Return Match
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘BUT why do we have to move out of the Manor and into the Dower House?’ six-year-old Tara protested stubbornly, the full lower lip so like their father’s trembling ominously.

Across the tousled fair head Fanny gazed despairingly at her stepdaughter, and Lucy automatically suppressed her own tiredness and irritation.

‘Tara, you know why,’ she said patiently. ‘Now that … Now that Daddy’s … gone, we can’t live here any longer. The house belongs to someone else now.’

It had been a long day—a long and wearying month in fact since her father’s death from a third and long-dreaded heart attack, but then he had never learned to live quietly as his doctor had advised him—but beneath Tara’s belligerence she sensed the six-year-old’s fear at the way her small world was being destroyed, and it was this fear she sought to ease.

Ironic really that Tara should turn to her and not to her own mother, Lucy’s stepmother Fanny, but then, as the late George Martin had known, Fanny was one of the weaker vessels of this life, not the stronger. Some of his last words to his elder daughter had been a warning that she was the one on whom the small family would now have to lean—not Fanny.

‘It’s not fair.’ Another voice joined the chorus, the face of Fanny’s ten-year-old son setting in lines of stubborn resentment, familiar to Lucy. ‘If you had been a boy we needn’t have lost the Manor. You could have inherited it.’

Repressing a sigh Lucy shook her head.

‘The Manor has always been entailed to the closest male heir, Oliver,’ she reminded her half-brother. ‘You know that.’

‘Yes.’ The boy’s gruff admission wrung her heart. Unwittingly her eyes met Fanny’s and, reading the guilt and misery in them, slid quickly away. She felt like a conspirator involved in some dark and unseemly crime, and Fanny’s attitude of guilty misery only served to heighten her feelings.

She wished more than she had wished anything in her life that her father had not chosen to burden her with his death-bed confessions; but he had, and in doing so had put on her shoulders a responsibility she was not sure she was able to carry.

The promise he had extracted from her to look after Fanny and the children, she could accept; but this other burden, this ‘secret’ that only she and Fanny shared …

Her mouth compressed slightly as she looked across the packing-case strewn room at Oliver. Up until just over a month ago she had believed Oliver to be Fanny’s son from her first marriage to a local MP, but now she had been told that Oliver was in fact her father’s child, conceived during an affair with Fanny which had begun while she was still married.

Her father had been quite free to marry Fanny, but it seemed that Fanny had been unwilling to risk the shame of a divorce from her husband who at the time had been newly elected to Parliament.

In the event, Henry Willis had been the one to do the divorcing when his affair with his secretary became public knowledge, leaving her father and Fanny to marry after a decent interval of time had elapsed.

However, by then Oliver had been four years old, and once again rather than risk any scandal Fanny had insisted that he should continue to be thought Henry’s child.

In a surge of bitterness during his last hours, her father had confided to her that it was a damn shame that Tara had not been the child to be born outside the marriage and Oliver within it, because then he would not have been put to the necessity of realising as many of his assets as possible to ensure that very little more than the Manor House itself should pass out of his family’s hands.

Privately Lucy had been appalled when she learned what her father had done and if he had not been so dreadfully ill, she would have been tempted to point out to him that it was Fanny, rather than Saul Bradford, who had deprived Oliver of his birthright.

After the funeral, Fanny had come to her weeping copiously to plead with her never, ever to reveal the truth about Oliver. She could not endure the trauma of the scandal there would be if the truth were to come out, she had said tearfully, and Lucy had weakly agreed.

Privately, having had a long talk with her father’s solicitor, she felt that, even if Oliver had inherited, within a very short space of time the Manor would have had to be sold. The roof was in need of repair, some of the windows needed attention, and it grieved her to walk through the once elegant rooms and see how shabby they had become.

It was far too large to be maintained as a private home, unless of course one was a millionaire, which her father had been far from being.

By anyone else’s standards, the Georgian Dower House was a very elegant and spacious dwelling, and much, much more manageable. She herself, the eldest of her father’s three children and the one who had lived in the Manor the longest, was the least reluctant to leave it. Perhaps because she had long ago outgrown childhood, and could see all too clearly the headaches attached to owning the Manor.

The oldest part of the house was Elizabethan, its pretty black and white frontage hiding a warren of passages and dark, tiny rooms with sloping floors.

A Stuart Martin had added the panelling and more imposing entrance hall with its Grinling Gibbons staircase, but it had been left to a Georgian ancestor to completely overshadow the original building by adding a complete wing and restructuring the grounds so that a fine carriageway swept round to an impressive portico in the centre of this new wing, leaving the Elizabethan part of the house as no more than a mere annexe to this fine new development.

Now damp, seeping in through the damaged roof, was causing mould to darken the fine plasterwork in the ballroom on the second floor, the creeping tide of deterioration so slow that it was not until quite recently, looking at the place through the eyes of her cousin Saul Bradford, that Lucy realised just how bad it was.

Really the house was more suitable for a hotel or conference centre than a private home, and she privately had little doubt that Saul would sell it just as soon as possible.

She remembered quite well from his one visit to the Manor how derogatory and contemptuous he had been of her home. They had met only once—over twelve years ago now, and the meeting had not been a success.

She had found him brash and alien, and no doubt he had found her equally alien and unappealing. They had neither of them made allowances for the other. She had still been getting over the shock of her mother’s death in a riding accident—she had always been closer to her mother than her father—and Saul, although she hadn’t known it, had been sent to them by his mother so that he would be out of the way while she and his father fought out a particularly acrimonious divorce.

She sighed faintly, grimacing inwardly. It was too late now to regret the various snubs and slights she had inflicted on a raw and unfriendly American boy all those years ago, but she did regret them and had for quite some time—not because Saul was her father’s heir, but simply because with maturity had come the realisation that Saul had been as hurt and in need of comfort as she had herself and it grieved her to acknowledge that she had allowed herself to be influenced in her manner towards him by someone who she now recognised as a vindictive cruel human being.

At twelve she had not been able to see this, and in fact had been held fast in the toils of a mammoth crush on her cousin Neville.

Still, it was too late for regrets now, but not too late hopefully to make amends. Despite the antipathy her father had felt towards Saul, and which he seemed to have passed on to his son and widow, Lucy was determined to make life as uncomplicated as she possibly could for her American cousin and to give him whatever help he needed.

