Dreaming

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER ONE

ZACHARY WEST loaded the last canvas into the back of the van, then checked yet again that everything was securely fastened down. He didn’t want any accidents en route. That was why he was taking the canvases himself, instead of sending them with the courier service Leo had wanted him to use.

‘Much safer, Zac!’ Leo had urged on the phone. ‘And much less trouble for you! They’ll pack them up; you won’t have to do a thing!’

‘I prefer to do it myself.’

‘That’s crazy, Zac. These people are experts! They—’

‘I once lost a canvas when someone who was carrying it dropped it, fell over, and put a foot through it. Never again. I pack them up myself, and I’m driving them to London, too.’

‘Why are you so stubborn, you irritating man?’ Leo had demanded, but Zachary would not change his mind.

He thought long and hard before he did anything, but once he had made up his mind he didn’t change it, whatever anybody said. In the last resort, he believed, you could only rely on yourself, and life had proved him right. Zachary West was grimly self-sufficient, and it showed.

His black leather jacket and jeans coupled with his height gave an almost menacing look to his rough black hair, razor-cut features and hard jawline. Of this Zachary was quite unaware, even when he got sideways looks of uneasiness from people in the street. He was rarely conscious of other people. His mind obsessed with his work, he had no time to waste on anything else.

He rarely went to London and there had been no woman in his life for a year or so, since he’d found out that his last girlfriend was dating someone else at the same time. Zachary had brutally told her what he thought of her and hadn’t seen her since. He had barely thought of her, either, except when he found something of hers around the cottage—a handkerchief, still sweet with her perfume, a small comb, a red lipstick.

Frowning, he would get rid of them, but for a while the cottage would hold her presence: Dana’s bright, seductive eyes and amused mouth hovering on the air like the smile of the Cheshire cat. Zachary exorcised it with relentless work.

When he wasn’t painting he looked after the garden, grew his own vegetables and fruit, kept chickens so that he had free-range eggs whenever he needed them, and when the hens stopped laying eggs Zachary killed and cooked them to supplement his diet. He lived simply and did his own housework and washing.

The red-brick cottage had been built in the reign of Queen Anne for a retired sea captain who wanted to pretend he was still at sea. The house looked out over the windy coastline of Suffolk and in a gale the old timbers creaked and groaned as if they were at sea. Nothing had changed in that view in the last three hundred years; it was still a wild and lonely place with the savagery of the sea in front of it and behind it flat, low-lying fields with winding roads buried secretly among them.

The village, Tareton, was a mile away, the nearest little town, Whinbury, a good twenty-minute drive past that. That isolation was what had drawn Zachary to the place. Here he could work uninterrupted and without distractions and when he needed anything he couldn’t get in the village shop—paints or canvases, for instance—he could always drive into Whinbury and there pick up the main road to London as he would be doing this evening.

The light was going as Zachary came out of the cottage again, locking the door behind him as he looked up at the darkening spring sky. It was early for twilight—was there rain in those clouds? He didn’t enjoy driving long distances in the rain, especially at night. Grey eyes frowning, he looked at his watch. He should be in London by seven. With luck, the rain might hold off until then.

As he drove, he thought of the coming exhibition and all the turmoil which would accompany it. His mouth twisted cynically. Leo loved it, of course; he revelled in the Press showing, the society parties, the art critics with their reviews and their rich, smart friends. Zachary hated it.

He was dreading the whole experience; he should never have let Leo talk him into it. It wasn’t his first exhibition, it was his third, but he had not had one for some years because he disliked them so much, and he didn’t need to drum up custom. He wasn’t a portrait painter, looking out for rich people to paint. He painted landscapes, still life; they sold well because people knew what they were about, they did not need to have them explained. Leo thought that...

At that instant, out of the corner of his eye, Zachary caught a flicker of white and instinctively turned his head. There it was again, a whiteness, floating sideways, above a leafy hedge, through the growing dusk.

‘What on earth is that?’

He narrowed his eyes, but still couldn’t make it out clearly. A piece of paper blowing in the wind? A white bird? A barn owl? One didn’t often see their white faces haunting these lanes any more, but Zachary loved them and regretted that.

