She curled up into a foetal position, her arms clasped round her knees, shivering. He might have gone now, but he would come back. She knew it. She had thought she was getting over it, that it had faded like a bruise, all but disappeared. Seeing him today had brought it all back, though. The nightmare pressed at the borders of her mind, and she was afraid of falling asleep again.
Just now, for instance, when he’d touched her, pushed his finger down inside her dress, she had felt dizzy; she felt her heart pick up speed now at the very memory.
Her skin burned; she shut her eyes. No! She mustn’t think about that.
But she couldn’t shut it out of her head. It kept returning—the intense sensation when his finger slid down the cleft between her breasts, his skin cool, yet leaving such heat everywhere it touched.
It had all happened in a second. He had been quick to disengage the locket, yet to her it had seemed an endless time; it had seemed to happen in slow motion. The tiny golden hairs on her skin had been drawn upwards to his flesh, as if he magnetised them. Her nerve-endings had gone on vibrating after his finger moved away. She had felt every sensation with such incredible intensity.
Even remembering it was unbearable.
She put her hands over her face, groaning. Ever since that night on the beach she had been terrified of any sort of intimacy, mental or physical. She preferred to keep people at a distance, shut them out, hide from them. In the garden just now, though, Patrick Ogilvie had invaded her head, as well as her body space; he had touched her, in some way or another, over and over again, probing her mind, asking her questions she did not want to answer, picking up every instinct of her senses.
She didn’t know which was worse—the mental or the physical invasions. They had only been together in the garden for such a short time, yet she couldn’t count the number of ways he had come too close. He had carried her in his arms when she fainted. She had woken up to find him holding her, his body touching hers, his face bending over her. Later he had slid that cool finger down inside her dress and she had felt him watching her while he did that, assessing her reactions.
His blue eyes were so quick and shrewd; at times she had felt as if they could see right through her, read her thoughts—and she hadn’t only imagined it, because later he had actually said so, said he could tell what she was feeling, guess what she was thinking.
He had made her angry, frightened her, worried her—in half an hour he had come closer to her in every possible way than anyone else had ever done over the past two years, and Antonia found that deeply disturbing.
* * *
She left for the palazzo earlier than usual next day and was out until late in the afternoon. If Patrick Ogilvie had been to the house in the interim she saw no sign of it. He would have found nobody in if he had come, and the house would have been well locked up.
She had been very busy all day, sorting through a large trunk containing the usual muddle of objects—some very valuable books had been pushed in with a set of eighteenth-century Chinese plates, several early wax cylinder recordings, a portfolio of Victorian anatomical drawings of horses, dogs and other animals, thought to be by Munnings, business papers and letters.
Patsy Devvon came down to look at them, drifting into the room in a blue silk harem suit, a flowing jacket over trousers that ballooned at the thigh then came in and were tied at the ankle. It suited her; she had an unerring sense of what did suit her. In her forties, very slim, relentlessly dieting all the time, with pale blue eyes and hair she now had to dye to keep it blonde, she looked far younger than her age, and dressed to maintain the illusion.
‘I’ve no idea where all that came from,’ she said, peering at the piles of objects Antonia had laid out on a table. ‘Where’s the trunk they were in?’ She inspected that, saw a torn label on one side. ‘I think we bought that at an auction in Paris,’ she said. ‘Yes, that address is a French one, that’s the auctioneer’s address. Gus was always buying stuff when we were away, and having it freighted here. He loved the flea market in Paris, could never resist browsing around the stalls and buying lots of that old junk. Is any of this valuable?’
‘I think the wax cylinders are probably the most valuable; they’re very rare, and I can’t play them to find out who is on them, because we would need the right machine for that, but if they are recordings of someone famous they could be worth more than any of these other things. We’ll have to have them assessed by an expert, which I’m not.’
‘But you’re so clever even knowing what they are,’ Patsy said, picking up one of the cylinders and turning it around, staring at it curiously. ‘I wouldn’t have had a clue, honey. Funny-looking things, aren’t they?’
She had been Gus Devvon’s fourth wife, and years younger than her husband, who had been sixty when he married Patsy. Gus had collected women, as he collected objets d’art; none of his previous wives had lasted very long—he had lost interest in them quite fast—but his marriage to Patsy had lasted nearly twenty years, until his death, and although Antonia hadn’t known Mr Devvon she could understand how Patsy had held him longer than any of his previous wives. She was a lively, warm-hearted, friendly woman and Antonia was very fond of her. So was Cy. Patsy was as close as a sister to him, and she had welcomed Antonia into their family.
‘Well, you deal with it, honey,’ she told Antonia, smiling vaguely as she drifted away again. ‘I’m off to lunch with Amy Patterson; see you later.’
Antonia had her lunch on a tray in the dusty, echoing cavern of a room she was working in on the top floor of the old building. It was a simple meal: melon, followed by pasta with a bacon and
mushroom sauce. Lucia came to get the tray later and lingered to inspect what Antonia had been doing so far.
‘What rubbish that man bought! I would just throw it out if I had my way!’
‘Then you’d be throwing away large sums of money,’ Antonia told her, and was amused by the quick, sharp look she got.
‘It’s really valuable? All that dusty old stuff?’
‘What you see on the table is worth thousands, at least,’ Antonia assured her, and Lucia pulled a face.
‘Crazy.’ She picked up the tray, stared at the half-eaten pasta. ‘You didn’t even touch any of this!’
‘I did; it was lovely,’ Antonia hurriedly said. ‘But there was far too much for me.’
‘You don’t eat enough to keep a mouse alive! No wonder you’re so pale and skinny. I can’t think what Mr Cy sees in you. What he needs is a woman with red blood in her veins, not a pallid little thing like you.’
Lucia was not only Mrs Devvon’s maid; she ran the house with a rod of iron. There were several other servants who cleaned and cooked; Lucia gave them their orders and kept a beady eye on them, as she did on Antonia, and she believed she had the right to comment on anything that concerned the Devvon family.
Antonia bit her lip and didn’t retort. Lucia gave her a grim little smile of satisfaction, and shuffled away again. Antonia got on with her work, feeling oddly uneasy all the time, wishing Cy would ring. He made her feel so safe.