Читать книгу A Reason For Being - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 5

‘SO YOU’RE really going to do it.’

‘I don’t see that I have much choice, after a letter like that,’ Maggie muttered through the biscuit she was munching.

The letter in question lay on the coffee-table where Maggie had placed it. It was written in a round, schoolgirlish hand, the letters neatly formed, much like her own handwriting at that age.

‘Mm,’ Lara, her flatmate, agreed, sipping the coffee Maggie had made them both. ‘But girls of that age are prone to exaggeration, you know. Are you sure the situation’s as dire as she says? What does she say, exactly?’ she added curiously.

‘Read it for yourself.’ Maggie got up, and Lara watched thoughtfully as her flatmate walked over to the small table. Maggie never ceased to fascinate her, even now, after the length of time they had known one another. There was something very compelling about Maggie: a power she herself wasn’t aware she possessed, a warmth that drew people to her. That she was beautiful as well seemed to be another unfair advantage fate had handed her. When they first met almost ten years ago, Lara had felt envious of the tall, slender redhead with her creamy skin and mysterious dark green eyes. Her envy had not lasted long. Although they were roughly the same age, Maggie had had a maturity about her, a sadness which Lara felt instinctively but had never been allowed to penetrate, Maggie being a very private person. She still possessed that slightly melancholy-tinged mystery, that aura of having withdrawn slightly from the rest of the world to a secret and inviolate place.

Maggie picked up the letter and handed it to her. Lara read it out loud, dark eyebrows lifted in faint amusement.“‘Come home quickly. Something terrible has happened and we need you.” Oh, come on, Maggie,’ she exclaimed wryly. ‘You surely aren’t taking this seriously? If there was really something wrong, someone would have been in touch with you…a telephone call…’

‘No,’ Maggie told her fiercely, her expression changing from its normal one of sweetness to an unfamiliar hardness that made Lara’s eyes widen slightly. She and Maggie had known one another ever since Maggie had first arrived in London and, despite her red hair, Maggie was one of the most placid and gentle people she had ever known. Which was perhaps why she had opted out of the aggressive and demanding world of art and instead used her talents to provide herself with an excellent living illustrating books.

‘But surely someone would have got in touch with you,’ Lara protested. ‘Some older, more responsible member of your family.’ She groped in her memory for more concise details of Maggie’s family and couldn’t find any. In fact, until the letters in that round, schoolgirlish hand had started arriving eight months ago, Maggie hadn’t had any contact with her family at all.

She never talked about them other than to say that her parents were dead and that until their death she had lived with them in the Scottish borders where her father taught at a small private school. After their death she had gone to live with her grandfather, and Lara had rather gathered from her silence on the subject that the relationship had not been a happy one and that that was why, when she had come to London, Maggie had cut herself free of all her family ties.

And yet, from the time of the receipt of that first letter, forwarded to her by the publishers, and the others which had come after it, Maggie had changed. Not discernibly perhaps to those who didn’t really know her, but the difference in her was obvious to Lara and she was intrigued by it.

What was it that lay in her friend’s past that caused that unmistakable aura of restless tension to possess her when the letters arrived? What was it that made the swift hunger fly to her face when she opened the letters, only to be quickly controlled, as though she was desperately afraid of it being observed?

Since the arrival of the letters, Lara had realised what it was about Maggie that set her so unmistakably apart from others. It was the protective cloak of withdrawal she wore at all times to distance herself from others; she was a part of their lives at the same time as she was refusing to allow them to enter anything more than the periphery of hers. Almost as though she was afraid of allowing anyone to get too close to her.

A result of her parents’ death, perhaps, which must have come as a traumatic shock for a sensitive child in her early teens. But Lara suspected there was more to it than that, although she was puzzled to know exactly what.

In another woman she might have ascribed the withdrawal to an unhappy love affair, but Maggie had been seventeen when she’d arrived in London, and since then the men-friends she’d had all been kept strictly at arm’s length.

