Someone Special (25 page)

And so she would. Far from him. So he had frightened the woman with threats and ordered her to go, then he had left the small, damp house and headed up the drive towards the castle.

Only he realised halfway up the drive that he had no idea why he was hurrying in this direction, or whom he intended to confront when he got there. He felt ill, confused, and soon his footsteps slowed and he leaned against a gate, the better to think. Had the man really said Hester was unfaithful? His Hester? The pretty wife of whom he had been so proud? Surely no man would say such a thing, and why should the man be at the castle? Someone lived at the castle, he knew
that
, and he worked for the fellow. He couldn’t remember the name but it would come to him in a minute. In the meantime, he turned and hurried down the long drive. He should never have told Hester to go, not when he was ill and confused. Who would nurse him if she left?

He reached the lodge again and burst through the kitchen door. A part of his mind acknowledged that it was not locked and knew it to be a bad sign, but he searched each room anyway, calling her name, calling for the child. They couldn’t go far; they had nowhere to go. Hester was an orphan-child, the lodge was her first real home, Matthew her only relative. She would go to the village, to some woman or other, but she would listen, would come back to him.

He left the lodge, but the world was beginning to behave very oddly indeed; trees tried to strike him with their branches, he had to duck to avoid their attack, and
the lodge gates began to swing open and closed as he approached. Using considerable cunning, he ran between them when they weren’t watching, and on to the road. He saw the bus approaching and stayed where he was; the road was slipping and sliding like a pulled ribbon, no sense in stepping under the vehicle’s wheels.

The bus drew level, and something pulled his gaze up to the small faces in the window on the upper deck. And she was there, watching him, her eyes big and black in her pale face, fear in every line. He ran at the bus. He screamed her name to the four winds, ‘Hester, Hester, don’t leave me, don’t go, I didn’t mean …’

The bus trundled on. He followed, though his heart felt it would burst with effort and his breath burned in his chest. It got farther and farther ahead and he knew there would be no catching it, no second chance for him. The bus rounded the corner and disappeared and Matthew made one last enormous effort. He slogged on and on, no longer knowing why he was running, simply running, slower and slower, the breath in his throat harsher and harsher. He bit his lip until blood came, then his legs gave way and he felt the wet tarmac come up and smite his hands, his knees. Uncaring, he let go, almost welcoming the darkness which rushed up and dragged him into its chilly depths.

Mr Geraint arrived at the lodge early, to take Hester and the child down to the hospital. He was feeling pleased with himself. For seven years he had shilly-shallied, not sure whether Nell was his daughter, unsure whether to claim her as such. Then he had found the picture in the Long Gallery and had been intrigued by a likeness which had struck him at once. Surely this meant she was his child? He had always suspected it, but there had been no need to rock the boat, no need to say anything.

Then Nell had got herself trapped in the cave, and
all at once he had known he loved her. The feeling he had for Hester, he told himself, was not love, simply an unusually strong physical attraction. The fact that in all his promiscuous life he had never felt it about a woman for longer than a few hours – in fact, never after he had possessed her – was something he ignored because it did not suit him to acknowledge it. But his feeling for Nell was different; purer, simpler. She was the child he had wanted. She was clever, brave, affectionate. She needed him and he needed her; who was Hester to stand in the way? Or Matthew, for that matter?

So he made his plans; bribe Hester and Matthew with promises of good schooling, money, advancement. Threaten if necessary; and then step in.

He drew the car to a halt outside the lodge, putting the brake on gingerly, for he rarely drove when Matthew was available. He got out, looking hopefully up at the sky. It was clearing – good. It might be possible to put the hood down on the way home, give them all a good blow. The car ran with condensation on a wet day and it took a good deal of the pleasure out of a motor trip.

He approached the front door and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. Locked. Well, of course it would be, cottagers never used their front doors. Hester and the child would probably be in the kitchen, getting ready. He strode round to the back yard and pushed open the door. He entered the room breezily, as of right, but it was empty. He frowned; the fire wasn’t lit, last night’s supper things were still on the table. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the house deserted.

