Princess

by Alison Fraser

  ‘With the passing of time Serena added her own refinements—she rolled over and played dead. Initially the switching off was a trick, but it was met with an increasingly violent response that made Serena want to stay as part of the dreams inside her head. Paradoxically the physical abuse kept her in touch with reality, but as it tailed off with Andrea’s illness, the dreams almost took over completely—and then we came along...’

  Nancy sat silent through it all, honour bound not to express her horror by her claim that she could take it, but when Adam finished so abruptly, she asked, aghast, ‘How could anyone do that to a child?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Adam replied, but continued, ‘A very sick sort of jealousy, I think. Serena came first with her father—the enchanting child given to him by the wife of his heart. Too late Andrea realised she came a poor third to the child and a ghost, unacceptable to the possessive woman she was. A devouring monster, that’s what Serena called her—and with Templeton gone, she made damn sure she took it out on his child.’

  His explanation was calm and rational, but underneath there was a bitter sympathy with Andrea’s victim, and Nancy no longer doubted the quality and strength of Adam’s love.

  ‘Why didn’t she tell anybody?’ she murmured bewilderedly.

  ‘She did,’ he returned with aggression, and cancelled it with a rueful smile when he realised he was being oversensitive to criticism of Serena, his earlier anger against her dissipated. ‘She told a governess, who promptly went to Andrea to report the lies of her ungrateful charge. An old buffer of a doctor, who listened and promised to help her. He did—with a bottle of sedatives to calm the poor child. And Andrea took her retribution—with drugs and humiliations she made sure Serena didn’t risk telling any more tales. She belonged to Andrea. No one else cared. Even in death Andrea was pounding over her total dependence with a legacy to her beloved stepdaughter of Serena’s own mother’s jewellery. And I, for my sins, was nominated new keeper.’

  For a long moment his mother sat in stunned silence as the full picture came home to her, then she rose, very pale, very shaken, to excuse herself.

  Left alone, Adam didn’t finish his packing but went downstairs to the lounge. He poured himself a whisky with the cynical thought that he was starting as he meant to go on. But he took a long time to drink it. Calmer now, more able to think, he no longer found that farewell note convincing and feared for the unpredictable wild side of Serena’s nature. Or maybe he just preferred to believe she couldn’t walk away from him, cool and uncaring, without saying goodbye.

  ‘Adam! Adam!’ His mother’s voice, loud and insistent, broke into his absorption.

  ‘Feeling better?’ he asked, knowing how sick he had felt when he had heard only a fragment of the truth.

  ‘Yes.’ She dismissed tersely. ‘Listen to me, Adam. Tomorrow. You’ll go tomorrow and bring her back.’

  It was a command, and he wasn’t arguing but simply stating facts when he said, ‘I don’t see how you think I could force her to come back with me.’

  ‘Then at least go and find out why she left. She’ll tell you, Adam. She’s shared so much with you already.’

  ‘Father confessor,’ he laughed self-mockingly. ‘I can’t go on playing that role any more.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to.’ Nancy had done her own thinking upstairs, and awarded him a hard, searching glance before challenging him outright, ‘Did you ever tell her you loved her?’

  ‘It was bloody obvious if she’d cared to see it,’ he growled, his bitterness defending his reticence.

  She shook her head, a gesture of maternal despair. ‘For a highly intelligent man you can be incredibly stupid!’

  It was an echo that brought an image of a vulnerable hurting Serena from the previous night; God, how he ached to hold her!

  ‘She doesn’t say where she’s gone.’ As a protest it was weak and his mother bowled it over with a dogged vehemence.

  ‘I checked with the airports. She took the noon flight to Rome from Manchester. She’s heading for a small Italian fishing village in the South. And it’s no pleasure trip she’s on.’

  A pilgrimage home, his mother meant, that could turn out to be one more disappointment. ‘You trust me with her?’ Adam asked, recalling her hostility in the past.

