A Question Of Marriage. Lindsay Armstrong
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furry wrapped itself around her legs, she never knew, but the large cat then sat down beside her, purring quietly.
She swallowed and bent down to stroke it, feeling much less as if she should take flight—the cat had obviously made the noise because there was no one else at home, simple, she told herself. And she flicked the torch on briefly again, before she stealthily made her way to the staircase and began to climb it one carpeted step at a time, counting beneath her breath and avoiding, from sheer habit, the fifteenth step that creaked.
Perhaps it was this that rendered her less cautious, she was to wonder later. Because to be silently enfolded into a pair of strong arms as she reached the top step took her supremely by surprise and paralyzed her for several heart-stopping moments. Then terror got the upper hand and she screamed and pummelled so vigorously, the two of them started to topple over in slow motion.
‘Oh, no, you don’t, lady!’ she heard a masculine voice breathe huskily, but as she twisted like an eel she must have taken him by surprise, because the rest of what he’d been going to say was smothered by an exclamation of pain and she felt him go slack just long enough for her to evade his grasp, jump onto the banister and slide down it. Then she raced across the hall and kitchen, out through the laundry, locking the door with the key that was still in it, and sprinted across the back garden, jumped the fence and raced down the easement as if all the demons from hell were on her heels.
She’d had the foresight to park her car two blocks away. Although the easement led onto a different street from the front entrance to the house, she’d thought it wise in case anything went wrong and it could be identified. But, out of the heavily overcast sky, a clap of thunder at last rent the pregnant night and heavy rain began to fall.
‘Thank you, thank you up there!’ she whispered devoutly, although she was almost instantly soaked to the skin. ‘A good storm has got to muddle my tracks, surely!’
‘And just repeating the local headlines: the storm that ravaged the southern and bay-side suburbs of Brisbane last night is estimated to have caused close to a million dollars’ damage to homes in its path… This is Aurora Templeton for Bay News.’
Aurora pulled off her headphones and steered her chair on its trolley tracks to the other end of the console. Her programme director gave her a thumbs-up sign and she got up stiffly and walked out of the studio. Her morning radio news shift was over and she couldn’t be more grateful, not only because she felt as if she’d been through a wringer, but the consequences of her actions only hours ago had kicked in to plague her conscience with a vengeance.
She couldn’t avoid looking around constantly or expecting a heavy hand to fall on her shoulder. And it had been the stuff nightmares were made of to wonder whether she would have to broadcast a police report of her own misdemeanour—thankfully not, but there was no guaranteeing it wouldn’t be on tomorrow’s news!
Why you never stop and think, Aurora Templeton, is a mystery to me, she castigated herself bitterly and repeatedly on the way home.
Her new town house, in the Brisbane suburb of Manly, was pleasant and comfortable—or would be when she sorted the clutter.
Manly was an eastern suburb of Brisbane, south of the mouth of the Brisbane River on the shores of Moreton Bay. Because of its bay-side position, lovely breezes and views as well as its geographical make-up—a steep cliff running adjacent to the shore atop of which were some wonderful old houses—it had become fashionable again but it was also home to a large boat harbour.
Many of the boaties who enjoyed the waters of Moreton Bay, with its twin guardians of Moreton and North Stradbroke Islands, moored their boats in the Manly harbour so the suburb had a distinctly nautical flavour.
Aurora didn’t have a view of the bay from her new town house although she did have a small garden and a courtyard. But she’d had no idea, when she’d come home a couple of weeks ago from six months overseas, that she’d find the family home sold, that her retired sea-captain father would have taken it into his head to buy a yacht and decide to sail around the world solo.
She’d lost her mother when she was six and been brought up by her father, when he’d been home, at boarding-school otherwise, and by a devoted housekeeper, Mrs Bunnings—known affectionately as ‘Bunny’—in between times. But she’d also spent a lot of time travelling the world with her father and, at twenty-five, she had a Bachelor of Arts degree, she was fluent in several languages, cosmopolitan, well able to take care of herself and had embarked on a career in radio broadcasting.
None of that worldly education had managed to eradicate a daredevil streak in her character, however, which had often seen Bunny despair of her. And it was this that Aurora blamed as she brewed herself a cup of coffee in her new town house, the morning after she’d broken into Professor Luke Kirwan’s home.
Well, not only that, she amended the thought as she inhaled the coffee aroma luxuriously. All sorts of things had gone towards creating the debacle, not the least her father’s sudden decision to sell their home without even consulting her, then go sailing off into the wide blue yonder a bare few days after she’d got home and before she’d remembered her diaries.
She took her coffee to the lounge and curled up in a winged armchair, and thought back down the years.
She’d always been a compulsive scribbler, an inveterate diarist. Not that you would know it from the face she presented to the world but, deprived of her mother at an early age and separated from her father for long periods, an only child with no other close relatives—all of it had created the need in her for some kind of a lifeline, which was what her diaries had become: her companions that never deserted her.
The discovery, when she was about twelve, of a loose brick in the never-used fireplace of her bedroom that revealed a cavity in the wall behind it, had been a wonderful cache for them. She’d used it right up until she’d gone overseas, convinced her dreams, fantasies and innermost thoughts were quite safe from prying eyes.
But it wasn’t until she’d rung Bunny to tell her that she was home and to discuss the turmoil of Ambrose Templeton’s unexpected actions that she’d remembered them.
Bunny had been delighted to hear from her and able to tell her that she had been kept on, three mornings a week, as a cleaner for the new owner of Aurora’s old home. That was when a vision of the fireplace in her old bedroom had floated through Aurora’s mind and her mouth had dropped open…
It hadn’t taken long to occur to her, however, that the normal course of action, simply ringing the new owner and explaining about secret caches and diaries, was, at the same time, inviting extreme curiosity in any normal person who most probably would not be able to resist having a look first for themselves… Just thinking about it made her break out in a cold sweat.
So she’d rung up and tried to make an appointment with Professor Luke Kirwan, Professor of Physics, she now knew, without giving a reason other than saying it was important and personal, and with the thinking that, once she was in the house, she could explain then and retrieve her diaries herself so that no one could get to them first.
Only to discover that the professor himself didn’t take calls at home at all. He had an extremely officious secretary to do it for him during working hours, long working hours at that, and an answering machine he never responded to at other times.
Nor was this secretary—and Bunny had told her what a dragon the woman was, always sneaking up behind her to check what she was doing—at all interested in making an appointment for Aurora with the professor without good reason, saying he was far too busy at the moment unless she could state her case.
Aurora had thought swiftly, then explained that she was the previous owner’s daughter, she’d been away at the time of the sale and she’d just like to check that nothing of hers had been left behind.
‘Definitely not,’ Miss Dragon Hillier had said coldly down the line. ‘I checked the house myself and you can rest assured there was nothing that shouldn’t be here! Good day.’ And she’d put the phone down heavily.
Aurora had taken the receiver