A Reason For Being

It was selfish, this dwelling on the mistakes of her past; she had come here for one reason and one alone. She had missed her two young cousins, the children from her uncle’s second marriage to Marcus’s mother, but she would never have tried to make contact with them if Susie hadn’t chanced to see her name on the jacket of a book she had illustrated, and written to her care of the publisher.

They had been corresponding for eight months now. Letters she was quite sure Marcus knew nothing about.

The sickness gradually wore off and she started the engine wearily. These dauntingly draining bouts of nervous reaction had gradually lessened over the years; she had learned to recognise the symptoms which heralded their arrival and to take evasive action. It was noticeable that she was far more vulnerable to them at such times as Christmas and family celebrations…times when the past refused to stay locked away in the deepest recesses of her memory.

She looked in the driving mirror and saw that her face was reflecting her tension. She must put the past to one side and concentrate on the present.

What would be waiting for her at Deveril House? Why had Susie written to her so dramatically, begging her to come home? It occurred to her that it was all too probable that her young cousin knew nothing of the events which had caused her to leave.

Only three people had been witness to them: herself, Marcus and her grandfather. Her grandfather was now dead. It grieved her that she had been unable to attend his funeral. She had only known of his death because in those early years she had not been able to stop herself from buying Border Life, a monthly glossy based in her home county, which had carried the news of Sir Charles Deveril’s death. It had carried something else as well, a message so stark and poignant that it was carved in her heart.

‘Maggie, please come home.’

She had ignored that message, dreading what it portended, dreading facing Marcus…too proud and too hurt to acknowledge even to herself how very, very much she wanted to be with him.

It had taken her years of ruthless mental self-flagellation and self-control before she had finally been able to eradicate that need, but now it was eradicated, she reminded herself firmly. That teenage passion had finally died, and she had scattered the ashes so thoroughly that no embers remained to burn. Her coming back had nothing to do with the love she had once had for Marcus. It was for her cousins’ sake…because of their plea…because she knew all too well the follies of which teenage girls were capable that she had come home. Home! How her own heart betrayed her, that she should still think of the weathered stone house as that.

Deveril House had been built on the spilled blood of betrayed Jacobeans, or so rumour had once had it. It was certainly true that the Deveril who had built it had heeded the advice of his cautious English father-in-law and kept himself free of any entanglement in the uprisings of forty-five, which proved so disastrous for the Stuart cause.

Whatever her ancestor’s political affiliations might have been, he had been a good builder. The house stood four-square to the world, its stone walls mellowed by the seasons. Ivy clung to the east-facing side wall as though protecting it from the harsh winds that buffeted across the North Sea.

A regency rake had added an impressive Palladian entrance before the gaming tables had claimed the rest of his fortune, and his Victorian ancestor had managed to recoup what he had lost by judiciously investing in the new boom in railways.

Two world wars had depleted the family’s resources; much of the land had now been sold off, leaving just the home farm, which was tenanted, and the house and its grounds.

The property had not been entailed, and her grandfather had left the house and its land in trust for all his grandchildren.

And that included her.

Yes, she probably had more legal right to call Deveril House home than had Marcus, who only lived there by virtue of the fact that he was his two half-sisters’ legal guardian and their trustee.

The future of houses like Deveril House was not a good one; even during her own short lifetime, Maggie had seen many similar houses fall into the hands of property dealers, their owners exhausted both emotionally and financially by the burden of maintaining them.

That wouldn’t happen to Deveril House. At least, not during Marcus’s lifetime. Her grandfather had been prudent with his money, and Marcus, whatever else his faults, would be scrupulously honest in honouring the responsibility her grandfather had placed on his shoulders.

It was whispered locally that there was a curse on the family, put there by a wild gypsy girl who had had a passionate affair with the heir to Deveril House, only to be cast off by him when his parents arranged an advantageous marriage.

Every family of long lineage in the country could probably claim similar curses, Maggie reflected wryly as her small car crested the last hill before home, and it was foolish of her to dwell too much on the many tragedies which seemed to have touched hers.

Marcus at least would be free of it, if indeed such a curse existed, since he was not a Deveril at all, and it was only by his mother’s marriage to her uncle that he had been drawn into the family. There had been times when Maggie had felt that her grandfather wished that Marcus had been his grandson; his male heir.

It had been after hearing of her own father’s death that her grandfather had had his first stroke; and no wonder, Maggie reflected, remembering her own shock and pain at losing the parents she adored.

The death of his last remaining son had exacerbated his frail condition, and after that Marcus had stood between the world and her grandfather, challenging them to disturb his fragile peace.

She had slowed down without realising it. She had the road to herself, and yes, there it was, Deveril House, viewing the surrounding countryside from the small hill on which it stood, the stone walls basking in the summer sun, as though the house wanted to soak up its warmth.

