White Rivers

by White Rivers (retail) (epub)

  ‘Then there was an incident,’ David said carefully. ‘There had been many small fights among the crowd, apparently, and it seems there was also a crowd of anarchists out to make trouble, and they soon swelled into a mob. A dozen people were injured, some of them seriously. And there was one fatality.’

  ‘My brother,’ Skye said. He expected her to cry, she thought woodenly. To fall apart. To be a hysterical female. She had fainted, but that was as much out of concern for her father as anything else, she realised, consumed with a new guilt. She and Sinclair had never truly got on, nor understood one another.

  To most men, hearing such news should result in predictable female reactions. David was no exception. She could tell that by the way he seemed intent on holding her, squeezing her arms so hard now that she was sure she would have bruises on them.

  But she couldn’t cry. Not yet. She was still numb with shock, and brandy was only going to make her light-headed, dulling the pain. Her journalist training was forcing her to be analytical about it all, keeping emotions at bay until a suitable time. A suitable time for weeping… She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, wondering if these really were the thoughts of the emotional and passionate Skye Tremayne… But of course they weren’t; these were the thoughts of the mature and dignified Skye Norwood, wife and mother, but still the journalist, with the monstrous ability to see the drama in a situation, however close to her heart…

  She felt the thrust of a glass against her cold lips, and swallowed a minute amount of the bitter spirit. She hated its taste, grimaced, and said she would prefer the hot sweet tea, if nobody minded.

  ‘She’s such a brave lady,’ she heard Mrs Arden whisper again. ‘And ’tis such a terrible thing to happen, on account o’ they terrible people dressed up in their comic hats.’

  Comic hats indeed… such an innocent phrase for men with such evil intent to hide behind. It was the one thing, the only thing, that had the power to scatter all Skye’s senses, and the tea went flying as her nerve broke, and she seemed to lose control of her limbs.

  ‘That’s right, my love. Let go and cry as much as you want,’ David’s muffled voice said, as she fell against him in a torrent of weeping. ‘You’ll be all the better for it.’

  * * *

  How long she stayed there, she couldn’t have said. She was hearing nothing but the sound of her own keening and her ragged heartbeats. And then she heard Philip’s outraged voice.

  ‘What the devil’s going on here?’

  Before anyone could answer, Skye caught sight of Mrs Arden rushing into the room behind him, and of her daughters’ frightened and disbelieving eyes at the spectacle of their mother in the arms of a stranger.

  ‘Mr Norwood, sir,’ the housekeeper said. ‘Please bring the children outside for a moment while Mrs Norwood composes herself.’

  Skye expected a bombastic remark from her husband, but something in the urgency of the housekeeper’s voice, and her own obvious distress, apparently alerted him that this was no clandestine meeting, but something far graver. She saw Philip shoo the girls out of the room, and struggled away from David Kingsley at once, highly embarrassed now at losing control of herself so badly.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘For what?’ he said gently. ‘For being a woman, with all a woman’s tenderness and compassion? I would never have expected anything less of you, Skye.’

  She caught her breath, wishing he would go now. Needing to think. Needing to know what to do next.

  He stood up. ‘Look, you’ll want to be alone with your husband, so I’ll get back to town and see if any more news has come through. I’ll telephone you tonight, if I may, to see if there is anything I can do for you. I have some influence with the shipping company, and if you need an immediate passage—’

  She looked at him, not understanding for a moment. And then she did, and it all became clear what she must do.

  ‘Thank you, David. And there is something you can do right away. Would you send a telegram to my father, saying I’ll come as soon as possible?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She went to the little bureau in the corner of the room, wrote down the address and handed it to him. Her hands shook, but she was oddly calmer inside, knowing what she had to do.

  She had to go home. Her father needed her, and there was no one else. Out of all that huge, generations-old, widespread Tremayne family, she was the only one who could comfort him. The only one left of his own.

