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“I spoke to Vogue after I left you today,” Pepper told him. “One of their assistant editors is here tonight, apparently—Rosemary Bennett—do you know her?”
“Yes, I do. In fact I’ve seen her somewhere.” John turned round and searched among the tables. “Over there—look, Pepper. The woman in the Giorgio Armani—the white satin. Do you want me to introduce you?”
“No…not here, I’ll go and see her at Vogue later in the week.” Pepper looked away from the table, and her body froze as she saw the man making his way through the tables. For one moment she thought he was heading for her, and her face lost all its colour, her body tense with shock.
“Pepper, what’s wrong?”
Somehow she managed to drag her attention away.
“Are you feeling all right?”
John’s forehead was creased in an anxious frown, his eyes dark with concern. God, what was the matter with her? She had everything under control, but just one unexpected glimpse of Miles French had thrown her so completely off guard that she was still fighting the shock.
This afternoon must have been more of a strain than she had realised. Miles French hadn’t reacted like the others. He had been far more cool, far more in control of himself, and he had also recognised her. That was something she hadn’t expected him to do. She had changed so much from the girl she had been that she had thought there was nothing of that girl left.
Miles French had shown her otherwise, and she had found the experience disquieting.
On the other side of the room Rosemary Bennett reached out and scored her long nails delicately over Miles’s wrist.
“You’re looking very pensive, darling, is something wrong?”
Miles gave her a perfunctory smile.
“Not specifically.”
There was something different about him tonight, Rosemary recognised; something distancing. She was far too experienced and knowledgeable about men not to recognise the signs. Miles was bored.
It was time to end their affair. She didn’t really want to lose him. As a lover, physically she doubted that she had ever met his equal, but emotionally there was always a part of him that he withheld, that remained aloof and unobtainable. Rosemary veiled her eyes and studied him. Miles was not the sort of man who could live without a woman for very long, which probably meant that he had already chosen her successor.
She wondered without rancour who the woman was. Whoever she was, she hoped she had the good sense not to fall in love with him. Miles turned his head and looked at her.
“I thought tonight we might leave early.”
Trust Miles to deliver the coup de grace with style! she thought wryly, and wondered if he intended to tell her before or after he had taken her to bed. Knowing Miles, it would probably be beforehand, then he would make love to her as a way of saying goodbye.
Once she had seen Miles, Pepper couldn’t relax. Sensing her tension but at a loss to understand the reason for it, Geoffrey asked her if she would like to leave once they had finished their supper.
She got up gratefully, making her excuses to John and Louise. “I’m afraid I have a rather bad headache,” she lied, letting Geoffrey take her arm and lead her away.
“You stay here. I’ll get your coat for you,” he instructed once they were in the foyer.
Pepper sat down on one of the small gilt chairs and stared abstractedly into space. Another couple walked into the room, the woman’s voice cool and faintly metallic, the man’s deeper, almost laconic and somehow familiar.
She tensed and looked at them.
“Pepper, what an unexpected pleasure!”
She saw Miles coming towards her and was conscious of a tight aching tension constricting her throat. She struggled to stand up, catching the heel of her shoe in the hem of her skirt, overbalancing slightly. Miles reached out to steady her, and she flinched beneath the unexpected warm pressure of his hands on her bare arms.
Five feet away Rosemary saw the way Miles was looking at the other woman and knew that she had seen the lady who was going to take her place in his bed. She smiled bitterly to herself. At least he had taste. Pepper Minesse was no pretty fluffy doll.
They had gone by the time Geoffrey returned with her coat, but as he helped her into it Pepper was still struggling to obliterate the small scene from her senses.
4
Pepper didn’t sleep well that night. The old nightmare haunted and pursued her. It always came at times like this when she was under stress. Long-suppressed memories surfaced and twisted through her mind, and she lay back against the tangle of satin sheets, her hand over her heart feeling it steady, as she forced herself to block out the too-intrusive memory of smothering darkness, of hands and voices, whispers pitched just too low for her to hear. In her nightmare she struggled to catch what they were saying, but in reality she had heard; had known what was happening to her.
