To Catch A Unicorn

by Sara Seale

  "Well, what had you in mind, then? There's a bit of truth in these old legends, you know, and young virgins are very delectable bait."

  "As you've already discovered, perhaps?"

  "Not with the chaste Miss Bread-and-butter, my sweet, delightful though I find her in small doses."

  "Dom's scarcely going to believe that, knowing your reputation, is he? He already thinks it's you who's stolen her innocent heart. I've worked on that one."

  "You're full of spite, aren't you?" he remarked conversationally, then suddenly abandoned his casual air of inconsequence. "Don't be a damn fool, Cleo! You don't want the kid, and you don't really care about Dom—or Laura. If you can soak him for a decent settlement and no strings attached, cash in while the going's good. I might even play along, if he makes it worth my while. Anyway, don't antagonise him just for a bit of spleen."

  "Spleen ... spite ... Troy taught me that very early," she said with a rather strange air of pride. "Yes, Perry, like you, I'm full of spite when I'm crossed. I am a Trevayne now."

  "Like all converts you're more fervent than those born into their faith," he said, getting off the bed and patting the creases from his clothes, then he suddenly fell back on it again, pulling her with him.

  "Stop needling me, you little bitch," he said, his mouth on hers. "You know you've got me, just as you got Troy ... there were times when you almost got me to the altar until you had larger ideas. Chuck it up, Cleo ... make your little killing work for us both ..."

  "And what does that mean?" she asked, without really caring, as she felt the familiar touch of his hands on her breasts, her limbs, and knew her own animal attraction reaching out to his.

  "Never mind ... never mind ..." he murmured, and just for a moment, as his lips and his body made demands, she was suddenly a young girl again, wanting the innocent, sweeter things of love, seeking assurance of her own capacity

  for giving.

  After he had gone, she lay for a long time drifting back into the half-remembered hopes and uncertainties of late adolescence, then, realising the hour was growing late, and with Perry and Laura safely out of the way Dominic was vulnerable to a flank attack, she renewed what items of make-up Perry had ruined and went downstairs.

  Peregrine drove Laura through empty lanes, and villages shuttered and deserted by the Bank Holiday exodus to the towns, already regretting his impetuous invitation. Fresh as he was from Cleo's experienced hands, the negative little cousin seemed no fit companion for an evening's jollification in the pub, though it might be both entertaining and instructive to see how many drinks it would take to get Miss Laura Smith to let her back hair down.

  Laura, on the other hand, was experiencing a blessed sense of relief as the car took them away from Penzion and she felt the cool wind in her hair and saw the young spring sky arching above them. It was a pity, she thought, when they arrived all too soon at St. Mewan, to spend such a fine evening in the stuffy bar parlour of a pub, but at least it sounded cheerful with the noise and laughter coming from the public bar next door.

  Conversation was desultory at first, for Peregrine seemed silent and morose, though more likely, Laura thought, with her practical acceptance of other people's moods, it was all the beer he had consumed at the races now lying heavy on his stomach.

  "I don't want to be involved," she said suddenly with that precipitate habit she had of voicing her thoughts, and Peregrine raised an enquiring eyebrow, reminding her of the impression of horns she had on the train.

  "Involved in what?" he asked. "Drink?"

  "Whatever's going on at Penzion."

  "But you are involved, my sweet, aren't you? You've lost your silly little heart to Dom, and he—well, your guess is as good as mine."

  "But you know, don't you, Perry."

  "Well, if I do, I'm not telling. I thought you said you didn't want to be involved."

  She sighed and he told her to drink up and drown her sorrows.

  "We're both drowning our sorrows, aren't we?" she said, mournfully. "There's something I want to ask you, Perry."

  It was dark in the little back parlour and her face was in shadow, but he found the innocent column of her slender neck, and her pale, fluttering hands oddly touching.

  "Well, ask away. What's scaring you?" he said.

  "I'm not scared," she said, "just a little nervous because I'm going to be impertinent."

  "Are you, now?"

