The Silver Dragon (5 page)

They walked until they came to a wall with a door in it, which took them out on the headland above a
steep flight of steps cut from the rock and dropping directly down into the sea. They were outside the bay and there seemed no point in their being there except as an extra landing place
w
hen it was impossible to take a boat in between the headlands to the shelter of the bay itself.

John looked down at Adele and she felt guilty and distressed as she shook her head.

“I thought it might have rung a bell,” he said, closing the door behind them. “But no matter. We can try again.”

Once more he had been disappointed, and she felt as if she had failed him in some personal way.

“Do you think the launch has been here before?” she asked unsteadily as they made their way back through the garden.

“Undoubtedly. That was an expert job.” His brown eyes narrowed as he scanned the windows at the rear of the villa. “I’m convinced it has been in and out of the bay many times.”

To their surprise they came around the end of the house to find a small dark woman in her middle forties coming toward them along the driveway. She had evidently been inspecting John’s car and she blinked at them shortsightedly in the bright sunshine. The unrelieved black dress she wore and the heavy marketing basket over her arm suggested that she might be some sort of domestic servant.

“I am the caretaker,” she informed them when John looked at her inquiringly in his turn. “I come to look after everything for my sister. She is in the hospital at Nice,” she added importantly. “She break her leg. I take care of Mr. Cabot till she well enough to come.”

The name electrified them both. John took Adele’s hand and drew her forward.

“This is Miss Cabot,” he said. “We’ve just arrived from Switzerland—rather unexpectedly.”

The woman shaded her eyes with her hand, staring at Adele.

“
Madame
Cabot, surely?” she suggested. “I have hear my sister speak of Monsieur Cabot’s wife, but never of a sister.
N
’
importe
,”
she added with a philosophic shrug. “I could be mistaken, to be sure!”

Adele felt petrified. There was no ring on her finger, but suddenly she was remembering the wedding ring in the green morocco jewel case. It seemed now that she should have been wearing it.

Turning to John, she found him looking decidedly nonplussed. She had not mentioned that disturbing ring to him. When she had discovered the scrap of paper with the address on it, the ring had seemed comparatively unimportant, although the thought of it had troubled her once or twice since. She told him about it now.

The caretaker had moved away to open the side door of the villa and suddenly Adele felt trapped. She drew back out of the shadow of the house.

“I
...
can’t go in,” she said breathlessly.

“Why not?” John put a compelling hand under her elbow. “This is what we have been looking for. Apparently you do belong.”

His voice had been quietly insistent, but there was a new hardness in it that distressed her. Did he think that she had deliberately deceived him about the ring?

He led her into the green twilight of the shuttered house, while the stout little Frenchwoman bustled off in the direction of the rear premises to rid herself of her basket and coat.

“It’s fantastic!” Adele pushed open the nearest door. “I just can’t believe it.”

“You’ve got to accept it for the present,” he told her, “without the details. We can’t very well question a servant about something we ought to know. In any case, she’s only a locum. We might have made a few judicious inquiries if it had been her sister, but we would only further confuse the old dear if we started explaining the situation to her now.”

He took a quick turn around the lavishly furnished room, opening one of the windows that led directly onto the terrace.

“It seems as if you’ve come home,” he said. “All we have to do now is get you settled in and wait for
...
your husband to turn up.”

She caught her breath. His back was toward her and she could not see his expression, but she imagined his mouth to be tightly set. Her own heart was seething with a tumult of emotion. The announcement of her marriage had meant nothing to her at first, but soon she would be meeting a stranger who would be her husband.

Swiftly she pressed the back of her clenched hand against her lips, as if to stifle the cry of protest which rose to them.

“I can’t believe it,” she repeated. “It all means nothing to me.”

John came to stand beside her, taking her hand. They could hear the caretaker opening up the rest of the house.

“This can’t be goodbye,” he said gruffly. “I can’t leave you here alone like this.”

She turned from him.

“You must go,” she told him in a frozen voice. “There’s no need for you to get any further involved.”

“I am involved.” He scratched his head ruefully. “Right up to the neck!” His smile was a little wry. “You don’t really expect me to go, do you?” he amended. “I’ve always made it clear that your case is of absorbing interest to me, and I promised the professor a detailed report.”

She smiled, thinking how genuine he was and how kind.