It was not as though, by inheriting, he had deprived her of anything after all—she had known very early on in life that the Manor was entailed; but Oliver, whom her father had spoilt dreadfully, seemed to be finding it difficult to adjust.

Privately Lucy thought the adjustment would do him no harm at all. In the last couple of years she had begun to detect signs in him that her father’s spoiling and his mother’s complete inability to institute any form of discipline were changing him from a pleasingly self-confident little boy into an unpleasant, self-centred preteenager.

Fortunately she was fond enough of her half-brother and sister for her father’s charge that she look after them not to be too onerous a burden. Fanny, however, was another matter. Although they got on well enough, there were times when Lucy found it exasperating to have a stepmother who behaved more like a dependent child.

‘I don’t want to go to the Dower House.’

Tara’s bottom lip wobbled again, tears glistening in the dark brown eyes.

Physically both Tara and herself took after their father’s family, Lucy thought, eyeing her half-sister sympathetically. Both of them had the deep brown Martin eyes and strikingly contrasting blonde hair. And the elegant profile, which family rumour said had led to an eighteenth-century Amelia Martin being propositioned by the Prince Regent. It was because she had turned him down that the family had never received a title, or so the family story went, but how much truth there was in it, Lucy did not know. Perhaps, when she had researched a little more of the family’s history, she might find out.

Eighteen months ago she had started to sift through the family papers, trying to make some order of them, and it was then that she had first conceived the idea of writing a novel based loosely on her family’s history. Now, that one novel was threatening to develop into three or four, and next week in fact she was due to go to London to talk about this possibility with the publishers who had expressed an interest in her initial manuscript.

She had been lucky there—there was no doubt about that; her mother’s family had connections in the publishing world. Her cousin Neville was a partner in a firm of publishers—not the one she was dealing with, but his father had made the recommendation for her, much to Neville’s disgust; he was no doubt hoping she would fall flat on her face, if she knew Neville, Lucy thought wryly.

She had got over her crush on her cousin many years ago, and all that was left was a healthy wariness of the man he had become. Occasionally he indulged himself in light-hearted flirtatiousness with her—more to see exactly how vulnerable she might be to him than for any other reason. Neville was extremely conceited and never liked losing an admirer. His father and her mother had been brother and sister, and Lucy retained a deep fondness for her uncle and his wife.

‘Tara, please stop that noise … My head …’

Fanny’s protest broke through her reverie, making her realise that Tara was crying in earnest now, while Oliver scowled and kicked disconsolately at one of the packing cases and Fanny pressed a fragile hand to her forehead.

‘Lucy, I must go and lie down … My poor head …’

Knowing that she would make faster progress with her stepmother out of the way Lucy made no demur, summoning a smile and a few words of sympathy, while at the same time producing a handkerchief for Tara’s tears and warning Oliver not to ruin his shoes.

‘Come on, it won’t be that bad,’ she comforted Tara when Fanny had gone to her room. ‘You’ll like the Dower House.’

‘Yes, but what about Harriet?’

Harriet was Tara’s exceedingly plump little pony, and for a moment Lucy frowned, not following the thread of her half-sister’s conversation.

‘Well I’m sure Harriet will like it, too,’ she told her. ‘She will have that lovely paddock all to herself.’

‘But Richard says that we won’t be able to keep her. That you won’t be able to afford it …’

Richard was the junior partner in her father’s firm of solicitors and Lucy frowned at the mention of his name. For several months now he had been making it plain that he wanted more from her than the casual relationship they presently enjoyed.

Only the other week he had mentioned marriage, adding that the fact that her father had left the Dower House to Lucy in her sole name would mean that on marriage she would have a very comfortable home to share with her husband.

The reason her father had left the house to her was that he didn’t want any gossip to arise from the fact that he was leaving the bulk of the money he had realised, from selling everything that wasn’t entailed, in trust for Oliver and Tara, with the income to go to Fanny until the children reached their majority. Lucy had been less than impressed that Richard should choose to mention marriage only when he realised what her father had left her.

She wondered if Richard was also aware that she had as good as promised her father that both children and Fanny would have a home with her as long as they needed it. Richard did not like children, and neither Oliver nor Tara liked him. Anyway there was not the remotest possibility of her marrying him. To put it bluntly, sexually he left her stone-cold. As did most men. So much so that she had reached the grand old age of twenty-five without a single passionate affair to look back on. Was that the fault of her lifestyle or her genes?

There had been a time, just before her father married Fanny, when she had made a bid for freedom, suggesting that she leave the newly married couple alone and move to London, but Fanny had pleaded with her to stay.

Almost from the moment of her mother’s death Lucy had run the house—not through choice but through necessity—and Fanny had claimed that the thought of taking over from her totally overwhelmed her. And so, despite her misgivings, she had stayed, trying not to feel too guilty about the waste of a perfectly good degree and the loss of her personal independence.

Since then her life had been busy rather than fulfilling. There were certain responsibilities incumbent on living in the Manor, certain local charities her mother had taken an interest in and helped, and this mantle had now fallen to her.

Her decision to try and write had been born of the mental starvation she suffered from, Lucy suspected, and certainly the hours she spent alone in the library on her research had been among the most fulfilling she had experienced since leaving university.

Now, though, she was likely to lose all that, unless Saul allowed her to use the library.

He was such an unknown quantity, she wasn’t really sure what to expect. Her memories of him were clouded by the animosity which had sprung up between them almost from the word go and when she pictured him mentally, it was with a truculent scowl on his face.

In looks he didn’t resemble the Martins at all, being very dark, almost swarthily so, his eyes grey and not brown, his transatlantic accent adding to his alienness.

Looking back on that disastrous summer, Lucy felt a twinge of sympathy towards him.

Poor boy, it couldn’t have been easy for him—thrown upon relatives he did not know, who moreover spoke differently and had a different set of rules to live by. That scowl, that stubborn indifference to all that the Manor had to offer, must have been defensive rather than aggressive, but of course at twelve she could not see that, and had only seen that he mocked everything that she held dear, while all the time reinforcing his own Americanness. The brash superiority had just increased her own dislike of him, so that she had willingly joined Neville in his tormenting of him.

