Cloud Castle Read online

  CLOUD CASTLE

  Sara Seale

  Judy Ware was angry. Hired by correspondence, she had traveled to Ireland to be the secretary at Slyne Castle guest house, only to have its owner, the aloof Michael O’Rafferty, refuse to let her start. And for the ridiculous reason that Judy’s red hair and temper reminded him of his long-dead love, Kathy! Fortunately, cooler heads persuaded him to give her a chance.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  “THIS ONE,” Marcia said, with a laugh that was almost a giggle, picking a letter from the small pile on Raff’s desk. “She signs herself Poppy Piper and is prepared to do anything. She will clearly keep Noel amused.”

  “Heaven defend!” her brother retorted, snatching at the next letter. “I’ll settle for this one—she sounds class. Her name is Gwendoline de Vere, if she can be believed.”

  “I have decided on Judith Ware,” said Raff, and his voice shared none of the ribald amusement of the other two.

  “Why?” asked Marcia with interest. Raff had been against the idea from the beginning.

  “She writes a legible hand, can apparently spell correctly and is a sensible age,” he replied reasonably, and the girl made a small grimace.

  “Probably one of those efficient automatons who’ll order us all around and look down her prim English nose at our feckless Irish way of life,” she said, and he smiled for the first time. She had no drop of Irish blood in her, but she could, like her brother, be more Irish than the Irish when it suited her.

  “I thought efficiency was what we were aiming at,” he replied mildly. “A secretary who doesn’t know her job wouldn’t be very much use to us.”

  “Well, darling, you’ll have to work with her,” Marcia said, and rose to her feet, stretching with her lazy cat-like grace.

  Raff watched her reflectively. She boasted all the traditional dark beauty of the blood she could not claim and something more besides. It had been Noel’s idea to turn Castle Slyne, Raff’s elegant but decaying home in the west of Ireland, into a guest house to ease the drain on his dwindling income, but he suspected that Marcia, with her greater driving force, had probably conceived the notion in the first place and, once her brother was established as manager, had offered her services as receptionist with no thought of being refused. It was indeed, he thought, not easy to refuse Marcia when she had set her heart on something.

  It had worked admirably. Raff had been shrewd enough to see that it was the two Maules, with their preposterous good looks and equally preposterous charm, who brought in the customers. He himself might be officially the owner and proprietor, but he knew from experience that his manner had none of the expected warmth and easiness of the popular notion of an Irish landlord, nor did he care very much what his unwanted guests might think of him.

  He did not like his home filled with paying guests, who left cigarette burns on the carpets and cocktail stains on the mellow patina of period furniture, but it was better, he supposed, than seeing it all go. There had been O’Raffertys at Slyne since Cromwell’s time, but he was the last of them, with no wife and no heirs to perpetuate this gently crumbling inheritance.

  “You’re looking feudal and king-of-the-castle, Raff. A penny for them,” Marcia said idly.

  “Most likely he’s wondering how he’s going to pay for the conversion of the cocktail bar,” her brother laughed, and saw the quick look of distaste on Raff’s thin, ugly face.

  “A cocktail bar at Slyne!” he snorted, and Noel hunched his long, elegant body farther into his deep chair.

  “Don’t be stuffy, old boy, it’s been the making of this place. Let’s face it, the first demand your rich American clientele will make is for the bar.”

  “Sorry,” Raff said. “If one’s going to commercialise one’s sole asset one can scarcely afford to be touchy, I suppose.”

  “All the Irish are touchy,” Noel retorted, “but not to worry, me boyo. The guests expect a trace of grand seigneur to lend colour to the background. Of course they expect a display of the national warmth and proverbial wit, too, but I’ll supply that.”