His foot hit the brake. As his van slowed he went on staring, the hair standing up on the back of his neck as the whiteness flowed on alongside him, on the other side of that hedge. No, that wasn’t a bird, or an owl. What in the name of heaven was it?

Zachary didn’t believe in ghosts, and disliked things he could not rationally explain. He was an artist, with trained eyes; he knew what tricks the eye could play, how the eye and brain together could deceive. There had to be an explanation, but what was it?

His van slowed almost to a stop as he reached a gate through which he saw a garden and behind that, at a great distance, along a tree-lined drive, the pale, shadowy shape of a large white house. The floating whiteness reached it too, a second later, and turned in the air.

As it did so, Zachary suddenly realised what he had seen, and began to laugh a little angrily because he felt a fool. Just for a second he had almost thought he saw a ghost.

But it was only a girl: a small, slender girl with long, straight dark hair, framing a pale oval face. Her head must have been turned away from the road, her dark hair hiding her face, making her head invisible to him.

That was why he hadn’t realised he was watching a human being as she walked behind the hedge. All he had seen was the white dress she wore—a flowing garment with long, billowing sleeves. Now she leaned over a gate in the hedge, staring out into the road, clearly visible to him. Briefly, she looked across at Zachary, in his van, then her dark blue eyes moved on indifferently, to watch the road ahead of him, the road into Whinbury.

Grimacing, Zachary drove on. If he hadn’t been in a hurry he would have stopped to ask her if she was human. Or was she a witch-girl weaving spells in the twilight? He laughed at himself again. Oh, come on! he told himself—stop thinking nonsense. At this time of the evening it was easy to let the imagination run riot, especially in a state of heightened excitement.

She was neither a ghost nor a witch-girl. But she had a strange, unearthly beauty; he couldn’t help being curious about her and wondering what she had been doing, walking alone in the twilight garden. Who had she been waiting for? A lover? There had been a sense of urgency in her fixed waiting, the intentness of those blue eyes—and yet at the same time Zachary’s antennae, the intuitions of an artist accustomed to reading what lay behind people’s faces, had picked up no passion, no sensuality. There had been something else entirely in that face. What? he thought, frowning, trying to pin down his shifting impressions. Something almost nun-like: a purity in the oval of her face, in her widely spaced blue eyes, in her gentle pink mouth, as if she came from another plane, a spirit world.

Zachary remembered Dana, grimacing. There was a world of difference between the two girls! Now, Dana...

The road turned sharply on a bend at that point, and as Zachary began to take the corner a dark red car hurtled towards him from the other direction, but much too far over on Zachary’s side of the road. Zachary swore, stiffening and turning pale. He slammed on his brake, swinging his wheel sharply to one side, but there was no chance of avoiding the red car. He hit it with a crash that sent his van skidding and spinning right across the road through a hedge.

He was flung violently forward, into his steering-wheel, his chest slamming into the padded leather.

His seatbelt held, though. He was pulled sharply back again as the impact of the collision filled the world with the sound of splintering glass, rending metal, screaming. His head hit the side of the door and he slumped, dazed, half unconscious for a moment, then his nostrils twitched, inhaling a pungent scent.

‘Oh, my God...’ he groaned, pulling himself together as he recognised the smell of petrol.

White-faced, he struggled to undo his seatbelt and get out of the van, but even as he felt the metal clasp give way, releasing him, there was a sudden whooshing sound and a wall of flame shot up in front of him. Fierce, searing heat blazed through the broken windscreen and Zachary gave a scream of agony as it hit him, his hands flung up in front of his face in a vain effort to shield himself from the flames.

* * *

The phone rang as Luisa was just starting out on her round, which had already been delayed endlessly by one crisis after another. She sighed as she picked up the phone. What else could go wrong? But her voice was soft and calm, betraying nothing of her thoughts. ‘Burns Unit.’

‘Sister Gilbey?’ The voice was familiar and a faint smile touched her mouth and eyes, changing her whole expression.

