Читать книгу Tower Of Shadows - Сара Крейвен, Sara Craven - Страница 6

SABINE opened the front door with her latch-key and walked into the hall. She stood for a moment, looking round her, waiting for the onrush of some emotion—nostalgia, maybe, or regret. But all she felt was a strange emptiness.

The house, she thought, was like a vacuum, waiting for the personalities of its new owners to fill it.

There’s nothing for me here, she told herself. But then, after Maman died, there never really was.

She wished she hadn’t come, but Mr Braybrooke had been most insistent.

‘You and Miss Russell must meet to discuss the division of the contents. There are still clothes, I understand, and personal items which will need to be disposed of.’

Something in Sabine recoiled from the idea.

She said, ‘I suppose—a charity shop.’

‘By all means. But surely there will be keepsakes—small pieces of furniture, perhaps, that you will wish to have?’

Sabine shrugged. ‘Just Maman’s jewellery. She stated in her own will it was to come to me when Dad died.’ She paused. ‘I’m not sure he would have wanted me to have anything else. There were times during these last couple of years when I felt he hated me. That’s why, in the end, I stayed away.’

Mr Braybrooke looked pained. ‘But you were Mr Russell’s only child, my dear, and you must not doubt that he loved you, even if he didn’t always make it perfectly apparent.’

Sabine sighed. ‘Be honest, Mr Braybrooke. He left the house, his only tangible asset, jointly to my aunt and myself. I imagine you had to fight like a tiger to secure me even that half of his estate.’ She looked at him, brows lifted. ‘That’s so, isn’t it?’

His expression changed to embarrassment. ‘I really cannot reveal private discussions with a client.’

Sabine nodded. ‘I knew I was right,’ she said calmly. ‘It’s all right, Mr Braybrooke. I’ve managed to come to terms with it all. I think Dad was the kind of person who could only love one person in his life. He loved Maman, and when she died she took everything. I must have been a constant reminder of her, and he couldn’t bear it.’

Mr Braybrooke looked at her for a long moment. Then he said gently, ‘I don’t think, my dear, that your father was always very wise.’

Standing silent in the hall now, Sabine let herself feel once more the pain of Hugh Russell’s rejection of her. Her hands curled slowly into fists, the nails scoring the soft palms until she winced, and let them relax again.

Then squaring her shoulders, she crossed to the drawing-room door, and threw it open.

‘So you came.’ Aunt Ruth was occupying the wing chair beside the empty grate, her hands busy with the inevitable piece of knitting. Across the room, Sabine could sense her hostility, and wondered how much influence she’d exerted over her brother in those last years.

She said quietly, ‘Not by choice, but the house has to be cleared. I see that. When is the sale due to be completed?’

‘On Friday.’ Ruth Russell’s lips were compressed into their usual taut line. ‘I’ve prepared an inventory of the furniture, and ticked those pieces to which I’m particularly attached.’

‘That’s fine. We can send the remainder to a saleroom.’

Miss Russell stared at her. ‘There’s nothing you want?’

Sabine glanced round the once familiar room. She had her own flat now, light and bright and filled with the things she herself had carefully chosen. She had her own life. She wanted no hang-ups from the past to shadow the future. And yet…

She said, ‘Only Maman’s jewellery, thank you.’

‘That absurd name.’ Miss Russell’s face showed a sudden, unbecoming flush. ‘Take her trinkets. I don’t want them.’

‘No,’ Sabine said meditatively. ‘You never liked her, did you?’

‘Hugh could have married anyone.’ This was clearly an old and bitter theme. ‘Instead he chose a foreigner—a girl with no background—no class.’

‘The French had a revolution once,’ Sabine pointed out mildly. ‘It was supposed to wipe out that kind of thinking, and replace it with liberty, equality and brotherhood.’ She looked pointedly at the busy hands. ‘A lot of knitting went on then, too.’

‘You are—insolent.’

‘Yes,’ Sabine agreed wearily. ‘But I tried being polite for a long time, Aunt Ruth, and it got me nowhere. Your dislike for Maman was handed down to me, wasn’t it? I often wondered why. I was your brother’s child, after all.’

