Stranger on Rhanna by Christine Marion Fraser

Author:Christine Marion Fraser [Fraser, Christine Marion]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2013-03-13T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Rachel entered Tigh na Cladach via the back porch and without hesitation went straight to the softly lit sitting room. There she found Otto sprawled in a chair by the fire, deathly pale, his pain-filled eyes black and dazed so that at first he wasn’t aware that she had entered the room.

‘Otto!’ Her heart cried his name. A few quick strides took her to his side and as she stooped to gaze into his face she knew why she had experienced these moments of pain and poignancy whenever they had been quiet and alone together. He was a very sick man: this big, wonderful Austrian, with his marvellous physique, his vigour, his delight of life, was dying.

All along she had sensed it – the shadow of death had been there in his eyes even while he had talked and laughed and played his spellbinding music. She had known, but even so, now that the moment of truth was here, the knowledge hit her like a sledgehammer.

‘Rachel.’ His mouth struggled to form her name. He seemed to come back from a very long way and his hand came up to enclose hers. ‘Pills – in the bedroom – get them – quickly please.’

She didn’t remember running upstairs but quite suddenly it seemed she was standing in the bedroom with its rose-sprigged walls and camped ceilings, its rose-coloured bed light shining down on the big, soft feather bed.

Frantically she gazed around, blinded at first by anxiety and fear, then her eye fell on the bedside cabinet – nothing there except a volume of Burns’ poems, another of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. But wrenching open the little drawer she saw them, a motley collection of brown pill bottles, full, half-full and some empty.

Her hands shook slightly as she picked them up and looked at the labels. He had asked for pills but which ones? Wildly she wondered if she should take them all down to him but then she remembered his pain and seizing the one containing morphine she raced down to the kitchen where she filled a glass with water and went back into the sitting room.

Taking the bottle from her trembling grasp he gulped down two of the pills and sat back to look at her. ‘In a little while I will be better,’ he told her breathlessly. She sat there with him, quiet and still by the fire, her mind strangely calm, her hands, those slender, delicate, soothing hands, wherein lay a power that could not be denied, placed cool and tender upon his clammy brow.

Gradually he relaxed, pain departed, he took several deep breaths and taking her face in his hands he turned it towards him till he could look deep and straight into her eyes.

‘You know, don’t you, liebling?’

She nodded; he gave a funny little half-smile. ‘From the beginning I felt you were different from anyone I had ever known. You have the sixth sense, the eyes that see deep and clear beyond the soul. I have been ill for a long time, Rachel.

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