  ‘I trust you to ignore your own inclinations, and do what Serena wishes—whatever it is,’ she responded cryptically, and waited tensely for his decision.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he conceded quietly, incapable of promising more.

  And scarcely heard his mother murmuring, ‘You’ll do the right thing, Adam. I know you will.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Yesterday had been spent travelling and snatching fitful sleep when she could, and today facing up to the realisation that there was no such thing for her as home. The village hadn’t changed, but home was not a place, but people. And they were gone—everybody she had ever needed to stay close. Even Adam, although she hadn’t been able to take waiting around for the final parting. Lucky Adam who didn’t depend on anybody.

  Serena had tried to hold on to him a little while longer, and had made a complete fool of herself by imagining he would still want her that way. One kiss, his hand gentle on her breast, and all that frightening panic raised by his goodbye present had dissolved, lost in mindless beautiful sensation till there was just Adam and that moment and his loving.

  But he had merely been teaching her another object lesson, drawing away from her, cold and insulting, untouched by it all. When her body had been crying out to him to make her his woman, he had rejected her with his scathing, ‘I don’t make love to children.’

  She had lain on her bed, dry-eyed and nursing the hurt he had inflicted, and much later when she had heard his door shutting at the other side of the stairs, she had conceived the absurd idea of going to him to apologise for embarrassing him with her floundering efforts to be adult about her feelings for him.

  The apology had never been made. Frozen in the passageway outside her door, she had watched that awful woman walking down from Adam’s room, her face flushed and her sullen mouth forming a smile when she spotted Serena. The smile had said it all, and yet she hadn’t believed it. Not at first. She had sat on her windowseat numb to the pain, but it hadn’t worked for long because she had never been able to shut out Adam.

  Her pride had changed the hurting to anger and sent her running. Anger with him, with the unfairness of it. She could have loved him better than that cold selfish woman if he’d just shown her the way. Didn’t he know that? Couldn’t he see? And she wouldn’t have put a price on her love but left him free to come and go.

  Serena drifted in from the balcony. At last the sun was setting and she left the shutters open for the breeze, but hesitated about putting on the light.

  The hotel looked a little less shabby in the half-light—it was the only hotel in the village, cheap and clean, and the proprietor’s wife, remembering the Signora Templeton who had once been part of the small community, had made Serena feel very welcome.

  But with the night her loneliness began—she had to stay angry, to cut him out of her life. She had to do it to survive. Tomorrow she’d move on, use the money her mother’s aunt had left her to see Europe, as she’d said in the note.

  The knock at her door interrupted the forced exercise of planning a grand tour for which she had no enthusiasm, and she pulled her towelling robe tighter as she went to answer the call of ‘Signorina Templeton?’

  Her automatic smile froze on her lips as she took in Adam standing at the proprietor’s side. For a second, she considered slamming the door, leaving him to try and explain her conduct.

  ‘Signorina, your cousin, he arrive with the sad news of the family,’ the unwitting hotelkeeper repeated the lie designed to dispel his suspicion of Adam’s sudden arrival.

  Serena’s startled eyes locked on Adam’s and anger quickly replaced relief at the slight shake of his head and his taking up the pretence with, ‘Aunt Ida, I’m afraid, passed
away in her sleep.’ He willed her to follow his lead, to reassure the manager of his right to be there.

  And she did. Eventually. Coming back with a sharp, ‘Well, which of us gets the old dear’s money?’

  The Italian, with his innate reverence of the family and of the dead, was truly shocked by her hard words; she had seemed such a nice young lady.

  Adam, on the other hand, knew she was trying to embarrass him, but he snatched the opportunity it presented.

  ‘As you can hear, signore, my dear cousin has no need for your protection,’ he effectively dismissed the other man, who was more than willing to let the heartless English get on with their own affairs.

  His foot was in the door, too quick for her hurried attempt to close it on him. She gave up the struggle and retreated to the bed.

  ‘You’ve outraged the poor man’s sensibilities with that peculiar sense of humour,’ Adam muttered, not really giving a damn about it.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked icily. ‘I didn’t leave so you would follow.’

