David leaned over to look down into Honor’s sleeping face.

Even in her sleep she was smiling. What was she dreaming of—him? He grimaced a little at his own vanity and then wondered if she would still be smiling if she knew the truth about him.

In reality they hardly knew one another, but there had been an honesty, a purity, about their coming together that had elevated it way, way above anything cheap or carnal.

Honor had talked to him openly about her life, her past, but he had not been able to be similarly honest with her.

There was no real point, he reminded himself. Their time together could only be brief, the relationship transitory, and once she knew the truth she was bound to reject him. Who could blame her? But he knew he would have to tell her, even though he couldn’t really understand the compulsion that was drivng him to do so. Just as he didn’t understand why he had felt that he must come home.

“Honor …”

Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” David began.

PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of a hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire, and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Crightons

A Perfect Family

The Perfect Seduction

Perfect Marriage Material

Figgy Pudding

The Perfect Lover

The Perfect Sinner

The Perfect Father

A Perfect Night

Coming Home

Starting Over

Coming Home
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

The Crightons

Title Page

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

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘HOW’S GRAMPS?’

‘Not too good, I’m afraid, Joss,’ Jenny Crighton admitted in response to her youngest child’s question, looking past the tall, gangly shape of the seventeen-year-old to where her husband Jon was standing, frowning a little.

‘Maddy managed to have a word with me in private after I’d been to see him,’ Jenny told her husband. ‘She’s very concerned about the way he seems to be deteriorating. Despite the fact that medically both his hip operations have been a success, he still complains that he’s in pain and that his joints ache. He’s quite definitely losing weight and Maddy’s worried that he isn’t eating as well as he was. He’s looking positively gaunt.’

‘He is in his eighties, Jen,’ Jon reminded her, but Jenny could see that he was still frowning and she knew he was troubled. Ben was his father after all and even though they all knew that Ben could not possibly receive better care than that given to him by Maddy, their daughter-in-law, the wife of their eldest son Max, Jenny also knew that Jon still felt that he should be the one to carry the main responsibility for Ben, just as he still felt guilty because …

‘Aunt Ruth says that Ben is turning into a curmudgeonly old man,’ Joss informed them both. ‘She says he actually enjoys being grumpy.’

‘Grumpy perhaps,’ Jenny allowed, ‘but no one enjoys being in constant physical pain, Joss,’ she reminded him gently.

Joss had always preferred the company of Great-Aunt Ruth to that of his grandfather, and Jenny knew that she could hardy blame him. Ruth had been far more of a grandparent and a mentor to Joss than Ben had ever been.

Out of all his grandchildren, there was only one for whom Ben Crighton had ever shown any real liking and that was for Max. Not that such favouritism had had either her or Jon’s backing. Once there had been an acute degree of antagonism between Max and his parents, but thankfully that rift was now healed. Jenny only had to watch Max with his wife Maddy and their three children to feel overwhelmed not just with love and pride but with a humbling gratitude to whomever or whatever had drawn the master plan for her son’s life.

To say that Max had completely changed virtually overnight from a human being even she as his mother had sometimes come close to loathing to one whom everyone who now knew him spoke of with respect, admiration and love sounded overly dramatic and theatrical, but it was no less than the truth. But in order to undergo such a transformation, Max had had to sail terrifyingly close to the fine, dark edge that separated life from death. Not willingly or voluntarily but through the trauma of a vicious physical attack that could have ended his life or left him permanently injured.

Mercifully, it had not, and Max had returned to them to begin a new life here in the small Cheshire town of Haslewich.

Families! Jenny gave a small sigh, but she wouldn’t be without hers, not a single member of it, including her irascible father-in-law, Ben.

The Crighton family was a large one with several branches. But one thing that linked all of them together, one inheritance they all shared, was their fascination with the legal world, the world of lawyers, solicitors, barristers and judges. It was an in-joke in the family that every Crighton child, just as soon as he or she was old enough to know what the words meant, when asked what they wanted for Christmas or birthdays, would respond eagerly, ‘I want to be a QC.’

Queen’s Counsel. It had been a goal to which Ben had strived unsuccessfully, the goal to which he had relentlessly tried to push his own son and then more recently his grandson Max.

There had been a time when Jenny knew that had Max attained that goal, she would have felt it was somehow tainted and wrong, but when, the previous year, Max had come over to tell them that he had heard on the grapevine that he was going to receive this accolade, Jenny had been filled with love and pride for him. So, too, had Jon, who had embraced Max with emotion as he congratulated him.

But, typically, when Ben Crighton had praised his favourite grandchild on his achievement at a family gathering, he hadn’t been able to resist adding brusquely, ‘It should have been my son David. It would have been David,’ he had told them all fiercely, giving his granddaughter Olivia an angry glower, ‘if it hadn’t been for your mother.’

Olivia hadn’t responded, but Jenny had seen the look of pain in her eyes and the anger in her husband Caspar’s and she had felt for her.

There had been no point in trying to console or comfort Olivia by reminding her that Ben Crighton gave as little value and love to her own daughters as he did to Olivia. Ben might have been born into the twentieth century, but he had never embraced its ethos to the extent of accepting that women were as professionally capable as men. The achievements of the female members of his own family were something Ben either ignored or criticised as women taking jobs that should more rightfully belong to men.

‘Is Gramps going to die?’ Joss asked his mother now, the anxiety in his eyes reminding Jenny that despite her youngest son’s growing maturity, the sensitive side of his nature, which had so marked him out as a child, could still hold him emotionally hostage to his fears.

‘I don’t know, Joss,’ Jenny answered him honestly. ‘According to the doctor, there is no physical reason why he should.’ She paused, choosing her words carefully. ‘But your grandfather has never been a man who has enjoyed life. He—’

‘He still misses Uncle David, doesn’t he?’ Joss cut in.

Jenny and Jon exchanged speaking looks. Joss had accurately and swiftly highlighted the true cause of Ben’s deep-seated malaise.

David Crighton, Jon’s twin brother, had disappeared just a few weeks after their joint fiftieth birthday party, only a short time ahead of Jon’s discovery that David had fraudulently plundered the bank account of an elderly widow whose business affairs he had been responsible for.

Had it not been for the fact that Jon’s aunt Ruth had stepped in and offered to repay every penny of the money David had ‘borrowed’, the resultant scandal would have damaged not just the guilty but the innocent, as well. David could have put into disrepute the family’s legal firm in which he was the senior partner although, in truth, it had been run by his quieter and less flamboyant brother, Jon.

Even so, Jon had argued passionately against Ruth’s decision, insisting that the interests of truth and honesty must be put before those of the family and himself.

In the end, though, Ruth had prevailed upon him to listen to what she was saying because, as she had insisted at the time, since David had disappeared, none of them had any means of knowing if David himself had intended to repay the money or indeed if the now deceased widow had actually loaned or given it to him.

Initially, only Jon, Olivia and Ruth knew the truth, but after an emotional discussion it had been decided that they would tell their ‘nearest and dearest’ because, as Ruth had put it, secrecy between couples and close family members could be very hurtful and damaging. But the truth had been kept hidden from Ben for the most altruistic of reasons.

Since his disappearance, nothing had been heard of David despite Jon’s attempts to discover his whereabouts.

The last contact they had had from David had been from Jamaica, but when Max had flown out there to look for him, no trace could be found. All Max had got for his pains was a vicious knife attack on one of the local Jamaican beaches.

After David’s disappearance, his wife Tania had returned to her parents’ home on the south coast. The marriage was well and truly over and Jon and Jenny had brought up Jack, David and Tania’s son, alongside their own.

There were only a couple of years between Jack and Joss. They had always got on well together and were as close as brothers.

Right now, though, Jenny’s concern was not for the younger contingent of the Crighton family, but for its oldest member, Ben, who was visibly getting frailer with each month that passed.

‘He called me David last week,’ Joss told his mother sadly.

Jenny frowned. There was no way Joss looked anything like his uncle.

‘Do you think Uncle David will ever come back?’ the boy asked.

Jenny looked helplessly at her husband.

‘I doubt it, Joss,’ Jon told him gently. ‘David was … is …’ He stopped and shook his head, not wanting to tell his son that David had not just been a braggart and as careless with other people’s feelings as he had been with their money, but that he had been a coward, as well. Thanks to their father, David had grown up believing he could do no wrong. Ben had shielded David from the harsh consequences of his behaviour all through his life, often at Jon’s own expense. David was the favoured child, the blue-eyed boy, and Ben had set him upon a pedestal, which, it seemed now to Jon, was so high, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would have had to fall.

Despite the cruel comparisons his father had made over the years, Jon had always loved David—did still love him—but no longer with the blind love that his father had compelled him to give his sibling, no longer in a way that meant he had to subjugate his own needs and feelings to those of his brother.

Without David’s presence casting its dark shadow over his life, Jon’s personality had flourished and blossomed, but that did not mean that he had stopped loving his twin—not for a moment.

‘I don’t think he would ever want to come back,’ Jon offered quietly.

‘Not even if he knew how much Gramps wants to see him?’ Joss asked.

Helplessly, Jon looked at Jenny.

‘It isn’t quite as easy as that, Joss,’ Jenny told him. ‘There are problems … and—’

‘Because of the money,’ Joss interrupted her. ‘But he could still come back. He could still see Gramps. Surely if he knew how much Gramps wants him …’

‘Maybe if he did,’ Jenny agreed. Privately, she didn’t think it would make the least difference. David had always been self-absorbed and selfish; a vain, weak man who had never put another person’s feelings or needs before his own in the whole of his life. ‘But since we have no idea where he is nor any way of contacting him—’

‘But he and Dad are twins,’ Joss interrupted, startling them both by adding not entirely jokingly, ‘There’s supposed to be a bond between twins that means they are telepathically linked.’ When neither of his parents responded, he reminded them urgently, ‘Katie and Louise have it.’

Jenny sighed. It was true their twin daughters did have that special bond that twins do sometimes experience, that ability to know when the other was in need or in pain despite the miles separating them.

‘Joss, I don’t think …’ she started to respond, then stopped, turning to look at Jon.

