She was sitting on the bed staring numbly at the drawn curtains when he tapped on the door.
‘Come in,’ she called automatically.
He carried a glass of some amber liquid and a steaming cup. ‘I thought you might like a hot drink,’ he said. ‘It’s tea with sugar. I guess you’re suffering from shock.’
She took the cup. ‘Thank you. I’m not the only one, am I?’
His mouth made an effort at some kind of smile. ‘Right.’ He lifted the glass and tossed off the contents. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Physically.’
‘Yes. It’s…good of you to be concerned. I appreciate that.’ Her voice was stilted as she made the formal little speech.
He stood before the closed curtains, staring at her as she sipped the hot, sweet tea.
‘You’re very certain,’ he said, ‘about your facts. One fact, anyway.’
‘Yes.’ She looked down into the cup, and felt herself trembling.
‘Your memory’s returned.’ It was more of a statement than a question.
‘Yes.’ It had crashed in on her all at once, like a gigantic tidal wave, overwhelming her with its force. She remembered everything, right up to the rending, hairraising sounds of tearing metal as the train was pushed off the track and half into the river, sounds mingling with the screams of the terrified passengers, the injured, the dying. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them Rolfe was still looking at her, his eyes reflecting much of her own dazed incredulity at what had happened to them. Between them.
He shook his head as if to clear it, and said, his voice so flat and emotionless she knew he was keeping it that way with a superhuman effort of will, ‘Then…who the hell are you?’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘I’M…’ Her voice was husky, barely audible. ‘I’m Francesca Ryan—Capri’s twin.’
‘Twin.’ Tonelessly he repeated the word as if it meant nothing, could mean nothing. ‘This is…incredible.’
‘I know.’ She still felt incredulous herself. And disoriented—and afraid. ‘Capri found me, you see. She’d traced our birth mother and discovered that she’d had twins, but we’d been adopted by different families.’
He frowned sceptically. ‘Surely that wouldn’t have been allowed, even twenty years ago.’
‘It should never have happened. Capri was told when she went to the authorities and asked about me that it couldn’t have happened. There’s going to be an inquiry into the departmental records.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Capri told me.’
He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Capri never knew she had a twin.’
‘Neither did I. Our mother has a husband, children…other children. When Capri found her, she asked for time to break the news to them and let them get used to the idea before she introduced their new half-sister. Capri promised, and then she went looking for me. She was very excited to find me…I was too. It was the most peculiar feeling, seeing myself in a stranger’s face. And yet we had so many things in common—likes and dislikes, our taste in music, even gestures, and our voices…’
‘I’ve sometimes thought your accent…Capri’s accent—was slightly different since the accident. I put it down to your—her—having spent time back in Australia so recently.’ He was looking at her as though he couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘You know more about New Zealand than you’d have got from geography lessons.’
He was still faintly suspicious. She couldn’t blame him, given the fantastic turn of events. ‘My father—my adoptive father, I mean—is a computer engineer specialising in dairy machinery. We spent a year in New Zealand when I was still at school while he helped set up a new factory complex in the north. Then we went back to Australia, and now my parents live just outside Gosford with my younger brother. They adopted me because they had three boys and there hadn’t been a girl in my father’s family for three generations—and my mother desperately wanted a girl.’
‘You’ll want to get in touch.’
‘Yes.’ But not now. There were things she had to say to this man first. ‘Capri showed me photographs of you, and her adoptive family, and of this house. She’d brought them along to show her—our—mother. To show any family she found, I suppose. We were looking through them on the train when…when it crashed. That’s why your face was familiar when I came to in the hospital, and how I knew your name. And why I recognised the house when you brought me here. Those photographs would have been the last thing I saw. She’d taken them out of her bag, and it was open on the seat between us.’
He nodded. His lips compressed. ‘How was she?’
