by Penny Jordan
She picked up the magazine again, this time with determination and purpose.
Charles arrived at Castle Kilrayne five days later, alerted too late by Geraldine Frances’s failure either to return to Rothwell or to get in touch with him, as he had confidently anticipated she would. After all, what other options were open to her? Either she married him and he gave her the son who would one day inherit from her, or he married someone else and gave another woman that child.
He knew his cousin well. After the blows he had dealt her, the home truths he had told her, she would never recover enough to let another man within a mile of her.
However, when he got there all he found waiting for him was a room that looked as though it had been torn apart by a force of nature and a note from Geraldine Frances saying that her life was something she could no longer endure.
The police made enquiries, of course, but her apparent suicide so soon after the death of the father she had adored was accepted as the action of a woman whose mind was disturbed and disorientated by shock and grief. Finding one of her shoes washed up on the beach, and surmising that she had. thrown herself from the cliffs into the sea, they had instituted a search for her body, and when none was found Charles was told that legally it would be seven years before Geraldine Frances could be pronounced dead and he could inherit her estate and titles.
A minor inconvenience. To all intents and purposes he was now the Earl of Rothwell. Rothwell itself was his, and without the necessity of marrying Geraldine Frances.
Gleefully he reflected that she had done him the best favour she could have done him in taking her own life. It was a pity, though, that she had not also seen fit to do so in a way that would have provided the authorities with her body, he reflected callously.
All through the highly secret negotiations Geraldine Frances carried out with her father’s Swiss bankers and lawyers, she held on to the magazine as though it was some sort of talisman.
This was not the first time those astute Swiss bankers had been approached by someone who wanted to ‘disappear’ while still having access to their wealth. There were ways and means, if one was adept and skilled, and they were, but their skills came at a high price. Geraldine Frances paid it.
The desire for revenge now burned within her with the strong, unquenchable flame of a funeral pyre, overtaking the anguish and fear that had obsessed her in Ireland. They had been emotions far too turbulent and intense to endure. The feelings she had now, the need that burned ice-cold inside her, was different.
It was almost as though the person who had been Geraldine Frances no longer existed, almost as though that person had indeed died. Had in fact been killed by Charles’s callousness.
The new Geraldine Frances was different. Stronger… surer… colder… thinner, she acknowledged with a bitter, acid smile as she caught sight of her reflection as she left the discreet and private entrance to the equally discreet and private venue the bankers had chosen for their meeting.
Her appetite, the appetite that had remorselessly driven her for so many years, had gone. The mere thought of food now nauseated her… now there was a different hunger within her… a new greed that would not allow any other need to exist in competition with it.
She was going to destroy Charles. She was going to destroy him just as surely and as uncaringly as he had destroyed her father; as he had wanted to destroy her.
Thoughts, plans, ideas whirled through her head, each one a venom-tipped arrow seeking its target. Outwardly she was cold, controlled; admirable traits, if rather unusual in a woman, thought those bankers who were unknowingly her allies, listening to her and watching her.
From Zurich it was only a two-hour drive to the small clinic owned and run by Annie Rogers. The clinic had originally been a sanatorium for people suffering from TB and was set high up in the Alps, approachable only by a winding zigzag road.
The clinic was almost as difficult to find as Annie Rogers herself, the celebrated plastic surgeon who had made her name by creating beautiful faces, but who now, it seemed, had eschewed that world, instead concentrating on mending the broken bodies of children from all over the world, children who through no fault of their own were paying the full penalty of the wars engaged in by their elders.
The discovery that the clinic was funded in the main by charitable donations had given Geraldine Frances the lever she needed to ensure that Annie would see her.
There was no price she was not prepared to pay for what she wanted… what she needed if she was to succeed in her determination to destroy Charles.
Annie Rogers wasn’t easy to persuade. The magazine article was out of date, she told Geraldine Frances dispassionately but briskly, hardly even glancing at it. She no longer performed plastic surgery purely for cosmetic reasons, except in very rare and special cases.
It took Geraldine Frances almost two weeks to persuade Annie Rogers to accept her as a patient… What she was suggesting wasn’t impossible to achieve, but there would be dangerous psychological barriers for her to overcome… there would be pain such as she had never known before; there would be weeks, months of physical and mental agony, Annie warned Geraldine Frances, and then was surprised when her patient said grimly, ‘Good. The more I suffer, the more I shall enjoy exacting every last measure of atonement…’
Very much against her will, Geraldine Frances had been forced to tell Annie Rogers the purpose behind her request. Without knowing the reason, Annie had firmly refused to even consider taking her on as a patient.
She had made it plain that she did not consider what Geraldine Frances was contemplating was wise, but she had read in the other woman’s eyes her unwavering determination to go through with her plans, and she had known that if she did not help her she would find someone else who would.
Intensely compassionate and intensely aware of the feelings of others, Annie had not been able to dismiss Geraldine Frances, knowing that she could all too easily end up in the hands of some unscrupulous and unskilled surgeon who could maim and even kill her.
