Lacybourne Manor (6 page)

She was about to order
him out, when, to her astonishment, Bran, who
hated
the car and
anywhere Sibyl might take him in it, darted into the car and curled
up on the driver’s side floor.

Any effort she made to pull out
the recalcitrant dog met with loud, angry “woofs” and the cat sunk
his claws into the carpet and would simply not let go.

“Okay!” she gave up with ill
grace after what she considered a valiant struggle. “You’ll come
with me, but you have to be good. I’m already outside of visiting
hours as it is. Whoever owns Lacybourne Manor does not want a big
mutt and a crazy feline traipsing around his graceful estate.”

Mallory was beside himself with
glee at this turn of events and drooled happily on the car’s
battered upholstery. Bran shifted to the floor of the passenger
side while Sibyl forced the reluctant car to do what it was told,
all the while muttering dire threats and foul curses at her
animals.

Luckily, with only five minutes
to get there, it took only ten minutes to arrive. She didn’t want
to disappoint the strangely intense Mrs. Byrne (who had shared her
name after Sibyl had shared her own). The woman had gone out of her
way to arrange this tour and, as was her style, Sibyl didn’t want
to disappoint her.

Unluckily, when she arrived in
Clevedon proper the wind had whipped up and a fierce thunderstorm
had rolled in.

By the time she made it through
the gate of Lacybourne, lightning was flashing through the sky and
her dratted dog and damned cat were practically jumping out of
their skins.

“
This is
not
a good
idea,” she told the animals. “I’m just going to have to tell Mrs.
Byrne that I have you in the car and thank her…” she stopped,
realising she was talking to her pets.

She gave a brief thought
to the idea that maybe she should listen to her mother, maybe
she
did
need a man. She had been reduced to talking to her animals
as if they could not only understand but respond.

She halted the car in the drive
just before a small copse of trees. She fully intended to explain
the situation to the older woman, thank the owner (if he was there)
and get her pets home. She opened her door to get out and the
moment she cleared the frame, Bran flashed out of the driver’s side
door and Mallory, very inelegantly, trundled out right behind
him.

“Bran! Mallory! Get back here!”
she shouted and as the wind whipped her hair around her face her
animals disappeared into the night. She pulled her hair back
angrily with her hand, narrowing her eyes to peer through the
darkness. “Damn it, you crazy beasts!” she yelled, “Get your
behinds back in this car!”

Many of the lights were lit in
Lacybourne upon her arrival and there were several cars in the
drive. Sibyl noted with a bit of panic and rising despair that now
even more lights were coming on in the house.

“When I catch you fiends, I’m
going to tan your hides. Bran! Mallory!” she shouted.

She reached the very centre of
the copse of trees when out of nowhere Bran shot toward her,
leaping gracefully into her arms. Mallory, much less gracefully,
hurtled out of the darkness, skidding to a halt at her side. The
big dog sat down beside her like he often wiled away his hours,
relaxing calmly at her side, the wind whipping at him, the
lightning tearing through the skies.

She put her hand on top of the
dog’s head in order to slide it down to his neck and find his
collar when she heard…

“What in bloody hell?”

She lifted her head and at that
very moment, lightning arced down behind her, the longest flash of
lightning she’d ever endured in her life. Not just a scant second
but entire, long, breathless moments.

And holding Bran in one arm,
her other hand resting on Mallory’s head and the wind whipping her
hair while a faltering smile (and, for Sibyl, even a faltering
smile came out as dazzling, much to her parents’ dismay) formed on
her lips, she saw, illuminated in the lightning right in front of
her, the tall, handsome form of the murdered lover from her
dream.

There he was, right before her,
not four feet away, in real life.

The man of her dreams.

It was then that Sibyl Jezebel
Godwin did something she had never done in her entire life.

She fainted.

Unfortunately, when she did so,
her head smashed rather painfully against a jagged rock.

Misunderstanding

“Call the doctor!”

