A Suitable Vengeance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,39

just as well. And if I'm to put up with Mr.

Sweeney as a thespian for an evening, I ought to be prepared."

She laughed and went to get it for him, calling back into the bedroom, "Actually, this isn't a bad idea. If tonight's production is anything like the other we saw, we'll all be popping pain killers before the evening's through. Perhaps we should take the bottle along with us." She brought the tablets back into the bedroom. He had gone to the window where he was leaning forward on his crutches, looking out at the southern view of the grounds. But she could tell from his profile that his eyes registered nothing. The sight of him like this negated his words, his polite cooperation, and the lightness of his tone. She realised that even his smile had been a device to cut her off completely, while all along he existed, as he always had done, alone. She would not accept it.

"You might have fallen," she said. "Please. Simon darling, the path was too steep. You might have been killed."

"Indeed," he answered. The cavernous Howenstow drawing room did not possess the sort of qualities that made one feel at home wandering through it. The size of an over-large tennis court, its furniture - an aggregation of antiques positioned in conversational groupings - was scattered across a fine chenille carpet. Walled with Constables and Turners and displaying an array of fine porcelains, it was the sort of room that made one afraid of moving precipitately in any direction. Alone, Deborah carefully picked her way down its length to the grand piano, intent upon examining the photographs that stood on top of it. They comprised a pictorial history of the Lynleys' tenure as the Earls of Asherton. The stiff-backed fifth Countess stared at her with that unfriendly expression so predominant in the photographs of the nineteenth century; the sixth Earl sat astride a large bay and looked down at an unruly pack of hounds; the present Lady was robed and gowned for the Queen's corona tion; Tommy and his siblings frolicked through a youth of wealth and privilege. Only Tommy's father, the seventh Earl, was missing. As she noticed this, Deborah realised that she had seen his likeness nowhere in the house, in either photograph or portrait, a circumstance she found decidedly odd, for she had seen several pictures of the man in the townhouse Tommy occupied in London.

"When you're photographed to join them, you must promise me you'll smile." Lady Asherton came to meet her, a glass of sherry in her hand. She looked cool and lovely in a cloudy white dress. "I wanted to smile, but Tommy's father insisted that it wasn't done and I'm afraid I caved in quite spinelessly. I was like that in my youth. Most appallingly malleable." She smiled at Deborah, sipping her sherry and moving from the piano to sit in the embrasure of a window behind it.

"I've so enjoyed my afternoon with your father, Deborah. I talked incessantly, but he was quite gracious about it, acting as if everything I said was the height of wit and sense." She turned her glass upon her palm and seemed to be watching how the light struck the design cut into the crystal. "You're very close to your father."

"Yes," she answered. "That's sometimes the way when a child loses one parent, isn't it?

It's the mixed blessing of a death."

"Of course, I was very young when my mother died," Deborah said in an attempt to explain away the distance she had not been able to ignore between Tommy and his mother. "So I suppose it was natural that I would develop a deeper relationship with Dad.

He was doing double duty, after all. Father and mother to a seven-year-old. And I had no brothers or sisters. Well, Simon was there, but he was more like . . .I'm not sure. An uncle? A cousin? Most of my upbringing fell to Dad."

"And you became a unit as a result, the two of you. How lucky you are."

Deborah wouldn't have called her relationship with her father the product of luck. Rather it was the outcome of time, paternal patience, and willing communication. Saddled with a child whose impetuous personality was nothing like his own, Cotter had managed to adjust his own thinking in a constant attempt to understand hers. If devotion existed between them now, it was only due to years in which the seeds of a future relationship had been