The Love Letter (79 page)

She felt again for the hot new brand beneath her hair, knowing she’d been a total fool for coming. But she had to see it through.

‘Where is the quarry?’

‘Oh, you don’t want to go there. It’s impossible to find unless you know the local area.’

‘I have a sat nav. Just give me the location details.’

‘You’ll never drive there. The old road in is shot to pieces. Francis took a horse.’

Stubbornly, Legs took the coordinates.

‘You have arrived at your destination. You have arrived at your destination.’

‘How can I have?’ Legs howled driving on through a haze of dust on the bumpiest, steepest and stoniest road she’d ever tried to navigate, raised high on the limestone escarpment, so narrow and precarious that it was like trying to drive along a lumpy tightrope. ‘I can’t see anything!’

Then she let out a scream as the car seemed to lurch sideways, tipped at an acute angle, the nearside wheels now spinning uselessly.

At boiling point, she hauled up the handbrake and clambered out to assess the situation. It could have been worse, she realised; she could have driven another three feet and plunged to her death. Instead, she’d been grounded in a deep rut inches from a precipice.

Ahead of her stretched a miniature Grand Canyon cut out of the ground like an inverted cathedral. It must have been disused for many years, and had now been reclaimed by nature, the quarry floor carpeted with wildflowers, a deep pool at its centre dancing with insects and dragonflies, the strata in the steep stone sides filled with nesting birds, and the grassland ridge was the brightest emerald green, patrolled by hundreds of blue butterflies.

Slumping against her wonky car bonnet in a haze of dust, she gazed out across the wide drop and spotted a horse tethered on the opposite side, grazing peacefully. A few yards away, she could
make out a figure sitting beneath an ash tree, his back propped against the trunk, earphones blotting out all outside noise as he worked on a laptop propped on his knees.

For a moment, Legs wanted to turn and flee, mortified to have chased after him across the sea, living for the moment yet again with the consequences certain to humiliate her. But her car was beached, and she had to tell him the truth about Kizzy. At least she’d beaten the redhead here. She just had to say her piece and leave as swiftly as possible by whatever means, even if that meant racing all the way back to Laois on foot. She had her running gear in the car, after all.

She looked for something to wear to cover the back of her neck, determined that he mustn’t see the heartfelt declaration she’d so foolishly had stamped there. She remembered Francis’s appalled face when she’d revealed the precious little stars on her ankle, and his pious pronouncement that all tattoos became labels of regret one day. No doubt he’d derive great satisfaction from her current situation. But she was determined to keep her cool and maintain her dignity. She would even give him the ring she’d had engraved to replace the signet with the Kelly family crest that had gone over the cliff at Farcombe the night he’d rescued her. It would be her parting gesture, a reminder that he’d thought her life worth saving once, even if he could never share it.

Collecting a fluffy pink polo-necked jumper from the back seat of her car and dragging it over her head, she pulled a small box from her glove compartment and she set out around the lip of the quarry.

She was pouring with sweat by the time she reached him, the horse starting back in alarm to find another human penetrating this remote spot.

Byrne looked up and pulled out the earphones, equally surprised, dark eyes stretched wide. ‘Are you going to tell me you’re a ghost again?’

Legs wiped the sweat angrily from her face, ‘Of course not.’

‘How on earth did you get up here?’

‘I drove.’ She nodded across to the Tolly car, now a dusty wreck poking from a huge pothole at a jaunty angle as though abandoned there by teenage joy-riders.

‘Looks like it could use a valet.’ He raised his eyebrows and then closed his laptop, casting it aside on top of a copy of
Finnegan’s Wake.

Legs was overheating fast. She felt faint being so close to him again. ‘I have to tell you something important. It’s too personal for an email or call.’

He looked up at her, his face shaded by his hand as he squinted against the sun. ‘Isn’t an announcement in the
Telegraph
more standard practice?’

She stared at him dumbly, guessing he must think she was here on festival business. This was going to be tougher than she’d imagined. Just looking at him was turning her inside out, and her polo-neck was suffocating her. She was starting to sway dizzily, like a Carpenters fan listening to ‘Close to You’.