‘Oh, no, you were not.’

The words were uttered with such venom that Sabine’s head jerked back in shock. She felt as astonished as if the older woman had got out of her chair suddenly, and struck her across the face.

She said, faltering a little, ‘What did you say?’

‘I said you were not my brother’s child.’ The words seemed squeezed between the compressed lips. They were staccato with a violence and bitterness which Sabine, stunned, guessed had been suppressed for years. ‘Your mother—that precious Maman you speak about with such reverence—was nothing but a common slut. She was already pregnant when Hugh met her. She was living as au pair with the Drummonds—such a nice family—and he went there to dinner. Mrs Drummond was distraught when she realised Isabelle’s condition. She turned her out of the house, and rightly so—contaminating innocent children.’ Her breath rasped harshly.

‘She was over six months gone, when he married her,’ she went on. ‘I begged him on my knees not to do it, but he was besotted with her. He’d never shown the slightest interest in any other woman—any decent woman. Oh, no, he chose her. And everyone knew—everyone was laughing about it.’

Sabine found it difficult to breathe. She tried to speak calmly. ‘You’re lying. I know you are. I’ve seen my birth certificate. My father was Hugh Oliver Russell, however much you may wish to disown the connection.’

‘Of course, his name is there. He registered the birth. He claimed you—took responsibility for you. There was no one else to do so. He’d married her, so he accepted the shame of you. She made him do it.’

Sabine’s legs were weak suddenly. A chair, she thought. She had to get to a chair otherwise she would collapse on to the floor. She walked somehow to the other side of the fireplace and sat down.

There was no point in argument and denial. She knew that now. Because Ruth Russell was speaking the truth at last, with a furious conviction that left no room for doubt. And although she felt she was being torn apart inside, at the same time the older woman’s brutal candour was welcome, because it finally answered so many unhappy questions.

She’d thought she’d failed Hugh Russell in some way, or that she was intrinsically unlovable. Now she knew it wasn’t so. It hadn’t really involved her personally at all. It was what she represented to him.

Perhaps he’d always secretly resented giving his name to another man’s child, she thought sadly. Maybe the fact that she’d remained the only one had rankled with him too.

She said, ‘I wish he’d told me this himself.’

‘He never would. He was too loyal to her.’

Sabine lifted her chin. ‘Did he know—who my real father was?’

Ruth Russell shook her head. ‘She would never say. In all those years, she refused to speak about it—to give even a clue.’

‘Although I’m sure you never hesitated to badger her about it,’ Sabine said evenly.

‘We had a right to know whose bastard we were fostering.’

‘That’s certainly one way of looking at it,’ Sabine agreed. She took a breath. ‘In the circumstances, I presume you want me to remove all Maman’s things from the house.’

‘I wanted him to do it after she died. To get rid of everything—every trace of her. But he wouldn’t. In spite of what she’d done—even when she was dead—he went on loving her—the blind, stupid fool.’ Tears were running down Ruth Russell’s face.

‘I know,’ Sabine said gently. ‘And for that reason I shall always love his memory.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ll make a start upstairs. Goodbye—Miss Russell. There’s very little reason for us to meet again.’

‘None at all.’ The tone was like a knife, severing any tenuous bond that might remain between them.

Sabine wryly decided against any attempt to shake hands, and left the room.

She was still dazed by the revelations of the past half-hour as she went up the stairs. She’d come to perform an unpleasant but routine chore, and suddenly, virtually in the twinkling of an eye, her entire life had been turned upside-down, and all its certainties challenged.

If she shared no blood tie with Hugh Russell, she found herself debating the morality of claiming any part of his estate at all. She would have to talk to Mr Braybrooke about it.

But she wouldn’t think about that now. She would concentrate on the job in hand instead, and get it done as quickly and cleanly as possible.

During Isabelle Russell’s lifetime, she and her husband had shared the big front bedroom. After her death, he’d moved out into one of the back rooms, and Aunt Ruth—although she supposed she’d have to stop thinking of her in that way—had taken the other.

