The Silk Vendetta by Victoria Holt Page A

It is natural and right that this should be so. But for the time… we are together, eh? And while I am with you I will watch over you … and you will tell me when you are afraid. I know that in time you are going to be happy. I want you to have all your mother missed, She was thoughtlessly happy … too trusting. Well, that is in the past and this is the present, and we must live in that.”
    I woke up next morning with a terrible fear for a moment that I was in the mausoleum. Then the familiar objects in my room began to take shape. Grand’mere came to my bed.
    “You have had a good night’s sleep,” she said.
    “You’ve been here all the time.”
    “I was quite comfortable dozing in the chair. Now I am going to get you something nice and soothing. Some porridge, I think … a little bread and butter. Mrs. Dillon suggested the porridge. She said it was soothing. They are all very anxious to help. Clarkson is annoyed because Charles took the key without asking him for it.”
    I ate the breakfast and said I wanted to get up but Grand’mere thought I should rest for a while.
    “You were frozen to the marrow. I don’t want you catching a cold.”
    I felt limp and unreal and was not averse to agreeing to stay in bed. She brought me Jane Eyre to read. I had read it before but I had enjoyed it so much and always felt so sorry for Jane that it made me feel how fortunate I was.
    I told Grand’mere that she must not sit with me all day. It made me feel like an invalid, and if she were in the workroom, 1 knew that she was close.
    “You’ve had a big shock,” she said. “I feel that is more to be considered than the cold you endured in that place. You were there for three hours. Enough to chill anyone’s bones … but the fact of your being there was probably the worst. So now you will rest.”
    Cassie came to see me. She stood by my bed looking at me with a kind of wondering tenderness.
    “It’s all right, Cassie,” I said. “I’m not there now.”
    “I can’t tell you how I felt when I heard that you were there for three hours. I should have died.”
    “I thought I was going to die there.”
    “Your hair hasn’t changed a bit.” She was peering at me, “There’s no white … and it should show … your being so dark.”
    “I think I’m getting over it now … though I dreamed of it last night quite a lot and when I woke up I had a terrible feeling that I might still be there.”
    “I can imagine nothing more horrible.”
    “There are more horrible things.”
    “You are very brave, Lenore.”
    “You should have seen me shivering … thinking of all sorts of horrors … watching for the ghosts … I was far from brave.”
    “There has been a lot of trouble,” she said. “It has been terrible. Mama is most distressed. She is in her room with the curtains drawn and no one but Miss Logan is to go near her.”
    ”What happened then?”
    “Drake … and Charles … they fought. It was all about you. Drake got Charles on the ground and made him tell about locking you in the mausoleum. Charles said it was his affair and he was only teaching you a lesson. You needed to be taken down a peg or two because you gave yourself too many airs for a servant.
    ”Drake shouted at him and said he was a cad … and worse than that. He said he had sent that stable boy to get you in the place so that he could lock you in. Charles said he didn’t deny it and what business was it of Drake’s? Drake said it was every decent-minded person’s business and as he was so fond of giving lessons he was going to get one himself. We couldn’t believe it. They were quite different from what they are normally. Drake being bigger than Charles was able to pick him up as though he were a dog, and he just shook him. At the end he threw him into the lake. Julia was crying. I was near to it. I have never seen anything like it.”
    “What about Charles in the lake?”
    “He walked out. He wasn’t very far in but by that time Drake