The Devil’s Due by Boucher, Rita (short books for teens .txt) 📕

withdrawn, sullen. My daughter had always been such a bright and candid child, but there were a number of easy explanations . . . her father’s death . . . the alterations in her life. And I was becoming frightened myself. How could I have been such a fool?” she cried.

This time there was no question of oaths or promises. Duncan grasped her against him as she sobbed against his chest. His lips gently brushed against the sun-warmed silk of her hair. “We are all fools at one time or another, make errors in judgement,” he said ruefully.

“But it was not me who paid the price for that mistake,” Kate protested, her words vibrating with shame. “It was Anne; Anne who suffered because of my blindness. Anne and poor Becky, the nursery maid. When I think how long it must have gone on; how I only found out by chance. . .”

Her fingers gripped his arms much too tightly with all the force of her bitterness and guilt, those faraway eyes peering inward toward the past. But Duncan bore that small nipping pain in silence, content to be her anchor in the midst of the maelstrom of self-blame.

“I had been due to go to a small gathering,” Kate said, in a distant voice. “A musical evening, entirely suitable for a woman in the latter part of her mourning,’ he told me. He encouraged me to go, damn him, and by then, I was glad enough to get away even for a short time. Those eyes of his were always devouring me, stripping me naked with secret glances. His salacious hints had long passed the pale of the acceptable. The touching that was always an ‘accident,’ was getting bolder. One night, I heard the knob turning on my door, but fortunately, I had locked it. That was when I had insisted Daisy sleep in my dressing room, you see, instead of the nursery where she had been used to spend the night. I was afraid that one night the door would open, and I would have to fight him off. If only I would have left Anne in Daisy’s charge . . . if only. . .” She choked.

It was like watching a mail coach taking a turn too fast. Duncan found himself praying that his conclusions were wrong, but the direction of Kate’s tale, the facts that Anne had unknowingly placed in Duncan’s possession were all pointing toward inevitable disaster. The bare anguish in Kate’s eyes told him that the only question remaining was the extent of the devastation.

“Just before my husband’s sister departed, a storm broke. It was one of those autumn tempests, all thunder and lightning as if the heavens themselves were threatening to break apart. I decided to cry off and spend the evening in the nursery with Anne, watching the storm from the windows. We both used to love seeing the jagged bolts streak across the sky. Even the footman was unaware that I had returned home and I wished to keep it so. My brother-in-law was due to spend the evening at his club, so I thought that I might be certain of being left alone.”

The thought of her skulking about, sneaking into her own home to avoid molestation was almost too much to bear. A killing outrage for her, for Anne was threatening to consume him. Kate’s fingers were icy, loosening and clenching in spasms as she continued her story.

“I went upstairs to change my gown. There were so many buttons to that dress,” she recalled. “And it took me some time to free myself, for I did not even wish to call for Daisy to help me because it might have alerted him that I was home. Then I went upstairs. It was so dark as I came up, not even a light in the passageway. I wondered, why had the nursery maid extinguished all the candles? Anne has always had a fear of the dark.”

There was a quaver in her voice. He wanted to deny what he saw in her expression, to somehow forestall the truth that he knew was coming. Kate could have left off then and there and with the facts that Anne had let slip, Duncan could have told the end of her story, but he did not stop her. Somehow he knew that she had to say it even though he did not wish to hear.

“I thought I heard footsteps,” Kate said. “I wasn’t even sure. The sound of the thunder was so loud, and the rain on the roof, like the beating of a thousand drums. Then I saw a shadow at the door. It was my brother-in-law and I wondered what he was doing up there, in the nursery? He had only showed Anne the mildest of interest, previously. Then I saw that he was leading Becky, the nursery maid, out of the room. I shrank into the shadows. As he passed my hiding place, I saw that the girl wasn’t struggling, but there was a look of mortal terror in her expression. Coward! I was a coward!” She shouted the word in self-condemnation. “I suppose that it was fear for myself that kept me from questioning him then and there, fear of what might happen were he to find me defenseless in the dark. So, craven weakling that I was, I hid and kept quiet, waiting until he went down the stairs.”

“And what would have happened had you confronted him, Kate?” Duncan asked softly, but she would not hear him. She got up from her seat and he followed her to the edge of the loch.

“I found Anne, huddled in the corner of her bed, unmoving, still as a stone. Were it not for her breathing, I would have believed that she was dead. Her eyes were wide open, but she did not see me, I swear. I put my arms around her . . . but it was like grasping a piece