Winter at Cray

by Lucy Gillen

  ‘I doubt it very much,’ she agreed. ‘Are you finding it an awful bore being stranded here, Essie?’

  ‘I’m not bored at all,’ Essie assured her, and there was a knowing look about the smile that she gave her. ‘Actually I’ve been getting on rather well with your cousin Stephen.’ There was speculation in the blue eyes, Louise thought, and wondered if Essie had some idea of retaliating by becoming friendly with Stephen in the hopes of making Louise jealous.

  ‘I’m glad you get on well,’ she told the blonde girl. ‘Stephen isn’t always the easiest person in the world to talk to; but he’s interested in so many things and he likes to find a good listener.’

  ‘I’m a born listener,’ Essie confessed, ‘but only when I’m interested in the subject, and I’ve always been keen on political economy, so we have mutual ground.’

  ‘Political economy?’ Louise echoed, and stared at her in frank surprise.

  Essie chuckled happily at having startled her. ‘I studied it among other things at university,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ve never used it.’

  ‘And then became a magazine photographer?’ Louise said, shaking her head; her suspicion confirmed that Essie was not as flighty as first impressions might suggest. ‘But why, when you have such qualifications? Why waste them, Essie?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think they are wasted,’ Essie told her. ‘I love this photography game, and the job takes me all over the place. It’s hectic but it’s fun and you meet such interesting people. Like your cousin,’ she added with a wicked look.

  ‘I’m glad Stephen’s found a willing listener,’ Louise smiled, ‘and if it stops you being bored to death with life on Berren so much the better.’

  ‘What’s puzzling me,’ Essie said slowly and with her eyes fixed on Louise’s face reflected in the dressing-table mirror, ‘is what’s keeping Jon from being bored to death. Maybe,’ she added blandly, ‘he’s found a distraction too.’

  Robert insisted on going out after breakfast, although it was still very slippery underfoot and made for rather dangerous walking, but Louise succumbed to his pleas and accompanied him.

  Venturing out, she found it less hazardous than she had anticipated and she let Robert run down the steep path to the pier, part way only, calling him back when he became too venturesome. It was when they were returning to the house that Louise saw someone approaching from the direction of the cottages below.

  He was climbing the slope, or at least attempting to climb it, finding it far more slippery lower down than it was nearer the house, and even at this distance she had no difficulty in recognising Henri Dupont.

  ‘Robert!’ She called to her son hastily, and he ran up to her, his eyes curious as he too spotted the man on the path. ‘We’ll go in now,’ she told Robert. ‘It’s getting cold out here.’

  She sent Robert into the house in front of her and turned to see what progress Henri Dupont had made, and to her relief he appeared to have given up the struggle, for he was now walking with his back towards her, slipping and sliding down the steep incline to the pier. She watched until he reached the bottom of the path, then hastily looked away when the dark head turned and he looked back at her and, although she could not see the expression in his eyes from there, she shuddered involuntarily as she went into the house. She was all kinds of a fool, she told herself, for making so much of the man’s presence on the island.

  Her son was talking to Jonathan Darrell when she came in through the door and she felt the colour touch her cheeks when she met his eyes. ‘Who was the stranger trying to come up the hill?’ he asked bluntly, watching her face as she sought for an answer.

  ‘Oh, just someone,’ she told him, unwilling for Robert to hear too much. ‘Just—just someone staying in one of the cottages, I think.’

  ‘Robert said he saw someone,’ he said to explain his curiosity, and she nodded.

  ‘He’s given up and gone back again.’ She hoped she made it obvious that she had no intention of discussing it further.

  It was certain, Louise thought the following morning, when she looked out of the window at the thawing ground, that Henri Dupont would come up to Cray today if he intended coming at all, and she sighed as she brushed her hair. He would probably not be so easily deterred by the presence of a third party this time either, even the old lady.

  He did not arrive until after lunch and Louise sensed as well as saw Jonathan Darrell’s curiosity when Hannah announced his arrival. There was only Robert, Stephen, Jonathan Darrell and herself in the room and it seemed to Louise that an air of expectancy emanated from all of them at the housekeeper’s announcement.

