Prisoner of Love (12 page)

“No! She could not. She was in love with him,” Cathie cried, suddenly overcome by emotions that she had believed locked away in her heart forever. “But Julius pursued her with his strictest censure. She had no freedom. He locked her away here in the wilds—or what she considered the wilds—and then he became suspicious of her. Insanely suspicious and jealous. That was the end.” Cathie’s eyes were tragic and she was conscious of trespass when she looked at Laura, but she made one appeal for forgiveness. “Don’t let him do that to you, Laura,” she begged.

“I—can take care of myself,” Laura said, hardly able to form the words because of the mounting doubt in her heart.

“Yes,” Cathie said swiftly, “I’m sure you can.”

They went out to where the men were still waiting on the terrace, and the last Laura saw of Cathie was her stocky little figure sitting bolt upright in the Ford beside Zachray with the two jars of preserve clutched on her knees.

CHAPTER TEN

The weeks that followed were very full. Laura took a keen delight in preparing the long list of clothes and personal effects that Lance needed for his new school, proud that he had passed the entrance examination with flying colors and pleased Julius, yet a little sad at the thought of the long parting that lay before them.

Lance was quite excited about the new adventure. He treated Julius with awe and the necessary respect, but they never reached the happy state of companionship and mutual understanding that had characterized the friendship with Blair right from the beginning. Sometimes Laura thought Lance was afraid of Julius in some way.

They drove down to Ashleigh on a bright day in
mid-September
when the trees in the vast park surrounding the school had taken on russet and gold mantles and the first suggestion of autumn tinged the air. The old buildings, mellowed and steeped in hundreds of years of tradition, stood high and looked down on the broad river that wound gently through the green belt of the playing fields. Laura felt content to leave Lance here. “It’s a wonderful old place,” she said. “Thank you, Julius.”

“The boy could not have remained at Harley Street,” Julius returned. “He should be able to make a life for himself here.”

The rather cold observation disturbed her, because it seemed as if Julius had dismissed her brother from their scheme of things now that he had successfully settled him in a worthy school.

Perhaps she was wrong about that, though, nervous and a little upset at the thought of parting with Lance for the first time.

Other cars began to fill up the quadrangle where they had parked and boys tumbled out, lugging lunch boxes and various badly-tied packages of food. They all appeared to be assured and quite happy, and she was able to draw a freer breath.

“I think you had better report to your form master now, Lance,” Julius advised in a slightly longer pause when there appeared to be nothing more to say, no further, last-minute instructions to be given. “Laura wi
ll
come down at half-term, of course, and take you out.”

“Yes,” Lance said. “I shall look forward to that.”

He was keeping a stiff upper lip, but he clung to Laura’s side, making the most of these last few minutes together, drawing time out where he could with a question or a smile.

“You wouldn’t like to have a last walk around the grounds, would you?” he suggested.
“
We don’t really have to be in till six.”

Julius glanced at his watch, frowning.

“It’s after five,” he said. “You’ll find your way around. I have to be back in London before seven o’clock.”

“I see,” he said. “Well—it won’t be long till half-term, will it?”

“Of course not!” It was almost more than Laura could do to keep back the tears. “It’s only weeks, really, when you count it that way.”

Julius slipped a treasury note into her brother’s hand and Lance looked at it uncertainly for a moment. He had never been given so much money before.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “It’s—rather a lot, isn’t it?”

“You may need it,” Julius said, getting into the car.

Afterwards, Laura thought that they had driven away rather abruptly; but perhaps that was only her imagination, her natural sensitiveness at saying goodbye to someone she had cared for and loved for so long.

Harley Street seemed strangely deserted after Lance had gone, and for a time Julius appeared to be engrossed in his work to the exclusion of all else. Laura longed to ask him about Dunraven and Blair Cameron, but could not, although she knew that reports came to him from the lodge with efficient regularity. She knew that he intended to go back to Dunraven, that his original plan for the lodge had not been changed or discarded, but
he did not discuss the future with her in any detail. She felt, however, that she must always be ready to go at a moment’s notice, and the suggestion in itself was vaguely unsettling.

