Craving the Forbidden

by India Grey

  It came out in the armoury hall. As she went down the sound of voices rose up to meet her—less subdued and funereal now as champagne was consumed, interspersed with laughter. She found herself listening out for Kit’s voice amongst the others, and realised with a tearing sensation in her side that she’d never heard him laugh. Not really laugh, without irony or bitterness or cynicism.

  But maybe he would be laughing now, with Olympia.

  She came down the last step. The door was ahead of her, half-open and letting in arctic air and winter sunshine. Determined not to look round in case she lost her nerve, Sophie kept her head down and walked quickly towards it.

  The cold air hit her as she stepped outside, making her gasp and bringing a rush of tears to her eyes. She sniffed hard, and brushed them impatiently away with the sleeve of her faithful old coat.

  ‘So you’re leaving.’

  She whirled round. Kit was standing at the top of the steps, in the open doorway. His hands were in his pockets, his top button undone and his tie pulled loose, but despite all that there was still something sinister in his stillness, the rigid blankness of his face.

  The last glowing embers of hope in Sophie’s heart went out.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded, and even managed a brief smile although meeting his eye was too much to attempt. ‘I saw you talking to Olympia. It’s a small world. I suppose she told you everything.’

  ‘Yes. Not that it makes any difference. So now you’re going—just like that. Were you going to say goodbye?’

  Sophie kept her eyes fixed on the ivy growing up the wall by the steps, twining itself around an old cast-iron down-pipe. Of course it didn’t make any difference, she told herself numbly. He already knew she was nothing. Her voice seemed to come from very far away. ‘I’ll write to Tatiana. She’s surrounded by friends at the moment—I don’t want to barge in.’

  ‘It was Jasper I was thinking of. What about him?’

  Sophie moved her bag from one hand to the other. She was conscious of holding herself very upright, placing her feet carefully together, almost as if if she didn’t take care to do this she might just collapse. She still couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  ‘He’ll be OK now. He doesn’t need me.’

  At the top of the steps Kit made some sudden movement. For a moment she thought he had turned and was going to go inside, but instead he dragged a hand through his hair and swung back to face her again. This time there was no disguising the blistering anger on his face.

  ‘So, who is he? I mean, he’s obviously pretty special that he’s come all this way to claim you and you can’t even wait until the funeral is over before you go and fall into bed with him. Is it the same one I heard you talking to on the train, or someone else?’

  After a moment of confusion it dawned on Sophie that he must have seen her with Sergio. And jumped, instantly, to the wrong conclusion.

  Except there wasn’t really such a thing as a wrong conclusion. In her experience ‘wrong conclusion’ tended to mean the same thing as ‘confirmation of existing prejudice’, and she had learned long ago that no amount of logical explanations could alter people’s prejudices. That had to come from within themselves.

  ‘Someone else.’

  ‘Do you love him?’ Suddenly the anger that had gripped him seemed to vanish and he just sounded very tired. Defeated almost.

  Sophie shook her head. Her knees were shaking, her chest burning with the effort of holding back the sobs that threatened to tear her apart.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why? Why are you going to him?’

  ‘Because he’d fight for me.’ She took a deep breath and lifted her head. In a voice that was completely calm, completely steady she said, ‘Because he trusts me.’

  And then she turned and began to walk away.

  Blindly Kit shouldered his way through the people standing in the hall. Seeing his ashen face and the stricken expression on it, some of them exchanged loaded glances and murmured about grief striking even the strongest.

  Reaching the library, he shut the door and leaned against it, breathing hard and fast.

  Trust. That was the last thing he’d expected her to say.

  He brought his hands up to his head, sliding his fingers into his hair as his mind raced. He had learned very early on in life that few people could be trusted, and since then he had almost prided himself on his cynicism. It meant he was one step ahead of the game and gave him immunity from the emotional disasters that felled others.

  It also meant he had just had to watch the only woman he wanted to be with walk away from him, right into the arms of someone else. Someone who wore designer clothes and left his shirt tails trailing and trusted her. Someone who would fight for her.

  Well, trust might not be his strong suit, but fighting was something he could do.

  He threw open the door, and almost ran straight into the person who was standing right on the other side of it.

  ‘Alexia, what the—?’

  ‘I wanted to talk.’ She recovered from her obvious fright pretty quickly, following him as he kept on walking towards the noise of the party. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  ‘Now isn’t a good time,’ he said, moving through the groups of people still standing in the portrait hall, gritting his teeth against the need to be far more brutally honest.

  ‘I know. I’m sorry, but it’s bothered me all these years.’ She caught up with him as he went through the archway into the armoury hall and moved in front of him as he reached the door. ‘That thing that happened at school. It wasn’t Summer, it was Olympia. She set it all up. I mean, Summer—Sophie—did have the dress and I don’t know how she got the money to pay for it, but it certainly wasn’t by stealing it from the dorm. Olympia just said it was.’

  ‘I know,’ Kit said wearily. ‘I never doubted that bit.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alexia had taken her hat off now, and without it she looked oddly exposed and slightly crestfallen. ‘I know it’s ages ago and it was just some silly schoolgirl prank, but hearing Olympia say it again like that, I didn’t like it. We’re adults now. I just wanted to make sure you knew the truth.’

