Out of The Night

CHAPTER ONE

EMILY frowned as the flurries of snow ominously started to thicken into what her lifelong experience of these border hills told her threatened to be a fully grown blizzard.

She was no fool—no town-bred child whose only real experience of the truly life-threatening danger of heavy snows on these hills came from watching televised newsreel film.

Perhaps she ought to have put off her departure, but she had already spent two days longer with her parents than she had intended and, as she had explained to them, Uncle John had reached a critical point with his book and would be champing at the bit to get working on it, so she couldn’t really delay any longer.

She had seen the wry, almost amused looks her parents had exchanged, and, even though she’d thought she had taught herself long ago to accept herself as she was, she had felt a sharp, painful flash of hurt, reminding her of her childhood.

Perhaps it had been because Gracie had also been at home. Gracie: four years her junior, pretty, ambitious, self-confident, popular with everyone who knew her, and now engaged to be married to the tall and obviously besotted Australian she had brought home with her.

Emily knew that her parents were baffled by her; she could imagine them wondering where she had come from, their quiet, introverted, almost prim little brown wren of an eldest child—her smallness somehow all the more noticeable in a family of tall Scandinavian-type blondes.

And she was different in other ways, too. She had been conceived while her parents were walking in the Andes; although their home base was here in the border hills, her parents were intrepid adventurers, forever off to far-flung parts of the globe. Her father had the family talent with words and wrote very clever and witty travel books, wonderfully illustrated by her mother. Gracie, too, was a traveller, loving nothing more than to take off for far-away places at a moment’s notice.

Emily, though, was different—she hated travelling, and she hated adventuring even more. She was the quiet, stay-at-home type. She knew she puzzled and sometimes disappointed her parents. They loved her, she knew that, but it was a love fraught with a lack of true understanding of her nature.

After she had left university, they had talked enthusiastically and encouragingly of her taking a year off to travel the world, and had been rather like two hurt children when she had told them that that was the last thing she had wanted to do.

When they had learned that she was going to work for her father’s uncle, an academic who had devoted his life to the mysteries of ancient Egyptian civilisation, they had been astounded. Bury herself in the quiet backwater close to Oxford where Uncle John held the Chair in Ancient Civilisations in one of the colleges? They hadn’t been able to understand her decision then, and she knew that they understood it even less now, four years later.

Once it had hurt her knowing that they had probably dismissed her as dull and boring, because she did have her dreams and her hopes…dreams and hopes that were far removed from those of her parents and sister. Unlike them she had no craving for travel, no thirst for fresh sights and unfamiliar pastures—her dreams did not have wide horizons. It was the small, intimate world of domestic happiness she craved: a home, husband, children—love that could be shared.

Unfashionable dreams, these days; dreams that she was afraid to voice, knowing how they would be received even by her parents. Once she had even thought they might come true.

She had met Gerry while she was at university, and for the first time in her life she had been able to step outside the confines of her lack of self-confidence…her feeling that, in being the way she was, she had somehow let both her parents and herself down. With Gerry she had felt different: self-confident, attractive, interesting. He had courted her and flattered her, wooing her skilfully and ardently, but not too ardently that she took fright.

And then, just when she had been happily beginning to dream about engagement rings and weddings, the cruel revelation of the truth had come. Gerry hadn’t loved her at all. She had been the victim of a particularly nasty and cruel male joke.

It had happened the weekend after she had gone home to see her parents. Gerry had come round to see her on the Monday. He had kissed her passionately…so passionately that she had been a little afraid.

Sex had been something new and untried for her and, much as she had adored Gerry, his obvious experience and expertise had seemed to underline her own lack of them, making her hesitant to allow the feelings inside her to break through the barriers she had imposed on them.

Normally so patient and understanding with her, this time Gerry had lost his temper. What did she want, he had asked her nastily—to remain a virgin all her life? Before she could speak he had gone on to tell her cruelly that she was lucky he was prepared to overlook her ignorance of sex, her inability to turn him on, her total lack of any kind of knowledge about how to make herself desirable.

She had never seen him in a temper before, and she had shrunk from the uncontrollable anger emanating from him, her face tense and white as she had listened in disbelief to what he had been saying.

Her lack of response had only seemed to goad him on. ‘Look at you,’ he had derided. ‘Did you really think I could possibly want you? Do you really imagine I’m going to all this trouble simply so that I can take your frigid body to bed? No way…’

He had stopped then, conscious that he had said too much, but it had already been too late. Feeling as though her world had broken apart in front of her, Emily had forced herself to confront the truth and to demand to know what he had meant.