Neville … so smooth and sophisticated to her then, so excitingly male and aloof, and yet undeniably a part of her world in a way that the American intruder was not. When Neville spoke, it was in the same way as her father, his accent public school and clipped, unlike Saul’s American drawl.

Even the way he dressed was different … alien … And how she and Neville had tormented him when they watched the way he rode! She had been unkind almost to the point of being cruel and had since regretted it deeply because it was not part of her nature to inflict hurt on others.

Poor Saul. How did he remember her? she wondered wryly. Well, she would have ample opportunity to make restitution for her sins once he arrived. Neville might speak slightingly of the Manor passing into American hands, but now she did not encourage him.

Tara had stopped crying and was watching her hopefully. ‘We won’t be too poor to keep Harriet,’ she told her firmly. ‘Richard was quite wrong.’

‘Are you going to marry him?’

That was Oliver, eyeing her truculently.

‘No.’

Relief showed briefly in the brown eyes before he turned away. Oliver had been closer to their father than any of them, something she had not really thought about before she knew the truth, and Oliver was the one who would miss his male influence the most. Perhaps Saul might be induced to take an interest in him. Perhaps he was married now with children of his own.

It was a shock to realise how little she knew about him. In all the anxiety and tumult of her father’s death, she had had little time to spare to wonder about Saul; little time to give to him at all apart from overseeing the sending of a telegram to advise him of what had happened.

She had half hoped he would attend the funeral and had been almost hurt when he had not. Towards the end her father had complained that Saul had never made the slightest attempt to learn anything about his heritage, but fair-mindedly Lucy had pointed out that he had scarcely been given much chance.

Certainly her own memories of Saul weren’t happy ones, but like her he had no doubt matured and mellowed, and probably also, like her, knowing the close proximity to one another in which they would be living, he would want their relationship to be an amicable one.

Despite all these sensible thoughts Lucy could not quite stifle the apprehension burgeoning to life inside her. As yet they had no idea when Saul would arrive, but she was being meticulous about vacating the Manor just as quickly as she could. She was also being meticulous about what she took with her—only the furniture which had been her mother’s and nothing more.

Fortunately the Dower House was furnished, although somewhat haphazardly as up until quite recently it had been tenanted, but no doubt the furniture that had been her mother’s would make it seem more like home.

With the help of Mrs Isaacs, their daily, Lucy had already cleaned the house from top to bottom. Nearly all the rooms needed redecorating and she had promised herself that this was a task she would tackle just as soon as she had time. With the income from the trust funds her father had established for Oliver and Tara they would be able to manage financially—just about. Oliver’s school fees would take a large slice of these funds, but Fanny had been adamant that her son must go to prep school at the start of the new term, as had been planned.

The school which had been chosen was George Martin’s old school, and even though privately Lucy thought it was almost an extravagance to pay out such a large sum of money annually just so that Oliver could be educated at her father’s old school, she had not had the heart to oppose Fanny.

It was her opinion that of the two of them Tara was the cleverer and inwardly she was determined that when the time came Tara would somehow be given the same opportunities as her brother. Fortunately at the moment that was one problem which could be shelved, unlike the jumble of packing cases now littering the ballroom floor.

She and Mrs Isaacs had brought them here mainly because of the large area of empty floor space, and tomorrow morning Mr Isaacs and his two large sons were going to drive up from the village with their van and spend the day transporting the cases over to the Dower House.

From the ballroom window it was possible to look right across the park that surrounded the house and Lucy caught her lip between her teeth as she glanced at the view. They had almost the same view from the Dower House, which was surrounded by a very pleasant garden.

With hindsight Lucy could recognise that her father’s decision to divorce the Dower House and a certain amount of land from the main house had probably originated with Oliver’s birth; even then he must have been planning to do everything he could for his illegitimate child, she thought wryly. But, in doing so, there was no getting away from the fact that he had stripped the Manor of anything that might usefully have been sold to provide its new owner with funds. The farmlands had now all gone, the last few acres having been sold just prior to her father’s death.

Those paintings which had not been sold previously to cover death duties had been auctioned at Sotheby’s eighteen months ago, along with the few good antiques they had left.

Now the house had a forlorn, neglected air, almost an air of desolation and desertion. What on earth Saul would do with the place she had no idea. Sell it most likely; she could not see how he could do anything else.

Sighing faintly she turned away from the view and surveyed the packing cases. She had written in chalk on each one what it contained, meticulously refusing to pack the Meissen dinner service or what was left of the family silver. Those went with the house and she was determined that they would stay with it.

Whatever wealth the Martin family had once possessed from trade and a sugar planation in the West Indies had been dissipated by the time of the First World War, and since then the family had survived by gradually selling off its assets. It was true that her father had held several directorships which had brought in a reasonable income, but the house simply devoured money.

The same Martin who had added the Georgian frontage to the house had also commissioned the Dower House, and its Georgian elegance had always appealed to Lucy. She knew their solicitor found it strange that it had been left to her and not to Fanny, but Lucy understood the reason why.

Her father had thought that the security of the family would be safer in her hands than Fanny’s and indeed her stepmother was, in some ways, very much another child. She had leaned on George Martin during their marriage and Lucy suspected that now she would lean on her.

Fanny didn’t really care for the country and spent as much time as she could in London, staying with friends. Neither was she particularly maternal, allowing Lucy to take day-to-day charge of her half-brother and sister. Fortunately the three of them got on well together, but it was typical of Fanny’s nature that she should not consider that a single woman of twenty-five might not want the responsibility for a stepmother and two children.

The one thing she would miss about the Manor was the library, Lucy reflected half an hour later as she went downstairs. Her book, although fiction, relied heavily on information she had discovered among the family papers and diaries and she was hoping that Saul would allow her to use these for her work. She could of course simply take them and he would be none the wiser, but her own strict code of ethics would not allow her to do that. The unhappy, shy teenager, who had allowed her older male cousin to bully her into being unkind to their colonial relative, had long since been superseded by a woman who knew her own mind and how to stick to her own decisions and assessments.

She grimaced faintly as she stepped into the kitchen. This was one room she would not miss. Large and old-fashioned, it was ill-lit and ill-equipped, unlike the kitchen at the Dower House which had been installed by one of their tenants.

After her father’s death, in an attempt to cut back on costs, Lucy had been obliged to let Mrs Jennings, who had acted as their cook-cum-housekeeper, go. She had been eager to retire and more than happy with the generous cheque Lucy had given her, but Fanny had not stopped grumbling, complaining that it was too much to expect her to provide meals for all of them.