  Chapter Seven

  No matter how hard Skye resolved to put all thoughts of the children out of her mind, the memory of their tearful faces and clinging arms as she said goodbye to them kept haunting her. She would be an unnatural mother if it were any different, and it had been hard not to let them come and wave her off at Falmouth, but that would have truly finished her. As it was, they stayed at home with their father, and it had been the ever-supportive David Kingsley who had taken her to the quay on that sunny August morning.

  True to his word, David had got her an amazingly early passage on a ship bound for New York, and it was David Kingsley who had hugged her and wished her well, just as though they were a normal, loving couple. His last words reminded her that once, long ago, he had had every hope that they would be…

  ‘Take care of yourself, Skye. You’re very precious to a lot of people,’ he said softly.

  ‘Good Lord, that sounds most unlike your usual pragmatic self,’ she said, her eyes bright.

  ‘I know. But at times like these, a little poetic licence is permissible, isn’t it? Even in a hard-headed newspaperman.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, hugging him back, and uncaring that they were in a public place. In any case, it was the kind of place for hugs and kisses and emotional farewells. ‘You’ve been a good friend, David, and I won’t forget it.’

  ‘Just come back safely, and you know we’ll all be thinking of you.’

  She nodded. The trip itself was traumatic enough – travelling back to where she had once belonged – without such a sad time ahead of her. The funeral would be delayed until her arrival, and her father’s last telegram had been effusive and lengthy, and almost pathetic in his thanks for her presence. As if there had been any doubt that she would be there… Her next thought had been her firm intention to bring him back to Cornwall with her.

  Cresswell Tremayne would be a lonely man now, she reflected sadly. His wife was gone, and so were his parents. His beloved daughter had continued his link with his Cornish heritage, but there had always been Sinclair, staunchly American, the son of whom he was inordinately proud, despite his priggish ways. Skye knew that. A man’s son was always a man’s son… and now he too was gone.

  She leaned on the ship’s rail, shivering in the coolness of the sea air, and watched the receding Cornish shoreline until she could see it no more. Her eyes were blurred, torn between the need to be with her father, and her anguish at leaving her own small family behind. There had been no question of any of them coming with her, of course. The children were too young to come on such a sad mission and Philip’s place was with them.

  ‘Can I get you anything, ma’am?’ a deferential American voice said, close beside her, and she turned to see one of the ship’s young stewards.

  ‘Nothing, thank you,’ she told him, shaking her head.

  ‘Don’t catch cold, then, ma’am. It can turn chilly very quickly once we get out to sea.’

  ‘I know it. And thank you again.’

  She was cheered by his familiar accent, the first American one she had heard in a long while. In fact, one of the last ones had been that of Lieutenant Lewis Pascoe, the soldier who had turned up at New World near the end of the war, and had turned her grandmother’s life upside down, reviving such evil memories of the man who had raped Morwen Tremayne’s best friend, so many years ago.

  Skye shivered again, and went down to her cabin to unpack properly. Memories were strange things. They came back to haunt you at the most unexpected times. Even
now, even here, on this return voyage to her homeland, she kept remembering another voyage, the one where she had met her husband, and started a chain reaction that had sent them into one another’s arms.

  She closed her eyes, picturing the moments. Philip had been so dashing then. So educated and forceful, and so everything, when she was feeling so young and gauche to be crossing the Atlantic alone on the great adventure to the country of her mother’s birth. But from the moment they met, she had known she was no longer alone.

  Skye gave a small sigh, peering through her porthole at the last sight of land for days. The ocean was very calm, the dying rays of sunlight gleaming on its mirrored surface and the shadowy silhouette of the Cornish coast. An artist’s paradise. As the phrase entered her head, her thoughts turned at once to Albert Tremayne.

  She had naturally informed all the family of her brother’s death, but since none of them had ever known him, she was met with no more than the usual platitudes. Except from Albie, when she called on him to say goodbye.

