Wife Without Kisses

by Violet Winspear

  “How strange that Philip should marry a London girl— he with his passion for Somerset and all that it holds!”

  “But I’m not married to—” then Rea broke off, for James Larchmont had closed a restraining hand upon her shoulder, his fingers pressing her to silence. She glanced up at him, rather wildly. But his face told her nothing; it was quite impassive.

  “King’s Beeches is a very beautiful house, isn’t it?” the gentle, rather melancholy voice of Mrs. Larchmont continued. “How you must love living there, my dear. I always used to think of it as an enchanted house. Do you not think that it has that look? That untouched look, as of belonging in a world of its own?” She studied Rea, with her head a little to one side. “Yes, I can see that you love King’s Beeches. Philip would want you to, he loves it so very much himself, doesn’t he? Now his brother—I expect they’ve told you of him, haven’t they?—he was so restless, so seeking; King’s Beeches couldn’t hold him. He went away, you know.” She frowned and her glance slowly drew away from Rea’s face. She ran a hand that trembled slightly through her silver curls. “Yes, he went away—they both went away.”

  “Both?” Rea’s heart was beating high in her throat and once again she felt James Larchmont’s fingers close upon her shoulder.

  “Vera,” he said, “I’m going to t’kitchen to make a pot of tea. I want you to show Mrs. Ryeland your lace-work. I’ll fetch it, shall I?”

  “Why—yes, Jim.” Vera Larchmont gave him a childlike smile, a childlike compliance. “It’s in the cabinet beside my bed. Mind you don’t pull out any of my silks.” He strode from the room, and the dog, Mike, who had been sitting just inside the door as though reluctant to come farther, eagerly trotted out after him.

  Silence fell upon the room. Mrs. Larchmont seemed to lose the desire for conversation, her eyes slowly turning to that laughing portrait above the fireplace, and Rea, watching her, suddenly saw her pretty wasted face take on the lax hopelessness of someone who waits —and waits in vain. Rea knew for whom she waited —knew that the girl in the portrait had been called Dani. So lovely—too lovely to be dead and alone!

  Then Rea jumped, the awareness of a third person in that pretty but rather haunted room touching her like a cold finger. She turned a quick, startled head and met dark eyes so exactly like the eyes in the portrait that she knew this slender, insolently smiling man, hands thrust negligently in the pockets of very ancient breeches as he lounged in the doorway watching her, was Dani Larchmont’s brother. She knew this as surely as though someone had told her; he had the same unruly blue- black hair and deeply dimpled chin, but what was gay daring in the girl’s face was reckless insolence in the man’s. He looked, Rea thought, exactly like a disreputable gipsy.

  “A visitor, eh?” he said suddenly, pulling his shoulder away from the door and lounging into the room. Mrs. Larchmont drew her haunted eyes away from the laughing portrait of her daughter and slowly turned them upon the insolent face of her son. She stared at him as though she saw him through a mist. “Oh, is it you, Jack?” she said.

  “Yes, Mother, it’s Black Jack,” he drawled. His eyes didn’t leave Rea’s face, and the smile that lifted one corner of his mouth in such a taunting, bitter fashion became slowly more pronounced as he crossed the room and stood over her. “The house of Larchmont is honoured—Mrs. Ryeland.” The dark slanting eyes held Rea’s in a glance that was almost mesmeric. “Let me introduce myself. I am Jack, scapegrace son of this very lovely lady here,” he lightly touched his mother’s shoulder, “and the earthy and estimable gentleman who is now carrying in tea.” He swung round with the words and swept his father a low, mocking bow.

  James Larchmont marched past as though he wasn’t there, lowered the tea-tray, with its quaint Staffordshire teapot and colourful cups and saucers, on to a table near his wife’s couch. “Jack,” he said, “I’ve left a mite of your mother’s lacework in t’kitchen. Go and get it. It’s on the dresser.”

  “With all speed, sir.” Jack Larchmont sauntered to the door, but at the door he turned and once again Rea was treated to his insolent, half-smiling stare. It travelled over her, quite deliberately, then he turned and his booted heels rang loud on the stone flags of the passage as he made his way to the kitchen.

  James Larchmont shot Rea a quick, rather embarrassed glance. “D’you take sugar, missie?” he asked. Rea nodded. “Two lumps, please.”

