Spindrift

by Rebecca Stratton

  Across the hall she could see Marie from the corner of her eye, padding across the wooden floor from the kitchen to the dining-room, and the smell of calalou tickled her nostrils, tempting her appetite. Marie was an excellent cook in the best Creole style, and her crab soup was as good as any produced by a Cordon Bleu cook. She caught Dominic’s eye and nodded, a signal he seemed to have no difficulty interpreting.

  ‘It’s almost time for dinner, Bryony, and we both have to get clean and tidy before we eat, so let’s leave this for now, eh?’ His arm was still around her shoulders while they mounted the wide staircase together, and when they reached her bedroom door he turned her to face him for a moment. His hands on her shoulders, he looked down into her face and half-smiled. ‘You seem to have grown into a woman without me noticing it happen,’ he confessed, and Bryony looked at the wide, sensual mobility of his mouth rather than meet his eyes.

  ‘Maybe you just weren’t looking,’ she suggested.

  ‘Maybe.’ He seemed to make the admission reluctantly, and his strong fingers still rested on her shoulders until they squeezed lightly into her flesh before releasing her. ‘Maybe so, petite, but I must take more notice from now on.’

  From her window Bryony could see the other side of the island, for the house was built near the elongated tip and set on a slight hill that overlooked the lush greenness of trees and shrubs, with the sea just visible beyond them. Immediately outside her window and occasionally trespassing into her room, a bignonia displayed its bold orange trumpets as it twined its way over the side of the house, and beyond that, hibiscus in red, white and yellow ran riot with the star-shaped red and white blossoms of fragrant frangipani.

  A huge jacaranda blocked her view to one side with its feathery fern-like leaves and blue flowers, and next to it an immortelle displayed its coxcombs against the deep blue Caribbean sky. This was the leisure part of the island, the house and gardens; it was the greater, wider part that supported them all and had kept the Laminaires prosperous for so long.

  Beyond the gardens stretched the plantation with a forest of banana plants fanning their shredded leaves against the hot sky and beyond them again, Dominic’s latest venture, a crop of low-growing pineapples. At the far side of the island, out of sight from her windows, was the village.

  In the beginning it had been no more than mean shacks that housed the imported slaves who worked the plantation, but now it was in fact a small village of neat little houses, each with its own patch of garden. Quite a few of the field workers had been born on Petitnue, although there was always a certain shifting element who came and went, and everyone knew that Laminaire paid well and looked after his workers.

  Although not a native born, like Dominic, Jules and Tim, Bryony felt very much at home on the island after eight years, and she could not imagine anyone wanting to give up the life there, as it seemed likely Tim was going to do. He would miss Petitnue; he had been born there and, apart from his years in school, he had lived there all his life. Even at school he had come home for holidays and the one weekend a month, as she had done herself. He would surely miss it all.

  Shaking off a mood of rather pessimistic gloom, she began getting ready for dinner with, somewhere in the back of her mind, a resentment against the woman who threatened to change all their lives if Tim persisted in his pursuit of her.

  A lime green dress set off her red hair with dazzling effect, and showed off her bare, golden-tanned arms, and she used a new bottle of expensive French perfume that Tim had bought her, with a lavish hand. Somehow she had to put on a show and try to dispel her present mood.

  It was her perfume that Dominic noticed first when she came down to dinner. He turned from the dressoir with a glass in each hand and handed her one as he wrinkled his nose appreciatively. ‘Faberge?’ he suggested, and looked at her over the rim of his glass.

  ‘Tim bought it for me, do you like it?’

  She felt she had to challenge the hint of surprise she thought she detected in his remark, as if he had not thought of her using sophisticated perfumes before. There was a suggestion of a smile in his eyes that made her suddenly uneasy and she drank hastily from her glass to disguise it, catching her breath on the dryness of the aperitif.

  ‘It’s very—effective.’

  He always seemed so very French when he used his hands like that, and she wondered just what he meant by effective. She had been over-generous with the perfume, she had to admit, and she realised suddenly that he might be thinking there was some ulterior motive behind it; that she had done it with some idea of making herself more attractive to him, and hoping to enlist his support for Tim.

