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The Sun At Midnight
Sandra Field


It must be embarrassingly clear to everyone that you and I can't stand the sight of each other.Kathrin had found peace and indescribably beauty in the brief Arctic summer. The last person she expected - or wanted - to see was Jud Leighton who, with his brother, had betrayed her so cruelly seven years ago.And she certainly didn't want to accompany Jud out on the unforgiving tundra. Especially since he seemed to believe that she had wronged him… .







The Sun at Midnight

Sandra Field






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




CONTENTS


CHAPTER ONE (#ufecdaa4f-8926-5f78-bb16-af00672eab75)

CHAPTER TWO (#u6feb6ef4-65af-5127-91f5-3a499019006d)

CHAPTER THREE (#u139535d1-b53b-5cbf-ae73-fd64e36ac400)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER ONE


IT WAS heaven.

Sheer heaven.

Kathrin Selby smiled to herself. Very few people would feel that her present location bore any relation to paradise. In fact, a great many of them might equate the landscape that stretched in front of her with hell rather than heaven. But to her it was astonishingly beautiful.

She settled herself a little more comfortably on the boulder and cupped her chin in her gloved hands. She was sitting on a granite ridge that overlooked the meadows of a wide valley, its far side flanked by plateaux of loose grey shale and by drifting, sunlit clouds. There was not another human being in sight. Behind her lay another valley where a glacial river tumbled and churned beneath snow-covered mountains. From her perch she could not see that river. Nor could she see the sea or the pack ice, nor the camp where she and the other scientists were staying. The only other creatures sharing the landscape with her were a herd of muskoxen, grazing on the slope below her.

Kathrin had spent the last five days out on the tundra watching the herd, taking copious notes and a great many photographs. She had nicknamed the herd bull Bossy, because of his huge horn bosses and because of his habit of displacing the cows from the best clumps of grasses and sedges. Now she picked up her binoculars and focused on him once again. As a species, muskoxen had changed very little in the last ninety thousand years, and it was all too easy in the deep Arctic silence to imagine herself in another time, a time long ago, when hunting these great beasts might have meant the difference between life and death.

The wind stirred the long guard hairs of the bull’s outer coat. He looked not unlike a boulder himself, his dark brown hair almost hiding his thick, light-coloured legs, his huge hump and pale saddle a solid mass against the evening sun. He was browsing on the tiny, ground-hugging willow, the only tree that grew this far north.

Kathrin shifted, pushing back the sleeve of her jacket to check her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock, and she had a three-hour hike to get back to the base camp. She was almost out of food; she had to go back. But she was reluctant to leave the peaceful valley, which was bathed in soft gold light as the sun moved in its slow circle around the horizon. Reluctant, too, to leave the herd that from long hours of observation she was beginning to know so well. The three cows, two yearlings and two new calves dotted the tundra, the cows moving with stately grace, the calves leaping among the rocks as if there were springs in their heels.

She felt another upwelling of happiness. At the age of twenty-four she had finally found her niche. She was doing work that she loved in an environment whose vastness and solitude spoke to her soul. Not many people were that lucky, she thought humbly, and stood up, taking a long breath of the chill, pure air. Bossy raised his head, his dark eyes gleaming. He pawed at the ground, rubbed the side of his face along his foreleg, then lowered his head to graze again. Slowly Kathrin turned away and began walking towards her small yellow tent.

She would be back here tomorrow. Deciding to leave her tent up, she ducked into it, shoving her dirty clothes and her camera gear into her backpack, then pulling the pack outside. Carefully she zipped up the tent flap and anchored the pegs with rocks. Then she heaved the pack on to her back and clipped the straps around her hips. As she did so, the plaintive call of a plover drifted to her ears, and to her surprise she felt tears prick her eyes. She was so incredibly lucky to be here.

She stood still. The luminous clouds that were piled high over the plateau, the big, slow-moving animals with their long shadows on the grass, the cry of the bird: all coalesced in her heart so that for a moment out of time she and the tundra were one.

Then the plover called again and the spell was broken. Her lips curving in an unconscious smile, Kathrin began trudging up the hill towards the ridge. The quickest way to the base camp was across the ridge and along the river valley. She hoped there’d be some supper left. Even more urgently, she hoped tonight was the night that Garry Morrison, the camp leader, was firing up the sauna. After five days of living in a tent, she badly needed to renew acquaintance with hot water, soap, and shampoo.

She walked easily, her long legs moving at a steady pace. After climbing the rock ridge, she descended into the valley, her knee-high rubber boots squelching in the bog; the permafrost was only a foot down, so the water had nowhere to drain. As she automatically scanned the valley for wildlife, the constant broil of the river assaulted her ears. The ice-cap high in the mountains was its source, and Kathrin had never tasted water as cold or as clean. She took a drink from her water bottle, stooping to admire the magenta flowers of an early patch of willowherb before she struck out north-west towards the camp.

Its official name was Camp Carstairs, after the scientist who had founded it thirty years ago on the western shore of Hearne Island in the Canadian High Arctic. Before she arrived, Kathrin had pictured something more imposing than the reality: a small cluster of plywood-faced buildings and insulated tents, all brightly coloured so as to be visible from the air. Now, as she scrambled over a scree slope and rounded a cliff, she saw in the distance the orange of the radio shack and the bright blue of her own little hut and smiled again. It would be good to see the others. While she loved being alone, it was a little difficult to carry on a meaningful conversation with a muskox.

Even though she could distinguish the individual buildings, Kathrin knew she still had at least an hour’s hard hiking ahead of her. Distances, she had learned early, were deceptive in the clear northern air, where there were no trees of any height to give a sense of scale.

She began the slow descent to the lowlands, which were pockmarked with lakes and ponds. It would not only be good to see the others, Pam and Garry and Karl and Calvin, it would be good to be home, she thought. Then her brow puckered. How, in only four weeks, had the motley collection of outbuildings come to be called home?

It had been a long time since she had felt like calling anywhere home. Not since she had left Thorndean.

Thorndean...Kathrin could never think of the formal stone mansion, where her mother had been the housekeeper and where she herself had grown up, without remembering the two young men who had shaped her life so definitively and so destructively. Ivor and Jud. Half-brothers, sons of the owner of Thorndean. Ivor, whom she had loved, and Jud, whom she had trusted...

She had seen neither of them for seven years.

Her boot caught in a willow stem, throwing her off-balance, and with a jolt she came back to the present. She was a two-hour flight from the nearest hospital; she’d do well to remember that. She couldn’t afford to be careless.

The past, by definition, was past. Over and done with.

Determinedly Kathrin forced her mind to the prospects of a warm kitchen and her own bed. Nothing like five days in a tent to make six inches of foam mattress seem like utter luxury, she thought wryly.

Not that she’d slept much the last four nights. Hearne Island was at so high a latitude that the daily passage of the sun made a halo around the tundra rather than a line across it, and therefore bathed the hills and valleys in constant light. To Kathrin it seemed as though the days had no beginning and no end, each one blending into the next in a plenitude of time that delighted her. So she’d tended to skimp on sleep, preferring to follow the muskoxen as they wandered their way along the valley, and to catch catnaps when she could. She was enough of a pragmatist to realise also that the Arctic summer was short and that in less than six weeks she’d be on her way back to Calgary to work on the data she’d accumulated.

Red-throated loons were swimming in the lakes between her and the camp. They wailed a warning signal, a chorus so eerie and mournful that it never failed to raise the hairs on the back of Kathrin’s neck. Obediently she kept her distance from their nesting sites, the frigid wind that was blowing off the pack ice scourging her cheeks.

Offshore, the humped cliffs of Whale Island were black against the sky. Garry had promised he’d take her and Pam out there one day soon. There were ancient tent sites on the island, with the bones of bowhead whales slaughtered hundreds of years ago; and nesting on the cliffs were gyrfalcons, the rare white-feathered hunters of the far north.

