Scandals
Penny Jordan

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Penny Jordan 2010

Penny Jordan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

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Source ISBN: 9781847560759

Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007371686

Version: 2016-10-11

To silk – the most magical of fabrics that always casts its spell on me.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Scandals Reading Group Questions

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Christmas 1991

‘It won’t be long now. They’ll all be here soon,’ said Amber.

Jay gave his wife an understanding smile, acknowledging her excitement.

They were in the drawing room at Denham, the elegant Palladian house Amber had inherited from her grandmother. The low-lying December sun was striking beams of pale light through the windows to illuminate the room’s soft blue and yellow décor, as Jay and Amber anticipated the arrival of their family.

Amber may have just had her seventy-ninth birthday, but even now she possessed a child’s delight in the magic of Christmas.

This youthful enthusiasm she had never lost, combined with her experience of life, had made her the driving force behind the success of Denby Silk, the Macclesfield silk mill, she had also inherited from her grandmother Blanche Pickford, instigating innovative procedures and designs. Amber had opened her own interior design studio in London’s Walton Street, and kept the business going during the war, and the even more economically difficult post-war years. Eventually she had handed over the day-to-day running of the business to younger members of the family so that they could continue and expand on her success. Here was a woman who had had the strength to endure the deaths of her first husband, Robert, Duke of Lenchester, and her son, and to go on from that to support and protect her own family here at Denham, as well as Jay’s own motherless daughters, before making his life the happiest it had ever been by agreeing to marry him. She had given him two more children, their twin daughters, Polly and Cathy. And now their shared extended family were ‘coming home,’ to Denham to celebrate Christmas.

Continuing a routine that was almost as traditional for them as Christmas itself, he asked her obligingly, ‘So who exactly is coming?’

‘Everyone,’ Amber assured him, smiling.

Ticking off the names on her fingers, she listed them for him, starting with the eldest: Jay’s two daughters from his first marriage.

‘Ella and Oliver are flying in from New York. They’re bringing Sam with them, but Olivia has a writing commission she has to finish for one of the magazines she freelances for so she’ll be coming on a later flight than her parents.

‘Janey’s going to come over later this morning and stock the freezer, and of course she and John and the boys will be spending Christmas Day with us. Luckily both boys will be able to come home.’

Janey, Jay’s younger daughter, and her husband, John, Lord Fitton Legh, lived only a few miles away from them in Cheshire at Fitton Hall. Harry, their heir, was currently working as a land agent for a wealthy landowner in Norfolk, since leaving Royal Agricultural College in Circencester, whilst his younger brother, David, had followed Fitton family tradition and was undergoing army officer training at Sandhurst.

‘Emerald telephoned yesterday to say that she and Drogo will be here on Christmas Eve,’ Amber continued, ‘and that Katie will come to us direct from Oxford.’ She paused and then admitted ruefully, ‘I know that Emerald is my daughter, Jay, but I do wish sometimes that she wasn’t quite so…so…privileged, and so, well, such a snob. It certainly isn’t Drogo’s fault, even if he is a duke.’

Drogo, Emerald’s husband, had inherited the title of Duke of Lenchester from Amber’s first husband, Robert. Emerald’s discovery that her father was not Robert, as she had always believed, but Jean-Philippe du Breveonet, a French artist, had led to rift between Amber and her eldest daughter, and even though that rift was now healed, Emerald had insisted that the fact that Robert was not her father was to remain a secret known only to Amber, Jay, Emerald herself, Drogo, and, unfortunately, her ex-mother-in-law, the Dowager Princess of Lauranto.

‘Emma and James will be coming with Emerald and Drogo.’ Amber proceeded with her list, referring to Emerald’s elder daughter and her younger son. ‘I’m so glad, James and Sam get on so well with one another. I suppose it helps that they are a similar age.’

‘What about Robert?’ Jay teased his wife. ‘You haven’t mentioned him yet.’

Robert was Amber’s eldest grandson, Emerald’s son from her brief runaway marriage to Alessandro, Crown Prince of Lauranto, a marriage that had been dissolved via the machinations of Alessandro’s mother.

Robert, now in his thirties, lived in London where he worked as a very successful architect, running his own practice.

‘Robert’s driving himself down.’

‘And coming alone?’

Jay knew that it was a matter of some concern to Amber that Robert was still single and seemed to prefer to have a constant and rapid succession of women through his life and his bed rather than to settle down.

‘Yes, he’s coming on his own. I do wish he could find the right person, Jay. Life hasn’t been as kind as it might to him. And although I would never say so to Emerald, I don’t think that the life he lived with her as a child can have helped, on top of knowing that his father didn’t want him. Olivia adores him, I know, but Robert has never shown any interest in her. Oh, don’t look at me like that,’ she laughed. ‘I’m not going to turn into a matchmaking grandmother. As it happens, I don’t believe that Olivia and Robert would be right for one another. Robert needs someone who will make him work hard to win her. Much as I love him I have to admit that some things in life have come too easily for him and that has made him rather thoughtless and arrogant. He is a very good-looking young man, independently wealthy and well connected, but that loving sweetness he had as a child has gone, and I do worry that unless he starts to think about others a little more, his life will be less happy than it could be.’

‘Things haven’t been easy for him. He’s always admired Drogo, and Drogo has been an excellent stepfather to him, but it is Jamie who will inherit from Drogo, not Robert.’

‘Do you think that is the root of the problem, Jay? Do you think that Robert minds that it is Jamie, and not he, who will one day step into Drogo’s shoes?’

The anxiety in Amber’s voice had Jay immediately seeking to reassure her.

‘No. To be truthful I think the problem is the situation ation with his real father. From the moment he could understand the situation, Robert has known that his father, or, more accurately, his paternal grandmother, has refused to accept or acknowledge him. When Alessandro remarried, Robert must have expected, as we all did, that there would be a child from that marriage to continue the line. But now Alessandro has died without producing an heir, and Robert’s paternal grandmother is courting him with a view to him stepping into his late father’s shoes. The unwanted unworthy child has become the desired and soughtafter future Crown Prince. In view of that it is perhaps no wonder that Robert has become increasingly cynical.’

Amber sighed. ‘Emerald is adamant that she does not want Robert to accept either the olive branch that Alessandro’s mother has extended to him, or the crown, but the Dowager Princess is a very determined woman who is used to having her own way. She dominated Alessandro and was the power behind the throne during his lifetime. Emerald has always refused to tell Robert about her real father, and although she hasn’t said so, some of her antagonism to this recent visit Robert has made to Lauranto to see his grandmother must be because she is afraid that the Dowager Princess might tell Robert the truth. I hope she doesn’t, Jay. That information should come from Emerald. I begged her to tell Robert whilst he was still young enough to accept it matter-of-factly and not to make the mistake I made when I concealed the truth from her, but she wouldn’t. I know that people who don’t know him think that Robert is too proud, that he has too high an opinion of himself, but I think that’s just a defence mechanism he’s adopted to protect himself. I still remember him asking me if it was true that his father had left his mother because he didn’t want him. Poor little boy. Some other boy at school had taunted him about Emerald and Alessandro’s marriage being annulled.

Jay patted his wife’s hand. He knew that Robert, her first-born grandchild, had a very special place in her heart.

‘What about the others?’ he asked her. ‘Will Rose be coming?’

At the mention of her late cousin Greg’s daughter, from his relationship with his Hong Kong Chinese mistress, Amber’s face lit up. She had loved Rose from the minute she had seen her, a tiny, very sick, unloved baby, brought back to Denham by Greg.

Rose had grown up at Denham with Jay’s own daughters and Emerald, and she now lived in London with her husband, Josh, a very successful entrepreneur who had built his hairdressing business into a multimillionpound empire. Rose and Josh did not have any children of their own, but Rose had taken to her heart her husband’s illegitimate son from a brief affair he had had before he and Rose had met.

‘Rose and Josh are coming. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Rose here.’

‘So that just leaves Polly and Cathy,’ said Jay, referring to his and Amber’s own twin daughters.

‘Cathy and Sim are driving up from Cornwall with the girls, and Polly and Rocco will be flying in from Venice with their two boys. We are so very lucky, Jay. I am lucky,’ Amber stressed, reaching out to hold his hand, ‘because I have you.’

It was typical of her that she should say that, Jay thought.

‘No, Amber, it is I who am the fortunate one,’ he told her tenderly.

Theirs had been a wonderfully happy marriage, all the more so, Jay reckoned, because of the despair and heartache they had both endured before they had married one another, Amber through the betrayal of her first love, Jean-Philippe, then through the road accident that had resulted in the death of both her husband and dearly loved son, and Jay himself through an unhappy marriage to his mentally unstable first wife.

She had been so blessed, Amber thought gratefully in turn, and in so many different ways, but the blessing she valued the most had been Jay’s survival of the heart attack that she had feared would take him from her. They had waited so long to share their love and be together gether, that even now she still felt that every minute they shared was a precious gift. It grieved her that not all their children and grandchildren had found such happiness in their lives.

‘So that’s everyone accounted for then, is it?’ Jay teased.

‘Not quite. There’s still Cassandra,’ Amber reminded him.

They looked at one another and their faces fell.

‘I know that she’s your cousin, Jay, and of course John’s stepmother, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t forget the past and her cruelty.’

‘I know.’ Jay gave Amber’s hand a gentle pat. Its skin might be soft and loose and mottled with age now, but to him she was still the same beautiful girl she had been when she was seventeen, and his love for her had had to be a secret he could not share with anyone.

Cassandra! Jay had no more liking for his cousin than Amber did.

‘What makes a person like that, Jay?’ Amber asked sadly. ‘It’s as though Cassandra enjoys being cruel and mean. I know that Greg was wrong to fall in love with Caroline, but no one need have known they had been lovers. Cassandra was the one who told Caroline’s husband about the relationship.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid that I too can’t bring myself to forgive her for the harm she did,’ Jay agreed sombrely.

Amber gave a small shiver. Despite the warmth from the logs burning in the grate of the elegant Carrara marble fireplace, the room suddenly seemed cold, as though the chill of past tragedies had somehow swept in.

‘We’ll never know if poor Caroline’s death was an accident, and she missed her footing and fell into the lake, or if she deliberately took her own life because Cassandra had exposed her infidelity to Lord Fitton Legh. Caroline and Greg paid such a dreadfully heavy price for their affair: Greg disinherited by our grandmother and sent to Hong Kong, and Caroline facing divorce and disgrace. I often wonder if Cassandra would have been more compassionate if it hadn’t been for her own feelings for Caroline. She was so passionately in love with her. Do you think Cassandra went on to marry Lord Fitton Legh because he had been Caroline’s husband?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jay admitted. His cousin was an enigma to him, a difficult spiteful girl who had turned into an embittered and cruel woman.

‘I do wish that she hadn’t married Lord Fitton Legh, Jay. She always was a very unkind stepmother for poor John, and she is even now, despite the fact that he and Janey are so very kind to her.’

‘John feels he has a moral obligation to carry out the terms of his father’s will, not just to the letter but above and beyond it, and his father did stipulate that John must provide well for Cassandra. You know how highly John thought of his father.’

‘Yes,’ Amber acknowledged, ‘but that makes it all the more upsetting that he was such a cold and distant father to John, although of course…’ She stopped and looked uncertainly at her husband.

‘Except that John may not be his child, you mean?’ Jay supplied. He saw her face and added quietly, ‘Yes, I know that your cousin Greg believed that John was his child—’

‘Because Caroline Fitton Legh had told him so,’ Amber pointed out, ‘but in truth she could have told Greg that he was John’s father because it was what she wanted to believe herself

‘None the less, Lord Fitton Legh brought John up as his son.’

‘And John worshipped him. Him and Fitton. Fitton is his life. Janey complains that sometimes she thinks the house and the land mean more to him than either she does or their sons. John isn’t very good at articulating his feelings and I do sometimes wonder if their marriage is as happy as we thought it would be when they first married. It would destroy John, I think, if he were ever to suspect that Greg, and not the late Lord Fitton Legh, was his father, and that he himself had no right to the title or to Fitton.’

‘So have we now finally accounted for everyone?’ Jay asked ruefully.

‘Yes,’ Amber confirmed, looking up as they both heard the familiar sound of the tea trolley outside the drawing-room door.‘Here’s Mrs Leggit with the tea,’she announced unnecessarily, smiling at their housekeeper as she came in. ‘We’ve just been discussing Christmas, Mrs Leggit. It would be lovely if we have snow.’

‘They’ve had some already up in Buxton, or so I’ve heard,’ the housekeeper answered, adding as she headed for the door, ‘Mind you, they are much higher up there, than we are down here.’

‘Christmas, the family and snow. Wouldn’t that be perfect?’ Amber smiled at Jay as she handed him his tea.

‘Perfect,’ he agreed.

Chapter Two

It was snowing and Olivia hated snow in New York. It wasn’t like proper snow at all – not like snow in Aspen, or Switzerland. New York’s snow made yellow cab drivers even more bad-tempered than they were ordinarily, and turned to slush on the sidewalks. She just hoped that it didn’t snow heavily enough to ground the planes at JFK so that her flight to Manchester was cancelled. To Manchester and to Robert.

Her rich chestnut shoulder-length hair gleamed with health as she stepped out of Vanity Fair magazine’s reception and waited for the lift to take her back down to the lobby. Tall and slender, her classically elegant features and blue eyes, enhanced by discreet makeup, Olivia carried with her an air of calm confidence that right now belied the excitement she felt inside. Soon she would be seeing Robert. She sighed ruefully at herself. When was she going to grow up and behave like a proper twenty-five-year-old and not a wide-eyed teenager in the grip of her first crush? Never, probably, where Robert was concerned, she admitted. She had loved him for so long that she couldn’t imagine not loving him, she admitted as she stepped out of the lift into the lobby of the building that housed Si Newhouse’s publishing empire of glossy magazines. She was wearing the new butter-soft leather boots she’d seen in Barneys and not been able to resist, and they were about as suitable for slushy pavements as a pair of high-heeled summer sandals. The hem of her long dark cream cashmere coat would also, no doubt, be marked, but she’d felt she had to wear it since that Mecca of fashion, Vogue magazine, also had its offices in the building. She was sure she’d seen Christy Turlington, one of the so-called supermodels, in the lobby when she’d come through.

At least now she’d delivered the article she’d been working on for Vanity Fair, a real coup for her, and she was keeping everything crossed that they liked it, even if the deadline had meant that she’d had to stay home instead of accompany her parents and younger brother on their flight this morning.

Still, it wouldn’t be long before she was following them, and then there’d be Denham, her grandparents, Christmas, the whole family and Robert.

Engrossed in the pleasure of thinking about her cousin, she almost walked straight into the man heading for the lift, her stomach clenching in dismay and dislike when she looked up and recognised who he was.

Tait Cabot Forbes, political investigative reporter sans equal, sans pity for his victims, sans everything, really, that made a human being human. Tait was a walking, talking, writing law book, looking for someone to break one of those laws so that he could pillory them without mercy. He could have built a skyscraper out of the reputations he had shredded so mercilessly in his freelance newspaper articles and on his TV programmes, and she hated him.

There had been a time when Olivia had actually admired him, and even seen him as something of a hero for his brilliant exposés of those whose moral failings were damaging humanity, but that had been before he had decided to wage war on her parents.

