“Bollocks, that. He's a man on a string, and we both know where it's tied. She's got him so he can't see up for down.”
“Hardly.”
“Hard's the word, all right. He's been hard so long that his brain's made a permanent journey into his dick.”
“Uncle Jeremy-”
“All he thinks about is having a suck on those pretty pink teats of hers. And once he gets his prong inside and has her moaning like a-”
“All right.” Samantha drove the chef's knife through the green pepper like a cleaver. “You've made your point thoroughly, Uncle Jeremy. I'd like to get on with making dinner now.”
Jeremy smiled slowly, that inebriate's smile. “You're meant for him, Sammy. You know that as well as I.” Swellseye, he said. “So what're we going to do to make it happen?”
He was suddenly looking at her steadily, quite as if he were not drunk at all. What was the mythological creature that could fix you in its stare and kill you? Cockatrice, she thought. Her uncle was a cockatrice.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said, but she sounded, even to herself, much less assured and far more afraid.
“Don't you.” He smiled, and when he left the room, he didn't walk the walk of a man who was remotely tipsy.
Samantha kept determinedly chopping the peppers until she heard his footsteps on the stairs, until she heard the kitchen door latch shut behind him. Then, with a careful control that she was proud to be able to muster in the circumstances, she set the knife to one side. She put her hands on the edge of the work top. She bent forward over the vegetables, inhaled their scent, directed her thoughts into a self-created mantra-“Love fills me, embraces me. Love makes me whole”-and tried to regain a sense of serenity. Not that she'd had any serenity since the previous night when she'd realised what a mistake she'd made in conjunction with the lunar eclipse. Not that she'd had serenity at all once she'd realised what Nicola Maiden was to her cousin. But forcing herself to whisper the mantra was habit, so she used it now, despite the fact that love was the very last feeling of which she pictured herself capable at the moment.
She was still attempting the meditation when she heard the harriers barking from their kennels in the converted block of stables just to the west of the manor house. The sound of their sharp, excited yelping told her that Julian was with them.
Samantha looked at her watch. It was feeding time for the adult harriers, observation time for the newly born pups, and rearranging time for the play runs in which the older puppies were beginning the socialisation process. Julian would be out there for at least another hour. Samantha had time to prepare herself.
She wondered what to say to her cousin. She wondered what he'd say to her. And she wondered what it mattered anyway, with Nicola Maiden to consider.
From the moment she'd met her, Samantha hadn't liked Nicola. Her dislike wasn't grounded in what the younger woman represented to her though-primary competition for Julian's affections. It was grounded in what Nicola so patently was. Her easiness of manner was an irritant, suggesting a self-confidence that was entirely at odds with the girl's appalling roots. The daughter of a little more than a publican, graduate of a London comprehensive and a third-rate university that was no better than an ordinary polytechnic college, who was she to move so easily through the rooms of Broughton Manor? Decrepit as they were, they still represented four hundred years of unbroken possession by the Britton family. And that was the kind of lineage that Nicola Maiden could hardly claim for herself.
But this knowledge didn't seem to faze her in the least. Indeed, she never acted as if she was in possession of the knowledge at all. And there was a single good reason for this: the power that went with her English-rose looks. The Guinevere hair-unnatural in colour though it doubtless was-the perfect skin, the dark-lashed eyes, the delicate frame, the seashell ears… She'd been given every physical advantage a woman could be given. And five minutes in her presence had been enough to tell Samantha that she bloody well knew it.
“It's brilliant to meet one of Jules’ relatives at last,” she'd confided to Samantha on their first meeting seven months earlier. “I hope we'll become the best of friends.” Half term for Nicola, she'd come to spend her holiday with her parents. She'd rung Julian on the morning of her arrival, and the moment he pressed the telephone receiver to his ear, Samantha had seen which way the wind was blowing and for whom. But she hadn't known how strong that wind was till she met Nicola herself.
The sunny smile, the frank gaze, the shout of pleased laughter, the artless conversation… Although she'd rather more than mildly disliked her, it had taken several meetings with Nicola for Samantha to make a full evaluation of her cousin's beloved. And when she did, the realisation she reached did nothing but add to Samantha's discomfort whenever they met. For she saw in Nicola Maiden a young woman completely content with who she was, offering herself to the world at large without the slightest care as to whether the offering would be accepted. Not for her were the doubts, the fears, the insecurities, and the crises of confidence of the female in search of a male to define her. Which was probably why, Samantha thought, she had Julian Brit-ton so hot and bothered to do just that.
More than once in the time she'd been at Broughton Manor, Samantha had come upon Julian engaged in an act that was testimony to the thrall into which Nicola Maiden drew a man. Hunched over a letter he was writing to her, sheltering the telephone receiver from unwanted eavesdroppers as he talked to her, staring sightlessly over the garden wall at the footbridge that spanned the River Wye as he thought of her, sitting in his office with his head in his hands as he brooded about her, Samantha's cousin was little more than the prey of a huntress he couldn't begin to understand.
There was no way that Samantha could make him see his beloved as she truly was, however. There was only the option of allowing his passion to play itself out, to culminate in the marriage he was so desperate to attain, or to lead to a permanent break between him and the woman he desired.
Having to accept this as her only course had brought Samantha face-to-face with her own impatience, and it accosted her at her every turn at Broughton Manor. She fought her longing to beat the truth into her cousin's head. Time and again she deliberately turned from the appetite for derogation that rose in her whenever the subject of Nicola came up. But these virtuous efforts at self-control were taxing. And the price she was beginning to pay was anxiety, resentment, insomnia, and outright rage.
Uncle Jeremy didn't help matters. By him, Samantha was daily regaled with lubricious innuendoes and direct assaults, all circling or landing upon the subject of Julian's love life. Had she not quickly seen upon her arrival how necessary was her presence at Broughton Manor, had she not needed a respite from her mother's incessant displays of lugubrious mourning, Samantha knew that she would have decamped months before. But she maintained her position and held her peace-most of the time-because she'd been able to see the bigger picture: Jeremy's sobriety, the blessed distraction that a reunion with him would provide her mother, and Julian's gradual awakening to the contribution Samantha was making to his well-being, his future, and his hope of transforming the derelict manor house and the estate into a thriving business.
“Sam?”
She raised her head. So deeply had she been into her attempt to release the tension of having a conversation with her uncle, she'd failed to hear his son come into the kitchen. Stupidly, she said, “Aren't you with the dogs, Julian?”
“Short shrift,” he said in explanation. “They need more but I can't give it to them now.”
“I did see to Cass. Do you want me to-”
“She's dead.”
“My God. Julian, she can't be,” Samantha cried. “I went out as soon as I spoke with you. She was fine. She'd eaten, the puppies were all asleep. I made notes of everything and left them on the clipboard. Didn't you see it? I hung it on the peg.”