Mariana (6 page)

Seeing me, her eyes widened in astonishment. 'My child! What are you doing abroad at this hour of the night? Come inside ... come inside and warm yourself!'

I was practically dragged from the threshold and deposited in front of a sputtering fire. I stared at the flames, feeling a hollow cold that the fire's warmth could not touch.

'My mother is ill,' I said.

The woman's eyes met mine, and there passed between us an anguished understanding more eloquent than words.

'When?' she asked.

'She was struck suddenly.' My voice was wooden. 'At dinner. Already she is fevered and knows me not. The servants sent me from the house.'

'They did wisely. You cannot return there.' She sat down, heavily, beside me. 'Nor can you stay here. My neighbors fear the sickness too much. They would make trouble.' She was silent a long moment, thinking. 'You will go to the country,' she said, at last. 'To your mother's elder brother.'

'My Uncle Jabez?" I bit my lip.
She knew the cause of my misgivings. 'He is not like your uncle John, God rest his gentle soul. But he is highly thought of, and an honest man. I will arrange a coach in the morning. Have you brought nothing away with you?'

I shook my head, and she frowned. 'You will need clothes. My girl Ellen is very like you in size. She may have something suitable.'

She rose from her stool and bustled toward the narrow stairway. I moved in feeble protest.

'Aunt Mary ..."

'Mariana.' Her voice was firm. 'This is the Lord's will. It is decided.'

The dancing fire flickered, dimmed, and disappeared.

I blinked. I was standing in Blackfriars Lane, among the rubble of construction, in a dark and empty lot. It had begun to rain, a cold, relentless spring rain, and a passing car spat up a freezing spray that sent a chill through my entire body and set my teeth chattering. A short block above me, yellow light and laughter mixed with music poured out onto the street through the open door of the local pub, and I turned my stumbling steps in that direction.

The cab company was quick to respond to my telephone call. Settling myself in the backseat for the short ride up to Islington, I shrank into a shadowed corner, well out of the light of the swiftly passing streetlamps.

Inside the cab, out of the rain, it wasn't cold at all; but I went on shivering and shivering, as if I would never get warm.

Six

‘Mariana’.
Vivien Wells rolled the name I around on her tongue like a wine of questionable vintage, tilting her fair head back with a frown. 'No, I don't remember hearing about anyone by that name. Do you, Ned?'

Without looking up from his newspaper, the barman shook his head, and Vivien carried on balancing the cash register.

"It's rather an unusual name, isn't it?' she said. 'Old-fashioned.'

'Funny you should put it like that.' I smiled into my glass of orange juice, and she looked up from her work with interest.

'Been finding old love letters tucked beneath the floorboards, have you?' she asked.

'Something like that. It's really not important.' I set my glass down on the bar and glanced toward the empty table in the corner.

‘I see the lads aren't in today.'

Vivien followed my gaze and smiled. 'It's early yet.'

I looked at my watch and saw, with some surprise, that it was only half-twelve. Admittedly a little too early for the
good people of Exbury to be heading off to the pub, especially on a Sunday. To me, though, it felt as if it were already the middle of the afternoon.

I had slept badly the night before. 'Slept,' perhaps, was not the right word, since I had spent most of the night staring wide-eyed into the darkness, watching the glowing digital display on the bedside clock count off the minutes, one by one.

I had relived those strange and frightening moments in Blackfriars Lane, turning them over and over in my mind until I felt I must be going mad. It was not the sort of experience I could talk to anyone about, really. Tom might have listened, but this was Sunday, and Tom was unobtainable on a Sunday. Over the breakfast table in the lonely London flat, Cheryl's cat had stared blankly back at me.

'What do you think?' I had asked it. 'Am I losing my mind?' The cat merely went on staring. No answers to be had from that quarter, I decided. And so I had come home.

Strange, I thought, how this little sleepy village had so quickly come to feel like home. Stranger still how London, where I had spent so many years, now seemed oddly foreign and remote.

'Nice to get back to town for a bit?' Vivien was asking me, tapping into my thoughts with uncanny accuracy.

'Do you know,' I said slowly, 'I was just thinking how nice it is to be
out
of London. To be home.'

She nodded her understanding. 'Live here long enough, and London starts to seem pretty unreal. People are so tense there. I
often
wonder how anyone can sustain that kind
of
tension, day after day. What do you think, Iain?'

I started in my seat, and turned. As always, I had not heard his approach.

'Me? I've no fondness for London,' Iain Sumner said, leaning an elbow on the bar and crossing one heavily booted foot over the other.