‘David and I were never close in that kind of way,’ Jon told Joss gruffly.

‘But you could try,’ the boy persisted. ‘For Gramps’s sake.’

Uneasily, Jenny studied his set face. Something was bothering him, something that he wasn’t saying.

‘Joss—’ she began gently, but as though he had read her mind, Joss continued quickly.

‘When Gramps mistook me for David, he …’ He hesitated and then told her chokily, ‘He started to cry … he said that he had missed me … and that life hadn’t been worth living without me. I never really had much to do with Uncle David and I know what you all think about him. Even Jack says he wishes that you were his father, Dad, but Gramps …’

Wordlessly, Jon reached out and put his arm around his son. Tall as he was, just that little bit taller than Jon himself now, his body, his bones, still had that terrifyingly vulnerable feeling of youth.

As he hugged him fiercely and ruffled his hair, Jon knew that the tears he could see gleaming in his son’s eyes were mirrored in his own.

‘We’ve tried to find him, son,’ he told him huskily. ‘But sometimes people just don’t want to be found. He could be anywhere,’ he added gently.

‘But what about Gramps? Doesn’t he care that Gramps is missing him and that he’s getting older?’

Not knowing what to say, Jon sighed as he heard the emotion breaking up his son’s voice.

His twin and their father had always been close, far closer than he had ever been to either of them, but it had been a closeness founded on their mutual promotion of David into a person he had never actually been. Keeping up that kind of fiction, that kind of falsity, year after year, decade after decade, had ultimately resulted in the relationship self-destructing or being destroyed, which, in effect, was what David had done with his disappearance.

Of course, Jon knew how much his father missed David, but the David Ben missed was someone he himself had created.

Jon suspected that the realisation that he was not the superhuman that his father had always lauded him as being had been as traumatic to David as its discovery would have been to their father. But that was in the past now. David’s dramatic exit from their lives had heralded a series of transformations that had seen his own marriage develop into the deeply fulfilling emotional and physical bond he had always longed for.

If David were to return now, Jon suspected that he would be thoroughly bemused by the changes that had taken place. David’s daughter, Olivia, was now married and a mother. Jack, his son, had grown from a boy into a young man, just nineteen and about to start his first year at university. Max, Jon’s son, was married and the father of three.

Yes, there had been plenty of changes and a whole new generation of babies born, including David’s own granddaughters.

Olivia, he knew, had never forgiven her father for what he had done nor for the fact that his actions had almost resulted in the destruction of her relationship with her husband, Caspar.

Her mother, Tania, a victim of the eating disorder, bulimia, had been more the child in the relationship between herself and Olivia than Olivia herself had ever been, and although she had never said so, Jon knew that Olivia placed a large part of the blame for her mother’s disorder on David’s shoulders.

Olivia. Jon frowned as he released his son. He had become increasingly concerned about his niece over the past few months. When he had tried to suggest to her that she was working too hard and that for her to be at the office before him in the morning and still there when he left at night was an excessive devotion to duty, she had snapped crossly at him.

Later, she had apologised, explaining tiredly that it was impossible for her to take work home. ‘Caspar feels that when we’re at home we should spend as much time as we can with the children. Of course I agree with him, but sometimes when I’ve got statements or counsel’s opinions to read through …’

Jon had given her a sympathetic smile, but he couldn’t help thinking a sense of responsibility to one’s work was one thing, but using it as a means of putting a barrier between oneself and one’s family was another entirely. Perhaps he ought to ask Jenny if she could have a word with Olivia. They had always got on well together.

A LITTLE LATER that evening as they were preparing for bed, Jenny told Jon musingly, ‘I was just thinking about that time when Louise gashed her leg so badly and Katie, who was miles away at the time playing with a school friend, insisted on coming home because Lou had hurt her leg and needed her to be with her. Do you remember?’

‘Mmm …’ Jon acknowledged, guessing what his wife was leading up to.

‘When you were boys, did you and David ever …?’ Jenny persisted, then stopped as she saw the look in his eyes.

‘David and I never shared the kind of relationship that Lou and Katie have. You know that,’ Jon told her quietly and then added almost brusquely, ‘Do you think if there was any way, any way at all I could bring him home for Dad that I wouldn’t use it?’

As she heard the pain in her husband’s voice that couldn’t be masked by his anger, Jenny went up and put her arms around him.

Even though he was in his fifties and had a relatively sedentary lifestyle, Jon still had a very sexy body—well, she certainly thought so, and after all the sterile, weary years of having to hide her feelings for him, to be able to caress it … him … freely and openly was something that never failed to give her joy, but the caress she gave him now was one of tender emotion rather than teasing sensuality.

Like all the Crighton men, Jon was good-looking, tall, broad shouldered with a very masculine profile. His hair was thick and closer to caramel colour than blond. Women’s eyes still followed him when they went out and hers followed them. Not that Jon ever noticed their glances of discreet female appreciation. He was a wonderfully loyal and loving husband and she was a very lucky woman to have such a fulfilling marriage, such a truly loving and lovable man, but Jon was no saint. He could be stubborn and even a little blinkered at times, but for him to be angry was a very rare occurrence indeed and she knew that the fact he was now was an indication of how deep his feelings went over the issue of his twin.

A man with a weaker personality than Jon’s, a man lacking in his emotional strength and compassion, might have been badly warped by the obvious and relentless favouritism of their father for David. But Jon was too kind, too caring a person to fall into that trap, and Jenny loved him all the more for what his father had once so contemptuously dismissed as Jon’s softness.

‘Come on,’ she said now, kissing his chin. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

JON GLANCED at the bedside clock. Jenny was asleep at his side, curled up next to him like a little girl. He smiled as he looked down into her sleeping face. They had made love earlier and she had fallen asleep almost immediately afterwards, his prerogative as a male, surely? And to be fair to Jenny, he was the one who normally fell asleep first, but tonight for some reason he just hadn’t been able to do so.

For some reason … There was only one reason why he couldn’t sleep—David. Not even to Jenny had he confided … admitted … how often he thought about his twin, or how much he missed him. It was ironic, really, because he knew damn well that David wouldn’t be thinking about or missing him and he knew, too, that without David’s presence in it, his own life had improved immeasurably.

Where was David now? Did he ever think of them … of him? Deliberately, Jon closed his eyes, letting his mind drift back through the years to their shared childhood. Those childhood years had been so painful for him, pushed as he was by their father into the shadows, ignored and unwanted, unloved, he had always felt, constantly reminded by their father of just how lucky he was to be David’s brother.

‘David is the first-born,’ their father used to say, and Jon had known almost before he could analyse what that knowledge meant how important it was that David should be the first, the sun, the star, and that he should never attempt to preempt David’s role.

As they grew up, it had become second nature to him to remain in the shadows, to withdraw into himself so that his twin could be first.

David … Stored away in his memory, Jon had a thousand, a million different images of him. David …

‘YOU SEEM … PREOCCUPIED. Is there something on your mind?’

David smiled warmly at his companion and teased him gently. ‘Once a Jesuit priest, always a Jesuit priest.’

The older man laughed. ‘I confess that there are times when the habit of encouraging another’s confession is too strong to resist, but purely for the most altruistic of reasons, I hasten to add.’

Looking away from him, David said passionately, ‘On a night like this, I can’t help wondering what it is about us human beings that compels us to behave so imperfectly when we have been given the gift of such a perfect universe, the potential to enhance our lives, to be the best we can be….’

‘It is a perfect evening,’ Father Ignatius agreed gravely as he sat down slowly next to David on the rocky outcrop of land from which it was possible not just to look up into the star-studded Jamaican sky above them but also out to sea. ‘But there have been other equally perfect evenings and they have not resulted in such a philosophical outburst.’

‘Philosophical.’ David shook his head. ‘No. To be philosophical is to be detached, to talk about the human condition in general terms, whereas I was thinking … wishing … regretting …’

He stopped whilst the priest looked at him and said knowledgeably, ‘You want to go home.’

‘Home!’ David gave a mirthless laugh. ‘This is my home and a far better one than I deserve.’

‘No, David,’ the priest corrected him gently. ‘This is where you live. Your home is where your heart is. Your home is in England … in Cheshire …’

‘… in Haslewich,’ David supplied wryly for him. ‘I dreamed about my father last night,’ he said to the priest abruptly. ‘I wonder what they have told him … about me … about my disappearance. I wonder if …’

‘From what you have told me of your family, your brother, your twin,’ the priest emphasised, ‘I doubt they will have told him anything that might hurt him. But if you really wish to know, then you should go back,’ he said gently.

‘Go back,’ David repeated brusquely. ‘No, I can’t do that.’

‘There is no such word as “can’t”,’ the priest replied sturdily.

‘I’m a thief, a criminal. I stole money,’ David reminded him sharply.

‘You sinned against one of God’s laws,’ the priest agreed. ‘But you have repented your sin, acknowledging it with humility and genuine contrition. In God’s eyes, you are making atonement.’

‘In God’s eyes, maybe,’ David agreed grimly. ‘But in the eyes of the law, I am still guilty.’

‘Which is more important to you, David?’ the priest questioned him softly. ‘The burden of guilt you carry for the debt you owe your family or that which you carry in the eyes of the law?’

‘My father might no longer be alive.’

‘You have other family,’ the priest pointed out. ‘A brother … a daughter … a son …’

‘They are better off without me,’ David told him curtly, turning his head away so that the priest couldn’t see his expression.

‘Maybe … maybe not.’

‘I can’t go back,’ David repeated, but the priest could hear the uncertainty and yearning in his voice.

Ever since he had read the report of David’s nephew, Max’s knife attack, in the island’s paper, he had been preparing himself for this moment. David had become as close to him as a son and the love he felt for him was that of a father, but he was not David’s father, and had he been he knew perfectly well that it was the duty of a loving father to set even his most beloved child free to live his own life.

Since David had been working here helping him in his self-appointed task of nursing the island’s terminally sick, those too poor … too shunned by society to merit any other kind of help, Father Ignatius had come to realise just how solitary and lonely his life had been.

