The Colour Of Midnight

‘Oh, I won’t disturb him then.’

Ruth liked talking on the telephone, but eventually Minerva said, ‘Ruth, I have to go. This is costing me a packet!’

‘Surely Nick will—’

Minerva said firmly, ‘I’m paying for it.’

‘All right, then, I’ll see you when we get home, darling. Don’t hurry back to Auckland, though, if you’re having fun at Spanish Castle.’

Fun! Oh, Ruth, if you only knew, Minerva thought as she hung up.

On her way to bed, Minerva hesitated. Should she just go up, or beard the lion in his den and say goodnight? Bearding the lion seemed more polite. He might growl at her interruption, but Ruth would be proud of her manners.

He didn’t growl, or show any claws. Reading the contents of a file, he was standing across the room by a bank of cabinets. Even after he looked up it took a moment for him to register that she was there. ‘Yes?’ he said curtly.

‘I’m on my way to bed.’ A yawn brought her hand up over her mouth. ‘What time do you eat breakfast?’

‘Seven o’clock, but don’t worry about getting up, I can make my own. Goodnight. And thank you very much for stepping into the breach like this.’ His face was expressionless, his voice cool and distant.

‘Families are wonderful institutions,’ she returned flippantly. ‘Goodnight.’

The rain had stopped during dinner, and with a lightning change of mood the weather had gone from dank to fine. Up in her room, Minerva got into her pyjamas then sat on the bed, listening to the quietness flow in through the windows and through the big house. Nothing stirred; there was no sound of traffic, no breath of wind, nothing but peace and a cool, dark, moonless tranquillity.

Stella had loved parties and dances and dinners, people and motion and music; how had she felt about this all-pervading silence?

Yawning, Minerva got into bed and stretched out luxuriously across the queensized innersprung mattress.

She was almost asleep when she heard Nick come along the passage past her door. For a moment she thought he had stopped outside her room, but no, of course he’d gone into the room next door. It gave her the oddest sensation. The walls were too thick for her to hear more than the occasional noise of movement, but she could imagine him stripping off and getting into bed, and her wayward brain didn’t want to stop there.

Well, why not? she thought, trying to make light of it. Nick Peveril was definitely fantasy material, if you could put up with the icy remoteness.

Later, waking up from a confused dream, she realised she’d seen nothing of Stella in the grand old house, no photograph in the morning-room, nothing to say she had lived there. It seemed that, as far as Spanish Castle was concerned, her stepsister had simply never existed.

CHAPTER THREE

IN THE morning Minerva woke to a terrifying sense of dislocation. For a moment she lay staring at the ornately pleated silk of the tester above her, until she remembered where she was.

Reluctantly, she got out of the comfortable bed and pulled back the curtains, to gaze disbelievingly at a day as glowing and peerless as anything summer itself could produce.

Spiders’ webs looped crystal netting along the wire fence; she looked beyond gardens and trees and thickly wooded paddocks to darkly brooding bush. A blazing silver arc across the eastern horizon indicated the distant sea.

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