Windswept (31 page)

“I’m Nora, remember? I told you. I’m a friend of Jacob’s.”

Dylan’s face lit from within at the mention of Jacob’s name. He clapped his hands like an excited child. “Jacob’s here. Jacob’s here,” he said.

“That’s right, he is.”

“Does Jacob like you?”

Dylan’s pale face became a picture of innocent trust and childlike hope. Nora wouldn’t have told him no even if she had believed that to be the honest answer. “Yes, Jacob likes me,” she said.

“Good. Then I will like you.” He went to a table in the center of the room and picked up a painted metal teapot. It was just like one Nora had owned as a child and kept in her playroom for imaginary tea parties. Dylan came back to the door and proudly displayed the pot. He reached out with his other hand and grabbed her arm. “You can come in, and we’ll have tea.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps I should get back.”

He stomped his foot. “No. We’re having tea!”

Nora thought it best not to argue with him and was just about to go inside when a look of such intense sadness crossed his face that she remained rooted to the threshold. “Dylan, what’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer, but suddenly dissolved into tears. The teapot clattered to the stone floor, and he covered his face with his hands. “Now we can’t have any fun because she won’t let us,” he cried.

The meaning of his strange exclamation became clear when a shrill voice split the air behind her. “Miss Seabrook, what in heaven’s name are you doing here?”

Nora spun around to see an extremely angry Juditha bearing down upon her. Like a poor girl with her hand caught in the Sunday morning collection plate, Nora could only mumble feeble excuses. “I’m sorry, Juditha. The gate was open. I was only looking for someone… I didn’t go far from the garden…”

Juditha positioned herself in the doorway, blocking Nora’s view into the cottage. “Now you’ve done it, miss. You’ll have the both of them coming down on us like God Himself threw a thunderbolt. Now go on, get out of here!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” The rest of her words caught in a choked sob. Nora stumbled away from the cottage and ran as fast as she could to the gate. Through her heart hammering in her ears, she heard Dylan’s pitiful wails.

“She scared me, Juditha. She made me fix tea, and I burned myself.”

“Where is Vincent?” the housekeeper demanded.

“I think she killed him,” Dylan blubbered. “That horrible girl killed Vincent. And she killed Marianne, too.”

The rest of their words were lost in the notes of the music box again and the rush of leaves in tall trees at the edge of Harrison Proctor’s garden. Nora pushed through the gate and slammed it behind her. Without looking back she ran to the house.

With rote motion that required little thought, Nora dressed for dinner that evening. Certain she wouldn’t be able to eat a bite of food, she thought it likely the Proctors wouldn’t offer her any anyway. By this time Juditha would have told both Jacob and his father of her transgression that afternoon. There was no denying that she had broken Jacob’s primary rule. She’d ventured beyond the confines he’d set for her, and she surely was going to have to pay.

She brushed her hair fiercely before coiling it into a semblance of a topknot. Using the few pins that had survived her ordeal in the hold of Jacob’s ship, she stuck first one and then another into her haphazard creation.  “Ouch,” she cried when one pin found more scalp than hair.

She pulled strands of hair from the unruly mass and tried to bully them into spirals at her neck. Then she spoke to the distraught reflection in her mirror. “For heaven’s sake, Nora, you have nothing to feel guilty about. You haven’t done anything wrong.
He’s
the one who should apologize…expecting you to stay a prisoner in his house. All you did was walk less than a quarter of a mile away from his precious boundaries.”

And yet, while she outwardly rationalized about Jacob’s unfair treatment, a niggling apology kept creeping into her thoughts. She had violated the rules and in doing so, she was sure she had stumbled upon the very thing, no, the
person
, that was the center of the mystery of Belle Isle. She had discovered Jacob’s secret, and he was going to be angry.

She tugged at the waistband of the gold and white striped dress Polly had just finished that morning. The bit of fancy frill the maid had added to the scooped neckline and which Nora had thought delightful suddenly seemed too frivolous for the unpleasant evening ahead.

“So what if I did meet Dylan?” she said to her reflection. “The poor confused man shouldn’t be kept a secret in the first place. He’s probably just starved for companionship. If he’s constantly spied upon by that grim-faced Juditha, I can understand why!”

She recalled the range of emotions she’d experienced in Dylan’s presence. “I really wasn’t so very frightened of him,” she said to the face in the mirror. “I could have stayed and had some imaginary tea and gone back to the house later. What would have been the harm?”

“Nora! Are you coming to dinner?”

Jacob’s voice boomed from the hallway, and Nora knew that any harm that would come from her encounter with Dylan was about to be realized in the next few minutes. She stuck her head out the door and saw him standing several feet away. He looked achingly handsome in casual attire, his sun streaked hair brushing the collar of a loose-fitting shirt the color of a ripe coconut.

Nora wanted to believe he would offer his arm and they would stroll together to a candlelit dining room where they would eventually become heady on fine wine and meaningful gazes. But the solemn set of his features and the wide, powerful spread of those gabardine-clad legs told her otherwise.

“Yes, I’m coming,” she said, “if I’m not going to be the main course.”

Nora sat opposite Jacob at the wide dining table. Neither of them spoke even when the cook came into the room and asked if they would like wine with dinner. A subtle nod of Jacob’s head answered the question, and the servant poured a deep burgundy Chianti into both glasses. Nora tasted hers, and while it was tart and fruity on her tongue, it burned going down her throat. She regretted having inherited her father’s temperamental digestion and reached for a glass of water. I would be better off starving, she thought, especially if Jacob doesn’t quit staring at me like that.

As if reading her mind, he looked away. He rolled the stem of his glass between his thumb and forefinger and watched the contents pool along the sides of the crystal.