  ‘The truth is slightly irrelevant really. It’s what we’re prepared to believe that matters.’ He hesitated, his throat suddenly feeling as if he’d swallowed arsenic. ‘The other thing—about her checking into the hotel with a man. Was that one of Olympia’s fabrications too?’

  ‘No, that was true.’ Alexia was looking at him almost imploringly. ‘Kit—are you really OK? Can I help?’

  From a great distance he recognised her pain as being similar to his own. It made him speak gently to her.

  ‘No, I’m not. But you have already.’

  He wove his way through the parked cars jamming the courtyard and broke into a run as he reached the tower gate. At the sides of the driveway the snow was still crisp and unmarked, but as he ran down he noticed the prints Sophie’s high-heeled shoes had made and they made her feel closer—as if she hadn’t really gone. When he reached the road through the village they were lost amongst everyone else’s.

  The King’s Arms was in the mid-afternoon lull between lunchtime and evening drinkers. The landlord sat behind the bar reading the Racing Times, but he got to his feet as Kit appeared.

  ‘Major Fitzroy. I mean Lord Fitzr—’

  Kit cut straight through the etiquette confusion. ‘I’m looking for someone,’ he said harshly. ‘Someone staying here. Room three I believe? I’ll see myself up.’

  Without giving the flustered landlord time to respond he headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time. Room three was at the end of the short corridor. An empty vodka bottle stood outside it. Kit hammered on the door.

  ‘Sophie!’

  Kit listened hard, but the only sounds were muted voices from a television somewhere and the ragged rasp of his own breathing. His tortured mind conjured an image of the man he’d seen earlier pausing as he unzipped Sophie’s dress and her whisperin
g, Don’t worry—he’ll go away …

  But he wouldn’t. Not until he’d seen her.

  ‘Sophie!’

  Clenching his hand into a fist, he was just about to beat on the door again when it opened an inch. A face—puffy-eyed, swarthy, unshaven—peered out at him.

  ‘She’s not here.’

  With a curse of pure rage, Kit put his shoulder to the door. Whoever it was on the other side didn’t put up much resistance and the door opened easily. Glancing at him only long enough to register that he was naked except for a small white towel slung around his hips, Kit pushed past and strode into the room.

  In a heartbeat he took in the clothes scattered over the floor—black clothes, like puddles of tar on the cream carpet—the wide bed with its passion-tumbled covers and the room darkened, and he thought he might black out.

  ‘Kit—’ Jasper leapt out of the bed, dragging the rumpled sheet and pulling it around himself. Blinking, Kit shook his head, trying to reconcile what he was actually seeing with what he had expected.

  ‘Jasper?’

  ‘Look, I didn’t want you to find out like this.’ Jasper paused and ducked his head for a moment, but then gathered himself and raised his head again, looking Kit squarely in the eye while the man in the white towel went to his side. ‘But it’s probably time you knew anyway. I can’t go on hiding who I really am just because it doesn’t fit the Fitzroy mould. I love Sergio. And I know what you’re going to say but—’

  Kit gave a short, incredulous laugh as relief burst through him. ‘It’s the best news I’ve had for a long time. Really. I can’t tell you how pleased I am.’ He turned and shook hands with the bewildered man in the white towel, and then went over to Jasper and embraced him briefly, hard. ‘Now please—if Sophie’s not here, where the hell is she?’

  The smile faded from Jasper’s face. ‘She’s gone. She’s getting the train back to London. Kit, did something happen between you, because—?’

  Kit turned away, putting his hands to his head as despair sucked him down. He swore savagely. Twice. And then strode to the door.

  ‘Yes, something happened between us,’ he said, turning back to Jasper with a suicidal smile. ‘I was just too stupid to understand exactly what it was.’

  The good news was that Sophie didn’t have to wait long for a train to come. The bad news was that there was only one straight-through express service to London every day, and that was long gone. The one she boarded was a small, clanking local train that stopped at every miniature village station all along the line and terminated at Newcastle.

  The train was warm and virtually empty. Sophie slunk to a seat in the corner and sat with her eyes closed so she didn’t have to look at Alnburgh, transformed by the sinking sun into a golden fairy tale castle from an old-fashioned storybook, get swallowed up by the blue haze.

  She was used to this, she told herself over and over. Moving on was what she did best. Hadn’t she always felt panicked by the thought of permanence? She was good at new starts. Reinventing herself.

  But until now she hadn’t really known who ‘herself’ was. Sophie Greenham was a construction; a sort of patchwork of bits borrowed from films and books and other people, fragments of fact layered up with wistful half-truths and shameless lies, all carried off with enough chutzpah to make them seem credible.

  Beneath Kit’s cool, incisive gaze all the joins had dissolved and the pieces had fallen away. She was left just being herself. A person she didn’t really know, who felt things she didn’t usually feel and needed things she didn’t understand.

  As she got further away from Alnburgh her phone came back into signal range and texts began to come in with teeth-grating regularity. Biting her cheeks against each sledgehammer blow of disappointment, Sophie couldn’t stop herself checking every time to see if any were from Kit.

