PENNY JORDAN

Sins

Copyright

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

AVON

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Penny Jordan 2009

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

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

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

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847560742

Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007331659

Version 2019-03-01

I would like to dedicate this book to all my readers, but especially to all the kind people who have written to tell me how much they enjoyed Silk and asking me when Sins would be coming out.

Table of Contents

Copyright

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Part Two

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Part Three

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Part One

Chapter One
London, January 1957

Rose Pickford exhaled a small sigh of relief as she opened the door and stepped into the familiar scented warmth of her aunt Amber’s Walton Street shop, with its smell of vanilla and roses–the scent blended especially for her aunt.

One day–or so her aunt had told her–Rose would not just be managing the exclusive Chelsea shop where the furnishing fabrics from her aunt’s Macclesfield silk mill were sold, she would also be in charge of advising clients on the most stylish ways to redecorate their homes.

One day.

Right now, though, she was simply a raw, newly qualified art student, working as little more than a general dogsbody for Ivor Hammond, one of London’s most prestigious interior designers.

‘Hello, Rose, we’re just about to have a cup of tea. Would you like one?’

Rose smiled gratefully. ‘Yes, please, Anna.’

Anna Polaski, who currently managed the shop, had originally come to England with her musician husband, Paul, as refugees from Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. Anna was always very kind, and Rose suspected that she felt sorry for her–because she recognised that Rose, too, was, in a way, an ‘outsider’?

‘I hate January. It’s a horrid month, so cold and miserable,’ Rose said to Anna, as she pulled off the beautifully soft Italian leather gloves that had been a Christmas present from her aunt.

‘Pah, you call this cold? In Poland we have proper winters, with snow many feet deep,’ Anna told her. ‘We shall be having lunch soon,’ she added. ‘I have brought some homemade vegetable soup and you are welcome to join us.’

‘I’d love to,’ Rose replied, ‘but I can’t. I’ve got to be back by half-past one so that Piers can go out and measure up for a new commission.’

Piers Jeffries was Ivor’s senior assistant, a good-looking young man, who affected to like Rose and want to help her, but who at the same time seemed to have the knack of somehow working things so that whenever anything went wrong, she ended up being blamed. Piers might publicly sympathise with her and even take her side with their impatient and quick-tempered employer, but Rose suspected that privately he enjoyed her falls from grace.

‘I need to check the provenance of one of my great-uncle’s designs,’ Rose explained. ‘Ivor has a client who wants to use it and he’s enquired about its origins. The trouble is that he doesn’t know the name, he can only describe it.’

Anna gave a derisory snort. ‘And he thinks you’ll be able to find it in half an hour! Didn’t you remind him that we have over two hundred different designs available here from your great-uncle’s drawings?’

‘There’s a bit of a panic on. The client is impatient to get things moving, and Ivor has promised him the information this afternoon. Ivor doesn’t like it if we make things seem other than effortless. I think it’s one of the Greek frieze designs, so I’ll start with that book.’

‘You run upstairs then, and I’ll send Belinda up with a cup of tea for you.’

Whilst the ground floor of the Walton Street premises were used as a showroom, the pattern books were kept upstairs in the workroom, which was also used as an office.

Since her aunt kept meticulous record and pattern books, it didn’t take Rose very long to find the fabric for which she was searching. Decorated with an imposing Greek frieze border, the fabric came in four different colourways: a warm red, royal blue, dark green and a rich golden yellow. The border pattern came from an original frieze held in a London museum, which her great-uncle had sketched, the piece of stone frieze itself having been brought back from his Continental grand tour by the Earl of Carsworth in the 1780s, according to the notes with the samples.

After writing down this information Rose swallowed her now cold tea before making for the stairs.

Outside it was even colder than it had been earlier, with an east wind that knifed through her, despite the thick warmth of her navy-blue cashmere coat–a present from her aunt when she had started her job–a coat that created ‘the right impression’, Amber had said.

The right impression. Sadness shadowed Rose’s eyes as she flagged down a taxi. She would have to pay the fare herself, of course, but that would be better than risking being late back. What her aunt had not said, but what they both knew, was that with her physical inheritance from her mother, it would be all too easy for people to place her not as the niece of one of Cheshire’s richest women, a woman whose first husband had been the Duke of Lenchester and whose second was the local gentry, but instead as the daughter of a poor Chinese immigrant.

The truth was, of course, that her mother had not been anything as respectable as that.

‘Your mother was a whore, a prostitute who sold her body to men for money,’ her cousin Emerald had once taunted Rose.

Rose knew that Emerald had hoped to shock and hurt her but how could she when Rose had heard her late father saying the same thing so often in his drink-and drug-induced outbursts.

She was the reason he had had to turn to drink, to drown out the despair and misery of the life her existence had forced on him, her father had often told her. Her, the child he loathed and detested, and who looked just like her Chinese whore of a mother.

After his death, Rose had been terrified that she would be sent away–back to China, where Emerald had told her that their great-grandmother wanted her to be sent, but thanks to her aunt she had been given a home beyond her wildest dreams.

Her aunt Amber and her husband, Jay, had been wonderfully kind and generous to her. She had been brought up at Denham Place, alongside her cousin Emerald, the product of Amber’s first marriage, Jay’s two daughters from his first marriage, Ella and Janey, and Amber and Jay’s twin girls. She had been sent to the same exclusive boarding school as Ella and Janey, and, like them, had gone to St Martins, the famous art and design college in London. She was made to feel just like one of the family–a blessed relief after her wretched early childhood, when her taking one step out of place had provoked her father into a rage–by everyone, that was, except Emerald. For some reason, she loathed Rose and even now, her barbed remarks were frequent and just as poisonous as ever.

Now Rose lived with Ella and Janey in a four-storey Chelsea house, Amber’s pied-à-terre during her bimonthly visits to London to oversee her interior design business.

Rose thought the world of her aunt. There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for her. Amber had protected her and supported her and, more than that, she had loved her too. So when Rose had realised how much it pleased her aunt that she enjoyed talking about interior design, Rose had determined to learn as much about that world as she could. That in turn had led to her aunt encouraging Rose to train as an interior designer so that one day she could take over the running of the business from Amber.

The knowledge that her aunt placed so much trust and had so much belief in her had filled Rose with renewed determination to do everything she could to repay her love and kindness. And that was why she was determined not to let anyone see how much she disliked working for Ivor Hammond.

Her aunt had been so pleased when her old friend Cecil Beaton had announced that he had recommended that Ivor Hammond take Rose on as a trainee.

‘You’ll learn so much more than I could ever teach you, darling, working with him, and I know that one day you will be London’s most sought-after interior designer.’

The taxi was coming to a halt outside the Bond Street showroom of her employer.

The window of the showroom was decorated with an impressive pair of Regency carver chairs, and a mahogany bureau on which stood a heavy Georgian silver candlestick.

Ivor specialised in the kind of furniture and décor that was already familiar to the upper classes, and which appealed to those who aspired to it. Rose’s own taste ran to a look that was less fussy and more modern, but she knew that she would never say so. If her aunt believed that Ivor was the right person to teach her about interior design then Rose was going to believe it as well, and she was going to crush down those rebellious ideas of her own that had her longing for something more exciting and innovative.

‘Oh, there you are, Chinky.’

Even though Piers’ words made her flinch inwardly, Rose did not voice any objection. She had been called worse, after all. Her great-grandmother had made no secret of the fact that she abhorred having ‘an ugly yellow brat’ for a great-granddaughter.

‘Got the info the boss wants, have you? Only I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if you haven’t ’cos he isn’t in a very good mood. The pools winner came in whilst you were out and cancelled her order.’

‘I thought he’d said that he didn’t want to take her on as a client anyway,’ Rose responded.

Their employer had been, Rose thought, unnecessarily cruel about the peroxide blonde, who had tripped into the shop wearing a leopardskin coat and too much scent, to announce that she and her hubby had had a win on the football pools and that they were buying a ‘posh mansion flat’ that they wanted redecorated for them.

‘He may not have wanted her, but he wanted her money all right.’ Piers gave a disparaging sniff. ‘Personally, I’m beginning to think that I really ought to think about accepting one of the other offers I’ve had. As dear Oliver Messel was saying to me only the other day, I really would need to think about my reputation and my future if I were to become too associated with the kind of new-money clients Ivor seems to be attracting these days. Word gets round, after all. And, of course, the fact that he’s taken you on doesn’t help. Well, it wouldn’t do, would it? I’m surprised we haven’t been inundated with requests for quotes for redecorating Soho’s Chinese restaurants.’

Rose’s face burned as he sniggered at his own wit. She longed for it to be the end of the day so that she could escape from the poisonous atmosphere of the shop.

The only time she felt totally comfortable and safe and accepted was when she was with her aunt Amber, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that she wanted to please her aunt so much, Rose would have begged her to help her find another job.

She got on well with Jay’s daughters and they had fun together but, despite their kindness, Rose was still very much aware that she was ‘different’ and an outsider, whose looks meant that people–men–often felt that they had a right to behave towards her in a way that made her feel vulnerable and afraid. They looked at her as though they knew about her mother, as though they wanted her to be like her mother. But she never would be, never…

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ella, do be careful. You really are so dreadfully clumsy.’

Clumsy and plain, Ella Fulshawe thought miserably, as she bent down to pick up the clothes pegs that had fallen off the desk where the fashion editor’s junior had left them. They were used to hold in the backs of dresses worn by very slim models so that, photographed from the front, the clothes appeared to fit.

Ella had never really wanted to work for Vogue in the first place; she had wanted to be a proper reporter on a proper newspaper. Her sister Janey might have been filled with envy when she had been offered the job, but then Janey lived and breathed fashion whilst Ella wasn’t the least bit interested in it. She wanted to write about important things, not silly clothes, but her father had been so pleased and proud of her when she had been offered the job that she hadn’t felt able to refuse.

‘I expect your father is hoping that working for Vogue will transform you from an ugly duckling into a swan, Ella,’ had been Emerald’s taunting comment.

Had her father thought that working for Vogue would turn her into someone pretty and confident? If so, his hopes had been bitterly disappointed. If anything working alongside pretty, glamorous models only served to emphasise her own plainness, she thought. The models, with their small bosoms and skinny legs, made her feel so clumsy and huge. She had grown to hate her own full breasts and the curves of her body.

‘It’s such a pity that if you had to inherit your poor mother’s facial features you didn’t inherit her figure as well. Frankly, Ella, there is something decidedly bucolic and almost common about so much fleshy excess. Your poor mother would be horrified if she could see you now; she was so slender herself.’

Her aunt Cassandra’s unkind criticism, delivered when Ella had entered puberty, had left its mark, hurting her far more than her stepsister, Emerald’s, catty comments ever could. It was, in fact, burned into Ella’s heart.

The models were so slim and pretty, and she could see the admiration in the eyes of the male photographers who worked with them, whilst those same photographers dismissed her with one brief glance. Or rather, most of them did. There was one who had made his contempt of her far plainer. Oliver Charters.

Charters was an up-and-coming young photographer who had just struck out on his own. He was, according to Vogue’s Art and Fashion Departments, amazingly talented and bound ‘to go far’. He seduced models and editorial staff alike with just one look from his brilliant green eyes.

But when that green-eyed gaze had been turned in her direction, all the careless interest with which it rested on other girls had been banished, to be replaced with a look of disbelief. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, the exclamation that had accompanied it had underlined his feelings, causing the assistant art director to snigger, and then later repeat the incident to what now felt like the whole of Vogue’s office staff.

Oliver Charters was here now in the small cramped office, where Ella’s boss, the features editor, and the fashion editor were surveying the pretty model wearing the cream woollen dress that was far too big for her. More Ella’s size than the model’s.

Ella tried her best to disguise her unfashionable shape, wearing large baggy sweaters over pleated skirts and white shirts–rather as though she were still wearing their old school uniform, Janey had once told her disapprovingly.

At home at Denham she was the eldest, and there she felt confident enough to take her responsibility towards the younger ones, especially Janey, who was so prone to doing things without thinking and getting into trouble, sometimes very seriously indeed. All the more so when it came to her taking on lame ducks of every description–both animal and human. But here at Vogue, deprived of the protection of her father and her stepmother’s love, Ella felt awkward and vulnerable and stupid. Now her clumsiness had her face burning and her throat closing on the threat of tears.

‘I can’t write about that. It looks dreadful,’ Ella’s boss was complaining. ‘I’m supposed to be covering exciting new young fashion; that looks more like something a county farmer’s wife, or a girl like Ella would wear. Where’s that dress we got from Mary Quant? Go and find it, will you, Ella?’ she demanded.

Oliver, who was standing in the open doorway, propping himself up as he talked to the model, was blocking her exit. The leather jacket he was wearing, combined with a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, gave him a raffish air that matched his overlong dark hair and the cigarette dangling from his mouth. Janey would have thoroughly approved of him but Ella most certainly did not.

‘Excuse me.’

He was so engrossed in the model that he hadn’t even heard her apology, never mind realised that she couldn’t get through the door.

Ella cleared her throat and tried again. ‘Excuse me, please.’

The model tugged on his leather-clad arm. ‘Ella wants to get past you, Oliver.’

‘Squeeze through then, love. I don’t mind if you rub up against me bum.’

He was being deliberately vulgar, Ella knew, hoping no doubt to embarrass her, so she gave his back a freezing look. The model giggled as Oliver arched his back to create a space large enough, perhaps, for her to wriggle through, but nowhere near wide enough for Ella.

‘Ella can’t get through there. Ollie, you’ll have to move,’ the model told him.

Now he was looking Ella up and down and then up again, his inspection coming to an end when his gaze rested on her now flushed face.

‘Going to make the tea, are you, love?’ he asked her, giving her a wicked grin. ‘Two lumps in mine,’ he added, before deliberately letting his gaze rest on her breasts.

As she left the office Ella could hear the model saying bitchily, ‘Poor Ella, being so huge. I’d hate to be like that. She’s the size of an elephant. I’m surprised she doesn’t try to lose some weight.’

This was followed by Oliver Charters’ laughter as he announced, ‘There’s no point in her trying. She’d never succeed.’

Her face on fire, Ella was rooted to the spot, forced to listen to them discussing her until she was finally able to make herself walk away. She hated them both but she hated him, Oliver Charters, the most, she thought bitterly. Horrible wicked man! She could hear their laughter following her down the corridor.

So, Oliver Charters thought that she didn’t have the willpower to lose weight, did he? Well, she’d show him. She’d show them all.

The Duchess.

Dougie Smith stared hard at the faded name on the prow of the ship berthed in the dry dock.

‘Laid her up because she ain’t wanted any more. Bin pushed out of her place by summat new,’ an old tar standing on the dockside, lighting up a Capstan Full Strength cigarette, told Dougie, before breaking into a fit of coughing.

Dougie wondered if the vessel’s silent, almost ominous presence in its enforced retirement was some kind of message for him. He nodded in acknowledgement of the sailor’s comment and then turned away, careful to avoid the busy activity on the dockside, with its smell of stagnant water, cargoes from the ships, and the familiar mingling of tar, oil, rope and myriad other aromas.

Ducking under hawsers and ropes, he huddled deeper into the reefer jacket he’d been warned to buy in the balmy warmth of Jamaica, where he’d changed ships.

The cargo ship he’d worked his passage on from there to London loomed up out of the cold January fog like a grey ghost. Dougie shivered. He’d been warned about London’s cold, foggy weather by the crew of merchant seamen he’d sailed with. Toughened old tars, most of them, they’d been suspicious of him at first, a young Australian wanting a cheap passage to the ‘old country’, but once he’d proved he could pull his weight they’d taken him under their wing.

He felt bad about the lies he’d told them and the truth he’d had to keep from them, but he doubted they would have believed him if he had told them. What would he have said? ‘Oh, by the way, lads, I just thought I’d better tell you that some solicitor in London reckons that I’m a duke.’ Dougie could just imagine how they would have reacted. After all, he remembered how he had reacted when he’d first heard the news.

He picked up his kitbag, turning his back on the grey hull of what had been his home for the last few months, and headed in what he hoped would be the right direction for the Seamen’s Mission he’d been told about, where he could get a clean bed for the night.

At least they drove on the same side of the road here, he acknowledged, as a truck came towards him out of the fog, its driver blasting his horn as a warning to get out of the way.

The docks were busy, no one paying Dougie any attention. Seamen didn’t ask questions of one another; like outback drovers they shared a common code that meant that they respected one another’s right not to talk about the past.

Dougie had been grateful for that on his long voyage to England. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the fact that he might be a duke. His uncle, who had despised the British upper class for reasons he had never properly explained, would have told him in no uncertain terms to ignore the solicitor’s letters.

But what about his parents–what would they have thought? Dougie didn’t know. They had been drowned in a flash flood shortly after his birth, and if it hadn’t been for his uncle, he would have ended up in an orphanage. His uncle had never said much to him about his parents. All Dougie had known growing up was that his uncle was his mother’s brother, and that he hadn’t really approved of her marrying Dougie’s father.

‘A softie, with an English accent and fancy ways, who couldn’t shear a sheep to save his life,’ had been how his uncle had described Dougie’s father.

It had been a hard life growing up in the Australian outback on a large sheep station miles from the nearest town, but no harder than the lives of plenty of other youngsters like himself. Like them, he had done his schoolwork sitting in the station kitchen, taught by teachers who educated their pupils over the airwaves, and like them too he had had to do his bit around the station.

When he had finished his schooling and passed his exams he had been sent by his uncle to work on a neighbouring station as a ‘jackeroo’, as the young men, the next generation who would one day inherit their own family stations, were known.

Times had been hard after the war, and had continued to be hard. When his uncle had fallen sick and had been told by the flying doctor that he had a weak heart and should give up work, he had flatly refused, dying just as he had wished, one evening at sundown on the veranda of the old dilapidated bungalow, with its tin roof on which the rain rattled like bullets in the ‘wet’.

As his only relative, Dougie had inherited the station, with its debts, and his uncle’s responsibilities towards the people who worked for him: Mrs Mac, the housekeeper; Tom, Hugh, Bert and Ralph, the drovers; and their wives and families.

It hadn’t taken Dougie long to work out that the only thing he could do was accept the offer of partnership from a wealthy neighbour, who bought a half-share in the station.

That had been five years ago. Since then the station had prospered and Dougie had taken time out to finish his education in Sydney. He had been there when the solicitor’s first letter had caught up with him and he’d been disinclined to pay it any attention.

Half a dozen letters down the line, and with a growing awareness of just how little he knew about his father or his father’s family, he had decided that maybe he ought to find out just who he was–and who he wasn’t.

The solicitor had offered to advance his airfare. Not that Dougie needed such an advance–he had money of his own now, thanks to the success of the station–but he had been reluctant to get involved in a situation that might not suit him without knowing more about it. And more about himself.

Working his passage to England might not have been the swiftest way to get here, but it sure as hell had been the most instructive, Dougie acknowledged as he walked out of the dock gate and into a fog-enshrouded street.

He was Dougie Smith, Smith being his late uncle’s surname and the name by which he had always been known, but according to his birth certificate he was Drogo Montpelier. Maybe, just maybe, he was also the Duke of Lenchester, but right now he was a merchant seaman in need of a decent meal, a bath and a bed, in that order. The solicitor had explained in his letters the family setup that existed here in England, and how the deaths of the last duke and his son and heir had meant that he, the grandson of the late duke’s great-uncle–if that was who he was–was now the next in line.