‘I’ll have to go up there,’ Maggie told her, ignoring her question, her forehead pleating into a frown of concentration. ‘I don’t know how long I’m likely to be gone, Lara. I’ll make arrangements about paying my share of the mortgage etc. while I’m gone. I’ll have to get in touch with my agent…’

As she listened to her, it came to Lara that something deeply buried inside her friend was almost glad of the excuse to go home. While she talked, underneath the anxiety there was a light in her eyes that Lara had never seen before, and with startled perception she realised that she had never really seen Maggie herself before. It was as though the real Maggie had suddenly stepped out from behind the shadow-figure she had used as concealment.

‘You know…you look like someone who’s just been told they’re no longer an outcast from paradise,’ she told her softly.

Instantly Maggie’s expression changed. Wariness crept into her face, her body tensing, as though she was waiting for a blow to fall, Lara recognised. Panic flared in her eyes, obliterating the wariness, and she said edgily, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Am I being?’ Lara asked her quietly. ‘We’ve known each other a long time, Maggie, but I think I can number on the fingers of one hand the times you’ve mentioned your home and family, and yet when you do…I wonder what you’re doing living here in London when you would so obviously rather be with them.’

She saw Maggie go pale as though she was going to be sick, her eyes betraying her shock, but, rather to Lara’s surprise, she made no protectively defensive rebuttal of her comment, saying only in a huskily tense voice, ‘I have to go back, Lara. Susie wouldn’t have written like that if they didn’t need me.’

Much as she longed to ask who ‘they’ were, Lara held her tongue. She could see that Maggie was perilously close to the edge of her self-control—another rather odd circumstance in a woman whose smilingly calm manner was normally such a feature of her personality.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll know how long you’ll be gone?’

‘No,’ Maggie agreed shortly, impatiently pushing her hair off her face with one of the narrow, elegant hands that Lara, with her more stocky frame, had once envied so desperately.

‘You’ll have to let Gerald know you’re going,’ Lara reminded her.

Gerald Menzies was the latest in a long line of men who had dated Maggie. Ten years older than her, he was urbane and sophisticated—divorced, with two sons at public school and an ex-wife who was determined that, divorce or not, she was still going to live in the manner to which Gerald’s wealth had accustomed her. He owned a small but extremely fashionable gallery, which was where Maggie had met him. Lara had introduced them, following an approach from Gerald to show some of her work.

Their affair, if indeed their relationship could be described as that, which Lara privately doubted, had endured for nearly ten months. They dated once or twice a week, but as far as Lara could tell Maggie felt no more for Gerald than she had done for any of the other men she had dated over the years.

No, Maggie had never been short of men willing to admire her, but as far as Lara knew she had never been deeply emotionally involved with any of them.

Indeed, at twenty-seven, they were probably the only two of their year at art school who were still not involved in a partnership of one sort or another. For Lara it was because she had ambitions that she knew were going to be hard enough to fulfil, without the added burden of a husband and potentially a family.

But for Maggie it was different. Maggie didn’t share her ambitions. Maggie was made for love, for giving and sharing, but Maggie held everyone who might want to share her life at bay. Carefully, gently, almost without them being aware of it—but keep them at bay she did.

‘I’ll telephone him once I’m there,’ she responded rather vaguely to Lara’s comment.

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Lara told her firmly. ‘Why don’t you telephone home and find out exactly what the problem is before you go haring up there?’

She could see that her suggestion didn’t find favour with her friend, and for a moment she almost disliked herself for making it. She could see that Maggie was struggling to find an acceptable explanation for her refusal, and, since there was something about Maggie that made you want to be kind to her, she found herself offering, ‘Or perhaps they aren’t on the phone?’

‘Yes…yes. They are, but…’ Maggie had her back to her, but now she turned round. ‘Yes, you’re right. I ought to ring.’

The telephone was on a small table beside the settee. She snatched up the receiver almost as though it was hot to the touch, Lara thought, watching her punch in the numbers with shaking fingers. Numbers which she had quite obviously had no trouble at all in remembering, Lara recognised on a wave of compassion.

