House of Storms

by Violet Winspear

  She flushed vividly at the compliment and it was nerves rather than vanity that moved her to take off her glasses and fiddle with them.

  'Y-you make it difficult for me to refuse you,' she said, confused by this new side he was showing her . . . mastering her and telling her openly that he admired her hair.

  'I wanted to make it difficult,' he rejoined. 'You're a girl to hold your head up anywhere and I expect you to do so tomorrow evening, but if you lose your nerve I shall understand. I won't hold it against you but I shall feel let down.'

  They left it at that and resumed work, but something new had crept into the atmosphere between them . . . Debra knew that they had become aware of each other as man and woman.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FROM a fascinating old book which Debra found on the shelves of the den she learnt that the Midsummer festival of fire was a custom dating back to pagan times before becoming blessed by the church as the Eve of St John.

  In each locality the fire was blessed by a priest who spoke his words in the old Cornish dialect, then wild flowers and herbs were flung among the flames and when the fire had burnt down low, those who were still agile joined hands and leapt the embers, laughing and chanting to chase away evil spirits from their homes.

  This was linked to the old pagan belief that the fires helped to warm the sun, always a source of worship, and a sun that shone all through the summer helped their crops to flourish and their children to grow. The sun was venerated and devils and witches had to be warded off which was the reason why broomsticks were burnt on some of the fires.

  Debra was enthralled by all this old Cornish lore and the meaning of old Celtic words such as Bodmin, which meant house of the monks.

  The Cornish, she read, were an unconquered people, tough and durable as the granite cliffs, and deep-natured as the mine shafts which penetrated beneath the sea.

  As she laid aside the book, she pondered the strains of Celt and Latin in the Salvador clan ... in Rodare those strains were intermingled like serpentine rock. The sombra y luz, as she had termed it, the light and shade in layers through his personality until it became hard to tell when the lighter side of him would be overshadowed by the dark, almost devilish side.

  Whenever she was alone with him Debra was aware of how swiftly he could shift his mood, rather like a tiger whose purr was only a concealment for a sudden attack. Big, tawny, menacing like one of those great cats that prowled in a cage. Abbey witch, for all its gothic beauty high on the cliffs, was Rodare's cage, and Debra reflected what a shame it was that Jack wasn't the eldest brother. Unlike Rodare he wasn't divided by a love of Spain and an obligation to settle here on Lovelis Island if ever he married.

  Rodare had used those very words, a marriage of obligation, as if he had already decided that he could never find happiness anywhere but in his beloved Spain.

  She wondered what his reaction would be if she did fall in with Jack's wish that she dine downstairs tomorrow evening. She tried to imagine herself walking into the drawingroom where drinks were served before the family went in to dine, facing up to Rodare's irony, the curiosity of the Chandlers, and most daunting of all the condescension of Lenora Salvador.

  Heaven forbid! Snatching a woolly jacket from the closet Debra flung it around her shoulders and decided that she needed a breath of air. She wanted to walk in the moonlight above the cool sea.

  As she passed the tall clock on the gallery it chimed eight, the silvery chimes following her down the stairs. The family and their guests were at dinner right now, their ease with each other excluding her.

  Silent as a shadow she crossed the hall and slipped out of the side door into the courtyard which extended to archways leading in various directions.

  She went in the direction of the headland, along a pathway bowered in trumpet-vine, quince and firethorn. The air was alive with moths like pale floating feathers, and somewhere among the trees a rook croaked, for black as the Devil they nested here, craftily aware that later in the year the oaks would shed acorns for them to feed on.

  Being a city girl Debra had been wary of the island's wild life, especially the hawks who swooped upon smaller birds in mid-air and fed upon them to the last feather. The seals she loved, especially when they waddled out of the water and perched on the ebony boulders along the shore. Their doglike heads and huge shining eyes had such appeal as they sunned themselves among the sandpipers and the puffins.