She soothed her conscience by reminding herself that the fabulous fee Geraldine Frances was prepared to pay was desperately needed for the clinic.
Human emotions… they caused such problems, such havoc. She was beyond that now. She had loved only one man in her whole life. He was now dead, his death a result of his chosen way of life. She had loved him and she mourned him, but for her the clinic had become a retreat from the physical world in much the same way as women widowed had once retired into convents. All she now asked from life was to be allowed to perform the work which had become for her a personal crusade.
‘It won’t be easy,’ she warned Geraldine Frances, once she had agreed to her request. ‘There will be countless operations and almost unendurable pain. It will take at least a year, maybe longer, perhaps even closer to two, as it would be better if you slimmed down before we start on the surgery. We shall have to see how quickly your flesh heals.’
Two years. Geraldine Frances smiled grimly to herself. Time enough for Charles to grow secure… to feel safe… time enough for her suicide to have become an accepted fact… for people to have forgotten that anyone called Geraldine Frances had ever lived.
Seeing that she was not going to be put off, Annie said calmly, ‘I shall assign you a room here. You can move in tomorrow.’
Geraldine Frances hadn’t given her her real name; among the other things the men in Zurich had given her had been a new identity. From now on she was Silver Montaine. This name was a joke against herself as she had noticed a shock of white hair which had dramatically appeared at her left temple. All her recent trauma was gradually changing her life in every way.
Annie rang through to her assistant, and when the girl came said briskly to her, ‘Jeannette, could you please take Miss Montaine over to the private wing and admit her?’
Geraldine Frances’s eyebrows rose mockingly.
‘A private wing… for orphans from Third World countries?’
‘I do occasionally take private patients,’ Annie reminded her drily. She frowned as something occurred to her, a small complication which she had not so far thought of.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she added casually, looking down at the papers on her desk, just in case this extraordinary young woman, who for all the obese plainness of her face and body had already demonstrated that she had a razor-sharp brain and the kind of perceptiveness that most people would find very daunting, should prove curious, ‘I have another private patient here at the moment.’
It wasn’t strictly true. Jake was not staying at the clinic as a patient in the strictest sense of the word. No amount of surgical skill could give him back his sight; and as for his scars… well, he had a few more painful operations to go before she could be content that she had done everything she could for him. His outward scars she could handle, but it was the ones he carried inside which worried her…
She sighed to herself. Only one thing, it seemed, would heal those.
Strange to think that both occupants of her private wing, in their very different ways, sought the same goal.
It was rare, in Annie’s experience, for human beings to feel a need for retribution that was so strong that it superseded every other emotion and need. Revenge was normally a fierce but short-lived desire, quickly burning itself out, a form of desperate madness that sooner or later had to give way to sanity.
And yet there was nothing impulsive or short-lived about the feelings of either of these two. They were united, although they themselves did not know it, by the very logical determination, the resoluteness, the relentlessness, the sheer, cold, hard intentness of their separate purposes.
Even so, she reflected with wry humour, she doubted that either of them would welcome such knowledge, and she suspected that it might be a sensible idea to keep them apart.
She had only been able to persuade Jake to come here because he had needed her surgeon’s skills… and because he needed a base… somewhere from which he could work towards his goal.
An impossible goal, some might think. Annie sighed softly. She was very fond of Jake… He and her husband had been in the army together, Jake a junior officer under Tom’s command.
Tom had liked and respected him, and their friendship had developed as they continued working together in the drugs field.
Now Tom was dead and, while Jake had tried to reject her offer of help, in the end he had had nowhere else to go.
She looked down at her desk. On it was a small parcel containing, she suspected, tapes from Jake’s contacts… the men he was using to try and track down his wife’s murderers. Tapes… but then a blind man could hardly read letters…
PART THREE
Jake
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JAKE heard Annie’s familiar footsteps as she walked down the corridor outside his room and he discovered he was holding his breath, not really knowing whether or not he wanted her to come in.
There was someone else with her. They walked past his door and into the next room. He heard Annie’s voice, and that of her companion. Another woman, her voice cool and controlled, the vowels effortlessly clear and sharp. His mouth twisted as he recognised the tell-tale accent of a member of the British upper classes.
He tried to fit a face and body to the voice, a supposedly therapeutic task, but one which left him feeling angry and frustrated with the limitations of his blindness.
When they had first told him in the small, bare military hospital that he had lost his sight, he had been in too much pain to care. It had been later, in London, that the full realisation of what that was going to mean, how it was going to affect the purpose which had driven him for the last four years, had really sunk in.
At headquarters they had commiserated with him, offering him awkward, uncomfortable pity, treating him with an unfamiliar blending of caution and unease, no one wanting to say what was now obvious.
