by Penny Jordan
Charles’s hand on her wrist shackled her, but behind them his lover emerged from the library and demanded mockingly, ‘Who on earth is this ridiculous creature, Charles? And what is she doing here?’ And while Charles’s attention was distracted, Geraldine Frances slipped free of his hold and made for the front door.
She might have seemed strong and resolute outwardly, but she knew quite well that inwardly she was not. Logic, reason might dictate that she abandon any thought of marrying Charles, might tell her that she had now seen him revealed as he really was, but her feelings… her emotions… her deepest feminine needs were not so easily disposed of. She loved him… even now… even knowing…
She discovered that she was sitting in her car with tears streaming down her face. She started the engine and headed for Rothwell, knowing full well that it wasn’t over, that sooner or later Charles would follow her, would try to persuade and browbeat her into marrying him. The only truth he had told her tonight had been that he wanted Rothwell… And wanted it badly—badly enough to marry her without loving her, without wanting her—and without even liking her!
At Rothwell she abandoned her car outside the front door, and after Soames had let her in she went straight upstairs to her room. Uncapping the small jar the doctor had left for her, she took two of the sleeping tablets inside it, her hand shaking. Somehow or other she had to blot out those awful pictures of Charles with that woman… those awful words he had thrown at her, those appalling home truths she had had to face.
Tomorrow would be soon enough to deal with her problems; for tonight she needed to escape. She needed sleep, she needed oblivion, and as she undressed and prepared for bed she wondered agonisingly if this was how her father had felt, knowing what lay ahead of him, and if after all he had, as the doctor and Charles had implied, taken his own life… But no… Everything she knew about him said otherwise. His death had been an accident… an accident…
She woke up early, her head aching, her mouth dry from the effects of the sleeping tablets.
The thought of food nauseated her. All she wanted was coffee. Hot, strong coffee, the way her father had always enjoyed it. She gulped at it downstairs in the library, scalding her mouth, but not caring.
Charles hadn’t slept. He had been awake all night, alternately cursing both Thérèse and Geraldine Frances. Why had she come here in the first place, the fool… and why the hell had he been so stupid as to give in to Thérèse’s pleading that they have one last evening together?
And over and above his rage and feeling of being trapped lay a darker, more insidious anger. James had done the one thing Charles had not allowed for… he had told someone else his suspicions.
Normally Charles knew he would have had no problem persuading her that her father was wrong, coaxing and bemusing her into ignoring whatever she had been told, but last night’s discovery of him with someone else had destroyed that blind, worshipful adoration she had had for him, even if only temporarily.
He cursed again, reaching for the phone. He couldn’t trust himself to see her right now… if he did, he’d probably be tempted to put his hands around that fat neck of hers and squeeze it until she had no breath left to defy him.
If he had had any sense he would have thrown Thérèse out last night and then taken Geraldine Frances to bed… telling her that she had come to him because she wanted laying had possibly been his worst mistake, even if it was the truth. How much easier everything would have been now if he had given her what she had so plainly been asking for. Even more so if he had made her pregnant…
He cursed again before dialling Rothwell’s private number.
Geraldine Frances answered the phone herself… he said her name caressingly, but she made no response.
‘Darling, we have to talk…’
‘What about?’ she asked tonelessly. ‘My father—–’
Rage seized hold of him. ‘Your damned father is dead,’ he told her viciously, and suddenly, as she stood there in the library at Rothwell, Geraldine Frances knew quite definitely that somehow or other Charles had been responsible for her father’s death.
It was like standing under a freezing fall of water, the shock numbing her.
‘Gerry, are you still there…?’
She stared out of the window, and then said quietly, ‘And my love for you is dead, too, Charles.’ She knew that it was a lie. She still loved him; she must, otherwise she would not be feeling this excruciating pain, but that love would have to be destroyed… before Charles used it to destroy her.
‘You killed him,’ she accused him shakily. ‘I know you did. I won’t marry you, Charles.’
His very silence betrayed him, and then he said venomously, ‘Oh, yes, you will. I intend to make sure of that. You are going to be my wife, Gerry.’
And suddenly they were the most frightening words she had ever heard. She had his measure now… He might not risk killing her as he had killed her father, but there were other ways, other things… Right now he needed her so that he could get Rothwell, but once he had her… She started to shake. Oh, God, what could she do? She had no one to turn to… nowhere to go… but no—that was wrong. There was somewhere, somewhere where, she hoped, Charles would not follow her. Somewhere where she would be safe, for a little while at least.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GERALDINE FRANCES didn’t waste time once she had made up her mind. She fled to the only place she could think of where he wouldn’t follow her. Ireland and Castle Kilrayne. For the second time in her life, she knew what it was to experience fear of the power of another human being. Like mother, like son, she thought wretchedly as she boarded the plane, a tall, plain woman, whose clothes were already beginning to hang a little loosely on her bulky frame.
The shock of discovering the truth about Charles, coupled with her father’s death, had achieved what no amount of stringent self-lecturing could… Geraldine Frances did not want to eat. She herself was totally unaware of the fact that already she was losing weight. Her width was the very last thing on her mind… totally unimportant when set against other and more urgent troubles.