But what about the last duke’s widow, who was now remarried? What about his daughter, Lady Emerald? Dougie couldn’t imagine them welcoming him, muscling in on what he guessed they must think of as their territory. He might not know much about the British upper classes, but he knew one thing and that was that like any other tight-knit group of people, they would recognise an outsider when they saw one and close ranks. That was the way of the world, and nature’s way too.

A young woman with tired eyes and shabby clothes, her hair dyed bright yellow, her skin sallow, pushed herself off the wall on which she had been leaning and called out to him, ‘Welcome ’ome, sailor. ’Ow about buying a pretty girl a drink, and letting ’er show you a good time?’

Shaking his head, Dougie walked past her. Welcome home. Would he be welcome? Did he want to be?

Hefting his heavy kitbag further up on his shoulder, Dougie straightened his back. There was only one way he was going to find out.

Chapter Two

Janey felt wonderfully happy. She should, she knew, have been feeling guilty, because she should be at St Martins right now, listening to a lecture on the history of the button. Mind you, she was in one sense concentrating on the importance of the button. She had unfastened the buttons on Dan’s shirt very carefully indeed.

An excited giggle bubbled up in her throat. What she was doing was dreadfully bad, of course. Not only had she skipped a lecture, she had come back to Dan’s basement flat with him and they were now cuddled up against the January icy damp in Dan’s single bed with its lumpy mattress. Whilst Dan’s shirt now lay on the floor, Janey was still wearing her sweater, although the bra she was wearing underneath had been unfastened and pushed out of the way so that Dan could squeeze and knead her breasts, causing delicious quivers of pleasure to run right through her.

Yes, she was very bad. Her sister Ella would certainly think so. Ella would never have missed a lecture, never mind let a boy fondle her naked breasts. But she, Janey, wasn’t Ella, thank goodness, and Dan, an actor whose sister was also at St Martins, was such a gorgeous boy. Janey had been attracted to him the minute she had laid eyes on him. And Dan was so very happy that she was here with him. Janey adored making people feel happy. She could remember the first time she had realised that she could stop herself from feeling frightened and unhappy simply by doing things that other people had wanted her to do. It had been when her mother had been in one of her frightening, erratic moods, and Aunt Cassandra had come to visit.

‘I’m glad you’re here, Auntie Cass,’ Janey had told her aunt, ‘because you make Mummy happy.’

To Janey’s relief, immediately the atmosphere had changed. Her mother had started to laugh and had actually hugged her, whilst her aunt had been so pleased by her comment that she had given her a penny. Janey had been very young when her mother had died but she could still remember very clearly how frightened and miserable she had felt when her mother had been angry. From then on she had gone out of her way to say and do things that would make people feel happy…

She had continued ‘being thoughtful’, as her teachers approvingly described her behaviour, all through school. Janey had always been eager to share her sweets and her pocket money with her schoolfriends, especially if she thought it would stop them from being cross about something. And now she somehow needed those around her to be happy before she could be happy herself. If one of her friends was unhappy then it was Janey who went out of her way to coax a smile from her. She hated quarrels and angry, raised voices. They reminded her too uncomfortably of her childhood.

She was so glad that she wasn’t like Ella–poor Ella, who always took things so seriously, who could be so snippy and unfriendly at times, especially with boys, and who thought that having fun was a sin.

Janey gave a small squirm of pleasure. She would have liked to have pleased Dan even more, and been even more adventurous than she was being but she didn’t dare risk it. Last term there had been two girls who had had to drop out of St Martins because they had got into trouble. She certainly didn’t want to end up pregnant, and then have to leave without finishing her course. Dan had said that he perfectly understood, which made everything especially wonderful; some boys could be very difficult and unkind to girls when they said ‘no’.

Janey loved London and St Martins; she adored being part of the King’s Road crowd that filled the coffee bars and pubs at weekends, and went to noisy parties in dark smoky cellars where beat music played. Already she had made up her mind that there could be no better place in the world to be than the King’s Road, Chelsea. It was just so exciting to be in the ‘know’, part of that select group of young people who were making the area their personal playground, and putting their stamp on it. It was the place to be, to see and to be seen. Everyone who knew anything knew that. Even the big fashion magazines were beginning to take notice of what was going on.

Janey’s ambition, once she left St Martins, was to join the ranks of the lucky young designers who had already set up shop on the King’s Road, following Mary Quant’s example and selling their designs from their own boutiques. She could hardly wait.

‘What’s that you’re reading, Ella?’

‘Nothing,’ Ella fibbed, trying to conceal the article she had been reading in Woman, about how eating Ryvita biscuits could help a person to lose weight.

She’d been so determined when she’d first decided that she would lost weight, but somehow the harder she tried not to eat, the more she wanted to do so, with the result that this morning when she had weighed herself on the scales in the entrance hall to the tube station she had discovered that she had actually put on three pounds.

‘Fibber,’ Libby, the art director’s assistant, retorted cheerfully. ‘Let me see.’ She tweaked the magazine out of Ella’s hold before she could stop her, Libby’s eyebrows lifting queryingly. ‘You’re trying to lose weight?’

Ella’s heart sank. Soon the elegantly slender Libby would be telling everyone and then the whole office would be laughing at her.

‘Well, you don’t need to waste your time eating Ryvita biscuits,’ Libby told her without waiting for her to reply. ‘What you need to do is go and see my doctor and get some of his special pills. I lost a stone in a month. They’re amazing.’

‘Diet pills?’ Ella questioned uncertainly. She hadn’t known such things existed. She’d seen advertisements for some kind of toffees one was supposed to eat three times a day, but nothing for diet pills.

‘Yes, that’s right. Everyone takes them, all the models, only of course no one admits to it. Look, why don’t I ring Dr Williamson now and make an appointment for you? But you must promise not to tell anyone that I told you.’

‘I…’

Before she could say anything, Libby was picking up the telephone receiver and giving the operator a number she was reading from her pretty leather-covered diary.

‘There, it’s all fixed,’ she announced triumphantly a few minutes later. ‘Dr Williamson can see you at lunchtime. He’s only in Harley Street.’

The man was still watching her. Not that Emerald was surprised. Of course he was. She was very beautiful, after all. Everyone said so. The visit to the Louvre, one of the cultural activities organised by the French finishing school she was attending, had threatened to be so dull that she had been tempted to find an excuse to escape from it, but now, with an admirer for her to tease and torment behind the back of the ancient art historian who was accompanying her round the museum’s treasures, the afternoon was promising to be far less dull than she had expected. Very deliberately, almost provocatively, she smoothed her hand over the neat fit of her fawn cashmere sweater. She would have preferred to have worn something in a more noticeable colour, but typically her mother had insisted that the neutral shade was far more elegant. Far more correct had been what she had really meant, of course. Far more likely not to draw the admiring male attention to Emerald’s figure that her face already received. How foolish of her mother to imagine that she could stop men admiring her, Emerald thought contemptuously. That was impossible. Not that her mother had ever come anywhere near acknowledging that. It infuriated Emerald that her family, her step-and half-siblings, but most especially her mother, should refuse to admire and pay homage to her undeniable superiority–of birth and breeding as well as looks. Her mother behaved as though she were no different from any of the others: Ella and Janey, the daughters of Jay; the twins, Cathy and Polly, still at school, who were her half-sisters, but most of all, Emerald’s half-Chinese cousin, Rose. Just thinking about Rose made Emerald feel furious. A half-Chinese bastard who, for some unimaginable and irritating reason, Emerald’s own mother actually treated as though she were her own child. Her mother had fussed over Rose and given her more attention than she had ever given Emerald, her own daughter. Emerald would never forgive her mother for doing that. Never. Both Nanny and Great-grandma had always said that Rose was a mere nobody; a child who should have been left to die, whilst Emerald was the daughter of a duke, one of England’s richest men; an honourable heroic man, whom everyone had admired, not like Rose’s father, a wastrel and a drunk. Great-grandmother had always said that the reason Uncle Greg drank so much was because he was so bitterly ashamed of Rose. By rights Emerald’s mother should have felt the same way instead of treating Rose as though she was someone special–more special than Emerald herself. That, of course, was impossible. Emerald believed that the reason her mother made such a fuss of Rose was because she was jealous of Emerald, jealous of the fact that Emerald had been born a duke’s daughter and had been so much loved by her father that he had left her virtually all his money. A fortune…

If she could have done so, during her childhood Emerald would have demanded that she be allowed to live in one of her father’s houses, as befitted her status, and not at Denham with her mother and Jay and the others.

She had flatly refused to attend the same school as the others, and where they had treated their coming-out parties and presentation at court as old-fashioned rituals to be gone through for form’s sake, Emerald had deliberately held back from having her own until afterwards so that she didn’t have to share with them. Now she was insisting on having the kind of season that her great-grandmother had told her about when she had been younger. Blanche Pickford might not have possessed any blue blood herself but she knew its importance and she had made sure that Emerald knew it as well.

Well, it wasn’t Rose who had a title and a fortune, and it wasn’t Rose who would be the débutante of the season and who would marry a man who would make her even more important. Then Emerald’s mother wouldn’t be able to ignore her in favour of a Hong Kong gutter brat, or insist, as she had tried to do so often, that Emerald and Rose were equals. Emerald had always been determined that she must be the winner in every contest with a member of her own sex.

Always.

The man who had been watching her was standing up and looking as though he was about to come over to her. Emerald eyed him calculatingly. Her admirer wasn’t very tall and his hair was thinning a little. Disdainfully Emerald turned her back on him. Only the very best of the best was good enough for her: the tallest, the most handsome, the richest and the most titled of men. Her step-siblings, with their ridiculous plans to work, like common little shop girls, would have no option other than to end up with dull ordinary husbands, whilst Rose, of course, would be lucky if she found any decent man willing to marry her at all. But it was different for Emerald. She could have and must have the most eligible, the most prized husband there was.

In fact Emerald had already chosen her husband. There was in reality only one man it could be: the elder son of Princess Marina, the Duke of Kent, who was not just a duke like her father had been but, even better, a royal duke. Emerald could see herself now, surrounded by the envious gaggle of bridesmaids, all of them green with envy because she was marrying the season’s most eligible man.

They would be in huge demand, invited everywhere, and other men would look at her and envy her husband, other women would look at her and be filled with jealousy because of her beauty. Emerald intended to cut herself off from her family. She certainly intended to refuse to have anything to do with Rose. As a royal duke her husband couldn’t be expected to socialise with someone like Rose, and since her mother thought so much of her then she wouldn’t mind being excluded from Emerald’s guest lists so that she could keep Rose company, would she? Emerald smiled at the thought.

The young Duke of Kent had celebrated his twenty-first birthday only the previous year, and had already gained a reputation for being very difficult to pin down when it came to accepting invitations, but of course she would have no trouble in attracting him, Emerald knew. He wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with her. No man could.

It was a pity that the Duke of Kent didn’t own a proper stately home, not one of those dreadful ugly places that even the National Trust wouldn’t take on, but rather somewhere like Blenheim or Osterby. She would have to have a word with Mr Melrose, her late father’s solicitor and her own trustee, Emerald decided. It was surely only right and proper that, as a royal duchess, she should have the use of her late father’s property and estate; there was Lenchester House in London, where she was having her coming-out ball, and the family seat as well. Her mother had tried to prevent her from having her coming-out ball at Lenchester by saying that technically they had no right to use the house, which now had been inherited through the rule of primogeniture, along with everything else that was entailed to the dukedom, by the new ‘heir’: the grandson of her late father’s great-uncle, the ‘black sheep’ of the family who had been shipped off to Australia as a young man. Initially, it had been thought that this black sheep had died without marrying, but then it had come to light that there had been a marriage and a son, who in turn had produced a son of his own. Now Mr Melrose was trying to track him down. However, Mr Melrose had agreed with Emerald that there was really no reason why, as her late father’s daughter, she shouldn’t have her ball at Lenchester House. Her father would have wanted her to do so, Emerald was sure. And she was sure that he would much rather have seen her living at Osterby and Lenchester House than some heir he had never met. And who would now inherit Osterby and everything else, simply because he was male.

Lenchester House was magnificent. Until recently it had been let out to a Greek millionaire, and Emerald could see no reason why she and the duke shouldn’t lease it from the estate once they were married.

Mademoiselle Jeanne was still droning on about the Mona Lisa. Emerald gave the portrait a dismissive look. She was far prettier. And anyway, she thought the portrait dull. She preferred the striking strokes of brilliant colour favoured by more modern artists, the kind of paintings her mother would never dream of hanging at Denham. Emerald rather thought that she might become a patroness of modern art once she was married. She could imagine the praise she would receive from the press for her excellent eye and taste, and the entries in the gossip columns that would confirm her status: ‘HRH The Duchess of Kent is London’s premier hostess, as well as being a well-known patroness of modern art.’

Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Kent. Emerald preened, thinking how well the title suited her.

Ella shivered as she stepped out of the building that housed Dr Williamson’s rooms and into Harley Street, not so much from the raw biting wind as from shocked disbelief and excitement that she had actually done what she had done.

She had been weighed and measured by a smartly uniformed nurse, had filled in a long form giving all her medical details, and had then been told by the serious-looking Dr Williamson that for the good of her health she really did need to take the course of medication he was going to prescribe for her in order that she could lose weight.

She was to take two pills per day, one after breakfast and one late afternoon, and then after a month she was to return to him to be weighed and measured and given another prescription.

It wasn’t cheating, Ella had reassured herself. All the diet pills would do was help her to control her appetite. And when she had controlled it and lost some weight, then no one, but especially Oliver Charters, would laugh at her behind her back ever again.

Chapter Three

‘Janey, I’m still not sure that we should be going to this party,’ Ella protested, feeling irritated and exasperated when she saw that, instead of listening to her, Janey was concentrating on drawing a thick black line round her eyes, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly between her lips as she did so.

‘We can’t not go,’ Janey announced, proving that she had been listening all along. ‘I’ve promised.’

Promised Dan that she’d be there, was what she meant and she didn’t want to disappoint him. Not when things were getting so exciting.

Ella made no response. She knew there was no point. She wished, though, that her sister looked more conventional. Janey considered herself to be bohemian, or at least she had done until she had started frequenting Mary Quant’s shop Bazaar on the King’s Road, and had fallen in love with her signature style. It was Janey’s greatest ambition to have her own designs admired by Mary–designs that Ella thought quite frankly were far too daring. Take the short-skirted, A-line, striped ticking fabric dress Janey had made herself and had insisted on wearing this afternoon when she had bullied and coaxed Ella and Rose into going with her to her favourite coffee bar, the Fantasy.

The Fantasy, the only ‘proper’ coffee bar outside Soho, was owned by Archie McNair, friend and sponsor of Mary Quant, and Janey had told Ella and Rose excitedly that she hoped that her idol might come in and spot her in her new creation. That had not happened, but Janey had attracted a good deal of attention. No wonder people, or rather men, had stared at Janey so much. Much as she loved her younger sister, there were times when Ella couldn’t help wishing that Janey acted with more decorum and wore sensible proper grown-up clothes, not garments that made people stare.

Attracting attention of any kind was something that made Ella feel anxious. As they were growing up, whenever she and Janey had been the focus of their late mother’s attention it had been because they had done something ‘wrong’–something that had made their mother cross and for which Ella, as the elder of the two, always got the blame.

Her stepmother was nothing like her mother. Ella’s father’s marriage to Amber had been a blessed relief. Amber was a proper mother, who understood about things of importance, like not wearing wet socks or going upstairs in the dark without the light on.

At least one thing she would not be attracting attention for soon would be her weight, Ella acknowledged with a small spurt of pleasure. Dr Williamson’s diet pills had done everything both he and Libby had promised her they would, and already she was losing weight. Not that she had told anyone else about them, or about how much the cruel words and laughter she had overheard had hurt her. She would be lost now without her small yellow pills and their magical ability to make her not want to eat.

‘You can always stay here, if you want to,’ Janey told her sister. ‘You don’t have to come.’

The last thing Ella felt like doing on a cold winter night was going out to a party in some grubby smoke-filled cellar packed with people she didn’t know and with whom it was impossible to talk above the noise, but Janey’s words had aroused her suspicions.

‘Of course I’m going to go,’ Ella insisted. ‘It’s up to me to make sure that you don’t get into trouble, after all.’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not going to get into trouble,’ Janey defended herself indignantly.

Ella, though, wasn’t impressed. ‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ she told Janey. ‘I haven’t forgotten those men you brought back with you from that jazz club the other week, the ones I found sleeping downstairs.’

‘It was a freezing cold night, Ella, and they didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

‘We could have been murdered in our beds, or worse,’ Ella retaliated, her anger growing as Janey giggled.

‘Don’t be silly, they were far too drunk.’

‘It isn’t funny, Janey,’ Ella remonstrated. ‘The parents wouldn’t have approved at all.’

‘You fuss too much, Ella.’

Janey was beginning to wish that Ella would stay behind if she was going to be so stuffy. Janey had arranged to meet Dan at the party and she didn’t want Ella cramping her style.

Dan. Just thinking about him gave her a delicious squiggly feeling in her tummy.

‘If this party is going to be one of those rowdy parties at some dreadful smoky dive and filled with scruffy musicians, then—’ Ella began, only to be interrupted by Janey, who had finished making up her eyes and was now applying what looked like white lipstick to her mouth.

‘Is that really what you’re going to wear?’ Janey challenged her sister, looking disapprovingly at Ella’s pleated tartan skirt and navy-blue jumper. ‘We’re going to a party, not school…’

‘In some cold damp cellar,’ Ella retorted. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with what I’m wearing.’

‘I bet they don’t think that at Vogue,’ Janey grimaced. ‘I’ll design something for you, if you like.’

Ella shuddered. ‘No thank you.’

‘Well, you could at least wear a dress, Ella. Look how pretty Rose is in hers.’

The sisters both looked at Rose as she walked into the room in her dark green mohair dress.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Ella objected. ‘I could never wear anything like that. I’m too big, and anyway, that colour wouldn’t suit me like it does Rose.’

Whilst Ella and Janey were both tall and fair-haired, with grey eyes and good English skin, Rose was an exotic mix of East and West, fine-boned and only five foot one. Her skin was olive-toned, her face heart-shaped with high cheekbones and soft full lips, whilst her dark brown eyes were European in shape. Her long hair was silky straight and inky black, and she always wore it in a chignon.

Janey looked impatiently at Ella. If she could have done so, Janey would far rather have been sharing a dingy bedsit with one of her arty friends than living in luxury in her parents’ elegant red-brick house on Cheyne Walk. Still, at least it was in Chelsea, which sort of made it all right. Janey loved her family dearly but she had always been something of a rebel, loving the unconventional, passionate about fashion and music, art and life itself.

It was a pity that Ella had insisted on dragging her back to Cheyne Walk when, if they’d have stayed in the coffee bar, there must have been a good chance of Mary Quant coming in and spotting her. Only her sister could be old-fashioned enough to think that the ritual of ‘afternoon tea’ actually mattered and not understand that just to mention it in the circles in which Janey moved at once rendered a person hideously unhip. A person would never have thought that Ella herself had graduated from St Martins, but then Ella had been happy to go and work in Vogue’s offices, whereas nothing other than creating her own fashion designs would do for Janey. She had wanted to be a dress designer for as long as she could remember. As a little girl she had always been begging scraps of silk from Amber to make clothes for her dolls.

