by Penny Jordan
He glanced nervously over his shoulder, and Silver held her breath, flattening herself against the wall. Jake’s head turned towards her, so that for a moment it was almost as though he was looking directly at her… as though he had seen her. She froze, faltering for a moment.
Charles still had his back to her; all she could see of Helen was her arm and the gun she held in her hand.
‘Come on, Charles,’ she heard her saying almost jovially. ‘You can’t expect him to make it completely easy for us and jump,’ she chuckled. ‘I’m afraid he’s not as obliging as your cousin. Did she really commit suicide, by the way, or did you help her, the way you helped her father?’
‘What…? How…? You can’t prove…’ Charles’s shock almost matched her own, Silver recognised.
‘My dear Charles, don’t be a fool… I’m not threatening you. In fact, I admire you; I had no idea you could be so resourceful. But you did kill him, didn’t you?’
‘He was thrown from his horse…’ Charles said sulkily. ‘Everyone knows that.’
‘And you were the only witness. Forgive me if I say that I find the convenience and neatness of his demise too extraordinarily beneficial from your point of view to accept that it was an accident. However, it isn’t particularly important. You and I have other matters to discuss.’ Silver heard her laugh. ‘Ah, no… not the monies you owe us, my friend… although you will of course ultimately pay those back. It’s very isolated here, isn’t it? And I understand that no one properly knows how deep the sea is here. Almost a natural harbour for anyone wanting to bring a boat in close to the castle walls… but first we must dispose of our friend here. I’m almost disappointed in you, Jake… I never thought you would be so easy to fool. Such a tragic accident… a poor, blinded man foolish enough to come up here not knowing of his danger…
‘So unfortunate… such a tragedy. And of course no one will really be surprised. After all, he won’t be the first to fall to his death from here, will he? Your cousin, Charles…’
‘Geraldine Frances committed suicide—–’
‘No, she didn’t, Charles, she’s standing right behind you,’ Jake interrupted softly.
For a moment Charles froze, and then he swung round, his eyes bulging with fright and disbelief as Silver stepped out of the shadows and confronted him. Beyond Charles she could see Jake turning in the direction of Helen Cartwright, but she could not afford to pay attention to them, hoping Jake’s resourcefulness would keep him safe as she concentrated instead on Charles and walked steadily towards him.
‘You’re not Geraldine Frances,’ he started to babble, but as she stepped forward he stepped back… back towards the low parapet where Jake had just been standing.
‘Yes, I am,’ she told him softly. ‘Did you really think I’d kill myself, Charles? How pleased you must have been… You’d got rid of my father and then I was gone as well, and you were free to take Rothwell. Only you couldn’t, could you… not without my body as proof of my death? Only I’m not dead, you see…’
‘You are… you have to be… Rothwell is mine… You can’t be Geraldine Frances. You’re lying to me.’
‘No, I’m not… I am Geraldine Frances, and I can prove it… just as I can prove that you caused my father’s death.’
It was a lie, but she saw the look of fear that crossed his face, and pressed home her advantage.
‘Did you really think I’d let you marry me after I’d found out the truth… after I’d discovered you with someone else?’
‘You’re lying, it’s all lies!’
The shock was beginning to wear off and he was staring at her with narrowed eyes.
Beyond them, there was a soft grunt of pain as Jake wrenched the gun from Helen Cartwright’s hands.
As she doubled over and fell against the wall, she cried out angrily, ‘Charles… the gun…’ And Charles turned round, throwing his full weight against Jake, hurling him back against the parapet, the force of his fall causing a shower of stones to break free from the wall and crash down into the sea below.
As Jake fell he flung the gun out over the parapet. It glinted dully in the sun for a second before hurtling down on to the rocks below.
Charles grabbed Jake’s arm, too late to retrieve the gun, and then kicked him savagely to the ground.
‘Never mind about that… the wall… push him over…’ Helen Cartwright commanded, staggering to her feet and going to help him.
As Helen moved Silver saw the crack that suddenly appeared in the wall and felt the movement of the walkway beneath her own feet as another crack opened along it.
She heard Helen scream as she tried to fling herself to safety, grabbing hold of Charles, but the whole parapet and the walkway were disintegrating, and as Silver looked on in horror the ground beneath Helen gave way.
She screamed as she fell, gripping hold of Charles. Angrily Charles turned his attention from Jake to the woman clinging to him, wrenching himself away from her so that she had nothing left to hold on to.
Silver heard her scream as she fell and felt the nausea rise up inside her… Whatever she had done, she did not deserve such a death… Silver shuddered.
She heard a grunt and focused on Jake and Charles. There was blood trickling from Jake’s mouth; he was slumped against what was left of the wall, and Charles… Charles was trying to drag him towards the edge of the hole… Charles was going to kill him, she realised, and without even thinking about it she left her own position of safety by the inner wall and ran towards them, grabbing hold of Jake’s arm, praying desperately that he wasn’t unconscious and that he would be able to help her.
Across his inert body Charles snarled at her. This was the real Charles, she recognised, looking into the mask of hatred and fury he had turned towards her.