On the plane she had a window-seat; another woman took the seat adjacent to her, but Geraldine Frances didn’t even glance at her.
When the stewardess came round with food and drink, she dismissed her with a small shake of her head, and the uniformed girl wondered sympathetically if the poor woman was afraid of flying. She looked so tense and white-faced, and the girl remembered how nervous she herself had been when she’d first started to train.
Perhaps it was that that made her keep an extra special eye on Geraldine Frances, so that when the passengers disembarked she found the glossy magazine in the seat next to Geraldine Frances, and carefully tucked it into Geraldine Frances’s large shoulder-bag as she solicitously guided her off the plane. The poor thing looked as though she was in a state of shock, her movements disjointed, her eyes unfocused. She almost fell on the metal steps leading off the plane, and, once down on the ground, stared bleakly and dazedly around as though confused by her surroundings.
Bridie clucked over her like an anxious hen once she’d arrived at Kilrayne, offering her the comfort of her freshly baked soda bread, and talking about these things being ‘God’s will and not for the likes of us to question’.
Geraldine Frances ignored her. Bridie obviously hadn’t noticed that she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring, because she made no comment on its absence, and, if nothing else, the older woman was outspoken in her views, in the way of the Irish. But then, Bridie had never taken to Charles, never been impressed by his charm and his good looks.
Bridie had more sense than she had herself, Geraldine Frances acknowledged bitterly as she ignored the older woman’s anxious cluckings and made her way slowly, almost zombie-like, to her tower rooms.
Once there, she barred the door, a symbolic gesture only, because, despite the thickness of the door and the stoutness of the heavy iron bar that closed her sitting-room and the bedroom above
it off from the staircase, barring it couldn’t prevent Charles from breaking it down if he wished, just as he could break down her determination not to marry him.
She sat down in a chair without removing the jacket she had travelled in, dropping the shoulder-bag that contained everything she had brought with her on to the floor with a dull thud.
She was exhausted, spiritually and emotionally. She hadn’t slept properly since her father’s death; she mourned him deeply, had lost her closest and only friend, her confidant. She had no one she could now turn to… no one at all. There was no one who could help to ease the pain of Charles’s treachery… no one to ease the shock of the discovery of his emotional and sexual betrayal. And now to discover that he was not, as his outward appearance suggested, a golden, shining example of the perfection that humanity could attain, but just the very opposite—cruel, destructive, violent, greedy, completely without ethics or morals—was tearing her apart. He had killed her father. She would never forgive him for that. Never!
Her eyes burned as though they had been washed with grit, but, much as she ached to close them, she could not. Every time she did so she saw Charles and his lover, their bodies entwined, interlocked… she heard the elemental sound of their passion, felt the heat it generated… felt her insides turn to liquid with the agony of jealousy and pain.
To know that a man you loved was unfaithful was one thing. To witness the act of that infidelity was another, far more painful cross to bear.
The sun was starting to drop over the sea when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Bridie called out to her, but she ignored her and eventually she heard the older woman muttering complainingly as she announced that she was leaving her a tray.
Long after Bridie had gone away, Geraldine Frances roused herself enough to open the door and retrieve it. Instinct told her that she ought to eat, but when she was confronted by the food her stomach rose nauseously and she shuddered in sick distaste.
Bridie, whether from habit or on purpose, had placed a full bottle of Geraldine Frances’s father’s favourite claret on the tray, and on some savage impulse she barely understood Geraldine Frances poured herself a glass and drank it, not as the claret deserved to be drunk, savoured, but quickly and savagely, for no other reason than her instinctive knowledge that it would provide some kind of panacea for her pain.
By the time the bottle was empty, the wine had already hit her stomach… a stomach deprived of food for several days.
She went under the influence of the alcohol so quickly that she barely realised what was happening.
She surfaced from it briefly, shuddering at the almost animalistic, howling cries of pain filling the room, trying to blot out the sound of some tormented, hunted fox in its dying agony, and then abruptly realised that she was the one who had cried her pain into the silence of the room, letting it be absorbed by the ancient stones that had absorbed so much pain before hers.
Her glance fell on the fragile, delicate furniture that had been her mother’s; pretty, feminine furniture that reminded her vividly and unbearably of the slim, small-boned woman whose body had been wrapped so sensuously around Charles’s, and without knowing why or what she was doing she picked up one of the valuable chairs and smashed it against the wall.
Bridie, partly deaf, insulated from the sound of destruction in the tower room by the thickness of its walls and the distance that separated it from her private quarters near the kitchen, heard nothing…
Geraldine Frances, sobbing for breath, crying frenziedly, moved blindly round the room, goaded and driven by the pain inside her, unaware of the destruction she was wreaking, unaware of anything other than her own agony, her own helplessness… knowing she had no way of escape… that she would marry Charles, and that he would destroy her, just as she was destroying her mother’s pretty French furniture. And if she didn’t? As her father had known would happen, with the knowledge that she could no longer marry Charles had come the grim realisation of all that her own lack of a husband and children, especially sons, would set in train. She had no illusions left now. Charles had seen to that. No man could possibly want her… desire her… give her a child. She loathed and derided herself for ever thinking that they might. No, she would have no sons for Rothwell. So Charles would ultimately win… for his sons, if not for himself. Unless… unless what? What could she do?
