Dancing in the Dark

Table of Contents

Cover

A Selection of Titles by Susan Moody

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

LOSING NICOLA *

DANCING IN THE DARK *

DOUBLED IN SPADES

DUMMY HAND

FALLING ANGEL

KING OF HEARTS

RETURN TO THE SECRET GARDEN

THE COLOUR OF HOPE

THE HOUR OF SEPARATION

TOUCHING THE SKY

* available from Severn House

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

First world edition published 2012

in Great Britain and in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2012 by Susan Moody.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Moody, Susan.

Dancing in the dark.

1. Vermont--Fiction. 2. Romantic suspense novels.

I. Title

823.9'14-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-232-0 (ePub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8149-6 (cased)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

H
e stood by the window, looking down at the girl in the wide-brimmed straw hat as she paced the perimeter of the garden. The planting was formal, geometric. In the explicit sunlight, the clipped hedges seemed almost black. If he were to push open the long glass doors and step out on to the narrow balcony, the air would be filled with the aggressive scent of box, and the sweet-smelling plants which crowded the beds. The fountain in the middle caught rainbows from the air. White wooden benches were set in the exact middle of each hedge, with white planters on either side of them, each containing a single white agapanthus. Sorrow occupied him. And apprehension. But not, perhaps surprisingly, guilt.

Guilt would have demeaned them both. Until this young woman who waited for him in the garden, he had never known doubt. His way had always been clear, a simple matter of setting one foot in front of the other until he reached his expected destination. He had always had just a single ambition. Now the purity of his purpose had changed. Now there were choices, and he was afraid. Damned if he did, and damned if he did not.

The woman seated herself on one of the white-painted benches at the far end of the garden. She took off her hat, and for a moment, the ribbon tied around its crown trailed over the shoulder of her pale dress before she lifted it free. To him, she seemed entirely beautiful.

Somewhere a bell tolled, sombre and coercive. She looked up at his window and their eyes met but neither of them smiled. He did not know if they had reached the end of one thing, or the beginning of another. He was not sure which he would rather it be. What he wanted, he admitted wryly to himself, was to have both the end and the beginning. But that was the one thing not allowed.

She bowed her head, and he saw the white part in her black, black hair. This is a moment trapped in time, he thought. A fly in amber, a bubble in ice. This may be all I shall have to hold on to for the rest of my life. Whatever we decide –
she
decides – I must remember this always: white flowers, green hedges, a woman walking, holding our future in her hands.

M
y mother went mad when I was eleven. I didn't tell anyone, of course. Even at that age, I knew enough to be aware that if I asked for help, they might split us up, put me in a home or her in an asylum. Who'd look after her then?

We were living in Rome at the time. It was Easter Monday and she'd gone to the Mass being celebrated at St Peter's. I usually went with her but that day I didn't because we'd been only the day before. She came back limping, her tights ripped, her face white, a large gash above one eye.

‘What on earth happened?' I demanded.

‘He pushed me,' she said, shuddering. ‘He tried to kill me.'

She was dragging our bags out from under the bed, and my heart sank.

‘You should go to the hospital,' I said. ‘You need at least three stitches in that cut.'

‘Off the pavement,' she said, as though I hadn't spoken. ‘Deliberately. Right into the traffic. Oh God, a car just missed me.' Her teeth were chattering. ‘Thank heavens you weren't with me.' Tears rolled down her face. ‘I always knew he would.'

‘Would what?' I was suspicious. This wasn't the first time she had spun some wild story about someone trying to kill her. ‘Do you even know?'

‘I saw him. I . . . recognized him.'

‘Are you sure it wasn't an accident? Maybe you just slipped or something.'

‘I didn't slip.' There was a tight white line round her mouth. Just looking at her made me feel ill. ‘We have to leave.' Pulling things out of the drawers, she began piling them into the suitcases. ‘We must get out of here right away.'

‘But
why
?' I could tell that this wasn't like our other departures.

‘Because,' she snapped. She snatched up the postcard of the Virgin of the Rocks, which she carried with her everywhere we went.

‘That's not an answer.'

‘It's all the answer you're getting,' she said. ‘You might be indiscreet and then what would happen?'

‘Indiscreet about
what
?'

‘Anything.'

‘So where are we going?'

‘Anywhere that's not here.'

