Victoria Fox

Praise for Wicked Ambition

‘It’s sexy and wicked … I loved this dirty, steamy page-turner.’

—The Sun

‘Quite simply the best “bonkbuster” you’ll read all year.’

—Daily Express

‘Oozes glamour and revenge. The ultimate beach read for 2013’ —All About Soap

‘Lashings of scandal, shocking secret pasts and steamy romance’

—New

‘A proper guilty pleasure’ —Now

‘Fans of glamorous bonkbusters will enjoy’ —Heat

Praise for Temptation Island

‘Victoria Fox’s glossy chick-lit novel gives Jackie Collins a run for her money.’ —Irish Tatler

‘Just too exciting to put down’ —Closer

‘Pour yourself a glass of Pimms because this summer’s bonkbuster is guaranteed to get you seriously hot.’

—Cosmopolitan

‘Even we were shocked at the scale of scandal in this juicy tale! It’s 619 pages of sin!’ —Now

‘If you’re a fan of Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper you’ll love the whirlwind of intrigue, mystery, sex and scandal …

We couldn’t put it down!’ —handbag.com

Praise for Hollywood Sinners

‘This debut novel is full of sex, glamour and divas!’ 4 stars

—Star

‘For a trip to ultimate escapism, take the Jackie Collins freeway, turn left at Sexy Street, right at Scandal Boulevard. Your destination is Victoria Fox’s Hollywood.’

—dailyrecord.co.uk

Glittering Fortunes
Victoria Fox

www.mirabooks.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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For Kate Wilde

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Love and thanks to Sally Williamson, Jenny Hutton, Donna Condon, Ian Grutchfield, Ali Wilkinson and all at MIRA/Mills & Boon, for turning a hot date into a romance.

Also to Maddy Milburn, who works so hard for my books; to Cesca Major for what makes a hero; and to Alice Usherwood for letting me borrow her beautiful name.

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

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

Part Two

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

Part Three

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS A fine day to be on the sea. Summertime in England and the sky was wide and cornflower-blue, golden sunshine twinkling on the water, and on the shore the small Cornish town of Lustell Cove sat pretty as a drawing.

Olivia Lark sensed the wave at her back and began to paddle, working her arms as the rush gathered pace and she braced herself for the leap. On a surge she lifted on to the board, the motion of the swell carrying her for an electrifying instant before her footing slipped out from beneath her and she toppled into the water. For seconds she was submerged in a whoosh of salty-fresh silence before surfacing, half gasping, half laughing, into the day, and feeling, as she always did, on the receiving end of a cosmic punchline. Despite a mouthful of chalky Atlantic and the noose of seaweed wrapped around her ankle, out on the water she felt happiest of all.

She splashed into land, the board tucked under one arm and the other lifted to squeeze the briny dregs from her chestnut hair. On the beach, bronzed bodies basked in the heat on pink towels, a rainbow of parasols fluttered lazily in the breeze and chased an arc around the horseshoe inlet. Holiday makers licked strawberry ice cream and patted castles out of gritty, grainy buckets, while on the water black shapes paddled, bobbing on the sway, counting to the ultimate wave.

Swiftly she showered and dressed, tying her hair in a loose, damp ponytail, and made her way across the sand. She couldn’t put it off for ever.

The Blue Paradise surf shack was a timber cabin bordered by cut-out palms. Out front a heap of kayaks were knotted together, haphazard driftwood stumbling a path to the entrance. She almost collided with a group of girls on their way out.

‘Oops,’ she backed up to let them pass, ‘sorry!’

Slinky as panthers in their wetsuits, tossing manes and tinkling laughter, the girls were like glossy creatures from another planet. Olivia couldn’t help wondering if, in her younger years, she had enjoyed access to mascara, a hairdryer, a wardrobe—words that through her teens had taken on the exotic overtones of a far-flung spice market—she might have earned access to that kind of magazine-friendly femininity. As it was there seemed to be an awful lot of effort that went into it (seldom was the day she staggered into the morning with so much as a perfunctory glance in the mirror), time that could be better spent doing other things, like sticking your head out of a car window, or running at cows through a mud sludge, or daydreaming about the guy you fancied, or having a lie-in, or painting a picture, or making lists about all the things you really ought to spend your time doing, which wasn’t any of the above.

Even as a child, playing Teatime at Tiffany’s (horrid little conferences she had endured as a six-year-old; Tiffany Price pouring air out of the spout and asking if anyone took milk, which had troubled Olivia’s young mind deeply because how could there be milk if there were no actual tea?) had never held the same allure as whatever adventure the boys were having—building dens, firing catapults, hunting the beach for gold. She had scrambled into their fold by way of initiation: Oli who could climb a tree quick as a monkey, who picked up spiders in her bare hands, who drew her own comic books with a blunt pencil and who always had grass stains on her knees.

Taking a breath, she stepped inside.

‘Hey, Addy.’

She propped her board by the door. The shop was gleaming with drowsy afternoon glow, its shelves stacked with reef gear, trunks and bikinis, racks and wax. On the wall hung an impressive model of a Great White, tail whipping and teeth bared.

Addy Gold was in his usual position at the counter, thumbing through his phone with his top off, a string of beads at his neck and wrists. Illuminated in a shaft of sunlight, his six-pack glistening above the peeled-down skin of his wetsuit, Olivia half expected a burst of choral music to accompany the sight.

‘Hey,’ he mumbled, glancing up from important business to give her a fleeting, if somewhat confused, smile. ‘Back already?’

‘It’s been a year.’

‘Has it?’

His indifference stung. ‘Yeah, well, London didn’t work out.’

That was the understatement of the century. It was hard to believe she was back at Lustell Cove, her childhood home: scene of angst-ridden school years at Taverick Manor, endless lazy Saturdays paddling the water and stolen kisses after dark with Theo Randall from the tennis club, who had always smelled faintly of Aertex. At twenty-two Olivia had graduated from a local art course, London had seemed like the next logical step and so she’d headed to the city to Become A Painter (how ridiculous that sounded!), envisaging days spent floating about museums discussing abstract expressionism and sipping free wine. Instead she’d spent the next year trading an Aix-en-Provence atelier for an Archway bedsit, and camping with a tortured writer who never bought loo roll and who was in possession of so much body hair it was like showering after a gorilla. Wading ankle-deep through unsold drawings had soon become depressing and, following a series of short-lived bar jobs, the last of which had culminated in Olivia telling an aggressively sexist customer to fuck off, her bank account had finally run dry and she’d been forced to admit defeat.

‘No kidding,’ he droned.

She smiled brightly. ‘So did I miss much?’

‘Nah.’ Addy yawned, stretching so his chest opened before her like a casket of treasure. ‘The cove’s dead. Nothing exciting ever happens round here.’

‘It will now I’m back. I can’t spend the entire summer sitting under my mother’s caravan roof, you know.’ If it could be called that: parts of Florence Lark’s ancient Pemberton Static were tacked down with masking tape.

‘Guess you’ll be looking for a job?’

‘It’s why I’m here.’ She consulted the noticeboard. ‘Anything good come up?’

‘Dunno—haven’t checked it in ages.’

Every opening at the cove advertised at the Blue Paradise and the display was thick with flyers requesting bar staff, shop help, grape pickers at the Quillets Vineyard or muck shovellers at the Barley Nook stables … The list went on. Olivia had taken most as holiday earners when she was still in training bras.

‘Suppose I should,’ Addy commented boredly. ‘New horizons and all that.’

Her head snapped up. ‘You’re leaving?’

‘Maybe. I’m antsy. You know how I get. I need more out of life than sitting round here chatting up girls … It’s samey after a while, you know?’

She forced a smile. Was Addy aware of how she felt? Maybe. But then he could have the pick of any girl he wanted, and she was just his friend. She could make him laugh. She could surf with him in the rain. She could help him with his English homework because he had a fear of any book that was longer than fifty pages. What she couldn’t be was a six-foot blonde with legs that went on for miles.

Even though Olivia had known him since the beginning of time, the Addy fire burst before her now just as brilliant and dangerous as the first day she’d seen it. She’d been six and he’d been nine, and Addy’s little sister a regular at Tiffany’s tea parties. Olivia would spy him outside with his friends playing Gun Tower Home! and would long to flee the dinky dining room and china pots filled with nothing, and tear through the brambles till her dress ripped. Of course the boys had tried everything to shrug her off: locking her in the Creepy Shed, vowing that she had to be slave, racing on their bikes so she couldn’t keep up, setting up dares they never thought she’d meet … But Olivia was determined, and once she had accepted the ultimate challenge of sprinting across the field owned by Farmer Nancarrow, a shadowy, mysterious, darkly enticing character who had become in the children’s eyes more myth than man—he would shoot anyone who trespassed on his land and then cook them for supper!—they had finally accepted her as marginally all right for a girl.

It was a lifetime ago, and yet still only yesterday.

Olivia had hoped that seeing Addy again might have prompted an epiphany, a realisation that all these years he had tricked her into seeing what wasn’t there, believing what wasn’t true. But with Addy, just with Addy, always with Addy, it returned to the same. Olivia wasn’t stupid, but he made her crazy. She was solid; he turned her to mush. She was level-headed; with him she went wonky. Her love for him could be traced back to twelve, eleven, ten, maybe before, when they had made hideouts in the ferns and she’d started noticing his eyes were blue, not grey, and her mum would pack them fish-finger sandwiches, and each time Olivia gave him a sketch, of him, of her, of the swinging tyre they had rigged above his parents’ lake, folded tight and slipped into his pocket, it had felt like losing a tiny piece of her heart.

‘There’s tons of stuff on here,’ she said, without conviction.

‘No offence, Oli, but I’m aiming higher than the cove. I haven’t bothered with that waster pinboard.’ Addy scratched his chin. ‘I’m thinking big.’

Olivia almost didn’t see it.

A leaf of paper obscured by a yachting brochure, but where its edges escaped it bore the unmistakeable crest she remembered from her youth:

Usherwood Estate seeks able & enthusiastic gardener Summer hours at competitive rates— please enquire

She frowned. As the stately residence of the former Lord and Lady Lomax, grand old Usherwood was a fairytale castle of turrets and wings, towers and acreage, a majestic relic of a forgotten time. The Lomax couple had perished in a plane crash thirteen years ago, and their sons, at that time only teenagers, had inherited. Cato, the eldest, was notorious, a Hollywood A-lister who had bolted after the tragedy, never to return. The youngest had stayed at the ancestral home, and was by all accounts a recluse.

‘Hey, Humpty, check this out!’

The voice was so upper class it sounded like there was a bag of marbles rolling around in its mouth. Olivia turned. A strut of city boys had located a window mannequin in a state of undress and one of them was making an obscene gesture at her nether regions. Lustell Cove attracted the Made in Chelsea set. With its lush, wild panoramas matched by higgledy-piggledy streets dotted with quaint Cornish cottages and tea shops, it was far enough from the capital to feel exclusive to the seriously wealthy, while its hot beach culture ensured it was anything but a stuffy hideaway.

‘Too funny, Ruffers, too funny.’ Humpty was sporting a pair of Hawaiian-print boardshorts despite Olivia’s suspicion he had never done anything in the water save a breaststroke—and that only if it promised not to get his hair wet.

‘D’you surf?’ asked Addy, not especially interested. Olivia saw his eyes scan the gathering for a hot blonde with a trust fund—she knew him too well.

‘My dad’s got a Maxus,’ Humpty replied, tossing his coiffed arrangement in the direction of the marina, which was bobbing with sleek white speedboats. His entourage of Hooray Henrys guffawed their approval. ‘Who needs a plank of wood?’

‘Can I help you, then?’ said Addy. ‘You know, with anything surf-related?’

