by India Grey
After that time in the hall Sophie didn’t see Jasper cry again, but his grief seemed to turn in on itself and, without the daily focus of sitting at Ralph’s bedside and the hope of his recovery to cling to, he quietly went to pieces. He was haunted by regret that he hadn’t had the courage to come out about his sexuality to his father, driven to despair by the knowledge that now it was too late.
Sophie’s nerves were not improved by a lonely, insecure Sergio ringing the castle at odd hours of the day and night and demanding to speak to Jasper. She fielded as many of the calls as possible. Now was not the time for the truth, but the charade had come to seem pointless and the main difficulty in Jasper and Sergio’s relationship was not that it was homosexual but that Sergio was such an almighty, selfish prima donna.
On the occasions when Jasper did speak to Sergio he came off the phone with hollow eyes and a clenched jaw, and proceeded to get drunk. That was something else Sophie was worried about. It was becoming harder to ignore the fact that as the days wore on he was waking up later and making his first visit to the drinks tray in the library earlier.
But there was no one she could talk to about it. Tatiana barely emerged from her room, and Sophie sensed that speaking to Mrs Daniels or Thomas, as staff, would break some important social taboo. Of course, it was Kit that she really longed to talk to, but even if he had been there what could she say? Unless she was prepared to break Jasper’s confidence, any concerns she expressed about his welfare would only serve to make Kit think more badly of her. Who could blame Jasper for drinking too much when his girlfriend had been about to leap into bed with his brother, while he was with his dying father?
As the week dragged on she missed him more and more. She even found herself counting the days to the funeral, where she knew she would see him again.
Looking forwards to a funeral, she told herself bleakly, was a mark of a truly bad person.
The day before the funeral Sophie was perched on top of a stepladder in the armoury hall. Taking down the antique pistols that had got soaked in the burst-pipe deluge, she dried them, one by one, as Thomas was anxious that, left alone, the mechanisms would rust. Sophie was very glad to have something to occupy her while Jasper huddled on the drawing room sofa, mindlessly watching horseracing.
Her roots were beginning to come through, and what she would really have liked to do was disappear into the bathroom with a packet of hair dye, but there was a line of shallowness that even she couldn’t bring herself to cross. Anyway, the pistol-cleaning was curiously therapeutic. Close up, many of them were very beautiful, with delicate filigree patterns engraved into their silver barrels. She held one up to the light of the wrought-iron lantern, feeling the weight of it in her hand and wondering under what circumstances it had last been fired. A duel, perhaps, between two Fitzroy brothers, fighting over some ravishing aristocratic virgin.
The despair that was never far away descended on her again, faster than the winter twilight. If she was ravishing, or aristocratic—or a virgin for that matter—would Kit feel enough for her to want to fight for her?
Theatrically she pressed the barrel of the gun to her ribs, just below her breasts. Closing her eyes, she imagined him standing in front of her, in tight breeches and a ruffled white muslin shirt, his face tormented with silent anguish as he begged …
‘Don’t do it.’
Her eyes flew open. Kit was standing in the doorway, his face not tormented so much as exhausted. Longing hit her first—the forked lightning before the rumble of scarlet embarrassment that followed.
‘Tell me,’ he drawled coolly, picking up the stack of letters that had come in the last few days, ‘had you considered suicide before, or is it being here that’s driven you to make two attempts in the last week?’
Sophie made an attempt at a laugh, but it dried up in her throat and came out as a sort of bitter rasp. ‘It must be. I was perfectly well adjusted before. How was your trip?’
‘Frustrating.’
He didn’t look up from the envelopes he was sifting through. Sophie averted her eyes in an attempt not to notice how sexy he looked, especially from her vantage point where she could see the breadth of his shoulders and the way his hair curled into the back of his neck, however, her nipples tingled in treacherous recognition. She stared at the pistol in her hand, polishing the barrel with brisk strokes of the cloth.
