House of Storms

by Violet Winspear

  'I think, Miss Hartway, that you have a deal.'

  But Debra felt trapped in her own silence. . . she had flung down the gauntlet and Jack had picked it up, but now she felt afraid of the challenge.

  'I'm holding you to it.' Jack eyed her with a frown. 'You've pleaded your case in Dean's defence and made me feel guilty, and that's what you wanted when you came looking for me. I'm going home and you are going with me—that was the bargain.'

  'Yes,' she admitted, and saw in the adamant set of his jaw his likeness to Rodare. It was vagrant that likeness; it came and went and it added to her awareness that she had talked herself into a situation fraught with problems.

  'There's no need to worry any more about my mother.' Jack picked up the bill and studied it. 'I shall see to it that she doesn't bother you—did you enjoy your lunch?'

  'It was very nice, thank you.'

  A glimmer of amusement came into his eyes, which dwelt on her as if he didn't quite know what to make of a secretary who made bargains with him.

  He beckoned the waiter and as he took his wallet from his pocket he said casually: 'This storm isn't going to let up for a while and we'd have a wet journey home if we went today. I suggest that you stay overnight in Penarth and we'll arrange to have Mickey Lee pick us up when he comes across for the family mail and the morning newspapers. You could probably book in here at The Cap And Bells for the night.'

  'All right/ she said, feeling relieved by his suggestion. She was committed to going back with him to Abbeywitch and a few more hours in Penarth would be welcome. She would have time in which to adjust to this turnabout in her plans; time in which to build up the nerve to face Rodare on her return. Dare she ask Jack to ensure that his brother didn't bother her?

  Oh lord! Her legs felt trembly as she walked with Jack out of the dining-room. What would be his reaction when he found out the real reason for her flight from the island? Would he understand and believe that Rodare's presence in her bedroom had been entirely innocent?

  Could he possibly understand when a suspicion of Rodare ate like a worm at the core of him?

  Debra went with him to the reception desk and stood there in a mood of misgivings as he arranged for her to stay overnight at The Cap And Bells at his expense. She tried to protest about payment for the room being added to his bill, but he overruled her. She was staying as his guest and he further informed the recep-nonist that her suitcase was upstairs in his room for the present. They would transfer it to her room later on.

  'Let's sit in the lounge.' He led her into a room whose mullioned windows looked out over the drenched beer-garden. They sat in winged chairs at either side of the fire, down whose wide chimney large drops of rain fell spitting among the log flames. Jack lit himself a thin cigar and after taking a few thoughtful draws on it he asked Debra to tell him all about Dean.

  She saw that now he had made his decision he looked more relaxed. Hers had been quite a victory, she realised. Dean mattered more than any of them for he couldn't fight his own battles, and a glow of pleasure encircled her heart as she sat answering questions about Pauline's baby.

  Yes, he was growing by leaps and bounds and he was a bright and friendly child. Yes, he was still fond of splashing about in his bath and seemed to have an inborn love of water. Yes, he had a number of his milk teeth and already he was starting to pull himself to his feet in his efforts to toddle.

  Jack reflectively smiled to himself. 'He's everything I'd want in a son, do you know that, Debra?'

  'Don't you think,' Debra said quietly, 'that Pauline may have lied to you? She wanted to leave the island, didn't she, and she knew you'd fight tooth and nail to keep Dean at Abbeywitch? Oh, I know you said she never told lies, but people will go to extremes when they want something badly enough and she had lived among the Salvadors long enough to find out all about their pride. She knew how you would react if she told you that Dean belonged to her lover.'

  Jack stared across at Debra; the room was dim from the pelting rain and from the shadowed panelling of the walls upon which old faded prints were hung. In the large winged chair Debra looked the mere girl that she was, untried in the ways of love but reaching into her heart for an answer to the question that haunted him.

  'You believe Dean to be a Salvador, don't you?'

  'Yes,' she replied.

  'You must also realise how that could have come about?'

