous personality was nothing like his own, Cotter had managed to adjust his own thinking in a constant attempt to understand hers. If devotion existed between them now, it was only due to years in which the seeds of a future relationship had been planted and cultivated.

  'You're estranged from Tommy, aren't you?' Deborah said impulsively.

  Lady Asherton smiled, but she looked very tired. For a moment Deborah thought that exhaustion might wear at her guard and prompt her to say something about what was at the root of the trouble between herself and her son. But instead she said, 'Has Tommy mentioned
the play tonight? Shakespeare under the stars. In Nanrunnel.' Voices drifted to them from the corridor. 'I'll let him tell you about it, shall I?' That said, she gave her attention to the window behind her where a light breeze carried into the room the salty fragrance of the Cornish sea.

  'If we fortify ourselves enough, we should be able to survive this with some semblance of sanity,' Lynley was saying as he entered the room. He went directly to a cabinet and began pouring three sherries from one of the decanters that stood in a semicircle upon it. He gave one to Lady Helen, another to St James, and tossed back his own drink before catching sight of Deborah and his mother at the far end of the room. He said, 'Have you told Deborah about our Theseus and Hippolyta roles this evening?'

  Lady Asherton raised her hand fractionally from her lap. Like her smile, the movement seemed weighted by fatigue. 'I thought that was best left to you.'

  Lynley poured himself a second drink. 'Right. Yes. Well' - this to Deborah with a smile - 'we've a duty play, darling. I'd like to tell you that we'll go late and bow out at the interval, but the Reverend Mr Sweeney is an old family friend. He'd be crushed if we weren't there for the entire production.'

  'Dreadful though the production will certainly be,' Lady Helen added.

  'Shall I take photographs while we're there?' Deborah offered. 'After the play, I mean. If Mr Sweeney's an especial friend, perhaps he'd like that.'

  'Tommy with the cast,' Lady Helen said. 'Mr Sweeney will burst. What a wonderful idea! I've always said you belong on the stage, haven't I, Tommy?'

  Lynley laughed, made a response. Lady Helen chatted on. As she did so, St James took his drink and wandered towards two large Chinese vases that stood at either side of the doorway into the long Elizabethan gallery that opened off the east end of the drawing room. He ran his fingers over the smooth porcelain surface of one of them, tracing a particularly intricate pattern made by the glaze. Deborah noted that, although twice he lifted his glass of sherry to his lips, he drank neither time. He seemed intent upon looking at no-one.

  Deborah hardly expected anything else after the afternoon. In fact, if not acknowledging anyone's presence helped him to forget about it all, she felt quite as if she would like to indulge in the same behaviour even though she knew that, for herself, forgetting would not occur any time soon.

  It was bad enough tearing Brooke away from Sidney, knowing his behaviour was the product of neither love nor lust but violence and a need to hammer her into submission. It was even worse helping Sidney climb the cliff, hearing her hysterical weeping, catching hold of her so that she wouldn't fall. Her face was bleeding and beginning to swell. The words she sobbed out were incoherent. Three times she stopped, wouldn't move, merely wept. All that had been a living nightmare. But then at the top there was Simon, standing against a tree, watching for them. His face was half-hidden. His right hand dug into the tree's bark so hard that the bones stood out.

  Deborah had wanted to go to him. For what reason, to what possible end, she could not have said. Her only rational thought at the moment was that she couldn't leave him alone. But Helen stopped her when she took a step in his direction, pushing her with Sidney towards the path to the house.

  That stumbling trip back had been the second nightmare. Each part stood out vividly in her mind. Coming upon Mark Penellin in the woods; making inarticulate excuses for Sidney's appearance and her distraught condition; approaching the house with an ever rising sense of trepidation that someone might see them; slipping by the gun room and the old servants' hall to look for the north-west stairway that Helen had insisted was near the pantry; taking a wrong turn at the top of those stairs and ending up in the disused west wing of the house; and all the time terrified that Tommy would come upon them and begin asking questions. Through it all, Sidney had gone from hysteria to rage to despair and finally to silence. But this last was dazed, and it frightened Deborah more than Sidney's earlier unrestrained agitation.

  The entire experience had far exceeded dreadful, and when Justin Brooke walked into the drawing room, dressed casually for the evening as if he had not tried to rape a woman in front of five witnesses that afternoon, it was all Deborah could do to look at the man without screaming and flying into the attack.

  8

  'Good God, what happened to you?' Lynley sounded so surprised that St James turned from his perusal of the Kang H'si porcelain to see Justin Brooke taking the proffered glass of sherry with complete nonchalance.

  Christ, St James thought. Brooke was actually going to join them, smugly confident that they were all too self-servingly well bred to say anything about the afternoon while Lynley and his mother were in the room.

  'Took a fall in the woods.' Brooke looked around as he spoke, making eye contact with each of them, challenging one person after another to expose him as a liar.