Kathrin topped the final rise and then her boots were crunching in the loose stones on the airstrip. She marched along it between the two rows of oil drums that were its only markers. She was hungry. Surely Pam, who was the camp cook as well as Garry’s girlfriend, would have saved her some supper? Real food instead of freeze-dried rations, she thought dreamily...that, too, could be considered very close to heaven.

The building that was a combination kitchen, dining-room and library was painted a garish orange. Kathrin pushed open the porch door and slid her pack to the floor, leaning against the wall. From inside she could hear the murmur of voices and a burst of laughter. After leaving her boots on the mat alongside several other pairs, she stepped into the kitchen.

The heat from the coal stove enfolded her, bringing an added pink to her cheeks. She blinked a little, pulling off her jacket and her knitted cap, so that her hair fell in untidy wisps around her face. Sniffing the air, she said, ‘I sure hope you guys have left me something to eat.’

In his stilted English Karl said, ‘We have left much food.’

‘Not a thing,’ said Calvin. ‘You’re too fat.’

Pam gave a snort of laughter. She was too fond of her own cooking and hence rather plump, and openly envied Kathrin’s ability to eat well and stay slim. ‘It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to heat it up,’ she said. ‘I left a plate out for you.’

Karl was lanky and bespectacled, frighteningly clever and unfailingly serious; he was on a scientific exchange programme from Sweden. Calvin, short, stout, and cheerful, was a lover of pretty women and practical jokes, not necessarily in that order. To all who would listen, he professed himself madly in love with Kathrin’s dark eyes and chestnut hair; yet she would have shared a tent with him on the tundra and known herself to be entirely safe. She liked him very much. ‘I thought you were supposed to be collecting algal samples in the bog,’ she said sternly.

‘I got my socks wet,’ he replied. ‘How were the muskoxen?’

Kathrin dropped her jacket over the back of a chair and hauled her sweater over her head. More of her hair was tugged free of its braid, to lie in chestnut strands on the shoulders of her green shirt. ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘I followed the herd for nearly five days—I think I’ll go back out tomorrow.’ She caught sight of Garry standing by the stove, his bearded face flushed from the heat, and added, ‘After I have a sauna, right?’

‘It’ll be ready in half an hour,’ he rejoined. ‘And you might have company to go and see the muskoxen tomorrow—we have a visitor.’

As she raised her brows in inquiry, not best pleased at the thought of sharing her solitude, a voice spoke from behind her, a man’s voice. ‘Hello, Kit,’ it said.

Only one person in the world had ever called her Kit.

Swept back into the past with an immediacy that petrified her, Kathrin felt her eyes widen with shock and her muscles tense in rejection. Her whole body rigid, she clutched at the sweater she had draped on top of her jacket. She would wake up in a minute and find this had all been a dream. Or a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep.

Because it couldn’t be true. Jud couldn’t be here.

Not Jud.

Very slowly, aware at some distant level that Karl was looking puzzled and Calvin gaping at her, Kathrin turned her head. A man was sitting in the far corner of the room, his chair tipped back, his thumbs tucked in his belt. His eyes were fastened on her face. In front of him on the flowered plastic tablecloth was an empty coffee mug.

She recognised him immediately, and at the same time saw that he was unutterably altered from the man she had known so many years ago. She could not have smiled to have saved her soul, for the flesh seemed to have frozen to her face and she could feel herself being drawn into the cold blue pits of his eyes in a way that appalled her. No one else she had ever known had eyes of so intense and vivid a blue as Jud; yet right now they reminded her of nothing so much as the meltwater that collected in pools on glaciers, deep turquoise over hidden depths of ice. Struggling to find her voice, she croaked, ‘Jud...Jud Leighton.’

Pam banged a saucepan on the stove and said matter-of-factly, ‘Your supper’s ready, Kathrin.’

Rescue. With a huge effort Kathrin unlocked her gaze from her antagonist’s—for instantly she had known that was what he was—wondering in some dim recess of her brain if she were physically capable of walking across the room and taking the plate that Pam was holding out to her. It’s not Ivor sitting at the table, she thought dazedly, it’s Jud. Ivor was the brother she had been in love with, the one who should have roused this storm of emotion in her breast. Even though Jud had materialised without warning in a place thousands of miles from Thorndean, she would never have expected him to have upset her so strongly. So why was she standing here as stiff-limbed as a plastic doll?

Because Jud’s betrayal had been worse than Ivor’s.

Ten times worse.

This new knowledge slammed into Kathrin’s body with the force of a fist. She should have known it seven years ago, and had not. It had taken Jud’s sudden reappearance into her life to make it clear to her how deep was the wound he had inflicted. Deeper than Ivor’s more physical wounds. Deeper, too, than her exile from Thorndean, terrible though that had been. Numbly she became aware that Pam was now standing in front of her holding out the plate, her long-lashed grey eyes concerned. ‘Are you OK?’ Pam asked. ‘You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.’ She turned an unfriendly gaze on the man on the other side of the table. ‘Jud didn’t tell us he knew you.’

Not hurrying, Jud lowered the legs of his chair to the floor and leaned his arms on the table. ‘I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. There must be more than one Kathrin Selby in Canada.’

In an unexpected and invigorating rush, like flame seizing upon dry wood, Kathrin lost her temper. ‘More than one with red hair and brown eyes, who loves wild places and wild animals?’ she blazed. ‘Give me a break, Jud!’

‘You overestimate yourself,’ he mocked. ‘I didn’t bother asking for any details. When I heard your name, I just tucked myself in the corner and waited to see who would walk in the door.’

His voice might be as smooth as the exquisite silk scarf he had given her for her sixteenth birthday; but she still knew him well enough to realise that beneath a thin veneer of control he was furiously angry. He had no right to be angry, Kathrin thought blankly. None whatsoever. She was the one who had been wronged, not him.

As if a wound had been reopened, she was suddenly flooded by all the anguish of the seventeen-year-old girl whose world had collapsed around her one summer long ago. There had been no firm ground to stand on that summer, for everything that she had taken for granted had shown her another face, a demonic face, ugly and frightening beyond belief.

Frantically Kathrin fought to collect her wits. She might have been knocked off balance a few minutes ago; but she was not so disoriented as to challenge Jud’s anger in the camp kitchen in front of an audience as rapt as any play-wright could have wished. With a fresh spurt of fury she realised how easily Jud had gained the advantage over her, just by sitting out of sight of the door and waiting for her to walk into the room. All her shock and horror had been written on her face for him to read. Him, and everyone else in the kitchen.

Pam was still holding out the plate of food, while Garry, Karl, and Calvin had been listening to every word in a fascinated silence. With a gallant effort to achieve normality Kathrin said lightly, ‘Well, no one’s going to miss the soap operas tonight, are they? Jud and I grew up together, parted on somewhat less than amicable terms, and haven’t seen each other for seven years.’ She glanced over at Calvin. ‘And that’s all you’re getting out of me. Pam, that looks wonderful, thanks.’

She took the dinner plate with hands whose tremor she could not quite disguise, and pulled up a chair as far from Jud’s as she could. The plate was heaped with roast chicken, mashed potatoes and canned green beans, and she had totally lost her appetite. Grimly she began to eat.

Garry, who disliked too much emotion, said bluffly, ‘Guess I’ll go check the sauna,’ and strode out of the room with visible relief. Pam sat down next to Kathrin, blocking her from Jud’s view, and started describing the latest antics of the Arctic fox that came scavenging at the kitchen door every evening. Calvin and Karl were talking to Jud. Kathrin chewed and swallowed, and with a quiver of inner laughter that hovered on the edge of hysteria realised that she was also furious with Jud for spoiling her first real meal in five days.