Family meant a great deal to Olivia – all her family, but most especially her parents and her teenage brother. Olivia didn’t just love her parents, she respected and admired them, and to have their reputation besmirched all over the pages of the New York press by a man who was notorious for bringing down those he targeted had been an assault on them she could never forgive.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t the doggedly devoted daughter,’ Tait greeted her. ‘Still public enemy number one, am I? I don’t suppose that exchanging Christmas kisses is in order then?’ he teased when Olivia tried to step past him.

She hadn’t intended to lower herself to speak to him but his comment proved too much for her self-control.

‘I’d rather kiss a rat,’ she told him angrily.

‘Flattery. It does it for me every time,’ Tait retorted, giving her what she thought of as a shark smile, all polished white teeth in a face tanned by a lifetime of summers spent sailing off Cape Cod.

He was good-looking, Olivia acknowledged grudgingly, if one liked that big healthy Eastern Seaboard all-American male look. In fact his hair and eyes were dark enough for him to have Italian blood. Now wouldn’t that be a thing, a Boston Brahmin – top-of-the-heap WASP – with Italian immigrant blood in his veins?

Olivia knew that her antagonism towards him wasn’t shared by her female media colleagues. The word on the New York street was that Tait wasn’t just the bestlooking reporter, he was also the best in bed.

‘Your folks spending Christmas here in New York, are they?’

‘No. Not that it’s any of your business.’

The melting snow had slicked down his thick dark hair so that it hung over his forehead in damp spikes, the bright lights in the lobby highlighting the small lines fanning out from his eyes and the thickness of his eyelashes. He might have women falling over themselves for his attention, but Tait Cabot Forbes was exactly the kind of man who turned her off, Olivia thought. Unlike Robert.

Robert. It was comforting to be able to blot out Tait’s face by focusing instead on her own personal mental image of her cousin. Robert was her perfect man. The courtly behaviour he must have learned as a young boy living with his grandmother and stepgrandfather made him unique in Olivia’s eyes: a true gentleman of the old school, who set high moral standards for himself and who believed in such old-fashioned virtues as honour and loyalty.

And love? Olivia gave a small sigh. She knew perfectly well that all Robert felt for her was mere stepcousinly affection, even if he had been kind when she’d been in the throes of her painfully obvious teenage crush on him. The fact that the teenage crush had now become a carefully hidden woman’s love was her business and her problem, and definitely not something she would allow out into the open to humiliate her and embarrass Robert.

‘Tait.’ The sound of a woman’s voice, filled with delight as she spotted the reporter and came hurrying over, gave Olivia a chance to escape. A very welcome chance, she thought thankfully as she slipped past Tait and out into the street. Once there, without having intended to do so, she looked back, only to see Tait exchanging the ‘Christmas kisses’ she had refused with the pretty blonde who had hailed him.

Christmas kisses. She was in her mid-twenties and the last time she had had anything that came close to being labelled a ‘relationship’ had been during her first year at college. But she had her work, she reminded herself, and her ambitions, and of course her wonderful parents.

In London, at Lenchester House, the London home of the Dukes of Lenchester, the object of Olivia’s love was sitting in the library with his stepfather.

Drogo and Robert sat opposite one another at either side of the marble fireplace in the armchairs that had been commissioned from Hepplewhite by the third duke. Heavy silk velvet curtains in a rich shade of amber, woven especially at Denby Mill, home of Drogo’s wife’s family silk business, hung at the windows. The depth of their colour meant that the room was always filled with a warm golden glow, as though sunshine was pouring through the windows, no matter what the time of year.

The chairs were upholstered in a complementary pineapple-patterned cut velvet in amber and cream, the colour scheme originally chosen for the room by the previous duke, Lord Robert, in honour of his new bride, Amber. The Savonnerie carpet covering the parquet floor had been woven during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, its colouring of deep gold and blue on a beige background a perfect foil for the curtain and chair fabrics. Drogo could well understand why Lord Robert had chosen such a colour scheme over the more traditional dark red so often used in such masculine rooms.

‘So now that you’ve been to Lauranto and had a chance to discuss things with your grandmother and her advisers, how do you feel about stepping into your late father’s shoes officially?’ Drogo asked his stepson.

How did he feel about it? Robert suspected that if he answered his stepfather’s question honestly, Drogo would not only not understand him but would also be concerned for him. To outsiders their situations might seem similar: Drogo too had stepped into an inheritance ance and title he had never expected to be his, and in a culture and a country that was alien to him. That, though, was where the similarities between their situations ended. Drogo hadn’t grown up knowing that he had been rejected as not good enough to inherit. He had not had to endure the childhood taunts and mockery that Robert had known because of that public rejection. He had not grown up having to accept that his father did not want him. So how could Drogo be expected to understand the savagely visceral feeling of satisfaction it gave him to have his grandmother courting him, with a view to him stepping into his late father’s shoes, even if only because she had no choice as there was no one else? How could he expect Drogo to understand how much he now wanted what he was being offered, when he had not known himself until the first letter had been sent and the first approach to him made? It was his birthright, and he felt that a wrong had been righted by a higher authority than that of his father or his paternal grandmother, but above all, he was determined to prove that as Crown Prince of Lauranto he could be better than any Crown Prince before him, and certainly better than the father who had rejected him. That was what was driving him now – not altruism, which would probably have motivated both his stepfather and his grandfather, not Lauranto itself and its people, but ambition. He wanted this for the child who had been dismissed as unworthy even before his birth, and who had gone unwanted and unrecognised until desperation had forced his grandmother to recognise him.

He would make Lauranto his. He would stamp his personality on it, so that in future Lauranto would be him, and so that future generations would say that he had taken Lauranto to its greatest heights. He would leave his mark on it in everything he did, from its architecture, to its finances and its laws, and ultimately via the sons he would give it. No, his stepfather would not understand how he was now relishing the driving thoughts of retribution and triumph.

Drogo studied his stepson as he waited for his response. Tall, with thick dark hair, brilliantly blue eyes, and an almost classically perfect profile, with a strong jaw, neat ears and a well-shaped nose, Robert combined the good looks of both his parents, although his temperament was very different from that of his mother. Robert had a tendency to withdraw into himself and shut others out, and sometimes it seemed to Drogo that his stepson was at war with himself.

‘It will be a challenge,’ Robert answered him, having weighed up how much to say to his stepfather. Alessandro –’ Robert gave a dismissive shrug – ‘I just can’t think of him as my father. You’ve always been that, Dad, and there’s no way I’d ever want to change that – I suspect that Alessandro was something of a lightweight and dominated by his mother. He was a figurehead who allowed others to run the country for him. The country needs modernising and that will be a huge challenge. My grandmother and her advisers are absolutely dead set against any kind of change. The country is run on almost feudal lines, with the poorest treated almost like serfs, especially those working on the estates belonging to the clique of barons favoured by my grandmother. The children of these workers leave school at fourteen to work on the land, whilst the children of the “nobility”, and the very small professional and middle class, are in the main educated abroad. There is no crossing of social lines. The court lives by a formal routine more suited to the Victorian age than ours; the exchequer is almost empty. All that will have to change.’

‘Have you told the Dowager Princess how you feel?’

‘Not yet. We have agreed to have further meetings in February. By then I should have formulated my terms for accepting the Crown.’

‘So you do intend to accept it?’

‘I don’t see that I have any option.’ That much was true, although Robert knew that Drogo would interpret his statement as meaning that he felt he had a duty to step into his father’s shoes for the sake of the people, rather than because he had a driving need to take up the challenge for himself.

‘Oh, Robert, no. I can’t believe you are giving in to that old harridan and letting her persuade you into accepting the Crown, after the way she’s behaved,’ Emerald announced coming into the library in time to hear Robert’s comment.

She went over to kiss the top of Drogo’s head. ‘And I can’t believe how difficult it is to get this family organised. I’ve had to take Jamie out this morning and buy him new Wellingtons, he’s grown so much whilst he’s been at Eton. Emma is still fussing about what she’s going to take to Italy with her when she goes back there with Polly after the Christmas holiday, Katie isn’t even home from Oxford yet, and we’re supposed to be leaving for Macclesfield tomorrow morning.’ Whilst Drogo smiled indulgently at his wife, Emerald warned her elder son, ‘It’s your decision – I know that, darling – but once she’s got her claws into you Alessandro’s mother won’t rest until she’s taken over every aspect of your life, including finding you a wife. All she wants you for is to produce future heirs.’

Robert smiled, looking unfazed by his mother’s comment. Emerald sighed inwardly: why was it that her eldest child, conceived in the wild passion of her youth, should be so lacking in that wild passion himself? Like any mother she wanted to protect her children from emotional pain, but sometimes she found herself almost wishing that Robert would fall passionately and even hopelessly in love, if only so that he would know what passion was. Emerald couldn’t imagine how anyone’s life could be fulfilling without having tasted that emotion, even though as a mother that wasn’t something she would ever say to her children, especially not to Robert, who sometimes looked at her as though he was the older and wiser of the two.

‘The country has a population of three million, most of whom are scratching a living under the burden of a feudal system,’ Robert told his parents. ‘It’s practically bankrupt financially and the governing élite are certainly bankrupt morally.’

‘But that doesn’t mean you have to become Saint Robert and go riding to its rescue,’ Emerald pointed out.

Robert laughed. He knew his mother, and he knew all about the old enmity that existed between her and his paternal grandmother. They were both very strongminded and determined women who liked getting their own way.

‘I’ve agreed to go back and talk with my grandmother again in the New Year, once I’ve had a chance to think things through. The country does have potential, its people could be so much better off if things were handled differently. All the royal and government buildings in the old city are early eighteenth century and desperately in need of renovation. As an architect I’d love to get my teeth into that challenge.’

That was true, but Robert was deliberately promoting that project as a means of concealing from his mother how he really felt.

‘Think of it,’ he teased her. ‘All that scope for using Denby Mill silks. Surely that would be a form of revenge worth having? The mill could do with the business, after all, from what you’ve been saying.’

Emerald sighed, distracted, as Robert had intended that she would be.

‘That’s true. This current fashion for glazed chintz swagged everywhere has affected our sales, although we have had some success with the new Sweetpea design. I envy Angelli Silk, and their historical connections with Italy’s opera houses, which mean that they get the commissions when they need refurbishment.’

‘Denby Silk has its contracts with the National Trust,’ Robert pointed out.

‘We do have some contracts with them, yes, but they don’t use us exclusively. The American market is where the future lies and where we need to succeed. I’m going to have a word with Ella whilst she’s over about seeing if we can get some of the top-rank New York interior designers to start using our silks…and it’s all very well you sidetracking me, Robert,’ she continued, returning to their earlier topic of conversation, ‘but if you go ahead and become Crown Prince you will have to marry, because it will be your duty to produce an heir.’

Robert had dated any number of young women over the years but hadn’t as yet shown any inclination to settle down, and for a very good reason, but it was not one he could communicate to his mother. The early years of Robert’s life, before his mother had married Drogo, had been very turbulent. Emerald had partied hard and lived life to the full, as the saying went. One of her lovers had been a notorious East End gangster, Max Preston. Robert had been seven then.

Memories he preferred to keep safely locked away would surface abruptly against his will: his mother’s frightening changes of mood; the sound of slammed doors and screaming arguments; the sounds from her bedroom one night when he had woken up in the dark feeling afraid and alone, and had gone there seeking comfort. He had been afraid for her when he had heard the noise, the man’s voice thick and harsh, his mother’s begging over and over again, ‘Please…please…please…’

He had opened the door and seen…

Perhaps every child inadvertently witnessing a parent having sex retained the same feeling of revulsion that he felt. Perhaps, like him, they put those memories in a box and buried that box very deeply with a stone slab on top of it. Perhaps they also grew to adulthood too sharply aware of the danger of out-of-control passion, fearful of it and determined, like him, never to let it take control of them. Perhaps. But Robert didn’t know, because it wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone discussed.

Now, whilst sexually his taste ran to intelligent, feisty, exciting, passionate and even challenging women, his experiences as a child meant that he had decided that he would never want to commit permanently to such a woman. They were too intense, too adversarial, too demanding and high maintenance emotionally and mentally for the men who loved them, and to their families. Life with them was a roller coaster that mowed down everything and everyone in its path. Robert had no intention of allowing himself to ride such a roller coaster. Better to enjoy the passion and the excitement, but to keep the woman who provided it at a safe distance, to make sure she was dispensable. For that reason he had decided that he would not marry. There had been, after all, no need. But the death of his father and his grandmother’s approach to him had changed all of that. If he was to satisfy his now driving ambition to become Crown Prince of Lauranto then he would have to marry, as his mother had just pointed out.

His mother and his paternal grandmother would fight – virtually to the death, he suspected – to be the one to select his bride for him, so it was far better that he selected his own bride. He had, in fact, already done so. The right wife for him, as Crown Prince of Lauranto, would be a wife whose whole loyalty was to him, who supported him unquestioningly, and whose temperament was such that she would accept that her role must be a supportive rather than a leading one. She must love him and only him, but at the same time she must not be passionately possessive or openly sexual in her attitude or behaviour. She must have the intelligence, the education, the confidence and the right kind of nature to be his consort, and she must, of course, look good. It was a long list of requirements but Robert knew someone who filled them all.

Olivia, the cousin he knew already loved him. Olivia, who was elegant, well groomed, well educated, calm, and whose loyalty to him would be absolute.

However, he had no intention of telling his mother what was in his mind – yet.

It was only later, when Robert had returned to his own home – the penthouse apartment in a stylish new block for which he had been the lead architect – that Emerald showed Drogo how anxious she really was about her son’s future.

‘Is it selfish of me to hope that Robert will turn down Alessandro’s mother, and refuse the Crown?’

‘I don’t know,’ Drogo replied carefully, ‘but I do know that it won’t help if you keep running her down to him, because ultimately if he does decide to accept that could put him in an awkward position.’

Strong-willed Emerald might be, but she hated feeling that her husband disapproved of something she’d said or done.

‘But she is such a horrendous monster,’ she insisted, turning on the slender heel of her damson-coloured Charles Jourdan court shoes and walking towards the window, the cut of her Chanel tweed suit, flecked with lilac, damson and white against a black background, discreetly outlining her curves.

Even with the sharp winter light falling on her, to Drogo she still looked as stunning as she had done when he had first seen her.

When she finally turned and saw the look of love and concern on her husband’s face, she walked back to him and put her head on his shoulder.

‘I only want Robert to be happy, Drogo – is that so very wrong?’ She paused and then added in a voice shorn of her normal confidence, ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s true what they say about being careful what you wish for.’

‘Meaning?’ Drogo invited.

‘When Robert was born I felt triumphant because no matter what Alessandro’s mother might choose to think, Robert would always be Alessandro’s first-born son and his rightful heir. Since then I’ve wished so often that you had been his father. That way he’d always be here, with us, part of us and our way of life.’

It was so unlike Emerald to show any hint of vulnerability or regret, that Drogo took her in his arms, wanting to comfort her.

‘If he accepts what Alessandro’s mother offers him,’ Emerald went on, ‘then he won’t be part of us any longer. I worry for him, Drogo. We’ve brought him up to be comfortable in the life he has here in England; Alessandro’s mother will want him to be Alessandro’s son, charming but weak, royal but malleable, a handsome puppet prince.’

