‘It will not be a task, doctor,’ she assured him. ‘Rue has come to mean a lot to me.’
Dr. Fabre nodded and fingered the stethoscope around his neck. ‘I understand your feelings, madame. Rue is a delightful child, but then it is a strange fact of nature that such children are invariably above average in beauty and intelligence.’
Kara met the doctor’s eyes, and she was wildly tempted to ask him if he had known Rue’s mother. She fought the temptation, for instinct told her that the girl had been quite lovely, and so infatuated with the man in question that she had not counted the cost of loving him.
‘Come,’ said Dr. Fabre, and they entered the cool green room where Rue was tucked up beneath the covers of the fourposter. Lucan stood at the bedside, gazing down at the small face with its faraway look. Rue’s hair was spread on the white pillow, and a bandage encircled her head.
‘Will she be all right, Edmond?’ Lucan glanced anxiously at the doctor. ‘She looks so little and far away from us.
‘She suffers from concussion and needs complete rest and quiet. I have asked your wife to be her nurse, Lucan. I hope you concur?’
Lucan glanced at Kara, but his eyes were too brow-shadowed to be readable. ‘Surely a professional nurse would be best,’ he said.
‘My dear fellow,’ Dr. Fabre looked at him with shrewd eyes, ‘you are concerned for the child and that is only natural, but I am sure your wife can do for her all that a proper nurse would do. I shall be calling in at regular intervals to examine the little one, who may remain unconscious for a day or more.’
Lucan gazed broodingly at his wife, then he turned away and walked into the solarium and Kara could see him looking down at the sea as she was given her instructions by the doctor.
Her answers to his questions were competent, and she told him about her aunt, who had been in her care for several weeks in the old Greek house above the harbour of Andelos. The house where Nikos had been born and where Kara had lived whenever her brother Paul was away on business.
Nikki had been deeply grateful to her for the care she had bestowed on his mother, and Kara had been too innocent at that time to realize that a man’s love is not gentle or grateful or based on childhood memories. If she had known that she would have been prepared for Nikki’s letter from America and she would not have run away … into the arms of yet another man who could not give her his heart’s love.
The lamplight made shadows and the clock ticked softly. Kara sat in a deep chair at Rue’s bedside, and the book on her lap lay open but unread. She was listening to the sea, which sounded strangely angry as it pounded the rocks of the bay. Rushing in, lashing at the lower terraces of the house as if seeking to take back what it had given long ago to the Savidges.
The clock chimed low and silvery, and Kara bent over Rue and laid the back of her hand across the child’s forehead. Last night she had run a temperature, but tonight she was cool-skinned and seemed to stir slightly under Kara’s touch. Kara sat with bated breath, hoping Rue would open her eyes and return to them from out of that world of her own.
Several minutes ticked by, but her lashes did not lift. Such long lashes, their tips curling upwards with a glint of bronze to them—the very same glint that Lucan’s had when he slept.
She was filled with the memory of Lucan at the beach house, the rage of the storm, the flash of the lightning, getting into his eyes and into his kisses until she had not known what she said to him, or felt for him. He was like a demon lover from whom there was no escape. She had thought to escape, but here she sat beside the child he loved so much, and when they met or talked there was between them a state of truce. He knew she would go when Rue recovered. She knew he would try to stop her—not out of love but because she might have his child, and that child might be a boy.
She forced her thoughts away from him and glanced around the green room, which she had transformed with the toys she brought from Rue’s cupboard that afternoon.
Da had sat with Rue while Kara took a nap on the bed in Rue’s room. After a shower and change of dress she had ransacked the toy cupboard and brought an armful to the Emerald Suite. Da had looked at her with sharp eyes embedded in wrinkles and high cheekbones.
‘This a sickroom, Miz Kara,’ she had said. ‘You cain’t put all them toys around.’
‘Rue will see them when she comes to herself and they will help her to forget the terrible thing that happened to her.’ And ignoring Da and her pursed lips, Kara had proceeded to arrange the dolls and soft toys so they were holding out their arms to Rue.