‘I expect you’ll be going back to London yourself when the funeral’s over,’ he said absently, as if it were of no consequence to him.
‘Oh.’ The idea had come out of the blue and she felt suddenly disorientated, and a little dizzy up there on the ladder. She took a quick breath, polishing harder. ‘Yes. I expect so. I hadn’t really thought. Are you going to be staying here for a while?’
He took one letter from the pile and threw the rest down again. ‘No. I’m going back.’
‘To London?’
To give her an excuse not to look at him she put the gun back on its hooks on the wall, but her hands were shaking and it slipped from her fingers. She gave a cry of horror, but with lightning reactions Kit had stepped forwards and caught it.
‘Careful. There’s a possibility that some of these guns might still be loaded,’ he said blandly, handing it back to her. ‘No. Not London. Back to my unit.’
For a moment the pain in Sophie’s chest felt as if the gun had gone off.
‘Oh. So soon?’
‘There’s not much I can do here.’ For the first time their eyes met and he gave a brief, bitter smile. ‘And at least it’s a hell of a lot warmer out there.’
Sophie’s heart was thumping hard enough to shake the stepladder. She could tell from his offhand tone and his abstracted expression that he was about to walk away, and she didn’t know when she would see him alone again, or get the chance to say any of the millions of things that flooded her restless head at night when sleep wouldn’t come and she lay awake burning for him.
‘I only came back to pick this up.’ He held up the letter. ‘I have an appointment with Ralph’s solicitor in Hawksworth, so—’
‘Kit—wait.’ She jumped down from the stepladder, which was a bit higher than she thought, and landed unsteadily in front of him so he had to reach out a hand to grab her arm. He withdrew it again immediately.
Sophie’s cheeks flamed. ‘The other night—’ she began miserably, unable to raise her head. ‘I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t a mistake. I knew what I was doing, and I—’
His eyes held a sinister glitter, like the frost outside. Beautiful but treacherous. ‘Is that supposed to make it better?’
She shook her head, aware that it was coming out wrong. ‘I’m trying to explain,’ she said desperately. ‘I don’t want you to think that Jasper and I— It’s not—we’re not—’
Kit’s mouth twisted into a smile of weary contempt. ‘I’m not blaming you for what happened—it was just as much my fault. But I don’t think either of us can really pretend it wasn’t wrong.’ Moving past her, he went to the huge arched door and put his hand on the iron latch. ‘Like you, I don’t have that many unbreakable rules but I wasn’t aware until recently that one of them is that you don’t touch your brother’s woman. Under any circumstances.’
‘But—’
‘Particularly not just because you’re both bored and available.’
The cruelty of his words made her incapable of reply. The door gave its graveyard creak as he opened it and went out, leaving nothing but an icy blast of winter in his wake.
The windscreen wipers beat in time to the throbbing in Kit’s head, swiping the snow from in front of his eyes. But only for a minute. No sooner was the glass clear than more snow fell, obscuring everything again.
It seemed hideously symbolic of everything else in his life right now.
In London, trying to make some sense of Alnburgh’s nightmarishly complicated legal and financial position, he had come up against nothing but locked doors and dead ends. But at least there he had had some perspect
ive on the situation with Sophie.
Being back within touching distance of her had blown it all out of the water again.
Was it her acting ability or the way she looked up at him from under her eyelashes, or the fact that watching her rub the barrel of that gun had almost made him pull her down off the ladder and take her right there, against the door, that made him want to believe her? Wanted to make him accept it without question when she said that a little thing like being Jasper’s girlfriend was no obstacle to them sleeping together?
He pulled up in the market square and switched the car engine off. For a moment he just sat there, staring straight ahead without seeing the lit-up shops, the few pedestrians, bundled up against the weather as they picked their way carefully over the snowy pavements.
Since his mother had left when he was six years old, Kit had lived without love. He didn’t trust it. He had come to realise that he certainly didn’t need it. Instead he had built his life on principles. Values. Moral codes. They were what informed his choices, not feelings.
