Later that afternoon, I lay naked in Uther’s arms, my body jerking wildly as a violent orgasm tore through me. He, as always, was fully clothed and I had stopped asking why this love—if such it could be called—must be so one-sided. I knew he wanted me with the same fathomless desperation with which I craved him.
As if he read my mind, he took my hand and placed it against the straining hardness of his erection. Shyly, I reached for the buttons on his breeches, but he forestalled me. “No, I will not be answerable for the consequences if you release me,” he growled, shuddering as my inexperienced fingers continued to caress him through the restraining cloth. “I want you to feel it, feel the power you have over me.” His golden gaze burned into mine. “One day, you will feel it here.” He pushed his fingers hard inside me and my muscles, still racked by sensual spasms, tightened eagerly around him. “And when that day comes, you will know what it is to weep in ecstasy.”
“When?” I whispered hungrily. I wanted it to be now! Why must we wait?
“One day very soon, Lucia.” Whenever he called me Lucia, his passion for me intensified to a point just beyond rational thought. He devoured me again with those lips that I wanted to spend my whole life tasting. This action effectively silenced my question for the time being, but, having given myself to him so completely already, I was eager to finish it. There was, after all, only a minor technicality left. Having decided that I wanted to make love to him, there were no considerations of decency left to me. I wondered what the reason for Uther’s odd reluctance could be. I was sure it was not morality or prudishness! Just then, his lips moved down my throat towards my breast and, unaccountably, I lost my train of thought.
“Why does Demelza dislike Lady Morwenna?” I asked him later.
He shrugged. “They have always been the competing beauties of the neighbourhood. Old rivalries die hard, I suppose.”
“Lady Morwenna likes you very much,” I observed, pleating the eiderdown with nervous fingers. I was being presumptuous, and dared not meet his eyes.
“Jealous, Lucy?” His voice was amused. Gripping my chin, he forced me to look up. “Did you think I was a monk?” he asked. I shook my head sadly. It was an admission of what I already knew. He and Morwenna had been—perhaps still were—lovers.
“Morwenna is a passionate woman, married to an old man. It is not surprising that she should seek satisfaction elsewhere. And I am a man. It means nothing.”
“Will you go to her tonight?” I hung my head again so that he could not see the pleading desperation in my eyes.
“I may.” He rose and stretched, reminding me irresistibly of a large cat. “Would you like to come along and watch, little Lucy? Morwenna is very open-minded—I’m sure she would not object.” He laughed at the shudder of horror that rippled through me. Leaning over, he nipped my bare shoulder with sharp teeth. Numbly, I lifted my face up to him to be kissed. He studied me long and hard. “Don’t look at me that way!” he said harshly. “If you want me, Lucia, you will have to accept what I am…who I am.”
With a muffled groan of frustration he walked out, leaving me staring after him in confusion.
* * *
“Good Lord, Uther, what was that awful caterwauling I heard from your room last night?” Tynan asked with a feigned lack of guile as we all met over breakfast. “One might almost think you had the kitchen cat trapped by its tail in there.”
Lady Morwenna, unabashed, gave a throaty chuckle and Uther threw Tynan a look of intense dislike. I swallowed the hard, invidious lump in my throat and stared down at my plate. When I glanced up, Demelza’s expression drew my mind away from my own emotions. She appeared, for a brief, unguarded moment, totally bereft, like a mother who has just learned of the death of her child. The look was gone before anyone else noticed and, with no trace of any emotion, she invited Morwenna to join her on a trip to Wadebridge that morning. I declined the offer of a seat in their carriage and, instead, spent a peaceful hour curled up in a chair in the library. I was, however, drawn away from my book by the strains of the piano.
The music was knife-sweet and haunting and I followed it to its source. The music room had windows on two sides and overlooked the highest point of the cliff so that, on entering, it appeared the whole room was soaring, untethered, across the ocean.