  Debra looked away from him into the fire, and it was then that she decided to tell Jack the real reason why she had left her job on Lovelis Island, and so she plunged into it, telling him all about the party and the after events which had led to his mother coming to her room and finding Rodare with her.

  'He thought we should get married. He was terribly concerned about my reputation and what people would say about me, and of course he didn't like the tag that people might hang on him. He said that Spanish rules of behaviour applied to Abbeywitch and he felt he owed it to me to tell your mother that he intended to marry me.'

  Debra paused, remembering some of the scornful things Lenora Salvador had flung at her, implying that she be paid off for any services she might have rendered Rodare.

  'Your brother was being gallant, Mr Salvador, but I couldn't let him go through with it—there being no need because we hadn't done anything wrong. I packed my suitcase as soon as it was daylight and I asked Mickey Lee to bring me to the mainland. He thought I needed to collect a pay certificate from you and that's why he brought me to The Cap And Bells.'

  'Rodare was prepared to marry you?' Jack leant forward in order to search her eyes. 'On the other hand, you weren't prepared to marry him, eh?'

  'I—I wouldn't marry anyone for those reasons. I knew he was just being polite and honourable—'

  'Honourable?' Jack demanded.

  'Yes. He could easily have walked out of my room and left me looking demoralised. Instead he stayed and defended me in the only way he could think of, and obviously he thinks in Spanish rather than English.'

  Jack sat there mulling over her words and in a while he shook his head rather like a man emerging from deep water. 'You say it all in those last few words, don't you, Debra? When it comes to contact between men and women Rodare sees that iron grille and doesn't trespass, and I should have seen it where he's concerned!'

  He surged to his feet and paced back and forth across the creaking floorboards covered by footworn carpet in which the woven roses had long since faded. The lightning had lost its strength and the thunder had faded into the distance, and within Debra there was a transient kind of peace and she leant back in the wings of her armchair and watched Jack Salvador throw off the burden he had carried ever since Pauline had drowned in the waters surrounding Lovelis Island.

  She had made it possible for him to go home and already Debra had an image of him walking into the nursery and taking back into his arms the little boy he had never stopped loving.

  'I want to go now!' He made for the door. 'Wait here—I'm going to look for Mickey Lee.'

  The lounge door closed behind him and in the silence Debra felt the beating of her heart . . . she needed time, even if only a night, in which to find some courage for when she walked back into Rodare's house. The things she had said to Jack Salvador about his brother were the idealistic things she would like to believe ... if only she could believe them!

  There was more to why he had leapt in with his proposal of marriage, and Debra drew her lip between her teeth as a person does when pain strikes a sensitive place in the body. She didn't doubt that Rodare Salvador did think like a Spaniard in many ways, especially in relation to passion and pain.

  For decades the Inquisition had flourished in Spain and it was probably bred in the bones of a Spaniard to seek absolution for the commitment of a sin.

  Debra rested her cheek against the wing of her chair and gazed into the hot heart of the fire where the flames had burnt their way through the logs, and she remembered her sense of shock when Lenora Salvador had reminded Rodare that he was committed t
o make his home at Abbeywitch as a married man.

  Quite a punishment, Debra thought, for a man who related to Spain as if it were his own skin. What a way to absolution to tie himself down to a wife and a home he didn't love.

  Abruptly the lounge door opened and her nerves quivered. 'I told Mickey to wait about,' Jack said as he entered the room, 'but it seems he won a couple of pounds playing darts and happy as a sandboy he went off home without a care in the world. Anyway, he'll be back in the morning and we'll leave then.'

  Debra looked at him dumbly, wondering why she didn't tell him that she didn't want to go.

  'It will be all right,' he assured her, catching her look of appeal. 'I'll explain how you feel to Rodare, and I'll make sure that my mother understands the situation.'

  'You must make her understand that my only reason for being at Abbeywitch is to complete work on your book.' Debra spoke with such intensity that her voice shook. 'The very fact that I'm returning in your company will make her dislike me all the more—'

  'Dislike is a strong word,' Jack broke in.

  'Your mother is a strong woman,' Debra rejoined. 'She isn't afraid to say what she thinks even if she upsets people.'

