For the Sake of Elena

3

Anthony Weaver pulled his Citroën to a halt on the wide gravel drive of his home in Adams Road. He stared through the windscreen at the winter jasmine that grew-neat and restrained-on the trellis to the left of the front door. For the last eight hours he’d been living in the region that lies just between a nightmare and hell, and now he was numb. It was shock, his intellect told him. Certainly, he’d begin feeling something again just as soon as this period of disbelief had passed.

He made no move to get out of the car. Instead, he waited for his former wife to speak. But stolidly sitting next to him in the passenger seat, Glyn Weaver maintained the silence with which she had greeted him at the Cambridge railway station.

She hadn’t allowed him to drive to London to fetch her, to carry her suitcase, or to open a door. Nor had she allowed him to witness her grief. He understood. He’d already accepted the blame for their daughter’s death. He’d taken on that responsibility the moment he’d identified Elena’s body. Glyn had no need to hurl accusations at him. He would have agreed with every one.

He saw her eyes sweep over the front of the house, and he wondered if she would remark upon it. She hadn’t been to Cambridge since helping Elena get settled into St. Stephen’s in her first term, and even then she’d not set foot in Adams Road.

She would, he knew, see the house as indication of the combined elements of remarriage, inheritance, and professional egocentricity, a veritable showpiece of his success. Brick, three storeys, white woodwork, decorative tile cladding from second storey to roofline, a glass-enclosed morning room with a roof terrace atop it. This was a far cry from their claustrophobic newlywed digs, three rooms on Hope Street more than twenty years ago. This house was set alone at the end of a curved drive, not butted up to a neighbour’s dwelling and squatting less than five feet from the street. This was the house of a tenured professor, a respected member of the history faculty. This was no ill-lit tenement of dying dreams.

To the right of the house, a copper beech hedge-brilliant with the sunset colours of autumn-walled off the back garden. Through an opening in the bushes, an Irish setter bounded joyfully towards the car. Seeing the animal, Glyn spoke for the first time, her voice low, without apparent emotion.

“This is her dog?”

“Yes.”

“We couldn’t keep one in London. The fl at was too small. She always wanted a dog. She talked about a spaniel. She-”

Breaking off, Glyn got out of the car. The dog took two hesitant steps forward, tongue hanging out in a slap-dash canine grin. Glyn observed the animal but made no overt attempt to greet him. He took another two steps and snuffled round her feet. With a rapid blink, she looked back at the house.

She said, “Justine’s made you a lovely place in the world, Anthony.”

Between brick pilasters, the front door opened, its polished oak panels catching what little of the quickly fading afternoon light managed to seep through the fog. Anthony’s wife, Justine, stood with one hand on the doorknob. She said, “Glyn. Come in. Please. I’ve made tea,” after which she backed once again into the house, wisely offering no condolences where they would not be welcome.

Anthony followed Glyn into the house, carrying her suitcase up to the guestroom, and returning to find her and Justine standing in the sitting room, Glyn at the window overlooking the front lawn with its careful arrangement of white, wrought iron furniture glistening through the fog, and Justine by the sofa with the tips of her fingers pressed together in front of her.

His first and second wives could not have been more dissimilar. Glyn, at forty-six, was making no attempt to resist the encroachments of middle-age. Her face was worn, with crow’s feet at her eyes, deep lines like trenches from nose to chin, tiny indentations shooting out from her lips, jawline losing definition from the pull of flesh beginning to sag. Grey streaked her hair, which she wore long, drawn back from her face in a severe chignon. Her body was thickening at the waist and hips, and she covered it with tweed and wool and fl eshcoloured stockings and fl at walking shoes.

In contrast, Justine, at thirty-five, still managed to suggest the fresh bloom of youth. Blessed with the sort of facial structure that would only enhance her looks as she grew older, she was attractive without being beautiful, with smooth skin, blue eyes, knife-edged cheekbones, a firm jaw. She was tall and lanky with a cascade of dusty blonde hair that hung, as it had from adolescence, loosely round her shoulders. Trim and fit, she wore the same clothes now in which she had gone off to work this morning, a tailored grey suit with a wide black belt, grey stockings, black pumps, a silver pin on her lapel. She was perfect, as always.

