had fallen from an arrangement that sat on the shelf of a cheveret to one side of the window. They felt like small pieces of down-covered satin against her palm. She looked for a rubbish-basket and thus circumvented an open acknowledgement of St James' primary vanity, a need to hide his bad leg in an attempt to appear as normal as possible.
'Has anyone seen Tommy?'
Lady Helen read the meaning underlying St James' question. 'He doesn't know what happened. We've managed to avoid him.'
'Deborah's managed as well?'
'She's been with Sidney. She saw to her bath, got her to lie down, took her some tea.' She gave a brief, humourless laugh. 'The tea was my profound contribution. I'm not sure what effect it was supposed to have.'
'What about Brooke?'
'Can we be so lucky as to hope he's taken himself back to London?'
'I doubt it. Don't you?' 'Rather. Yes.'
St James was standing next to the bed. Lady Helen knew she should leave the room to give him privacy to dress, but something in his manner — a meticulous control too brittle to be believed — compelled her to stay. Too much remained unsaid.
She knew St James well, better than she had known any other man. She had spent the last decade becoming acquainted with his blind devotion to forensic science and his determination to stoke out ground upon which he could build a reputation as an expert. She had come to terms with his relentless introspection as well as with his desire for perfection and his self-castigation if he fell short of a goal. They talked about all of this, over lunch and dinner, in his study while the rain beat against the windows, on their way to the Old Bailey, on the stairs, in the lab. But what they did not talk about was his disability. It had always represented a polar region of his psyche that brooked no-one's intrusion. Until today on the cliff-top. Even then, when he had finally given her the opening she had long awaited, her words had been inadequate.
What, then, could she say to him now? She didn't know. Not for the first time did she wonder what sort of bond might have developed between them had she not left his hospital room eight years ago simply because he asked her to do so. And to obey him then had been so much easier than taking the chance of walking into the unknown.
Still, she couldn't leave him now without attempting to say something that gave him — even in small measure — back to himself.
'Simon.'
'My medication is on the counter above the washbasin, Helen,' St James said. 'Will you fetch me two tablets?'
'Medication?' Lady Helen felt a quick surge of concern. She didn't think she had misread his reasons for locking himself away in his room for the afternoon. He hadn't been acting as if he was having any pain at all, despite Cotter's admonition to her earlier.
'It's just a precaution. Above the washbasin.' He smiled, a flicker that passed across his face and was gone in an instant. 'I take it that way sometimes. Before instead of during. It works just as well. And if I'm to put up with Mr Sweeney as a thespian for an evening I ought to be prepared.'
She laughed and went to get it for him, calling back into the bedroom. 'Actually, this isn't a bad idea. If tonight's production is anything like the other we saw, we'll all be popping painkillers before the evening's through. Perhaps we should take the bottle along with us.'
She brought the tablets back into the bedroom. He had gone to the window where he was leaning forward on his crutches, looking out at the southern view of the grounds. But she could tell from his profile that his eyes registered nothing.
The sight of him like this negated his words, his polite co-operation, and the lightness of his tone. She realized that even his smile had been a device to cut her off completely, while all along he existed, as he always had done, alone.
She would not accept it. 'You might have fallen,' she said. 'Please. Simon darling, the path was too steep. You might have been killed.'
'Indeed,' he answered.
The cavernous Howenstow drawing room did not possess the sort of qualities that made one feel at home wandering through it. The size of an overlarge tennis court, its furniture — an aggregation of antiques positioned in conversational groupings — was scattered across a fine chenille carpet. Walled with Constables and Turners and displaying an array of fine porcelains, it was the sort of room that made one afraid of moving precipitately in any direction. Alone, Deborah carefully picked her way down its length to the grand piano, intent upon examining the photographs that stood on top of it.
They comprised a pictorial history of the Lynleys' tenure as the Earls of Asherton. The stiff-backed fifth Countess stared at her with that unfriendly expression so predominant in the photographs of the nineteenth century; the sixth Earl sat astride a large bay and looked down at an unruly pack of hounds; the present Lady was robed and gowned for the Queen's coronation; Tommy and his siblings frolicked through a youth of wealth and privilege.
Only Tommy's father, the seventh Earl, was missing. As she noticed this, Deborah realized that she had seen his likeness nowhere in the house, in either photograph or portrait, a circumstance she found decidedly odd, for she had seen several pictures of the man in the townhouse Tommy occupied in London.
'When you're photographed to join them, you must promise me you'll smile.' Lady Asherton came to meet her, a glass of sherry in her hand. She looked cool and lovely in a cloudy white dress. 'I wanted to smile, but Tommy's father insisted that it wasn't done and I'm afraid I caved in quite spinelessly. I was like that in my youth. Most appallingly malleable.' She smiled at Deborah, sipping her sherry and moving from the piano to sit in the embrasure of a window behind it.
'I've so enjoyed my afternoon with your father, Deborah. I talked incessantly, but he was quite gracious about it, acting as if everything I said was the height of wit and sense.' She turned her glass upon her palm and seemed to be watching how the light struck the design cut into the crystal. 'You're very close to your father.'
'Yes,' she answered.
'That's sometimes the way when a child loses one parent, isn't it? It's the mixed blessing of a death.'
'Of course, I was very young when my mother died,' Deborah said in an attempt to explain away the distance she had not been able to ignore between Tommy and his mother. 'So I suppose it was natural that I would develop a deeper relationship with Dad. He was doing double duty, after all. Father and mother to a seven-year-old. And I had no brothers or sisters. Well, Simon was there, but he was more like… I'm not sure. An uncle? A cousin? Most of my upbringing fell to Dad.'
'And you became a unit as a result, the two of you. How lucky you are.'
Deborah wouldn't have called her relationship with her father the product of luck. Rather it was the outcome of time, paternal patience and willing communication. Saddled with a child whose impetuous personality was nothing like his own, Cotter had managed to adjust his own thinking in a constant attempt to understand hers. If devotion existed between them now, it was only due to years in which the seeds of a future relationship had been planted and cultivated.
'You're estranged from Tommy, aren't you?' Deborah said impulsively.
Lady Asherton smiled, but she looked very tired. For a moment Deborah thought that exhaustion might wear at her guard and prompt her to say something about what was at the root of the trouble between herself and her son. But instead she said, 'Has Tommy mentioned the play tonight? Shakespeare under the stars. In Nanrunnel.' Voices drifted to them from the corridor. 'I'll let him tell you about it, shall I?' That said, she gave her attention to the window behind her where a light breeze carried into the room the salty fragrance of the Cornish sea.
'If we fortify ourselves enough, we should be able to survive this with some semblance of sanity,' Lynley was saying as he entered the room. He went directly to a cabinet and began pouring three sherries from one of the decanters that stood in a semicircle upon it. He gave one to Lady Helen, another to St James, and tossed back his own drink before catching sight of Deborah and his mother at the far end of the room. He said, 'Have you told Deborah about our Theseus and Hippolyta roles this evening?'
Lady Asherton raised her hand fractionally from her lap. Like her smile, the movement seemed weighted by
