A Suitable Vengeance - By Elizabeth George Page 0,40

planted and cultivated. "You're estranged from Tommy, aren't you?" Deborah said impulsively. Lady Asherton smiled, but she looked very tired. For a moment Deborah thought that exhaustion might wear at her guard and prompt her to say something about what was at the root of the trouble between herself and her son. But instead, she said, "Has Tommy mentioned the play tonight? Shakespeare under the stars.

In Nanrunnel." Voices drifted to them from the corridor. "I'll let him tell you about it, shall I?"

That said, she gave her attention to the window behind her where a light breeze carried into the room the salty fragrance of the Cornish sea.

"If we fortify ourselves enough, we should be able to survive this with some semblance of sanity," Lynley was saying as he entered the room. He went directly to a cabinet and began pouring three sherries from one of the decanters that stood in a semicircle upon it.

He gave one to Lady Helen, another to St. James, and tossed back his own drink before catching sight of Deborah and his mother at the far end of the room. He said, "Have you told Deborah about our Theseus and Hippolyta roles this evening?"

Lady Asherton raised her hand fractionally from her lap.

Like her smile, the movement seemed weighted by fatigue.

"I thought that was best left to you."

Lynley poured himself a second drink. "Right. Yes. Well" - this to Deborah with a smile

- "we've a duty play, darling. I'd like to tell you that we'll go late and bow out at the interval, but the Reverend Mr. Sweeney is an old family friend. He'd be crushed if we weren't there for the entire production."

"Dreadful though the production will certainly be," Lady Helen added.

"Shall I take photographs while we're there?" Deborah offered. "After the play, I mean. If Mr. Sweeney's an especial friend, perhaps he'd like that."

"Tommy with the cast," Lady Helen said. "Mr. Sweeney will burst. What a wonderful idea! I've always said you belong on the stage, haven't I, Tommy?"

Lynley laughed, made a response. Lady Helen chatted on.

As she did so, St. James took his drink and wandered towards two large Chinese vases that stood at either side of the doorway into the long Elizabethan gallery that opened off the east end of the drawing room. He ran his fingers over the smooth porcelain surface of one of them, tracing a particularly intricate pattern made by the glaze. Deborah noted that although twice he lifted his glass of sherry to his lips, he drank neither time. He seemed intent upon looking at no one.

Deborah hardly expected anything else after the afternoon.

In fact, if not acknowledging anyone's presence helped him to forget about it all, she felt quite as if she would like to indulge in the same behaviour even though she knew that, for herself, forgetting would not occur any time soon.

It had been bad enough tearing Brooke away from Sidney, knowing his behaviour was the product of neither love nor lust but violence and a need to hammer her into submission.

It was even worse helping Sidney climb the cliff, hearing her hysterical weeping, catching hold of her so that she wouldn't fall. Her face was bleeding and beginning to swell. The words she sobbed out were incoherent. Three times she stopped, wouldn't move, merely wept. All that had been a living nightmare.

But then at the top, there was Simon, standing against a tree, watching for them. His face was half hidden. His right hand dug into the tree's bark so hard that the bones stood out.

Deborah had wanted to go to him. For what reason, to what possible end, she could not have said. Her only rational thought at the moment was that she couldn't leave him alone.

But Helen stopped her when she took a step in his direction, pushing her with Sidney towards the path to the house.

That stumbling trip back had been the second nightmare.

Each part stood out vividly in her mind. Coming upon Mark Penellin in the woods; making inarticulate excuses for Sidney's appearance and her distraught condition; approaching the house with an ever rising sense of trepidation that someone might see them; slipping by the gun room and the old servants' hall to look for the northwest stairway that Helen had insisted was near the pantry; taking a wrong turn at the top of those stairs and ending up in the disused west wing of the house; and all the time terrified that Tommy would come upon them and begin