hands. Charlie looked up at her expectantly. His joy in the water had been muted by her tears, and now he stuck close beside her, waiting to see what she was going to do next.
‘Good question,’ said Mallory, as if he had asked it out loud. She turned to look at Kincaillie. It looked as inhospitable as ever, but they had nowhere else to go.
‘We’ll finish our walk,’ she told him, ‘but then we’ll have to go back.’
Torr was emptying ashes onto the kitchen garden when she and Charlie came back through the gate at last, and her heart jumped a little at the sight of him. She needed to talk to him, but she hadn’t counted on facing him just yet. Not until she had made herself look a little more presentable at least.
There had been a peaty brown burn running down the beach, and she had splashed some of its freezing water onto her face, but it was hard to disguise the effects of a crying jag, and knowing that she was bug-eyed and blotchy made her feel at a disadvantage before she had even started. Perhaps Torr would be a gentleman and pretend not to notice?
A frown touched Torr’s eyes as he straightened to look at Mallory more closely. ‘You’ve been crying,’ he said.
Embarrassed, she slid her gaze away from his. ‘I’ve been thinking.’ She tried to correct him.
‘About Steve?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘And about being here, being married to you…’ She swallowed, not sure how to express the thoughts that had been churning round her head as she walked Charlie. ‘I think we need to talk,’ she said at last.
Something shifted in Torr’s expression. ‘Now?’
‘If you’ve got a moment,’ she said awkwardly. Having got this far, she might as well get it over with. Torr could only say no to her idea, after all, and even if he did she would be no worse off than she was now.
‘Time is something I’ve got plenty of,’ said Torr, upending the bucket to get rid of the last of the ash on the tangled and overgrown bed where fruit bushes still struggled to survive. ‘There are no deadlines here,’ he said. ‘Shall we go in? I got the range going, but there won’t be much heat yet. It might be a bit warmer than out here, though.’
They made yet more coffee, so at least they had something hot to hold, and sat on either side of the kitchen table.
‘So,’ said Torr. ‘I imagine you’re going to tell me that you don’t want to stay.’
Mallory looked down at her mug. ‘I do want to leave, yes, but I know that I can’t.’
‘You’re not a prisoner!’
‘Not literally, but I might as well be,’ she said, lifting her eyes to meet his scowl. ‘I owe you a lot of money, Torr. That was why I married you.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ he asked harshly. ‘You don’t owe me anything, Mallory. The money was part of the deal.’
‘I know, and that’s why I can’t walk away, even though I hate it here and would rather be almost anywhere else,’ she said frankly. ‘I can’t end our marriage the way I want to unless I can repay that money, and I’m never going to be able to do that if I stay here.’
She had spoken without thinking, and Torr didn’t answer immediately. He was studying his coffee, head bent and dark brows contracted in a frown.
For some reason Mallory could hear her words echoing in the silence.
The pause went on for so long that it began to feel uncomfortable anyway, but just as she was about to break it Torr lifted his head and looked straight across at her. His eyes were very blue and penetrating as they met hers, and Mallory’s pulse gave a strange little kick.
‘So what are you suggesting?’ he asked.
It was Mallory who looked away first. For a moment there she had forgotten what she wanted to say. ‘That I work off my debt,’ she told him. ‘I saw how much work there is to do here this morning. If you really are going to do it yourself, you’re going to need help and, as you pointed out, there are things I could do. I might not be much use with the plumbing or the electricity, but I can clean and I can paint, and I can learn to do other things too, just like you said.’
‘And in exchange?’
She drew a breath. It had seemed a good idea when she was walking by the sea, but she had no idea how Torr was going to react. Well, she wouldn’t know unless she put it to him.
‘If I work here for a year, doing whatever you need me to do, I would like you to give me a divorce at the end of it and consider our debt settled.’
‘You want to earn a divorce?’ Torr’s voice was empty of all inflexion, and Mallory squirmed a little.
‘Yes. I realise that I’m asking you to be generous,’ she said carefully, ‘but I would work really hard, and if I knew I could leave eventually I wouldn’t complain about the conditions here. I’d help you as much as I could.’
‘I see,’ said Torr, his expression still impossible to read. ‘And if I agree to this?’
‘I’d go back to Ellsborough.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I just know that the thought of being stuck here for ever is unendurable.’ She looked around her at the dirty, dilapidated kitchen. ‘This place…Kincaillie…it’s awful,’ she tried to explain. ‘It would be awful even if it wasn’t falling down. There’s nothing to do here, no one to see, nowhere to go. I can’t live here long-term, but I can bear it for a year.’
‘So you’re not planning to go in search of Steve?’ Torr said.
She flushed. ‘No,’ she said. Picking up a teaspoon, she stirred her coffee mindlessly. ‘I suppose that somewhere deep inside I was holding onto the hope that Steve would come and rescue me from you,’ she confessed, dark hair swinging forward to hide her face.
‘Just like in a fairy tale,’ he commented sardonically.
‘A bit,’ she agreed. ‘But he’s not going to come.’
‘No,’ said Torr, and Mallory sighed.
‘I just realised that this morning. It’s taken until now for me to understand properly that I’m on my own now. That means I’m going to have to rescue myself, and until I do I’m stuck with you.’
‘Charmingly put!’ he said sardonically.
Mallory’s flush deepened and she set her teeth. ‘I’m sorry, but I think it’s better if we’re honest with each other. There was never any pretence that marriage meant anything more than a practical arrangement to either of us, was there? Our marriage doesn’t mean any more to you than it does to me,’ she reminded him.
‘The situation has changed since we made our deal,’ she went on. ‘You’re certainly not going to be doing any entertaining for a while, so you hardly need a hostess. If you had known that you were going to inherit Kincaillie you would have married someone quite different, wouldn’t you?’
‘Would I?’
‘There’s no reason you shouldn’t marry again when we’re divorced,’ Mallory reassured him, assuming that he was being sarcastic, but Torr sat back in his chair and regarded her coolly across the table.
‘I haven’t agreed to a divorce yet,’ he pointed out.
Mallory bit her lip. ‘You can’t want me to stay,’ she said cajolingly. ‘We would just make each other miserable. Imagine what it would be like to be stuck here, with just the two of us hating each other more and more because neither of us is the person we really want them to be,’ she said. ‘It would be unbearable for both of us.’
‘If you say so.’ Torr’s expression was indecipherable.
Mallory pushed her hair behind her ears. He was making her work for it, she realised. Well, that was OK. She would have to find another way to persuade him. She would do whatever it took to get back to Ellsborough and a life that she recognised, even if it wasn’t the one she had wanted and thought she would have with Steve.
‘I thought it all through on my walk with Charlie just now,’ she started. ‘I’ve been wretched about Steve for too long. It’s awful being that unhappy,’ she told him. ‘You can’t think clearly about anything. If I’d been thinking, I’d never have married you, but I got myself into this mess, and that means I’m going to have to find a way out of it- even if it does mean putting in a year of hard labour out here.