Rape. The taste of the word on her tongue was sour and foetid. Her mouth twisted bitterly. It was a full mouth, wicked and sensual; men always looked at it, imagining its red moistness against their skin.
She was too hyped up to even try to go back to sleep. If she did she knew what would happen. She would be back in that shadowy room in Oxford with the door guarded by the men who had taken her there, while…
Her body shook, sweat glistening on her soft silken skin. Once more she felt the smothering sensation of fear engulfing her and fought against it, pushing away the terrifying memories of unseen hands touching her body, voices whispering softly just outside the stretch of her ears.
She reached out abruptly and switched on the lamp beside her bed, deliberately controlling her breathing as she willed herself to regain control. She was both hot and shivering, pursued by demons that owed nothing to any human life form. The May night was warm, but inside she felt deathly cold.
“You can have whatever you want from life,” Philip had once told her, “but there’s always a price to be paid for it.”
Pepper had paid her price, and now it was time that others paid theirs.
She got up and padded downstairs, ferreting about in the kitchen cupboard until she found the tin of drinking chocolate. It had been there since Mary’s last visit two years ago, for Christmas shopping. Mary and Philip had never felt totally at home in her London house. Its cool designer exclusivity overwhelmed them.
Happiness and contentment had always been the meter by which they had measured their own lives, and she knew that both of them in their different ways worried about her. Although they didn’t know it, they had good reason to be worried. Pepper grimaced faintly to herself, as she made a milky drink and carried it back to her bedroom, curling up against her cream satin sheets and pillows, her dark red hair spilling out over the antique trimmings. Without makeup, with her hair curling extravagantly round her face, she looked about seventeen, like a little girl who had strayed into her elder sister’s room. But she wasn’t seventeen…
At seventeen…
She sighed and compressed her body against the intrusive memories, but it was too late, already they were flooding back, drowning her in pain and fear. She let herself relax and admit them.
Perhaps after all it was only right that tonight she should remember, she thought tiredly, with the acceptance of her mother’s face, for the vagaries and implacability of fate.
Very well then, if she must remember, let her at least remember it all. She would go back to the beginning…to the very beginning.
In January of 1960 the gypsy tribe to which Pepper’s mother belonged was camped in Scotland on a tract of land belonging to the laird of the clan MacGregor. It had been a bad winter, with thick snow and howling east winds straight off the Russian seas. Sir Ian MacGregor was a kindly man brought up in a tradition that made him, as chief of his clan, as responsible for their welfare as he was for that of his own immediate family.
The MacGregors had never been a particularly wealthy clan; they owned lands, yes, but the land was fit for nothing but running sheep and renting out as grouse moors to rich Americans. When his factor told him that the gypsies had arrived and were camping in their usual valley his first thought was relief that they had arrived safely. The gypsies had been camping in that valley for more than two hundred years, but this year the heavy snowfalls had delayed them. His second thought was concern for their survival in the bitter cold, so he sent his factor into the valley with bales of straw for the ponies and some meat from the deer that he and his ghillie had shot just before Christmas.
Duncan Randall was not just the MacGregor’s factor, he was also his nephew and heir, a tall, rather withdrawn eighteen-year-old, with black hair and a narrow bony face. Duncan was a dreamer and an idealist. He loved his uncle and the land, and in his soul he carried the poetry of his Celtic heritage.
An overnight fall of snow had blocked the pass through the valley so that the gypsies were completely enclosed. Dark faces and wary eyes monitored his progress in the Land Rover as he drove towards their encampment. Smudges of smoke from their fires hung on the horizon, small groups of wiry, silent children huddled round their warmth.
It had been a bad year for the tribe. Their leader had died in the autumn, leaving the tribe like a rudderless ship. He had been sixty-eight years old and it was to Naomi, his widow, that the rest of the tribe now turned.