One of them asked: ‘Dude, do you know the Lomaxes?’

Addy returned his attention to his phone. ‘Not if you mean Cato,’ he bristled. ‘Far as I know he hasn’t been back here in, like, for ever.’

‘The house is pretty creepy, huh,’ said Humpty.

‘Is it true it’s, like, the biggest house in England?’ enquired Ruffers.

‘I heard they’ve got champagne fountains in the gardens,’ said another.

‘And Cato keeps a monkey in the cellar,’ put in Humpty, ‘to bring him things. I read about it. Someone saw it swinging about in a gold waistcoat.’

There followed an inventory of increasingly extravagant fictions. Everyone was so busy talking that they didn’t notice when Olivia unpinned the Usherwood flyer and fed it discreetly into the back pocket of her jeans. She slipped outside.

The sun had vanished, casting the bay in shade. Olivia folded her arms against the rash of goosebumps prickling across her skin. High on the hill loomed the vast silhouette of the Usherwood Estate, staining the horizon like a great inkblot.

She stepped on to the beach. The sand was cool and silky between her toes and she padded across the inlet, away from Usherwood and back into sunshine.

CHAPTER TWO

‘OH, BABY, YES! Keep going, stud—you are truly the best in the world!’

With each brutal thrust Susanna Denver’s back was scraping painfully against the knobs on her lover’s gold-plated washroom cabinet, but then space was always going to be at a premium at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic.

‘Keep it dirty,’ Cato growled, his breath ragged in her ear. ‘You know I love it when you talk filth, you scandalous harpy.’

Susanna clamped her thighs around his waist and reached down to clasp the most famous backside in America (recently initiated into the Hollywood Hall of Fame after an Award-nominated nude scene). Sharp crimson nails dug into his flesh.

‘Harder!’ she squealed, bucking a touch too fervently so that behind her a decorative tap flicked on and she found her ass being sprayed with water. ‘Faster!’

‘Not wet enough already?’ Cato snarled in that impossibly attractive English accent, which made Susanna think of black-and-white World War II movies where everyone went about smoking pipes and talking about submarines.

‘Always for you, baby,’ she gasped, ‘always for you!’

Cato slipped a hand between her legs, dousing her in the liquid heat.

‘Say my name,’ he croaked, ‘say it!’

‘Ca-to!’ she managed, the word severed in two as he thrust into her, his black shock of hair abrasive against her chest and his face buried in her tits.

‘Say my full name—my full name, goddamnit!’

‘Lord Cato! Fuck me, Lord Cato, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!’

Lord Cato did as he was told, seconds later coming so fiercely that Susanna’s ass was slamming in and out of the porcelain bowl and Cato had water coursing down his legs and into the nest of suit pants pooled at his ankles.

‘You’re a rampant little nympho, aren’t you?’ he choked afterwards, fighting to catch his breath. ‘Be a good girl and run along, I could murder a gin on the rocks.’

Back in her seat on the Lomax private jet, Susanna patted her hair and checked her reflection in a crystal compact. Her lipstick was smudged—Cato preferred there to be a prime blowjob on the menu; it was one of his foibles—she fixed it and smiled with satisfaction. Looking back at her wasn’t just the face of Susanna Denver, romcom queen who commanded ten million a movie—oh, no, it was the face of a future Lady of the Manor! She couldn’t suppress the mewl of excitement that escaped when she thought of it. Surely it was only a matter of time before Cato proposed, and what would she say? She would say Yes, yes, yes! as fiercely as she had five minutes before with his cock driving through her like a steel truncheon.

It was several minutes before Cato joined her (he always needed the bathroom after sex: another eccentricity). He picked up his Tanqueray and balanced the tumbler in the palm of his hand. The dark hair on his knuckles was a stark contrast to the clean, ice-cracked liquid, and on his pinkie he wore a fat gold signet.

‘Everything all right, darling?’ Susanna asked, giving him her most winning smile. She had considered that he might have asked her to marry him on the jet—after all, he spent most of his life on the darned thing—but obviously he had something far more romantic planned for when they got to Cornwall. She couldn’t wait to see the mansion: it looked like Charles Dickens lived there, as if they’d have a chimney sweep, and a maid who wore a doily on her head! It was too sweet for words.

‘Fine,’ Cato barked. She went to rub his shoulders but he batted her off. ‘If you must know, I’d rather turn this filly around and be touching down in LA in an hour’s time, not bloody Heathrow.’ He swigged the gin in one.

‘Oh, darling,’ she comforted, ‘it’ll be gorgeous when we get there …’

‘Will it? It’s England, Mole; it rains all the time.’

How Susanna wished he wouldn’t call her that. It was an endearment—she had a freckle birthmark on the small of her back—but all the same it made her sound like a soggy, twitchy little thing emerging blindly from the ground. Cato had taken to introducing her as Mole in new company, which she absolutely had to put a stop to.

‘I don’t mind a bit of rain,’ said Susanna, flipping open her magazine.

‘You’re not cut out for it,’ Cato retorted.

‘I can be. I will be.’ She wanted to add when we’re married, but didn’t.

A muscle twitched at his temple. ‘If Charles did the right thing and moved on I’d be a damn sight happier. Usherwood is mine, after all. I’m the eldest; it’s my inheritance. Still,’ Cato swirled the glass, ‘I can’t apologise for being a trans-Atlantic man. Career calls—not that my brother would know the first thing about that.’

Susanna flushed with pleasure. She loved it when Cato talked about claiming the estate full-time. Things were going impossibly well for him in LA right now, but come next year he would be ready to divide his time between the two—and she would be right there alongside him as the next Lady Lomax. She couldn’t wait.

‘Another,’ Cato commanded one of his staff, holding aloft the empty glass. ‘Why he insists on being such a miserable bastard is well and truly beyond me.’

Susanna craned to see. ‘Go easy on him, baby, he hasn’t been with us long …’

Cato shot her one of his your-stupidity-never-ceases-to-amaze-me looks. ‘I’m not talking about that cretin,’ he snipped. ‘I’m referring to Charles. Naturally.’

The gin landed, accompanied by a miniature offering of salted nuts.

‘Just because Mummy and Daddy got lost in the fucking Bermuda Triangle’—Cato said ‘fucking’ like ‘fahking’—’I mean, let’s get over it, shall we?’ He chucked the nuts into his mouth like a shot of Tequila and appeared to swallow without chewing. Susanna found him urgently sexy. With his splintering eyes and jet-black mane, so brutish and carnivorous, he possessed the kind of unreconstructed maleness that had women worldwide longing to experience the Lomax magic. Once she was his wife, Susanna Denver alone would achieve that privilege.

‘These are stale,’ Cato complained of the nuts, but continued to pulverise them nonetheless.

‘Try and relax, sweetheart …’

Cato loosened his tie. ‘I am relaxed. Just don’t talk to me about my brother.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You brought him up. And now look! I’m in a terrible mood thanks to you.’

Susanna had learned early on in their acquaintance that Cato was not a man with whom to be argued. She knew better than to raise the issue of Charles (like the prince!), but privately thought their relationship was bound to be strained what with the family history being so raw. Cato rarely talked about the accident, only in garbled bursts when he was blind drunk on Courvoisier. Thirteen years ago, Richmond and Beatrice Lomax had taken a single-engine plane for a day flight over the Bahamas—at nine a.m. they had departed; by twelve they had abandoned radio signal. Their plane was lost, the bodies never found. To this day their deaths remained unclassified.

‘Put him from your mind,’ she calmed him. ‘Shall I rub your shoulders?’

Cato scowled.

Susanna couldn’t help but suspect there was more to the brotherly rivalry than met the eye. Reading between the lines it seemed that Charles, the youngest, had always been the favoured son—and Cato resented him for it. Funny how such petty jealousies could wind their way into adulthood. Perhaps Susanna could be the peacemaker, encourage the men to see what was really important. Once she and Cato moved into Usherwood on a permanent basis she saw no reason why Charles should have to be evicted. Where would the poor mite go?

On cue Cato pronounced: ‘Charles is in for a terrific surprise when I tell him I’m taking over. He never could handle the place; it’s falling apart around his bloody ears. What Usherwood needs is a real man to take care of it.’ Buoyed by the thought, he turned to Susanna and awarded her an indulgent smile. ‘A bit like you, Mole.’

Susanna took his hand. ‘Indeed,’ she purred demurely, in the way English ladies surely did when they were soon-to-be-heirs to great stateliness and fortune.

Cato downed the drink, exhaling heavily through his nostrils like a bull with a ring through its nose. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he said, ‘I think I’ll have your mouth wrapped around my cock one more time before we land,’ as though he were considering which route they would take into the southwest once they hit the roads tomorrow (Susanna suffered from jetlag and preferred a night at Claridge’s before entertaining an onward journey). She had selected a vintage burgundy Bentley for the trip and might even don a floral headscarf, if the weather was clement.

England’s fields appeared like patchwork in the window, a quilt of greens and yellows stitched together by thorn and thistle: Land of Hope and Glory.

Susanna sighed the sigh of the devoted. She couldn’t wait to be introduced to her new home. And once Cato proposed, everything would be just perfect.

CHAPTER THREE

CHARLIE LOMAX STOPPED at the stream to let his dogs drink. He wiped his dark brow, the material of his T-shirt damp with sweat and sticking across his shoulders. It was a scorching day, thick with heat, the only sounds the steady babble and the hounds’ lapping tongues as they attacked the water in loud, contented gulps.

He squinted up at Usherwood House. One hand was raised to counter the glare, and the skin where his sleeve drew back was pale compared with the tan on his forearms. The earthy, musty pocket of his underarm was a hot, secret shadow.

The dogs clambered to their feet for a vigorous shake, their fur releasing a shower of glittering drops. Comet, the setter, pricked his ears in anticipation of his master’s next move: tail bright, eyes alert. Retriever Sigmund panted happily.

Russet sunshine bounced off the stonework, drawing-room windows rippled in the haze. Charlie could picture its quiet interior, shafts of light seeping through dusky glass. A sheet of verdant lawn rolled up to the entrance, studded with flower beds that flaunted summer colour despite their neglect. Mottled figurines hid behind oaks like ghosts, a head or a hand missing, moss-covered and cool in the shade.

It was habit to see everything that was wrong with the place: the dappled paintwork, the peeling façade, and at the porch a stippled, stagnant fountain whose cherubic statuette sang a soundless, fossilised tune. But on days like today, lemon sunbeams bathing the house, the old monkey puzzle rising proud in the orchard and the flat grey sea beyond with its white horses flirting on the waves, it was possible to imagine an inch of its former glory. When Charlie would return for yearned-for ex-eats, the car pulling up alongside his mother’s classic Auburn, gravel crunching under the tyres and the smell of buttered crumpets soaking into the purple evening, those were the times he remembered. That was what Usherwood meant to him.

He climbed the ditch, put his fingers out so a soft, soggy muzzle came in curiosity to his touch, and with it the hot lick of an abrasive tongue.

Through the Usherwood doors the great hall echoed, high windows illuminating a mist of dust particles that drifted into the vaults. Above the sooty inglenook a portrait of Richmond and Beatrice was suspended, its frame a tarnished copper. The dogs skated muddy-pawed through to the library, tails thumping as they waited for Charlie to catch up.

‘Oh, you scamps!’ Barbara Bewlis-Teet, housekeeper since his parents’ day, came in from the kitchen. She shook her head at the dirt the dogs had brought with them. ‘Mr Lomax, you’d let those mutts rule the roost given half the chance!’

Charlie ran a hand through his raven hair. It had grown longish around his ears and he hadn’t shaved in a week, giving him a rugged, piratical appearance. His eyes were panther-black. The bridge of his nose had been split years before in a cricket match, and the residual scar made him look more fearsome than he was.

