Cloud Castle Page 4

  Marcia joined them now, demanding a champagne cocktail. She looked put out and insisted rather sharply on paying for her own drink, saying when Raff protested:

  “My dear man, you can’t have your employees drinking all the profits.” She looked rather meaningly at Judy’s half-empty glass and Raff said pleasantly:

  “Miss Ware is our guest, if you remember.”

  “So she is. Well, if you’re going to be obstinate and refuse to employ her, darling, we’d better start going through the whole dreary business of advertising again, for I can’t and won’t cope with the paper work that’s piling up.”

  “Is there so much?”

  “If you troubled to look at your mail each morning instead of leaving it to me, you’d soon find out,” she retorted, and her brother made a small grimace across the bar at her.

  “Not the way to break down the famous O’Rafferty resistance, my sweet,” he told her. “What’s upset you?”

  “Oh, everything. The servants have been particularly tiresome, and the honeymoon couple took offence because Raff wasn’t there to say good-bye when they went this morning, and all those letters! Really, Raff, I’ll have to leave if you can’t settle something about a secretary. I can be pleasant to your guests and run your house, but I cannot cope with the office work as well.”

  Judy had been feeling uncomfortable ever since Marcia had joined them. She did not wish Raff to be embarrassed on her account, neither did she want to become involved in their domestic wrangles, for, as a guest, she could scarcely be expected to voice opinions on the running of the business. She had finished her drink and started wandering round the room, admiring the elegant furniture which graced it. She touched the smooth surface of veneer and delicate inlay with loving fingers, dwelling on what treasures this house must have held for generations, and as she worked her way back to the bar, she said with delighted pleasure:

  “What lovely things you have here, Mr. O’Rafferty. It’s a pity the only reproduction hasn’t been better done. It can’t stand up to the others, can it—this chest, I mean?” The three at the bar suddenly froze. The chink of ice as Noel began mixing another drink sounded sharp and unfriendly, then Raff said with polite indulgence:

  “There are no reproductions at Slyne, Miss Ware. The stuff has been in the family for generations.”

  “Oh, but—” Judy was too much a stickler for accuracy to consider whether or not she was being tactless, “... you can see for yourself! Compare the linenfold pattern with the carving on the box chair—it’s been clumsily done. This chest must have been made quite recently.”

  “Then you must be wrong,” Raff replied with a slightly raised eyebrow. “I’ve bought no furniture since the place came into my possession. There’s been no need.”

  Judy felt the colour mounting under her skin. The other two were looking at her with curious expressions, and although Raff had spoken pleasantly enough, the way he turned back to the bar, dismissing the subject and her, made her feel that she had committed a breach of good manners. She cast another surreptitious look at the chest; it was a fake, and not a very good one at that

  “There’s another drink waiting for you,” Noel called to her, and when she shook her head in refusal said, with a hint of laughter in his voice, “Oh, come on, don’t be stuffy! Anyone can make a mistake.”

  Raff’s eye on the third “special” was disapproving, she thought but she was not going to let Noel Maule think she was sulking like a child.

  “Very well,” she said, resuming her seat on the high stool. “Thank you—and I didn’t make a mistake.”

  “Really, my dear, what can you possibly know about old furniture?” Marcia asked, and the smile she gave Raff implied all too plainly that the young thought it smart to air their knowledge.

  “I know a little. My father used to keep an antique shop, you see,” said Judy gently.

  There was another small silence, and she was aware that the two Maules exchanged significant glances and that Michael O’Rafferty stood looking down at her with a flash of amused interest “You seem to be an unusual young woman, Miss Ware,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather have gone into the antique business yourself than have taken a secretarial course which I would have presumed to be rather dull by comparison?”

  “Of course,” Judy replied with her wide, sudden smile, “but one has to live. Father had no business to leave to me, and you don’t get paid very much working in junk-shops. Thank you for my drinks. What time do you want to start after lunch, Mr. O’Rafferty?”

  She spoke casually, because she knew that for some reason or other the Maules were ganged up against her, but as Raff hesitated, she experienced a sudden doubt. She had insulted him about his furniture and he had an objection to red hair. Might he not already be regretting his invitation to show her the view from the Pass of Slyne?

  “About two-thirty,” he replied, then, aware of Marcia’s suddenly inquiring gaze, “There’s nothing to keep me here, is there, Marcia?”

  III

  Judy set out with her host after luncheon, still unsure of the effect of her company on him. He had been uncommunicative during the meal and the Maules, too, had been a little withdrawn, so that Judy, still young enough to be appalled by an unintentional gaffe, experienced shame at her unthinking outspokenness in the bar. It was a common enough thing, she knew, for impoverished landowners to sell their more valuable pieces and replace them with good reproductions, but Raff had denied that anything had been sold or bought, though the chest, a bad copy of a thirteenth-century Gothic, had certainly only been made in the last year or so. Well, it was none of her business, either way, but the small puzzle nagged and persisted until halfway round the lough road which led to the mountains she felt impelled to say:

  “Mr. O’Rafferty, that chest—I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have drawn attention to it, but I wasn’t wrong, you know. My father was particularly interested in linenfold carving and you can’t mistake the real thing.”