  They weren’t.

  There were several from her agent. The vampire film people wanted to see her again. The outfit had impressed them, at least.

  ‘Tickets from Alnburgh.’

  She opened her eyes. The guard was making his way along the swaying carriage towards her. She sat up, fumbling in her broken bag for her purse as she blinked away the stinging in her eyes.

  ‘A single to London, please.’

  The guard punched numbers into his ticket machine with pudgy fingers. ‘Change at Newcastle,’ he said without looking at her. ‘The London train goes from platform two. It’s a bit of a distance so you’ll need to hurry.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Sophie muttered, trying to fix those details in her head. Until then she’d only thought as far as getting on this train. Arriving at Newcastle, getting off and taking herself forwards from there felt like stepping into a void.

  She dug her nails into her palms and looked unseeingly out of the window as a wave of panic washed over her. Out of nowhere a thought occurred to her.

  ‘Actually—can you make that two tickets?’

  ‘Are you with someone?’

  For the first time the guard looked at her properly; a glare delivered over the top of his glasses that suggested she was doing something underhand. The reality was she was just trying to put something right.

  ‘No.’ Sophie heard the break in her voice. ‘No, I’m alone. But let’s just say I had a debt to pay.’

  The station at Alnburgh was, unsurprisingly, empty. Kit stood for a moment on the bleak platform, breathing hard from running and looking desperately around, as if in some part of his mind he still thought there was a chance she would be there.

  She wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t. She had left, with infinite dignity, and for good.

  He tipped his head back and breathed in, feeling the throb of blood in his temples, waiting until the urge to punch something had passed.

  ‘Missed your train?’

  Kit looked round. A man wearing overalls and a yellow high-vis jacket had appeared, carrying a spade.

  ‘Something like that. When’s the next one to London?’

  The man went over to the grit bin at the end of the platform and thrust the spade into it.

  ‘London? The only straight-through London train from here is the 11.07 in the morning. If you need to get one before that you’ll have to get to Newcastle.’ He threw the spadeful of grit across the compacted snow.

  Hopelessness engulfed Kit. Numbly he started walking away. If he caught a train from Newcastle, by the time he’d got to London she’d be long gone and he’d have no way of finding her. Unless …

  Unless …

  He spun round. ‘Wait a minute. Did you say the only straight-through train was this morning? So the one that just left …’

  ‘Was the local service to Newcastle. That’s right.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Kit broke into a run. He didn’t stop until he reached the tower gate, and remembered the cars. The party was evidently still going on, and the courtyard was still rammed with vehicles. Kit stopped. Bracing his arms against the shiny black bonnet of the one nearest to him, letting his head drop as ragged breaths were torn from his heaving chest, almost like sobs.

  She had gone. And he couldn’t even go after her.

  ‘Sir?’

  Dimly he was aware of the car door opening and a figure getting out. Until that point he hadn’t registered which car he was leaning against, or that there was anyone in it, but now he saw that it was the funeral car and the grey-haired man who had just got out was the undertaker.

  ‘I was going to ask if you were all right, but clearly that would be a daft question,’ he said, abandoning the stiff formality of his role. ‘A better question would be, is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kit rasped. ‘Yes, there is.’

  Sophie stood on the platform and looked around in confusion.

  Newcastle Central Station was a magnificent example of Victorian design and engineering. With its iron-boned canopy arching above her, Sophie felt as if she were standing in the belly of a vast whale.

  Apart from the
noise, and the crowds, maybe. Being inside a whale would probably be a blissfully quiet experience compared to this. People pushed past her, shouting into mobile phones to make themselves heard above the echoing announcement system and the noise of diesel engines.

  Amongst them, Sophie felt tiny. Invisible.

  It had been just a week and a half since she’d dashed onto the 16.22 from King’s Cross but now the girl with the stiletto boots and a corset dress and the who-cares attitude could barely bring herself to walk away from the little train that had brought her from Alnburgh. After the space and silence of the last ten days it felt as if the crowds were pressing in on her and that she might simply be swept away, or trampled underfoot. And that no one would notice.

  But the guard had said she needed to hurry if she was going to catch the London connection. Adjusting her grip on her broken bag, holding it awkwardly to make sure it didn’t spill its contents, she forced herself to move forwards.

  Platform two. Where was platform two? Her eyes scanned the bewildering array of signs, but somehow none of the words made sense to her. Except one, high up on the lit-up board of train departures.

  Alnburgh.

  Sophie had never been homesick in her life, probably because she’d never really had a home to be sick for, but she thought the feeling might be something like the anguish that hollowed out her insides and filled her lungs with cement as she stared at the word.

  She looked away. She didn’t belong there—hadn’t she told herself that countless times during the last ten days? The girl from nowhere with the made-up name and the made-up past didn’t belong in a castle, or in a family with a thousand years of history.

  So where did she belong?

  Panic was rising inside her. Standing in the middle of the swarming station concourse, she suddenly felt as if she were falling, or disappearing, and there was nothing there to anchor her. She turned round, desperately searching for something familiar …

  And then she saw him.