A Season of Secrets (26 page)

There was no malice in her voice, only deep affection.

Dieter covered her hand with his. ‘I think,
Liebchen
, that I prefer you just as you are.’

Olivia flushed with happiness and, as they looked deep into each other’s eyes, it was so obvious that he loved her just as much as she loved him that Thea was overwhelmed with heartache.
Why couldn’t Hal love her as Dieter loved Olivia? Why couldn’t he love her so much that he wanted to marry her, have children with her and grow old with her?

It was a question she had no answer to and it was still gnawing at her heart when, an hour later, they went their separate ways – Dieter by cab to the German Embassy, Olivia by cab to a
hairdressing appointment in Bond Street, and Thea on foot to nearby Mount Street.

The light fall of snow had long since stopped and only the merest dusting still lay on the ground. As she approached the house, wondering how, when she entered it, she could best avoid
Zephiniah, the front door opened and a man she had never seen before stepped out. As the door closed behind him he paused on the top of the shallow flight of wide stone steps, as if wondering where
he should go next.

She quickened her footsteps, intrigued. Just as her eyes were on him, so his eyes were now on her.

She came to a halt at the foot of the steps and he began walking slowly down them. She judged him to be in his mid-twenties. He was wearing a black double-breasted overcoat and a grey fedora.
Though his clothes shouldn’t have given his nationality away, he couldn’t have been mistaken for anything other than an American – and an American who was a New Yorker.

He had a very neat, very dark, very attractive moustache above a well-shaped mouth, a pleasingly straight nose, satanically winged eyebrows – and beneath them eyes as distinctively
slate-blue as Rozalind’s.

‘Hello, Kyle,’ she said as he came to a halt in front of her. ‘Roz forewarned us you’d soon be turning up here.’

‘I don’t think she forewarned Lady Fenton,’ he said in dry amusement. ‘I seemed to have taken her completely by surprise and I’m still not sure she understands my
connection to the family.’

‘Don’t worry. She will. But as she wouldn’t give us any privacy in which to chat and get to know each other, I’d prefer not to make things clear to her right now. Shall
we pick up a cab and go to the National Gallery? We can stroll there in the warm to our heart’s content and when we’re tired of looking at great art and deciding if we have mutual
tastes in it, we can have tea and cakes in the cafe.’

‘Done deal, Thea.’ He flashed her a broad smile and crooked his arm.

She slid her gloved hand through it. ‘How do you know I’m not Olivia?’

‘Because Roz described you as being bossy and decisive.’

Companionably, as if they had known each other forever, they began walking in the direction of Park Lane, keeping an eye out for an empty taxicab as they did so.

By the time one stopped for them, Thea was giving him an update on Olivia’s recent engagement to Dieter. By the time they reached Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery she was telling
him about Violet’s obsession with becoming an actress.

‘Does she get any encouragement?’ he asked with interest after he’d paid off the cab.

‘Not one iota. My father has said he’s happy to send her to finishing school now she’s sixteen, but all she says is that she doesn’t want to go to a finishing school;
that she wants to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.’

As they strolled through the galleries devoted to paintings dating from 1200 to 1500, which Thea said was her favourite period and Kyle said left him totally cold, he gave her an update on
Rozalind’s affair with Max. ‘She’d thought she would have been sporting an engagement ring by now,’ he said as they stood in front of Giorgione’s
The Adoration of
the Kings,
‘but Max seems content to let things stay as they are.’

Thea wondered if Kyle knew exactly what letting things ‘stay as they are’ meant. Would Roz have told her stepbrother that she and Max had been lovers within days of meeting –
and of the lie she had told to ensure that they were? She doubted it – and if he didn’t know, then it wasn’t for her to tell him.

As they moved from the Florentine art of the fifteenth century to the Venetian art of the sixteenth century, Kyle said, ‘Roz tells me you’re finding it difficult adjusting to having
a stepmother.’

‘I would probably have adjusted to someone else quite well. It’s Zephiniah I’m finding it difficult to adjust to. She’s such a snob – and I find that so odd, when
my father has always been so egalitarian.’

There was a padded leather seat in the centre of the room and they sat down on it, facing the blazing reds and blues of Titian’s
Bacchus and Ariadne.

