‘Slade, no!’ she protested, her desire abating as self-revulsion swamped her.
‘Damn you,’ he swore hoarsely, ‘you can’t tell me “no” now! God knows why when I know what you are, but I want you more than I’ve wanted any woman in a long time. There’s something about you…’ He shifted slightly, studying her pale outline and watching the movement of his own hand as it moved over her skin. Chelsea shivered, shocked that even now her body seemed to have a mind of its own, wantonly responding to his touch.
‘Slade…’
The sudden shrill ring of the phone shocked her into silence. Slade swore, and for a moment she thought he intended to ignore it, but eventually he got up and left, closing the door behind him. Chelsea heard him pick up the receiver and was suddenly galvanised into action.
Her dress lay on the floor, but she ignored it. She daren’t waste time. Her coat was on a chair and she pulled it on, snatching up her bag as she slid’ into her shoes, praying that Slade’s caller would keep him occupied for long enough for her to escape. Another door led off the bedroom into an inner hall which as she had hoped opened into the marble foyer.
Her fingers trembled over the latch, made clumsy by her desperation, but at last the door was open. Not daring to slam it behind her in case the sound alerted Slade to her escape, she fled downstairs and into the cold darkness of the night.
By fortunate chance she was able to pick up a taxi just outside the apartment, and within ten minutes of leaving Slade she was inserting her key in her own front door.
Once inside she locked and barred the door, quickly stripping off everything that she had been wearing and hurrying into the bathroom, where she quickly showered, grimacing with distaste as she tried to banish from her mind her fevered response to Slade’s touch.
By the time she was dried and dressed in her nightclothes she had managed to persuade herself that she had over-exaggerated her own response, and that far from experiencing pleasure in Slade’s arms what she had actually felt was revulsion. How could she feel anything else when not even Darren had been able to arouse her to desire? She stifled an hysterical laugh as she dwelled on Slade’s reaction to finding that she had fled, leaving merely her dress. That dress—she shuddered. If she never saw it again she would be more than happy. Thank God Slade didn’t know her address. He had been so determined to make her pay for the pleasure of his company that she wouldn’t have put it past him to suddenly arrive at her flat, demanding that they take up where they had left off. It was ridiculous really, but just before the phone rang she had had the impression that he resented her. He had told her that he ‘wanted’ her, but men were notorious for their purely physical desire. Sickness welled up inside her and she raced to the bathroom, gagging suddenly as reaction set in. Dear God! To think it could have been Kirsty in her place tonight. Knowing that made everything’ she had endured worthwhile. Her last thought as sleep claimed her was that she was glad that she would soon be going north and that there was scant chance of her ever meeting Slade Ashford again. Lutons was only one of the companies he owned, and once the takeover had been sorted out to his satisfaction Ralph was doubtful that Melchester would see very much of him. Thank goodness!
* * *
The impatient ringing of the telephone penetrated the deep layers of sleep blanketing her, and Chelsea reached muzzily for the extension phone at her bedside.
‘Chelsea—thank God, for a moment I thought Slade must have done away with you! I’ve rung twice already. I thought you weren’t there.’
‘I’m fine, Ann,’ she lied numbly. If Slade Ashford had had his way she wouldn’t have been, unless it was his practice to send his women home once he had finished with them.
‘Thank heavens for that!’ her sister breathed. ‘Ralph was furious with me for letting you leave with Slade. He told me that after the way you’d been playing up to him all night Slade might quite naturally have thought that you wanted to spend the night with him as well as the evening.’
‘I’m fine,’ Chelsea lied again. She had no wish to remember the black anger in Slade’s eyes when he had touched her body. Disgust for her own behaviour flooded through her. She had never thought of herself as sexually repressed, ‘sex-starved’ to the point where she would respond physically to any experienced man—just the opposite; and yet last night…
‘How’s Kirsty?’ she asked her sister, trying to obliterate Slade Ashford from her mind.