  Marcia did not add any contribution of her own, but sat regarding Raff through her lashes, wondering what it was about him that stirred her. He was lean and bony, like her brother but without Noel’s elegance, and perhaps that in itself was an attraction. There was a toughness about the loose, angular lines of his frame that appealed to her, accustomed as she was to men who were part of their clothes, rather than their clothes being part of them, and she liked the touch of arrogance that could put them all in their places, if he chose. His face, she supposed, was ugly, compared with the smooth, familiar handsomeness of Noel’s, but she liked the long Irish upper lip, the equally long nose with the hint of a break, the grey that was beginning to fleck his dark, rather untidy hair Grey in the middle thirties? But he was, of course, quite a bit older than Noel, then his grey, ineffably cool eyes met hers for a moment and she knew that this was his attraction for her, that odd reserve which she, despite her own vicarious experience of men, had never been able to break down.

  “You look thoughtful, Marcia,” he said. “Doesn’t my choice of a secretary meet with your approval?”

  “Secretary?” Her thoughts had been so unrelated to the subject which had brought them together in Raff’s study this mild February afternoon that she could not, for the moment, adjust herself. “Oh, yes—you have chosen Judith Somebody because she writes a legible hand and can spell correctly. What will you do? Engage her on trial?”

  “I suppose so. It’s scarcely worth paying the return fare over for an interview.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic. It was your idea to put an advertisement in the English newspapers. You could have picked someone up over here, probably more cheaply.”

  “I daresay, but the results of our first advertisement in the Irish press were scarcely reassuring, were they?”

  She began to laugh.

  “No, darling, not exactly, but I think you frightened most of them off. They probably thought from their interviews that you would be a slave-driver.”

  “I?”

  “Yes, you! You are deliciously vague and remote when it suits you, but you have an abrupt way with you sometimes that might strike qualms in the stoutest breast.”

  “But not yours?”

  Her eyes were soft and fleetingly coquettish as they met his.

  “No, darling, not mine,” she said lazily, and caught her brother’s appreciative grin.

  An answering grin creased the rather forbidding lines of Raffs face to unfamiliar softness, bringing back his youth, and he flung himself into one of the shabby chairs and reached for a well-worn pipe.

  They sat in companionable silence for a while, listening to the accustomed sounds from outside; sounds woven among the multifarious other sounds which made up the familiar pattern of Slyne and which none but himself, perhaps, noticed. He caught Marcia hiding a yawn and knew that she was bored.

  “We’d better get this letter off to Miss Judith Ware,” he said. “There’s one thing, Marcia, her coming will relieve you of the paper work.”

  “Praise the pigs for that!” she said, sitting down at the typewriter and finding the ribbon had jammed. “I can only type with one finger and I don’t think I’m cut out for a secretary, anyway.”

  He smiled as he watched her wrestling with the machine. Marcia was cut out for a hostess, a job she filled with admirable ease and elegance; it had been her idea, in the first place, that a full-time secretary should be employed.

  “I wish,” she said with a grin, “you had chosen Poppy Piper. Noel is going to be awfully bored with your English paragon.”

  “It remains to be seen whether she turns out a paragon or not, and I might remind you that the girl is scarcely being
employed for Noel’s amusement,” he replied a little dryly, and she turned down the corners of her charming mouth in mock acceptance of a rebuke she clearly did not take seriously.

  “Girl indeed!” she observed, slamming paper into the typewriter. “She admits to twenty-seven, which means she’s probably well over thirty. A sensible age, you say!”

  “Well, what do we care?” asked Noel lazily.

  “You will, darling,” she retorted with an edge to her voice that made Raff glance at her curiously.

  He did not find it strange that the Maules should now so plainly regard Slyne as their home. Meeting Noel again after so many years had been a reminder of old times rather than a mutual delight for, in the past, their ways had seldom led along the same lines, but the younger man’s plans for Slyne had proved a fillip after a period of apathy and his viewpoint was refreshing.

  “Let’s face it, old man,” he had said, “we’re all on our beam ends, so why not get together and capitalise your principal asset?”

  Raff had not bargained for Marcia, whose type was unfamiliar to him. She was different from Kathy who had been young and naive, and quite without sophistication, but Kathy, he supposed, would never have managed difficult guests as Marcia did, and he was grateful for, and still a little puzzled by, her willingness to stay.