Francesca swallowed. She felt as though her heart was being torn apart inside her. ‘She was thrilled and happy that she’d found me—and found our mother. We had a lot of fun swapping childhood stories, giggling like a couple of schoolgirls, trying to catch up on the years we’d been apart, reliving a childhood that we’d never had together. She…spoke of you.’ Looking down, Francesca twisted the empty cup in her hands, trying to hide the pain that threatened to overwhelm her. ‘She said you were handsome and successful and willing to give her anything.’ And sexy, she’d said, laughing and looking saucy and coy. There’d been no mention of Gabriel. According to Capri everything m her particular garden of Eden was rosy. She hadn’t wanted to admit to her new-found family that she might have failed at anything, or been less than honourable, that her life was not utterly perfect.
‘I…’ Rolfe cleared his throat. ‘I tried. To give her everything she wanted. But she was…’
‘Needy. I know. Even in the short time I knew her, I felt that in her. You would have been good for her, you’d have…cared for her. I’m sure she loved you.’ As much as she could love anyone, without ever quite trusting them to love her back…‘I think she would have come home to you.’
But first, perhaps, she’d have wanted to punish him, hurt him, let him worry about her. Because she’d been wilful and difficult and not quite mature. And afraid that no one truly loved her.
‘Thank you,’ Rolfe said formally.
Her throat ached. ‘I liked her. She was the other half of myself, that I hadn’t known existed. But I think that all her life she’d felt incomplete in a way I never had.’
‘Yes.’ The word came out on a breath, a sigh.
‘She said she’d always known deep down that something was missing. She’d never had the feeling of belonging. Finding me was like…suddenly being whole. It meant more to her than it did to me, because I’d been lucky. I love my family dearly, and I know they couldn’t have loved me more if I’d been their natural daughter. And I know Treena tried her best, but Capri hadn’t ever really got over her parents’ divorce. I don’t think she felt safe after that—she spent her life looking for a security that no one could have given her.’ Raising her eyes, she said steadily, ‘It wasn’t your fault, Rolfe. It was her own sense of incompleteness and insecurity that drove her…’
‘Into Gabriel Blake’s arms,’ he said grimly.
For a long moment Francesca was silent. ‘You knew they were lovers.’
‘I wasn’t sure how far it had gone. Whether she was merely flirting with the idea of infidelity, or trying to capture my attention or…if she was genuinely in love with him. But yes, of course I knew she was seeing him. When she disappeared I thought maybe she’d gone to him, that Thea was covering for her when she said Capri was headed for Australia. Then Gabriel came looking for her.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘I suppose in his way he loved Capri.’
‘He wouldn’t have held her either, Rolfe. She didn’t even know what she was searching for, but it wasn’t a man.’
Rolfe nodded. He looked away, then steadily back at her, his eyes sombre. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’
Tears filled her eyes and scalded her cheeks. She had to gulp them back, trying to steady her voice. ‘We were going to see my family. My adoptive family, I mean. We planned to surprise them—like children. That’s how Capri had got me to
meet her in Sydney…with a mysterious phone call, asking me to meet someone I’d be pleased to see, in a hotel bar. I wondered if it was some kind of new marketing ploy at first Or even something sinister. But in a public place, and she was so insistent…I couldn’t help being intrigued. And when I walked in and saw her…’
‘You must have been stunned.’
Francesca managed to lift a hand to wipe away the tears. ‘Putting it mildly.’ Straightening her shoulders, she said quietly, ‘I don’t think she ever knew what happened. There was a horrendous noise and everything rocked over to one side. I blacked out for—I don’t know, maybe a couple of minutes—and when I came to she was lying across me, bleeding…As soon as I moved her I knew…there was no hope for her. She died in my arms.’
Rolfe turned abruptly, presenting his back to her, his head bowed onto one raised hand.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘About everything.’ There was a huge ache in her chest, partly for Capri, her sister, and partly for Rolfe in his bereavement. And also for herself, for the shining future that she’d glimpsed so briefly, and that now was cruelly snatched away.
She wanted to go to him, hurl herself into his arms and cry out that she loved him, needed him, wanted to stay with him for ever, to comfort him in his loss.