When Pam pushed back from the table to get Kathrin some coffee, Jud’s chair scraped the floor as well. He was on the opposite side of the table from Kathrin. Unable to help herself, she watched as he walked past her to the stove to refill his own mug. He still moved with the long-limbed grace that had characterised him even as a boy, for he had never gone through that awkward, gawky stage of most adolescents. While he had always been lean and narrow-hipped, she had not remembered his shoulders being quite so broad or so impressively muscled. Instinctively she was sure he could move with the lethal speed of a bullwhip. Prison would have done that for him, she thought sickly, and stared hard at the remains of her mashed potato as he walked back to his chair.

Pam put a mug of steaming coffee and a piece of apple pie in front of her and sat down again. ‘You didn’t mind being alone out there?’

‘I loved being alone,’ Kathrin said in a carrying voice. ‘It’s a place that calls for solitude.’ Garry, what seemed like aeons ago but was probably only a few minutes, had mentioned she might have company on her next trek to the muskoxen. If Garry was cherishing the slightest thought that she was going back to the valley with Jud tomorrow, he could think again. Jud, watching her every move? Jud, sleeping in a tent only feet from hers? She’d die rather than go anywhere alone with Jud; and the sooner Garry understood that, the better.

Ignoring the vigour with which Kathrin was attacking her pie, Pam said with a chuckle, ‘You’re hooked. Garry always says he can tell within a week the people who are counting the days until the end of summer, and the ones who’ll be back north on the first plane at spring break-up.’

Glancing through the window at the rectangular patch of blue sky, Kathrin said, ‘Up here, I forget there are days.’

‘Cooking breakfast every morning keeps me on track,’ Pam said drily. ‘More pie?’

The piece of apple pie seemed to have disappeared. Kathrin shook her head. ‘That was delicious, Pam, thanks. Maybe I’d better go over to my place and find some clean clothes...you don’t know how much I’m looking forward to the sauna.’

On cue, Garry pushed open the door. ‘It’s up to temperature,’ he said. ‘You and Pam go first, Kathrin, and one of you let me know when you’re through.’

The sauna, at the far end of the camp, was heated by an oil-driven generator, and as such was treated as a luxury item. Kathrin got up, carried her plates to the sink, and left the room with Pam, all without so much as glancing Jud’s way. ‘Ready in five minutes,’ she called to Pam, and hurried across the road to the little blue hut that, as the only other woman in the camp, she occupied alone. The outer door creaked on its hinges; she left her boots on the mat and went inside.

The interior of the hut consisted of one room with unpainted wooden walls. Two bunk beds, a desk, a chair, and a set of plain board bookshelves were the entirety of the furniture, along with a kerosene stove. But Kathrin had arranged her books and some rocks from the shore on the shelves; the colourful mat her mother had braided and that went everywhere with her lay on the floor by her bed. Cheap flowered curtains softened the two small windows and she had pinned four of her favourite photographs on the walls. The room was neat, for Kathrin had lost the careless untidiness of her teenage years—along with so much else—when she had been banished from Thorndean: neatness gave her an illusion of control that she still needed. The room was also, despite the sparseness of its furnishings, very welcoming.

She leaned her pack against the wall. Her toilet articles were on one of the shelves; she put them in a plastic bag along with two towels, and from one of the drawers under her bed took out the clean clothes she would need. There. That was everything.

But beneath her socked feet she was suddenly aware of the thickness and warmth of her mother’s rug. One of the braided strands was a deep blue; it had been a shirt of Jud’s the winter he had turned fifteen. Kathrin sat down hard on the chair, closing her eyes. Jud was here. A man she had thought never to see again had thrust his way into her life, confronting her with a past as painful now as it had been seven years ago.

To the best of her ability she had worked at healing the damage Ivor had done. But she now knew how deeply she had buried Jud’s betrayal, not even allowing herself to recognise how badly it had scarred her.

Someone knocked on her door. She gave a violent start, terrified that it might be Jud, then with a rush of relief heard Pam’s cheerful voice. ‘Ready, Kathrin?’

‘Coming!’ she called in a cracked voice and scrambled to her feet, grabbing her clothes and the plastic bag.

Pam was waiting outside. If she saw the strain on Kathrin’s face, she chose not to mention it, saying instead as they set off down the road, ‘I wish it weren’t so difficult to get an oil supply up here—then we could do this more often.’

Because everything had to be flown in, the camp was prohibitively expensive to run, and part of Garry’s job was juggling the figures to enable the research to be carried out each summer. ‘If we could have a sauna every night, we wouldn’t appreciate it nearly as much,’ Kathrin said fliply.

‘Try me!’ said Pam. ‘By the way, Garry’s going to run the washer for a couple of hours tomorrow if you’ve got dirty clothes...isn’t the sky beautiful?’

From eleven at night until one in the morning was Kathrin’s favourite time, for the light had a gentleness, a tranquillity that she found very appealing. Although the sun was well above the horizon, the clouds were tinged with the softest of pinks and golds, and the tundra itself seemed to harbour that gold as if gilded by the most skilful of artists. Aware of the first measure of peace since she had heard Jud’s voice in the kitchen, Kathrin jogged down the slope to the sauna.

It was shaped like an igloo with a metal stove-pipe and a low door. Behind a plywood screen Pam and Kathrin took off their clothes. Then Kathrin pulled the door open and they went inside. Pans of water were heating on the hot rocks. She poured some in one of the plastic bowls on the counter and started shampooing her hair, luxuriating in the steamy heat. In a casual voice Pam said, ‘Want to tell me about Jud?’

Pam was both discreet and kind-hearted. But she also lived with Garry, who would make the final decision whether Jud would accompany Kathrin to watch the muskoxen. Kathrin said, sluicing the shampoo from her long hair, ‘If I tell you what happened, would you pass it on to Garry for me, Pam? I can’t go out with Jud tomorrow, I just can’t!’ Biting back the panic that had made her voice rise, she poured another bowl of water.

‘Garry makes his own decisions about the camp, Kathrin, you know that as well as I do—but he’s fair, too. Sure, I’ll tell him.’

Kathrin reached for the soap, lathered it on her facecloth and began to talk, deliberately detaching her emotions from the words she was recounting. ‘I grew up north of Toronto. My mother was the housekeeper on a big estate called Thorndean, owned by a man named Bernard Leighton. You may have heard of him—he’s a major entrepreneur with business interests all over the country: mining, forestry, a couple of newspapers. My mother was there for years, because my father had been the head gardener. He died when I was two, and my mother stayed on.’

She scrubbed her arms as if getting clean were her only care in the world. ‘Bernard Leighton had two sons. Ivor, the elder, by his first wife, and Jud, whom you’ve now met, by his second. Ivor was the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.’ She gave a rueful laugh. ‘I fell in love with him when I was about six, I guess...I thought the sun rose and set on him. He never paid much attention to me—he was eight years older, after all—so it was Jud I spent time with, not Ivor.’

‘Ivor’s better-looking than Jud?’ Pam interposed incredulously. ‘I’d get up at four a.m. any day of the week to make Jud Leighton his breakfast. It’s just as well I’m in love with Garry—Jud’s gorgeous, Kathrin!’

‘I suppose so,’ Kathrin said without much interest. She had never seen Jud in that light and wasn’t about to start now. ‘He and I were buddies, Pam. Friends. More like brother and sister than anything else, I suppose. When I flunked an English test and when I had to get braces on my teeth and when my best girlfriend moved away—Jud was the one I went to for comfort and advice. My mother and I were never that close, so I suppose it was natural that I gravitated to Jud. Besides, we both liked the same things—the outdoors and animals and roaming the countryside. And there were only four years between us.’ She stretched to scrub her back. ‘Jud always had a wild streak in him, something untamed and uncontrollable. He used to skip school on a regular basis because he couldn’t stand being cooped up.’ For a moment her voice faltered. One of the many thoughts she had smothered over the years had been how Jud, who had found the brick walls of the school a prison, had ever been able to stay sane in a real prison.

