'It's not always a sin, you know,' he said, 'being greedy.'
I sent him a long, motherly look. 'You need to have a talk with my brother,' I advised him. 'Your soul's in mortal peril.'
Vivien sailed into the pub on a wave of energy and radiant good health, her fair hair whipped by the wind into a tangled mass of gold. 'Who's in mortal peril?' she asked, pausing beside our table with interest.
'I am,' Geoff informed her. 'Or at least, my soul is, according to Julia, here.'
Vivien nodded agreement. 'Past redemption, I should think,' she told him.
'Then another drink won't spoil it.' He drained his glass and held it up hopefully. 'That is, if you're serving.'
'You might give a girl a chance to get her coat off,' Vivien laughed, snatching the glass away from him. 'Have you missed me that much? I'd have thought Ned would be keeping you entertained,' she teased, and the barman glanced idly up from the pages of his newspaper, not missing a beat.
'You missed seeing me tap-dance, earlier,' he said dryly.
'Give over,' Vivien told him, slapping him on the arm as she passed. 'You'd have a coronary if you tried, and we both know it.' She pulled another pint for Geoff and came back around to join us at our window table.
'You're in a good mood, today,' I commented, and she grinned broadly, her eyes secretive.
'I have reason to be,' was all she would say, and no matter how hard we pressed her, we could not make her tell us where she'd been.
'She's probably out meeting some married man,' Geoff joked, as we made our way back up the road toward my house an hour or so later.
I looked at him, horrified, thinking more of Iain Sumner than of the moral implications. 'Oh, I hope not.'
'I'm joking,' Geoff explained, hugging my shoulders with a laugh. 'She'll tell us her secret, when she's ready to. What are your plans for the rest of the afternoon? You working?'
I nodded. 'I have to get the next batch of illustrations ready to send to my editor, or else she'll have my head. What about you?"
'I think I'll take a walk over and see what Iain's up to,' he said, looking off toward the river. 'I'll ring you later, okay?' He bent and kissed me swiftly and we parted, Geoff taking the smaller turning that led off to the right while I continued up the main road to my house.
The wind had been dropping steadily all afternoon, and by the time I reached my drive the air was almost still, and the heavy clouds hung overhead, unmoving, blotting out the sun. Despite the warmth, I shivered as I went round to the back door and fitted the key in the lock.
The kitchen was dark and deserted and cool, and I left the door partly open to let in the warmer outside air. Somewhere, a baby was crying, and the sound filtered into the room, faint but persistent. Dumping my keys on the table, I raised my hand to my forehead as another shiver struck me, bringing beads of perspiration to my skin.
The child's cry became a scream, behind me, and I lowered my hand to find Rachel watching me with concern.
'Does your head ache?' she asked.
It had a right to, I reasoned. Johnnie had been fussing steadily for the past hour, despite all Caroline's attempts to quiet him. But the truth was that my head did not ache—I had only been trying to clear my thoughts. I was about to tell Rachel so, when the kitchen door opened and my uncle came into the room, his expression black as a thunderstorm.
He had been out of humor these past few days, and we had all borne the brunt of it. Now, he turned the force of his displeasure upon his wife. 'Are you not accomplished enough, woman, to keep your own child from crying?'
Without thinking, I came to Caroline's defense. 'He is breaking a tooth,' I informed my uncle evenly. 'He cannot help the crying.'
I might have been invisible. Jabez Howard leaned closer to his wife, his expression calm. 'Shut the babe's mouth,' he advised her pleasantly, 'or I swear I'll shut it for you.'
Terrified, Caroline smothered the child against her breast, rocking back and forth in an agitated motion. As if he could sense the danger, John stopped crying. Satisfied, my uncle straightened and turned to look at me, his eyes frightening with the depth of their cruelty.
'Mariana,' he said, 'I would have squab for dinner. Go you to the dovecote and fetch me a bird.'
I looked at Rachel, and she rose cheerfully from her work, brushing her hands against her skirt. 'I'll go,' she offered, but my uncle stopped her with an upraised hand.
'I did not speak to you,' he told her, in a voice as smooth as honey. 'I spoke to Mariana. I would have her fetch me a bird, and I will wait here for her to deliver it dead into my hands. Tis time she learned how to take a life.'
My hands trembled and I placed them behind my back so he would not see my weakness. There was no help to be had from any quarter. Rachel's eyes held sympathy but she could not act, and Caroline was all but sobbing over her child in the corner by the hearth. Under my uncle's insistent gaze, I turned and went out into the sunlit yard, my heart a heavy weight within my chest.
Twenty-five
The dovecote stood to the back of the garden, a stout, square building of rough stone with a roof of wooden shingles, crowned with an open cupola. The pigeons entered and left through that cupola, always returning with unerring exactness to the dovecote, to raise generation upon generation of young in the dim and crowded nesting boxes. It was a highly efficient structure—a comfortable, cunning, and deadly trap.