by Penny Jordan
Her mother had assured her that she would make sure that Cherry didn’t worry. Her daughter was sensible enough to be told the bare outline of why the quarantine was necessary. Cherry was an intelligent child, and Kate had never made the mistake of underestimating her intelligence nor of talking down to her.
The door opened and Sam came back, empty-handed. ’We’ve used the last of the sterile stuff. I remembered when I went to get it that the new supply is in the boxes you collected this morning, and they aren’t unpacked yet.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve got some at my place. Kate will have to stay there, anyway. It’s the only place where there’s any spare room.’
‘I am not staying with you,’ Kate told him furiously, the moment his assistant disappeared.
‘You don’t have any alternative,’ he told her grimly. ‘And even if you had, are you honestly telling me that you’d prefer to share a dormitory and a bathroom with a dozen or so men rather than having your own private room?’
Of course she wouldn’t, and if she only dared let herself acknowledge it, her traitorous heart would like nothing better than to be close to Silas again. But such traitorous impulses couldn’t be allowed to have life. Silas was a married man, and she was a woman who had already borne him one illegitimate child.
Kate shivered. Put like that, the silent words fell harshly against her conscience, but those were the facts, harsh and unpleasant though they might be.
‘Exactly how long will this quarantine have to last?’ she asked him coldly, pushing aside her personal vulnerabilities and presenting him with an unreadable face.
What had happened to the joyous girl he had known? he wondered, mourning her. That girl had been a creature of quicksilver emotions, each one of them vividly illuminating her face. He remembered how she had looked at him that first time he had made love to her, and a terrible sense of loss and despair he thought he had long put behind him surfaced through the barriers he had imposed against it, threatening his self-control.
He turned away so that she wouldn’t see it, and Kate, mistaking the gesture for one of bored irritation with her questions, compressed her mouth. She had every right to ask these questions and to get answers to them.
‘How long?’ she pressed.
‘I’ve already told you—a week.’
She was aghast.
‘I can’t stay here for a week!’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to,’ Silas told her quietly.
‘And if I don’t choose to?’
This was the Kate he remembered, her eyes flashing warning signs, her chin tilted in feminine rejection of his right to impose his will on her.
‘Then I have the power to make you,’ he told her equably. ‘This is a government establishment, and I’m in charge. For God’s sake,’ he demanded, suddenly losing, his temper, ‘do you think I want you here?’
She had known he wouldn’t, of course, but hearing the words thrown at her in that angry, bitter voice hurt. She turned away, fighting to control the surge of hot, burning tears that stung her eyes, her teeth digging sharply into her bottom lip, leaving tiny indentations when she had to release it.
Silas stared at them, mesmerised by the neatly incised marks and the memories they aroused.
Once, in the early days before they had been lovers, he had inflicted similar wounds to those, driven almost out of his mind with desire for her, and yet at the same time not wanting to push her into full sexuality before she was ready. She had cried out beneath his mouth, pushing against his chest, and he had soothed the pain he had inflicted with the moist balm of his tongue until both of them forgot that his caress was supposed to be merely comforting and she had gone wild in his arms, covering his face with frantic little kisses and his mouth with hungry little bites.
He pulled himself back to the present, angry at his own vulnerability.
‘I’ll show you where you’ll be staying,’ he told her curtly. ‘And we’ll get that scratch attended to at the same time.’
Still not ready to give up, Kate retaliated acidly, ‘I take it that during this incarceration, I’ll at least have access to a telephone.’
‘There is one at the house. I’ll get someone to put an extension into your room for you. It’s this way.’
Without a word Kate turned on her heel and followed him through the main hall and down a maze of passages which ended in a grim, old-fashioned kitchen, dimly lit by a too-small window.
Remembering the gracious proportions of the rest of the house, Kate marvelled at the conditions in which the ordinary person had once been expected to work.
The kitchen was obviously in use. A huge freezer had been installed and a modern cooker, plus two microwave ovens.
A young man was busily chopping vegetables as they walked through. He smiled at Silas and then stared at Kate, plainly astonished to see her.
‘Mrs…’ Silas began.
‘Miss Seton,’ Kate interrupted him curtly, as he turned to introduce her. She saw him frown and check, but then, as though remembering their audience, he continued, ‘Miss Seton trespassed into the grounds in pursuit of a goat, and so I’m afraid she’s going to have to be incarcerated here for the rest of the quarantine period…Larry is our chef,’ he explained unnecessarily to Kate.
‘It’s beef stew tonight,’ Larry told her with a grin. ‘There’s a smashing herb garden outside and…’
‘And I hope you haven’t been using any of them,’ Silas cautioned him, turning to explain to Kate, ‘We’re conducting several agricultural experiments here, and one of them involves testing new fertilisers, hence the ban on eating anything in the grounds.’ He opened the back door and stood by it, waiting for her.
Kate dutifully followed him out across the cobbled yard and past the now empty stables.
‘The rest of the staff are living up there,’ Silas told her, indicating the area above the stables with a brief jerk of his head.
‘Why not in the house?’ Kate questioned him.