Anthony looked beyond her to the dining room where she had laid the table for afternoon tea. It served as demonstration of how Justine had spent the hours since he had telephoned her at the University Press to tell her of his daughter’s death. While he had been to the morgue, to the police station, to the college, to his offi ce, to the railway station, while he had identified the body and answered questions and accepted incredulous condolences and contacted his former wife, Justine had made her own preparations for the coming days of their mourning. The result of her efforts was spread across the burl-topped dining table.

On a linen cloth sat the entire tea service from their wedding china, a pattern of gilt-edged roses and curling leaves. Among the plates and cups and silver and crisp white napkins and vases of flowers lay a poppy seed cake, a platter of delicate afternoon sandwiches, another of thinly sliced bread and butter, fresh scones, strawberry jam, and clotted cream.

Anthony looked at his wife. Justine smiled fl eetingly, saying again with an airy motion at the table, “I’ve made tea.”

“Thank you, darling,” he said. The words felt unnatural, badly rehearsed.

“Glyn.” Justine waited for the other woman to turn. “May I offer you something?”

Glyn’s eyes slid to the table, from there to Anthony. “Thank you. No. I couldn’t possibly eat.”

Justine turned to her husband. “Anthony?”

He saw the trap. For a moment, he felt suspended in the air, like the rope in an endless tug-of-war. Then he went to the table. He chose a sandwich, a scone, a slice of cake. The food tasted like sand.

Justine came to his side and poured the tea. Its steam rose in the air with the fruity scent of the modern, herbal blend she preferred. The two of them stood there with the food spread out before them, the silver gleaming, and the flowers fresh. Glyn remained by the window in the other room. No one moved towards a chair.

“What did the police tell you?” Glyn asked. “They never phoned me.”

“I told them not to.”

“Why?”

“I thought I should be the one to-”

“You?”

Anthony saw Justine set down her teacup. He saw that her eyes remained on its rim.

“What happened to her, Anthony?”

“Glyn, sit down. Please.”

“I want to know what happened.”

Anthony set his plate down next to the cup of tea which he had not tasted. He returned to the sitting room. Justine followed. He sat on the sofa, motioned his wife down next to him, and waited to see if Glyn would move from the window. She did not do so. Next to him, Justine began twisting her wedding band.

Anthony recited the facts for Glyn. Elena was out running, someone killed her. She was beaten and strangled.

“I want to see the body.”

“No. Glyn. You don’t.”

Glyn’s voice wavered for the fi rst time. “She was my daughter. I want to see the body.”

“Not as she is now. Later. When the morticians-”

“I’ll see her, Anthony.”

He could hear the tight elevation in her voice and knew from experience where it would lead. He headed her off with, “One side of her face is bashed in. The bones are showing. She doesn’t have a nose. Is that what you want to see?”

Glyn fumbled in her handbag and brought out a tissue. “Damn you,” she whispered. Then, “How did it happen? You told me-you promised me-she wouldn’t run alone.”

“She phoned Justine last night. She said she wasn’t going to run this morning.”

“She phoned…” Glyn’s glance moved from Anthony to his wife. “You ran with Elena?”

Justine stopped twisting her wedding band, but she kept her fingers on it, as if it were a talisman. “Anthony asked me to. He didn’t like her running along the river when it was dark, so I ran as well. Last night she phoned and said she wouldn’t be running, but evidently, for some reason she changed her mind.”

“How long has this been going on?” Glyn asked, her attention going back to her former husband. “You said Elena wouldn’t be running alone, but you never said that Justine-” She abruptly shifted gears. “How could you do that, Anthony? How could you entrust your daughter’s well-being to-”

“Glyn,” Anthony interposed.

“She wouldn’t be concerned. She wouldn’t watch over her. She wouldn’t take care to see that she was safe.”

“Glyn, for God’s sake.”

“It’s true. She’s never had a child, so how could she know what it’s like to watch and wait and worry and wonder. To have dreams. A thousand and one dreams that won’t come to anything because she didn’t run with Elena this morning.”

Justine hadn’t moved on the sofa. Her expression was fixed, a glazed mask of good breeding. “Let me take you to your room,” she said and got to her feet. “You must be exhausted. We’ve put you in the yellow room at the back of the house. It’s quiet there. You’ll be able to rest.”

“I want Elena’s room.”

“Well, yes. Of course. That’s no trouble at all. I’ll just see to the sheets…” Her voice drifting off, Justine left the room.

Glyn said at once, “Why did you give her Elena?”

“What are you saying? Justine is my wife.”

“That’s the real point, isn’t it? How much do you care that Elena’s dead? You’ve got someone right here to cook up another.”