“I think you ought to stay here,” he said, “now that we’ve established your identity.” He lit a cigarette, but almost immediately crushed it into an ashtray on the table between the two long windows. “I’ll get back to Nice and settle things at the hotel. You’ll want your suitcase.” He moved toward the open window, anxious to leave now. “I’ll bring it back as quickly as I can,” he promised. “I’d like to get in touch with the professor, though, and you don’t have a phone out here. I’ll call the clinic from the hotel.”

“Will you ... come back for some lunch?” It seemed strange to be inviting him to share a meal with her in a house she did not recognize.

He shook his head, glancing at his watch.

“I’d better have something at the hotel,” he decided. “It’s eleven o’clock now. By the time I get to Nice it will be almost twelve.”

Watching as he drove away, she felt a ridiculous sense of betrayal. She was alone, but she was quite sure that he would come back, if only to deliver her suitcase.

Restlessly she made a complete circuit of the villa. There were six bedrooms leading off the wide hall, which ran along the head of the magnificent staircase, each one meticulously tidy and coldly impersonal, so that she did not stop to wonder which was her own.

On the ground floor there were three large reception rooms, a wide marble-pillared hall and the kitchens at the back of the house. The kitchen windows were the only ones overlooking the garden. All the other windows faced south across the bay toward the distant blue gleam of the Mediterranean.

Coming back to the kitchens, she looked in at the open door, attracted by the savory smell of coffee and herbs. The dark-eyed little caretaker was preparing a meal.

“I wonder if I should remember your name?” she asked with an apologetic smile.

“Maria,” the little woman supplied cheerfully, wiping her hands on the large coarse apron she wore to protect the black dress. “Annette’s sister,” she added, as if she thought it might be necessary to repeat her former statement to someone who apparently forgot so easily.

“You speak very good English, Maria,” Adele remarked. “Have you lived in England?”

“For seven years,” Maria told her proudly. “Before I married I live with an English lady in Manchester. I cook for her,” she added by way of further explanation.

“I see.”

There were so many other questions she wanted to ask, Adele thought, but she had to decide against the impulse, contenting herself with an inquiry about the absent Annette instead.

“She will be in hospital for three
...
maybe four weeks,” Maria told her quite cheerfully. “You want me to come and cook for you instead
...
yes?” she asked, answering her own question.

“I think that might be an excellent idea, Maria,” Adele found herself saying.

Suddenly she wanted to laugh, a little hysterically, it was true. Here she was engaging staff without any knowledge of what the master of the house might say, without even knowing the sort of person he liked to have serve him. Without even knowing what he himself was like.

Confused and nervous, she began to count the hours until John’s return, but the entire afternoon slipped past without any sign of an approaching car. She walked down to the bay and across the crunchy white pebbles to the water’s edge, climbing back up the tortuous path to the terrace edge where she had stood with the doctor that morning watching a white launch retreating toward the open sea.

The garden seemed the most deserted place she had ever walked in, but she spent an hour there, waiting and listening with a steadily mounting sense of impending disaster.

What had happened to John? What
could
have happened to him? How isolated, how deserted a house could feel without a telephone! Why was Les Rochers Blanches cut off from its neighbors in such a way?

Desperately she sought the shelter of the kitchens and Maria’s tuneless singing. The lunch Maria had prepared for her had been excellent and now she produced a well-made pot of tea and some crisp, newly baked cakes, setting the tray down before the wood fire she had lighted in the smaller of the two sitting rooms.

It was a man’s room, Adele decided, looking around with a new curiosity. Deep rawhide chairs surrounded the open hearth, chosen more for comfort than elegance, and there was a large square desk between the two long windows and books lining most of the space on the other two walls. The desk was unado
rned
save for a silver lamp topped by an austere red shade and a curious-looking table lighter that had claimed her attention as soon as she had entered the room.

It was fashioned in the shape of a dragon. The idea had obviously sprung from the horn of an animal of the gazelle family. It formed the body and long tapering tail. The dragon’s head, wings and feet had been fashioned in silver by some expert craftsman. The flame from a lighted wick sprouted from the monster’s mouth when lighted. A small silver snuffer was attached to the body by a slender chain.

The ornament fascinated her. When she had finished her tea she crossed to the desk and stood with the dragon in her hands, examining it carefully in the fading light. Surely an unusual sort of thing like this should knock at the door of memory, she thought, feeling all the old uncertainty flooding over her again.
Surely, somewhere, there mu
s
t be some point of contact.