That there was no place there for him now. What good was an agent who could no longer see? He would be a liability, not just to himself, but to others as well. There had been some talk of a desk job, but he had refused it angrily, and had sensed that they had been relieved by his refusal. The life that had been his for so long was now over.
They had sent him to a military hospital where he had received the very best treatment, both physical and psychological. They had taught him as best they could how to come to terms with the reality of his blindness, and then, later, when he received his final discharge, there had been an interview in London, with an anonymous man in an anonymous office, who had told him quietly and without emotion that his days of usefulness to the agency were now at an end.
The agency… He smiled grimly to himself, trying not to let his mind slip back across the years… trying to focus on the voice of the woman in the next room… a cool, sharp voice that reminded him of the voice of another woman from another time…
‘Of course, it will have to be the army for Jake… I can’t say that I approve, but you know how my father thinks. It’s difficult enough financially as it is, and once Daddy dies, what with death duties and everything, I suppose the Park will have to go, probably to some ghastly nouveau riche pop star.’
The sharp, querulous voice was that of his aunt. Jake was standing outside the drawing-room door listening to her.
It was the sight of the gleaming Aston Martin car drawn up outside on the drive that had drawn him in, its immaculate refinement sharply in contrast to the house’s neglected shabbiness.
The once pristine gravel drive was now infested with weeds, the elegance of Fitton Park’s frontage marred by peeling paintwork. During heavy storms the roof leaked into the attic rooms and the stone facade was stained with rust where the gutter had rotted away.
Inside, the results of neglect through lack of money were even more visible. The once elegant plastered ceiling in the upper-floor ballroom now sagged ominously. Damp stained the walls, mould stretched grey-green tentacles across expensive silk wallpapers.
The whole house wore an air of shabby hopelessness, as though it had sunk into a state of apathy. Its rooms smelled of decay and damp; its furniture bloomed with fungus and rot.
His aunt tried to, as she described it, ‘keep up appearances’, which meant having a fire in the drawing-room to banish the damp, even though the rest of the house was freezing cold. It also meant that, whenever anyone visited, Finks, Grandfather’s batman, had to walk along the maze of corridors from the ancient cavernous kitchen to the drawing-room, carrying a heavy silver tea-tray and its precious burden of delicate china Sevres cups, despite the fact that he only had one leg. The other had been lost at Ypres. Jake’s grandfather had lost an arm in the same action.
Jake had lost count of the number of times he and Justin had listened to their grandfather describing the incident.
Justin always flinched and looked sick, and Jake had learned long ago to manoeuvre himself so that he was standing or sitting in front of his elder brother, shielding him from their grandfather’s fierce gaze.
Fittons did not look sick at the thought of losing a limb in action; rather, they gloried in the knowledge that they were doing what their ancestors had done since William the Conqueror had landed his force of men on English soil… fighting for Crown and Country. Portraits of generations of Fittons in military dress from various periods adorned the walls of the gallery that overlooked the enclosed Tudor gardens. The men of their family had a long and proud record as fighting men, a tradition which had cost their grandfather his arm and their father his life.
Their mother, whom their grandfather had dismissed as a wishy-washy creature, had died when Jake was four. A car accident dismissed by their grandfather as not being worthy of note.
The brothers, orphaned by the death of first their father and then their mother, were dispatched to live with their grandfather and his unmarried daughter.
Mary Fitton had been born seven years before their father. She was what had once been described as a spinster, bot
h in inclination and by circumstance. She did not particularly like small children, especially dirty, noisy little boys.
Justin she could tolerate… just. He was quiet and biddable, and this she approved of, not seeing that behind the seven-year-old’s meek, obedient behaviour lay the trauma of losing first his father and then the mother he adored, and then finding himself removed from the comfortable environment of a small London house to the rambling originally Tudor mansion that was Fitton Park, and to the care of a man who frankly terrified him.
Boys did not cry, Richard Fitton told his grandson disgustedly, the first time he discovered the seven-year-old weeping for his mother, and Jake, despite the fact that he was three years his brother’s junior, had realised then, with the clear-sighted astuteness he had inherited from his father, that he must be the one to protect Justin now that their mother was no longer there to do it.
Justin had always been their mother’s favourite. Jake had recognised that fact and accepted it with a stoicism that was part of his heritage from his grandfather. Justin was delicate, fine-boned, blond-haired like their mother, while he, Jake, took after their father, being far more robust, dark-haired and blue-eyed. People looking at the boys were often astonished to discover the age difference between them, because Jake was such a large, sturdy child and Justin so obviously delicate.
Delicate was a word that Richard Fitton associated purely with the female sex, and it was not one with which anyone was ever going to be allowed to describe his grandsons, especially his elder grandson. Already in his mind, Richard Fitton had decided that both boys would follow him into the army. It was their tradition… their heritage… their duty. He scowled ominously when, after Justin had been away at boarding school for six months, the headmaster approached him and tactfully suggested that Justin was a child who might benefit more scholastically from being educated at a good day school where he could return to the comfort and security of his home each night.