That was none of her concern, she thought fiercely, and picked up the thread of her story, only wanting it to be done. ‘Jud might have been wild. But he was—or so I thought—totally honest and trustworthy. If he was going to do something to you he’d do it to your face, never behind your back.’

‘That’s kind of the way he looks,’ Pam said thoughtfully.

‘It’s fake,’ Kathrin said curtly. ‘The summer I was seventeen, he was caught embezzling money from his father’s business. Caught red-handed. It had been going on for months.’

Pam padded over to the stove and helped herself to more hot water. ‘Are you sure? That’s so sneaky and underhanded. He doesn’t look the type.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Kathrin’s voice thinned. ‘There was an anonymous phone call tipping off the police. At the trial Jud tried to pin the call on Ivor. But Ivor was with me; he couldn’t have done it.’

Ivor and she had been in bed together, she thought, ducking her head in a wave of dizziness. ‘It’s awfully hot in here,’ she mumbled.

‘It’s a sauna,’ Pam said, reasonably enough. ‘You can’t stop there, Kathrin—what happened?’

With a complete lack of emotion Kathrin said, ‘Bernard—their father—was so upset that Jud could have accused Ivor that he had a stroke. A relatively mild one, but a stroke, nevertheless. The prosecution had already produced evidence that Jud had been systematically stealing for months, salting the money away in different accounts. He finally confessed, and he was sent to prison. End of story.’

Pam shook out her cluster of black curls. ‘You never married Ivor,’ she said, making it more question than statement.

Kathrin said rapidly, ‘Right after the trial Ivor told his father he and I had made love. Bernard fired my mother, and she and I left the next day. I never saw Ivor or Jud or their father again.’

‘Until tonight when Jud turned up at the kitchen table. No wonder you looked as if you’d seen a ghost,’ Pam said, obviously intrigued. ‘It all sounds terribly feudal...like one of those family sagas on TV. Didn’t his father think you were good enough for Ivor?’

‘The housekeeper’s daughter? I should say not! He couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.’

‘He was nuts,’ Pam said succinctly.

Kathrin managed a weak smile. ‘That’s sweet of you. But Pam, you do see why I can’t possibly go out with Jud tomorrow—I don’t want to be anywhere near him!’

‘I’ll speak to Garry,’ Pam said decisively. ‘I’m sure he’ll understand.’

‘Thanks,’ Kathrin rejoined in true gratitude, ‘you’re a real friend. Now, are we going into the lake or not?’

The sauna was on the shores of Loon Lake, which was still partially frozen, and it was the custom of the more stalwart of the scientists to follow their sauna with a swim. ‘Not me,’ Pam announced. ‘The last time I did that, it took me the whole night to warm up.’

But Kathrin needed some kind of drastic action to shake off the mood of her story. She had told Pam the truth. But she had not told the whole truth, and it was the gaps in the story that were bothering her as much as its fabric. She flipped her wet hair over her shoulder and said, ‘Wait for me, I won’t be long.’

‘I bet you won’t!’

The air outside struck cold on Kathrin’s bare skin. It was one of the unwritten rules of the camp that the men stayed away from the vicinity of the sauna when the women were using it, so Kathrin didn’t even look around as she picked her way down the rocky slope to the lake. The ice was about fifty feet out. Not giving herself time to think, because if she did she would turn tail for the warmth of the sauna, she stepped into the lake.

It was, not surprisingly, ice-cold. Keeping a wary eye for rocks, Kathrin ran forward and plunged in, gasping with shock. Kicking as hard as she could, she swam to the very edge of the ice, let out a couple of whoops worthy of any loon, then stroked for the shore with an inelegant but highly effective degree of splashing. She was half-upright, her feet seeking a purchase on the bottom of the lake, when she saw something from the corner of her eye. Her head swung round.

Jud was standing on the shore watching her.




CHAPTER TWO


KATHRIN stood still, a rock digging into her heel. Jud was wearing a dark blue parka, a haversack thrown over one shoulder, and something in his posture made her heart skip a beat. Once, when he had been fourteen or fifteen, he had liked to hunt; and just so had she seen him waiting, statue-still in the woods, for his prey.

The coward in her, that part that subconsciously had hoped she would never see any of the Leighton men again, wanted to scurry up the slope and vanish into the sauna. But Kathrin was twenty-four now, not seventeen, and cutting through the turmoil in her breast was a clear, pure flame of anger. Earlier in the evening she had likened this place to heaven. She had been happy. But Jud, who had invaded her heaven, had by his very presence despoiled her hap-piness.

Neither hurrying nor bothering to disguise the fact that she had seen him, she straightened, her body a smooth interplay of pale curves against the dark waters of the lake. Her nudity scarcely bothered her; as a child, had she not swum naked with Jud in the lake on his father’s estate time and again and thought nothing of it? ‘You’re breaking the rules,’ she said crisply. ‘The men don’t come near the sauna when Pam and I are here.’

‘I’ve always broken the rules,’ he drawled. ‘You should know that better than anyone.’

‘Until they sent you to prison for it,’ she flashed. ‘You’ve never grown up, have you, Jud?’

He tensed; to Kathrin, it was as though he had raised a loaded gun to his shoulder. Clipping off his words, he said, ‘Don’t you dare tell me what I’m like! You know nothing of what’s happened to me the last few years. Nothing.’

‘And whose fault is that?’

‘Oh, you have your share of the blame,’ Jud said viciously. ‘Don’t play the innocent with me, Kit.’

Kathrin shivered, feeling the cold invade her flesh and the stones bite into the soles of her feet. He had become a stranger, she thought, an accusatory, angry stranger. Yet he was worse than a stranger. For hidden in the man’s body was the memory of the boy she had known, who had laughed with her and taught her to climb trees and fish for trout in the brook. ‘We know nothing of each other’s lives,’ she said tightly. ‘I’m not sure we ever did.’

Then, because she could not bear to prolong a conversation that seemed the very opposite of communication, she began wading to shore, moving with a grace that came naturally to her; and the whole time Jud watched her. Once she had climbed the rocky steps to the sauna door she was hidden by the wooden screen. Crouching low, she stepped inside.

Swathed in a towel, Pam was waiting for her. ‘You actually got in the—what’s wrong?’

Cursing her giveaway features, Kathrin said, ‘Stay behind the screen when you go outside—Jud’s out there.’

Pam scowled. ‘Garry must have forgotten to tell him.’

‘Garry shouldn’t have to. Spying on us like that, it’s loathsome!’

‘It could have been an honest mistake, Kathrin.’

‘Sure—muskoxen can fly.’

‘You’ve really got it in for this guy.’

Her body was tingling from her swim and perhaps that was what shocked Kathrin into indiscretion. ‘I trusted him, Pam! I would have trusted him with my life. And all along he was acting a lie, stealing from his own father.’

‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’

‘They proved it in court,’ Kathrin said shortly. ‘And besides, he admitted it, I told you that. We’d better get out of here, the others are waiting for their turn.’

She and Pam got dressed behind the screen, then walked back to the camp together. Jud was nowhere to be seen. Pam said, when they reached the kitchen, ‘Come on in and I’ll stoke up the stove. We’ll make hot chocolate while the men are getting cleaned up.’

Kathrin wanted nothing more than to hide away in her own little hut. But her hair was wet and it was extravagant to light her own stove when the kitchen was so warm. ‘OK, but I won’t stay long,’ she said.

To her great relief only Garry and Karl were in the kitchen; once they had gone, she began brushing out her hair, and by the time she had finished her cocoa and helped Pam clean up the supper dishes it was dry. ‘I’m going to get out of here,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got the energy to face Jud again tonight. ‘Night, Pam, and thanks for listening.’

