Discordant, she thought, like the mood of the lunch she had shared with Rodare. Her head turned restlessly on the pillow. How inadequate to say she was sorry, and almost with contempt he had turned his head away from her.
Who was it who had planted that appalling suspicion in her mind? It certainly hadn't been Nanny Rose who had been horrified that she should entertain it. And though Lenora Salvador had said cutting things when she had discovered Rodare in her room the night of the party, she had not implied that he was in the habit of being found in the wrong bedroom.
Debra remembered quite suddenly ... it had been Stuart Coltan, saying in his insinuating way: 'They liked to dance together so perhaps they liked doing other things together.'
Stuart was the snake in the grass who had whispered his venom and then watched it have its effect on her. Stuart and Pauline, the realisation struck her like a blow that brought her completely to her senses so that she wanted to run and find Rodare and beg him to forgive her.
But it was too late for regrets. The clock couldn't be turned back to last night when he had kissed her and wanted her because the moon had lit a little madness in his heart.
Debra lay with her face buried in the crook of her arm and in a while, like a misery-worn child, she fell asleep, unaware when the curtains began to flutter as the sun cooled and the sea deepened in colour. Her exhaustion was complete and she slept on, the room slowly darkening around her.
Moonlight was flooding into the room when she awoke, and she sat up with the guilty realisation that she should long ago have started to dress for dinner.
As she reached to the bedside lamp her arm protested, for she had slept on it heavily. She gave a gasp of dismay when she saw the time ... it was twenty minutes to eight, which gave her very little time in which to shower and dress.
It was a special occasion and every one would be dressed accordingly, and here she was, still drowsy from a heavy sleep, rubbing a numbed leg as she stumbled to the closet and opened it. Even though her brain screamed she couldn't seem to make the scream come out of her mouth. Stuart Col tan was standing there among her dresses; he was wearing his white dinner-jacket and his pink shirt with the string-tie, and in his upraised hand he held Mickey Lee's claw-hammer.
'I'm in your room this time, Miss Prim,' he said, and his eyes danced with a crazy blue light. 'This time you're tucked well away from the brothers, aren't you, milady? I can do to you what I did to Pauline and not a soul will hear you scream when I do it. Bunch of fools, even if they live high on the hog in this high-toned house of theirs.'
He laughed and swung the hammer in his fingers like a pendulum. 'They think she drowned in the sea but I know differently. We swam ashore, the two of us, to make love on the beach. When the fun was over she started her usual monologue about telling Jack if I didn't marry her—marry her when I had rich and devoted Zandra on the hook? I told her to shut her mouth and when she just kept yelling at me I picked up a rock and closed her mouth with it. She fell in the rock pool and that's where she drowned.'
And each awful word fell into place and made sense as Debra drew away from him, badly frightened and yet defiant . . . this wasn't a man who confronted her with his confession of murder, this was a vicious, whining brat who had found a hammer to play with.
'Why pick on me?' she found enough voice to ask.
'Because I happen to feel like it.'
'You're mad,' she said, and knew the Midsummer moon was looking in through her wide-flung windows ... a mad, livid face just like Stuart's.
'Oh no,' he shook his head and grinned his brazen grin, 'it's big Mickey Lee who's mad and he's the one they'll blame when they find you, your chestnut hair—'
'I'll join you in hell before that ever happens!' The voice was iron like the hammerhead, savage with intention, and it came from the direction of the door. 'Lower the hammer carefully, my friend, and then hand it to me.'
'Sure, I'll hand it to you, el señor!' Stuart flung it viciously and it swiped Rodare's shoulder as he took a flying tackle at Stuart's legs and closed on them with powerful hands. The two men went crashing to the floor and items of furniture overturned as they wrestled and jabbed, each one of them driven by a desperate need to gain supremacy.
Debra didn't stand there like a petrified fool, she ran as fast as her legs could carry her downstairs and into the drawing-room where Lenora presided in her regal velvet. Zandra in rose-red georgette half-rose from a chair, and Jack in a dark dinner-suit was about to hand a drink to a creamy blonde all in blue.