Gradually, very gradually, the days began to seem long. Even when Holmes was off duty for an hour or two, Laura was never really permitted to take over. Julius’s secretary-receptionist was a brisk young woman who came and went almost unseen, the soul of efficiency, but strangely cold when it came to the personal touch. Julius seemed to gather her type around him almost inevitably, Laura thought with a small feeling of dismay.

Half-term came and went. She traveled down to Ashleigh without Julius, because he was busy with some conference or other, and spent two gloriously happy days with Lance, coming back wonderfully refreshed. Lance, it appeared, was writing to Blair regularly once a week and had all the news of the glen at his fingertips. There were two other patients at the lodge now, and they had been doing some easy rock climbing on the surrounding hills. At Christmas, Blair had promised, they might still be able to tackle Suilven, going up the easier way through the corrie.

Laura began to look forward to the Christmas vacation when school would break up and they would all travel north together. The weather had been mild and sunny, a glorious, rich autumn prolonged into November without frost or the usual London fogs. Because Julius was always busy she began to go about on her own.

She phoned the flat at Chiswick and renewed her friendship with Anne Meakin and Gillian Davis. The initial shyness and hesitancy with which they greeted her was soon blown away, and once or twice they even included her in small parties, although these were never connected with the hospital. They felt, perhaps, that she must stand aloof where St. Clement’s was concerned because of Julius’s position there.

It was on one of these occasions, when they had dropped into a convenient coffee bar after an afternoon’s tour of the West End shops, that they were suddenly confronted by the junior registrar from St. Clement’s and two of his friends, both young doctors working at nearby hospitals. Without ado, the men joined Anne and Gillian at their table and the next hour was uproarious. Laura felt herself slipping back into the old happy, carefree atmosphere of her student days, and possibly she had not laughed so much for years.

When she finally consulted her watch it was well after six o’clock.

“Heavens! I must fly!” she exclaimed, gathering her parcels together off the floor. “We have people coming in to dinner at eight
—
”

There was a sudden small, reserved silence and Anne shifted uneasily.

“I’m sorry, Laura, if we’ve kept you,” she said.

“I’ve kept myself!” Laura smiled. “I’ve never known time go quite so quickly. I’ll phone you next week Anne, but now I must dash off and find a taxi.”

“I’ve got my car here,” James Calder offered tentatively. “Could I give you a lift? It’s on my way, as a matter of fact.”

Laura was glad of the suggestion. She climbed into the brightly-painted sports car parked at the side of the bar, her parcels packed in behind her, and they drove off with much hand-waving and goodbyes.

“They’re a nice crowd,” James Calder said. “Full of laughter and fun. I think we sometimes need that kind of distraction to keep us on an even keel, especially when we’re doing hospital work.”

They didn’t have far to go, and when he drew up just short of Julius’s door, Laura turned to proffer her thanks.

“It was very kind of you to run me back,” she said. “Will you come in for a drink?”

He looked slightly embarrassed.

“Not when you are expecting friends,” he said. “Perhaps some other time.”

As she got out of the car Laura had an uncomfortable feeling of being watched, but when she looked up at the windows there was no sign of anyone looking out. There never was in that discreet thoroughfare, she . reflected. All was decorous calm.

Holmes opened the door to her, and she thought, suddenly, that Julius had never offered her a key of her own.

He was standing in the doorway of the drawing room when she crossed the hall, a shadowy figure within the shadows.

“Can you come in here a moment, Laura?” he asked.

Holmes took her parcels and she shed her expensive fur wrap on one of the high-backed chairs flanking the hall table. They were never, never as much as a fraction of an inch out of place, she thought irrelevantly. Nothing was ever out of place. Nothing that Holmes controlled.

Julius had gone into the room ahead of her and was standing at the fireplace with his back to the door. When he turned she saw the cold anger in his face.

“I won’t have you coming home with junior registrars!” he said. “Where have you been?”

“Shopping.” Laura’s voice was not quite steady, her own anger very
near the surface. “I was offered a lift when I realized how late it was. That’s why I came back with Doctor Calder.”