‘She seems fine,’ Ann told her. ‘In fact she seemed more puzzled than distressed about you going off with Slade. Perhaps she’s just trying to put on a brave front—I don’t know, but I do know one thing—she’s going out with Lance James tonight, to some disco. All we have to do now is to make sure that the rift becomes permanent. I don’t suppose you…’
‘No way,’ Chelsea told her firmly. ‘I’ve done my femme fatale bit to death—besides, I’ll be leaving at the end of the week.’
‘Ralph says I’m not to worry. He persists in believing that Slade was merely indulging Kirsty. He says a man like Slade doesn’t need to chase after seventeen-year-old schoolgirls, no matter how pretty they are… Are you sure you’re all right?’ Ann persisted. ‘You sound strange. Look, why don’t you come over…’
‘Ann, I’m fine,’ Chelsea interrupted firmly. With the night behind her it was easier to convince herself that she must have exaggerated her body’s response to Slade’s skilled lovemaking.
With a sudden start of horror she relived her flight from Slade’s apartment, shuddering with distaste as she recalled the way she had been dressed. Her dress! Hysterical laughter bubbled up inside her. What was more important—the loss of a dress, or the loss of her self-respect? Besides, something told her that she would never have been able to wear it again, because at the back of her mind was the knowledge that it was tainted for her by the way she had behaved while wearing it.
For Slade Ashford it had been nothing more than simply another brief sexual encounter; an automatic male response to an available woman; a casual acceptance of a way of life which was totally alien to her.
CHAPTER THREE
IT seemed impossible to believe that she had been at Darkwater for nearly a month, Chelsea reflected, walking up the overgrown lane which led from the Dower House to Darkwater. Her task was turning out to be one of the most demanding she had ever undertaken, but instead of depressing her, the restoration work on the tapestry promised to be so potentially rewarding that even the problems it caused her were a challenge rather than a chore.
The National Trust officials who had been working on the house had now completed their work—as it had been inhabited until the death of the owner very little had needed to be done, and Chelsea knew that the Trust had high hopes of opening the house to visitors the following summer.
Because Darkwater was so remote—ten miles from the nearest border town of Jedburgh—Chelsea was staying at the Dower House. The new owner, whom Mrs Rudge the housekeeper referred to in a rather tight-lipped fashion as ‘Mr Harold’s newphew’, was apparently away—Mrs Rudge had grudgingly informed her that he had considerable business interests which took him away a good deal.
‘Not that we ever saw much of him at all before he inherited,’ she had told Chelsea that morning at breakfast. ‘Born and brought up in the South, he was. Mr Harold’s sister married one of them stockbrokers. It would break Mr Harold’s heart if he knew what was going on with the house an’ all.’
‘It’s probably for the best,’ Chelsea had told her gently, guessing that the housekeeper’s feeling towards her late employer’s nephew sprang from resentment at what she saw as a callous indifference to his family home. ‘With death duties many families find keeping on their homes an impossible burden. At least endowing it to the Trust will ensure that it’s preserved.’ She knew that the Trust very rarely took on houses unless the donors were prepared to include a substantial sum of money for upkeep, which was why so many people were forced to sell their homes to developers, to be converted into f
lats and hotels.
Her walk took her past a newly ploughed field. Mist clung to the hedgerows as the ground dipped away; a faint riming of frost reminding her that it was less than a month to Christmas.
The red tractor in the distance executed a neat circle, its driver lifting a checked shirt-clad arm.
Chelsea waved back, her lips curving into a warm smile. The Littles, who farmed High Meadow, which had once been the home farm, had made her very welcome, especially Tom, the son of the family. Two years Chelsea’s senior, he had been farming in New Zealand when his father had suffered a heart attack, and as he ruefully told Chelsea, it was sometimes hard after living one’s own life to return to the parental roof.