‘Well, I just hope that this party is respectable,’ Ella warned, ‘because Mama has enough to worry about at the moment with Emerald, without having to worry about you as well.’

Ella wished that Janey was more like Amber. She worried dreadfully about her younger sister’s casual attitude to life and its dangers. Where Ella frowned anxiously, Janey laughed; where Ella retreated warily, Janey stepped forward and embraced; where Ella saw danger, Janey saw only excitement. But Janey could not remember what Ella could, and she did not know what Ella knew either. Their real mother had loved excitement. She had craved it. Ella had heard her saying so in that wild manner she had sometimes had as she paced the floor like a bird beating itself against the bars of its cage. Her mother had laughed wildly with their aunt Cassandra, the two of them disappearing upstairs into Ella’s parents’ bedroom.

Janey had been their mother’s favourite too, somehow always managing to win a smile from her, where Ella got only cross words.

Janey didn’t understand how afraid Ella was of either of them possessing the traits of their mother, and Ella couldn’t tell her why she feared that. Janey didn’t remember their mother as well as she did–she was lucky. Even now Ella sometimes woke up in the night worrying about what their lives would have been like if their real mother had lived. She remembered vividly her mother’s moods, the rages that could come out of nowhere and then the tears, the way she had screamed at them.

The truth was that their mother had been a little mad–more than a little. Her madness had been brought on by the births of Ella herself and then Janey, so Blanche, Amber’s grandmother, had once let slip. Ella hated to think of her mother’s illness. In fact, Ella hated to think of her mother at all. She envied Emerald having Amber as her real mother.

Whenever Ella found herself beginning to feel upset or angry about anything she deliberately reminded herself of her mother and then she shut her feelings away. She would never marry–or have children–she didn’t want to end up like her mother.

But what about Janey? Janey didn’t know why she had to be afraid of what they might have inherited from their mother and Ella couldn’t bring herself to tell her because, much as she worried about her young sister and her giddiness and recklessness, Ella also loved her dearly. She didn’t want to take away Janey’s happiness and replace it with the fear she had herself.

Chapter Four
Paris

‘Well, your father might have been a duke, Emerald, but you certainly aren’t a duchess.’

Emerald only just managed to stop herself from glaring at Gwendolyn.

The three of them, Emerald herself, the Hon Lydia Munroe, and Lady Gwendolyn, her godmother’s niece, were all going to be coming out together.

Gwendolyn might be as plain as her dull-looking and boring mother, whose sharp gaze had already warned Emerald that she had not found favour with her, but Emerald knew how highly her godmother thought of her. Gwendolyn’s father was Lady Beth’s brother, the Earl of Levington, and she thought the world of him and his family. If Emerald gave in to her longing to put ‘Glum Gwennie’, as she had privately nicknamed her, in her place, she’d risk her going telling tales to her mother and her aunt, and that would mean that Emerald could lose a valuable ally. No, sadly Gwendolyn’s comeuppance would have to wait for a more propitious occasion. So instead Emerald smiled falsely at the other girl.

Obviously thinking that she got the better of the exchange Gwendolyn seized on her moment of triumph and, determined to prolong it, continued recklessly, ‘And it isn’t as though your mother has any family either. No one knows how she managed to marry your father.’

Since it was no secret that her parents’ first child had been born eight months after their hastily arranged marriage, Emerald had a pretty good idea herself. But at least her mother had been clever enough to hold out for marriage.

As much as she resented her mother, Emerald was thankful that she had held out for the status of marriage and not remained merely a mistress. She would have hated being illegitimate, people knowing, laughing at her behind her back, looking down on her.

Emerald, Lydia and Gwendolyn were seated on their beds, in the bedroom they shared in their finishing school, which was in fact a villa, close to the Bois de Boulogne, owned by the Comtesse de la Calle. The comtesse’s finishing school had the reputation for being the smartest of such schools. Being finished in Paris had a cachet to it that was not given to those girls who were finished at one of the two ‘acceptable’ London schools, so naturally Emerald had insisted on coming to the Bois de Boulogne villa.

Buoyed up by her triumph Gwendolyn continued happily, ‘Mummy and Auntie Beth both think that your mother was awfully lucky to marry as well as she did and neither of them thinks that you’ll be able to do the same.’

Emerald tensed. Gwendolyn’s words were like a match to the dry tinder of her pride. Springing up off her bed, she stood over the younger girl, her hands on her hips, the full skirts of her silk dress emphasising the narrowness of her waist,

‘Well, that’s all you know.’

‘What? Do you mean that you think that you’ll get to marry a duke like your mother did?’ Lydia demanded excitedly, joining the conversation. Lydia was two years younger than Emerald and inclined to hero-worship her, something that Emerald fostered.

Gwendolyn, though, wasn’t looking anything like as impressed.

‘A duke, yes, but like my mother, no. I shall do better than she did,’ Emerald confirmed fiercely.

There was a small sharp sound–the sucking in of air from Gwendolyn as though it tasted as sour as any lemon, followed by a thrilled gasp from Lydia.

‘Oh, Emerald, you mean the Duke of Kent, don’t you?’

‘He has to marry someone, doesn’t he, and since he can have his pick of the débutantes, he’s bound to want one of the prettiest…’ was all Emerald permitted herself to say.

She didn’t finish her sentence, but then she didn’t need to. Its meaning was plain to both of the girls sitting looking at her. Emerald was a beauty, and quite clearly destined to be the beauty of the season. Whilst Lydia had a certain fresh healthy country-girl charm about her, Gwendolyn was very close to the ugly edge of plain.

That was Gwendolyn dealt with, Emerald decided with satisfaction. Emerald wasn’t in any way fond of her own sex. She had had friends at school, of course–one had to if one wished to be the most popular girl in school–but those friends had been impressionable naïve girls rather like Lydia, easy to manipulate. There was no way that a plain, overweight girl like Gwendolyn could be admitted to that circle; she was the kind of girl that Emerald despised and treated with contempt. By rights Gwendolyn ought to have tried to seek her approval, but instead, to Emerald’s irritation, she was forever making unwanted, even critical comments in that toneless voice of hers. What a joke Glum Gwennie was, daring to think that she could criticise her, looking at her with those small sharp eyes of hers as she asked her equally sharp questions. But she would get her revenge once she was married to the Duke of Kent.

Emerald threw down the copy of the Queen magazine she had been reading and got up, pacing the room impatiently. She was bored with Paris now. She’d expected being here to be far more exciting than it was. Thank heavens they and school would soon be ‘finished’ and the fun could start in earnest.

The magazine she had discarded caught her eye. Although the season hadn’t officially started yet, already the Queen was carrying studio portraits of some of the débutantes due to come out. Her own photograph had been taken by Cecil Beaton and she had been pleased with it, but now that she had seen the photograph of another deb, taken by Lewis Coulter, an ex-Etonian with no title but excellent connections, and who had recently become the society photographer, Emerald had decided that she had to have a fresh photograph done. Never backward in coming forward when she wanted something, she had already written to him to this effect, giving him the date of her return to London and announcing that she would call on him then. It might say in the magazine that he was in such demand that he was turning away commissions but he was a photographer taking people’s photographs for money. And money was a commodity that Emerald’s mother possessed in great abundance. As did Emerald herself. Or rather as she would have when she reached the age of twenty-five, and she didn’t have to bother coaxing Mr Melrose into agreeing to pay for things she wanted from her trust fund.

Of course, her mother hated it that she was going to be so very rich…

And as for Rose…Emerald’s mouth hardened. How could her mother even acknowledge her, never mind make such a fuss over her? Didn’t her mother realise how badly having a cousin like Rose could reflect on Emerald? Emerald’s great-grandmother had been right: Rose should have been sent back to Hong Kong to live in the slums where Uncle Greg had found her mother.

It was just as well that she had had the forethought to persuade her godmother to offer to present her, and have her to stay in London with her, ‘so that Mummy can get on with her work, Auntie Beth,’ as she’d put it to her sponsor. She’d have far more licence to arrange things how she wanted under the aegis of her godmother than she would with her own mother.

Emerald was well aware that her godmother had high hopes of a match between her and her own second son. After all, Rupert had no money to speak of, and one day Emerald would have rather a lot. But she certainly did not intend to waste either herself or her fortune on such a nonentity. Equally, Emerald was also aware of exactly what was meant by the damp forceful squeeze Gwendolyn’s father had given her hand when he had called at the villa ‘to see how my little girl is’. Of course he would find her attractive, because she was.

Emerald was saving the pleasure of telling Gwendolyn exactly how revolting her father was–making up to girls his daughter’s age when he was married–as something to savour when the time was right. For now, she had more important things to think about, like what she wanted to be wearing the first time the Duke of Kent saw her…

Chapter Five
London, February 1957

Dougie looked round the empty basement beneath the Pimlico Road photographic studio, which would soon be packed with the young and the beautiful, all intent on partying the night away.

He reckoned he’d been lucky to have met Lewis Coulter. Lew–to those he knew well–supposedly employed Dougie as a junior photographer, not a general dogsbody, but when you were an Aussie newly arrived in the old country, no longer sure of your station in life, and you had your own private reasons for being here, you didn’t start protesting to the employer who had taken you on simply because he’d liked the look of you.

Besides, Dougie liked his boss and his work. He’d learned a lot from watching Lew doing his stuff–and not just with his camera. For all his outwardly lazy charm, Lew could move with the speed of lightning when he saw a girl he wanted–so fast, in fact, that the poor thing was as dazzled by him as though she had been a rabbit blinded by the headlights of his Jaguar sports car.

The fact that Lew was a member of the upper class only made the situation even better. Working for him gave Dougie an entrée into a world in which he might otherwise never have been accepted. He could study this exclusive world at first hand, something he needed to do all right, since by all accounts, if this lawyer bloke was right, then he was a member of the aristocracy himself. A duke no less. Strewth, he still hadn’t got his head round that. After all, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a duke. He’d done pretty well for himself without being one, keeping his supposed title a secret from his new friends in London, along with his real reason for being here. He didn’t want to be tracked down and revealed to be a duke, so he had also kept quiet about his background in Australia. He didn’t want anyone putting two and two together.

He’d taken a look at the house in Eaton Square that was supposedly his, although he hadn’t been to see the other place yet, the one in the country. From what he’d heard Lew saying about Britain’s aristocrats, they were all so deep in debt that they couldn’t wait to offload their old houses onto the National Trust, and he certainly didn’t intend to part with any of his inheritance keeping an old ruin going.

Dougie reckoned he’d been lucky in meeting Lew. But then Lew wasn’t your normal upper-class snob. He was a true decent bonzer bloke, who could out-drink anyone, including Dougie himself. Not that Dougie had been doing much serious drinking recently. He was too busy working for Lew.

They’d first met in a pub in Soho and, for some reason that he couldn’t remember now, Dougie had challenged Lew to a drinking contest. Dougie had fallen in with a lively group of fellow Aussies, and egged on by them, he had been sure he would win. How could he not when he was six foot two, heavily muscled and an ex-sheep shearer, and his opposition was barely five foot ten, had manicured nails, spoke with an irritating drawl and dressed like a tailor’s dummy? No contest, mate, as Dougie had boasted to his new friends.

He had kept on being sure he would win right up until he had collapsed on the pub floor.

When Dougie had finally come round he had been in a strange bed in a strange room, which he had later discovered was the spare bedroom of his now employer.

When he had asked Lew what he was doing there, the other man had shrugged and responded, ‘Couldn’t leave you on the bar floor, old chap. It isn’t the done thing to leave one’s mess behind, don’t y’know, and since your own friends had gone, I had no choice other than to bring you back here, unappealing though that prospect was.’

Still half drunk, Dougie had promptly come over all emotional and had thanked him profusely. ‘You know what, you’re a real mate.’

Lew had responded, ‘I can assure you I am no such thing. I had to remove you from the pub because the landlord was threatening to make me pay for a room for you. The last thing I wanted in my spare room was a sweaty drunken Aussie stinking of beer and sheep.’

Dougie had soon realised that Lew was something of a ladies’ man, bedding them faster than Dougie could count and then dropping them even faster. It was nothing for him to have three or four girls on the go at the same time. Dougie had never had any trouble attracting girls himself, but he freely admitted that Lew was in another league altogether.

Lew explained to Dougie that he was the only son of a younger son, ‘which means I’m afraid that whilst my veins might be filled with blue blood, my bank account sadly is not filled with anything. D’you see, old chap, the eldest son gets the title and the estate, the second son goes into the army, and the youngest into the Church, unless they can find heiresses to marry. Such a bore having to earn one’s own crust, but I’m afraid needs must.’

From what Dougie had seen, Lew’s life was anything but boring. When Lew wasn’t photographing, he was either out partying or, like tonight, throwing parties of his own. Tonight was to be a ‘bring a bottle’ get-together, to celebrate the birthday of one of Lew’s many friends.

There’d be models, and the more daring society girls and their upper-class escorts, sneaking a look at Lew’s bohemian and louche way of life, actors coming in from the nearby Royal Court Theatre, arty types; writers and musicians.

Pretty soon now people would start arriving. A smooth Ella Fitzgerald number was playing on the gramophone. Dougie always felt nervous on these occasions. He was proud of what he was–an Aussie from the outback–but he knew that the more sophisticated young Londoners liked to make fun of colonials and laugh at their gaucherie and inadvertent mistakes. Dougie was constantly getting things wrong, putting his size elevens in it and ending up looking like a prize fool. There’d been no call where Dougie had grown up for the fancy manners and customs that Lew’s sort took for granted. His uncle had been too busy running his sheep station to have time to teach his orphaned nephew all that kind of fancy stuff, even if he had known about it himself, which Dougie doubted.

It had been Mrs Mac, his uncle’s housekeeper, who had seen to it that he knew how to use a knife and fork properly and who had taught him his manners.

As a boy, Dougie had worked alongside the station rousabouts, drovers and the skilful shearers, learning the male culture that meant that questions weren’t asked about a person’s past, and that a man earned respect for what he was and what he did in the here and now, and not because he had some fancy title. It might have been a hard life but it had been a fair one.

Now he was having to learn to live by a different set of rules and customs. He’d caught on pretty quickly to some things–he’d had to, or risk going around with his ears permanently burning from humiliation.

Dougie checked his watch. Dressed in black trousers, and a black polo-neck jumper with the sleeves pushed back to reveal the muscular arms and the remnants of his Australian tan, his thick wavy dark brown hair faintly bleached at the ends from the sun, Dougie had quickly adopted the working ‘uniform’ of his boss, and mentor.

He wondered if the pretty little actress he had his eye on for the last couple of weeks would be at the party. But even if she did bite, he could hardly invite her back to the run-down bedsit in the ‘Little Australia’ area of the city, which he shared with what felt like an entire colony of bedbugs, and two hairy, beer-swilling, foul-mouthed ex-sheep shearers, whom he suspected knew one end of a sheep from the other better than they did one end of a girl from the other. Sooner or later he was going to have to find a place of his own.

‘Quick, there’s a taxi.’

They’d had to run through the rain, Janey laughing and pulling the plastic rain hood off her new beehive hairstyle as the three of them scrambled into the taxi and squashed up together on the back seat.

‘Twenty Pimlico Road, please,’ Janey told the driver before turning to Ella.

‘You’ll have to pay out of Mama’s kitty, Ella. I haven’t got a bean.’

Like any protective mother, Amber wanted to keep her children safe, but wisely she and Jay had also agreed that they didn’t want to spoil them, so the rule was that on shared outings, when a taxi was needed, this could be paid for from a shared ‘kitty’ of which Ella was in charge.

‘We could have walked,’ Ella pointed out.

‘What, in this rain? We’d have arrived looking like drowned rats.’

Her sister was right, Ella knew. But though the Fulshawes might be rich–very rich, in fact–that did not mean they went in for vulgar ostentation or throwing their money around. Ella knew for a fact that the workers at Denby Mill, her stepmother’s silk mill, were paid in excess of the workers in any of the other Macclesfield mills. But millworkers could not afford to ride to parties in taxis and Ella’s social conscience grieved her that she was doing so.

On the other hand, without passengers how would the cabby be able to earn his living? Her conscience momentarily quietened she looked down at her ankles, hoping that her stockings would not be splashed when she got out.

They were halfway to their destination, stopped at a red traffic light, when suddenly the door was yanked open.

‘’Ere, can’t you see I’ve already got a fare?’ the cabby protested.

But the young man getting into the cab and pulling down the extra seat ignored him, shaking the rain off his black hair and grinning at the three girls as he demanded, ‘You don’t mind, do you, girls?’ in an accent that held more than a trace of cockney, before turning to the driver: ‘Trafalgar Square, mate, when you’ve dropped these three lovelies off.’

Ella had shrunk back into the corner of the cab the minute she had seen the intruder. Oliver Charters. She’d recognised him straight away. Her face burned. Of all the bad luck.

Ella had disliked Oliver Charters the minute she had set eyes on him, and she had disliked him even more when he had started to poke fun at her, mimicking her accent, and generally teasing her.

Her boss had noticed and had asked her why she didn’t like him.

‘I just don’t,’ was all she had been able to say. ‘I don’t like the way he talks, or looks, or…or the way he smells.’

To Ella’s chagrin, her boss had burst out laughing.

‘That, my dear, is the heady aphrodisiacal smell of raw male sexuality, so you had better get used to it.’

Remembering the way he had behaved towards her in the Vogue office, Ella could feel herself stiffening with resentment.

Janey, of course, had no reservations about the intruder. Eager to please as usual, she smiled warmly at him as she said, ‘You’re playing that new dare game that’s all the rage, aren’t you? The one where you have to jump into someone else’s taxi and get the driver to take you somewhere without them complaining?’

Oliver flashed her a grin that revealed the cleft in his chin, pushing back his thick floppy ink-black hair and smiling at her with the brilliant malachite-green eyes that mesmerised cute little popsies like this one at sixty paces.

‘Play games? Nah, not me. It’s you posh nobs that do that. Me, I’ve better things to do wiv me time.’

Janey looked so entranced that Ella couldn’t help but give a small snort of disgust. He was putting on that cockney accent, exaggerating the way he normally spoke, and now that he’d got Janey on the edge of her seat, all wide-eyed with excitement, he was laying it on like nobody’s business.

The snort had Ollie turning his head towards the corner of the taxi. Ella, realising her mistake, shrunk deeper into the shadows and lowered her head so that he couldn’t see her face.

Oliver gave a dismissive shrug–the girl in the corner had probably got spots and puppy fat–and turned back to Janey, who quite obviously did not have either, and neither did the little beauty with the Eurasian looks.

‘We’re going to a party–why don’t you come with us?’ Janey offered.

‘No he can’t.’

Now it wasn’t only him who was looking at her, Ella realised, it was Janey and Rose as well, and just then the taxi turned a sharp corner, throwing her forward so that she had to grab the edge of the seat to steady herself, and the light from the street revealed her face to Oliver.

The posh stuck-up girl from Vogue, who was always looking down her nose at him; the one who didn’t just have frigid virgin written all over her, it was probably written right through her as well, like the lettering on a stick of Brighton rock. Yep, that was what she was: a posh virgin, all pink-candy-coated exterior with ‘virgin for marriage only’ written into her pure sexless little body.