Then, quite distinctly, she was aware of being watched. With her back turned to the windows, she felt the flesh prick along her spine, and small beads of moisture gathered on her upper lip. It was not John. There had been no sound of a car.

Pale and shaken, she wheeled around to confront the man standing just outside the windows in the gathering dusk.

Silhouetted against the pale wash of the Mediterranean sky and the distant headland, he looked abnormally tall. His long loose-limbed body and thin bronzed face with its keenly searching blue eyes was typically British, but that, she found, was the only reassuring thing about him.

Slowly he pushed back the window and stepped into the room, and automatically she backed away from him until she reached the door. With a gesture that was almost defiant, she switched on the central lights.

“Good evening!” His smile was suavely assured as he advanced into the room and drew up under the crystal chandelier where she could see him to the greatest advantage. “I trust you are making yourself comfortable?”

Adele’s heart began to pound hard against her ribs. In that split second she imagined she had seen him somewhere before—a photograph, perhaps, in a newspaper?

“Who are you?” she demanded almost hysterically as he extracted a cigarette from a thin gold case that he had taken from the inside pocket of his traveling coat.

His smile was frankly sardonic when he answered her.

“Dixon Cabot, traveler and author, at your service,” he informed her.

He picked up the table lighter and she heard the hard
metallic click of the flint before the flame sprang from between the dragon’s jaws. He bent his dark head to light the cigarette, and when he straightened she had the disconcerting impression that he had been aware of her every movement, almost her every thought. His eyes reflected the orange flame from the silver dragon as he added, “I can see that it means nothing to you, even though you happen to bear my name.”

Adele drew back. Her hands pressed against the hard paneling of the door, she could only stare at him speechlessly while her heart pounded on slowly and heavily in the stillness.

“You mean
...
?”

Eyes as blue as tempered steel met hers, although his smile still held a hint of mockery.

“I have seen Maria,” he said, walking to the cabinet at the far side of the room. “She was good enough to inform me that
‘
madame
’
had returned.”

With his back still toward her he proceeded to pour two drinks.

“If I am married to you, I
...
don’t remember,” Adele blurted out. “I’ve had an accident—climbing in the Swiss Alps.” Desperately she tried to explain the situation to his unresponsive back view, but he gave her no help. “There was an avalanche and I was hurt. The past has gone. I don’t ... I can’t remember anything that happened before I went to Bourg-St. Pierre.” When he turned with the two glasses in his hands, he looked frankly incredulous.

“Your ... adventure in the Alps can hardly complicate the situation any further,” he assured her. “As I see it,” he added with slow deliberation, “our alliance remains the same.”

He handed her one glass, raising his own while he continued to watch her warily.

“To our complete indifference!” he toasted her. “To
the marriage that you can’t remember and to our separate ways!”

“I’ve got to make you understand,” Adele cried. “This is amnesia—hysterical amnesia, I think it’s called. They didn’t exactly say so at the clinic, but I heard John talking to the professor. John Ordley,” she added when the black brows shot up in swift interrogation. “He’s a doctor. He was at the clinic where they took me after my accident. He’s English.” Suddenly her voice sounded flat. “He brought me here and he was to come back with my suitcase, but he hasn’t come.” She looked up at him, biting nervously at her lip. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she accused. “You don’t believe a single word I’ve said!”

He was like steel. Nothing could penetrate his cold reserve, she thought, gazing back into the vividly blue eyes that revealed nothing but a cynical incredulity.

“Perhaps we’d better wait for your doctor friend to turn up,” he suggested in answer to her challenge. “He might be able to explain the
...
amnesia.”

She could not tear her eyes away from his dark face. There was anger in it now, restrained, but none the less disconcerting for being held in check. If they were indeed married, she decided, something terrible had come between them, driving them irretrievably apart. Beneath the suave exterior she fancied that she could detect a desire for retaliation and knew herself completely vulnerable. Alone and unable to remember one single thing about her life until now, how could she cross swords with this man? She could not even appeal to him for understanding, because what she saw in these steady blue eyes was surely contempt.

“I can’t hope to convince you,” she told him with a dignity that appeared to surprise him. “I can only wait till Dr. Ordley returns from Nice with my suitcase.”