Because she had come to love him over the past weeks, and all the while he hadn’t known who she really was. When he’d shown her such patience and tenderness and compassion, and desire and love and even anger, he’d been caught in an illusion, believing she was his beloved, his wife, the woman he had planned to spend his life loving.
It wasn’t her place to offer the comfort of her arms, or take comfort from his. She was a stranger to him, an unwitting impostor who didn’t belong in his bed, in his home, in his life…
‘How did you get out?’ Rolfe asked, his voice muffled.
‘I’m not sure. There were people climbing all over us, seats had been wrenched from the floor, luggage and other things were still falling, the carnage hadn’t stopped moving and there was water coming in…’ She stopped, shivering with remembered horror. ‘Someone grabbed me, tried to help me out of a broken window, and then I think the carriage slid further and maybe something cracked me on the head. Because that’s all I remember until I woke up in the hospital…and you were there.’
He was standing now as she had first seen him, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, with his back to her. He said hoarsely, ‘You were found on the riverbank with other passengers who had got out somehow. When Capri’s bag was recovered among the stuff that had floated downriver, the hospital authorities matched the passport and the other photos with you, and having done that, no one would think to look further.’
Their birth mother wouldn’t have known they were on the train. Even if she’d seen the list of those killed, Capri’s name wouldn’t have been there.
Not Capri’s name. But Francesca’s…
‘I believe,’ she said slowly, ‘my adoptive parents may have identified her as me.’
Rolfe was silent for a moment. ‘God, yes,’ he said, and swung round to look at her, his face grey. ‘You’d better get hold of them.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘FRAN! Phone!’
Her younger brother’s shout brought Francesca hurrying inside, stripping off the gardening gloves she wore, and leaving her shoes on the porch. ‘Who is it?’
Shayne shrugged angular shoulders. ‘How would I know? One of your boyfriends, I guess.’ He handed over the receiver.
Fran gave him a reproving look. Boyfriends were a thing of the past, ever since she’d returned home, shattered and pale, to a tumultuous, tearful welcome from a family who had thought her gone for ever. And she’d stayed, instead of returning to her flat in Sydney, because there were unseen wounds that still had not healed. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s Rolfe.’ His voice was clipped and sounded almost cold. ‘I wondered if I could…see you. I’m in Gosford.’
‘Rolfe!’ Her hand was suddenly clammy on the receiver. She hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since the day nine months ago when she’d stood with her family and Capri’s beside the gravestone that now bore her sister’s name in the local cemetery, where Rolfe and Treena and the twins’ natural mother had agreed that her troubled soul should remain at rest. Now and then Fran placed a bouquet of flowers there, and cried a little for the sister she had never really known. Had Rolfe been there again today?
‘Will you come?’ he said abruptly.
And she replied, ‘Of course.’ She could no more refuse him than she could have refused to breathe.
He took her to a bar, and ordered dry white wine, then hesitated. ‘Is that right?’
Capri had liked dry white; he’d never asked before. Fran nodded. She and her sister had been amazed at the convergence of their tastes after a lifetime apart. She’d since done some reading about twins and realised the phenomenon wasn’t uncommon.
She was tongue-tied, and she thought Rolfe felt awkward too. He’d ordered a beer for himself, and didn’t speak until it was nearly finished. ‘How are you?’ he said.
‘You already asked. I told you—’
‘You said you were fine. Are you, really?’
‘Yes.’ But she looked down, avoiding his eyes, because there was a pain around her heart that wouldn’t go away, despite her family’s astonished, grateful love and care, despite her return to the work she loved as an illustrator for nature magazines. On the surface her life appeared to have returned to normal following the traumatic events after the train crash. But the experience had profoundly altered her; she knew she wasn’t the same and never would be.
There would never again be a day when she didn’t recall that for a few short months Rolfe had thought he loved her—never a day when she didn’t remember his smile, or the touch of his hand, or the passion of his kisses, when she didn’t piercingly feel the loss of a happiness that had not been rightfully hers.