He could see the familiar cold dislike in her eyes, and for a minute he was tempted to punish her just a little, to tease her, and put the real fear of God into her and make her cling to her knickers, but he had other things to do, like talking an idiot of a younger cousin from getting involved with one of the East End’s most notorious gangs, daft bugger.

Oliver had trained as a boxer until his widowed mother, who had not liked the thought of her only child ending up with his brains addled, like so many boxers did, had had a word with a chap she went cleaning for. He’d put in a good word for Ollie, who’d been taken on by a local photographer, his mother somehow managing to find the money to pay the indenture for his apprenticeship. No one, least of all Oliver himself, had expected that he’d not only develop a talent for photography but that he’d also become so passionate about it that he’d give up the boxing ring to work for next to nothing, going out in all weathers to take pictures that he then had to hawk round gritty world-weary newspaper picture editors’ offices. He’d got his first break with a photograph of a couple of East End toughs, the Kray twins, at a boxing match. They’d been in the foreground of the shot, whilst in the background there’d been a couple of society women and their partners, the women dressed up to the nines in mink and diamonds.

Now he’d built himself a reputation for photographing society where it met London’s lowlife, as well as photographing fashion models for glossy magazines like Vogue.

‘Wot, me go to a party wiv you toffs?’ he teased Janey, who was wriggling with pleasure. ‘Not ruddy likely. I’d be frown out.’

‘Janey, do come on,’ Ella demanded.

They had reached their destination and Ella was already out of the taxi and standing on the pavement, having handed over their fare to the cab driver.

As she followed Ella, Janey was conscious of the fact that Oliver was watching her or, more correctly, her breasts. She was wearing one of the circular-stitched cone-shaped brassieres that daring girls wore to give them a film star sweater-girl shape beneath their jumpers, and the effect, even beneath her oversized jumper, was making Janey feel very pleased with herself indeed. Ella didn’t approve of her new brassiere one little bit. She had pursed her lips earlier and said that she thought it was vulgar. Sexy was what her elder sister had really meant, but of course, being Ella, she would never be able to bring herself to use such a word, Janey knew. She smiled at Oliver in response to his wink as he closed the door and the taxi shot off in the direction of Trafalgar Square, leaving the three girls standing on the pavement.

‘Janey, you’re going to get soaked,’ Ella complained. ‘Why haven’t you got your coat on?’

Because her coat concealed her newly shaped breasts, was the truthful answer, but of course it wasn’t one that Janey was going to give.

‘Quick, let’s get inside,’ she said instead, darting across the wet pavement, leaving the other two to follow her, torn between feeling guilty and triumphant, and all sort of squishy and excited inside. Maybe tonight would be the night she’d go all the way with Dan.

Janey hadn’t said anything to the others about having even met Dan, never mind that she was hoping that he would be at the party, but Ella wasn’t deceived. Janey was up to something and, what was more, Ella knew instinctively that it was the very kind of something that could lead Janey into trouble.

Ella didn’t like trouble of any kind. Just the thought of it was enough to bring a dreaded and familiarly unpleasant feeling into her tummy. She could remember having that feeling as a very little girl when, on one humiliating occasion in the nursery, when her mother had been in one of her moods, Ella had wet her knickers because she had been too afraid to interrupt her mother to tell her that she needed the lavatory. How cross her mother had been. Ella had been made to wear her wet knickers for the rest of the day as punishment.

Hidden away inside her memory where she kept all those shameful things she didn’t really want to remember were images of the black lace underwear she had once seen her mother wearing. It had been one hot afternoon when Ella was supposed to be having a nap. She had woken up feeling thirsty and, since her nanny hadn’t been there, she had got up to go downstairs to the kitchen to ask Cook for a drink. On the way she had heard laughter coming from her parents’ bedroom and she had paused on the landing outside and then opened the bedroom door.

Her mother had been lying on the bed in her black lace underwear, whilst Auntie Cassandra, wearing a bathrobe, had been fanning her with a black feather fan.

The minute they had seen her the two women had gone very still, and then her mother had screeched furiously, ‘How dare you come in here, you wicked girl? Get out. Get out.’

Ella had backed out of the room and run back upstairs to the nursery.

She desperately wanted to warn Janey how important it was not to emulate their mother and turn out like her, but at the same time she couldn’t find the words to explain just what it was about their late mother’s wildness that worried and upset her so much.

Dougie let the girls in, grinning appreciatively at all three of them, introducing himself and asking their names.

‘Ella and Janey Fulshawe, and Rose Pickford,’ Janey answered.

Fulshawe? Pickford? Dougie knew those names. He’d seen them often enough in the correspondence sent to him by the late duke’s solicitor. The solicitor had set out all the intricate details of the widowed duchess’s family connections in a lengthy letter, accompanied by a family tree, while Dougie had been in Australia. He hadn’t paid much attention to it at first, but since coming to London he had studied the family tree. He hadn’t expected his first meeting with young women listed there to come about like this, though. If it was them and he wasn’t jumping to the wrong conclusion. It must be them, he assured himself, giving Rose a quick assessing look. He remembered now that there had been something on the family tree to show that the duchess’s brother had a half-Chinese daughter, and Rose was beautifully Eurasian. Dougie cursed himself now for not having paid more attention to the finer details of the genealogy, such as the exact names of the duchess’s extended family. The only name he could remember was that of the duchess’s daughter, Emerald. Surely it had to be them, though?

‘You’re Australian,’ Janey guessed, breaking into Dougie’s thoughts.

‘I reckon the accent gives me away,’ Dougie agreed ruefully. He was desperate to find out more about them, to find out if it really was them.

‘Just a bit,’ Janey agreed, smiling at him.

Rose tensed. She knew exactly why the young Australian who had let them in had looked at her the way he had when she had given him her name. He’d assumed, as so many others did, that because of the way she looked she belonged to a different stratum of society, and her upper-class accent had surprised him. He probably thought, as she was aware people who did not know her family history often did, that she had deliberately changed the way she spoke in an attempt to pass for something that she wasn’t.

The year Amber had brought them out, Rose had been shocked and hurt by the number of young men who had taken it for granted that they could take liberties with her that they would never have dreamed of doing with Ella and Janey.

The white-painted sitting room was heaving with people, the pitch of the conversation such that it was almost impossible to hear the swing music playing in the background.

Janey surveyed the room as best she could, disappointed not to be able to see Dan immediately, but then plunging into the mêlée when she finally managed to pick out her St Martins friends, leaving Ella to protest and then grab hold of Rose’s hand so that they could follow her.

Dougie was desperate to keep the girls with him so that he could find out a bit more about their lives. He knew that it was the deaths of both the duchess’s husband and her son that had resulted in him being next in line to inherit the dukedom. The solicitor had implied in his letters that the duchess was anxious to make him welcome in England, but Dougie suspected those words were just good manners, and that in reality she was bound to resent him.

Dougie had never had what he thought of as a proper family, with aunts and uncles, and cousins of his own age, and the obvious warmth and attachment between Ella, Janey and Rose drew him to them. OK, they might not strictly be cousins, but they were ‘family’. Weren’t they?

It would be easy enough to find out–but not by declaring himself. He wasn’t ready for that yet.

He was still clutching the coats the girls had given him and he could see that they were turning away from him and looking into the room. This might be his only chance to find out for sure.

Clearing his throat, he said as nonchalantly as he could, ‘So where’s Emerald, then?’

The effect on all three of them was electric. They turned almost as one to look at him. Well, at least they knew who she was. Dougie had been half afraid that they would look blankly at him and that he’d be forced to accept that he had got it all wrong.

‘She’s still in Paris,’ Ella informed Dougie.

‘Do you know Emerald then?’ That was Janey.

‘Er, no,’ Dougie admitted, ‘but I’ve heard about her. That is, I’ve heard her name.’

They knew Emerald all right, but for some reason the mention of her name had changed the atmosphere from easy warmth to quite definitely very cool.

‘Emerald isn’t like us,’ Janey explained, taking pity on the young Australian, who was now looking self-conscious. ‘You see, Emerald isn’t just Emerald, she’s Lady Emerald.’ As she finished speaking Janey turned to scan the room. Pleasant though the young Australian was, he wasn’t Dan. ‘Excuse us.’ She smiled at Dougie, heading into the centre of the room, leaving Ella and Rose to follow her.

Within a few minutes of joining the party the girls had become separated, Janey deliberately escaping from Ella’s watchful eye so that she could find Dan, Ella ending up in the kitchen where she was asked so often for a clean glass that she had busied herself collecting empties and washing them. At least it gave her something to do and helped her to feel less self-conscious. Nearly all the other girls were wearing the same kind of clothes as Janey. None of them was dressed like her. But then none of them was as big and lumpy and plain as she was. One girl, with hair such a bright shade of red that it could only be dyed, did have large bosoms, which she was showing off proudly in a thin black jumper, but she was the sort who obviously didn’t mind flaunting herself. Ella shuddered over the kitchen sink at the thought of the way the other girl had laughed when one of the men had touched her breast. Ella went hot and then cold with horror at the thought of being subjected to that kind of treatment.

‘’Scuse me…oh, sorry,’ a tall dark-haired young man apologised to Rose as he tried to get past her and ended up almost spilling his drink over her. ‘Blame my friends.’ He indicated a group of young men congregated by the table of drinks. ‘If I don’t reach them soon, they’ll have drunk all the beer we brought with us.’

‘Hey, Jew boy, stop trying it on with the Chink and get over here.’

Just for a second before he masked it with a small shrug of his shoulders and an easy smile, Rose saw the anger tightening his mouth.

‘Sorry about that,’ he apologised to her again. ‘He’s got a big mouth and, like they say, empty vessels make the most noise.’

Rose inclined her head and looked away. She wished she could move away as well, but that was impossible with the room packed so tightly with people.

‘Over a hundred years my family have lived in London, and yet I still get identified as an outsider because of the way I look.’ He was smiling–apparently more resigned than resentful–revealing strong white teeth and a dimple in the middle of his chin.

Her surprise that he should continue the conversation had Rose looking back at him before she could stop herself.

‘What about you? Have your family been here long?’

‘That depends which side of my family you’re asking about. My mother never made it here from the slums of Hong Kong, whilst my father’s family have lived here for many generations.’

‘That must be hard for you.’

‘What must? Looking like my mother when I’m living in my father’s country?’

‘Living here, but feeling like you aren’t accepted,’ he corrected her gently.

Rose stiffened, but either he hadn’t seen how much she disliked the direction the conversation was taking or he didn’t care, because he continued, ‘The trouble is that when you’re like us you’re an outsider wherever you go. I worked on a kibbutz in Israel after I finished my national service. There were Jewish kids there from all over the world, we were made welcome, but we weren’t at home. The thing is that people like you and me, we aren’t the past because we don’t fit in, but our children will be the future. One day we and they will be the past, just like the Romans are, and the Vikings and all those others who came here as outsiders. What’s your name? Mine’s Josh, by the way. Joshua.’

‘Rose–Rose Pickford.’

He nodded, then demanded, ‘So what do you do, Rose Pickford, when you aren’t out partying?’

‘I’m training to be an interior designer.’

To her surprise he gave an exultant whoop of approval. ‘You know what? I think that you and me were destined to meet, because what I need right now more than anything else is an interior designer.’

Rose eyed him suspiciously. ‘I really must go and find my friends,’ she told him coolly, but as she made to edge past him, someone pushed by her, and would have sent her slamming into the wall if Josh hadn’t reacted quickly and scooped her towards himself so that it was his forearm that connected with the wall and not her back.

She could feel his exhaled breath against her forehead.

‘Are you OK?’

This close up she could smell the scent of his skin, sort of citrussy, causing her to clench her stomach muscles. Her gaze was almost on a level with his Adam’s apple and her heart jerked. Rose struggled against a backwash of unfamiliar emotions.

‘Yes, thanks, I’m fine.’ Her response was unsteady. It was impossible for her even to think about trying to stand independently of him, the room was so packed. He was towering over her, his shoulders broad, the prominent hook of his nose casting a shadow over the olive-toned flesh of his face, his hair thick and as dark as her own, although a very different texture with its natural wave flopped over his forehead and curled over the collar of his shirt. He was undeniably handsome and Rose suspected probably very sexy, but there was also a kindness about him that, like his natural ebullience, disarmed her and somehow drew her to him.

He was bending his head towards her ear. ‘Want to guess what I do?’

Rose wanted to shake her head, but without waiting for her response he told her, ‘I’m a hairdresser.’

Now he had surprised her.

‘That’s why I need an interior designer,’ Josh continued. ‘I’m setting meself up in business and I’ve got this salon, see, but it needs tarting up a bit, and I reckon you could be just the person to help me get it sorted.’ He grinned at her.

Josh was aware that a new mood was rushing across the Atlantic from America and sweeping Britain’s youth up into its very own new culture. Rock and roll had arrived, a brand-new form of music that belonged only to the young, and one that demanded that the young changed the way they looked and acted to separate themselves from their parents’ generation. New hairstyles were a part of that culture, and Josh intended to ride the crest of the new wave by opening his own salon so that he could make his name and his fortune.

‘I can’t pay you anything,’ he continued, ‘but I’ll give you a free haircut and it will be the best you’ll ever have.’

He had so much confidence, and so much vitality and energy, Rose couldn’t help but smile.

He was looking at her hair and Rose automatically touched her chignon protectively.

‘I don’t want my hair cut.’

She was a one-off and no mistake, Josh decided, amused by her defensiveness. Normally he had girls pushing eagerly for his attention within minutes of meeting them, even if some of them masked their interest in him by acting all hoity-toity. This one was different, though, with her serious dark eyes and her cautious manner, as though she were afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. Josh had a large and a very warm heart. He had grown up in the East End in a community where you looked out for your own and protected them. Rose, he recognised, aroused that protective instinct in him. She was looking as though she wanted to get away from him, but he didn’t want her to.

‘All right, I won’t cut it then, but I still want you to sort out the salon for me.’

‘But how can you say that? You don’t know anything about me.’

‘Well, that’s soon solved, isn’t it? Come on, I’ll go first and tell you my life story, then you can tell me yours.’

There was no stopping him, Rose decided with resignation.

‘My dad wanted me to be a tailor, like him, and even now he still doesn’t think that hairdressing is a man’s job, even though I’ve told him that it’s his fault that that’s what I do. He was the one who got me a Saturday job sweeping up hair from the floor of the salon close to where he works, and he’s the one who taught me how to use a pair of scissors, even it was on cloth and not hair. He didn’t speak to me for a week when I told him that I wanted to be apprenticed and learn to become a proper hairdresser. He told me he’d rather disown me, but my mother talked him round in the end, and once he’d met Charlie, who owned the salon where I wanted to train, and realised that he wasn’t a pouf, he calmed down a bit.’

Josh wasn’t going to say so to Rose, but Charlie had been as rampant as a ram and ready to get his leg over anything female that moved, including most of his staff, as well as his younger and prettier clients. But it was the fact that he drove a fancy car and swaggered through the salon, come Saturday afternoon, wearing a sharp suit, eyeing up the birds for a date for Saturday night that had helped to make Josh decide that he wouldn’t mind a bit of that life.

Rose was a cut above the girls he knew, Josh could tell that, not because she talked posh–that would never have impressed Josh–but because she was…he hunted around for the right way to describe her and then gave a satisfied nod when he finally came up with the words…delicate and refined. That was it: Rose was refined, and needed to be treated right.

‘I’d seen Charlie coming into the salon all dressed up in a fancy suit, and I’d reckoned that hairdressing must be a good way to make a bit of money. And, of course, me being a Jew boy, I fancied making a bit meself.’ He grinned at his joke. ‘He worked his apprentices damn near into the grave and paid us peanuts, but I learned a lot whilst I was working for Charlie.’

He certainly had. Josh had quickly learned about offering to do the prettier girls’ hair for free in their own homes on his day off, and getting to have a bit of a smooch with them in payment.

‘Of course, I’d got my sights on better things, even then. I’d made up my mind that as soon as I was qualified I was going to find myself a job as a stylist at some posh West End place and start saving for my own salon. That’s where the money is: owning your own place. Only I had to do my national service first, of course, and then this other hairdresser, another Jewish lad, persuaded me to go out to Israel with him,’

‘To work on the kibbutz?’ Rose asked, remembering what he had said earlier. She was more interested in his story than she had expected.

Josh shook his head. ‘Not exactly. Or at least that wasn’t the original plan, although we did end up doing a spell in one.’

Rose’s eyes widened. ‘You went there to fight,’ she guessed.

‘It wasn’t my idea,’ Josh told her. ‘It was Vidal’s. And by the time I’d realised what he’d volunteered us for, and that it wasn’t a few weeks in the sunshine picking fruit, it was too late. I reckon that Vidal was hoping that would be the end of me, what with us both wanting to open our own salons and me being a better hairdresser than him.’

He was laughing to show that he was only joking, so Rose smiled too.

‘Me and Vidal both worked for Raymond, Mr Teasy Weasy,’ he explained to Rose. ‘You’ll have heard of him?’

Rose nodded. Raymond was one of London’s best known society hairdressers.

‘Tell me all about him…’ she said.

Ella was longing for the evening to be over. Not because of the smoke-filled air that was stinging her eyes, or because she was tired, but because for the last five minutes Janey had been sitting in a dark corner of the room with a decidedly louche-looking dishevelled type, whom she was snogging for all she was worth, and who right now had his hand on her mohair-covered breast.

Ella was filled with anxiety and misery. She wanted desperately to go over and put an end to what was going on but at the same time she didn’t want to do anything that would draw attention to her sister’s reckless behaviour.

Meanwhile, Janey felt bitterly disappointed. She’d waited and waited for Dan to arrive, but he hadn’t done, and then she’d heard one of the girls from a theatrical school in Markham Square saying that Dan and some of the others from their crowd had gone to Soho to a new jazz club instead of coming to the party. And then Larry had pounced on her and she was trapped with him now, because she hadn’t had the heart to say ‘no’ when he had looked so pleased to see her. She’d been so excited about the party but it was turning out to be anything but enjoyable. Larry’s breath smelled of beer, and being kissed by him wasn’t a bit like being kissed by Dan, and she wished she hadn’t got involved with him.

Dougie didn’t quite know what to do. He knew what he wanted to do, of course. The pretty little actress hadn’t shown–not that Dougie was too disappointed; there were plenty of other equally pretty girls here, after all–and, more importantly, they were here: the three girls who could tell him so much that he didn’t yet know about the dukedom, and the duchess’s feelings about someone taking what should have been her own son’s place.

Although Dougie understood all about the law of primogeniture, he still felt uncomfortable about stepping into shoes that should belong to someone else, especially when he was pretty sure that they weren’t going to fit him or be his style. There was a big difference between the dusty boots worn by outback stockmen and the laced-up brogues and polished leather shoes of the British aristocrat.

The three girls could give him an insight into how things were that he could never get from anyone else. It was a golden opportunity and he’d be a fool to let it go to waste.

He looked round for Janey. She’d been the friendliest of the three, but the only member of the trio he could see was Ella. She was standing on her own.

He hesitated and then plunged through the crowd towards her before he could change his mind.