She touched her arm, not really surprised to discover the tension of the muscles beneath the fine skin.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she whispered, but Maggie shook her head and grabbed hold of her, her colour suddenly very hectic and hot.

‘No…please stay.’

And, because Maggie was holding her so tightly, she was standing right beside the receiver when the ringing stopped and a harsh male voice said, ‘Deveril House?’ with a brusque impatience which, although rather off-putting, was surely no reason for Maggie to start shaking violently. The blood drained from her face and she slammed the receiver back down, holding it there while she shivered and trembled and the delicate bones of her small face stood out in proud relief.

Despite all the questions clamouring in her brain, Lara managed to restrain herself from saying anything other than a dry, ‘A rather formidable gentleman.’

‘My stepcousin,’ Maggie told her shakily. ‘Marcus Landersby.’

And then she dropped down on to the settee with her head in her hands, her body racked by such deep shudders that Lara was genuinely frightened for her. Whatever else Maggie was, she was most definitely not emotionally unstable, rather the opposite, and yet here she was virtually falling to pieces in front of Lara’s eyes. And the explanation for this so out-of-character behaviour lay, Lara was quite sure, with the owner of that enigmatic and grim voice.

Marcus Landersby. She tried to visualise what he might be like, but couldn’t. It was like being given a jigsaw puzzle with too many of the pieces missing to form any kind of real picture.

She left Maggie and went into the kitchen, raiding their small supply of drinks to pour her a restorative brandy.

Maggie shuddered as she drank it, her eyes blank with despair when she raised her head and looked at her flatmate. ‘Sorry about that,’ she apologised thickly.

‘That’s quite a talent this stepcousin of yours has,’ Lara commented lightly, watching the colour come slowly back to her skin. ‘Instant and abject terror…He wouldn’t happen to be related to Dracula, would he?’

Now Maggie was flushed where she had been pale.

‘I can’t talk about it, Lara,’ she apologised huskily. ‘I’m sorry…I must pack. It’s a long drive home, and I’d like to get there while it’s still light.’

So, for all that they had been good friends for ten years, Maggie was still not going to confide in her.

‘I’m sorry,’ Maggie apologised awkwardly a second time. ‘It’s just that…that there are some things that it’s impossible to talk about, even to as good a friend as you.’

‘I’ll help you pack,’ Lara offered, resisting the impulse to press her for at least some hint of what had happened between her and her stepcousin in the past to elicit such a reaction.

‘Thanks.’

ONLY ANOTHER few miles. It was ten years since she had left here, and yet nothing had changed. Of course, she was seeing the countryside at the best time of the year: summer. In the winter these hills were covered in snow, these small villages totally cut off. In the winter it was quite easy to imagine what it must have been like centuries ago, when these border hills were the preserve of the notorious bands of border reivers, both Scots and English, who robbed and killed one another, often conducting vendettas that went on for generation after generation.

Her own family had been one of the most notorious of all such reivers, until they turned respectable during the middle of the eighteenth century when one son’s marriage with a wealthy sugar heiress had removed the need for such nefarious activities. The need, but perhaps not the desire, Maggie acknowledged wryly. It took more than money to eradicate that.

She was in the village now, driving past the small church with its dark graveyard. She gave an intense shudder of fear, remembering the starkness of the new stone that marked her parents’ grave.

With the facility she had learned over the years, her mind switched itself off, protecting her from the pain of memories she could not even now endure.

Turned away from her home, alone, terrified almost out of her mind by what had happened, unable to take in how her world had fallen apart around her, she had fled to London, desperate to lose herself and her shame in its anonymity. She shivered despite the warmth inside her car, a moment of blind panic attacking her. What was she doing coming back? She must be mad. She had to be mad…

She almost turned the car round, and then she remembered Susie’s letter. ‘Come home quickly…we need you.’

How could she ignore that desperate, childish plea?

Susie had been six years old when she’d left, Sara only four—the children of her uncle’s marriage to Marcus’s mother. Her cousins and his half-sisters.