He poured her a sherry from the decanter on the low table between them, his eyes hard and watchful as the golden liquid ran into the glass.

“Doctor Calder and, no doubt, the rest of your companions
o
n this afternoon’s little jaunt, are very junior members of the hospital staff,” he reminded her in a tone as biting and incisive as the instruments he used so skilfully in the operating room. “They, if not you, seem to be aware of the inadvisability of such clandestine meetings, since they had the sense to pull up just short of my doorstep.”

“There was nothing ‘clandestine’ about our meeting,” Laura flashed angrily. “We met by accident.”

“While you were out with Miss Davis and Miss Meakin,” he suggested frigidly.

“You married a nurse!” Laura reminded him. “You seem to have forgotten that, Julius.”

He came around the end of the table.

“You little fool!” he said between his teeth. “I can make you more than that! I can give you all you want in life, but I won’t have you running with the gang. I thought I made that quite clear to you some time ago?”

“Not quite clear enough,” Laura said wearily. “Or perhaps I wasn’t clever enough to understand.”

“Now that you do understand,” he said, smiling, “I’m sure that you will come to accept my point of view without question.”

She did not answer him, and two days later, when she phoned Anne Meakin, she was met with a slight rebuff.

“I called you yesterday,” Anne informed her, “but your husband said you were ‘otherwise engaged’. He also said you would be rather busy for the next few weeks, mostly with social commitments at the hospital. I’m sorry, Laura,” she added in a slightly bewildered tone. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

Laura had put the call through from her bedroom, and suddenly she realized that they were cut off. The line had gone dead, and she hurried downstairs to find Holmes at the small private switchboard.

“I thought you were finished, madam,” he said, his curious eyes completely expressionless as they looked into hers. “I’m very sorry if I cut you off. Do you want me to get you the number again?”

“No,
”
Laura said, suppressing her anger, “it doesn’t matter. We had—nothing more to say.”

After that, small and unpleasant scenes seemed to develop between her and Julius with amazing regularity. There was the day when Holmes was off duty and the impeccable Miss Gleason had failed to report back after lunch. Laura had opened the door to a patient and shown him into the waiting room adjacent to Julius’s consulting room, but
half an hour had passed without Julius putting in an appearance. She knew that he was due back from a luncheon engagement by three o’clock, and he had never kept a patient waiting before. The man seemed restless, pacing up and down the carpet as he waited, till finally she opened the door on an impulse to speak to him.

“I’m sorry you have been kept so long,” she apologized. “My husband expected to be back before three. Something must have delayed him.”

“Traffic, no doubt.” He stopped his pacing to smile at her. “You must think me very impatient,” he said, “but I’m due to leave for the Continent at five o’clock and I wondered, if an examination is necessary, whether I could do it or not. I can quite easily cancel my trip, of course,” he added.

“I hope it won’t be,” Laura said, looking out of the window. “Delays are unavoidable sometimes, but my husband generally allows for them when he is making an appointment. There’s no way of getting in touch with him, I’m afraid.”

“You mustn’t worry about it,” he assured her. “My health is much more important than my trip to Paris!”

He was a pleasant person and they chatted on. He had just come back from Scotland, and the fact that he had visited the Western Isles made Laura’s heart lurch nostalgically.

“I was there during the summer,” she explained, “and we hope to go back for Christmas.”

“Indeed? It’s a wonderful country, and, thank heaven, it hasn’t been fully exploited by the holiday crowds yet!”

Neither of them had noticed the door opening and it was several minutes before Laura looked around to find Julius standing there. His face was cold and set.

“Thank you, Laura,” he said in a voice of ice. “I shall be able to take over from here.”

Passing him, she closed the door behind her, feeling humiliated and disgraced. She had only been trying to help him and he had dismissed her in cold fury.

The heavy front door closed behind his patient half an hour later and he joined her in the dining room, where she was arranging the table flowers. “Allow me to look after my patients in my own way, Laura,” he said in a
voice of frigid politeness. “You were guilty just now of a complete breach of etiquette. What you did was most unprofessional,” he flashed in sudden uncontrollable anger.

“I’m sorry, Julius,” she apologized abjectly. “But you were late—”