Anthony got to his feet. Against her words, he summoned up the image of Elena as he last had seen her from the window of the morning room, offering him a grin and a final wave from her bicycle as she pedalled off to a supervision after their lunch together. It had been just the two of them, eating their sandwiches, chatting about the dog, sharing an hour of love.

He felt anguish swell. Re-create Elena? Fashion another? There was only one. He himself had died with her.

Blindly, he pushed past his ex-wife. He could still hear her low, harsh words continue as he left the house even though he couldn’t distinguish one from another. He stumbled to his car, fumbled the keys into the ignition. He was reversing down the driveway when Justine ran outside.

She called his name. He saw her caught for a moment in the headlamps before he plunged his foot onto the accelerator and, with a sputter of gravel, clattered into Adams Road.

He felt his chest heaving, his throat aching as he drove. He began to weep-dry, hot, tear-less sobs for his daughter and his wives and the mess he’d made of every part of his life.

He was on Grange Road and then on Barton Road and then, blessedly, out of Cambridge itself. It had grown quite dark and the fog was thick, especially in this area of fallow, open fields and winter-dying hedges. But he drove without caution, and when the countryside gave way to a village, he parked and threw himself out of the car only to fi nd that the temperature had fallen further, encouraged by the bitter East Anglian wind. He’d left his overcoat at home. All he wore was a suit jacket. But that was of no account. He turned up its collar and began to walk, past a kissing gate, past half a dozen thatched cottages, stopping only when he came to her house. He crossed the street then to get some distance from the building. But even through the fog, he could see in the window.

She was there, moving across the sitting room with a mug in her hand. She was small, so slender. If he held her, she would be practically nothing in his arms, just a fragile heartbeat and a glowing life that consumed him, fired him, and had once made him whole.

He wanted to go to her. He needed to talk to her. He wanted to be held.

He stepped off the kerb. As he did so, a car skidded by, horn honking in warning, a stifl ed shout from inside. It brought him back to his senses.

He watched her go to the fi replace where she fed wood into the flames as he once had done, turning from the fire to find her eyes on him, her smile a benediction, her hand held out.

“Tonio,” she’d murmur, his name underscored with love.

And he’d answer her even as he did this moment. “Tigresse.” Just a whisper. “Tigresse. La Tigresse.”

Lynley arrived in Cambridge at half past five and drove directly to Bulstrode Gardens where he parked the Bentley in front of a house that reminded him of Jane Austen’s home in Chawton. Here was the same symmetry of design-two casement windows and a white front door below, three evenly spaced windows in the same positions above. Possessing a pantiled roof and several plain chimneys, the house was a rectangular, solid, uninteresting piece of architecture. Lynley didn’t, however, feel the same disappointment upon seeing it that he had felt in Chawton. One expected Jane Austen to have lived in a snug, whimsically atmospheric thatched cottage surrounded by a garden fi lled with fl owerbeds and trees. One didn’t expect a struggling lecturer from the divinity faculty to maintain a wife and three children in that kind of wattleand-daub heaven.

He got out of the car and shrugged into his overcoat. The fog, he noted, managed to obscure and romanticise features of the house that spoke of a growing indifference and neglect. In lieu of a garden, a semi-circular driveway of leaf-strewn pebbles curved round the front door, and the inner part of the semicircle comprised an overgrown flowerbed which was separated from the street by a low, brick wall. Here, nothing had been done to prepare the ground for autumn or winter, so the remains of summer plants were lying blackened and dying against a solid sheet of unturned soil. A large hibiscus was fast overpowering the garden wall, trailing among the yellowed leaves of narcissi which should long ago have been cleared away. To the left of the front door an actinidia had worked its way up to the roof and was sending out tendrils to cover one of the lower windows, while to the right of the door, the same species of plant was creating an inert mound of disease-spotted leaves. As a result, the front of the house bore a lopsided appearance at odds with the symmetry of its design.

Lynley passed beneath a birch at the edge of the drive. From a neighbouring house, he could hear faint music, and somewhere in the fog a door slammed like the crack of a pistol shot. Sidestepping an overturned large-wheeled tricycle, he mounted the single step to the porch and rang the bell.

Its noise was answered by the shouting of two children who raced to the front door with the accompanying clatter of some sort of popping toy. Hands which could not yet successfully manage the doorknob pounded frantically instead on the wood.

“Auntie Leen!” Either the boy or the girl was doing the shouting. It was difficult to tell.