Because of this Lucy had discovered that she was the one doing the cooking, something which in other circumstances she might not have minded, but which in addition to all her other responsibilities had the effect of making her heart sink every time she entered the kitchen.

Tonight they would have to make do with beans on toast, she decided ruefully, anticipating Oliver’s objections to this meagre fare. Tomorrow night she would make it up to them, she decided, but for tonight a snack would have to do. She wanted an early start in the morning and was already far too tired to start preparing a large meal.

This physical and mental exhaustion was something which seemed to have dogged her since her father’s death, exacerbated by the discovery of Oliver’s true parentage. In many ways it shocked her that her father should have been so imprudent, and what of Oliver himself? Telling herself that now was not the time to start worrying about the future, she started laying the table.

Tara came in just as she was finished.

‘Mummy says she’s got a headache,’ she informed Lucy, ‘and she wants to have her supper in her room.’

Stifling the exasperated sound springing to her lips, Lucy said nothing. She tried to be patient with Fanny, telling herself that after all her stepmother had lost a husband, while she had merely lost a father who had not been particularly close to her. She could still remember the acute devastation of losing her mother, whom she had truly loved, and if Fanny was experiencing just one tenth of the anguish she had experienced then, then she did indeed deserve her sympathy and patience.

Fanny wouldn’t want beans on toast anyway. Perhaps if she boiled her a couple of eggs …

‘Go and tell Oliver to wash his hands and come down to eat, will you, Tara?’ she instructed the younger girl. ‘I want you both to have an early night tonight because we’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.’

‘Yes. I’ve already told Harriet all about her new paddock,’ Tara responded importantly. ‘Do you think she’ll really like it there, Lucy? She’ll miss Cinders, won’t she?’

Cinders was the small tabby cat who lived in the dilapidated stables; suppressing a smile, Lucy said seriously, ‘Oh, I think we can take Cinders with us.’

‘But you said that we couldn’t take anything that belonged to the Manor.’

So she had, but privately Lucy could not see that her cousin was going to object too much to the removal of one small cat, and, as Tara had said, her pony was very attached to the little animal.

‘Is he really horrid, Lucy?’

‘Horrid? Who?’

She turned away from what she was doing, her attention concentrated on the little girl.

‘Your cousin. The one who’s coming to live here.’

‘Good heavens, of course he isn’t horrid. Whatever gave you that idea?’ Heavens! The very last thing she wanted was for the children to take an anti towards Saul, and she had better nip that idea of Tara’s very firmly in the bud.

‘Oliver said he was,’ Tara told her determinedly, ‘and Neville told him.’

Mentally cursing her maternal cousin, Lucy said airily, ‘Oh I expect Neville was just joking. I promise you Saul is very nice.’

Behind her back she crossed her fingers. Tara’s scowl relaxed. ‘And he won’t take Harriet away from me?’

‘Of course not. Now go and tell Oliver to come down for supper.’

CHAPTER TWO

IT was another three very hectic days before they were able to actually move into the Dower House, and as she surveyed the now empty ballroom Lucy reflected that she was more tired than she had ever felt in her life.

Fanny had alternated between bouts of weeping, shutting herself away in her bedroom, and an almost frenzied desire to have her children beside her.

Both of them were unsettled by their mother’s half-hysterical behaviour, especially Tara, but, now that they had actually physically left the Manor, Lucy was hoping that Fanny would start to make a recovery.

An odd kind of melancholy engulfed her as she wandered through the familiar rooms, stopping every now and again to touch some familiar item of furniture. She loved the old house, but felt no possessive desire to live in it. She had grown up after all knowing that it was entailed and would never be hers. A small smile curled her mouth as she thought back over the years, remembering that Neville had been more upset than she was herself when her father had curtly explained to both of them what the entail involved.

That had been the year before Saul had spent the summer with them. Up until then Neville had always claimed that when they grew up he intended to marry her. Even as a child Neville had had a keen eye for the main chance, she thought, wryly amused that she could ever have been taken in by her cousin’s shallowness.

How long would it be before Saul arrived? A familiar sliver of tension spasmed through her stomach and she pushed it aside, annoyed with herself. What was there to feel apprehensive about? Her ownership of the Dower House was secure enough after all and, even if he wished to do so, Saul could not dislodge her. But why should he want to? The fact that they had not got on as children could hardly influence his attitude towards her now … could it?

It was disconcerting to realise how little she knew about him. Her aunt, his mother, had left home just after the war to marry her American. Much against their parents’ wishes, her mother had told her once when Lucy had pressed her for more information about her aunt who lived so far away.

About Saul’s father she knew very little, only that his mother had divorced him. It struck her uncomfortably that her father had been rather remiss in not making any attempt to get to know the nephew who would succeed him, but, knowing her father as she had done, Lucy recognised that he had probably hoped right up until the end that somehow he would be able to prevent the inevitable and pass the Manor on to Oliver.

In his own way her father had been as much of an ostrich as Fanny. Still, it was too late to regret her father’s omissions now. Even to her accustomed eyes, the house looked shabby. She hoped that Saul wasn’t expecting too much of his inheritance. She remembered he had not allowed himself to be overly impressed with it on his one visit, grimly ignoring all her heavily embellished boastings about secret stairways and haunted rooms.

As she walked past the giltwood mirror over the drawing-room fireplace she saw that her face was streaked with dust, her hair curling wildly about her face. Her hands and clothes were filthy, too. She needed a bath. There was nothing left for her to do here apart from locking up. Tomorrow she and Mrs Isaacs could set about cleaning the place properly.

As she slipped out into the courtyard at the back of the house she remembered that she had promised to feed Harriet, who was still in her stable. They had been too busy as yet to take her down to her new home in the paddock. Thank goodness it was summer and they would have time to build her a new stable in the paddock before winter came.

The fat little pony whickered a greeting as Lucy opened her door, Cinders winding herself sinuously round her ankles. She dealt quickly with the feed before wandering disconsolately back to the Dower House.

The next morning she was awake early, disturbed by the unfamiliar pattern of the sunlight across her face. Groggily she opened her eyes and then winced as her stiff muscles made their protest. At least here in the Dower House she would not have to coax a sulky range into life before she could have any breakfast.