  He glanced down at her with a faint look of surprise. “What a persistent young woman you are,” he observed with slight impatience. “My father might have bought it for all I know.”

  “How long ago would that be?”

  “Well, the old man died ten years ago and since he lived for some seventy-five years before that, it might have been at any time,” he replied a little dryly.

  “Then it couldn’t have been him. That chest isn’t more than a couple of years old,” she said, and his brief laugh held a hint of exasperation which warned her that, for him, the subject was both tedious and unimportant “Well, what in hell does it matter?” he exclaimed. “All the stuff’s been moved around a lot since we turned the place into a guest house. I expect it was tucked away somewhere else and nobody noticed. Now, for heaven’s sake pay attention to the quaint Irish sights you were so anxious to behold or I’ll turn the car round and take you back.” She laughed a little apologetically, aware that she had been persistent almost to the point of impertinence. His explanation could be right, of course, and she herself could have been wrong as to the age of the chest. She gave herself up willingly to enjoyment of the landmarks he pointed out, asked innumerable excited questions and, when they entered the Pass of Slyne, fell silent from sheer wonder at the wild strangeness of the rocks which towered on either side with little streams gushing from the crevices where the roots of thorn and rowan still managed to thrive in the stony ground.

  “There’s your view, Miss Curiosity. That’s something to take back across the Channel, isn’t it?” he said, and she heard the ring of pride which he could not quite keep out of his voice and knew that he loved the place with a love that sprang from his very bones.

  “We are behind Slieve Rury now,” he said, speaking a little harshly. “You can just see Slyne the other side of the lough. When the fuschia is out there’s a wonderful splash of colour, it grows wild all over the place in this part of the world.”

  She turned to look at him, sensing that he was talking to
rid himself of unwelcome thoughts, and she knew instinctively that he had come here often with the girl who had died and that once again the colour of her own hair had disturbed him.

  “Mr. O’Rafferty,” she said, “you can find a reminder anywhere you choose to look for it. It shouldn’t upset you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My hair—it upsets you. It’s even made you dislike me.”

  “On the contrary, I think I could like you very much,” he answered, regarding her strangely.

  “Is that what you’re afraid of, then?”

  “Afraid!” He rubbed the bridge of his nose with the same irritable gesture she remembered from the night before and she thought he was about to snub her severely for trespassing on such short acquaintance, but he only smiled and said quite mildly:

  “What an unexpected girl you are! So they told you about Kathy, did they?”

  “Yes. You used to bring her here, usen’t you?”

  “Often. She never lost her sense of wonder. Each time was a fresh experience. You share that quality too with her, I think.”

  “Tell me about her,” she said. Up here, above the pass with the wind and the wild stretches of moorland and mountain isolating them from reality, it did not seem strange that she could venture on intimate matters after barely forty-eight hours’ acquaintance.

  “There’s little to tell,” he replied with equal lack of restraint “We were to have married, but she contracted polio—heaven knows how—and died. For her it was a mercy, perhaps. She couldn’t have borne to be crippled and I would have found it hard to see her so. When you are very young, Judy, you take so much for granted.”

  He spoke quite unemotionally, and probably had not even realised he had used her Christian name for the first time.

  “It was best and kindest for both of you,” Judy said conscious at the same time that the observation must sound banal. “And you mustn’t let the colour of my hair prejudice you in consequence. One doesn’t forget, but one remembers with increasing tolerance.”

  “You’re very wise, Miss Judy Ware,” he said. ‘Tell me more about yourself.”

  “Well,” she said, delighted, as always, to talk about a childhood which had been happy and was, clearly, still not very far behind her “as I told you, we had an antique shop—a little shop in one of the suburbs where there’s almond and cherry blossom in the spring, and fields and woods a bus ride away. We used to take a bus into the country every Sunday. It wasn’t like this, of course, but it was all we had to hand and we liked it.

  “We had a flat over the shop, very makeshift and inconvenient, and I kept house when I wasn’t at school. My mother, you see, died when I was quite small, so there were just the two of us. We never had much money because of my father’s impractical way of conducting his business, but it didn’t seem to matter, and he must have saved a little from the wreck when the business finally folded up, because there were a few hundred for me when he died and I used some of it on the secretarial course on the advice of our lawyer. Whether you’re plain or pretty, ambitious or the opposite, he said, you can’t fail to find a living of sorts with that behind you.”

  “And are you ambitious?” he inquired, but she shook her head sadly.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Of course, like everyone else I used to have dreams of grandeur—turning into a famous actress, writing a book that got banned—even stopping a runaway horse in Hyde Park and being given a medal; none of it at all practical, though.”

  He laughed again.

  “How absurd you are! But why did writing a book that got banned rank among your ambitions?”

  “I don’t really know. Because it sounded important and madly worldly, I expect—but I don’t suppose it would have done, really; if nobody was allowed to read it they’d simply think it was pornographic or something, wouldn’t they?”