‘Cigarette?’ he said, quickly wiping his now damp palm against his pocket as he offered her the pack, and then apologised, red-faced with embarrassment when it nearly slipped out of his hand.

His obvious gaucheness had the effect of both disarming Ella and arousing her sympathy. He was so big that it was no wonder he was clumsy. Although normally she would have refused the offered cigarette, she accepted it instead, giving him a smile that, although she didn’t know it, filled Dougie with relief. He’d been half expecting that she’d cold-shoulder him.

‘I still haven’t got the hang of doing this,’ he admitted ruefully when he had finally managed to tap out a cigarette for her. His awkwardness helped Ella to relax and drop her guard.

‘Didn’t you smoke before you came to England?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, but not these. We rolled our own, on the sheep station. It’s cheaper.’

Ella’s sympathy for him grew. He might be good-looking but he was as out of place at the party as she was. His obvious discomfort brought out her ‘big sister’ protective instinct. She suspected he felt a bit out of his depth in London.

‘You must miss Australia,’ she guessed.

Dougie felt some of his tension ease. She was more sympathetic than he had expected.

‘It’s different here, and sometimes that does make me feel a bit out of things,’ he admitted truthfully. Another couple of minutes and she’d have smoked her cigarette and he’d have lost the opportunity he had created. Dare he ask her what he wanted to ask her? And if he did, would she walk off in disgust? There was only one way to find out. He took a deep breath.

‘You looked a bit put out earlier when I mentioned Em—Lady Emerald, but she’s your sister, right? I get a bit confused with your English setup with titles.’

‘Stepsister,’ Ella corrected him. ‘Emerald’s mother is married to my and Janey’s father. They were each married before, our father to our mother, and Emerald’s mother to the duke, which is how Emerald gets her title.’

‘So that makes Emerald’s mother a duchess, and in time that will mean that your stepsister will be a duchess as well?’ Of course Dougie knew that was not the case, but there was something he was desperate to know.

Normally people simply did not ask that kind of question, but Ella couldn’t help but take pity on the young Australian. There was something engaging about him, something friendly and, well, safe. He reminded Ella in an odd sort of way of a large, well-meaning but clumsy dog. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know any better. He was from overseas after all, and allowances had to be made.

Taking a deep breath she corrected him firmly, ‘No, Emerald can never be a duchess, unless of course she married a duke. The title descends through the male line, you see.’

‘I get it,’ Dougie answered truthfully, fighting the superstitious temptation to cross his fingers as he asked his all-important question as casually as he could. ‘So who is the duke then?’

‘We don’t know. You see, both Emerald’s father and her brother were killed in the same accident, and Lord Robert, Emerald’s father, was an only child. The family solicitor thinks that he’s traced someone who might be the heir, but he’s still waiting to hear back from him–that’s if he is the right man, and he’s still alive.’

Circumspect as always, Ella didn’t want to say too much to Dougie, although of course she knew that the family solicitor was desperately trying to make contact with the new heir.

‘I dare say your stepmother isn’t too keen on having some stranger take what should have been her son’s place,’ Dougie suggested, trying not to feel too guilty about his deceit.

‘No, that’s not the case at all,’ Ella defended her stepmother vehemently. ‘Quite the opposite. Mama just isn’t like that. She desperately wants there to be an heir, because otherwise the title will die out and the estate will be broken up, and she says that Lord Robert would have hated that. It was so awful what happened, Lord Robert and Luc being killed in a car accident.’

‘You knew them?’

‘Yes. They used to come and visit Mama’s grandmother. My father was her estate manager. I was only young, of course, but I can remember them. Mama says that only when the dukedom has been passed on to a new heir will she be able to feel that Lord Robert is finally at peace.’

‘So you reckon, then, that this heir, whoever he is, would be welcomed by the duchess?’

‘I’m sure of it,’ Ella confirmed, adding, ‘I’m not so sure that Emerald would welcome him, though. She’s planning to have her coming-out ball at the house in Eaton Square, which really belongs to the duke. Mama didn’t want her to but Emerald always manages to get her own way.’

‘I dare say the estate is pretty run down, there not being an heir?’ Dougie probed further.

‘Oh, no,’ Ella assured him firmly. ‘Mama is a trustee, along with Mr Melrose, the family solicitor, and although Osterby–that’s the main house in the country–is shut up and not used, there’s a skeleton staff there to keep everything in order and there’s an estate manager to take care of the land.’

‘Strewth, that must be costing someone a bob or two,’ Dougie commented.

‘Well, the money comes out of the estate itself. The duke was very rich, and Mama says that everything must be kept in order whilst there’s the slightest hope of finding the heir so that it can be handed over to him as Robert would have wanted it to be.’

‘Emerald will feel her nose has been put out of joint then, won’t she, if some heir arrives and then she gets nothing?’

‘Emerald couldn’t have inherited the estate–it’s entailed–and besides, her father set up a very generous trust fund for her.’

‘So she’s a rich heiress then, is she?’

‘I expect she will be one day.’

‘And you don’t mind?’

‘No. Not at all.’

Ella might understand that Australians did not know any better than to ask the kind of questions that were normally taboo but she drew the line at informing Dougie that her stepmother was independently wealthy, and that none of them had any need to feel envious of Emerald, in any way.

Ella knew that she should not have said as much as she already had, but the truth was that talking about Emerald helped to keep her mind off her anxiety over Janey, who was still locked in an embrace in the corner. Now when Ella looked she could see that the dishevelled one’s hand had disappeared up inside Janey’s jumper. She opened her mouth in shock and the small anxious sound she made had Dougie looking in the same direction.

‘Looks like someone is enjoying the party,’ he chuckled, offering Ella another cigarette.

‘I’m sorry. Please excuse me.’

Ella was obviously flustered. Her set expression and pale face indicated how alarmed she was by her sister’s behaviour, and Dougie wasn’t really surprised by her obvious desire to do something about it.

How awful of her to be so rude, but she had to stop what was going on, Ella comforted herself as she hurried over to her sister. She came to a halt, standing determinedly in front of Janey.

‘It’s time for us to go, Janey.’

Janey, who had been struggling to stop Larry’s hands from roving far more intimately over her body than she welcomed, greeted her sister’s arrival with relief–not that she intended to let Ella know that–and extracted herself from his embrace.

‘Where’s Rose?’ she asked Ella.

The honest answer was that Ella didn’t know, but she could hardly say that unless she wanted to risk Janey accusing her of pretending she wanted to leave. The last thing she wanted was a row with Janey, which would result in her impetuous sister going straight back to the man Ella had just prised her away from.

To her relief Janey announced, ‘Oh, there she is, over there.’

‘Look, I meant what I said about wanting you to come and take a look at my salon,’ Josh was saying to Rose.

There was more space around them now and she had been able to step back from him. She started to shake her head, but he stopped her, reaching into his pocket and producing a business card with a theatrical flourish.

‘Here’s my card. Think about it.’

Rose could see Ella beckoning her urgently, Janey beside her, so she took the card and slipped it into her handbag.

‘I must go,’ she stammered hurriedly, before making her way to Ella’s side.

‘Look, leave it out, will you, Ollie? I know what I’m doing.’

The stubborn look on his cousin’s face as he pulled his arm free of Oliver’s restraining hand told Oliver all he needed to know about Willie’s frame of mind.

They were in their local East End pub, the Royal Crown, standing at the bar with their beers.

‘I thought like you meself once, Willie. In fact I was all for making meself a career in the boxing ring, but then I got to thinking—’

‘You mean that your ma got to thinking for you,’ Willie interrupted him. ‘Well, I’m not being told what to do by you, Ollie. Harry Malcolms reckons I’ve got a good future ahead of me, and that there’s bin talk of either the Richardsons or the Krays tekkin’ an interest.’

The mention of two of the East End’s most notorious gangs made Oliver frown.

‘If you go down that route you’ll be expected to throw matches as well as win them, Willie,’ he warned.

His cousin gave a dismissive shrug. ‘It’s only them lads that aren’t good enough that get told to lose, and that ain’t going to happen to me. Reggie came down to watch me sparring the other night, and he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t fink he wanted me on board.’

Willie might think he had what it took to make the big time but Oliver had asked around and the word on the street was that he was more boxing ring fodder than a future champion, and would end up merely as a sparring partner for more skilled boxers, working for a pittance in a boxing club rather than earning big money in prize fights.

The trouble with Willie was that he was easily led and just as easily deceived.

‘You’re a fool, Willie,’ Oliver complained, beginning to lose patience. ‘Throw in your lot with them and my bet is that you’ll end up with your brains turned to jelly, or working as one of their enforcers.’

‘You’re just jealous,’ Willie accused him, his cheeks flushed. ‘You know what your problem is, don’t you? It’s that mother of yours. My dad reckons—’ He broke off suddenly, looking self-conscious and scuffing his shoe on the ground.

Oliver froze. This wasn’t the first time there’d been dark hints thrown out about his mother.

‘Go on, Willie. Your dad reckons what exactly?’ he challenged, his voice hard.

‘Oh, leave it out, will you, Ollie? I didn’t mean nothing. It’s just that your ma always carries on like nothing’s good enough for her. Me ma reckons that it’s rich, her coming on the way she does when she works as a ruddy cleaner, but me dad—’

He broke off again, his face reddening whilst Oliver’s mouth compressed into a thin line of fury.

He should be used to it by now. After all, he’d pretty much grown up shrugging off the whispers and sly looks that people exchanged when they talked about his mother. The gossips whispered that the rich widower for whom she cleaned was responsible for her good figure and her smart appearance.

Oliver scowled. He was no stranger to the pleasure of sex–far from it–but the thought of his mother tarting herself up for her wealthy boss wasn’t one that sat comfortably with him, and all the more so because of the benefits that had come his way over the years, courtesy of Herbert Sawyer.

He bunched his fist and then slowly and deliberately relaxed it. He hadn’t come here to get involved in a fight with his younger cousin–or anyone else, for that matter. He’d left all that business behind long ago.

‘Please yourself,’ he told his cousin, putting down his beer glass, ‘but don’t come crying to me when you’re standing in the dock about to be sent down because you’ve used them fists of yours on someone you shouldn’t on Reggie Kray’s orders.’

‘Give over, Ollie. Come on, let’s have another drink,’ Willie tried to appease him.

Oliver looked round the bar. He wasn’t really in the mood for the kind of drinking session that Willie no doubt had in mind.

Before he could reply, the door from the street opened and a group of men came in, Reggie Kray in their midst. He was dressed in the dapper fashion he favoured, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Automatically Willie stepped back–no one stood in the way of the Krays–lowering his head, almost as though in obeisance.

Reggie stopped, causing the enforcers behind him to trip over their own crepe-soled brothel creepers in their efforts not to bump into ‘the boss’. It wasn’t Willie Reggie stopped in front of, though, but Oliver.

‘Saw that photograph you took of me and Ronnie,’ he announced, drawing deeply on his cigarette and then exhaling before adding, ‘Smart piece of work. Me and Ronnie liked it. Next time, though, make sure you get some bits of smart upper-crust skirt in as well, not them old dames.’

Without taking his gaze from Oliver he called out to the barman, ‘Alf, give my friend here a drink.’ Then he continued, ‘Mind you, there’s to be no photograph taking in here, mate, understand?’

Oliver certainly did. The pub was a seedy dive where the Krays came to talk business, not flash their East End smartness for public view. Like rats coming up from the sewers, those with whom the Krays did business often preferred to conduct that business under the cover of darkness.

Chapter Six
Paris

Emerald arched her foot, the better to admire the elegance of her new Italian leather shoes, and the slenderness of her legs in their Dior silk stockings. This time next week she would be back in London, and she couldn’t wait. The Dior dress she had been coveting, and which she suspected her mother would not have permitted her to have, on the grounds that it was too grown up, was safely packed ready to be taken back with her. By the time her mother got the bill it would be too late for her to do anything about it. She certainly couldn’t send it back as the couture gown had been made especially for her.

Emerald had known she had to have it the minute she had seen it at the autumn season’s show. She would wear it for the formal official photographs that would celebrate the announcement of her engagement to the Duke of Kent. His mother, Princess Marina, was well known for being stylish and elegant. Emerald intended to make it plain that, in future, as the new Duchess of Kent, she would be the most stylish and elegant member of the extended Royal Family. Emerald intended to be a very popular duchess.

With her future all mapped out and waiting for her, Emerald was impatient to put her plans into action. She planned to make sure that she encouraged the duke to fall in love with her from the minute they were introduced. The official purpose of being finished might be to equip girls with good social skills, but Emerald had been using her time in Paris to hone skills that she felt would be far more use to her than conversational French.

Today she was going to polish those skills a little more, having managed to escape from under Madame la Comtesse’s eagle eye. She smiled triumphantly to herself, but then frowned.

Trust nosy Gwendolyn to insist on coming with her, and dragging Lydia along as well. It served them right that they were looking so uncomfortable. Emerald was enjoying herself, though, basking in the admiration of the four young men seated at the table with them in the artistic quarter of Montmartre. But it was the solitary older man sitting close by, reading his newspaper, in whom Emerald was more interested, and for whose benefit she had just been admiring her silk-stocking-clad legs. Narrow-faced, with his dark hair just beginning to grey, there was something about him that sent a shiver of anticipation and expectation through her. Instinctively Emerald knew that he was the kind who knew a very great deal about her sex, the kind of man any woman would be proud to have as a conquest, the kind of man it would be a challenge to turn into a devoted admirer, unlike the four boys, who were making it plain that they were ready to adore her. Emerald liked older men, or rather a certain kind of older man–not ones like Gwendolyn’s revolting father. It excited her when they flirted with her, hinting deliciously about improper pleasures.

Emerald hadn’t had a lover yet–she couldn’t risk the scandal. And she would certainly never be tempted to let boys take liberties or go too far. She was far too well aware of her value as an ‘unspoiled’ virgin to do that. But if she did take a lover, it would have to be one who knew what he was doing, not some silly boy. That couldn’t happen until after she was married to the duke, of course. Some girls thought it was old-fashioned to hang on to their virginity but Emerald didn’t agree; they were the kind of girls who would probably be happy with any kind of husband, whereas she only wanted the best.

The young men they were with were students at the Sorbonne, or so they had said when, earlier in the week, she had dropped her purse in the Bois de Boulogne and one of them had picked it up for her.

She had agreed to meet them on impulse. After all, she had no intentions of doing anything that might render her unfit to become the wife of the Duke of Kent, but it amused her to see Gwennie looking all bug-eyed and mutinous, as though the act of enjoying a cup of coffee in a café was something akin to taking up residence in a brothel. Emerald liked knowing that Gwennie felt uncomfortable. How silly she was. Did she really think that any man would look at her whilst she, Emerald, was there?

‘I really don’t think you should have brought us here, Emerald,’ Gwendolyn was muttering.

‘I didn’t bring you, you insisted on coming with me,’ Emerald pointed out, opening her gold cigarette case, with its inlaid semi-precious stones the exact colour of her eyes–another new purchase from a jewellers on the Faubourg St-Honoré, and removing one of the prettily coloured Sobranie cigarettes.

Immediately all four young men produced cigarette lighters. Really, it was almost like one of those advertisements one saw in Vogue, Emerald thought. How silly and immature Lydia and Gwendolyn looked, both of them plain and lumpen. Emerald smoothed down the hem of her black wool frock, allowing her fingertips to rest deliberately on her sheer-stocking-clad legs. She would hate to be as plain as Gwennie. She would rather be dead.

She allowed the best-looking of the four boys to light her cigarette, and laughed when he caught hold of her free hand and brought it to his lips. French boys were such flirts and so charming. Charming, but not, of course, dukes.

Emerald removed her hand, and announced with insincere regret, ‘We really must go.’

‘I’m going to have to tell the comtesse what you’ve done,’ Gwendolyn announced self-righteously as they made their way back.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ Emerald denied.

‘Yes, you have. You met those boys and you let one of them kiss you. You do know, don’t you, that something like that could ruin your reputation, and bring shame on your whole family?’

Emerald stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, causing the other two girls to stop as well.

‘I wouldn’t be quite so keen to talk about tale-telling, people’s reputations being ruined, and shame being brought on their family, if I were you, Gwendolyn. Not in your shoes.’

The words, spoken with such a quiet, almost a deadly conviction, caused Lydia to look anxious, whilst Gwendolyn declared primly, ‘What do you mean, in my shoes? I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘You may not have done.’ Emerald paused. ‘Your father is very fond of pretty girls, isn’t he, Gwendolyn?’

Gwendolyn’s face began to burn a miserable bright red.

‘Did I tell you that I saw him coming out of a shop in the Faubourg St-Honoré with a very pretty girl on his arm? No, I don’t think I did, did I? But then you see, Gwendolyn, I am not a nasty little sneak, like some people I could name. I wonder what would happen to your reputation if people knew that your father has a common little showgirl for a mistress?’

‘That’s not true,’ Gwendolyn shouted, panic-stricken and almost in tears. Lydia gave Emerald an anguished look that implored her to stop, but Emerald ignored it. Gwendolyn, with her holier-than-thou attitude and her determination to get Emerald into trouble, deserved to be put in her place.

‘Yes it is. Your father is an adulterer, Gwendolyn. He has broken his marriage vows to your mother.’

‘No.’ Gwendolyn’s mouth was trembling, her face screwed up like a pig’s, Emerald thought unkindly, as she gulped and snivelled, ‘You’re lying. And I won’t let you say things like that.’

Emerald smiled mockingly. ‘Am I? Then I’m lying too about your father trying to put his hand up my skirt and kiss me as well, am I?’

Lydia piped up naïvely, ‘Oh, I’m sure Uncle Henry didn’t mean anything by it, Emerald. He kissed me the last time I saw him.’

Gwendolyn’s face went from scarlet to a blotchy red and white.

‘You see, Gwendolyn,’ Emerald said mock sweetly. ‘Now, do you want me to tell the comtesse about your father, or—’

‘All right, I won’t say anything to her about those boys,’ Gwendolyn gave in.

Emerald inclined her head in regal acceptance of Gwendolyn’s submission. It had been truly clever of her to make up that story about seeing Gwendolyn’s father with a showgirl. What a fool Gwendolyn was. Everyone knew that her family had no money, so how on earth did she think her father could afford to keep a mistress?

Chapter Seven
London

Head down and umbrella up against the driving February rain, Rose hurried up King’s Road on her way home from work. The wind was icy and she couldn’t wait to get inside. In her haste, Rose didn’t see the two men standing on the pavement in front of her until she had virtually collided with them. In her attempt to sidestep them she almost lost her footing and a strong hand reached out to steady her. As she looked up to thank him, Rose recognised the hairdresser from the party, Josh Simons.

‘Well, I never, it’s the interior designer,’ he joked.

‘Training to be an interior designer,’ Rose corrected him.

‘Where am I going wrong, Vidal?’ he asked his companion sadly. ‘I’ve offered her a free haircut in exchange for some decorating advice for my new salon, but she still hasn’t taken me up on my offer.’

‘Wise girl,’ the other man responded with a grin. ‘Look, love, if you really want a decent haircut come and see me, Vidal Sassoon.’

‘He gave me a job when we left Raymond, then helped me to set up on my own,’ Josh put in.

‘He means in the end I had to pay him to go.’

They were both laughing, and obviously such good friends that Rose found herself relaxing.