‘You like a child yo’self,’ Da had muttered, and as she went out of the room the points of her Creole turban had seemed like the devil’s horns.
Kara fingered the cherry-coloured ribbons of her quilted robe, and then noticed that one of the dolls had fallen on its face. She went over to straighten it, a favourite of Rue’s with its stuffed body and limbs, painted face and impossibly red plaits. Ginger, she called the doll. Yunk had given it to her a long time ago and she often took it to bed with her.
Kara took hold of the doll to prop it against the dressing table mirror, and she gave a sudden gasp of pain as something pierced her hand. After sucking the pinprick, she examined the doll with caution and found die pin sticking through its head. She withdrew it and found that it was a sharp-pointed bodkin, which could have been used for sewing the doll and might have got lost inside it when it was stuffed.
A bare bodkin, impaling the head of a doll Rue loved. Rue, who lay so still and hurt, her bright head bandaged.
The clock ticked, the sea churned and lashed at the rocks of Dragon Bay, and Kara wanted to snatch up Rue and run with her from this house of menace.
With hands that shook she bundled the doll and the bodkin into the back of a drawer and slammed it shut. Then she hurried back to Rue and stood over her in a protective attitude. Long ago witches had stuck pins in dolls, and an element of superstition still held sway over the people of this island. What if someone in this house wished harm on those close to Lucan? Someone who hated him and blamed him for Pryde’s accident. Someone who had frightened Rue at night, ridden Kara down in the cane, and caused the chandelier to fall.
Kara suddenly wanted Lucan. She wanted him in this room, his strength a barrier against that stalking someone who might at this moment be out on the gallery.
She straightened and listened, and her heart jumped into her throat as she heard the approach of footsteps. They paused, the room next door was entered. …
‘Lucan?’ His name broke from her.
The communicating door opened and he strode in, tall, a dark green sweater to his chin, carrying a pair of steaming tankards. His eyes as he looked at her seemed to collect the lamplight into them and become lambent.
‘I thought you might like a hot rum punch.’ He handed her one of the tankards, and then stood looking down at Rue. ‘Still no change?’
‘A little while ago she seemed to stir when I touched her.’ Kara cradled the tankard in her hands and took a grateful sip of the spicy punch. The shadows of a moment ago were not to be feared when Lucan stood by to guard that small figure. ‘Stroke her hair, Lucan. I am sure she knows when you are here.’
His large hand was curiously gentle on the wings of bright hair. The child’s lips seemed to move, as if to murmur his name, and Kara knew beyond any doubt that the affinity between these two was of the blood, the senses, the very fibres of the heart. Why then had he let Pryde adopt what was his ? Was it written in stone, or in Lucan’s heart blood that he must give everything to Pryde? Was that why he had made such angry love to her, breaking the amber beads as if he longed to break free of his brother’s house?
He stood by the night-lamp drinking his punch and there was something remote and melancholy about his profile. Kara was moved to touch him, to speak, but what after all could she say? She, who had sworn that if she had a child she would rear it as a stranger to him.
He kept her company through this second n
ight and towards dawn, as she nodded in her chair, he made her go and take a rest on the divan in his room. Some time later he came to her, his hands warm on her shoulders ‘Wake up, Kara!’ There was a note of urgency in his voice. ‘Rue’s eyes are open, but she doesn’t seem to know where she is.’
He half lifted Kara off the divan and almost before her feet were in her slippers he was hustling her into the adjoining room. Yes, the child’s eyes were open, green and hazy as moss with the dawn dew on it. Eyes that gazed without recognition at Kara, dwelt thoughtfully on Lucan, then took in slowly the green-canopied bed, the wide windows filled with sea-light, and the dolls and lop-eared soft toys on the dressing table and other articles of furniture.
‘Ginger,’ she murmured.
No, Kara wanted to cry out. No, my dear, not that doll! Then Lucan shot a look at her, as if feeling her tension, and with clumsy hands she opened the drawer in which she had bundled the doll and took it out. She saw Lucan frown, and her hands were feeling all over the doll, desperately, as she walked to the bed with it.
