Rachel Trevellyan

Now she shivered and pressed the palms of her hands against the soft leather. If only her father had confided his difficulties to her, allowed her to get a job in one of the towns close by, instead of permitting her to spend her days painting, assuring her that they had no money worries.

When the crisis had come, inevitably Malcolm Trevellyan had been at the core of it. Unknown to her, he had bought their cottage several years earlier when her father needed money. Then, later, he had loaned her father more money, making no demands for payment, pretending to be his friend.

When Rachel was eighteen, his motives had become clear. He had asked her to marry him, and when she had almost laughingly refused, half imagining he could not be serious, he had given her father an ultimatum: persuade Rachel to do as he asked or he would ruin him.

Her father had been desperate. He could not believe that a man he had supposed to be his friend should turn on him in this way. Rachel herself had been distrait. She could see her father failing daily, unable to do anything to help himself. None of the villagers could help them. No one was wealthy enough to pay her father’s debts.

Rachel had inevitably come to a decision. She had no other alternative. She went to Malcolm Trevellyan and agreed his terms.

Her father had begged her not to do it He had assured her he would get the money somehow. He would take the boat out. He would start fishing for himself. These were good fishing waters. He would succeed.

But Rachel knew he would not, and she and Malcolm Trevellyan were married a few days later.

There began for Rachel the most terrible few months of her life. Adding to her anxiety for her father was her own revulsion for the man who had made himself her husband, and she submitted to his demands on her with a despairing humility.

To her father she pretended that everything was turning out all right, but he was not deceived. He saw her change from a glowing creature of warmth and vitality into a slender wraith of pale cheeks and hollow eyes.

He blamed himself, and he could not stand it for very long. Six months later he took out the fishing boat and never returned. A verdict of accidental death was reached, but Rachel knew her father’s death had been no accident.

It was as though the whole bottom had dropped out of her world and she had had a nervous breakdown.

It took many months for her to recover. To give him his due, Malcolm secured the very best attention for her, but his motives were not wholly altruistic. He wanted his wife again in every sense of the word, but nevertheless, during that period, she grew to rely on him to a certain extent.

By the time she was fully recovered, any thoughts she might have had of leaving him, of trying to get a divorce, had become distant and unreal, and she hardly needed his reminder that he still possessed her father’s promissory notes and would use them if she tried to thwart him.

Instead, she started to paint again, drowning the inadequacies of her life in her art, creating pictures which occasionally brought her money. What small amounts she did earn this way proved sufficient to buy the personal necessities she needed without having to ask Malcolm for every penny, for he seemed to grow meaner as time went by.

And then, just before Christmas last year, he had had a thrombosis. It had been a comparatively mild affair which had left him weakened but active. Although she urged him to take care, he seemed to imagine he was immune after recovering from the first attack so easily, but eventually, two months ago, he had had the second stroke, and it had paralysed him initially all down one side and made the movement of his legs impossible. With therapy, he had regained much of the use of his left hand and arm, but his legs remained helpless.

In consequence, he had become totally unreasonable, demanding Rachel’s company at all hours of the day and night. Her occasional visits to the village for shopping or to see her friends were curtailed by the use of the telephone, and he became insanely jealous of anyone, male or female, who spent any time alone with her.

Yet in spite of that, she had never even suspected that he might be planning to leave for Portugal.

She knew of his correspondence with someone in Portugal, of course. From time to time he would give her a letter to post, and now and then there was a reply for him with a foreign postmark. But that was all. He had not troubled to explain to her his association with the Marquesa de Mendao, and certainly Rachel had known nothing of the fact that once Malcolm’s family had cared for the young girl who had grown up to marry the wealthy Portuguese nobleman.