He swung round, his eyes dark, glittering with an anger almost as intense as her own. ‘Perhaps I was waiting for you to tell me!’
Her eyes betrayed her shock, and he laughed harshly. ‘But no, of course, that would never occur to you would it? I would be the last person you would confide in, even though a simpleton could have realised the truth. Or do you really think me so crass a lover that I did not know? Is that it, Jenna?’
He had wanted her to tell him about Lucy? Jenna could not understand why. Surely it was enough that he knew the truth. And how had he intended to use that truth? As a weapon to force her to give up her claim to the Hall.
‘I have known whose child Lucy is almost from the moment we returned from the Caribbean,’ he told her softly, ‘and all that time, my dear wife, I have waited for you to tell me the truth yourself.’ This time there was no mistaking the irony in his voice. ‘I have waited…and still continue to wait.’
‘But why?’
The words burst from her before she could check them, and it seemed so incredible that she should actually see pain and bitterness reflected in his eyes that she was sure she must have imagined them.
‘Perhaps as a gesture of trust?’ His lips twisted slightly.
Her mouth had gone completely dry, a nagging, haunting pain making her chest ache for something elusive and lost. Concealing her expression from him, she asked thickly, ‘Why should you want my trust?’
She thought she heard him sigh as he murmured softly, ‘Why indeed?’ and then his voice hardened as he said in a more normal tone, ‘But if I can’t have your trust, then at least I shall have the truth.’
His cool control, the purposeful determination she read in his eyes, and the hard grimness of his mouth combined to arouse inside Jenna an even deeper fear. She wanted to run from the room and hide herself from him. She felt as though she were being forced to face ever
y menacing, hideous monster that had ever lurked in her nightmares, as though she were standing in the path of some primeval force of destruction from which she could not escape.
Goaded beyond endurance her self-control snapped and she cried out, ‘What is it you want to know? How my sister was raped by Charles Deveril? Is that what you want me to tell you? How she was abused and humiliated by the same man who humiliated your own mother? Is that what you want me to tell you, James? She was eighteen, that was all…only a girl, but because of that family she died. We came here to see Sir Alan…’ Her voice was high and tight with hysteria now, James really forgotten, as she was sucked back into the past, reliving the terror and pain of those months before Rachel’s death.
‘Everyone liked her, you know. She wasn’t like me, she was soft and gentle. I came here with her, but Sir Alan virtually threw us out. He threatened Rachel, told her that no one would ever believe her story, that they’d say that she had encouraged his son to abuse her, but it wasn’t like that. I know…Rachel would never…’ She caught back a bitter sob, her eyes wide and dark as they looked past the man standing watching her, not seeing him, instead seeing her sister’s pale face and swollen body.
‘She wouldn’t let me tell anyone. She was too frightened. I was frightened too. I was there when she went into labour…I went with her to the hospital…I could hear her screaming…’ Her voice dropped, her body shuddering with remembered agony. ‘I wanted to go to her, but they wouldn’t let me…’
Her eyes focused abruptly and she saw that James was standing immediately in front of her, his face pale, the bones beneath the skin harshly delineated.
‘Do you know what it was like…?’ She was virtually screaming the words at him. ‘Can you imagine what I felt like to have to stand there and hear my sister scream in mortal agony? My sister, who never did anything to hurt anyone…who was so gentle and good…’
She was breathing hard, sobbing almost, unaware of the fact that she was beating her fists on James’s chest until he took her wrists in a gentle grip.
‘Jenna, Jenna…Stop now…’
She took a deep, painfully racking breath and glared at him with angry, bitter eyes. ‘Oh, no. You wanted to know…well, I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you what I haven’t told anyone else…anyone…I wanted to see Rachel, but they wouldn’t let me. I pushed my way past the nurses and into the ward. She was lying there. There was blood everywhere, on the sheets, on the floor…’
‘Jenna…’
‘No!’ She said it savagely, her eyes wild with her tormenting memories. ‘You wanted to know. Well, now you do. No, I did not give birth to Lucy, but my sister did; she’s part of her, all I have left of her, and——’
‘You must have been so young…’
She heard the words dimly, and forced herself to respond. ‘Fifteen. I was fifteen.’ Her voice seemed to come from a long distance. ‘They wanted her to be adopted, but I wouldn’t let them. Bill and Nancy helped me. I had to keep her.’ She said it urgently, as though James was someone she had to convince of the rightness of her actions. ‘She was Rachel’s child…Rachel would have wanted…Rachel…’
Tears spurted from her eyes and poured unceasingly down her face. Jenna tried to stem their flow and discovered it was impossible. Something unfamiliar had happened to her. She felt curiously weak and empty somehow as though something she had carried within her for years had gone. And then she realised what it was—it was her pain, the pain of losing Rachel, the guilt and fear she had known because of her sister’s death, because she had not been able to do anything to help her. She swayed giddily, suddenly glad of the protective bulk of James’s body against her own. She wanted to stay here with him for ever, she thought dreamily, safe…But she was not safe with James and she never would be. All the life seemed to have drained out of her. It was more than she could cope with right now to move away from him. Like a limp doll Jenna allowed herself to be lifted in his arms and carried from the room.
With a curious sense of being apart from herself she felt James place her on her bed. No, not her bed, but his own, she realised, raising her head to glance incuriously round his room.
She couldn’t remember their coming upstairs, and as though he knew what she was thinking, James said tightly, ‘You fainted. I think you need a drink,’ he added in that same strangely tight voice. ‘I think we both do.’
Jenna wanted to protest that she didn’t want anything but she was too weak to do so. Telling him about Rachel’s death had been like a dam breaking, sweeping away the hurt and the pain that had built up over the years, and now she just felt empty somehow, lifeless and unable to so much as co-ordinate a single thought. All she wanted to do was simply to lie here.
‘Jenna.’
James was back, carrying two brandy glasses. He saw the face she pulled and his own expression relaxed slightly from its hard remoteness. ‘Come on, let me help you.’ He put the glasses down and leaned over her, lifting her shoulders from the bed and supporting her with the soft pillows.
‘I don’t want anything to drink, James.’ She turned her face away from him. ‘I’m all right.’