He had found David lying drunk in one of Kingston’s stinking gutters and even now had no real idea just why he had stopped to help him, a man who had cursed him and who, when he was sober enough, had blamed him for not allowing him to die.

It had been months before David had finally brought himself to start talking to him about his life, his past, but once he had done so, the priest had not passed any judgement. Why should he? Judging others was not what he was here for. Helping them, healing them, loving them; those were his duties.

Originally, when he had entered the priesthood, he had been filled with such ideas, such visions, but then had come the faith-shaking discovery that the man he most admired, his inspiration and guiding light, had been guilty of one of the most unforgivable of sins. Father John had broken his vow of chastity and had not just had a secret relationship with a woman but had also given her his child. Torn between conflicting loyalties, tortured by what he should do, in the end the younger man had simply felt obliged to speak up.

The result of his action had been catastrophic. Father John had taken his own life and he, Francis O’Leary, known by the church as Father Ignatius, had been to blame. Totally and absolutely. Even the bishop had seemed to think so.

He had been sent away out of the area, hopefully to get a fresh start, but the news of his role in the tragedy had followed him and he had become untouchable, defiled, someone to be avoided, a priest whose faith not just in others but in himself had been destroyed. He had volunteered for missionary work and had been granted it.

‘Even if I wanted to go home, I couldn’t,’ David said, bringing the priest back to the present. ‘There’s no way I could raise the cost of the airfare.’

It was true they lived very simply and meagrely, growing as much of their own food as they could and relying on the generosity and gratitude of the patients and their families for the rest of it.

‘There are other means of travel,’ Father Ignatius pointed out and then added, ‘There’s a yacht in the harbour now waiting to be sailed back to Europe. The captain was in the Coconut Bar yesterday saying that he was looking for a crew willing to work their passage.’

‘A yacht bound for Europe? What’s her cargo? Drugs?’ David asked him drily.

‘No, but her owner is dying and he wants to go home.’ The two men exchanged looks.

‘AIDS?’ David asked him forthrightly.

‘I imagine so,’ the older man agreed.

A very large proportion of the priest’s patients were in the final stages of that ravaging disease, abandoned by their frightened families and friends. Working alongside him, David had learned to respect the disease and those who suffered from it. To respect it and not to fear it.

‘I can’t go … not now….’ David resisted, but there was no denying the longing in his voice.

‘Do you often dream of your brother?’ Father Ignatius asked him obliquely.

‘Not like I did last night,’ David admitted. ‘I dreamed about when we were children. It was so vivid. It was when we got our first bikes, but the odd thing was …’ He paused and frowned. ‘In my dream, though I could see myself riding my bike, my feelings were Jon’s.’

The older man said nothing. He knew David had seen Jon Crighton from a safe distance when he had come to the island to visit Max in hospital and eventually take his son home. Life was so precious, and because he was becoming increasingly aware of just how frail his own physical strength was getting, the priest prayed that Jon Crighton would find it in his heart to welcome home his twin.

‘I can’t go,’ David was saying, but the older man knew not just that he could but that he would.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YES, MRS CRIGHTON … very well, Maddy,’ Honor corrected herself into the telephone receiver with a warm smile as she responded to her caller’s request that she use her Christian name. ‘I’d be very happy to come and see your father-in-law, although I can’t promise …’

She paused. Over the years she had grown used to the fact that her patients and their families, having failed to find a cure for their illnesses through conventional medicine, tended to expect that she could somehow produce something magical to restore them to full health.

‘Herbal medicine is not some kind of black art. It’s an exact science,’ she sometimes had to tell them severely.

Many modern drugs were, after all, originally derived from plants even if more latterly scientists had discovered ways to manufacture them synthetically in their laboratories. In her view, synthetic drugs, like synthetic foods, were not always sympathetic to the human system, and to judge from the increasing number of patients consulting her, other people were beginning to share her views.

Honor had not always been a herbalist. Far from it. She had been at medical school studying to become a doctor way back in the seventies, a sloe-eyed brunette burning the candle at both ends, studying and partying and desperately trying to deny her aristocratic background and connections to become part of the London ‘scene’. Ironically, it had not been on the London scene that she had met her late husband but through one of her mother’s friends.

Lady Caroline Agnew had been giving a coming-out party for her daughter, and Honor’s mother had insisted that Honor had to attend. Rourke had been there photographing the event. Lady Caroline had contacts at Vogue and he was the ‘in’ photographer of the moment, more used to photographing long-legged models than chubby adolescent debs.

Honor had been fascinated by him. Everything about him had proclaimed that he belonged to the world she so longed to join. His clothes, his hair, his laid-back manner and, most of all, his sharp cockney speech. Somehow or other she had managed to catch his eye and they had left the party together.

Three months later they became lovers and three months after that they married and she dropped out of medical school.

For two years she had been so passionately and completely in love with him that she had blinded herself to reality, his unfaithfulness, his drinking, the drugs he was taking with increasing regularity, the bills that mounted up because he refused to pay them, the unsavoury characters who hung like dark shadows on the edges of his life, their lives, and then she had become pregnant.

Their first daughter Abigail had been less than six months old the first time he left her.

Her parents, who had never really forgiven her for her marriage, had refused to have her home, but her father had given her a tiny allowance just enough to cover the rent on a small flat, and she had found herself a job working in a small family-owned chemist’s shop. It had been whilst working there that her interest in medicine had been reactivated. The shop was old-fashioned, its upper room stuffed with all manner of things amongst which Honor, who had been sent upstairs to tidy it, had found the herbal book that once opened she had been unable to put down.

Rourke, his affair over, had turned up on her doorstep one dark, wet night and foolishly she had taken him in. Nine months later Ellen was born. Rourke had already embarked on another affair with a rich older woman this time.

On her own again, Honor had become fascinated by herbal medicine and cures, so much so that when she learned of a local herbalist in a magazine she was reading in the dentist’s waiting room, she made a note of her address so that she could get in touch with her.

Now a fully trained herbalist herself, Honor always made a point of advising her patients to make sure they went to similarly trained and accredited practitioners whenever they chose alternative forms of healing.

Her own training had been long and thorough and one of her main reasons for coming to live here in the rather dilapidated house she had just moved into on her second cousin Lord Astlegh’s Cheshire estate was because of the land that went with it—land on which she would be able to grow some of her own herbs in a way that was completely natural and free from pesticides and any kind of chemicals. The house, which was miles away from any other habitation, might have drawn cries of despair from both her daughters, who had protested at its lack of modern amenities and creeping damp, but Honor had assured them that once she had time to get someone in to repair and improve the place, it would make a very snug home indeed.

‘It’s a hovel,’ Abigail had said forthrightly.

‘A wretched hovel,’ Ellen had agreed.

‘The locals will probably think you’re some kind of witch,’ Abigail had joked.

‘Thank you very much,’ Honor had told her daughter drily. ‘When I want my ego boosted, I shall know where to come.’

‘Oh, no, Mum, I didn’t mean you look like a witch,’ Abigail had immediately reassured her. ‘Actually, you look pretty good for your age.’

‘Mmm … Nowhere near forty-five,’ Ellen had agreed.

‘Forty-four, actually,’ Honor had corrected her with dignity.

‘Honestly, Mum,’ Abigail had told her. ‘With all the money you inherited from Dad, you could have bought yourself somewhere really comfortable. I know you had to scrimp and scrape whilst we were growing up, but now …’

‘Now I have chosen to come and live here,’ Honor had told them firmly.

She was still not totally over her shock at the amount of money she had inherited from Rourke. She hadn’t expected him to die so relatively young and certainly not from something so ridiculous as a cold turned to pneumonia. She was even more surprised to discover that since they had never divorced, she was his next of kin. The young leggy model he had been living with had been quite happy to accept the fact, simply shrugging her sparrow-like shoulder-blades and gazing at Honor with drug-glazed eyes as she shook her head over Honor’s concern and explained in a small, emotionless voice that she was really quite rich herself.

Rourke’s unexpected wealth had come not from his current work as a photographer but from his earlier and highly original work as a young man, which had now become extremely valuable collector’s pieces, selling for thousands upon thousands of pounds.

She had insisted on sharing the money with the girls, her daughters … Rourke’s daughters. Both of them were adults now and they often tended to treat her as though she were the one in need of parenting. Whilst both of them loved their mother’s elderly second cousin and thought that his Palladian home, Fitzburgh Place, and the philanthropic way in which he was developing the estate’s resources were both worthy of their highest approval, they were united in disapproval of the ramshackle place their mother had chosen to make her home.

‘I can’t bear to think about your living like this,’ Ellen had said, grimacing in distaste as she wiped a fastidious finger along one grimy window-sill the weekend her mother had moved into Foxdean.

‘Then don’t think about it,’ Honor had advised her gently.

Much as she loved them, her daughters, both wonderful girls, clever, independent, good fun to be with and undeniably beautiful, could, at times, in their attitudes and conversations, remind her disconcertingly of her own mother.

‘Honoraria has always been … way ward,’ her mother had been fond of saying exasperatedly, and Honor knew how pained and bemused her mother in particular had been at what she had seen as her daughter’s determination to turn her back on the kind of life they had expected her to lead.

If her decision not to go to Switzerland following in her mother’s footsteps and attending an exclusive finishing school but instead to study medicine had shocked and confused her parents, then the way she had ultimately lived her life, the man she had married, the friends she had made had earned her their wholehearted disapproval. But as she sometimes pithily had to remind the more conventional members of her large family, their aristocratic forebears, of whom they were so proud, had received their lands and titles for acts that had been little short of outright theft and barbarism.

Her parents had tried their best, poor darlings. No one could have been more true to stereotype than her father. His family, although not quite as noble as her mother’s, was nonetheless extremely respectably provenanced. No doubt the Victorian son of the Jessop family, who had so providentially married the only daughter of an extremely wealthy mill owner, had been more than happy to exchange his upper-class connections for her wealth. Honor’s mother’s family had always managed to marry well, which was, of course, the main reason why her second cousin, unlike so many of his peers, could afford to be paternally benevolent towards his tenants and keep his large estate in tiptop condition.

