Вайолет Уинспир: Dragon Bay

She refolded his letter with a thoughtful expression, and was about to turn out the night-lamp when her gaze was caught by a movement of the door handle. It turned to the right, then to the left, then a voice spoke against the panels. ‘I know you are awake, Kara, I can see the light beneath the door. May I come in and talk to you?’

Kara hesitated, feeling that she had borne all she could for one evening of the Savidge temperament. Then with a sigh she slid out of bed and shrugged into her robe. She turned the key in the lock and opened the door, and Clare stood looking at her with inquiring eyes. ‘I–I know it’s late,’ she said in some agitation, ‘but I had to talk to someone or go out of my mind.’

‘Please come in.’ Kara noticed with concern that Clare, her make-up removed and clad in a long silk dressing-robe, was unusually pale with shadows haunting her eyes. She sank down in a basket chair and as Kara closed the door she saw a tremor shake Clare from head to foot.

‘I will switch on the electric fire.’ Kara was glad herself of the glow of the bar and the warmth. She sat on the foot of the divan and studied Clare, who huddled forward, her long-fingered hands stretched to the fire.

‘I was going crazy all alone in my room, listening to the sea. That damnable pounding, it gets into your head. "No peace for you. No peace for the wicked," it seems to keep drumming. Do you hear it, Kara? Does it worry you?’

Kara stared at Clare and felt the pounding of her heart, and the distant pounding of the waves. ‘Why do you stay here, Clare? Anyone can see you are not happy, and you said the other day that your work was not going well.’

‘Why do any of us stay?’ Clare asked moodily. ‘Why do you stay, Kara? You lock your bedroom door, against Lucan I presume?’

Kara caught her breath, lost for an excuse to offer his sister.

‘So soon?’ Clare said cynically. ‘Has the gilt worn off the wedding vows? I have thought for days that you have looked unhappy, my dear, and I had such hopes that Lucan would settle down and be a good husband to you. You are like a deep-running brook, Kara, quiet on the surface but with undercurrents. Lucan needs those — he needs passion.’

Kara put her hands up against her cheeks and remembered his urgent arms and his kisses. If only love was all that Lucan needed, wanted — but he wanted what it was beyond her to give.

‘One tries,’ she whispered. ‘I tried — hoped to make him care, but other things stand between us.’

‘Caprice being one of them?’ Clare said.

Kara nodded, her feet curled beneath her, her eyes big and dark in her pointed face. ‘He told me of his trip to Paris, and his intention of proposing marriage to her. For some reason he left without asking her to be his wife— and then at Fort Fernand he met me and—’

‘You fell in love with him.’ Clare spoke the words over which Kara hesitated.

‘What is love?’ Kara asked in bewilderment. ‘I ran away from the Greek island where everyone knew I loved a young man named Nikos. I thought it love, and found it was something less. Nikos and I were dear companions, with no danger or excitement to learn from each other. I know that now, but at the time I was so blind to it. So very young.’

‘Yes, young,’ Clare echoed, the firelight gleaming on her tawny hair, gathered back from her temples, and her long neck. A lovely neck, showing through the opening of her silk robe the Venus crease which is said to denote a woman of strong passions. Yet Clare vowed she was cool, even heartless.

Their glances met and held, and Kara saw not coolness but anguish in Clare’s grey eyes.

‘What is wrong?’ Kara asked. ‘Do you care about hurting Nils?’

‘Perhaps.’ Clare rose to her feet and the silk robe sculptured the long, lovely lines of her figure. Her gaze dwelt on the door that separated this room from the one in which Rue was sleeping. ‘Is she fast asleep?’ Clare asked.

Kara nodded.

‘May I — take a little peep at her?’ Clare looked strange, and curiously eager. ‘I am not sentimental about sleeping children, Kara, but I–I have a sudden longing to look at Rue while she sleeps.’

‘Be very quiet,’ Kara said, carefully opening the door of the big bedroom. Clare stepped in ahead of her and walked with care to the bedside. She stood looking down at the child, and then suddenly her hand was against her mouth and Kara heard a strangled sob as Clare hastened past her, into the other room again, where she sank down on her knees and buried her face in the cushion of the basket chair. She was weeping as Kara closed the door of Rue’s room and leaned her shoulders against the panels.

‘She’s mine,’ Clare sobbed. ‘My child — my Rue.’

T HE heart-stricken sounds of Clare’s weeping filled the room, and Kara hastened to her side and did what she could to ease this breaking down of the dam in Clare. This melting of the ice.

‘It’s true,’ Clare gasped, seated at last in the chair, beaten, exhausted after her storm of tears. Her hair had loosened from its nape knot and hung to her shoulders. ‘I couldn’t go on any longer without telling someone. For years I have hated the very thought of Rue being mine. I–I have never admitted being her mother even to Lucan, but he knows. He has given her the love I should have given. He has taken the blame for her birth.’

Clare reached out and her hands clung to Kara’s. ‘I had to tell you because you must often have thought he was irresponsible, a heartless rake who made love to girls and did not care about the consequences.’

‘Rue is eight years old,’ Kara said in a shocked voice. ‘For all that time you have let people believe a lie about your brother.’

‘Yes.’ Clare looked crushed, and the shadows beneath her wet eyes looked like bruises. ‘Rue always looked so much like him, right from her birth. She had those green eyes, that russet hair, the smile that wrenched at you with its devilment. It was that devilment in Lucan, that streak of damn-you-all, think me Cain or the devil himself, that made the deception a sure one. I knew that Lucan would never betray me.’

Clare’s eyes filled with tears that hung in her eyes. ‘As the years went by I don’t think he wanted people to think anything else but that Rue was his. lie loves her, and she adores him. Sometimes I think this makes Pryde a little envious, but children are like little animals; they don’t understand infirmity of the body.’

‘Has Pryde never suspected the real truth?’ Kara asked.

‘Pryde believes what everyone else believes, that Lucan is Rue’s father. He knows, as everyone else knows, that right from a boy Lucan had something about him that girls were irresistibly drawn to, like pins to a magnet. There were girls, of course, whose hearts he played around with, but I don’t think he ever broke one.’

Kara tautened when Clare said that, for what of her heart, her feelings — her body which he had hurt in the cane, and possessed at the beach house with a totality that had left no room for a moment’s tenderness?

‘You look at me with such big and inquiring eyes,’ Clare said with a sad smile. ‘Your face is all expression, Kara. In the strangest way you are one of the loveliest people I have ever seen. Your eyes are so alive. They reflect a candour I truly envy. They are full of heart.’

Their glances held and Kara knew that at last she was looking at the real Clare, a woman with a tempestuous heart which she had concealed for years behind a mask of self-sufficiency.

‘Yes,’ Clare murmured, as if reading her thoughts, ‘we all wear masks one way or another. When we have been hurt we need a mask to hide our scars, to conceal the secret passion we are ashamed of.’