She collapsed eventually, lying on the floor, shuddering and nauseous, somehow managing to find her way up the flight of stairs to her private bathroom, where she was violently and painfully sick.
Afterwards, her stomach and brain cleansed of alcohol, she staggered under the shower, turning the cold jet on full, letting the icy water burn her skin until she was covered in goose-bumps.
Weak and empty, she hid the bulk of her ungainly body in a voluminous towelling robe and padded through into her bedroom, wanting to sleep so that she could find the strength to face the morning and ultimately her next confrontation with Charles, but unable to do so.
Restlessly she moved round the room, and then, admitting she was not going to be able to sleep, she went back down to her private sitting-room.
As she opened the door, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Broken furniture littered the room… Someone had written on the delicate French wallpaper with lipstick the words: ‘I hate her… I hate her…’ Someone had torn the curtains from the window and smashed the valuable antique lamps… Someone, in a frenzy of destruction, had attacked the room and virtually destroyed everything in it… And that someone was herself, she recognised dazedly as she surveyed the destruction and shuddered in self-revulsion. How could she have done such a thing?
No need to ask why she had done it. She had tried to destroy the room’s beauty because she wanted to destroy the beauty of the woman who had taken Charles from her… Taken him? He had never been hers to lose.
She touched the wild lipstick message slashed across the wall, her fingers trembling. Who was it she hated? The other woman… or herself? As she removed her fingers, she knew the truth. She hated herself… hated and loathed herself with a soul-deep, terrible hatred that whispered to her that she deserved to be punished, to be humiliated, to be destroyed the way marriage to Charles was going to punish, humiliate and destroy her.
Bravely she pushed back the final barrier, admitting the knowledge she ached to suppress. Charles had been responsible for the death of her father. Oh, he had not perhaps killed him physically with his own hands, but she knew instinctively and irreversibly that he was responsible. Knew it as though Charles himself had told her so, even if her knowledge could probably never be proved. He had killed her father and now he intended to marry her. Because he wanted Rothwell.
She lifted her hands to her face in a helpless gesture of defeat, and as she did so her attention was caught by the magazine sticking out of her leather bag.
She stared at it, focusing on its unfamiliarity… frowning as she wondered how it got there. She never bought glossy magazines. Curiously she pulled it from her bag… There was a beautiful girl on the cover, and a large caption reading, ‘Would you like to have this face? Read inside about the miracles of modern plastic surgery,’ and before she knew what she was doing she was opening the magazine, flicking faster and faster through its pages as though driven by a mind beyond the control of her own.
By the time she found the article, her hands were trembling so much she could hardly hold the magazine straight enough to read. She devoured it quickly, dizzily, and had to go back and read it again, more slowly this time, as the fierce surge of adrenalin pumped through her and she ignored the destruction all around her, an idea so fantastic, so unthinkable forming in her mind that she hardly dared to contemplate it.
She stayed up all night, reading and rereading the article. She memorised it, and with it the name and address of the surgeon the magazine claimed was the most skilled and potentially the most expensive in the world.
There were interviews with women who had committed themselves, their fac
es and bodies to the woman’s scalpel… Beautiful women… but none of them had undergone anything as radical as the kind of changes Geraldine Frances contemplated. And then she came to the final part of the article… the surgeon’s description of work she had carried out on the victims of Beirut’s internecine war… faces that had been completely rebuilt…
Completely rebuilt. Geraldine Frances felt her heart leap and pound. Impossible… crazy. She would have to be mad to contemplate such a thing. Mad. Or desperate…
She had a fleeting, momentary vision of the way Charles had looked at her when she’d told him that she wasn’t going to marry him, and she shivered, recognising now what she had not recognised then, knowing illuminatingly all that her life would be if she ever allowed Charles to have control over any part of it.
A kind of fierce, desperate and instinctive need to survive pulsed through her. She thought of her father, of all that he had been, and then she thought of Charles and all that he was not and never would be, and she knew that, no matter what the cost to her in terms of physical pain, she had to take whatever route she could to escape from Charles, to punish him for what he had done, to make him suffer as she was suffering. Not just to suffer for the emotional pain and degradation he had caused her, but, far more importantly, to be brought down, destroyed for what he had done to her father.
Yes, she wanted to destroy him. But how? And then, as she looked at the magazine again, she knew.
Only by destroying Geraldine Frances as though she had never been and re-creating in her place a woman whom Charles would never recognise, only by allowing him to think that Rothwell was his, that he was secure, and then taking everything from him as he had wanted to take everything from her, would she be able to avenge her father’s death.
Yes, she would destroy Charles… and, when she had done so, she would tell him why…