Prince Of Darkness

‘Don’t be so rude, Damian,’ Hester rebuked him. ‘Ros has a very interesting job and I’m sure her family is very proud of her.’

‘Hester, you might think it’s interesting to plough through George’s bits and pieces,’ he drawled. ‘Frankly, I’d get more of a thrill mucking out stables.’

‘Well, you’re not Ros,’ snapped Hester, looking slightly shocked. ‘And I’m sure your people are very proud of you, and rightly so,’ she added, smiling apologetically at Rosanne.

‘I haven’t got any people,’ blurted out Rosanne before she could stop herself. ‘I mean...I...my grandfather died last year.’

She wanted to leap to her feet and run—to escape this ordeal and to leave behind this stricken, inarticulate creature who had taken her over and was making her sound such a fool.

‘My dear, how sad!’ exclaimed Hester Cranleigh, reaching out a frail hand to her in reflex sympathy. ‘Was he all the family you had?’

‘Yes—he was,’ said Rosanne, her body tensing with the effort it took not to flinch from the hand patting solicitously on her arm. How could this woman possibly care? she asked herself savagely as hatred, hot and harsh, seared through her. ‘I was adopted when I was a baby, but my adoptive parents moved to Australia a few years ago.’

‘Was it your real or adoptive grandfather who died?’ asked Hester, removing her hand from Rosanne’s arm as though conscious of its lack of welcome.

‘He was my real grandfather,’ replied Rosanne, an edge of desperation in her tone. ‘The person I loved more than anyone else.’

‘Damian, would you mind taking my tray, there’s a dear?’ murmured Hester, the sudden frailness in her voice inexplicably cooling the heat of hatred within Rosanne.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, convinced that they must think her deranged, ‘but I still find it difficult talking about my grandfather.’

‘Of course you do, my dear,’ sympathised Hester, as a granite-faced Damian towered above them and took the tray. ‘And I’m sure that, missing him as you do, you find it hard to realise how lucky you were to have had him—most adopted children don’t have a blood relative around to whom they can turn to ask all those questions that must inevitably crop up in their minds.’

There was an expression of dazed disbelief on Rosanne’s face as she turned and looked at the small, frail figure seated beside her... How could she possibly have allowed herself to make such a statement with a secret as dark as hers festering inside her?

‘Ros—would you like more tea?’ Damian’s tone was harsh as his words interrupted her reeling thoughts and his look, when she dazedly turned to face him, openly hostile.

‘No—no, thank you,’ she muttered, then addressed the woman beside her without looking at her. ‘Believe me, I know exactly how lucky I was to have had my grandfather.’

‘It’s sad that you didn’t get on with your adoptive parents,’ stated Hester quietly.

‘Now you’re being fanciful, Hester,’ teased Damian, while flashing Rosanne a scowling look. ‘She said nothing about not getting on with them.’

‘She didn’t have to,’ replied Hester, a questioning sadness in her eyes as they met Rosanne’s.

Rosanne hesitated, feeling strangely compelled to answer that questioning look, her nervousness in the face of such a compulsion exacerbated by the almost threatening look to which Damian was subjecting her from the sofa.

‘No—I didn’t get on with them,’ she eventually stated tonelessly. ‘But now that I’m older I can see that much of the fault for that lay with me.’

It was her discussions with her grandfather about her life with John and Marjory Grant that had opened her eyes to that fact and had made her realise that the Grants’ openness about her having been adopted had, in many ways, been her salvation. In a conservative, God-fearing household—with two much older natural daughters who were carbon copies of their parents—she would have stood out like a sore thumb anyway with her vibrant looks and fiery temper. But it was the sum of money for her future education that George Cranleigh had handed over together with his baby granddaughter that had set her so totally apart from the Grant family. From the age of six she had been sent to boarding-schools, as opposed to the local school the other two Grant girls attended, isolating her completely and compounding totally her sense of being the odd one out. In trying to salvage what faint conscience he might have had by providing for the future education of the baby granddaughter he had otherwise dumped as unwanted baggage, George Cranleigh had only ensured that she would always feel alienated and insecure.

‘A bit of a rebel, were you?’ asked Hester, her tone implying approval.

‘Caused, no doubt, by that Irish blood she was telling me about earlier,’ drawled Damian in tones that were neither approving nor in the least friendly. ‘You’re looking a little tired, Hester—how about another cup of tea?’

‘No, thank you, darling,’ replied the old lady. ‘But perhaps Ros would now, to help wash down Bridie’s cake.’

Rosanne flushed guiltily as she glanced at the piece of cake, on the small table beside her, out of which she had only managed a single bite—the nervous tension churning inside her making her feel almost nauseous.

‘No, I shan’t, thank you very much,’ she said, reaching over and breaking off a small portion of the cake.

‘Perhaps it’s time we showed Ros George’s study—where she’ll be doing her work,’ suggested Damian. ‘Then we can get you tucked up for a rest,’ he added gently. ‘You look as though you could do with one.’