‘Ginger!’ Rue reached for it with a smile of delight, and Kara had to give it to her and watch the child clasp it to her.
‘She remembers the doll,’ Lucan said, still frowning and puzzled.
‘It is probably a temporary amnesia,’ Kara reassured him.
Dr. Fabre was in complete agreement with Kara when he called in later that morning. The shock, he said. The blows caused by the falling plaster. It was little short of a miracle, hein, that the little one had not caught the full impact of the chandelier ?
That russet-haired child, playing so innocently with her doll, would have been killed. The unspoken words hung in the air, and Kara saw Lucan glance about him with a trapped, leashed expression. He sensed like a wild, proud animal the danger in the air, and as yet he could not tell from what direction it came.
‘Kara,’ he said, after the doctor had gone, ‘come in here a moment.’ He drew her into the solarium, and the scent of the sea and the plants was a trifle dizzying. She sank down in one of the wicker chairs and was unaware of how small she looked, how large her eyes, how fragile and at the same time how indomitable she was. Kara Stephanos, in whom ran the blood of Greeks who had fought tooth and nail for what they loved.
A fine mist drifted over the sea below the solarium—on a morning such as this her brother had almost died, and she had sat with Domini through the waiting hours.
She glanced up at Lucan, this tall, bold-featured man who was her husband, and saw her tiny image reflected in his eyes as he bent down to her and rubbed some warmth into her cold hands. ‘I want to thank you for the way you care for Rue,’ he said, and his words were almost an echo of those used by Nikos a year ago. Words that sent a warning to heart; words that armoured her against this man who looked so troubled, so uncertain, so like a lost boy whose tousled hair needed stroking back from green eyes guarded by lashes with bronze tips to them.
‘Will you stay with her as much as possible?’ he asked, and she felt him fingering the gold band on her left hand. ‘My sister will sit with her while you rest—Clare owes me that,’ he added in a lower tone.
‘Now Rue is so much better, Clare will not be so—so unnerved by her. Clare is an artist and imaginative, and such people are never very good in sickrooms.’ Kara looked at him and felt her heart beat fast. Dare she confide in him about the doll she had found with a bodkin impaled in it ? Or would he think that she was being over-imaginative? After all, it was bizarre to suggest that someone in the house was playing such tricks … using black magic.
Then the moment for telling had passed as there arose from the courtyard the impatient nicker of his stallion, saddled and ready for him to ride to the mill, where some new machinery was due in. The ring of hooves on the cobbles, the deep bark of the hound who always rode with him, drew Lucan’s attention to the time.
‘I must be off,’ he said, and he drew Kara to her feet and held her by the elbows as if to pull her into his embrace. But all he did was to brush an impersonal kiss across her cheekbone. Then he strode into the bedroom to Rue.
‘I will see you later, petite amie,’ Kara heard him say.
She touched her cheek where the passing warmth of his lips still lingered. Little sweetheart! Her eyes filled with tears. Little Rue. I must not mind that he loves you, and does not love me, she told herself with firmness.
During the next few days Rue grew much stronger. Her partial loss of memory was due, said the doctor, to her subconscious wish to blot out the moment when the chandelier had come crashing down towards her. Her mind needed a cushion to rest against and so it chose to make blank the things she could not yet face.
She told Kara that she had dreamed of falling off her swing. ‘Is that how I got hurt?’ she asked.
Kara thought it expedient to say yes. ‘Come, eat your breakfast,’ she coaxed. ‘If you eat every bit, then Dr. Fabre will let you get up for a few hours.’
The child’s appetite was jaded and Kara tempted her patiently with chocolate in a cup painted with birds, and scrambled egg with curls of pink ham. ‘Come on, cuckoo, open your mouth and let me pop in another titbit.’
The game proceeded until most of the plate was cleared, and then Kara set about straightening the room while Rue put on her heart-shaped wristwatch and the necklet of vari-coloured shells which Julius had made for her.
