by Pamela Kent
Pamela Kent
Cuckoo in the Night
SAGA Egmont
Cuckoo in the Night
Cover image: Shutterstock
Copyright © 1966, 2021 Pamela Kent and SAGA Egmont
All rights reserved
ISBN: 9788726564976
1st ebook edition
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All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
Chapter I
JANINE saw Stephen standing on the platform as soon as she stepped from the train. Two years should have done something to alter him—to age him a little; but no, he seemed exactly the same, except that he was, perhaps, a trifle thinner, and a bit grimmer.
He had always had the ability to appear grim, even when he was feeling particularly happy, so that was nothing very much to go by. She must not allow herself to be affected by a certain wistfulness at the corners of his lips, a blank, unseeing stare, as if he was deliberately forcing himself to contain his secrets and give away nothing by his expression.
“Hullo, Jan!” He picked up her suitcase, and seemed to be more concerned with the amount of luggage she had brought with her than the way she looked after two years … the possible deterioration in her looks, considering that she had once been badly jilted. “Is this all you’ve got? I imagined you’d be returning with bales of Swiss muslin and half a dozen cow-bells to prove you’ve spent the last six months in the mountains.”
“I have got a trunk,” Jan answered. “It’s in the van. What do we do about it?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll collect it later.”
He led the way out of the station—busy St. David’s station, Exeter, where people were milling about because it was the height of the holiday season—and stowed her suitcase away in the boot of his car. If it was anything to go by he had done very nicely for himself in the last two years, for it was a low-slung Jaguar, and obviously new. Jan patted it with appreciation before she slipped into the seat beside the driving seat.
“Um,” she said. “Lucky Chris! It must be nice to have a husband who can keep her in style.”
Stephen said nothing, but he looked rather more than grim as he climbed into his own seat and they started off.
Once clear of the town Janine decided it was permissible to talk to him and perhaps distract his attention, and she began by making a confession.
“I’m dying to see your new house. It sounds utterly fascinating, but I don’t quite understand why you chose Dartmoor as a suitable place in which to live. Highly romantic, of course, and very beautiful … At least, I imagine it is, judging by the pictures I’ve seen of it. But isn’t it a little cut off, for you? I mean, you have to be in London most of the time, don’t you? What happens to Chris while you’re away?”
“She’s all right,” he replied, as if he had worked out this reply to any possible questions she might put to him. “And I’m not in London as much as you apparently think. For one thing I often travel down overnight in order that Chris shan’t be too much alone.”
“Then you still keep on the London flat?”
“Oh, yes, of course.”
“Don’t you find it a bit of a strain doing so much travelling?”
“Not really. I’m getting used to it, for one thing.”
“But with your work on top of that …?”
“I manage,” he answered, smiling briefly. “I hope the signs of strain don’t show up too much?”
“Of course not. You look, as you always did, as hard as nails.” She glanced at him sideways, and it was true that despite that well-worn cleft between his brows, the lines at the corners of his attractive mouth, and the little hollows in his cheeks, he did look remarkably fit and virile. As if he had a secret fund of strength that kept him going even in times of stress. And as he spent so much of his time before the public eye it was important that he should create the illusion, at least, of having an alert mind supported by a well-trained and disciplined and naturally healthy body.
Stephen had never been one for excesses, and in addition he believed in exercise. He and she had done a lot of walking together in the past, and, in fact, they had had so much in common that it was a matter for astonishment that now they were virtual strangers who had to make the effort to get to know one another again. She was aware that he was not as detached as he seemed … perhaps not as indifferent. But he was handicapped by a guilty conscience, and she had all the cause for grievance, and there are few men who like to be reminded that they have erred in the past, particularly when their public image has been built up carefully over the years and they dislike the thought of having it blown upon.
Now that she herself was no longer involved in any way Janine could feel sympathy for this essentially masculine attitude. But there was something else that had to be gone into … the reason why she had come home to England. At great difficulty she had secured her release from a job to which she had grown accustomed, and there had to be some explanation of the reason why it had become necessary.
She could have refused, of course. She could have ignored Chris’s letters. That would have been the human thing to do, but she had risen above being merely human. Largely because she had always been terribly fond of Chris.
“I’ve been reading about you, Stephen,” she said slowly, “in the papers. You’ve made quite a name for yourself, haven’t you? That doesn’t surprise me, because we always knew you’d get to the top, didn’t we? … Or I knew!”
“Thanks,” he said, unsmiling.
“But I didn’t think your success would come so swiftly. I thought it took years for a barrister to become known.”
“All depends on how lucky he is,” Stephen remarked nonchalantly.
“And how eloquent? That case you handled a few weeks ago … Wasn’t it a woman who shot her husband?”