And they were what he had to hold on to.
He got out of the car and slammed the door with unnecessary force and headed for the offices of Baines and Stanton.
The Bull was beginning to fill up with after-work drinkers when Kit came out of his meeting with the solicitor. He knocked back his first whisky in a single mouthful standing at the bar, and ordered another, which he took to a table in the corner.
He intended to be there for a while; he might as well make himself comfortable. And inconspicuous. On the wall opposite he noticed the Victorian etching of Alnburgh Castle. It looked exactly the same now as it had done a hundred years ago, he thought dully. Nothing had changed at all.
Apart from the fact it was no longer anything to do with him because Ralph Fitzroy wasn’t his father.
It was funny, he thought, frowning down into the amber depths of his glass, several whiskies later. He was a bomb-disposal expert, for God’s sake. He was trained to locate explosives and disarm them before they did any damage, and all the time he’d been completely oblivious to the great big unexploded bombshell in the centre of his own life.
It explained everything, he mused as the whisky gave a sort of warm clarity to his thoughts. It explained why Ralph had been such a spiteful bastard when he was growing up. And why he had always refused to discuss the future of the estate. It explained …
He scowled, struggling to fit in the fact that his mother had left him with a man who wasn’t his father, and failing.
Oh, well, it explained some things. But it changed everything.
Everything.
He stood up, his chest suddenly tight, his breath clogging in his throat. Then, draining his whisky in one mouthful, left the bar.
Wrapped in a towel, still damp from the bath, Sophie put her bag on the bed and surveyed the contents in growing dismay.
Out of long habit she hadn’t ever bothered to unpack, so she couldn’t, even for a moment, enjoy a glimmer of hope that there might be something she’d temporarily forgotten about hanging in the wardrobe. Something smart. And black. And suitable for a funeral.
Black she could do, she thought, rifling through the contents of her case, which was like a Goth’s dressing up box. It was smart and suitable where she fell down.
Knickers.
How could she have been so stupid as to spend most of the day looking for displacement activities and polishing pistols when she could have nipped out to The Fashion Capital of the North, which must surely do an extensive range of funeral attire? But it was way too late now. And she was pretty much left with one option.
She’d balled her last unlucky purchase from Braithwaite’s in the bottom of the bag, from whence she’d planned to take it straight to the nearest charity shop when she got back to London, but she pulled it out again now and regarded it balefully. It was too long obviously, but if she cut it off at the knee and wore it with her black blazer, it might just do …
Rubbing herself dry, she hastily slipped on an oversized grey jumper of Jasper’s and some thick hiking socks and set off downstairs. It was late. Tatiana had retired to her room ages ago and had supper on a tray, Thomas had long since gone back to his flat in the gatehouse and Sophie had helped a staggering, slightly incoherent Jasper to bed a good hour ago, after he had fallen asleep on the sofa watching The Wizard of Oz. However, the fact that all the lights were still on downstairs suggested Kit hadn’t come back yet.
Her heart gave an uneven thud of alarm. Passing through the portrait hall, she looked at the grandfather clock. It was almost midnight. Kit had said something about him going to see the solicitor—surely he should have been back hours ago?
Visions of icy roads, twisted metal, blue lights zigzagged through her head, filling her with anguish. How ridiculous, she told herself grimly, switching the light on to go down the kitchen steps. It was far more likely that he’d met some old flame and had gone back to her place.
The anguish of that more realistic possibility was almost worse.
She switched the kitchen light on. On the long table in the centre of the room a roast ham and roast joint of beef stood under net domes, waiting to be sliced up for the buffet at the funeral tomorrow. After that she’d be going back to London, and Kit would be leaving for some dusty camp somewhere in the Middle East.
Sophie felt her throat constrict painfully.