  For a moment Louise hesitated, then she nodded her head and a moment later Henri Dupont walked into the room, his glance going first to the little boy at the window.

  Stephen’s face flushed angrily at the sight of him and Jonathan’s eyes narrowed slightly, showing the dark glitter of curiosity. The visitor’s eyes, so like her son’s, were fixed on her face after that first brief glance at Robert and she was reminded of the possible effect such a meeting might have on the boy.

  ‘Robert!’ she called across to him. ‘Will you go and find Uncle Colin, please, and stay with him for a while?’

  ‘Mummy—’ Doubt clouded Robert’s eyes and he looked unhappily at the stranger whose features so closely resembled his own.

  ‘Will you come with me, Robert?’ Jonathan held out a hand to him with a smile, and after only a brief hesitation, Robert went with him while Louise breathed her relief.

  ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr. Dupont?’ she asked as the door closed behind them.

  The dark eyes glittered as Simon’s had done so often during the many times he had been angry with her, and she shivered at the hateful familiarity of it. ‘I have asked that we speak alone, madame.’ His gaze flicked for a moment to Stephen, rightly interpreting his interest, and he raised one black brow in query. ‘This man—?’

  ‘Is my cousin, Stephen Kincaid,’ Louise said. ‘I’m sorry, I thought perhaps you knew from—from the other night—’

  ‘Ah, so—when you so conveniently fainted away, hmm?’ Malice poured over her from the liquid dark eyes and she was reminded again of Simon and the cruel viciousness of his tongue.

  Determinedly pushing back the memory, she shook her head. ‘It—it was your appearance, it was a great shock to me,’ she explained. ‘I’d forgotten Simon had a brother.’

  ‘Ah, there is no doubt much you choose to forget about your husband,’ he retorted. ‘Conveniently, perhaps.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Louise denied, ‘it’s—it’s such a long time, that’s all; one forgets.’

  ‘No doubt.’ He eyed her closely for a moment and she felt her hands tight and damp-palmed, clenched at her sides. ‘You know why I am here?’ he asked, and Louise shook her head.

  ‘I have no idea,’ she told him, ‘unless it’s to open old wounds, and I—I can’t think you’d be so cruel as to do that.’

  ‘Cruel?’ He could see her weakening resolve, she thought, and it pleased him; he was all too much like Simon had been. ‘You call me cruel, madame, after you—you—’ The thin hands swept through the air expressively. ‘My brother was young, full of life, and you just disposed of him—pouf! And you call me cruel?’

  It was all starting again, Louise thought desperately, the coldness of fear gripping her heart as she turned to seek Stephen’s hands, looking for reassurance. The hands she found, however, were stiff and reluctant, as if he would rather have turned and gone, and left her alone with this man who hated her as much as his brother had done.

  ‘Stephen—’ She looked up at the flushed face and set mouth of her cousin and sensed the doubt in him.

  ‘I think you’d better go, Dupont,’ he told him. ‘You’d much better go now.’

  ‘I came to see my brother’s wife, his widow, Mr. Kincaid. I shall not go until I have talked to her alone, you understand?’

  ‘I—I don’t want to talk to you,’ Louise cried, wishing it was n
o more than the bad dream that had haunted her so often in the early years after Simon’s death.

  ‘But you will talk to me, madame!’ The words were ones which Simon had used on so many occasions when he had been demanding money from her and she had been obliged to refuse. The familiarity of them and the same deep, strongly accented voice in which they were spoken was too much for her self-control. She felt her knees weaken and a rising panic that threatened to engulf her.

  ‘No! No, I won’t!’

  ‘Louise—’ Stephen’s voice sounded uncertain and slightly unreal and she felt her head throbbing dizzily.

  ‘Louise!’ This time there was more depth in the voice and before she could insist that she was all right, she was encircled by a strong arm and half led, half carried into the small sitting-room.

  She was seated carefully in the armchair her great-grandmother usually used. ‘Get some brandy or something,’ Jonathan ordered impatiently as Stephen followed them in, and surprisingly Stephen went without argument.

