She looked steadily and directly into his eyes, and attractive as she was, the calculated and somehow impersonal invitation made him feel uncomfortable. Moved by a perverse desire to ruffle her, to indicate that he was not one to be so easily manipulated, he asked, “Does your assistant live here on the premises as well? He seems a pleasant chap.”
Cassie straightened up abruptly. Her voice, as she delivered Sebastian Wade’s social condemnation, betrayed a hint of the venom he had heard earlier. “No. In the town with his old mum. She keeps the tobacconist’s shop.” She brushed her hands together, as if disposing of crumbs. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve things to do. Let me know if you need anything, otherwise I’ll see you later.” The smile was brief this time, and held no invitation. Cassie slipped past and left him alone on the balcony.
CHAPTER 2
Penelope MacKenzie stole a furtive look into the suite’s sitting room, where her sister Emma seemed to be absorbed in checking her life-list against today’s notations in her birding notebook. Penny settled herself more comfortably in front of the bedroom window with a quick sigh of relief. She’d have a few more minutes with no demands, a small escape from her sister’s solicitous supervision.
Things were different before Father died. Penny hadn’t been forgetful then, really; just a little absent-minded sometimes. But after those last, long months of Father’s illness some of the tenuous connections between thought and action just seemed to dissolve.
Only last week she’d put a saucepan of water on the cooker and gone into the sitting room for a book. When she remembered the pan, the water had all boiled away and the middle layer of the pan’s bottom had melted and run across the cooker’s top in a silvery flood. And then there was the leftover Sunday roast she popped into the oven instead of the fridge. Emma had been furious when she discovered it the next day and had to throw it away.
But those were the little things. Penny didn’t like to think about the day she went down to the shops in the village, did her errands, and found she couldn’t remember how to get home. Instead of the memory of the well-worn path through Dedham village and up the hill to Ivy Cottage, there was only an emptiness in her mind.
She stumbled, terrified, into the familiar warmth of her friend Mary’s tea shop. She sat there perspiring, chatting and drinking hot, sweet tea, trying to pretend a gaping hole hadn’t opened in her universe, until she saw a neighbor pass. She caught up to him, and asked breathlessly. “Are you going home? I’ll walk with you, shall I, George?” As she walked, familiarity with her surroundings returned, filling the vacant space, but the fear settled itself comfortably inside her. She told no one, most particularly not Emma.
Perhaps a holiday was all she needed, a fortnight with no responsibilities. It had taken her long enough to convince Emma that they deserved something after their years with Father. After all, they had his money now and could do what they pleased. She’d seen the timeshare brochure herself, at the travel agent’s in the village. And Followdale was lovely, every bit as lovely as she’d imagined.
“Daydreaming as usual, Pen?” Her sister’s voice startled her. “Stir yourself, then. We’d best be getting to the shops if we’re to return in time to dress for the party.” Emma pulled her waterproof jacket out of the wardrobe and began buckling herself into it with her usual no-nonsense briskness.
“Yes, Emma, coming,” Penny answered. There was no need to make Emma cross, or even worse, to try her until she spoke with that unaccustomed air of gentle patience. Penny rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, as if the physical smoothing of lines would return the accustomed veneer of placid cheerfulness to her face, and smiled brightly when Emma turned to her.
Twenty-eight… twenty-nine… thirty… Hannah Alcock sat in front of the mirror and counted the smooth, circular motions of the hairbrush. Odd, she thought, how childhood habits stayed with you. She knew of no logical reason why hair should be brushed a hundred strokes a day, but if she closed her eyes for a moment she could see herself sitting at her old dresser in her nightgown, watching the arc of the brush descend through her long, brown hair, and hearing her mother’s voice from the hall, “Hannah, darling, remember to brush your hair.”
All that was a long time ago-almost thirty years, in fact, since the night she had taken the scissors to her waist-length hair. It had lain like a pall across her back, a rich, shining chestnut brown with glints of auburn, her mother’s pride, and she had brutally hacked it off just at the nape of her neck.
Although she’d kept her hair cut short in the years since, she had continued the nightly brushing. A silly ritual, one that should have been discarded with that remote adolescence, but when she was nervous, as she was tonight, she found it oddly comforting. Her stomach muscles relaxed as she breathed with the rhythm of the strokes, and by the time she laid the silver-backed brush neatly beside its matching mirror, she felt a little more capable of getting through the evening.
The cocktail party had already been in progress for a quarter of an hour. If she didn’t hurry she would be more than fashionably late. Still, she continued to examine herself in the glass. A good face, she had come to think, once she had outgrown a girl’s desire for conventional prettiness. Those round, blond fluffy girls she had so envied were faded now, their skin puffy, hair streaked and tipped to cover the encroaching gray. Her own hair, now carefully and expensively cut, held only a few silvery threads at the temples, and the strong, underlying bone structure she had despised now gave her face an arresting individuality.
It had been years since she had worried about others’ opinions. Successful, confident, serene-she thought nothing could disturb her carefully built balance. Nothing, that is, until the strange, slow stirrings of the last year had grown within her, warping the shape of her life, leading her finally to take action that might prove irrevocable folly.
She had planned this face-to-face meeting with all the attention she would have given the most demanding experiment, hiring a private detective to ferret out the details of his life, buying into the timeshare for the exact same week-yet here she was, dithering at the last minute, suffering from stage-fright like the gawky schoolgirl she had once been.
What had she to lose, after all? They might spend a week passing in the halls, a greeting, a casual physical contact, and then he would leave without remembering her name or face. Surely, there could be no harm in that?
Or they might become friends. She wouldn’t think beyond that-what she might say to him, how he would react. Tonight, with an easy introduction and polite exchange of trifles sure to follow, was beginning enough.
She rose, picked up her bag from the sitting room, and shut the front door firmly behind her.
Duncan Kincaid leaned on his balcony rail, reluctant to move, reluctant to knot a tie around his throat, to go through the civilized motions required if he were to meet his social obligations. His earlier burst of energy had given way to a creeping lethargy.
It would be easy enough to fix himself some supper, then stretch out on the sofa with the battered paperback copy of Jane Eyre he’d found in the drawer of the bedside table. The eggs, bacon, and loaf of fresh-baked whole-meal bread he’d bought at the village shop would be sufficient provision for a quiet evening.
He had been browsing in the shop’s biscuit aisle when a girlish voice behind him chirped, “You must be the new guest. We’ve been so eager to meet you.” He turned, and found himself facing a slight woman wrapped in a voluminous, tartan cape. She was, he judged, sixtyish, with a fluffy bird’s nest of gray hair surrounding a thin face and a pair of extraordinarily blue eyes. Peeping from the folds of the cape’s bottom were a pair of old-fashioned, lace-up ladies’ boots.