Apart, of course, from her house.

What she had not told her daughters, and moreover had no intention of telling them, was that the main reason the house was so dilapidated was because of the history appertaining to it.

Local legend had it that originally it had been built on the instructions of the younger brother of the then Lord Astlegh to accommodate his mistress. He would visit her there, often spending several days with her much to the disapproval of his elder brother and the rest of his family who had arranged a profitable marriage for him with the daughter of another landowner.

The young man refused to do their bidding. The only woman he wanted, the only one he could love, was his mistress, the wild gypsy girl for whom he had built the house but whom he would often find wandering barefoot through the woods scorning the comforts of the home he had given her.

‘Come with me,’ she was supposed to have begged him when he told her of his family’s plans for his future. ‘We can go away together … be together….’

He had shaken his head. He loved fine food, fine wines, fine books.

‘I can’t stay here,’ the gypsy girl had told him. ‘It hems me in. I need to travel, to be free. Come with me.’

‘I cannot,’ he had told her sorrowfully.

‘You are a coward,’ she had returned contemptuously. ‘You have no fire, no passion. You are weak. You are not a true man, not like a Romany man. A Romany man would kill for the woman he loved.’

Her voice had been scornful, her eyes flashing, and in the darkness of the small copse where they had argued, he had mistaken her tears for a gleam of taunting mockery.

It had been said later when the bodies were found that she had bewitched him and that only by killing her and then killing himself had he been able to break free of her spell.

He came from a powerful family, the most powerful family in the area. James, his elder brother, the then Lord Astlegh, used his position to have the affair hushed up, but news of what had happened quickly spread amongst the local population and with it claims that the copse and the house itself were haunted. Tenants who pooh-poohed the warnings and moved sturdily into it very quickly decided to move out again!

It was a reasonably sized house, a well-built, pretty Georgian red brick building with its own small porticoes and elegant sash windows, the kind of house that the upper-class women Honor had grown up with would drool over as the ideal country retreat, but her cousin was unable to successfully find a tenant. It was he who told Honor of the legend surrounding it.

‘Have you ever seen a ghost there?’ she had asked him, intrigued.

Immediately, he had shaken his head. ‘Dashed nonsense if you ask me,’ he told her gruffly. ‘But wouldn’t want you not to know about it. Give it to you rent-free. Can’t sell it—part of the estate. Have to do your own restoration work on it … local workforce shun the place.’

Honor who had fallen in love with the house the moment she saw it had been delighted.

Her chance visit to her second cousin had really been a duty visit since she had heard on the family grapevine that he was suffering badly from a colicky stomach disorder that the doctors seemed unable to relieve. She had guessed that she was being subtly asked if she could do anything to help, but the visit had had the most advantageous outcome. She had been looking for a new home for some time.

Rourke’s inheritance meant that she could actually afford to completely renovate the place and fulfil the ambition she had been harbouring, not just to prepare her herbal remedies but to grow the herbs themselves, as well. Foxdean, with its surrounding land, was perfect for her purposes. Why, she might even be able to persuade her cousin to allow her to erect a glass house where she could grow some of the more tender, vulnerable herbs.

A visit to Haslewich’s excellent health-food shop and a long chat over lunch with its owner had resulted in her being contacted by so many potential patients that her diary was becoming quite full. This was why, as she listened to Maddy Crighton outlining her grandfather-in-law’s problems, she had to tell her, ‘I can’t do anything for Mr Crighton until I have seen him, of course, and unfortunately, my first free appointment is not for a few weeks.’

There was a small pause at the other end of the telephone line, then she heard Maddy saying, ‘Oh dear. Well, in that case we shall just have to wait until then.’

As she pencilled the appointment into her diary, Honor asked Maddy several questions about her grandfather-in-law.

‘He’s had two hip operations in the past few years, but he’s still complaining about the pain he’s suffering,’ Maddy informed her. ‘But it isn’t just his pain that’s concerning us. Just lately he seems to have lost interest in life. He’s always been rather dour and a little bit tetchy, but these past few months …’

‘If he’s in constant pain, it will be having a debilitating effect on him,’ Honor responded, ‘if his GP hasn’t prescribed some painkillers.’

‘Oh, he has, but Gramps threw them away. He isn’t very good about taking medicine … he doesn’t have a very high opinion of the medical profession.’

‘Oh dear,’ Honor sympathised, guessing that Ben Crighton was the kind of patient who made most doctors’ hearts sink.

‘I’m afraid I must be painting a rather gloomy picture,’ Maddy apologised. ‘Gramps can be a little bit difficult at times, but I hate to see him in so much discomfort. He isn’t so old after all, only in his early eighties. I know it must be frustrating for him not being able to get about as much as he used to. He doesn’t drive any more and he can’t walk very far.’

‘Try to persuade him to take the painkillers his doctor has prescribed,’ Honor advised her.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to do something to help him?’ Maddy asked tentatively.

‘Hopefully, yes. You’d be amazed at the difference even the smallest fine-tuning of someone’s diet can make where joint pain is concerned. Then there are poultices that can be applied to the damaged joints and a variety of herbal medicines that can help. I’ll be better placed to discuss these with you, though, once I’ve seen Mr Crighton.’

After she had finished speaking, Honor went through to the old-fashioned back kitchen that she was in the process of turning into her still-room. In the passage that led from the kitchen proper to this room, she had put up bookshelves and she looked quickly along them, extracting a volume that she carried back with her to the kitchen proper. She sat down in a chair whilst she looked for what she wanted.

The book was one she had found tucked away amongst a pile of fusty documents at the back of a little bookshop in the cathedral town of Wells. As it was entitled A Medieval Herbal, she had pounced on it straight away. Now as she turned the pages, she paused at the one headed ‘Bramble’ and read it with a small smile. ‘For sore of joints take some part of this same wort, seethe in wine to a third part and with the wine then let the joints be bathed.’

As she closed the book, Honor sat back in her chair. Herbalism had come a long way since its early days, but its principles were still the same as they had always been—to heal the sick.

In the high-pressure world of modern drugs the race was on to comb the most remote tracts of land searching for the plant that would give the world a panacea that would cure mankind of all his ills and give him eternal youth.

Personally, Honor felt that their efforts would be better employed in preserving the rain forests instead of letting them be destroyed. Surely the increasing incidence of childhood asthma and eczemas was proof enough of what polluting the earth’s atmosphere was doing. Trees cleaned the air. Without them …

Already she had plans to plant a new grove of trees on her rented land. She knew that her views, her beliefs, often exasperated Ellen who, as a biologist, took a somewhat different view of things, whereas Abigail, an accountant, tended to view everything in terms of profit and loss.

It often amazed her that she had produced two such practical daughters—or was it that the hand-to-mouth peripatetic existence they had all had to live when the girls were young had made them overly cautious?

As she got up to fill the kettle and make herself a cup of coffee, the black cat, who had appeared from out of nowhere the first week she moved in and adopted her, strolled through the door.

None of Honor’s enquiries had brought forward an owner for the cat, who had now fine-tuned her timetable to such a precise degree that Honor knew without having to look at the kitchen clock that it must be three o’clock.

The cat, she assumed, must have found its way to the house along the old bridle-way that passed in front of it, leading from Haslewich to Chester across her cousin’s land.

She frowned as she glanced towards the kitchen door. Like the rest of the house, it was very much in need of repair if not replacement. She was going to have to renew her efforts in finding someone to work on the place soon.

The two large building firms she contacted had given her what she considered to be extortionate quotes and the three small ‘one-man’ businesses she tried had all turned her down with a variety of excuses.

Thoroughly exasperated when the third man who had been recommended to her claimed to be ‘too busy’, she challenged him, ‘Don’t tell me that people around here still actually believe those idiotic stories about the place being haunted?’

The man had flushed but stood his ground. ‘They ain’t just stories,’ he had told her grimly. ‘Uncle of mine broke his leg working here. Aye, and had to have it cut off—infection set in.’

‘An accident,’ Honor had responded. ‘They do happen.’

‘Aye, they do, and this house has had more than its fair share of them,’ he had answered bluntly.

‘I can’t believe that people are actually refusing to work on the house because of some silly story of its being haunted,’ Honor had complained to her cousin a few days later when he invited her up to Fitzburgh Place to have dinner. ‘I mean … it’s just so … so … ridiculous.’

‘Not as far as the Cooke family are concerned,’ he had retorted. ‘They’re closely related to the gypsy tribe the girl was supposed to have come from, and in a small town such things aren’t easily forgotten.’

‘Oh, I’m not saying that there wasn’t an affair nor that it didn’t end tragically. It’s just this silly idea of the house being haunted.’

‘Mmm … well, the Cookes are a stubborn lot, a law unto themselves in many ways. You could try bringing someone in from Chester.’

‘I could try paying nearly double what I should be paying to a high-priced fancy builder, as well,’ Honor retorted drily, adding with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I’m beginning to think my “bargain” home with its peppercorn rent wasn’t quite the bargain I first supposed.’

‘Ah well, my dear, you know what they say,’ Lord Astlegh told her jovially. ‘Caveat emptor.’

‘Let the buyer beware,’ she translated.

REMEMBERING the pleasant evening she had spent with her cousin, Honor smiled. He was a kind man, well-read and interesting to talk with. A widower now without any children to inherit from him, he was determined to do everything he could to safeguard the estate from being broken up when it eventually passed into the hands of the next in line. It was to that end that he was trying to make the estate as self-supporting as possible, using a variety of innovative means.

The outbuildings that he had converted into small, self-contained working units for a variety of local craftspeople were now in such demand that he had a waiting list of eager tenants. The antiques fairs and other events that the estate hosted brought in not just extra income but visitors to the working units and to the house and gardens and its tea and gift shops.

He was now talking about renovating the orangery and getting it licenced for weddings, and Honor had to admit it would make a perfect setting for them. Large enough to hold even the most lavish of receptions, the orangery ran along one wall of the enclosed kitchen garden. Enthusiastically, he had described to her how he planned to have the garden subtly altered with the addition of bowers of white climbing roses and a fountain.

