She nodded—but she knew in her heart that she was only released from real care when she played like this in this room that seemed miles from King’s Beeches when the curtains were pulled on the ridge of the Mendips and the door safely shut and not likely to be opened by Burke’s grandfather.
He never came here. He seemed to realize, and to be angered by the fact that the room had been deliberately designed by Burke as an escape valve.
And then, one morning, he did come.
Rafe, the big Alsatian, was with him, for the two were inseparable.
The big dog, rather to its master’s annoyance, had taken a fancy to Rea; but the old man remained coldly hostile. Abruptly he said: “I hear you were up all last night with the boy. Got a cold or something, hasn’t he?”
Rea nodded. “His teeth are coming through, you see. I hope we didn’t disturb you?”
“No, no!” He shook his head. “It did occur to me, though, that it might be a good idea to have Tab Gresham over to see him. We don’t want the lad sickening for anything.”
Now Rea’s hands fell idle as she gazed up at old Mr. Ryeland. So, behind that frozen face of indifference he invariably presented, even when he visited the nursery, he did care about Peter! She knew a warm rush of relief —of gratitude, almost. “To tell you the truth,” she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth, “I should like Dr. Gresham to see him. I—I’m awfully glad you suggested it. Being such a plump baby, he could develop bronchitis. I don’t want that to happen.”
“No, no!” he said at once. “No, we certainly don’t want that. As you say, he’s a plump baby.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll send one of the servants over to Tab with a note.” He shot her a sharp glance. “What did Burke think? Didn’t he think the lad ought to have a doctor?”
“He said he’d call Dr. Gresham in if Peter didn’t seem any better by lunchtime.”
“Well, we’ll get Tab now. I’ll send over a note.” For a moment he glared at her, as though she offended him, then he turned about and went stamping from the room. In a moment Rafe had scrambled to his feet and followed him. Tab Gresham came within the hour.
He surprised Rea. Because Burke’s grandfather was so friendly with him, she had expected him to be a middle-aged man. But he was round about Burke’s age. A slender, sandy-haired man, with shrewd, grey-blue eyes and a jagged little half-moon scar immediately under his left cheekbone. He was the kind of person who is strongly likeable at first glance; an uncomplicated obviously dependable type.
He shook Rea’s hand with warmth and as they went up the stairs to the nursery, he said: “I should have been over long before this to meet you, Mrs. Ryeland, but I’ve been playing lazy for the last three weeks. I’ve been up in
Scotland, fishing.”
“Then you’re a traitor,” Rea smiled. “Burke declares that the best fishing in England is to be found in the Barle.”
“Ah, yes, but Burke is a Somerset man. I’m a Scot, Mrs. Ryeland.”
“Oh, I see. Then that obviously excuses you,” Rea met his smile with a lack of shyness that amazed her. Usually she found it difficult, this business of making ready conversation with a stranger. Always in the old days, her days with Mrs. Damien, she had found it difficult. Of course, Laura’s friends had been rather different from this man—racy, aggressive, challenging her shyness rather than accepting it as part of her, like the colour of her eyes or the texture of her hair.
They went into the big colourful nursery. Moira was sitting with the fretful Peter, attempting to amuse him with one of his many toys, a dancing monkey in a straw hat. Usually he loved to watch this particular toy, but today he only lay grizzling, his sore gums sucking at his dimpled fists and his big blue eyes full of misery.
Tab Gresham immediately set about examining the baby, remarking to Rea: “He’s very splendid, Mrs. Ryeland. What does his great-grandfather think of him?” Then he chuckled. “Adores him, I bet? Who wouldn’t!” The long, sensitive hands, gently pressed the baby’s neck glands. “Um, he seems to be teething with a sore throat and a slight earache, poor little feller.”
“His chest is all right isn’t it?” Rea queried anxiously. Tab Gresham nodded reassuringly. “That huskiness you can hear is caused by the throat soreness. I’ve something to ease that. Mr. Ryeland’s note mentioned that the baby was teething, so I took the precaution of bringing along with me a certain little mixture I recommend for this particular trouble. I’ll give him a dose now.”
“Is it nasty?” Rea watched him go to his medicine-bag, her hand stroking Peter’s soft black curls.