‘Here, sit down.’ He patted the ground beside him. ‘This sun’s punishing today. You look dressed for the arctic.’

‘I’m fine!’ She perched awkwardly beside him, grateful at least that he was being quite amicable. She’d expected him to shout at her to go away. As long as she could curb her own emotions and her mood-swinging desire to both kiss and punch him, she’d be fine. She simply had to make her point in a straightforward, unemotional way:

‘It’s about Kizzy. She’s on her way up here right now; your dad doesn’t think she’ll make it in her high heels, but she’s very determined. She’s here in Ireland with Conrad to talk you back to Farcombe; that is Kizzy thinks she’s going to meet Gordon but as soon as she sees you she’ll realise you’re Jago Byrne, Poppy’s son. And Conrad doesn’t know you’re Poppy’s son at all, but he will as soon as Kizzy puts the two of you together. And Kizzy might even try to seduce you – in fact I’m pretty certain she will –
but you mustn’t let that happen because what neither of you know is that—’

He put his finger up to her lips to silence her, making Legs’ mouth so tingly then numb with longing she felt as though she’d kissed a nettle leaf. ‘Breathe, Legs.’

Realising that she was starting to hyperventilate, Legs went even hotter and started to pant. Even her eyes were sweating. She could see Byrne’s concerned face swimming in front of her, dark brows lowered. He probably thinks I’m ill again, she realised in horror; first pneumonia, now swamp fever. She didn’t want to come across as sickly. She wanted to be cool and calm as she relayed the truth about Kizzy before departing with her dignity intact, possibly elbowing him over the quarry precipice as she went.

‘Let’s get that jumper off. Ridiculous thing to wear on a day like this.’ He reached out to haul it up over her head.

‘No!’ Legs protested, but her face was already surrounded by pink mohair and it was too late as Byrne tugged it off, almost removing her ears in the process.

Even though she leapt away as fast as she could, he still caught sight of the reddened skin at the top of her spine. ‘What’s this? Have you hurt yourself?’

‘It’s nothing!’ She covered it with her hair, edging further away from him.

He sighed, casting another wary look. ‘So what exactly is it you’ve come here to tell me? You lost me somewhere after the high heels bit.’

‘Kizzy’s your sister, Byrne. Half-sister.’

He stared at her incredulously. ‘She’s Poppy’s daughter?’

‘No. Her birth mother is definitely Liz Delamere. Kizzy has no idea who her real father is, but Liz told me it’s Brooke.’

‘Ah.’ He tipped his head back against the tree and looked up, closing one eye as he took in the implications of this. Then he suddenly laughed. ‘Dad’s longed for a bigger brood all his life and I
always hated being an only child, so I guess we just got what we both wanted. Thank you for telling me.’

Legs didn’t know what to say. She’d expected him to seethe with anger in classic Byrne fashion, berating his irresponsible father and mad Liz for forsaking him just as her mother had with Hector. Instead, he shook his head in bewildered delight and laughed again.

‘Thin Lizzie the conspiracist. Who’d have guessed? She can’t have been much more than a child back then. I wish I could remember her better. I know she made Dad laugh, which was an amazing thing. There had never been much laughter at Nevermore before that.’

‘Oh, she’s still quite a joker,’ Legs muttered. ‘We had a hilarious time on the cliff’s edge. Shame you climbed up to put an end to the fun really. It was all downhill from there that night.’ Tears were welling again as she thought about following him here to Ireland. Stop it, she told herself. Don’t go there. You’ve said all you need to, and now you can give him the ring and go before you make a fool of yourself by shouting at him for deceiving you into loving him.

But she stayed glued to her rocky perch, unable to tear herself away as Byrne looked out across the quarry. ‘This is where I taught myself to climb,’ he told her. ‘I’d come here after school as a teenager and worked my way up those walls from every approach, sometimes in the pitch dark.’

