Barbara Erskine - Kingdom of Shadows

‘No!’

‘No?’ He stared at her.

‘No, Paul. I won’t contest it. She’s right. You’re a wealthy man. My brother had nothing, nothing at all. He never even had a father. Daddy died before he was born!’

‘He had Archie –’

‘Archie hates us. He has always resented us for being there; he thinks of us as coming between him and Mummy – you know that as well as I do.’ Clare’s eyes were blazing. ‘No, that money is James’s by right. I have everything I want.’ Abruptly her anger subsided. She put her hands on Paul’s shoulders. ‘Come on, darling. We don’t need any more money.’

Paul caught her wrists and pushed them away. ‘Everyone needs more money, Clare. Duncairn’s worth nothing .’ His voice was harsh.

For a moment she stared at him, shocked, then she turned away and walked over to the window, staring down over the rooftops at the back of the hotel towards the distant Firth of Forth. ‘Well, it’s worth everything to me,’ she whispered. ‘Everything. Don’t you understand?’ She spun round. ‘It’s been in our family for seven hundred years!’

‘Then perhaps James ought to have it as well. He is, after all, the heir to whatever pretensions your family have to gentility, not you.’ Paul’s voice was deliberately cruel.

She gasped. ‘Paul!’

‘Well, it’s true. Or are you claiming some feminist right of inheritance because you are the eldest? Perhaps it is I who should have taken your surname when we married!’ His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

‘Well, at least it’s a name to be proud of!’ she flashed back at him, not caring suddenly what she said any more. ‘After all, what are you? The third son of a family who can’t trace their ancestors back more than one generation! I never could understand why you were so anxious for an heir. He’ll have nothing to inherit from you!’

‘Apart from the wealth which everyone keeps talking about, you mean,’ said Paul. His voice was ice-cold.

Clare stared at him, furious to find herself near to tears. To conceal them she turned back to her scrutiny of the rooftops, watching with anguished intensity a gull wheeling around the distant chimney-pots. She hunched her shoulders.

‘Apart from your wealth,’ she echoed.

‘So. At least I now know what you think of me,’ he went on quietly. ‘May I enquire why you lowered yourself so far as to marry me?’

‘You know why I married you!’ She didn’t turn round. ‘I loved you.’

‘Loved, I notice. Not love.’

‘Love, then! Paul, what’s the matter? What’s wrong with you? Why are you like this?’ Pushing herself away from the windowsill, she came to stand in front of him.

He stared at her. Her pale face with the expressive grey eyes and the dark frame of her hair never failed to make him catch his breath with its frail beauty. The frailness, of course, was misleading. Clare was as tough as old boots, even if she was a bit highly strung. He noted the tears on her cheeks now and felt a sudden twinge of contrition. He hadn’t meant to hurt her.

It was just that the disappointment and the anxiety had been so intense. Dear God! how he had relied on that money. It was to have been his life-line. His only way out of the hell he had found himself in. He could feel the sweat starting out on the palms of his hands just at the thought of what had happened. Abruptly he began to peel off his jacket. ‘If we’re to meet the others in the bar before lunch we’d better get ready,’ he said abruptly, throwing it down on the bed. ‘No doubt your brother will want to buy a bottle or two of Bolly to celebrate his little windfall.’

‘Paul –’

‘No, Clare. Don’t say another word. Not another word. I think you’ve said enough.’ Pulling off his tie he threw that down too before disappearing into the bathroom and slamming the door.

Clare stared after him in silence. She could feel herself beginning to shake. She was overwhelmed by a sense of utter loneliness, as though she had found herself suddenly in the room with a stranger. A stranger of whom she had been for a moment almost afraid.

Her gaze fell on the dressing-table where earlier he had thrown his car keys. Less than a minute later she had grabbed them and, with a glance at the closed bathroom door, let herself out of the room, and begun to make her way quickly down the hallway.

Dazzled by the blaze of the hot afternoon sun Clare had stared around at the castle ruins. Behind her the cooling engine of the British racing green XJS ticked quietly, pulled up on the grass at the side of the track. The cool wind carried the scent of the sea, sweetened by the dog roses which climbed the crumbling grey walls. Slowly she walked out along the promontory towards the cliff and cautiously peered over. Perhaps a hundred years ago railings had been put up across the massive breach in the walls where the seaward stones had begun to fall down the cliffs, but now they sagged drunkenly over the gap. She looked down towards the water, grey-blue and opaque, cold, even beneath the blazing June sky, and watched the gulls circling in the air currents. All round her the sound of birds was deafening; kittiwakes on the cliffs, their cries echoing off the granite shell of the tower, the yelp of a jackdaw hidden somewhere in the crumbling walls, a blackbird high in the rowan which grew in the space between the walls where once the chapel had stood.

The castle was deserted. Well off the tourist trail, and unsignposted, only the visitors to the hotel ever came here, and there were few enough of them. She glanced over her shoulder towards the grey stone walls of the Duncairn Hotel, nestling behind the deep windbreak of birch and fir. It was making a loss, that she knew, but it would be hard, very hard, to bring herself to change things. She loved Duncairn for its solitude, with the distant low silhouette of the hills behind it. A successful hotel would end that solitude overnight.

Slowly she strolled over the grass. In the centre of the walls someone had mown it roughly, just enough to make for easy walking amongst the ruins – Jack Grant at the hotel, she supposed. She would stay the night there before driving back to Edinburgh. It would give both her and Paul time to cool off. And she couldn’t face going back to Airdlie. Not now it belonged to James.

She was no longer shaking. She had expended her fury and her pain by hurtling up the motorway at over a hundred miles an hour, not looking or caring if the police were patrolling, and then on the long narrow road north. But she was still tense, still depressed after the ordeal of the formal reading of the will, knowing that she had been the only person in the room who truly and desperately mourned Margaret Gordon.

She jumped as a shadow fell across the grass near her and looked wildly round, but it was nothing: just the wind flexing and tossing the graceful branches of a birch. Slowly she began to walk round, every now and then reaching out to touch the warm, grey-pink stones of the castle walls as if greeting them ritually, taking possession of her inheritance. Picking her way through the thistles and rank grass and wild flowers towards the stone steps she climbed precariously up to what remained of the second floor of the old keep. The floor had half collapsed and two of the walls had gone, but one high rounded window on the seaward side remained intact and she made her way carefully to it, standing in the embrasure, her hands on the sun-warmed sill, looking out to sea. There was a bank of mist out over the water now, pearly in the diffused sunlight.

A man was standing watching her from about twenty feet away, leaning against the crumbled remains of the eastern tower. Instinctively she drew back into the shadow of the window arch. He must be a guest at the hotel, she supposed. She studied him covertly, noting the patched khaki sweater, the threadbare cords and the more-than-serviceable binoculars slung around his neck. He was a tall man, in his mid-thirties perhaps, good-looking in the rugged Scots fashion; very fair. And he was an intrusion. She felt a wave of resentment at his presence. She needed to be alone. Angrily, she turned back and descended the steps once more, conscious that she was in full view of him. She wondered suddenly what he must make of her, still dressed for the Edinburgh solicitor in a dark blue silk dress with court shoes, scrambling over the ruins. Only her hair was appropriate now, torn from its neat style by the wind and whipped into wild tangled curls.