‘You can’t save him, and when he’s gone…’
‘You’ll what—kill me?’ She forced herself to laugh, although in reality she was sick with terror and shock. ‘You’ll never get away with it, Charles…’
‘No? A blind man and an unknown woman fall to their deaths after a lovers’ quarrel… and then, when they discover who you really are, Rothwell will finally be mine,’ he told her gloatingly.
He was mad, quite mad, she was sure of it, but his physical strength far outstripped hers… and there was no one here to help her, only Jake… Jake, who was unconscious… Jake, whom Charles would kill if she didn’t stop him.
‘He’s going to die,’ Charles told her gloatingly. ‘You’re both going to die.’ He laughed harshly, drunk on his own power. ‘And then all this—–’ he got up, gesturing wildly with his arms ‘—will be mine.’
Numb with fear, Silver watched him, staring up at him as he stood facing the sun and laughing wildly, and then suddenly, as though the sunlight had blinded him, he staggered and stepped to one side, reaching out for the parapet…
The parapet that was no longer there!
Silver watched as he fell, saw the crazed fear in his eyes as he looked at her one last time.
Even after his screams had ended and it was silent, she remained where she was, crouched against Jake’s side, gripping his arm. It wasn’t until pins and needles burned her skin that she could bring herself to move, carefully edging back from the crumbling masonry and dragging Jake with her.
He must have been knocked unconscious when Charles hit him, she recognised as she wiped the blood from his mouth with the sleeve of her white silk shirt… An unnatural calm had descended on her; she heard herself talking to Jake as though he was unconscious, and realised that her mind was trying to blot out the horror of what she had seen.
She knew she ought to go downstairs and find someone to help her with Jake, but it was a long time before her shock cleared sufficiently for her to accept that if she left him, if she ceased to crouch protectively over him, Helen would not somehow reappear and push him to his death.
Even when she knew that the fear was produced by shock and reaction, she was still reluctant to leave him. She touc
hed his hair, her hand trembling, and then his face. His skin felt hard and warm, deeply familiar… deeply loved.
A shudder wrenched through her. It wasn’t Jake who was blind; it was she.
How long had she loved him? From Switzerland… yes, almost certainly. From even before he had touched her… shown her… She shivered, conscious of so much about herself which she had deliberately denied.
She hadn’t been able to let Charles touch her because she loved Jake. Her mouth twisted. She hadn’t changed at all…
What was it about her that made her inflict on herself the anguish of loving where her love could not be returned?
When she had left this place she had sworn, and believed it, that love was something that had no place in her life. Then she had been thinking of Charles, of the love she had thought she had had for him.
Now, once again, she must leave Castle Kilrayne, knowing that all that waited for her outside its gates was loneliness and pain.
She touched Jake’s face again. He was breathing evenly and regularly. She reached for his wrist and felt his pulse and as she did so he moved his head and opened his eyes.
‘Silver…’
‘Yes. I’m here…’
‘I know,’ he told her drily. ‘Where are the others?’
She told him briefly what had happened and then said, ‘You ran a great risk tackling Helen Cartwright like that. How did you know where she was?’
‘I heard some stones shift under her feet and knew that my only hope of escape—our only hope of escape— was to spring a surprise on them. I ran the risk of Charles overpowering you, but put faith in his shock when faced with a woman he’d thought safely out of the way.’
‘Had you guessed, that Helen Cartwright…?’
‘Only sort of… It was after you told me about Charles lying about knowing her that I started putting two and two together, and realised how well they made four.
‘Her work enabled her to travel widely without suspicion; she had visited Colombia quite regularly, supposedly on photographic assignments.’ He moved uneasily, wincing a little.
‘Can you walk?’ Silver asked him. ‘It would be better if you could get back downstairs.’
She helped him as he got to his feet, accepting the hard weight of his body as he leaned against her for a moment.
‘Why did you let them bring you here?’ she demanded as they walked slowly back towards her own tower. ‘You must have realised the danger…’
‘I thought it was the only way to get the truth out of them. I didn’t realise they were on to me and that they intended to kill me. Lucky for me that you turned up…’ He said it drily, making her tense, wondering if he had somehow guessed how she felt about him.
‘How did you know I was there?’ she asked him. ‘They didn’t.’
‘Your perfume…’
She stopped and stared at him. ‘But I wasn’t wearing any…’
‘You don’t need to,’ he told her obscurely, and then winced again, distracting her, so that it wasn’t until much later when he was comfortably installed in the bedroom that had been her father’s, with Bridie fussing over him, that she remembered his comment and wondered a little at it.
The phone-call he had insisted on making to London would ensure Charles’s and Helen’s deaths received the minimum amount of publicity. The local doctor had announced that after twenty-four hours in bed Jake would be as good as new and, as she watched Bridie tending to him, Silver knew that she would always carry with her this memory of him wherever she went, lying on the high four-poster bed, in the room that the masters of Castle Kilrayne had always occupied.
It suited him somehow. She smiled grimly at the idiocy of her own thoughts… Even if he wanted her… even if he loved her… even if there were no past between them there could not be any future; she knew him well enough to know that.
And she knew that if she stayed she would forget her pride and her past, and ignore all the subtle inner voices that warned her against such folly, and she would tell him how she felt about him and beg him as she had once begged Charles.