And it had been to Marcus’s care that her grandfather had consigned his underage granddaughters in his will, so Susie had told her in one of her letters.

They were a fated family, the Deverils, or so they said locally. Fated and, some said, cursed, and who could blame them for such thoughts? The death of her own parents in a car crash, followed so quickly by the deaths of Marcus’s mother and her uncle, murdered in an uprising in South Africa when they were out there on holiday, seemed to be evidence that it was true.

Now there were only the three of them: herself, Susie and Sara…and of course, Marcus. But Marcus wasn’t a Deveril, for all that he lived in Deveril House and administered its lands. While she…while she had been cast out of her home…like Lucifer thrown out of Heaven.

And now she was doing what she had once sworn she would never do. She was coming back. She started to tremble violently, and had to grip the steering wheel to control the shuddering tremors. So much guilt…so much remorse…so much pain. When she looked back now across the chasm of the decade which separated her present-day self from the teenager she had been, she could only feel appalled by the enormity of what she had done.

No, she couldn’t blame Marcus for telling her to leave.

She was a different person now, though. A person who had learned the hard way what life was all about. A person who had learned to control those teenage impulses and emotions. Marcus would see that she had changed…that she…

Appalled, she swerved to a halt, for once uncaring of her driving, but luckily she had the road to herself. Was that why she was going back…to prove to Marcus that she had changed? No…of course it wasn’t. She was going back because of Susie’s letter…nothing else. What she had once felt for Marcus had died a long time ago. The shame and agony she had endured when Marcus had ripped aside the fantasy she had woven had seen to that. Not one single vestige of those teenage feelings was left. She was like a burned-out shell…a woman who outwardly possessed all the allure of her sex, but who inwardly was so scarred by what she had endured that it was impossible for her to allow herself to love any man.

That was her punishment…the price she had had to pay. And she had learned to pay it with pride and courage, unflinchingly facing the ghosts of her past whenever they rose up to taunt and mock her…whenever a new man came into her life, and she felt…nothing, nothing at all.

What she had done…What she had done lay in the past, and if Marcus tried to make her leave her home a second time she would have to remind him that, under the terms of her grandfather’s will, Deveril House was one-third hers.

Although she didn’t know it, the burning glow in her eyes was that of someone who had found a longed-for purpose in life. Her cousins needed her…quite why, she did not know yet, but she would find out, and, no matter how Marcus might choose to taunt or humiliate her, while they had that need she was not going to be moved from her determination to help them.

Coming back wasn’t going to be easy—there would be the curious speculation of the village to face—but the long, arid years away had taught her how much her spirit craved what only this place seemed able to give her.

She had found peace here after her parents’ death, and she had bonded herself to the land which had belonged for so long to her family. That she had bonded herself also to Marcus she preferred not to think about, because to travel down that path meant travelling down into the mouth of Hell itself. It struck her like a bitter taste in the mouth that, concealed within her desire to help her cousins, there might also be a kernel of her old abject and foolish need to receive absolution…to receive forgiveness…to be freed from the burdens of her past and able to walk upright once more, no longer chained by guilt and pain.

But no, that wasn’t so. She had learned the hard way to come to terms with what she had done, to acknowledge that, after the way she had injured Marcus, there could be no absolution. Not from herself, and certainly not from him.

As though it was yesterday, if she closed her eyes she could still see the fury in his eyes, smell his rage like sulphur in the air, feel the shock of her pronouncement as it ricocheted around the room.

‘No!’ he had cried out passionately. ‘God, no. None of it is true!’

And her grandfather, looking into her face, had seen for himself that she had lied. She would carry the memory of the look in his eyes with her for the rest of her life. That, and the knowledge that she had deserved every acid barb, every cruel word Marcus had thrown at her.

She leaned her head on the steering wheel, sweat dampening her upper lip, nausea clawing at her stomach, while her whole body shook with the violence of her emotions as the memories she wanted to suppress tormented her from behind the barriers she had erected against them.