  Why indeed, when she was staring at him as though she wished him in hell. ‘My mother was worried about you.’ It sounded lame even to his ears, but he was feeling his way, scared of treading on sacred ground.

  ‘As you can see, I’m quite capable of finding a bed for the night. Your duty’s accomplished, you can go home,’ she said tautly.

  Aware as he was of her nakedness beneath the towelling robe, Adam could still see the wounded child that lurked under the seemingly hard exterior. About to move away from the door, he checked himself; this was as near as he trusted himself.

  ‘My mother wants you to come home.’

  ‘I have my own life to live, and that pile of rubble was never my home,’ she declared, a shade more defensively.

  In all probability what she said was true, and he had no clever arguments to counter that sad fact. He said what was in his heart.

  ‘I want you home, Princess.’

  It brought her eyes back to his face, wide in their anger, as she flung contemptuously at him, ‘I would have thought one woman was enough for you. In the same house anyway.’

  ‘Julia left yesterday morning,’ he announced quietly. ‘She has no place in my life, now or in the future.’

  ‘Not even as a casual companion for the night?’

  Her bitterness was unmistakable, yet he dismissed the fleeting hope to which it gave rise, frightened he was reading into it only what he wanted to be there.

  ‘I haven’t been to bed with Julia or any other woman for over a year,’ he stated plainly.

  ‘I saw her,’ Serena accused, her voice rising. ‘I saw her at your door!’

  ‘You saw her entering or leaving?’

  ‘Leaving your room,’ she threw at him, her rigid composure cracking. She shut her eyes tightly against him, crying, ‘For pity’s sake, Adam, don’t deny it. Spare me that!’

  But he couldn’t. It was too important, and this time he had to risk her bad opinion.

  ‘If you saw her leaving, then it must have been shortly after twelve. And whatever you may think, it’s not my habit to make love to a woman and then turf her out of my bed in the middle of the night. I want her beside me in the morning,’ he finished softly, his mind filled with the clear beautiful vision of Serena lying with him.

  ‘Stop!’ she cried tempestuously. ‘I don’t want to hear any more!’

  ‘No, you’ll listen to what I have to say. I did not ask her to come to my room. She got the idea I’d welcome her from some cheeky little madam in a temper,’ Adam accused, and startled a blush from her before she flung herself face down on the pillow and tried to block out the sound of his voice. Without thinking, he crossed to the bed and dragged her round.

  ‘Nor did I make love to her. Trust me, Princess. I wouldn’t lie to you.’ He had thought her still angry, but when he saw her long lashes, darker than her hair and wet with the tears that threatened, he touched her cheek tenderly with the back of his hand. ‘Don’t cry, Princess. I can’t bear it. I’ll go now and we’ll talk again in the morning.’

  When he would have risen to leave her, a small desperate hand clutched his arm.

  ‘Stay with me. Hold me.’ Her plea was but a whisper, yet Serena had no doubts about what she wanted. A memory she could live on, to join her collection of transient dreams.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re asking,’ Adam didn’t feel noble, but his conscience stirred deep within him. ‘I can’t....’ he forced the words out, his breathing ragged with his desire for her.

  ‘You don’t want me?’ she asked with the directness of her generation.

  ‘Very much. I want you very...’ He was silenced by the arms that slid around his neck, and the mouth that pressed tentatively on his, with a kiss that spoke of nervous shyness. The hands that gripped her waist with the intention of pushing her gently away were alive to her perfumed softness and they betrayed him, drawing her closer until only their clothing separated them. Still he felt the strength within him to resist temptation.

  And then all was sensation, momentarily obscuring right and wrong, as Serena’s fingers curled into his hair, and her mouth moved beneath his, desperately searching for a response. Her lips opened fully as he pushed her slowly down on the bed, and the taste of her was awakening a hunger that made his body tremble. But he was afraid—afraid of damaging his frail, beautiful Princess. He eased her away from him and they lay on their sides on the large double bed, not touching with their bodies, but communicating with their eyes. She looked so open, so sure—there was no fear in her steady smile.