‘You’re underestimating Robert,’ Drogo tried to comfort her. ‘He is his own man, Emerald.’

‘It would all have been so much better if he had been your son – not that I’d want James disinherited, of course – but, Drogo, how on earth am I going to face owning up to a son who is the Crown Prince of somewhere as ridiculous as Lauranto? Everyone who’s anyone knows that a European title is merely a joke compared with a British title.’ Emerald gave a small shudder, reassuming her normal mantle of assured superiority. ‘We can’t let him make even more of a Ruritanian comedy of himself by marrying some girl with the trumped-up title of “Princess” just because it suits Alessandro’s mother.’

‘No, better by far that he marries someone we have chosen for him,’ Drogo agreed straight-faced.

Emerald leaned back within the circle of his arms and looked up at him. It’s all very well you laughing, but these things are important, Drogo.’

‘I’m prepared to agree that if Robert does step into Alessandro’s shoes then it will be important that he marries someone he loves, someone who understands the demands of his role and her own, and who can deal with the problems those demands may cause them both, but as for us choosing that someone – just think how you would have felt if your mother had chosen your husband for you.’

Still looking up at him, Emerald told him derisively, ‘She did – she chose you, even if she has never said so.’

‘Mmm. Well, there are exceptions to every rule,’ Drogo allowed, with a grin, before bending his head to kiss her.

Chapter Three

‘It’s definite then, Nick? This separation, I mean. There’s no chance of the two of you…?’ Rose Simons asked her stepson sadly.

‘No, none. Sarah has made that more than clear. She’s even had the locks changed. Her father’s idea, no doubt.’

Nick’s voice might be as crisp as the shirt he was wearing – laundered, no doubt, professionally rather than by his wife – Rose thought wryly, but she knew her stepson, and she knew the vulnerabilities and insecurities Nick was so adept at hiding. Too adept? Was that part of the reason why he and his wife had separated? Because the experiences of the first twelve years of Nick’s life had made him wary of trusting others?

To the outside world Nick might be an aggressive and very successful corporate raider, whose photograph appeared regularly in the financial press, accompanied by articles praising his economic acumen, but to her he was still, in part, the troubled orphaned child she had taken to her heart.

Nick pulled out one of the matt chrome bar stools from the kitchen island unit where his stepmother had been chopping vegetables for the curry she planned to make for supper. The kitchen of the Chelsea town house Josh and Rose had bought together after their marriage, with its streamlined and highly individual chrome and glass décor, might not look as cosy and domesticated as the hand-painted, extortionately expensive Smallbone kitchen Sarah had insisted on having fitted in the overpriced house in The Boltons she had fallen in love with, but Nick knew which kitchen he felt most at home in and where he felt most valued.

His stepmother had her own unique style, which owed much to the fact that she was a very successful designer of both commercial and private house interiors, working from the family-run Walton Street shop, first opened by her aunt Amber, and something to the oriental genes inherited from her Chinese mother. To those who didn’t know her, from the top of her polished still-black pixiecut hair, to the hem of her strikingly simple black dress, Rose Simons breathed a style that appeared intimidating, but Nick knew the loving heart Rose concealed beneath her couture clothes and her businesslike manner.

He couldn’t think of any other woman he knew and he knew plenty – who, on opening her front door to a scruffy, dirty, snotty-nosed unknown boy of twelve, who was announcing that her husband was his father, would have reached out, as Rose had done to him, to say calmly, ‘Well, I am pleased to hear that because if there’s one thing this house lacks, it’s a boy living here.’

‘Nick…’

‘It’s all right,’ he told her now. ‘I’m not going to do anything stupid, like going round there and kicking up a fuss. I’ve already tried that, after all.’ He rubbed his hand against his jaw, the contact making a faint rasping sound. He was the image of his father, Rose thought, as she put the sliced vegetables into a bowl, and covered it, her movements practised, calm and minimal, in harmony with the pared-down elegance of the kitchen. Rose liked things to be easy to understand and assess instead of complicated; she liked things to be out in the open instead of hidden away, and all that was reflected in her designs. Just as a cluttered, overfilled mind could conceal forgotten secrets and thoughts that ultimately could grow and fester, so, she felt, could cluttered ‘space’ lead to the same potential hazards.

Nick wasn’t like that, though. Nick was a child damaged by the misery of the early years of his life, and Rose’s heart ached for him.

Although he was trying to conceal them, she could see his bitterness and his anger over the draining, long-drawn-out misery that had been the ending of his marriage, even if those emotions were now banked down under a thin seal of acceptance.

‘What…what’s going to happen about the children?’ Rose had dreaded asking. She and Josh adored their grandchildren, and Rose considered herself fortunate to see as much of them as she did, thanks to the fact that she and Josh lived virtually within walking distance of Nick and Sarah’s house.

‘Sarah’s agreed that I’ll be able to have reasonable access. Reasonable access. Hell, they are my kids, I made them, I—’ He broke off and pushed his hand into his hair. ‘Sorry…but when I think of what this is doing to them, and all because of Sarah’s ruddy father. The poor little sods were crying their eyes out when I left. Bloody Sarah – you think she’d have spared them that, at least until after Christmas.’

Christmas.

Rose bent her head over the bowl, not wanting Nick to guess what she was thinking. For her Christmas meant going ‘home’ to Denham Place, near Macclesfield, and to Amber, her aunt. It meant being part of the large gathering of siblings, cousins and parents that now spanned three generations. But Nick had never truly been comfortable within that group, always holding himself deliberately outside it, and since the boys had been born he had opted out of going altogether, ‘because Sarah wants to go up to Scotland to be with her parents.’

‘Will you be seeing the boys over Christmas?’ Rose asked.

‘Not a hope in hell. Sarah’s taking them to her parents. They’ve never liked me, especially her father. No doubt they’ll have some kilt-wearing chinless wonder waiting in the wings to offer her the comfort of a male shoulder and the right kind of background. Jesus,’ Nick exploded, ‘when I think of the way I’ve bloody half-killed myself to give her the kind of lifestyle she kept on whining that she wanted, only to have her turn round and say that she wants us to separate because I’m always working.’

Rose didn’t say anything. How could she? She knew as well as Nick did himself that there was some justification in Sarah’s accusation, and that the reality was that he loved his work. It enabled him to express the aggression within him that came from his struggle to withstand the cruelty of his childhood, living with a stepfather who had beaten both him and his mother, until the man had fallen into the road after a heavy bout of drinking and had been hit by a bus, dying of his injuries in hospital. Nick’s work gave him not just financial independence, but also something he needed very badly, and that was the triumph that came from out doing others who, for one reason or another, considered themselves to be his betters.

Rose loved her stepson but she wasn’t blind to his faults or the inner demons that drove him.

There was one thing, though, about Nick that filled her heart with pride and gratitude and that was his abhorrence of physical violence. He could so easily have developed the same behaviour patterns as the man he had once believed to be his father. Even at twelve, with the deprivation he had suffered, he had been a tall, muscular boy. Rose knew she would never forget the evening the headmaster of the excellent local school they had got Nick into had come round to tell them about the taunting Nick had suffered from a group of boys in his class, and the way that Nick had endured that taunting and walked away from it without resorting to the violence they were obviously trying to goad him into.

When Rose had talked to him about it later, he had confided to her that his mother had made him promise before she died that he would never use his fists on anyone, ‘because him that beat us both up isn’t your proper dad, and I want to be proud of you when I think of you with your proper dad when I’m gone.’

Later that night, Rose had cried in Josh’s arms. ‘I can’t bear to think what Nick’s had to go through,’ she had told him. ‘He’s only twelve and he’s had to watch his mum dying, and then come and find you, not knowing how he’d be treated.’

‘Well, I could hardly deny him, could I?’ Josh had said bluntly. ‘Not when he’s the spitting image of me. But I’d still not have taken him in if you hadn’t been willing to have him, Rose.’

The thin, dark-haired boy had indeed been unmistakably Josh’s son when he’d knocked on their door and announced that Josh was his father from, as they’d discovered later, a brief fling he’d had with a young married woman, way back before Rose had even met Josh.

And, of course, Rose, childless by choice because of all that she’d suffered herself because of her mixed race, had taken Nick straight to her heart. Josh had taken a bit more convincing that the boy should stay, but within a month Nick was walking like his dad and talking like him, and Josh, when he thought Rose wasn’t looking, had been bursting with pride in his son.

‘Well,’ Rose said now, ‘you’re welcome to come to Macclesfield for Christmas with us, you know that, Nick’

‘What, and have Saint Robert sympathising with me, whilst secretly they’re all thinking that they don’t blame Sarah. Because, let’s face it, Ma, I don’t fit in with them and I never have. Posh people with posh kids, that’s what they are. No offence meant. As it happens I’ve got a mate who’s going to be spending Christmas in the Bahamas and he’s invited me to join him. Sun, sea and pretty girls – what else could a man want, eh, Ma?’

Rose wished she could do more to help him but she knew how independent he was. Nick had inherited Josh’s sharp instinct for a good business deal. After university he’d studied for an MA and then gone to work on the trading floor of the London arm of an American bank. The Gordon Gekko world of money and Nick had almost been made to go together, Rosie recognised, and neither she nor Josh was surprised that he’d become so successful.

She also understood perfectly well why he had fallen for Sarah, then a newly qualified young accountant, whom he’d met through work, and why Sarah had fallen for him, but she had worried that they were rushing into marriage with expectations that couldn’t be met.

Rose knew there had been differences between them for a while – arguments that had caused problems between them, which neither of them had seemed willing to resolve. Sarah’s father was a wealthy titled Scottish landowner, who, Rose privately thought, was inclined to bully his wife and daughter and who didn’t like Nick. But Rose suspected that Nick sometimes went out of his way to provoke his father-in-law into hostility towards him. Rose actually felt sorry for Sarah, guessing that there were times when the young woman felt torn between her father and her husband.

‘Of course, Sarah’s father is going to be crowing, but if either of them think that I’m going to allow my sons to be packed off to his old public school then they can have another think.’

Rose sighed. She knew that the subject of the education of Nick and Sarah’s two young sons, Alex and Neil, had led to the most bitter of their quarrels. Sarah’s father felt the two boys should be educated at his old public school, as boarders ‘to make men of them’, whereas Nick wanted the boys to attend his own old school.

Nick might like to come across as a bit of a cockney wide boy when it suited him, and in order to infuriate his father-in-law, but the reality was far more complex than that.

‘Cup of tea?’ Rose went to fill the kettle when he nodded. ‘Remember when you first arrived here, Nick?’ she asked him as they waited for it to boil.

‘Do I?’ he laughed. ‘I was nearly crapping meself as I stood on the step, not knowing what to expect. Christ, I hadn’t even known Bert wasn’t my father until my mother told me when she was dying. When you opened the door and saw me there I bet you felt like sending me packing, a snotty-nosed scruffy kid, claiming that your husband was his dad.’

‘What I saw, Nick, was a young boy with more courage than a man three times his age. Not that it wasn’t a shock.’

‘You’re the one with courage,’ Nick told her, going to the fridge to get the milk. ‘We both know that Dad would have had me out on my ear and handed over to Social Services, if he’d had his way. But you wouldn’t let him do that. You told us both that my place was here.’

‘Josh was just shocked. He’d never really have turned his back on you. He simply had no idea that you existed.’

‘It was you, though, who swung things in my favour, Ma. You who loved me before Dad did.’

Rose put her hand on his arm. ‘I was so grateful to your mother, Nick. I still am. When she sent you to us she gave me the best gift I could ever have had, aside from your father’s love.’

‘But…’ Nick challenged ruefully. He knew his stepmother. He knew how much she loved him, how protective she had always been of him, knowing from her own experience how hard it could be to find acceptance when you were ‘different’. He had gone from living on welfare, to having a father who could afford to give him the very best of everything. It had been Rose, though, who had understood that he needed to find his own level, and who had supported him.

‘No buts,’ Rose assured him. ‘Just don’t let your pride lead you into doing something you might regret, Nick. You’ve got two sons—’

‘You mean I’ve provided Sarah’s father with two grandsons,’ he interrupted her bitterly, ‘because that’s what she thinks is more important. It’s no use. I’ve tried…Sarah would probably say that she’s tried as well, if she were sitting here, but all the trying in the world can’t put right what’s gone wrong between us and, to tell the truth, I don’t even think that I want it put right any more.’

‘Oh, Nick…’ Rose hugged her stepson tightly.

In so many ways he was the image of his father, and she would have loved him for that alone. But there were other ways in which he was uniquely himself and she loved him for that as well. Josh had grown up as an only child of loving Jewish parents, who had themselves grown up in the East End of London. His childhood had given him self-confidence and an optimistic self-assurance. Nick had been brought up in an atmosphere of male violence and female fear. He had Josh’s self-confidence, but in Nick that confidence had a much harder edge to it, twinned with cynicism and sometimes even suspicion about the rest of the human race. Where Josh was exuberant and physically affectionate, Nick found it difficult to show his feelings. Whilst Josh had always been ambitious, Nick was far more driven. The so-called ‘big bang’ in 1986, when the financial system in London had become deregulated, had made Nick a very wealthy man, taking him from the trading floor to heading up his own department within one of the world’s most successful merchant banks, but it was rare to see Nick smiling and even more rare to hear him laughing.

‘When’s Dad due back?’ Nick asked, changing the subject.

‘He said he’d be home in time for dinner, but you know how these sessions with the advertising people run on.’

Out of the success of his original hairdressing salon Josh had built up his business, mainly by lending his name to hair-care products and merchandising, and these days he was more of an entrepreneur and businessman than a hands-on hairdresser, although he still insisted on cutting Rose’s hair himself.

‘Black gold, that hair of yours was,’ he often told her. ‘That style I cut for you and the photographs Ollie took of it were where it all began for me, Rosie. You’re my good luck.’

‘Why don’t you stay and have dinner with your dad and me?’ Rose suggested.

Nick shook his head. ‘I’ve got a client to see this evening, and I need to sort myself out with a decent flat before Christmas.’

‘I can’t give you your Christmas present yet because it hasn’t arrived,’ Rose told him.

Nick had come to them with no possessions, and when Rose and Josh had gone round to the house where he and his mother had been living, they’d found a handful of photographs of Nick as a baby with his mother. Recently Rose had sent the best of these photographs to Oliver in New York, and he had promised to produce some new photographs from them, to be framed and given to Nick as his Christmas present. They were Rose’s way of saying to him that neither she nor anyone else had the right to exclude his mother from his life, nor to ignore all that she had done for him, and Rose knew that when Nick saw them he would understand that, just as she knew that beneath his sharp-edged exterior he could be both vulnerable and sentimental.

Christmas presents…Nick looked away from his stepmother. He hadn’t had time to go with Sarah when she’d taken the boys to Hamleys and Harrods at the beginning of December. He’d stopped going Christmas shopping for the boys with her after he’d bought them both battery-driven child-size cars. He’d been thrilled with the cars. As a child he hadn’t even been able to dream of things like that. He’d raced home from work the day they were due to be delivered, only to find that Sarah had sent them back.

‘But, Nick, that kind of thing is so dreadfully vulgar,’ she had told him.

