The Body on the Beach (The Weymouth Trilogy) (29 page)

Giles was staring at her wildly.

‘But I need your love, Kitty. You cannot take it from me just like that – you cannot
take it from me and
give it to him instead
. I will not let you
.
I will not let you love him.
You are my wife.
You owe it all to me.’

Giles was silent for a second
, awaiting an answer that did not come
. Then he looked down at his gun. Kathryn could tell what he was thinking.

‘Aye – point that gun at me, Giles Miller,’ she said. ‘Stretch out your arm, take your aim and fire it. I care not any more. Shoot me if you wish to.
Shoot me, Giles, and take my life.
There is nothing more of me for you to take.’

He looked up at her desperately for one last time.

‘
So that is it, is it? You will not renounce him. You have taken your love away from me and given it to him. You will not give it back?
You will not love me ever again?
Then
I
’
m sorry, Kitty,’ h
e said at last. ‘I’m
so very, very sorry.
I cannot let
t
hat
happen.
If
I
cannot have your love then no
-one
can
have it
.
’

And then, very slowly and ve
ry deliberately, he took the pistol
into his hand
. Andrew leapt forward to snatch it from him but he was a second too late.
In the moment it took him to cross
to the table
from the fire Giles had
rais
ed the pistol
, aimed it
at her
, pulled the trigger
and shot her
point blank
in the neck.

For a few long moments Giles just stared at the crumpled figure before him. Andrew and Sally stared at it too. Tom, hearing the shot from the garden, rushed inside and, seeing the body, gave out a monstrous wail of distress. Andrew’s tiger, hanging about at the front door, found his way into the garden and gaped at what he saw through the open kitchen door.

For several
seconds
Andrew felt totally unaware of anything. The shock had numbed him.
His ears were still ringing from the deafening blast. His breath was coming in great gulps, tainted by the plume of acrid smoke that still drifted about the table, suspended in time. Yes, the shock had numbed him, b
ut it did not numb him for long. A few seconds more and then reality hit him. Perhaps he should have felt hatred for the quivering wreck of a man that cowered next to the body on the floor, perhaps he should have felt horror at what he had just that minute witnessed. Certainly nobody could have blamed him had he done so. But he felt none of these things. Just one sensation was foremost in his mind. One sensation overpowered all of the others. This was simply an overwhelming feeling of despair - a despair that the love of his life, a love that he knew could never be equalled, had in that one moment of utter madness been taken
away
from him for ever.

Giles got up and looked wildly about him. Nobody was taking any notice of him – they were all too shocked
,
too absorbed
in trying to take in and
understand what had just
been enacted
in front of them. He went over to the kitchen door and walked out through it, heading off towards the clifftops. Tom made as if to stop him. Andrew shook his head.
No.
Let him go.

A few moments more and
Andrew found himself
quivering uncontrollably.
Kathryn was lying in a great pool of blood on the floor. The blast had knocked her off her chair and ont
o the hard flagstones beneath. Shivering
, and whimpering co
mp
ulsively
, h
e went and crouched at her side, holding her head to his chest
,
rocking her gently
, despairingly
, mindless of the blood. But then, suddenly, t
hr
ough all his grief and anguish
, he heard
her give
a faint
and feeble
moan.

In a moment he was up.

‘Quickly, quickly – she is not yet dead,’ he shouted, desperately trying to pull her from the floor. ‘Tom – help me to get her onto the table. We must find some way of stemming the blood.’

Tom leapt forward and assisted Andrew in getting Kathryn onto the table, while Sally tore at the towels which were hanging up by the side of the fire. They eased Kathryn’s gown away from her neck. The bullet had ended up in the muscle of her shoulder, which was bleeding profusely. There was another great gas
h in the back of her head, which must have been
sustained in her sudden crash onto the flagstone floor. Andrew took the strips of towel and pressed them gently over the areas that were bleeding. He was still shivering but as he gazed down
fearfully
at her his hopes were lifted yet again to hear another little moan and see her eyelids flicker just a fraction.

‘Tom – Tom, we need to get a surgeon. Go into Weymouth and fetch one. Get Jack to drive you in the curricle.’

Tom nodded and left immediately with Andrew’s tiger. Andrew looked down at Kathryn’s wounds once again.

‘I think the bleeding is slowing just a little, Sally,’ he said, not perfectly convinced. ‘Do you think?’

Sally nodded, although she was no better a judge than Andrew was himself. Nevertheless, by the time the surgeon arrived almost an hour later Andrew had managed to
stem the blood and
carry Kathryn into her bedroom and place her tenderly in her bed. He was sitting on it himself, holding her hand
as if he would never let it go, staring down at her, oblivious to anything else in the room.

The surgeon having advised him to leave whilst he went about his gruesome task, Andrew went down to the kitchen, where Sally was bustling around,
sorting things out
. She had cleaned the kitchen as best she could, though an ominous great shadow remained on the floor, and when she saw Andrew she stripped him of his bloodied shirt and threw it at once into the fire. Andrew went out into the yard and cleaned himself under the pump. By the time he got back, towelling himself vigorously, Sally had found an old shirt of Tom’s – neither of them wanted to h
ave anything to do with any
thing
of Giles’ – and she slipped it over his head and onto his broad chest as she would have done
for
a baby.

