Penny Jordan (10 page)

The wine was finished and Honor could tell that David was regretting what he had revealed to her.

Another few minutes and he would be saying that he had changed his mind and that he had to leave.

She didn't want that. Oh, no, she didn't want that at all.

Standing up, she gave him a small smile and told him calmly, 'If you'll come up with me, I'll show you your room and then tomorrow we can discuss which repairs should have priority.'

A little muzzily, David got to his feet. He had been on the point of telling Honor that he ought to go. Her questions about his family had brought home to him the danger and stupidity of what he was doing. He was the last person they would want back in their lives. In their place, he knew that was how he would feel.

'It's this way,' Honor was saying, and somehow or other David found he was following her into the hallway and up the stairs.

The bedroom she showed him was down a small half-landing at the back of the house.

'It isn't as large as the rooms at the front, but I'm sleeping in one of them and the girls have bagged the others for when they visit,' she said apologetically as she snapped on the light and stepped to one side so that he could walk past her.

The room wasn't large, it was true, but compared with the places David had been sleeping in since he came home, what did size matter? It had a bed—luxury indeed so far as David was concerned. It had furniture, too, a wardrobe and two chests, not that he would need those. He travelled light; all his possessions were in the haversack on his back and they wouldn't even fill one of the two chests.

There were curtains at the window and a carpet square on the floor. That they were rather threadbare scarcely mattered to him. The room still had its own fireplace and the air smelled faintly damp and cold.

'The house does have central heating—of a sort,' Honor told him as though she had guessed what he was thinking. 'But as yet I haven't found a way of making it work.'

'Mmm...what priority on the list is that to have?' David asked her drily.

'Well, it will come somewhere before trimming the hedge but after fixing the leak in the roof,'

Honor answered with that little glinting smile of hers that did such interesting things to his hor-mone levels.

As a young man, David had taken his sexuality and his body's response to a pretty woman for granted. He had met and wanted Tania—Tiggy—

in the heady days of the sixties when sex was a free-for-all of snatched goodies grabbed and con-sumed greedily without thought.

They had married and had two children. Then had come the fallow years of their marriage, years when sex had become a ritual, a duty, a chore, and then later still, a resented payment at the shrine of Tiggy's insecurities and his own guilt.

In Spain and Jamaica there had been women who had approached him, middle-aged, eager, avaricious, their demands falling little short of aggression, wanting not just his body but his spirit, as well. He had resisted them all. The celibacy of recent years had served as a welcome oasis of peace. He had assumed he had no regret that he had become both physically and emotionally im-potent so far as sex was concerned. Yet here he was becoming aware of Honor, reacting to her with bemusingly unexpected potency.

'The bathroom's the third on the left,' Honor informed him. 'You'll find plenty of towels in the airing cupboard. Luckily, the immersion heater is one of the few things that does work, so there is always plenty of hot water. Oh, and I always leave the landing lights on, but with your bedroom door closed they shouldn't disturb you,' she told him casually as she turned back to the door.

'You
always
leave them on?' David questioned. 'What for, the ghost?'

He could see the tension in her departing back as she suddenly went very still.

'Perhaps,' she agreed, but he could hear the faint tremor in her voice and guessed, with a small shock of surprise and compassion, that she must be afraid of the dark.

It seemed such an unexpected and almost childish fear in so strong a woman that for a moment he was almost tempted to laugh, but just in time he managed not to do so.

'Well, they won't disturb me,' he assured her gravely instead.

His reward was the look of relief in her eyes as she turned round to face him. She said in a slightly wobbly voice, 'We still have overhead power cables here and every time there's a storm the power tends to go off. I keep a supply of candles—-just in case.'

'Candles can be a fire hazard,' David cautioned her gently. 'It might be worth your while to think about investing in a generator.'

'Yes, I had wondered about that,' Honor agreed.

Whatever it was that made her afraid of the dark, it was obviously a very big fear, David recognised. He turned round again and walked across his bedroom. It took him a while to fully analyse the feeling it gave him knowing that she had allowed him to see her vulnerability. It was pride, male pride and machismo...coupled with a desire to protect, to
be
her protector.

'No, no,' David warned himself as he put down his haversack and started to unpack. 'Oh, no, you don't.
That
isn't what you are here for, David Crighton. That isn't what you're here for at all.'

DAVID WAS AWAKE
at first light, momentarily dis-orientated by the unfamiliarity of his room and the comfort of the old-fashioned, soft-mattressed double bed.

He had neglected to close the curtains the previous night, and through his window he could see the trees forming the woodland that belonged to Fitzburgh Place cloaked softly in dawn mist, the sun only just on the rise.

In Jamaica, this had always been his favourite part of the day, when the air was still and relatively cool up in the mountains where Father Ignatius had his refuge.

There was nothing like an English autumn.

Others might rave over the wonderful colours of a New England fall, but here in the Cheshire countryside one could feel totally in tune with the changing season and the fading year. There was a haunting melancholia heightened by the linger-ing warmth of the sun, reminiscent of summer days. At the same time, the air was sharpened by the cool tang of early-morning mists and the en-veloping darkness of evenings that brought the coming winter sharply to mind.

Stretching his body, he got up and padded naked across the floor as quietly and softly as a jun-gle cat. Living in the tropics had taught him how to be economical with his body's store of energy.

Living alongside Father Ignatius had shown him how to value the wisdom of the older man's experience.

At first he had laughed a little unkindly at the priest's insistence on his morning shower beneath the cold waterfall close to the refuge, followed by a brisk exercise routine.

'The body is like a piece of equipment. With a little care it can serve us well, but like any other piece of machinery, if we neglect or abuse it, our laziness and lack of respect will show up in our later years.'

