CHARLOTTE LAMB - Dark Fate

Yet she hadn’t really been aware of anything that was happening on stage!

As the audience began to get up, Saskia ran for the exit, swerving round other people, pushing past anyone who blocked her way, muttering apologies. She didn’t look round to check if Jamie was following. She was too busy concentrating on getting out of the theatre before Domenico or one of his bodyguards caught up with her.

She was already a street away before Jamie panted up beside her. ‘Hey! You almost lost me! I stopped to explain to Terry that we were going back to the hotel; if he didn’t know we had left he would have panicked when he counted up heads and found two missing.’

She gave him an apologetic look. ‘Oh, you should have stayed; I’m sorry I’ve ruined your evening, Jamie! I know how much you were looking forward to La Traviata .’

‘It isn’t your fault; you didn’t ask to have toothache tonight!’ he said with a resigned sigh. ‘It’s just fate.’

No, he was wrong, Saskia thought. It wasn’t fate that had planned this evening; it was her own stupid folly. If she hadn’t come to Italy she would never have been in this theatre, she would never have seen Domenico again.

Yet...why had Domenico been there? Had fate been busy, after all?

They came to one of the rounded corners which were so typical of the labyrinthine streets of Venice which curled round and round like the inner spirals of an ear, and Jamie paused, looking up at a street name painted on the wall.

‘We go left here, don’t we?’

‘I can’t remember!’ Saskia looked around anxiously. She wanted to get as far away from the theatre as possible, quickly. She did not want Domenico to catch up with them.

Venice was such a maze of tiny streets and squares, alleys and canals. She hadn’t orientated herself properly yet, and, anyway, had a very poor sense of direction. She could get lost even when she had a map in her hand.

Jamie asked a man walking past and got directions; they started off again and as they approached their hotel at last she began to relax and feel safe. Domenico couldn’t catch up with them now.

She knew he had lost them completely. She didn’t need to see him to be sure of that. She could feel it; his anger, his frustration, as he realised she had got away again. He was searching the streets around the theatre, she sensed, as if she were watching him; moving with that prowling lope which was characteristic of his tall, loose-limbed, long-legged figure, while his eyes flicked, quick and intent, along alleyways, into empty, moonlit squares, hunting for her.

She knew what he was feeling, although not exactly what he was thinking. Domenico was too clever for her to be able to divine his thoughts. She could only tell what he was thinking when his feelings and his thoughts merged, were one. That rarely happened with Domenico, although with some people it often did.

She had discovered her gift many years ago, when she was a child; she hadn’t understood it then, and it was intermittent, so unpredictable, that sometimes months would go by before it happened again, that sudden flash of awareness of what someone else was thinking. Saskia had actually wondered if she was imagining it for a long time, until she reached puberty and it began to happen more frequently. At that age she had experimented with it, turned it almost into a party game for her friends, and been able to check that she was really picking up their thoughts and not imagining them.

Not that she could read everything in their minds, or do so at will, but if ever they were very angry, or upset, or frightened she could tune into those emotions, tell them what they were feeling exactly.

It always amazed them, it even frightened some, who would keep away from her after one such experience, seeing her as someone weird, alarming, even dangerous. People did not like the idea that you could read their minds and know what they were really thinking, even though she assured them that her glimpses of their minds were fragmentary and arbitrary.

‘It’s like picking up radio waves,’ she had told Domenico once. ‘Like voices coming out of the air. I hear what people are thinking...but only if they’re very excited or upset; it only happens when there’s an extra charge of electricity in their brains, I think, boosting the signals so that I can pick them up. Anger or fear or happiness...I always pick up strong emotions.’

‘I can see I’ll have to be careful of you,’ he had said, those grey eyes of his watching her sardonically, and she hadn’t needed to tune into his thoughts to know that he didn’t believe her, he thought it was all nonsense, crazy imagination on her part.

Domenico did not believe in other dimensions—in horoscopes or signs of the zodiac, fortune-telling, mind-reading, the tarot, palm-reading or second sight. Saskia didn’t believe in most of them, either; she had often tried to explain that she didn’t do any of those things, she didn’t even pick up other people’s thoughts voluntarily any more, she hadn’t since her teenage years. She would be glad to stop doing it, especially now, she found it more and more disturbing, but she didn’t know how to switch it off or shut it out.

‘It just comes,’ she had said. ‘Out of nowhere, whenever there’s a crisis, or someone is really upset.’

Domenico had shaken his head at her, his mouth crooked and incredulous. He hadn’t understood or believed a word of what she said; it didn’t fit in with his view of the universe or human nature.

He had a clear, diamond-hard, ice-cold mind; logical and rational. Domenico was a perfectionist, about himself, his job, even his life. Even her, she began to realise. Domenico expected her to be perfect, too.

Perfect in looks, in the way she dressed and behaved, in everything she did, the perfect wife for a powerful man like Domenico Alessandros and, he expected, in time, the perfect mother of his no doubt equally perfect children.

Perfection was a hard act to sustain. Saskia was bitterly aware of being human, of failing in some areas of her life, of weaknesses, inadequacies which she could do nothing about, and which, she began to be afraid, Domenico would never forgive in her, when he recognised her imperfection.

He was not a man who forgave easily, and she had failed him. That was why she had run away from him, dreading the icy contempt of his stare, the cutting lance of his voice. She wasn’t normally a coward, but Domenico’s anger had frightened her; still frightened her.

Two years away from him and yet she still couldn’t face him and she knew now, after picking up his feelings across the theatre, that Domenico still hadn’t forgiven her, either. His pain and rage were still as bitter.

‘You’re very quiet—is the pain worse?’ asked Jamie anxiously as they collected their keys from the reception clerk and turned towards the hotel lift.

She made a wry, self-mocking face. ‘Would you believe...I’ve got a headache now, as well?’ It was true; her head was thudding as if a little man were perched on top of it banging hammers. She groaned. ‘This isn’t my day, is it?’

‘You must take two of these pills with a glass of water, and then ring Room Service and ask them to bring you some hot chocolate to help you sleep,’ Jamie told her, handing her a packet of pain-killers, as the lift slowly moved up to the third floor on which their rooms were situated.

‘Thanks, Jamie. I’m sorry...’ she began again, and he shook his head at her, smiling.

‘Forget it. I’ve had toothache, I know how you must be feeling. I often think there’s no pain worse. My mother often says she’d rather have a baby than toothache any day!’

They walked along the hotel corridor quietly. As they reached her door Jamie paused and looked down at her. ‘Now, you get to bed as soon as you’ve drunk some hot chocolate; and if you don’t feel better in the morning we’ll make sure you see a doctor, or go back to that dentist and ask him to take another look at your tooth!’