  ‘Your mother would have been grief-stricken,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘Primmy was always an emotional woman. This news would have devastated her.’

  ‘And my father,’ Skye reminded him.

  She still wasn’t comfortable in thinking of Albert and her mother in the same breath. Her moments of compassion for him were fewer now, though she was alarmed to see that he had gone downhill fast in the last few months. He was a rheumy-eyed old man now, and none too clean.

  ‘Oh ah, your father.’ The sneering note was in his voice again, and any sympathy for him vanished. He was never going to forgive Cress for taking his beautiful Primmy away from him, she thought, but it was all so long ago, and time now for forgetting and forgiving on all sides.

  ‘I’m hoping to bring him back with me, for a long visit, at the very least,’ she said coolly. ‘He’s got no one else now. I hope the family will make him welcome – all of them.’

  ‘I dare say they will,’ Albie remarked, non-committally. As she turned to go, he caught at her hand. ‘What? No kiss goodbye, when you ain’t even been to visit me for weeks, and it took a knife in your brother’s guts to bring you to my studio? I’ll not be seeing you for God knows how long—’ his voice became whining, with the petulance of the self-centred elderly.

  ‘Goodbye, Uncle Albie,’ she gasped, claustrophobic at the very nearness of him, and needing to get out of his presence while she could still feel untainted by it. It was terrible to feel that way, about the man, the brother, whom her mother had loved so dearly.

  But perhaps Primmy had been more innocent than Skye had ever been. Primmy hadn’t seen the horrors of war the way Skye had, nor heard the tortured tales of lust and downright evil inhumanity that some of the dying soldiers had whispered to her, in order to appease their consciences.

  Compared with what Skye had experienced, Primmy was an angel in heaven… and she undoubtedly was now, she thought, her breath catching on a sob. And Primmy’s ever-ambitious son was probably organising his portion of heaven already, came the more irreverent thought.

  But she sobered at once, remembering where she was, and why she was leaving Cornwall. She lay on her bunk for a while before the bell was due to call the passengers for dinner, and closed her eyes. She didn’t sleep, although she was exhausted by the speed and trauma of the past few days. But lulled by the rhythmic motion of the ship, she seemed to see a succession of people and places passing through her waking dreams.

  So many people… her own sweet children, and Philip, holding them close to him. Albie… her thoughts slid away from him. Theo and his unexpected concern for her, followed by a more predictable swift return to last-minute discussions about the pottery and the clayworks, which were far more important… Her own last visit to the pottery, surrounded by the purity of the products she loved, to oversee and check with Adam Pengelly that all was well with the new man Theo had so arrogantly installed… Nice young Ethan pressing a bunch of flowers into her hand and wishing her well… And Nick…

  Her heart jolted. She hadn’t seen Nick Pengelly since the day he had made the outrageous comments to her outside the pottery, but his face was suddenly there in her mind, as if it was the only one that mattered. His rich, deep voice was filling her senses, as caressing as a lover’s touch. Her nerve-ends tingled, and she felt herself curling up on the narrow bunk, hugging her arms to her chest, her breasts, as if it was someone else’s arms hugging her, holding her. Nick’s arms… Nick’s hands…

  Her eyes were open, but dilated now, not seeing anything but the knowledge she had seen in his eyes and his face, and knowing that the feelings were reciprocated in her, or could be, given the chance… and thank God, there was no such chance. But even as she thought it, she was aware that the spectacular rhythmic sensations she was experiencing had nothing to do with the throbbing of the ship’s engines. They were deep and exquisite within her, reminding her that she was a passionate and sensual woman, with a woman’s longings and needs, and a yearning that she hadn’t felt in a very long while – a fierce and primitive desire to be loved by a man who wasn’t her husband…

  * * *

  Nick Pengelly didn’t believe in telepathy. Nor did he logically expect Skye Norwood to be giving him a second thought. He was a dealer in logic, in facts, but he also had a fair acceptance of fate putting in a hand from time to time. Because of all those things, he also accepted that he could never forget the woman with so much beauty and grace who had made such an impression on him, and that he thought about her far too often.