“Her lover,” with a touch of curtness.
“Well, I thought you handled that magnificently. And apparently everybody else thought so, too. The papers were full of praise. You must have been snowed under with briefs as a result.”
“I’m pretty busy,” he admitted.
She glanced around her at the rolling countryside. It was all so beautiful, and so English … and although Switzerland was beautiful this was something quite different. England was gentle, variable, an exquisite patchwork after the grandeur of Swiss mountains, and although they were approaching Dartmoor the greenness was as refreshing as a mountain stream. She could see the bluish haze that surrounded the high tors in the distance, the violet shadows that marked the patches of woodland. The arable land was rich and rewarding, the cattle that grazed beneath the hot Devon sun were rosy as apples. As they climbed steadily the air was full of the bleating of sheep and the cry of larks hurling themselves into the transparent atmosphere.
Since Stephen seemed loath to get around to the all-important subject, and they couldn’t have very many more miles to go, Janine decided to be more blunt in her questioning.
“How is Chris? I mean, how is she really? Her letters were so uninformative they merely worried me.”
“She asked you to come home, d
idn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“She told you about the baby that died?”
“Yes. I was terribly sorry about that, Stephen,” she added quickly. “It must have been quite a blow to you both!”
“It was a disappointment.”
“But Chris is young … You’ll have other children. Why was Chris so upset? … so desperately upset? Although she said so little I gathered from what she wrote that it was almost as if the bottom of the world had fallen out for her. She didn’t seem to be able to look ahead. I—I gathered that she’s terribly depressed.”
Stephen stopped the car abruptly. It was in a leafy lane, the boughs bending and forming an arch above their heads, and when he switched off his engine the silence—apart from that endless twittering of larks—was so profound that it actually startled Janine.
“Look here, Jan.” He had obviously formed a resolution, and his mouth was tightly set. Despite the fact that she was now quite cured of being in love with him the girl’s heart experienced something like a pang as she noticed the one or two silvery strands in his hair as he bent towards her, the way the lines were really bitten in deep at the corners of that so very handsome mouth that had once devoured her with kisses.
She shrank a little away from him, for somehow it seemed indecent now to recall those kisses when, instead of becoming her husband, he was her brother-in-law. He had married Chris, the beauty of her family—the girl who always got everything she wanted—and the one thing she must never forget was that he was now Chris’s husband. He was the father of Chris’s child that had died at birth.
She edged slowly away along the red leather seat.
Stephen glanced at her and smiled in an odd way. He laid a lean brown hand on her knee.
“Don’t think I forget the past, Jan. I shall never do that! You and I were pretty close, and I treated you badly. Perhaps if there were any fairness in life I would be regretting it now, but I’m not … not really. Chris is the wife I want, and I’ve been happy. I’ve no doubt I shall be happy again in the future—Chris, too—but for the moment our happiness is under eclipse. We don’t, as you might say, pull together in harmony any longer.”
“Why is that?” Janine asked, her slim brows crinkling.
Stephen shrugged.
“Have you never heard of an otherwise happily married woman whose nerves go to pieces when she loses her first-born, and she finds herself unable to cope with the disappointment?”
“Well, yes, of course. But Chris was always so sensible, so practical. She must have changed a good deal.”
“Marriage changes a woman.”
“And then, no doubt, she misses her modelling. She was quite set on the idea of a career for herself. Wouldn’t it have been a better plan if you’d remained in London and permitted her some interest outside the home? I’m quite sure the firms for whom she worked would have continued to employ her.”
“The very last thing I want Chris to do is to join that vast army of unsatisfied and unsatisfactory women who continue to work when they’ve no longer any right,” Stephen replied to that, with an almost glacially cool glint of disapproval in his eyes. “No! We had that all out in the beginning, and as far as I know Chris never bothers about her old life in London.”
“Then what does she bother about?”
“I don’t know,” meeting the soft grey eyes that were fringed with extraordinarily long and luxuriant dark eyelashes that cast attractive shadows and created an illusion of unplumbed depths when she looked straight at anyone.
“She said something about being afraid … always afraid!”
“That’s rubbish!” he exclaimed, with emphasis. “There’s nothing about Sandals to make anyone afraid. It’s the most delightful old house you could ever come upon, and the situation has everything to commend it from the health point of view. High, uncluttered, with a clean wind blowing straight in from the sea … and glorious views, of course. The few friends I’ve invited to stay there have rhapsodised about the place and the spot. They consider we’re extraordinarily fortunate to have found such a house at a price we could afford.”
“Then it wasn’t terribly expensive?”
“The furnishing was expensive. But an old aunt of mine died recently and left me everything she possessed, so we were able to climb out of the red quite quickly.”
