A Reason For Being

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she whispered, but Maggie shook her head and grabbed hold of her, her colour suddenly very hectic and hot.

‘No…please stay.’

And, because Maggie was holding her so tightly, she was standing right beside the receiver when the ringing stopped and a harsh male voice said, ‘Deveril House?’ with a brusque impatience which, although rather off-putting, was surely no reason for Maggie to start shaking violently. The blood drained from her face and she slammed the receiver back down, holding it there while she shivered and trembled and the delicate bones of her small face stood out in proud relief.

Despite all the questions clamouring in her brain, Lara managed to restrain herself from saying anything other than a dry, ‘A rather formidable gentleman.’

‘My stepcousin,’ Maggie told her shakily. ‘Marcus Landersby.’

And then she dropped down on to the settee with her head in her hands, her body racked by such deep shudders that Lara was genuinely frightened for her. Whatever else Maggie was, she was most definitely not emotionally unstable, rather the opposite, and yet here she was virtually falling to pieces in front of Lara’s eyes. And the explanation for this so out-of-character behaviour lay, Lara was quite sure, with the owner of that enigmatic and grim voice.

Marcus Landersby. She tried to visualise what he might be like, but couldn’t. It was like being given a jigsaw puzzle with too many of the pieces missing to form any kind of real picture.

She left Maggie and went into the kitchen, raiding their small supply of drinks to pour her a restorative brandy.

Maggie shuddered as she drank it, her eyes blank with despair when she raised her head and looked at her flatmate. ‘Sorry about that,’ she apologised thickly.

‘That’s quite a talent this stepcousin of yours has,’ Lara commented lightly, watching the colour come slowly back to her skin. ‘Instant and abject terror…He wouldn’t happen to be related to Dracula, would he?’

Now Maggie was flushed where she had been pale.

‘I can’t talk about it, Lara,’ she apologised huskily. ‘I’m sorry…I must pack. It’s a long drive home, and I’d like to get there while it’s still light.’

So, for all that they had been good friends for ten years, Maggie was still not going to confide in her.

‘I’m sorry,’ Maggie apologised awkwardly a second time. ‘It’s just that…that there are some things that it’s impossible to talk about, even to as good a friend as you.’

‘I’ll help you pack,’ Lara offered, resisting the impulse to press her for at least some hint of what had happened between her and her stepcousin in the past to elicit such a reaction.

‘Thanks.’

ONLY ANOTHER few miles. It was ten years since she had left here, and yet nothing had changed. Of course, she was seeing the countryside at the best time of the year: summer. In the winter these hills were covered in snow, these small villages totally cut off. In the winter it was quite easy to imagine what it must have been like centuries ago, when these border hills were the preserve of the notorious bands of border reivers, both Scots and English, who robbed and killed one another, often conducting vendettas that went on for generation after generation.

Her own family had been one of the most notorious of all such reivers, until they turned respectable during the middle of the eighteenth century when one son’s marriage with a wealthy sugar heiress had removed the need for such nefarious activities. The need, but perhaps not the desire, Maggie acknowledged wryly. It took more than money to eradicate that.

She was in the village now, driving past the small church with its dark graveyard. She gave an intense shudder of fear, remembering the starkness of the new stone that marked her parents’ grave.

With the facility she had learned over the years, her mind switched itself off, protecting her from the pain of memories she could not even now endure.

Turned away from her home, alone, terrified almost out of her mind by what had happened, unable to take in how her world had fallen apart around her, she had fled to London, desperate to lose herself and her shame in its anonymity. She shivered despite the warmth inside her car, a moment of blind panic attacking her. What was she doing coming back? She must be mad. She had to be mad…

She almost turned the car round, and then she remembered Susie’s letter. ‘Come home quickly…we need you.’

How could she ignore that desperate, childish plea?

Susie had been six years old when she’d left, Sara only four—the children of her uncle’s marriage to Marcus’s mother. Her cousins and his half-sisters.

And it had been to Marcus’s care that her grandfather had consigned his underage granddaughters in his will, so Susie had told her in one of her letters.

They were a fated family, the Deverils, or so they said locally. Fated and, some said, cursed, and who could blame them for such thoughts? The death of her own parents in a car crash, followed so quickly by the deaths of Marcus’s mother and her uncle, murdered in an uprising in South Africa when they were out there on holiday, seemed to be evidence that it was true.

Now there were only the three of them: herself, Susie and Sara…and of course, Marcus. But Marcus wasn’t a Deveril, for all that he lived in Deveril House and administered its lands. While she…while she had been cast out of her home…like Lucifer thrown out of Heaven.