As she listened to him, Honor had discovered that most of his ideas came originally from the man who was responsible for organising the antiques fairs—Guy Cooke.

‘Nice chap,’ he had told Honor. ‘Must introduce you to him and his wife. Pretty girl. One of the Crightons but on the wrong side of the blanket. Still, can’t say too much about that with our colourful family history, can we?’

THE CAT MIAOWED demandingly and to oblige it Honor went to get some food. Tomorrow she would make a concerted effort to find herself a builder—unless fate was kind enough to send her one.

‘A HERBALIST! I can’t see Gramps … Do you think that’s a good idea?’ Max Crighton asked his wife dubiously. ‘He’s bad enough about conventional medicine and I don’t think—’

‘We don’t have to tell him that she’s a herbalist,’ Maddy said gently. ‘I don’t want to deceive him, but I’m so worried about him, Max. He looks so weak and frail even the children are beginning to notice.’

‘Mmm. I know what you mean,’ Max agreed absently, picking up one of the fresh scones Maddy had just placed on a wire rack to cool and then shaking his fingers as it burned them.

‘Wait until they’re cool,’ Maddy scolded him. ‘You know they’ll give you indigestion if you don’t.’

‘Indigestion.’ Max’s eyes danced with laughter. ‘That’s what marriage does for you. The woman you love stops seeing you as someone who is sexually exciting and thinks of you instead as someone with indigestion.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Maddy responded with a small smile.

‘No?’ Max questioned, his voice muffled as he took her in his arms and buried his mouth in the warm, soft, creamy, cooking-scented curve of her throat.

‘Nooooo …’ Maddy sighed.

The truth was that it would be hard to find a man who was more sexually attractive than her husband. Max wore his sexuality with very much the same panache and air of self-mockery with which he wore his barrister’s robes, a kind of dangerously sexy tongue-in-cheek, wry amusement at the reaction he was causing, coupled with a subtle but oh so sexy unspoken invitation to share in his amusement at it.

‘Why is that lady looking at my daddy?’ Emma had once asked Maddy as Max had met them both on their way home from school. He had stopped his car and got out, causing all the other mothers to gawp at him with varying degrees of bemused appreciation.

‘The lady’ in question had been almost as stunningly attractive as Max was himself, but for all the notice he had taken of her she might as well have been the same age as his aunt Ruth.

To the envy of Maddy’s friends, Max was a totally devoted husband and father.

It hadn’t always been that way. The Max who had married her had been a dangerous predatory man who had treated the emotions of those closest to him with a callousness it was hard to imagine now.

If, by some horrible blow of fate, the changes within him brought about by his frighteningly close brush with death in Jamaica should ever be reversed and he should revert to the man she had first met, Maddy knew that she could not and would not go back to being the girl she had been, the girl who had such low self-esteem that she had quietly and humbly allowed Max to emotionally abuse her.

Those days were gone and so was that Maddy. Now she and Max were equal partners in their marriage. Max didn’t just love her; he respected her, as well.

‘Where are one, two and three?’ he murmured against her throat as he nibbled hungrily, referring to their three children.

‘At your mother’s,’ Maddy told him huskily.

‘Mmm … let’s go upstairs.’

‘What’s wrong with down here?’ Maddy teased him daringly, giving him a flirtatious look. ‘Ben never comes in here and there’s no one else in the house.’

‘Here?’

Max raised his eyebrows, but Maddy could tell that her suggestion had excited him.

‘You look so wonderfully sexy in your court clothes,’ she whispered in a small breathy voice.

Max started to laugh but immediately joined in her game, reaching out towards the tray of scones and saying sternly, ‘So what is this? I see that one scone is missing and you, wench, are the only one who could have taken it. Such a theft demands a very heavy sentence.’

‘No … no …’ Maddy cried, trying to tug her hand out of Max’s grasp, but he refused to let her go, skilfully backing her against the table.

‘A very heavy punishment,’ he repeated huskily. ‘Unless, mayhap, you have not eaten the stolen sweetmeat but secreted it about your person, in your pocket, perchance,’ he demanded. ‘Or …’

As his hands lifted towards her breasts, Maddy exploded into laughter. ‘Oh, Max.’ But as she saw the look in her husband’s eye, her laughter died.

‘Oh, Max, what?’ he challenged as he moved his body over hers and slid his free hand inside the blouse he had just unfastened. His palm felt heavy and warm against her breast, her nipple hardening immediately.

‘We can’t,’ Maddy breathed. ‘Not here …’

‘No?’ Max challenged her, letting go of her wrist to push her blouse off her shoulder and un-clip the front fastening of her bra before lifting her onto the table.

An hour later, a flushed and floury Maddy just managed to finish fastening her blouse before her three children and her mother-in-law came into the kitchen.

‘Jenny.’ Maddy beamed as she responded to the older woman’s affectionate hug. ‘Thanks for having them. Have you been good for Grandma?’ she asked her two elder children whilst Max expertly scooped their youngest out of Jenny’s arms.

‘Your skirt is all floury,’ Leo pointed out to his mother.

‘Yes, and so is your blouse,’ Emma chirped.

Blushing, Maddy turned away.

‘Mummy’s been very busy,’ Max told them tongue-in-cheek.

As Maddy turned towards him to give him a wifely look, Jenny remarked in amusement, ‘There’s flour all over the back of your skirt, as well, Maddy … and Max’s suit—’

‘Caught in the act,’ Max admitted cheerfully. ‘Well, almost …’

‘Max!’

Both Jenny and Maddy protested at the same time.

‘What does Daddy mean?’ Emma demanded, tugging insistently at Maddy’s skirt.

‘Uh-huh, bath time for you, baby,’ Max announced quickly, walking towards the kitchen door.

‘Men!’ Maddy expostulated to her mother-in-law after he had escaped.

‘Hmm. Talking of which, how’s Ben?’ Jenny asked her.

‘Not really any better,’ Maddy admitted. ‘He just doesn’t seem to … I’ve arranged for this herbalist I’ve heard about to come and see him. The problem is that she’s so busy it’s going to be a few weeks before she can come.’

‘A herbalist …?’

‘Herbal medicines are proven to work,’ Maddy began defensively, but Jenny shook her head.

‘I wasn’t criticising, my dear. I think it’s an excellent idea.’

‘Do you? Good. In fact, I’ve been wondering if we mightn’t use it somehow at The Houses.’

‘The Houses’ were the units of accommodation originally sponsored and started by Ben Crighton’s sister Ruth to provide secure homes for single mothers and their babies. They had since been extended to provide not just accommodation and rooms where young fathers could visit their children, but also to give access to educational opportunities to help equip the young mothers to earn their own living.

‘What are you planning to do?’ Jenny asked Maddy in some amusement. ‘Train all our teenage mums as potential herbalists?’

Maddy laughed. ‘No, of course not. No, what I was thinking was that we could perhaps utilise the kitchen garden here and combine a programme on gardening with nutritional awareness and simple, basic home remedies of the type our grandmothers would have used. It would be another step towards making our mums independent and add to their sense of self-worth.’

‘Well, it’s certainly worth thinking about,’ Jenny agreed.

After her late marriage to the man she had loved and believed lost to her, the father of her illegitimate daughter, Ruth had handed over day-to-day control of the charity she had founded to Jenny and Maddy, thus allowing her to split her time between her home in Haslewich and her family in America.

‘Mmm … and you know that land that was used for allotments—the land the council owns down by the river—it’s all overgrown and untidy now. Well, I was thinking, if we could persuade them to allow us to use it, the boys could perhaps be encouraged to clear it. It could be a community project.’

As she listened to the enthusiasm in her daughter-in-law’s voice, Jenny reflected that Ruth couldn’t have chosen anyone better to be her successor. Maddy had transformed herself from the shy, downtrodden bride Max had married into a woman of such enormous capability and compassion, of such energy and love, that Jenny felt blessed to have her as a member of the family.

‘Joss is most concerned about Ben,’ she confessed quietly to her daughter-in-law. ‘He asked Jon if he thought David would ever come home.’

Maddy gave the older woman an understanding look. ‘Gramps has become increasingly withdrawn and morose, as you know, but when he does speak, increasingly the sole topic of his conversation is David, and just recently he’s no longer talking about if David comes back but when he comes back.’

‘Oh dear,’ Jenny sighed. ‘Do you think …?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘Oh, no, he’s perfectly sensible. No sign of any dementia, according to Dr Forbes. No. I think that Ben is just so desperate to have David home, so determined that he will come home, that he’s convinced himself that it is going to happen. Do you think he will come back?’ Maddy asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Jenny replied thoughtfully. ‘He wasn’t … isn’t … like Jon. He …’

‘He’s like Max was before,’ Maddy agreed. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Well, yes, but David never really had that … that hard-edged aggression of Max’s,’ Jenny told her. ‘He was selfish, yes, breathtakingly so, but weak. He must have known for years about Tiggy’s eating disorder,’ Jenny used the nickname for Tania the whole family knew her by, ‘but he never once attempted to do anything about it so far as we can tell. He never made any attempt to defend Olivia from Ben’s unkindness when she was growing up or to encourage her in her ambition to become a solicitor. And as for poor little Jack …’

‘Olivia has always said that he wasn’t a good father.’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ Jenny concurred soberly and then felt obliged to add in her brother-in-law’s defence much as she knew Jon would have done, ‘But against that you have to set his upbringing and the appalling indulgence with which Ben treated him. He put David on a pedestal so high that it not only gave him a warped idea of his own importance, but it must have been frightening for him at times.’

‘Frightening?’ Maddy queried.

‘Mmm … He must have worried about falling off it,’ Jenny told her simply. ‘And Ben never stopped insisting to Jon that he must virtually devote his life to his first-born twin brother. He also paradoxically and probably without thinking deliberately did everything he could to drive a wedge between them. Their loyalty to one another was never left to develop naturally. Jon was practically ordered to put David first.

