The Colour Of Midnight

‘I’ve been home for three weeks.’

He nodded, his eyes not leaving her face. ‘Spanish Castle’s only a couple of miles down the road to the left. You’ll see the gateposts. Left again inside, and follow the drive to the homestead. When you get there, tell Mrs Borrows who you are. Are you staying?’

‘No,’ she said too quickly. ‘I’m going to spend the night in Mangonui at the backpackers’ hostel there.’

He didn’t look relieved. He didn’t, she thought with a waspishness that surprised her, look anything except austere and impervious and infinitely remote.

‘I hope it’s not too inconvenient,’ she said sweetly, essaying a smile.

It didn’t evoke any response. Minerva was suddenly conscious that she wore no make-up at all and that her long ash-brown hair was probably hanging in strings down her back, dulled by the rain into an undistinguished mouse colour.

‘Not in the least. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ An imperceptible signal propelled the big horse across the road and through a gate she hadn’t noticed. The horse turned; with a skill indicative of long practice, and a brutal economy of movement unhindered by the heavy riding coat, Stella’s widower bent and pushed the gate closed. Straightening, he lifted a hand in what might have been a mocking salute, then urged the horse forward again.

The mist swallowed them up, horse, dog and man, as though they had never existed.

Minerva stared stupidly after them until her stiff hands and wet feet recalled her to herself. So that was Nick Peveril! She shivered. He was—elemental, a fit denizen for this gloomy, rain-soaked landscape. Yet Stella had written glowingly of his laughter, his kindness and his fascinating sophistication.

There was nothing amusing, kind or sophisticated about this man. He was made of much more primal stuff. In spite of that pale horse, he looked like the dark lord of Hades himself. However, there was no need to surrender to the chill that crawled down her spine. She was no virginal Persephone, to be snapped up as a pretty trophy to brighten his gloomy kingdom.

It was Stella he had swept away in a whirlwind courtship that had lasted a bare month. In spite of her ravishing beauty and her affairs Stella had been oddly inexperienced and Nick Peveril was the first man she had ever loved.

Yet he had killed her as surely as if it had been one of those lean strong hands that had measured out the infamous combination of sedatives and tranquillisers and painkillers that had put an end to her twenty-six years of life.

Minerva wriggled back into the car, held the umbrella out of the door and shook it vigorously before thrusting it on to a plastic bag in the back. Turning around, she slammed the door shut and gripped the wheel, gazing ahead with eyes that stung.

Only then did she admit that the real reason she had taken the road to Spanish Castle was that she wanted to know what had gone wrong with her sister’s idyll.

Although almost a year had passed since Stella’s death, Minerva had come back to a house that still mourned. Oh, Ruth, Stella’s mother, smiled a lot, but her strenuously bright manner didn’t hide the fact that she was too thin, her carefully coiffed hair grey, her pretty face haggard. Minerva had been shocked and alarmed.

That night she had sat talking with her father long after Ruth had gone to bed, finally saying bluntly, ‘She hasn’t got over it, has she?’

‘No.’ Her father set down his glass of whisky; it was almost water, as it had been ever since Minerva was old enough to remember. A prosperous businessman, Brian Robertson was abstemious by nature. He’d used to tease Ruth by telling her he’d married her to provide a bit of drama to his boringly normal life. It didn’t look as though he had teased his wife for a long time.

Now he said heavily, ‘I don’t think she’ll ever get over it. She still cries every night.’ His mouth tightened. ‘She waits until she thinks I’m asleep and then she weeps into her pillow. It rips me to pieces. She feels so guilty, as though she failed Stella, and I can’t get her to understand that Stella was a grown woman, old enough to be responsible for her actions. Ruth thinks she should have seen what was happening.’

Minerva rubbed at the frown between her brows. ‘Poor Ruth.’

‘I’m worried,’ Brian said unnecessarily. ‘She’s slipping away from me. If only she knew why Stella killed herself!’

‘Nothing’s turned up? No other letter?’ She knew the answer, but she asked just the same.

‘No.’ Brian sipped his drink, his pleasant, good-looking face set in lines it hadn’t had a year before. ‘Just the note she left for Nick, and that told us nothing.’

Both were silent. ‘I’m so sorry’, Stella had scrawled with an unusual economy of words. ‘Please try to forgive me’.

‘What about Nick? He must have some inkling of what went wrong.’

‘He’s just as much in the dark as we are. It shattered him.’