But she had not wasted the last ten years, and the hardy way she fought back and regained her self-control showed the value of the lessons she had learned. Hard lessons…necessary lessons…sometimes shockingly abrasive lessons to a seventeen-year-old who, until she ran away to London, had experienced very little reality.

Guilt had motivated her in those early years, fuelling a cool independence as she fought not to give in to her need to go home.

‘Get out. Get out of this house and never come back,’ Marcus had said…and she had done just that, losing herself in the harsh anonymity of London’s seething streets.

What might have happened to her if Lara hadn’t found her? Lara, who had been toughened by her parents’ divorce and the reality of travelling the world with her journalist father, living in nearly every one of its great cities. Lara, who had come across her crying her eyes out in one of London’s famous parks. Lara, who had insisted on dragging her home with her. Lara, who, on learning that, like her, Maggie should have been starting art school that autumn, had prevailed upon her father to finance them both.

He was living in Mexico now, John Philips, married and retired, and they rarely saw him, but Maggie knew she would never forget him.

Financially she owed him nothing, she had paid him back every penny, and he had let her, knowing how much it meant to her; but there were other debts…and none as great as the one she owed Lara. She felt guilty that she had not confided in her friend, but right from the start she had been grimly determined that no one else should know of her folly and humiliation. Because, despite the fact that she had known what she had done was wrong, she had genuinely believed that Marcus loved her. She had genuinely believed that.

It was selfish, this dwelling on the mistakes of her past; she had come here for one reason and one alone. She had missed her two young cousins, the children from her uncle’s second marriage to Marcus’s mother, but she would never have tried to make contact with them if Susie hadn’t chanced to see her name on the jacket of a book she had illustrated, and written to her care of the publisher.

They had been corresponding for eight months now. Letters she was quite sure Marcus knew nothing about.

The sickness gradually wore off and she started the engine wearily. These dauntingly draining bouts of nervous reaction had gradually lessened over the years; she had learned to recognise the symptoms which heralded their arrival and to take evasive action. It was noticeable that she was far more vulnerable to them at such times as Christmas and family celebrations…times when the past refused to stay locked away in the deepest recesses of her memory.

She looked in the driving mirror and saw that her face was reflecting her tension. She must put the past to one side and concentrate on the present.

What would be waiting for her at Deveril House? Why had Susie written to her so dramatically, begging her to come home? It occurred to her that it was all too probable that her young cousin knew nothing of the events which had caused her to leave.

Only three people had been witness to them: herself, Marcus and her grandfather. Her grandfather was now dead. It grieved her that she had been unable to attend his funeral. She had only known of his death because in those early years she had not been able to stop herself from buying Border Life, a monthly glossy based in her home county, which had carried the news of Sir Charles Deveril’s death. It had carried something else as well, a message so stark and poignant that it was carved in her heart.

‘Maggie, please come home.’

She had ignored that message, dreading what it portended, dreading facing Marcus…too proud and too hurt to acknowledge even to herself how very, very much she wanted to be with him.

It had taken her years of ruthless mental self-flagellation and self-control before she had finally been able to eradicate that need, but now it was eradicated, she reminded herself firmly. That teenage passion had finally died, and she had scattered the ashes so thoroughly that no embers remained to burn. Her coming back had nothing to do with the love she had once had for Marcus. It was for her cousins’ sake…because of their plea…because she knew all too well the follies of which teenage girls were capable that she had come home. Home! How her own heart betrayed her, that she should still think of the weathered stone house as that.

Deveril House had been built on the spilled blood of betrayed Jacobeans, or so rumour had once had it. It was certainly true that the Deveril who had built it had heeded the advice of his cautious English father-in-law and kept himself free of any entanglement in the uprisings of forty-five, which proved so disastrous for the Stuart cause.

Whatever her ancestor’s political affiliations might have been, he had been a good builder. The house stood four-square to the world, its stone walls mellowed by the seasons. Ivy clung to the east-facing side wall as though protecting it from the harsh winds that buffeted across the North Sea.