'You move like a damned cat,' I accused him peevishly,
my nerves raw from lack of sleep. He turned his head to look at me, raising an inscrutable eyebrow.

'I'm sorry,' he said evenly. 'D'ye want me to whistle, or something, to let you know I'm coming?'

'It'd be a thought.' Vivien laughed, her blue eyes dancing. I had the distinct impression that she liked Iain Sumner very much. 'You want your usual poison?'

'Aye,' he nodded, watching as she poured him a foaming dark pint of bitter. He drew a crumpled packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt, shook one loose, and looked inquiringly at me. 'D'ye mind?'

'If you smoke, you mean?' I shook my head. 'Not at all'

'Thanks.' He lit the cigarette, cupping the match in his soil-stained fingers and ignoring Vivien's disapproving look.

'I thought you gave that up,' she said.

'Aye. So does my mother.' He met her eyes innocently. 'I'm on an errand, as it happens, from the Hall. Geoff says he's found all the papers you were asking about, the ones he used to research the manor's history, and would you like to invite him over for coffee this evening, so he can show the stuff to you and Julia, here.'

'Would I like to invite him over? Of all the cheek!' Vivien smiled broadly. 'What, are peasants not allowed up to the Hall on Sundays?'

Iain raised his pint and shrugged. 'More likely the cleaner's not been in lately. You know Geoff. And he made quite a mess hunting
about for
those papers.'

'All right,' Vivien capitulated, 'tell him to consider himself invited. That is, if Julia's free this evening. Are you?'

I nodded.

'Good. Shall we say seven o'clock? Iain?'

His eyebrows rose again. 'Am I invited as well?'

'You're always invited,' she told him.

'You'd best be feeding me, then.'

'I'll make sandwiches,' Vivien promised solemnly. 'By the way, does the name Mariana mean anything to you?'

'Shakespeare,' was his instant, and unexpected, response.
'Shakespeare?' I echoed, and he nodded.

'Angelo's sneaky fiancée in
Measure for Measure'

'Oh.'

'Should it have meant something else?'

'It's nothing, really,' I said, I just came across the name in a ... letter, when I was cleaning up, and wondered if anyone knew who she was.' No one noticed my little stumble over the lie.

'Well, I'm probably not the best person to ask about things like that,' Iain conceded, with a slight smile. "Your Aunt Freda might know,' he told Vivien. 'Or one of the lads.' He nodded toward the empty table in the corner.

'It's really not important,' I said again. I was almost sorry that I'd asked Vivien about it in the first place. After all, my strange experience in Blackfriars Lane last night might simply have been the product of too much drink, or too much stress ... or some latent thread of insanity that was woven into the fabric of my ancestry. Either way, the chances were slim that the young woman Mariana and her fussing Aunt Mary had ever existed. At least, I preferred to think so. Because if there really
had
been a Mariana, then that would mean that I---

'Right.' Iain set his empty glass down on the bar with a satisfied thump, interrupting my thoughts. 'I'm off.'

'You won't forget to deliver my message to Geoff?' Vivien asked, and Iain turned at the door.

'No, I won't forget to deliver your message to Geoff. You know,' he said dourly, 'one or the other of you might learn to use the telephone, and save my aching legs.'

'The walk'll do you good,' she shot back.

'No doubt. I'll see you both tonight, then.'

'He's really a wonderful guy,' Vivien said, as the door banged shut behind him.

'And he reads Shakespeare.'

'That surprised you, did it? Iain read English at Cambridge, believe it or not. That's how he and Geoff met each other.'

'Really? And now he keeps sheep?'

'Mmm. He's a farmer at heart, is Iain. He could have done a lot of things with his life—I mean, he's fairly well set financially, and he's bloody brilliant, when he wants
to
be. But I think he's happiest mucking around in the dirt.'

'And what did Geoffrey de Mornay study at Cambridge?' I asked her, with what I hoped was the right degree of nonchalance.

"Politics, I think. Not that he needed to. There never was much question where Geoff's future was concerned.' She smiled. 'His grandfather started Morland Electronics.'

'I sec.' It was a bit of a jolt. The blood-red Morland logo was nearly as recognizable as the silhouette of Stonehenge, and almost as awe inspiring. From a small wartime company producing radio equipment, Morland had grown into one of the largest of Britain's multinational firms. Its annual earnings, I guessed, must amount to billions of pounds.

'You haven't met him yet, have you?' Vivien asked.

'Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. Last Thursday evening. We sort of bumped into each other in the lane behind the church.'

'Did
you, now? Funny he didn't mention it.' She eyed me curiously. 'Damn good-looking, isn't he? I often think it isn't fair, one person having all that money and a face like that.'

