The Unlived Year [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE As far back as she could remember she had known the place as Sun Hill. Gay Denison stood on the roadway leading down into the dale, looking across at it now with the bitterness of defeat in her heart. It faced west, a gentle, rounded hill, green against the darker backcloth of the ridge which closed Martindale in from the surrounding moors. The morning sunshine found it early and lingered on it in the evening, reluctant to depart, and the rest of the dale looked up to it. Or so Gay had always felt. As children they had climbed to its mossy summit to sit there, monarchs of all they surveyed—Chris and she. And her father had built a house on Sun Hill, halfway up, whose windows reflected the sunlight all day long and burned with a splendid fire in the brilliance of tJtie afterglow. Gay deliberately averted her eyes from the house, thrusting her hands deep into the pockets of her sheepskin coat in a quick gesture which betrayed her restlessness. Why was she thinking so much about Chris today? It was over two years since the letter had come telling them of her brother's death in Central Africa—or at least of the fact that he had disappeared on safari in circumstances which made his death inevitable. They had been forced to accept it in the end, death without proof, bowing to the superior knowledge of the man who had been Chris's partner on the African farm. A man they had never met Gay had wondered about Stephen Royle quite often, trying to discover between the lines of his letter something of the man himself, only to be forced to the conclusion that she could read into that one brief epistle no more than it meant to convey. Her brother had died in the bush, under regrettable circum-