It was too early to wake the others and, once showered and downstairs, Lucy found herself enjoying the unfamiliar solitude. The kitchen, so airy and well equipped after the Manor’s, made her spirits lift slightly, and as she sipped her fragrant hot coffee she went over her plans for the day. She had arranged to meet Mrs Isaacs up at the Manor at nine, which meant that for once Fanny would have to get the children’s breakfast. Shrugging away a faint feeling of guilt, she reminded herself that after all Fanny was their mother.

By eleven o’clock the clean jeans and T-shirt she had come out in were streaked with dust and grime. Her skin felt hot and sticky, her body was aching.

‘I think we’ll take a break,’ she suggested to Mrs Isaacs.

‘A good idea. I’ll go down and make us both a cup of tea.’

Mrs Isaacs had been gone for about five minutes when Lucy heard the car, the shock of the unexpected sound drawing her to the window.

It was a large BMW, and it was stopping right outside the front of the house. A tremor of nerves seized her stomach as she watched the tall, dark-haired man emerge from the driver’s seat.

Saul! Funny that she should recognise him so immediately when for weeks she had tried to conjure up his boyhood features without success.

He was wearing a lightweight pale grey suit and looked, if anything, more European than American; dark enough to pass for an Italian, although perhaps rather too tall.

As she watched, Lucy saw Tara emerge from the side of the house, leading Harriet. The little girl was talking earnestly to the pony, who seemed oblivious to her mistress’s attempts to get her to hurry. In fact Harriet seemed more interested in the juicy grass beside the drive than Tara’s commands.

Lucy saw Saul move warily towards the little girl, the face which had seemed almost grim as he got out of the car softening slightly.

Tara had frozen at the sight of him, clinging desperately to Harriet’s reins. Amused, Lucy watched as Saul’s attempts to make friends were fiercely rebuffed, amusement changing to alarm as she realised that Tara was starting to cry. What on earth had Saul said to her?

Quickly she ran downstairs and out on to the drive, just in time to hear Tara crying out tearfully, ‘You are horrid after all. Very horrid!’

Saul’s hands were on Harriet’s bridle, and Tara was desperately trying to tug the pony away.

As she saw Saul’s face change, Lucy bit her lip. Now, with the amusement gone from his eyes, he looked very cold and alien.

Neither he nor Tara was aware of her until she called out sharply, ‘Tara, that’s enough.’

Tears flooded the brown eyes as they met Lucy’s.

‘Well he is,’ Tara insisted stubbornly. ‘You said he was nice, but he isn’t.’

Saul was looking at her now, and Lucy felt the colour burn up under her skin as she realised what a dreadful picture she must present, her face stained with dust and completely free of make-up, her hair all tangled and untidy.

‘Saul! How lovely to see you.’ Ignoring Tara for the moment, she forced herself to smile the poised, self-confident smile she had learned so carefully, but it faded quickly when she realised he wasn’t smiling back at her, his eyes as cold and grey as the North Sea as he looked her up and down and then without a word turned back to Tara.

‘I wasn’t really trying to take your pony away, you know,’ he told her. ‘I was just trying to make friends with her, that’s all. She’s far too small for me, but she reminds me of a pony I had when I was a little boy.’

Amazingly Tara stopped crying, her eyes widening as she whispered, ‘Did you?’

‘Yup. He lived on my uncle’s farm, and I used to visit him during my vacations.’

His voice hadn’t lost the soft drawl she remembered so vividly. Why on earth had she and Neville made fun of it? It was pleasantly soft and fell easily on her ears, causing her to suffer a momentary pang for her own folly in antagonising him. Instinctively she recognised now that he would have made a far better ally than Neville, that he could even have been a refuge for her to lean on during those difficult months after her mother’s death.

Cross with herself for letting emotion get in the way of reality, she interrupted breathlessly. ‘I’m sure Saul doesn’t mind you taking your pony Tara …’

‘Why should I?’ he interrupted her in that same slow drawl. ‘After all, you’ve already taken damned near everything else. What’s a pony?’

The way he looked at her, the ironic contempt in his voice, stunned her into dismayed silence.

This was not what she had expected at all, this gage flung down at her feet for her to pick up. But what on earth could she say to him in her own defence?

She glanced at Tara. ‘Take Harriet down to the paddock, Tara, and tell your mother that Saul’s arrived.

‘We didn’t expect you quite so soon, and I’m afraid everything’s still rather a mess. However, we’d be delighted if you’d have lunch with us.’

‘My, my … how you’ve changed.’ Again that biting mockery. ‘Or have you? Those are very pretty party manners you’ve got somewhere along the way, Lucy. You certainly didn’t have them twelve years ago.’

His cynicism stung her into replying fiercely, ‘Twelve years ago I was still a child, Saul … And what’s more I had just lost my mother.’

Watching his eyes harden she bit her lip, angry with herself for being so easily provoked. What on earth had happened to all her good resolutions about proferring an olive branch?

Turning away from him to hide the hot tide of colour flooding her skin from his penetrating glance, she mentally derided herself for the sensations engulfing her.

The truth was that she had stupidly expected a more physically adult version of the boy Saul she had remembered, but what she had got was a man who seemed to share nothing other than a name with that boy she remembered.

‘I want you to have lunch with us,’ Tara interrupted firmly, gazing up at him. ‘I want you to tell me all about your pony. What was his name?’

‘Mustard.’

For some reason the slow smile he gave Tara made Lucy feel bleakly excluded and hurt.

‘You’re sure it’s no trouble?’

He was looking at her now, his eyes still cold, smoothly assessing the shape of her body beneath its covering of skimpy T-shirt and ancient jeans, Lucy recognised. Anger flared hotly inside her, her mouth hardening as she turned away from him. As she fought for self-control she reminded herself that Saul had good reason to feel antagonistic towards her; he would after all have based his assessment of her on the girl she had been at twelve, and she could not really blame him for looking for chinks in her armour. Even so, in some strange way it hurt that he should have looked at her like that, dismissing the blood relationship between them, to treat her with a sexual contempt which she had found shatteringly demeaning.

Forcing a smile and ignoring the look he had given her she said calmly, ‘No trouble at all. It will be about an hour or so before it’s ready, but if you like I’ll introduce you to Mrs Isaacs before I go. She and I have just been trying to clean the place up a bit.’

