Читать книгу Sins - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Quick, there’s a taxi.’

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

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

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

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

‘We could have walked,’ Ella pointed out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No he can’t.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Janey, do come on,’ Ella demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That must be hard for you.’

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

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

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

‘Rose–Rose Pickford.’

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

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

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

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

She could feel his exhaled breath against her forehead.

‘Are you OK?’

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

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

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

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

Now he had surprised her.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t want my hair cut.’

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

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

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

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

There was no stopping him, Rose decided with resignation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tell me all about him…’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You must miss Australia,’ she guessed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You knew them?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I expect she will be one day.’

‘And you don’t mind?’

‘No. Not at all.’

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry. Please excuse me.’

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

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

‘It’s time for us to go, Janey.’

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

‘Where’s Rose?’ she asked Ella.

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

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

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

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

‘Here’s my card. Think about it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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