The Colour Of Midnight

Nick gave her a glass of sherry before dinner; they talked of her parents and her half-brother Kane, who was enjoying himself enormously at the same boarding-school Nick had attended, then found themselves discussing the implications of a book that had startled New Zealand. It was pleasant and low-key, and Minerva didn’t drink all of her sherry, yet she felt as though it had been champagne. Tiny bubbles of excitement fizzed softly through her bloodstream.

They ate in the morning-room off the kitchen, a room that moonlighted as a sitting-room too, for there were comfortable chairs at one end, and a set of cabinets and shelves that held books and pretty things as well as a television and an imposing stereo and CD player. The billionaire had been a stereo buff; Minerva noticed that the name on the speakers was the one on the huge affairs in the yacht.

Over dinner they spoke of generalities, nothing personal. Nick’s conversation revealed an incisive brain and a crisply unsentimental outlook which Minerva rather liked. She enjoyed the way he put her on her mettle.

Afterwards he helped carry the dishes into the kitchen, stacked the dishwasher while she made coffee, and told her that she was to feel free to watch television or play music if she wanted to. Unfortunately he wasn’t going to be able to stay with her; he had more work to get through.

Minerva found herself wondering if the detachment she found so off-putting was merely a front he assumed. Intuition, that subliminal reading of unnoticeable signs and intonations, made her suspect him of being a man of strong emotions and intense desires.

Of course she could be wrong. Perhaps he was simply ice through and through, and poor Stella had frozen to death.

She drank her coffee with him, and when he had gone back to the office rang her parents in their hotel in Seattle.

‘You’re where?’ Ruth asked.

‘Spanish Castle.’ She was glad Nick had left the room, because there was a note of betraying self-consciousness in her voice that galled her. ‘I dropped in to see Mr—Nick, just as his housekeeper was called away on a family emergency. She didn’t think she could go because Nick’s having a group of very high-powered Brazilian officials to dinner on Saturday, so Nick co-opted me.’

‘That’s sweet of you,’ Ruth said with satisfaction. ‘But talk about a busman’s holiday!’

‘I do like cooking, you know.’

‘Just as well, isn’t it. Darling, is Nick there with you?’

Absently, Minerva shook her head. ‘No, he’s working in his office.’

‘Oh, I won’t disturb him then.’

Ruth liked talking on the telephone, but eventually Minerva said, ‘Ruth, I have to go. This is costing me a packet!’

‘Surely Nick will—’

Minerva said firmly, ‘I’m paying for it.’

‘All right, then, I’ll see you when we get home, darling. Don’t hurry back to Auckland, though, if you’re having fun at Spanish Castle.’

Fun! Oh, Ruth, if you only knew, Minerva thought as she hung up.

On her way to bed, Minerva hesitated. Should she just go up, or beard the lion in his den and say goodnight? Bearding the lion seemed more polite. He might growl at her interruption, but Ruth would be proud of her manners.

He didn’t growl, or show any claws. Reading the contents of a file, he was standing across the room by a bank of cabinets. Even after he looked up it took a moment for him to register that she was there. ‘Yes?’ he said curtly.

‘I’m on my way to bed.’ A yawn brought her hand up over her mouth. ‘What time do you eat breakfast?’

‘Seven o’clock, but don’t worry about getting up, I can make my own. Goodnight. And thank you very much for stepping into the breach like this.’ His face was expressionless, his voice cool and distant.

‘Families are wonderful institutions,’ she returned flippantly. ‘Goodnight.’

The rain had stopped during dinner, and with a lightning change of mood the weather had gone from dank to fine. Up in her room, Minerva got into her pyjamas then sat on the bed, listening to the quietness flow in through the windows and through the big house. Nothing stirred; there was no sound of traffic, no breath of wind, nothing but peace and a cool, dark, moonless tranquillity.

Stella had loved parties and dances and dinners, people and motion and music; how had she felt about this all-pervading silence?

Yawning, Minerva got into bed and stretched out luxuriously across the queensized innersprung mattress.

She was almost asleep when she heard Nick come along the passage past her door. For a moment she thought he had stopped outside her room, but no, of course he’d gone into the room next door. It gave her the oddest sensation. The walls were too thick for her to hear more than the occasional noise of movement, but she could imagine him stripping off and getting into bed, and her wayward brain didn’t want to stop there.

Well, why not? she thought, trying to make light of it. Nick Peveril was definitely fantasy material, if you could put up with the icy remoteness.

Later, waking up from a confused dream, she realised she’d seen nothing of Stella in the grand old house, no photograph in the morning-room, nothing to say she had lived there. It seemed that, as far as Spanish Castle was concerned, her stepsister had simply never existed.

CHAPTER THREE

IN THE morning Minerva woke to a terrifying sense of dislocation. For a moment she lay staring at the ornately pleated silk of the tester above her, until she remembered where she was.

Reluctantly, she got out of the comfortable bed and pulled back the curtains, to gaze disbelievingly at a day as glowing and peerless as anything summer itself could produce.

Spiders’ webs looped crystal netting along the wire fence; she looked beyond gardens and trees and thickly wooded paddocks to darkly brooding bush. A blazing silver arc across the eastern horizon indicated the distant sea.