Fourteen-year-old Sabine had remained in the roomy attic which had been hers since nursery days. It had always been a much loved and private domain. Often, in those anguished and bewildered days as Miss Russell began to impose a new regime, it had become a sanctuary.

Eventually, Sabine had been glad to escape altogether to university, where she’d read Modern Languages. Vacations had proved such a strain that she stopped going home at all in the end, applying for any holiday jobs which offered accommodation. After obtaining her degree, she decided against teaching, opting instead for a career as a freelance translator. So far, she hadn’t regretted it.

She was thankful too that she’d struggled to exist on her grant, and what she earned in vacations, without making too many extra demands on Hugh Russell. She’d been well aware that Ruth Russell grudged her every penny.

To her I was always an outsider—an interloper, she thought, as she opened the door of the master bedroom. At least I know why now.

Miss Russell had a morbid fear of sunlight fading carpets and furnishings, so the curtains were half drawn as usual. Sabine wrenched them apart, and opened the windows for good measure, letting the brightness of the June day flood into the room. Then she looked around her.

It was like taking a step back into the past, and for a moment a little shiver ran down her spine. The bed had been stripped, of course, but apart from that everything seemed much the same. Too much the same. She could almost imagine the door opening and Isabelle coming in to sit down at the dressing-table with its pretty antique tortoiseshell and silver toilet set, humming softly as she loved to do.

What was the song which had always been her favourite as a child? Sabine hummed the tune, then sang the words under her breath. ‘Auprès de ma blonde, il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon Auprès de ma blonde, il fait bon dormir.’

A most unsuitable thing to teach a child, Miss Russell had always said disapprovingly. But it had just been part of Isabelle’s patient determination to make Sabine as bilingual as possible.

‘You have French blood. You must take pride in speaking our beautiful language,’ she had told the little girl more than once. And songs, even faintly risqué ones about blondes, had been part of the learning process.

Isabelle had been blonde herself, of course, her eyes as dark as brown pansies, in startling contrast to her pale hair and creamy skin.

Sabine had inherited her mother’s fair hair, and wore it sleekly cut in a similar straight bob, swinging almost to her shoulders. She was the same medium height too, with the lithe slenderness which had also characterised Isabelle. But her eyes were greyish-green, and her oval face had charm, rather than the outright beauty which her mother had possessed.

She had always tried to emulate Isabelle, too, in buying the best clothes she could afford, and keeping them in pristine condition, making sure she was well-groomed at all times.

Ruth Russell had claimed her sister-in-law had no class, yet Isabelle could achieve the kind of casual chic which made every other woman around her look dowdy. Probably that had been one of the things which Aunt Ruth, who had little dress sense, so disliked about her.

She stood absently fingering the jars and brushes on the dressing-table. Even when Hugh Russell’s attitude towards her had begun to change it had never occurred to her to doubt her parentage for a moment. She’d always believed in the strength of her parents’ marriage, the power of its mutual affection. Now she had to face the fact that it could all have been a sham.

Isabelle had loved another man—had given herself to him with disastrous consequences—and here was Sabine, the living proof, the cuckoo in the conventional Russell family nest.

She wondered if Hugh Russell had ever hinted that his wife should have her baby adopted. According to Miss Russell, Isabelle had forced him to treat her child as his own—had even made it a condition of their marriage.

He had loved her, Sabine thought, but how had she felt about him? Was it love or simply gratitude because he had offered her a safe haven? She would never know.

Biting her lip, Sabine walked over to the wardrobe, and flung open its door. They were still hanging there on their plastic covers—the classic suits, the dateless dresses, with the shoes, always plain courts, racked neatly beneath them.

She lifted down the big suitcase from the top of the wardrobe, and, placing it on the bed, began to fill it, folding the garments as carefully as Isabelle would have done.

At times, a faint remembrance of the scent her mother used to wear drifted up from the folds of the clothing. That was the most personally evocative thing of all, Sabine thought, wincing, and she could understand why Hugh had always shied away from clearing out his wife’s things. It was interesting too, she realised, that he’d never allowed his sister to dispose of them either.