Colin shouted this order to
Tamara and Mrs. Byrne who were both crowding around him while he
carried into the house the unconscious, unbelievable woman he’d
encountered outside moments ago.

The very vision of Beatrice
Godwin.

Except blonde.

Like the woman in his
dream.

Not only were Tamara and Mrs.
Byrne crowding him but an enormous, beige beast with a black face
and black floppy ears was following closely at his heels, barking
ferociously and a fluffy, black cat was darting in and out of his
legs, nearly tripping him.

“Oh my goodness! What
happened?” Mrs. Byrne queried, her voice filled with concern.

“Call the damned doctor!” Colin
answered, striding swiftly through the Great Hall and into the
library, carrying his burden.

Tamara peeled off the scene
hopefully to phone a medic. Mrs. Byrne stayed with him as he
carefully deposited the woman onto the leather of a burgundy couch
in the library and she leaned forward to arrange the woman’s long
legs in a comfortable position.

Then she looked at the
woman.

“She’s bleeding!” Mrs. Byrne
exclaimed.

“Get a towel, the bathroom –”
Colin started to explain but Mrs. Byrne was already rushing towards
the bathroom (rather agilely for a woman of her age). He realised
with a delayed reaction that in her role as a volunteer at
Lacybourne, she probably knew the house better than he.

The dog was still barking and
the cat had leapt up to walk daintily the length of the woman’s
body.

“Quiet!” he ordered the dog
and, to his surprise, the dog ceased barking immediately and sat
down in a slouch where most of his body reclined against the side
of his couch. He then inclined his neck forward and licked Colin’s
hand. Not quite finished, he turned his massive head and sniffed
his mistress’s hair before sloppily licking the entire side of her
face with one long lash of his exorbitantly wet, enormous
tongue.

“Down,” Colin commanded and the
dog settled onto the floor and, with a loud groan, rested his head
on his front paws.

Colin had laid her on her back
and now, gently, he leaned forward and pulled the soft, heavy hair
away from her face.

Then he saw her, as he’d seen
her outside, except now she wasn’t exactly mimicking the pose from
the portrait.

Beatrice’s double, right here
in Lacybourne Manor.

She was the woman in his
dream.

Albeit, without a slit throat
but with a bleeding head wound.

“Good Christ,” he muttered, his
body frozen, his eyes staring into her pale, familiar face, his
mind unable to process anything but the incredible vision of
her.

The cat had decided to settle
smack in the middle of her chest, curling into himself and licking
one of his paws.

Colin stared at her as finally
Colin’s mind again started working and he thought of Mrs. Byrne
arriving not ten minutes ago to explain that she had, because of
her extreme age and faltering memory, forgotten to call the
American to tell her not to arrive for her tour.

Then they’d all heard the
frustrated, shouting woman’s voice rising above the storm
outside.

Then Colin had gone out to
investigate.

Then in the unbelievably long
flash of lightning, he’d seen her standing amongst the trees in a
perfect rendition of the pose of Beatrice Godwin.

“I’ve called 999, they’re
sending someone straight away,” Tamara said as she rushed into the
room.

Colin didn’t look at Tamara, he
continued to stare at the woman on the couch.

All the years he’d waited and
now here she was.

And she was blonde.

And suddenly and very
strangely, he felt his body react, every muscle tightening
instantaneously as he continued to drink in the sight of her. His
gut clenched and his heart felt clutched in an iron fist.

“Colin?” Tamara called, her
hand lightly touching his tense arm but her light touch felt like
pinpricks of icicles sinking into his flesh and he experienced the
strange desire to shrug her off and eject her forcibly from the
house.

Before he could wonder at this
reaction, he heard, “I’ve got a wet flannel. She’ll need some ice.”
Mrs. Byrne was walking quickly into the room. She pushed past Colin
and sat next to the woman, leaning forward to press the flannel
gently against the bloodied area of the woman’s head.

Not even close to coming to
terms with his shock at seeing the vision of Beatrice (but blonde),
Colin stared at the older woman as she ministered to her charge in
a way that Colin thought distractedly was rather familiar. Mrs.
Byrne had said the woman was just an American who wanted to view
the house and now the older woman was caring for her as if she was
her own granddaughter.