Josh smiled warmly at her, shaking his head in warning as he told Vidal, ‘I know what you’re up to, and no way are you getting your scissors on that hair, Vidal. I saw it first. Look,’ he said to Rose, whose arm he was still holding, ‘since you’re here anyway why don’t you come up and have a look at my salon?’

‘You may as well go with him,’ Vidal said. ‘I can tell you that there’s no point in trying to argue with him–he never gives up when he’s set his mind on something. Besides, you’d be doing the rest of the world and me a favour if you did help him out. From what I’ve seen of his salon, no girl worthy of the name is going to want to get her hair cut there. And since I’ve only loaned him this money I’d like to see him earning something so that he can pay me back.’

What could she say? It would be churlish to refuse now, after such an appeal.

‘Very well,’ Rose agreed, ‘but I’m only in training and I don’t know the first thing about designing hairdressing salons.’

‘You don’t need to,’ Josh told her promptly. ‘Come on, it’s up here.’

Still holding on to her arm, he started to guide her towards the door behind them, and it was only Josh’s farewell to Vidal that alerted Rose to the fact that there was now only the two of them. But by then it was too late: Josh was already reaching for the shabby door and opening it for her.

The door opened straight onto a long narrow staircase, its walls painted a sludgy dark brown, the paint chipped in places to show an even more repellent shade of green underneath.

‘You need something light and bright in here,’ Rose announced, immediately inspired, ‘something with a finish that can be wiped clean as people are bound to put their hands on the walls on their way up because the stairs are so narrow.’ She eyed the wall thoughtfully. ‘A sort of off-white shiny paint would be best, and then you could break up the wall with some black-and-white photographs, in plain black frames–head-and-shoulder shots showing off various hairstyles, perhaps.’

Rose was thinking aloud, her imagination taking off and quashing her reluctance to get involved. The shabbiness of her surroundings and the challenge of transforming them was affecting her like an itch she had to scratch.

‘That’s a terrific idea. I’ve got a mate who’s a photographer; always photographing pretty girls, he is. I might be able to do a bit of a deal with him.’

Rose, who was already halfway up the stairs, turned back to look at him. Standing below her brought him to the same eye level. He had extraordinary long eyelashes for a man, and those deep-set dark brown eyes were even more mesmerising close up. He definitely wasn’t her type, though. She liked quiet studious young men, like the young Chinese medical student she had recently got to know whose family owned a Chinese restaurant patronised by Janey’s arty crowd. Lee worked in the restaurant when he wasn’t studying, and one evening, when they had been the last customers to leave, he had sat down with them at Janey’s insistence and told them about his dreams and plans.

Not that Rose had any romantic interest in Lee, or was likely to develop one. Her heart was already given to John, Lord Fitton Legh. John’s stepmother was Ella and Janey’s aunt Cassandra, who his father had married after the death of John’s mother, and the girls had known John all their lives. He was quiet and kind, and Rose loved him for that and for treating her as though she were no different to the others…She had developed a crush on him when she was twelve years old and he had saved her when Emerald had tricked her into getting up on a far too mettlesome horse, knowing that she was a nervous rider. John had come into the yard just as Rose was clinging in terror to the rearing horse’s reins. Within seconds he had calmed it down and had scooped Rose up off its back. In that moment he had become for her the most wonderful person in the whole world. Not that she would ever allow either John himself, or anyone else, to know how she felt. Emerald would have had a field day taunting her if she had guessed, because it was, of course, impossible that John would return her feelings. She had heard her aunt and uncle talking about John’s future, saying that he would probably marry a girl from one of the local aristocratic families, someone who would share his deep commitment to the land and his inheritance, and she had known, young as she had been, that someone in John’s position would never want to marry a girl like her. The Fittons were, after all, a very old and proud Cheshire family.

But that hadn’t prevented her from having her daydreams.

Later on, when she had been at college and she had seen the way that men looked at her, knowing that she loved John had made her feel safe. Because if she loved John then there was no need for her to worry about falling in love with anyone else–with someone who might pretend to love her but who would really only want to treat her as her father had treated her mother.

No other man could hurt her or reject her whilst she loved John. And she always would. Always. Even though she knew that nothing could ever come of it. Instead she hid her private love for him in her heart and concentrated on her work and on making sure that she repaid her aunt Amber’s faith in her.

‘When I said head-and-shoulder portraits of girls, that was exactly what I meant,’ she told Josh severely now, as she focused firmly on the present, ‘not poses more suitable for a certain type of magazine.’

Josh burst out laughing. ‘Ollie would be mortified if he heard you say that. He photographs models for Vogue, not Men Only.’

Rose could feel her face starting to burn. Quickly she turned round and headed to the top of the stairs where the first door in front of her had an unsteady ‘WC’ painted on it.

‘You’ll have to make sure that there are proper cloakroom facilities,’ she announced. ‘At least you will if you want to attract girls.’

She hadn’t realised that there was a double entendre to her words until she heard Josh laugh again.

‘So that’s where I’ve been going wrong when I’ve taken girls back to my place,’ he joked. ‘And there I’ve been, changing my toothpaste, thinking I might have bad breath. You reckon I’d be better getting one of those fancy crocheted covers for the toilet roll, do you?’

Rose laughed in spite of herself. She wasn’t fooled for a minute; she doubted that any girl who agreed to go home with this man cared two hoots about his bathroom. She wasn’t going to boost his ego by telling him so, though, not when she was pretty sure that he already knew it himself.

Instead she said loftily, ‘Of course I don’t know what kind of clientele you want to attract.’

‘But posh girls like you wouldn’t come and get their hair done in a salon run by a working-class Jewish hairdresser whose salon that hasn’t got the right kind of “cloakroom,” is that it?’

He sounded more curt than amused now. His obvious contempt made Rose flinch, but she stood her ground.

‘That wasn’t what I meant at all. It isn’t a matter of being “posh”. In fact, some of the grandest houses in the country have the most antiquated bathrooms you can imagine. It’s just a matter of making your clientele feel that you appreciate and value them, especially when that clientele is going to be female. Making them feel comfortable, but at the same time making them feel that they deserve something that’s special, and…and the best. That is after all why you want them to come to you, isn’t it?’ she challenged him. ‘Not just so that you can do their hair but because you think you can do their hair better than anyone else?’

Josh was taken aback and impressed by her astuteness. He looked at her as though he hadn’t really seen her before and in one sense he realised he hadn’t. Previously he’d seen her as a stunning-looking girl whose Eurasian beauty would make her an excellent model for the avant-garde hairstyles he and Vidal talked about so passionately into the early hours. They were both in their different ways determined to do away with the old-established hairdressing model of rigidly arranged and lacquered ‘set’ styles, and to replace them with precision cutting that focused on the natural movement of a woman’s hair.

Whilst he and Vidal understood one another’s drive, Rose had astonished Josh with the speed at which she had tapped into his ambitions. She was, he decided ruefully, bang on the money, though, and that was exactly what he wanted.

In that moment Josh made up his mind that Rose and no one else was going to be responsible for the décor of his salon, no matter how much cajoling he had to do to get her to do it–and somehow he knew he would have to cajole her. He was no fool, though. There was no point in scaring her off by telling her what he had decided. Instead he stepped past her and pushed open the door into the long dilapidated room that he planned to turn into his salon.

‘Come and have a look at this…’

Chapter Eight

The sound of someone knocking on the door, when Lew was out at lunch with his latest girl, distracted Dougie’s attention from the small portable typewriter on which he was typing up a list of potential clients Lew had left him. There were no sittings booked for the afternoon and, knowing Lew as he now did, Dougie suspected that when he returned it would be with the young woman he had been pursuing and that he himself would be told to shoot off for the day. Cursing under his breath as the knocking continued and he hit two wrong keys in succession, Dougie pushed back his chair and stood up.

Emerald waited impatiently at the door. She hadn’t been put off when the new top society photographer, lauded in Tatler and the Queen, hadn’t replied to her letter to him from Paris insisting that she wanted him to take her new official débutante photograph, and nor had she changed her mind about the importance of having him do just that.

She had quickly discovered on her return to London that she was far from the only contender for the position of HRH The Duchess of Kent, and that invitations offering an opportunity for débutantes to meet the duke were very carefully monitored by those who managed to secure his presence at any event. Naturally, she was not going to be readily invited to parties the duke was attending by the mothers of other débutantes, for instance. Emerald quite understood that, and she understood too that she was going to have to use subtle, even underhand, means to ensure that she brought herself to the duke’s attention. Getting herself photographed by Lewis Coulter, and then being described as the season’s prettiest débutante would do her campaign no harm. His mother was bound to have copies of all the top magazines, and Emerald could easily imagine her pointing her photograph out to her son and saying what an impeccable lineage. At least on her father’s side. It was a pity that her mother wasn’t better born. Emerald’s mouth thinned. Had she been, then Emerald wouldn’t have to think about strategies for bringing herself to the duke’s attention because her mother would naturally have numbered Princess Marina amongst her social circle.

Irritatingly, the young duke, instead of establishing himself in London and taking part in its social scene, seemed to spend most of his time in the country. Emerald made a small grimace of distaste. Once they were married that would have to change. She didn’t like the country at all. Of course, once she had given birth to their first child–a son, of course–it would be quite permissible for her husband to go to the country if he wished, whilst she spent time with her friends in London, but initially, as a newly engaged and then a newly married couple, they would appear together, he looking very much in love with her–which of course he would be.

She knocked again. Once Emerald had made up her mind about something she didn’t like any delay in putting it into action, and she was impatient to get the duke’s courtship of her started.

The cold wet February weather had brought almost the entire household down with heavy colds, with the exception of Emerald, enabling her to escape from her godmother’s chaperonage to visit the photographer.

Emerald was enjoying living at Lenchester House. It was, after all, by rights more her house than anyone else’s. It was all very well for her mother to point out that Mr Melrose doggedly believed that there was an heir. Mr Melrose was an old man, after all, and if there was such an heir then why hadn’t he made himself known and claimed his inheritance?

Emerald raised her hand to bang on the door again, only to find that it was being opened by a tall broad-shouldered young man with thick untidy dark brown hair, which was fairer at the ends, and a cross expression.

Emerald, who had seen photographs of Lewis Coulter in the society columns, gave Dougie a haughty look and declared, ‘I’m here to see Lew.’ Then she swept past him, leaving him no option other than to close the door behind her.

‘He won’t see you without an appointment,’ Dougie warned, but Emerald simply shrugged.

‘I wrote to him to tell him that I’d be coming to see him and he will see me. My mother particularly wants him to take my coming-out photograph.’ She delivered the lie without a blink.

‘Lew’s out at the moment and he won’t be back until, well, much later, but you can leave your details, if you like, and I’ll tell him that you called. What’s your name?’

‘Lady Emerald Devenish,’ Emerald told Dougie haughtily, his Australian accent causing her to view him with open contempt.

Lady Emerald Devenish. That was the family name of the Lenchesters. This then was…Dougie let go of the door he was still holding open, hurrying after Emerald as she stalked into the room, and then bumped into his own desk.

Emerald gave him a withering look. She certainly wasn’t going to waste her charm on a boring colonial with a dreadful Australian accent. How very odd that a photographer with Lew’s reputation, who surely ought to have known better, was actually employing this uncouth Australian.

Dougie watched Emerald warily. She was everything he had assumed the upper classes would be. And she was also the nearest thing he had to ‘family’, someone who shared his blood–a true blood relative if this Melrose bloke had got his facts right. Perhaps he should go and see him, after all. Right now it would have given him a great deal of pleasure to tell her exactly who he was. From what he’d observed of high-society life, it wasn’t so very long ago that, when the head of a titled family spoke, that family jumped to attention. The thought of this arrogant little beauty being forced to kowtow to him was an appealing one, he had to admit. On the other hand, didn’t this head of the family stuff also carry a lot of responsibility? There was all that business of keeping the family name unsullied–at least that was what he’d gathered from some of the tales Lew had told him. The Lenchester family name wasn’t likely to remain unsullied for long once Lew got his hands on this minx.

Dougie’s sudden surge of protective responsibility was an unfamiliar and unwanted feeling, and one he determinedly pushed out of the way. After all, it wasn’t even proved yet that he was this ruddy duke, and so long as he didn’t go and see Mr Melrose, it wasn’t ever going to be proved. What did he want with a title, and the responsibility for a girl like this one who had already got his back up?

‘Look, why don’t I make you an appointment and then you can come back when Lew is here?’ he offered, having decided that for now it made sense to get her out of the way, for his own sake, if nothing else. If he ran true to form, any minute now Lew was likely to return with his latest conquest.

Did this…this Australian nobody think she was going to fall for that, Emerald wondered. She looked round the small sitting room and then made her way to one of the sofas, seating herself carefully on it to ensure that her legs were displayed to their best advantage.

‘I’ll wait,’ she announced, before picking up one of the magazines on the coffee table and starting to flick through it.

She certainly was a little madam, Dougie decided. Someone should have put her across their knee years ago and paddled her backside until she learned a few manners. It was too late now, of course. She was certainly nothing like the three girls he remembered from the party; they had all been really decent sorts, not arrogant little snobs like her. Well, she’d certainly get her comeuppance when Lew did show up. His favourite mantra was that no day was worth living unless it contained both sex and work, and when he returned it would be with sex on his mind. Lew could deliver caustically cruel put-downs when he was so minded. Dougie had seen Lew reduce girls to tears with his unkindness when he was irritated or bored with them.

But so what if he did hurt this little madam’s feelings? Why should he care? He returned to his typing, breathing heavily over the unwanted task made all the more difficult by the small keyboard and the size of his hands.

Really, the man was disgustingly boorish, Emerald decided contemptuously. All that heavy breathing interspersed with the odd swear word. He looked as though he’d be more at home on a farm than working here, although no doubt the nature of his work was equally menial. He wasn’t even properly dressed. Instead of a business suit he was wearing a pair of those silly narrow black trousers that a certain type of bohemian young man wore teamed with a black polo-neck jumper, its sleeves pushed back to display muscular tanned forearms. A lock of his thick dark brown hair had fallen down almost over his eyes, adding to his uncouth appearance. Emerald was more used to men with the traditional short back and sides, favoured by the establishment and the services.

The sound of the front door suddenly opening had them both looking towards it, Emerald’s quickly prepared smile faltering for a moment as she saw the man coming in and immediately recognised him as the society photographer. What she hadn’t expected, though, was that he would be dressed in the same bohemian fashion as his dogsbody, only his polo-neck jumper was enlivened by a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted round his neck.

Lew was back and on his own. Dougie immediately recognised that his employer was not in a good mood. He had that air of suppressed tension and irritation about him that Dougie had learned to recognise. Predictably, though, the instant he saw Emerald that tension was broken, replaced by one of his deliberately caressing looks accompanied by a warm smile.

Now the fat was really in the fire, Dougie recognised. Deprived of his afternoon of sex with his girl, Lew would be like a cat on hot bricks until he had relieved his sexual tension, and who better to do so with than the snobby little madam sitting there looking at him with such confident expectation. Well, it would serve her right if he simply left her to her fate and she became yet another of the girls Lew picked up, seduced and then very publicly dropped, ruining her reputation as he did so.

Lew, predictably, was all charm, going over to Emerald to offer his hand and an apology.

‘I’m sorry. I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.’

‘She hasn’t got an appointment,’ Dougie felt obliged to point out, but neither of them was listening. Instead they were gazing deeply into one another’s eyes.

‘I did write to you, about you taking my coming-out photograph,’ Emerald was saying, her cut-glass accent suddenly accentuated and grating on Dougie’s already frayed nerves. ‘Once I’d seen the photograph you took of Amelia Longhurst I told Mummy that I couldn’t possibly have my photographs done by anyone else.’ She smoothed her hand over her skirt as she spoke. She had dressed very carefully for this meeting in the palest of pink cashmere twinsets, its plainness relieved by a string of startlingly lustrous pearls, and a deep rose-pink full mohair skirt that showed off her narrow waist, cinched in with a wide black patent belt. On her feet were a pair of high heels, and her handbag was from Hermès. Her hair, newly done that morning in a beehive, looked as delicate as spun glass, and she had outlined her lips in a soft pink lipstick. She looked, she had decided before leaving her bedroom, totally delectable and she had already visualised the photograph of her that would appear in Tatler and the words that would accompany it.

‘Lady Emerald Devenish is tipped to be the débutante of the season. Her ball will be held in her late father’s London house in Eaton Square, and HRH The Duke of Kent will be attending along with his mother, Princess Marina.’

The invitations had already gone out, and Emerald knew exactly what kind of speculation that wording beneath her photograph would give rise to. In the language of gossip columns it was tantamount to a pre-engagement declaration, but of course if anyone were to accuse her of exaggerating the situation she would simply pretend not to know what they meant.

The photographer was disappointingly short for a man who featured so often in the gossip columns as a man about town and a flirt, but Emerald had no more interest in him as a man than she did in the uncouth Australian. He was simply a means to an end.

‘Indeed not.’

Lew had been furious when his lunch date–a pretty young wife whose husband hated town and preferred to remain on their estate in the country–had refused to play ball, pretending that she hadn’t realised why he had suggested they had lunch together or what he had had in mind for the rest of the afternoon. But now the clouds that had darkened his temper had lifted. This girl was, if anything, even prettier than Louise, and unless he was wrong, far more sensual. One could always tell. They had a certain look about them that had nothing to do with experience. It shone from them like a special luminosity on the skin or like a definite scent on the air that surrounded them. This girl, a typical virginal deb on the outside, would on the inside be a positive volcano of passion. Teaching her to enjoy her sexuality would be like eating hot chocolate sauce on cold ice cream.

‘You’d better come up to my studio,’ he told Emerald. Without taking his gaze from her face, he added to Dougie, ‘Please see to it that I’m not disturbed for the rest of the afternoon.’

Dougie’s heart sank.

Well, why should he want to stop him? If she wanted to make a fool of herself and lose her reputation with a man who was known to be lethal, then why should he care?

Because if he was this duke, then she was family, that was why, and it was his duty to do what he could to keep his family and its name safe. Girls like this one married men to whom the virginity of their bride was almost as important as their lineage and their wealth, and all because of that important first-born son–and it had to be a son. Once the line was secured they didn’t seem to mind who their wives slept with, or so it seemed to him. He was not saying that he agreed with such practice; he didn’t really agree with hereditary titles either, if he were honest, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist. He was proof of that. One day an ordinary farmer back in Oz, the next a duke!

But perhaps he should go and see this Mr Melrose before he went round acting like some kind of saviour of the family name and reputation.

Lew loved his work every bit as much as he loved sex, and so taking photographs of Emerald before he seduced her was no hardship. In fact, photographing girls was the best part of his seduction technique, one that excited and aroused him as he watched them becoming excited and aroused at the thought of the lens of his camera capturing their beauty and freezing it for eternity. And then, of course, there were all those little touches as he showed them how he wanted them to pose for him, directing them, rearranging their limbs, caressing them with theatrical compliments and teasing little kisses. No wonder by the time he eventually took them to bed they were so eager for him.

He put on a smoochy Frank Sinatra record to help set the mood, whilst Emerald looked round the studio incuriously. She was well aware now just how Lew expected the photography session to end, but he was going to be disappointed. She was certainly not going to throw away her virginity on him, but since she wanted him to take her photograph she knew that she would have to string him along. Telling him that she had got her period should keep him at bay for today and when she called round to see the proofs she’d make sure that she had Lyddy with her. A call to Tatler pretending to be her mother should ensure that the magazine got on to Lew for the photographs and she could make sure that they added the wording she wanted at the same time.