‘Like me, you mean?’ he had fired back, and she hadn’t denied it, simply turning away from him, saying quietly, ‘Daddy says that we really ought to be thinking about getting the boys used to riding. He’s sorting out a couple of ponies he thinks will suit them.’

‘Ponies? They are my sons, not some ruddy little Lord Fauntleroys,’ he’d told her before he’d stormed out of the house.

‘Hurry up, you two, otherwise Katie is going to miss her train.’

The sound of her best friend’s brother’s voice from the bottom of the stairs had Katie making a grab for her case whilst Zoë put her finger to her lips and mouthed, ‘Let’s pretend we aren’t here. He’ll have a heart attack. You know what he’s like about being on time for things.’

Katie could have said that since, on this occasion, what he wanted to be on time for was the train she needed to catch for London, teasing him didn’t seem very fair. But long experience of Zoë had her shaking her head instead, whilst downstairs Tom swore audibly. Zoë burst out laughing and called out, ‘Ooooh, Tom, fancy you using such naughty words.’

Well pleased with her joke, Zoë turned back to Katie, tossing a parcel towards her. ‘Catch! Happy Christmas, and don’t you dare open it until Christmas morning.’

‘Yours is in your suitcase,’ Katie responded. ‘I sneaked it in last night.’

‘What is it? Tell me. Is it a naked poster of that gorgeous boy who serves in the uni bar? The one who looks like he could be a modern-day Earl of Rochester?’ Zoë was mad about the seventeenth-century notorious rake and poet, and Katie wasn’t surprised when she struck a pose, grasping two handfuls of her top as though it were a lecturer’s gown, and quoted,’“…with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness”. He must have been the most deliciously wickedly dangerous man, far more so than Lord Byron,’ she sighed. ‘I would love to meet a man like that, a reincarnation of him, wouldn’t you, Katie?’

‘Who, Dr Johnson?’ Katie teased, referring to the author Zoë had just quoted.

‘No, silly, John Wilmot, of course. Just imagine how exciting it must have been to be with him.’

‘He was a womaniser and a rake,’ Katie reminded her.

Zoë gave a small ecstatic sigh. ‘Exactly,’ and then demanded, ‘Tell me what my present is.’

Katie shook her head.

‘Please…’

‘No.’

‘Katie, do you want to catch this train or not?’ Tom bellowed.

Zoë ran to lean over the banister. ‘Katie does, but I don’t want her to. Why do you have to go home for Christmas when you could have come with us to Klosters? I thought you were my best friend.’ Zoë adopted a tragic pose. ‘You don’t love me any more, do you?’

‘Zoë, stop fooling around for once, will you? Of course Katie wants to spend Christmas with her family.’

Katie blew Zoë a kiss and dragged her case down the stairs, giving Tom a look that was both grateful and apologetic.

It was funny how things could jog along in the same way for so long and then suddenly change overnight or in her case, over a lager in an Oxford pub when she and Zoë had met up with Tom, newly returned to the UK, having completed his Master’s in America. She’d known him virtually all her life, but sitting there in the pub, listening to him talk about America, watching the way he smiled and pushed his dark hair out of his eyes, Katie had realised that the excitement she suddenly felt had nothing to do with the fact that he was Zoë’s brother. And then he’d smiled at her as though he guessed what she was thinking and she’d smiled back. Now it wasn’t just because of Zoë that she was looking forward to going skiing after Christmas.

Katie and Zoë had been best friends from the first term at the small exclusive junior school they’d attended in Kensington, and then all through their time at St Paul’s Girls’ School, before coming to Oxford. Katie, used to the bossiness of an older sister with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility about such things as properly tied shoelaces, neatly brushed hair, and not dragging one’s feet in puddles, had been fascinated and bewitched by Zoë, with her mop of red curls, and her delight in challenging authority, from the moment they had met. It had been Katie who had giggled when, that first break-time, Zoë had held a wriggling worm up to her mouth, pretending that she was eating it, whilst the other girls had fallen back in shocked horror, one of them actually bursting into tears, and that had sealed their friendship.

‘See you in Klosters,’ Zoë called now from the upstairs window of the pretty house her parents had bought for her whilst she was at Oxford, and which the two girls shared.

‘Honestly! Girls! Why do you have to cut things so fine?’ Tom mock-grumbled as he pulled away from the kerb.

Katie had never known a brother and sister who were such opposites as Tom and Zoë. Where Zoë thrived on taking risks, Tom preferred caution; where Zoë was tiny, and had a mass of dark red curls, Tom was tall, with the physique of a keen sportsman, and his hair was straight and black.

Zoë claimed that it was the wild Irish blood she had inherited from her mother’s family that was responsible for her sometimes reckless nature, while Tom took after their father’s family, conservative bankers whose small private bank, in which Tom worked, was still family owned.

‘Tom is quite happy just to exist,’ she was fond of saying, ‘but I want to live.’ ‘I hope I’m not going to miss the train,’ Katie said anxiously as Tom drove steadily towards the station. ‘My mother will kill me if I do.’

‘You won’t,’ he assured her. ‘Knowing my dear sister as I do, I made sure I came to pick you up with time in hand.’

Katie gave him a relieved smile.

As Tom had predicted, they arrived at the station in good time, and Katie was secretly thrilled when he insisted on accompanying her onto the platform, carrying her case for her, and waiting with her until the train pulled in.

‘Thank you for the lift.’

As he placed her case on the train for her and Katie stepped into the carriage, she automatically aimed a brief ‘thank you’ kiss at his cheek, her eyes widening when Tom cupped her face and kissed her back, not on her cheek, and not as the irritating friend of his equally irritating sister, but properly. Really, truly properly. Not with tongues – they were in public, after all – but almost. And it was a long kiss, a meaningful kiss, a lovely, wonderful, wonderful kiss, Katie decided, pink-cheeked as Tom released her and stepped back, saying softly, ‘See you in Klosters.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes!’ Katie agreed fervently. The train was pulling out but she couldn’t bear to go off to find her seat until the platform and Tom had finally disappeared from sight.

She had already had the best Christmas present ever, she decided blissfully, as her train rumbled south towards London, cold air, not warm, predictably coming out of the heating vents, making her glad of the thick tights she was wearing under her miniskirt, as she huddled into the warmth of her black peacoat.

Beyond the carriage window rolled the disappointing green of the Oxfordshire countryside. Christmas should be white, not green and wet. But there would be snow in Klosters, of course. Katie’s tummy fluttered with excitement and anticipation.

She was looking forward to being with the family of course she was – especially Granny and Gramps, who were such darlings. She hoped everyone would like the presents she’d got them – books this year; she liked to have a theme. The book she’d bought for Zoë was a beautifully bound copy of the Earl of Rochester’s poems that she had found in an antiquarian bookshop in Falmouth during the summer.

Normally after Christmas Katie’s parents took Katie, her elder sister, Emma, and her younger brother, Jamie, skiing, but this year her parents and Jamie were flying out to Australia instead, where her father had business interests, whilst Emma went to Italy to spend a term studying fabric design at Angelli’s.

Silk was the lifeblood of their family, although that might not be immediately obvious to outsiders. Her own ambition, once she had finished university, was to set up an archive library-cum-museum documenting all the patterns Denby Mill had produced, along with their provenance. Her grandmother, Amber, would be an invaluable help. And how much Katie was now looking forward to seeing her. Christmas at Denham Place, even without snow, would be utter bliss.

Through the plate-glass window wall of his penthouse apartment, sitting in the Eames lounge chair with his feet on its footstool, Robert stared out across the London rooftops. The chair was positioned exactly so that its occupant could see both out of the room and into it. Robert knew that he had a perfect panoramic view of the city, but the images inside his head weren’t of St Paul’s, the Thames and the distant horizon, but of the classically elegant buildings of cream stone and the cobbled square they dominated and surrounded: the royal palace and the offices of state of the Principality of Lauranto. What a project it would be to bring those Palladian buildings back to their original glory, to restore the dingy, shabby harbour below the ancient walled capital city back to the charmingly picturesque place it had once been. It would take money, of course – investment, investors. Olivia’s parents were the principal trustees of a very large charitable trust, and responsible for finding suitable causes for it to invest in and support. Oh, yes, Olivia would definitely be the ideal wife for him.

She had grown into an elegant, intelligent, socially adroit and confident young woman, with that aura of polished gloss that New York women possessed; a woman that it wouldn’t be hard for him to marry. In fact, it would be extremely easy for him to marry Olivia, Robert recognised. Extremely easy and very suitable.

Chapter Four

‘Darlings, how lovely!’

‘I’m sorry we’re later than I said we’d be, Mummy,’ Emerald told Amber, ‘but the traffic was simply awful. Is Robert here, only he’s got all the presents? We simply didn’t have room, what with everything that Emma is insisting on taking to Italy with her.’ ‘Yes, he’s here.’

‘And the others? Have they arrived yet?’

‘Yes, everyone’s here apart from Olivia, and Robert has gone to the airport to collect her.’

Detaching herself from her mother’s embrace, Emerald asked, ‘I take it that we’re all in our usual rooms?’

‘Yes, of course, darling.’

‘Drogo, can you take everything up? There’s something I want to have a word with Cathy about before I forget. Where is she, Mummy?’

‘In the kitchen with Janey, I think.’

As their mother headed in the direction of the kitchen, Jamie told Katie, ‘Granny and Gramps have got the tree ready for decorating.’

‘Yes, and it’s my turn to put the fairy on top this year,’ Katie answered

It was a family tradition, started when they had all been small, that the children took it in turns to place the fairy on top of the tree.

The front door opened, as she spoke, to admit a surge of cold air, and Harry and David, Janey and John’s sons.

‘Made it after all, have you?’ Harry joked. ‘We were going to give you another half an hour and then start the tree without you.’

‘It’s lovely to be here, Granny.’ Katie hugged Amber, firmly ignoring her stepcousin’s teasing.

Amber hugged her granddaughter back, their contact making her aware of the physical differences between youth and age. Whereas her own thinness represented a withering away, Katie’s slenderness was due to an abundance of youthful energy. Katie’s flesh felt firm against strong young bones, whereas Amber’s now hung slack and soft against bones that were thin and fragile. Katie even smelled of youth and freshness, Amber thought fondly.

‘It’s lovely to have you here,’ she responded. It didn’t do to have favourites amongst one’s grandchildren but Katie had an extra special place in her heart, perhaps because she shared Amber’s own passionate love for the history of the family silk business.

Katie was dressed in what Amber assumed was the current uniform of youth: black tights encasing her long slender legs, a short skirt, a skinny-looking jacket, which looked like something a seaman might wear, and thick, heavy-looking boots. Gold hoop earrings swung from her ears – Amber well remembered the fuss there had been when Katie had gone behind her mother’s back to have her ears pierced after being told she must not – her long thick nut-brown hair swinging on her shoulders.

Katie released her grandmother to turn and eye the bare branches of the Christmas tree.

‘It’s no use you looking at it like that,’ Emma reproved her sister, coming over to join them. ‘We can’t start decorating it until Robert comes back with Olivia. It wouldn’t be fair.’

It was typical of her sister to claim the moral high ground, Katie thought. ‘I wasn’t going to, Emma. I was just telling Harry that it’s my turn to put the fairy on the top.’

‘We can’t start but we can get organised for when Robert and Olivia get here,’ Harry pointed out. ‘We’ll need a couple of pairs of tall stepladders. Where did you put them after you’d put those curtains back up for Granny?’ he asked his younger brother.

‘Outside in the garage.’

‘Right, we’d better go and fetch them.’

‘Let’s go and sit down in the drawing room and you can both bring me up to date with all your news,’ Amber suggested to her granddaughters.

The kitchen at Denham was a big comfortable room with a table in the middle large enough to seat a dozen people, but with the six female members of the second generation of Jay and Amber’s family gathered round, all talking at once, it wasn’t just the soup simmering on the Aga that was giving off heat and filling the space.

‘Janey, you’ve done enough. Do let me help. I know you, you’ll have been working flat out for weeks getting ready for this,’ Rose pressed.

Although there was no blood relationship between them, Rose had grown up with Ella and Janey, gone to St Martins with them, lived and worked in London with them, and the two of them were the closest she had to siblings.

‘No, honestly, Rose, I’m fine. It’s only soup, after all. I would appreciate a hand, though, when we take the tea into the drawing room, and if you wouldn’t mind buttering the scones…?’ The two of them fell easily into the kind of efficient domestic routine that came from years of living together.‘…It makes it easier for Amber and Dad. They’re in those boxes, and the butter’s our own. John and Dad have been experimenting. John wants to open a farm shop at Fitton. I’ve brought a trolley from Fitton Hall so that we’ll have two. We won’t take it in, though, until Robert and Olivia get here.’ Rose made her way to the worktop and opened the first of the Tupperware boxes, whilst Janey looked at her a little enviously. Rose always looked so…so contained and calm. Even the way she dressed reflected that. In fact, everyone looked better than she did, Janey thought glumly: Emerald in her Chanel; Polly in what Janey suspected must be Armani; Ella, her own sister, in something that was chic and obviously Fifth Avenue, and even Cathy, who wasn’t in the least bit interested in fashion, was wearing a pretty dress. No one looking at them now would ever guess that she had been the one who had been passionate about clothes and design when she’d been young. Unlike the others, Janey recognised, she’d put on weight, but there was no point feeling sorry for herself or hard done by because her life meant that she simply never had either the time or the money to spend on herself. Maintaining Fitton Hall was like having an ever-open extra mouth to feed, which gobbled up money and always needed more. Fitton, it could be said, was the cuckoo in the nest of her marriage.

Janey knew that it hurt her husband, John’s, pride that her father paid him to manage their estate along with Fitton’s land, but without that money they could never have managed, despite all they tried to do to bring in extra income.

Her father and stepmother were both generous and tactful, discreetly paying both boys’ school fees, helping them through college and Sandhurst, and providing them each with a small allowance. They should be grateful to them, and she was, which was why she tried her hardest to repay their generosity by making sure that she was always on hand to help and keep an eye on them. John, though, sometimes chaffed resentfully against their need for what he called ‘charity’.

Things wouldn’t be so bad if John’s father hadn’t provided quite so generously in his will for his second wife. It irked John that, despite the fact that she was drawing such a generous annual income from Fitton, his stepmother still expected John to pay for the upkeep of the Dower House.

Janey tried not to feel too sharply aware of the difference between them as she looked from her own work-reddened hands and short unpolished nails to Rose’s discreet manicure. Rose was so fastidiously controlled in everything she did that she probably wouldn’t get so much as a smear of butter on the black dress she was wearing, whilst if she had been wearing it, no doubt it would already be covered in greasy smears…

Janey made a big effort to gather herself, to raise her game. She was just feeling down because Cassandra was being so very difficult at the moment, she told herself. It was hard to remember sometimes that Cassandra had been such close friends, not just with her own mother, but also with John’s mother, when Cassandra was constantly complaining and making life so unpleasant for poor John.

Goodness, but Janey was letting herself go, Emerald thought critically, glancing at her stepsister, before looking round the kitchen for her younger twin sisters and then heading determinedly in their direction.

‘Whilst you’re both here,’ she began without preamble, ‘there’s something I wanted to discuss with you about Walton Street.’