  She strolled along in the moonlight, breathing the salty air and feeling its cool touch in her hair, which she had let down from its knot. Her eyes glimmered at the mystery and enticement of the sea, splashing in upon the rocks, gentle enough at the moment but when the tide arose the powerful motion of the sea made a bellowing sound in a blow-hole below the headland where Debra walked.

  Just ahead of her it jutted out above the beach, forming a kind of plateau, and she was unsurprised to see that work on the bonfire had already begun. It was already half built, perhaps by Mickey Lee who was probably having his own evening meal, for he was nowhere to be seen. A cart filled with logs and boughs and bundles of loose kindling stood with its shafts empty and Debra guessed that Mickey had taken the horse to the stable for its meal of oats.

  Was it from here, Debra wondered, that Jack had scattered his young wife's ashes, seeing them waft out over the water and then settle on the crest of the waves . . . rejoining her spirit where she had died?

  Debra glanced about her, pulling her jacket closer around her shoulders as a pale image was evoked. Her glance was caught by some wild flowers growing at the edge of the cliff, the moonlight on their petals. She knelt down and was touching the flowers, so soft and cool to her fingers, when a voice spoke above her head:

  'Don't pluck blue scabius or the Devil will come to your bedside.'

  She went very still, rather like a wild creature who hopes its stillness will fool the hunter.

  'Come to your feet and step away from that edge,' the voice commanded.

  'I'm all right—'

  'You're a little fool.'

  'I expect I am.' And defiantly she plucked a single flower and then rose to her feet. As she turned to face her intruder the tide wind caught at her hair and blew it into a coppery pennon, and the moonglow made her skin pearly pale as she stood there indecisive, wanting to pass by him but afraid he would touch her.

  'Do you want the Devil at your bedside?' he mocked, long-legged in black trousers, wearing a dress-shirt open against his throat. He looked like a freebooter there in the moonlight, filling Debra with a mixture of feelings.

  'I—I've had him there,' she retorted, somehow driven to recklessness, perhaps by the mad moon of Midsummer.

  A smile curled his lip and he cast up at the moon a glance which seemed to share her thought. 'The moon is said to incite primitive responses in a woman, and strangely enough when your hair is set free you seem more of a woman and less of an efficient little robot who obeys her master with such quiet dignity.'

  'I haven't a master,' she argued, seeing the moonlight like fire in his eyes.

  'And don't want one, eh?'

  'Indeed not.' She flung up her chin, the blue scabious flower clenched in her hand. 'I wouldn't tolerate one.'

  'So you are a free soul, señorita?'

  'Yes I am, señor.'

  'With no wish to be the adorada of a man who will jealously guard you and make of you his very own possession?'

  'How claustrophobic!'

  'You believe so, eh?'

  'I know so.'

  'You know!' He took a step closer to her, his eyes flashing with scorn. 'What can you know of the emotions, straight out of the schoolroom and into an office to work upon other people's imaginings on sheets of paper. You know very little of real life there behind your prickly hedge that keeps men at a distance.'

  'Y-you haven't always kept your distance,' she reminded him.

  'Perhaps because my hide is so tanned it has become tough as leather—isn't that what you are thinking?'


  'Yes.' Her eyes were upon his tanned throat in the opening of his shirt and there was something else on her mind . . . she was quite alone with Rodare up here on the headland, the boom of the tide like a pagan drum, the surging sea lit by the radiance of the huge tawny moon. There was a barbarous splendour to the night as if some of the Midsummer magic and madness was in the air.

  'We say in Spain, señorita, that when a woman argues with a man she is entering the arena with the bull.'

  'I don't quite see you as a bull, señor.'

  'You don't?' He slowly raised an eyebrow. 'How do you see me?'

  'As the matador, with your cape hiding the sword.'

  His eyelids narrowed and for long seconds the silence between them was filled with the boom of the sea, echoing up the cliffside and filling the air with the tang of wreck and beaten sand and secret gardens on the bed of the ocean. Debra breathed it in and felt a cool moisture on her skin as she stood there with her hair blowing about her brow.