The day had turned cold and gloomy. Spots of sleet spattered
on
the window. The surgeon
was not hopeful.
The wounds were
severe
. Either one
of them
could kill her.
He
thought
it unlikely that
Kathryn
would
survive the night. Indeed, had Giles not been so drunk
, and so hurried by Andrew’s intervention,
that his shot had been marginally off target she would not
have
be
en
with them even then. He advised them to prepare for the worst. But Andrew knew otherwise. He loved this woman, loved her with a passion that gnawed at his very soul. He knew that she
could not die just yet. He knew that she
was destined
to survive
for him
.

Andrew spent all afternoon and all that night at the bedside, staring down at her
white face
, trying to sense her spirit in the darkness, continually searching for some sign that she was pulling through
, that the danger had passed
. It was a stormy night. The wind and driving rain battered the house relentlessly from the east. For hour upon hour he listened as it lashed the building, screaming round the corners, drumming on the panes. But at first light the next morning the wind abated and the rain drifted away. Andrew got up, stretched his weary body, and kissed her on the forehead. He put on his coat and made his way downstairs and
out
through the kitchen into the cold greyness that was the dawn of a new day.

It was then that Andrew spied the body on the beach. He had taken the track past the cottages down the hill to Preston
cove
, there to feel his spirits soothed by the rhythmic lapping of the now quietened waves. It was as he stood at the head of the rocks, staring out to sea, that he suddenly spotted it only a very few yards away from him. The mass of seagulls, mewing excitedly overhead, drew his attention to it. He could see in an instant that it was Giles. He slipped cautiously down the rocks to take a closer look. It looked as though Giles had either fallen or jumped off the clifftop and then drowned in the angry sea. Andrew gazed down unfeelingly at the pitiful sight, cold and grey in the half light. And then, turning to clamber back up the rocks, he returned to Sandsford, there to renew his vigil until he should
finally
know her fate.

The late August sunshine was streaming through the crack between Kathryn’s curtains as she lay comfortably in her bed
in the best chamber that Belvoir House had to offer, luxuriating in the coolness of a gentle, early morning breeze. She was thanking God, not for the first time, that young Miss Brewer had finally lost patience with her errant lover and told him in no uncertain terms that he should take himself elsewhere. Maybe she had divined that there would always be a third party in her marriage. Maybe it had been the irresistible attractions of another, much more enticing partner in the shape of a particularly devastating Privateer, with silver ear-rings, dark, seductive eyes and plenty of prize money and ad
venture.
Or perhaps – and, sorry to say, the most likely - she had finally learned from her papa that Andrew’s fortune, tied up as it was for several long years to come, would be quite insufficient to support her in the glamorous and exciting lifestyle that she had always had in mind for herself – that there would be no smart town house in London, no expensive round of visits and entertainment to satisfy her vanity and lust for excitement, no investing in innumerable new gowns and jewellery to show off to her friends
. What ever the reason, call
off
the wedding
she had, and the day upon which Andrew had raced up to the apartment at the rear of Maiden Street with the news of his unexpected freedom had been the happiest day of Kathryn’s life so far.

Andrew had joined her in her bed as usual and was holding her as closely as he could, kissing the scar and crinkled burn mark that decorated her shoulder, thanking God in his turn, as he did every day, that Kathryn had been spared and given to him for all time. Sometimes they talked – trivial things, things that would be of no interest at all to anyone else, but which delighted the two of them in their shared understanding of each other. Sometimes they were quiet, communing solely through their touch, each telling the other that they were by far the most cherished,
by far
the most revered,
by far
the most important individual in the whole of the rest of the world.

‘Out of all the hours in the day it is at these times, early in the morning, when we share a bed together, that I am always at my happiest,’ he was telling her, between his kisses. ‘You always give me such hope, such optimism, such enthusiasm to face the new day.’

On her part Kathryn was feeling just a tiny bit queasy. She knew that feeling. She had felt it in the mornings several years before.

‘It is mine as well,’ she told him. ‘I could happily lie here all morning with you, just feeling at one with you, loving you from the bottom of my heart. When we are together like this I can want for nothing more. I just feel so complete, so at peace....So in some ways it’s a pity that we shall not have many more times together like this, communing so deeply, on our own.’

Andrew scrabbled onto his elbow to take a look down at her.

‘What ever do you mean?’ he asked her.

She rolled over to look at him. She looked into his anxious blue eyes, smiling.

‘Well, it is early days, to be sure, and I may yet be mistaken,’ she told him. ‘But I have felt a little sickly this past few mornings and I seem to think that we may shortly be obliged to share our morning indulgence with a new, small member of the household. I know it shall be a sacrifice, but I half thought you may be just a tiny bit pleased as well.’

‘Pleased?’ In a split second Andrew’s face revealed all those emotions that a gentleman can be presumed to feel on first learning that he can expect to become a papa – shock, surprise, incomprehension - and then the most perfect and utter delight that ever a person can feel. ‘Pleased? Oh Kathy, oh
lieveling
–
oh
my darling - I should say that I am pleased! I had thought that my life could get no happier than it is just now. I have been so much blessed already. But now – to become a papa – to - oh, glory, I know not what to say.’