“I’m going across to the home farm,” Adam informed her as he pulled up the car at the side of the road. “We can go by the field path, unless you would rather wait for me in the car?”
She shook her head, slightly disappointed that they were not going to visit the Priory.
“I’d much rather come with you,” she told him. “I’ve been sitting all afternoon, and I’d like to see the farm.”
To reach the home farm they would have to cross the river at some point. There would be a bridge, of course, nearer the Priory , itself, but it could not be seen from where they stood.
“I thought we could go over by the stones,” Adam said as he led the way down toward the river bank. “The water’s shallow enough here and we generally use this way across. It saves four miles round by the road.”
Beneath them the river lay shining in the sun like a flat sheet of molten metal, with little flurries of foam at the edges and along the line of the deep stepping stones. It was a lovely sight and Jane drew in a breath of sheer delight. Aisedale was far more beautiful than she had thought.
With a swift upsurging of happiness for which she could not account, she ran down on to the nearest stone. She felt like a child again, as if she had been taken on an unexpected, excursion into a new paradise, fresh and green and unsullied by doubt or sorrow or disappointment. She wanted to explore it, to capture every minute of its ecstasy, as if it were a delicately colored bubble which might burst at a touch or vanish at a word.
Then, suddenly, she was gazing down at her feet, looking in consternation at what was, for her, an impassable gap. The water rushed brown and strong between two stones which had been set at a greater distance apart than the others, and she would have had to leap across to reach the far one in safety. One false step or a small miscalculation would land her in the river, and she could see that it was deep and knew that it would be ice-cold with melted snow from the fells.
“What’s the matter?” Adam asked, coming across the stones behind her. “Can’t you make it?”
“It’s my silly foot!” How she hated to admit to him that she couldn’t cope with one small stepping stone. “I can’t rely on it. I can’t put any weight on it to jump. I’m sorry, Adam. I ought to have known what a handicap I would be. I ought to have stayed behind in the car.”
“That’s easily remedied,” he told her. “We haven’t time to turn back now that we’ve come this far.”
He picked her up as if she had been a child, vaulting with her easily from stone to stone, and Jane’s mind and heart seemed to stand still as river and fields and sky tilted madly for a moment. Then all she was sure about was Adam’s strong arms clasped firmly round her and Adam’s hard, dark face close to her own.
She could not breathe easily and she dared not speak. His body felt hard and taut against hers and his lips were parted a little as they made the far bank, his breath strong between his even white teeth. She closed her eyes, still feeling the strength and security of these supporting arms but knowing they circled her as remotely as a stranger’s. To Adam this was no more than the necessary effort which her frailty demanded of him. She thought of her injured foot with a sharper, keener bitterness than ever before because suddenly she knew that she wanted Adam Drummond to hold her in his arms with the knowledge of her desirability shattering the icy barrier about his heart.
He stood her on her feet on the grass bank, steadying her with a hand under her arm.
“I’m sorry if I had to be rather abrupt about it,” he apologized, without looking at her. “If we had stood there arguing you would have fallen in out of sheer panic!”
He had dismissed it with a shrug. Jane felt humiliated and angry, but beneath it all she could not deny what she already knew only too well. What had happened to her out there on the stepping stones across the placid, peaceful Aise had never happened before. She was in love.
It had shaken her to the very depths of her being: this all-powerful, pride-shattering emotion which she had never had to grapple with until now.
When she thought about Stephen and their affection for one another, it was like contemplating something so remote that it might never have existed at all. They had been children, Stephen and she, idle children playing at love. He had been fond of her and she had been in love with a myth, with the man she had imagined him to be, but she had known what manner of man Adam Drummond was from the beginning.
Hard and inflexible, he would scorn her for loving so easily a second time, and all she could do now was to try not to let him see.
He stood waiting without any show of emotion on his dark face, neither of anger nor of contempt, and she fell into step beside him with a heavy heart.
What a position she was in! She had come to High Tor to help Penny and to try to help Adam Drummond, and now she could not even help herself. She was hopelessly, irretrievably in love with a man she was quite sure would never love again.
Halfway across the pastures Adam looked sharply up to the hillside above them.
“Marion rides hard,” he observed. “She’ll be with us in half a minute.”
Jane’s gaze followed his, and when Marion came riding down toward the home farm she knew that the incident on the stepping stones had been observed from the hill.
Horse and rider took the last fence at a gallop. It was a low, dry-stone dike skirting the moor, with a steel wire running above it, and the jump was a magnificent one. Even Jane could see that. It all looked so effortless as Marion cantered up, but it had been quite a feat of horsemanship, and somehow Jane knew that Marion had staged it deliberately to impress.
“Hullo, you two!” she greeted them casually. “I saw you trying to commit suicide crossing the stones. You could have gone round by the Priory.”
“My job was at the home farm,” Adam told her, holding the rein for her to dismount. “Jameson is away and someone has to arrange for the sale of these two heifers Barraclough wants.”
“I’m on my way to the Priory,” Marion said, looking directly at Adam. “Will you come across when you’re through at the farm?”
Without hesitation he said:
“Take Jane. I’ve an hour’s work to do and then I must get back to High Tor as quickly as possible.”