She’d probably never see him again. After all, she’d been friends with Jasper all these years without meeting him. She remembered the photo in the paper and wondered if she’d catch glimpses of him on the news from time to time. A horrible thought struck her: please, God, not in one of those reports about casualties—
She jumped as she heard a noise from the corridor behind her. It was a sort of rusty grating; metal against metal: the noise made by an old-fashioned key being turned in a lock—yet another piece from Alnburgh’s archive of horrorfilm sound effects. Sophie turned around, pressing herself back against the worktop, the scissors held aloft in her hand—as if that would help.
In the dark corridor the basement door burst open.
Kit stood there, silhouetted against the blue ice-light outside. He was swaying slightly.
‘Kit.’ Dropping the scissors, Sophie went towards him, concern quickening inside her. ‘Kit, what happened? Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’
His voice was harsh; as bleak and cold and empty as the frozen sky behind him.
‘Where’s the car?’ Her heart was pumping adrenaline through her, making her movements abrupt and shaky as she stepped past him and slammed the door. In the light from the kitchen his face was ashen, his lips white, but his eyes were glittering pools of darkness.
‘In town. Parked in the square outside the solicitor’s office. I walked back.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was well over the limit to drive.’
He didn’t feel it. No gentle, welcome oblivion for him. The six-mile walk home had just served to sharpen his senses and give a steel-edged sharpness to every thought in his head.
And every step of the way he’d been aware of the castle, black and hulking against the skyline, and he’d known how every potential intruder, every would-be enemy invader, every outsider, for God’s sake, for the last thousand years had felt when confronted with that fortified mass of rock.
One thought had kept him going forwards. The knowledge that the six-foot-thick walls and turrets and battlements contained Sophie. Her bright hair. Her quick smile. Her irreverence and her humour. Her sweet, willing body …
‘What happened?’
She was standing in front of him now, trembling slightly. Or maybe shivering with the cold. She was always cold. He frowned down at her. She appeared to be wearing a large sweater and nothing else. Except thick woollen socks, which only seemed to make her long, slender legs look even more delicious. They were bare from mid-thigh downwards, which made it hard to think clearly about the question she’d just asked, or wa
nt to take the trouble to reply.
‘Kit? Was it something the solicitor said?’
She touched his hand. Her skin was actually warm for once. He longed to feel it against his.
‘Ralph wasn’t my father.’
He heard his own voice say the words. It was hard and maybe, just maybe a tiny bit bitter. Damn. He didn’t want to be bitter.
‘Oh, Kit—’
‘None of this is mine,’ he said, more matter-of-factly now, walking away from her into the kitchen. He turned slowly, looking around him as if seeing it all for the first time.
‘It all belongs to Jasper, I suppose. The castle, the estate, the title …’
She had come to stand in the doorway, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She was looking up at him, and her eyes were liquid with compassion and understanding and …
‘I don’t.’
Her voice low and breathless and vibrating with emotion as she came towards him. ‘I want you to know that I don’t belong to Jasper. I don’t belong to anyone.’
‘And I don’t have a brother any more.’
For a moment they stared at each other wordlessly. And then he caught her warm hand in his and pulled her forwards, giving way to the onslaught of want that had battered at his defences since she’d sat down opposite him on the train.
Together they ran up the stairs, pausing halfway up at the turn of the staircase to find each other’s mouths. Kit’s face was frozen beneath Sophie’s palms and she kissed him as if the heat of her longing could bring the warmth back into his body. His jaw was rough with stubble, his mouth tasted of whisky and as he slid his hands up beneath the sweater she gasped at the chill of his hands on her bare breasts while almost boiling over with need.
‘God, Sophie …’
‘Come on.’
Seizing his hand, she ran onwards, up the rest of the stairs. Desire made her disorientated, and at the top she turned right instead of left, just as she had that first night. Realising her mistake, she stopped, but before she could say anything he had taken her face in his hands and was pushing her up against the panelled wall, kissing her until she didn’t care where they were, just so long as she could have him soon.