  “Dear Miss Ware,” he began suddenly, aware that it was slightly ridiculous to be dictating a letter to Marcia when he could quite well have written it himself, “In reply to your letter of the 10th inst...

  II

  In the days that followed, Raff went about his policies already regretting the engagement of Miss Judith Ware, that unknown young woman from London who, as Marcia had suggested, would most probably look down her prim English nose at their lax methods and hanker after a cosy little flat in Streatham; not that there was anything lax about Marcia, or Noel either, when it came to hard cash. The guests who came to Slyne paid handsomely for their privileges and, when they irked him, Raff had learnt to think in terms of the benefits they brought; restoration to the panelling in the drawing-room, fresh plumbing, and the employment of more labour to keep the parkland from falling into complete neglect. Coming back from his frequent tours of inspection, he would often pause to regard the house rising grey and gracious above its terraced lawns which met the water’s edge, and know that the strangers within his gates were unimportant, a bearable pest like flies, or the gentle stench of rotting vegetation in warm weather, but a pest, without which continuance at Slyne would have been barely possible. The love of his land was in his bones, and for Slyne he would bear much, even the indignity of paying guests.

  Sometimes, but not often now, he would think of Kathy, remembering her youth and her joy in living, seeing again the ghost of a naive young girl running to him across the lawns, hearing her laughter or, perhaps, seeing the tears she would have shed that there should be strangers now where once only she had visited. Then he would look towards Slieve Rury, its tapering summit rising in cloud beyond the lough; to the wild stretches of country which cut Slyne off in the splendid isolation of the west, and experience that strange pride and love for his unfruitful acres, an affection which the years of fighting and racketing on foreign soil had only served to strengthen.

  “You have a one-track mind, haven’t you, darling?” Marcia would say when she observed him regarding his property with that familiar inward look. “Have you only eyes for stone and mortar and the not very fruitful soil of your ancestors?”

  His reply would be evasive as usual, but she knew that once there had been Kathy to turn his thoughts to flesh and blood, and that now Slyne had become a protective barrier between him and the rest of the world.

  The new secretary was to arrive at the end of the week and Marcia had a little difficulty in persuading the so-called staff that the innovation was for the benefit of Slyne. The permanent servants consisted of Mary Kate, the cook, who, in her youth, had been a nursery-maid to Raff’s nanny, finally taken her place, and stopped on ever since, and Timsy, one-time boot-boy who stepped sourly into most capacities required of him, aided by a middle-aged niece and young Rosie Boyle from the farm. The frequently changing complement of girls from the tenants’ cottages and the half-trained youths who waited at table in the season were, in their scornful eyes, unqualified to rank as members of the household.

  ‘Tor what would himself be troubling with a secretary? Are you too grand to type out his letters yourself, Miss Mauler Mary Kate demanded crossly, and was unimpressed when it was explained to her that Marcia had other duties.

  “Another to make trouble with the girls who mislike waiting on paid employees they consider no better than themselves,” Mary Kate grumbled.

  “Well, they’ll have to make the best of it,” Marcia replied a little sharply. “We’d better give her the Oak Room—it has plumbing of a sort and that will save cans of hot water.”

  “Ah, sure the old nursery’s good enough for the likes of her, and if she wants hot water then she can fetch it herself from the sink at the end of the passage.”

  “There’s only a cold tap.”

  “Then if she wants it hot she can go down to Timsy’s pantry and boil it herself on that new contraption Mr. Noel persuaded the poor master to put in there when the furnace was good enough in the old days till Timsy got too grand or too lazy to stoke. You’ll not find Miss Doyle traipsing up and down them stairs with cans.”

  “Really!” Marcia complained to Raff, “your valued retainers can be very pig-headed when they choose. Prim Miss Ware is going to find it hard to please. Mary Kate clearly considers her no better than a servant.”

  “Most Irish servants of the old school are snobs at heart,” Raff replied absently. “ ‘The quality never soil their hands with work’ was a familiar saying, even in my parents’ time.”

