CHAPTER ONE
‘SO YOU’RE really going to do it.’
‘I don’t see that I have much choice, after a letter like that,’ Maggie muttered through the biscuit she was munching.
The letter in question lay on the coffee-table where Maggie had placed it. It was written in a round, schoolgirlish hand, the letters neatly formed, much like her own handwriting at that age.
‘Mm,’ Lara, her flatmate, agreed, sipping the coffee Maggie had made them both. ‘But girls of that age are prone to exaggeration, you know. Are you sure the situation’s as dire as she says? What does she say, exactly?’ she added curiously.
‘Read it for yourself.’ Maggie got up, and Lara watched thoughtfully as her flatmate walked over to the small table. Maggie never ceased to fascinate her, even now, after the length of time they had known one another. There was something very compelling about Maggie: a power she herself wasn’t aware she possessed, a warmth that drew people to her. That she was beautiful as well seemed to be another unfair advantage fate had handed her. When they first met almost ten years ago, Lara had felt envious of the tall, slender redhead with her creamy skin and mysterious dark green eyes. Her envy had not lasted long. Although they were roughly the same age, Maggie had had a maturity about her, a sadness which Lara felt instinctively but had never been allowed to penetrate, Maggie being a very private person. She still possessed that slightly melancholy-tinged mystery, that aura of having withdrawn slightly from the rest of the world to a secret and inviolate place.
Maggie picked up the letter and handed it to her. Lara read it out loud, dark eyebrows lifted in faint amusement. ‘“Come home quickly. Something terrible has happened and we need you.” Oh, come on, Maggie,’ she exclaimed wryly. ‘You surely aren’t taking this seriously? If there was really something wrong, someone would have been in touch with you…a telephone call…’
‘No,’ Maggie told her fiercely, her expression changing from its normal one of sweetness to an unfamiliar hardness that made Lara’s eyes widen slightly. She and Maggie had known one another ever since Maggie had first arrived in London and, despite her red hair, Maggie was one of the most placid and gentle people she had ever known. Which was perhaps why she had opted out of the aggressive and demanding world of art and instead used her talents to provide herself with an excellent living illustrating books.
‘But surely someone would have got in touch with you,’ Lara protested. ‘Some older, more responsible member of your family.’ She groped in her memory for more concise details of Maggie’s family and couldn’t find any. In fact, until the letters in that round, schoolgirlish hand had started arriving eight months ago, Maggie hadn’t had any contact with her family at all.
She never talked about them other than to say that her parents were dead and that until their death she had lived with them in the Scottish borders where her father taught at a small private school. After their death she had gone to live with her grandfather, and Lara had rather gathered from her silence on the subject that the relationship had not been a happy one and that that was why, when she had come to London, Maggie had cut herself free of all her family ties.
And yet, from the time of the receipt of that first letter, forwarded to her by the publishers, and the others which had come after it, Maggie had changed. Not discernibly perhaps to those who didn’t really know her, but the difference in her was obvious to Lara and she was intrigued by it.
What was it that lay in her friend’s past that caused that unmistakable aura of restless tension to possess her when the letters arrived? What was it that made the swift hunger fly to her face when she opened the letters, only to be quickly controlled, as though she was desperately afraid of it being observed?
Since the arrival of the letters, Lara had realised what it was about Maggie that set her so unmistakably apart from others. It was the protective cloak of withdrawal she wore at all times to distance herself from others; she was a part of their lives at the same time as she was refusing to allow them to enter anything more than the periphery of hers. Almost as though she was afraid of allowing anyone to get too close to her.
A result of her parents’ death, perhaps, which must have come as a traumatic shock for a sensitive child in her early teens. But Lara suspected there was more to it than that, although she was puzzled to know exactly what.
In another woman she might have ascribed the withdrawal to an unhappy love affair, but Maggie had been seventeen when she’d arrived in London, and since then the men-friends she’d had all been kept strictly at arm’s length.
‘I’ll have to go up there,’ Maggie told her, ignoring her question, her forehead pleating into a frown of concentration. ‘I don’t know how long I’m likely to be gone, Lara. I’ll make arrangements about paying my share of the mortgage etc. while I’m gone. I’ll have to get in touch with my agent…’
As she listened to her, it came to Lara that something deeply buried inside her friend was almost glad of the excuse to go home. While she talked, underneath the anxiety there was a light in her eyes that Lara had never seen before, and with startled perception she realised that she had never really seen Maggie herself before. It was as though the real Maggie had suddenly stepped out from behind the shadow-figure she had used as concealment.
