A Suitable Mistress

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Are you all right?’ Dane asked from beside her, and she leant her head against the window-pane.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she answered a little shortly. The cottage was lost from sight and within a couple of minutes the vast house appeared in front of them, like a familiar friend not seen for a long time. She seemed to remember every brick and every angle of every window, and she wondered whether it was the same for him too. After all, it was a long time since he had last laid eyes on it.

  She looked at him sideways, from under her lashes. ‘Does it feel like coming home to you?’ she asked hesitantly, and he didn’t look at her when he replied.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he murmured, his eyes on the house—his house. ‘Everywhere else has simply been in transit. This is the destination that’s waited for me from the very first day I left.’

  There were no cars in the courtyard and for a second she wondered whether the trip would result in the anticlimax of finding no one in, but she remembered the second courtyard behind the house, by the stables, and realised that that was where the cars would be parked.

  Martha had always insisted on having two cars: the Rolls-Royce—a silvery blue one which Suzanne’s father had used to drive her from one appointment to another—and her convertible Mercedes sports car which she drove herself when she didn’t want to be chauffeured. Suzanne could remember seeing the burgundy car flash past in summer, with the roof down and Martha behind the wheel, her blonde hair neatly contained under a silk scarf, looking like a movie star.

  She felt a lump of resentment at the back of her throat and for the first time was profoundly glad that Dane had asked her along on this trip.

  A youngish girl answered the door when they rang. Suzanne had never seen her before. Enid, who had been the housemaid there for years, had been summarily despatched when old Mr Sutherland had died. Martha had never liked her; she had felt that the old woman undermined her authority, and she had taken the first available opportunity to get rid of her, after which there had been a succession of maids because none of them ever seemed to last the course. Martha, Suzanne recalled, had a way of issuing orders that would try the most patient of souls.

  This girl was plump, with dark hair tied back in a pony-tail, and she looked at Dane with surreptitious interest but no recognition.

  ‘Mrs Sutherland is in the drawing room,’ she said. ‘If you’d like to follow me...?’

  ‘I know the way,’ Dane said, which startled her somewhat, but she had obviously been trained to listen to commands, because she obediently fell back and shut the door behind them.

  ‘I see that Martha has imposed her own tastes on the place,’ Dane said, looking around him once the housemaid had retired to the kitchen. His face was disapproving and Suzanne followed his eyes. She had become accustomed to the decor, all changed after old Mr Sutherland’s death, but she could appreciate how strange it must seem to Dane.

  Where there had once been paint, there was now wallpaper in the large hallway, busily patterned with flowers, more suited to a bedroom than to the high-ceilinged hall, which seemed to lose its dignity under the bombardment of roses climbing vines with the odd bird peeping out from behind the leaves.

  ‘She said that the original paintwork was too fusty.’

  ‘Not what she said when she first came here with my father,’ Dane muttered grimly. ‘She was falling over herself with delight then.’

  Suzanne didn’t say anything, and they both lapsed into silence as they walked towards the drawing room.

  Martha was waiting for them. She stood up as they came in, not looking a day older than when Suzanne had last seen her. She was wearing a canary-yellow suit with a strand of pearls around her neck and an expression of stunned surprise on her face.

  ‘Dane, darling,’ she said, recovering quickly. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting you. I thought—well, that Mr Martin...’

  ‘Couldn’t make it,’ Dane said smoothly, stepping away from the outstretched arms. ‘I’m here instead.’

  ‘Of course. Do sit. It’s lovely to see you.’ She had, Suzanne noticed, pretended not to have noticed her presence at all.

  ‘You remember Suzanne Stanton, don’t you, Martha?’ Dane asked, and Martha reluctantly looked at her with a marked change of expression.

  ‘Of course. I was tremendously sorry about your father.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Suzanne said politely, and the atmosphere shifted. Now there were no overtones of cordiality.

  ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ she asked curtly.

  ‘She’s with me,’ Dane said coldly. ‘I asked her to come.’

  ‘Really? How cosy.’ She looked away from Suzanne, as though the sight of her aroused too much distaste, and resumed her seat on the sofa, which put her at an immediate disadvantage since neither Suzanne nor Dane sat down.

  ‘But, of course, I know all about your affair with the girl,’ Martha said, and now that the mask of genial hostess had dropped it wasn’t difficult to see the tight-mouthed dislike on the attractive face, with its fine lines peeping through the camouflage of foundation and make-up. Martha was beginning to look her age, but she would never be one to concede gracefully. The yellow skirt was still a goodish way above the knees and her make-up was still heavily applied.

  ‘How common of you, Dane, darling. I would have thought that you might have known better.’

  There was a deep silence, and there was such cold dislike on Dane’s face that Martha was forced to look away.

  ‘It would be nice if you didn’t discuss me as though I wasn’t present,’ Suzanne said, with a white rage of her own burning inside her and threatening to explode. ‘If you wish to hurl insults at my expense, then do please show enough good breeding to do it to my face.’ The breeding bit, Suzanne knew, would bit home, and it did. Martha’s face contorted with fury.