‘Emerald, it’s Christmas,’ Polly protested, ‘and I haven’t seen Cathy for over six months.’ ‘This is important. London’s booming, thanks to the banking industry. There’s been a big influx of Americans buying up property. Robert’s inundated with commissions from them, but Walton Street hasn’t seen a corresponding increase in sales—’

‘That’s because everyone wants polished cotton for their curtains, preferably from Tricia Guild,’ Cathy interrupted her.

‘I know that, Cathy. What I’ve been thinking is that we should try and get into the American interior design market, with Ella’s help, make a move away from the private homes market over here and think instead about targeting the corporate market. We should expand into commercial soft furnishing, specifically hotels. There’s a huge demand for top-quality hotel accommodation at the moment, and that’s going to increase. If we can get in on the ground floor of that kind of development it would give us a huge advantage. I was at a cocktail party the other week and one of the other guests was complaining that he simply can’t find anyone of the right calibre to oversee the soft furnishings side of a new hotel he’s building.’

‘Well, it’s certainly worth thinking about,’ Cathy agreed. ‘But we’d need larger premises, and more staff. And you’ll have to sweet-talk Rose into agreeing. She’s the one who co-ordinates the interior designs, after all.’

They all looked across the kitchen to where Rose was buttering scones.

‘What are you three up to?’ Ella’s amused voice broke into their conversation.

Of all of them, Ella was the one who had changed the most, Emerald reflected, turning from a plump, anxious and defensive young woman, who never bothered much with her appearance, into the elegant soignée New Yorker she was now. In fact, it was almost as though, with regard to their appearance, Ella and Janey had changed places so that now it was Ella who dressed fashionably and Janey who didn’t. But then, Emerald acknowledged, it would be next to impossible to live in New York and be married to a man like Oliver, who had once made his living photographing beautiful women and clothes, and not be affected.

She eyed Ella’s effortlessly elegant draped cream jersey top and skirt with a definite twinge of lust.

‘It’s Donna Karan,’ Ella answered her unspoken question, looking amused, her English accented with a faint American drawl that was as sensual as her clothes. ‘Perfect for travelling as it doesn’t crease. Olivia bought the darlingest pieces from her leisurewear collection when we went out shopping together.’

Although she was speaking to Emerald, Ella’s real attention was on her sister. Janey worked so hard, Fitton Hall was a demanding mistress, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted to share her husband with it. They’d flown over first class and she’d taken advantage of the extra luggage allowance to fill a large case with clothes for her sister. In New York, heading up a charity meant attending a constant succession of society events and maintaining a high profile, and that meant a constantly renewed wardrobe. She’d have to wait until she could catch Janey on her own, so that she could do things discreetly. Janey had her pride, after all, and no one was more prickly about this than John. ‘We were just talking about the business,’ Emerald told her. ‘We really need to get a foothold in the American interior design market.’

Emerald had always had a good head for business, Ella acknowledged.

‘If we go ahead, with profits being so low at the moment it will mean us not taking anything out of the business this year, especially if we do expand,’ Polly pointed out.

‘Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?’ Emerald shrugged impatiently.

‘For us, yes,’ Cathy agreed, ‘but it might not suit Janey’

Amber had made the business over to all of them in equal shares shortly after Jay’s heart attack, and although neither Ella nor Janey worked in the business, their share was the same as everyone else’s – a mutual decision from everyone concerned.

‘I can sort something out about that,’ Ella said quietly. ‘And I’ll speak to Rose,’ Emerald told them.

‘Right that’s the scones done,’ Rose told Janey. ‘What’s next?’

‘There’s some cream for those who want it, and some homemade jam. I don’t want to overface everyone now, otherwise no one will want any supper, which I thought we’d make help yourself this evening.’

‘Good idea.’

‘Heavens, who on earth is going to eat all these scones?’ Emerald demanded.

‘The children,’ Janey and Rose said together, both laughing.

‘Speaking of children, I take it, Rose, that Nick and Sarah have gone up to Scotland?’ Rose’s heart sank a little. She didn’t really want to discuss the failure of Nick’s marriage but she didn’t have much option.

‘Sarah has, but Nick’s gone to the Bahamas. Things haven’t been very good between them for a while and they’ve decided to separate for a while to give one another some breathing space. Sarah’s father never approved of her marrying Nick and I suspect that she feels torn between the two of them.’

‘Oh, well, he wouldn’t. Sarah’s mother came out the same season as me, and I remember him from then. Aunt Beth was touting him as one of the debs’ delights but there was nothing remotely delightful about him. He was frightfully dour, as they say in Scotland, with red hair and dreadful skin. And he was a terrible snob, always going on about his title.’ Emerald pulled a face. ‘I was astonished that Sarah actually defied him to marry Nick in the first place…Rose, there’s something I want to discuss with you about the Walton Street business.’

Rose nodded. ‘And there’s something else we should all discuss whilst we’re here, perhaps.’

‘What’s that? Ella queried.

‘Well, it will be Amber’s eightieth birthday next November. I know that’s nearly a full year away, but since we’re all together it seems a pity not to take the opportunity to discuss how we might celebrate the event.’

‘Well, of course we shall have a family party,’ Emerald agreed. ‘Drogo and I could host it.’

‘A party, yes, but I was thinking of something else, a special gift,’ Rose said firmly.

‘That means that you’ve already thought of something,’ Emerald guessed shrewdly.

‘Yes,’ Rose agreed, ‘but what I’ve got in mind is rather a large project and it would need us all to agree and to contribute to it.’

‘So what is it?’ Polly demanded.

‘Well, this does in a way tie in with what Emerald has been saying about the need for us to look in new directions to promote the business. As you all know, through my own private practice I deal with clients who want new interior designs for their shops, hairdressing salons, et cetera, and I’m beginning to see a move away from the pretty-pretty to something more dramatic.’

‘And…?’ Emerald urged impatiently.

‘I’m wondering if we could introduce a new design to Denby Mill’s existing portfolio, based on the length of silk featured in The Silk Merchant’s Daughter. I know that Amber has that piece of silk, and I’ve always thought how wonderful the colours in it are, all those rich dark ambers, plums and charcoals, shot through with lighter colours.’

Emerald had heard enough. She could never and would never feel comfortable about the famous painting of her mother, the work of the French artist Jean-Philippe du Breveonet, and which she herself had once tried to destroy.

‘That piece of silk is priceless and antique. It could never be replicated.’

Rose nodded in agreement. She had expected resistance to her idea from Emerald, who for some reason was always antagonistic to anything to do with the French artist and the paintings he had done of Amber.

‘You’re right,’ she agreed, ‘but what I was thinking was more along the lines of us creating an entire new range of designs, using the colours from the silk and incorporating them into modern styles – stripes, block prints, architectural designs – the kind of patterns that would appeal to interior designers and really stand out from what’s on offer at the moment.’

‘That’s a terrific concept, and I love it already,’ Cathy announced, joining the conversation. ‘Rose is right about the colours in the silk. Every time Sim and I go to the National Gallery we look at the painting and marvel at it all over again.’

‘It sounds a good idea,’ Janey concurred.

‘I thought that if we could work on it in secret so that Amber doesn’t know, we could with luck have it ready for launching by her birthday. I thought we’d name it and launch it in her honour.’

‘Name it? What?’ Emerald challenged, unable to conceal her dislike of the idea. She couldn’t help it. Anything to do with the artist who had secretly been her mother’s lover and her own father made her feel angry and vulnerable. The last thing she wanted was attention being drawn to the series of paintings, which were currently on loan to the National Gallery and which the artist had given into her mother’s care during the war, just prior to his own death. For years those paintings had remained shut away, but Sim, Cathy’s husband, had persuaded Amber to let him show them in his own small gallery in Cornwall, where they had attracted such a lot of interest that the National Gallery had asked to borrow them.

‘We could call the range “Amber”, I suppose,’ Ella suggested.

Rose shook her head. ‘You don’t have to agree with me – this is only a suggestion – but what about calling the entire range simply 1912 as in “The 1912 Range”? That is the year Amber was born, and I think using that date will set the range apart from the current crop of floral patterns and names, if you’ll all forgive the pun.’

‘Rose, that’s a brilliant idea,’ Janey approved, clapping her hands together.

‘It is very stylish,’ Ella agreed. ‘I can see that appealing to the high-end American market.’

‘It does sound rather elegant,’ Emerald agreed reluctantly, ‘but you’re forgetting something important, Rose. To come anywhere near replicating the colours in the original silk, we’re going to need that piece of fabric, and Mummy keeps it under lock and key. She’ll be bound to ask what we want it for if we wish to borrow it.’

‘We can ask Jay to get it for us,’ Rose told her promptly. ‘If we tell him what we’re planning he’ll help us, I’m sure. And, Polly, how would you feel about taking it back to Italy with you and asking Rocco to look into matching it? Denby Mill has its own strengths but Angelli Silk has the best reputation in the world for its dyes.’

Angelli Silk was the centuries-old Venetian silk manufacturing house still owned by the family of Polly’s husband, Rocco. It was now in partnership with Denby Silk.

‘I can see it now,’ Janey enthused, ‘gorgeous stripes in all those rich colours: chocolate brown, dark amber, plum, and crimson.’

‘With just a thin line of off-white and black,’ Cathy put in, equally excited. ‘We could add some fun designs in, perhaps spots.’

‘Or etched cartoons,’ Ella added, her own imagination taking fire. ‘Perhaps the outline of an elegant 1912 female profile?’

‘Or a hat?’ said Polly. ‘Or maybe just the figures 1912? Oh, Rose, you really are a genius. This is just such an innovative and wonderful idea, and yet it follows the tradition of great-grandfather so well.’

The great-grandfather to whom Polly was referring was Amber’s own father, whose designs Amber herself had used to produce some of Denby Mill’s most popular ranges.

Listening to them, Rose exhaled in relief. She had been worried that there might be objections to her suggestion, and was delighted that it had been received so well.

Rose’s idea was a good one, Emerald acknowledged, and she could already see the huge potential the range could have, and she loved Rose’s suggestion for its name. She would just have to put to one side her feelings about the painter and the painting, and focus instead on the benefits.

Her plane had just landed at Manchester airport. It was silly to have excitement fluttering inside her just because she was going to see Robert. Silly, pointless but inevitable, Olivia acknowledged wryly.

As she was travelling light, with only hand luggage, Olivia was one of the first passengers to reach the arrivals hall. She looked for her father’s familiar face, and then came to an abrupt halt when she saw an equally familiar but unexpected face and heard Robert saying her name.

‘Robert, you’ve come to meet me.’ Of all the inane things to say, and did her voice have to sound so thready and, well, silly?

They were walking side by side, the rail separating those waiting from new arrivals between them.

Robert looked so English in his dark overcoat, worn over a dark suit, his shirt white with a soft red stripe, his tie a slightly darker shade of red. His shirt would have been made to measure for him in Jermyn Street, his suit would be from Savile Row and his shoes from Lobb. He looked exactly what he was: a well-brought-up upper-class Englishman, and he had come to the airport just to meet her. A wave of giddy delight and joy washed over her.

‘Is that all the luggage you’ve got?’

They had almost reached the end of the barrier.

‘Yes. Mom promised to bring everything else.’

‘Yes, she said to tell you not to worry, they’ve brought all your presents for everyone with them.’

‘I wasn’t expecting to get a commission so close to Christmas.’

They were standing face to face, Robert reaching for her case. And that was when Olivia realised that something extraordinary and previously unimaginable except in her daydreams was happening. Robert was looking at her mouth in that way – that way that said that he was thinking about kissing it…kissing her. Her heart was jumping and racing. She could hardly breathe. She felt…oh my, how she did just feel. This was crazy. She wasn’t a teenager any more and—

Another passenger bumped into her, jolting her forward. Robert’s free hand fastened protectively on her arm.

Olivia was attracting a good deal of surreptitious interest from other members of his sex, Robert noticed, and he could understand why. Watching her come towards him before she’d seen him, he had felt his heart lift – with triumph in his own judgement and the acknowledgement that he had made the right decision.

From the top of her shiny thick mane of tawny brown hair to the toes of her pale beige boots, she exuded the confident discreet allure of a beautiful well-groomed woman. The confidence was only a veneer, though, he suspected. He had seen the way she’d reacted when he’d looked at her mouth. And that had pleased him.

‘I suppose it’s raining?’ For goodness’ sake relax, Olivia begged herself as, still holding her arm, Robert guided her towards the exit. Her cashmere slacks were warm but thin, and she could feel the muscular hardness of Robert’s thigh against her own. This was ridiculous. She was nearly twenty-six, and adult.

‘Of course. This is Manchester. The car’s not very far away, though.’

They were outside in the cold damp early evening air.

‘It’s really good of you to come for me.’

‘I had my reasons.’

‘What reasons?’ she asked, whilst her heart bounced.

Robert mustn’t have heard her because he didn’t answer.

They reached the car and he unlocked the passenger door for her and held it open while she got in. The interior smelled of leather, the plush cream seat enfolding her.

Robert’s Aston Martin was his pride and joy, she knew. The radio was playing – traditional carols being sung beautifully by a choir – the sound just that little bit too loud for them to talk. Olivia wanted to suggest that Robert turn down the volume but felt reluctant to do so in case he didn’t want to be bothered chatting with her. There was eight years between them and, of course, when they had been growing up that gap had seemed huge. But an eight-year gap was supposed to be ideal between a couple, wasn’t it? A couple? She was crazy thinking in those terms just because Robert had looked at her mouth. So she was crazy, Olivia thought defiantly. It was Christmas and she could be crazy if she wanted. Crazy for Robert, crazy for the feel of his mouth on hers. Crazy full stop, she warned herself.

Robert glanced at Olivia when they stopped at traffic lights. She suited the car perfectly, both of them classically stylish and beautifully put together. The lights changed and he put his foot down on the accelerator.

It might be dark but the road was familiar enough for Olivia to recognise its landmark: the branches of the trees behind gated properties bare of leaves; the bends in the road, swept by the Aston’s headlights; Christmas trees sparkling in windows and fairy lights shining in trees.

This was northern Cheshire, moneyed, successful and very proud of itself. They came to another junction, turning right to dip down into Wilmslow and then out again, through Alderley Edge, the road then climbing but skirting the Edge itself, with its mysterious silence and stories of Merlin.

Olivia smiled to herself, thinking that it was predictable that Robert, with his keen eye for style and his love of perfection, should choose to drive to Denham through this smart stockbroker belt part of Cheshire instead of taking the route that was their shared grandparents’ favourite, through Macclesfield and then past the family silk mill.

They were in the countryside now, fields stretching to either side of them in the darkness, Olivia knew, even though she couldn’t see them. To the left of the road lay Fitton Hall, and to the right Denham Place, the magnificent Vanbrugh building that was their grandparents’ home, inherited by Robert’s grandmother Amber from her own grandmother Blanche Pickford, and which, so the family story went, Blanche had bought to spite Barrant du Vries, the aristocrat she had loved but who had not thought her good enough for him.

Now the du Vries land was part of Denham, and Felton Priory, formerly the de Vries home, was the headquarters of a multinational company.

‘I wonder what Blanche thought when Granny and Gramps married.’ Olivia voiced her thoughts. ‘After all, Barrant du Vries was Gramps’ grandfather.’

‘What on earth made you ask that?’ Robert turned his attention from the road to look at her.