‘I am an Irish princess and now I am ready to receive homage from all my subjects. Bow to me instantly, you peasants.’ She flattened her knees and her row of dolls fell on their faces and she laughed with delight, her green eyes brighter than they had been for several days.
When Kara glanced over and smiled at her, she said:
‘Do you think I am like my father to look at?’
Kara’s heart skipped a beat, for since her accident the child called Lucan her father. At first she had not known who Kara was, and upon being told that Kara was Lucan’s wife she had said: ‘Did my own mother die a long time ago, and was my father sad for a long, long time before he married you, Kara?’
‘Well, darling, that is a question I don’t like to ask him,’ Kara had replied.
‘I suppose you keep wondering if he loved her better than he loves you.’ The childish candour had hurt without meaning to. ‘You are very good and kind, Kara. I expect my father married you for that reason.’
‘I expect he did,’ Kara said drily, and suggested that they do a jigsaw puzzle.
Whenever the child broached the subject of her parents, Kara found a way to divert her. This morning she suggested that Rue try her legs out of bed and if she felt strong enough they would go downstairs and sit in the Folly.
The Folly was attached to the veranda, and it would do Rue good to sit in the sunshine for a couple of hours.
‘I feel a bit wobbly,’ she admitted.
‘Sam can carry you downstairs.’ Kara helped her to dress, and was glad that the debris from the broken chandelier had been carted away and the ceiling re-plastered. The workmen had found a crack in the ceiling, and because of the closeness of the house to the sea Lucan had suggested to Pryde that an expert on land erosion be called in to examine the cliffs on which the house was built.
‘Those cliffs hold firm as iron in the seabed,’ Pryde had scoffed. ‘This house will stand another hundred years or more.’
‘How can you be so certain of that?’ Lucan had demanded with impatience. ‘We all know that the sea is closing in, and the foundations of this house must receive a hammering each time the seas are high. I am darned certain that storm the other night had something to do with that chandelier breaking loose.’
‘Old houses will creak and crack.’ Pryde had eyed his pacing brother with sardonic eyes. ‘Very well, call in an expert if it will put your mind at rest.’
Lucan was very restless these days—turning up at odd hours, looking in on Rue, then riding off again with Jet bounding beside him and baying down the cocoa valley.
The atmosphere was
tense as if a storm brewed, and it was as much of a relief to Kara to get out of the house as it was a change for Rue. Walking behind Sam and the child, her arms laden with books, puzzles, and the red-plaited doll, Kara watched anxiously to see if Rue glanced up at the ceiling where the chandelier had hung. But no, she went on chatting to Sam and seemed quite unaware that here in the hall, ten days ago, she had been knocked out by flying plaster and had lain still and bleeding in Lucan’s arms.
There was a smouldering murmur of bees as they entered the Folly, whose outside walls were a mass of clambering coral flowers. Inside it was cool and there were chairs set round the small fountain, a figure of Pan blowing water through the pipes he held.
Kara felt a lifting of her spirits and knew that something in the house had been weighing them down.
‘Catch!’ Rue tossed her ball to Kara, and then ran to the edge of the fountain as a dragonfly flew in and settled on the figure of Pan.
‘Her wings are like green tissue and she quivers all over,’ the child whispered. ‘Kara, isn’t the world full of lovely things?’
‘Yes,’ Kara said softly, and watched the sun slant in on the child’s russet hair and stroke her young cheek.
‘Kara,’ Rue swung round from the fountain rim and her eyes were green as the wings of the dragonfly, ‘don’t you think that the Great House is like a palace? An enchanted palace, with a dragon and a prince and all of us under a spell.’
‘What sort of a spell?’ Kara asked indulgently.
‘I am not sure,’ Rue said thoughtfully. ‘Do you know the story of the princess and the frog? He was a nobleman who had been enchanted and he knew that if the princess fell in love with him, he would change and be handsome again.’
[Stephanos 02] - Dragon Bay Page 15