The Daughter of Night Read Free

it out for yourself!'
    'It could have been rape,' he suggested mildly.
    'It was!' she retorted, 'but not the way you think, not the way you hope. When I'd traced my mother, I went down to the little place where she'd been living at the time—very small and everybody knows everybody. Apparently I'm very like my father, so I hardly had to ask—I was directed to where his mother was living by at least four very helpful people in the local pub.' She paused, the grimness of her face softened by sorrow and a faint, wry pity.
    'He was dead, of course. He'd gone out to Australia, worked on sheep stations and with rodeos—that was where he was killed—and they'd sent his few personal effects back to his mother since he had no other relatives. She showed them to me and in the box was a little bundle of notes and letters, all tied up with pink ribbon. The poor, romantic fool, he'd actually loved her! Anyway, those notes and things proved who'd raped whom!'
    'But if Vilma's your mother, as you say…'
    'I don't just say it, I can prove it, so there's no "if" about it,' Hester interrupted him swiftly and fiercely. 'My dear little mother covered it all up very successfully. She'd left things too late for an abortion, so she went on a "six-month cruise" to explain her absence from the social scene. Everything was very neat and tidy and nobody would ever have known if the law hadn't been changed and I was allowed to trace her as soon as I was old enough. She gave me away the day I was born in the place where she'd spent the last few weeks of her "cruise", and she didn't even bother about a reputable adoption agency—I suppose she thought that might be traced. Oh no, I went into a Council orphanage as an abandoned baby.'
    During the last part of this, she had turned her back on him to look out of the window at the gathering shadows of the spring evening and to hide the hurt which she knew must be showing on her face, but now she swung round on him like a tiger. 'She didn't tell anybody, not even my father's mother who would have been quite willing to bring me up. The old lady's dead now, so that part of it doesn't matter any more. You're looking at me as though I was dirt, aren't you? Well, I am! I'm Vilma's dirt which she carefully swept under the carpet—something to be forgotten, ignored and as quickly as possible—but I won't be forgotten! Now, you get back to her and tell her she has until the end of this week to pay up. I traced her as soon as it was possible and I was able—it took a bit of time and a lot of money which I could ill afford, but I did it, and now I've got my birth certificate to prove what I say and,' she smiled tightly into his rigid face, 'you can tell her, while you're about it, that I can put a name to that blank space she left in the column marked "Father". That should make her all the more eager to have the whole thing kept quiet!'
    Demetrios Thalassis moved slightly in his chair, although he continued to look enigmatic. 'This makes you one of the family,' he murmured.
    'Thank you for nothing!' She spat it at him. 'Vilma's kind of family is something I can do without.'
    He frowned her into silence. 'I'm speaking about the Thalassis family, so kindly be silent while I work this out. We apparently owe you something…'
    'You—
your
family owes me nothing,' she broke in on him stormily. 'It's Vilma who owes me and it's Vilma who's going to pay. She can afford it, this is her second wealthy husband and she has money of her own anyway. Tell her to spare some of that!'
    'And if you get the money?' He raised eyebrows, black and arched. 'What do you intend doing with it?'
    'When, not if,' she corrected him. 'And it's none of your business what I do with it. Personally, I'd like to burn the whole lot under her nose, but I've got a better use for it. Now, if you'll please go—it's not midsummer and I'm getting cold.' She smoothed out her voice to a polite flatness, all trace of anger and any other emotion wiped