Charade In Winter

Alex collected herself with difficulty. ‘I—I’m Mrs Thornton,’ she amended reluctantly. ‘How do you do, Melissa?’

The little girl beckoned her nearer the bed. ‘Are you really married? Do you have any children of your own?’

Alix flicked an embarrassed look in Makoto’s direction, but fortunately the Japanese woman was regarding her charge with evident satisfaction. ‘No,’ she answered uncomfortably, ‘I don’t have any children.’

Melissa’s small shoulders sketched a regretful shrug, and then she went on eagerly: ‘Have you come to stay with us? Daddy says you have. He says I have to go to an English school, and learn to be an English lady, and you’re going to help me.’ she paused. ‘Are you an English lady, Mrs Thorn—’

‘Melissa!’

Oliver Morgan’s voice was full of irritation, and Alix turned her head to see the master of the house striding into his daughter’s bedroom with evident annoyance. His appearance—he was dressed in black suede pants and a black silk shirt—was sufficiently grim to daunt the most intrepid heart, but Melissa’s reactions were totally without fear. Pushing back the covers, she thrust her small legs out of bed, and rushed across the floor to reach him, and with only a half-hearted protest her father swung her up into his arms. But not before Alix had glimpsed the flaw in the perfection—Melissa was lame.

Her eyes lifted to encounter the incisive scrutiny of Oliver Morgan’s gaze, and she knew he was waiting for her reactions. But she refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing she had been shocked, about anything, and before the child could launch into her explanations, she said: ‘Melissa and I have been getting to know one another.’

‘You’re not cross, are you, Daddy?’

Melissa’s arms were around his neck, modestly hidden beneath wrist-length sleeves, but her leap into his arms had brought the hem of her nightgown up round her thighs and Makoto was trying desperately to pull it down.

Oliver Morgan brushed the Japanese woman away, and looked into his daughter’s mischievous face. ‘You were supposed to wait until tomorrow morning to meet Mrs Thornton,’ he told her, but there was indulgence in his tone, and Alix was amazed at the tenderness in his expression.

‘I couldn’t wait,’ said Melissa simply, his face cupped between her two small palms. Then she flashed a smile at Alix. ‘She’s not at all like you said she would be, is she?’

‘Young ladies do not make personal remarks,’ observed her father dryly, allowing her to slide to the floor. ‘And now, I suppose, Makoto will have the devil’s own job getting you settled down again.’

‘Makoto brought Mrs Thornton here,’ stated Melissa, reluctant to return to the bed, and Oliver Morgan’s eyes turned in Alix’s direction, subjecting her to another of those raking appraisals such as he had given her downstairs.

‘I guessed that,’ he conceded, irritation tightening his lips, as if he blamed Alix for upsetting the child. Then he turned to Makoto, and speaking rapidly in a language Alix couldn’t begin to comprehend made his demands known.

‘Daddy is telling Makoto that you are here to give me lessons only, not to entertain me,’ translated Melissa artlessly, arousing an impatient oath from her father, and Alix decided that the time had come for her to leave. But the child was intriguing, and she was loath to go without reassuring her on that point at least.

‘I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to entertain each other,’ she told her lightly, as Melissa obeyed her father’s terse directions and limped back to the bed.

Alix walked pensively to the head of the stairs, and then began to descend them slowly. She had reached the central landing when Oliver Morgan caught up with her. He passed her without a glance, however, and then stood waiting at the foot of the stairs, watching her come down the rest of the way with what she was beginning to recognise as his usual taut expression. He made her nervous and in consequence she stumbled, but apart from a further tightening of his lips, he made no acknowledgment of her small accident.

‘Would you like a drink before dinner?’ he inquired when she had reached the comparative safety of the hall, but she shook her head. In truth, the whisky she had drunk earlier had been stronger than she had imagined, and she needed no further dulling of her wits where Oliver Morgan was concerned.

‘Then I suggest we go straight in to dinner,’ remarked her host briefly, and led the way across the hall and into the dining room.

Like the other rooms of the house, it was large, but as it was filled with a long polished table, flanked by a dozen tall-backed chairs, a pair of matching sideboards and a huge Welsh dresser, it did not seem excessively so. One end of the table had been set with two places—heavy silver cutlery, Waterford crystal and Crown Derby—and as they entered, a girl came through another door at the far end of the room which probably gave access to the kitchens.

Alix was relieved to see that there was a girl of around her own age at Darkwater Hall, and she looked pointedly at Oliver Morgan, waiting for him to introduce them. He seemed strangely loath to do so, however, although from the avid way the girl was looking at him, she had no objections. In fact there was something faintly repelling about the dog-like devotion in the girl’s eyes as she pulled out his chair for him, and the way her mouth gaped when he thanked her. Alix quickly subsided into the vacant seat to his right, and the girl cast a vaguely hostile look in her direction before disappearing again, no doubt in pursuit of the first course.