‘You know…you look like someone who’s just been told they’re no longer an outcast from paradise,’ she told her softly.
Instantly Maggie’s expression changed. Wariness crept into her face, her body tensing, as though she was waiting for a blow to fall, Lara recognised. Panic flared in her eyes, obliterating the wariness, and she said edgily, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Am I being?’ Lara asked her quietly. ‘We’ve known each other a long time, Maggie, but I think I can number on the fingers of one hand the times you’ve mentioned your home and family, and yet when you do…I wonder what you’re doing living here in London when you would so obviously rather be with them.’
She saw Maggie go pale as though she was going to be sick, her eyes betraying her shock, but, rather to Lara’s surprise, she made no protectively defensive rebuttal of her comment, saying only in a huskily tense voice, ‘I have to go back, Lara. Susie wouldn’t have written like that if they didn’t need me.’
Much as she longed to ask who ‘they’ were, Lara held her tongue. She could see that Maggie was perilously close to the edge of her self-control—another rather odd circumstance in a woman whose smilingly calm manner was normally such a feature of her personality.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll know how long you’ll be gone?’
‘No,’ Maggie agreed shortly, impatiently pushing her hair off her face with one of the narrow, elegant hands that Lara, with her more stocky frame, had once envied so desperately.
‘You’ll have to let Gerald know you’re going,’ Lara reminded her.
Gerald Menzies was the latest in a long line of men who had dated Maggie. Ten years older than her, he was urbane and sophisticated—divorced, with two sons at public school and an ex-wife who was determined that, divorce or not, she was still going to live in the manner to which Gerald’s wealth had accustomed her. He owned a small but extremely fashionable gallery, which was where Maggie had met him. Lara had introduced them, following an approach from Gerald to show some of her work.
Their affair, if indeed their relationship could be described as that, which Lara privately doubted, had endured for nearly ten months. They dated once or twice a week, but as far as Lara could tell Maggie felt no more for Gerald than she had done for any of the other men she had dated over the years.
No, Maggie had never been short of men willing to admire her, but as far as Lara knew she had never been deeply emotionally involved with any of them.
Indeed, at twenty-seven, they were probably the only two of their year at art school who were still not involved in a partnership of one sort or another. For Lara it was because she had ambitions that she knew were going to be hard enough to fulfil, without the added burden of a husband and potentially a family.
But for Maggie it was different. Maggie didn’t share her ambitions. Maggie was made for love, for giving and sharing, but Maggie held everyone who might want to share her life at bay. Carefully, gently, almost without them being aware of it—but keep them at bay she did.
‘I’ll telephone him once I’m there,’ she responded rather vaguely to Lara’s comment.
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Lara told her firmly. ‘Why don’t you telephone home and find out exactly what the problem is before you go haring up there?’
She could see that her suggestion didn’t find favour with her friend, and for a moment she almost disliked herself for making it. She could see that Maggie was struggling to find an acceptable explanation for her refusal, and, since there was something about Maggie that made you want to be kind to her, she found herself offering, ‘Or perhaps they aren’t on the phone?’
‘Yes…yes. They are, but…’ Maggie had her back to her, but now she turned round. ‘Yes, you’re right. I ought to ring.’
The telephone was on a small table beside the settee. She snatched up the receiver almost as though it was hot to the touch, Lara thought, watching her punch in the numbers with shaking fingers. Numbers which she had quite obviously had no trouble at all in remembering, Lara recognised on a wave of compassion.
She touched her arm, not really surprised to discover the tension of the muscles beneath the fine skin.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she whispered, but Maggie shook her head and grabbed hold of her, her colour suddenly very hectic and hot.
‘No…please stay.’
And, because Maggie was holding her so tightly, she was standing right beside the receiver when the ringing stopped and a harsh male voice said, ‘Deveril House?’ with a brusque impatience which, although rather off-putting, was surely no reason for Maggie to start shaking violently. The blood drained from her face and she slammed the receiver back down, holding it there while she shivered and trembled and the delicate bones of her small face stood out in proud relief.
Despite all the questions clamouring in her brain, Lara managed to restrain herself from saying anything other than a dry, ‘A rather formidable gentleman.’
‘My stepcousin,’ Maggie told her shakily. ‘Marcus Landersby.’
And then she dropped down on to the settee with her head in her hands, her body racked by such deep shudders that Lara was genuinely frightened for her. Whatever else Maggie was, she was most definitely not emotionally unstable, rather the opposite, and yet here she was virtually falling to pieces in front of Lara’s eyes. And the explanation for this so out-of-character behaviour lay, Lara was quite sure, with the owner of that enigmatic and grim voice.