A quick check through his camera lens assured Lew that Emerald was as photogenic as he had guessed she would be.

He removed his leather jacket and threw it over a chair, then pushed back the sleeves of his black jumper, telling her easily, ‘The twinset will have to go. There’s a screen there you can pop behind to change. There should be a robe there as well.’

Since the photograph that had brought her here had shown the bare shoulders of the deb he had photographed, Emerald wasn’t too alarmed by this suggestion. Once she was behind the screen and removing her twinset, though, his casual, ‘Oh, and you’d better take off your bra as well,’ caused her to tense for a moment. The robe he’d mentioned was a flimsy piece of silk through which it would be perfectly easy to see her bare breasts, but Emerald suspected that if she objected he would simply refuse to take her photograph. It wasn’t that she was particularly bothered about him seeing her breasts–in different circumstances she acknowledged that she might have enjoyed teasing him–but she had her reputation to consider and her planned future as HRH The Duchess of Kent. It would not do at all for her to have allowed any man, never mind a mere photographer, to have seen her naked to her waist. ‘What’s wrong? Do you need some help?’ Lew’s sudden appearance round the back of the screen, holding a glass and a bottle of whisky just as she was about to unfasten her bra, had Emerald whisking the wrap around herself and saying coquettishly, ‘No peeking.’ His response was to laugh and then say, ‘I dare say you are far too young and innocent for me to offer you a glass of whisky?’

Emerald made a small moue of distaste. ‘I’d have preferred a Martini.’

She had the most wonderful figure, Lew decided, firm pert breasts, and a tiny waist that together made her look almost voluptuous. He glanced at the pearls she had put with her twinset. Compared with the modest single or double row of pearls worn by most débutantes these were almost rococo in appearance, and glowing with colour.

‘Nice pearls,’ he commented,

‘They belonged to my great-grandmother.’

An idea had suddenly come to him. Reaching for them he told Emerald, ‘What I want you to do is to take off the wrap, put these on and then I want you to pose like so…’ Putting down his glass, he went over to the corner of the studio and picked up a dark green length of silk from his collection of ‘props’, which he threw on the floor and then lay down on it on his stomach, lifting his torso and propping his chin up with his hands.

Emerald frowned. The pose was an enticing one, a very promising one, in fact, for a girl who wanted to make her mark and stand out from the crowd, and it was one that appealed to her ego. Normally she would have jumped at the chance to show off, but the pose was also a very provocative one–far too provocative for the future wife of the Duke of Kent.

‘I think it would be far better if you simply photographed me sitting down and from the neck upwards,’ she told Lew firmly, as he got to his feet.

He looked at her in astonishment. ‘My dear girl, I am the photographer.’

‘And I am the client, and it is my mother who will pay your bill,’ Emerald pointed out sweetly.

Downstairs Dougie pushed back his chair and stood up. He’d agonised long enough. It was no good. He had to do something.

Upstairs, Lew’s mood changed swiftly from amusement to angry irritation.

‘Either I photograph you as I wish or not at all.’

Emerald glared at him. She was used to people giving in to her, not giving her ultimatums. She had desperately wanted him to take her photograph but not in a pose that would make it obvious that she had been half nude when he had done so.

Without bothering to answer him Emerald went back behind the screen and started to dress, only realising once she had her bra on that her twinset had fallen down the other side of the screen.

Dougie knocked loudly on the door and then pushed it open, without waiting for a response. They wouldn’t be in bed yet. Lew always worked up to bed via a photographic session.

Just as Dougie walked in Emerald emerged from behind the screen in the diaphanous wrap to retrieve her clothes, and almost bumped into him. They each came to an abrupt halt and stared at one another.

Lew scowled when he saw Dougie. ‘What do you want?’

‘You said you wanted me to remind you that you’re having dinner with Lady Pamela later to discuss the arrangements for the photographs for the christening.’

‘You came up here to tell me that? It’s only three o’clock in the afternoon.’

Quickly grabbing her clothes, Emerald retreated back behind the screen and hurriedly got dressed. Damn, damn, damn. Why had that wretched Australian had to come in and see her like that?

‘Well, since you are here you can show Lady Emerald out, since she’s had second thoughts and is leaving. So silly of you to panic like that, darling,’ Lew told Emerald with spiky malice. ‘You were quite safe. I never shag girls who wear pink twinsets, and even if I did, shagging virginal débutantes simply isn’t my style, far too unrewarding. Oh, and a bit of advice for you: don’t wear pink, it doesn’t suit you. Makes you look sallow.’ The acid tone in which the comments were delivered left Emerald in no doubt as to what Lew thought of her. And of course the Australian had overheard it all and would be enjoying her humiliation. Emerald’s scalded pride burned her cheeks bright pink.

So Lady Emerald was leaving of her own accord and he needn’t have come up here risking his employer’s displeasure after all? Dougie cursed under his breath.

‘It seems Lady Emerald got the wrong photographer,’ Lew was telling him disdainfully.

‘Next time try Cecil Beaton, sweetheart. He does a lovely soft focus pearls-and-twinset look that’s just right for prudish little virgins,’ he added unkindly to Emerald.

Glaring at Dougie, Emerald shot past him. She knew she had made a fool of herself and she could imagine how they would laugh about her once she’d left.

‘I’ll see you out,’ Dougie told her, catching up with her outside the door.

‘Don’t bother,’ Emerald snapped.

The dreadful Australian might be keeping a straight face but she just knew that inside he was laughing at her. She hated them both, but she hated the horrid Australian the most.

As for her photograph…She’d just have to make do with Cecil Beaton’s original photograph of her now, and that had already appeared in Tatler. Well, she’d think of some other way of publicly linking her name with the duke’s. Perhaps she could manipulate things so that they were photographed together at one of the deb balls? If only her father had still been alive she could have persuaded him to invite the duke to stay at Osterby. There was no point in even thinking about inviting him to Denham. He was a royal duke, after all, and hardly likely to accept an invitation to a millowner’s house.

Chapter Nine
April 1957

Rose hoped that she wasn’t going to be late as she hurried through the Saturday crowd thronging the King’s Road, on her way to the salon. She felt guilty about putting Janey off instead of having coffee with her as they’d originally planned, but thankfully Janey had understood when she’d explained that she’d had a last-minute telephone call from Josh, wanting her to meet up with him at the salon because he’d arranged a meeting with his photographer friend who was going to bring some shots he had done for Vogue so that Rose could look through them and pick some out for the stair wall.

Time seemed to be rushing by so fast; the days longer and the air warmer with spring flowers in bloom. Even her job wasn’t making her as miserable as it had done, although she knew she would never be totally happy at Ivor Hammond’s, not with the way she was treated.

At least she’d soon be getting a break from work with the Easter holiday coming up.

Easter. Easter meant going home to Denham and, if she was very lucky and fortune smiled on her, seeing John.

She was still smiling, lost in her own private daydreams, as she opened the door to the salon using the key that Josh had insisted on giving her, and ran quickly up the stairs.

The friend Josh had found was typical of the kind of working-class young men with East End accents and wicked teasing smiles that Josh seemed to know. Despite their bold manners, they treated Rose with deference, instantly ceasing to pepper their conversation with swear words when she was in earshot. A couple of them had plastered the stair wall after Rose’s attempts to remove the old paint had resulted in half the rotten plaster coming away too, and had done an excellent job. So too had the painter whom Josh had insisted on hiring, looking horrified when Rose had told him that she planned to paint the high wall herself.

‘Over my dead body you are,’ Josh had told her. ‘I’m not having my designer breaking her neck falling off a pair of ladders, not when she hasn’t come up with a design for my salon yet.’

‘I’ve told you, I think we should stick to the black and white theme but spice it up with touches of shocking pink.’

‘Shocking pink…’ Josh had groaned. ‘Take a look at me, will you, and then tell me, do I look like a bloke who does poncy shocking pink?’

Rose had giggled, despite her attempt to remain professional.

‘There’s nothing poncy about shocking pink,’ she’d told him firmly. ‘And besides, girls like it. Your stylists could wear black and shocking-pink turbans and headbands, and uniforms in black with shocking-pink scissors and hairdryers appliquéd onto them. What are you going to call the salon?’

‘I haven’t decided yet, why?’

‘Well, we could appliqué the name onto the uniforms as well.’

‘Fine, but what if these juniors and stylists you seem to think I’m going to be taking on aren’t all girls? What if some of them are male?’

‘Then they can wear black trousers and a black shirt with the appliqués on it, and perhaps a shocking-pink tie.’

She had seen that Josh was impressed but that he didn’t want to say so, so she went on lightly, ‘You’re going to have to come up with a name soon. I really like the way Vidal has called his salon simply Vidal Sassoon.’

‘Well, I suppose I could call mine Josh Simons,’ Josh had suggested.

From the sound of male voices now coming from the upstairs salon, it appeared that Josh and his photographer friend had already arrived. The salon, its walls also newly plastered, was still a bare empty space, apart from a folding card table and a pair of bentwood chairs so battered that Rose was inclined to believe Josh when he’d claimed to have rescued them from a skip.

She was so much happier working here than she was in the expensive Bond Street premises of her employer, Rose acknowledged. She loved the challenges that working within such a tight budget, and more importantly, creating something useful rather than merely decorative, were giving her. The contrast between working here and in the Bond Street showroom was making her increasingly aware of where her real ambitions lay and how unhappy she was. Given free choice, Rose suspected that she would have willingly switched now from studying interior design for the home to studying interior design for commercial premises, but there were at least two good reasons why she could not do that. The first and most important was that she knew that her aunt was looking to her to take over her business, and the second was that as far as Rose knew, there was no recognised ‘apprenticeship’ for someone wanting to specialise in commercial premises. It was true that some interior designers took on such projects–Oliver Messel, for instance–but they did not work exclusively in that area.

Working on Josh’s salon had opened her eyes to so much that she now wanted to learn more about. Commercial interior design wasn’t just about wallpaper, fabrics and the placement of furniture and art; there were important practicalities to be taken into consideration, such as the supplies of electricity and water, and the fact that often premises were leased and the landlord’s permission for any changes needed to be obtained, change of use approved, and so much more.

It was necessary for someone to be in charge of the various tradesmen Josh had found to work on the salon, and Rose had seen what an opportunity there was for someone to offer a service that oversaw everything from the initial design right through to its eventual completion. The thought of such a challenge made her feel dizzy with excitement, but she had a duty to her aunt, who had done so much for her and who she loved so much.

Earlier in the week Josh and Vidal had been engaged in an earnest discussion about the benefits of installing wash basins that enabled the clients to tilt their heads backwards into the basin instead of leaning forward.

‘Much easier for the juniors when they shampoo, and better for the clients, who won’t get their makeup smudged as well,’ Vidal had insisted, and Rose had been inclined to agree. ‘And don’t forget to make sure that you get a decent sound system installed and some cool music playing,’ Vidal had added.

Josh had already found ‘a friend’ who was looking around for four of these basins–at the right price, of course.

‘Here she is, Ollie,’ she heard Josh announcing as she walked into the salon. ‘Come and meet my interior designer. Rose, this is Ollie.’

The photographer was protectively nursing a Rolleiflex camera in one large hand, a bag slung over his shoulder, no doubt containing his tripod and other equipment. He was good-looking, if you liked the unkempt bad-boy type, Rose acknowledged as he reached out to shake her hand. He was also oddly familiar.

‘Haven’t we met somewhere before?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but I can’t remember where.’

‘I’ve got it.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘I hitched a ride in your taxi a few weeks back. You were with two other girls.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Rose smiled. ‘Ella and Janey. We were on our way to the party where I met you, Josh.’

‘London’s a small world,’ Josh agreed. ‘Come and have a look at these photographs Ollie’s brought.’

Half an hour later, kneeling back on her heels as she crouched on the floor surrounded by the excellent photographs Oliver had produced for their inspection, Rose watched as Josh threw up his hands in despair.

‘No. They won’t do. No offence, Ollie, the photos are great, but the hair…’

They all looked at the assortment of stiff regulated hairstyles–beehives and backcombed, flicked ends all heavily lacquered.

‘What I want to do here in my salon is to follow Vidal’s example and work with hair in a new way, one that allows the hair to move and breathe and to look natural.’

When they both looked dubiously at him he told them, ‘Look, I’ll show you what I mean.’ He took hold of Rose’s hand, hauling her to her feet. ‘It’s time for me to cut that hair of yours, Rose. It’s been driving me mad with temptation to get to work on it.’

‘No, I don’t want it cut,’ Rose protested, her free hand going protectively to her neat French pleat.

‘Why not? What’s the point in keeping it long when it’s always screwed up in that pleat? I’m going to cut it, and that’s that. Come and sit here.’

He meant it, Rose realised weakly. He had been threatening to cut her hair ever since they’d met.

As Josh sat her down and swiftly removed the pins from her hair, letting it fall in a silky black sheet down her back, Rose was vaguely conscious of Ollie setting up his camera, but she was more concerned about her hair. She had never worn it loose, not since Amber’s great-grandmother had compared it to Emerald’s luxurious head of dark curls and had said how ugly it was, and now automatically she tensed as though half expecting a verbal blow, wanting to cover her hair from sight and yet unable to do so because Josh was brushing it and giving both her and Ollie a running commentary on what he was planning to do.

‘Just look at it, it’s like finding gold,’ he crooned.

‘Then why cut it off?’ Ollie asked as the shutter clicked and he moved round on the periphery of Rose’s vision.

‘Because gold is nothing in its raw state. It needs the eye and the hand of an expert to make it into something of beauty, which is exactly what I intend to do with Rose’s hair. The length of it makes it so heavy that it takes away all its natural movement and rhythm. It’s like trying to play jazz with a traditional orchestra: too much weight and tradition weighing down the magic of the music.’

Rose saw the light from the window flashing on the scissors Josh always carried with him.

‘No,’ she protested, but it was too late. Long black snakes of hair were covering the floor as she sat at Josh’s command with her head bent forward, her panic soothed in some odd way by the almost rhythmic sounds of the scissors and the camera, punctuated by the staccato bursts of questions and explanations exchanged by the two men.

‘Look at this,’ Josh was saying. ‘Look at how I’m freeing up the hair to move and swing. See how it comes to life.’

‘Are you sure you aren’t cutting it too short?’ was Ollie’s response as he moved the tripod round the back of her.

Rose wished she was in a traditional salon with a mirror in front of her so that she could see what was going on, instead of sitting here in this empty room, terrified about the end result of Josh’s endeavours.

‘Vogue are sending my boss to Venice to cover the high-society nightlife there, and she’s told me that she’s taking me with her.’

Ella didn’t try to keep the pride out of her voice as she relayed this information to her stepmother, who had arrived unexpectedly at the Chelsea house. As one of such a large family, Ella rarely got opportunity to have her stepmother to herself, and as the eldest child she always felt it her duty to step back and let the others claim Amber’s attention, especially the younger ones.

Now, though, with both Rose and Janey out, she didn’t attempt to hide her pleasure at having Amber’s undivided attention.

‘So you’re happy, then, at Vogue?’ Amber asked her proudly.

‘Yes, but I do wish now that I’d taken a course in proper journalism. I’d love to progress to writing articles about important things, not just new lipstick colours,’ she told Amber with a rueful look. ‘There’s so much happening now, and things are changing so much. Women aren’t just daughters or wives or mothers any more, they are real people doing real things.’

She looked and sounded so earnest that Amber was determined not to smile. She could imagine, though, what her grandmother, who had single-handedly run her own business and managed her own fortune for years, would have had to say to Ella’s naïve declaration.

What Ella had said was true in one sense, though. Modern young women were certainly taking for themselves far greater personal freedoms than her generation had ever had. Most observers put that down to the war and the fact that during those terrible years women had had to become far more independent, for the sake of the country.

‘Well, you certainly seem happy,’ Amber told Ella. ‘I’ve never known you be such a chatterbox. Working at Vogue suits you, Ella. It’s bringing you out of yourself.’

Ella smiled, but the real truth was that it was her diet pills that were making her more vivacious, as well as curbing her appetite. She had noticed how, within a short time of taking one, she was more inclined to start chattering. When she’d said as much to Libby, the other girl had told her that it was yet another benefit of Dr Williamson’s marvellous little pills that they gave a person so much extra energy. No one had noticed her weight loss yet, but then Ella didn’t particularly want them to. She was losing weight to prove that she could to herself. The last thing she wanted was Oliver Charters noticing and thinking totally the wrong thing, like she was doing it because she wanted to impress him. Because she wasn’t.

Amber’s real purpose in coming to London had been to discuss the final arrangements for Emerald’s ball with Beth, and to meet with Mr Melrose on Monday. The lawyer had telephoned her in an excited and agitated state late on Friday evening to tell her that he had had a telephone call from a young man who claimed to be the lost heir to the dukedom. This young man was meeting with Mr Melrose on Monday and he had asked Amber if she would be kind enough to be there.

‘But I know nothing of Robert’s Australian family,’ she had protested.

However, the lawyer had begged her to attend, saying that he would appreciate her views on the young man and adding that he felt that if he was the duke then it would ease his passage in society if he could have some support from her as Robert’s widow.

Since Jay wasn’t going to be at home, having agreed to go and look at a combine harvester the estate manager wanted him to buy, Amber had decided that she might as well spend the weekend in London catching up with her family, and checking that Emerald was not abusing her friend Beth’s somewhat indolent chaperonage. Beth was a wonderfully kind godmother to Emerald but Amber was sure she let her get away with murder.

Her first port of call on her arrival in London had been Eaton Square, where she had left her case and learned from the housekeeper that Beth and the girls were out, so she had then taken a cab to Chelsea, to find that only her eldest stepdaughter was at home.

‘And Janey and Rose are well and happy?’ Amber asked with concern.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Ella answered her truthfully. ‘Janey is still convinced that Mary Quant is going to beg her to design for her, the minute she leaves St Martins, and Rose already has her own personal interior design commission.’

She explained to Amber what Rose was doing, and Amber was relieved that her niece was settling down so well. She always worried more about Rose than the others. All she wanted for the children was that they should be loved and love in return, and know the happiness that she knew with Jay. Young people, though, needed to spread their wings; to learn about life and to follow their dreams. Amber knew that too.

‘So when do you leave for Venice?’ she asked Ella.

‘Early next week. We’ll be travelling with the fashion editor and some models, as she’ll be doing a feature on travel and fashion, and fashion and Venice, so we’ll be going on the Orient-Express. I’m so excited about that.’

Amber laughed. ‘But you’ve travelled on it before, when Daddy and I took you all to Venice several years ago.’

‘Yes, I know but that was different. I didn’t realise then how lucky I was. Venice was just a place with lots of canals and a funny smell, where you and Daddy were going to talk to people about silk.’