Tynan was seated at the grand piano, his face rapt as his hands flew, with expert precision, across the keys. The familiar lock of hair flopped over his brow and his eyes were closed. His fingers told stories of satin sheets and writhing passion. I stood still in the doorway for long minutes, watching him and allowing the yearning beauty of his playing to consume me.
“You can come in, you know,” he said eventually, without pausing.
I bit my lip. “I did not think you had seen me,” I confessed, moving forward to stand at the piano.
“I didn’t,” he replied, opening those incredible golden eyes and smiling up at me. “I smelled you. You smell fresh and new, like wild flowers when the rain has washed them.”
I felt a blush stain my cheeks and, to cover my embarrassment, said, “I do not recognise the piece you are playing. It is beautiful. Who is the composer?”
He finished with a flourish and bowed slightly from the waist. “It is very rough,” he confessed. “I have been sadly neglectful of my muse of late.” He shifted along the piano stool, making room for me. “Do you play?”
I joined him and said, “Woefully badly. I was taught, but, when my father and I went to live in India, I was left very much to my own devices. I confess, with shame, that I was not disciplined enough to maintain any level of skill.”
“Play something for me.” He watched my profile. “Make it of light and happiness. I never have enough of either.”
I spread my fingers over the keys. Turning my head, I encountered a look of such intensity that it made me shiver. “My memory is not good….” I stated with a smile that was instantly reflected back at me.
“Indulge me anyway,” he said softly.
I began to play. It was an old, comforting lullaby that my father had sung to me when I was a child. The words came back to me and, hesitantly at first, I began to sing.
“Calm be thy sleep as the infant slumbers
Pure as the angel’s thoughts thy dreams
May every joy this bright world numbers
Shed o’er thee their mingled beams….”
“And is your sleep calm, Cousin Lucy?” Tynan asked me when I had finished.
“Why, yes,” I replied truthfully. “Generally it is.”
“I envy you then,” he said with a sorrowful note in his voice. Before I could question the words, he began to play again. It was a simple, light-hearted duet which I knew, and I joined in, stumbling over some of the notes. As he laughed at me, the haunted look left him briefly. I thought how young and carefree he seemed, and how much it suited him.
We finished with a flourishing crescendo, both of us giggling like schoolchildren. Our laughter faded abruptly as, clapping his hands together appreciatively, Uther strode into the room. His presence dominated the mood instantly. I had the oddest feeling that he was angry, but his smile could not have been more charming.
“Why, Lucy, my dear.” His eyes were like a warm caress on my upturned countenance. My imagination presented me unbidden with a picture of him in Lady Morwenna’s bed the previous night. I glanced quickly away in case he caught a glimpse of my thoughts. “You play delightfully.”
“You are very kind, sir, but also very untruthful.” I rose from the seat. I was unnerved by the sensation of him looming over me. It reminded me of other, more intimate moments. “I play very badly, as my cousin here will testify.”
Tynan, however, had turned moodily away. He shuffled pages of scribbled music and made as if to leave. My heart was unexpectedly wrung with pity. “Why, Cousin Tynan, are you deserting me so soon?” I asked in a rallying tone, which won a reluctant, answering smile. “I had hoped my playing would not give you quite such a disgust of me. That we might even, perhaps, play together some more?” I rejoined him on the piano stool.
After a minute of watching us through narrowed eyes as we selected our next piece, Uther turned sharply on his heel and left us.
* * *
I left Tynan at the piano, adding the finishing touches to his composition. My heart felt lighter. I rounded a corner of the corridor and stopped short in surprise to find Uther propped up against my bedroom door with his broad shoulders.
“So you have managed to tear yourself away from him at last?” Fury blazed in the molten depths of his eyes as he jerked me roughly toward him. “You prefer his company—that of a callow boy—to mine?” His voice grated roughly in my ear. “You would rather he was here doing this to you….” His lips plundered mine. Desire, fanned into a furnace by his anger, flared between us instantly. His tongue was smooth and hard in my mouth, probing deeply as his hands slid to cup my breasts. My nipples reacted immediately, stiffening against the cloth of my gown. Frenziedly, he tore the tiny buttons of my bodice undone, freeing my breasts from the restraining cloth and pressing burning lips to them.