‘They’re all right.’ He pulled off his boots, thick with caked-on mud.

Affection made Barbara want to reach out and touch him, the boy she had once known—but she couldn’t, because Mr Lomax was untouchable.

How she wanted to rewrite the story whose beginning and end could be found in the landscapes of his face: the concentrated, permanent frown; the dark angle where his jaw met his neck; the fierce brushstrokes of his cheekbones. There was Charlie before the tragedy, a dimly recalled child with a clever smile and a skill for putting things together—cameras, watch mechanisms, telescopes—to see how they worked; and Charlie afterwards, wilted at the Harrow gates, at thirteen so young, too young, for the education that sometimes what was taken apart could never be reassembled. She had driven through the night to collect him in her Morris MINI, doing away with the nonsense of a chauffeured car. Cato had left for the South of France, done with his final year, a hard-boiled show-off whom nothing seemed to touch. Barbara wasn’t sure when Cato had returned to Usherwood, if he even had, to join the mourners and to console the younger brother who had needed him.

‘Tea’s ready,’ she said gently, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Shall I bring it through?’ It was four p.m. sharp and the time-worn set patiently waited, citrus steam rising from the delicate chipped cups Barbara still insisted on using; a splash of milk in a porcelain mug, a silver basin of sugar and a plate of powdery gingerbreads. So long as Mr Lomax cared about Usherwood’s standards, so must she.

‘I’ll be at my desk.’

‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘And shall I light a fire?’

‘No, I’ll manage.’

Barbara was used to his economy with words. He didn’t give himself away, not to just anyone. He was twenty-six this winter, and to all intents and purposes had removed himself from the world. He was a distant rock battered by storms, a locked door in a darkened corridor, a half remembered song.

After what had happened, how could it be different?

‘Very well,’ she said softly. ‘Will that be all?’

‘Yes,’ Mr Lomax replied, ‘that’s all.’

It was cool in the library; cellar draughts seeping through the floorboards, the damp in the walls making everything chill despite the heat of the day. Charlie dragged on a frayed Guernsey and lit the flames. His hands were broad and work-roughened, the flesh stained and splintered, chapped by outdoor grind. Sparks burst and crackled and he spread his fingers to warm them in the orange, spitting glow.

He settled at the morning’s post. Red warnings glared through envelopes, demands for payment and threatened court action. Sigmund padded over and absent-mindedly Charlie scratched the retriever’s head. The dog put both paws on his lap, resting his chops and gazing up at his master forlornly.

The books told a sorry story. Usherwood was in dire straits and despite Charlie’s initiatives—selling off his mother’s art collection; opening the outbuildings; renting the south field as a campsite—it scarcely touched the sides. Each cheque was engulfed by a rising tide of demands. The drive needed resurfacing, the greenhouse was suffering a leak, the roof in the old maid’s lodgings begged a restoration, the arch on the chapel was collapsing … He couldn’t keep up. Maintaining the occupied quarters was bad enough. They’d had neither heating nor hot water for over a month, and Charlie had taken to bathing early morning in the bitter spinney stream.

Of course he was meant to be rich. This was a mansion, after all—palatial, exquisite, the finest example of Jacobean architecture in the West Country—and its inhabitant aristocracy, heir to great fortune. But the upkeep had sapped every penny of that fortune. Huge chambers slept unused, locked away, spaces once bright and vital now relegated to the graveyard. Piece by piece the house was shutting down. It reminded Charlie of a night when he was eight, camping in the trunk of the withered oak with a blanket up by his ears. The house had seemed an advent calendar of golden windows, his father passing through to extinguish one light at a time until nothing was left but the stain of dark upon dark, the shell of a house sliced out of the night.

Amid a nest of paperwork, a red blinking caught his attention.

One message pending:

‘Can’t stop, old bean,’ came a familiar, hated voice. ‘Susanna’s been hankering after a taste of the Cornish Riviera and you know me—never one to disappoint a lady. We arrive tomorrow. Tidy the place up, won’t you? Oh, and do spare us by getting those rotten hounds on a leash; Susanna won’t like them a bit.’ He was about to ring off, before a parting: ‘Tell the girls to whip up something nice. Susanna wants British; you know the thing. Tarts. Shortbread.’

The line went dead.

Charlie listened to it a second time before hitting delete. His knuckles cracked.

Cato Lomax.

Movie star, icon, Casanova—but the world didn’t know him as Charlie did. His Cato was narcissistic, decadent, reckless, wicked; the grubby-palmed boy who had terrorised him, pushing him from the apple tree so he knocked his front teeth grey, dunking his head in the glacial lake one vicious winter, bolting him in the stuffy leather trunk they had taken to Harrow and feeding in a sack of crawling beetles, trapping him in the secret passage that ran between the pantry and the sword room …

And then, when they were adults, taking from him the one thing Charlie could never forgive him for. People said it hadn’t been Cato’s fault, but Charlie knew better.

Acid clutched his heart when he thought of that furious, thundery night … Cato’s tail lights disappearing down the Usherwood drive, rain slashing the windows, a red torch bleeding into darkness …

The very last time he had seen her.

The manslaughter charge had been dropped. Nothing more said about it. That was what money could do—it could buy justice, as rotten and corrupt as it came.

But by Charlie’s judgement, his brother could never be forgiven.

Whenever he read about Cato in the papers, posing with a new actress girlfriend, he swallowed fury like a knot of wire. Despite it all Cato still imagined himself to be emperor of Usherwood. By virtue of his age the true and righteous Lord Lomax, winging in whenever it suited to boast his heritage to a Plasticine army of Americans. Cato had no clue about the place or what it needed; all he cared for was his reputation and the social currency Usherwood awarded. Being gentry wasn’t about playing polo and hanging pheasants; it was about a birthright that had been passed through generations, this wounded house that Charlie toiled for night and day because he felt it in his soul, his true devotion and his true belonging.

He went to the window and released the catch, grounding himself against the approaching storm.

That was it, then: the prodigal son returned.

Cato’s imminent arrival slid over the surrounding hills like an army on the mount. The air outside was fragrant. A cabbage white fluttered on to the sill, twitching its wings. Somewhere in the grounds a nightingale sang.

CHAPTER FOUR

OLIVIA SHOULD HAVE known that the car wouldn’t start. For most of the year Florence Lark had been using the battered green-and-white Deux Chevaux as an elaborate planter, filling it with sorrel and sage, parsley and peppermint, basil and bay. Olivia wasn’t sure if this arrangement was intentional or if her mother had just neglected to unpack the allotment spoils one day and things had grown from there.

‘Take the bicycle,’ Flo said from her position on the caravan steps, where she was busy peeling apples into a basin. She was an attractive woman with a stream of honey-blonde hair, bright blue eyes and the skin of a seventeen-year-old. ‘It’s a glorious afternoon; you could do with getting some country air back into you. I can’t imagine how you put up with The Smoke for so long. I never could.’

‘It was only a year.’ Olivia had a brief, strange pang for the Archway bedsit, and the top decks of buses she’d see sailing past her window as she ate breakfast.

‘Well, a year’s long enough.’

‘I’m not staying, you know.’ She yanked the pushbike from its moorings amid a hillock of grass. A slick of oil smeared blackly across her dress and she wiped it with the back of her hand. ‘This is just a stopgap.’

‘Hmm, you say that now …’

‘I’ll be saying the same in a month.’

‘But you love the cove!’

‘Nothing ever happens here, Mum. It’s full of the people who never left.’

Her mother pulled a face. ‘Like Adrian Gold?’

Olivia glanced away. ‘Maybe.’

‘You’re drastically out of his league.’

‘You would say that.’

‘And you’ll never see it, of course.’ Flo sighed. ‘There he is sailing about with a string of airheads in bikinis without a brain cell to speak of between them …’

Olivia rolled her eyes. So much for the sisterhood that had been drummed into her since birth—and anyway, what was wrong with wearing a bikini and being hot and having Addy Gold lusting after you? All her life she had been steered away from the tricks that helped a girl look nice, and suddenly she felt pissed off, as if she’d been robbed of her only shot, which was ridiculous because it was hardly as if a stick of gloss and a spritz of Dior would have made all the difference. Or would it? Natural is beautiful, her mother insisted, and besides, stuff like high heels and make-up were Crimes Against Women. They were alternative, remember? But alternative was fine when you were forty and wore moccasins and smoked damp roll-ups, and not when you were sixteen and just wanted to go on a date without having to explain why your shoes were made of hay (that was an exaggeration—but only just).

Olivia saddled up. Thanks to this conversation she felt every inch the grumpy adolescent: how did coming home always achieve that?

‘Wish me luck,’ she muttered, before she could mutter anything else.

‘Don’t let that Lomax give you any trouble,’ counselled her mother. ‘He’s meant to be downright insufferable. Any nonsense and you tell him what for.’

In finding her feet on the pedals Olivia almost toppled sideways. It was ages since she’d ridden and the squeaky brakes and cranky gears did little to bolster the confidence. Flo gave her a push and she teetered off down the path.

Olivia might find herself pining for the city, but even she couldn’t deny how free she felt flying down Lustell Steep with the wind in her hair, up on the handlebars, sheer momentum carrying her. She could taste the ocean and hear the swooping cries of seagulls as they wheeled overhead. Over the mount she passed the church. Sweet buds nestled in hedgerows and the back-end of a hare darted into the mossy verge.

This was the way she used to come in the holidays, racing against her best friend Beth to reach the old bench first. Past the weathered seat there was a gap in the border, big enough for two girls to squeeze through. They called the field beyond the Hush-Hush—perhaps because it had been quiet as a lake on the day they’d found it, or perhaps because they’d sworn to keep its discovery a secret. In the hot months it was bright with corn and rape, kernels you could pick off in juice-stained fingers and pop their oily pods in your mouth. In winter it was rough with earth and churned up like the sea in a gale. This was where her mother had taken them when she’d first bought the 2CV, picking them up from school with a tray of eggs laid out on the rear shelf, pink and smooth as pebbles and lined up neatly in rows like a cinema for bald people. Flo had driven fast as a rocket across the field and the car had gone bouncing and bounding and leaping over the ridges, Olivia and Beth in the back, clutching each other and laughing till they cried, shrieking, ‘Slow down!’ even if they hadn’t wanted her to, and when they stopped they were amazed to see the shells still intact.

‘There you go,’ Florence had triumphed. ‘Best set of wheels on the market.’

That was before Olivia found out that Farmer Nancarrow owned the Hush-Hush land. She had never told the boys this, but once, ages ago, she had seen him kissing her mother at a barn dance, a dark, dusky giant of a man, and she had hid in the wings of the stage, wide-eyed and watching.

By the time she reached the foot of the Usherwood drive, the sun was lowering in the sky and early evening shadows were lengthening across the plots.

At the entrance a sign announced the house, faded with age and leaning to one side. Across the cattle grid the route opened up and Olivia rode faster, the track galloping away beneath her wheels. All her life the estate had been a distant wonder, perpetually beyond reach, the untouchable palace of the aristocracy. She’d been ten when Lord and Lady Lomax had died, and supposed she must have come once or twice when she was little, but the memories became eclipsed by their grim successors: TV crews descending; reporters on the streets; the canvas of shocked, sad faces as the cove had digested the news. People like that—rich, glamorous, exceptional people—didn’t just disappear. For months afterwards, Olivia had imagined divers scouring the ocean depths, finding nothing except a diamond bracelet winking on the seabed.