When a bowl of steaming clam chowder was set before her, Nora decided that perhaps she could eat a little something. It smelled too heavenly not to, and Jacob was acting his usual remote self. Maybe he wouldn’t say anything about the incident at the cottage after all, and it made no sense to waste good food.

She had taken several spoonfuls when he said coolly, “I understand you had quite an afternoon, Nora.”

Oh fine. Her luck just ran out. Jacob used the same tone her father had when she was a naughty child, and rather than intimidating her, the authoritative attitude only infuriated her. She did exactly what a ten-year-old Nora would have done to test her father’s patience to its limit. She filled her spoon with creamy liquid and slurped loudly. Satisfied with an expression on Jacob’s face that was a combination of amusement and shock, she smiled and said, “Yes, I did, thank you.”

He took a swallow of wine that emptied half the contents of his glass. “You realize that your actions today put this house in an uproar.”

“I’m sorry that my taking a walk of no more than a few hundred feet beyond my limits had that effect. Perhaps your staff needs more to occupy their time than to vex themselves over my transgressions.”

His eyes glittered over the candelabra in the center of the table. “You shouldn’t have done it. I warned you and you gave me your word.”

She had to concede that point. “I apologize for breaking my word, though I feel it was only to a minor degree, but, Jacob, I must tell you how I feel about what I discovered…”

She intended to tell him that if Dylan was the reason he shrouded this beautiful island in mystery…if that poor befuddled young man was the cause of all the secrecy, then everyone, including Jacob himself, should realize that to hide the man from society seemed to her an inexcusable wrong.

While she had experienced a moment of trepidation in Dylan’s presence, she truly doubted that he was dangerous. Confused? Yes. Prone to imaginings? Obviously. But to practically deny his existence to the world was no better than what Juliet and Francis had done to Charlotte.

She would have told Jacob this except she never got the chance. The metallic hiss of iron on wood announced the approach of Lord Proctor’s wheelchair. Pushed into the room by a haughty Juditha, Jacob’s father clenched his hands repeatedly on the arms of the chair. His facial expression reminded Nora of a wild animal sensing the close proximity of its prey. Once again she had the impression of her head resting on the silver platter in the center of the Proctor dining table.

Juditha positioned Harrison at the end of the table and stood dutifully behind him. Jacob drained the rest of his wine and said simply, “Father.”

Nora wiped her lips with her napkin. “Good evening, Lord Proctor.”

He fixed her with a steely glare and raised a finger to thrust it at her. “You’re a damned, stupid woman, you know that, Miss Seabrook?”

Jacob rose from his chair. “That’s enough, Father. I won’t have you speak to Nora that way.”

“Well someone has to. It’s obvious your warnings passed through the feathers of her brain like water through a sieve. Your head was so turned by the looks of her that you gave no thought to what is good for this family.”

Nora had never known such pure, definitive fury as what she felt toward Harrison Proctor at that moment. It pounded at her temples and hummed in her ears.

“Stop it,” she shouted across several feet of polished mahogany. “You’ve no right to blame your son. I understood perfectly what he told me, but I chose to wander beyond the boundary of the garden on my own.”

“So, you had an original thought, did you?” he sneered. “But you’re such a foolish chit that you had absolutely no idea what havoc this one impulsive act might bring down upon this household.”

Jacob snapped his gaze to her face. Anger as intense as her own ignited the charcoal of his eyes. “Nora, leave the room.”

“No, he must be made to understand…”

“Nora! I don’t need you to defend me in front of my father. Go out to the garden and stay there. I’ll come for you later.”

She rose but didn’t move for several seconds. Her breaths came fast and hard so that she felt her breasts strain against the ruffles Polly had sewn on her new dress. “What is the matter with you two?” she cried. “That poor man out there touches my heart. It’s no sin to be ill!” She turned the full force of her indignation on Harrison Proctor. “Surely you must understand that more than anyone could!”

He quaked violently in his chair. The pegs and dowels holding it together rattled in the suddenly oppressive silence of the cavernous room. Had he been able to, Nora had no doubt he would have leapt across the table and lunged for her throat. But instead he turned his vengeance on his son. “You see what you’ve done? You’ve brought another female onto this island, and she will ruin everything just as surely…”

Jacob’s voice rattled the crystals of the delicate candleabra. “Nora, go to the garden!”

There was so much she wanted to say, but no words would come. Only a low moan of frustration came from her throat. Both of these men were cruel and heartless, and it was pointless to try and reason with them. All at once she was terribly afraid of these people and this island. And she wished to God she was home in Key West.

She ran from the room and through the kitchen to the back entrance. She stopped in the garden and looked around, frantically searching for an escape that didn’t exist. On Jacob’s island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, she had nowhere to go. Among Harrison Proctor’s fragrant, colorful blossoms, she imagined only horrors.

The threat of what was in the woods beyond the garden and even in the little cottage beyond the gate suddenly loomed as menacingly as what existed in the house. She sank onto a garden bench. “You were wrong, Lydia Proctor,” she said, through tears. “Belle Isle is not beautiful at all.”  

Chapter Nineteen

By the time Jacob found her, Nora had calmed down enough to face an undeniable reality. Her only hope of getting off Belle Isle was the
Dover Cloud
, and she had to rely on its captain to take her. It had become almost impossible to trust anyone associated with Proctor House, but she concentrated on the man she had met in Key West. Jacob Proctor was the same man who, though he confounded her at every turn, was at times gentle, compassionate and even gallant. He had given his word to see her home safely, and despite everything, she believed he would.

She was sitting on a bench in the garden when he came up behind her and set a cloth-wrapped bundle next to her. She looked up at him and then cast a questioning glance at the bundle.

“It’s just some bread and cheese and a bit of tonight’s flounder,” he said. “You missed your dinner.”