  Then booted heels again rang on the stone flags outside and Jack Larchmont came back into the room. He brought the carefully rolled up piece of lacework to his mother and laid it in her lap. He grinned at her. “May the recalcitrant stay for a dish of tea Mother?” he queried.

  But Mrs. Larchmont didn’t answer, and Rea saw that she was nervously biting at her lip as she unwound the piece of lacework.

  It was her husband who replied to Jack, bringing Rea’s cup of tea to her and carefully placing it in her hand. “Hop it, Jack,” he grunted. “Tea ain’t your tipple, as I know. Hop round t’back and get the cows to the shed. ’Tis close on four.”

  “Perhaps Mrs. Ryeland wants me to stay,” Jack drawled.

  Rea glanced up at him, her cheeks growing pink. “I —I shouldn’t dream of keeping you from your work, Mr. Larchmont,” she exclaimed.

  “Yet you could do it—so easily,” he returned. His reckless, handsome face broke into a grin of taunting devilry. “You’re banishing me to the cowshed, then?” “Hop it, boy,” James Larchmont said again. “Young missie ain’t used to your manner of talkin’—she’ll be takin’ offence.”

  “Will you, young missie?” Jack raised an insolent eyebrow at Rea. “Will you be taking offence at poor Black Jack, when he means you no harm?”

  Rea ducked her head away from his laughing eyes, taking an embarrassed gulp at her tea. With her eyes downcast, she shook her head in answer to his question.

  She heard him laugh. Then, very deliberately, he went down on his haunches in front of her and thrust his face so close to hers that she could do nothing else but look at him.

  “I’ m terrible bad, little girl, as everyone hereabouts eagerly tell you. I drink and I swear and I play when I should be milking the cows—but I’d like to be friends with you. May I be friends with you?”

  “Of course, if you wish it,” Rea stammered. She was painfully unnerved by him—and, at the same time, curiously excited to pity. Yet why should she feel pity for him? He looked the last person on earth in need of it. He had more than his share of good looks; he had obviously been well educated; and Rea knew, from the manner in which he addressed her, that he was a practised and recognized success with the ladies. Yet, gazing down into the reckless, slanting eyes, Rea felt an unmistakable pity for him touch her heart. The unhappiness that walked this house had not left this brother of Dani Larchmont’s untouched. He might laugh it off, but it was at the heart of him, like canker at the heart of an outwardly sound-looking apple tree.

  “You’ll really be friends with me?” His eyebrows quirked at her in a half-mocking fashion. “You’ll not be afraid of me, or turn the other cheek when I address you in the village?”

  She shook her head. She even smiled slightly. “You don’t look an ogre to me,” she said.

  “I hide my horns and my hoofs during the daylight hours, Mrs. Ryeland. We’ll meet by moonlight sometime and you’ll see me in my true guise.” With these words he rose, reached along to the sugar-bowl on the tea-tray beside his father, who was sipping tea in a rather morose fashion, and took about four lumps out of the bowl. He then went sauntering from the room, tossing the glistening cubes into his mouth and crunching them with his very white teeth.

  With his going Mrs. Larchmont seemed to relax. She leant towards Rea, displaying her lacework, and Rea’s eyes grew wide with admiration. This was genuine, delicate work, executed with great patience. “I made up the pattern myself,” Mrs. Larchmont murmured.

  “It’s exquisite, it really is!” Rea said. “What wonderful

  patience you must have!”

&nb
sp; “Vera has that, missie,” James Larchmont said, pressing his wife’s shoulder with a fond hand. “She’s taught me to have it, bless her.”

  “Nonsense, Jim!” Mrs. Larchmont broke into a little trill of laughter. “That’s nonsense,” she said to Rea. —Jim is the soul of patience—and endurance. He has endured much, poor boy.” The faded, lonely eyes stared straight into Rea’s. “If you have found a love like the love my man gives me, then you have found great treasure.” She pressed Rea’s hand. “I like you, child. I think Philip is very lucky to have found you.” Half an hour later Rea walked with James Larchmont from the black and white farmhouse and as they crossed the green to the door in the yew hedge, he said: “I couldn’t let you tell my missus that ’tis Mister Burke ye’re wedded to. She wouldn’t understand, y’see. Since she fell ill—’twas the death of our girl caused her illness—she gets muddled in her poor mind. But it does her such good to see a young creature like yourself, and I could see you wouldn’t be foolish enough to be frightened by her. And you weren’t, were you? She’s such a poor thing, isn’t she?” His question, put with such touching, prideful pathos, moved Rea to reach out and reassuringly press his arm.

