In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(33)

“Girly girl, listen,” Jeremy said. “I see how you look at him, and I know what you want. I'm on your side. Hell, keep the family for the family in the family's my motto. You think I want him chained to the Maiden tart when there's a woman like you hanging round, waiting for the day when her man'll wise up?”

“You're mistaken,” she said, although the pounding just beneath her skin told her how her blood was giving the lie to her words. “I'm fond of Julian. Who wouldn't be? He's a wonderful man—”

“Right. He is. And d'you actually”—ackshully—“think the Maiden sees that in our Julie? Not on your life. She sees a bit of fun when she's hereabouts, a bit of tumble-in-the-heather-and-poke-me-if-you-can.”

“But,” Samantha went on firmly as if he hadn't spoken, “I'm not in love with him and I can't imagine ever being in love with him. Good grief, Uncle Jeremy. We're first cousins. I think of Julian the way I think of my brother.”

Jeremy was silent for a moment. Samantha took the opportunity to move past him, cauliflower and peppers in hand. She placed them into the cutting trough, where four hundred years of vegetables had been chopped. She began breaking the cauliflower into florets.

“Ah,” Jeremy said slowly, but his tone was sly, which told Samantha for the first time that he wasn't as drunk as he seemed. “Your brother. I see. Yes. I do see. So he wouldn't interest you in the other way. Wonder how I got the idea … ? But no matter. Give your uncle Jer a touch of advice, then.”

“About what?” She fetched a colander and scooped the cauliflower into it. She turned her attention to the green peppers.

“About how to cure him.”

“Of what?”

“Of her. The cat. The mare. The sow. What you will.” Whachewill.

“Julian,” Samantha said in a last-ditch effort to divert her uncle from his course, “doesn't need to be cured of anything. He's his own man, Uncle Jeremy.”

“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.