Chelsea had found his mother to be a mine of information about the Darkwater family, although she had been surprised when Chelsea told her what she was doing in the Borders.
‘Restoring a tapestry?’ she had murmured. ‘Well, there’s a thing… a firescreen, is it?’
Chelsea had laughed, visualising the thirty-odd-foot length of mediaeval tapestry obviously designed to cover one of the walls in a huge baronial hall, and Mrs Little had joined in her laughter when she had explained.
Tomorrow she planned to drive into Newcastle to collect some silks she was having specially dyed. The tapestry itself, so fragile that in places it hung together on single threads, was being attached to a new backing. Once that was done Chelsea intended to clean it, using the specialised processes she had learned during her training. Old fabrics were notorious for their fragility and momentary clumsiness could ruin centuries-old articles.
As always when she saw the house she was struck by the granite hardness of it, rising out of the earth; more of a fortress than a home, its back to the sea looking down the long valley which linked England and Scotland; a formidable guardian of the Borders, and one whose owners had owed loyalty to both the English and the Scottish Crowns at various times in history.
It was hard to accept that once this green, fertile valley had run red with the blood of warring clansmen; Border reivers, a law unto themselves, too far from the civilising influences of both London and Edinburgh to heed the commands of their rulers.
Chelsea had the house to herself, and as she walked upstairs to the long gallery where she was working and where it was intended eventually to hang the tapestry she couldn’t help peopling the house with those who had owned it when it was first built during the latter part of Elizabeth the First’s reign. She had visited it, as she had visited so many houses on her indefatigable tours of her country, and the Trust had been given the account books detailing the family’s expenditure for the occasion—and the blunt north-country statements as to the extravagance of it all.
Chelsea had always known that under her strong practical streak lurked what she considered to be a very self-indulgent tendency to daydream, but nowhere had it been given such free reign as here. Every room of the house was being restored as much as it could be to its original state at the time it had been built, although it was obvious that such modern additions as the Georgian wing designed and furnished by the Adam brothers, who had also been responsible for the Dower House, would look ridiculous furnished with wooden settles and bare floors.
As she switched on the power lamp she used to work on the tapestry she marvelled, as she did each time she saw it, that it had survived.
It had been found rolled up in one of the attics and dumped casually in the Long Gallery by one of the workmen—a chance discovery of something with the potential to rival the fabled Bayeux tapestry.
Today Chelsea was preparing the tapestry for some specialised photography. Before the tapestry had been touched, a photographic record of it had been taken, after which Chelsea and a skilled artist employed by the Trust had work unflaggingly to reproduce an accurate facsimile of how it would have looked when new, and this too had been photographed. What she would do eventually would be to compare the two and then work on the tapestry to renew it as closely as possible to what it had once been.
The phone rang as she was studying a particularly damaged piece which she thought represented a Crusader in hand-to-hand combat with one of Saladin’s warriors. Frowning, she hurried to answer the phone, smiling when she heard Tom’s deep, pleasant voice on the other end of the line.
‘I hope I haven’t interrupted you at a critical moment,’ he began, ‘but I wondered if you’d like to come out for a drink tonight. I could pick you up and we could go into Alnwick—in fact,’ he added, ‘Why don’t we go this afternoon? You said you wanted to see the Percy castle. We could have a look round the town and then have dinner.’
It sounded very tempting, and Tom was quite right, she did want to see the famous Percy stronghold, guarding the road from north to south.
‘What about the farm?’ she demurred, not wanting to take him away from his work.
‘It will survive without me for a few hours—besides, I’ve earned a break.’
‘Then I’d love to go,’ Chelsea replied promptly. In her job flexibility was a very important consideration. She had lost count of the number of times she had worked a fifteen or sixteen-hour day to complete a special job and then fallen exhausted into bed, and Jerome trusted her to work at her own pace, so she had no compunction about taking time off, knowing that before work on the tapestry was completed she would more than have made it up.