  'And she upset you?'

  'Quite a lot.'

  'Because you don't care to be thought of as the kind of girl who plays around?'

  'I'm not that kind of a girl, Mr Salvador.' Debra gave him an unwavering look. 'I'm not a prig either and I accept that lots of women are as desirous of expressing their freedom as men have always been, but I just haven't the kind of nature that needs the attentions of men all the time. I enjoy my work. It fulfils me, and I don't want involvements that go from white heat to sullen coldness. I am my own person!'

  'Indeed you are.' Jack came across to her, took her by the hands and drew her upwards. 'And in your own way, Debra, you are as strong as my mother. I know you think her a snobbish and suspicious woman, but she was the second wife of a man she idolised and I think she knew that she never really replaced the tempestuous Spanish dancer who gave birth to Rodare. Added to which, I could never be the eldest son and heir to the property. These things rankle, so when she found an opportunity to belittle Rodare she took it.'

  'Do you mind that you're not the eldest son?' Debra asked him.

  'It would be nice to own Abbeywitch,' Jack admitted, 'but I grew up knowing that my brother in Spain would inherit. The property is entailed in his favour, though my mother has always insisted that the form of marriage my father went through with Rodare's mother could be disproved in court. I doubt it!'

  'What form of marriage was that?' Debra looked curious.

  'She was a Spanish gipsy and they were married in the gipsy way.'

  'Bonded by blood,' Debra murmured, seeing in her mind's eye the leaping flames of the camp fires, the silk scarf tying together the bleeding wrists of the couple. The night would have been filled with tempestuous music, and gipsy bride and English husband would have stolen off into the starlit hills to consummate their marriage. The romanticism of it appealed to her and she couldn't help but realise that Rodare had wild strains of passion in him which he couldn't always control.

  Passionate impulses at war with a rigid sense of morality which caused a duality in his nature: the heart of him hot with Spanish fire; the feet of him bound to the rock and stone of Lovelis Island.

  'I suppose Rodare's mother couldn't bear to live anywhere else but in Andalucia?'

  'That's what broke up their marriage,' Jack agreed. 'Rodare grew up in Spain and I can't imagine him ever wanting to leave—I can't help saying that I still find it strange that he asked you to marry him.'

  'Oh, it was only a gesture.' She half-smiled. 'The sombra y luz in his nature.'

  'The shade and light, eh?' Jack studied her as if he found her unexpected and rather intriguing. 'So you see Rodare as a divided man on account of his parentage? Both my parents were of the same social clique which my father rejoined after he took Soledad and her son home to Spain. Inevitably he grew lonely and married my mother, who got herself pregnant very quickly in order to cement the marriage. I admit that she can be a difficult woman at times, but can any of us help the nature we're bom with? Our destinies are in our genes.'

  'Not in our stars?' Debra murmured.

  The stars are too far out of reach,' he replied, 'even when we see them in another person's eyes.'

  CHAPTER NINE

  DEBRA felt as if she had been swimming against the tide and now it was carrying her back to the sands of Lovelis Island. As it came into sight, she felt a wild fluttering inside her . . . within the next fifteen minutes she would be stepping on to the beach where her very first meeting with Rodare had taken place.

  She felt a pair of eyes upon her and turned to look at Jack Salvador. It touched her the way his fingers were twined in the string which secured the boxes of toys for Dean. They had gone out in yesterday's rain in order to buy them, and she knew that in his own way Jack was just as strung up as herself.

  'He'll love the lion,' she smiled. It was a big woolly creature with wheeled paws so Dean could ride on its back, and the instant they had seen it in the shop they had agreed that it was the ideal present for him. But once in the shop Jack had bought soldiers and farm animals, a Panda police-car and a Paddington Bear, and mechanical toys such as a donkey that kicked its back legs in the air.

  'I can hardly wait to see him again.' Jack's eyes were agleam with anticipation. 'I can just imagine how much he's grown—do you think he'll have forgotten me?'