A light went on in the room to the right of the front door, sending an insubstantial oblong of illumination onto the driveway through the mist. A baby began crying. A woman’s voice called out, “Just a moment.”

“Auntie Leen! Door!”

“I know, Christian.”

Above his head, the porchlight went on, and Lynley heard the sound of the deadbolt turning. “Step back, darling,” the woman said as she opened the door.

The four of them were framed by the architrave, and held in a sideways diffusion of gold light from the sitting room that would have done credit to Rembrandt. Indeed, just for a moment, they looked very much like a painting, the woman in a rose cowl-necked sweater against which she held an infant wrapped in a cranberry shawl while two toddlers clutched the legs of her black wool trousers, a boy with a misshapen bruise beneath his eye and a girl with the handle of some sort of wheeled toy in her hand. This, apparently, was the source of the popping sound Lynley had heard, for the toy was domed in transparent plastic and when the child pushed it along the fl oor, coloured balls fl ew up and hit the dome like noisy bubbles.

“Tommy!” Lady Helen Clyde said. She took a step back from the door and urged the two children to do the same. They moved like a unit. “You’re in Cambridge.”

“Yes.”

She looked over his shoulder as if in the expectation of seeing someone with him. “You’re alone?”

“Alone.”

“What a surprise. Come in.”

The house smelled strongly of wet wool, sour milk, talcum powder, and nappies, the odours of children. It was filled with the detritus of children as well, in the form of toys strewn across the sitting room fl oor, storybooks with torn pages gaping open on the sofa and chairs, discarded jumpers and playsuits heaped on the hearth. A stained blue blanket was bunched onto the seat of a miniature rocking chair, and as Lynley followed Lady Helen through the sitting room into the kitchen at the rear of the house, the little boy ran to this, grabbed it, and clutched it. He peered at Lynley with defi ant curiosity.

“Who’s he, Auntie Leen?” he demanded. His sister remained at Lady Helen’s side, her left hand fixed like an extra appendage to her aunt’s trousers while her right hand made the climb to her face and her thumb found its way into her mouth. “Stop that, Perdita,” the boy said. “Mummy says not to suck. You baby.”

“Christian,” Lady Helen said in gentle admonition. She guided Perdita to a child-sized table beneath a window where the little girl began to rock in the tiny ladder-back chair, her thumb in her mouth, her large dark eyes fi xed with what looked like desperation on her aunt.

“They’re not dealing with a new baby sister very well,” Lady Helen said quietly to Lynley, shifting the crying infant to her other shoulder. “I was just taking her up to be fed.”

“How’s Pen doing?”

Lady Helen glanced at the children. The simple look said it all. No better.

She said, “Let me take the baby up. I’ll be back in a moment.” She smiled. “Can you manage?”

“Does he bite?”

“Only girls.”

“That’s a comforting thought.”

She laughed and went back through the sitting room. He heard her footsteps on the stairs and the sound of her voice as she murmured to the baby, gentling its cries.

He turned back to the children. They were twins, he knew, just over four years old, Christian and Perdita. The girl was older by fifteen minutes, but the boy was larger, more aggressive, and, from what Lynley could see, unlikely to respond to friendly overtures from strangers. That was just as well, considering the times in which they lived. Nonetheless, it didn’t make for a comfortable situation. He had never been at his best with toddlers.

“Mummy’s sick.” Christian accompanied this announcement by bashing his foot into the door of a kitchen cupboard. One, two, three savage little kicks, whereupon he discarded his blanket on the floor, opened the cupboard, and began pulling out a set of copper-bottomed pots. “The baby made her sick.”

“That happens sometimes,” Lynley said. “She’ll get better soon.”

“I don’t care.” Christian pounded a pan against the floor. “Perdita cries. She wet the bed last night.”

Lynley glanced at the little girl. Curly hair tumbling into her eyes, she rocked without speaking. Her cheeks worked in and out round her thumb. “She didn’t mean to, I imagine.”

“Daddy won’t come home.” Christian selected a second pan which he banged unmercifully into the first. The noise was teeth-jarring, but it didn’t seem to bother either one of the children. “Daddy doesn’t like the baby. He’s cross with Mummy.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I like Auntie Leen. She smells good.”

Here, at least, was a subject about which they could converse. “She does indeed.”

“You like Auntie Leen?”

“I like her very much.”