He searched it, of course. No thought of an employee’s right to privacy entered his mind. It was his house, they were his servants, the child was his child, he had every right to find them when he wanted them. But he didn’t find them because they weren’t in the house. Little spitfire, she had probably taken umbrage at his remarks last night and
caught the early bus to visit Matthew. He was annoyed, of course, but couldn’t help an appreciative grin. How typical of Hester, his wild-child, to make a fool of him, teach him the unwisdom of trying to dominate her. He would dominate her, of course, and he had every intension of carrying out both his threats and his promises. Nell was too good to be wasted on a country yokel; he loved her; he had every right …

He went through the house again, but idly this time, out of curiosity. He sat on Nell’s hard little bed and examined her possessions, an ill-made reed basket with some badly blown birds’ eggs in it and some old, grimy children’s books. He peered behind the hanging curtain and frowned; she had very few clothes, even fewer than he would have thought. I’ll buy her more, he thought complacently; I’ll take Hester with me and we’ll choose some really pretty things. She would look lovely in primrose cotton, or a clear, pure pink. That wonderfully shiny black hair needs pastel shades to set it off.

He went into the room Hester and Matthew shared. There was a rickety table on Hester’s side of the bed with a couple of drawers and a shelf. The shelf contained more books, equally thumbed. Old romances, several volumes of Dickens, a set of Shakespeare which, he realised with a wry grin, she had almost certainly filched from the library up at the castle. And in the first drawer he found a pressed wild-flower collection, carefully arranged in a small, cheap exercise book with her name on the outside:
Hester Coburn. Wild flowers of Pengarth
. Close by it, small tins. They had once contained shoe polish, Glaxo, Pears soap; now they held a collection of dry moss, some unusual stones, a few birds’ eggs and some fossils – a fern, sea-shells, a curly ammonite, all labelled and stuck on small pieces of card.

For some reason it touched him, brought unexpected tears to his eyes. She was only a child herself, Hester!
She had missed out on a normal country childhood, shut up in her Liverpool orphanage, and she had been making up for it. He imagined her, by night a woman whether she liked it or not in Matthew’s bed, by day an eager child, searching the lanes for wild flowers, for birds’ eggs, for strange objects for her collection. She had not had time for such things since she took over at the castle, of course. He knew that, acknowledged now that he had worked her too hard, been unfair. But he would change, be different. He would see to it that she had help, that she took time for herself. He remembered the day she had come storming up to the room over the arch, wanting to know why he was suddenly interested in Nell, suddenly taking her to the seaside. He had laughed and made love to her and she had forgotten her anger and her questions, but now he felt faint stirrings of guilt. Now he realised she would have loved to accompany them, paddle in the pools, push a shrimping net under the heavy swags of seaweed in search of miniature monsters of the deep. He could imagine how it would have thrilled her to find a sea-urchin’s shell, to see the green, scuttling crablets, to gloat over a silver and brown flatfish, undulating across the bucketful of seawater in which she would keep her temporary treasures.

But this was doing no good; he closed the last box, replaced it in the drawer, closed the drawer and looked around him. What a dull room! A chest of drawers with a small piece of mirror on top, a curtained-off corner where her clothes hung, Matthew’s too, probably; one wobbly kitchen chair beside the bed and linoleum on the floor. Not exactly a love-nest, but then Matthew wasn’t exactly a lover – a husband perhaps, but not a lover!

Geraint left the room, closing the door firmly behind him. He would buy her some pretty things. Why had he not thought of it before? She would resent his interference far less if she had a pretty room with a few nice knick-knacks around.

Outside, he cranked the starter, thinking ruefully that it had been a good few years since he’d started and driven his own car, then drove slowly down to the gates. If he turned left he would reach the village, but there was no point in doing that; he would turn right and drive into Rhyl, pick the pair of them up when they left the hospital and take them somewhere nice for luncheon – why not? They deserved a treat after the ordeal they had all suffered the previous day. And later, if the weather improved, they might even go on the beach. He turned right and had driven perhaps a mile when he saw, sprawled on the tarmac ahead of him, what looked like a man. It was probably a drunk from the village, though it was a funny time to find a drunk, at nine in the morning, unless he was ill or worse.