Watching him hesitate, knowing how much she ached to believe the lies she already knew he was trying to formulate, she had deliberately denied herself that surcease, and had said quietly, ‘Will it help you to tell me the truth if I say that there’s absolutely no chance of our being lovers?’

If she had thought his temper was out of control before, she had then realised her mistake. The language he’d used, the virulence of his temper, ought to have terrified her; but somehow she had gone beyond that, to find a temporary harbour in some small corner of her mind that had sheltered her while she had listened to him pouring scorn on her, telling her that the only reason he had bothered with her was because some fellow students had challenged him to get her into bed—humiliatingly having guessed at her total lack of experience. Heavy bets had been placed on his ability to do so. He himself had stood to gain financially if he succeeded.

And what had shocked her most of all was that he had not been in the least ashamed of admitting it to her. If anything, he had seemed to think that she was the one who had behaved badly—that she had been the one at fault. Well, perhaps she had been, although

her fault had not been in not allowing him to use her body, but in ever thinking that he might have actually cared for her.

She had seen him so clearly then, and had hated herself for the tawdry cheapness of the image she had foolishly believed she had loved. What she had loved was a man she had created out of her own daydreams and imagination and then clothed with Gerry’s features. The real Gerry had been nothing like the man of her daydreams.

She had learned a hard and painful lesson, and she had sworn to herself, as she had quietly demanded to know exactly how much money he would have won had he succeeded, that never again would she repeat her folly. When he had grudgingly told her, she had written out a cheque and had handed it to him.

Her parents had been generous, and she had never been short of money. There had been very little she had wanted to spend it on. She had not been fashion-conscious like most of her contemporaries. She had smiled grimly to herself, realising that she was probably the only girl in the whole university who still wore clothes that approximated to something like a school uniform: neat woollen jumpers, sturdy brogues. She dressed for comfort in clothes that helped her to blend in with her surroundings, not stand out from them.

Gerry had taken the cheque, blustering that it was no less than she owed him, and adding sneeringly that if she changed her mind and decided that she wanted to get rid of her virginity after all, he’d be prepared to oblige her for a similar amount. ‘After all,’ he had taunted her, ‘what’s the point in saving it…unless you’re planning to become a nun…’

She would cry later, she had told herself stonily, watching him leave. She would grieve later for the destruction of her dreams, but right now the most important thing focusing her mind had been that somehow or other she patch together the broken shards of what had once been a person named Emily Francine Blacklaw, and that she find a way of making that person appear to be a human being, and not a robot from whom the ability to think, reason and feel had been taken away.

Somehow, from a reserve of strength buried inside her which she hadn’t known she possessed, she had managed it, just as she had managed to appear not to notice the sometimes curious, sometimes amused looks of those of her peers who must have been privy to the original bet.

It had been the year of her finals, but now, instead of looking forward to the future, she had simply tried to endure the passing of each day as best she could. Then in a letter from her mother had come the news that her father’s Uncle John had been about to embark on actually getting down to write the book he had been threatening to work on for as long as Emily could remember. He would need to find a devoted and very patient research-assistant-cum-secretary, her mother had written, and, when she had read those words, Emily had known that she had found somewhere where she could hide herself away from a world which had become too painful and alien for her. Not a convent, precisely, she had thought with the small bitter smile which had been beginning to replace her once warm and natural, if slightly shy beam.

Perhaps if her parents hadn’t been so busy with the preparations for their forthcoming trip to Mexico…perhaps if her sister hadn’t elected to take a year off between A levels and university and travel to Australia…perhaps if she had had a close girlfriend to note the warning signs and do something about them, someone might have intervened and turned her back to face the world instead of withdrawing from it. But fate had decreed otherwise, and, by the time her parents had returned from Mexico, she had obtained her degree and had been working for Uncle John for three months.

Despite the almost monastic life he lived in the rather ramshackle house several miles outside the university town, Emily had settled very well into her new existence. She enjoyed working for Uncle John, and she had the patience to help him to disentangle and transcribe the notebooks which held over twenty years of notes made supposedly in preparation for the opus it had been his life’s dream to complete.

Although neither of them realised it, Emily’s was the hand and brain that had translated the dusty dry facts so painstakingly uncovered by the scholar into the first outline for a book—a book which John Blacklaw’s publishers had found surprisingly readable. They were an old-established and very small firm, based in the same town as the university, and well versed in dealing with their sometimes eccentric would-be authors.

Peter Cavendish, the great-great-grandson of the original founder of the business, had raised a few tut-tuts from his older relatives when he had commented enthusiastically that at last he had read a manuscript which he could not only understand, but which he had also found made him want to explore its subject in more detail.