Christian seemed to feel this planted the seeds of friendship between them. He scrambled to his feet and shoved a pot and its cover into Lynley’s thigh.

“Here,” he said. “You do this way,” and he demonstrated his skill at noise-making by slamming another cover onto a pot of his own.

“Really, Tommy! Are you encouraging him?” Lady Helen closed the kitchen door behind her and went to rescue her sister’s pots and pans. “Sit with Perdita, Christian. Let me get your tea.”

“No! I play!”

“Not at the moment, you don’t.” Lady Helen detached his fingers from the handle of a pot, lifted him up, and carried him to the table. He kicked and squalled. His sister watched him, round-eyed and rocking. “I’ve got to get their tea,” Lady Helen said to Lynley over Christian’s wailing. “He won’t settle till he’s eaten.”

“I’ve come at a bad time.”

She sighed. “You have.”

He felt his spirits sink. She knelt and began gathering the pots from the fl oor. He joined her. In the unforgiving kitchen light, he could see how pale she was. The natural blush of colour was faded from her skin, and there were faint smudges like newly bruised fl esh beneath her eyes. He said, “How much longer will you be here?”

“Five days. Daphne comes on Saturday for her two weeks. Then Mother for two. Then Pen’s on her own.” She brushed a lock of chestnut hair off her cheek. “I can’t think how she’s going to cope alone, Tommy. This is the worst she’s ever been.”

“Christian said his father’s not here much.”

Lady Helen pressed her lips together. “Quite. Well. That’s putting it mildly.”

He touched her shoulder. “What’s happened to them, Helen?”

“I don’t know. Some sort of blood score. Neither one of them will talk about it.” She smiled without humour. “The sweet bliss of a marriage made in heaven.”

Unaccountably stung, he removed his hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His mouth quirked in a smile. He shrugged and put the last pot in its place.

“Tommy.” He looked her way. “It isn’t any good. You know that, don’t you? You shouldn’t have come.”

She got to her feet and began removing food from the refrigerator, carrying four eggs, butter, a wedge of cheese, and two tomatoes to the cooker. She rummaged in a drawer and dragged out a loaf of bread. Then quickly, without speaking, she made the children’s tea while Christian occupied himself by scribbling on the table top with a stubby pencil he’d removed from between the pages of a telephone directory on a jumble-covered work top nearby. Perdita rocked and sucked blissfully with her eyes at half-mast.

Lynley stood by the kitchen sink, watching Lady Helen. He hadn’t removed his overcoat yet. She hadn’t offered to take it from him.

What, he wondered, had he hoped to accomplish by coming to her at her sister’s house when she was plagued by worry and worn by the effort of caring for two children and an infant who were not even hers? What had he hoped? That she would fall gratefully into his arms? That she would see him as her blessed salvation? That her face would light with joy and desire? That her defences would crumble and her spirit surrender-fi nally, irrefutably, once and for all? Havers was right. He was such a fool.

“I’ll be off, then,” he said.

She turned from the stove where she was scooping scrambled eggs onto two Beatrix Potter plates. “Back to London?” she asked.

“No. I’m here on a case.” He told her what little he knew about it, concluding with, “They’ve given me digs at St. Stephen’s.”

“So you can relive your own undergraduate days?”

“Bedders and gyp rooms and night keys from the porter.”

She took the plates to the table along with the toast, grilled tomatoes, and milk. Christian fell to like a victim of famine. Perdita rocked. Lady Helen placed a fork in her hand, touched her dark head, and rubbed her fi ngers gently against the child’s downy cheek.

“Helen.” He found some comfort in saying her name. She looked up. “I’ll be off now.”

“Let me see you out.”

She followed him back through the sitting room to the front door. It was colder in this part of the house. He looked at the stairway.

“Shall I say hello to Pen?”

“I don’t think so, Tommy.” He cleared his throat, nodded. As if she read his expression, she touched his arm lightly. “Please understand.”

He knew instinctively that she wasn’t talking about her sister. “I suppose you can’t get away for dinner.”

“I can’t leave her alone with them. God only knows when Harry’s coming home. He’s staying for formal dinner at Emmanuel tonight. He may sleep there as well. He’s done that already four nights this past week.”

“Will you phone me at the college if he comes home?”

“He won’t-”

“Will you phone?”

“Oh, Tommy.”

He felt a sudden, overpowering surge of hopelessness which prompted him to say, “I volunteered for this case, Helen. When I knew it was Cambridge.”