‘Yes, Mr Hallows,’ she said demurely, because in the hospital they always tried to keep their outward relationship professional. David sounded tired, and no wonder. He had been in Theatre for hours.

‘He’s in Recovery and he’ll be coming down to you in half an hour or so. I’m just sending you the papers. Considering the nature of the burns, he stood up to the operation pretty well. He’s fit and tough; he should pull through. Shock’s the immediate threat, of course. If he gets through the next twenty-four hours without a set-back the prognosis is hopeful.’

Luisa listened, frowning, her blue eyes dark with compassion. She had worked on this ward for several years now and was used to seeing men, women, and, even worse, children, with horrifying injuries, their faces and bodies badly burnt, but she never became hardened by custom; she was still moved and disturbed by what she saw.

‘Lucky we aren’t rushed off our feet at the moment. I’ll be able to have one nurse monitoring him closely all night. Whatever nursing can do we’ll do for him, poor man.’

‘I know you will—you have a very good team down there,’ David Hallows said warmly, then paused before adding, in a lower and more personal tone, ‘Talking about not being rushed off your feet, does that mean you will be able to come to the dance on Saturday, after all?’

He had invited her several weeks ago and she had been hesitant, warning him that she might have to work this weekend because her senior staff nurse would be on holiday and she had another girl away with a broken leg. The ward roster had had to be rearranged, and Luisa wasn’t sure whether or not she could get anyone to take charge of the ward on Saturday night.

‘Well, I’ve had to compromise, David,’ she said wryly. ‘I’ve arranged with Staff Nurse Jenkins from Surgical to do a split shift. She was on this ward for a long time before she moved to Surgical, so she knows the routine. She’ll work here from eight until two, and then I’ll take over and finish the shift.’

‘So you’ll come to the dance with me?’ His voice was pleased; she could imagine the smile on his calmly attractive face. David Hallows was not handsome, but he had a face people instinctively took to on sight. Warm brown eyes, set wide apart, direct and friendly; wide, placid cheekbones, a firm but kindly look to his mouth, and smooth brown hair—he was one of the most popular members of staff at Whinbury Hospital.

‘I’d love to! Thank you for asking me, David.’ Luisa had been out to dinner with him quite often over the past months, but they both knew that this invitation was different. At the hospital dance they would be very publicly paired off; everyone would be watching them, fascinated. In this closed community, people gossiped endlessly.

‘A pity you can’t have the whole night off! We could have gone on somewhere afterwards. Everyone else will be going back to Mack’s place, I gather.’

She laughed. ‘They usually do.’

‘Ending up with bacon and eggs for breakfast at dawn!’

‘Poor Mrs Mack—she’s a long-suffering soul.’

‘She seems to thrive on it, and being the wife of the chief consultant gives her a lot of status,’ David said drily.

‘I like her; she can be very kind.’

‘Hmm...well, she throws her weight around too much for me—thinks she’s Queen of Whinbury. I don’t like bossy women.’

Luisa’s eyes were amused; this confession was not news to her. She had seen David bristling whenever Mrs MacDonald appeared at the hospital. That regal manner didn’t worry Luisa, who had spent her training being ordered around by autocratic senior nurses, but she knew it put David’s back up.

He yawned then. ‘Oh, well, I’m going to bed now, but I’m on call all night, if I’m needed.’

‘You must be dead on your feet, poor David—I hope I won’t have to wake you up. Sleep well.’

David hung up and Luisa replaced the phone and left her office. The ward was shadowy, curtains drawn around some of the beds, one of her nurses sitting constantly beside a patient who was still on the danger list. Some beds were empty, stripped down to the plastic cover and smelling strongly of the disinfectant with which they had been washed. In others, patients lay rigidly like Egyptian mummies, their bedclothes carefully raised over a cradle so that no weight should lie on their bodies. They were afraid to move: lay there, trapped in pain, only the sheen of their eyes as she walked past betraying that they were alive and awake, and suffering. Luisa walked from bed to bed on almost noiseless feet, at her customary measured pace, used to the half-dark of the ward, the pools of yellow light here and there. She whispered gently to those who were awake, soothed, promised pain-killers, paused to watch those who slept before walking on again.