She had been too young then to appreciate what it must have been like for the children left behind. Losing her own father at six had at least spared her the pain of a proper understanding, the significance of it too big, too serious, to process. Even when Flo had held her close and told her Dad was never coming back, Olivia had secretly known that he would. He’d show up one day and surprise them. Got you, monkey! A game; like when he’d chase her round the garden and throw her over his head, forcing her to squeal her delight. But as the weeks turned into months and the seasons unfurled, so did the realisation that her mother had been right. Grief assailed her gradually; there had been no ambush. The Lomax boys had been ambushed.

Through a canopy of trees Usherwood at last came into view. It was beautiful and sad and majestic all at the same time. The entrance was arched, the exterior dotted with dozens of bay windows that gazed enquiringly back at her. Curvilinear gables, peaked like the spade suit in a deck of playing cards, adorned the ridges like icing. Close up, telltale signs of decay blushingly revealed themselves: chalky efflorescence on a renovated chimney, a weathered ox-eye on a central facade, twisted pillars pockmarked by age … Yet nothing could rob the mansion of its splendour.

The drive widened into an oval expanse of gravel, stones grinding beneath her tread, and Olivia climbed off to wheel the rest of the way.

She spotted a man up a ladder, his back to her. From what she could see he was fixing a gutter. She pictured how she must look, a stranger with a cloud of auburn hair and thistle scratches on her legs, pushing a bike whose pannier was stuffed with a beach towel and a crumpled sketchbook.

Two dogs bounded over, hindquarters bowed in excitement, their tails going frantically. She made a fuss of them, patting their flanks and scuffing their ears.

‘Hello,’ she called. ‘Hello there!’ She gave a pointless little wave, like someone on the deck of a ferry.

The labourer swore. He sucked the tip of his finger where he’d splintered it, or bashed it with a hammer, or whatever it was he was doing up there, and turned.

‘Can I help you?’ he hollered down irritably. His voice was very deep, and low, like a shout thrown back from the distant end of a tunnel.

Olivia couldn’t see his face, just a big black shape where he obscured the melting sun. ‘I’m, er, looking for a job,’ she replied uncertainly. ‘I saw the ad at the beach; you’re after someone to help with the gardens? I hope I’m in time …’

The man thought for a moment before climbing down. She could practically see his bad mood, sense it like a squall on the water when she was out on her board and the weather was changing. As he came nearer she was dwarfed by his size. He had a tousle of coal-black hair and his shoulders were treble the width of hers. He was so tall she barely came up to his chin. His eyes were darker than three a.m.

‘I’m Olivia,’ she started. ‘Olivia Lark.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I know.’

She took in his paint-splashed work trousers and faded checked shirt. He had a clever, angular face, catching the sun on one side. His eyelashes were long. Sooty. She wondered if he had helped out on her mother’s allotment.

‘Could I speak to the owner?’

His frown deepened.

‘Or if now’s a bad time …?’

He continued assessing her in that peculiarly penetrating way. She had never been on the receiving end of such stark, unapologetic scrutiny.

‘The thing is,’ she forged on, ‘I’m an artist. That sounds massively wanky, but it’s the truth so I might as well be truthful, and the other truth is that I’m unemployed and I need to make money so that I can move back to London and get on with things.’ Why was she babbling? She never babbled. His frown became more of a scowl. ‘So I’m back for the summer, and I’m hardworking, and reliable, and I wouldn’t ask to be paid too much. I’m good with plants and stuff—and I cook a bit … though actually,’ she retracted it, ‘not very well; as a matter of fact I had a complete catastrophe with a macaroni cheese the other day. You should have seen it! All burned on the top and chewy as bootlaces …’ She trailed off. His expression was stony.

‘I don’t like macaroni cheese,’ he said eventually.

‘Whoever doesn’t like macaroni cheese?’

‘I just told you: I don’t.’

There was a long, difficult silence that he appeared entirely untroubled by. Olivia’s patience expired. What the hell was his problem? No wonder the house was going under with people like this charged with greeting outsiders.

‘I’m sorry I’ve interrupted,’ she said, prim as a debutante as she turned on her heel. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘Don’t.’

Flabbergasted by his rudeness, she raged, ‘Bloody hell, you’re rude. You could’ve just—’

‘Now will do.’

He rubbed the stubble on his jaw. He was sexy, in a prehistoric sort of way. There was something very raw about him, like one of her pictures when she’d only done the most ragged outline in pencil. The top of his nose was cracked out of shape.

‘I’m looking to open the ornamentals at the end of the season,’ he said. ‘I’ve drawn up the plans, and I dare say you’ll be cheaper than a hired hand. It’ll be hard work and I won’t be paying more than I have to. Believe it or not, we’re in need of money ourselves, so that’s one thing we already have in common.’

She expected him to smile but he didn’t.

He named his price, concluding indifferently: ‘Take it or leave it.’

Olivia agreed before he could change his mind. ‘But shouldn’t I speak to Mr Lomax? I mean, I don’t know who you are, but—’

‘I am Mr Lomax.’

‘Oh.’

She looked away, embarrassed, as if he’d just taken all his clothes off in front of her. There were shades of Cato, maybe: a coarser, unpolished version. She had always envisaged the other brother as the hunchback in the attic, warty and stooped and living on a diet of pickled onions. The reality was rather different.

One thing was for sure: arrogance ran in the family.

‘Well,’ she said stiffly, ‘you could have said—’

‘Remember I didn’t ask you to be here. You asked me.’

She blinked. ‘All right.’

‘Be aware that this house owes you nothing except your pay. My brother doesn’t live here, so if that was your motivation you can leave right away.’

‘It wasn’t,’ she clarified hastily. ‘I don’t even fancy him!’

Her statement sounded impossibly stupid in the quiet that followed.

‘I’m Charlie,’ he gave her eventually. ‘Don’t bother with Mr Lomax or sir or anything like that. Just Charlie.’

‘OK. When do you want me to start?’

‘Not now, I’m expecting people.’

‘Right. So …’

‘So leave?’

Olivia bit back the smart retort he’d been begging for since she’d arrived. Did this man have absolutely no social graces? Deliberately he had put her on the back foot, watching her squirm because that was exactly the kind of enjoyment a person in his position preferred. She supposed life must become tiresome when you were king of all you surveyed, lord of a privileged, proud dominion that sprawled as far as the eye could see. Commoners like her were just a passing opportunity for entertainment. Wasn’t Mr Lomax—sorry, Charlie—meant to be an advocate for the upper classes? It went to show that all the huff and puff of an absurdly expensive education couldn’t buy manners. And anyway, Lomax or no Lomax, she wasn’t sure she could ever altogether trust someone who didn’t like pasta and cheese.

‘Monday morning,’ he directed, ‘eight o’clock. Don’t be late.’

He returned to the ladder, gazed up at the darkening sky, dusted his hands off and lifted it from the stones. Olivia watched him disappear inside the house, the dogs behind. She stood feeling like a prize lemon and hoping against hope that the gardens were miles away from Charlie Lomax … The other side of the county would be fine.

She scooped up her bike, running through all the things she wished she’d said. It was his opener that had thrown her. How could he have any idea who she was?

Puzzled by it, she pushed off through the weeping, hanging boughs. The drive was shrouded in gloom, no faint shimmer of streetlights, no passing sweep of traffic, no distant drone of life, only the far-off crash of waves as they washed over the cliffs. A pair of early evening bats swooped between trees, their leather wings fluttering.

Olivia negotiated the twisting route, and was halfway to the road and lost in thoughts of her mother’s roast pork supper with lashings of Granny Smith sauce, when, seemingly from nowhere, a monstrous car appeared around the corner. The last thing she saw was a pair of dumbstruck faces, bone-white in the burgeoning dusk, before she was thrown from her saddle and after that there was nothing.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘DEAR GOD, WHAT in heaven’s name was that?’ There was a sickening crunch as the wheels bumped over something. Susanna’s hands flew to her face. ‘It’s a ghost! We’ve hit a ghost! Did you see her? A girl! We’ve killed her!’

‘Don’t be insane, woman.’ Cato stopped the vehicle and climbed out. ‘Put those ruddy lights on, will you?’ He’d said he didn’t need them, knowing the place so well. Perhaps it was a deer. They had deer here, didn’t they? Deer who rode bikes?

Susanna flicked on the headlamps to aid his investigation and patted her headscarf with fear. ‘Should I come?’ she called, praying they wouldn’t be confronted with a corpse. Imagine the headlines! LORD & LADY LANGUISH BEHIND BARS.

‘All right, all right, Mole,’ came the impatient response. ‘Are you with us, sweetheart? Ah, there you go. Bump on the head, that’s all. What’s your name?’

It sounded like it was in the land of the living, whatever it was. Susanna joined him on the track, the engine purring behind her. Her heels click-clacked on the stones.

‘Oh.’ She was surprised to find Cato bending rather too willingly over a girl, who was youngish, early twenties at a guess, and who was rubbing a wild nest of curls. The girl wore a flummoxed look and Cato was rubbing her shoulder.

‘Look what we’ve done, old thing,’ purred Cato. ‘Frightened the poor angel half to death! See if there’s a blanket in the boot, would you? She must keep warm.’

I’m sure she’ll manage fine with your arms clamped around her, Susanna thought uncharitably. And since when had he called her old thing?

The trunk offered up little more than a spare tyre and a leaking vat of windscreen wash. ‘No luck!’ she sang. ‘Shall we get her in the car?’

‘We’ll have to try,’ answered Cato. Goodness, how handsome he looked. Rugged and wild against the trees, his eyes glinting like a night-time beast’s, but at the same time irresistibly polished and carrying the scent of safety, of warm hotel rooms, of expensive restaurants and the interiors of chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Part of Susanna felt bilious at Cato’s attentions being lavished over another woman; part of her was madly turned on by it. Just wait until they were in their four-poster tonight.

‘Shall I take her legs?’ asked Susanna.

‘She’s not a blasted plank of wood!’ Cato scoffed, turning to address the casualty with a far gentler: ‘Are you able to walk?’

‘I—I think so.’ The girl had a very sweet English accent. How pretty was she? It was difficult to see.

‘We’ll take you up to the house,’ decided Cato, helping her to her feet.

‘I’ve just come from there.’

Cato’s voice changed. ‘Charles’ girl, are you?’

‘No! I—I came for a job. I’ve never been here before. But I have to get home; I told my mum I’d be back …’

‘Come now, one step at a time.’ Cato steered her towards the vehicle with gut-wrenching tenderness. When was the last time he had treated Susanna in such a way? She was overtaken by the desire to find the nearest main road and toss herself under a passing truck—see if that got him prioritising his attentions.

Once the girl was installed in front and the bike parked by a tree, Cato drove the rest of the way. Susanna was able to get a proper look at her before the interior bulbs faded. She was plain, which was a relief. Her hair was a mess and her skin could do with a California tan. She was wearing a blue dress, too short for those legs.

Relegated to the back seat, Susanna stared glumly out of the window, feeling miserably like a forgotten-about child. She tried to blot out her lover’s ministrations as he chatted kindly to the girl, no doubt aware that a report of this type would do little for his precious PR. Right now she wanted nothing more than to run a very deep, very hot bath and sink into it with a glass of chilled Sancerre. It had been a long drive from Heathrow. Cato’s mood—at least until now—had been frightful, and Susanna, usually adept in keeping her pecker up (as Cato would say) had in turn become tired and irritable. Couldn’t they have taken a helicopter? It was infinitely more civilised.

Yet as they skirted the final corner, the Usherwood approach she had pictured so many times, the magical house at last appeared. Its details were tricky to decipher in the creeping dusk, but, oh, it was so definitely there, solid and timeless and noble, and when Susanna let the window down she was met by a fragrance of floras and honeysuckle, heat-soaked after a day in the sun, the quiet rush of a stream and the first faint glimmer of stars high above them in the lilac sky.