As soon as the words were out, he despised himself. He was resorting to the worst form of emotional blackmail. It was manipulative, dishonest, and unworthy of them both. She didn’t respond. In the shadows of the hallway, she was darkness and light. The glossy unbroken curve of hair to her shoulders, the cream of her skin. He reached out, caressed the line of her jaw. She came into the shelter of his overcoat. He felt her arms slip warmly round him. He rested his cheek on the top of her head.

“Christian said he likes you because you smell good,” he whispered.

Against his chest, he could feel her smile. “Did he?”

“Yes.” He let himself hold her for a moment longer before he pressed his lips to the top of her head. “Christian was right,” he said and released her. He opened the front door.

“Tommy.” She crossed her arms in front of her. He said nothing, waiting, willing her to take some sort of fi rst step.

“I’ll phone,” she said. “If Harry turns up.”

“I love you, Helen.” He walked to his car.

Lady Helen returned to the kitchen. For the first time in the nine days that she had been in Cambridge, she looked at the room dispassionately, seeing it as an outside observer would see it. Dissolution, it declared.

Despite the fact that she had scrubbed it herself only three days ago, the yellow linoleum floor was once again grimy, patched with spilled food and drink from the children’s meals. The walls looked greasy, with grey handprints smeared like directional indicators against the paint. Work tops acted as storage space for anything that couldn’t be fitted anywhere else. A stack of unopened mail, a wooden bowl of apples and browning bananas, half a dozen newspapers, a plastic jar of kitchen utensils and brushes, and a children’s colouring book and crayons shared the area with a wine rack, an electric mixer, a toaster, and a shelf of dusty books. Beneath the burners on the cooker, the remains of boil-overs lay like sour slop, and cobwebs collected on three empty wicker baskets atop the refrigerator.

Lady Helen wondered what Lynley must have thought, seeing all this. It was quite a change from the only other time he had been in Bulstrode Gardens for a quiet summer dinner in the back garden, preceded by drinks on a lovely terrace that had since been turned into a sandbox and play area now choked with toys. Her sister and Harry Rodger had been live-in lovers then, consumed with each other and fueled by the delights of early love. They were virtually oblivious of everything else. They exchanged meaningful glances and knowing smiles; they touched each other fondly at the slightest excuse; they fed each other small morsels of food and shared a drink. They had their own lives by day-Harry lecturing at the University and Pen working for the Fitzwilliam Museum-but by night they were one.

Their devotion to each other had seemed excessive and embarrassing to Lady Helen at the time, too cloying to be in particularly good taste. But now she questioned the nature of her own reaction to such an overt display of love. And she admitted the fact that she would rather see her sister and Harry Rodger clinging and cooing than witness what they had come to over the birth of their third child.

Christian was still noisily addressing himself to his tea. His toast fi ngers had become dive bombers, and with accompanying sound effects which he supplied at maximum volume, he was flying them gustily into his plate. Eggs, tomatoes, and cheese dripped down the front of his playsuit. His sister had only picked at her own meal. At the moment, she was sitting motionless in her chair with a Cabbage Patch doll laid across her lap. She was studying it pensively, but she did not touch it.

Lady Helen knelt by Perdita’s chair as Christian shouted, “Ka-boom! Ka-plowy!” Eggs splashed across the table. Perdita blinked as a bit of tomato hit her on the cheek.

“Enough, Christian,” Lady Helen said, taking his plate from him. He was her nephew. She was supposed to love him and under most circumstances she could say that she did. But after nine days, her patience was at its lowest ebb, and if she’d ever had compassion for the unspoken fears that underlay his behaviour, she found that she couldn’t summon it at the moment. He opened his mouth for a howl of protest. She reached across the table and covered it with her hand. “Enough. You’re being a wicked little boy. Stop this right now.”

That beloved Auntie Leen would speak to him in such a manner seemed to surprise Christian momentarily into cooperation. But only for a moment. He said, “Mummy!” and his eyes fi lled with tears.

Without the slightest qualm, Lady Helen seized the advantage. “Yes. Mummy. She’s trying to rest, but you’re not making it very easy for her, are you?” He fell silent and she turned to his sister. “Won’t you eat something, Perdita?”

The little girl kept her eyes on her doll which lay inertly across her lap, with cheeks shaped like marbles and a placid smile on her lips. The appropriate picture of infancy and childhood, Lady Helen thought. She said to Christian, “I’m going up to check on Mummy and the baby. Will you keep Perdita company for me?”