From here she could see the straight line of the drive, and the park designed by a disciple of Capability Brown and bearing all his famous hallmarks of created naturalness.

From here she could even see the swans on the small lake. Unbidden, she had a painful memory of how, when one of the farmer’s sons had threatened to shoot the beautiful birds, she, not realising that he was only teasing her, had run to Marcus to beg him to intervene.

That had been in the early days after her parents’ death, when Deveril, although familiar to her from her visits, was still not truly her home…when she had clung to Marcus as the only stable thing in her very unstable world, and he had patiently and kindly let her.

Marcus had been kind to her then. Too kind, perhaps, and she had turned towards him like a flower to the sun, drinking up his warmth as greedily as the stone house soaked up that of the sun.

It had surely been only natural that her adoration of him should turn to an emotional teenage crush; there was, after all, no blood tie between them. Marcus was only ten years her senior, a vital and very sensual man, who should surely have been able to deal quite easily with the emergent feelings of a shy young girl. So where had it all gone wrong? How had it happened that she had become so lost in her own fantasy world that she had actually believed Marcus returned her feelings…that he was only waiting for her to grow up to claim her as a woman?

She was the one at fault. She was the one who had deliberately lied about their relationship, who had deliberately tried to force…But no…even now there were some things she just could not acknowledge; some truths she just could not accept. It was a physical agony even now to face up to her own failings, the muscles in her chest and throat locking as she battled with herself, refusing to allow herself to escape and hide from reality. From the truth.

And the truth was…The truth was that, demented by jealousy, she had deliberately and wantonly tried to destroy Marcus. At least, that was what he had thought, what he had bitterly accused her of wanting to do, and she had been too sick with the shock of realising just where her idiotic fantasy had led her to deny his accusations, to tell him that it had been out of love and naı¨vete´ that she had lied, and not out of jealous destructiveness. That it had been because she had honestly not been able to believe that he was getting engaged to someone else…not because she had wanted to destroy that engagement…But what had been the point? By then she had seen with appalling clarity just how foolish she had been…had realised that her dreams had been nothing but that, and in an agony of angry shame she had refused to speak a single word in her own defence, listening to Marcus’s furious tirade of bitter anger as though she were doing penance. And afterwards…

And afterwards, as she stole away in the night like a thief, Marcus’s words burned into her like so many brands.

Tiredly she gripped the steering wheel a little harder. Hadn’t she learned years ago that there was nothing to be gained from this pointless torment of herself? She had long ago outgrown the need for self-punishment, surely…had long ago faced up to what she had done and accepted that it could never be undone.

But Marcus had never married. She had learned that from Susie’s letters. Ignoring the tiny prickly feeling of sensation that ran through her, she drove down the dip and in through the open gates.

She automatically parked her car at the rear of the house, in the cobbled courtyard which had once been busy with servants and horses, or so her grandfather had told her. Now the stables were empty of everything bar Marcus’s hunter, and the servants were gone. Mrs Martin, who had been her grandfather’s housekeeper, had now retired and Maggie had been unable to place the Mrs Nesbitt Susie had mentioned as being Mrs Martin’s replacement.

The kitchen door gave under her hand. Inside, nothing had changed, and the large, old-fashioned room was still dominated by the huge scrubbed deal table that stood in the centre. As a young girl coming to visit the house, one of the first things that had struck her about the kitchen had been its lovely smell. Her uncle’s second wife had been an inspired cook, and not just that…She had grown her own herbs and vegetables, and in due season the herbs had been picked and hung up to dry in the storerooms off the kitchen, so that their scents permeated the atmosphere.

It had been her own mother who had taught her to cook, but it had been her aunt who had shown her how to turn that basic skill into an art form.

Disappointment scored Maggie with sharp claws as she searched for the smallest trace of that once-familiar smell, but it was gone. The kitchen seemed empty and barren, not the warm, comfortable hive of activity that she remembered.

She walked from it down a narrow passage, and pushed open the door which had once marked the boundary between the servants’ and the family’s quarters.

The once immaculate polished parquet floor looked dusty, and Maggie frowned as the sunlight from the windows picked up the uncared-for appearance of the furniture in the sturdy square hallway.

Six doors led off it, but she found herself walking automatically to only one of them.

Her fingers touched the cool brass of the handle. These were heavy mahogany doors, installed at the same time as the Palladian portico and owing much to the influence of Robert Adam. She knew from experience that, despite their weight, the doors would swing open without a sound, so perfectly balanced that, even after all the years which had passed since they were installed, they still opened silently.

She thought at first that the room was empty. It had the same unkempt and slightly cold air as the kitchen and the hall. This room had once been her grandfather’s study, and then Marcus had made it his own private domain.