  "Yes. Look, Perry, I know you and Cleo are having an affair and that's none of my business, but—but I want to know if—if Cleo marries Dominic, are you really going on with it?"

  "Well, for crying out loud!" he exclaimed, swallowing his drink at a gulp. "What the hell's that go to do with you?"

  He crossed to the hatch a little unsteadily, not waiting for a reply, but when he came back with the drinks she answered politely:

  "It's got to do with me because I care. I care, I mean, that Dominic has a square deal. Cleo doesn't, you see."

  "Now look here," he blustered, beginning to sound a little slurred, "you can't go asking indecent questions like that. What do you suppose your more civilised cousin would say to such notions?"

  "What she's already said—that she means to have her cake and eat it. Cleo is ruthless, you know. But you, Perry—I don't really believe that even you—" She had clasped her hands in an unconscious little gesture of entreaty, stilling their restless movement, and leaned towards him across the table between them.

  He leaned forward himself across the table to peer more closely into her face, and put out a hand to touch her, seeking assurance for something already forgotten, and she suddenly smiled at him, the trusting but slightly mischievous smile of a little girl begging a favour.

  It was only then that he became aware of the unnatural silence which, for several minutes, had fallen upon the bar next door, and he turned uneasily to glance across the half open door, mentally cursing any interruption at this rewarding moment.

  Dominic stood there, a glass in his hand, regarding them with such an expression of bitter darkness that Laura, following the direction of Peregrine's eyes, gave an involuntary little cry and then sat very still.

  CHAPTER NINE

  To Laura he looked, silhouetted against the bright light behind him, as he had that first night on the station platform; the dark stranger who had seemed like an apparition owing to both piratical forebears and ancestry of a more sinister origin. Then he closed the door behind him, shutting out the background of light, and the illusion was lost.

  "Are you ready to come home?" he said with casual enquiry, and to Laura, who had almost expected his first words to be accompanied by the smell of smoke and brimstone, the question seemed an anticlimax.

  "Yes," she said a little nervously. Peregrine might be too full of dutch courage to notice the danger signals, but she could see them, and it wouldn't take much, she thought, to start one of their brawls. "Come on, Perry—it's been a nice party, but I'm getting hungry."

  "Sit down, Miss Bread-and-butter. When I bring you out for an evening's mild entertainment, you'll go when I'm ready."

  Laura sat down, not from any conscious obedience to his command but because her legs felt weak.

  "You see?" he said with triumphant insolence. "Aren't you rather overdoing the role of watchdog, Big Brother? Your ewe lamb's scarcely under age for licensed premises, so why spoil the fun?"

  Dominic's eyes went from the rows of empty glasses to Laura's embarrased face, and he observed quite mildly:

  "If your idea of fun is to get a girl who's unused to liquor tight, then I think interference is necessary. What were you hoping for—an easy roll in the hay on the way home?"

  Peregrine got to his feat unsteadily, an angry flush on his dark face.

  "If that's the way you want it, Dom, come outside and take

  a licking. You haven't much luck with the girls you pick to defend, have you?"

  His brother caught him a blow across the cheek which sent him reeling back to his seat, but he
did not, as Laura feared, hit back, but sat, glowering and sullen and more than a little fuddled.

  "You'll be sorry for that—you'll be very sorry," he said thickly, but Dominic took no further notice of him. The violence with which he had sat down had upset glasses and plant alike on the table, and Laura's hidden cache was revealed, spilling their untasted contents in little trickles over the cloth.

  For the first time Dominic's face relaxed in a rather grim smile and he turned to Laura, now on her feet again.

  "I misjudged you, Miss Mouse," he said. "It would appear it was you trying to get my brother sloshed, not the other way about, and apparently succeeding very ably. Shall we go? We'll leave Perry to follow at his leisure."

  He emptied his own glass without hurry, set it down on the table with the others, then opened the door for Laura to precede him into the street.

  "Well!" she said, getting into the car parked beside Peregrine's. I must say my sympathies are rather with Perry."