Christian eyed his sister’s plate. “She din’t eat,” he said.

“Perhaps you can persuade her to have a bit.”

She left them together and went to her sister. In the upper corridor, the house was quiet, and at the top of the stairs she took a moment to lean her forehead against the cold pane of a window. She thought of Lynley and his unexpected appearance in Cambridge. She had a fairly good idea of what his presence presaged.

It had been nearly ten months since he had made the wild drive to Skye in order to fi nd her, nearly ten months since the icy day in January when he had asked her to marry him, nearly ten months since she had refused. He had not asked her again, and in the intervening time they had somehow reached an unspoken agreement to try to retreat to the easy companionship which they once had shared. It was a retreat that brought little satisfaction to either of them, however, for in asking her to marry him, Lynley had crossed an undefined boundary, altering their relationship in ways neither of them could have possibly foreseen. Now they found themselves in an uncertain limbo in which they had to face the fact that while they could call themselves friends for the rest of their lives if they chose to do so, the reality was that friendship had ended between them the moment Lynley took the alchemical risk of changing it into love.

Their every meeting since January-no matter how innocent or superfluous or casual-had been subtly coloured by the fact that he had asked her to marry him. And because they had not spoken of it again, the subject seemed to lie like quicksand between them. One wrong step and she knew she’d go under, caught in the suffocating mire of attempting to explain to him that which would hurt him more than she could bear.

Lady Helen sighed and pulled back her shoulders. Her neck felt sore. The cold window had made her forehead feel damp. She was tired to the bone.

At the end of the corridor, her sister’s bedroom door was closed, and she tapped on it quietly before letting herself in. She didn’t bother to wait for Penelope to answer her knocking. Nine days with her sister had taught her that she would not do so.

The windows were closed against the nighttime fog and cold air, and an electric fi re in addition to the radiator made the room claustrophobic. Between the closed windows sat her sister’s king-size bed, and, looking ashen-faced even in the soft light of the bedside table, Penelope lay holding the infant to her swollen breast. Even when Lady Helen said her name, she kept her head tilted back against the headboard, her eyes squeezed shut, her lips pressed into a scar line of pain. Her face was sheened with sweat which was forming rivulets that ran from her temples to her jaws, then dripped and formed new rivulets on her bare chest. As Lady Helen watched, a single inordinately heavy tear trickled down her sister’s cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. Nor did she open her eyes.

Not for the first time, Lady Helen felt the frustration of her own uselessness. She had seen the condition of her sister’s breasts, with their cracked and bleeding nipples; she had heard her sister cry out as she expressed the milk. Yet she knew Penelope well enough to know that nothing she might say could make a difference to her once she was bent upon a course of action. She would breast-feed this baby until its sixth month, no matter the pain or the cost. Motherhood had become a fi ne point of honour, a position from which she would never retreat.

Lady Helen approached the bed and looked at the baby, noticing for the first time that Pen wasn’t holding her. Rather, she had placed the infant on a pillow and it was this which she held, pressing the baby’s face to her breast. The baby sucked. Soundlessly, Pen continued to weep.

She hadn’t been out of the room all day. Yesterday, she had managed ten listless minutes in the sitting room with the twins squabbling at her feet while Lady Helen changed the sheets on her bed. But today she had remained behind the closed door, stirring herself only when Lady Helen brought the baby to be fed. Sometimes she read. Sometimes she sat in a chair by the window. Most of the time she wept.

Although the baby was now a month old, neither Pen nor her husband had yet named the child, referring to it as the baby, she, or her. It was as if not naming the baby made her presence in their lives a less permanent feature. If she didn’t have a name, she didn’t really exist. If she didn’t exist, they hadn’t created her. If they hadn’t created her, they didn’t have to examine the fact that whatever love, lust, or devotion moved her making seemed to have disappeared between them.

Fist curled, the infant gave over sucking. Her chin was wet with a thin greenish fi lm of mother’s milk. Releasing a fractured breath, Pen pushed the pillow away from her breast, and Lady Helen raised the baby to her own shoulder.

“I heard the door.” Pen’s voice was weary and strained. She did not open her eyes. Her hair-dark like her children’s-lay in a limp mass pressed to her skull. “Harry?”

“No. It was Tommy. He’s here on a case.”

Her sister’s eyes opened. “Tommy Lynley? What did he want here?”