‘It all stemmed, of course, from the fact that Ben lost his own twin brother at birth. His mother, who I am sure never realised what she was doing and was perhaps following the way of the times, seems to have brought Ben up in the belief that his dead brother would have been a saint and that Ben’s life and hers were blighted because he was not there to share it with them.

‘Having a twin is such a special relationship,’ Jenny added soberly. ‘To have another person made in one’s exact physical image and to have shared the intimacy of the womb with him and yet to know oneself to be completely separate from him.’

‘Olivia would hate it if David were to return,’ Maddy said with insight.

‘She does have scant reason to want him back. As we’ve agreed, he wasn’t a good father. Add to that the fact that she had to deal with not just her mother’s bulimia but David’s fraud, as well, at a time when her own relationship with Caspar was going through a bad patch, and I can understand why she feels so negatively towards him.’

‘Yes, so can I.’ Very carefully, Maddy drew an abstract outline on the kitchen table with her fingernail before saying slowly to Jenny, ‘I don’t think Olivia is feeling too happy at the moment.’

As she lifted her head and looked into Jenny’s eyes, the older woman’s heart sank. Olivia was as close and as dear to her as one of her own daughters—more so in some ways—and although Olivia had said nothing to her, Jenny, too, had noticed how strained and unhappy she was looking.

‘Jon has told her that she is working far too hard,’ Jenny responded.

There was a small pause and then Maddy said uncertainly, ‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong between her and Caspar, do you?’

Jenny looked searchingly at her. ‘What makes you ask that?’

‘Nothing. Well, nothing I can explain logically,’ Maddy admitted. ‘It’s just … well, I’ve noticed whenever I go round that there’s a sort of atmosphere.’

‘Olivia has mentioned that she feels that Caspar ought to refuse an invitation they’ve received to attend a wedding in the family,’ Jenny told her carefully. ‘Perhaps …’

‘No, Olivia told me about that. I think it’s more than that. They just don’t … they just don’t seem happy together any more,’ Maddy told her hesitantly. ‘And the children …’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘Olivia isn’t the type to discuss her most personal thoughts and feelings freely, but I know how much you and Jon think of her and would hate—’

‘Olivia has always been a very private person,’ Jenny quickly agreed. ‘Her home life made her very independent from an early age. That was one of the things that helped her to bond so closely with Caspar, I think, the fact that they both experienced difficult childhoods, Caspar with his parents’ constant remarriages and Olivia with David and Tiggy’s problems. We were very close when Olivia was younger, but she seems to have changed since Alex’s birth.’ Jenny gave a small sigh. ‘I suppose it’s only to be expected—she has Caspar now and the children, and Caspar adores Amelia and Alex. He’s a wonderful father.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Maddy agreed, turning away from Jenny as she asked a little awkwardly, ‘I was wondering if that could be part of the problem. Oh, I know that Olivia loves them, too, but—’

‘You think that she might be a little resentful of the fact that because of their different careers, Caspar has taken over the main parenting role?’ Jenny guessed. ‘Olivia loves her children,’ she added protectively.

‘Her children—yes,’ Maddy replied before saying uncomfortably, ‘I probably shouldn’t mention this, but the other week when we were over there for dinner, Olivia really snapped at Caspar over something trifling and it wasn’t just an ordinary husband-and-wife grizzle. She’s told me, too, that she thinks Caspar has become far too protective of the children. Whilst we were there, she said to him, quite vehemently, that Haslewich wasn’t New York.’

‘Max is a very caring father, too,’ Jenny said.

‘Mmm … but not to the extent of correcting me about what size socks the children wear and whether or not they need new underwear,’ Maddy told her simply. ‘To be quite honest, I can imagine that in Olivia’s shoes I might easily feel just a little shut out and I—’

‘You didn’t have Olivia’s upbringing when she learned in the most painful way that as a girl, as herself, she wasn’t properly valued. I understand what you’re saying and I can see the problem, but seeing it and knowing what to do about it are two different things.’

‘Yes, I know. I did offer to have the children for a weekend so the two of them could go away together, but Olivia said that they simply didn’t have the time. “I’m far too busy at work” and “Caspar would never leave the children” were her exact words.’

‘Mmm …’ Jenny was thoughtful.

‘Oh, and speaking of children, I almost forgot. Did Leo say anything to you about seeing a strange man?’

‘No!’ Jenny denied immediately, looking alarmed. ‘Where? What …?’

‘Well, you know what a vivid imagination my son’s got.’ Maddy gave Jenny a rueful look. ‘But he keeps talking about a “nice man” who he wants to be his friend. He says he’s seen him in the garden. “Grampy Man” he calls him, whatever that means! But whenever we’ve gone out to look, we haven’t seen a sign of anyone.’

‘Oh, Maddy, have you told the police? These days …’

‘Not yet. Leo knows, of course, about not talking to strangers or going near them, but the odd thing is that he keeps referring to this man as a nice man, but when I asked him what he meant he couldn’t explain. He’s normally very cautious, too, but—’

‘Where exactly has he seen him?’ Jenny asked worriedly.

‘In the garden. But when I wanted to know what the man was doing, Leo said, “Nothing. He was just standing looking.” Not at him, apparently, but at the house.’

‘I think you really ought to mention it to the police,’ Jenny cautioned.

‘Yes, but if it’s just some poor itinerant looking for an empty shed to spend the night in—’

‘Maddy, you’ve got a heart of gold,’ Jenny told her, shaking her head.

‘Maybe, but I’m still making sure that the children don’t go out of my sight when they’re in the garden,’ Maddy assured her.

As the grandfather clock on the stairs struck the hour, Maddy gave a small groan.

‘Is that the time? I haven’t given Ben his medicine yet this afternoon.’

Jenny laughed not unsympathetically as she told her, ‘Perhaps if your herbalist’s remedies work, you won’t have to any more.’

Maddy laughed with her. ‘Wouldn’t that be something? You wouldn’t believe the lengths he goes to not to have to take his pills and yet, after refusing them, he goes on to complain about the pain he’s in. He says they make him feel sleepy and he’s even accused us of trying to sedate him into senility. He apologises afterwards, of course, but when he’s having a bad day …’ She shook her head.

‘You’re a saint. Do you know that?’ Jenny told her fondly as she got up and gave her a loving hug.

CHAPTER THREE

‘… MADDY WAS SAYING that when she and Max went to dinner with Olivia and Caspar, Olivia was … Jon, you aren’t listening to a word I’m saying,’ Jenny protested.

‘Sorry, Jen. What was that?’ Jon apologised, giving his wife a penitent look.

‘I was just trying to talk to you about how concerned both Maddy and I are about Olivia and Caspar,’ Jenny told him mock sternly and then sighed and asked him more gently, ‘What is it, Jon? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ he denied swiftly, too swiftly in Jenny’s wifely opinion.

‘Yes, there is,’ she insisted. ‘Tell me.’

‘It’s David,’ Jon admitted with reluctance. ‘I just can’t stop thinking about him. I don’t want to. Heaven knows I’ve got a hundred other things I ought to be thinking about—at least—but no matter how hard I try to keep him out, he keeps coming into my mind.’

Because she understood and loved him, instead of allowing him to see her curiosity by demanding further details, she simply smiled and said nonchalantly, ‘Oh, I expect it’s just because we’ve been talking about him recently.’

‘Mmm … that’s what I thought,’ Jon agreed in relief. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked as Jenny suddenly got up out of her armchair and hurried towards the sitting-room door.

‘Oh, I just remembered that I need to give Katie a ring. She was saying the other day that she had no idea what to get her mother-in-law for her birthday and I saw the very thing for her in the shop, the prettiest Dresden inkstand.’

The antiques shop in Haslewich, which had originally been owned and run by Jenny and her partner, Guy Cooke, but which was now owned solely by Guy and run by one of his cousins, Didi, was a favourite stopping-off point for Jenny whenever she went into town. Still, Jon couldn’t help giving a faint, pained male sigh of incomprehension and bewilderment at his wife’s sudden and to him inexplicable need to speak with their daughter right in the middle of a discussion about something else.

‘I thought you wanted to talk to me about Olivia and Caspar,’ Jon complained.

‘Yes. I did … I do,’ Jenny agreed. ‘But you know what I’m like. If I don’t ring Katie now and tell her about the inkstand, I’ll probably forget.’

Jon blinked a little in surprise at this disarming statement since, as he had good cause to know, Jenny never forgot anything. She could, he often privately thought, have masterminded the provisioning and deployment of an army were she called upon to do so, so excellent was her grasp on all the many different threads of her life. Still, who was he as a mere male, a mere husband, to question the intricate thought patterns of a master tactician?

‘Katie?’ Jenny answered her daughter’s hello as she picked up the telephone receiver. ‘Do you ever find that Louise sometimes pops into your thoughts, sometimes when you don’t really expect her to be there?’

‘As though she’s trying to get in touch with me, you mean?’ Katie responded to her mother’s question with immediate insight. ‘It did happen, especially when we were younger and she wanted to borrow money off me.’ She laughed before saying more seriously, ‘Yes, I do get her in my thoughts. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing, not really. Oh, and by the way, I saw the ideal present for Seb’s mother in the shop the other day. It—’

‘—the antique inkstand. I’ve already bought it for her,’ Katie told her mother triumphantly. ‘I was in town myself this afternoon and the moment I saw it I knew she’d love it. I bumped into Maddy, as well. She said something about consulting a herbalist to see if she could do anything to help Gramps.’

‘Mmm … she was telling me all about it earlier,’ Jenny said.

‘It isn’t a herbalist he really needs,’ Katie told her sadly. ‘It’s a magician, someone who can wave a wand and bring Uncle David back for him. Speaking of which, this herbalist of Maddy’s wouldn’t be the woman who’s moved into Foxdean, would it? She was in the health-food shop when I went in the other day. Very attractive. Tall, dark-haired, with the most amazingly piercing blue eyes, and despite her casual clothes she had that unmistakable look of elegance about her—if you know what I mean. After she had gone, Didi told me that she’s related to Lord Astlegh, a second cousin or something.’