She was excited about the coming trip, Ella acknowledged later after her stepmother had left to do some shopping. Although officially she was travelling to Venice in her capacity as the features editor’s assistant, she had managed to persuade the travel editor to let her do a ‘trial’ piece on the city from a potential visitor’s point of view. Determined to do a good job and prove that she could write a stimulating article, Ella had been reading up on the history of the city. She knew that the travel editor would expect her to write a piece that focused on the glamorous society side of Venice life, mentioning its elegant hotels and the private palazzos, where smart exclusive parties were held, including the kind of detail that would appeal to Vogue readers. However, privately Ella would have liked to write something more challenging than a tame piece about rich people and expensive clothes. The city had a fascinating history, and she was hoping that whilst she was there she would come across something that would enable her to give her article a true depth. Ella’s favourite newspaper was the Manchester Guardian, and secretly she longed to write the kind of gritty no-holds-barred articles she read in its pages, articles that spoke about hardship and oppression, and not expensive frocks and the right shade of lipstick. Ella imagined that the female reporters who worked on the paper would look and speak rather like the actress Katharine Hepburn, and in her daydreams she imagined herself working in a busy newsroom, filing copy of stories of immense social importance.

She knew that everyone at Vogue would laugh at her if they realised what she really longed for, but she wasn’t going to give up her dreams. One day she would write deep meaningful articles that would uncover social injustice and change people’s lives. One day.

Chapter Ten

The back of Rose’s neck was cold and bare and she felt oddly light-headed, as well as unable not to give in to the temptation to turn her head to sneak a look at her reflection in the shop windows she was walking past. The wind caught her hair, ruffling it in much the same way that Josh had done after he had cut it.

He had told her that on Monday he intended to shampoo it and go over it again.

‘I’d like to put a colour rinse on it as well, something to bring out the shine. A dark plum would look fantastic.’

Rose blenched a little now at the memory, and yet a smile was tugging at her lips as well. She felt so free and so…so different, tossing her hair in hesitant pride instead of ducking it down when she saw people turning their heads to look at her.

‘Hey, cool chick, I dig the hair,’ one of a pair of young Teddy boy rockers called out to her as they walked past her in the opposite direction.

She ‘dug the hair’ herself, Rose admitted, although it had been a huge shock at first to see what Josh had done.

He had cut her hair so short at the back that the whole length of her slender neck was exposed right from the nape. He had also fashioned it somehow so that it possessed an unfamiliar volume and movement, the sides longer than the back, caressing her jaw line in delicate little flicks. He had cut her a fringe too, and yet her new hairstyle had produced unexpected high cheekbones, now delicately flushed with happy colour.

She was on her way home, having left Josh and Ollie together, Ollie so eager to get back to his studio to develop the photographs he had taken of Josh in action that he had almost been ready to ignore the commission he had for the afternoon until Josh had reminded him that he owed him ‘ten quid’.

Janey would adore her new hairstyle, Rose knew, but she wasn’t so sure what Ella would think.

A wolf whistle from a grocer’s boy cycling past from the shop further down the road made Rose laugh at his cheek, as she enjoyed the unexpected light-heartedness her new image gave her.

Well, he had done it now, Dougie acknowledged, unable to concentrate on what he should be doing, which was checking through Lew’s diary for the forthcoming week. He’d telephoned the lawyer bloke and on Monday he had an appointment to see him so that Mr Melrose could go through things with him and check him out.

He hadn’t said anything about having met Emerald, though, not even when Mr Melrose had told him that he proposed to invite the late duke’s wife to attend their meeting, as he felt that Dougie would need a ‘sponsor’ to help him adapt to society and his new role within it if it did turn out to be that he was indeed the heir. He’d cross that bridge as and when he came to it.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Emerald gasped, feigning an embarrassed self-consciousness she wasn’t feeling at all as her deliberately planned ‘accidental’ bumping into the Duke of Kent had him turning towards her, allowing her to continue with her plan by uttering a mortified, ‘Oh, Your Royal Highness.’

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry.’ The duke’s smile was polite rather than warm, and he was already turning away from her but Emerald wasn’t so easily put off. Ever since she had been formally and very briefly presented to him and to his mother, Princess Marina, earlier in the evening, she had been watching him and waiting for her chance to bring herself properly to his attention. A débutante party featuring an evening of chamber music would not normally have been something she would have wanted to attend, but that had been before she had learned that the duke was going to be one of the guests.

Emerald had had to be patient to make her move, waiting until the music was over, and the duke had moved to a quieter corner of the large formal reception room by one of the balconies. She certainly wasn’t going to let her prey escape her.

Speedily moving so that she was standing in front of him, she affected to breathe in the evening air coming through the open balcony doors, whilst telling him, ‘I seem to be dreadfully clumsy whenever I’m at one of these events. I suppose that’s because I’d rather be in the country.’ She gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Do you like the country, Sir?’

‘Yes, I do.’ The duke’s voice was slightly warmer now, and he was looking properly at her. Emerald felt a fierce surge of triumph. He couldn’t possibly be anything other than entranced by her. She had taken extra special care over her appearance. She was wearing her hair up in a deliberately semi-regal style (so perfect for a family tiara, she had thought happily to herself earlier). Her dress of pale lilac silk emphasised her small waist, whilst its matching bolero provided just the right note of modesty. The upturned style of its collar showed off the slender length of her neck and drew the eye down to the discreetly concealed curves of her breasts. Her nails were varnished pale pink to match her lipstick. Emerald knew that she outshone every other girl in the room.

‘It’s very generous of people to invite me to so many lovely parties,’ Emerald continued with fake modesty. ‘But I lost my father when I was very young and it makes me feel sad when I see other girls with their fathers.’

‘Yes, I can understand that,’ the duke agreed. Now she had touched his emotions, Emerald knew, because he too had lost his father at a young age.

‘I’m dreading my ball,’ Emerald confided. ‘It will be held at home at Lenchester House in Eaton Square, of course, just as my father would have wanted, but I won’t be able to enjoy it properly without him there.’

There, she had told him now where he could find her. There was only one more thing she needed to do.

‘I’ve always admired Her Royal Highness Princess Marina. She’s so elegant and gracious. I remember my father saying that. I’d love to meet her properly.’

Emerald managed to make her voice sound wistful and almost childlike. How could the duke refuse her? He couldn’t, of course.

‘Then please do allow me to introduce you.’

Already he was crooking his arm and politely waiting for her to place her hand on it.

‘Oh, would you?’ Emerald was the epitome of sparkling delight. Out of the corner of her eye she registered the resentment in Gwendolyn’s expression, along with the astonishment and envy on the faces of her fellow debs as the duke led her across the floor to where his mother was standing talking with some of the chaperones. But of course her attention wasn’t on her rivals but on the duke. The look in her own eyes was carefully designed to show him her pleasure in his company, just as her manner was planned to reveal her as sweetly innocent and slightly helpless, whilst at the same time extremely well born; things Emerald was sure he was bound to find attractive in a prospective wife. In forcing a one-to-one conversation on him she had achieved for herself something that even the most determined of débutante mothers had failed to do, and she had every reason to feel very pleased with herself indeed, Emerald decided as they reached the duke’s mother and her small entourage.

Princess Marina was elegant, Emerald admitted, elegant and regal, and quite definitely coolly distant with Emerald as she was presented to her. Without a single word being said or a look given, Emerald knew that the duke’s mother was well aware that Emerald had manipulated the duke into presenting Emerald to her, and that her behaviour had not gone down well. Princess Marina would, though, be forced to change her tune once Emerald was the new duchess, she thought smugly.

Afterwards when she had rejoined Gwendolyn and Lydia and her godmother, Emerald entertained herself by mentally rehearsing her married name: Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Kent.

Edward and Emerald. How fortunate that they shared the same initial, almost as though it had always been meant to be, she sighed happily as Gwendolyn prattled on about tennis.

The duke was in the Royal Scots Greys, and now Emerald was intent on finding out discreetly who amongst the other debs might have a male relative with the Greys so that she could make a friend of her and suggest that some of the young officers were invited to one of the deb ‘teas’. It was, after all, customary for young officers from the household regiments to attend the season’s social events.

Yes, Emerald decided, all in all it had been a most successful evening.

Ollie straightened up, stretching his back in the cramped confines of his small darkroom as he looked at the prints he had just developed with growing excitement. It had still been light when he had returned from the birthday party he had been summoned to attend and capture with his camera by one of the Kray twins’ stalwarts, not so much an enforcer, this one, as a fixer, although he still knew how to handle himself. Ollie had remembered sparring with him in the gym when he had been in training. Heavily built, with a typical ex-boxer’s broken nose, he had delivered the twins ‘request’ in an affable enough manner but Ollie had known better than to suggest that he had another engagement for that afternoon.

In the event the party had been a chance for him to mix with a crowd of once familiar faces, including that of his younger cousin, Willie, who had ignored his advice and who had been strutting around obviously considering himself very much a part of the twins’ ‘task force’.

It wasn’t the Kray brothers or the photographs he had taken of their distant cousin’s seventieth birthday party that had been responsible for him working in his darkroom until the early hours of the morning, though.

He looked at the images again, a wide grin of delight creasing his face. There was no doubt about it, he was good, and one day–soon–he would be the best. The photographs he had taken of Josh cutting Rose’s hair, snapping frantically as he tried to catch each movement, were a bloody work of art, even though he said so himself. If he had any sense about him he’d charge Josh a fortune for them and no mistake, ’cos they would pull in the chicks wanting their own hair cut like Rose’s like no one’s business. There was no point in thinking of what he could charge Josh, though. His friend was as skint as he was himself, living virtually hand to mouth, hoping to keep going in the precarious world of self-employment in which they were both taking their first faltering steps.

On the other hand, if he could get Vogue interested…Not that the posh commissioning editors who worked there were likely to welcome him acting off his own bat. They had their own ideas about the images they wanted and they were quick to reject his ideas if they conflicted. Still, it was worth a try, seeing as he would be going to Venice with the art director, the fashion editor and the models who had been hired for the feature he had been commissioned to photograph on ‘The Fabled Train Journey to Venice on the Orient-Express’, as well as in Venice itself.

It was the largest commission he had received from Vogue, and it would be worth toeing the line just to get the money. The trouble was that once he got behind his camera he almost always had trouble reminding himself of the need to earn money and instead became totally lost in his own imagination.

God, but he rated what he had done with Rose and Josh. Sometimes he could hardly believe himself what a genius he actually was.

He couldn’t wait for Josh to see what he had done. He looked at his watch, frowning in disbelief and shaking his wrist when he saw that the time was four o’clock, thinking that the watch must have stopped during the afternoon, and then realising that it had not and that it actually was four o’clock in the morning.

He was tired and hungry–very hungry. Stifling a yawn, he padded barefoot across to open the door.

The place he was renting was the first he had had all to himself. He had seized on it because the single large room that, along with a long narrow bathroom, comprised the flat, had access to the roof space, and he had been able to persuade the landlord to let him turn part of it into a darkroom.

When he could afford it he planned to move into somewhere where he could have a proper studio, but that was still just a pipe dream at the moment.

In his living quarters, he opened the food safe and removed several rashers of bacon, dropping them into the blackened frying pan, which he then put on top of his single-ring gas cooker, turning the heat up high and adding a dollop of lard. Whilst the bacon sizzled and spat noisily, depositing fat on the double row of tiles stuck haphazardly onto the bright yellow painted wall behind the cooker, Ollie removed an already started loaf from the breadbin on the tin dresser that held his meagre supply of china and kitchen utensils. The dresser was a gift from his mother, who had nearly cried when she saw what her son had given up his room in her lovely immaculate terraced house to live in, denouncing the flat as ‘a hovel’.

Cutting himself a couple of thick slices, Ollie buttered them generously and then removed the rashers of bacon from the frying pan, flattening them firmly between the thick wedges of bread.

By the time he took his first bite he was practically drooling with hungry anticipation. A bacon butty, there was nothing better. Except the sweet taste of success. It was something he hoped would become a regular event for him now.

Chapter Eleven

They were travelling from the Vogue office to pick up the boat train to Paris, where they would transfer to the Orient-Express, and Ella had naturally been up early, checking her small case over and over again in nervous anticipation. This trip meant so much to her–the opportunity to be noticed, to be given a senior assignment. She had everything crossed it would all work out as well as she hoped.

She didn’t have to be at Vogue’s offices until ten, but she was too anxious to sleep, sitting instead in the kitchen in her dressing gown, her feet tucked into her slippers whilst she sipped a cup of tea. The thought of eating made her feel even more nauseous.

She could hear Janey and Rose coming down the stairs. Soon it would be time for her to leave. She stood up, carrying her now empty cup over to the sink as Janey burst into the kitchen, complaining about the cold floor.

From the minute she had seen Rose’s new hairstyle on Saturday, Janey had not stopped demanding that Rose tell Josh that she wanted her own hair cutting in exactly the same style, and she was still doing so now, only breaking off to say to Ella enviously, ‘Lucky you, going to Venice, where the sun will be shining and it will be warm.’

‘I shall be working, not sunbathing,’ Ella pointed out, checking her watch. Yes, it was definitely time for her to leave, but first she must make one last check of her handbag, just to make sure that she really hadn’t forgotten anything.

Seated on the opposite side of the heavy old-fashioned mahogany partners’ desk in Mr Melrose’s office, Dougie tried hard not to stare too obviously at Emerald’s mother.

Physically she presented no surprises to him. He had not worked for Lew for several months without learning something, and it hadn’t taken him much effort to source some reasonably recent newspaper photographs of Amber. If he had been asked to describe her in one word, that word would have been ‘classy’. From the top of her elegantly styled chignon to the toes of her navy-blue leather shoes, Amber almost glowed with a special patina of good looks, good manners and a gentleness that spoke of the kindness that Dougie was sure he could see in her eyes.

It was that softness and the kindness allied to it that had surprised him. It hadn’t been obvious from the press photographs he had seen, and it had taken him off guard. All the more so because Emerald was her daughter. How could two women so closely related be so very different?

Amber eyed the young Australian seated opposite her sympathetically. She had warmed to him instantly, feeling rather sorry for him as he explained the chain of events that had led to him being orphaned. It had been interesting to learn about his life in Australia. He was a wealthy young man in his own right, and from one or two comments he had let drop, it had been plain that he had been brought up to look unfavourably on the British upper class, with its archaic practices.

‘I’ll admit that when I first got your letters I didn’t altogether like the thought of me being this duke bloke,’ he had told them.

So what had made him change his mind, Amber wondered. He had told them that he worked for a society photographer and the young Australian had admitted himself that he often felt ill at ease amongst the upper-class set. His admission had increased Amber’s sympathy for him, reminding her of how out of place she herself had sometimes felt as a young woman growing up amid wealth but not aristocracy. Despite his rough edges, though, Dougie had a natural pride in himself that Amber admired, even whilst she acknowledged that if he did prove to be the duke he would need a lot of help getting used to his new role.

He would, she felt, bring a freshness to the dukedom, like a clean gust of air blowing into a dusty room that had been closed up for too long. Robert would have liked and approved of him, she thought, considering her late husband. Jay would like him too. They would be able to talk together about farming matters. As those thoughts formed, Amber knew that she had already accepted him as part of her extended family, and equally that she already felt a maternal sense of protectiveness towards him.

He was obviously used to standing up for himself and living his own life, but he would be vulnerable in his new role, and the sharks that would swim close to him would not always be easily recognisable. He would need support, and who better to provide that, Amber decided, than the family he already had.

‘Well, there are several things that need to be confirmed before a formal announcement can be made,’ Mr Melrose was saying, ‘but…’

He looked at Amber, who smiled back at him before turning to Dougie to say warmly, ‘I don’t quite know whether to congratulate you or commiserate with you, Dougie. Or should I say, Your Grace?’ she added, teasing him gently.

Dougie shook his head, half bemused and half embarrassed.

‘You’ll want to see the Eaton Square house, I expect, and Osterby, of course,’ Amber continued. ‘I have a confession to make with regard to the London house. I’m afraid that I’ve allowed my daughter to move into it for the duration of her season and that her coming-out ball is to be held there.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Dougie began, and then stopped as both Mr Melrose and Amber looked curiously at him. ‘That is to say, I remember reading about it,’ he amended, ‘and of course I’m delighted. That is, I mean that I don’t…well, there’s no problem at all with your plans, so far as I’m concerned.’

‘That is very generous of you,’ Amber told him. ‘I know you’ll have made your own friends here in London but I’d like to introduce you to the rest of the family soon, if you think you could bear it. My stepdaughters and my niece live here in London, in Chelsea, and I know they would love to meet you. Jay, my husband, spends most of his time at Denham, our estate in Macclesfield, and our twin daughters are still at school. They’ll be home for Easter in a few days, though, and if you haven’t made any other arrangements it would be so nice if you would join us at Denham.’

Amber had caught Dougie off guard. He hadn’t made any plans for Easter, and in many ways he would be very happy to accept her invitation. As he was beginning to realise, there was going to be a lot more to being a duke than being called Your Grace. However, whilst Amber seemed ready to welcome him into the family, Dougie couldn’t see Emerald being equally welcoming. She wasn’t going to be at all pleased when she learned that they were related.

Before he could say anything Mr Melrose was announcing with evident relief, ‘Amber, my dear, that is an excellent suggestion and typically generous of you.’

It was, Dougie admitted. After all, she owed him nothing, not really.

‘You must give me your address and your telephone number,’ Amber was saying, ‘and I shall give you ours so that we can make arrangements for your visit.’

It was too late to back out now; it would be too rude, Dougie realised.

Outside in the thin April sunshine he mounted his motorbike, kick starting it. He had followed his employer’s example and bought himself the sturdy but sleek chrome machine, and had soon learned to weave it in and out of the busy London traffic at high speed.

‘Shit!’ Ollie cursed as he stared in bleary-eyed disbelief at the alarm clock, before sinking back against his pillow. How the hell had he managed to oversleep so badly?

It was almost midday. He was due at Vogue’s offices at noon for a briefing, before leaving for Venice with a bunch of models, Vogue’s fashion editor, makeup artists, staffers, and no doubt trunks full of clothes. He ran his hand over his stubbly jaw. His eyes felt as though someone had throw a handful of grit in them and his mouth felt like the bottom of a birdcage.

His brain was refusing to wake up, creaking into action like an asthmatic old car, wheezing and protesting at every demand made on its clapped-out engine. Clapped out–that was exactly how he felt. No way was he going to make Vogue’s office for half-past twelve, never mind twelve. He sat up in bed, dropping his head into his hands and squeezing his eyes tightly closed against the thudding pain in his head.

He really should not have drunk that suspect bottle of wine last night after his bacon sandwich. He had been thirsty, though, and in the mood to celebrate, and the wine had been there.

The thin ray of reluctant sunshine edging its way past the faded curtains made him wince, as it lanced his aching eyes and then dappled his naked torso honey gold. His olive-toned skin tanned easily, and as soon as the weather warmed up he’d be off down to Brighton to get himself a tan and check out the girls in their swimsuits.

Quarter to one, gone that now. Hell. Vogue’s fashion editor would have his guts for garters, and his balls off as well. No way was he going to make the appointment. But he could still make the boat train, if he went direct to the station.

His earlier malaise forgotten, he was galvanised into action, getting out of bed to reach for the jeans he had left lying on the floor, and pulling on a sweater before heading barefoot for the door and the public telephone in the hallway to the flats. He’d ring Vogue and tell them that due to unforeseen circumstances he’d meet up with them on the platform.

He grinned to himself before starting to whistle under his breath. It would be OK. It always was for Oliver Charters.

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