Lady Helen patted the baby’s warm back. “To say hello, I suppose.” She walked to the window. Pen shifted in bed. Lady Helen knew she was watching her.

“How did he know where to fi nd you?”

“I told him, of course.”

“Why? No, don’t answer. You wanted him to come, didn’t you?” The question had the ring of an accusation. Lady Helen turned from the window where the fog was pressing like a monstrous, wet cobweb against the glass. Before she could answer, her sister continued. “I don’t blame you, Helen. You want to get out of here. You want to get back to London. Who wouldn’t?”

“That’s not true.”

“Your flat and your life and the silence. God oh God, I miss the silence most of all. And being alone. And having time to myself. And privacy.” Pen began to weep. She fumbled among creams and unguents on the bedside table for a box of tissues. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m no good for anyone.”

“Don’t say that. Please. You know it isn’t true.”

“Look at me. Just please look at me, Helen. I’m good for nothing. I’m just a baby machine. I can’t even be a proper mother to my children. I’m a ruin. I’m a slug.”

“It’s depression, Pen. You do see that, don’t you? You went through this when the twins were born, and if you remember-”

“I didn’t! I was fine. Perfectly. Completely.”

“You’ve forgotten how it was. You’ve put it behind you. As you’ll do with this.”

Pen turned her head away. Her body heaved with a sob. “Harry’s staying at Emmanuel again, isn’t he?” She flashed a wet face in her sister’s direction. “Never mind. Don’t answer. I know he is.”

It was the closest thing to an opening Pen had given her in nine days. Lady Helen took it at once, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “What’s happening here, Pen?”

“He’s got what he wants. Why hang about to examine the damage?”

“Got…? I don’t understand. Is there another woman?”

Pen laughed bitterly, choked back a sob, and then deftly changed the subject. “You know why he’s come up from London, Helen. Don’t pretend you’re naive. You know what he wants, and he intends to get it. That’s the real Lynley spirit. Charge right towards the goal.”

Lady Helen didn’t reply. She laid Pen’s daughter on her back on the bed, feeling warmed by the baby’s fi st-waving, leg-kicking grin. She wrapped the tiny fingers round one of her own and bent to kiss them. What a miracle she was. Ten fingers, ten toes, sweet miniature nails.

“He’s here for more reasons than to solve some little murder and you ought to be ready to head him off.”

“That’s all in the past.”

“Don’t be such a fool.” Her sister leaned forward, grabbed onto her wrist. “Listen to me, Helen. You’ve got it all right now. Don’t throw it away because of a man. Get him out of your life. He wants you. He means to have you. He’ll never give it up unless you spell it out for him. So do it.”

Lady Helen smiled in what she hoped was a loving fashion. She covered her sister’s hand with her own. “Pen. Darling. We aren’t playacting at Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Tommy isn’t in hot pursuit of my virtue. And even if he were, I’m afraid he’s about-” She laughed lightly. “Let me try to remember…Yes, he’s just about fifteen years too late. Fifteen years exactly on Christmas Eve. Shall I tell you about it?”

Her sister pulled away. “This isn’t a joke!”

Lady Helen watched, feeling surprised and helpless, as Pen’s eyes filled again. “Pen-”

“No! You’re living in a dream world. Roses and champagne and cool satin sheets. Sweet little babies delivered by the stork. Adoring children sitting on mama’s knee. Nothing smelly or unpleasant or painful or disgusting. Well, take a good look round here if you mean to get married.”

“Tommy hasn’t come to Cambridge to ask me to marry him.”

“Take a good long look. Because life’s rotten, Helen. It’s fi lthy and lousy. It’s just a way to die. But you don’t think of that. You don’t think of anything.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“Oh, I dare say you think about screwing him, though. That’s what you hoped for when you saw him tonight. I don’t blame you. How could I? He’s supposed to be quite the performer in bed. I know at least a dozen women in London who’ll be only too happy to attest to that. So do what you want. Screw him. Marry him. I only hope you’re not so stupid as to think he’d be faithful to you. Or your marriage. Or to anything, in fact.”

“We’re only friends, Pen. That’s the beginning and end of it.”

“Maybe you just want the houses and cars and servants and money. And the title, of course. We mustn’t forget that. Countess of Asherton. What a brilliant match. At least one of us will end up making Daddy proud.” She turned on her side and switched out the light on the bedside table. “I’m going to sleep now. Put the baby to bed.”

“Pen.”

“No. I’m going to sleep.”