The road between the two rows of tents and buildings was empty. Kathrin hurried across it and into her own hut. She pulled both the outer and the inner doors tight shut, and for the first time since she had come here wished she could lock them. After drawing the curtains across the windows, she hooked the room’s only chair under the doorknob. If Jud made up his mind he was coming in, it would not stop him; but it did make her feel a little safer.

It was well past midnight. She should go to bed.

She prowled around the room, sorting her dirty clothes, putting her notes and camera equipment on the desk, then changing into her fleece pyjamas. Finally she put dark plastic refuse bags over the windows to give at least an illusion of darkness. She did this only rarely, for usually she had no problem getting to sleep; but tonight, she knew, was different.

In the artificial gloom Kathrin lay flat on her back, staring up at the roof of the hut. Consciously she tried to relax her muscles one by one, starting at her toes and working up to her head. But, when she had finished, her fists were still clenched at her sides and her neck corded with tension.

Jud’s going to knock on the door. And if he does, I have nothing to say to him. Nothing. I want him to get on the first plane out of here and disappear from my life as thoroughly as he did seven years ago.

Because I’m frightened of him.

Her eyes widened a fraction. That was it, of course. She was frightened. Not for anything did she want to plunge back into all the pain and confusion of her love for Ivor, or the horror of Jud’s trial, or the dreadful day when she and her mother had left Thorndean. The past was over. She could not bear to live through it again.

From the direction of the sauna she heard men’s voices in a jocular chorus that grew louder and more distinct. The kitchen door opened and shut. Pam called something to Garry.

But no one knocked on her door.

* * *

In the morning Kathrin woke suddenly, with the sensation of having been dragged too rapidly from the depths of an ice-cold lake up into the air. Then the sound that had woken her came again: a peremptory rap on her door. She sat up, her heart racing, not sure whether she was awake or dreaming, and called out uncertainly, ‘Hello?’

‘Kit? I need to talk to you.’

The knob was turning on the inner door. ‘Go away!’ she cried.

Jud pushed against the panels and the chair that she had rammed under the knob scraped against the floorboards. ‘Open the door,’ he demanded. ‘I want to talk about our plans for the muskoxen.’

The chair clattered sideways to the floor, the door swung open, and Jud strode into the room, which immediately seemed to shrink. After he had closed the door behind him, he picked up the chair, straddling it and resting his arms on its curved back. He looked large, immovable, and—once again—angry.

Kathrin leaped out of the bunk and stood at bay, her cheeks still flushed with sleep, her hair a chestnut tangle on her shoulders; and perhaps if she had been fully awake she would not have spoken so hastily. ‘You’ve got one hell of a nerve,’ she seethed. ‘Bursting in here like a common crimin—’

As she broke off in mid-sentence, horrified by her choice of words, Jud snarled, ‘In your eyes that’s all I am, isn’t it? A common criminal.’

Striving for some semblance of dignity, which was difficult when she was clad in baggy pyjamas, Kathrin said, ‘I shouldn’t have said that—but you did wake me up and you did burst in uninvited. Jud, we can talk at breakfast once I’ve had a cup of coffee. Not that there’s anything to say. Because we don’t have any plans. I’m going back to the valley—you’re not coming with me.’

‘That’s not what Garry said yesterday afternoon.’

‘It’s what I say!’

‘Oh? I wasn’t under the impression that you ran the camp.’

Her breast rising and falling under her fleece top, Kathrin fumed, ‘I didn’t invite you up here, it should be entirely obvious that I don’t want you here, and there’s no way I’m heading out into the tundra with you. Have you got that straight? Now will you please get out of here so I can get dressed?’

Jud gave her a leisurely survey. ‘I won’t see anything I didn’t see last night.’

Like a hare startled by a wolf, she froze, every nerve taut, and again was aware of fear. ‘You know what? I don’t like what you’ve become,’ she said in a small, clear voice. ‘I never used to be afraid of you and now I am. So just leave, will you? Garry’s around somewhere, and he’ll tell you that you’re not going out with me.’ Unwisely she added, ‘He’s changed his mind since yesterday.’

‘Now why would he have done that, darling Kit? Because you’ve chosen to inform him that I’m an ex-convict?’ Jud asked silkily. ‘But he already knows that, you see, and I don’t think it’ll make him change his mind.’

‘Don’t call me darling! And he’ll change his mind for safety reasons. It must have been embarrassingly clear to everyone last night that you and I can’t stand the sight of each other. This is the Arctic—one of the most unforgiving environments in the world. It would be stupid to send us out together. Stupid and risky.’

To her fury Jud laughed. ‘You always were quick-witted in a crunch. That hasn’t changed.’ Then he went on with an air of calm reason that infuriated her, ‘However, much as I hate to disappoint you, Garry isn’t going to change his mind. It’s very simple. I need to photograph muskoxen. You know where the herd is. Therefore we’re going out together.’ He raised one brow in mockery. ‘But if you’d rather discuss our plans in public in the kitchen, that’s OK with me...by the way, you’ll never make it to the pages of Vogue magazine with those pyjamas.’

His eyes drifted down her legs, hidden by the thick green pile of her pyjama bottoms. Then suddenly his gaze sharpened. He got up from the chair and crossed the room, standing so close to her that she could see the individual stitches in his sweater. ‘That rug,’ he said, the tone of his voice altogether different. ‘I remember it—your mother made it, didn’t she?’

Kathrin fought the urge to step back. ‘Yes. The year you finished high school.’

Jud dropped to his knees, and unwillingly she looked down on his bent head. His hair was just the same, she thought, exactly as it had been since he was a small boy. She had always loved the ravens who nested in the tall beeches at Thorndean, admiring their adaptability and their fierce independence; and Jud’s hair had the same blue-black sheen as a raven’s wing. His fingers—the long, flexible fingers that she remembered so well—were caressing the blue strands of cloth interwoven in the rug. ‘My dad gave me that shirt,’ he said quietly. ‘I wore it until it was nearly falling apart.’

The words came out in spite of her. ‘You tore it the day you fell down the ravine. My mother mended it for you.’

‘Yeah...’ He glanced up, his eyes a much deeper blue than the faded fabric, and for the first time his face was unguarded and open, the face of the Jud she had always known. Kathrin’s breath caught in her throat. She said loudly, ‘Ivor’s cashmere sweater is part of the rug as well.’

As if prison bars had slammed shut, Jud’s face changed. He stood up, his gaze trained on hers. ‘I think you fell in love with Ivor when you were in the cradle,’ he said with a total lack of emotion. ‘So why didn’t you marry him, Kit?’

With all the dignity she could muster she answered, ‘I don’t want to talk about Ivor. The breakfast bell’s going to ring any minute and I’m not ready—it’s not fair to keep Pam waiting.’

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Jud said with a softness that rippled with menace. ‘It’s due time we talked about the past, you and I. About Ivor and my father and all that happened seven years ago. But not now. Not before breakfast. In that, at least, you’re right.’ He smiled at her, a smile every bit as menacing as his voice, and turned back to the door. But as he opened it, he looked at her over his shoulder. ‘You don’t think it’s coincidence that I turned up here do you, Kit?’ he said, and closed the door gently behind him.

Kathrin’s bare toes curled into the softness of the rug. With Jud gone, the room had resumed its normal proportions. Yet the silence within the four board walls echoed and pulsed with his presence, and with a sick feeling in her heart she knew that everything had changed. For she had not for one instant doubted the claim he had made on his way out of the door. Jud had indeed come here seeking her out. And he would not go away until he had achieved his purpose. Whatever that purpose might be.

With a raucous clang the breakfast bell split the silence. All her movements mechanical, Kathrin got dressed, not even noticing the small pleasures of a newly folded shirt and clean socks. Pulling on a pair of leather mukluks, she grabbed her jacket from the hook and left the hut.

It was a beautiful day, the breeze from the plateau tinged with real warmth. She’d do a wash this morning, she thought, and ask Pam to take it in for her. That way she could set off to find the muskoxen after lunch. Without Jud.