She just caught the look of surprise in his eyes before he suppressed it and suddenly he looked more like the boy she remembered.

‘Rather a demeaning role for you isn’t it? Cleaning? Or were you hoping for a few more pickings?’

A sense of despair engulfed her as she heard the contempt in his voice. How could she have thought that she simply had to extend to him the hand of friendship to wipe out the past? Saul might have left behind the awkward aggression she remembered, but in its place was something far more lethal: a cold hardness that warned her that in his eyes she was more foe than friend.

‘If you’re referring to the estate,’ she told him quietly, ‘my father was entitled to sell what he did.’

She wasn’t going to add that privately she had not been in agreement with her father’s actions, but without raising her voice she added significantly, ‘He did after all have certain responsibilities.’

Saul looked at Tara and then equally softly told her, ‘In the last few months of his life your father raised almost two hundred thousand pounds from selling off everything that was unentailed—that’s an awful lot of money to support one widow and her child … Or are you telling me that you’re included in those responsibilities? Hasn’t anyone ever told you about the pleasure of being self-supporting, Lucy?’

She could feel her face sting, but even if Tara had not been looking on there was no defence she could honourably make. How could she tell him of her promise to her father to keep the family together, to look after not only the children but Fanny as well?

‘I’ll take you to meet Mrs Isaacs.’

She caught the flash of bitterness in his eyes as she refused to respond to his barb, but what else could she do? She had not realised how bitter he would be about her father’s actions, but without betraying the secret of Oliver’s birth there was nothing she could do.

She maintained a cool distance while she introduced him to Mrs Isaacs, hesitating before offering to show him round the house. Mrs Isaacs was a warm-hearted soul, but a devout gossip, and she didn’t want it to get round the village that there was bad feeling between herself and Saul, which would be the conclusion Mrs Isaacs was bound to leap to if she did not make the offer.

‘I think I remember the layout pretty well. And I do have the plans so I don’t think I’ll get into too much trouble. Thanks for the offer though.’

He was dismissing her, Lucy thought irately; making it plain that he had no desire whatsoever for her company—or her presence in what was now his house.

‘I’ll see you at lunch time then.’ Try as she might she could not quite keep the corresponding stiffness out of her own voice, and as he dipped his head in acknowledgment she recognised that he was entitled to the mockingly victorious smile that twisted his mouth.

As she had half expected, when she got back to the Dower House Fanny was still in bed. She wondered what the children had had for breakfast.

Concealing her exasperation, Lucy went up to warn her about their visitor.

‘What’s he like?’

‘Tall dark and handsome,’ Lucy responded flippantly, and then realised that it was quite true; and more than that there was a masculine strength about him that she found inordinately appealing.

Appealing? Nonsense! She was letting the fact that the responsibility for Fanny and the children weighed heavily on her shoulders get to her.

It took her almost half an hour to persuade Fanny that she ought to join them for lunch.

‘You’ll have to meet him sooner or later,’ she reminded her stepmother. You don’t want people to talk.’

It was a good ploy and one that brought a petulant frown to her stepmother’s forehead.

‘How on earth are we going to feed him, Lucy?’ she demanded. ‘These Americans are used to eating well, you know.’

‘And so he will,’ Lucy responded tartly. ‘We’re having asparagus from the garden, fresh salmon, and strawberries and cream.’

The salmon had been a gift from one of their neighbours, a retired colonel who had been a close friend of her father and who lived alone.

‘I suppose the salmon was from Tom Bishop?’ Fanny shook her head. ‘That poor man. You know, he really should marry again Lucy … Living all alone in that huge house, spending all his time fishing …’

∗ ∗ ∗

At one o’clock on the dot Saul rapped on the front door. Lucy, who had been working nonstop from the moment she walked in the house, determined that there was no way he was going to be able to look as slightingly on her meal as he had done on her person, paused in the hallway and then called to Tara to let him in.

‘Take him into the drawing-room to your mother,’ she instructed the little girl, ‘and then go and tell Oliver to come downstairs.’ Oliver was in his bedroom, organising his possessions.

She had been so busy she hadn’t even had time to change, but now, from the safety of the kitchen where she was checking on the light sauce she had made to go with the salmon, she heard the drawing-room door and judged it was safe to dash upstairs and do something about her appearance.

Her wardrobe wasn’t exactly bursting with fashionable clothes, her lifestyle didn’t require them, but the few clothes she did have were good, carefully chosen and well cared for. Before her death her mother had once remarked approvingly that Lucy had inherited her own eye for colour and design, and the dress she hurriedly selected, a soft wrap-over style in pastel hued silk with pleats falling from the hip, was both elegant and feminine.

The soft peachy pink fabric with its pattern of muted greys and blues emphasised her summer tan, at once making her hair seem fairer and her eyes darker.

There was no time for her to bother with make-up and, quickly running a brush through her shoulder-length hair, she slipped on a pair of high-heeled sandals and hurried out of her room, almost colliding with Oliver at the top of the stairs.

He was, she saw with a sinking heart, looking oppressively sulky, his expression so like her father’s that she wondered that she had never realised the truth.

‘What’s wrong?’

He glowered at her. ‘I don’t want any lunch … I don’t want to have to talk to him … I don’t want him here, Lucy.’

‘Maybe not, but he is here and he has every right to be here,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘Oliver, I do understand how you feel, but you must try to realise how he feels as well. You don’t want everyone to think you resent the fact that he’s inherited the Manor do you?’

He shook his head slowly ‘I suppose not.’

‘Good. Now come down and have your lunch. It’s salmon. The colonel gave it to us.’

‘Did he?’ His face lit up. ‘I wish I’d been there when he came. He might have told me some more about during the war.’

Lucy laughed, relieved to see his sulks banished.

‘Well, there’ll be plenty more opportunities to talk to him I’m sure.’ Deliberately she didn’t let him go into the drawing-room alone, propelling him slightly ahead of her as she opened the door.

Fanny was sitting in one of the armchairs facing the french windows and to her astonishment Saul was standing close beside her, one arm casually draped over Tara’s shoulder as they all looked at something on her knee.