  “Very right and proper if one’s income would allow it,” Noel grinned. “Are you going to meet the train, Raff?”

  “What train?”

  “Miss Judith Ware’s train which we trust is bringing her to Knockferry. Really, Raff, don’t be so vague!”

  Raff frowned.

  “You go,” he said shortly. “I’m going to have a day on the lough now that we only have a few perishing guests billeted on us. At the moment I don’t need the services of a well-trained secretary at all.”

  “But you will, darling, when the season begins and rich Americans start applying,” Marcia said with amusement “Perhaps she won’t stay, anyway. Mary Kate is putting her in the old nursery which reeks of damp, and she must heat her own hot water on the contraption you put in Timsy’s pantry.”

  “I’m beginning to feel quite sorry for poor unsuspecting Miss Ware,” said Noel lazily as Raff left the room. “How am I to recognize the lady at the station?”

  “Easy,” his sister replied promptly, “hardly anyone gets off that train and the English stand out from the others like sore thumbs. She will be stiff and neat with large feet and her hair in a bun—probably glasses, too.”

  “Horn-rims? You have a prejudiced attitude towards the conventional secretary, my sweet. Can it be wishful thinking?”

  “Hardly necessary, would you say?” she answered demurely, “and I can’t say I envy the wretched girl if she has to work with Raff when he’s in one of his king-of-the-castle moods. Well, I’d better go and see that someone at least thinks of lighting a fire in the nursery, and you, my lamb, should be setting out on that dreary drive into Knockferry.”

  Noel did not hurry. He was often as bored as Marcia between seasons when their guests were few and sometimes dull, but he did not, any more than his sister, look forward to rewarding company in the shape of Raff’s new secretary. He only hoped, when the Land Rover sprang a puncture halfway to Knockferry and made him late, that she would have had the sense to remain on the platform and not have gone seeking the Englishwoman’s solace of a cup of tea in the town.

  The platform was deserted. The refuse of market day blew on to the line in careless abandon,
and there was no nervous arrival waiting beside a pile of luggage. Noel wandered over to the stationmaster s little office where a shot of the “crayture” could always be anticipated, and there he found the only passenger left from the train from Dublin. She was perched on the stationmaster’s table, sipping doubtfully at a glass of whisky, and old Mick, the stationmaster, and Patsy Kelly, the solitary porter, were grouped around her, like glasses in their hands.

  “Well,” said Noel, letting the door slam behind him, “you seem to be having a party—or is it a wake? May I join you?”

  “Sure, sure,” said Mick, foraging for another glass. “You’re late, me boyo, but so was the train. You shouldn’t be keeping a lady waiting, though, and she crossing the Irish Sea and sick to her stomach, no doubt. Was you sick, miss?”

  “No.” the girl replied. “But it was cold, and I find the times of your trains confusing.”

  “There!” the stationmaster exclaimed, as though she had paid him a compliment. “A fine, mislocated country we are, fit to astonish the English!”

  “You astonish me all right” she said, lifting her glass to him. “Never before have I been given comfort like this at a station. Slainte!”

  “Slainte,” echoed Mick and Patsy Kelly in unison, and Noel took a long look at the girl, and his mouth curved upwards in amusement Was this the prim, efficient secretary of their imaginings? She was younger, far, than the twenty-seven years she had claimed, her face was ingenuous and slightly freckled and her hair, wind-blown and untidy, was a warm but aggressive red.

  “Could you possibly be Miss Judith Ware?” he asked with malicious politeness.

  “Yes, I’m Judy,” she replied with comfortable assurance, then her eyes widened, and she slipped off the table, standing awkwardly before him.

  “Are you—are you, by any chance, Mr. O’Rafferty?” she faltered suddenly.

  He appraised her silently before replying. She was thin and wiry under the nondescript clothes she had travelled in, he saw; but her eyes were green and wide and inquiring and there was a generous, innocent curve to her wide mouth.