  At this, St James felt his jaw clench automatically to bite back what he wanted to say. With an atavistic satisfaction which he did not deny himself, he noted the considerable damage that his sister had managed to do to Brooke's face. Claw marks scored his cheeks. A bruise rose on his jaw. His lower lip was swollen.

  'A fall?' Lynley's attention was on the inflamed teeth-marks on Brooke's neck, barely obscured by the collar of his shirt. He looked at the others sharply. 'Where's Sidney?' he asked.

  No-one replied. A glass clinked against the top of a table. Someone coughed. Outside, at some distance from the house, an engine roared to life. Footsteps sounded in the hall and Cotter entered the drawing room. He stopped barely two feet inside the door, as if he'd taken a quick reading of the ambience and was having second thoughts about exposing himself to it. He looked at St James, a reflex reaction that sought direction and found it in the other man's detachment from the scene. He made no other move.

  'Where's Sidney?' Lynley repeated.

  At her end of the room, Lady Asherton rose to her feet. 'Has something—?'

  Deborah spoke quickly. 'I saw her half an hour ago, Tommy.' Her face flushed. Its colour did battle with the fire of her hair. 'She spent too much time in the sun this afternoon and thought. . . well, she's asked for ... a rest. Yes. She said she needed a bit of a rest. She did send her apologies and . . . you know Sidney. She goes at such a pace, doesn't she? She wears herself out as if nothing at all . . . It's no wonder to me she's exhausted.' Her fingers wandered to her throat as she spoke, as if her hand wanted to cover her mouth to prevent the lie from becoming even more obvious.

  In spite of himself, St James smiled. He looked at Deborah's father, who shook his head weakly in affectionate recognition of a fact they both knew only too well. Helen might have been able to carry it off. Casual prevarication to smooth over troubled waters was more in her line. But Deborah was hopeless at this particular form of conversational legerdemain.

  The rest of the party was saved from having to embellish upon Deborah's story by the entrance of Peter Lynley. His feet bare and a clean gauze shirt his only bow to dressing for dinner, he was trailed by Sasha whose glaucous-hued dress made her complexion seem more sallow than ever. As if she would speak to them or attempt to intercede in what she saw as a coming conflict, Lady Asherton started to walk in their direction.

  Peter gave no indication that he saw his mother or anyone else. He merely wiped his nose on the back of his hand and went to the drinks tray. He poured himself a whisky, which he gulped down quickly, then poured himself another and Sasha some of the same.

  They stood, an isolated little unit apart from the others, with the spirit decanters within easy reach. As she took a sip of her drink, Sasha slipped her hand under Peter's loose shirt and pulled him towards her.

  'Nice stuff, Sash,' Peter murmured and kissed her.

  Lynley set his glass down. Lady Asherton spoke quickly. 'I saw Nancy Cambrey in the grounds this afternoon, Tommy. I'm rather concerned about her. She's lost a great deal of weight. Did you happen to see her?'

  'I saw her.' Lynley watched his brother and Sasha. His face was unreadable.

 
'She seems terribly worried about something. I think it's to do with Mick. He's working on a story that's taken him away from home so much these last few months. Did she talk to you about it?'

  'We talked.'

  'And did she mention a story, Tommy? Because—' 'She mentioned it. Yes.'

  Lady Helen attacked the issue of diversion from a new angle. 'What a lovely dress that is, Sasha. I envy your ability to wear those wonderful Indian prints. I look like a cross between Jemima Puddleduck and a charwoman whenever I try them. Did Mark Penellin find the two of you? Simon and I saw him in the woods seeking you out.'

  'Mark Penellin?' Peter reached out to caress a length of Sasha's thin hair. 'No, we never saw him.'

  In some confusion, Lady Helen looked towards St James. 'But we saw him. He didn't find you in the cove? This afternoon?'

  Peter smiled a lazy, satisfied smile. 'We weren't in the cove this afternoon.'

  'You weren't. . .'

  'I mean, I suppose we were, but we weren't. So if he wanted to find us he would have seen us but not seen us.

  Or maybe it was after we went in the water. And then he wouldn't have seen us at all. Not where we were. And I don't think I'd have wanted him to. What about you, Sasha?'

  He chuckled and traced the bridge of Sasha's nose. He ran his fingers across her mouth. Cat-like, she licked them.

  Wonderful, St James thought. It's only Friday.

  Nanrunnel was a successful combination of two disparate environments: a centuries-old fishing village and a modern tourist haunt. Built in a semicircular fashion round a natural harbour, its structures twisted up a hillside dotted with cedar, cypress and pine, their exteriors hewn from rocks quarried in the district, some whitewashed and others left a natural, weather-streaked mixture of grey and brown. Streets were narrow - wide enough to allow only the passage of a single car - and they followed a strangely convoluted pattern which met the demands of the hills rather than the requirements of automobiles.