  Her hands were taken and rubbed soothingly, while he stood between her and the doorway, blocking her view of the unwelcome visitor. She had not even heard him come into the room, but he had obviously anticipated another faint and acted as promptly as he had before.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she told him, ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You’re not all right,’ he retorted, ‘or you wouldn’t have gone woozy on us just now. What’s been happening? Shall I get your grandfather, would you like to have him here?’

  ‘No, no!’ She stayed him with a hand on his arm and he covered it with his own for a second. ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘O.K.,’ he agreed, shrugging, ‘have it your way, but tell me what’s been going on in there.’

  Instinctively she stiffened and shook her head. ‘Nothing that need concern you, Mr. Darrell. I’m grateful to you for—for helping me, but there’s no need to worry, really. I’m perfectly all right.’

  He eyed her steadily for a moment and she thought he was undecided, thinking it must be a sensation unfamiliar to him. ‘D’you want to go back in there?’ he asked at last, and she in turn hesitated.

  ‘I—I don’t know.’

  She expected him to respond with impatience, instead he put one hand on the back of her chair and the other on the arm and bent over her, the dark eyes as serious as she had seen them yet. ‘I know you’ve got some high-minded notion that I’m a snooper,’ he told her, ‘but please believe me, at the moment I’m more concerned about the effect this man has on you than about any news value there may be attached to it.’

  ‘I’m—I’m sorry.’ She disliked having to apologise to him, even in such circumstances, but there was little else she could do and he did seem genuinely concerned for her.

  ‘Do you want to see him?’ He accepted the apology by ignoring it.

  ‘No—no, not really,’ she admitted, ‘but there’s not much else I can do, is there?’

  ‘He is some relation to your late husband?’ The question was inevitable, she supposed, and nodded.

  ‘He’s Simon’s brother.’

  ‘I see.’ He narrowed his eyes, straightening up, tall and somehow reassuring, although she still wondered how much of his interest was professional. ‘I won’t pretend to be in complete ignorance of the matter,’ he confessed, perching himself on the arm of the chair. ‘As I told you, I only remember the bare bones of the story and Essie doesn’t remember it at all. However,’ he added hastily when she showed signs of objecting, ‘I’m not prying, I just wondered if Dupont is threatening you—is he?’

  ‘He—he hasn’t so far,’ Louise admitted, ‘but—I don’t know, it’s the way he spoke, I suppose, I was so afraid that—’ She groped for the elusive words to explain why she had panicked so readily when Henri Dupont had done no more than ask to speak with her alone. ‘I was silly, I suppose,’ she added, ‘and Stephen—’

  ‘Stephen’s a fool,’ he declared bluntly, and turned to see the object of his scorn returning at last with brandy in a glass.

  ‘Now look, Darrell—’ He had evidently overheard and his face was flushed as he handed over the brandy to him without demur.

  ‘You are a fool,’ Jonathan repeated, unperturbed by the effect of his bluntness on the other man. ‘If your attitude when I came into the room was anything to go by.’ He handed the glass of brandy to Louise. ‘Drink this,’ he ordered, ‘all of it. I know it’s only Dutch courage, but every little helps.’

  ‘This is none of your damned business!’ Stephen informed him shortly. ‘You’d no right to come back in there when you knew there was family business being discussed.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Jonathan admitted blithely, ‘but I did.’ He looked down at Louise, small and silent in her chair, the brandy flowing warmly through her body and making her feel delightfully relaxed and unworried. He looked as if he found the whole situation rather intriguing and no cause for worry, and at the moment she almost agreed with him. ‘What are you going to do about Dupont?’ he asked, and Louise frowned at being asked to make a decision again. ‘Is there any reason why he can’t go back where he came from?’

  ‘Where he came from?’ she echoed. ‘Where did he come from? Oh, I know he’s staying with someone in the village at the moment, but I’m wondering if he lives in this country or—’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ Jonathan informed her. ‘We looked at his papers before he came round the other night and his passport gave an address in France, so he’s living at home and just over here to make a nuisance of himself, I’d guess.’