But then, he wouldn’t have wanted to see Isabelle’s treasured possessions grimly thrust into bin-bags and left outside for collection.

It took nearly an hour for her to empty the wardrobe and dressing-table. She didn’t hurry, using the time to do some serious thinking. It occurred to her for the first time that there were a couple of curious anomalies in her childhood.

Firstly, although Isabelle had kindled her love for foreign languages by teaching her their own native tongue, at the same time she’d been strangely reticent about her own life. When Sabine asked about France and French life, Isabelle had talked exclusively about Paris where she’d trained as a commercial artist. For that reason, Sabine had always assumed that her mother was a Parisienne by birth.

But assumptions, as she’d discovered that day, could be dangerous, and Isabelle had never actually stated where she was born. She’d never spoken about family either. Sabine had asked if she had any grandparents in France, or any other uncles and aunts. It seemed unjust if she was saddled with Aunt Ruth alone, but Isabelle had said there was no one, adding, ‘Hélas.’

The other odd thing, she realised, was that they’d never been on holiday to France. Nor could she recollect that it had ever been suggested they should do so. It was as if the subject had been taboo.

Yet they’d been to Spain, Italy and Greece time after time, and surely it would have been natural for Isabelle to want to show off the country of her birth.

Why did I never think of this before? she wondered blankly. Presumably because I was too young, and because life was so full in other ways that I never had time or any real reason to question it.

She’d left the top dressing-table drawer until last. It still contained a handful of cosmetics, and, at the very back, her mother’s suede jewellery case. Sabine extracted it gently. Her mother had been quite specific about it. ‘My jewellery case and all its contents to my daughter Sabine’, her will had read, with the added proviso that the bequest should only take place after Hugh Russell’s own death. Maman’s perception had probably told how impossible it would be for him to part with any of her things in his lifetime.

In fact, there was very little inside the case, just her watch, a few pairs of earrings, and her cultured pearl necklace. The tray didn’t fit very well, she noticed, and when she lifted it out she discovered why. Under it was a small flat package wrapped in yellowing tissue paper.

Sabine removed the paper carefully, trying not to tear it, feeling in many ways like an intruder. An oval silver medallion and chain slid into her hand, and she studied it, frowning. She knew all Isabelle’s small store of jewellery, and she’d certainly never seen this before, although she had to admit it was a beautiful thing. Moreover, it looked old, and by its weight in her hand could also be valuable. And equally clearly, concealed in the base of the box, it had not been for public view.

There was some kind of engraving on the medallion, and she took it over to the window for a closer look. The design wasn’t very clear, but she could just make out a building shaped like a tower, she thought, tracing the outline with her fingertip, and beneath it a flower which might or might not be a rose.

Sabine looked at it for a long moment, aware of a faint stirring in her consciousness, some elusive memory, fleetingly brought to life. But as she reached for it, tried to bring it into sharper focus, it was gone. Just another unanswered question, she acknowledged with a small sigh, as she re-wrapped it.

She was about to replace it when she noticed that the satin lining in the bottom of the case had been torn away from one edge, and stitched back into place with large clumsy stitches.

Not Maman’s style at all, she thought, frowning. I wonder when that happened?

She ran her fingers over the base, finding an unexpected bulkiness. There was something there—under the lining. She found a pair of nail scissors and cut the stitches.

The something was an elderly manila envelope, secured with a rubber band.

Slowly Sabine opened it, and emptied the contents on to the dressing-table. A latch-key attached to a ring in the shape of a small enamelled owl fell out first to be followed by a thin folder of photographs, a picture postcard, a label from a wine bottle, and, lastly, some kind of official document in French.

It was a mixed bunch, she thought wonderingly. Rather like that game where you had to memorise so many objects on a tray.

She picked up the document, and spread it open. Her heart seemed to be beating very slowly and loudly as she looked down it. She read it carefully twice, but her conclusion was the same both times. It was some kind of title deed to a house in France. A house called Les Hiboux, sited in the département of the Dordogne, which she knew was in the south-west, near a community called Issigeac. Not that it meant a thing to her.