‘Too much damp in the upper rooms, and, like all other government schemes in their infancy, we’re operating on something of a shoestring.’
Beyond the stables was a paddock filled with sheep of a similar breed to her father’s, only these had fleeces that were much thicker, surely?
‘New experimental breed,’ Silas told her noticing her interest. ‘We’re going to overwinter them on the fells to test their endurance ability. They carry twenty per cent more wool than the best rivals; they’re more resistant to disease.’
As she walked past them, the man who had first discovered her in the grounds came running up. ‘We’ve found the goat and isolated it,’ he told Silas.
‘Good. I’ll show Miss Seton to her room, and then we’d better decide what we’re going to do about that gap in the fence. I’d hoped our midnight visitors would have returned by now, but we can’t take the risk of waiting for them any longer. We don’t want anyone or anything else finding their way through that gap.’
Curious in spite of herself, Kate asked impulsively, ‘But who would want to break in and why? If you are working on animal vaccines, it’s so very worth while.’
‘Powerful drugs of any kind have to be tested,’ Silas told her quietly. ‘It’s an unfortunate fact of life that sometimes this means that they have to be tested on animals—not always with happy results. Here we keep such testings to the absolute minimum.
‘It’s an extremely vexed question, but I sometimes think our protesters might be better directing their endeavours against the many thousands of people who mistreat their household pets, or far worse—their children.’
He started walking again, following a rutted and overgrown lane that ran towards what she vaguely remembered as being the rear exit to the estate.
Less than half a mile down it was a solid, square, stone house surrounded by its own patch of garden.
‘It’s a dower house of some kind,’ Silas told her, ‘built probably in the mid-eighteen-hundreds.’
; Kate hesitated outside it, absently noting how the garden had grown wild and how bleak the uncurtained windows appeared, and yet it was a pleasant enough place.
‘Won’t your wife mind you inflicting me on her like this?’ she asked him uncomfortably. Panic hit her. It had been one thing for him to tell her that she would have to share his home. It was another to come face to face with the realisation that she would be living side by side with Silas’s wife.
He froze and then turned to stare at her, and said harshly, ‘What wife? I’m not married.’ And the shadow of some remembered pain quite clearly clouded his features, rendering him achingly vulnerable, if only briefly.
She had never seen vulnerability in him before, but was it just as she had never seen love and anguish in her father—because she had been too young to want to see? She had practically hero-worshipped Silas, her love still tinged with the fantasy of a teenager’s romantic dreams. She had put him on a pedestal and had wanted him to stay there, she recognised with adult perception. Now he had well and truly fallen from that pedestal.
What had happened to that dark-haired, laughing woman? Had she discovered his infidelity and divorced him?
‘I’m sorry.’
She wasn’t quite sure why she made the trite apology, but she didn’t expect his face to darken the way it did, nor his body to tense as though in mortal pain as he said savagely, ‘So am I.’
And then he was walking away from her, his lithe body suddenly oddly uncoordinated.
Whatever had happened, he must still love that woman; nothing else could account for that haunting look of pain in his eyes. So why the affair with her? She shivered, recognising her own pain, a pain that came with the knowledge that she herself had meant so little to him, and certainly nothing to compare with the woman who caused his eyes to cloud with pain and his body to tense.
‘Are you coming inside or are you going to stay out there all day?’ he demanded harshly.
He had unlocked the door and was waiting for her to precede him inside.
The house was as dreary inside as it had appeared from out; the large, square sitting-room could have been pleasant, but the leather chesterfield and the furniture were covered by a thin film of dust, the room bare of colour and life. It was drab and dull, in fact. Was that because Silas didn’t have time to make it any different, or because it reflected the way he felt about himself and his life?
What had happened to his sons? she wondered, resenting the pain she was causing herself, but knowing as a parent the agony he must feel at being separated from them. Already, even knowing that Cherry would be happy and safe with her parents, she ached to be with her daughter.
She glanced at the phone and, as though he read her mind, Silas said harshly, ‘Worrying about what he’s going to say, are you?’
He? She refused to respond to the taunt. Let him think what he liked.
‘The kitchen’s through here,’ he told her curtly, pushing open another door.
It was as drab as the sitting-room; as was the dining-room and the room he was using as a study.
Upstairs the house had four bedrooms, but only one bathroom. The bath must be the original Victorian one, Kate suspected; the water, Silas told her, was heated by an immersion, and since he virtually only slept in the house and it was summer, he made do with an electric heater whenever it was cold.
Looking round the drab bareness, Kate wondered what on earth she was going to do with herself, quarantined here for a week.
How often had she groaned for time to herself, for privacy and space, but now that she had them, she couldn’t think how on earth she was going to fill the empty time.
She felt more alone and deserted than she had ever felt in her life.
‘I’ll need clothes…toothbrush…my work,’ she told him stiffly, refusing to look at him in case he guessed her feelings.
’Someone will have to leave them outside the main gates. No one’s allowed in. You must see why,’ he added in a more gentle tone, and she had a sudden vision of Cherry, and knew beyond doubt that for the sake of her daughter’s safety she would spend three times as long here if it was necessary. ‘I’ll get that phone extension fixed up for you, but in the meantime, feel free to use the one in my study. First, though, I want to attend to that scratch.’
