A Suitable Vengeance

She shook her head. “A walk on the grounds, down to the cove, for a drive. Perhaps to the lodge to see Mark Penellin.” She sighed. The effort seemed too much. “I can’t believe he’s taken Deborah’s cameras. He’s sold most of his own things. I know that. I pretend not to, but I know it. Still, I don’t believe he’d actually steal things and sell them. Not Peter. I won’t believe that.”


A shout rose from the park as she finished speaking. Someone was coming towards the house at a hobbling run, a man who alternately clutched his side then his thigh with one hand while with the other he waved a cap in the air. All the time he continued to shout.

“Jasper, m’lady,” the gardener said, joining them with his rubbish sack trailing behind him.

“Whatever is he up to?” As he reached the gatehouse, Lady Asherton raised her voice. “Stop shouting like that, Jasper. You’re frightening us all to death.”

Jasper dashed to her side, wheezing and gasping. He seemed unable to gather enough breath to put together a coherent sentence.

“’Tis ’im,” he panted. “Down the cove.”

Lady Asherton looked at St. James. They shared the same thought. Lady Asherton took a step away as if to distance herself from information she couldn’t bear to hear.

“Who?” St. James asked. “Jasper, who’s at the cove?”

Jasper bent double, coughed, “’N the cove!”

“For heaven’s sake—”

Jasper straightened, looked around, and pointed an arthritic finger at the front door where Sidney stood, apparently seeking the source of the disturbance.

“’Er man,” he gasped. “He be dead down the cove.”





CHAPTER 15


When St. James finally caught up with her, his sister had already reached the cove, far in advance of everyone else. Somewhere in her desperate flight through the park and the woodland, she had fallen, and blood streaked in a furcate pattern down one arm and along one leg. From the cliff top, he saw her fling herself at Brooke’s body, snatching him up as if by that action she could infuse him with life. She was speaking in an incoherent fashion—inarticulate words, not sentences—as she held his body to hers. Brooke’s head hung in an impossible position, testimony to the manner in which he had died.

Sidney lowered him to the ground. She opened his mouth, covering it with her own in a useless attempt at resuscitation. Even from the cliff top, St. James could hear her small, frantic cries as each breath she gave him produced no response. She pounded on his chest. She pulled open his shirt. She threw herself the length of his body and pressed against him as if to arouse him in death as she had done in life. It was a mindless, grim mimicry of seduction. St. James grew cold as he watched. He said her name, then called to her, to no avail.

Finally, she looked up the face of the cliff and saw him. She stretched out one hand as if in supplication, and at last she began to cry. It was a horrible ululation, part despair and part grief, a weeping the source of which was as primordial as it was timeless. She covered Brooke’s bruised face with kisses before she lowered her head and rested it on his chest. And she wept, in sorrow, in anger, in rage. She grabbed the body by the shoulders, lifted and shook it as she shouted Brooke’s name. In reply the lifeless head bobbed ghoulishly on its splintered neck in a danse macabre.

St. James stood motionless, forcing himself to keep his eyes on his sister, making himself a witness to the worst part of her grief, accepting the watching as punishment, just and true, for the sin of possessing a body so ruined that it would not allow him to go to her aid. Immobilised and inwardly cursing with a rising ferocity that was fast approaching panic, he listened to Sidney’s keening wail. He swung round viciously at the touch of a hand on his arm. Lady Asherton stood there, behind her the gardener and half a dozen others from the house.

“Get her away from him.” He barely managed the words. But his speaking released the rest of them into action.

With a final, worried look at his face, Lady Asherton began a nimble descent of the cliff. The others followed, carrying blankets, a makeshift stretcher, a thermos, a coil of rope. Although they all climbed down quickly, it seemed to St. James that they moved in slow motion in the manner of mimes.