'I imagine he's got every girl in the village chasing after him,' I said. It was a shameless fishing expedition, and Vivien smiled again.

‘I chased him, myself,' she admitted, 'when I was at school. You think he's something
BOW,
you ought to have seen him then. He'd been five years in California and he had a smashing tan, even spoke with a bit of an American accent.' She half closed her eyes, appreciatively. 'But of course, he lost that rather quickly. Cambridge knocked it out
of
him.'

'California?' That surprised me. 'What was he doing there?'
'Geoff's parents divorced, when he was eleven. His mother went off with someone else, and Geoff went to America with his father. Morland has a big office there, I gather, near San Francisco. Anyway, Geoff was sixteen when they finally came back. Bit of an adjustment for him, that was,' she said, with another smile. 'He still hasn't made peace with the class system here, and he was even worse back then—he'd mix with anyone. Even me,' she added, grinning. 'Mind you, we were living under the same roof at the time, so it was only good manners, but it did raise some eyebrows. Still does, on occasion.'

I frowned a little, trying to follow. 'You lived at Crofton Hall?' I checked. 'When you were younger?'

'Yes. Sorry, I forgot you wouldn't know.' She flashed a quick, self-conscious smile. 'I do rather have to keep reminding myself, you know, that we've only just met. It sometimes seems like we've been friends for years, do you feel that? Anyway, yes, I did live at the Hall, when I was a little girl. My aunt kept house for Geoff’s dad, you see, and I lived with her. My parents,' she explained, before I asked, 'died in a train crash, years ago. I barely remember them. Aunt Freda brought me up, and did a marvelous job, considering, though I'm sure I gave her every gray hair she has.' She smiled at the memories. 'One night she found out I'd been to the pictures with Geoff, and that was that. She marched me right across the road to my gran's house, with my suitcases. No niece of
hers
was going to be a topic of village gossip. Poor Aunt Freda.'

I traced an idle pattern on the bar with my glass. 'Then you and Geoffrey de Mornay were ..."

'Oh, heavens, no. It was nothing serious. There's never been anyone serious, with Geoff, come to that.' Vivien's smile grew broader as she met my eyes. 'Not yet.'

I colored slightly and took a quick drink from my glass of juice.

'Are you sure you don't want something stronger than that?'
'Quite sure,' I said, turning my wrist so I could see my watch. 'In fact, I ought to be heading home. I still have to finish setting up my studio, and then if I'm lucky I can get a couple of hours' sleep before tonight. I didn't sleep well in London.'

'You do look tired,' Vivien said. 'We can always reschedule the history lesson, if you like.'

'Oh, no, I'll be fine. Seven o'clock was it?'

She nodded. 'Just come round to the back door. That's my private quarters. Ned can look after the customers by himself for one night, can't you, love?'

At the other end of the bar, Ned flipped a page of the sports section. 'Yeah, sure,' he said.

Something must have shown on my face at the thought of Ned tending bar by himself, because Vivien laughed out loud.

'You see the impression you've made on the girl, Ned?' she told him. 'She can't even picture you working.'

'She hasn't seen me in action,' Ned replied with a casual shrug.

Vivien lowered her voice and jerked her head in the direction of her co-worker. 'Ordinarily, we just keep him around because he blends so well with the decor,' she confided. 'But he actually does shift position every once in a while. It's quite exciting.'

'Keep it up,' the barman dared her calmly, 'and it'll be open taps this evening, love. Drinks on the house.'

I laughed. 'Do you want me to bring anything tonight?'

'Just yourself. You're sure you feel up to it?'

'A couple of hours' sleep and I'll be right as rain,' I assured her.

I was feeling exhausted. But for some reason, instead of going straight home when I left the Red Lion, I found myself turning to the right and wandering back up the High Street toward the church.

It had obviously been raining here the night before, as it had been in London. Apart from the telltale overcast sky,
the pavement was still damp, and the smell of earth and wet grass and rain-soaked flowers hung heavy in the afternoon air. You could have shot a cannon up the street without hitting a soul, the village was that quiet, but here and there the smear of muddy footprints on the cobbled walk provided evidence that some people, at least, had roused themselves early enough to attend the morning church services.

There were footprints, too, heading up the shaded lane that led to the manor house. Iain Sumner's footprints, I deduced, as there were two sets going in and only one coming out again. On impulse, I left the street and started up the lane, my shoes squelching a little in the drying mud. It was only idle curiosity, I told myself. I hadn't really taken a good look at the house on my last visit, and I doubted whether Geoffrey de Mornay would mind if I just had a peek around.