  They had met so few times, and yet she was already imprinted in his heart and soul. He had breathed in the scent of her, and seen the answering knowledge in her eyes at the frisson of magnetism between them. She may resist it, but she couldn’t deny it. Even if she refused to do anything about it.

  … And assuredly wouldn’t, Nick thought savagely. She was too sweet and upright, too bloody marvellous a woman to do anything but honour her marriage vows. And he was a lawyer who couldn’t afford such sentiments or even admit to such a raging desire to make her his own, whatever the cost.

  Almost wildly, he thanked God that he could keep far away from her in Plymouth. And when his brother Adam telephoned to tell him his mother was ill and calling for him, he learned at the same time that Skye Norwood’s brother had been killed in street fighting, and she had gone to America to be with her father. The tragedy aside, Nick decided that this was clearly meant to be providential.

  Whatever God was up to, He was keeping them apart. He didn’t intend them to meet and be lovers. The word slid into his mind before he could stop it, conjuring up unbidden images of Skye lying naked in his arms, and being everything in the world he’d ever dreamed about.

  ‘Christ, what’s happening to me?’ he muttered. ‘I’ve never hungered for another man’s wife in my life before.’

  ‘Are you all right, old boy?’ he heard his partner say mildly. ‘You’ve been staring at those papers for God knows how long. Is it that difficult a case?’

  ‘No,’ Nick snapped. ‘Just that I seem to have lost heart in it for the moment. Thinking of my mother, I suppose, and trying to fit in my schedule as best I can before I have to go down to Cornwall. I’m sorry to leave you at such a time, William.’

  He heard William clear his throat. ‘Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to speak to you about, Nick, and I’ve hardly known how to begin. But now seems as good a time as any, to give you time to digest it while you’re away.’

  * * *

  Skye couldn’t have said who she met on board ship, or who she dined with, and she was so obviously a woman in mourning who preferred to be left alone that the other passengers mutely respected her wishes. It suited her. She didn’t want transient company; she missed her children, and she longed for the voyage to end, where once she had longed for another voyage to go on forever. How far she and Philip had travelled, in so many respects, she thought sadly, when at last the ship was within sight of the New Yo
rk skyline.

  But as always, the sight of that vibrant city revived her spirits, despite the sadness that had brought her here. The ship’s purser had sent a telegraph ahead, and her father would be there to meet her.

  It was the reverse of her one-time departure from America, but the moment she caught sight of Cresswell amid the crowded quayside, the usual streamers and bunting heralding a ship’s safe arrival, and the crazy jazz music the bands were playing, she felt a deep, profound shock.

  She hadn’t seen him since Celia was born – nearly seven years – and in that time he had changed dramatically. Losing his beloved Primmy had done that… but Skye had not expected him to look so old, so desperately old. He was no longer the glamorous young man her mother had so adored. Not even the father she too had adored, and who had been at such pains to let her lead her own life, even though it took her far away from home. Nor the man who had encouraged his only son to go to Washington DC and follow his dream, even though it was obvious to all of them that Sinclair never really had what it took to be a politician.

  Cresswell Tremayne looked exactly what he was: a broken man, lost and bereft, and desperately seeking the one person in all the world he longed to see. The only one he had left. He had always been so strong, so large, and now he seemed to have shrunk in every way.

  Skye pushed away the sense of shock and waved madly, until at last he saw her. And the look on his face was so joyous, so wonderfully joyous, that her heart broke for him.

  ‘Daddy,’ she said chokingly, when at last she was clasped in his frail arms. ‘Oh Daddy—’

  She couldn’t say any more, and he couldn’t speak at all. They simply stood and held one another, jostled on all sides by the disembarking passengers, and not noticing it. But at last they became more composed, and he led her to a waiting car that was taking them home to New Jersey.