  "That, of course, is taken as read, judging by your expression when I so inconveniently interrupted," he replied as he took his seat beside her. "Was the affair coming along nicely?"

  "I don't know what you mean," she said, flushing.

  "Don't you? Weren't you trying softening-up tactics?"

  "Yes, I was, and thanks to you, I still haven't had my answer," she said crossly, not understanding in the least what he might be hinting at, and his answering smile was not at all reassuring.

  "Your cousin's more experienced methods don't become you," he said, starting up the engine.

  She sensed disparagement in this remark, and said resentfully:

  "What's Cleo got to do with it?"

  "I might make a guess, but you probably wouldn't care to be told you were making rather a poor hand at taking a leaf out of her book," he said. 'She had a pretty shrewd idea what you were up to, you know, and felt she might have given you bad advice."

  "Is that why you came?" she said as the car moved slowly down the deserted street. "Did she send you to rescue me from a fate worse than death, or some such corny nonsense?"

  "Oh, I hardly think you would have come to much harm in the local where we're all well known, apart from a possible thick head in the morning—though of course it's Perry who's going to have the thick head as it turns out," he said, reverting to his old manner of dealing with ill-considered absurdities, but her little spurt of indignation died as she remembered his contemptuous remark to his brother. An easy roll in the hay on the way home ... was that what he thought of her? Had his intervention been merely a self-imposed duty as head of the house to save a silly young girl from making a fool of herself?

  He did not break the stony silence between them, neither did he hurry through the lanes and villages as Peregrine had, and when they came to the cliff road which led to Penzion, he pulled up on the verge and cut his engine.

  "We might as well enjoy the last of the sunset," he remarked as though nothing less trivial lay between them than a Bank Holiday outing in fine weather. "We get some spectacular sunsets in these parts, you know."

  "Do you?" she said politely, and he turned to look at her, settling himself sideways behind the wheel and resting an arm along the back of the seat.

  "You're tired, aren't you?" he said ... Yes, she was tired, desperately tired, and the little wound in her hand was beginning to throb. She had managed to fight back the tears which had threatened earlier, but it would not take much, she thought, to bring them back, and of all else she wished to preserve the last of her dignity.

  "Well, it's been quite a day," she replied with a gallant attempt at lightness. "Scenes ... assaults ... high words ...

  tantrums ... the Trevaynes take these things as a matter of

  course."

  "Not all of them—but you mentioned assaults," he said with the lift of an eyebrow, and she said, resisting evasion:

  "Well, you did pounce on me in the book-room—certainly more in the nature of an assault than a tender embrace, I would have said—unprovoked, too."

  He smiled, and in the gathering darkness his face seemed to soften to the old half-impatient indulgence.

  "If there's one thing more than another I admire about you, Miss Mouse, it's that brash refusal to parley with the enemy," he said. "I apologise for my assault, as you call it, but it was not unprovoked."

  "N-not?"

  "No. I didn't at all care for your adoption of my brother's not very complimentary epithet for me—even though it was meant as a joke."

  "Then I apologise, too," she said handsomely. "Only—"

  "Only what?"

  "It—well, it seems an odd reaction if one's annoyed with somebody."

  "Yes, I daresay. You don't understand very much about the way a man's emotions react, do you?"

  "No," she said humbly, "and you least of all, Dominic. You—you alternate so quickly between aloof withdrawal and a sort of indulgent tolerance. It's very confusing."

  "Indulgent tolerance ... is that all you think I've felt for you?"

  "Did that sound unimportant to you?" she asked, resting her head against his arm with the natural confidence of a young child. "It wasn't to me, you see, because I know— Cleo's often told me—how irritating I can be with my naive remarks and what she calls whimsies. You may have laughed at me kindly, but you always listened."

  He was silent for such a long minute that she turned her head to look at him, wondering if she had, as so often, given the wrong answer. He was looking down at her with such an unexpected expression of pain that she put out a hand to

  touch his face.

  "Am I being naive again?" she asked a little anxiously, and he smiled at her.