A single flare glowed downstairs. She wondered if they still used candlelight! It would be most charming if so.

Cato halted the vehicle, emerged from the driver’s side and immediately bolted round the bonnet to assist their ward. Susanna tried to open her door but it wouldn’t budge. She battered the window and Cato was forced to return to release an absurd child lock they’d had fitted—the humiliation!

‘Good evening, my lord.’ A large, flustered-looking maid came rushing out. She had a scribble of grey hair and a rubicund complexion, and Susanna was assailed by the unsavoury suspicion that she could have hidden her entire body behind one of the woman’s haunches, like someone hiding behind a tree trunk.

Barbara. Unfortunately for the housekeeper, she was just as imagined.

‘It’s good to have you home,’ offered Barbara, with a half-bob. Seeing Susanna, she added warmly, ‘I’m Mrs Bewlis-Teet, welcome to Usherwood.’

‘Baps,’ barked Cato by way of greeting (a private amusement: Barbara heard it as ‘Babs’), ‘regretfully we’ve had an accident. Bloody pothole back on that drive, Charles really ought to get it looked at; the damn thing’s a liability. Threw me right off course—Olivia here almost went under the wheels!’

Susanna didn’t think they had gone over any potholes.

Baps went to help. ‘Oh, dear me, you must have had a terrible shock.’

‘I’m fine!’ said Olivia, who was pale as a sheet and clearly disorientated. Her arm was bleeding. ‘Really, I’d like to go home.’

‘Listen to Baps,’ proclaimed Cato, ‘she’s a wise old goose.’

‘But I’m OK.’

‘There is to be no argument.’

‘Please, if I could just—’

‘Absolutely not—you’re concussed: you haven’t the faintest clue what you’re saying.’ Cato draped his arm across her shoulders. ‘I won’t let you out of my sight, little one.’ His teeth flashed white. ‘That’s a promise.’

Susanna heaved her suitcase from the boot.

‘This is Mole,’ Cato tossed over his shoulder, before sliding through the door.

Susanna put her hand out. ‘Susanna,’ she said cordially.

Baps shook it, and curtseyed ever so slightly in a way that made Susanna’s heart tremble with pleasure, for it had to be due to her imminent Usherwood status rather than her celebrity: Baps didn’t look like the sort of woman who would have seen one of Susanna’s movies, which were typically about twenty-something city cliques on the lookout for Mr Right; she looked like the sort of woman who thrashed through undergrowth with a walking cane and made blackberry jams from scratch.

Through the entrance it was huge and echoey. The great black hood of a fireplace was crackling embers, deep with smoke, and a massive staircase climbed through the floors. A catalogue of Cato’s ancestors posed dourly: the men in breeches, boasting muskets and shotguns and earnest, humourless expressions; the women seated primly, their ringed fingers nestled in the fur of some lap-dwelling pet.

The light Susanna had seen on approach emanated from an adjoining room, from which she could detect the most delicious cooking aromas. The glow it provided cast sallow shadow across the largest oil portrait, a study of the former Lord and Lady Lomax. The couple eyed their guests on arrival, sombre faces flickering and jumping with every leap of the fire. The woman’s expression could only be described as sad. The man’s was blazing with latent savagery. Susanna shivered.

‘We’re saving electricity,’ explained Baps, as she led the way. ‘Heating too—despite the season it can get awfully draughty. I’ve made up the fire in your room, and there’s a supply of blankets in the wardrobe. You get used to it after a while.’

Susanna followed, gazing up as she went so that she almost tripped over the frayed burgundy rug that covered the flagstones. She tried to picture herself living here—if the rest of Usherwood were like this they would have to gut the whole thing! Beneath the supper smells lay the steeped, woody scent that old houses carried, not entirely unsavoury, and nothing one couldn’t undo with the help of a few plug-in air fresheners (Vintage Rose was her favourite). How much would Cato permit her to spend? She could hear the wind whistling through the vaults: replacement windows were a must, as were new carpets, plenty more lighting, and a spread of fabrics and furnishings to brighten up the space. They would work from the bottom up, beginning with wallpapering the downstairs and covering up those ugly mahogany panels. How ancient it looked! The house was crying out for a woman’s touch. It was easy to feel overwhelmed, but Susanna would attack it logically, as she did everything.

‘Rotten scrape you’ve got there,’ Cato was saying, his voice somehow louder in their new surroundings, ricocheting through the hollow caverns and reminding the house to whom it formally belonged. ‘Bandages, if you please, Baps!’

In the kitchen a table for three had been laid, silver cutlery and goblets for wine, through which Cato’s bungled efforts at winding the dressing blew like a storm. She wondered why they couldn’t eat in the dining room, before deciding it too might be in drastic need of her attentions. One of Susanna’s greatest incentives was the thought of hosting her infamous dinner parties here, sending out invitations, boasting the family glassware, the consummate queen of Usherwood.

Wait until her LA friends saw! They would be mad with jealousy.

‘Oh, let her go, Cato,’ Susanna said, wafting in. It was important she make her mark, show them all who was boss. ‘Someone can drive her, can’t they?’

‘Do pipe down, Mole,’ came Cato’s peeved response.

Susanna dropped on to a hard wooden bench and plucked an emery board from her purse. She was attending to her manicure when another woman, a fraction younger than Baps and decidedly more attractive, emerged from the scullery. She was slim, naturally pretty and her fair hair was wound in a knot.

‘I’m Caggie,’ she introduced herself, ‘house cook.’ She put out a flour-caked hand, which Susanna deemed rather disrespectful. Weren’t there rules about this sort of thing? When one met the Queen, for example, didn’t one wait to be presented, instead of sticking one’s grasping fingers out like a beggar clutching at coins?

‘Hello,’ said Susanna. She was accustomed to meeting new people and basking in the glow of her reflected celebrity—she was world-famous, after all—and was disturbed at how Caggie regarded her levelly, her green eyes spelling a challenge.

‘Caggie’s been here almost as long as me,’ supplied Baps. ‘She’s really wonderful; you’ll get to taste her best while you’re over. She’s been whipping up the most super treats ever since the boys were small.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be a far cry from the private chefs of Beverly Hills,’ said Caggie—a touch sarcastically, Susanna thought.

Was it her imagination, or did Cato’s gaze flicker just a moment too long over their new addition? She refused to entertain it: Caggie had to be flirting with fifty, and must spend her life elbow-deep in lard and gravy. She was tired, that was all. And anyway, once she and Cato were married they would be cutting both the women loose. Susanna would learn to cook herself, thank you very much, and if she needed extra help she would simply fly in Kaspar from her favoured bistro on Rodeo.

‘Back again so soon?’

Another voice joined them. It was serious as thunder.

Susanna turned.

Oh my. Oh my, oh my.

She ought to rise to greet him but found herself rooted to the seat. This was Charles Lomax? It couldn’t be. Where was the weedy boy Cato had conjured, trailing at his brother’s heels with a snivelling nose? The vision before her could only be described as a man: categorically and formidably a man. He was wildly dark, darker than Cato, even, with thick, muscular shoulders and hard black eyes. His face was brutally beautiful, a passionate structure beneath the shadow of a beard. His hair was a liquid, livid sable. He carried the scent of damp forest glades and burning wood.

Olivia stood. The mangled attempt at a bandage spooled to the floor.

‘Anyone would think you weren’t pleased to see me,’ Cato sneered.

‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ said Charles.

Cato pushed back the bench with an alarming scrape and sprang to his feet, his palms spread wide on the wood. ‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself,’ he spat. ‘Letting the place go to rack and ruin, risking a young girl’s life!’

The jet eyes landed on Olivia. ‘What happened?’

‘Nothing.’ The girl spoke up. The wound had started to prickle with crimson and she clutched it to keep it hidden.

‘I’ll call for a taxi, shall I?’ Baps retreated, pulling Caggie after her.

‘We almost had a death on our hands,’ Cato hissed, ‘thanks to you and your lackadaisical attitude. Even after all these years do I still need to tell you how to run your affairs, old boy? Olivia here nearly wound up as road kill—if I hadn’t been so deft at negotiating that canyon of potholes who knows what might have happened?’

Charles was unmoved. ‘She looks all right to me.’

Susanna was gratified that, despite his brother’s looks, the Lomax charm had all gone in Cato’s direction.

‘I’m Susanna,’ she said, giving him her most winning smile.

He didn’t take his glare from Cato’s. ‘Would it be too much to hope you might arrive, for once, without the usual dose of drama?’

‘Please,’ Cato swiped back. ‘You’ve been thriving on drama for the past fifteen years.’

‘There’s only one of us who’s thrived.’

‘Is that so?’

‘That’s so.’

‘Do get over it, Charles,’ he blasted. ‘The rest of us have.’

Baps appeared, fingers knotted nervously at her waist. ‘A car is on its way.’

‘Thank you.’

Charles’ voice was shiveringly intense, deep and soft as the most exquisite of fucks, and Susanna was overcome with the desire to fling herself between the two brothers and have them each ravish her ferociously over the kitchen table, at the centre of which was a lamb casserole that was rapidly getting cold.

And then, something extraordinary happened. On Olivia’s way past, he seized her wrist and brought it towards him. The speed and seamlessness of the movement was utterly spellbinding. Wordlessly he pressed a rag against her skin and wound the lint, quickly, once and then twice and then it was done. It was horrifically sexy.

Bewildered, mumbling her thanks, Olivia shot from the room.

Moments later the front door slammed.

‘I’m going to bed,’ said Cato.

‘What about supper?’ Baps objected. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

Cato stopped at a level with Charles, the top of his head a fraction shorter than his brother’s. ‘I can’t think why, but I seem to have lost my appetite.’

A thread could have divided the men’s chests: Cato’s lifted and fell with the hot breath of combat; Charles’ was utterly still. The silent war raged on.

Cato broke it, lips curling round the bitter shape of a single word: ‘Goodnight.’

Susanna gazed longingly at the casserole as her lover slipped from the room. A bowl of crispy golden potatoes sat next to it, sprinkled with rock salt and rosemary.

‘Come along, Mole!’ came a distant, urgent summons.

With a brief, apologetic glance at Charles, she scurried after it.

CHAPTER SIX

ON SATURDAY MORNING Olivia wobbled up the muddy track to the Barley Nook stables, sandals slipping off the backs of her feet so that her ankle kept catching on the greasy chain. Her denim shorts were baking hot, and beyond the paddocks the green line of the sea was desperately tantalising. She stopped at the crooked gate and wheeled on to the verge, jamming the bike over a crusted fold of earth before resting it against the hedge. To the south lay the avocado expanse of the Montgomerys’ vineyard, where a pair of figures milled in floppy hats, their pastel edges blurred in the Cornish heat, fluid as a Monet watercolour. Up ahead a riding lesson was unfolding. Horses were circling the ring, the strident aroma of hide and manure vinegary and sweet.

Beth Merrill was in the stalls, grooming her beloved stallion Archie. Beth had been inseparable from her horse ever since she’d picked him up as a wild foal: crossing the grassland at the tip of Lustell Cove she had discovered him on the brink of death, tangled in barbed wire and severely dehydrated. Over time she had nursed him back to health, housing him at the stables and riding him every day.

Olivia waved excitedly, making her way over. The girls hugged.

‘I want all the details,’ Beth instructed, her green eyes sparkling. ‘I mean everything. Right now. From the beginning.’

Olivia laughed. ‘All right, give me a chance!’

‘You’re seriously working there?’

‘As of Monday—but swear to God, I didn’t know about the Cato thing.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘I didn’t!’

‘Everyone in town’s going totally crazy. At first it was just a rumour, then Harriet Blease’s sister’s friend’s boyfriend said he saw them in this massive car going through the Usherwood gates and the window was down and apparently Susanna Denver’s had so many facelifts her chin’s up by her ears.’