There had been only one child of the marriage—a girl. Layla was fifteen and according to the custom of their tribe she must now be married to the man they had chosen as their new leader.
Rafe, her husband-to-be, was thirty years old, the younger son of a leader of another Lee tribe. To Layla at fifteen he seemed both old and faintly alarming. Her father had spoiled her, because she was the child of his old age, even though her mother had warned him against it, and she was a wild, almost fey creature, as changeable as April skies. Naomi worried for her, knowing that hers would never be an easy way through life.
Naomi had pleaded with Rafe to wait until Layla was sixteen before marrying her. Her birthday fell in the spring, and Rafe had reluctantly agreed, but all the tribe could see how he watched the girl with jealous, brooding eyes.
Layla had always been contrary and awkward; Naomi despaired of her. Rafe was a man any other girl would have been proud to call husband, but when he looked at her, Layla tossed her hair and averted her eyes, giving her smiles instead to the boys she had grown up with.
Since this was his first year with the tribe, Rafe had not visited the valley before, and he watched suspiciously as the Land Rover made its slow way in towards their camp.
“Who comes here?” he demanded of Naomi in their Romany dialect.
“It is the nephew of the MacGregor,” Naomi told him, putting her hand on his arm to stop him as he moved forward. “He is a good friend to us, Rafe.”
“He is a gorgio,” Rafe protested bitterly.
“Yes, but we have been made welcome here for many generations. See, he has brought fodder for our animals,” Naomi told him, watching as Duncan stopped the Land Rover and climbed into the back to unload the bales of hay.
The children ran to help him. Layla was with them, Naomi noticed, frowning as she watched the way her daughter’s skirts lifted as she ran.
To a Romany it is a wanton act for a woman to reveal her legs to any man other than her husband, and although she knew this very well there were times when Layla almost seemed to deliberately flout their conventions.
Layla didn’t want to marry Rafe, Naomi already knew that, but she had no choice, like must marry like, and Layla, like Rafe, was descended from one of their greatest leaders. Both of them carried his blood in their veins and it would be breaking an unwritten Romany law for Layla to marry outside her own blood. Even so, her heart was troubled for her wayward child.
The bales of hay were heavy and shifting them was hard work, but a year of outdoor activity had tautened and developed Duncan’s body so that he was able to take the weight quite easily. He was aware of the gypsies’ silent scrutiny, but he strove to ignore it even while it unnerved him.
Across the small clearing containing their fires he could see the old woman and the man watching them. He could feel the man’s resentment and dislike and it made him uncomfortable. Poor devils, it was no wonder that they resented him. He would hate to live the way they did, almost on the verge of starvation, constantly moving from place to place. He shifted his glance away from the brooding intensity of the man’s stare and saw the cluster of children staring up at him. Several of them had running sores on their faces, all of them looked thin and hungry. His uncle had sent down a sack of porridge as well as the meat, and as he reached into the Land Rover to get it out he saw the girl for the first time. She was standing slightly apart from the others, watching them as he did, but there was pride in her eyes and she had a way of holding her body that defied him to feel pity for her. Where the children were thin, she was slender and supple, reminding him of the reeds that bent beneath the wind at the edges of the lochs. Her hair was long and black, shining in the harsh sunlight, her skin smoothly golden. Her eyes flashed anger and arrogance at him as she met his stare; golden eyes like her skin. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The sack he was holding slipped in his slackened fingers and he caught it up, feeling the red tide creeping up under his skin and with it a fierce upsurge of desire.
Layla knew enough about men to recognise his desire. Although she hid it from him it excited her. There were very few young men of her own age in the tribe, and certainly none as handsome as this dark-haired, fair-skinned gorgio boy, who was so much taller and broader than the men of her tribe, and whose eyes betrayed his wanting for her.
She tossed her hair as she walked past him, filled with a sudden surge of exhilaration. She didn’t want to marry Rafe; he frightened her, although nothing would ever make her admit it. She sensed a cruelty within him that instinctively she feared.