'Providing one
makes
it to one's later years,'

David had reminded him a little grimly. The priest had inclined his head in acceptance of David's caveat.

'To take pride in one's faculties—physical, mental, emotional and spiritual—is the mark of a truly wise man,' the priest had responded. 'And perhaps it is vain of me, but I should not wish to be judged by myself or others as lacking the wisdom to respect the gifts that nature has given to me. Besides,' he had added with his lightning-quick, almost boyish smile, 'I like feeling clean and energised both in body and spirit.'

'A typical Jesuit teaching,' David had pro-nounced a little contemptuously.

'Cleanliness being next to Godliness,' the priest had quoted drily to him. 'I cannot speak for that, but I can say that cleanliness is quite definitely the first step towards controlling and eradicating disease, and since that is our task here...'

David had shrugged his shoulders, but he knew that the older man had a point. He was, as David had already observed, meticulous about boiling all the water they used in the hospice and keeping everything as spotless and sanitised as possible.

And, after a while, David discovered that he not only no longer felt any defensive need to taunt Father Ignatius for his habit of showering and changing from one shabby set of clothes into another clean set at the end of their day's work, but he himself was actually beginning to enjoy following the same morning and evening ritual.

One pair of threadbare shorts and an unmatched shirt might look the same as another, but there was no doubt that the clean ones felt a whole lot better.

In Spain he had earned enough to buy himself the kind of basic clothes he needed and to pay a woman in the village to wash them for him. But he had had to leave Spain in a hurry, only one step ahead of a deportation order for working there illegally. The offer of work crewing on a yacht bound for Jamaica had been too opportune for him to refuse. At the end of the trip, though, the skipper had announced that the only wage David was going to receive was his free passage.

In Jamaica the only paying work that was available to him involved working as a 'mule' for one of the drug-smuggling gangs, bringing drugs into the UK. Whatever sort of man he might be, David had too much sense to get involved in drug running and so he had found himself in a situation where he had to live day-to-day, from hand to mouth, and count himself lucky if he earned enough to feed himself.

Pulling his jeans on, he headed for the bathroom. He doubted that Honor would be up yet, which meant that...

Honor. What a fascinating woman she was. It amazed him that she was actually living alone.

Her choice, no doubt about that. The effect that thinking about her had on his body both amused and amazed him. He couldn't remember the last time he had been so immediately and so firmly aroused. Tiggy would definitely have trouble believing this and be astonished if she could see him now.

Even before Jack's conception there had been times when he had had to fake orgasm, when he had had to pretend that the excitement and arousal he was feeling were real, that his need to interrupt their 'lovemaking' to go to the bathroom was because of a weak bladder, when in reality...

David gave a small grimace of distaste as he stepped out of the shower. Tiggy's sexual appetite had mirrored her disordered appetite for food.

Wild binges of excess had been followed by self-revulsion and self-punishment. Whilst at the time he might not have recognised her symptoms for what they were, and most certainly had not possessed either the expertise or the compassion to help her, he had been as eager as her to maintain the outward facade of their 'perfect' marriage. He, too, had made a show of their highly charged and very sexual relationship, entered willingly into those little playlets of fake sexual intimacy and loving adoration that they enacted together in public. And like so much else in his life, eventually the burden of maintaining such a fiction had destroyed whatever genuineness might have existed, leaving in its place a ghastly, destructive, numbing fear that somehow he might slip up and that others would see him as he really was.

Just about the time he had started using his client's bank account as though the money was his own, he had started having terrifying dreams that he was walking through Haslewich's main town square, but no one he saw seemed to recognise him. When he paused and looked at his reflection in a shop window, he realised why. He looked nothing like he should have done.

He had turned round to face the street, calling out to those watching him, his brother Jon, his wife, his father, his cronies at the golf club, but all of them had refused to listen, shrugging him off as though he were a stranger importuning them.

Easy enough to understand the message of his dream now, when ironically he could walk through the square and be recognised physically as himself, the same David Crighton who had walked away from his family and his home, but inwardly...inwardly the man he was now was as much a stranger to them as though they had never met. A stranger sometimes to himself, as well, given the extent of his own bemusement over his physical reaction to Honor.

Once dressed, he went downstairs into the kitchen where he filled the kettle with water.

Whilst he waited for it to boil, he studied his surroundings. One of the window sashes had rotted, leaving the window unable to close properly.

There was a gap beneath the ill-fitting outer kitchen door. As he already knew, the stairs creaked badly and beneath the carpet on the landing a couple of floor planks were out of align-ment.

Honor had obviously attempted to brighten up the kitchen, which was painted in a strikingly warm shade of ochre, while the dresser against one wall was adorned with vibrant, Mediterra-nean-coloured pieces of china.

In the alcove over the large, old-fashioned range, a variety of what he imagined must be herbs were tied to a wooden drying rack. But despite these touches, the room felt cold and slightly damp, and when David went over to the range and touched it, he realised that it had gone out.

After a moment's hesitation, he got down on his knees in front of it. He then opened the doors and proceeded to clean it out.

He had just managed to light it when the kitchen door opened and Honor came in with a large wicker basket over one arm.

'You're up early!' she exclaimed as she smiled at him.

'I could say the same to you,' David returned as he closed the doors of the range and went to the sink to wash his hands.

'Oh well, a lot of the plants and herbs I use are best gathered when they are at their freshest. They are more effective then.'

'That sounds suspiciously like medieval my-thology to me,' David teased.

Sharing his laughter, Honor added, 'But it wasn't just plants and herbs I went out for.' She opened the draw-string top of her basket and removed a handful of mushrooms. Her eyes lit with pleasure as she showed them to him. 'Look, breakfast!'

'Are you sure they're edible?' David asked.

'Trust me, I'm a herbalist,' Honor responded tongue in cheek.