‘Kathrin! Got a minute?’

A wrench and an oil can in one hand, Garry was emerging from the white-painted building that housed the generator. She smiled at him, happy to see his bearded, pleasant face. No surprises with Garry, no hidden depths. ‘Isn’t it a wonderful day?’ she called, walking to meet him.

‘Supposed to stay like this until the weekend. Not that I ever trust the weather reports.’ He replaced the wrench in his metal tool box, which was sitting on the bench outside the hut. Then, without finesse, he plunged into what he had to say. ‘Pam told me about you and Jud. But it’s no go, Kathrin. Jud’s prepared to underwrite one whole research programme for us, and you know what that means.’

Kathrin’s heart sank. The research station received only minimal government support, depending on funds from universities and private donors. With all the cutbacks in recent years, the donors were becoming more and more crucial to the station’s survival. ‘He can’t have that much money,’ she said sharply.

‘He’s already given me a certified cheque—he made a small fortune on that prison movie he produced.’ At Kathrin’s look of mystification Garry went on, ‘You must have seen it, it came out a couple of years ago and did phenomenally well in the States.’

‘No, I never did.’ She frowned in thought. ‘That would have been the year I was taking honours and working part-time, I either had my nose buried in a textbook or I was trying to catch up on my sleep.’

‘Look, I know this is awkward for you,’ Garry said. ‘But in the interests of the station, I think you should be able to ignore any personal differences. All Jud wants is some shots of muskoxen. You’re the logical person to go out with him.’

She did not feel logical. She felt trapped and rebellious. ‘What does he want photos of muskoxen for?’

‘His next book will—’

Floundering in a sea of unknowns, Kathrin sputtered, ‘I didn’t know he was a writer.’

‘Well, you haven’t seen him for years, have you?’ Garry said patiently. ‘His first book, on west coast grizzlies, is due out next month. I saw the advance copy—some inspired photography and a really excellent text; the man knows his stuff. He’s even willing to plug the station in this Arctic book—so we sure can’t afford to antagonise him.’

As a boy Jud had always been fiddling with cameras; that at least was familiar territory. ‘All right, I get the message,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll take him out there and I’ll find him a herd of muskoxen if we have to walk thirty miles. But I’ll only be as polite to him as he is to me. And I won’t nursemaid him.’

Garry clapped her on the shoulder, and not until she saw the relief in his face did she realise he had half expected her to refuse. ‘Great!’ he said heartily. ‘He’ll carry all his own gear, and I’m sure he won’t be any trouble to you. Apparently he camped out in the Rockies for the better part of a year doing his first book—you won’t have to nursemaid him.’ He plunked the oil can beside the tool box. ‘Let’s go for breakfast. Pam’s making bacon and eggs.’

Every piece of information Kathrin was gathering about Jud only served to confuse her more and more. The Jud she had known when she was fifteen had certainly had the skills for wilderness camping. But the man who had cold-bloodedly stolen from his father and then spent four years in prison? How could that man have survived in the awesome silence of the mountains, alone and thrown upon his own resources?

Unhappily she trailed behind Garry to the kitchen. Inside, Jud and Karl were bent over a topographical map, Karl explaining the layout of the beach ridges, lakes and plateaux of the Carstairs lowland in his careful English. Turning her back on them, Kathrin helped herself to an orange and began peeling it. The delicious smell of frying bacon filled the kitchen. As Calvin offered her a freshly baked muffin and as she bit into the first sweet, juicy segment of orange, her spirits began to revive. She would hike as fast as she could to the herd. Once there, she would do her work and Jud could do his—after all, he was used to being alone. And she would not discuss with him anything that she didn’t want to.

Which, she thought, mischievously, could mean a very silent trip.

The muffin had blueberries in it and was warm enough to melt the butter she had lathered on it. After rinsing her hands at the sink, Kathrin cut some of Pam’s homemade bread, put the slices between two metal racks, and went over to the stove to toast them. ‘Did you sleep well?’ Pam asked.

‘Fine,’ Kathrin said warmly, sensing Pam was worried about the next few days. In a clear voice she added, ‘I’ll be leaving again this afternoon. As Jud’s donating money to the station, I’m duty bound to find him a herd of mus-koxen.’

‘Charmingly put,’ Jud said from directly behind her. ‘What time?’

Hoping her start of surprise hadn’t shown, Kathrin turned the rack to cook the other side of the bread. ‘About four,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘It’ll be at least a three-hour hike, maybe more if they’ve moved further up the valley. Pam and I will look after the food.’

‘I’ll be ready,’ Jud said.

There was a note in his voice that sent a shiver down her spine. She had no reason to be afraid, she thought stoutly. Once or twice a day she checked in with Garry on the portable radio; and if Jud’s company became intolerable, she’d simply come back to camp and leave him out there. ‘Wear rubber boots and bring your own tent,’ she said coolly.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Her cheeks flushed from more than the heat of the stove, Kathrin accepted a heaped plate of bacon, eggs and hashbrowns from Pam and went to sit down beside Calvin, who was regaling anyone who would listen with his latest findings on the role of blue-green algae in the ecology of the Arctic lowlands. Despite his loudly expressed interest in women, Kathrin often suspected Calvin was more interested in the convoluted sex lives of algae than the rather predictable amatory activities of humans. Listening with one ear, she tackled her food with gusto and kept a wary eye on Jud, who was talking to Pam by the stove. Now that she was over the initial shock of seeing Jud again, she was going to manage the next four days just fine, she thought optimistically. She was a grown woman—she could handle a dozen Juds.

This mood stayed with Kathrin through the day, a very busy day. She washed her clothes and hung them on the line between the storage hut and the kitchen, she brought her notes up to date, and she carefully accumulated everything she would need out on the tundra, knowing from experience that what she forgot she had to do without. By now, she had loading her backpack down to an art. At three forty-five she zipped up the last compartment and hefted the pack to check its weight. Not bad. She’d carried heavier.

Now to find Jud.

But first she halted in front of her mirror, pulling her hair out of its ponytail and brushing its shining weight back from her face. Nimbly she started braiding it, having discovered this was the simplest way to look after it when she was camping; and all the while her eyes looked back at her.

Her features were long-familiar and taken for granted: straight brows, straight nose dusted with freckles, level brown eyes. In repose her face was like a good drawing, the lines strong and sure. However, when lit by emotion it was transformed to a vivid beauty, elusive enough that she tended to discount it.

She was wearing a turquoise turtleneck under a wool sweater softly patterned in turquoise, mauves and browns, a favourite combination of hers in which she knew she looked well. Her hooded jacket was as dark a brown as her eyes; her corduroy trousers were also dark brown, tucked into high rubber boots. Tiny gold earrings shaped like seagulls twinkled in her lobes.

After fastening her braid, Kathrin brushed on lip gloss and put it in the pocket of her jacket. I’m delaying the inevitable, she thought. I don’t want to go out there and face Jud.

Quickly she stooped, lifting her pack on to one of the bunks and then swinging it in place on her back. Binoculars, gloves, notebook, pencil. She was ready.

She took one last, steadying look around the hut before going outside. Jud was standing in the road waiting for her, his face, tanned, unsmiling, giving nothing away. The sun gleamed in his hair while his eyes were a distillation of all the blue of the sky. With a jolt of surprise Kathrin realised that Pam was right. Jud was a very handsome man.

She stopped in her tracks. More than handsome. He exuded a highly charged masculine energy of which she was sure he was unaware, coupled with an air of utter self-containment: an intriguing paradox that bore no relation to the Jud she had grown up with. It was as though, she thought slowly, she were suddenly seeing him for the first time.

He said caustically, ‘It’s too late to change your mind.’