Furthermore, Colin thought, his
mind clearing quickly as he watched the scene, Mrs. Byrne had been
working in Lacybourne for years. She had to have seen the uncanny,
even otherworldly, resemblance of this woman to the portrait that
had hung in the Great Hall for nearly five hundred years.

Colin felt a feeling recognised
very well slicing quickly through his fogged brain.

No, not this,
not her,
he thought.

“Who is she?” Colin asked the
older woman, Tamara’s hand had not left his arm and her grip was
becoming less and less light with each passing moment.

The older woman didn’t appear
to realise he was addressing her. Colin ignored Tamara’s insistent
hand and knew that instinctive, familiar feeling in his gut was
something he did not very much like.

It was the feeling that he was
being played.

Colin’s mind fully cleared and
he felt a slow burn begin.

He may be ruthless, but
he was (most of the time) fair. He was normally quite controlled.
Cynical, of course, but aloof. Resigned to the often annoying
foibles of lower mortals (a league to which he relegated most
everyone but his sacred circle). He could have, and normally would
have, calmly waited for an explanation.

But now, this instant, with the
unconscious woman on his couch looking exactly like Beatrice
Morgan, the woman he’d waited for all his life, and Mrs. Byrne, who
had, perhaps with the help of the American, staged this entire
event, he felt an irrational, nearly uncontrollable fury begin to
build.

“Mrs. Byrne, who is she?” Colin
repeated.

Mrs. Byrne turned remarkably
innocent-looking eyes to his. “I’ve no idea, Mr. Morgan. She came
around yesterday afternoon –”

He didn’t believe her for a
second.

“How long have you been docent
in this house for National Trust?” Colin interrupted, his voice was
calm, so calm it was dangerous.

“Seven years, but I don’t see
–”

In that instant, he’d suddenly
had enough.

“Look at her face!” Colin
thundered, losing his nearly legendary patience. In fact, it seemed
his increasing rage was born of something else entirely, something
he couldn’t control, so he didn’t. “God damn it, you’ve seen that
portrait thousands of times! Who is she?”

Mrs. Byrne jumped, the hand not
compressing the flannel on the woman’s head rising to her throat.
Then she stared at him with a curious intensity as if she was a
scientist marking her reaction to an experiment.

At this point, the eyes of the
woman on the couch fluttered open and then darted around in a
passable interpretation of panic. She reared up into a sitting
position, dislodging Mrs. Byrne’s hand and the cat on her chest who
then went flying out of the room.

“Ow!” Her hand flew to her
temple and then, encountering wetness, it came away and she stared
in disbelief at the blood.

“Who the hell are you?” Colin
stormed, not believing her performance for one bloody, fucking
second.

Her hazel eyes, a
perfectly
familiar hazel, lifted to his and blinked at him in
bemusement. With one look from those eyes, he nearly forgot
himself. He nearly forgot the decades of betrayal that hardened him
against these schemes.

But then he remembered and it
was as if she embodied every deceitful bitch he’d ever had the
misfortune to encounter.

“
I said,” he roared,
“who
the fuck
are you?”

Tamara jumped away in
shock.

Mrs. Byrne stood, her hand
coming up in a placating gesture.

“Mr. Morgan, I don’t think –”
Mrs. Byrne began.

“
Who the fuck are
you?
” the
woman on the couch asked him, her own voice vibrating with
anger.

And Colin could not believe his
ears. He saw his vision explode in a white-hot fury he had not felt
in years, maybe never felt in his lifetime.

He knew, without any
doubt, that this woman and her old friend had set this up. She
looked
exactly
like Beatrice Godwin and Mrs. Byrne would have
noticed that in an instant. The fact that Mrs. Byrne had not
mentioned it, not once during the telephone conversation or her
explanation this evening, showed she was hiding something. They
would have, of course, wanted the element of surprise.