Perhaps, she thought, the heaviness pressing so uneasily upon her lungs was not really born of the air at all, but was instead a child of her dread. For she had promised herself that she would speak to Lord Asherton the first time he came on one of his rare visits to Cornwall. Now he was coming.
She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt limp, its ends brittle. In the last few months she had taken to wearing it pulled back with a piece of plain elastic at the nape of her neck, but today she had given herself a shampoo and left her hair to dry, hanging straight and simple, bluntly cut round her face and shoulders. It didn't feel right. She knew it didn't look right, unattractive and unflattering when once it had been a source of bashful pride.
The sound of voices up ahead made her pause and squint myopically through the trees. Vague figures moved near a table set out on the lawn where an old oak provided a substantial area of shade. Two of the Howenstow dailies were at work there.
Nancy recognized their voices. They were girls she had known from childhood, acquaintances who had never quite become her friends. They belonged to that collection of humanity who lived behind the barrier which she had erected between herself and others on the estate, barring her from intimacy with the Lynley children as effectively as with the children of the tenants, the farmers, the day workers, and the servants.
Nowhere Nancy, she had labelled herself, and her life had been an effort to carve out a singular place where she might belong. She had that place now, nominal at best, but decidedly her own, a world circumscribed by a five-month-old baby daughter, Gull Cottage, and Mick.
Mick. Michael Cambrey. University graduate. Journalist. World traveller. Man of ideas. And husband of Nancy.
She had wanted him from the first, eager to bask in his charm, to relish his looks, to hear his conversation and his easy laughter, to feel his eyes upon her and hope to be the cause of their animation. So when she went on her weekly visit to his father's newspaper to check over the bookkeeping as she'd done for two years, when she found Mick there in place of his father, his invitation to linger and chat for a bit had been welcome.
How he loved to talk. How she loved to listen. With little to contribute save her admiration, however, how simple it had been to arrive at the belief that she needed somehow to contribute more to their relationship. And she had done so – on the mattress in the old Howenstow mill where they'd spent an entire April making love, starting January's baby.
She'd given little thought to how her life might change. She'd given less thought to how Mick himself might change. Only the moment existed, only sensation mattered. His hands and mouth, his hard male body insistent and eager, the faint salt on his skin, his groan of pleasure as he took her. The knowledge that he wanted her superseded any reflection upon the possible consequences. They were insubstantial.
How different it was now.
'Can we talk about it, Roderick?' she'd heard Mick say. 'With our money situation being what it is, I hate to see you make a decision like this. Let's talk about it when I get back from London.'
He'd listened, laughed once, replaced the telephone receiver, and turned to find her shrinking back from the doorway, a flame-faced eavesdropper. But he wasn't concerned by her presence. He merely ignored her and returned to his work while above them in the bedroom little Molly wailed.
Nancy had watched as he tapped on the keys of his new word processor. She heard him mutter and saw him pick up the manual to read a few pages. She didn't cross the room to speak to him. Instead, she wrung her hands.
'Linen's gotter 'ole in it, Mary. Brought another?'
'Not with. Set a plate down on't.'
'Oo the 'ell's gonna sit squat in the middle of the table, Mar?'
Laughter drifted Nancy's way as the dailies shook out a crisp white tablecloth. It billowed from their hands, caught in a sudden gust of wind that managed to find its way through the armour of the trees. Nancy raised her own face to it, but it captured a patch of dead leaves and dust and flung them up at her so that she tasted fine grit.
She lifted a hand to brush at her face, but the effort drained her of strength. Sighing, she trudged on towards the house.
It was one thing, of course, to talk of love and marriage in London. It was another to feel the full range of implications behind those easy words when she saw them spread out before her in Cornwall. By the time she got out of the limousine that had met them at the Land's End airstrip, Deborah Cotter was feeling decidedly light- headed. Her stomach was churning as well.
Because she had never known Lynley in any way other than in her own environment and upon her own terms, she hadn't thought about what it would mean to marry into his family. She knew he was an earl, of course. She'd ridden in his Bentley, been to his London house, even met his valet. She'd eaten off his china, drunk from his crystal, and watched him dress himself in his hand-tailored clothes. But all of that had somehow fallen into a category of behaviour which she had conveniently labelled How Tommy Lives. None of it had ever affected her own life in any way. However, seeing Howenstow from the air, as Lynley circled the plane twice over the estate, had served as the first indication to Deborah that life as she had known it for twenty-one years faced potential – and radical – alteration.
The house was an enormous Jacobean structure built in the shape of a variegated E with its central leg missing. A large secondary wing grew in reverse direction from the building's west leg and to the north-east, just beyond its spine, stood a church. Beyond the house clustered a scattering of outbuildings and stables, and beyond these the Howenstow park spread out in the direction of the sea. Cows grazed on this parkland amid towering sycamore trees that grew in abundance, protected from the sometimes inclement south-western weather by a fortuitous natural slope of land. At the perimeter of all this, a skilfully crafted Cornish wall marked the boundary of the estate proper, but not the end of the Asherton property which was, Deborah knew, divided among dairy farms, agriculture, and abandoned mines that had once provided the district with tin.
Faced with the concrete, undeniable reality that was Tommy's home – no longer an illusory setting for the weekend house-parties she had overheard discussed by St James and Lady Helen for so many years – Deborah's mind became taken up with the risible notion of herself -Deborah Cotter, the child of a servant – moving blithely into the life of this estate as if it were Manderley with Max de Winter brooding somewhere within its walls, waiting to be rejuvenated by the love of a simple woman. Hardly an act in her line, she thought.
At least nothing was expected of her on the drive to Howenstow other than to admire Cornwall, and she had. It was a wild part of the country, comprising desolate moors, stony hillsides, sandy coves whose hidden caves had long been used as smugglers' caches, sudden lush woodlands where the countryside dipped into a combe, and everywhere tangles of celandine, poppy and periwinkle that dominated the narrow lanes.
The main drive to Howenstow shot off from one of these, canopied by sycamores and edged by rhododendrons. It passed a lodge, skirted the park, dipped beneath an ornate Tudor gatehouse, circled a rose garden, and ended before a massive front door above which a hound and a lion battled resplendently in the Asherton coat of arms.
They got out of the car with the usual jumble that accompanies an arrival. Deborah favoured the building with a single fleeting look. It appeared to be deserted. She wished that were the case.
'Ah. Here's Mother,' Lynley said.
Turning, Deborah found him looking not towards the front door, where she had expected to see an excessively well-dressed Countess of Asherton standing with one white hand extended limply in welcome, but towards the
