A Suitable Vengeance

As he enjoyed the subtle fragrance, a silver car glided round the corner from Cheyne Row onto Lordship Place and halted next to the old garden gate. St. James recognised the Bentley and its driver, who turned to the young woman next to him and took her into his arms.

The moonlight that earlier had served to illumine the street did as much for the interior of the car. As St. James watched, unable to move from the window even if he had wanted to—which he did not—Lynley’s blond head bent to Deborah. She raised her arm, fingers seeking first his hair, then his face before drawing him nearer to her neck, to her breast.

St. James forced his gaze from the car to the garden. Hyacinth, larkspur, alyssum, he thought. Kaffir lilies that wanted clearing out. There was work to be done. He needed to see it. But he couldn’t use the garden to avoid his heart.

He had known Deborah from the day of her birth. She had grown up, a member of his small Chelsea household, the child of a man who was to St. James part nurse, part servant, part valet, part friend. During the darkest time of his life, she’d been a constant companion whose presence had saved him from the worst of his despair. But now…

She’s chosen, he thought, and tried to convince himself in the face of this knowledge that he felt nothing, that he could accept it, that he could be the loser, that he could go on.

He crossed the landing and entered his laboratory where he turned on a high intensity lamp that cast a circle of light upon a toxicology report. He spent the next few minutes attempting to read the document—a pitiful endeavour to put his house in order—before he heard the car’s engine start, a sound that was shortly followed by Deborah’s footsteps in the lower hall.

He put on another light in the room and walked to the door, feeling a rush of trepidation, a need to find something to say, an excuse for being up and about, fully dressed, at three in the morning. But there was no time to think, for Deborah came up the stairs nearly as quickly as Sidney had done, bringing their separation to an end.

She stepped onto the final landing and started when she saw him. “Simon!”

Acceptance be damned. He held out a hand and she came into his arms. It was natural. She belonged there. Both of them knew it. Without another thought, St. James bent his head, seeking her mouth but finding instead her mane of hair. The unmistakable smell of Lynley’s cigarettes clung to it, a bitter reminder of who she had been and who she had become.

The odour brought him to his senses, and he released her. He saw that time and distance had caused him to magnify her beauty, attributing physical qualities to her that she didn’t possess. He admitted to himself what he had always known. Deborah was not beautiful in any conventional way. She didn’t have Helen’s sleek, aristocratic lines. Nor had she Sidney’s provocative features. Instead, she was a compilation of warmth and affection, perception and wit, qualities whose definition rose from her liveliness of expression, from the chaos of her coppery hair, from the freckles that dashed across the bridge of her nose.

But there were changes in her. She was too thin, and inexplicable, illusory veins of regret seemed to lie just beneath the surface of her composure. Nonetheless, she spoke to him much as she always had done.

“Have you been working late? You’ve not waited up for me, have you?”

“It was the only way I could get your father to go to bed. He thought Tommy might spirit you away this very night.”

Deborah laughed. “How like Dad. Did you think that as well?”

“Tommy was a fool not to.”

St. James marvelled at the rank duplicity behind their words. With one quick embrace they had neatly sidestepped Deborah’s reasons for having left England in the first place, as if they had agreed to play at their old relationship, one to which they could never return. For the moment, however, even spurious friendship was better than disjunction.

“I have something for you.”

He led her through the laboratory and opened the door of her darkroom. Her hand went out for the light, and St. James heard her gasp of surprise as she saw the new colour enlarger standing in place of her old black and white one.

“Simon!” She was biting the inside of her lip. “This is…How very kind of you. Truly…it’s not as if you had to…and you’ve even waited up for me.” Colour smudged across her face like unattractive thumbprints, a reminder that Deborah had never possessed any skills of artifice to fall back upon when she was distressed.

In his grasp, the doorknob felt inordinately cold. In spite of the past, St. James had assumed she would be pleased by the gift. She was not. Somehow, his purchase of it represented the inadvertent crossing of an unspoken boundary between them.