Tab laughed. She was a nice child. She really was! “It isn’t at all nasty, I assure you,” he replied. “I wouldn’t dream of giving your baby anything nasty.”
By the time they went downstairs, luncheon was almost upon the table and Rea pressed Tab Gresham to stay and have some. “Thank you, Mrs. Ryeland, I’d love to,” he said, and gave her that smile which sent his half-moon of a scar riding up upon his cheekbone.
Rea, with the doctor and Burke’s grandfather, had only been at the table a few minutes when Burke joined them. He had been over at Shepton Mallet all the morning, conducting the sale of produce from one of the estate farms. Now, although he had obviously been upstairs to have a quick wash, he still looked rather heated, a lock of his black hair falling forward over one eye.
“Hullo, Tab!” He gave the doctor a broad grin. “Have you been up to see my boy? Is he all right?” Tab nodded. “It’s his teeth, Burke. He’s cutting them with a slight throat and ear trouble. But I’ve given Mrs. Ryeland some medicine for him. He should be as bright as a new penny in a day or two.”
“That’s a relief!” Burke grinned at Tab. “Doesn’t he make you feel like taking a pattern? You’re getting on, boy, you should be thinking of settling down.”
Tab’s grey-blue eyes shot wide open. “I never thought I’d live to hear you say that, you Livingstone, you!” He turned his smile on Rea. “You’ve performed a miracle, young lady; are you aware of the fact?”
But Rea’s answering smile wasn’t truly spontaneous. She knew—she was the only one who knew—the desperate game of make-believe Burke was playing. . . .
“So the little lad has nothing seriously amiss with him?” Burke’s grandfather broke in.
“Nothing that a good easy sleep won’t put right, sir.” “He’s—humph—he’s a likely lad, eh, Tab?” The silver eyebrows shot rapidly up and down as old Mr. Ryeland helped himself to beef.
“No doubt about it, sir. He’s built for any emergency, like his father.”
Burke glanced up from his plate. His smile was quizzical. “You make me sound like a stevedore, Tab, old man. I resent the implication. You’ve got to remember that I’m a retired poet, traveller and writer.”
His grandfather snorted, while Rea said with a shy eagerness: “I’ve been trying to persuade Burke to write another book, Dr. Gresham. I could take his dictation and do his typing. It used to be my job.”
“What a splendid idea!” Tab exclaimed. “Now come on, Burke, don’t let your talents go to seed. I know you’re a farmer now, but as a farmer you should deplore the thought of anything going to waste.”
“That’s what I say,” Rea agreed. “His field of imagination is lying fallow, and if he leaves it too long it will start growing stones and weeds.”
Burke’s deep laughter broke from his throat. “I’ll leave it another year or two and it will start growing turnips.” “Burke, don’t talk like that!” Rea exclaimed, hurt by the cynicism in his eyes.
“The boy’s right,” Mr. Ryeland grunted. “He’s a farmer now. He’s forgotten all that dashed literary nonsense.” He cast a glare of frank irritation at Rea. “Remember it, will you, miss, and stop pestering him.” She flushed deeply.
“But it isn’t fair—he—” “Stop it, miss!” The old man’s fist came down hard upon the table, making the dishes and the glasses jump. “We’ll hear no more of this puling foolishness!”
Burke gla
nced up the table sharply, a sudden flare to his nostrils, the lazy, rather cynical good humour wiped in a second from his sapphire eyes. “There’s no need to speak to Rea in that tone, sir.” He spoke crisply. “That puling foolishness, as you call it, still happens to mean quite a lot to me, though I’ve now put it out of my life. I’m grateful to Rea for her offer, even though I can’t accept it.”
“Really?” The old man glared down the shining table, with its lace mats, glittering Waterford glass and silver bowl of greenhouse lilies. “And do you think I’m grateful—grateful that you’ve always set out to do everything you knew would displease me?”
Burke’s wide shoulders lifted in a shrug. “If our sympathies, our aims, our likes and dislikes, have always been in opposition, it hasn’t been deliberate on my part, believe me, sir. I had to go my way, just as Phil had to go his. And if his way was yours, I don’t suppose that was deliberate either.”