‘Well, Guy will know. He’s very close to Lord Astlegh and he goes over to Fitzburgh Place pretty regularly. Foxdean. It’s very brave of her to have moved in there.’

‘Because of the ghost? Oh, come on, Ma, you don’t believe in that, do you?’

‘No, of course not. What I meant was that she was brave to move in there because of the state of the house. Look, I must go. Your father will be waiting for his supper. We’ll be seeing you on Sunday, though, won’t we?’

‘You certainly will. Seb says that nothing would stop him from eating one of your Sunday lunches.’

After replacing the receiver, Jenny went over to the fridge, opened it and removed some of her home-made pâté. Jon loved cheese and pickles with fresh, crusty bread for his supper, but it gave him the most dreadful indigestion. He would complain about being given the pâté instead, of course, but he would still enjoy it.

Was it a sign that they were becoming old that the very predictability of her husband’s reactions was something she found reassuring and comforting as well as amusing rather than boring or irritating? If so, then as far as she was concerned, it was a definite plus point. The heady excitement that accompanied the early stages of being in love might have been denied to her and Jon for a variety of complex reasons that were now past history, but Jenny felt she had been more than compensated for its absence by the deep and richly joyous loving contentment and companionship they now shared. And for her, sex, too, was something that had improved and become infinitely more pleasurable in these past few years.

It now seemed odd to think that she had once envied David and Tania their outwardly so perfect marriage, feeling that everyone who knew them must pity Jon because his plain, dull wife in no way matched up to the exciting glamour attached to being married to an ex-model.

Quietly, she picked up the supper tray and headed for the sitting room, the new fitted carpets they had splashed out on the previous autumn muffling the sound of her footsteps as she pushed open the door.

Jon was standing with his back towards her, studying one of the photographs she kept on the small antique bureau. Silently, Jenny watched him.

The photograph was one that had been taken on the night of David and Jon’s shared fiftieth birthday party. Jenny forgot who had taken it, but it had caught David and Jon in mid-conversation with one another and conveyed a closeness that in reality had not existed, a rapport that for some reason made them look even more physically alike than they actually were.

Although he rarely spoke about it to her now, Jenny knew just how much David’s disloyalty and dishonesty had distressed Jon.

‘If my father knew what Ruth and I were doing by covering up for David, he would be shocked senseless,’ Jon had sadly said to Jenny at the time his brother’s fraud came to light.

Jenny had said nothing. If David had committed a murder, Ben would have expected and even demanded that Jon claim the crime was his to spare David any punishment.

‘If you didn’t let Ruth pay back the money, could you ever forgive yourself?’ Jenny had asked him.

The bleak smile he had given her had supplied the answer. Jon was the most honest and upright man there could be and Jenny knew how torn he was by his own conflicting desires to protect their clients from the results of David’s weakness and to save David from the consequences of his actions.

Nor could she forget, either, that David had suffered a heart attack at that very birthday party, one brought on by the stress he was under. Jon might live a far healthier lifestyle than his twin brother, but it wasn’t unknown for twins to share the same health problems, which was one of the reasons she was so insistent on Jon’s not working too hard at the practice.

But her concern for Jon’s health did not mean that she wanted to see Olivia putting a strain on her own marriage by trying to do too much. Perhaps she ought to suggest to Jon that he consider taking on another full-time qualified solicitor.

The arrival of Aarlston-Becker, the huge multinational drug company, in the area some years ago had brought a dramatic increase in the firm’s workload. Aarlston had their own legal department, of course, part of which was headed by Saul Crighton, another in the family caught up in the field of law.

As the tea tray gave a faint rattle, Jon quickly replaced the photograph and turned round to face her. Giving no indication that she had noticed anything out of the ordinary, Jenny smiled her thanks at him as he pulled out the small table they used for their suppers.

‘You won’t believe it, but Katie actually saw the inkstand and bought it. She sends her love,’ Jenny added chattily, but she could see that Jon still wasn’t really giving her his full attention. Now wasn’t the time to probe and pry. Ben’s distress over David’s absence was obviously affecting Jon, but what if David were to come back? Such an event would give rise to all manner of problems and conflicts and she certainly had no wish to see her beloved Jon pushed into second place again or made to feel that he had to shoulder the burden of protecting his brother.

Would it be very wrong of her if she were to offer up a tiny prayer that things could continue as they were and that the warm contentment of their lives should not be disrupted? Maybe not wrong, she acknowledged, but perhaps a little selfish.

AS DIDI FINISHED cataloguing the weeks’ sales from the antiques shop for its owner, Guy Cooke noticed that his normally chatty cousin seemed rather preoccupied.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked her quietly when they had finished their business discussion and had moved on to talk about family matters and the forthcoming eighteenth birthday of Didi’s son, Todd.

‘I’m a bit concerned about Annalise,’ she admitted worriedly. Annalise was her niece, the eldest child of her brother, whose acrimonious divorce had caused a good deal of discussion within the family four years earlier when it had taken place.

‘Paul’s eldest?’ Guy asked, surprised. ‘But Paul was saying only at Christmas how well she was doing at school.’

‘Yes, but in the past few weeks she’s apparently changed completely, neglecting her school-work, going out and refusing to tell him where she’s been or whom she’s been with. Paul says that she’s either lost in some kind of day-dream or snapping at the boys, so much so that she actually made little Teddy cry the other day when she told him off for forgetting to bring his sports kit home from school. And Paul said he has to speak to her at least half a dozen times on some occasions before he gets any kind of response from her.’

‘Sounds like she could be in love,’ Guy suggested.

‘Yes. That’s what Paul’s afraid of,’ Didi admitted.

Guy gave her a rather wry look. ‘Girls of seventeen do fall in love,’ he pointed out with a small smile, ‘or at least they think they do.’

‘Well, yes, but because of her parents’ divorce and her own rather serious nature, Annalise isn’t perhaps quite as aware as most other girls of her age. In some ways as a little mother to the others, she’s very mature, but in other ways—so far as boys go—she’s quite naïve.

‘Paul has tended to be a bit overprotective of them all since the divorce from their mother was a particularly unpleasant one. There had been … relationships with more than one other man before she eventually left with a lover. As you know, his wife’s a Cooke, too, another member of our large family and you also know how old gossip and exaggerated histories tend to be exhumed at times like this. Paul has been determined that his children, and especially Annalise, should remain free of any taint of “carrying the wild Cooke genes”. I have tried to hint gently to him since Annalise started to grow up that there is such a thing as being too protective where boys, sex and relationships are concerned, but you know how prickly Paul can be at times.’

‘Yes, a difficult situation, whichever way you look at it. Do we know who it is that Annalise has fallen so deeply in love with or—’

‘We do, and it poses a problem. It’s a boy called Pete Hunter. Paul is not disposed to think kindly of him because he’s the lead singer with a local group that’s all the rage at the moment.’

‘You mean Salt?’ Guy asked, naming the group of five young local boys who all the teenagers raved over.

‘Mmm … that’s them.’ She gave Guy a curious look. ‘I’m surprised you know the band’s name. I wouldn’t have thought their kind of music was to your taste, Guy.’

‘It isn’t,’ he agreed, ‘but Mike, my sister Frances’s boy, is a member of the group.’

‘Oh, yes, of course he is. So you’ll know Pete, then?’

‘Sort of. A tall, dark-haired lad with what I personally feel is just a little too much “attitude”,’ Guy returned wryly.

‘That’s the one,’ Didi sighed. ‘I mean in one way I doubt that Paul needs to be too worried. Pete is very self-aware and very sure of himself and what he wants from life. I doubt that normally he’d look very hard in Annalise’s direction. Not that she isn’t attractive, she is, and she’s going to be even more so, but right now she’s still very much a seventeen-year-old and a young seventeen-year-old at that.

‘From what I’ve heard, the girls Pete normally squires around are rather more streetwise and, dare I say it, bimboish, and if Paul hadn’t been silly enough to go storming round to Pete’s parents’ house and demand that Pete stay away from his daughter, I’m sure her crush would have died a natural and early death. Of course, Pete being the type of young man he is, Paul’s interference has had exactly the opposite effect from the one he wanted and now, apparently, Annalise has been seen in several clubs around the area where the band has been playing, very much a member of the band’s entourage.’

‘And does Paul know about this?’

‘I’m not sure, but once he does find out, as he’s bound to do … Annalise is at a very vulnerable age and if Paul starts trying to come the heavy father—’

‘Or if in his anxiety he panics and starts telling her she’s going to end up like her mother …’

‘Exactly,’ Didi agreed. ‘I’ve tried to talk to Paul, but he just doesn’t want to know. He can be so stubborn at times. I suspect whilst Annalise believes herself to be deeply in love with Pete, as only a young, idealistic girl can be, Pete is anything but in love with her. I hate to use such an ugly word, but my feeling is that he’s just using her and that once he’s bored he’s just going to push her to one side.

‘Normally, I’d say that that kind of experience is just a part of growing up. We all go through the pain of teenage heartache, but the disparity between Annalise and Pete makes me very anxious for her. Of course, I’m anxious for Paul, as well, especially since the whole thing is inevitably going to be conducted in public …’

‘Mmm … and of course it couldn’t come at a worse time for Annalise’s education, what with her A levels ahead of her,’ Guy added.

‘Exactly.’

‘Oh dear, the perils of a father of teenage daughters,’ Guy sighed. ‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help …’

Since his marriage to Chrissie, who was seen to have tamed this wild Cooke, not quite knowing how or why it happened, Guy discovered that he had been elected to the role of paterfamilias within the Cooke clan and that inevitably, at some stage or another, various members of the family would bring their problems to him.

This was one problem where he suspected that Chrissie’s gentle touch would be much more beneficial than his own.

‘We’ve got a family gathering looming soon, haven’t we?’ he asked Didi. ‘I’ll see if Chrissie will have a tactful word with Paul, if you like.’