The room was illuminated from a central chandelier, and the light glowed ruby red in the bottle of wine Oliver lifted to fill her glass. ‘You look disapproving, Mrs Thornton,’ he said, his eyes mocking hers. ‘Myra and her mother, Mrs Brandon, take care of all the cooking and cleaning here.’

Alix’s fingers sought the stem of the glass. ‘I see.’

‘Do I detect disapproval in your tones?’ His brows ascended. ‘It might not yet have become obvious to you, but Myra—isn’t quite as other girls. What I’m trying to say, not very successfully I’m afraid, is that Myra’s mental capacity is limited.’

‘Oh.’ Alix felt chastened.

‘You hadn’t noticed?’

Alix shrugged. ‘Not really…’

‘You weren’t offended by her behaviour?’

‘Offended? No.’

‘Affronted, perhaps?’ His lips curled. ‘You have very expressive features, Mrs Thornton. You’ll have to learn to control your feelings if you don’t want me to know what you’re thinking.’

Alix, used as she was to awkward confrontations in the course of her work, could nevertheless feel a faint deepening of colour at his words. He was altogether too perceptive, and she would have to be on her guard for more reasons than he knew.

In an effort to change the subject, she said: ‘How old is Melissa?’ and saw the immediate hardening of his profile.

‘She’s eight,’ he replied abruptly, and was saved from continuing by the return of the girl, Myra, with a tureen of soup. ‘We can help ourselves Myra,’ he told her firmly, after she had set soup plates before them, and she nodded rather sulkily and left them again.

It was leek soup, home-made, Alix guessed, and aromatically delicious. It made her realise that she had eaten nothing since lunchtime, and she needed no second bidding to fill her plate. She accepted a roll from the basket he offered, and began to spoon up the creamy liquid eagerly. It took her a few minutes to realise he had not followed her example, and she looked up to find him watching her with a curious expression on his lean features, his glass of wine held lazily in his hand.

At once she was on the defensive again, and feeling rather like a child in the company of an adult, she put down her spoon and said: ‘I’m sorry. I—I was hungry.’

He leaned back in his chair at the end of the long table, looking very much the master of the situation, and she wondered why his eyes upon her made her conscious of every inch of flesh she was displaying. Her hand went automatically to the low neckline of her dress, seeking and finding the medallion that swung there between her breasts, holding on to it as if to a lifeline.

‘Please,’ he said, without mockery, gesturing with his free hand, ‘do go on. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you, but it’s quite refreshing to discover that there are women who enjoy their food. My own experience has been limited to the other kind.’

Alix looked down at her plate. ‘But you’re not eating,’ she exclaimed, looking up again.

He shrugged. ‘My appetite is not what it was, Mrs Thornton. But please don’t let my inadequacy prevent you from enjoying your meal. Mrs Brandon is an excellent cook.’

Unwillingly, Alix picked up her spoon again and continued with the soup. But it was so delicious that after a while she forgot that his eyes might be upon her, and finished every drop.

‘Some more?’ he suggested, when she looked up, but she shook her head, and was glad when Myra arrived to remove their plates.

The main course was chicken, sliced and cooked in a sauce made with white wine, and served with vegetables on a bed of flaky rice. Alix noticed that although her host helped himself to a little of this, he spent the time it took her to eat her helping pushing his around his plate, and drinking several glasses of a dry white wine he had opened after finishing the red wine practically singlehanded.

When Alix refused a second helping of the delectable raspberry gateau which completed the meal and coffee had been served, Oliver Morgan produced a thick cigar and after gaining her assurance that she had no objections to his lighting it, said: ‘Now, Mrs Thornton, I suggest we get the preliminaries over with, and then we can perhaps get down to business.’

‘The preliminaries?’ Alix frowned. ‘I’m sorry, but—what do you mean?’

He rose from his seat to light his cigar, and then regarded her dourly. ‘Come, Mrs Thornton, don’t be coy. I was hoping to delay your introduction to my daughter until the morning, but I ought to have realised that curiosity would get the better of discretion.’

Alix looked up at him. ‘I did not go in search of your daughter, Mr Morgan.’

‘I know that,’ he retorted shortly, ‘but you’ve seen her now, and I can’t believe you haven’t noticed that she’s partly Japanese.’

‘She’s a beautiful child,’ said Alix honestly.

He frowned. ‘How much do you know of my family, Mrs Thornton?’

Alix was taken aback. ‘I—I—’