'Jack!'
'Good lord—'
'Stuart's gone crazy and Rodare's up there with him—do come!'
Debra ran back the way she had come, in her bare white feet and ivory-coloured slip, her hair like a dark flame about her shoulders. When she ran into her room Rodare had Stuart in a secure arm-lock and the actor was blubbering like the spoilt, spiteful brat that he was.
'Put on a wrap,' Rodare ordered her.
She obeyed him, breathing quickly as she tied the sash. Jack loped into the room, pulling up short at the sight of his brother, his black hair all over his brow as he held on grimly to Stuart.
'Don't go telling him!' Stuart yelped when he saw Jack. 'He'll kill me—'
'That is what I'd like him to do.' Rodare looked murderous himself. 'I would like to see my brother break your evil neck!'
'Stuart,' Zandra came running into the room, 'what are they doing to you, darling?'
'He killed Pauline.' It was the word 'darling' that Debra couldn't bear to hear on Zandra's lips. 'He was hiding in my closet a-and he was going to kill me—with that!' She indicated the claw-hammer which lay where it had fallen after striking Rodare on the shoulder. 'He was g-going to use that so Mickey Lee would take the blame—'
'What's she talking about, Stuart?' Zandra stood there in her brilliant dress, her eyes fixed upon him in her brother's unrelenting grip. 'I want to know what you were doing in her room—answer me!'
And as if he heard again the same hysterical tone which had driven him to violence the night he and Pauline had swum from the yacht to make love on the beach, he turned on Zandra a look of crazed hatred. 'You and your demands, who do you think you are, a princess with the right to order people about? You and your mother, a pair of real Queen Bees, one minute full of honey, the next full of stings!'
He stopped abruptly, then slowly turned his gaze on Debra and he was grinning. 'You had your chance, baby doll. I could have gone for you but you went all hoity-toity on me. Only el magnifico was good enough for you, and then when you'd got him you ran out on him! Just like every dame I ever knew, you're all mixed up. You don't know whether you want the moon or the sun—the stars or the dirt!'
Again he stopped, then all at once he was blubbering again, and Zandra watched him in a kind of horrified fascination. He squirmed and twisted and was almost pathetic in his white dinner-jacket and his pink shirt.
'He killed Pauline?' Jack said heavily.
'Yes, amigo.’ Rodare glanced at Debra, and his iron look seemed to soften for a fraction of a second. 'You are all right, ñiña?'
She nodded, unaware that she was clasping her wrap around her as if she were cold. 'You arrived like the cavalry, thank heaven!'
He didn't explain why he had come to her room, not in front of everyone, but Debra felt sure he would tell her why later on . . . she knew it had something to do with the way they had been with each other during the trip back from Penarth.
'It would give me intense satisfaction to burn this cerdo on tonight's bonfire,' he said crisply. Then he marched Stuart out of the room and Jack followed in a numb sort of way. Poor Jack, Debra thought, he now had to come to terms with the true facts of Pauline's death and they were as tragic as they were deplorable.
Jack, immersed in his writing, his initial passion for Pauline cooling down as he came to realise that they had very little in common. He may have believed her content with her baby, but her sensuality had not been satisfied by maternity.
<
br /> Debra remembered what Nanny Rose had said about Stuart, that he liked hanging around women, even one like herself who was old enough to be his mother. He had lost no time in noticing Pauline's discontent, and Debra glanced around the disordered turret and wondered how often the pair of them had been alone here, two people from show business who had crossed the barrier into the society of the wealthy Salvadors.
Poor, lost Pauline, torn between two worlds . . . two men. Wanting everything and losing all she had when Stuart grew tired of her. A shiver of compassion shook Debra and she wondered if things would have been different for Pauline had Jack's family drawn closer to her and made an attempt to understand her. Debra sighed. It was too late for regrets, and though she had suspected Stuart's amorality, her own troubled emotions had blinded her to the truth.
As she tightened her arms about her own body, she seemed to feel Rodare's strong arms when they had danced together, their every movement matched, their steps in perfect time. It was then he had taken possession of her, and she ached to be forgiven for ever thinking that he had possessed Pauline. With his Latin shrewdness he had suspected the truth, and he had been the only member of the family to give Pauline his friendship.