‘I think it might be an even better idea for you to take me up now—then you can show Ros the study.’ Hester turned to Rosanne, the exhaustion that had so swiftly overtaken her now etched plainly on her face. ‘I do hope you’ll forgive me, my dear. This wretched business of being an invalid can be such a nuisance. No—you stay there and relax,’ she protested, as Ros made to rise to her feet. ‘Damian will see me to my room,’ she added, reaching for the stick propped against her chair as Damian rose and strode over to help her. ‘And he’ll show you around George’s office and help you get settled in—or he’ll have me to answer to,’ she chuckled up at the man easing her to her feet.

‘You’ll have me quaking in my breeches if I don’t,’ he teased affectionately, slipping his arm around her as she leaned heavily on her stick.

‘And that’s another thing,’ chided Hester, as they made their laborious way across the huge room. ‘I’m not having you appear at the dinner table in your riding breeches—do you hear? Whatever will young Ros think of us?’

Their sparring remarks liberally interspersed with loving laughter, they made their slow progress towards the door—the stooped and fragile old lady and the tall, powerfully built, yet gracefully slender man against whose arm she leant.

They were part of her family—the family she had dreamed since childhood that she would one day find, thought Rosanne, the memory an ache within her that mirrored itself in the eyes that followed them.

But the Cranleighs had made certain she would find no one, she reminded herself bitterly. Paul and Faith Addison were the names entered as her parents on her birth certificate. She closed her eyes, reliving the rage of anguish that had been her grandfather’s when he had seen that document.

‘My God, not only was Cranleigh heartless, he also criminally falsified the records!’ he had raged. ‘Addison was your grandmother’s maiden name—we gave it to Paul as his middle name. Dear God, how could anyone cut off an innocent child from her roots so brutally?’

It had always been George against whom Grandpa Ted’s helpless rage had been directed...but he was a chivalrous old gentleman who would never speak ill of a woman, no matter what he might think of her. Yet now Rosanne found herself wondering if that really was the case. Her every instinct recoiled from the idea of Hester Cranleigh being involved in such cruel deception.

Wishful thinking would change nothing, she told herself harshly, her eyes opening to gaze down at the hands clenching and unclenching agitatedly in her lap. She was a Bryant and needed nothing from the Cranleighs, she reminded herself in an attempt to lessen the black despair engulfing her; she had had all the love, and more, she could ever have asked for from her darling grandfather.

‘Hester won’t be coming down for dinner this evening,’ announced Damian, his face like a thunder-cloud as he strode across the room towards Rosanne. ‘And that harrowing little orphan-Annie scenario to which you subjected her probably set her back months. Just what the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

Rosanne leapt to her feet, her reason deserting her.

‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ she demanded hoarsely, resentment and loathing burning in her eyes. ‘You know absolutely nothing about—’ She broke off, her lips clamping tight with the horrified realisation of what she had been about to hurl at him in thoughtless rage.

‘What is it I know nothing about?’ he demanded, scowling down accusingly at her.

‘Nothing—just forget it,’ she muttered defeatedly. ‘I came here to do a job, not to be harassed and shouted at by you—so just leave me alone!’

‘One thing I have no intention of doing is leaving you alone, my unwelcome Ros,’ he retorted with a grim travesty of a smile. ‘Hester Cranleigh happens to be one of those exceptionally rare creatures among mankind—a generous, warm-hearted and indiscriminately loving person who would never knowingly do even her worst enemy harm. I’d move heaven and earth to ensure her last days are spent in relative peace—and the chances are I’ll end up having to move both, given the memories this work on her husband’s biography will inevitably resurrect. But what she doesn’t need is harrowing tales of your ghastly childhood to—’

‘I never said anything about having had a ghastly childhood,’ cut in Rosanne indignantly. ‘And I certainly don’t go round telling harrowing tales about myself!’

‘Well, they’re harrowing to a woman who’s been forced to relive her past and who could well have had a grandchild around your age, had her daughter not lost the baby. You prattling on about how wonderful your relationship was with your grandfather—how the hell do you think that must have made her feel?’

‘And how was I supposed to know any of that?’ demanded Rosanne, trembling with rage and disbelief. If only he knew, she kept asking herself, what would his reaction be?

‘Well, you know now,’ he snapped, his eyes dark and unyielding as they glared down into hers.

‘What I do know is that you seem to have an extremely fertile imagination,’ she informed him coldly. ‘But you needn’t worry because, as I tried to make clear earlier, I’m not given to talking about my private life to strangers, so Mrs Cranleigh won’t be subjected to any voluntary disclosures from me that are likely to upset her.’

‘And they sure as hell wouldn’t be involuntary, would they, Ros?’ he demanded harshly. ‘It’s only when you lose that so-called Irish temper of yours that you ever let anything slip, isn’t that so?’

Rosanne tried to take a step back from the man towering accusingly above her and found her legs wedged against the edge of the chair.

‘Yet when you’re in control of yourself,’ he continued ruthlessly, ‘I get the feeling that not a single word passes those delightfully tempting lips of yours without having first been coldly weighed up and calculated.’