  ‘Fine. In that case, I don’t understand what my stepson is doing consorting with a tramp like you. I’ve heard all about what’s going on, and if your father—’ she glanced at Dane ‘—knew what had been going on he would turn in his grave.’

  ‘And where does your information come from?’ Dane asked with chilling politeness. ‘Or need I ask?’

  Martha laughed, just as there was a knock on the door. There was something quite ugly in that laugh. ‘On cue,’ she said by way of response. ‘As you’re as uninterested in catching up with old times as I am, Dane, then I might as well get straight to the point. Your trip here has been a waste of time. I know why you’ve come and you’ve made a mistake. For once in your life, you’ve got it wrong.’ There was intense hatred in those eyes and Suzanne looked at Dane and Martha and wondered what else lay beneath this act being played out between them.

  The door opened, and all three heads swung round. It struck her that the scenario was in a way highly theatrical, but with an element of danger running through it that made it real.

  Dane’s expression hardly altered at all. It was as though he had been half expecting the intrusion, but Suzanne’s mouth fell open with shock as Angela walked in, besuited like Martha but in darker colours, vibrantly attractive but with the allure of a deadly snake.

  ‘I wondered when you would come up here,’ she said conversationally, moving to sit next to Martha, where the physical similarities between them were even more noticeable. Both small, both blonde. With the right age-gap, they could have passed for mother and daughter, but, as it was, they looked like two sisters made from the same mould. Or maybe it was the similarity of expression that lent them that curious resemblance. A sort of triumphant, distasteful glee.

  ‘I did warn you,’ Angela said, looking at Suzanne, ‘but of course you had to do it your way, and now you’ve ruined poor Dane’s plans.

  ‘I would have left with some money—some highly deserved money,’ she said in a vicious voice to Dane, ‘but then your prying little lover discovered everything, so what else could I possibly do...?’

  ‘There’s another buyer,’ Martha said with open gloating in her vo
ice. ‘I’ve been having urgent talks to Geoffrey Martin and Greg Thompson, and you’ve wasted your time. The company has already been sold.’

  Suzanne couldn’t look at him. Was Martha right? Had he come so far to lose it all like sand between his fingers? Had she blown it? She felt sick. She realised that she loved him so much that it hardly mattered whether she meant nothing to him; she just wanted this one moment not to collapse, least of all because of her.

  Dane walked across the patio doors and stared out without a flicker of emotion on his dark face.

  ‘You should never,’ Angela told him with malevolent dislike, ‘have involved yourself with that girl. If you hadn’t, none of this would have happened.’

  He turned to face them and his personality was such that they all stared at him with varying degrees of fascination.

  ‘Did you really think that you could outsmart me, Angela? ’

  The words fell into the silence like a stone thrown into a pond, creating ever widening ripples that manifested themselves in growing looks of doubt and horror on the faces of Angela and Martha.

  ‘The directors of the company—’

  ‘Have been working on my behalf,’ he finished for Martha. ‘They have been in communication with me from the very day that I left England. Your company, my dear, no longer belongs to you.’

  Martha half rose and her face blanched. ‘I have been assured...’ she began faintly, falling back down onto the sofa.

  ‘Every move you have made has been relayed to me. You haven’t breathed without me knowing it from thousands of miles away.’ He walked towards the centre of the room. ‘The deal was done and completed last night,’ he told his intent audience.

  ‘As for you,’ he said to Angela, ‘you will repay every cent that you’ve embezzled if you have to clean floors to do it, because, as I stand here, I can promise you that you will find it extremely difficult to get a job of any standing anywhere in America, or here for that matter. Most companies do not appreciate employees who work against their bosses, when they think that it suits them.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ she said in a choking voice, and he didn’t even have to reply because his answer to that was written on his face.

  He crooked a finger in the direction of Suzanne, who had been hanging onto this exchange, hardly daring to breathe. Now she walked slowly towards him and to her intense surprise he slung his arm around her shoulder.

  ‘You may have forgotten, Martha,’ he said in a voice as smooth and as sharp as a knife, ‘but this house belongs to me. I want you and your belongings out of it by the end of today.’

  ‘But where will I go?’ she demanded, and her exquisitely made-up face was contorted with horror. Both she and Angela looked as though the world had collapsed around their ears.

  ‘You must still have some money from my father’s legacy. Use it. You can take the cars. Sell them if you have to.’ But my mind is made up, his voice said. ‘Suzanne will make sure that you leave on time.’

  He looked at her, she felt his head turn and his eyes rest on her for a moment, and when he next spoke his voice was softer. ‘She has every reason to want you out of here, and she has every right, because I intend to marry her.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS a goodish while before Suzanne could ask Dane about that extraordinary statement

  Things, after he had spoken, moved swiftly and with momentum, like a cart sent spinning down a hill, gathering speed.

  She hadn’t known whether he had really expected her to assist Martha with her departure, but he obviously had, because now he left them both in the room and headed towards the study where, he said, he had some things to sort out.

  One of those things appeared to be Angela, who followed him in a state of panic, her high voice disappearing down the corridor in a series of semi-wails and argumentative fury. If Dane paid the slightest bit of notice to this pleading, then it certainly wasn’t immediately apparent, because his deep voice was conspicuous by its absence.