When she walked back to the Dower House at lunch time the mist had all dispersed. Breathing in the cold air appreciatively, she acknowledged that it did have a more bracing, fresher taste than she was normally used to. It would be fatally easy to fall in love with this part of the world, she admitted; she had already come to love its tranquillity and sturdy air of permanence.
Mrs Rudge accepted the news that she would be eating out that night with a shrug and a grimace. Chelsea did not take offence at her manner; she had come to know that the housekeeper’s dourness was characteristic of her and not directed at Chelsea herself specifically.
The one person she did seem to actively dislike was her new employer, and Chelsea commented On this later in the afternoon when she and Tom were speeding towards Alnwick in Tom’s Range Rover.
‘Oh aye, she can’t abide him,’ Tom agreed with a grin. ‘Ma will have it that it’s all on account of his mother marrying a southerner.’ When he saw Chelsea’s expression he laughed. ‘Old habits die hard up here; time was when it was unthinkable even to marry someone from an opposing clan, but that’s all disappearing these days.’
Tom was a pleasant companion, full of interesting snippets of information about the countryside his family had lived in for centuries, and its inhabitants.
As they drove towards Alnwick he told her how Darkwater had originally come to be built by one of the younger sons of the Percy family, a black sheep who had come south to London to make his fortune.
‘He was one of Elizabeth’s handsome young men, and she eventually gave him permission to join Drake and his privateers. That was how he made his fortune. He married one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting and brought her back to the Borders. Darkwater was bought and rebuilt with his profits from his buccaneering. Previously it had been owned by one of his cousins.’
‘It sounds fascinating,’ Chelsea told him appreciatively, ‘Tell me more.’
Tom grinned, negotiating a sharp bend before saying teasingly, ‘The old place has really got to you, hasn’t it? Very well then, the manor was originally granted to Ranulf de Percie, by Henry the Second. His sons grew up with Henry’s at court; it’s even rumoured that one of them had Plantagenet blood in his veins, although that’s never been confirmed. All three of them swore allegiance to Richard the First when he became king and followed him out to the Holy Land. One of them died there; another lost his life in France with Richard later, and the third returned home to marry one of his Percy cousins.’
‘He must have been the one to commission the tapestry,’ Chelsea murmured.
‘The Black Percys, they used to be called round here,?
? Tom continued, ‘Partially to distinguish them from their redheaded cousins, and partially for other reasons; but in all fairness I doubt they were any worse than their neighbours.’
Conversation waned as they joined the busy A-road into Alnwick, and Chelsea concentrated on the rolling countryside of the Borders, her imagination taking fire from what Tom had told her. The ‘Black Percys’—the words had a sinister ring to them and, lost in the past, she felt quite a shock when Tom suddenly stopped the Range Rover.
‘We’re here,’ he told her goodhumouredly, indicating the bulk of the Percy fortress to his right, and parked the Range Rover facing the slow-moving river flowing past them a few yards away. On the opposite side of the road a terrace of shops huddled together; an old-fashioned baker’s, scenting the air with mouthwatering aromas as they left the Range Rover and walked across the busy street.
‘Castle first?’ Tom suggested.
It was incredible to think that this massive fortress had been built entirely by hand, Chelsea marvelled as they drew closer to the gaunt red sandstone building.
To Chelsea it was disappointing in many ways to discover that the castle had been modernised twice in its long history; once in the 1760s, in the then fashionable ‘Gothick’ manner, and then later in the 1850s, even down to the stone soldiers guarding the battlements, although Chelsea learned that such trompe l’oeil devices had been quite common in mediaeval times, mainly to puzzle and deceive enemy scouts into believing the battlements were well manned.
The views of the surrounding countryside from the towers were breathtaking, but beautiful though it was, Alnwick, or so it seemed to Chelsea, lacked much of the grimly foreboding air that made Darkwater seem the much more powerful bastion of the two.