the cheerful atmosphere, and it was while she was attempting to make up her mind about ordering an innocuous drink, in order to prevent the landlord receiving the impression that she considered the company of his locals a little beneath her, that he spoke.
He had a slightly bored expression, and, in fact, a faintly jaded air.
His smile was sardonically twisted, and his cool grey eyes as cold as steel.
“It’s Miss Woodford, isn’t it?” he asked, while he calmly selected another cigarette from his case and lit it.
“Yes,” she answered, her slim eyebrows shooting upwards in surprise. “But how did you know?”
“I study hotel registers.” His lopsided smile was somehow disquieting and definitely tinder- valuing. “It’s a useful habit when you want to find out something.”
“And you wanted to find out something about me?”
“As a matter of fact, I know quite a lot about you already.” He offered her his cigarette-case, but she shook her head.
“I don’t smoke.”
“And you don’t drink? Or very little? The occasional sherry before dinner, and that sort of thing?”
“How – how do you know?” She felt inclined to stammer and for no particular reason she felt annoyed. She was not in the habit of entering into conversation with complete strangers and discussing with them her various addictions, while their eyes flickered over her almost disdainfully and they looked drily amused.
This particular stranger was well-dressed and had the hallmark of being affluent, and she had observed that his cigarette-case was an expensive gold one adorned with a rather flamboyant set of initials. His shirt cuffs were immaculate and his tie seemed vaguely familiar. He was personable in a dark and very slightly forbidding fashion, and must have been somewhere in his early thirties.
“The way you hesitated just now, when trying to make up your mind about ordering a drink. You don’t frequent bars, but you’re sensitive about injuring other people’s feelings. The landlord is eager to be of service to you, and you think that’s very nice.”
“Well?”
She stared at him, her slim figure very erect; her shapely head with its cap of gleaming cop- per-beach hair aflame in the light that streamed down on it from an old-fashioned hanging lantern.
“But I don’t think he’s being unnaturally attentive when you’re Miss Charlotte Woodford of Tremarth, and you’re extremely attractive… if you don’t mind my saying so! ”
The landlord was preoccupied with one of his customers, but Charlotte glanced at him and bit her lip.
“I’d like some more coffee, landlord, if you don’t mind bringing it over to this table in the comer,” she requested in a singularly clear voice.
“Of course, miss… Certainly, miss!”
There was no doubt about it, she was a popular customer.
The dark man in the impeccable grey tailoring followed her over to her table in the comer.
“I wonder if you’ll permit me to introduce myself?” he asked, as if he had every intention in any case of doing so.
Her white eyelids fluttered, and her dark eyelashes lifted above her big brown eyes.
“Must you?” she asked in her turn.
She saw a flash of even white teeth as he smiled.
“It isn’t really necessary, because you do already know me. But it’s a very long time ago since we met – when you were only five. I used to give you rides round the orchard at Tremarth on my shoulders… remember?”
She gasped as she stared up at him. From the moment that her eyes alighted on him perched on a high stool at the bar strange things had been happening to her. She felt as if her memory was being tugged at. Few people can remember clearly the faces they encountered when they were five years old, but this one must have created for itself a niche somewhere in the deep recesses of her unplumbed retentive consciousness. She would have been exaggerating outrageously if she said that she recognised him. But memory was already beginning to stir a little, like a sleeper awaking from a prolonged state of trance, and she knew why those sardonically marked black eyebrows, and those disturbing grey eyes, had puzzled her. They had intrigued her against her will. And now she knew the reason why.
“But it can’t possibly be true,” she protested, still staring up at him. “You were so many years older – ”
“I was fifteen,” he told her, “and you, as I have just reminded you, were five.”
“You were away at school. But you came to Tremarth to stay with your uncle.”
“And you were staying with your Great-Aunt Jane.”
“My aunt didn’t like you. She discouraged your visits.”
“Because her house had once belonged to my family, and she disliked to think of herself as a usurper. That was precisely what she was, however. And she was not even a Cornish-woman!”
“You’re Richard Tremarth!”
“I am.” And he bowed slightly and mockingly from the waist. “One of your earliest admirers! Have I your permission to sit down and talk to you?”
Charlotte could think of no reason why she should be discourteous enough to refuse him this permission. True, the memories – such very, very faint and faded memories – he aroused had a kind of backwash of unpleasantness. She had disliked being carried on his shoulders round the orchard at Tremarth, and the childish perspicacity that had enabled her to sense that her Great-Aunt Jane was almost hostile towards him had no doubt shaped her own attitude of badly veiled dislike and mistrust. He was the local doctor’s nephew, and he visited Cornwall two or three times a year. His people were rich – his parents, that is – but it appeared that they were always abroad. Young Richard didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. In fact, to Charlotte he was a slightly unnatural boy already approaching manhood, who cared for very little except sailing and Tremarth.
She recollected now that he had seemed passionately devoted to Tremarth. He had taken photographs of it with his expensive German camera and carried them back to school with him in one of his opulent pigskin suitcases, and he had spent hours on the terrace trying to paint the south wall that overlooked the sea. But he was no artist, and his efforts had made her laugh – a little cruelly, as she realised now. She had had beech-brown curls and elfin dark eyes, and although she had had a wholesome fear of her impressive elderly aunt she had had no fear at all of the doctor’s dark, intense nephew. Quite the contrary, in fact. She had provoked him with the shamelessness of a far older specimen of her sex, and although she accepted sweets from him, and allowed him to take her out in his boat, she never thanked him for these favours.
She had told him on one occasion that she hated him. And now that she recalled it, she was not entirely surprised. He had been so extraordinarily possessive about Tremarth, saying that her aunt had no right to live in it. and one day he would buy it back. He would force her to part with it because it was the cradle of the Tremarth family, and he was more proud of being a Tremarth than he was of being English. She simply hadn’t understood why he had seemed to despise the English. He had insisted that he was Cornish.
And one day he intended to settle down in Cornwall. It was his background… his heritage.
“Well, well,” she exclaimed, as she watched him take a seat at her table and study her over the top of it. “Life is strange, isn’t it? I never expected a bit of my past to creep up on me when I returned to Cornwall.”
Richard, who was six feet two in his socks and as lean and lithe as a greyhound, smiled.
“I’m flattered to be described as a bit of your past.”
“You know what I mean_” She felt annoyed again.
“I’d honestly forgotten you. But then that isn’t really surprising, is it? I was only a baby. And to me you were neither fish nor flesh, if you follow my meaning. You were not another child I could play with, and you were not really a man. You were something in between, and you puzzled me.”
“If you’d had brothers and sisters I would not have puzzled you at all.” “No; but I hadn’t any brothers or sisters. I was – and still am – an only child.”
“I was an only child, too,” he told her. She studied him with rather more interest. He was astonishingly good- looking, really, in a dark and saturnine way. His eyes were quite extraordinary, and they fascinated her. She wanted to look away, but his eyes would not allow this, and they stared at one another, the colour stealing slowly into her deliciously creamy cheeks as she recognised that his whole expression was mocking her. She knew enough about men to realise that he found her attractive, but the curve of his mouth was hard and cynical. He had a square jaw that jutted ominously, and she wondered what it would be like to thwart him.
And then she found herself blushing furiously because it was such an extraordinary thing to think only a few