Still caught between fury and fascination, she followed his gaze across the sheer stone sides and imagined how dangerous it must have been navigating them in total darkness.

‘It made me feel alive, that huge adrenalin rush; it was one of the only things that really moved me. Inevitably I fell off a few times, and one day I smashed up my leg and ribs so badly, I was laid up in bed over a month. Dad was livid, as you can imagine. I might have died here if the local hunt hadn’t found me, and of course he ranted and raged about me ending up in a wheelchair
like him. That’s when I started writing, stuck in that bed with my leg in plaster. Then Dad bought me a laptop for my seventeenth birthday and I didn’t look back. After that, I came here to put Ptolemy in dire straits.’ He packed his laptop into a courier’s bag.

Legs didn’t trust herself to speak. Anger kept bubbling up inside her like boiling caramel then dying back just as fast, knowing that she was hearing a story that had probably never been shared. Counting back, she realised that she’d still been at university when the first Ptolemy Finch book came out, a pretentious undergraduate who recited Eliot down the phone to Francis while Jago was already a published author.

‘This is Byrne land,’ he was saying. ‘The family used to make their money from stone until the quarry was closed in the seventies. After that, the farm had to pay its way and it was always a struggle, especially once Dad, me and the horses arrived. Nan’s husband Mal is a generous man, and he never complained once, but it’s amazing to be able to put something back. They’ve got it just how they like it now; even Nan agrees that the front lawn can’t take another ornamental Greek urn, which is an anagnorisis I thought I’d never see.’

So the footballers’wives perfection and garish potted petunias weren’t to his taste, she realised. His wife certainly seemed to love them though, she thought wretchedly. The caramel was boiling over again, spilling into the cooking flames in a cloud of black smoke.

‘Does Zina know you’re Gordon Lapis?’ She struggled to keep her voice level.

To her astonishment, he didn’t seem to find anything odd in the question, shaking his head: ‘Just Dad. He’s known from the start; I had to explain who Conrad was and why he calls me Gordon when he comes here, plus all the letters that come addressed to Mr Lapis. He covers for me when I need him to, but we both find it’s easier to forget about Ptolemy Finch while we’re
here. Coolbaragh’s about the horses, not little winged soothsayers. None of the rest of the family knows. They think I’m some sort of internet entrepreneur.’

‘A paragon of virtual,’ Legs hissed, eyeing up the distance between Jago and the quarry edge and wondering how hard she’d have work to drag him there after she’d hit him over the head with his laptop.

The caramel anger was pouring in hot black rivers like lava now, she thought about poor, heavily pregnant Zina, totally unaware that she was married to the man behind a mega-selling global franchise. How could she not know? It was like Picasso’s wife believing his paint-stained fingers were down to a busy day mixing Dulux in B&Q.

‘I must go.’ She stood up quickly, realising she was going to make a huge, wailing, violent, tattooed spectacle of herself if she stayed a moment longer. Fumbling in her haste to cover the evidence, she knotted the polo neck high around her shoulders, taking care to keep her hair underneath so her neck was totally covered.

‘That car doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.’ He stood up too.

‘I’m sure I can get it out.’ She fished in her pockets and pulled out the little box, thrusting it at him before she could change her mind. ‘I remember you telling me rings are like a part of your heart you give away. This is for you because I lost yours, and it was never really mine to keep. I hope it works out with Kizzy and Conrad and Zina and the baby everything.’ Saying it out loud hurt like a body blow.

Not giving him time to answer, she hurried back to her car, stumbling and tripping and almost pitching into the quarry in her haste to get away and to keep the tears stemmed until she was out of sight.

But Byrne was right. The car was stuck fast and no amount of furious revving could make the wheels gain traction. She simply created a dust cloud. In despair, she grabbed her phone, but she had nobody to call for help and no signal.

Eventually, he rode up through the dusty heat haze like a Wild
West pony express, despatch bag slung across his back. ‘I’ll give you a lift back to the farm. We’ll come up with dad’s truck and pull it out later.’