  "No, my dear, just rather naturally uncomprehending," he answered. "Do you remember we once talked of defences— a cover-up for more serious thoughts and, possibly, emotions? You didn't understand, did you? I left it too long, it seems."

  "I have defences too, you know—I suppose everyone has. Covering up isn't always easy, either," she said, remembering that Cleo had told her she could be an embarrassment to him; and he, thinking of Peregrine who took so easily and cared so little, answered gently: "No, it isn't. What have you done to your hand ?"

  It was the bandaged hand she had put out to touch him and he captured it as she was about to withdraw it.

  "I pricked it on the unicorn's horn," she said indifferently, and he gave her an odd look.

  "H'm . . . quite a nasty little wound, and looking rather angry. Does it hurt?"

  "It throbs a bit."

  "It would seem the superstition's working the wrong way round—the wretched creature's succeeded in administering the poison instead of the antidote. That'll larn you not to muck about with unicorns," he said, and began binding up her hand again with a clean handkerchief of his own.

  "Perry said the beast of the house had put its mark on me and I was caught," she said sleepily, enjoying the excuse for having him touch her, but winced as he tightened the final knot with an unexpected jerk. "I told him, of course, it was the unicorn that has to be captured, not the maiden."

  "Don't you be too sure. Either way, you'd be advised to leave the chancy brutes alone until the time is ripe."

  "Are they chancy?"

  "Very! Proud and rebellious and defiant, too, according to Spenser."

  "That sounds like Peregrine," she said, and he returned her hand to her lap, with ungentle haste. "Don't, for God's sake, go weaving your romantic fancies

  around my brother and expect him to live up to legendary tradition," he snapped with a return of the old impatience.

  "Oh, I don't," she said, already half asleep and impervious to ill-humour. "I don't think Perry's a true unicorn ... he hasn't got blue eyes ..."

  "H'm ..." he grunted. "Time we were going home. They'll have finished supper, I'm afraid, but Bella will find us something, and I'll attend to that hand properly before you go to bed."

  He did not drive on immediately, but let the engine idle as he turned toward
s her suddenly and put one hand under her chin, tilting her face up to his. Her eyes flew open, but she could not see his expression very well in the darkness that had fallen, then he bent his head and kissed her very gently.

  "That's to show you I have another side," he said, and would have let her go, but her arms wound round his neck and she was offering her mouth again.

  "Why, Laura ..." he murmured softly, and would have drawn her closer, but a noisy sports car shot by them, the angry popping of its exhaust disrupting the stillness and the delicate nuance of the moment.

  "Perry evidently returning a little the worse for wear," he said a shade grimly, watching the car's tail-lights disappear up the road in erratic arcs and curves, and put his own car into motion.

  The next day the household appeared to return to normal with the disregard for recent disturbances which could still astonish Laura. Peregrine, if he was suffering from a hangover, showed no sign of it, and was his usual boastful self. Dominic, though he looked a little tired, seemed only to be occupied with the many outside jobs about the place which a week's holiday from the works would allow them to catch up on, and even Cleo had shed her bitter moodiness and resumed her lazy role as mistress of the house.

  "It's extraordinary how they all seem able to throw things off as if they had never happened," Laura said to Bella, realising, even as she spoke, that she now classed Cleo with the dark Trevaynes.

  "It would make for a very uncomfortable domestic life if they did not, dear child," Bella replied with unanswerable logic. "It has not occurred to you, I suppose, that it might be an alien element among us that sparks off these little disturbances?"

  "Are you, by any chance, suggesting that I'm this alien element?" Laura asked with such astonishment that Bella shook her head at her in faint reproof.

  "But of course. You might think that it's your cousin who creates tension with her airs and graces and strong sexual appeal, but she's too like them to score by being unexpected. It's natural, of course, that Perry should be attracted, for he's very like Troy in his tastes, but Dom remembers his mother, and she was not unlike you."

  "What was she like—Mrs. Trevayne?" Laura asked eagerly, as she had once asked Dominic, and Bella replied as he had: