Lord of the Far Island, Victoria Holt [world of reading TXT] 📗

be—and someone else wanted it. I wouldn't accept that.

You fool, said my practical self, you mean you don't want to accept it. You won't face facts. If you were out of the way it would be his.

But he loves me. He has asked me to marry him.

Yes, and you want to. You want to so much that you deliberately shut your eyes to the truth.

If he married me, he would have a share in the Island.

If you died, it would be entirely his.

It's nonsense, I thought. Just because I went out in a boat. . .

Then I pictured Slack's face, his eyes bewildered and anxious. Slack knew more than he would admit and this was his way of warning me.

I could not get Silva out of my mind. Was her story in some way connected with mine? What had happened to her? If she were only here and could tell me!

I went to that room on the ground floor which led from the hall and which my mother had used and in which I had found her sketchbook. There was a certain comfort in sitting on the old settle and thinking about my mother, who had run away, taking me with her—and thinking of Silva too.

How unhappy Silva must have been when she took the boat out! Was it really a gesture, as the threat to throw herself from the castle walls had been? It was frustrated love. I gathered that much from the notebooks. For the first time in her life she was loved ... or deceived into thinking she was.

Could it have been that someone had pretended to be in love with her . . . perhaps because she was her father's daughter ... his eldest daughter, who it was thought would inherit the Island; and had that someone discovered that my father doubted whether she was his daughter and had left the Island to someone else . . . myself?

Jago's face rose before me, intense, passionate, those heavy-lidded eyes which were not always easy to understand. He fascinated me and excited me; I wanted to be with him, to learn the truth about him—no matter how dangerous that might prove to be. I had always been adventurous and never one to take the safe road; and now it was as though Jago was beckoning me to go to him, to discover how far my suspicions were rooted in truth, to find the vital answer to the question: Does he want me or the Island? The answer to that might be that he wanted us both, which I knew he would freely admit. The real question was: Did he want to be the sole possessor of the Island? What did I really know of Jago except the overwhelming truth that he was exciting to know!

I almost wished Slack had not found the boat. How much more comfortable it would have been if I had dismissed the idea that I had seen grains of sugar and there had not been the evidence of that drilled hole.

Don't be a fool, I admonished myself. What's the good of being in love and finding life exciting if someone is planning to remove you from it?

As I deliberately refused to think of Jago as the one who had drilled that hole in the boat, hoping that I would not return, my thoughts went to Michael Hydrock, who had been so kind to me and seemed to enjoy my company so much. What if Michael had been the one with whom Silva had fallen in love? Then I thought of Jenifry and Gwennol, who had shown so clearly that my friendship with Michael did not please them.

Gwennol was a passionate girl. She would love fiercely and hate in the same way. They had the Devil in them, this branch of the Kellaway family—Jago's branch. That was how the legend went. Jago might want the Island but Gwennol wanted Michael Hydrock.

It was all too mysterious and complicated—but I could not rid myself of the thought that I was in danger.

If only my mother had talked to me! If only I had come to the Island earlier, I might have met Silva.

I pictured my mother here in this room, going to the cupboard, taking out her painting materials and then going out to paint a scene of the castle or the Island, or perhaps to do a portrait. Where had she seen the dream room? That was yet another mystery.

And as I sat there brooding I heard a sound and such was the state to which I had reduced myself that immediately a cold shiver ran down my spine. I stared at the door, which was slowly pushed open. I don't know what I was expecting. My fear was due to my conviction that someone was planning to murder me, I supposed, and was therefore understandable. But it was only Slack standing there.

"Oh, it be you, Miss Ellen," he whispered. "I did wonder. I knew someone was here like. It be a good spot to be when there's trouble about."

"What an odd thing to say. What do you mean by that, Slack?"

"Oh, just that it be good to be in this room like."

"What's so special about this room?"

"Miss Silva, her did come here. Her'd come and sit on that there settle, just as you be sitting now. I could shut me eyes and it would be like you was Miss Silva sitting there."

"How did you know she came here?"

"Me eyes did tell me so."

"My mother used to come here too. It seems that it's a sort of refuge."

"What be that, Miss Ellen?"

"A place you come to when you're pondering about something, when you're not quite sure what you ought to do."

"Aye," he said. "It be such a place. . . ." He paused and wrinkled his brow. It was as though he wanted to tell me something and did not know how to express it.

"Yes, Slack," I prompted.

"You be watchful, won't 'ee?"

"You've said that before, Slack."

"Aye,