  'I wonder,' he said at last, 'if you realise what you've said?'

  Her eyes widened upon his face, so very Spanish with those shaded depressions below his strong cheekbones, the dominant nose and lean, swarthy jawline. 'I thought I was stating a fact, señor. Doesn't the bullfighter conceal his sword before dealing the fatal stroke?'

  Rodare inclined his head in agreement, but glimmering in his eyes was the smile of a man enjoying a private joke. Held by his gaze, Debra didn't realise that he had moved until his hands closed upon her waist and made a captive of her.

  'Don't—please—'

  'Don't do what, santa pequeña?'

  'This—what you're doing—' She strained away from him, but it took no more than a little additional pressure for him to have her pressed against his pliant warmth. He lowered his head and his mouth vibrated against her skin, sending little waves of sensation to the very centre of her body.

  'I like to make you suffer, little saint. You put on such airs of demure self-containment, and then I touch you and you are like a moth twisting and turning in the flame, wanting the ecstasy even as it burns your angelic wings. Come, confess it to me! Be a woman for once and emerge from that prim cocoon in which you keep yourself bound up ... be again the girl who danced with me and forgot her inhibitions.'

  'I—I'll never be that girl again,' she panted. 'That girl makes trouble for me—you make trouble for me! It doesn't affect you if I'm seen in a bad light by your family a-and you ruin a job which I've grown to love.'

  'Does love of the job include my esteemed brother?' He spoke the words against the side of her neck where the soft column had picked up a distress signal from her heart.

  'I—I don't intend to discuss my private business with you,' she said, her voice as rigid as she tried to keep her body. 'I'm well aware that you're the master of Abbeywitch, but that doesn't give you any rights over me. Whatever your Spanish ways, they don't apply in this country.'

  'It's a pity they don't,' he drawled, his warm breath fanning her skin. 'In Spain a girl is dishonoured for life if found with a man in her room. To the Spanish mind there could be only one reason for such an encounter and that reason couldn't possibly be innocent.'

  'In our case, you very well know it was.' Debra found herself fighting him again. 'Let me go—your brother and Mickey will come soon and I don't—'

  'Don't want Jack to see you in my arms, eh?'

  'Of course I don't—he'd think—'

  'That you might enjoy having my arms around you?'

  'I enjoy it about as much as I'd enjoy having the coils of a snake around me!' The more she struggled the closer he seemed to hold her, those saddle-strong legs of his planted firm on the ground as she swayed in his arms in the tide wind and the moonlight. The image of the two of them was vivid in Debra's mind, etched there in detail against the sky.

  'You—you want your brother to find us together, don't you?' she accused.

  'The thought never entered my head.'

  'Liar!'

  'That's no way for a little saint to speak.'

  'I've never pretended to be a saint.'

  'Then why all this show of resistance?'

  'Y-you know why.'

  'Not completely, but I'm prepared to listen.'

  'I don't play around with men, but you've got it into your head that because I'm a single woman in my twenties who happens to be English I'm available for your attentions. How many times do I have to say that I'm neither available, nor am I dishonoured, as you call it, just because you were caught in my room. In short, Señor Salvador, I'm not your toy!'

  Her eyes blazed in the moonlight, fired by temper and a desperate need to be free of Rodare's arms before Jack arrived on the scene.

  'You're no better than Stuart Coltan,' she added. 'You're a whole lot worse because you make out to be the gentleman of honour. I don't find you very honourable!'

  Even as she spoke the word she cried out as she felt the ground slipping from beneath her feet ... as effortlessly as if he handled a toy, Rodare swung her over his shoulder and began to march along the headland with her, making for a wild area of butcher's-broom, tall grass and gorse and the strong tang of sweet-briar. He thrust his way among a tangle of shrub until they were out of range of all eyes, even the tawny eye of the moon.

  'You Spanish devil, let me down!' Debra struck with her fist at his back muscles, but they were firm as leather and she caused herself more pain than she caused him.

