by Penny Jordan
‘No,’ one of the men told her with a grin. ‘It isn’t deliberate, but most of the qualified women in this field have husbands and families, which could lead to complications in this particular instance.’
She could see that, Kate acknowledged, accepting a cup of coffee from Larry and thanking him for her meal. He flushed darkly, reminding her how young he was.
Once, she had been like that, wearing her every emotion on her face.
After dinner, Kate returned to Silas’s house and went straight to her own room. She had learned from the others that he frequently worked late into the evening, but even so she had no wish for him to think she was deliberately hanging around, hoping for his company.
At nine o’clock she rang the farm to say goodnight to Cherry. It was just as well that her daughter had taken so well to her grandparents, Kate reflected as she stared out of the window, and wished she could develop more enthusiasm for the new term projects she ought to be working on.
At half-past nine she acknowledged that there was no way she was going to work.
Pulling on a warm sweater, she went outside.
Although they were past Midsummer Day, up here the nights were lighter, tonight particularly so, Kate reflected as she headed towards the park area of the grounds. A walk and some fresh air, both would surely help her sleep.
And yet as she walked, instead of being more peaceful, her thoughts became more turbulent: images of Silas when she had first known him flitting through her mind like silent, reproachful ghosts.
Reproachful? She stopped abruptly, frowning to herself, an elusive awareness she had had ever since he had first looked at her this afternoon suddenly crystallising into realisation. But why should Silas want to reproach her, and for what? Unless their affair had been the cause of the break-up of his marriage and he blamed her for that fact.
Their affair. The very words left an acid taste in her mouth. But how else was she to describe their relationship?
A four-legged shape bounded out of the shadows ahead of her, but the male voice that shouted sharply, ‘Max’ did not belong to the dog’s official handler, and Kate was half inclined to turn and flee as she recognised Silas coming towards her.
Dusk was falling quite rapidly now, and she realised she had been out longer than she had originally intended.
‘It’s all right. Max and I understand one another,’ she told Silas as the dog came up to her and he motioned it back. It sat down at her feet, tail beating on the ground and she rubbed absently behind its ears.
‘Yes. You always did have an affinity with them.’
She was surprised that he remembered such a small detail about her, and to cover her confusion said rapidly, ‘I think it’s something that goes with being a Seton. Cherry is animal-mad. She has already decided she wants to be a vet when she grows up.’
‘Cherry?’
She couldn’t see him frowning, but she could hear it in his voice.
‘My daughter,’ she told him stiffly.
‘Yes, of course. I’d heard you had a child. How old is she seven…eight?’
Kate stared at him. He had no idea at all that Cherry was his; it was so obvious that he had never even given the possibility a thought. Even if she told him Cherry’s real age, she thought cynically, it would probably not mean anything to him.
‘A little older than that,’ she said evasively, and then, determined to put the past behind her completely, she asked in a determinedly bright voice, ‘And your two boys, how old are they now?’
They had started to walk back towards the house, Max padding silently at their heels. Once they had shared many long walks, and they seemed to fall into step automatically, but now Silas stopped abruptly, and as he turned towards her the twilight illuminated his features, giving them an odd starkness.
‘My what?’ he demanded.
Surely, after all this time, he wasn’t going to keep up the pretence? What would be the point? It angered Kate that he couldn’t be open and honest with her, and she deliberately did not allow herself to reflect that she had not been totally honest with him in allowing him to think that Cherry was another man’s child.
‘You know what I’m talking about, Silas, so don’t pretend you don’t,’ she snapped angrily. ’You may have lost your wife, but…’
‘What wife? I have no wife,’ he interrupted her flatly.
‘Don’t lie to me. I may have been idiotic enough to fall for it once, but not now. I saw you with her, Silas. I heard you talking to her. I heard her saying how much the boys had missed you. I saw you kissing her…’
The silence seemed to go on for ever, the tension it bred leaving Kate shaky and sick. Just merely talking about seeing him with his wife had brought back the scene so vividly that she could actually feel the same disbelief and despair she had experienced then, the same horrified realisation that Silas had lied to her, the same knowledge that what she had overheard had changed her world for ever.
As she had done then, she placed her hands over her still flat stomach.
The thought that she might be pregnant was something that had only just begun to occur to her. Her period was a few days late, that was all, but already she was beginning to worry. After that first time they had made love, Silas had cautioned her that they must not take any further risks, and she had told him that she would make arrangements to ensure that she was fully protected. Only she hadn’t done so; the time she spent either with Silas or daydreaming about him had meant that she was falling behind with her studies, and with the careless insouciance of youth she had put the matter to the back of her mind.
Until that week. Then the thought that she might actually be carrying Silas’s child made her feel both proud and nervous. They had talked about having a family, but they both had studies to finish and, although she had assured him that she wanted to be married as quickly as they could arrange it, Silas had insisted that she must finish her studies first. She might not mind now, but later…
She had pouted and sulked a little, and then remembering his cautionary words, she had been apprehensive about telling him of her fears.