  ‘He hasn’t really said why he’s here,’ Louise admitted, ‘but he was being—well, very unpleasant, and I’m afraid I reacted rather stupidly.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He made no bones about agreeing to that possibility and she frowned over it.

  ‘He must have arrived on the same day as you and Essie did,’ she said, determined not to be roused to anger. ‘If he’d been here longer he’d have come up to the house before, surely.’

  ‘And it started snowing that night,’ Jonathan mused, ‘so he couldn’t get up here before he did. As soon as it stopped he made the effort, not realising how bad the climb would be, hence his dramatic entrance.’

  ‘You are right, m’sieur.’ Louise started nervously at the sound of the voice and was not altogether surprised to find that it was Jonathan Darrell’s hand that lay reassuringly on her shoulder for a moment as she looked wide-eyed to where Henri Dupont stood in the doorway.

  ‘I thought I would be,’ Jonathan said quietly. ‘You’re a member of the family?’ The dark eyes questioned his authority to speak so frankly and Louise watched with interest to see what he would do. It was all slightly unreal, she thought, and the brandy fumes added to the illusion.

  ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘And perhaps we may ask why you’re here, Monsieur Dupont?’

  The question surprised him, Louise could see that, watching the play as if it did not concern her at all. The dark eyes, so like Simon’s, narrowed shrewdly as he faced his new antagonist. ‘I wish no more than justice for my brother’s family, m’sieur, for his child. I read of this gathering of the wealthy Kincaids for a birthday party and I thought to see this—this wife of my poor brother and get what should have been his.’ It was obvious that their wealth was what he hated most about the Kincaids, and Louise could not repress a shudder.

  ‘You want justice for Robert?’ she asked, puzzled out of her silence. ‘But Robert has everything he needs.’

  Expressive hands dismissed her son airily and the shoulders shrugged despair. ‘Robert? Who is Robert? I speak of Jean, Simon’s son by his first wife and in my charge these last five years.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Louise stared at him unbelievingly.

  ‘You didn’t know about the first wife?’ Jonathan asked, and she shook her head, her thoughts spinning wildly round and round and refusing to come to order so that she could think straight.

  ‘I didn’t know about her,’ she declared, shaking her head, �
�I honestly didn’t know.’

  Henri Dupont curled a lip. ‘My brother said you were a fool,’ he told her, and Louise swallowed hard on the unpleasant truth of it.

  ‘I was obviously a bigger fool that I realised,’ she said bitterly, her chin set at a defiant angle. She raised her eyes and looked at the man who was so much like her dead husband in every way, and realised for the first time that there was much more hardness than gentleness in the dark face and only avarice and shrewdness in those darkly beautiful eyes that had once attracted her so much. There was so much she disliked about the man and yet so much that was Simon. If only she could have seen him in the same light all those years ago.

  ‘You—’ he began, and Louise lifted her chin, her eyes less daring than her manner, but determined to be firm.

  ‘I should be an even bigger fool now, Mr. Dupont,’ she declared, ‘if I listened to you.’

  It was not the answer he had expected nor the one he wanted to hear, and she saw the dark eyes narrow warningly. ‘Madame—’

  Again she interrupted him before he could say more than one word. ‘I don’t see what this boy has to do with me,’ she told him, drawing encouragement both from the heady glow of the brandy and the gleam of approval she glimpsed in Jonathan Darrell’s eyes as he watched her. ‘I’m not responsible for him even if he is Simon’s son.’

  Henri Dupont frowned. ‘There are family obligations, madame, obligations one should meet.’

  ‘But why should I?’ She wished fervently that Stephen would do something more than stand silent and rather sulky by the door as if he found the situation far too embarrassing for him to take part in.

  The Frenchman looked as if he despaired of ever making such a fool see reason. ‘But why not?’ he asked. ‘When my brother married you, he understood you to be of a wealthy family. He could have provided for his son and for his family, then he discovers that you are not wealthy, all you have is what you call an allowance from your papa. You have not the money he needs and you will not get it for him. He was cheated, madame, and so was his family.’