  “Very possibly. So you settled for the typewriter being put to more prosaic use. Do you want me to give you a trial?”

  Her face became lit, for a moment, with an extraordinary transparency, so that he could clearly see the powdering of childish freckles on her skin, then her expression changed to graveness.

  “I think, Mr. O’Rafferty, you owe me that,” she said.

  “And apparently I owe it to Marcia, too,” he replied, his gravity suddenly matching hers. “I’ve evidently taken her routine duties too much for granted, and Slyne would come to a sorry pass as a guest house if she were to leave. She provides the grace the rest of us lack.”

  “Have they been with you long, the Maules?” she asked.

  “Noel a couple of years, Marcia a little less,” he replied.

  “And it was Mr. Maule’s idea to turn Slyne into a guest house?”

  “I suppose it was. Actually, I ran across him again in Dublin when he was just out of hospital and for old time’s sake invited him to Slyne to convalesce, since he didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. He’d no job, the place was going downhill, and the idea must have grown out of the combination of the two.”

  She looked up at him with a puzzled frown.

  “It sounds an awfully chancy beginning for a prosperous business,” she said, wondering how much capital between them the Maules had put into the venture, but his change of expression warned her that he was no longer prepared to talk on equal terms.

  “We can scarcely be called prosperous yet,” he retorted a little dryly. “We’d better be getting back, Miss Ware, if you’ve had your fill of our local beauty spot; and let me give you a word of warning. Don’t offer too many criticisms on the running of the business or the authenticity of the furniture alike. Marcia, for one, won’t take kindly to uninvited opinions.”

  On their return the motely pack of dogs rushed out of the house to greet them noisily. Raff admonished them mildly; they were not, he said, supposed to come into the house, so Marcia must evidently be out.

  “Doesn’t she like dogs?” Judy inquired, regaining her spirits at the indiscriminate canine welcome being showered upon her, but reflecting again that the beautiful Miss Maule appeared to have rather more authority than her position would warrant in ordering the affairs of the house.

  “They bring dirt in and annoy the lodgers,” he answered indirectly. “Are you by any chance sentimental over animals, Miss Ware?”

  “I’m not sentimental over anything,” she answered, detecting faint cynicism in the question, “but I like dogs.” She followed him into the house, but there was no one about and he suggested that she might care to check the office work which had accumulated in his study and see what she could make of it. She sorted through piles of bills and unanswered letters, glad of something familiar to do, but his lack of system appalled her. Accounts were certainly kept neatly and methodically in his own writing, but there were several discrepancies, items did not always tally with those in Noel’s ledgers, and bills which had been crossed off as paid by Raff had come in again with the latest batch for settlement. There seemed to be little co-operation between them, for though Raff’s paper work was orderly and clear enough, Noel’s was careless, the items often illegible, and he was either slipshod or just a bad mathematician when it came to adding up columns of figures.

  Raff watched her moodily as she worked, sucking at his pipe and answering her inquiries with slight irritability.

  “But don’t you really know what the outgoings are here?” she asked at last, feeling that she must be dealing with a child or a lunatic.

  “I know what Noel produces in the way of statements each month. I just sign the cheques,” he replied.

  “But don’t you check up together? You have some of these accounts already down as paid.”

  “Noel sometimes forgets to send them in, I imagine, or thinks I’ve done it. I haven’t much head for business, as you will doubtless have gathered. I leave the major part to him.”

  “Then he’s been rather careless,” Judy said with a prim expression that made him smile.

  “I can see,” he said wit
h a twinkling gravity, “that we did indeed need a secretary, despite my own reluctance. You seem very efficient, Miss Ware. I think you’ll keep us all in order.”

  She glanced up at him a little helplessly. Did he really think he could run a successful business in this haphazard fashion and treat his subordinates as if they were children to be humoured?

  You look disapproving,” he said, wondering vaguely what it was going to be like working day after day with a young woman whose green eyes presented an unconscious challenge and who, for all her tender years, appeared to have a better grasp of business than he himself.

  “I haven’t,” she said, “any experience of running a business, Mr. O’Rafferty, but books are books, and figures are figures. There are so many discrepancies.”

  “Very likely,” he answered indifferently, then slumped into a chair on the farther side of the desk and eyed her speculatively.

  “What,” he asked, “did you expect to find here, apart, of course, from a misconceived notion of Irish country life?”

  But he found then, as he was to find later, that, on duty, she was seldom to be lured into irrelevant digressions.

  “I came to do a job,” she countered briskly. “Now that we’ve got these accounts into some sort of order for further checking, I would suggest you dictate replies to some of these unanswered letters. You must be losing clients every day.”

  “Very well,” he replied, beginning to rub the bridge of his nose again with the remembered gesture of impatience. “But we can’t take them all.”

  “There are very few as it is, and every little helps,” she said severely, and he grinned.

  “True,” he said. “You and the Maules should get on.”

  “The Maules?”