He put down his empty glass.

“So,” he mused, “you did intend to move in? You must forgive me if I find the situation slightly amusing
.
”

His laughter angered her almost as much as the contempt, and she turned hastily toward the door.

“There’s no need for me to stay,” she cried. “I can easily walk back as far as Villefranche
...
”

He stepped between her and escape.

“I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” he said mildly. “Since you have come—of your own free will—I feel that you ought to stay. Besides, your doctor friend intrigues me. I would be more than sorry to miss his explanation of the amnesia. Surely you owe me that at least?”

Wearily she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, her eyes closed tightly in an effort at concentration.

“I can’t tell you any more,” she said. “I can’t tell you a thing about myself before this accident.”

He made no attempt to help her. Instead, he held the door open, waiting for her to precede him out of the room.

“This must be your doctor now,” he suggested as a car approached along the driveway. “We must certainly welcome him.”

John was already out of the car when they appeared together at the front door. Dixon Cabot did not give her an opportunity to speak to him alone. It was almost as if he suspected them of some deep intrigue, some plot that he hoped to nip in the bud now that he had returned to the villa so unexpectedly. He might even consider them lovers, she thought desperately, which would be reason enough for his show of anger a moment ago.

John looked completely disconcerted as he stood there in the pool of yellow light from the door lantern with her suitcase in his hand.

“Do come in,” Dixon Cabot invited. “Mediterranean nights can be extremely chilly at this time of year once the sun has gone down.” He stepped back into the hall. “I don’t think we’ve met before; Dr.—Ordley, isn’t it?”

John put down the suitcase just inside the door. He gave Adele a swift searching scrutiny, which said a good deal before he turned to the older man.

“You must be wondering about this setup,” he acknowledged, “but we did try to get in touch with you from the clinic where ... your wife was taken after her accident. The fact that you don’t have a phone here didn’t exactly help,” he pointed out, so aggressively that Adele knew he would have got in touch with her earlier in the afternoon if it had been at all possible.

“The telephone is about the last thing I want,” Dixon Cabot assured him, removing his heavy coat before he led the way back into the room, which Adele now knew must be his study. “I work here, Dr. Ordley, and I find it convenient not to be disturbed. In London one has to tolerate such things in the interests of business and social contacts. Here, I prefer to hold on to my privacy at all costs.”

“I don’t think I blame you,” John said, “but it can have its awkward side, can’t it? If
...
Mrs. Cabot had been seriously injured a week ago a quick telephone message might have made all the difference to you.”

Dixon Cabot chose to ignore that. He had turned to the cocktail cabinet and his back was toward them, but Adele realized that he could still see them. The cabinet was lined with mirror glass and their slightest movement would be recorded in it quite clearly.

John moved uneasily to stand before the fire. He had not expected to meet her husband so soon. Probably he had not expected to meet him at all, but Adele felt that she needed him at that moment more, surely, than she had ever needed anyone in all her life before.

“I’ve been trying to explain about my accident,
John,” she said as he accepted the drink that his host held out to him. “I found it difficult, since I can remember so little
...
”

She hesitated, aware of Dixon Cabot’s eyes steadily on her, unmistakably watchful. Of course he suspected her of trying to drop a hint to John, of attempting to convey the drift of their former conversation to him in the only way possible. It was maddening, especially as she could not challenge him outright.

“Of course,” John agreed, swallowing more than half his drink at one gulp, “that’s
my
job, isn’t it?” He looked at Dixon Cabot, his eyes suddenly narrowed in dislike. “Perhaps you don’t quite understand the true position,” he suggested stiffly. “Your wife is suffering from a form of hysterical amnesia that, at the present moment, we can do nothing about.”

The older man motioned
him
to one of the big cream leather chairs. Adele had already sunk into the chair near his desk because her legs had suddenly felt too weak to support her, and the pulses at her temples were beginning to throb. She rested her chin in her hand and looked at John with an odd helplessness in her eyes.

“So I hear.” Dixon Cabot remained standing. “Do you think you can explain ‘hysterical amnesia’ to me, doctor, in nonmedical terms? Preferably in words of one syllable,” he added with a crooked smile, “since I have quite a lot of thinking to do.”

John finished his drink.