‘She doesn’t look that bad.’

‘Well, go on then—spill!’

Olivia obliged, running through her first encounter with the Lomax family—she was still weirded out by the whole thing. Each time she recalled it she had to pinch herself, as if she had dreamed it, or it had happened to another person: the collision must have put her in a kind of stupor. She’d been led through the house by a movie star and his actress girlfriend, and it was only when she had returned to her own bed later that night that her brain had finally clicked into gear. Her mother’s caravan had never felt so small.

Beth listened intently, as she always had to Olivia’s adventures; a ten-year-old sitting cross-legged in the garden while she was showered with stories of monster quests and jungle riots, of pirate loot and buried treasure, and of how Addy had held Olivia’s hand one day when they were out in the forest and they thought Gun Tower HQ was being attacked but it had turned out only to be a badger. Since the girls were little, they had been like sisters. Beth was the more cautious, sensible one, a tempering agency on Olivia’s hot-headedness, where Olivia was reckless and fun, dragging her friend over walls and under fences, whispering secrets as they shared their first cigarette, pilfered from the locked tin box Flo kept under the sink. Seeing Beth at home was like no time at all had passed; they could have been those kids again, making potions with her mother’s hemp shampoo or dragging their sledge through the snow. They had shared so much at Lustell Cove.

‘Can I help, d’you think?’ Beth asked, awestruck when she reached the end. Her hair had gone coppery in the sun and her skin was tanned. ‘Since you’ve got the added bonus of visitors at the house? I could wash Cato’s pants?’

‘I’m not sure Cato wears any pants.’

‘Have you seen?’

‘No,’ Olivia lifted an eyebrow, ‘just an instinct. And anyway, I don’t know if Cato being there is a bonus. He and Charlie seem to really hate each other.’

‘Ooh; Beth teased, ‘it’s “Charlie”, is it?’

‘Shut up.’

‘Is he still all tortured and moody?’

Olivia regarded her quizzically. ‘Huh?’

‘You remember—at Towerfield?’

Something faint glimmered at the edges of her memory. Before the Lomax boys were bundled off to Harrow they had attended the local prep. Cato had been way older, she couldn’t recall him, but another boy in Addy’s year, yes, possibly: shirt untucked, messy hair, the big polished car that used to drop him off at the gates …

‘Silly question.’ Beth’s expression was wry. ‘You wouldn’t remember because you were so obsessed with Addy that you never even noticed anyone else.’

‘I was not.’

‘You were, too.’

‘He didn’t hang out with Addy. I’d have noticed if he had.’

‘That’s ‘cause he didn’t like Addy.’

‘How would you know?’

‘It might be an impossible concept for you to grasp,’ Beth sighed, ‘but not everyone does. It’s just you who’s got this massive blind spot.’

‘All right, all right!’ Olivia bristled. ‘Anyway you should have seen him with Cato. They were at each other’s throats, standing there yelling at each other. No,’ she frowned, ‘not yelling, it was more restrained than that—and kind of more intense for it. At one point I thought they were going to strangle each other!’

‘Sexy!’

‘Hmm.’

‘Is it any wonder, though?’ Beth resumed grooming her horse, taking the brush in long slow strokes across the animal’s flank. ‘Of course they can’t stand to be in the same room, what with Cato shooting off the second their parents disappeared. Poor Charlie,’ she grinned, ‘got left behind to look after everything.’

‘I suppose.’

‘What age was he back then, thirteen?’

Olivia shrugged, trying to work it out in her head. Charlie would have left Towerfield at twelve, when the boys had gone into senior school. He would have been at Harrow a year before his parents vanished, and she guessed that the housekeeper had taken care of him after that. He definitely hadn’t been at Towerfield when it happened because if he had then Addy would have talked about it; and she would remember Addy talking about it, if nothing else.

‘It would have been bad for Cato, too,’ Olivia argued. ‘I expect running away was easier, maybe he just couldn’t face things here.’ Cato had been far nicer to her in their brief acquaintance, and she felt the need to defend him.

‘Maybe.’

Olivia narrowed her eyes.

‘Between you and me,’ she confided, ‘I can’t help feeling the animosity’s about more than the parents dying. Something else, something deeper …’

Beth leaned against the stable door. ‘Here’s an idea, Oli,’ she suggested. ‘How about you take this job for what it’s worth—just like I and every other girl at Lustell Cove would—and not get in way over your head like you always do?’

‘I have my head perfectly above water, thank you very much.’

Beth giggled. ‘Only you could get run over by Cato Lomax in your first week back.’

‘It was an accident! Besides he was lovely to me, very apologetic.’

‘For fear you’d sue his arse—sorry, ass—all the way back to America?’

Olivia nudged her. ‘Cynic.’

‘Oh, great.’ Beth groaned. ‘Look who it is.’

With sinking hearts they spotted the Feeny twins making their way across the courtyard. Thomasina and Lavender had been in their form at Taverick Manor, and had stayed at the cove ever since, living off Daddy’s pocket money. They were snotty, spoiled little madams, with upturned noses like piglets. One was riding a black stallion; the other a white mare, like a pair of evil chess queens.

‘Hell-air!’ called Thomasina, easing her beast to a stop. Olivia could tell it was Thomasina because her nose was slightly more piggy than Lavender’s.

‘Hey.’ Olivia gave them the benefit of the doubt: perhaps they’d changed.

‘Good to see you settling back into your old life,’ commented Thomasina, peering snootily down at Olivia as if she were something growing mould in a petri dish. ‘There must be terrible competition in London to look thin.’

They hadn’t changed.

‘Though I’d imagine Cato Lomax being back in town would be diet incentive enough for anyone,’ she finished. Next to her, Lavender tittered.

‘What do you want, Thomasina?’

‘Ooh, well excuse us!’ Lavender had the annoying habit of emphasising the final word in every single sentence she said. ‘Is this conversation private?’

‘Not any more.’

‘What’s it about,’ she whined, ‘boys?’

‘You must be finished, then,’ put in Thomasina, thinking herself extremely clever. ‘There can’t be a great deal to talk about!’

The Feenys were insufferable—grade-? picture-perfect sorority bitches who nipped miserably at sticks of celery and slagged off anyone over a size 6. Ever since Olivia’s very first day at Taverick they had treated her no better than the offerings their rat-like pooches occasionally left in the bottoms of their Aspinal tote bags. According to the Feenys, Olivia was the scruffball who didn’t live in a proper house, who probably didn’t wash and who came with un-brushed hair into a school her mother couldn’t afford to send her to (she had got in on a scholarship).

Like most of the girls at Taverick Manor, Thomasina and Lavender took everything for granted: the Pacific island they jetted to on holiday, the yacht Daddy bought to moor off the Napoli coast, the wardrobe of designer labels they’d get bored with after a week. Olivia and Beth were always going to be outcasts. Beth’s family were working class and had only afforded her education because a distant Merrill cousin had died and left them a wad of cash—something Beth felt permanently guilty about: last year her father’s business had gone down the pan, and nowadays her parents had barely two pennies to rub together—while Olivia’s scholarship was, according to the Feeny brigade, a heinously unfair pass into a life of privilege which she had neither the faculties nor the finesse to appreciate.

‘Actually, Olivia’s working with the Lomaxes this summer,’ Beth chipped in, giving her a jab with her elbow. ‘Isn’t that right, Oli?’

The twins were stricken.

‘What do you mean?’ panicked Thomasina.

Olivia put her hands in her pockets. ‘Charlie Lomax hired me.’

Thomasina burst out laughing, a high-pitched, taunting sound she’d used to inflict on a blubbing Clarabel Maynard whenever she forgot her gym knickers, pushing her to the floor and triggering one of Clarabel’s nose bleeds. Once Olivia had hauled Thomasina off and slammed her into the changing-room lockers. She’d earned detention for a week and Clarabel still hadn’t spoken to her in the lunch queue.

‘You expect us to believe that?’ Thomasina carped. ‘With Cato back at the house? Come on. At least think up something semi-realistic, Chopped Liver.’

Chopped Liver had been her school nickname. Olivia had the sudden sensation of never having left Lustell Cove at all, the past year of city life, new friends and new horizons, evaporated in a single toxic gust of Feeny breath.

‘She’s gardening for them,’ elaborated Beth. ‘Charlie offered it on the spot. She’s already met Cato and Susanna.’

‘He hired you?’ quailed Lavender. Her horse performed a prissy circle, swishing its tail as if it too could scarcely grasp the outrageousness of this suggestion.

Thomasina was quiet. She was thinking more carefully about things.

‘By the way,’ she said mildly, ‘I saw Addy yesterday.’

Beth rolled her eyes. ‘Shut up, Thomasina.’

‘He was talking about you.’

‘Just go away, would you?’

‘He said how happy he was that you were back.’ Thomasina was all at once sweetness and light. ‘Addy finds it hard to express his emotions—but then he is a guy, what can we expect? I think he’s plucking up the courage to ask you out.’

‘Good for him,’ stepped in Beth, folding her arms. ‘But if you don’t mind, I’ve got a lesson to run and you’re in the way.’

‘I could put in a word,’ offered Thomasina innocently. ‘The trouble is, Olivia, I’m just not sure he’s confident you like him. You’ve been friends for so long, he probably reckons that’s all it is …’

Olivia had a recollection of her final term at Taverick, during which Addy had been discovered by Head Matron having frantic moonlight sex with one of the sixth formers in a broom cupboard. She remembered wanting nothing more than to wallow in a tepid bath of her own teardrops, and then possibly drown to death in them. To this day she was tortured by the idea that it could have been one of the Feenys.

‘Well?’ pressed Thomasina. ‘Do you like him?’

‘Bye, you two!’ called Beth.

‘Seeing as you ran off to London.’ Lavender caught up and joined the assault. ‘Men are so sensitive, aren’t they, Tommy?’

Thomasina nodded gravely. ‘Leave it with us,’ she said amiably. ‘Who knows, maybe we could organise a double date? You and Addy, me and Cato …’

Lavender was wounded.

‘You’ll have to have the other one,’ Thomasina explained snippily. ‘Cato already has a girlfriend. You’re not equipped to deal with that.’

‘With what?’ Beth spluttered. ‘Stealing other people’s boyfriends?’

Thomasina ignored her. ‘Just think about it,’ she finished, with a little quirk of the head. ‘Promise?’ She pulled the reins; Lavender followed suit. The girls turned on their steeds and sashayed off across the cobbles.

‘Can you believe them?’ Beth asked in wonder. ‘As if you’re dumb enough to fall for that.’ She peered sideways at Olivia. ‘And you’re definitely not dumb, right?’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

‘You won’t like me saying this but Addy’s just as bad as they are.’

‘He is not!’ she protested. ‘You just don’t get him like I do.’

‘I get that all he’s ever done is make you feel like shit. He’s aware how you feel about him and he loves stringing you along.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘You’re right, I don’t. But I do trust my instincts and I’ve known you both long enough. I don’t trust him, Oli, and neither should you.’

The first of Beth’s students arrived at the gate.

‘I’ve got to scram.’ She crossed the yard, calling back, ‘Catch up tonight? Come to mine. We’ll have pizza and you can talk to me more about Cato’s pants.’

Olivia smiled. ‘Sure.’

‘Don’t do anything stupid in the meantime. The Feenys are full of it, and so is Addy. Forget them. You will forget them, won’t you?’

‘Already have. Thanks, Mum.’

Beth smiled sweetly. ‘Always a pleasure.’

Olivia put her hand to Archie’s muzzle. She sighed.

Beth was right: the Feenys were poison.