“Don’t talk of Philip!” The words came with a roar. “Philip was everything you could never be. He gave more than the sinews you now give to this house, he gave his heart and then his blood.” With a harsh scrape upon the polished black oak floor, Mr. Ryeland’s chair went back. He rose in trembling, white-faced anger to his feet. He addressed Dr. Gresham with harsh dignity: “Excuse me, Tab! It’s uncouth to quarrel in front of guests and I’m well aware of the fact—but—dammit—” he threw out a hand that trembled towards Burke, “he never would listen to reason! Never!” Then he turned and went from the room. As the door slapped shut behind his elderly, offended figure, Burke drew a sigh.
“God, we don’t outgrow our bad tempers, or our antagonism, he and I. I think, Tab, we must be constitutionally antipathetic, as you medical fetters would have it.” Burke poured Richebourg with a rather unsteady hand. “The hell of it is, I’m tied here. I’m tied by my own damned conscience.” His smile, over the rim of his glass, was cynical to the point of sheer melancholy. “You weren’t aware that I had a conscience, were you, Tab? Well, I have. Like Jack’s beanstalk it grew and it grew, and now it’s so hardy that if I try to cut it down it only send out new shoots.”
He walked round the table to Rea and bent to her, holding her slim shoulders in his large, cool hands. “Stop looking as though you’ve brought all the gables and turrets of King’s Beeches down on my head.” His soft laughter moved her fringe. “We’ve always quarrelled, he and I. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“ I—I can’t help worrying!” She turned in agitation to him, meeting the deep, smiling blue eyes. “It isn’t fair that he should think you—what you’re not. It isn’t fair!”
“We’re never fair, Rea, or reasonable, when we lose what we cherish and continue to possess that which we despise. It’s as simple as that, my dear. As simple and as cruel as that.”
Though the afternoon was gusty and a trifle grey, Rea decided to take a walk. That sharp little exchange at luncheon had depressed her and she knew an almost desperate desire to escape from King’s Beeches for an hour or two.
So, after she had bade Dr. Gresham goodbye and assured herself that Peter was peacefully sleeping, she hurried into her camel-hair coat and made her way out of the house, and down to the wood that lay at the bottom of the meadow.
She climbed the gate, jumped down upon dead furze stems, and entered the eerie, blue-green stillness of the wood. Great beeches. arched their branches in a chancel like formality high above her head, and then appeared the dull red trunks of slender larches, the sombre jade of elms, the solidity of lichen-draped oaks, with their branches flung out like beckoning arms.
It was about twenty minutes later that the trees thinned and the gloom lifted and Rea found herself standing at the foot of a winding lane, where the swollen, over-ripe faces of blackberries still gleamed in the tangled hedgerows.
The lane wound upwards, but Rea knew that the quickened beating of her heart wasn’t due to the effort of mounting the lane; her legs were so long and young that they barely noticed the ground’s elevation. It was apprehension that was hurrying her heart, the strange conviction that something was urging her to follow this lonely, wayside path.
Then, almost before she realised it, the lane had branched sharply to the right and she found herself gazing at a white door in a yew hedge that surely rose to a height of thirty feet. She slowly moved towards the door, nervously eager, urged by more than the Paul Pry instinct that a sudden and mysterious-looking door might arouse in the casual passer-by. She had come here as though called and she knew she must open this door.
She did so, her fingers shaking slightly on the latch, and the door swung open with an ease that testified to frequent oiling. She stepped through the door, on to uneven paving-stones that ran all the way round a green fronting an ancient black and white farmhouse. Three magnificent walnut trees stood in a triangle upon the green, and the roof of the farmhouse clustered with Tudor chimneys. There was a curious charm to the place; a lost and lonely charm, catching at Rea’s heart, holding her transfixed by the white door. The moments sped as she stared, and when, with a sudden rush of guilt, she turned to dart away, a voice called out: “Hold hard, missie! Hold hard, now! Don’t you be runnin’ off!”
She gasped and stood in startled trepidation, watching a stocky, grey-haired man, with a bull-terrier at his heels, emerge from behind one of the massive walnut trees. He came across the green with heavy, deliberate strides. As he drew near to her, he said: “’Tis private property ye’re on, missie,” and the bull-terrier, as though to add weight to the words, came to Rea’s heels and gave a low, ominous growl.
“I’m—I’m awfully sorry I came through your door!” Rea gasped. “I—I wasn’t thinking.”
