'A tenner says you're wrong.'
'Done.' The two men shook hands, and Geoff turned with a smile as I hoisted myself onto the stool beside him. 'A lad who works for me is right-winger for Calne,' he explained. 'I'm only being loyal.'
Ned grinned. 'Like taking candy from a baby,' he said.
I sent Geoff my best motherly look. 'Is this what you get up to when I'm not around?' I asked him. 'Drinking and gambling?'
'I've been bored stiff,' was his defense. 'No one to play with. Iain's been too busy this week, and Vivien ...' He looked at Ned, frowning. 'Where exactly is Vivien, anyway?'
The taciturn barman raised one hand and shook his head. 'No use asking me. My lips are sealed on pain of death.'
'Well,' Geoff went on, 'Vivien is somewhere. I had to make my own amusement.'
'Well, I'm back now. What would you like to do?'
He tilted his head, considering the offer. 'Why don't I take you to dinner, for starters, and then you can come back to the Hall with me and help me pack.'
'Pack for what?'
'I leave for France on Saturday,' he said. 'Or had you forgotten?'
'This Saturday? But I thought you weren't going until the end of August.' Geoff smiled. 'This is the end of August, or very nearly. Don't look like that. I'll only be gone for six weeks.'
Six weeks! It seemed a minor eternity. I was still frowning as we left the pub and turned to walk along the shaded laneway leading up to the Hall. Geoff kept close beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. After a few moments' silence he turned his head and looked down at me, his eyes unreadable.
'Why don't you come with me?'
I looked up swiftly. 'What?'
'To France, I mean. Why don't you come with me? There's plenty of room on the plane, lots of space at the house, it'd be no trouble. And I'd enjoy your company.'
'Oh, Geoff, I couldn't.' My eyes pleaded with him to understand. 'I just couldn't.'
He understood. 'Because of Mariana.'
'Something important is about to happen, Geoff, I can feel it. Something that might help explain why this is happening to me. And it's going to happen soon. But I have to be here, in Exbury, if I want to find out how the story ends. I couldn't possibly leave now.'
We were nearing the bend in the path where it rounded the churchyard. Beyond the church loomed the stone gates of Crofton Hall, but before I could take another step toward them I was suddenly seized by the shoulders and hauled unceremoniously into the cover of the trees. There, in the cool green shadows, Geoff took my face in his hands and kissed me, and his kiss was almost rough in its urgency.
'What was that in aid of?' I asked him, when I could finally breathe again.
'I'm not sure. Maybe I just wanted to make certain you were paying attention.'
'I'm paying attention.'
He smiled, and kissed me again, more gently this time, then lifted his head and reached to tame a wayward curl by my cheekbone. 'Will you miss me, while I'm in France?'
'Of course I will.' 'I wonder.' The smile disappeared, and his face grew very serious in the dancing shadows of the leaves.
I stared up at him. 'What's that supposed to mean?"
'Who do you see, when you look at me?’ he asked. 'Geoff? Or Richard?'
It should have been easy to give him an answer, but I couldn't. I couldn't say anything, I just went on looking at him, trapped by the dark intensity of his eyes. He stopped toying with my hair, brushing my chin with one finger before dropping his hand from my face altogether.
'Which one of us is it, Julia?' he asked, softly. 'You'd do well to think on that, while I'm gone.'
Thirty
September was a gray and lonely month, soggy with rain and tediously uneventful. The rose garden at the Hall never really reached its full glory, blighted petals hanging limply above blackened vines and leaves spotted with the damp. In my own little dovecote garden, a scattering of wine-red anemones made a brave showing against a sea of Michaelmas daisies, but the rains soon finished them, too. There was little colour anywhere, only a drowned and tired green and the dull dun-gray of sky and stone.
The bright postcards Geoff sent from the south of France were a welcome bit of cheer, and I propped them in a row along my window ledge so I could look at them while I worked on my illustrations. I was in another of my antisocial moods, but nobody seemed to mind.
Iain was kept busy harvesting his apples for shipment to some cider maker in Somerset. From time to time I noticed a neatly cleared patch in the garden and knew that he had been there, but I never saw him. He must have worked in the dark. Vivien rang me occasionally to chat, and Mrs. Hutherson dropped in one morning to check up on me, but most days I was able to bury myself in my work without interruption.
After three weeks, I was no closer to answering Geoff's question whether I cared more for him or for Richard—I found myself missing both of them. Mariana's days were as dreary as my own, and since I took care to confine my flashbacks to my own house, Richard de Mornay did not enter into them. I was tempted to experiment a second time in the manor house, but for some reason I hung back, perhaps because some inner instinct kept telling me that it wasn't necessary. Whatever is going to happen, the niggling voice said, it will begin at Greywethers. And so I waited.
The twenty-third of September began much as any other -Saturday. I woke early, to the sound of the ever-present rain gurgling down my gutters. It seemed almost overkill to run the bath as well, with all that water outside, but I bathed nonetheless and went downstairs to breakfast.