A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(128)

“What were you really, Mother? Nothing more or less than a human being. I couldn’t accept that.”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

“I had to make you suffer. I knew Roderick wanted to marry you. I swore it would never happen. Your primary loyalty was to the family and to Howenstow. I knew he wouldn’t marry you unless you’d promise to leave the estate. So I kept you here like a prisoner, all these years.”

“You don’t have that power. I chose to stay.”

He shook his head. “You would have left Howenstow the moment I married.” He saw in her face that this was the truth. She dropped her eyes. “I knew that, Mother. I used that knowledge as a weapon. If I married, you were free. So I didn’t marry.”

“You never met the right woman.”

“Why on earth won’t you let me take the blame I deserve?”

She looked up at that. “I don’t want you in pain, darling. I didn’t want it then. I don’t want it now.”

Nothing could have stirred him to greater remorse. No rebuke, no recrimination. He felt like a swine.

“You seem to think the burden is all on your shoulders,” his mother said. “Don’t you know a hundred thousand times I’ve wished that you hadn’t found us together, that I hadn’t struck out at you, that I had done something—said something, anything—to help you with your grief. Because it was grief you were feeling, Tommy. Your father was dying right here in the house, and I’d just destroyed your mother as well. But I was too proud to reach out to you. What a supercilious little monster, I thought. How dare he try to condemn me for something he can’t even understand. Let him simmer in his anger. Let him weep. Let him rage. What a prig he is. He’ll come round in the end. But you never did.” She touched his cheek lightly with the back of her hand, a tentative pressure that he barely felt. “There was no greater punishment than the distance between us. Marriage to Roddy would have done nothing to change that.”

“It would have given you something.”

“Yes. It still can.”

A lightening of her voice—an underlying gentleness—told him what she had not yet said. “He’s asked you again? Good. I’m glad of it. It’s more forgiveness than I deserve.”

She took his arm. “That time is finished, Tommy.” Which was so much her way at the heart of the matter, offering a forgiveness that swept away the anger of half a lifetime.

“That simply?” he asked.

“Darling Tommy, that simply.”



St. James walked some paces behind Lynley and Deborah. He watched their progress, making a study of their proximity to each other. He memorised the details of Lynley’s arm round Deborah’s shoulders, hers round his waist, the angle of their heads as they talked, the contrast in the colour of their hair. He saw how they walked in perfect rhythm, their strides the same length, fluid and smooth. He watched them and tried not to think about the previous night, about his realisation that he could no longer run from her and continue to live with himself, about the moment when his stunned awareness had finally absorbed the fact that he would have to do so.

Any man who had known her less well would have labelled her actions on the previous night as a clever manipulation whose end-product gleaned her the witnessing of a measure of suffering to pay for the suffering he’d inflicted upon her. A confession of her adolescent love for him; an admission of that love’s attendant desire; an encounter that blended the strongest elements of emotion and arousal; an abrupt conclusion when she was certain that he intended no further flight. But even if he wanted to evaluate her behaviour as a manipulative woman’s act of spite, he could not do it. For she had not known he would leave his bedroom and join her in the study, nor could she have anticipated that after years of separation and rejection he would finally let go of the worst of his fears. She had not asked him to join her, she had not asked him to drop onto the ottoman next to her, she had not asked him to take her into his arms. He had only himself to blame for having crossed the boundary into betrayal and for having assumed in the white heat of the moment that she would be willing to cross it as well.

He had forced her hand, he had called for a decision. She had made it. If he was to survive from this time on, he knew he would have to do it alone. Unbearable now, he tried to believe that the thought would become more endurable in time.

Propitiable gods held back the rain although the sky was growing rapidly more tenebrous when they reached the cove. Far out to sea, the sun burst through a ragged tear in the clouds, casting beams like a golden spotlight on the water below. But it was only a momentary break in the weather. No sailor or fisherman would have been deceived by its transitory beauty.

Below them on the beach, two teenaged boys were idly smoking near the rocks. One was tall and big boned with a shock of bright orange hair, the other small and whip-thin with great knobs on his knees. Despite the weather, they were dressed for swimming. On the ground at their feet lay a stack of towels, two face masks, two snorkels. Looking up, the orange-haired boy saw Lynley and waved. The other glanced over his shoulder and tossed his cigarette aside.

“Where do you suppose Brooke threw the cameras in?” Lynley asked St. James.

“He was on the rocks Friday afternoon. My guess is that he’d have edged out as far as he could go and heaved the case into the water. What’s the bottom like?”