We gave no thought to the public place we had chosen; there was no attempt at gentleness or patience. Uther hoisted my skirts up to my waist, pressing his muscular thigh up between my legs. As he did, the voices of Demelza and Morwenna, newly returned from their shopping expedition, rang out in the hall below.
“Oh, no.” Uther forestalled me as I tried to pull away. “You have not answered my question.” As if we had all the time in the world, he slid his hand inside my bloomers and cupped the warmth between my legs. “You are so wet. Are you thinking of him?” I writhed in equal measures of fear and ecstasy, moaning his name. “Well?”
“No, Uther, please,” I pressed eagerly against his passive hand, silently pleading.
“Say it.” His hand remained still. The chatter and laughter below us increased as Demelza issued directions to Pascoe.
“I don’t want him, Uther.” I was almost sobbing now. “I want you, only you.”
“Good girl.” He moved his fingers. Deep, fast and hard, he rubbed the exquisitely sensitive nub that throbbed for his touch. “Tell me how it feels.” His voice was detached.
“Uther, please. It feels so…so good….” I was almost sobbing, but whether it was with pleasure or panic I could not have said. The voices grew closer as they began to mount the staircase. “But they are coming.”
He leaned in close and nuzzled my neck, laughter in his voice. “But what about you, little Lucy? Are you coming yet?” He showed no mercy, driving me ever onward, relentlessly flicking and stroking the taut, slippery little pearl. “Hurry up, Lucia, or this could become embarrassing.”
I exploded in a sudden rush of violent, gasping pleasure. Pressing a swift kiss onto my lips, Uther tugged my skirts back into place and, with a flash of his wicked smile, turned to greet his sister and her guest just as they rounded the turn in the staircase. Still shuddering with erotic tremors, I entered my bedchamber an instant before I would be seen by the new arrivals.
Throwing myself down on the bed, I buried my burning face in the cool cotton of the pillows. My mind was torn in two by conflicting emotions. Half of me wanted to linger in erotic recollection, while the other—saner—part of me cringed in shame. As much as I liked what Uther did to my body—and, oh! how much I liked it—I could not keep hiding from the truth. I did not like him, the man who could do what he had just done to me while another of his lovers was mere feet away. And, perhaps more importantly, I did not like the person I became when I was with him.
* * *
Dinner the next evening was a subdued affair, but I think we were all, perhaps for different reasons, secretly relieved that our guest had departed. When we repaired to the drawing room, conversation was stilted and I stifled a few yawns as we sipped our tea. Tynan had no such compunction. Stretching his legs out in front of him, he stuffed his hands into his pockets, lowered his chin to his chest and closed his eyes. Uther was engrossed in the newspapers and Demelza, eyeing me with sympathy, suggested that Tynan might like to teach me to play backgammon. The gentleman concerned opened one eye, sighed and said, with a noticeable lack of civility, “If you wish, cousin.”
“I would not dream of disturbing you,” I said with mock huffiness. This had the effect of rousing him from his lethargy and, together, we knelt before the large sideboard and rummaged in its depths for the backgammon board.
Tynan set up the board, explaining the game as he did so. It soon became apparent that he lacked both the patience and the inclination to be a good teacher. Before long, the proceedings had deteriorated into an undignified squabble.
“Really, hweg,” Tynan informed me loftily. “If you are not prepared to listen when I try to explain the rules to you—”
“Explain?” I demanded, my words buzzing with annoyance. Uther glanced up from his newspaper and threw Demelza a questioning look. She gave a tiny shake of her head and their exchange only fired my frustration. If they wanted to swap cryptic looks that excluded me, let them! I stood up abruptly and Tynan rose, too. We faced each other across the board. “You have made no attempt to explain anything to me, Cousin Tynan. All you have done is lecture me in the most autocratic, unreasonable manner imaginable, and then shout at me when I get it wrong!”