Peter Cavendish was thirty years old and unmarried and, in the eyes of his grandfather and great-uncles, a little too frivolous for their kind of publishing. Privately, Peter confided to his mother and sisters that he intended to drag the firm into the twenty-first century by the scruff of its neck if necessary. ‘And I think I’ve found the book which will do it…’

Neither Emily nor Uncle John were as yet aware of his intentions; the book was still in its very early stages, and he had enough of the family caution to want to make sure that the old boy could produce more than half a dozen chapters before committing himself.

Now, as she drove with proper respect for the howling wind buffeting the car and the thick snow which was all too quickly whitening the road, Emily wished she had ignored Gracie’s pleas to her to extend her visit long enough for her to get to know Travis, her Australian fiancé; but, ever sensitive to the opinions of others, Emily had felt that if she did not stay her family might think that it was because she was envious or resentful of Gracie’s happiness.

She had once overheard her mother discussing her with her father, saying that she was the type of girl best suited to marriage with a similarly quiet man, with whom she could live in suburban security to raise the requisite two-point-odd children. The words hadn’t meant to be hurtful, but they had been to a girl on the threshold of womanhood who had still been dreaming of a lover of heroic proportions…a lover straight from one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, or one of Georgette Heyer’s wondrous Regency Romances; a lover who would see through her quiet exterior, who would cherish and adore her…

She knew better now, and, if it was foolish of her to say to herself that, if she could not reach the stars, if she could not experience the heights of emotional intensity she had once dreamed of reaching, then she would rather not bother than settle for the kind of mundane relationship her mother had described, then only she knew of that folly.

And so she had stayed on, to smile at Gracie’s Travis, and to hide her real feelings at the astonishment on his face as he had looked from the tall, golden, glowing Blacklaw parents and his equally golden, glowing fiancée to the small, brown little creature who was their daughter and sister.

And then yesterday it had snowed enough for Gracie to insist on their digging out the old sledge and going tobogganing on the snowy fields beyond the house. Unwillingly, Emily had allowed herself to be dragged along with them. And of course it should be her luck that, instead of sledging skilfully to the bottom of the hill, she should have hit a covered root and end up soaking wet and bruised sitting in a shallow, muddy pool of water hiding beneath the ice.

What had made it even more unfortunate was that she had not brought a second skirt with her, having only intended to stay two days; and so now, instead of travelling home in her neat pleated skirt and sensible blouse and jumper, she was wearing what Gracie had described as a ‘sweatshirt’ in a shade of fuchsia pink which might suit Gracie but which she felt was hideously startling on her—and worse still there was a rather dubious slogan printed across its chest in two-inch-high letters.

To go with this, Gracie had proffered a pair of jeans, ruthlessly ignoring Emily’s protests that they were far too tight and too long, telling her that she could easily shorten them, and then immediately doing so, so that Emily had had no option but to put the things on and to leave the soaking wet skirt behind her.

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Weakly she had also accepted the multicoloured and huge sweater Travis had pressed on her as a ‘present’. Gracie had plainly not told him what Emily looked like, because the sweater had obviously been designed for a woman like her sister—someone tall and self-confident enough to carry off such a very vivid and eye-catching item.

In fact, the only things she had on that were her own, apart from her underwear, were her sensible flat shoes; but, looking at them and then looking at the frighteningly fast-thickening snow, Emily was forced to acknowledge that a sturdy pair of wellington boots was likely to have been more use to her.

She had deliberately chosen to drive back to Oxford over one of the high passes to avoid the traffic. Her father, who always listened to the farming weather, had warned her that more snow had been forecast, but she had assumed that he meant further small flurries of the sort they had had over the previous two days—not this potentially life-threatening blizzard. However, there was no point in panicking. A quick glance in her rear-view mirror confirmed her opinion that she had come too far up the pass to turn back; another half-hour and she would be over the pass and down the other side, heading for the small village of Thraxton, whereas if she turned back she would have to drive for over an hour to reach the nearest town.

She frowned again as she felt her car wheels start to spin, and slowed down to a safe crawl, thanking providence that her mother’s housekeeper, Louise, had insisted on providing her with a huge flask of coffee and some sandwiches. She had a new unread paperback in her overnight case, plus the car rug she always carried with her to tuck round Uncle John’s knees. He suffered badly from arthritis now, and welcomed such small touches of extra warmth and cosseting.

If she did have to spend the night in the car, she would survive. It wouldn’t be pleasant, of course, but she was sensible enough to know that it would be far wiser for her to stay in her car than to risk exposure by getting out and going looking for help. Not that she was likely to find any. These hills were barren and uninhabited, and it was too late now to wish that she had chosen the more sensible busy route.