It was her nature… her weakness, that for her loving another human being must always have this intensity… this absoluteness.
She was older now and wiser, and it wouldn’t do to burden him with something that was not his fault, and so, when she was sure that he had everything he might need, she smiled at him and said goodnight, wondering if he guessed that what she was actually saying was goodbye, and then she walked away from him, grateful that he wouldn’t see the tears that fell in silence from her eyes.
She spent six months travelling, visiting, re-establishing the friendships which had once been her father’s, reaffirming her allegiance to the heritage he had left her.
She was once more Geraldine Frances, Countess of Rothwell, and to those who expressed astonishment at her changed appearance she said simply that she had grown tired of her old face and so had changed it for another.
The effects of her new face were predictable enough; men flocked round her, flirted with her, coaxed and flattered her, and then, once they realised that they were simply not getting through to her, they left her as they had found her: as alone as she had been in the days when she was alone through necessity rather than desire.
She accepted commiserations on her cousin’s death and mentioned Jake to no one. If she had hoped that time and distance might dim the ache inside her she was forced to acknowledge that she had been wrong.
In November she was invited to spend Christmas and the New Year in Switzerland, but she turned down the invitation. Rothwell was where she would spend Christmas, and she would spent it there alone.
The staff welcomed her back with cautiousness, not sure how to treat this elegant, fine-drawn woman whose beauty was hauntingly perfect.
In the gallery she stood in front of the portrait of her father she had commissioned after Charles’s death.
It was a good likeness of him. One day, too, her portrait would hang there; and after that those of her children… her sons…
Her sons. She had no wish to marry, no desire to share her life with any man who was not Jake, and to share it with him was an impossibility.
At first she had hoped that he might contact her, if only out of friendship and curiosity, but as the weeks and months passed she acknowledged that it was better that he did not do so, and she wondered grimly if he himself had recognised earlier what she had been so slow to see, and accepted that it was more than likely that he had.
On Christmas Eve she summoned the staff together in the library to give them their Christmas gifts, a custom started by her great grandfather, and then she told them that they might all have the rest of the holiday off.
She saw the looks they exchanged and wasn’t surprised. It was an odd sort of person indeed who would spend the Christmas season completely alone, but her loneliness was less difficult to bear than other people’s company.
After they had gone she returned to the library, and started going through the accumulated post.
She frowned as she opened one letter and saw the cheque it enclosed.
It was drawn on a bank in Chester and signed ‘Jake Fitton’, and it was for the exact amount of money she had paid him in Switzerland.
There was nothing else in the envelope, no letter, no message, and even though she went feverishly through the rest of the post several times there was nothing there to indicate why Jake had sent it or how he had come by the money.
While she was still frowning over it, she heard a car draw up outside.
One of the staff coming back for something they had forgotten.
She went to the door and walked across the hall. Outside, the car moved off and disappeared down the drive. Puzzled, she opened the front door. Jake was standing there, his face illuminated by the lights. As she stared at him in disbelief he said curtly, ‘You’re back, then? So obviously you’ve got my cheque?’ and walked past her into the hall, leaving her to stare after him until the c
old blast of air reminded her to shut the door. She wondered how he had known it was her and not Soames, the butler, but then she remembered that uncanny way he had of knowing her by her scent even when she wasn’t wearing his perfume.
‘Yes, I’ve got it, but—–’
‘Good… then that leaves only one small matter to be resolved…’
‘One? But—–’
‘I don’t have much time,’ he told her briskly. ‘I suggest we get it over with as quickly as we can. A month should take us almost to the end of January… I’m due to fly out to see Annie then…’
Silver was still staring at him, and as though he sensed her confusion he turned to her and asked softly, ‘You do realise why I’m here, don’t you?’
‘No… no, I don’t.’
‘I should have thought it was obvious. I’ve returned the money you paid me…’
‘Yes… How?’
‘A generous accident of fate. My mother-in-law—my late mother-in-law, I should say—died unexpectedly four months ago. Since she hadn’t made a will, I inherited everything…’
It took Silver several seconds to assimilate what he was telling her, and then, still unsure as to the purpose of his visit, she said tentatively, ‘And you wanted to make sure I had received the cheque. Well, I have, and of course I would have acknowledged its receipt, but I’ve been away and I’ve only just returned.’
‘I know… and it isn’t acknowledgement of the cheque I’m here for, Silver.’ He smiled at her and her heart started to thump. ‘I’ve paid you back, and now it’s your turn to repay me.’
‘Repay you… but what… how—–?’
‘A month,’ he told her softly, interrupting her. ‘A month of your time, of your body in my bed, of—–’
‘No!’ she told him stunned. ‘I didn’t buy you… I bought your expertise… your knowledge. You told me that. I can’t repay those.’
‘You can try,’ he told her obliquely. ‘Which is your room?’ He was already heading for the stairs, and she followed him automatically, only catching up with him when he reached the top.
‘Jake, this is madness!’ she began. But he wasn’t listening to her, and her heart was beginning to thump erratically; her mouth had gone dry, and her body was whispering all sorts of idiotic messages to her.