Right now Zandra had a self-absorbed look; a pride-affronted air, and not knowing what to say to her Debra started putting the furniture to rights, and it was then she noticed that her precious little vase had been knocked from the vanity-table and trodden to pieces in the furious struggle between Rodare and Stuart Coltan.
Sadly she began to gather up the pieces.
'You knew he was no good, didn't you?' Zandra spoke abruptly, her hands shaking as she lit a cigarette.
'Yes, I knew, but I never dreamt he was quite so—bad.'
'God, it's like a nightmare!' Zandra dragged deeply on her cigarette and the rose-red tips of her fingers danced in the air with nerves. To think I wanted to marry him and he—he killed Pauline.'
Suddenly a terrible thought struck Debra as she knelt there gathering up the broken pieces of her silky pink vase. What if Dean ... oh no, Dean was a Salvador; she had seen in his infant face the look that as he grew up would make him proud and noticeable. He had those blue eyes from Pauline . . .
Eyes blue as Sharon's as she came into the room in her rustling satin dress, carrying a tray with a coffee pot and cups on it. She was surprisingly cool and kind as she poured coffee for Debra and Zandra and insisted that they sit down and drink it.
'You poor dears, what a shock for you both.'
Debra held her cup in both hands and drank from it gratefully. The sight of Stuart lurking in her closet among her dresses was fading like a detail in a dream, losing delineation even as she sat and started to feel warmed by the hot, sweet coffee.
'We—we can't let this spoil things,' Zandra said suddenly. 'Father Restormel is coming from the Chapel to bless the fire and his being here will be like an exorcism. Sharon, what are my brothers doing about—Stuart?'
'Rodare has taken him to the mainland. Mickey Lee's gone with them because poor Jack is in a bit of a state, which is only to be expected.'
'Jack's with Mama?'
Sharon nodded. 'Only an hour ago everything was so pleasant and she was showing me photographs of her wedding day, and when Jack was baptised. Isn't life a surprising thing!'
'There's more drama in it than in the theatre, I sometimes think.' Zandra was beginning to recover her poise and her second cigarette was steady in her fingers. 'Mama has always loved Jack the best of the two of us, but that's the way of mothers, unless they're little sensation-seekers like Pauline. She had everything in Jack and Dean and yet she couldn't keep her hands off Stuart—she drove him to it, that's the truth of it!'
'Perhaps.' Sharon cast a significant look at Debra, then she said brightly: 'Isn't little Dean the image of his grandfather? I was amazed when your mother showed me that photograph of his grandfather taken in Spain, where they tint them so well. That chubby child has the same deep-blue eyes.'
Debra had been listening in a kind of dream, but suddenly the significance of Sharon's remark struck her wide awake. Dean was Jack's child. Dean had his grandfather's eyes. Dean owed nothing at all to his mother's association with Stuart Coltan. He was Pauline's baby by Jack Salvador and that night on the yacht she had flung a lie into his face, hurting him deliberately because she had wanted dross in the place of gold.
'Thank God,' she said, and didn't know that she spoke aloud.
'Yes.' Zandra rose to her feet. 'You are right there, Debra, and as I said before, we mustn't let Midsummer Eve be spoilt. We'll leave you to get ready—come along, Sharon.'
'You will be all right, Debra?' Sharon hovered, her hand on Debra's shoulder. 'You've had such a fright so perhaps we shouldn't leave you on your own?'
'I'm fine now.' Debra smiled and decided that she liked Sharon Chandler, that her first impression of her had not been wrong. She was a warm-hearted girl who would make the perfect daughter-in-law for Lenora Salvador.
'Don't be too long,' Sharon said. 'We'll see you downstairs.'
The door closed behind the two figures in their glamorous dresses and once again Debra had to approach her closet in order to find something suitable to wear. She couldn't quite suppress a shudder as she put her hand inside the closet and withdrew the white dress she had worn the night she had danced with Rodare.