‘I don’t know. I was just thinking about Denham and how Blanche bought it to get one up on Barrant.’ She gave a small shiver. ‘I don’t think I’d want to have such an intense relationship.’

Robert’s smile was amused and indulgent. Olivia’s comment confirmed his judgement of her.

As they turned off the main road and onto the drive that led to Denham, Olivia could see the lights blazing in the large gatehouse, which was currently occupied by the Leggits in their roles as housekeeper and general handyman-cum-gardener.

Whoever had planted the beech trees lining the drive had known what they were doing, because not one of them had fallen during the appalling storms of October 1987, which had done so much damage throughout the country. But the drive and the house itself would benefit from some well-designed and targeted outdoor lighting, Robert decided as he brought the car to a halt halfway down the drive, at the exact spot where it could not be seen either from the gatehouse or Denham itself. He should mention it to his grandfather, but not right now. Right now he had something else he needed – and wanted – to do.

Robert had stopped the car. Why? Olivia shifted in her seat so that she could turn to look at him.

‘Remember when I said earlier that I had my reasons for coming to pick you up?’

‘Yes…’ Olivia’s heart was thudding so fast and hard that she wanted to put her hand over it to quieten it.

‘Well, this is one of those reasons.’ He leaned towards her purposefully, as though he was going to kiss her.

No, not as though he was going to kiss her – he was kissing her.

Olivia closed her eyes. Robert’s lips brushed her own tantalisingly lightly, once, twice and then a third time, before settling on them gently, their caress deliberately careful, that deliberation extraordinarily sensual. He wasn’t touching her in any other way, and yet his kiss felt far more intimate than if he had been doing.

It was such a pleasure to be kissed in such a way: an old-fashioned kind of kissing, with an intimate pleasure all of its own way, instead of as a prelude to being groped. The mere touch of lips on lips was so heart-warmingly wonderful that she didn’t want it to end.

When it did she opened her eyes, slowly luxuriating in the pleasure that still clung to her senses, to find Robert watching her, his breath warm against her skin.

‘I’ve been wanting you to kiss me since I was sixteen,’ she told him.

‘I hope it was worth the wait? I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently,’ he continued, without waiting for Olivia to answer him. ‘Thinking about you and looking forward to seeing you, and to telling you showing you – how much I’ve looked forward to us being together.’

Was this really happening? Should she pinch herself just to see? Was Robert really saying what she thought he was saying? Had he really kissed her, or was she just dreaming that he had? The unexpected shift in their relationship had happened so quickly, and so unexpectedly that it was having the same heady effect on her as though she had drunk several glasses of champagne, Olivia thought dizzily, suddenly realising that Robert was still waiting for her to say something, but all she could manage was a mundane, ‘That’s nice.’

Robert laughed. ‘And this is even nicer.’ He kissed her again. She really was perfect. So grateful and delighted, just as he had expected. He reached for Olivia’s hand, sliding his fingers between hers and then lifting her clasped hand to his lips.

‘I know this must seem sudden, but I’ve been waiting a long, long time for you to grow up enough for me to tell you how much you mean to me. That time is now, Olivia, and if I’m speaking out of turn or saying something you don’t want to hear—’ Robert was telling her that he loved her? Robert, whom she’d adored and thought the most perfect man there was, for as long as she could remember?

‘No. I mean, yes, I do want to hear it. Oh, Robert, you should have told me before. I’ve been old enough for years.’

‘Dearest darling Olivia, you have just made me the happiest I have ever been.’

In the time it took her to catch her breath, Robert had released her hand, kissed her forehead gently and restarted the car. If Olivia was disappointed that he hadn’t kissed her again – perhaps even taken things a little further than mere kisses – then she was also touched that he was being so respectful of her. It proved that he was every bit as wonderful as she had always believed.

The house was just the same, the hall smelled as it always did at Christmas – of pine from the tree and wood smoke from the fire – those smells mingling with the scent of cinnamon and women’s perfume.

She could see her grandfather standing talking to her father. Her father’s skin brown from Hamptons summers, his thick hair greying now. Her parents had such a good, strong marriage, the kind of marriage she wanted for herself.

‘Darling.’ Her mother hugged her. ‘I’ve brought your clothes and your presents. Did you get your article in on time?’

‘Yes, thank goodness.’ As she returned her mother’s warm hug and listened to her questions, Olivia was trying desperately hard not to look across to where Robert was talking to his grandmother. Her face felt as though it was burning, and her heart was racing. She felt as though everything was a little unreal, as though she and Robert were enclosed in their own private bubble of happiness that distanced them from everyone and everything else.

Robert was looking at her, smiling. It was almost impossible for her to focus on Amber’s face when Robert was standing next to his grandmother, and her gaze just wanted to fill itself with him.

Olivia turned back to her mother. ‘I need to run upstairs and get cleaned up.’

‘Don’t be too long, Olivia,’ Katie begged her. ‘I’m dying to start decorating the tree, but Granny made us wait until you and Robert got here. You seemed to be ages.’

Chapter Five

‘Oh, look at these baubles. I remember Granny buying them at Flora’s in Macclesfield,’ Katie, sitting on the floor, going through one of the large cardboard boxes of decorations, enthused, holding up the glittering ornament.

Flora’s was a garden centre famous for its Christmas decorations.

‘Oh, and these!’ she exclaimed, holding up a fabric bauble made from velvet and glittering beaded silk. ‘Aunt Janey made them, didn’t she, from pieces of our own silk?’

‘I thought we were supposed to be decorating the tree, not reminiscing,’ Harry teased her, but Katie didn’t pay any attention. She loved this part of Christmas.

On the other side of the tree Emma was working far more industriously through the contents of her box, insisting, ‘You can’t put that there; it doesn’t go. We agreed we’d stick to a colour theme this year, remember?’

‘But these are so pretty,’ Katie protested.

‘Here’s the fairy,’ Harry told her. ‘I’ll hold the ladder for you whilst you put it on.’

Scrambling to her feet, Katie took the fairy from him and started to climb the ladder.

The tree was tall and very wide at the base – so wide, in fact, that even though she was leaning forward she couldn’t quite reach the top.

‘Come back down, Katie, and I’ll move the ladders,’ Harry suggested.

‘It’s OK. I can reach if I just lean over a bit more.’

‘Katie, no!’ Harry protested, but Katie laughed down at him before stretching up on tiptoe to try to reach the top. But her foot slipped, the sound of her own gasp of shock mingling with Harry’s anxious, ‘Katie!’ as she lost her balance and crashed down, her fall broken by Harry, who rushed to try to save her.

‘Are you all right?’

‘What’s happened?’

‘What on earth was that noise?’

‘Katie fell off the ladder.’

‘Katie, are you all right?’ Her father was crouching on the floor beside her, saying calmly, ‘Let’s have a look at you. Don’t try and move.’

Move? That was the last thing she felt like doing. She felt sick and dizzy, and there was the most dreadful pain in her arm.

‘How is she?’ That was her mother, sounding impatient and anxious at the same time.

‘Is she hurt?’ That was Aunt Rose.

‘She’s broken her arm, by the look of it. We’d better get her down to A & E.’

Broken her arm? But she was going skiing next week, and she had to go because Tom would be there, and she desperately wanted to see him.

However, when Katie tried to tell everyone that, the pain in her arm became so intense that she fainted instead.

‘Here you are, Janey. This is the last of them.’

Janey took the empty Tupperware containers from Ella and put them into the back of the Range Rover.

‘Dad and Amber both look well,’ Ella continued, watching as Janey closed the back of the car.

‘Yes, they’re marvellous,’ Janey smiled.

Ella had taken the opportunity of the distraction provided by Katie’s fall to have a few minutes on her own with her sister.

‘A lot of that is down to you,’ she pointed out. ‘I really don’t know how you cope with all that you’ve got to do.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind. Dad and Amber aren’t any trouble at all.’ She paused and then acknowledged, ‘I wish I could say the same about Cassandra. She’s become so very difficult, and John finds it very hard to deal with her. To be honest, she wears me down. I felt so envious of all of you when we were in the kitchen earlier; you all looked so groomed and glamorous.’

‘Oh, Janey.’ Ella gave her sister a fierce hug.

‘You are the best of all of us.’

As she released Janey, Ella, feeling awkward, said, ‘I’ve brought some clothes with me that I thought you might be able to use. I know you don’t get much chance to shop these days.’

‘And if I did I wouldn’t have the money to buy designer clothes. Oh, it’s all right,’ she assured Ella, ‘I don’t mind eating humble pie – which is just as well as we’d probably all starve if we didn’t.’ Anything of Ella’s with a waist in it would have to be let out, of course, Janey thought, since she was nowhere near as svelte as her sister, but luckily that was something she could do herself.

‘I don’t know how we’d manage without all the help we get from the family, and I’m especially grateful to you, Ella, for giving up your share of the Walton Street business profits to me. They’ve installed the new central heating in the Dower House, which Cassandra insisted she was entitled to, and bought me this very handsome vehicle.’

‘You deserve it, Janey, and more. I’m sorry that Cassandra is giving you such a hard time.’

‘I can’t understand why she is being so mean,’ Janey responded. ‘Especially when she and our mother were such great friends.’

Ella wondered if this was the time to tell Janey about the real relationship that had existed between their late mother and their father’s cousin. Even now, after all these years, she hated thinking about the time as a child she had opened her parents’ bedroom door to see her mother and Cassandra naked on the bed together, Cassandra caressing her mother intimately, but before she could bring herself to speak, Janey’s elder son came out of the kitchen to join them.

‘Uncle Drogo has just rung from the hospital. Katie has broken her arm but it’s a nice clean break and the hospital says it will mend well.’

‘Well, thank goodness for that.’ Janey greeted Harry’s announcement with relief. ‘Go and find your father and David, will you please, darling, and tell them that I’m ready to leave? I’ve got to get back,’ she explained to Ella, after Harry had gone, ‘otherwise I won’t be able to get organised for the morning. I’ve left everything you’ll all need for breakfast in the fridge.’

‘Modern life is a far cry from the days when houses like these were run by an army of servants,’ Ella remarked as they closed the door on the cold night air, and then took off their coats, a sturdy well-worn Barbour in Janey’s case, and a luxurious camel-coloured wool and cashmere coat in Ella’s. ‘I wonder what Blanche would make of things if she was alive today?’

‘She wouldn’t approve at all,’ Janey laughed.

‘If you’ve got time we could go to our room and I could give you those things I mentioned?’

‘You’re so tactful, Ella,’ Janey told her, ‘trying to be discreet and make sure that the others don’t see me accepting my big sister’s charity, but truthfully, I don’t mind. Pride is a luxury I simply can’t afford, and I am truly grateful to you.’

When she got back to New York, she’d buy her sister something lovely and special and brand new, Ella promised herself, fiercely blinking away the tears she knew Janey would hate to see.

‘What makes it all so much more difficult with Aunt Cassandra and John is that she will keep reminding him of what close friends she and John’s mother were. She says it in that sort of way that implies that John owes her something above and beyond the very generous provisions for her made by his father in his will. I know it’s mean of me but I can’t help wishing that she hadn’t decided not to go and stay with her friends in Brighton this Christmas.

‘Oh, I know what I meant to say,’ Janey continued, changing the subject. ‘Your Olivia and Robert looked very happy in one another’s company when they arrived this evening. Is something going on there?’

The amused and questioning note in Janey’s voice distracted Ella from thinking about the brief sharp prick of warning she had felt when Janey had been talking about John’s mother and Cassandra.

‘They’ve always got on well together.’ Ella sidestepped Janey’s teasing question. Naturally she’d noticed Olivia’s glow of happiness, and she’d seen the looks that Olivia and Robert had been exchanging, but if something was going on between them it was a very new ‘something’, and one she wasn’t sure she liked.

‘I’m sorry for causing so much trouble, Dad,’ Katie said as Drogo stopped the car in front of Denham.

‘And so you should be, Katherine,’ Emerald scolded. ‘You’re old enough to know better than to take such silly risks.’

‘Yes,’ Emma chipped in with big-sister superiority. ‘Harry told you to come down.’

Drogo shot his younger daughter a sympathetic smile. ‘Not in too much pain now, are you?’ he asked her.

Stupidly it was her father’s kindness that brought her close to tears, rather than her mother and her sister’s criticism, Katie acknowledged, as she sniffed and shook her head. ‘My arm aches a bit but that’s all.’

‘You’re lucky you didn’t end up with concussion after a fall like that,’ Emerald told her, her crossness a cover for the shock and anxiety she had felt when she’d hurried into the hall to see her daughter lying crumpled there.

‘It was Harry who saved her from that by breaking her fall,’ Emma announced. ‘I bet he’ll be bruised black and blue with you falling on top of him like a sack of potatoes,’ she added. ‘Of course, you won’t be able to go skiing now. Not with a broken arm.’

‘I’ll be able to manage, Katie protested. ‘You see loads of people out there with arms and legs in plaster.’

‘Yes, but they’ve normally had that plaster put on whilst they’ve been out there. They don’t fly out to ski with it on, do they?’ Emma retorted.

‘Dad, I can still go, can’t I?’ Katie pleaded. ‘Zoë’s expecting me to, and I could sit out whilst the others ski.’ Of course she wasn’t going to say anything about Tom, but it was the thought of not seeing him that was making her feel sick and miserable.’

‘Well…’ Drogo began, but Emerald shook her head. ‘Don’t be silly, Katie. Of course you can’t go. What would be the point? And apart from anything else, your father and I would never have a moment’s peace, worrying about you, if you did.’

Somehow, after that, David’s, ‘I’ve put the fairy on the top of the tree for you,’ wasn’t as comforting as it might have been. She wasn’t going to be able to go to Klosters. Zoë would be furious with her – she was furious with herself; furious and miserable.

‘At least it’s not your right arm, darling,’ Amber tried to cheer up her granddaughter, ‘and you’re welcome to stay on with us, you know, until your parents get back from Australia. I know it won’t be as much fun as Switzerland.’

Katie forced a wan smile, whilst over her head Emerald gave her mother a grateful look.

‘If you’re sure it won’t be too much for you and Jay, Mummy, that would be wonderful.’

‘Emerald, I am seventy-nine not ninety-nine,’ Amber pointed out with a touch of asperity in her voice. ‘It will be a good opportunity for me to do something about sorting out some of the old records of our fabrics. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages. It will be a step towards organising that archive you’ve been talking about, Katie. Jay and I salvaged snippets of fabric and wallpaper from Felton Priory before it was sold, and they are really interesting.’

Staying on here at Denham would be much better than being at home in London on her own, Katie knew, but it wouldn’t be Klosters. Even so, she forced herself to look appreciative, knowing that under almost any other circumstances she’d have been thrilled by such an opportunity.

Family tradition meant that everyone had an early night after their arrival, and with Katie back from hospital, those mothers with young children started to gather them up ready for baths and bed.

‘I’ll come up with you and Sam, Mum,’ Olivia told Ella. ‘I need to collect my case from your room, and hand over some parcels to Santa,’ she added with a smile in her younger brother’s direction, laughing when he gave her a scathing look and told her, ‘I’m fourteen years old. I stopped believing in Father Christmas when I was six.’

Laughing back, Olivia ruffled his hair and teased, ‘So does that mean you don’t want any presents then?’