After staring at me for a blazing instant, Tynan suddenly burst out laughing, snatching me into his arms and whirling me about the room in an impromptu dance. At first I strained every muscle to break free, but then, suddenly, I started to laugh with him at the ridiculous figure we must cut. Uther watched us with an unfathomable expression on his perfectly carved features, while Demelza called out a light-hearted warning not to knock over the tea table.
“Oh I do like you, Cousin Lucy!” Tynan exclaimed, releasing me and flopping back down into his chair. “So very much.”
“I’m very glad to hear it, Cousin Tynan,” I told him when I could catch my breath again. “But perhaps you could warn me next time before you decide to like me quite so exuberantly?”
His smouldering eyes travelled slowly over my face, searching it suspiciously. “Are you teasing me?” he asked eventually, a note of genuine interest in the words.
“Would you mind if I was?” I asked, amused at the intensity of his expression.
“Not at all,” he answered. “I expect I should quite like it, but I don’t know, because it has never happened to me before.”
“Then,” I told him seriously, “I will undertake to do it on a daily basis.” I resumed my seat. “Now, where were we? Which is my home board again?”
* * *
The cat weaved itself sinuously about my ankles, bumping its tabby head against me and purring in an excess of ecstasy. I stroked its silken ears and it obligingly jumped onto the seat beside me, inviting me to continue this activity for an unspecified but, I suspected, lengthy period. We sat a while, like old friends enjoying the gentle sunlight. My thoughts were thousands of miles away from this sweet-scented English garden. Parched red earth and relentless heat flavoured my memories. The cat regarded me, trance-like, through half-closed emerald eyes.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you, hweg!” Tynan’s voice startled me out of my daydream and my hand tightened briefly on the cat’s neck. The ungrateful creature took exception to this treatment and, with a hiss of protest, punished me with a swipe of its extended claws. Deep lacerations pinpricked with blood welled on the tender white flesh of my forearm and I studied it ruefully.
“Wretched animal!” Tynan exclaimed, looking about for the cat, but it had darted away. “Let us go into the house and bathe it, cousin.” With old-fashioned courtesy, he offered me his arm and, despite my protests that it was just a scratch, insisted on treating me as if I had been mortally wounded.
“Demelza will have some sort of potion for it,” he informed me, insisting that I sit down in the great hall as he went to fetch fresh water and cloths. While he was gone, Uther strode in from the library. His presence instantly filled even the deepest reaches of the cave-like room.
“Lucy!” He started forward, reaching for my hand as he noticed my injury. “Who has done this to you?”
I was surprised at his choice of pronoun. “I think you must mean ‘what has done this to you?’ and, in answer to that question, it is the kitchen cat who is the villain of the piece!”
His laughter held a note of relief which, I decided, was quite preposterous. Did he picture some marauding assassin scaling the castle walls only to inflict a minor scratch upon the poor relation before retreating back from whence he came? These Jagos appeared, at times, to allow the terrors of their hard-won past to infect their present with wild imaginings.
Tynan returned with a damp cloth and a small pot of unguent that smelled of hemp. Ignoring Uther, he knelt before me and tenderly pressed the compress to my arm. I murmured my thanks and he grinned up at me saying, with a gleam of fun, “I make a good nurse, do I not, hweg?” His smile was irresistible. Returning it, I agreed that he did.
Uther cleared his throat and we both looked at him. I was shocked at his expression as he watched us. Black jealousy gnawed at the lightness of his eyes and twisted the perfect splendour of his lips into a snarl. It was fleeting, gone almost before it was noticed. But he knew I had seen it; and I knew he was glad.
* * *
“What are you reading, hweg?” Tynan slouched over the grass towards me.
I held up the book jacket and he grimaced. “Northanger Abbey—very Gothic! Will you read some to me?” Without waiting for my reply, he threw himself down on the grass at my feet.