“And now you can honestly say you’re flourishing?”
“I’m doing very well.” He frowned. “But please don’t harp on the prosperous angle. There is something very wrong with my marriage.”
She clasped her hands together in her lap, surveyed the neat tips of her gloved fingers, and then glanced at him quickly and away.
“You’re quite sure there isn’t another man?”
His thin, dark, handsome face grew even darker as she made the suggestion.
“Absolutely sure.”
“And there isn’t another … woman?”
He turned and looked at her again. His face grew a trifle bleak.
“I dislike this inquisition, but the answer is ‘No.’”
He smiled with the same absence of humour that typified all his smiles.
“You mustn’t be annoyed with me, Stephen,” she said. “If you are honest with yourself you’ll have to admit that I have a certain amount of reason for suspecting that your attitude towards a wife could change as completely and drastically as your attitude towards a fiancée once did. That much is history, so you can’t even deny it.”
For one moment she thought that the blackness that invaded his face was the blackness of sheer anger and resentment. And then the blackness lightened, and he even showed her his excellent hard white teeth as he smiled a little whimsically. She felt him grasping her gloved fingers.
“Touché!” he exclaimed. “I would never have believed you would reproach me like that. Why, you never even reproached me when you had the cause! And you’re right, of course … A man’s feelings can change, just as, I imagine, a woman’s feelings can change. I don’t believe you’re capable of anything like regret because you’re not married to me at this moment, are you?”
She smiled at him serenely.
“Sorry, Stephen, but it took me three months after your marriage had actually taken place to get over you … and not one second longer than three months!”
His smile became touched with wryness.
“Well, that should be good for my ego, at least. But you’re still so delightfully pretty I can’t say I’m relieved to hear you’ve got over me. At the moment it would have given me a boost to see just a tinge of regret in your eyes.”
She folded her hands primly in her lap.
“I don’t think it needs a tinge of regret in my eyes to give you a boost, Stephen,” she said. “What about all those lovely ladies who come to you for help and advice when they’re up against it? I seem to remember a Mrs. Philip Hay, whom you defended, was so beautiful she had the jury in tears when she was fighting for her life after murdering her husband.”
“She didn’t murder him,” Stephen said coldly. “His death was an accident, and the accident was proved. That was why she was acquitted.”
He started up the car, and they continued on their way to Sandals. It was only a distance of half a dozen miles, but silence descended on them as Stephen drove frowningly.
Chapter II
JANINE was not averse to finishing her journey in silence, for after two years at an ultra-modern and clinically clean school in Switzerland, teaching English, she was happy to be back where no effort was needed, and the landscape was at least partially familiar.
There were no frozen peaks on either hand, and no Alpine meadows; but the tors, which Stephen had named for her, were grim enough to have a close kinship with mountains. The day was fine, with little balls of cotton-wool cloud chasing themselves across a clear blue sky, but what the effect would be when there was lowering cloud and creeping mist she could only exercise her imagination by trying to picture. And if hovering hawks and kes
trels were substituted for blithesome larks the picture grew more forbidding.
The last two miles of the journey they were actually skirting the moor, and if Stephen hadn’t appeared so broodingly lost in his own thoughts she would have asked him about the cairns of stones that piled themselves up beside the road. At some time in her earlier history she had read about these cairns of stones, and if her memory served her it was asking for dire misfortune to move them, even if they encroached on a newly planned garden.
They dived into the gloom of an avenue of trees, and as the road uncurled like a ribbon Janine was flung against Stephen. He stopped at a white gate.
“Do you mind getting out and opening it?” he said. “And shutting it again after we’ve passed through.”
“Cattle?” she asked.
“Amongst other things. The moor ponies are the worst.”
They proceeded up a winding lane—dark and shut in by the ever-present trees—and then stopped at a second gate. Janine laughed as she slipped out this time.
“It’s exciting,” she declared. “Like guarding oneself against an enemy.”
Then, as she returned to the car, she sat hugging her knees and her thoughts grew more sombre. Christine had written that she was afraid. She had written imploringly, begging her sister to resign her position and come home. And if this was her home, bowered in trees at close range and surrounded beyond the trees by great open stretches of lonely moor, it was not perhaps surprising that, following a disastrous confinement and the loss of an eagerly awaited child, she had grown edgy, even to the point of being temporarily slightly deranged.
The great towering chimney stacks of Sandals soon came into view above the trees, and then when the trees thinned Janine could see the house itself, exactly the same colour as the moorland rocks and stones. It was obviously old. There were farm buildings adjoining it, stables and outhouses, and it appeared to be the core of a large estate. The drive circled it completely before ending up at the front door, and sloping away from the door was a smooth green lawn and flower beds.