She tossed her head. ‘I said I’d take you to the muskoxen and I will.’ In a surge of adrenalin she added, ‘I’m the one who jumped the ravine—remember?’ The ravine was on the far boundary of Thorndean, an outcrop of granite where ferns grew lush and green, and water dripped mournfully in the murky shadows among the rocks. It had long been a haunt of the ravens. ‘The summer I was twelve you dared me to jump across it—and I did.’

‘I never thought you would.’ A reluctant smile tugged at Jud’s lips. ‘I was crazy to dare you and you were crazy to do it...that was the day I tore my shirt.’

He had also scraped the skin from his ribs and she had been the one to smooth on antibiotic ointment that she had stolen from her mother’s medicine cabinet; as if it were yesterday she could see his teeth gritted against the pain. She said tersely, ‘Let’s go. I want to find the herd before we stop to eat.’

‘Can’t handle the memories, Kit?’ he jeered.

Exasperated, she said, ‘You have a choice here, Jud—you can stand talking to thin air or you can follow me.’

Suiting action to word, Kathrin set off past the radio shack for the nearest rock ridge. Soon her boots were crunching among loose stones and shell fragments, and her stride had settled into its natural rhythm; although Jud’s longer stride was right beside her, the tension of his presence lessened as she filled her lungs with the crisp, pure air. This was where she wanted to be. Perhaps it didn’t matter who was with her as long as she could inhabit this immensity of space.

He said casually, ‘Karl was saying this whole area was under the sea not that long ago.’

‘That’s right. The weight of the ice cap pressed the land down. But as the ice melted, the land rose. You can see a whole series of beach ridges ahead of us.’

‘So tell me about the blue-green algae of which Calvin is so enamoured.’

She laughed almost naturally and described their role in the slow evolution of the Arctic soil, finding Jud’s questions intelligent and his own knowledge considerable. They descended the first ridge and skirted a lake. A pair of loons flew overhead. Jud spotted a phalarope, Kathrin a sandpiper; and their boots brushed the tiny Arctic flowers, glossy golden buttercups and purple-striped campion.

For the next hour they climbed steadily towards the plateau, beyond which lay the valley where the muskoxen roamed. At about six o’clock Kathrin said breathlessly, ‘We should fill our water bottles at this stream. And let’s take a short break.’ Loosening the straps, she lowered her pack to the ground.

The stream gurgled out of the hillside between rocks carpeted with green and scarlet mosses. Chewing on some trail mix, Jud said reflectively, ‘Colour leaps out at you here, doesn’t it? The flowers and mosses are so vivid, so full of life.’

She had often noticed the same thing. She said eagerly, ‘I think it’s because at first glance the Arctic offers a kind of sensory deprivation—dun-coloured tundra, grey rocks, and the white of last year’s snow. Even the sky’s pale blue, as though the ice cap has sapped it of all its strength. So the flowers make straight for the heart.’

‘You love it here.’

She nodded. ‘I feel as though I’ve come home...I don’t know why.’

His eyes fixed on hers, Jud said, ‘It’s a land pared to the bone. No euphemisms possible—only truth.’

She knew instantly that he had shifted from the landscape to the personal. For a moment she looked around her at the vast sweep of land and sky, recognising that her anger early that morning now seemed petty and unworthy of her. She said gravely, ‘Jud, seven years ago my world turned upside down. I’ve done the best I can since then, in my own way, to deal with that. But I really don’t want to talk about it...please.’

He was hunkered down very close to her, the breeze ruffling his hair. ‘You think I stole that money.’

‘I know you did. You confessed, didn’t you?’

‘Ivor made the phone call, Kit.’

‘He couldn’t have—I was with him at the time.’

‘You were in love with him.’

‘I wouldn’t have lied, Jud!’

‘You did lie.’ As she made a sudden move, he stayed her with one hand on the sleeve of her jacket. ‘You were young and vulnerable and very much in love...perhaps it was inevitable that you supported Ivor over me.’ A harsh edge to his voice, he added, ‘I just need to know the truth, that’s all.’

There was a scar across his knuckles, a scar white as bone. Staring down at it, because she could not bear the force of his gaze, Kathrin said, ‘How did you hurt yourself?’

‘In prison—I was on a labour gang for a while,’ he said impatiently. ‘Kit, the truth...surely this place deserves the truth.’

When she looked up, her eyes were deep, troubled pools of darkness. ‘I’ve told you the truth. Just as I told it at the trial.’

In total frustration Jud picked up a chunk of granite, banging it so hard against a boulder that chips flew; the noise seemed a violation of the unfathomable silence of the tundra. ‘I thought better of you than this,’ he said.

In a clumsy movement Kathrin scrambled to her feet. ‘You’re proving my point—this is just why I don’t want to talk about what happened,’ she cried. ‘What’s the use? It’s over and done with. Finished.’

He stood up as well, balancing his weight on the rocks. ‘I could have photographed muskoxen on lots of other islands in the Arctic. I came here because I saw your name on the roster of scientists at the camp...I always figured you’d end up somewhere like this.’

‘Then maybe you’d be better off going to one of the other islands,’ she said steadily.

‘I’m staying here.’ He paused, his eyes narrowed. ‘There’s something else I should tell you—some time in the next week or so, Ivor will be coming here, too.’

Kathrin’s heart gave a great lurch in her breast. ‘What did you say?’

His face as immobile as if it had been carved from stone, Jud repeated, ‘Ivor will be visiting the camp in the next few days—he pilots the company helicopter.’

‘No!’ She took two steps backwards over the uneven ground, all the horror of that last meeting with Ivor invading her as if the intervening years had never happened. ‘Not Ivor—not here.’

‘You’re still in love with him,’ Jud accused savagely. ‘For God’s sake, how can you be so blind?’

Scarcely hearing him, Kathrin whispered, ‘Tell me you’re joking, that this is some kind of cruel game. This isn’t a place Ivor would choose to be; he’s not like you and me—why would he come here?’

‘To make money—why else does Ivor go anywhere? Mining, Kit. Uranium and silver. That’s why Ivor’s coming here.’

Her heart was pounding as if she had run all the way from the camp. ‘I never want to see him again,’ she said raggedly.

‘Too bad. Garry told me you’ll be one of the people Ivor will be interviewing. The effect on muskoxen of overhead flights and survey crews,’ he finished mockingly.

Standing as he was on the rocks, Jud towered over her: a man hardened beyond belief. ‘You’re out for revenge, aren’t you?’ Kathrin faltered. ‘That’s what your game is—revenge.’

‘Truth. Not revenge. There’s a big difference. And—believe me—it’s no game.’

She had no answer for him, no reserves to draw upon. In her overwrought state the panorama that only minutes ago had been the harbinger of tranquillity now seemed bleak and inimical, no more home than, ultimately, Thorndean had been. Seeking refuge in action, she hauled on her backpack, turned her back on Jud and headed up the slope as fast as she could.




CHAPTER THREE


AN HOUR later Jud and Kathrin reached her tent, a brave yellow triangle on the hillside. Neither of them had spoken a word since they had stopped by the stream; while Kathrin had forced herself to an outward composure, her emotions were still in a turmoil. Ignoring Jud, she set up the viewing scope on its tripod and scanned the width of the valley. ‘No sign of them,’ she said finally. ‘That means at least another two hours to get beyond those cliffs. We’ll have to check the river valley as we go.’

‘I think we should eat here,’ Jud said.

‘Fine by me,’ she answered indifferently, fiddling with the knobs on the tripod.

‘Look at me, Kit.’

‘I hate it when you call me that name.’

‘It’s what I’ve always called you and I plan to continue.’ He went on in a level voice, ‘I had to tell you about Ivor—I didn’t want you meeting him the same way you did me.’

‘Oh, sure,’ she said sarcastically, ‘you’re the soul of kindness.’

He ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to spend the next four days trading insults with you! It’s a waste of time and this place asks better of us. Let’s for heaven’s sake call a truce.’

‘I don’t trust you,’ she blurted.

