A Suitable Vengeance

“Sidney. Someone’s with Sidney. I heard a man’s voice. I heard her cry. I thought that Justin might be—”

St. James didn’t wait for her to finish the sentence. He hurried from the room and rushed down the main corridor towards the northwest wing. With each step his anxiety grew, as did his anger. Every image from the afternoon manifested itself before him once again. Sidney in the water. Sidney on the sand. Brooke straddling her, punching her, tearing at her clothes. But there was no cliff to separate him from Justin Brooke now. He blessed that fact.

Only years of dealing with his sister caused St. James to pause at her door rather than throw himself into her room. Deborah came up next to him as he listened against the wood. He heard Sidney cry out, he heard Brooke’s voice, he heard Sidney’s moan. Damn and blast, he thought. He took Deborah’s arm, guiding her away from the door and down the long corridor that led to her own room in the southern corner of the house.

“Simon!” she whispered.

He didn’t reply until they were in her room with the door shut behind them. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“But, I heard her.”

“Deborah, she’s all right. Believe me.”

“But…” Sudden comprehension swept across Deborah’s face. She turned away with a gulp. “I only thought,” she said but gave up the effort and concluded with, “Why am I such a fool?”

He wanted to reply, to assuage her embarrassment, but he knew that any comment only held the promise of making things worse. Frustrated, angry at the changes in their lives that seemed to bind him to inaction, he looked aimlessly round her room as if it could formulate an answer for him. He took in the black oak panelling upon the walls, the formal Asherton armorial display in the plaster overmantel of the fireplace, the lofty barrel ceiling that soared into the darkness. An immense four-poster bed dominated the floor space, its headboard carved with grotesques that writhed their way through flowers and fruit. It was a horrible place to be alone. It felt just like a tomb.

“Sidney’s always been a bit hard to understand,” St. James settled upon saying. “Bear with her, Deborah. You couldn’t have known what that was all about. It’s all right. Really.”

To his surprise, she turned to him hotly. “It isn’t all right. It isn’t and you know it. How can she make love with him after what he did to her today? I don’t understand it. Is she mad? Is he?”

That was the question and the answer all at once. For it was a true madness, white, hot, and indecent, obliterating everything that stood in its way.

“She’s in love with him, Deborah,” he finally replied. “Aren’t people all just a little bit mad when they love?”

Her response was a stare. He could see her swallow.

“The film. Let me get it,” she said.





CHAPTER 12


The Anchor and Rose benefitted from having the most propitious location in all of Nanrunnel. It not only displayed from its broad bay windows a fine, unobstructed view of the harbour guaranteed to please the most discerning seeker of Cornish atmosphere, but it also sat directly across from Nanrunnel’s single bus stop and was, as a result, the first structure a thirsty visitor’s eyes fell upon when disembarking from Penzance and regions beyond.

The interior of the pub was engaged in the gentle process of deterioration. Once creamy walls had taken their place on the evolutionary path towards grey, an effect produced by exposure to generations of smoke from fireplace, cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. An elaborate mahogany bar, pitted and stained, curved from the lounge into the public bar, with a brass foot-rail heavily distressed through years of use. Similarly worn tables and chairs spread across a well-trodden floor, and the ceiling above them was so convex that architectural disaster seemed imminent.

When St. James and Lady Helen entered, shortly after the pub’s morning opening, they found themselves alone with a large tabby cat that lounged in the bay window and a woman who stood behind the bar, drying innumerable pint and half-pint glasses. She nodded at them and went on with her work, her eyes following Lady Helen to the window where she stooped to pet the cat.

“Careful with ’um,” the woman said. “Watch he doesn’t scratch. He’s a mean ’un when he wants to be.”

As if with the intention of proving her a liar, the cat yawned, stretched, and presented a corpulent stomach for Lady Helen to attend to. Watching, the woman snorted and stacked glasses on a tray.

St. James joined her at the bar, reflecting upon the fact that if this was Mrs. Swann, she was trapped somewhere in the cygnet stage, for there was nothing the least bit swanlike about her. She was stout and solid, with minuscule eyes and a frizz of grey hair, a living contradiction to her name dressed in a dirndl skirt and a peasant blouse.

“What c’n I get you?” she asked and went on with her drying.

“It’s a bit early for me,” St. James replied. “We’ve come to talk to you, actually. If you’re Mrs. Swann.”