I began to read and, as I did, without guile or artifice, he leaned against me, long lashes drooping over his beautiful eyes. Some instinct made me reach out and stroke the midnight darkness of his hair, and he murmured appreciatively. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, his head in my lap, my hand smoothing his hair, but it was the sweetest moment I had known since my father died. In comforting this scarred, tortured soul I found a release from my own pain that nothing else—not kissing Uther or being intimately caressed by his all-knowing hands—could match.
“‘There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends,’” I read Miss Austen’s words. “‘I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.’”
“Lucy?” Tynan’s voice was drowsy.
“Tynan?” There was note of laughter in my enquiry and he looked up at me, his handsome young face breaking into an answering smile, and a shard of something sharp and bright pierced my heart in that instant. It was so unexpected that my breath caught in my throat.
“I’ve never had a friend,” he confessed cheerfully. “What does it feel like?”
I tried to ignore the invisible hand of pity that gave my heart a swift squeeze. I thought how frightening the world must have been to a sensitive boy starved of affection and companionship. And yet he was untouched by its harshness. There was an unworldly purity about Tynan that made me want to protect him against all of life’s cruel barbs.
“I think it feels a lot like this,” I said, taking his hand in mine. As I did so, I thought how my own strange childhood had also been oddly lacking in friends of my own age. The difference was that I had my father, while Tynan had…what? Uther and Demelza were, quite possibly, worse than no one. He had now and then, however, mentioned his old nurse. I was glad there had been someone there to love him.
We sat in silence, and I thought that it really was a mark of true friendship that we did not need to speak to each other. “‘Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find,’” Tynan said quietly. That one succinct quote from the great Bard told me that we were both thinking the same thoughts.
“Are you in love with my uncle?” Tynan asked eventually. He did not seem to feel there was anything inappropriate in asking such a personal question. And, if we were friends, I supposed there wasn’t. He folded his arms across my knees and rested his chin on them. I cupped his face in my hands.
“I don’t know.” There. I had said it out loud. I was being perfectly honest. I was letting a man I hardly knew play my body the way a maestro plays an instrument, and I didn’t even have the excuse of knowing I loved him. I wasn’t sure I even liked him. My shame was surely now complete.
“Good…” Tynan seemed about to say more, but a shadow fell over us as Demelza appeared and began to laughingly reproach us for being late for lunch.
* * *
Breakfast at Tenebris was always a grand affair. Huge silver salvers were set on the serving table, containing porridge laced with fresh cream, steamed fish—perhaps whiting, halibut or bloater—smoked haddock, sausages, bacon and kidneys and eggs cooked in an eye-opening variety of ways. A bloody sirloin and a large ham sat on spiked dishes, waiting to be carved. This huge repast could be followed, should the diner desire or his stomach allow, by delicate cakes, pastries and Mrs Lethbridge’s famous scones laden with thick clotted cream. Or, for the faint-hearted, there were bowls of fruit from the orchard or berries from the walled garden. Occasionally, I wondered what happened to the inevitable mountain of leftovers.
The family appeared at different times to partake of this meal. Often, I breakfasted alone. Uther was an impossibly early riser, who usually left the house by the time others emerged from their bedchambers. Demelza rarely put in an appearance before the clock struck eleven, and Tynan abhorred breakfast. I was surprised, therefore, when he joined me as I sipped tea and nibbled a slice of toast.
He accepted a cup of black tea, but shook his head at the offer of food. I had noticed already that he never seemed to eat very much and meat, particularly red meat, made him shudder. On this particular morning, he appeared jaded and in the grip of a deep depression.
“You know,” I remarked conversationally and those beautiful eyes studied me intently, “if ever I am feeling a bit blue-devilled, Cousin Tynan, I find that a light breakfast sets me up for the day.”
A faint shadow of amusement flitted across his face. “Is that what you think of me, hweg? That I’m ‘blue-devilled’—a tad moody—now and then? Or perhaps, like Huddy, you think every ill can be cured with a decent meal?”
“Not at all,” I replied. “To be honest, I was just making conversation,” I said, trying to sound flippant.