A regency rake had added an impressive Palladian entrance before the gaming tables had claimed the rest of his fortune, and his Victorian ancestor had managed to recoup what he had lost by judiciously investing in the new boom in railways.

Two world wars had depleted the family’s resources; much of the land had now been sold off, leaving just the home farm, which was tenanted, and the house and its grounds.

The property had not been entailed, and her grandfather had left the house and its land in trust for all his grandchildren.

And that included her.

Yes, she probably had more legal right to call Deveril House home than had Marcus, who only lived there by virtue of the fact that he was his two half-sisters’ legal guardian and their trustee.

The future of houses like Deveril House was not a good one; even during her own short lifetime, Maggie had seen many similar houses fall into the hands of property dealers, their owners exhausted both emotionally and financially by the burden of maintaining them.

That wouldn’t happen to Deveril House. At least, not during Marcus’s lifetime. Her grandfather had been prudent with his money, and Marcus, whatever else his faults, would be scrupulously honest in honouring the responsibility her grandfather had placed on his shoulders.

It was whispered locally that there was a curse on the family, put there by a wild gypsy girl who had had a passionate affair with the heir to Deveril House, only to be cast off by him when his parents arranged an advantageous marriage.

Every family of long lineage in the country could probably claim similar curses, Maggie reflected wryly as her small car crested the last hill before home, and it was foolish of her to dwell too much on the many tragedies which seemed to have touched hers.

Marcus at least would be free of it, if indeed such a curse existed, since he was not a Deveril at all, and it was only by his mother’s marriage to her uncle that he had been drawn into the family. There had been times when Maggie had felt that her grandfather wished that Marcus had been his grandson; his male heir.

It had been after hearing of her own father’s death that her grandfather had had his first stroke; and no wonder, Maggie reflected, remembering her own shock and pain at losing the parents she adored.

The death of his last remaining son had exacerbated his frail condition, and after that Marcus had stood between the world and her grandfather, challenging them to disturb his fragile peace.

She had slowed down without realising it. She had the road to herself, and yes, there it was, Deveril House, viewing the surrounding countryside from the small hill on which it stood, the stone walls basking in the summer sun, as though the house wanted to soak up its warmth.

From here she could see the straight line of the drive, and the park designed by a disciple of Capability Brown and bearing all his famous hallmarks of created naturalness.

From here she could even see the swans on the small lake. Unbidden, she had a painful memory of how, when one of the farmer’s sons had threatened to shoot the beautiful birds, she, not realising that he was only teasing her, had run to Marcus to beg him to intervene.

That had been in the early days after her parents’ death, when Deveril, although familiar to her from her visits, was still not truly her home…when she had clung to Marcus as the only stable thing in her very unstable world, and he had patiently and kindly let her.

Marcus had been kind to her then. Too kind, perhaps, and she had turned towards him like a flower to the sun, drinking up his warmth as greedily as the stone house soaked up that of the sun.

It had surely been only natural that her adoration of him should turn to an emotional teenage crush; there was, after all, no blood tie between them. Marcus was only ten years her senior, a vital and very sensual man, who should surely have been able to deal quite easily with the emergent feelings of a shy young girl. So where had it all gone wrong? How had it happened that she had become so lost in her own fantasy world that she had actually believed Marcus returned her feelings…that he was only waiting for her to grow up to claim her as a woman?

She was the one at fault. She was the one who had deliberately lied about their relationship, who had deliberately tried to force…But no…even now there were some things she just could not acknowledge; some truths she just could not accept. It was a physical agony even now to face up to her own failings, the muscles in her chest and throat locking as she battled with herself, refusing to allow herself to escape and hide from reality. From the truth.