Her mother called sharply to her and she scowled. She was not a child who needed to heed its parents’ every sharp word. She was a woman; and she would choose her own way through life. Avoiding Rafe, she darted through the snow and into the caravan.
Duncan saw Naomi walking towards him and knew from his uncle’s description that she was the wife of the leader of the tribe. Her English was thickly accented, but Duncan understood enough of what she said to realise that her husband was dead, and that Rafe was now their new leader.
Later, while he and Sir Ian ate the hot potato cakes smothered in melting butter and drank strong dark tea in front of the peat fire in his uncle’s study, Duncan told his uncle how surly and uncommunicative he had found the gypsies.
“It is just their way. They are very slow to trust us, Duncan, and you can understand why. They are in many ways a persecuted and little understood race, whose habits and customs are not ours. They adhere to a much harsher code than our modern laws allow for, but then their life is much harsher than ours. Their women are still cruelly punished for adultery, and they consider their marriage to be a sacred rite that can be set aside by death alone. They are a fascinating people, though, and a very proud one.”
It was on the tip of Duncan’s tongue to tell his uncle about the gypsy girl, but before he could, the housekeeper came in with a plate of fresh scones.
Sir Ian lived well but simply, and already Duncan was ceasing to miss his more sophisticated life in Edinburgh at the University. His mother was Sir Ian’s sister. She had married outside the clan, and her husband, Duncan’s father, was a solicitor.
Ian MacGregor was much older than his sister. His only son had been killed at the end of the war. His wife had died shortly afterwards, of a broken heart, so some said, and Ian had refused to marry again, so that now Duncan was his only heir. Duncan had willingly given up his law studies to take over the job as his uncle’s factor—a training for the inheritance which would one day be his.
Layla was bored and restless. She hated the confinement the snow enforced on them. She wanted to get away from Rafe’s brooding presence. She wanted to escape…She wanted to see Duncan Randall again.
No one else was stirring when she slipped out of the camp in the early morning light. She moved quietly and silently across the snow, climbing as agilely and sure-footedly as one of Sir Ian MacGregor’s sheep as she headed up the narrow track that led out of the valley.
It took her half an hour to climb to the top. From there the moors stretched all round her in every direction, bordered by even higher hills. Here and there a dark crevasse in the snow indicated where other narrow valleys might lie, and against the skyline she could see a smudge of smoke. Layla was drawn to it even while caution urged her to retreat.
Duncan was also up early. He wanted to drop feed off with the shepherds before they had a fresh fall of snow.
Layla heard the sound of the Land Rover engine long before she saw it, the noise carrying well on the crisp cold air. She watched as the blue grey smudge came towards her, her body outlined against the sky, her hair flowing back like a dark banner.
At first when he saw her Duncan thought there must be something wrong with the tribe, but when he stopped alongside her and looked at her, there was no mistaking the look in her eyes. He felt the heat run through his body, and silently opened the Land Rover door for her.
She had dreamed about the gorgio last night, and now this morning she had found him. He was her fate, suddenly Layla was sure of it. Marriage to Rafe was not for her, she wanted more from life than that.
Uneducated, inarticulate, knowing only the feelings that flowed through her blood, she knew nevertheless that the feelings inside her were the same ones that flowed through the body of the gorgio boy beside her.
Layla was a virgin, but she was not ignorant of the ways of a man and a woman together. Her mother had told her when she protested that she did not want to marry Rafe that she would know when she was ready to be his wife. She knew now that her body was ready for a man’s possession; she felt it in her responses to the way Duncan looked at her. She reached out and touched his arm and felt the muscles contract beneath his skin.
When he stopped the Land Rover they kissed as urgently and hungrily as though they had known and wanted each other for years. Despite their inexperience there was nothing fumbled or clumsy about the way they came together, both of them overwhelmed by a force stronger than their separate or combined wills.
Layla’s sharp cries of delight, her firm thighs gripping his body, the soft feminine scent of her; these were the things Duncan remembered late at night, lying awake in his bed, aching for her, wanting yet again to expend his life force inside her.