Marion’s eyes narrowed. She did not try to hide her anger. She was disappointed and chagrined at his refusal, and she did not particularly want to take Jane to the Priory.
“I could easily wander back to the car on my own,” Jane suggested when Adam had left them.
“And manage the stepping stones all by yourself this time?” Marion queried cynically.
“No,” Jane said coldly. “I thought there might be some other way back to the road.”
She did not want to go with Marion, even though Adam had suggested she should.
“There isn’t,” Marion said. “The first bridge across the river is in the Priory grounds. It’s part of our driveway, as a matter of fact.” Her laugh was a harsh, brittle sound, which she could not disguise as anything other than the deepest bitterness at her loss. “I should have said ‘Adam’s driveway,’ of course. The Priory is his property now.”
“I don’t suppose the land could have been sold without including your home?” Jane asked sympathetically. “I think it was just the land that interested Adam.”
“Unfortunately, he had to take the Priory with it,” Marion said thinly. “He probably considered it fortunate at the time,” she added with deliberation. “He was engaged to my sister and I suppose he planned to make their future home there.”
Jane wanted to ask her about Angela and could not, aware once more of the strange reticence which had kept her silent when Angela Denholm’s name had been mentioned at High Tor.
“It’s a heavenly spot!” she said instead, looking about her with keen appreciation. “So vastly different from the moor yet not so very far away. The dales have been a revelation to me. Somehow, one generally imagines the North of England, and especially the Border country, to be all rugged hills and moorlan
d.”
“And sheep!” Marion put in dryly. “You live and learn. We are more or less civilized, you know.”
They entered the grounds by a turnstile gate in an iron fence, erected to keep out the deer that roamed freely across the fells.
“I shall have to go in by the side door,” Marion said, setting her mount free in a small paddock close to the house. “We’re locked and barred at the front. I still keep most of my trophies here and, of course, there’s the furniture. Adam has been quite kind about not hustling me out,” she added.
Jane had a peculiar feeling that Marion did not intend to go. At least, she did not mean to go in a hurry. Her possessions were still locked away here in her old home and that gave her at least a foothold.
“Here we are!” Marion inserted a large iron key in the lock of the side door and gave it a push. “It always was rather stiff. You’re going to find everything a bit musty,” she warned. “Old houses unfortunately have that drawback when they have been shut up for so long.”
Jane wondered how long the Priory had been closed. It seemed such a waste of a beautiful old home to keep it permanently untenanted like this, but, of course, that was Adam’s affair.
She wondered if he would have used it if he had married Penny, and, going from room to room in Marion’s wake, she could very well imagine her vivacious twin setting the sunshine free in this lovely old house. At the moment all the light seemed to be trapped in the gardens, closed out of the rooms themselves by the heavy shutters guarding the windows. Marion had unbolted some of them here and there to let them see their way about, but the inside of the Priory looked gloomy with its shrouded furniture and the light only filtering through.
In spite of this, the general impression of the house was one of complete beauty. The long, panelled rooms with their lofty windows and wide stone fireplaces would have made a gracious home and the views across the parkland to the river were magnificent.
Marion appeared to have little time for the views, however. She had come, she explained, to bring away the trophy for the local point-to-point, which she had won now for two years in succession and hoped to retain at the forthcoming meeting in a week’s time.
“It needs a bit of spit and polish,” she observed as she took down the heavy silver salver from its position of honor in the hall.
Jane wandered round the hall, looking with interest at the many trophies which adorned its walls and stood on every inch of shelf space.
“Are they all yours, Marion?” she asked in a genuinely awed tone.
“Most of them.” Marion came over, lighting a cigarette. “One or two of them are Tony’s but he took the bulk of his cups to Canada with him. Not to remind him of the old place, I don’t suppose,” she added harshly. “He could always drink beer out of the tankards!”
The contempt in which Marion held her brother was obvious, and Jane felt uncomfortable, knowing so little about Tony Denholm. Marion put the salver under her arm and turned toward the door.
“Adam won’t come for us,” she said. “We’d better wander down to the farm.” She began to pull the shutters across the high windows, closing out most of the light. “He never comes here if he can possibly avoid it,” she went on deliberately. “But perhaps you might be able to persuade him to break that rule in time.”
The words had been a question. Marion paused beside the final, unshuttered window waiting for her reply.
“We haven’t discussed it,” Jane answered weakly.
“But surely you must have discussed your marriage?” Marion asked evenly. “Where are you going to live?”
“I thought that High Tor was Adam’s home,” Jane said, feeling trapped.
Marion laughed.
“That’s what Adam would like, but he can’t quite trust Nigel down here yet. Not on his own.” She turned abruptly, allowing the remaining light to flood revealingly on to Jane’s face while she kept her own back to the window. “You seem to know amazingly little about your fiancé,” she suggested. “But perhaps Adam doesn’t want you probing into his past. It does seem a peculiar thing to me, though, that he should have made the same mistake twice.”
Jane felt the blood draining out of her cheeks.
“Mistake?” she echoed. “I don’t think I understand you, Marion.”
Marion came closer, open derision in her pale eyes at last.