‘Would you?’ Didi smiled in relief. ‘I haven’t dared say anything to Paul, but I have heard a whisper that Annalise has been bunking off school to be with Pete. The band practises in an old barn out at—’

‘Laura and Rick’s farm, yes, I know,’ Guy said, nodding. ‘They used to use Frances’s garage, but she gave Mike an ultimatum and told him that there was no way she would continue to allow them to use it unless they agreed to keep the noise level down. Laura stepped into the breach and offered them the use of one of their barns.’

‘Well, as I said, it seems that Annalise has been sneaking off school to spend time with them there.’

‘Leave it with me. I’ll do what I can,’ Guy promised.

DAVID TENSED as he watched Maddy’s car come up the drive towards Queensmead. He had been watching the house ever since his arrival in England some days earlier, sleeping at night in unlocked garden sheds and open hay barns. After several weeks at sea sharing cramped quarters with the rest of the crew, the solitariness of his present existence was a relief. He missed Father Ignatius, of course; the two of them had become very close in the time they had worked together. As well as missing him, though, David was also concerned about him. Despite the priest’s vigour and positive attitude towards life, David had sensed recently that the older man was not quite as stalwart as he had once been.

Had he done the wrong thing in leaving him to come home? Had he made the selfish decision—again?

In the car with Maddy were her three children, the second youngest, Emma, with her solemn eyes and determined expression reminding him so much of his own daughter Olivia’s at the same age. It was odd the things that memory retained without one’s being aware of it. If asked, he would have been forced to admit that he had paid scandalously little attention to either of his children as they grew up. Olivia had spent more time with Jon and Jenny than she had done at home, getting from Jenny the loving mothering she had never received from Tiggy, his frighteningly fragile and vulnerable ex-wife. Given the number of years he had been away, David had assumed Tiggy would have divorced him by now and this had indeed been confirmed when he overheard a comment about her having moved away and established a new life for herself with another man. David was shamed to realise that he felt more relief than grief at this discovery. His ex-wife’s loss was one thing; seeing Emma in the garden with her brothers Leo and Jason and being reminded of Olivia was quite another.

But was it his nephew’s children David had really come to see, familiar to him now by name and expression as he watched them play and call out to one another? They tugged at his heartstrings in a way that reinforced how much he had changed.

The eldest child, Leo, who was physically so very much a Crighton, seemed fascinated by him. David had ached to talk to the children and to hold them, but he had restrained himself. Seeing them, though, reinforced just how much he had lost. Man and child had not spoken with one another, but David sensed that both he and Leo felt the tug of the blood bond that existed between them. ‘Grampy Man,’ Leo had wailed in protest as David made a hasty exit from the garden when Maddy had come to the garden door.

Was it, then, his own adult daughter and almost adult son who had brought him back home like a lodestar? Or had it been his need to see his father? He was an old man now, who spent most of his day in a chair apart from his twice daily walk around the garden with Maddy or Jenny, Jon’s wife, or sometimes with Max.

Max!

Max had surprised David. What had happened to the selfish, hedonistic young man who had looked up to him and on whose adulation David had often preened himself, whose envy of him had fed David’s own always vulnerable sense of self-esteem?

Only two days ago he had watched as Max walked in the garden with his younger brother Joss, the two heads close together as they talked earnestly. At one point they had stopped walking and Max had put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders in a gesture of comfort and very real affection. There had been no mistaking the closeness between them and no mistaking, either, the love and pride in Max’s eyes as he played with his own children.

Seeing Max with his wife and children and witnessing the total transformation of his character had left David with a sharp sense of pain and regret.

The day he walked out of the nursing home where he had been recuperating from his heart attack and out of his old life, he had done so because he could no longer tolerate the unbearable weight not just of his own guilt but of his father’s expectations.

The onus of being the favourite son, the first-born twin, the good-looking husband and charming brother-in-law, the isolation of being the one all the others looked up to, had become so burdensome to him, so resented by him, that he had felt swamped by it.

He had needed to break free; to step away from the image others had created for him and be himself. At least that was what he had told himself at the time; that and the fact that he had every right to put himself first, that his brush with death had released him from any and every obligation he owed to anyone else; that his heart attack was a warning to him to live his own life.

A faint smile touched his mouth, creasing the lean planes of his face.

He weighed a good deal less now than he had done when he had left home and his body possessed the taut, muscle-honed strength of a man used to hard physical work. His skin was tanned by the Jamaican sun and the sea air, and his streaked blond hair was only just beginning to show some grey. But it wasn’t just his body that looked different; the long hours spent in often painful reflection and the even longer hours in discussion and debate with his friend the priest had also left their visible mark on him. His eyes now looked out on the world with reflection, compassion and wisdom, and he was able to smile warmly, generously and even sometimes tenderly at the frailties of his fellow man.

A stranger looking properly at him now would have found him something of an enigma. His physical appearance was that of a tough manual worker, but married to it was a depth of awareness and intelligence in his eyes that suggested a man of letters and deep reflection. But David no longer courted the approval of other people; he no longer needed either their admiration or their company. Solitude, physical, mental and emotional, had become his chosen friend rather than his feared foe.

It had taken some months of working beside Father Ignatius before David had been able to start confiding in him.

‘I have no family, no friends,’ David had told him. ‘If I were to go back home, they would disown me and rightly so. I have committed an unforgivable crime.’

‘No crime is unforgivable in God’s eyes,’ the priest had replied firmly. ‘Not if one truly repents it.’

‘What is true repentance?’ David had asked him, adding sardonically, ‘I’ve never been the sackcloth-and-ashes type. Too much of a sybarite, I suppose, and too selfish.’

‘You say that and yet you are prepared to acknowledge that you have sinned. It takes a brave man to submit himself to the judgement of his peers and an even braver one to submit to his own judgement and God’s. If to admit the existence of one’s sins is the first step on the road to self-forgiveness, then to make true atonement for them is the second.’

‘True atonement! And how am I supposed to do that?’ David had asked savagely. ‘There is no way I could ever repay the money I stole or undo the damage I have done.’

‘There is always a way,’ Father Ignatius had insisted, ‘but sometimes we can make it hard for ourselves to find it.’

Always a way! David shook his head as he remembered those words now. If he had imagined that his leaving, his absence, had created an emptiness in the lives of those he had left behind, he was discovering how vain that assumption had been. The jagged edges of the destruction he had caused had been repaired, and in the days he had spent silently witnessing the lives of his family, he had also discovered just who was responsible for the new closeness and harmony that now permeated their lives.

Jon, the brother he had always secretly pitied and sometimes openly mocked.

Jonathon. Only the previous evening his twin had walked so close to David’s place of concealment in the dusk-shrouded garden of Queensmead that by moving a few yards David could have been at his side.

His brother had changed, grown taller, or was it simply that his bearing had become more upright? As he watched him, David had been aware of how much more confident Jonathon seemed, of how much more content. Was it because he was no longer a part of Jon’s life?

David hadn’t always been kind to Jon or valued him as he ought to have done. It shamed him now to remember how often he had allowed their father to insist that Jonathon step back into the shadows to allow him to become more prominent, how easily and vainly he had allowed himself to be put up on a pedestal and fêted as the favourite son—to his twin’s detriment. How conceitedly and selfishly he had laid claim to all the virtues of their shared heritage, pinning on Jonathon the label of the one to inherit all the weaknesses. The truth was that, of the two of them, it was Jonathon who was the stronger, the purer of heart and deed.

He was beginning to feel hungry. He had very little money and no wish to be recognised by anyone. Last night he had raided Maddy’s vegetable garden. Tonight …

A car was coming down the drive. Not Maddy’s this time. This one had a different engine sound. Swiftly, he withdrew into the protection of the shrubbery surrounding the lawn, watching as the car came to an abrupt halt and a young woman got out, her cap of hair shining in the sunlight.

Olivia …

David’s heart skipped a beat as he watched his daughter head for the house. She looked preoccupied and much more on edge than either Maddy or Jenny appeared to be. A sharp surge of paternal anxiety plucked fiercely at his heartstrings.

Olivia was worrying about something. Why? What?

OLIVIA FROWNED as she hurried into Queensmead’s kitchen. She had come hoping to see Maddy who had obviously gone out.

‘She said she’d be back, that she wouldn’t be very long,’ Edna Longridge, the retired nurse who came to Queensmead a couple of times a week to keep an eye on Ben, explained to Olivia.

‘I can’t wait,’ Olivia told her. ‘I’ve got a meeting in half an hour.’

‘Oh dear, can I give her a message for you?’ Edna asked.

‘No, it doesn’t matter.’

Her decision to pay Maddy a call had been an impromptu one, an impulse of the moment, a need to talk over her present disenchantment with her life and her marriage with someone she knew would understand.

Maddy and Max might be happy together now, but their marriage had not always been a happy one. No one knew better than Maddy what it was like to be married to a man who didn’t love you … a man who was unfaithful to you….

Olivia tensed.

But Caspar did love her and so far as she was aware he had certainly never been unfaithful to her.

Not yet! That small, sharp inner voice that had become increasingly vociferous recently berated her smartly.

Not yet … not ever. Not Caspar …

No? Then why was he so irritable with her? He might claim that it was because he felt shut out of her life, because he felt that her work had become more important to her than either he or the children were. He must know that that simply wasn’t true. He must know how haunted she was by her fear that if she didn’t do everything she could to prove that she was not like her father—unreliable, selfish, incompetent, dishonest—she would be letting not just herself down but their children, as well. She would be condemning them to be tainted with their grandfather’s sins. It was all very well for Jon to claim that she bore no responsibility for her father’s crimes; that no one would ever think that just because her father had been dishonest she was going to be the same. Somewhere, deep down inside herself, Olivia could not bring herself to believe him. She was scared beyond measure that Jon was lying to her, that he really didn’t trust her, and that was why she drove herself so hard, why she felt compelled to prove herself over and over.

Only the previous week she had come back from an appointment out of the office to find Jon standing beside her desk. Her stomach had clenched with sick fear as she had a flashback to the day she discovered what her father had done. Was Jon simply in her office because he needed a file, as he had said, or had he been checking up on her?

She had tried to discuss her fears with Caspar, but her pride, that same stubborn pride that had always been her major sin had got in the way.

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