His eyes crinkled into genuine laughter at that. “What do you suggest, Cousin Lucy? What sort of fast-breaking feast will cure me of my maudlin malaise?”
I regarded him thoughtfully, my head tilted to one side. “You look like a boiled egg and dippy soldiers man to me.”
“You flatter me, Cousin Lucy,” he drawled in a mock-affected tone.
I moved to sit next to him and explained what I meant as I cut a slice of buttered bread into neat strips and lopped the top off a soft-boiled egg. “These are the soldiers,” I explained, holding up one of the rectangles of bread. I dipped it into the runny egg yolk and held it out to Tynan who, after regarding it for a moment as if it were a coiled snake, accepted it from me and ate it. We repeated the process until all of the “soldiers” were gone. “Now, ordinarily,” I continued, “you would finish off this repast by eating the egg white.” His shudder informed me that such an eventuality was unlikely.
“I think my nurse used to coax me in the same way when I was a child.” His eyes wore a faraway expression. “I was a horrid, sickly brat.”
“Demelza told me your health has always been a great concern to her and Uther,” I said.
“Did she now?” he asked. “How very considerate of her.”
* * *
I slept surprisingly well and woke refreshed to the sound of Betty lighting the fire. She pulled back the bed curtains, but the words of greeting died on her lips. Our synchronised gasps of horror shuddered on the air. The limp tabby figure was suspended by a noose from the rail of my four-poster bed. The cat’s neck was broken so that its head flopped over at an impossible angle. Sightless green eyes stared pitifully at us and sharp, bright teeth showed in an endless, frozen snarl.
Betty began to scream. It was a thin, high-pitched whine that had no beginning or end. I leaped from my bed and ran to her, gripping her shoulders tightly and giving her a little shake. She stopped screaming and gulped back a sob, whipping her head from me to the cat’s body and back again with wide, horrified eyes.
The door flew open and Uther stormed in. “What the devil? Lucy, I heard screaming.” His sweeping glance took in the whole scene. “Cut that abomination down, girl,” he barked at Betty. “And get rid of it at once!”
Betty rushed to do his bidding, untying the noose—which had been fashioned from the cord of my dressing gown—with trembling fingers and carrying the sad little body from the room. When the door had closed behind her, Uther drew me into the safety of his arms, holding me close until my disordered senses finally calmed.
“How has this happened?” he asked, guiding me to sit with him on the edge of the bed.
“Someone has managed to get into my room in the middle of the night and do…this…” Tears threatened to drown the words, and I struggled to overcome them.
“But who?”
“It must be someone who has a key,” I said, explaining that I always locked the door, just as he had insisted when I first arrived. My routine was unfailing. I removed the key from the lock and hung it next to the door so that Betty could let herself in each morning using her own key.
“Is this the first time something like this has happened? That someone has been in your room?” His eyes probed my face and, when I hesitated, he said sharply, “This is important, Lucy!”
“No,” I admitted quietly. With a reluctant sigh, I told him about the night of the storm when I had found Tynan’s handkerchief in my bedchamber. “But aside from Betty, I do not know who else has a key to my room.”
“Mrs Lethbridge and I both have a master set of keys, but, apart from that, I can think of no one else who would have access to one. What do you know of this girl, this Betty, who waits on you?”
I shook my head emphatically. “Betty has no reason to wish me ill! And you saw how shocked she was at what had been done to the cat….” I broke off, biting my lip.
“Can you think of anyone who does wish you ill?” he asked, sliding an arm about my shoulders and holding me close against the comforting warmth of his body.
I shook my head. A horrid thought intruded and an inkling of it must have shown on my countenance. “What is it?” Uther demanded.
“The cat scratched me, remember? A few days ago.”
His lips thinned. “So this might have been the gesture of someone who wanted to please you? A misguided soul who thought that punishing the cat would make you happy?”
I felt my lip tremble and fought desperately to control it. “He wouldn’t…surely not—”
“Oh, I think he would,” Uther said grimly. “I think Tynan would do anything to please you.”