Jud flinched. But his recovery was so quick that Kathrin was left to wonder if she had imagined the pain that had so fleetingly tightened his features. He said irritably, ‘Then let’s bring it down to its lowest level. We’re the only people within ten miles of each other—surely we can at least have a little civilised conversation as we eat.’

It seemed a sensible request. Not that she felt sensible. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said.

‘Good. If you want to take down your tent, I’ll get supper.’

Anything that kept them busy with separate tasks was fine with Kathrin. She cleaned the dirt from the tent pegs, slid the poles together, and folded everything into a neat bundle, which she stowed on top of her backpack. Then, once again, knowing how easily a lone animal could be missed, she traversed the valley with her scope.

Supper was Pam’s beef stew with home-made bread, and was eaten largely in silence, for Jud, despite his request for civilised conversation, had withdrawn into himself. Seated on a boulder, Kathrin scrubbed her plate clean with a piece of bread. ‘I wonder why food tastes so good out here?’ she ventured.

For a moment she thought Jud hadn’t heard her; he was gazing across the valley, and in profile looked more like the boy she had grown up with than the stranger he had become. Then he said, so quietly that she had to strain for the words, ‘Perhaps because there’s room to breathe.’

In swift compassion she said, ‘How did you ever survive being in prison, Jud? Five days in a classroom used to be more than you could take.’

‘I went so deep inside myself that nothing and no one could touch me. I’d have gone mad otherwise.’

He had spoken without emphasis, in a way that was completely convincing. She remembered the slow seep of blood through his blue shirt all those years ago and the stoicism with which he had borne her awkward ministrations, and wanted to weep. It was on the tip of her tongue to cry, ‘Why did you do it?’, for this was the one question whose answer had always evaded her. But she quelled her words before they could be spoken. He had called for a truce, and she had said she did not trust him. It was not for her to ask that question.

Her voice credibly calm, she said, ‘Then this is the right place for you to be.’

He glanced over at her and almost conversationally said, ‘You know, you’ve grown into a very beautiful woman, Kit.’

Her jaw dropped. ‘Who, me?’

A rare smile lit up his face. ‘No one else here.’

Ivor had never told her she was beautiful. Ivor had favoured exquisitely groomed blondes, and if they were rich, all the better. ‘I’ve got freckles.’

He poured boiling water out of the pot on the little gas stove into two mugs containing instant coffee, and passed her one. ‘Is that a crime?’

‘Women in Vogue don’t wear fleece pyjamas and don’t have freckles.’

‘But the women in—’ He broke off. ‘Good lord, where’s my camera?’

As he grabbed for his pack, she looked over her shoulder. A big dark-winged bird was flying straight for them. ‘It’s a jaeger,’ she said with a grin. ‘A parasitic jaeger. Stercorarius parasiticus, to give it its—duck your head!’

But Jud was standing up to adjust his lens, and as the bird swooped overhead, his shutter clicked busily. For a moment the jaeger hung in the air, perfectly poised, its tail fanned and its streamers gracefully punctuating the sky. Then it dived again, and with a burble of laughter Kathrin watched its passage stir the parting in Jud’s hair.

The jaeger passed over them twice more before flying off in the direction of the sea. Jud lowered his camera. ‘I’m sure I got at least one good shot there,’ he said, ‘and maybe two. It must have had a four-foot wing span.’

‘Forty-two inches,’ Kathrin said obligingly, laughter lingering on her face. ‘It’s a good thing we ate all the stew—they’re not called pirate-birds for nothing.’

‘To hell with the stew—I thought it was after my scalp.’

‘It did give you a new hairdo,’ she chuckled, and reached up with one hand to smooth his hair back in place. But Jud was taller than she remembered, so that she had to stand on tiptoe; and his hair, for all its thickness, was silky to the touch. She had somehow expected it to be coarse and springy. Taken aback, she realised with a frisson along her spine that what she really wanted to do was stroke it as she might have stroked the smooth pelt of a wolf, in wonderment and pleasure. Of their own accord her eyes flew to his face.

He was standing very still, the camera dangling from one hand. Yet it was far from the stillness of repose: he blazed with an energy that gathered Kathrin into its orbit as naturally as the act of breathing. Her hand drifted from his hair to his face, her fingertips tracing the ridge of his brow and the jut of his cheekbone, all the while achingly aware of how warm his skin was. Then she touched the corner of his mouth and heard the sharp inhalation of his breath.

Only a tiny sound, but it broke the spell. Her hand dropped to her side and she said incoherently, ‘Jud, I’m sorry—I don’t know what came over me to act like that, I—I must have been out of my mind...I’ve never behaved like that with you before, never. I promise it won’t happen again, truly.’

She backed away from him, her dark eyes filled with panic, and because she was not looking where she was going she stumbled on a hummock of grass. Jud grabbed for her arm. Through the layers of her jacket and her two sweaters she was aware in every nerve of her body of the strength of his grip, and of the current of energy that seemed to surge from his body to hers. A man’s energy. Called up because she was a woman...

Frightened out of her wits, Kathrin pulled free. ‘We’ve got to go. Please let go, Jud!’

He did so instantly. But her blood was still beating in her ears, destroying the tundra’s silence and with it her peace of mind. Striving for the ordinary, she said inanely, ‘We didn’t finish our coffee.’

‘I’ll make more when we reach the muskoxen,’ Jud said with a casualness that did not ring true.

He was as shaken by what had just happened as she was, Kathrin thought in disbelief. Yet what exactly had happened? She was not sure that she knew. She was less sure that she wanted to know. Certainly there was no way she could have put the strange intensity of the last few minutes into words.

Jud knelt to replace his lens cap on the camera. Glancing up at her, his voice almost normal, he said, ‘Before that jaeger arrived, we were talking about women and beauty, weren’t we? I know one thing—I’ve never seen a woman in Vogue as beautiful as you, Kit. Because there’s intelligence and character in your face. Character you’ve earned over the last few years, I suspect...were they difficult years?’

How could she talk about the past—especially to Jud—when the present was filling her with such confusion? ‘This conversation doesn’t qualify as a truce. Anyway, what I did in those years is really none of your business.’

With a violence that startled her Jud said, ‘Do you know what keeps knocking me off balance? One moment we’re back where we always were, having fun in the outdoors, laughing because a bird’s just dive-bombed us...then sud-denly I’m aware that you’re a woman. Not a girl. A woman. A beautiful woman.’

With uncanny accuracy he had mirrored her own perception, that the two of them were on a seesaw that kept tilting between the past and the present. But she didn’t want to be alone on the tundra with a man who saw her as a beautiful woman; a man whose hair was soft to the touch. ‘We were like brother and sister,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t want that to change, and there’s no reason why it should. And now we’d better get going...I need to get some sleep at some point tonight.’

‘You want things simple and tidy, don’t you?’ he said ferociously. ‘Jud was once like a brother to me so he’ll always be a brother to me. Life’s not like that; surely you’ve learned that much?’

Kathrin dumped her cold coffee on the ground and shook the last droplets from the mug. ‘We’re here to look for muskoxen. Not the meaning of life.’

‘If we’re alone out here for four days, we’re going to find more than muskoxen,’ Jud said grimly, and bent to dismantle the little stove.

A few minutes later they set off, Kathrin in the lead, Jud behind her. But as she trudged through the bleached grass, she knew Jud would follow her lead only as long as he wanted to—and no longer.

* * *

The muskoxen were in the next valley, grazing in the meadow beyond an outcrop of rocks. ‘There they are!’ Kathrin exclaimed, as excited as if she’d met old friends. ‘It’s the same herd. I call the bull Bossy and the cow that doesn’t have a calf is Daisy. You can tell the other two cows apart by the degree of shedding—Clara’s only just started, and Sara’s well along. Their calves must have been born within a couple of days of each other, I can’t tell them apart.’




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