‘He must know something.’

But her father shook his head. ‘He says he doesn’t, and I believe him.’

Her father was an acute judge of men, but now, as Minerva switched on the engine, she wondered. The man who had appeared out of the mist didn’t look as though he would balk at lying if it suited him. Had he lied about his wife’s state of mind?

Setting a jaw that gave definition and character to her rather indeterminate features, Minerva put the car in gear and drove carefully through the thinning mist.

Just inside the gates she stopped, looking to the right at the great pile of rock which a hundred years ago had given the first Nicholas Peveril the name for his land. The eroded neck of an ancient volcano, it reared high above the surrounding countryside. Cloud drifted low across the sheer rock faces, moving on invisible winds, parting to reveal trees clinging to clefts and fissures in the cliffs. Dramatic and awe-inspiring, it did look like the massive ruins of some gaunt castle of the giants.

A shiver of apprehension pulled the tiny hairs of Minerva’s skin upright.

‘Stop being so jittery and stupid,’ she told herself as she put the car in motion again. ‘You’ve seen Igor, and he wasn’t so bad. No obvious fangs, and a horse and a dog instead of bats!’

Nick Peveril was clearly a good farmer. The fences were in excellent repair, as were the various buildings, and the grass in the paddocks lay thick and lush in its spring growth.

He was also a good employer. The farm workers’ cottages were big, well-cared-for, and set in substantial gardens.

But the homestead was breathtaking, a huge double-storeyed building that must have been built by that first Nicholas, for it was a Victorian structure of weatherboards, with more than a hint of the severe, satisfying proportions of the Georgian style it had supplanted.

Shading the front veranda was a wistaria vine that was probably as old as the house. Its thick stems were hazed by bronzed, gleaming new growth, punctuated by fat buds silver in the rain.

A wide flight of wooden steps led up to the veranda. On either side of a glass-panelled front door French windows with panes of glass above stretched in ordered pairs down the side of the house. This was one nineteenth-century villa that wouldn’t be dark inside.

And the garden was like something out of a fairy-tale, a bower of skilfully contrasted form and colour, each glowing flower, each leaf, sprinkled by crystals of rain.

Minerva switched off the engine and got out. From somewhere around the back of the house a dog barked, warning the inhabitants that a stranger was near. Heavy, unsettling scent from the roses mingled with the rich perfume of a white rhododendron beside the steps. More roses, miniatures planted in clay pots, ascended on either side of the steps; as she moved between them perfume billowed into the moist air, adding to the mingled scents that drifted from the plants in the wide bed beneath the veranda.

Minerva’s nerves tingled. Holding herself very erect, smiling sardonically because it was ridiculous to imagine that the place was welcoming her, she walked to the door.

Before she had time to ring the bell or use the knocker the door opened. A middle-aged woman with a harassed expression looked enquiringly at her.

‘I’m Minerva Robertson,’ Minerva said, smiling. ‘Mrs Peveril’s sister.’

‘Mrs Pev— Oh!’ For a shocking moment the woman looked appalled.

‘I met Mr Peveril along the road,’ Minerva said smoothly, struggling to hide a fierce, corroding anger. ‘I’ve just called in. I’m on my way north.’

‘Oh. Yes, of course. Do come in.’ Collecting herself with an obvious effort, Mrs Borrows held the door open.

Minerva, who had some experience of old wooden houses, braced herself as she walked into a wide hall decorated in paper the rich gold of Jersey cream. But instead of the damp rawness she expected, the place was warm and dry.

The temperature was a definite bonus. It wasn’t a centrally heated stuffiness, more a gentle, all-pervading warmth that banished the bone-chilling dankness Minerva had experienced in other old houses.

Over the years she’d worked in the kitchens of several very expensively decorated houses. Some she had liked, some she had found soulless. The homestead at Spanish Castle had been decorated by someone with great skill and a definite empathy for Victorian architecture. Minerva’s gaze skimmed a splendid console table on a mellow Persian runner. Reflected in the gilt-framed Regency mirror above was a bunch of apricot and yellow and white old-fashioned roses in a silver vase, their sweetness almost unbearably evocative.

Beyond the table an elegant staircase ascended to the first floor. Gilt-framed pictures, mostly of an age in keeping with the house, were displayed carefully, and there were flowers everywhere.

‘This is beautiful,’ she said softly, looking around her with pleasure. ‘How old is it?’