“Briefly,” he said, “It’s a mental blackout effacing all memory before the set of circumstances that produced it. There has been some shock, coupled with physical distress. In
...
your wife’s case, a climbing accident. She was apparently swept down with an avalanche and only saved from death by the remotest cha
n
ce—a broken rope. She suffered both a severe blow on the head and extreme exposure. This, coupled with the fact that she may have been through some heavy emotional
strain just beforehand, could quite easily produce such amnesia. The mind rejects the past by refusing to remember, that’s all.”

His words sank into a deep silence. Dixon Cabot moved to a low table on the opposite side of the hearth and opened a jade cigarette box, offering the doctor a cigarette. For a moment he looked undecided about what to say, as if for the first time he doubted his own suspicions.

“Does this mean that there is a certain amount of invalidism attached to the condition?” he asked at last.

“None at all,” John assured him somewhat sharply. “These cases are only unusual in so far as the mind refuses to look back beyond a certain point. It’s a protective mechanism, if you like to put it that way.” He took a cigarette, holding it thoughtfully as his host crossed to the desk. “Of course,” he added, “someone must be here to look after
...
Mrs. Cabot.”

The name stuck in his throat as Dixon Cabot picked up the silver dragon and came across the room to light his cigarette for him. Their eyes met over the first swift little burst of flame.

“Are you returning to England, doctor?” the older man asked.

“Not yet
.
” John pulled strongly at his cigarette. “My original intention was to take a holiday, somewhere down here on the south coast.”

“Why don’t you stay with us?” The invitation was so unexpected, so smoothly delivered, that Adele almost gasped with surprise. “You have just explained that you are on holiday with no ultimate destination in view. Cap Ferrat can be as pleasant as anywhere along the Mediterranean coast in early spring.

J
ohn hesitated. It was obvious that he did not want to stay and equally obvious that he could not desert Adele if she needed him. Subconsciously she made a little pleading gesture toward him.

“I’ll stay,” he agreed without further demur.

“Excellent!” Dixon Cabot prepared to fill their glasses once more. “That means that you will have to return to your hotel for your luggage,” he suggested. “We have two hours before dinner. You could easily manage Nice and back in that time.”

John rose to his feet and Adele noticed that, standing, he was disconcerted by the other man’s superior height, as many stocky people are when they seek to gain an advantage.

“I won’t be long,” he said brusquely. “I seem to be inaugurating a ferry service between here and Nice!” His host saw him to the door and Adele went slowly toward the staircase. Somewhere on the floor above Maria was busy, and she fled up the stairs, guided by the caretaker’s tuneless singing.

“Maria,” she said when she came on her in one of the rooms, “will you prepare a bed for Dr. Ordley? He will be staying with us for a day or two.” There was sudden blessed relief in the thought. “Mr. Cabot will tell you which one to use,” she added, greatly to the servant’s surprise.

“I get this room ready for the master,” she explained, looking back into the bedroom she had already prepared. “He says it is the one he will use.” Maria gave her a dark, almost an accusing look. “You have the one there, next door.” She pointed, shrugging expressively. “Too big a room for one person,” she added decisively.

Adele escaped to where she could see shaded wall lights burning through an open doorway and her suitcase lying on a chair between two long windows, which led onto a balcony overlooking the terrace and the bay.

Swiftly she drew the curtains, shutting out the oncoming night. Then, since she had the best part of two hours to await John’s return, she began to unpack.

A chambermaid had put her things together at the hotel. They were all meticulously folded and she laid them automatically in the drawers that had been pulled out for her use. Then, suddenly, she was searching among the few remaining items still in the suitcase, looking for something she knew should be there.

The green morocco leather jewel case. It was as if a light had been switched on close above her head. She could not remember seeing it at the hotel. Certainly she had not unpacked it there.

Her hands dug down among the filmy silk underwear, but they did not encounter any hard object, and she searched each pocket without result.

Flustered, she turned toward the door to find Dixon Cabot standing there, looking in at her.

“You look distressed,” he suggested. “Have you mislaid something?”

“My jewel case,” she told him shakily. “It was here, in the suitcase, when I left the clinic and now I can’t find it anywhere.”

He came into the room, so slowly that she wanted to shriek.

“What was in it of value?” he asked.

She thought for a moment.

“I don’t think there was anything very valuable in it,” she decided. “Oh! Except my wedding ring...
”