‘Oh there you are, Lucy dear …’ Fanny looked slightly flustered. ‘I was just showing Saul the photographs of our wedding. How pretty you look. It isn’t often we see you in a dress. That must be for your benefit, Saul.’ She smiled coyly up at him, blushing a little, while Lucy mentally seethed. She knew her stepmother to be completely innocent of any charge of guile, but nevertheless it was extremly galling that Saul should think she had dressed especially for him.

‘Well I could hrdly sit down to lunch in my work clothes,’ was all she said, but she was conscious of the mocking scrutiny in Saul’s eyes as she crossed the room with Oliver, and introduced him to the older man.

She was pleased to see that instead of talking down to him Saul shook hands with the boy, gravely treating him very much as the man of the house. Oliver visibly relaxed and Lucy gave a mental sigh of relief. Oliver could be extremely intractable and sulky when he chose—the result of too much laxity and spoiling, which she tried to counteract as best she could, all too conscious that once Oliver went away to school he would find that discipline was imposed upon him whether he liked it or not. Here again she blamed her father for not taking a firmer hand and not realising what a traumatic shock it could be for Oliver to go straight from his mother’s spoiling to the rigours of boarding school.

‘Darling, I think we’d better go into the dining-room for lunch.’ Fanny suggested. ‘Will you bring it in?’

It was good to see Fanny rallying from her depression and taking an interest in something once more and Lucy willingly complied, leaving the others to make their way to the dining-room while she hurried to the kitchen.

Everyone was seated when she went in with the asparagus.

The furniture in this room had been her mother’s, and if the Sheraton dining chairs were rather scratched and worn, they were still undeniably elegant.

‘Asparagus … Very English,’ Saul commented as Lucy served him. ‘From here?’

‘From the Dower House’s garden, yes,’ she agreed, making it plain to him that the asparagus was not from the Manor. In point of fact the vegetable garden attached to the Dower House was better stocked and cared for—a legacy from one of their tenants who had been a keen gardener.

She had the satisfaction of seeing the faint tide of colour creep up under his skin as he digested her remark.

‘Lucy, really,’ Fanny reproached her. ‘There’s no need for that. I’m sure that Saul wouldn’t have minded in the least had the asparagus come from the Manor.’

The smile she directed towards him was one she had always used to good effect on her husband, and, watching Saul respond to it, Lucy wondered a little bleakly if she herself wouldn’t be well advised to adopt a few feminine wiles.

Not once had Saul smiled at her like that. Not once had he smiled at her at all.

‘This is really delicious.’

He was looking at Fanny, who coloured modestly but said nothing.

Oliver, seated beside Lucy, frowned watching the by-play and then said sturdily, ‘Mum didn’t cook it—Lucy does all the cooking.’

She was aware of Saul looking at her, but refused to look back, concentrating on her food until she felt the concentration of his gaze slacken.

Fanny she saw was frowning slightly, not pleased by her son’s comment. ‘Poor Lucy has had to take charge of so much,’ she told Saul, giving her stepdaughter a little smile. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been so prostrate with misery that I haven’t been able to do a thing.’

For a moment Lucy had to stifle a wild desire to remind her stepmother that never once since the start of her marriage had she shown the slightest interest in running the Manor, but she stifled it at birth, telling herself that she was being unfair. Fanny was Fanny and that was that.

‘I’ll go and get the main course,’ she said calmly instead, quickly collecting the plates and heading for the door.

Saul reached it before her, his forearm touching her body as he leaned across her to open the door.

A frisson of sensation shivered through her, so unexpected as to be faintly shocking, and she drew back from him as though her skin burned.

‘Am I correct in thinking I recognise the Sheraton?’

No one else could overhear the remark because Saul had his back to the room and she was almost through the door.

‘Yes,’ she agreed curtly. ‘It belonged to my mother and she willed it to me.’

There! Let him make what he liked of that!

The remainder of the meal passed all too slowly for Lucy. She was aware of Saul and Fanny conversing, but made no attempt to take part in their conversation. Saul praised the salmon and its accompanying sauce, looking at her this time, but she made no response. His remark about the furniture still hurt. Hurt? She examined the word covertly. Why should she feel hurt? Anger would be far more appropriate.

‘Do you see much of Neville these days?’

The unexpected question caught her off guard and, remembering how she and Neville had treated him that summer, she coloured a little.

‘Oh Neville’s a regular visitor,’ Fanny answered for her, giving her a teasing smile. ‘Although she always denies it I suspect Lucy has a soft spot for him. Of course he’s a very popular young man, more so since he’s taken over his father’s position in the business. Did you know about his connection with Holker’s, the publishers? He was most helpful to Lucy with her book, wasn’t he darling?’

Lucy felt her spirits plummet. It was all too easy to guess at the conclusions Saul had arrived at from Fanny’s artless speech.

‘It was my uncle who recommended Bennett’s to me, not Neville,’ she reminded her stepmother. ‘We don’t see quite so much of Neville as we once did.’ she added, looking directly at Saul, ‘but he does come down occasionally.’

He ignored her last statement to comment, with what she was sure was faked admiration, ‘So you’re writing a book. I’m most impressed Lucy. What’s it about?’

As though he, too, had sensed the derision behind the surface pleasantry of the words, Oliver answered for her.

‘It’s all about the Martin family … And Lucy spends hours in the library reading all about them. It’s going to be really good when it’s finished.’

Fanny laughed indulgently. ‘Really, Oliver darling. He quite dotes on Lucy,’ she told Saul over the latter’s head. ‘Sometimes I feel quite jealous. But then of course the children have been spending so much time with her recently. And then of course, living here … in her house.’

There was a sudden silence while Lucy gazed incredulously at her stepmother. Did Fanny resent the fact that the Dower House had been left to her?

She frowned, shocked by the thought, swiftly banishing it. It was because Saul was here that she was having these unfair thoughts.

‘Tell me more about this book of yours.’

Saul’s question caught her off guard, a faint frown pleating her forehead as she looked at him.

‘There isn’t very much to tell really. I’ve finished the draft of the first book, and I’m due to go to London next week to discuss it with the publishers.’

‘Mmm. What is it exactly? A history of the Martin family?’

‘No … not really, although I have used family papers and diaries as a background. It’s a fiction work not a factual one, but by using the family documents I’ve been able to give it a strongly factual framework.’