She liked working at night. There was a very special feel to a ward during those long dark hours when the rest of the world slept, and only you were awake. You came much closer to the patients than you could during the day. Then they had their guard up, were better able to hide their fears and anxieties. At night, though, they were at their lowest and needed reassurance, to know that they weren’t alone with their pain. She had become a nurse because she wanted to do a job that was more than just a way of earning money, and helping very ill people get through the long night made Luisa feel that she was doing something important.

Returning to her office, she did some paperwork, her capped head bent over her desk, a frown between her thin dark brows.

‘I’m back from the canteen, Sister,’ a cheerful voice behind her said. ‘Fish pie again—I wish they’d put some fish in it! It was all potato and parsley sauce.’

Luisa could imagine it and grimaced. ‘Please! You’re making me feel sick!’

‘Shall I tell the others to go now?’ Nurse Carter asked.

‘Yes, then give Mr Graham his injection, would you?’

A moment later she heard the quiet feet passing her door as her other two nurses went down to have a meal. Luisa made herself a cup of jasmine tea, a fragrant, pale golden liquid served without milk or sugar which she found refreshing during the night. She never ate in the canteen because the food was far too heavy: fatty or stolid, unimaginative. It was useless for the hospital dietitian to complain or protest. The canteen was run on a tight budget; they went for the cheapest alternative, and that was usually stodgy—bread, pasta, potatoes, often served as chips. Luisa ate fruit, nuts, yoghurt at her desk during the night, and ate her one large meal of the day at home before she came on duty each day.

The phone rang sharply in the silence, making her jump so that her pen skidded on the paper, ruining the word she had been writing. Her nerves were shot to hell tonight. Pull yourself together! she impatiently told herself, and picked up the phone. ‘Burns Unit.’

‘Surgical Recovery here. We’re just bringing Mr West down now.’

‘Right, we’re ready for him.’ Luisa was tidying her papers as she spoke, sliding them into a drawer in the desk and locking it.

The caller hung up. Luisa replaced her own phone and stood up, her white apron crackling. From the ward door, she could see the neatly made bed waiting for the new patient. She heard noises in the sluice-room just behind her and pushed open the door.

Anthea Carter was busy sterilising the bed pans. Flushed and faintly untidy already, she looked round, her face pinker than ever as she met Luisa’s blue eyes.

‘Did you want me, Sister? Sorry, Sister, I was trying to get on with these.’

‘They’re bringing the new patient down now, Nurse Carter. Leave that—I’ll get Nurse Brett to do it when she gets back from the canteen. I want you to stay with the new admission for the rest of this shift; he’s going to need constant supervision. You know how to recognise the signs of shock—that’s what we’re mostly worrying about, with this one. If you see anything worrying, don’t hesitate. Hit the panic button.’

Anthea Carter pulled down the bib of her apron, straightened the cap precariously perched on her curly hair. ‘Yes, Sister.’ She was a good nurse, in spite of her untidiness and lack of method. She was likeable, too, and Luisa smiled at her as she turned to leave.

They both heard the rattle of the lift doors. ‘There they are!’ Luisa said, moving to meet the new arrival. Anthea Carter deftly clipped back the swing doors so that the patient could be wheeled through into the ward by the porter pushing him, while Luisa was taking the folder of notes from the nurse who had come down with the patient. At the same time she took a quick look at the still figure being wheeled past her. He was unconscious; she winced at what she saw, but her professional training told her that in time his face could be rebuilt to hide the scars his burns would leave.

‘Zachary West,’ she murmured, looking at his notes. ‘Age thirty-four. Well, Dr Hallows says he’s strong and should pull through—I wonder what sort of patient he’s going to be?’

‘Not easy,’ said the nurse who had brought him down from the theatre floor. ‘I saw him when they brought him in... He was conscious for a while and made the air turn blue with his language.’

‘Not unusual,’ Luisa said absently, staring at the strong bone-structure of the unconscious man.