She had known she would never tell him, and she had stood shivering in the bright sunshine, her youth and happiness destroyed in the space of time it had taken her to witness Silas and the other woman embrace.
Giving herself a tiny shake, Kate dragged her thoughts back to the present.
‘Susie isn’t my wife,’ Silas told her flatly. ‘She’s my sister.
He had never talked to her about his family, other than to say that his parents were dead. He had made the announcement in a flat, hard voice that had warned her not to question him.
‘I didn’t know you had a sister,’ she told him in a low, pain-filled voice.
As he registered her confusion, he said quietly, ‘Susie’s husband and our parents were killed in a motorway pile-up. Simon had gone to collect them so that they could all spend a bank holiday weekend together. They were killed on their way there.
‘I’d just started at Lancaster at the time, and I was torn between giving up the course and finding a job somewhere close to Susie and the boys, or persuading her to bring the boys and come and live with me, but I underestimated her bravery. She insisted on staying in the home she and Simon had built together; she felt the loss of their father and grandparents was enough for the boys to cope with, without inflicting a change of house on them, no matter how painful it was for her to stay there.
‘That weekend, she’d come up to tell me that she was remarrying, an old friend of both hers and Simon’s.
‘I’d known she was coming up, but not why. I’d been selfishly concerned that she might have changed her mind and decided to take up my original offer for her to make a home for herself and the boys with me. I hadn’t met you when I’d first suggested it.’
There was just enough light left for her to see the bleakness in his face. Her heart was thudding painfully, the full realisation of what his words actually meant mercifully still
not fully dawning on her.
‘When she told me she was remarrying, the first thing I wanted to do was to tell you. I told her all about you…I’d planned for the three of us to go out for dinner to celebrate, only I couldn’t find you.’
She’d taken a bus into Cumbria, Kate remembered, and she’d spent what was left of the day walking until her body ached with fatigue. Even then she hadn’t wanted to stop, as though in some way the ceaseless motion was keeping her pain at bay.
She’d spent the night with a couple who did bed and breakfasts, and had left early the next morning, despite their protests that she hadn’t had anything to eat.
She’d spent almost a week like that: simply walking, sleeping, eating when her tormented nervous system would let her. And then she’d sent Silas a letter, telling him that she had changed her mind about marrying him and enclosing the small solitaire ring he had bought her.
No period and three consecutive days’ worth of early-morning sickness had confirmed her fears that she was pregnant and, having no other option left open to her, she had gone home to tell her parents.
‘Was it because you saw me with Susie that you broke our engagement?’ Silas asked her in a low voice.
She could hear the shocked disbelief in his voice, and just for a moment she hesitated, but her innate honesty made her tell him the truth.
‘Yes.’
‘You saw me kiss her, heard us talk about the children, and from that drew the conclusions that I was married with a family? You actually thought that, after everything we’d been to one another?’
‘I was eighteen, Silas,’ she told him wearily, turning her head so that she wouldn’t have to face the accusation in his eyes.
Hearing him put her assumptions into words made them sound so idiotic.
‘Why on earth didn’t you say something?’ he demanded roughly. ‘Why just disappear?’
Because I was pregnant…because I loved you…because I was frightened…because I felt hurt and betrayed…because I was eighteen and still very much a child.
What could she tell him?
‘You’re lying to me,’ he said roughly. ‘Seeing me with Susie was just an excuse.’
Kate shook her head.
‘No. I loved you, Silas, but you have to understand…I’d had a very narrow upbringing; the very thought of being involved with a man who I thought was committed to someone else went against everything I’d been brought up to believe in. I was confused, jealous, frightened, and so I ran away.’
And you didn’t even bother to try and find me, she thought inwardly, so whatever the cause of their break-up had been, whatever his initial shock, there must have come a time when he had decided that it was for the best. And from the vantage point of her own maturity, she herself sincerely doubted if their relationship could have lasted. Those eight years between them had been a vast gulf: she still really a child, unsure of herself, bemused and bedazzled by the thought of him loving her, not really believing it.
She had loved him, but she had not wholly believed he had loved her, that he could love her. The insecurity bred in her by her upbringing, when she had always believed herself inferior to David, second-best to her brother in her parents’ affections, had made her feel unsure with Silas, and it was that insecurity which had prompted her to leap to the conclusion that he was committed to someone else, almost as though there was an odd sort of relief in discovering that she had been right not to believe that he could love her.
‘I don’t think I believe this. God, I don’t know if I want to believe it,’ she heard Silas groan, and in the half-darkness she saw him shake his head and then reach out as though he intended to touch her.
Instinctively she stepped back, and saw the shutters come down over his eyes, his expression hardening as he, too, stepped back.
‘Well, it’s all one hell of a long time ago, and scarcely important now,’ he said curtly. ‘When did you get married?’ he added carelessly.