Ella hadn’t intended to start asking questions – after all, Olivia would tell her if there was anything she wanted her to know – but it was impossible for her to stop herself from commenting lightly, once Sam was in bed in the room he was sharing with Jamie, and Ella and Olivia were back in Ella and Oliver’s room, ‘You and Robert seem to be getting on well.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s natural that we should gravitate towards one another. After all, we are the eldest members of our generation.’

Olivia’s airy response did more to increase Ella’s concern for her daughter than to reduce it. That kind of evasion just wasn’t like Olivia.

‘Has he said anything to you about his visit to Lauranto? Sooner or later he’s going to have to decide whether or not he wants to succeed Alessandro and become Crown Prince, and if he does—’

‘He picked me up from the airport, Mom, that’s all. I hope everyone’s going to like their Christmas presents. Oh, and you’ll never guess who I saw just after I’d dropped off my piece to Vanity Fair.’

Olivia plainly wanted to change the subject.

‘Who?’ Ella asked her.

‘Tait Cabot Forbes,’ Olivia grimaced, explaining when Ella didn’t respond, ‘You know, that dreadful journo who wrote about Maisie changing her will, and you and Dad.’

‘Yes, I know who you mean, darling, but once your father had spoken with him privately and explained the situation he didn’t pursue the matter.’

‘No, but he didn’t apologise in print for what he’d said either, did he?’

‘Well, he couldn’t really, could he? Not when your father had said that what he told him was in the strictest confidence.’

Ella gave her daughter a loving smile. Olivia was extremely loyal to those she loved – it was one of her strongest characteristics and a lovely one – but sometimes it made it hard for her to accept that life was not always black or white but came in various shades of grey

‘Tait is a journalist,’ Ella reminded Olivia, ‘and a very good one, and he was only doing his job, after all.’

Olivia nodded. But no matter what her mother said she was not prepared to forgive Tait Cabot Forbes for the way he had publicly tried to accuse her parents of doing something wrong, and she would certainly never forget it.

His whole article had been based on supposition, suspicion and spite. In it he had tried to claim that her parents must have put undue pressure on their elderly friend Maisie Fischerbaum to change her will, cutting out the trustees to whom she had originally entrusted her estate, and instead appointing Ella and Oliver as the sole trustees of her billion-dollar foundation, and responsible for deciding which charitable causes would benefit from it. The fact that she had made this change in her ninetieth year, using a new solicitor and without saying a word to the original trustees, had led to a good deal of gossip behind the scenes about her decision and her parents’ involvement with her, Olivia knew. However, she also knew that the reason Maisie had changed her will was because she had been devastated to discover that shortly after the death of an old friend of hers, his trustees had ignored his wishes and used his money in ways of which he would not have approved. After that Maisie felt that the only people she could trust were Olivia’s parents. They had tried to reassure her, but Maisie had refused to change her mind, and the new will was drawn up in secrecy at her insistence. The original trustees hadn’t done anything illegal and Maisie had been worried that if it got out that she no longer trusted them to carry out her wishes to the letter, they might either sue her for defamation, or have her legally declared to be unfit to continue to conduct her own financial affairs.

After her death, when the gossip had started, Olivia had urged her parents to go public with Maisie’s reasons for changing her will, but they had felt honourbound not to say anything in case Maisie’s distrust ended up reflecting badly on her original trustees, who, after all, had done nothing wrong. It was typical of her parents to protect others at their own expense, Olivia knew.

Her parents might have forgiven Tait for his article now he had backed off, but Olivia didn’t intend to do so. He hadn’t actually taken back what he’d said or apologised, had he? And besides, there was something about Tait as a person, as a man, that made her feel on edge, and…and judged. He was so…so pleased with himself, and arrogantly and, yes, sexually male. Not like Robert, who was so very much more gentlemanly.

Robert…Olivia hugged to herself the thought of the kiss they had shared.

‘Here’s your case,’ Ella told Olivia. ‘Amber said to tell you that you’re in the lilac room.’

‘She knows that’s my favourite,’ Olivia smiled, reaching for the strap of her roller case.

Each of Denham’s many bedrooms was decorated in a different colour to coordinate with the Denby Mill silk used for its soft furnishings.

The panelling in the room Ella and Oliver were occupying was painted a soft grey blue, to contrast with the butter-yellow silk curtains, their Greek key design border a deeper richer gold. The Greek key design provided a border for the blue-grey and off-white trellis-patterned carpet, whilst the bedcover, the seats of the two bedroom chairs and the lamps on the mantelpiece were covered in the yellow silk.

Within seconds of Olivia going, the bedroom door opened again and Oliver walked in.

‘You look thoughtful,’ he commented.

‘Mmm…I think there could be something going on between Olivia and Robert.’

‘Robert? How can there be something going on between them? She hasn’t seen him since last Christmas, has she?’

‘No, but when they came in together tonight, there was definitely something there, and she did have that crush on him at one stage.’

‘Robert,’ Oliver repeated in the tone of voice a man uses when he suddenly realises that his little girl has transferred her affections to another male.

‘She hasn’t said anything to me,’ Ella admitted. ‘In fact, if anything she was rather evasive when I brought up the subject, so I could be wrong, but somehow I don’t think so.’

In their room – the room that had been hers when she had been growing up, but which her mother had had redecorated five years ago, along with the rest of the house – Emerald dropped into one of the pretty Louis Quatorze-style chairs, the elegant arch of her feet in the high heels she insisted on wearing no matter what the fashion, revealed as she crossed her legs.

‘Why must our children be so exhausting, Drogo?’ she demanded.

‘Probably because they’re your children,’ Drogo answered with a smile.

‘I would never have tried to do anything as pointlessly silly as Katie,’ Emerald claimed, quickly changing the subject to continue, ‘Poor Janey, she’s beginning to look quite old. She really should take a bit more care of herself

‘I doubt she has the time – or the money,’ Drogo said mildly.

‘They’d be a lot better off if they let Fitton and moved in here with Mummy and Jay. After all, John could run both estates just as easily from here as he can from Fitton. Denham’s a far more comfortable house, and Janey would be on hand to help Mummy and Jay when they need it.’

‘Fitton means far too much to John for him to ever want to do that, and even if it didn’t, John would still have the problem of Cassandra living in the Dower House.’

Emerald gave a small exasperated sigh.

‘I do hope that Rose isn’t going to get too involved with Nick and those children of his now that he and Sarah are separating. Not now, when we’re hoping to expand into the commercial market. If we do get contracts to provide the soft furnishings and the interior designs for hotel bedrooms, then we’re going to need Rose. She fusses far too much over Nick – I’ve always said so. He isn’t even her child, and there’s no real proof that Josh fathered him.’

‘Apart from the fact that Nick looks exactly like Josh, you mean,’ Drogo pointed out. He was used to his wife criticising her relatives, and he knew that in reality Emerald’s critical manner was just a cover for the concern that her nature would not allow her to express openly.

‘It’s all very well us coming here to Denham, Drogo, but the family would be every bit as comfortable at Osterby as they are here. More so, in fact, since Osterby is properly staffed.’

Since Osterby, the Lenchester family seat, was of a similar size to Blenheim, whereas Denham was of far more modest proportions, at Emerald’s comment Drogo gave her a wry look.

‘Osterby might have the grandeur and stature of a would-be palace, but Denham is a proper home.’

‘It isn’t as though Mummy and Jay couldn’t afford to employ more staff. Mummy inherited all Greatgrandmother’s money, after all, and that was millions. Heavens, when Mummy grew up here, there were dozens of servants. Now, apart from the Leggits and the estate workers, there’s no one. Janey’s actually cooked virtually all the food for Christmas herself. I really do think we’re going to have to say something to Mummy. I mean, Janey was actually talking about drawing up a rota for kitchen duties!’ Emerald wrinkled her nose, making Drogo laugh. ‘It’s all right for you,’ she objected. ‘My manicure will never last until we get back to London.’

‘You do realise that you are the world’s worst snob, don’t you?’ Drogo teased her. ‘And that we’re going to be in the Australian outback for nearly three weeks when we leave here?’

‘You might be in the Australian outback, counting your sheep or whatever it is people do on sheep stations; I shall be staying in a decent hotel in Sydney or the Whitsunday Islands.’ A sudden smile illuminated her face, the other side of her nature breaking through like a patch of brilliantly blue in an otherwise grey sky.

‘I am so lucky to have married you, Drogo.’ She reached up to cup his face, leaning forward to kiss him, and then stopped to add in her normal manner, ‘but not, of course, as lucky as you were to marry me.’

Chapter Six

‘Happy?’

Olivia nodded, turning her face towards Robert, the wind tangling the normal sleekness of her hair, her hand held warmly within Robert’s clasp as they walked together through Denham’s frost-rimed formal gardens, their Wellington boot-clad feet crunching on the gravel pathways. They startled a couple of male pheasants that had been foraging for food and that now walked slowly away in that manner peculiar to pheasants, meant to convey the impression that they actually weren’t there at all.

‘Yes, I am happy,’ Olivia reaffirmed. ‘And you?’

‘Not as happy as I would be if I was kissing you, but I think we’re already the subject of enough family curiosity, without stoking up any more for the time being, don’t you?’

His answer couldn’t have shown better how similar their thinking was. Olivia loved that there was no gameplaying between them, no having to contrive artificial tests and tricks so that each could lure the other into being the first to admit to their feelings. It had charmed and delighted her that instead of holding back from her, in the style favoured by New York men – who promised to ring and then didn’t, only to do so just when you’d given up, requiring a girl to pretend then that she wasn’t interested, or risk losing face – Robert had been prompt and plain about seeking her out this morning, after picking her up at the airport yesterday, discreetly creating an opportunity for them to be alone together via the simple expedient of announcing after breakfast, ‘Come on, Olivia. It’s Christmas Eve, and you and I are on holly-finding duties. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas at Denham without holly’

‘Mom’s already been quizzing me, saying that we seemed to be “getting on very well”,’ she informed Robert ruefully, loving the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed.

‘That’s probably because my mother will have been warning her not to let you seduce me,’ he teased her, mock solemnly.

Olivia aimed a playful punch at his shoulder with her free hand, retaliating, ‘My mother has been warning me to remember that you’ve got a decision to make about Lauranto.’

‘Is that an issue?’

Oh, she did like his directness. It made everything feel so easy and natural.

‘Not for me,’ she answered him truthfully. ‘It must be a difficult decision for you to make, though?’

‘I do feel I have a duty to the people of Lauranto. My grandmother is set in her ways; the whole country is in need of modernisation.’ He turned to her. ‘And I, Olivia, have a very great need of you in my life.’

So this was happiness, this giddy, dizzy, disbelief, this delight that made everything – every sensation, every sense, every thought – feel as though it was imbued with a special wonder.

Hand in hand they continued through the garden. The crisp winter air smelled of frost and wood smoke from Denham’s chimneys, the sky swept clean of clouds by the sharp easterly wind blowing down from the Derbyshire hills, the Cheshire plain cradled snugly between those hills and the Welsh mountains to the west. The Romans had marched and fought and settled here, mining the area’s rich deposits of salt, building the fortress city of Chester, but it was a county that belied the bloodiness of its history, blanketing it with its rich farmland, which spoke more easily of orderly contentment and peace.

They’d reached the end of the walled garden now, the land beyond it parkland scattered with the handsome specimens of trees originally planted by Denham’s first owner.

With unspoken mutual consent, Robert opened the age-silvered oak door in the wall to let Olivia pass through ahead of him. To the west of the formal garden lay the vegetable garden and the Victorian succession houses, whilst in front of them, beyond a pretty wooded area in which winter crocuses were still showing their lavender petals, lay the ha-ha that separated the formal gardens from the park, with its muntjac deer.

‘I do love Denham,’ Olivia sighed happily, before adding consideringly, ‘I like Osterby as well, of course, especially its peacocks.’

‘Noisy brutes,’ Robert complained before relenting and telling her, ‘There are some in the palace garden in Lauranto.’

As he spoke he pulled the wooden door shut behind him, and reached for her.

Olivia went willingly into his arms, raising her face for his kiss. She could feel the silky warmth of the scarf he was wearing against her hand. She could smell the clean soap scent of his skin, mingling with the tweedy wool smells of his jacket and scarf. His lips were cold at first and then deliciously warm, the sensation reminding her of the childhood pleasure of hot chocolate sauce poured over ice cream.

As he had done before, Robert simply kissed her, taking his time, making the sensation of his mouth moving against her own a subtly sublime pleasure that had her toes curling in her Wellingtons.

When he finally released her it was to take her hand again, telling her as they headed for a holly tree on the edge of the thicket, ‘I’ve got to revisit Lauranto in February. When I do, I’d like you to come with me.’

Olivia stood still. She could feel the unsteady beat of her heart, and the colour coming up under her skin.

‘You…you would?’

‘Yes. Very much. As I was saying earlier, there’s a lot that needs to be done, for the people, for Lauranto’s heritage, and I’d like you to see everything as it is, before—’

‘I’d love to go with you.’

This time when Robert kissed her, Olivia knew that, without the words being said, a commitment had been made between them, an awareness shared of what could be, along with an acknowledgement that they would travel to that destination at their own pace.

Robert observed the glow of happiness illuminating Olivia’s. Everything was going to work out. In fact, it was all going to be perfect. Olivia was perfect and he could love her for that alone, he told himself.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and get that holly, otherwise it won’t just be our mothers who are asking questions.’

Emma, Katie, Harry and David had taken possession of the billiard room from which the younger members of the family were currently barred. Despite the cold outside, the windows were open, the better to dispel the telltale scent of the roll-ups they had been passing round, the smoking of which had produced a shared mood of beneficent relaxation, spoiled only by David, who had started giggling and been unable to stop until Harry had dragged his younger brother to the window and held his head out of it, to bring him down.

It was the day after Boxing Day, and after two days of charades, sardines, and similar hearty party games shared with the littlies, the four of them were all agreed that they deserved some chill-out time that was a bit more relaxing.

‘The thing is,’ David remarked earnestly, ‘it’s not as though smoking a joint does anyone any harm. I mean, it’s not like doing heroin or coke, is it, so the parents making a fuss about it is just a joke really.’

‘You’re the joke, fathead, if you think that Dad wouldn’t make a fuss if he caught us,’ Harry responded.

‘Oh, Dad. He’d probably think a chap should be cashiered from his regiment, he’s so old-fashioned.’

‘In the twenties heroin and coke were all the rage, and accepted. It wasn’t even against the law,’ Katie offered. She was still feeling very down about not being able to go to Klosters. She’d had a miserable telephone conversation this morning with Zoë, who had sounded even more wildly off the wall than normal, whispering into the phone that she couldn’t talk properly now but that she’d met ‘my fate and my soulmate in the shape of my own personal Earl of Rochester’.

The sudden warning rattle of the door handle had the four of them leaping to their feet, Harry calling out in an impressively firm baritone, ‘If that’s any of you kids, you’re barred, remember.’

The door opened and Olivia stepped in, smiling as she told them, ‘I’m not really sure if I come into the barred category or not, but I can warn you that Polly’s boys have asked her why they can’t play billiards, so if I were you…’ She could smell the telltale sweet scent of the dope and she turned to exchange a knowing smile with Robert, who was standing behind her. She’d finally crossed the bridge now that had previously divided them, leaving her on the side of the ‘young ones’, whilst Robert had been firmly on the side of the adults, and it felt good, Olivia acknowledged, it felt very good indeed. She watched in amusement as Emma and Katie started frantically flapping their arms in an attempt to move the sweet-scented air out of the window.