Its windows looked out on the main drive and the sweep of the park. Its marble mantelpiece was exactly the right height for a gentleman to place his glass of port on while he meditated on his business affairs; the bookshelves to either side of the fireplace were of the same rich mahogany as the door. At some stage or other, a Victorian Deveril had had the walls papered in a rich, dark green, very masculine silk, so that the room always seemed rather dark and overpowering.

Curtains of the same silk hung at the window, and the Aubusson carpet had a background of the same rich green.

Either side of the fireplace stood a heavy wing chair, a huge old-fashioned desk being the only other major piece of furniture in the room, and it was only as she advanced across the carpet that Maggie realised that the chair with its back to her had an occupant, one heavily plastered leg propped up on a stool.

She knew who it was before she saw him, just by the way the hairs on her scalp prickled warningly, and it took all her considerable courage not to turn round and flee while she still could.

As she rounded the corner of the chair and came into his sight, she took a deep breath to hide her inner agitation and said calmly, ‘Hello, Marcus.’

CHAPTER TWO

HE HAD changed so little physically that to look at him was to step back ten years in time.

It was true that there were small touches of grey in the black hair, hardly discernible unless one looked closely, but his eyes were the same—the pure cold grey of the North Sea—and his face still held that same quality of hard perception, that made one feel there could be no secrets safe from him.

His skin was still as tanned, his body still as physically fit, despite the encumbrances of two plaster casts, one from hip to ankle and one on his right arm. He still had that same daunting air of authority, of knowledge and intelligence, which had initially made her feel nervous of him as a teenager.

Strange, when she had met so many successful people, both male and female, that Marcus should still stand out among them; or was it simply that she was still held in thrall to her own childhood awe of him, so that she was investing him with a magical power he did not really possess?

Where she had not quailed in the presence of millionaires and politicians, she quailed a little now as that cold, searching grey gaze fastened on her, but she controlled her reaction to it, masking her thoughts from him by dropping her eyelids, so that she missed the sharp quiver of emotion that tensed his face.

There was no emotion though in his voice as he exclaimed harshly, ‘My God!’ He half made to start up, and then demanded instead, ‘What the hell are you doing here, Maggie?’

She took a deep breath, and stepped aside from her own personal feelings and emotions as she had taught herself to do, so long ago.

‘Susie wrote to me and begged me to come,’ she told him quietly.

She saw his expression darken with quick, growing anger, his muscles tensing as he fought to control it.

So something had changed, after all. How many times in the past had she been infuriated, baffled and, yes, frustrated by Marcus’s ability to hide his feelings from her? She had always been aware of his strength of will, or course, but, apart from the night she had run away, she had never seen him so quickly aroused to betraying what he felt.

Quite a unique distinction, she reflected grimly: to be one of the very few people he disliked strongly enough to betray an emotional reaction to.

That was another thing which had always infuriated her about Marcus: the fact that he always seemed to distance himself from others…to set himself apart and sort of look on in almost contemptuous amusement at the follies of the rest of the human race.

She had seen and met people in London who displayed the same skill, although with nothing like Marcus’s finesse. They, she had learned, used it as a protective shield against the world and the hurts it could inflict; she had even learned to adopt a little of that camouflage for herself, and now, unexpectedly, beneath her firmly controlled apprehension, ran a fine thread of speculation. What was it in Marcus’s life that had made him decide he needed the benefit of such camouflage?

As she observed his angry reception to her arrival, she was aware that, perhaps for the first time, she and Marcus were meeting on the same level. The ten-year gap which as a teenager had made her feel so awestruck and tongue-tied in his presence, especially when she started to suffer from that crippling crush on him, was now of no importance at all.

Yes, the disadvantage she had suffered because of their age difference had gone, but the hostility remained. And small wonder that he should resent her. He had never married—because of what she had done? It was an uncomfortable thought, and one which awoke old guilts.

‘How long have you been in contact with Susie?’ he asked her harshly, trying to swing round in his chair so that he could face her properly.

It gave her a tiny, savage thrill of satisfaction to realise that for once he was the one at a disadvantage, both from the surprise of her arrival, and from the fact that his heavy plaster cast made it virtually impossible for him to stand up, so that she was in the enviable position of looking down on him. It was a strange sensation when she was more used to him towering above her.

She was a fairly tall girl, somewhere around five foot seven or eight, but she had always found Marcus’s powerful six foot two male frame a little intimidating.

Probably because vulnerable teenage girls were, by their very natures, inclined to be over-impressed by such physically masculine attractions as those Marcus possessed, she reflected cynically.

He wasn’t perhaps a strictly handsome man, but he had something more compelling than intense good looks. He had a magnetism…a maleness that no woman could fail to be aware of.