  Suzanne, however much bitterness was stored up, could feel herself beginning to have twinges of sympathy for Martha, but any such sympathy was killed virtually before it began because Martha was not about to become sweetness and light now that she had been forced out of her castle.

  ‘I suppose you can’t wait to start gloating,’ she said, and her face was still a mask of fury—the fury of someone summarily stripped of her honour. She didn’t give Suzanne an opportunity to answer that, and for the rest of the day, as she collected her belongings, she continued a vicious monologue of insults and innuendo.

  After a while, Suzanne became completely impervious, and she followed Martha through the vast rooms, half-heartedly making sure that everything was collected, but thinking deeply about what Dane had said.

  Had he meant it? Had that been a proposal of marriage out there? A real proposal of marriage? Or had it been a carefully calculated statement designed to work in his favour and arouse maximum reaction from two people who had had the temerity to think that they could outsmart him?

  She frowned as she went from room to room, looking up when Martha said something outrageous and then returning to her quiet speculation.

  Which, of course, only served to infuriate Martha further. She threw her expensive clothes into her equally expensive suitcases, and when Suzanne remarked mildly that she would have a hell of a job getting the creases out she gave vent to five minutes of undiluted rage, which included everything from Dane to his father, to Suzanne, to her father, to the awful nightmare of living in a backward village miles away from any good shops.

  Before she was even halfway through the tirade, Suzanne was lost in speculation once again, this time trying to decipher the tone of Dane’s voice when he had uttered those words. She hadn’t been looking at him, so she had no idea what his expression had been, and her imagination busily tried to fill in the missing pieces, which left her with a slight headache.

  Martha had packed as much as she possibly could by early evening. She had stripped the house of everything which she claimed belonged to her, and various things which Suzanne suspected didn’t and which she would casually mention to Dane some time later on.

  Martha had eyed several of the paintings on the walls with a proprietorial gleam in her eyes, and at that Suzanne had quietly insisted that she talk to Dane, since the paintings had been in the Sutherland family for generations and belonged to the house, which had been when Martha had ungraciously conceded defeat.

  Now she stood there in the hallway, surrounded by at least a dozen Louis Vuitton bags of various sizes, and it was a relief when Dane appeared from the direction of the study, because Suzanne had no idea what she was supposed to do next.

  ‘All done, Martha?’ he asked with a studied politeness that made his stepmother’s face tighten. He put his arm over Suzanne’s shoulders, the way he had done earlier on in the drawing room, and she began frantically speculating all over again.

  ‘I hope that you carry this on your conscience for the rest of your life,’ Martha told him with icy hatred.

  Angela was nowhere to be seen. Had she been dismissed earlier on by Dane? Suzanne wondered.

  ‘In the same way that you no doubt carry the burden of those dismissed workers on your conscience?’ he replied with barely concealed distaste. ‘You at least have the wherewithal to carry on until you find yourself another wealthy man.’

  Martha’s eyes were flicking between the two of them.

  ‘I can’t say that I wish you both happiness,’ she said with a little shrug. ‘I don’t care enough whether you make a go of your marriage or not.’ She directed her cold blue eyes in Suzanne’s direction. ‘I dare say you worked hard enough to get him, my dear, but you’ll never keep him, you know. You’re far too gauche and plain.’

  She glanced at Dane and this time there was a different look in her eyes—one which Suzanne couldn’t interpret. ‘It could have been different between us, Dane,’ she said, and Suzanne wondered whether she could he
ar something throaty in that voice or whether her imagination was playing tricks on her.

  ‘I don’t think so, Martha,’ he drawled, and his arm tightened on Suzanne’s shoulder. Perceptibly. ‘Now, I really think that it’s time we brought these pleasantries to an end, don’t you? Harris is waiting to take you in the Rolls. The rest of your belongings will be forwarded to whatever your new address is.’

  ‘America.’ Martha looked at him, challenging him to question that remark, and when he didn’t she said, with clipped irritation because no curiosity had been evoked, ‘Angela and I have decided to go into business together. We intend to set up an interior design company. Angela says that there’s immense scope in the States for my kind of taste in decor.’

  Suzanne lowered her head and choked back a laugh at that, although the pair of them would probably make a roaring success of it. They were both forceful enough to browbeat any potential clients into terrified submission.

  ‘Now,’ Dane said softly, turning to Suzanne as soon as Martha and her bags had departed. ‘You.’ He held her at arm’s length, with his hands on her shoulders, and she looked up at him nervously, not quite knowing what the next scene in this remarkable play was going to be.

  ‘Me,’ she said numbly, looking away, and he tilted her head back to him. There was a slight smile on his lips.

  ‘There is, I believe, some unfinished business between us.’

  Her heart gave a leap.

  ‘Dane...’ she began, and he put his fingers on her lips.

  ‘Don’t tell me that you’re going to argue with your husband-to-be,’ he murmured, his eyes dark, and this time she felt as though everything inside her had undergone a scramble.

  ‘You didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Didn’t I?’ he asked huskily.