But not Addy—Addy was different. He wasn’t like that. He was her friend, her partner in crime, her hero; he was the blond-haired soldier crashing through leaves in autumn, the boy who had taught her to surf.

Her head refused to believe a word that came out of the Feenys’ mouths.

If only she were able to tell her heart the same.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHARLIE LAID THE PAPER in the tray, tipping it gently so the thick-smelling solution washed across the undeveloped image. He liked how the photograph revealed itself piece by piece, an outline here, a detail there, silver greys that became stark blacks, and whites that stayed as pure and bright as the gloss beneath. Ever since his father had given him his old Minolta Maxxum, he’d been hooked. Years ago it had been the magic of bottling everything he saw. Now, it was what he didn’t see that captivated: moments that slipped by too quickly the first time, things he’d missed—people he missed—contained on a sheet, for ever unchanged.

The darkroom was an extravagance he knew he ought to get rid of. Penny had encouraged him to build it after their first trip together; her hand in his as they had strolled the canals of Amsterdam, taken bicycles to the flower markets and marvelled at the brave, raucous colours. She’d been happy, her chin resting in the palm of her hand as they had lingered outside cafés and talked about the future.

You should do this properly, she’d told him when they returned, poring over stills he had captured of bridges, cathedral spires; a stray dog they had encountered on a street corner. He’d unveiled the room to her weeks later, holding his hands over her eyes as they had stumbled into the uncanny light; red glow bathing the benches and worktops in fire. They’d kissed, hard against the wall; papers swiped from surfaces, her knees hoisted up around his waist. Charlie had made urgent, passionate love to her against the cabinet, reels of negatives hanging between them like wilderness threads, the blackout curtain torn by a sweat-drenched hand so that his day’s work had been flooded with frozen daylight. It was how her love had made him feel: as if every slate could be wiped, every book rewritten, every bad memory erased …

Except for the memory of her.

It had taken a blind leap to open up to Penny in the way that he had. He should have known better. To trust her had been foolish.

To this day he could not forgive himself for allowing Cato into their lives. Everything his brother touched turned to dust.

Charlie pegged the images and emerged into the chill cellar, closing the door behind him. Along the walls were the powder-covered graves of vintage wines and ports, dusty hollows where the bottles had been removed and sold, leaving only cobwebs behind. Above him neat rows of Hungerford bells lined the passage, a remnant of life below stairs, the labels faded and tarnished: HER LADYSHIP’S ROOM. GRAND STAIRCASE. LIBRARY.

What must it have been like in the servants’ day, at the height of Usherwood’s glory? Hard to conjure it now: the energy, the bustle, the rush and spill of household secrets. His father had told him a story once about how as a boy he had crept underground for the servants’ Christmas party, had danced until he could no longer stand, and had to be carried to bed by a butler called Ashton. But by the time Charlie came along, servants were only good for gossip, my boy. No wonder the remaining few he could remember had been dismissed before Harrow.

Sigmund and Comet were panting at the top of the stairs, fur still damp from an afternoon on the moors. They wagged their tails when they saw him.

‘Hullo, pups.’

‘What’s that God-awful stink?’ The quiet of the afternoon was obliterated.

Cato stormed into the hall with a hand clamped over his nose and mouth. His brother had taken to just appearing, cropping up unexpectedly like a grim rabbit out of a hat. The house was so big that it was possible to forget he was there.

‘Oh.’ Cato landed on the dogs and said disgustedly, ‘There’s my answer.’

‘They’re animals.’

‘Precisely my problem.’

‘This is the countryside, not downtown Los Angeles.’

‘Just because we’re in the countryside doesn’t mean we have to be in the countryside,’ came the riposte. ‘We might as well be rolling about in the bloody paddocks.’ Cato was wearing several bulky jumpers to drive home the fact he was cold, and had irately suggested over lunch that he would organise a cash injection to land with the estate by morning. Then we can get this wretched heating sorted at last! This sort of sporadic, mood-dependent handout was typical. Charlie had endeavoured on several occasions to secure a long-term solution to the invading damp—Cato matching every pound Charlie put in, for example—but such temporary measures were part and parcel of his brother’s warped sense of obligation: the sun had to be shining wherever Cato was, and everywhere else could languish in the rain.

‘Susanna’s awfully distressed over the beasts.’ Cato took a cigar from a box he had positioned on the mantelpiece and lit it. He ejected a billow of smoke. ‘She’s allergic to your menagerie; I knew she would be.’

Charlie glanced out of the window. His brother’s girlfriend was under a parasol, fanning herself against the thunder flies.

‘I’m sure she’ll survive,’ he said.

‘She’s very sensitive. I may have to ask you to keep them outside.’

‘And I may have to remind you that this is my home.’

‘Your home?’ Only Cato could lace two words with such a potent mix of spite and incredulity. ‘I rather think you’re just looking after it for me, old bean.’

It was a good job Barbara came in when she did, or Charlie would have floored him. ‘How many for supper?’ she asked.

‘We’re heading out this evening,’ mused Cato, pouting out a smoke ring, ‘it’s arranged. I suppose I ought to show Susanna what this backwater’s got to offer.’

‘Very well,’ said Charlie. ‘It’ll just be me, then, Mrs B-T.’

‘Oh, no, it won’t. You’re coming with us and you’re bringing that girl with you. I’d say an evening out was the very least you could do.’

‘Olivia?’

‘Of course Olivia—whom else would I be talking about?’

Beyond Susanna’s elegant pose Charlie spotted his new planter’s distant shape in the Sundial Garden, crouched over the foxglove bulbs. He had recognised Olivia the moment she’d shown up—the girl who used to hang around the Towerfield gates on her bike, bare legs smeared with mud from where she’d charged through a puddle or fallen out of a tree. It had been years, but he remembered. Charlie had observed her some days, sitting in the shade while she waited for the school bell, scribbling in a book or making a chain out of daisies. He’d wanted to go and talk to her but he hadn’t known what to say. She’d had a thing for the pretty boy—all the girls had, though he couldn’t see why. Adrian Gold didn’t play rugby in case it messed his hair up. He couldn’t put up a tent. He didn’t read books, or play music, or know how to tie a reef knot. He didn’t get jokes the first time and once during a test he couldn’t arrange the vowels in ‘beautiful’, which had struck Charlie as unfortunate because there was enough prettiness in the world but beauty was rarer to come by, and if Adrian was friends with Olivia Lark then he ought at least to know how to spell it.

‘Do you really want her running to the papers,’ Cato rampaged on, ‘saying Charles Lomax all but finished her off with whatever health and safety transgression the pedants’ contingent are creaming their frillies over these days? She might act like butter wouldn’t melt, but believe me: they’ve all got an eye for the main chance. If you don’t keep her happy it’ll be your name on the line.’

‘I would’ve thought that might have been yours.’

‘Don’t flaunt your ignorance, Charles.’

‘I hired her. That’s a line I don’t wish to cross.’

‘You might have hired her, but you very nearly did away with her.’

‘Wasn’t it you behind the wheel?’ His temper swelled, bright and lethal. ‘Forgive me if I’m sensing a pattern developing here—’

‘If I could interrupt.’ Barbara stepped between them, compelled to make the peace as she had done for the last twenty years. ‘I spoke with Olivia this morning and she’s adamant that no one’s to blame. She’d like us to forget the episode, if possible.’

‘Go away, Baps,’ said Cato.

The housekeeper dutifully retreated.

‘Do you get a kick out of being so vile all the damn time?’ demanded Charlie.

‘Ah, look at her.’ Cato came to stand next to him at the glass.

At first Charlie thought he was talking about Susanna. He wasn’t.

‘Such a pretty little thing,’ said Cato, ‘and so nice to have a bit of flesh to bite into. Susanna’s a minx but it’s all bone and sinew.’

‘Keep away from her, Cato. I mean it.’

Cato smirked. He puffed a bit more on the cigar.

‘Come on, Charles.’ He winked. ‘You know me better than that.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

SAFFRON ON THE SEA was the only restaurant in the British Isles to boast three coveted Gastronomy Stars. Despite this accolade it was entirely unpretentious, a simply festooned yacht moored in a quiet creek between two cliffs. In the summer it caught the moonlight perfectly as patrons feasted on its bulb-strewn deck, and in winter its cosy wooden interior was intimate and seductive.

Ex-model Serendipity Swain, a ravishing six-foot brunette, owned the restaurant with her husband Finn Avalon, a rock musician who had enjoyed modest fame in the nineties. The couple had started coming to Cornwall as a bolthole from their London lives, before the cove slipped under their skin and they decided to set up here permanently. A mixture of brilliantly selected chefs and star-sprinkled clientele ensured the business had grown from a pet project to a goliath in haute cuisine.

Serendipity greeted them at the bow, cinnamon hair teased by the breeze and her elegant trouser suit rippling against the ocean backdrop. The sea was as still as silk, bubbles of conversation streaming from the deck and the waves lapping gently.

‘Cato, this is an absolute pleasure.’

‘Serendipity, hi.’ He kissed her elaborately on both cheeks.

As Finn led the group to their table, a mercifully secluded spot roped off at the stern, heads turned to discreetly assess the newcomers, by nature of the restaurant too moneyed or too proud to surrender themselves fully to a blatant examination.

Susanna was beside herself, settling at the table and fingering the arrangement of wild flowers at its centre. In a moment, she would describe it as charming.

‘Isn’t this charming?’ she enthused. Charlie was learning she would happily apply the adjective to anything so long as she was surrounded by English accents.

‘Indeed it is, Mole.’

‘Cato, please—’ she objected, before he pulled her close and planted a very public kiss on her cheek, which made her start simpering all over again.

Charlie flipped open the menu. Saffron on the Sea was strictly fruits de mer. When Serendipity returned he ordered local Lustell oysters, enough for everyone, followed by hot shellfish with chilli and lemon, and a great deal of wine.

Next to him, Olivia looked as if she was moments away from tossing herself into the water and swimming for the shore. Cato had invited her, and despite her objections she’d been all but manhandled into the car. Saying no to Cato was like trying to reason with a shark.

‘It must be extra special for you, Olivia,’ commented Susanna, as she twirled the stem of a glass between two fingers. When their waiter arrived with a bottle she covered the flute with a dainty palm. ‘I can’t imagine you get out to places like this very much. You must be quite overwhelmed!’

Olivia spread her napkin on her lap, seemed to change her mind about it, and replaced it in a bundle on the table. ‘Yes,’ she replied, taking a swig of Chablis before Charlie had a chance to taste it. ‘It’s a far cry from KFC.’

Susanna frowned.

‘How are you finding work on the estate?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I love it.’ Olivia’s voice warmed to the theme. ‘I studied landscaping as part of my design course and I’ve missed being outside all day so it suits me well. It’s pretty cool to plant something and watch it grow—good for the soul, I think.’

Susanna wasn’t listening. ‘I haven’t seen much improvement to those shabby lawns,’ she commented, ‘but I suppose these things take time, don’t they?’

‘Right now it’s a salvage operation,’ said Charlie, indicating to the sommelier to pour. ‘Once the ground’s recovered we should start seeing results. At this rate, we’ll be able to open to the public quicker than I thought.’

‘The public?’ Susanna cringed, as if he had suggested unveiling a sewage tank in the rose garden. Cato placated her with an imperceptible shake of the head: no, that wouldn’t be happening, not on his watch.

‘Well,’ Susanna shredded a seeded plait with her fingertips and declined the offer of butter, ‘it wouldn’t be for me. I can only stand an hour in the heat before my skin comes out in the most outrageous rash. Isn’t that right, Cato, darling?’

‘You’re a delicate flower, my dear.’