‘Here…’ she delved into her handbag and removed a small atomiser of scent to spray into the air around the door, ‘…this might help to provide a distraction.’

‘Softie,’ Robert teased her later as they walked out into the garden together, the only place they could really be sure of any proper privacy. ‘I dare say that the parents will do the same for them as they did for us, and pretend not to notice, knowing that in a very short space of time they’ll have grown out of it.’

‘Our parents maybe, but I am not so sure about Uncle John.’

‘Mmm…I see what you mean. He’s a good sort but more suited to the Victorian age in some ways, stiff upper lip, doing the right thing and behaving in the right way, and very conscious of being Lord Fitton Legh.’

‘That’s a bit unkind,’ Olivia objected.

‘But true?’

A little reluctantly, Olivia nodded.

Although as yet they’d done no more than exchange kisses, Olivia knew that Robert was serious about her, and about them.

‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to wait until February to see you again,’ he told her now.

‘I think you’ve been reading my mind,’ she admitted.

‘Delaying your return to New York and coming back to London with me would probably be a bit more obvious than either of us wants right now, but if I were to be able to snatch a couple of days in New York in, say, a couple of weeks’ time…?’

‘You’d be very welcome.’

‘I normally stay at the Pierre.’

‘My apartment has a spare room.’

They looked at one another, Olivia both smiling and blushing a little at what she could see in Robert’s eyes.

‘You’re quiet.’

Rose smiled at Josh. ‘I was thinking about Nick,’ she admitted. They were in the car on their way home from Denham. ‘I do wish there was something we could do to help him with Sarah.’

‘He’s a grown man and not a boy. He knows enough about the world to have sussed out why her parents wouldn’t exactly welcome him as their son-in-law.’

When Rose looked at him, he reached out and covered her folded hands with one of his own. She was so neat and compact and precise somehow, his Rose. And so vulnerable still, even after these years, still so sensitive to her own mixed-race heritage and the revulsion her great-grandmother had felt at the fact that Rose had a Chinese mother.

‘Rose, he’s working class, and Sarah’s father’s a titled, upper-class snob.’

‘Sarah chose to marry him.’ ‘Did she? Or did Nick choose for her? Look, I’m not knocking him – he’s my son – but he had a hard upbringing before he came to us. It’s bound to have affected him. He isn’t like me, we both know that. Nick’s got an edge to him, a need to win, simply for the sake of winning. To someone like Nick, brought up the way he was, marrying an upper-class girl like Sarah would seem like winning, and would be a goal he would set himself simply for the sake of that win.’

Rose shot Josh an unhappy look. ‘That’s not fair,’ she protested. ‘Look how hard Nick worked to buy Sarah that house. She and the boys have the best of everything.’

‘Of course they do. That’s part of the buzz for him, being able to give her more than the upper-class husbands of her friends can give them. It’s all about proving himself, Rose, about proving that he’s the best, but now he can’t, can he, because Sarah’s father is standing in his way, determined to prove that he’s the best.’

Rose gave him a troubled look.

‘Nick’s my son and I love him, Rose, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean that I’m blind to his flaws and faults any more than I am to my own. The trouble is that Sarah’s father is obviously intent on using those faults against him.’

‘Sometimes I think I shall never understand our children. Katie’s going round with a face like a wet weekend, insisting that she should still go skiing, with that broken arm.’

Folding clothes and putting them in the open case in their bedroom at Lenchester House, Emerald continued, ‘And then of course there’s Robert. Not a single word has he said to me about Olivia, and yet it’s obvious that something is going on between them. It’s only because Ella told me that Robert’s invited Olivia to go to Lauranto with him in February that I even knew he was going back, never mind taking Olivia with him. I really don’t like the idea of him getting involved over there, Drogo. I don’t trust Alessandro’s mother one little bit.’

Emerald paused and looked at her husband. ‘Do you think Alessandro’s mother will tell Robert about you know what?’

Drogo walked over to take her in his arms. He knew the real Emerald, the vulnerable Emerald she hid from the rest of the world. ‘About your father, you mean?’

Emerald nodded. ‘The Princess hates me and she always has done.’

Drogo knew how much it would hurt his wife’s fierce pride if the truth were ever to come out, although typically, rather than admit this, Emerald told him, ‘It would be dreadful for the children if they were suddenly to learn that their grandfather was a painter and not a duke, as they have always thought.’

‘I doubt very much that Alessandro’s mother will say anything. It’s in her own interests not to, apart from anything else. She wants Robert to take Alessandro’s place. Alienating him by revealing the truth to him isn’t something she would want to risk.’

‘You’re right.’

Drogo squeezed her arm gently. He knew how much, even now, she still hated the thought that her father had not been his predecessor, the late duke, but instead Jean-Philippe du Breveonet, painter of the picture of Amber, The Silk Merchant’s Daughter, now hanging in the National Gallery.

Chapter Seven

Outside, January snow might be falling on the New York avenues, children might be begging to be allowed to skate on Central Park’s frozen ponds, but here inside the Limelight disco on Sixth Avenue, in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, the air was heated to almost tropical warmth, as the élite of the fashion and publishing world gathered to ‘Celebrate the month of January’ at an ‘afternoon’ party hosted by Vogue magazine. Olivia had been invited, she rather suspected, in lieu of her mother, who was visiting friends with her father in Palm Beach.

Loud music, a mix of rock and industrial, pounded her eardrums. Waiters and waitresses, dressed in very little other than what looked like tinfoil and sequins, to reveal their perfectly honed bodies, danced and pouted their way through the guests in time to the music, carrying trays of champagne and tiny morsels of food, which Macey Greenberg, Olivia’s friend, had suggested cynically might contain some extra energy-giving or hallucination-inducing ingredients in view of the number of guests, including models, who were well known to have a drug habit.

‘That wouldn’t be any good for the models,’ Olivia had pointed out, before Macey had left on a mission to snag an interview with a not-as-yet-out gay singer for the music magazine for whom she freelanced.

Glamorous parties were supposed to be exciting, and Olivia was prepared to admit that she might have enjoyed this one if she hadn’t just realised that Tait Cabot Forbes was also one of the guests.

She’d seen him ten minutes or so ago, deep in conversation with the editor of the New York Times, no doubt planning to savage and potentially destroy yet another innocent victim so that he could claim some ego-boosting headlines for himself, Olivia thought bitterly.

Above the music she could just about hear the affected squeals of the group of very thin and very pretty young models, clustered together several yards away, the air around them blue with cigarette fumes as they smoked to keep their hunger pangs at bay. Poor things, Olivia thought sadly. She didn’t envy them at all. Watching them, she found it odd to think that once her own father had made his living photographing girls like them for fashion magazines.

Their extreme thinness emphasised Cindy Crawford’s far more sensual curves, the supermodel very much the centre of attention as the press photographers gathered round her.

One of the current crop of top fashion photographers was talking with an editor from British Vogue, who had flown in for the party. The Fashion Pack, including New York Vogue’s Grace Coddington, were all dressed in black, just as Olivia was herself. Pictures of the party would fill the new copy of Women’s Wear Daily, of course, and be pored over by its dedicated readers.

Her own Ralph Lauren dress was on loan from her mother, who had insisted that she borrow the sophisticated heavy black jersey tube of fabric that somehow magically became a ravishingly elegant dress once it was on, with a slashed neckline and just the hint of a small sleeve. With it Olivia was wearing a pair of diamond cuff bracelets, also her mother’s, and she had put her hair up, the whole effect, so her friend Macey claimed, very Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Olivia was just looking round for Macey when she felt a firm tap on her shoulder. Turning round, she was surprised and annoyed to see Tait Cabot Forbes standing behind her.

‘I’ve got a proposition to put to you,’ he told her without preamble, adding, when she stiffened, ‘No, not that kind of proposition. What I’m proposing is that we bury that hatchet you’re carrying around with you. It must be getting heavy and burying it will save you having to look for an opportunity to bury it in me.’

‘You mean like you tried to stick a knife into my father’s back?’ Olivia challenged him.

Tait spread open his hands. He had big hands with long fingers, Olivia noticed, his skin tanned and his nails clean without looking overmanicured in the way favoured by some New York men. His traditional Brooks Brothers shirt allied to law-school-graduate smartness made him stand out in a room in which most of the other men were attached to the fashion world and dressed flamboyantly.

‘There was nothing personal about my investigation into your parents’ relationship with Maisie Fischerbaum. That’s what I am – an investigative journalist.’

‘Earning your money and making your reputation by trying to destroy my parents.’

‘I got it wrong. I admit that. I’ve apologised to your folks.’

‘In private, but you never apologised publicly.’

His expression said that he was beginning to get annoyed with her. Good, Olivia thought. What had he expected? That she’d roll over and be thrilled because he’d attempted to talk her round? It took more than a too-good-looking face and way too much male confidence to do that.

‘Because your father asked me not to publish the reasons why he and your mother were appointed as trustees. I respected that, just as I respect your loyalty to your folks, but I’m beginning to get a bit tired of feeling that glower of yours burning through my skin every time you set eyes on me. So, how about we call a truce?’

‘You can call whatever you like,’ Olivia told him fiercely. ‘As far as I’m concerned you are still the man who tried to hurt my parents by writing things about them that weren’t true.’

Olivia turned on her heel and walked away from him. She would have walked past Macey as well, she suspected, she was so wound up and angry, if her friend hadn’t stepped in front of her waving a glass of champagne under her nose.

Olivia wasn’t going to turn round and see if Tait Cabot Forbes was even still there, never mind looking in her direction. In fact, what she’d like to do more than anything was leave the party early and go home in case Robert telephoned, which he sometimes did just before he went to bed. He hadn’t been able to come over to New York yet, as he’d hoped, but he’d promised he’d be over as soon as he could, and he’d told her that he’d informed his grandmother that Olivia would be accompanying him on his February visit to Lauranto.

Robert. Thinking of him, hugging the thought of him to herself was so much better than thinking about Tait Cabot Forbes. So very much better.

‘Katie.’

‘Tom.’

As she saw Tom coming towards her, Katie stopped dead, blocking the way of a group of determined middle-aged county Sloanes up in London to make the most of the final days of Peter Jones’ January sale. With a great deal of tutting, the group reformed with the skill and expertise of campaign-hardened bargain hunters, leaving Katie and Tom to exchange smiles and then swift hugs.

‘I missed you in Klosters.’

‘I wanted to be there.’

‘I told Zoë’ to tell you how sorry I was about your arm.’

‘I expect she forgot. You know what she’s like.’

It was what they were not saying, rather than what they were, that mattered, Katie knew.

‘I was going to get in touch but Zoë said that you were staying with your grandparents.’

‘I was. I only got back yesterday.’

‘You’ll be going back to Oxford soon,’ Tom guessed. ‘Zoë planned to go straight there from visiting her godmother in Cheltenham.’

‘I’m going back this weekend,’ Katie confirmed.

‘Have you got something else on right now, or would you like to have lunch with me?’

‘Yes. I mean, no, I haven’t got anything else to do and I’d love to have lunch with you,’ Katie told him immediately.

‘Good.’ Tom looked so handsome and grown up in his dark suit, crisp striped shirt and, of course, his essential banker’s red tie, Katie thought admiringly.

‘Will San Lorenzo be OK?’ he asked her, mentioning the very upmarket restaurant in Beauchamp Place, which was one of Princess Diana’s favourites.

Glad that for once she had given in to her mother’s chivvying and worn ‘something decent’ – the ‘something decent’ being a neat-fitting dark plum Armani dress with a dropped waist, under a toning dark plum and grey tweed jacket, worn with plum leather boots, the outfit a Christmas gift from her mother, who had said that she was tired of seeing her daughter looking scruffy – Katie nodded her head and tried not to look too impressed.

Half an hour later they were being shown to a table in San Lorenzo’s airy cream-painted restaurant, thanks, Katie suspected, to the fifty-pound note she had seen Tom discreetly slip the head waiter.

‘Just as well it’s January and the jet set are still either in the Caribbean or on the ski slopes,’ Tom told Katie ruefully, ‘otherwise we’d never have got a table.’

Katie felt a bit like Cinderella, she decided, plucked from the mundane and everyday into a magical world, with Tom, of course, playing Prince Charming.

Over Bellinis Tom studied the menu whilst Katie studied their fellow diners, unable to stop herself from leaning over to whisper excitedly, ‘Don’t look now but over there, just being shown to the window table, I’m sure that’s Jerry Hall and Marie Helvin.’

‘And Michael and Shakira Caine are sitting just behind you,’ Tom informed her back.

‘Tell me about Klosters,’ Katie begged him, once they had ordered and been served. She loved Italian food and had decided to go for the special house cannelloni, whilst Tom had ordered the liver.

‘Well, there was, you know, lots of snow, and mountains,’ Tom teased her.

‘I was so disappointed that I couldn’t go.’

‘I was disappointed that you weren’t there,’ Tom answered.

They exchanged looks, pleased but slightly selfconscious on Katie’s part, and meaningful and very male on Tom’s.

‘This is such a treat for me,’ Katie told him. She felt flushed and happy, and just a little bit out of her depth.

‘And for me,’ Tom told her, in such a deliciously sexy dark voice that Katie curled her toes into the soles of her boots and thought that she’d never ever be able to so much as walk through Beauchamp Place again without thinking about Tom and remembering today.

‘Zoë’s told me about meeting her Earl of Rochester,’ Katie laughed. ‘I’m dying to hear more about him.’

Immediately the smile died from Tom’s eyes.

‘What is it?’ Katie asked him.

‘There was a bit of an upset over that. Axel Von Thruber – I’m assuming that’s who you mean – isn’t someone my parents would ever approve of Zoë’ befriending. You know Zoë – of course she kicked up a fuss when the parents initially said that she wasn’t to have anything to do with him.’

Katie nodded, well able to imagine the ‘fuss’ her friend would have made. Zoë hated any kind of restrictions being put on her, and in fact they were something like a red rag to a bull to her.

‘I have to say, though, that I agree with them, which, as you can imagine, hasn’t made me very popular with Zoë. The fact is that Von Thruber has the very worst kind of reputation.’

‘You mean he’s very sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll?’

‘If only that were all he is,’ Tom answered grimly. ‘The drugs he favours aren’t just the odd reefer, and as for the sex, well, let’s just say louche doesn’t even begin to describe his lifestyle. He’s well known on the Eurotrash young jet set scene, or maybe I should say that he’s notorious. The trouble is, I suppose, he’s had too much of everything far too young. He inherited millions on his twenty-first birthday and he’s due to inherit millions more on his twenty-fifth. It doesn’t help, of course, that he is very good-looking,’ Tom admitted wryly. ‘And I suppose that Zoë, being Zoë, was inevitably drawn to him like the proverbial moth to a flame. Fortunately, though, now she’s come to her senses and seen him for what he is. Zoë can be very naïve. Initially I suspect she saw his decadence as glamorous, and of course the fact that everyone was warning her against him, and our parents so obviously disapproved of him, only added to his allure.’

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