  'When I'm ready, you long-haired vixen.' In retaliation he swung a slap at her backside. 'The time has come, mujer, to finish what started between us the day we met.'

  'Why didn't you do it then?' She gave him a punch for each word. 'Why didn't you rape me then to get it over with?'

  'So you think it's going to be rape, do you?' As he swung her to her feet her hair was a flying scarf of silk which he took in his grip, forcing her head backwards until her slim neck was exposed to where her blouse strained across her breast. His eyes raked over her, a prelude to his touch.

  'I like to feel you struggling in my arms,' he said. 'I like it when my fingers climb so smooth a slope to the peak of your breast.'

  'Damned devil!' She felt herself shudder as he suited action to his words . . . and what she found unforgivable in herself was that her shudder wasn't one of repulsion. Her eyelids closed heavily while her lips parted . . . parted to receive his lips as his fingers went on caressing her through the fabric of blouse and brassiere.

  'Don't—' The word blurred against his mouth. She made her protest, but couldn't stop his fingers from travelling from one button to another until her blouse slid from her shoulders. His hand slid around her and found the tiny hooks that released her breasts from the cups of silk. She cried out, but it was barely a cry as Rodare lowered her to the fragrant grass and the wild clover, his lips pausing for tantalising moments before they began to explore the warm valley that led to the peaks of her breasts. Her limbs grew heavy as sensual little waves began to beat through her bloodstream, her arms tightened around him and her response made him gasp her name . . . gasp as if he were suddenly drowning.

  Their lips clung hotly, their breath mingled, then, as his hands began to coax her towards the ultimate closeness, she found the will to refuse him.

  'Is this,' she broke his hold on her clamouring senses, 'is this what you did with Pauline?'

  Her words were followed by utter stillness, so that in the distance she heard the sound of a voice calling his name, then with the lithe grace he could never lose in any situation, he rose from the grass to his feet, half-turning away from her as he regained his control and thrust a hand through his disordered hair. 'So that's it,' he said harshly.

  'Go away.' Debra rolled over so the front of her was hidden from his gaze. 'Go and help with the bonfire a-and tomorrow night—throw yourself on it!'

  He made no rejoinder and she lay utterly still, waiting until she couldn't hear him any more, thrusting his way back to the headland where Jack had called his name. She fumbled with
tiny hooks and blouse buttons, then made her way to the house through the woodland that merged with the garden. The moonlight on the flowers made them unearthly in their loveliness, and all at once she felt such a reaction against Rodare that she sank down on one of the rustic seats and burst into tears.

  She howled inside though her outward weeping was stifled by her hands over her face. The painful tears seeped between her fingers and her weeping was like a grieving over something lost that she would never find again.

  Dreams . . . illusions of a love so precious that it would light up her life as the stars lit the sky. She had dreamt of romantic splendour, but now all her doubts and fears were confirmed. It meant no more than two bodies finding their satisfaction . . . hot lips on palpitating flesh ... a wild, delirious urging to give and be taken . . . taken until pain was pleasure, and pleasure was pain.

  'I hate him . . . hate him,' she whispered, over and over. If she kept saying she hated him then perhaps in time she would start to believe it. She would be able to look at him, big, powerful, beckoning, and nothing would happen inside her. She wouldn't feel as if her heart was suspended on a tightrope above a steep drop. She would be still and cold and empty inside, and safe from any more tumults of feeling when he laid hands upon her.

  It was some time before she felt ready to enter the house . . . his house where the dark and glossy furniture was of Spanish design, intricately carved like the black oak table at the centre of the hall on which stood the wide silver salvers always piled with fruit. Tonight black grapes, peaches and egg-shaped plums.

  Debra came to a hesitant halt, for standing beside the table was a slender figure in sugar-ice silk crepe, which was pleated beautifully and calf-length. A long strand of pearls was around her neck and she wore pink shoes with high narrow heels. She stood there as if trying to decide between a peach and a plum, and then from the comer of her eye she must have caught sight of Debra.