And the truth was…The truth was that, demented by jealousy, she had deliberately and wantonly tried to destroy Marcus. At least, that was what he had thought, what he had bitterly accused her of wanting to do, and she had been too sick with the shock of realising just where her idiotic fantasy had led her to deny his accusations, to tell him that it had been out of love and naı¨vete´ that she had lied, and not out of jealous destructiveness. That it had been because she had honestly not been able to believe that he was getting engaged to someone else…not because she had wanted to destroy that engagement…But what had been the point? By then she had seen with appalling clarity just how foolish she had been…had realised that her dreams had been nothing but that, and in an agony of angry shame she had refused to speak a single word in her own defence, listening to Marcus’s furious tirade of bitter anger as though she were doing penance. And afterwards…

And afterwards, as she stole away in the night like a thief, Marcus’s words burned into her like so many brands.

Tiredly she gripped the steering wheel a little harder. Hadn’t she learned years ago that there was nothing to be gained from this pointless torment of herself? She had long ago outgrown the need for self-punishment, surely…had long ago faced up to what she had done and accepted that it could never be undone.

But Marcus had never married. She had learned that from Susie’s letters. Ignoring the tiny prickly feeling of sensation that ran through her, she drove down the dip and in through the open gates.

She automatically parked her car at the rear of the house, in the cobbled courtyard which had once been busy with servants and horses, or so her grandfather had told her. Now the stables were empty of everything bar Marcus’s hunter, and the servants were gone. Mrs Martin, who had been her grandfather’s housekeeper, had now retired and Maggie had been unable to place the Mrs Nesbitt Susie had mentioned as being Mrs Martin’s replacement.

The kitchen door gave under her hand. Inside, nothing had changed, and the large, old-fashioned room was still dominated by the huge scrubbed deal table that stood in the centre. As a young girl coming to visit the house, one of the first things that had struck her about the kitchen had been its lovely smell. Her uncle’s second wife had been an inspired cook, and not just that…She had grown her own herbs and vegetables, and in due season the herbs had been picked and hung up to dry in the storerooms off the kitchen, so that their scents permeated the atmosphere.

It had been her own mother who had taught her to cook, but it had been her aunt who had shown her how to turn that basic skill into an art form.

Disappointment scored Maggie with sharp claws as she searched for the smallest trace of that once-familiar smell, but it was gone. The kitchen seemed empty and barren, not the warm, comfortable hive of activity that she remembered.

She walked from it down a narrow passage, and pushed open the door which had once marked the boundary between the servants’ and the family’s quarters.

The once immaculate polished parquet floor looked dusty, and Maggie frowned as the sunlight from the windows picked up the uncared-for appearance of the furniture in the sturdy square hallway.

Six doors led off it, but she found herself walking automatically to only one of them.

Her fingers touched the cool brass of the handle. These were heavy mahogany doors, installed at the same time as the Palladian portico and owing much to the influence of Robert Adam. She knew from experience that, despite their weight, the doors would swing open without a sound, so perfectly balanced that, even after all the years which had passed since they were installed, they still opened silently.

She thought at first that the room was empty. It had the same unkempt and slightly cold air as the kitchen and the hall. This room had once been her grandfather’s study, and then Marcus had made it his own private domain.

Its windows looked out on the main drive and the sweep of the park. Its marble mantelpiece was exactly the right height for a gentleman to place his glass of port on while he meditated on his business affairs; the bookshelves to either side of the fireplace were of the same rich mahogany as the door. At some stage or other, a Victorian Deveril had had the walls papered in a rich, dark green, very masculine silk, so that the room always seemed rather dark and overpowering.

Curtains of the same silk hung at the window, and the Aubusson carpet had a background of the same rich green.

Either side of the fireplace stood a heavy wing chair, a huge old-fashioned desk being the only other major piece of furniture in the room, and it was only as she advanced across the carpet that Maggie realised that the chair with its back to her had an occupant, one heavily plastered leg propped up on a stool.

She knew who it was before she saw him, just by the way the hairs on her scalp prickled warningly, and it took all her considerable courage not to turn round and flee while she still could.

As she rounded the corner of the chair and came into his sight, she took a deep breath to hide her inner agitation and said calmly, ‘Hello, Marcus.’