“No, of course not,” she agreed. “How could you? How could you see that you’re no use to Adam, that you never could be—with your clinging helplessness and your limping foot! Adam will get tired of carrying you over stepping stones. He’s not a man like that. He needs a woman who can live life to the full by his side, someone who can take her place in his natural environment. He has no time for a child—a plaything—someone he will always have to worry about and take care of—”
“Please stop!” Jane cried. “I can’t think all this is doing any good! Neither of us would dare to say these things to Adam, so why should we thrash it out between ourselves? It doesn’t matter, you see,” she added bleakly. “It doesn’t matter at all.”
“Of course it matters!” Marion flashed. “Even Adam can make mistakes—and find out about them in time. What surprises me is that he has made a second one.” She looked down at Jane with open contempt in her eyes. “He thought himself in love once before with a girl just like you, but it came to nothing.”
Jane drew back as if she had been struck. Marion’s face was livid with jealousy and she had been speaking about her own sister! Angela had been going to marry Adam and on her wedding day she would have become the new mistress of Aisedale Priory—Angela who was Marion’s junior by several years, the youngest of the three Denholms and the only one who might have lived eventually in the old family home.
“I can’t see that it matters,” she heard herself repeating almost foolishly as a heavy bell began to clang through the quiet house.
Marion looked across the shadowed hall to the great main door.
“Sounds as if we have visitors,” she remarked so casually that Jane was left to wonder if their conversation of a moment ago could ever really have taken place. “Someone has seen us come in or noticed Thunderer in the paddock.”
She motioned Jane outside by the way they had come, and as she re-locked the side door a big, thick-set man in riding clothes strode round the gable end of the house from the front terrace. He was the robust, hearty type, with a clean-shaven red face and small brown eyes that darted here and there incessantly as he spoke. He slapped his thighs hard with his riding crop.
“Saw you letting in the daylight, Marion, as I rode by,” he explained his presence. “By jove! Changed days at the Priory, eh?”
“For the moment, Roger.” Marion eyed him distastefully. “How is life?” she asked unconcernedly.
“Oh, so-so! But we bear up. The snow has made things rather unpleasant this winter, don’t you think?”
“It would depend on which ‘things’ you mean,” Marion observed dryly, but her sally only provoked the newcomer to hearty laughter.
“Yes, by jove!” he agreed. “Life would be pretty dismal without a little flutter, wouldn’t it? We never see you at the Circle nowadays, by the way,” he added. “Has High Tor given you cold feet?”
“It has given me a sense of proportion,” Marion informed him. “Oh, by the way,” she added, as if she had just thought about it, “this is Roger Malchatt, Jane, Roger—Jane Thornton, Adam’s fiancée.”
Roger Malchatt’s brows shot up almost to his sandy-colored hairline.
“By jove!” he exclaimed vacantly once again. “I had no idea! Is this a sort of well-guarded secret?” he asked after the barest of pauses. “It certainly comes as a surprise to me!”
“If you were here more often, Roger—in the North, I mean—you would no doubt have heard,” Marion said dryly. “Did you come about the salver, by the way?”
“Oh—yes, by jove!” He seemed relieved that the conversation had turned from Adam and the surprising fact of hi
s second betrothal. “I’ll take it along for you, shall I? They were moaning about it at the last committee meeting, saying it ought to be in their hands a week before the meet, and I promised to contact you.”
“You needn’t have worried,” Marion told him. “I’m not likely to make off with one silver salver, even if I have won it twice running!”
“Yes, by jove! And likely to win it outright in a week’s time, too!” His admiration for Marion’s prowess in the saddle was evidently quite genuine. “There’s nobody to take it from you.”
“Except perhaps Adam,” Marion suggested, her voice suddenly tense. “He’s the only one who could do it, but I believe he has scratched because his mother has been so ill.”
“No, he hasn’t scratched,” Roger said. “He must have forgotten. I hear the old lady is improving. Can’t get these old dales types down, can you?”
Marion frowned.
“No,” she agreed, handing over the salver. “Take care of it, Roger, won’t you? I shall want to use it again!”
“Make a nice wedding present for Adam!” he laughed. “Hasn’t he won it twice, too?”
“It’s three consecutive times,” Marion reminded him sourly.
“Come and see us at Fother Gill,” Roger Malchatt invited, turning to Jane. “If Adam won’t bring you, ask Nigel. He’s the socially inclined member of the family!”
Adam was coming toward them across the parkland when Jane and Marion returned to the terrace.
“We’ve just had a pressing invitation from Roger Malchatt to visit Fother Gill,” Marion informed him. “He came for the salver.”
Adam frowned, glancing at Jane.
“Did you accept Malchatt’s invitation?” he queried,
“It was left open,” Marion said before Jane could answer. “Roger suggested that Nigel might take Jane across.”
There was open amusement in her pale eyes, the desire, suddenly, to annoy Adam. But Adam’s mood had gone beyond annoyance. There was all the evidence of anger in his gray eyes as he watched Marion mount Thunderer and ride away.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said, “but I didn’t give my promise to go to Fother Gill.”
The Gated Road Page 6