  The thought was so discomfiting that she walked away and stood looking out of one of the windows, across the gardens to the silky blue Caribbean. She had never before let herself dwell on things like that and she found it hard to believe she was doing it now. Dominic was—Dominic, her guardian and Tim’s too, even though he considered himself beyond such guidance now. She had never before thought of him in any other light, and the fact that she did so now disturbed her.

  ‘Tim isn’t joining us for dinner, did you know?’

  Turning quickly, she stared at him for a moment, unsure what he expected of her. She had seen Tim not long before she came back to the house, but he had said nothing to her about not being with them for dinner. It was rather late to be crossing to one of the other islands, but it was possible Tim did not see it the same way.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’ He took a sip from his glass, watching as she shook her head. ‘He’s probably sulking; taken himself off somewhere to the other end of the island as a token of protest.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Marie says he let her know he wouldn’t be in for dinner but didn’t say why. I thought perhaps he might have told you.’ He took another sip from his glass and Bryony caught a glimpse of a smile on his mouth a second before he put it to his lips. ‘You usually know what he’s up to.’

  ‘Well, in this case, I don’t.’ He was probably right about Tim’s whereabouts, she thought, and said so. ‘He could be down with Louis, he was talking to him earlier and they looked to be pretty engrossed in something or other.’

  ‘Oh?’ A hint of narrowness gave his grey eyes a dismaying suggestion of cruelty, and Bryony wished she had not been so forthcoming. ‘If Louis’s encouraging him in his crazy romantic escapades, I’ll flay him!’

  The threat sounded far more fearsome than it was meant to be, she knew, but just the same Bryony felt a vague uneasiness when she remembered Tim talking so earnestly to Louis just after she left him. It would be just like Tim to think up some mad scheme for seeing his lady-friend, and to inveigle Louis into helping him to get to Guadeloupe; the two of them could handle the schooner between them in good weather.

  ‘Louis wouldn’t, Dom, he’s too afraid of what you might do or say. Well,’ she amended, unwilling to do Louis the injustice of implying he lacked courage, ‘at least he wouldn’t like to go against you in something like that. He wouldn’t, Dom.’

  ‘He’d just better not!’

  Louis was exactly Jules’ age. He was Marie’s grandson, born the exact same time that Louise Charn gave birth to Jules, only Louis had been born in one of the little houses down in the village. The result had been the same, for Marie’s unmarried daughter had died when her son was born too, and Marie had brought him up. He would do anything for Tim or Bryony, for he had an almost fiercely protective attitude towards them. It was quite possible that Tim could persuade him to help in furthering his romantic plans, though Bryony prayed he hadn’t.

  It was with relief that she turned to speak to Jules when he came in to join them. Jules was simply an older version of Tim. The same fresh-faced look that belied his thirty years; tall and good-looking, just as their father had been. He made no pretence of doing other than dote on his pretty half-sister, just as Jenny, his wife, did.

  After three years of marriage they still had no
children, and it was an open secret that they both regretted it deeply. It was probably why they both cared so much for Bryony and treated her rather as if she was still a little girl, despite her eighteen years.

  Jenny followed her husband into the room and came straight across to join Bryony by the window while Jules fetched them both an aperitif, murmuring something to Dominic as he did so. About Tim’s absence, Bryony suspected, and glanced across at them uneasily.

  Jenny was pretty in a rather gaunt way that was very English. Her short hair was brown, a rich golden brown that went with large and rather lovely hazel eyes and a wide mouth that smiled a lot, though with a hint of sadness sometimes. She liked living on the island, but sometimes Bryony thought she missed her friends and family in England. Hers and Jules’ had been a holiday romance, begun while Jenny was staying with friends on Guadeloupe, and ending with her coming to Petitnue as Jules’ bride only four weeks after they first met.

  ‘Tim’s gone missing.’