  'You'll soon know.' The island drew closer all the time, the snouts of its offshore rocks looming ahead of the motorboat, whose engine throbbed down into low gear as Mickey Lee guided it to the beach.

  'You're back home, Mr Jack,' he said, rather hesitantly.

  'Home!' Jack leapt ashore and took deep breaths of the island air which after yesterday's storm seemed laden with ozone.

  'Mr Jack—' Mickey pulled a face of such agony it was as if he was having a tooth pulled without the aid of ether. 'I didn't like to tell you right away—'

  'What the deuce are you on about, Mick?'

  'It was the storm—' Mickey glanced at Debra, then again at Jack and it was obvious that he was trying to break some bad news. 'A bolt of lightning struck the west wing and caused a lot of damage, Mr Jack. All the terraces along that side of the house crashed into the sea and the walls and ceilings of the rooms caved in. I—I had to fetch the doctor because N anny Rose and the babby were buried under the rubble.'

  Buried?' Jack grasped Mickey by the arm and his eyes glazed. 'Oh God, don't tell me Dean's been hurt?'

  The babby's all right,' Mickey said soothingly, 'apart from a scratch or two. They found him underneath his cot, just a bit dazed and the scratches are nothing to worry about, but poor Nanny Rose took a whack on the head that knocked her right out.'

  'Ye gods!' Jack flung a look up the cliffside. 'The house seems cursed—but my boy is all right, Mick? You're not holding anything back from me?'

  Mickey Lee energetically shook his head and crossed his heart. 'Doc Tregarth went over him from top to toe and called him a tough little tyke like all the Salvadors. But as I say, his nanny is laid up and your Ma is taking care of the little fellow.'

  'Let's hurry.' Jack caught Debra by the wrist and flung at Mickey that he bring up the boxes and baggage. When the pair of them reached the top of the cliff steps they were both out of breath but equally anxious to make sure that Dean was safe and well, and that Nanny Rose was recovering from the ordeal.

  There was Abbeywitch with the façade of gables and ivy-hung walls at least undamaged, and Debra wondered if it was an omen of bad luck that on the very day she met Jack and persuaded him to return home, the house was struck by lightning. Even as they entered there was a smell of brickdust and plaster lingering in the air, and Debra was gripped by such a feeling of restraint that she hung back and watched Jack go alone up the blackwood staircase.

  Dean was with Jack's mother and sh
e had no part to play in their reunion. She stood alone in the hall, beneath the big portrait of the founder of the family, and felt like an intruder and far less welcome this time than she had felt the very first day she entered Abbey witch. Then she had been gripped by anticipation, eager to begin work and never dreaming that here she would meet a man who would trouble her heart and disrupt her life.

  She was back on his territory and every nerve in her system was warning her of his presence. He might at any moment appear in the hall, and Debra was certain that when she saw him she would feel again the thrill and the tear that nobody else could evoke. He shattered her romantic dreams and rebuilt them not of rainbows but of storms.

  A movement at the top of the stairs caught her attention, where they branched left and right and formed a gallery that overlooked the hall. Her heart lurched as she saw standing there the man who at this moment filled her thoughts to the exclusion of everything else.

  She wanted to turn and flee from his house, but like someone in a dream she couldn't break the spell that held her there as he came down the stairs at his leisure, as if he had all day in which to approach her across the hall. Beneath the black brows his eyes had the intensity of ebony and though she tried to read them, their language was beyond her.

  'I understand that you came back with my brother.'

  'Yes.' She gave him a look which she hoped was remote. 'I hope his little boy is all right after that terrible incident yesterday? Mickey Lee told us about it—he said Nanny Rose was hurt.'

  'She has signs of concussion and is being nursed by Mrs Lee.' His eyes swept Debra up and down. 'Jack's return with you in tow is another bolt out of the blue.'

  'I expect it is.' Her body was rigid with tension. 'I've come back to complete work on his book—I haven't returned for any other reason.'

  'What reason could that be?' he drawled.

  'Y-you know—'

  'Ah, could you be referring to our engagement?'