He had started to move off in the direction of the house, and she had automatically followed him. Now she stopped, almost missing her step.
‘I’m not married,’ she told him indistinctly, watching him swing round and stare frowningly at her. ‘I never have been married,’ she elucidated proudly, her chin tilting, her eyes defying him to comment.
There was a brief hiatus, and then he asked evenly, ‘And the man who fathered your child, are you and he still together? Or did you dump him, too?’
His words were bitterly unfair, and angry tears burned at the back of her eyes.
‘Cherry’s father isn’t part of our lives,’ she told him, adding fiercely, ‘and we don’t need him to be.’
‘You mean, you don’t need him to be,’ he retaliated. ‘Your daughter…his daughter…might have different views.’
‘If you’re trying to suggest that Cherry is in any way deprived…’
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ he told her tiredly. ‘I was just wondering what you told him when you dumped him. Or was he the one to do the walking away this time? Fatherhood and responsibility don’t suit every man. One of the reasons I got this appointment was because I was single and unencumbered. It came as quite a shock when I realised that the new research centre was going to be here, but a few discreet enquiries soon informed me that John Seton’s daughter never came home and that there was a rift between her and her family. Didn’t they approve of the way you lived, Kate? It must have been hard for a man like your father to accept that his grandchild was illegitimate.’
They were at the house now, and Silas unlocked the door, standing back to let her in first.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she asked him when he turned to walk away.
‘I’ve got some stuff in the computer I want to check.’
’But, Silas, you worked right through dinner! You look exhausted.’ She saw him flinch slightly and bit down hard on her bottom lip, cursing her lack of tact.
‘It’s too late to start playing the concerned little woman now, Kate,’ he told her harshly.
And as he walked away she heard him add beneath his breath, ‘Eleven damn years too late.’
CHAPTER SIX
KATE couldn’t go to bed; she was more wide awake now than she had been before, every nerve-end jumping, her mind a jumble of discordant facts. She paced the kitchen restlessly, and then made herself a cup of coffee.
Nursing the hot mug, she sat down, staring into space. Silas not married, not a father…And he never had been.
Oh, God, what had she done? She thought of Cherry, of her bright intelligence and her warm, loving personality, and she thought of the relationship she should have had with Silas and guilty tears stung her eyes again.
She was the one who was responsible for depriving Cherry of her father. She was the one, not Silas. And all because she had been too immature, too insecure to ask one simple question. How on earth was she going to live with the knowledge?
She was still trying to find an answer for herself hours later when she fell asleep. And Silas had still not come in.
It was pointless wishing she could turn the clock back. By the very fact that he had made no attempt to find her, Silas had shown how indifferent he had been to their broken engagement.
The pain, the anguish, the bitterness she had seen briefly in his eyes—those must spring from another source rather than her own defection. And yet, when he had looked at her as she had accused him of being married, there had been a look in his eyes that had made her want to cross the gap between them, take him in her arms and tell him that whatever his pain she would make it go away.
So much for the value of experience and maturity. At heart, she wasn’t so very different from the girl she had been at eighteen. Then, she had looked at Silas and ached to have him as her lover, to be loved by him; and now, at twenty-nine, going on thirty, she had looked at him tonight and known that if he reached out to her, if he touched her, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from begging him to take her in his arms, to
forgive her for her stupidity. To…
To what? Say they could start again? Life wasn’t like that. They had a child, and she had allowed Silas to believe that Cherry had been fathered by someone else.
What else could she have done? Baldly announce that Cherry was his? What if he had refused to believe her, accused her of lying? Or worse, what if he had still remained totally indifferent? Or what if he had demanded parental rights to Cherry? What if he had said that he wanted to know the daughter she had denied him? How would she have been able to cope with that? No, it was better that he didn’t know.
This present situation wouldn’t last. In a week’s time, they would part and go their separate ways, and probably never meet again.
She found the thought less than comforting.
* * *
In the morning there was still no sign of Silas. His bedroom door was open, his bed unslept in.
Downstairs, Kate ate a solitary breakfast and then rang the farm.
Cherry sounded slightly subdued, and Kate had to work hard at enforcing a bright note of cheerfulness into her own voice, but by the time she had hung up Cherry was her normal bright, bubbly self.
After breakfast, time hung heavily on her hands; she felt honour-bound not to cause any more problems than she already had, which meant keeping away from the main building, and eating solitary lunch with less and less enthusiasm.
The whole day went by without her seeing a soul.
Her only contact with other human beings was her telephone calls home. Max appeared several times, simply scratching at the back door, and greeting her with very obvious pleasure when she let him in.
Her interest in the new term’s curriculum palled in the afternoon. She explored every inch of the home park. The evening dragged, Silas remained absent and she went to bed early—feeling irritable and lonely. To wake up the next day and find the sky heavy with rain-clouds was the last straw.
On impulse, she pulled on wellingtons and a weatherproof coat and set off for the main building.
Just as she reachd it, Graham emerged.