  Jenny whispered the information with a hasty glance in Jules’ direction as he made his way across the room with her drink, and Bryony nodded. As soon as he had gone back to continue his conversation with Dominic she went on, keeping her voice low, as if she did not want the two men to hear what she said, although almost certainly Tim was the topic of their conversation too.

  ‘He’s gone somewhere with Louis Ortega; Jules thinks they may have gone to Basse-terre to see that woman that Tim’s been seeing, but I do hope he’s wrong.’

  All Bryony’s loyalty to Tim welled up inside her at the breathless anxiety in Jenny’s voice, because she knew just why it was that her sister-in-law hoped he wasn’t seeing his schoolteacher. If Jenny had a drawback in Bryony’s eyes, it was her sensitivity about offending Dom.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Bryony declared in a clear voice that easily reached the two men the other side of the room, and Jenny looked at her reproachfully. ‘It’s no one else’s business if Tim’s gone to see Sarah Bryant!’

  ‘Is that her name?’

  It was startling to realise how against the woman they all were without even knowing her name, and she wondered for a second if she had been too rash in mentioning her name within Dominic’s hearing. ‘She’s a schoolteacher and Tim is a grown man, Jenny, not a boy! If he wants to see someone ten or fifteen years older than he is, then it’s no one else’s concern but Tim’s! He’s in love with her, so why shouldn’t he go and see her?’

  ‘Puppy love on Tim’s side, surely, darling, isn’t it?’ Jules teased her gently, as he always did, not for a moment believing she could be as serious as she sounded. ‘I suppose it is the same kind that makes the world go round!’

  ‘Oh, you don’t understand at all, do you?’ It was so seldom that she had cause to cross words with Jules, and he looked quite startled for a second or two. ‘You’re as bad as Dom—he thinks it’s all a five-minute wonder that Tim will grow out of! Doesn’t it occur to either of you that he might not grow out of it?’

  Dominic’s normally pleasant voice was edged with a certain harshness that Bryony recognised as impatience, and he used his hands a lot in that expressive way he did. ‘Bryony has become an expert in matters of the heart, Jules; sufficiently so to tell me how I should go about handling Tim’s sensitive feelings in the matter of this schoolma’am he’s infatuated with!’

  ‘Oh, Dom, you’re being cruel!’

  Bryony’s blue eyes reproached him, but he was apparently unrepentant, his gaze fixed on her steadily as he sipped the last of his aperitif. It made her uneasy and she was glad when he turned to put down his empty glass on the dressoir behind him.

  ‘I don’t claim to be an expert on anything,’ she denied, clutching her own glass in tight fingers. ‘I just think Tim should be free to make his own choice, that’s all. You’re too—too hard, Dom, you don’t understand.’

  ‘So you’ve informed me!’

  The retort reminded her of that hastily recalled observation on his lack of experience, and she felt the colour in her cheeks as she sought consolation from her glass of bacardi. Almost inevitably it was Jules who came to her rescue, his laughter making light of the matter.

  ‘Women always claim to be experts on affaires de coeur, Dom, don’t you know that?’ He gave no one a chance to follow up the question, but took his wife’s arm and hugged her. ‘And whether or not anyone else is hungry, I’m so ravenous I could eat Marie as well as the dinner she’s got for us, so let’s go in, shall we?’ Left alone with Dominic, Bryony gave him a brief, uneasy glance that evolved quite naturally into a deep and almost audible sigh of relief when he smiled. Taking her arm as they moved to follow Jules and Jenny, he squeezed the soft flesh of her upper arm with his strong fingers.

  ‘I just wonder if Tim realises what a gallant little champion he has in you,’ he said. ‘Or if he deserves your blind devotion.’

  ‘It isn’t blind, Dom!’ From below concealing lashes she looked at him anxiously, although she tried to disguise her anxiety. ‘You won’t flay him or Louis, will you, Dom?’

  The threat had been no more than a figure of speech, of course, but somehow she had no difficulty picturing how different things would have been in the same situation only a few generations ago, with one of Dominic’s ancestors making the same threat. There was still an element of savagery in Dom that she found disturbing. The Laminaires had created their own little world here on Petitnue, and she sometimes thought they had changed little when she looked at the latest of their line.