‘My jewellery case and all its contents to my daughter Sabine’.

All its contents.

She felt cold suddenly, and pushed everything back into the envelope. She would look at the rest later. For now, she had enough shocks to assimilate, she thought, as she put the case into her bag, and took a last look round.

She left the envelope on her dining table while she prepared her evening meal. Everywhere she went in the flat, she seemed to catch sight of it out of the corner of her eye. It was not to be ignored.

She’d called at the library on her way home and borrowed some books on the Dordogne. She glanced through them as she ate. The actual region where the house was situated was called the Périgord, and it was divided up into the White, the Green and the Black. Les Hiboux was in the Périgord Noir, which was called that, apparently, because of all the trees, particularly oaks, in the area. It was also a major tourist centre.

Issigeac, she discovered, was south of Bergerac, and on the edge of its wine-growing area.

Part of the Périgord’s fame, she read, rested on its cuisine, which included wild mushrooms, pâté de foie gras, and the ultimate luxury of truffles. Walnuts were another speciality, cultivated for salad oil, and also for a strong local liqueur.

She made a pot of strong coffee, and reached for the envelope. Les Hiboux, she thought, as the owl keyring fell into her hand. Hibou was French for owl. She put it to one side, and opened the folder of photographs.

There weren’t many, and they were all black and white. She studied them, frowning. They were just ordinary, rather amateurish snapshots. There were a couple of two children, a girl barely past the toddler stage in a sunbonnet and ruffled dress, and a much older boy, all arms and legs and ferocious scowl, staring pugnaciously at the camera. Maman had given the impression she was an only child, she thought, but was that the truth? Did she have relatives—a real family down in the south-west of France?

The other shots showed a man, standing alone outside some tall stone building. They were blurred and his features were indistinct, but Sabine got the impression that he wasn’t particularly young. She glanced at the back of each print, hoping for a name or a date or some other clue, but there was nothing. The man and the children remained anonymous.

She looked at the postcard next, her brows lifting in delight. It depicted a castle in a fairy-tale—a sprawl of golden stone topped by a high, sloping roof, and embellished with turrets. Sabine turned the card over. ‘Le Château La Tour Monchauzet’ the printed legend uncompromisingly informed her, with no further elaboration.

The wine label repeated the same words in a floridly ornate script overprinted on a picture, which Sabine recognised instantly. It was a simple drawing of a square tower, standing in splendid isolation like an accusing finger pointing at the sky. And at its base, as if tossed to the ground from one of the tower’s high windows, was a highly stylised rose.

It’s the same design as the medallion, she thought, with a little lurch of excitement. A tower and a rose. There’s definitely something familiar about that—something I recognised before. One of the stories, maybe, that Maman told me when I was small. Oh, why can’t I remember? I need to know.

They were a motley collection—these remnants of her mother’s past, she thought, as she began to put them back in the envelope. The deed to the house and the key she could understand—just. But what was the significance of the rest of it?

Well, there was only one way to find out. She was overdue for some leave, and she could go to France and make some enquiries.

But should she? Isabelle might have left her the case, but she’d hidden these things away, making sure they wouldn’t be discovered at least while her husband was alive. Clearly she hadn’t wanted Hugh to know she owned any property in her native country, but why conceal such an important fact? It made no sense—no sense at all.

Perhaps Isabelle hadn’t wanted them found at all, had intended her secret, whatever it was, to die with her.

But that can’t be true, Sabine thought, or she’d have burned the lot, and put the key down the nearest drain. No, for good or ill, they were intended for me. And now I have to make a decision.

Les Hiboux. Owls. Birds of ill-omen.

She shivered suddenly, and her arm caught the folder of photographs, knocking it on to the floor. The prints spilled on to the carpet and as Sabine bent to retrieve them the young boy’s face seemed to glare directly up at her, challenging and inimical. And she pulled a face back at him.

She said aloud, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I hope you’ve mellowed. Or that we never meet. Because you could make a nasty enemy.’