There was a very utilitarian bathroom cabinet in the room, and he opened it, extracting cotton wool, lint, a bottle of clear fluid and an unmarked tube.
It wasn’t until he washed his hands and then turned briskly towards her that Kate realised he intended to clean the scratch himself.
‘I can do it,’ she told him hastily.
Grim-faced, he watched her back off from him.
So even the thought of him touching her repulsed her now, did it? A muscle flickered in his jaw and, seeing it, Kate hesitated. She was behaving like a child, terrified of his touch in case it awakened sensations she wouldn’t be able to control; but she wasn’t a girl of eighteen any more, she was a woman. Moreover, she was a woman whose sexual urges had remained dormant for over ten years. It was hardly likely that the clinical touch of a man cleaning her skin was likely to reduce her to a trembling physical need, was it?
‘I’ll get Graham, our resident doctor, to come and check you over later, but it’s unlikely that you will have contracted anything. However, quarantine rules must be obeyed.’
He was trying to reassure her, Kate recognised, and she wondered at his kindness, wishing bitterly he had not evinced it. It would make it so much easier for her if she could despise him as a man as well as a lover.
But she didn’t despise him, she acknowledged, as he swabbed her arm with the cleaning fluid and she fought not to flinch, not because of its mild sting but because of the sensation of his fingers against her skin.
She looked away as he cleaned the scratch thoroughly, every muscle locked in desperate despair.
She felt him smear on the ointment and then wrap her arm in lint.
‘I’ll look at it again tonight, but I don’t think there’s going to be any problem. Does it hurt at all?’
‘Not as much as the bruises I got when I fell,’ Kate told him drily.
She saw him frown, and for one appalling moment she actually thought he was going to demand to see them, but to her relief he simply recapped the ointment and carried it back to the cupboard.
‘I’ve got to get back to my office, but please make yourself at home. There’s a freezer in the kitchen if you want something to eat.
‘We only get the luxury of fresh supplies once a month, but tonight you’re in luck. I’ll bring them back with me later.’
‘Don’t you eat with the others?’ Kate asked him, curious suddenly about his life. Surely it must be a very lonely existence. Had the loss of his wife turned him into a man who preferred solitude to the company of others?
‘Not normally. I’m head of station,’ he reminded her. ‘It can be inhibiting for them to have me around during their leisure time, especially if they want to let off steam.’
‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’
She had asked the question impulsively, bitterly regretting having done so when he gave her a level look and said quietly, ‘I got used to that a long time ago.’
When his wife had left?
Suddenly she needed desperately to hear Cherry’s bright voice, but she waited until he had gone before returning to his study and picking up the receiver.
She felt like an intruder here in the room where he worked, and yet there was no reason why she should. There were no personal touches about the room, no photographs on the desk, nothing at all to give someone who didn’t know him any clues about the kind of man he was.
Her mother answered the phone, and quickly brought Cherry to speak to Kate. Wryly, Kate realised that her daughter had had no time to miss her; she was full of her morning’s activities, and how she had helped her grandfather with his dogs. In addition to the supposedly untrainable Laddie, it seemed there was also a litter of puppies just o
ver six months old and ready to start learning their trade.
’Gramps has given me one of my own to train, and next year, if he does really well, I’m going to enter for the beginners’ class.’
Kate was astonished. The pups weren’t pets, but extremely valuable working-dogs, and it was unheard of for her father to allow anyone other than himself to have anything to do with their training. As Kate recalled it, he even supervised their diets.
‘He says I’ve got a natural skill with them,’ Cherry boasted, ‘but then, so I should have. I’m a Seton.’
Kate’s laughter caught in her throat. Hearing the proud note in Cherry’s voice, she recognised that, for all she had so much of her father in her, Cherry had something of her grandfather as well. She wondered ruefully if her father had realised yet that Cherry had also inherited some of his stubbornness.
She wasn’t blind. She knew quite well that the pup was her father’s way of ensuring that they would keep returning to the Dales, and yet she couldn’t find it in her heart to blame him for half bribing her daughter. Part of her acknowledged her understanding of why he should do so, and the scar caused by his original anger and rejection faded just a little more. Her father loved Cherry and Cherry loved him, and she herself was not going to spoil the relationship growing between them out of her own bitter memories. At least Cherry would be getting to know her grandparents while she was shut up here, Kate thought, closing her mind to the irony of the fact that she would be unwillingly close to Cherry’s father.
She explained about the quarantine, trying to soothe the quick alarm in her daughter’s voice.
‘It’s all right darling…now, don’t worry. Grandma and Grandpa will look after you, and when I come home you’ll be able to show me how well you’ve trained your pup. I’ll be able to speak to you every day, and when Gramps brings my clothes he can bring your photograph with him.’
She chatted for a few more minutes until she heard the happy, confident note re-enter Cherry’s voice. Before asking to speak to her father, she said quietly, ‘I love you very much.’