accepted her offer.” She took a tentative mouthful of lamb. “She also told me she thought you hated me.” She did not look up.
Nick said nothing for a moment.
“Hated me enough to want to kill me,” she went on, so quietly he thought for a moment he had not heard aright.
“Jo.” He reached across the table and took her hand. “Bet is a self-confessed troublemaker and bitch. She also had a vivid imagination. For God’s sake-” His expression turned to one of incredulity. “You don’t believe her?”
She shook off his fingers and put down her knife and fork. “No, of course not.”
She reached for the wine bottle and poured some more into her glass. “But you have been rather odd, Nick. You admitted it yourself.” Her hand was shaking as she looked up at him. She forced herself to smile.
He frowned. Then abruptly he stood up, pushing his chair back, his food hardly touched.
“Jo, we’ve got to have this out. I love you-” He gave her an embarrassed grin. “Not an easy thing for an Englishman to say in broad daylight, but, there, I’ve said it. I think I’ve loved you ever since I first met you.”
There was a moment’s tense silence as they both considered suddenly the deeper implications of what he had said. With a shiver Jo looked down at her plate. Her throat had constricted so tightly she could barely breathe.
“Then why did you go to Judy?” she whispered at last.
He groaned. “God knows! Because you told me to go to hell, I suppose.” He paused. “Because sometimes you make me so angry-”
“Angry enough to want to hurt me-” She looked up at him.
“No!” he replied explosively. “It is as if-” He paused in mid-sentence, staring out of the window. “It is as if there is something in my mind that closes down like a shutter. When it happens I don’t know what I’m doing for a while. That’s not an excuse, Jo. There is no excuse for what I did to you. It’s perhaps all the more frightening because it’s like that. I don’t understand it.” He frowned. “But it will not-cannot happen again.”
Jo ached suddenly to stand up with him and take him in her arms, but resolutely she sat still, staring down at her plate again. “Sit down, Nick, and eat your supper. Mrs. Griffiths will be so hurt if we don’t at least make the effort,” she said quietly. “I expect you’ve been overworking, what with the worry about Desco and everything,” she added, as matter-of-factly as she could. “That might explain it all.”
He sat down heavily opposite her. “It might, I suppose.” He gave a weary smile.
“Why did you come here, Nick?”
“To Wales?” He paused. “To see you. To be with you.”
“But why?” She clenched her fists in her lap, waiting for his reply.
“Because I was worried about you, I suppose,” he replied after a moment.
“I see.” She bit her lip. “And you’re still going back tomorrow?”
“I have to. I’m due to fly to New York on Wednesday and I’ve got an awful lot to do first. But I’ll wait and see how you are before I go. It worries me the way you are having these regressions spontaneously. Supposing there had been no one there. Supposing it had happened to you in the street, or driving, for God’s sake!”
“There is no reason it should happen again, Nick.” Jo gave up her attempt to eat and laid down her knife and fork. “I don’t think what I had today was a regression anyway. I just fainted-like I did at Ceecliff’s. As I told you, the doctor said it was probably something to do with the thunder we’ve been having so much. It happened before in a storm, remember? He thinks it’s an allergic reaction to electric force fields, or something.” She gave a little laugh. “He said I’d probably be the sort of person who pukes under pylons.”
Nick managed a smile. “But you didn’t tell them about the regressions, did you?”
She shook her head. “They’d have locked me up, Nick. And kept me in for a month for psychiatric tests. If anyone is going to do any tests on me, it’s going to be Carl Bennet.” She glanced up at him under her eyebrows. “Would you come with me, Nick, if I went back to him?”
Nick frowned. She saw his fingers clench and unclench around the handle of his knife. “As an observer, Jo,” he asked quietly after a long pause, “or as another patient?”
She went up at about nine. Nick did not stop her. Nor did he suggest he go to bed too. Instead he let himself out into the street and began slowly to walk toward the church.
The churchyard was shadowy. It smelled of new-mown grass in the evening twilight as he sat down on the wall and lit a cigarette, feeling the dew soaking into his shoes. He could see the bats flitting in and out of the darkness of the yew trees around him and once or twice he heard their faint sonar squeaks. Slowly it grew dark. He knew he ought to go back. Mrs. Griffiths would probably be waiting to lock up, but somehow he did not want to leave the quiet velvet night. He ground out his third cigarette into the grass with his heel, conscious that the dew was striking chill all around him now. Moths had begun to crawl over the streetlight near by, fluttering desperately in its harshness. He watched as the bats swooped through the pool of light, taking the mesmerized insects in quick succession before wheeling out into the darkness again and circling for another swoop. In the distance he heard a clock chime eleven.
Reluctantly he stood up.
Jo was asleep. He clicked on the lamp beside his bed but she did not move and for a moment he stood looking down at her. He had described the strange thing in his mind as a shutter. It was more like a shadowy incubus, lying sleeping in his brain, that every now and then shook itself and stirred and murmured. And when it spoke he had to obey. He felt the prickle of fear touch the skin at the back of his neck as his mind skidded obliquely away from the lurking suspicion that had begun to haunt him. But there was one thing he had to face. Whatever it was, this alien part of him, Bet was right, it threatened Jo. Gently he pulled the sheet up over her shoulders, touching a strand of her hair as he tucked it around her. Asleep she looked so vulnerable. Why should any part of him want to harm her? Bet had seen it. Her bantering and flirting had stopped the moment she had seen the other being in his eyes. And Judy. What was it she had said to him?
He remembered suddenly Judy’s expression as he had moved toward her in the living room of his apartment, intending to take her glass and refill it. She had backed away from him, and he had seen in her eyes the same fear and uncertainty he had seen in Bet’s; Judy too had glimpsed the stranger in him.
Jo stirred on her bed and flung out her arm, but she did not wake. Nick looked down at her, then he walked away to the other side of the room. He did not dare let himself touch her again.
She woke at dawn. Her eyes strayed sleepily around the unfamiliar room focusing on the open window for a moment, then she started to shake.
She sat up, clutching her pillow to her chest, burying her face in it as she tried to control the terror that flooded through her. The memory had returned all at once, just as it had before, the details three-dimensional in their clarity. Castel Dinas in the threatening storm, Prince John, the drunken men, and her own vulnerability and fear as the king’s brother made his intentions clear.
She clutched the pillow tighter, seeing again the handsome, drunken face above her, feeling his brutal hands on her breasts, feeling her absolute powerlessness before his determination.
“Are you all right, Jo?”
She stifled a scream as Nick’s hand closed over her wrist, and, tearing herself from his grasp, she threw herself to the far side of her bed. “Don’t touch me!” She slid out of the bed, still holding the pillow, and backed away from