By the time she had come to live at Deveril House he had been over his teenage years of dating a different girl every month, and for a long time there had been no serious girlfriend in his life, but it had still been very obvious even to her that the half-dozen or so girls who almost continuously called round on some pretext or other whenever he was at home were the ones doing the running in whatever relationship he had with them.

He had told her once that he didn’t intend to marry until he found someone he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with; she, at fifteen and already desperately in love with him, had breathed safely again. If he hadn’t found that women yet, then there was time for her to grow up and convince him that she was that woman.

After that she had prayed fervently every night that he would not find someone until she had grown up.

Her birthday fell in July, and the year before she left school, she thought that moment had actually come and that Marcus no longer saw her as a child, but as a woman.

Marcus and her grandfather between them had arranged a party to celebrate her attaining her seventeenth birthday. Her grandfather had given her some small items of jewellery which had once been her mother’s: a string of pearls, the diamond pendant which had marked her own birth, and various other gifts from her father to her mother, some of which had been in the Deveril family for very many years.

As the second son, her father had always known that eventually the small estate and the house would pass to his elder brother, but that had never worried him. He enjoyed teaching, loved his quiet, calm way of life and his small family, and his father, being a wise and caring parent, had made sure that there was no rivalry between his two sons by allowing both of them to give their wives gifts of jewellery from the small number of pieces that still belonged to the family.

Maggie had also received a charmingly delicate Victorian bow brooch in diamonds and pearls for her birthday, and she had left both that and the diamond ear-rings Marcus had given her behind her when she had left. When she had realised that, far from loving her, in reality Marcus thought of her as nothing more than a difficult child…a child whom he now hated and loathed. When, as the angry lash of his acid words had flayed her tender nerves raw, she had realised that she could no longer live under the same roof as him.

He had looked at her once after he had finished castigating her, and had demanded bitterly, ‘Why? Just tell me why?’

And she had turned her head in stubborn silence, too shocked and numb with the reality of what she had unleashed to defend herself.

‘You’d better go,’ he had told her quietly. ‘Before I do something I’ll only regret.’

And then, as she walked towards the door, sick with shame, trembling with the shock of his angry words, he had added rawly, ‘You just don’t care, do you? You just don’t give a damn…’

She had managed to speak then, fighting back the nervous tremors that racked her to say huskily, ‘Would it make any difference if I did?’

He had looked at her for a long, long time before saying stonily, ‘No…I don’t think it would. I wish you’d never come into my life. Do you realise that, I wonder? Do you realise how much I wish I never had to set eyes on you again?’ he had added viciously, and she had taken those words to bed with her and had known, as she lay there sleepless and cold with shock and reaction, that there was only one course open to her.

One of them must leave, and it couldn’t be Marcus. Her grandfather needed him too much, and so it must be her…

She came out of the past with a start.

Deveril House was in reality more her home than it was Marcus’s, but right from the first moment she had come to live here, after her parents’ death, she had associated the house with him, and therefore she had always felt that he had more claim on it than she had herself.

It was because of that conviction that she had not allowed herself to grieve over it…to miss it. Because of Marcus, she had striven so hard to remain independent of it.

Surely she had achieved that, if nothing else? she reflected with grim satisfaction, refusing to remember her seventeenth birthday party or the kiss that Marcus had given her then…her first truly adult kiss, or so she had thought it at the time. A tame thing perhaps, by modern standards…If she closed her eyes, though, even now she could call back the rough/smooth sensation of his mouth on hers, the tension that had gripped her for that heart-stopping second of time when the pressure of his mouth had changed and she had known, gloriously and triumphantly, that he wanted her.

So much for the folly of youth.

‘I said, how long have you been in contact with Susie?’

She took refuge in feminine vagueness, shrugging her shoulders and saying carelessly, ‘I don’t really know. Does it matter? Quite some time. Long enough for her to feel that she can trust me, obviously,’ she pointed out with delicate unkindness, watching the colour touch his cheekbones as her thrust went home.

‘Where is she, by the way?’ she asked idly, as though unaware of his anger.

‘She’s out with a friend,’ he told her grimly. ‘What exactly was it she told you that made you come rushing back here, Maggie? Quite a miracle for her to perform. I seem to remember that, when your grandfather died, I put notices in every newspaper and magazine I could find, begging you to return.’

‘That was different,’ Maggie defended herself huskily. ‘Gramps was gone. There was no point,’ she added, unwittingly betraying the fact that she had read his pleas for her to come home. ‘There was nothing I could do…but this is different.’ I’m different, she wanted to add, but the words remained unsaid. To utter them was to court danger, since he might reasonably demand to know in what way she had changed, and she would be forced to admit that it was only now, after ten years, that she felt confident enough of her self-control to be able to return to the scene of her agony.