The books she’d read didn’t say much about twins loving the same man.
Rolfe was drawing circles on the table with his glass. ‘I’m glad…’ he said, his voice low and hoarse, ‘…that you’ve recovered.’
She quelled a bitter smile at that. ‘Did you. .?’ She hesitated. ‘Have you been to the cemetery?’
‘Yesterday.’ He cleared his throat. ‘To say a final goodbye to the past. I…I don’t suppose you want her rings? As her sister…’
‘No. No, but thank you for thinking of it.’ Capri’s wedding and engagement rings had been routinely removed for safekeeping by the police before Francesca’s family had mistakenly identified her as their own daughter. Offered the jewellery, Fran’s parents had assumed some mistake, and the rings had stayed with the police until Rolfe claimed them.
Francesca picked up her glass and put it down again without drinking. ‘Perhaps Treena…or Venetia…?’ she suggested.
He nodded. ‘I’ll ask. If there’s anything you’d like as a keepsake…I think she’d want you to have something.’
‘Thank you. I’d like that.’
A strained silence fell. Fran broke it finally. ‘Are you…getting over it?’
‘I am over it, if you mean Capri’s death. At least as much as one does get over the death of someone you’ve been close to. It’s taken months to come to terms with what really happened. For a while I felt numbed, in an emotional vacuum. Then everything became totally confused and I was riding an emotional see-saw. Now—it’s all over. I’ve mourned her…and our marriage. I needed to do that before…well, before I could move on.’
‘I’m glad you feel you can move on. She wouldn’t have wanted anything else for you.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ He stared at his drink, then quickly lifted it and gulped some down. ‘What about you? Have you been able to pick up the threads of your life, Francesca? Are you…over it?’
Fran didn’t quite understand the look he gave her. She shrugged. Could she tell him she was in limbo, that she mis
sed him with a deep, abiding ache that never went away, that the months she’d spent with him had become a part of her life that would be with her until death—that had altered her for ever? That every man she met would be measured against him, and she couldn’t make herself believe there would ever be a man to take his place in her heart, her life?
She wouldn’t burden him with that. She said, ‘We both needed time to adjust.’
‘Yes. It’s been incredibly difficult sorting out my feelings for…for Capri, and for you.’
He’d thought they were one and the same. ‘I know.’ It wasn’t something that could be done overnight. Or even in a matter of weeks. Discovering his wife was dead would have been traumatic enough for any man. Rolfe had also had to cope with a complex nightmare of mistaken identity and false assumptions—and guilt, she guessed. Guilt that he’d taken the wrong woman into his home and cared for her, wooed her, made love to her, while his real wife, his true love, was lying in a grave marked with someone else’s name.
She drank some more wine and replaced her halfempty glass on the table. ‘It must have been hard for you, knowing she’s…she was dead all along, and you were…you thought…’
‘I thought that I was falling in love with her all over again. But I wasn’t. I was falling in love with you.’
Francesca’s heart stopped. She felt it. Then it took up its beat, faster. She couldn’t move, could scarcely breathe.
‘I didn’t realise of course, at the time.’ He was silent for a while, then drew an audible breath. ‘Before she went away, when I knew Capri was seeing Gabriel Blake…’ his shoulders hunched ‘…I didn’t know if she was sleeping with him, and it didn’t seem to matter all that much, although I knew it should. I hadn’t been able to give her whatever it was she wanted from me. Maybe he could. Or maybe she was trying to punish me for not caring enough, or hoping I’d find out about the affair and make an effort to win her back, give her the attention she craved so badly.’ He moved the glass again, not looking up. ‘I should have been jealous, but I just felt saddened that we seemed to have lost whatever it was that brought us together—that we’d thought we’d have for ever. I knew our marriage was dying before she left. And then, from the time I brought you home—thinking you were her—everything changed. Life was new and exciting. Love was possible after all. I realised—I thought—that I did love my wife, and I wanted desperately to repair my marriage. I was overhelmingly grateful for the second chance.’
Wife to a Stranger Page 15