  He curled his hard fingers about her arm and pulled her close for a moment, looking down into her face with eyes that gleamed like polished grey granite in his craggy face. ‘Not while they have you for their advocate,’ he promised, and sniffed appreciatively at the smells from the kitchen. ‘Tim doesn’t know what he’s missing—smell that calalou! How could he forgo that for the sake of some—’

  ‘Dom!’

  ‘Ah!’ He raised a hand and shrugged, then laughed as they went in to join Jules and Jenny. ‘You will not let me forget, eh, petite? You are my conscience!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was so dark that Bryony stirred only reluctantly, and noisy too, though it must be very late. She had come to bed just before midnight and had not meant to sleep until she heard Tim come in, but despite her good intentions, her body had eventually succumbed to a natural, healthy tiredness, and she had fallen asleep.

  When she first woke it had been difficult to decide just what was causing the disturbance that had woken her. It was a strange and eerie howling, rising to a screech, and a rattle like stones on a tin roof, and it prodded relentlessly at her consciousness until she awoke; then she recognised it for what it was and sat up swiftly.

  The banshee wailing of the wind and the curtains sweeping out into her room, billowing like full sails, even the bedclothes were shifting, it seemed, in the strong gusts from the partly open windows. It could only be a hurricane, or something close to it.

  Only once before during her eight years in the islands had she been witness to the kind of fury these paradise islands could summon up, and it had frightened her so much that time that she had trembled for hours afterwards.

  She was older now, and perhaps should have been less terrified, but even so her heart was thudding hard as she got out and reached for the robe that lay across the foot of her bed. Doing the commonplace things like putting on her slippers, automatically.

  From inside the house came the bang of shutters being battened and the thud of hurrying feet on the stairs, voices; Jules’ light baritone and Marie’s singsong Creole French as she spoke to Dom. And then it hit her with the force of a physical blow—she had not heard Tim come in! While she still coped with the sash at her waist she hurried across the room and just before she got there someone was hammering hard on her door.

  She had not even time to open it before Dominic came in. He was still dressed, she noticed, and he looked so grim-faced that she said nothing, but watched while he reached out and after a runn
ing battle with the fury outside, pulled the shutters over her windows, muffling the sound of the wind and bringing a curious stillness into the room.

  One glance at his face was enough to tell her that Tim had not come back and she put her hands over her mouth in sudden and sickening fear, staring at him over her finger-tips. For a moment, as he turned, the grim expression relaxed and he came to her, taking her hands in his and transmitting some of his own steadying strength to her, while he looked down into her face.

  ‘It’s all right, Bryony, don’t look so scared. You’ve sat out one of these before, remember? Just after you came here first?’

  It was ridiculous to say that her mouth was stiff, and yet that was exactly how it felt. Her lips had a curious numbness that made movement almost impossible, and yet somehow she managed to form the words she needed to say. ‘Tim? Is Tim back?’

  ‘No.’ She knew he did not want to tell her, and there was something about the look in his eyes that made it hard for her to be calm. ‘There was no warning of a hurricane, so that probably means it isn’t going to last very long—it will probably blow itself out very quickly.’

  ‘But they don’t stand a chance!’ She faced the worst, knowing it was what they could expect, but from somewhere Dominic found the wisdom and strength to shake his head and look as if he meant it.

  ‘It depends where they were when it started, they could have been near enough to Petitnue to run for it before the worst hit them.’

  ‘But if they’re still in the passage—’ The passage was a strip of water between two islands, notoriously rough going during a blow like this present one, and Tim and Louis were only two-handed.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do, kitten, except hope they aren’t.’

  The fact that he used her father’s pet name for her was proof to Bryony’s mind of how much he felt the frustration of his own helplessness, and she impulsively reached out and hugged close to his comforting strength, while his arms closed around her. With her face pressed close to his chest and her hands spread over his broad back she put everything out of her mind for just a few seconds, except the inexpressible sense of security he gave her.