‘No, but he struck me as a very angry man. If he ever catches up with the guy who caused his accident, murder will be done.’

Luisa frowned and closed the folder of notes. ‘Thank you, Nurse, you can get back to your ward now.’ She walked down the ward to oversee the transfer of the patient from the theatre trolley to his waiting bed, a delicate operation in his condition, although he was unconscious and could not feel the pain which the lightest touch would otherwise have caused him.

Once he was installed she went back to her office to get on with her paperwork. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been promoted: she preferred to deal with the patients rather than sit in here doing clerical work.

Just before dawn, Luisa did another tour of the ward. Anthea Carter was still beside Zachary West’s bed, keeping herself busy by mending a torn hem on one of her uniform aprons. Luisa studied his notes. Anthea had been taking his pulse and temperature every hour; Luisa followed the line. Nothing unexpected there.

‘He hasn’t shown any sign of waking up?’

‘Several times I’ve thought...’ Anthea broke off as there was a faint movement from the bed. Their voices must have disturbed the patient. His bruised lids flickered upward, his eyes glistening, silvery, unseeing, then he gave a strangled cry.

Luisa heard anguish and anger in the sound; she bent, murmuring comfortingly, not touching him because she knew how the lightest touch meant agony for him, but soothing him with her low, soft voice. The wild eyes turned towards her.

‘What have you done to me...?’

‘We’re looking after you, Mr West, don’t worry.’

‘Get away from me!’ he snarled, and she flinched as if he had hit her.

‘Give him his injection now, Nurse,’ she told Anthea, standing back to watch. A moment later, the patient was asleep again, his body limp. Luisa sighed and turned away.

Back in her office she rang another ward, dialling with trembling fingers. ‘Hello, Beth, it’s Luisa. How is he now?’

‘Fine, Luisa. Don’t worry, it’s just shock and a few bruises; nothing serious has developed. I expect he’ll be going home today. Are you coming up to see him later?’

‘Before I go home, yes.’

She replaced the phone; a tear trickled out from one eye and she angrily wiped it away.

* * *

Zachary West was trapped inside a ring of fire. Flames leapt up, glass splintered, glittering shards like daggers falling towards him. Heat seared his skin, made him blind.

I’m blind, I’m blind, I’m blind, he screamed in his dreams, but nobody heard him.

Sometimes she was there, floating along beside him, light as a white feather, a barn owl, a dove; a dreamlike, silent presence that calmed and soothed him. He called out to her from within his ring of fire and she slowly turned in mid-air and looked towards him. Long, wild black hair, a sweet, gentle face, dark blue eyes that held compassion and kindness. The pain fell away and Zachary sighed, holding his hands out to her.

She kept vanishing again, like a bubble bursting, and when she was not there he was plunged back into his nightmare.

Once Zachary managed to force open his eyes, cried out for her, but he didn’t see her; he saw other faces, strange faces, staring down at him out of yellow light that dazzled him.

He looked angrily at them. Who were they? What had happened to the girl in white? he tried to ask, but the words wouldn’t come out.

One of them bent towards him, saying something he couldn’t quite hear. This one had a cold, pale face, the look of a nun. Zachary disliked her on sight, with her hair dragged back off her face, buttoned-up eyes and tight mouth. Icy, dried-up virgin.

‘Where am I? What’s happened?’ he tried to ask, but the words came out in a mumble. He tried again, accusation in his voice. ‘What have you done to me?’

She opened her mouth and said something, but he didn’t hear a word; he just wanted her to go away. He told her so and she stiffened.

She said something to the other girl too quietly for him to hear, then Zachary felt a sting of pain. He glared at them: what the hell was that? What...? But they had gone, again; he was sinking back into the dreams, into the centre of the ring of fire. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t; he was trapped inside his pain. He tried to see through the flames, to look beyond to what lay outside, and suddenly she floated towards him, the girl in white, giving him that gentle smile, and Zachary’s fear fell away. An angel, he thought. That’s what she is—an angel! Why didn’t I realise that before? I am dead, and she is an angel.