And now she was doing what she had once sworn she would never do. She was coming back. She started to tremble violently, and had to grip the steering wheel to control the shuddering tremors. So much guilt…so much remorse…so much pain. When she looked back now across the chasm of the decade which separated her present-day self from the teenager she had been, she could only feel appalled by the enormity of what she had done.

No, she couldn’t blame Marcus for telling her to leave.

She was a different person now, though. A person who had learned the hard way what life was all about. A person who had learned to control those teenage impulses and emotions. Marcus would see that she had changed…that she…

Appalled, she swerved to a halt, for once uncaring of her driving, but luckily she had the road to herself. Was that why she was going back…to prove to Marcus that she had changed? No…of course it wasn’t. She was going back because of Susie’s letter…nothing else. What she had once felt for Marcus had died a long time ago. The shame and agony she had endured when Marcus had ripped aside the fantasy she had woven had seen to that. Not one single vestige of those teenage feelings was left. She was like a burned-out shell…a woman who outwardly possessed all the allure of her sex, but who inwardly was so scarred by what she had endured that it was impossible for her to allow herself to love any man.

That was her punishment…the price she had had to pay. And she had learned to pay it with pride and courage, unflinchingly facing the ghosts of her past whenever they rose up to taunt and mock her…whenever a new man came into her life, and she felt…nothing, nothing at all.

What she had done…What she had done lay in the past, and if Marcus tried to make her leave her home a second time she would have to remind him that, under the terms of her grandfather’s will, Deveril House was one-third hers.

Although she didn’t know it, the burning glow in her eyes was that of someone who had found a longed-for purpose in life. Her cousins needed her…quite why, she did not know yet, but she would find out, and, no matter how Marcus might choose to taunt or humiliate her, while they had that need she was not going to be moved from her determination to help them.

Coming back wasn’t going to be easy—there would be the curious speculation of the village to face—but the long, arid years away had taught her how much her spirit craved what only this place seemed able to give her.

She had found peace here after her parents’ death, and she had bonded herself to the land which had belonged for so long to her family. That she had bonded herself also to Marcus she preferred not to think about, because to travel down that path meant travelling down into the mouth of Hell itself. It struck her like a bitter taste in the mouth that, concealed within her desire to help her cousins, there might also be a kernel of her old abject and foolish need to receive absolution…to receive forgiveness…to be freed from the burdens of her past and able to walk upright once more, no longer chained by guilt and pain.

But no, that wasn’t so. She had learned the hard way to come to terms with what she had done, to acknowledge that, after the way she had injured Marcus, there could be no absolution. Not from herself, and certainly not from him.

As though it was yesterday, if she closed her eyes she could still see the fury in his eyes, smell his rage like sulphur in the air, feel the shock of her pronouncement as it ricocheted around the room.

‘No!’ he had cried out passionately. ‘God, no. None of it is true!’

And her grandfather, looking into her face, had seen for himself that she had lied. She would carry the memory of the look in his eyes with her for the rest of her life. That, and the knowledge that she had deserved every acid barb, every cruel word Marcus had thrown at her.

She leaned her head on the steering wheel, sweat dampening her upper lip, nausea clawing at her stomach, while her whole body shook with the violence of her emotions as the memories she wanted to suppress tormented her from behind the barriers she had erected against them.

But she had not wasted the last ten years, and the hardy way she fought back and regained her self-control showed the value of the lessons she had learned. Hard lessons…necessary lessons…sometimes shockingly abrasive lessons to a seventeen-year-old who, until she ran away to London, had experienced very little reality.

Guilt had motivated her in those early years, fuelling a cool independence as she fought not to give in to her need to go home.

‘Get out. Get out of this house and never come back,’ Marcus had said…and she had done just that, losing herself in the harsh anonymity of London’s seething streets.

What might have happened to her if Lara hadn’t found her? Lara, who had been toughened by her parents’ divorce and the reality of travelling the world with her journalist father, living in nearly every one of its great cities. Lara, who had come across her crying her eyes out in one of London’s famous parks. Lara, who had insisted on dragging her home with her. Lara, who, on learning that, like her, Maggie should have been starting art school that autumn, had prevailed upon her father to finance them both.

He was living in Mexico now, John Philips, married and retired, and they rarely saw him, but Maggie knew she would never forget him.

Financially she owed him nothing, she had paid him back every penny, and he had let her, knowing how much it meant to her; but there were other debts…and none as great as the one she owed Lara. She felt guilty that she had not confided in her friend, but right from the start she had been grimly determined that no one else should know of her folly and humiliation. Because, despite the fact that she had known what she had done was wrong, she had genuinely believed that Marcus loved her. She had genuinely believed that.

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.