Geraint applied his brakes and steered the car into the verge. He climbed out, but left the engine running. He walked over to the recumbent figure. It was Matthew! Geraint bent over him and rolled Matthew on to his back. The fellow was soaked, his face was bruised, he looked terrible. He was breathing though, and a hand slipped under his jacket proved that his heart was beating, though it seemed to Geraint a faint, jerky beat. Well, the man should have been in hospital and Hester and the child would be distraught when they got there to find him gone, so he had best be taken back before he caught pneumonia lying on the wet road.

Geraint heaved Matthew on to the back seat of his car and drove off, still puzzled by the whole business. He was sure that Matthew had run away from hospital for some reason, though he could not imagine what that reason could be, and had collapsed before he reached his home. Why no passing driver had noticed him, assuming he had been there for a while, was a mystery. Still, no point in fruitless conjecture; the thing to do was return
him to the ward at once, where he could get the treatment he so plainly needed.

It took twenty minutes to reach the hospital and by then Geraint, glancing over his shoulder to the back seat every now and then, thought Matthew’s colour was a little better. But the invalid did not regain consciousness until he was being carried to the ward on a stretcher, and then he didn’t make much sense.

‘She’s gone, then,’ he said as the ward nurse scolded him and began gently undressing him. ‘She wouldn’t wait for me, wouldn’t let me explain. She just upped and went.’

‘Who did, Matthew? Who are you talking about?’ Geraint asked gently, but Matthew just frowned and sighed and repeated what he had said.

‘He’s still concussed, sir,’ the ward nurse said, leading Geraint away from the bed. ‘He isn’t in his right mind yet. ‘Twill take a while, I daresay, before he comes to himself.’

‘But he’d walked all the way to Pensarn,’ Geraint objected. ‘Surely he couldn’t have done that in a state of concussion?’

‘I’ve known men, and women too for that matter, who’ve walked miles and miles, even ridden bicycles, and all without knowing it, because they were asleep,’ the nurse observed. ‘The mind’s a strange thing, sir. Now you come back in twenty-four hours and he’ll likely know you and be able to have a proper chat. Right now he isn’t making sense.’

Taking the nurse’s words as a dismissal, Geraint accompanied her down the long corridor towards the entrance hall, but as he was about to leave something else struck him. ‘Oh, nurse, what did you tell his wife?’

‘His wife?’

‘Yes; Coburn’s wife and daughter must have come to visit him earlier.’

‘Ah, I wasn’t on the ward then, sir. I was on Morrison until forty minutes ago.’

Geraint nodded and left. It was pointless questioning the hospital staff as to the whereabouts of the Coburn females. Hester and the child must have come into town on the bus and doubtless they intended to return by the same route. He would walk into town and have a look at the timetable, see what time the next bus left for Pensarn. Then he would take a look in the cafés, see if he could spot them, and reassure them that Matthew was back in his hospital bed.

He searched diligently, but saw neither hide nor hair of them all that long, wet morning.

When Hester and Nell climbed off the bus, Hester had no idea what to do next, but scarcely had they set foot on the pavement before another bus, which had drawn up beside them, began to show signs of departure.

Hester was wondering whether to get aboard or whether to find out first where it was going when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the familiar shape of Mr Geraint’s dark blue Lagonda. Without giving herself time to think she jumped aboard, pulling Nell with her.

‘Only just made it, my love,’ the bus conductor said, helping them on to the vehicle. ‘Put your bags in here, there’s two seats up the front.’

Presently he came along the bus, calling ‘Tickets, please,’ and whirring the handle on the little machine which produced the tickets. Hester waited until he was directly behind her, then listened intently.

‘Tickets, please.’

‘Return to the Beast Market at Wrexham, please.’

‘Right; change at Ruthin, love.’

The money changed hands, the conductor moved along to stand beside Hester and Nell. ‘Tickets, please.’

‘One single and one half to Wrexham Beast Market please.’