Вайолет Уинспир - Dragon Bay

‘I thought you might like a hot rum punch.’ He handed her one of the tankards, and then stood looking down at Rue. ‘Still no change?’

‘A little while ago she seemed to stir when I touched her.’ Kara cradled the tankard in her hands and took a grateful sip of the spicy punch. The shadows of a moment ago were not to be feared when Lucan stood by to guard that small figure. ‘Stroke her hair, Lucan. I am sure she knows when you are here.’

His large hand was curiously gentle on the wings of bright hair. The child’s lips seemed to move, as if to murmur his name, and Kara knew beyond any doubt that the affinity between these two was of the blood, the senses, the very fibres of the heart. Why then had he let Pryde adopt what was his? Was it written in stone, or in Lucan’s heart blood that he must give everything to Pryde? Was that why he had made such angry love to her, breaking the amber beads as if he longed to break free of his brother’s house?

He stood by the night-lamp drinking his punch and there was something remote and melancholy about his profile. Kara was moved to touch him, to speak, but what after all could she say? She, who had sworn that if she had a child she would rear it as a stranger to him.

He kept her company through this second night and towards dawn, as she nodded in her chair, he made her go and take a rest on the divan in his room. Some time later he came to her, his hands warm on her shoulders ‘Wake up, Kara!’ There was a note of urgency in his voice. ‘Rue’s eyes are open, but she doesn’t seem to know where she is.’

He half lifted Kara off the divan and almost before her feet were in her slippers he was hustling her into the adjoining room. Yes, the child’s eyes were open, green and hazy as moss with the dawn dew on it. Eyes that gazed without recognition at Kara, dwelt thoughtfully on Lucan, then took in slowly the green-canopied bed, the wide windows filled with sea-light, and the dolls and lop-eared soft toys on the dressing table and other articles of furniture.

‘Ginger,’ she murmured.

No, Kara wanted to cry out. No, my dear, not that doll! Then Lucan shot a look at her, as if feeling her tension, and with clumsy hands she opened the drawer in which she had bundled the doll and took it out. She saw Lucan frown, and her hands were feeling all over the doll, desperately, as she walked to the bed with it.

‘Ginger!’ Rue reached for it with a smile of delight, and Kara had to give it to her and watch the child clasp it to her.

‘She remembers the doll,’ Lucan said, still frowning and puzzled.

‘It is probably a temporary amnesia,’ Kara reassured him.

Dr. Fabre was in complete agreement with Kara when he called in later that morning. The shock, he said. The blows caused by the falling plaster. It was little short of a miracle, hein, that the little one had not caught the full impact of the chandelier?

That russet-haired child, playing so innocently with her doll, would have been killed. The unspoken words hung in the air, and Kara saw Lucan glance about him with a trapped, leashed expression. He sensed like a wild, proud animal the danger in the air, and as yet he could not tell from what direction it came.

‘Kara,’ he said, after the doctor had gone, ‘come in here a moment.’ He drew her into the solarium, and the scent of the sea and the plants was a trifle dizzying. She sank down in one of the wicker chairs and was unaware of how small she looked, how large her eyes, how fragile and at the same time how indomitable she was. Kara Stephanos, in whom ran the blood of Greeks who had fought tooth and nail for what they loved.

A fine mist drifted over the sea below the solarium — on a morning such as this her brother had almost died, and she had sat with Domini through the waiting hours.

She glanced up at Lucan, this tall, bold-featured man who was her husband, and saw her tiny image reflected in his eyes as he bent down to her and rubbed some warmth into her cold hands. ‘I want to thank you for the way you care for Rue,’ he said, and his words were almost an echo of those used by Nikos a year ago. Words that sent a warning to heart; words that armoured her against this man who looked so troubled, so uncertain, so like a lost boy whose tousled hair needed stroking back from green eyes guarded by lashes with bronze tips to them.

‘Will you stay with her as much as possible?’ he asked, and she felt him fingering the gold band on her left hand. ‘My sister will sit with her while you rest — Clare owes me that,’ he added in a lower tone.

‘Now Rue is so much better, Clare will not be so — so unnerved by her. Clare is an artist and imaginative, and such people are never very good in sickrooms.’ Kara looked at him and felt her heart beat fast. Dare she confide in him about the doll she had found with a bodkin impaled in it? Or would he think that she was being over-imaginative? After all, it was bizarre to suggest that someone in the house was playing such tricks … using black magic.

Then the moment for telling had passed as there arose from the courtyard the impatient nicker of his stallion, saddled and ready for him to ride to the mill, where some new machinery was due in. The ring of hooves on the cobbles, the deep bark of the hound who always rode with him, drew Lucan’s attention to the time.

‘I must be off,’ he said, and he drew Kara to her feet and held her by the elbows as if to pull her into his embrace. But all he did was to brush an impersonal kiss across her cheekbone. Then he strode into the bedroom to Rue.

‘I will see you later, petite amie,’ Kara heard him say.

She touched her cheek where the passing warmth of his lips still lingered. Little sweetheart! Her eyes filled with tears. Little Rue. I must not mind that he loves you, and does not love me, she told herself with firmness.

During the next few days Rue grew much stronger. Her partial loss of memory was due, said the doctor, to her subconscious wish to blot out the moment when the chandelier had come crashing down towards her. Her mind needed a cushion to rest against and so it chose to make blank the things she could not yet face.

She told Kara that she had dreamed of falling off her swing. ‘Is that how I got hurt?’ she asked.

Kara thought it expedient to say yes. ‘Come, eat your breakfast,’ she coaxed. ‘If you eat every bit, then Dr. Fabre will let you get up for a few hours.’

The child’s appetite was jaded and Kara tempted her patiently with chocolate in a cup painted with birds, and scrambled egg with curls of pink ham. ‘Come on, cuckoo, open your mouth and let me pop in another titbit.’

The game proceeded until most of the plate was cleared, and then Kara set about straightening the room while Rue put on her heart-shaped wristwatch and the necklet of vari-coloured shells which Julius had made for her.

‘I am an Irish princess and now I am ready to receive homage from all my subjects. Bow to me instantly, you peasants.’ She flattened her knees and her row of dolls fell on their faces and she laughed with delight, her green eyes brighter than they had been for several days.

When Kara glanced over and smiled at her, she said:

‘Do you think I am like my father to look at?’

Kara’s heart skipped a beat, for since her accident the child called Lucan her father. At first she had not known who Kara was, and upon being told that Kara was Lucan’s wife she had said: ‘Did my own mother die a long time ago, and was my father sad for a long, long time before he married you, Kara?’

‘Well, darling, that is a question I don’t like to ask him,’ Kara had replied.

‘I suppose you keep wondering if he loved her better than he loves you.’ The childish candour had hurt without meaning to. ‘You are very good and kind, Kara. I expect my father married you for that reason.’