“’Tis a dangerous habit, that, missie, not thinking before you act. If Mike here had been prowling about on his own, he’d have rushed you, taken some of your leg, like as not.” Unsmiling, but not totally unfriendly eyes scanned her from head to foot. “Ah, I’m thinkin’ I know you, missie. Ye’re the lass from King’s Beeches, aren’t you? Seen ye before, I have, riding in that car of the young master’s.” Her head gave a nervous little jerk of confirmation. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Ryeland,” she said.
“Ah!” The man’s lips became thoughtfully pursed in the deeply lined, weather-darkened face. Then abruptly, his gruffness gave way to a friendliness that was almost shy. “I wonder, missie, now you’re here, would you take a cup of tea with my missus? Gets very few visitors, does my poor old girl. Y’see, she’s an invalid. People,” he shrugged heavily, “they don’t seem to take much to invalids. ’Tis human nature to be that way, I suppose, but it makes my house a lonely one.” Abruptly he smiled and held out a hand to Rea. “I’m James Larchmont, missie, one of old Mr. Ryeland’s tenants.”
Rea put her small hand into the big, warm hand of James Larchmont, lighting his rather weary eyes to a momentary brightness by saying: “I’d very much like to take a cup of tea with your wife, Mr. Larchmont.”
“Then will you come this way, missie?”
They passed beyond the trees and crossed the uneven paving-stones to the front door of the farmhouse. A heavy, horseshoe-shaped door gave a deep creak as James Larchmont pushed it open, motioning Rea to precede him into a stone-flagged passage. At once she was aware of a strange chilliness; it came sweeping down the passage, along with a deadly stillness—and Rea knew that something frightening, something sad, something she would regret seeing, awaited her in this house. She stood stock still. “Are you sure—your wife won’t mind?” she whispered.
“I’m very sure, missie.” He spoke gently, realizing her moment of misgiving, seeing it written plain in her large rather frightened eyes. “Come straight along with me, missie, and don’t be nervous. ’Tis a wee, pretty, harmless creature my missus is, though she can’t rise to her feet and walk like you and me.” And as he ceased to speak, he threw open a door and Rea found herself upon the threshold of a long, low-beamed room, with latticed windows draped with a flowered chintz; delicate, needlepoint chairs and footsto
ols, and the recumbent form of a silver-haired woman upon a low, rose-coloured couch.
And even as the thought registered with Rea that this woman had once been very pretty, her eyes had gone beyond the delicate, tired face lifting in such wondering surprise to her, and had settled upon a face that laughed from a portrait above the fireplace. An exquisite, gipsy-wild, perfectly heart-shaped face, set with reckless dark eyes and framed in a riot of blue- black curls.
Rea felt her heart turn over. She had known there could be such beauty, but she had never before seen it. And she knew to whom it had belonged—she knew— she knew!
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’VE brought you a visitor, my dear,” James Larchmont said, gently propelling Rea across the room to the couch where his wife lay. “’Tis young Mrs. Ryeland, from King’s Beeches.”
“Mrs.—Ryeland?” The faded blue eyes were fixed upon Rea in a childlike surprise. Then she said: “Of course, I remember Jim saying that Philip had married. How nice for him!” She turned her gentle, rather lost eyes to her husband. “Bring forward a chair for Mrs. Ryeland, Jim. Don’t let her stand. I know she has had a long walk.” “I—I came through the wood,” Rea said, speaking rather breathlessly. “It didn’t take me so very long.” “Through the wood?” The gentle eyes slowly dilated. “But that isn’t a nice place to be walking alone in, my dear. It is a dark, haunted place. You shouldn’t—you really shouldn’t have come that way.”
“Oh, I didn’t mind.” Rea sank down into the low, needlepoint chair James Larchmont brought to the side of the couch. “There were only trees and birds and funny little bunches of toadstools and mushrooms growing under the trees.”
“I never liked the wood.” Mrs. Larchmont lifted her face to her husband. “I never liked it, did I, Jim? When I first came here as a bride, I would never go into it, would I?” Her glance returned to Rea and smiled. —Jim used to laugh like anything at my town ways—I was from London, you see.” She reached out a tiny blue-veined hand and pressed Rea’s wrist. “I believe you come from London, don’t you, my dear?” Rea nodded.
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