Curled up in her narrow bunk, Layla too was thinking of him. She had enjoyed the pleasure they had shared, but more than that she was exhilarated by what they had done. Now Rafe could no longer claim her in the ancient gypsy rite; now she would not have to bow her head to him or acknowledge him as her lord and master.
She knew that many of the others thought her proud and stubborn and said that her father had spoiled her. Maybe it was true, but she was not a horse to be sold into a man’s keeping. All the resentment she had experienced since Naomi had first told her that she was to marry Rafe surfaced and coalesced into fierce rebellion. She had taken the gorgio boy as her lover and in doing so had broken the most sacred of all gypsy laws, but she didn’t care. No laws could bind or chain her. She was Layla…she was free.
For over a week the young couple continued to meet and make love. Duncan became so obsessed with Layla that nothing else had any importance. He lived for the brief time they could snatch together, when she managed to escape from the tribe. The fact that she knew that Rafe was watching her only served to increase her exhilaration whenever she managed to sneak away to be with Duncan.
It was only when the snow started to thaw, and Rafe started saying that it was time they were on their way, that Layla began to fear the consequence of her actions. She confided her fears to Duncan one afternoon as they lay together in the hay loft of one of his uncle’s barns.
“Then don’t go with them,” he begged fiercely. “Stay here with me…we’ll get married.”
Layla moved restlessly in his arms. Marriage to Duncan? Was that really what she wanted? She loved him; she loved the smooth young feel of his body; she loved the desire he could make her feel; but she also loved the excitement of stealing away to be with him, the dangerous elixir of doing the forbidden.
If she stayed with him the tribe would reject her…her name would never be spoken by them again. Her mother…
Her mother had problems of her own. This Scottish valley had always been one of her favourite stopping places. Normally they spent two months or so here, but Rafe was now their leader, and Rafe did not like the valley. Rafe was also growing impatient and bitter about Layla’s foolishness, Naomi knew that, but Layla was so headstrong, such a child still, as wild and fey as the most spirited filly.
She was getting old, Naomi thought tiredly. Her bones ached in the cold wind, and life had lost its savour for her since she had lost her Leon.
Rafe’s surliness seemed to have infected the rest of the tribe as well. Some of the men were saying that the valley was not a good place any more. What was needed was a celebration of some sort to lift the tribe’s spirits…a wedding feast. But Layla was the only girl of marriageable age with the tribe, and she…
Sighing faintly, Naomi picked up the worn pack of Tarot cards she always carried with her, absently setting them out. One card stared up at her and her body froze colder than the snow outside her caravan. Death. She put the cards down with trembling fingers.
The Tarot cards never lied, she knew that. She shuddered deeply, sensing danger, aware of it waiting, lurking, not visible to the human eye, but there all the same, an indefinable presence that cast its shadow over the whole tribe.
One morning Rafe announced that they were leaving. No one queried his decision, not even Layla—no one could query the decisions of the leader of the tribe, but just as soon as she could she slipped away from the valley, heading for her meeting place with Duncan.
Only this time she was followed.
Rafe tracked her with the cunning skill of their race, keeping her easily in sight without letting her know that he was there. Panic had made her grow careless. Once they had left the valley behind Layla knew that Rafe would insist on marrying her. Now that she and Duncan had been lovers the idea of marriage to Rafe was even more abhorrent to her.
Duncan would marry her, she knew that, but to cast herself off from her mother, from their way of life…Her thoughts tumbled through her mind like a mill race in full spate. She was deaf to the tiny, betraying sounds Rafe made as he followed her.
Outside the barn, Layla hesitated briefly, glancing over her shoulder. There was no one in sight. She ran inside, and Duncan, who had heard her come in, hurried to meet her, taking her in his arms and kissing her passionately.
When he released her Layla told him of Rafe’s decree.
“Don’t go,” he urged. “Stay here with me.”
“I want to.”