I didn't want to leave. I liked Rome; I'd found Italian an easy language to master, which made me less of an oddball at school, and for once we'd been somewhere long enough for me to make a friend. ‘Can I at least say goodbye to Francesca?' I asked, and that's when I knew something terrible must have happened inside her head.

‘No!' she screamed. Running across the room, she pulled the limp curtains across the dirty panes, snap, snap. ‘You're not to leave the apartment, do you hear? Don't even look out of the window.' She was as tense as a guitar string; the tendons of her neck stood out like wings.

‘Why not?'

She didn't quite rock backwards and forwards making strange noises, but she kept plucking at the front of her blouse, the way crazy people do in films, and I could see white all round her eyes.

By late afternoon, we were on a train heading south out of Rome, she with her big battered suitcase full of tatty costumes, I with the few clothes that still fitted me, some books, and my father, wrapped in a blanket.

Before that, she'd always been eccentric, though I'd never minded about that. I'd grown used to the way she kept changing her name – Astarte, Jasmina, Yolanda, Lilith, names which had no connection to her staid English upbringing – but they were the sort of names you'd expect a dancer, an
artiste
, to use. She had other quirks too, like, when we went to Mass, she would insist on walking on the other side of the road, as though she and I were unattached. Or she'd tell me to meet her somewhere and then she wouldn't show up, and I'd know that if I looked around, I'd see her lurking in a doorway or hiding behind a parked car.

She hated crowds. She preferred canned food to fresh. Sometimes she kept the curtains closed all day long, saying the light was bad for her eyes. I was only allowed to call her Luna, never Mother or Mummy.

I was used to her bad days, too, when she would start weeping for no reason at all that I could see, and then I would have to hold her against my chest, or brush her long black hair, sometimes for an hour or more, until she was soothed. At other times, she was so bad-tempered and ugly that I would simply sit in a chair with a book until she got over whatever was bothering her, and would come to kneel at my feet, saying how sorry she was, what a terrible mother she was being. I always assured her that she wasn't, though sometimes I agreed with her.

I'd become accustomed to our poverty, and to the disorder with which she surrounded the two of us. I used to see it as something actually tangible, a savage animal sniffing at the windows, clawing at the door, trying to break in and gobble us up. In self-defence, I tried to maintain some control over our lives by hanging up the clothes she dropped on the floor, tidying the newspapers she left around or scrubbing down the hotplate on which we cooked.

It worried her. ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' she would say ruefully, ranging round whichever cramped quarters we were occupying at the time, scarves floating about her like pennants. ‘You should be grabbing at life, chewing it up and swallowing it down in gulps. Not plumping up cushions, folding newspapers,
dusting
.'

I didn't answer. There'd have been no point. Chewing up life, let alone swallowing it down in gulps, isn't really an option at the age of six, or eight, or ten.

‘You're such a good girl,' she said once. ‘Maybe you're a changeling. Maybe the fairies stole away my real daughter and left a middle-aged housewife in her place.'

Such remarks didn't upset me. Of course I was her real daughter. Put us together and our likeness to each other was as strong as a rope. But almost from birth, our roles had been reversed. I was the one who looked after things, who handled the day-to-day business of our peripatetic lives. It was I who dealt with landlords, or charmed shopkeepers into extending our credit. By the time I was six I'd learned to iron; at seven, I could fry chops, cook spaghetti sauce, make an omelette. I had never wished to be, but I was the one who held our chaotic world together.

In spite of that, we were happy. The only thing I couldn't stand was her restlessness. We didn't have any kind of social life, in the generally accepted sense of the phrase, because we were never in one place for long enough to get to know anyone. Occasionally we stayed put as long as a year, but mostly it seemed that no sooner had we settled somewhere than we were off again. Sometimes, I wanted to stay so badly I could almost taste it. I longed to put down roots and make friends and not be eccentric any more.

But that was OK. If she wanted to keep moving, I could handle it. People are weird, I knew that. I didn't like it, but I went along with it because I loved her. Because we were best friends. Because we were everything to each other.

After that time in Rome, she grew crazier and crazier. We never stayed anywhere longer than a few weeks, and everywhere we went, things happened to her. One night she started screaming and I woke up from my mattress on the floor to see her flapping at a spider which was crouched on her pillow.