He was looking at her in rather an odd way and rather belatedly Lucy realised that she had betrayed herself into her usual enthusiasm for her project. Instilling some of her earlier coldness into her voice she added, ‘Of course, if you would rather that I don’t use the library at the Manor from now on I shall understand.’

‘Magnanimous of you.’

His dry tone made her flush as she realised how easily the cool voice she had used as a defence could be misconstrued as being rather haughty and supercilious.

She remembered now, too, how she and Neville had mocked his American accent, so different from their own British accents. How silly she had been to think it would be easy to wipe out the slights of the past. It was plain to her now that Saul felt nothing but contempt for her, and would doubtless laugh in her face if she were to attempt to apologise.

All in all she was extremely glad when he stood up and said that he had to leave.

‘I have to go into Winchester to see the solicitors; apparently there’s still a few loose ends to tie up.’

His smile when he left was for Fanny, not her, and it amazed her to realise how much that hurt.

CHAPTER THREE

FOR the rest of the week Lucy took care to avoid going anywhere near the main house and was rewarded by seeing nothing of Saul.

Tara had seen him, though, and the little girl appeared to have developed a rather unlikely case of hero-worship for him. George Martin had not been the sort of man to cherish his daughters and the feeling of desolation that bloomed inside her whenever Tara peppered her conversation with ‘Saul said …’ was an extremely disturbing one. Surely she couldn’t be jealous? And if so, what of? The fact that Tara seemed to be transferring some of her dependence from her to Saul? Or the fact that Tara had found the solid male refuge a tiny part of herself had always secretly yearned for and been denied? It was impossible to give herself an answer.

Saul had been living at the house for five days when Fanny announced that she was spending the day in Winchester.

Lucy looked at her over her coffee cup. Both children had finished breakfast and were outside playing.

‘Do you want to take my car?’

Fanny shook her head. ‘No, it’s all right. Saul’s taking me.’

Slowly Lucy lowered her coffee cup, keeping her attention on it. As far as she was aware, Saul had not been down to the Dower House since that first visit, which must mean that Fanny had gone to see him. But without mentioning it to her?

Silly to feel hurt and yet she did. She and Fanny had always got on well together despite their very different temperaments, and never in a thousand years could she imagine Fanny deliberately deceiving her.

‘I wanted to talk to him about the children’s trusts.’

Numbly Lucy realised how defensive her stepmother sounded.

‘After all, Saul is the head of the family now, Lucy.’

The head of the family? What on earth was Fanny implying? Lucy knew how muddle-headed she could be, but surely she could not possibly believe that Saul owed them that sort of responsibility?

‘He was very kind and understanding,’ Fanny added. ‘And he’s taking me to see Mr Patterson, so that he can explain everything to me.’

‘But Fanny, he already has.’

Philip Patterson, the family solicitor, had visited them on several occasions, just before and then after George Martin’s death to explain at length the ramifications of his will and the trust he had set up for Oliver and Tara.

‘Yes, but he spoke to you, not me,’ Fanny said stubbornly.

Lucy frowned. ‘But Fanny, you were there with me …’

Across the table Fanny shrugged petulantly.

‘Well yes. But I was so upset about your father. I couldn’t take any of it in.’

There was a small silence while Lucy tried to assimilate her feeling of alienation and then Fanny said defiantly, ‘I know you don’t like Saul, Lucy, and that you resent him taking your father’s place, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to share your feelings.’

The unfairness of the criticism really hurt. So much so that for one awful moment she almost thought she might burst into tears. It was the unexpected direction from which the blow came rather than its weight, she told herself as she struggled to suppress the bleak desolation enveloping her. And Fanny was wrong; she did not dislike Saul.

‘Luckily Saul’s aware of how you feel about him. He told me he found you very anti when he came over that summer. I explained to him that it was quite natural really … what with you being aware that you couldn’t inherit and that he would. It was bound to make you resent him.’

Lucy opened her mouth and closed it quickly, swallowing back the hot words of denial springing to her lips. She was angry, more angry than she could remember being for a long time. How dare Fanny make such careless assumptions about her feelings and actions, and even worse how dare she pass them on to Saul as though they were fact! It seemed to be a long time before she had control of herself sufficiently to say calmly,

‘You’re quite wrong, Fanny. I neither resent nor dislike Saul.’ She wanted to explain to her stepmother her guilt over the past, but it was impossible to find the words, especially now when her anger still formed a hard lump in her throat.

An hour later, when Saul arrived, Lucy learned that the children were also included in the outing.

She didn’t go downstairs, unable to trust her own reactions if she were to come face to face with him now. One thing was clear though. She could not allow this ridiculous belief that she resented him for inheriting the house to stand. When she felt calmer she would have to go and see him and explain the truth. She had been horrified by Fanny’s careless revelation of what had been said, and the pride which had held her back from making an open apology for her foolishness all those years ago, when she realised he was not prepared to meet her equally openly, would have to be sacrificed to the truth. She was not going to allow him to go on thinking that she was stupid and small-minded enough to resent him owning the Manor.

From her own bedroom she heard the children racing about, doors slamming and then the expensive purr of Saul’s car as he drove away.

Standing by her bedroom window, watching the car disappearing down the drive, she was once again swept by acute desolation. Could it possibly be a delayed reaction to her father’s death? At the time she had been almost too busy to weep. And then there had been the shock of discovering that Oliver …

If anyone should resent Saul, it ought to be Oliver, but then in reality why should he? Her father had left Oliver more than well provided for, whereas Saul’s inheritance was more of a burden than an asset.

The sunny morning had turned dull, and by lunch time it had started to rain. Lucy spent the afternoon in the comfortable sitting-room-cum-study which she had made her own terrain, sewing labels on to Oliver’s new school clothes.

At half past four she heard the car, and although her body tensed, vibrating as though someone had touched a nerve, she made no move to get up.

The study door opened and she composed her face into a calm smile as she turned her head to the door.

But it was not Fanny and the children who came in, it was Saul. Her face felt as though it was caked in ice and about to crack, a violent tremor shuddering through her muscles.

Saul paused for a moment in the doorway, and her heart thudded as though suddenly struck a giant blow.

‘I startled you. I’m sorry. Fanny asked me to call in on my way home to tell you that she and the children won’t be back until after dinner. They ran into an old friend of your father’s in Winchester, Colonel Bishop, and he invited them back to dine with him.’

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