Yes, she would wear this dress in which to say muy bien to him, and in a quietly resigned mood she bathed in the scent from her favourite sachet, slipped into her nicest underwear and sat down at the vanity-table in order to comb her hair and arrange it so her neck was left slim and vulnerable for the style of her dress. She still looked rather pale so she applied light touches of blusher, lightly made up her lips and hung around her neck the pearl pendant and chain which were now as good as new, thanks to Rodare.
Yes, in retrospect, she should have guessed there was something more amiss with Stuart Coltan than a tendency to react like a destructive child when he was denied his own way. She fondled the pear-shaped pearl and her eyes were reflective. She had assumed he was merely vain and flirtatious, but remembering the crazy smile in his blue eyes she shivered and hastened with her dressing.
Later they would all go out on the headland to watch the blessing of the fire, so Debra decided to take a coat downstairs with her. It was a white angora jacket and Debra carried it over her arm as she descended the dark magnificence of the staircase lit by the blazing glitter of the chandeliers. She smiled a little and thought to herself that she should be trailing mink or sable in the leisurely wake of her silver shoes. Inevitably she thought of herself walking down these stairs with Stuart when he had said they were both ambitious.
He had been unbalanced and greedy, but Debra knew that her own ambitions were linked to her mother's hard-working struggle to provide her with a good start in life. She had a good position awaiting her at Columbine, and one day, perhaps, she would be able to look back upon events at Abbeywitch with a composure she didn't feel right now.
'There you are.' Jack came forward from a shadowed alcove and held out a hand to her. 'We've turned dinner into a buffet so come along in and eat something.'
She let him take her by the hand and directly they entered the dining-room she saw Lenora in conversation with a lean man in the dark robe of a monk. 'Come and be introduced to Father Restormel,' Jack said, and as she walked with him across the room she thought of what Zandra had said about exorcism. When her hand was taken by the monk's and she looked into his eyes she felt a sense of peace, the kind that comes when the spirit has been in turmoil.
'I hear that you are a very brave young woman,' he said, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, he made the sign of the cross on her forehead and with a look he seemed to say: 'Forget the evil that men do and think only of those who do good.'
Encouraged by Jack and Sharon, she managed to eat a slice of roast goose and some salad accompanied by a glass of Krug. She chatted with them but wondered all the
time if Rodare would suddenly walk into the room and see her in her white dress and forgive her for being young and unworldly and confused between her dreams and the reality of desire.
But it wasn't until they all stood out on the headland, with the flames of the Midsummer fire leaping skywards, and no burning of the devil after all, that Rodare came at a leisurely pace towards them, as if he had all eternity instead of only a few more hours in which to tell her why he had come to her room.
'Mickey is putting the boat away,' he said. 'He will be here soon to admire the bonfire he helped to build.'
'Rodare?' His stepmother's voice held the question they all wanted to ask.
'Taken into custody,' he said, 'and tomorrow the official enquiry will begin, which means I must cancel my return to Spain in order to be here. I fear it will all be stirred up again, Jack. There is no avoiding it.'
'At least we now know everything,' Jack said quietly. He turned his gaze to Abbeywitch, a wonderful sight in the moonlight, as if thinking of his son fast asleep in the care of Nanny Rose. There would come a day when Dean would learn how his mother died, but time would dim the brutality of her death. The flames leapt high in their golden dance, and a quiver went straight to Debra's heart as an arm stole around her waist and a deep voice murmured in her ear:
'Come quietly with me, I have something to say to you.'
Like a figure walking in a dream she went where he led, until the fire was only a glow in the distance and they were alone above the waves beating on the beach. Then Rodare turned her to face him and in the moonlight his face was strong but his eyes were tender. 'How young you look in your white dress, and how much I want you.' He said it quite simply. 'That is what I came to say to you, querida mia, but if you don't want me then I shall do my best to accept defeat with good grace.'
'You saved me,' she said softly.
'Dios mio, I don't want your gratitude!' He snapped his fingers at the very idea. 'Between us it is fire and passion and need—or it is nothing, so take your choice!'
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