  “I thought her very lovely,” she assured him. “Can— can nothing be done for her?”

  He shook his head. “’Twas a stroke, y’see. We never knew that our girl was ill, let alone dying, and the telegram came while I was out in t’fields. When I got home, my missus was as good as like a dead thing herself. I had to stay with her—I’d have lost her altogether if I had left her. And our girl—well, she was buried during that time I was tied to the bedside of my missus.” He drew a harsh sigh and stared down at Rea—stared with a sudden searching intentness. “There’s things we both know, Mrs. Ryeland—things that are best left unmentioned between us. But this I will say, I’m grateful to the heart of me for that certain responsibility your husband took upon himself that I, God help me, had neither the courage nor the charity to undertake.”

  “You—know?” Rea whispered.

  His nod was heavy and slow. “Aye, I know that the child ye’re rearing is my grandchild. I know, God help me again, that my Dani gave herself without love to young Philip Ryeland! Ah, well, ’tis done and can’t be undone!” He swung open the white door and as Rea stepped into the quiet lane beyond it, he said: “Don’t go through the wood, missie. It’s not that there’s anything amiss there but ye’ll think of what my missus said and be nervous.” He pointed along the lane, running beside the yew hedge as far as the eye could see. “Follow this lane, missie. It’ll take you straight home.”

  “All right.” She gave him her shy, charming smile. “Thank you for letting me meet your wife, Mr. Larchmont.”

  “Thank you for wanting to meet her, missie.” He touched his cap, swung on his heel and disappeared through the white door. Rea started up the lane.

  The wind had strengthened and a heavy chain of clouds was hanging overhead, seeming to gather the fading daylight into them as they hurried. Rea pushed her hands into her pockets, walking forward into the wind, but unaware of it. How could Burke have hurt that lovely, lovely girl? she asked herself, unable to forget the blue-black curls, the small pout of a mouth, the tiny chin smudged with the same dimple that smudged Peter’s chin. She had loved him! Laura Damien in fact had said that she had been crazy about him!

  Rea touched the rain on her cheeks and the rain was cold and real as the knowledge that cruelty could lurk beneath Burke’s smile, beneath all of his unfailing kindness to Peter and herself. Knowledge of his cruelty made his kindness less than it had been, for what did it cost him to be kind to—to a pair of babies? What, after all, did babies demand of a man? A few smiles. A few toys. A mere hour or two out of a man’s whole day.

  They took gratefully the little less he was prepared to give. Dani Larchmont had dared to ask for his heart—

  She left the lane behind her, with its formidable wall of yews, and very soon found herself upon the main road to King’s Beeches. Her long stripling’s legs flashed whitely as she ran, and the rain, which the wind was driving straight into her face, flattened her hair into wringing wet tendrils on her forehead.

  She didn’t hear, right away, the sound of a galloping horse behind her, and the great, deep-chested roan was almost abreast of her before she did become aware. She flung round with a startled gasp, and when she saw who the rider was, she stared through the rain. His face was dark above her—he seemed to loom giant-like out of the rain, upon his great horse—riding her down. She tossed her dripping hair back from her face and pathetically she cried out: “It’s only me—Rea! It’s only me!”

  “I know it’s you, you funny drowned thing!” Burke laughed and the roan tossed its wild, proud head as he pulled him down to a trot and bent from the saddle to Rea. He held out his arms to her. “I won’t leave you to be washed away,” he said. “Come aboard.” She hesitated, and then when she saw his fingers snap impatiently, she went into his arms. The muscles of his chest and his shoulders rippled beneath the tweed of his jacket as he lifted her into the saddle in front of him and he said to her: “You’re not frightened of Rebel, are you?”

  “No-no,” she said.

  “You seemed to be, just now.”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “We startled you, eh?” Burke smiled, then he touched his spur to the roan and it leapt forward into a gallop.