  ‘What about tomorrow?’ he murmured hesitantly.

  She brushed her fingers against his lips. ‘Shh! No tomorrows. There’s just now. Just us.’

  Reverently he undressed her, and then himself, and for a long moment they were silent, motionless shadows in the darkening room, each anticipating but shying from disappointing the other. Stretching his hand out, he slowly traced the outline of her face, his fingers trailed the length of her body. He wanted the touch of all of her, to know her by heart. Lifting her hand, he brought it to his mouth and kissed the babysoft palm, causing a low moan to escape her lips. He was on fire for her, yet restrained the urge to cover her body with his and use her to end his suffering; more than anything he wished to pleasure her, show her how much he loved her.

  With a featherlight touch he explored the smoothness of her thighs, wondering at the flawlessness of her small body. And then with hesitating shyness, Serena guided his hand upwards until it covered her firm rounded breast, and its hardness told him of her excitement. Lowering his head, he took its peak in his mouth, slowly teasing it to full life, glorying in the pleasure noises it brought to her lips until he could stand no more. Frantically his mouth sought hers and forced it open, no longer able to check his ardency as he plundered and drained its sweetness.

  Nothing had prepared him for the ecstasy of complete possession when their bodies fused into one, but it was ephemeral, replaced by a dreadful shaming agony at her muffled cry of pain, confirming that her denial of innocence had been an illusion. When he would have left her, her hands urged him to love her, to take all he wanted from her, and his flesh ignored the dictates of his mind, bringing him to a fulfilment that was shattering in its impact.

  Afterwards they lay in silence, save for the sound of their strained breathing, fingers entwined like diffident children.

  Adam turned to face her, eyes adjusting to the darkness, and looked on her with adoration. For a second a shadow seemed to cross her eyes, but she made the moment perfect with a quiet contented smile that said no regrets, no recriminations.

  Softly he whispered, ‘Forgive me. I hurt you.’

  Serena moved into his arms and laid her tousled head on his hair-coarsened chest. ‘No, it was... it was beautiful.’

  Stroking her hair, he was filled with a wondering gratitude for the gift she had bestowed on him. He couldn’t let himself believe that there would not be a lifetime o
f tomorrows with his lovely, loving girl.

  Her even breathing told him she was asleep and, at peace with himself for the first time in so long, Adam slept too.

  She flitted through his dreams—an elusive spectral creature, beckoning with her beauty but impossible to capture. As he drifted into semi-consciousness he reached out for her in the coming dawn—his living, breathing Serena, seeking the reassurance that she had not disappeared with the night. His hand travelled over the cold empty space where she had lain and a panicked voice, unrecognisable as his own, cried out her name.

  Within minutes he was dressed and in the hotel lobby, pressing notes on a bemused night porter who informed him that the young lady had already left for the station.

  The platform was deserted, save for a lone porter whose faltering English painfully established that there was no train until nine. And yes, a young lady had left a case with him before she left the station for the path that led to the village cemetery.

  As Adam climbed the hillside, he passed ah ancient disused church, and once inside the cemetery, his eyes were drawn to the grave whose headstone of white marble dominated the west wall. Of Serena there was no sign.

  Something compelled him towards the headstone, and his eyes riveted on the small miniature set in the large cross that rose from its base. Serena’s face stared back at him—the same breathtaking beauty he had let slip from his arms while he slept.

  Bending down, he read the inscription:

  MORAG CAMPBELL TEMPLETON

  1943-1970

  BELOVED WIFE OF GRAHAM AND LOVING MOTHER OF SERENA JANE

  ‘AND I WILL LOVE YOU STILL, MY DEAR,

  TILL A’ THE SEAS GANG DRY’

  And now he understood perfectly how Graham Templeton could do nothing other than keep that promise to a beautiful young wife, even if he had so tragically tried to fill the emptiness her leaving had created.