‘I can’t imagine it,’ said Olivia, tucking into a bread roll. ‘Me, I couldn’t be cooped up for any length of time. When I was in London it did my head in being trapped indoors all day … I surf, so I’m used to the fresh air.’

‘You surf?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Well, nothing, I suppose.’ Susanna considered it. ‘Only it’s not very ladylike.’

Cato’s eyes were flashing. ‘I think it’s rather sexy. I say, perhaps we should get you out on a surfboard, Mole.’

‘Over my dead body!’

‘You should try sometime,’ offered Olivia. ‘I’ll teach you, if you like.’

Susanna went to pour scorn on the suggestion before Cato supplied wolfishly:

‘You can teach me.’

‘I think she offered to teach me,’ Susanna huffed, snapping a grissini in two.

The oysters arrived, a majestic array of rocky shells, bolstered by wedges of sunshine lemon, their flesh pearlescent in the candlelight and doused in sweet shallot.

Cato seized a mollusc and threw it back. ‘Go on, girl,’ he encouraged Susanna, who took a suspicious sniff. ‘Down the hatch!’

‘These look awfully slimy,’ she observed. ‘Are they alive?’

Olivia lifted hers and it vanished down her throat. ‘Not any more.’

Susanna was horrified. Olivia laughed, and put her elbows on the table.

Charlie stole a glance at her. She was unembellished in a plain dress, her auburn hair loose, and she wore no make-up. In the shimmering light her cheeks were soft as apricots, and her eyes were the colour of the sea. Around her neck was a delicate gold locket.

He had kept the picture. He didn’t know where it was now—gathering dust in a box with all his old school stuff, probably. Remembering it felt strange, deceitful somehow, as she sat beside him.

The summer before he left for Harrow, Adrian and his gang had been in the common room, scrapping over a piece of paper, pointing at it and laughing. There had been some disagreement over its contents, a round of jostling and teasing, before the pretty boy capitulated and tossed it in the bin. Charlie had retrieved it after they’d gone, flattening it and smoothing down the creases. Straight away he had recognised the OL initials in the bottom right-hand corner.

It had been the most wonderful drawing. A map of Lustell Cove done in sharp, determined pencil, incorporating the beach and the Steep, the moors and the cliffs, with three big fat Xs scratched in red crayon at the foot of the bluff, where a sailboat was coming in to land, armed with treasure-seeking pirates. What had struck him wasn’t just how good it was, how talented the artist, but with what care it had been done. She had done it for Adrian, and he had thrown it away.

Susanna was attempting to sip her oyster from its shell. She looked like a mother bird returning to the nest, a regurgitated worm dangling from her mouth.

‘Suck it up, Mole, come on now!’

In a slurp it vanished. Susanna shuddered.

‘She’s trying to like them,’ explained Cato. ‘There’s the most terrific pressure to serve them at dinner parties.’

Susanna smacked the table with her hand. ‘That’s it!’ she cried.

‘What in heaven’s—?’

‘We’ll have a party,’ she announced. ‘At Usherwood! We’ll invite everybody! Get the gang down from London, I’ll do the place up, get designers in—caterers too; it’ll be the society event of the decade! Oh, can we, Cato, can we?’

Cato stroked his chin. ‘I don’t know about that, Mole …’

‘The town could come,’ she said recklessly, turned to Charlie for support, whose face was distraught. ‘Lustell Cove. Let’s see what your precious public makes of that! Oh, it’ll be wonderful. You know how easily bored I get when I’m not working. It would be a treat for me to plan something like this, a pet project—’

‘Let’s not get carried away …’

‘It’s not happening.’

The force of Charlie’s interjection plunged the table into silence. It was definite as a slammed door. Cato and Susanna might have opened every aspect of their lives to the masses but that didn’t mean he had to. The gathering wouldn’t be for the cove, or even the couple’s friends. It would inevitably drag an army of paparazzi and press attention with it: presumably that was the point.

Cato assumed everyone wanted the limelight. Charlie didn’t.

But predictably, his brother’s veto spurned Cato to a decision.

‘Let’s consider it, Charles—this might just be a fine idea.’ Next to him, Susanna clapped her hands together and released a squeal. ‘Since when has the old place hosted anything on that scale, hmm? It’d be good for the image.’

‘I don’t care about the image. It’s not reality TV, it’s a family home.’

‘Precisely. So this must be a family decision.’

The men stared each other down.

‘And as the eldest,’ continued Cato, ‘I think you’ll find it falls to me.’

‘You’re never here,’ lashed Charlie, ‘so how can it?’

Susanna went to dispel the fracas. ‘Ooh, look!’ she exclaimed, as a dish of razor clams and langoustines arrived at the table. ‘Aren’t they pretty? I do love pink.’ A light bulb went on above her head. ‘We could have a pink theme—not Barbie pink; prawn pink! Crab pink! Lobster pink! All seafoods pink, inspired by—’

‘Olivia, what do you think?’ Cato turned to their guest.

‘About the pink?’

‘About the party.’

‘It’s not for me to say.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Cato impatiently, ‘if I’ve just asked you. Keep up.’

‘Well, I—’

‘It’s not my job to keep your girlfriend entertained,’ interrupted Charlie.

Cato drew a sharp intake of breath. ‘Neither was it mine to entertain yours,’ he returned. ‘Strange how she didn’t seem to object.’

The table fell into a long and excruciating quiet.

Eventually, Charlie spoke. ‘You forget yourself.’

He pushed his chair back. Without another word he threw a stash of bank notes into the middle of the table, pulled on his jacket and walked away.

His brother’s voice chased him from behind, ripe with evil glee.

‘Not to worry, darling,’ Cato said. ‘We’ll send out invitations later this week. Never mind the decade, it’ll be the party of the century—just you wait and see.’

CHAPTER NINE

SUSANNA WOKE AT one a.m. with the most formidable stomach cramps, her belly growling and gurgling as if it were about to explode. Cato’s side of the bed was empty, the blankets pushed back and the imprint of his body fresh on the sheets.

As she staggered to the bathroom, all she could see were those horrid slithery oysters grinning back at her. She retched over the porcelain bowl. Why oh why did she insist on trying them? After a weak bout of spitting and weeping, she crawled on all fours back into the bedroom, a pitiful shadow, and slid beneath the covers.

It was utterly freezing. Had Cato left a window open? Susanna forced herself to investigate, her nightdress shining white as she staggered to the panes, imagining how she might look from miles away: a lonely ghost belonging to some bygone era, Victorian perhaps. The drapes were musty and thick, and when she drew them the grounds of the estate gleamed before her, impossibly still and as quiet as a painting. A river of star-glow spilled across the lawns, snaking between giant trees whose hulking frames were black as crows. The cherub in his pond, youth everlasting, sang a silent song to the sky. An owl hooted in the distance, a low, melancholy call.

Darting back to bed, she pressed a hand to her forehead. It was clammy and hot. The four-poster was lumpy, pockets of air and knotted springs in the fabric beneath, as if she were lying on a slab of her own distressed intestines. She gripped the sheets up to her chin and watched the door hopefully, waiting for Cato to return. Perhaps he could fix her a sparkling water: carbon was the thing for nausea.

Several minutes passed. Susanna’s teeth chattered with cold. Through the curtains a milky ribbon of moonlight threaded into the room, the world outside so quiet it was deafening, and she cursed the damp walls and draughty windows that made everything so damn Baltic the whole time—oh, to be in her condo in Malibu, sunbathing by the pool! Though she hadn’t broached the subject with Cato, she couldn’t understand why he didn’t just sell off one of his cars—he scarcely drove the Porsche, for instance—and solve Usherwood’s heating problem once and for all. Did his conflict with Charles really run that deep? Was his refusal to help more than a proud conceit; was it that as far as he was concerned, the sooner Charles froze to death in here the sooner he could step in and reign supreme?

She’d had no idea that Usherwood was in such a state. Cato holding back when he could so easily make a difference spoke volumes. Susanna remembered a drunken litany he had delivered last year.

The golden boy isn’t so golden now, is he? If Daddy could see what a failure he’s become, then he’d come running. He’d come begging me for the money: he’d pay me some attention, then, wouldn’t he?

It was a shame there had been such a spectacular falling-out over supper. Cato had been in a black mood when they’d returned, tossing her to the floor, unbuckling his trousers and demanding sex. Any other time she would have been desperately turned on by it, but tonight she had felt too queasy.

She hoped he wasn’t sulking. She vowed to compensate for it with an early morning blowjob, provided her gag reflex had settled by then.

With any luck the party would get things back on track, Susanna decided, and as she envisaged the revelry, the paupers’ gasps as they were led into the ballroom (which despite its raggedness was clearly where they had to have it) and the creativity she could unleash on the decorating process, she instantly felt better. Parties brought people together, didn’t they? Perhaps Cato and Charlie could use it as a bridge over their troubles, rendering Susanna not just a consummate hostess but also a saintly peacemaker, like Jesus, or the Pope, or a far younger and hotter Mother Teresa.

She was considering how this unification might also prompt Cato into the long-awaited proposal when she heard a short, high-pitched yelp coming from the far reaches of the house. Or had it come from outside? She couldn’t tell.

Her heart thundered in her chest. It came again, this time a prolonged whinny.

What was that?

Susanna gripped the bed-sheets. She listened for it, and where first there was silence she began to detect a thin moaning sound, high and reedy, almost a wail.

Her eyes were big as saucers. Her psychic in LA had promised her that this month would be spiritually fertile. Was she tuning into the desperate, drowning cries of a poor servant girl as she sobbed through the house of the dead?

Susanna gasped. Her eyes darted to the clock at her bedside, half expecting it to leap up and fling itself in her face because who was to say this wasn’t a poltergeist? Her ears searched for the sound, honing it to a pinpoint then just when she’d captured it away it would fly, offering up a moment’s respite before resuming its grisly song.

Perhaps it was the wind, a pesky current whistling through the deserted wings.

Perhaps it was a television, or a radio—? No, it was closer than that.

Perhaps it was a creaky floorboard …

That some heinous phantom was stepping on!

Her chest was about to blow open with all the blood that was hammering through it. She watched the door, convinced the handle was about to turn. Tentatively she extracted herself from the bed, the pains in her stomach all but eclipsed in the shadow of her fear. Her hand was like snow in the darkness, reaching for the door, disembodied as if it didn’t belong to her at all.

On the landing she backed up, forced to choke on her scream when a dour life-sized painting of one of Cato’s grandfathers assailed her vision from the top of the stairs. She crept down the passage, the yowling getting closer. The hall flickered uncertainly, a rich wood smell where the old panels seeped their age; and the framed ancestry of Lomaxes-past lined the walls, expressions shifting and melting in the gloom. Barefoot she padded among their watchful stares, the spectre at the feast.

A ticking clock matched her steps. By the time she reached the winding steps she dared not look behind her.

Here she could tune in to it more cleanly. It was a definite, protracted sigh, punctuated by an occasional whimper, and as Susanna tiptoed closer she swore the pattern was getting faster, the wailing higher, breaking momentarily into a screech, before a series of great sobs erupted, one after the other, an agony of ecstasy …

Abruptly, it stopped.

So did she. A chill prickled up the back of her neck and she knew then, absolutely knew, that she wasn’t alone. Her lips went dry and she gulped, swallowing the lump in her throat like a ball of cotton wool.

Too afraid to turn for fear of meeting the presence at her shoulder, Susanna reversed down the corridor, hands flailing behind her, fingertips exploring the unseen, and when she met the rough wood of her bedroom door she whipped it open and dived inside, slamming it shut and flinging herself into the safety of the bed.

It was ages before she got any sleep. Some time later she was distantly aware of Cato climbing in beside her, and bewilderedly she reached for him, content to encounter his solid, reassuring bulk. Only then did she drift into dreams.

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