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  ENCIRCLED by Burke’s arm, with her head resting against his shoulder, Rea could watch his profile, and she found herself comparing the hard decisive chiselling of nose, mouth and chin, above which the Ryeland eyes shone as blindingly blue as perfectly matched sapphires and yet were never warm—like brilliant tropic seas that were ice-baths when plunged into, Rea thought—with the startling, decadent perfection of Jack Larchmont’s face. A face that might have been stamped upon a Roman coin!

  The thought was vaguely disturbing and Rea bit at her lip, remembering again the half bitter, half appealling look that face had worn when Jack had crouched at her knee and asked for her friendship.

  Should she tell Burke she had met the Larchmonts?

  The very next instant she forgot the Larchmonts, for Burke said to her: “I’ m going up to London this weekend,

  Rea. The adoption people want me to sign Peter’s final adoption papers.” He smiled, his eyes travelling Rea’s face, a rain-wet triangle against the grey-blue tweed of his jacket. “D’you want to come with me, pixie-face?” he asked. “After all, I did promise you a shopping spree, didn’t I?”

  “Did you?” She had forgotten, never deeply concerned with clothes and grown used to Iris Mallory’s amusement that her wardrobe seemed so limited. But her heartbeats quickened at the mention of London. Oh, it would be nice to see London again. . . .

  “You know I did, you unusual child.” Burke amusedly flicked a raindrop, big as a pearl, from the tip of her left cheekbone. His finger felt the brittle fragility of the bone and stayed to trace the bone down to the side of her mouth. “I thought,” he said, “we’d buy you something really staggering to wear to Iris’s birthday dance. It’s on Guy Fawkes’ Night and she won’t fail to invite us; she invariably invites the entire county.”

  “Oh, I’d love to come up to London!” Rea said quickly. “But what about Peter?—I don’t really like the idea of leaving him.”

  Burke broke into indulgent laughter. “Oh, he’ll be in good hands, Rea. Moira is the soul of duty and I rather fancy that with us out of the house Grandfather will find quite a lot of time to spend in the nursery.” “Then I will come! ” But the smile that accompanied these words was hesitant, even a trifle shy. “Burke,” she rubbed at the rough tweed of his jacket, “I don’t want to come just to go shopping. I—I don’t want you spending money on clothes for me. There’s no need!” “There’s every need, you funny child, when it’s something I want to do.” Amusement, and a tinge of curiosity, were in his eyes as he watched her. “Don’t you want to outshine the im
peccable Iris?”

  “Oh, Burke,” her smile came and went, lifting the edges of her mouth, the pixie-line of her cheekbones, “I could never outshine Iris. She’s far too handsome.” “Terribly, terribly handsome,” Burke mocked. “The embodiment, in fact, of every county virtue in the book of county rules governing the selection of mates for all sons and daughters of ye olde county houses!” All at once his sapphire eyes were fairly dancing with sardonic amusement. “Rea, you funny, conscience-stricken baby, how much longer are you going to feel guilty about this marriage of ours? We’ve done fine, sweetheart. We’ve fooled everyone very satisfactorily.”

  “H-have we?” With a childish, burrowing movement, she hid her face in the rough warmth of his jacket. Its clinging scents of expensive cigarettes and horses tickled her nose and she rubbed the tickle away with the back of her hand. He didn’t know, because she had never told him, that when he wasn’t somewhere about King’s Beeches, she became again its awkward intruder—its unwanted guest.

  She had never told him about the hours she spent in quiet hiding. In deep window seats behind the fall of yards of thick curtaining. In little lonely arbours in the vast garden. Sometimes curled among the lower branches of the crowding apple trees in the orchard. He didn’t know how acute an embarrassment it was for her when one of the many servants about the house had to come searching for her because there was a caller, and his grandfather, for propriety’s sake, desired her to pour out tea and make polite conversation with the caller, who, nine times out of ten, as Rea well knew, had come to King’s Beeches on purpose to examine herself. He didn’t know that this realization so unnerved her that she poured more tea in the silver tray than in the teacups, and instead of making the polite conversation desired of her, she just sat gazing in tongue-tied misery at the bread and butter on her plate and blindly wishing she had never known Laura Damien and had therefore never had to go to Hastings. . . .

  “I—I wish you had married Iris—anyone but me,” she blurted out.