‘At our family home in Yorkshire we never stood on ceremony – Mama would simply never have allowed it.’

At the thought of her mother, and of how perfect life had been when Blanche was alive, tears stung her eyes.

She blinked hard, focusing fiercely on the band of revellers following Bacchus’s cheetah-drawn chariot. ‘Some of our closest friends when we were children were people who worked for
us; people like Charlie Hardwick – and I know Roz will have told you all about Charlie. We’ve also been best friends with Gorton’s odd-job man, Jim Crosby, since the time we were
able to walk – and we still are best friends with him. In a time of trouble both Charlie and Jim are the first people Olivia and I – and Violet – would turn to.’

‘If Zephiniah is the snob you say she is,’ Kyle said sagely, ‘she’s not going to like that.’

‘No, she isn’t. But she’s jolly well going to have to put up with it.’

Kyle frowned. From the little he’d seen of Zephiniah he didn’t think she was the kind of woman who would put up with anything she didn’t want to put up with. Rather than endure
the embarrassment of having stepdaughters who fraternized with the estate staff, she would ensure that the staff in question were no longer at Gorton to be fraternized with.

He looked at Thea’s profile as she stared straight ahead at the painting in front of them. Her jawline was strong and determined, and though her mouth was full and generous, it was also
the mouth of someone who could be as obstinate as a mule if she chose to be. When it came to laying down the law as to who Thea could, and could not, be friends with, Zephiniah was going to have a
battle royal on her hands – and the main issue wouldn’t be about Charlie and Jim. It would be about Hal Crosby and Carrie Thornton.

‘Though far more Carrie than Hal,’ Roz had said to Kyle, when they had dined together in New York the evening before he had sailed. ‘Things are a little sticky between Thea and
Hal at the moment. They had a falling-out a year ago and it still hasn’t been resolved. Carrie is a different matter. Both Thea and Olivia think of Carrie as family. They are as close to her
as they are to me, and Carrie has been in and out of Gorton just as if she was their sister, or a cousin, ever since she was eight years old. From what Thea and Olivia have written to me about the
former Lady Pyke, it isn’t an arrangement she is going to find acceptable.’

Kyle said now, wanting to prepare Thea for a situation she clearly hadn’t yet envisaged, ‘How do think your father’s marriage is going to alter things where your friendship
with Carrie is concerned?’

Startled – and with the threat of tears finally vanquished – Thea turned to face him. ‘Why should it alter things?’

He hesitated, hating the thought of giving her more distress than she was already coping with, where her father’s marriage was concerned.

‘You’ve just said yourself that Zephiniah is a snob. Carrie may be the granddaughter of your father’s old nanny, but she’s still a village girl. And if Zephiniah
isn’t going to like you being friends with Charlie and Jim, then sure as God made little green apples she’s not going to like you being friends with Carrie.’

Thea’s thick-lashed eyes widened. Her mouth opened on a gasp. No power on Earth – and certainly not Zephiniah – could prevent her from being friends with Carrie, and it
wasn’t that fear that was flooding her with unspeakable horror.

The horror was because of what Zephiniah could – and most certainly would – do. She would put an end to Carrie’s happy certainty that she was always welcome at Gorton. And for
Carrie, a life without visits to Gorton would be no life at all.

‘Oh God!’ she whispered, uncaring that they were in a very public place. Uncaring of the kind of language she was using. Uncaring that she could be overheard. ‘Oh Christ, Kyle!
Oh shit! Oh
hell!
’

On a blowy bright day in mid-March Hal strolled out of the offices of the
Richmond Times
for the last time, good wishes mixed with envy ringing in his ears. At twenty
years old he had achieved the ambition he had set for himself years and years ago when, after long days labouring on the farm, he’d run across the fields to Miss Calvert’s house to
receive an education. His goal had been to become a journalist on a national newspaper or on one of the leading London newspapers, either the
Evening Standard
or the
Evening News.

Today, in his inside jacket pocket, was a copy of a signed contract with the
Evening News,
a newspaper with a circulation of more than 900,000
.

900,000!

It was a figure he still couldn’t quite believe, and the numbers sang in his head as he left his parked car in the market place and headed towards Finkle Street and the Black Horse pub. He
wasn’t going to the Black Horse for a celebratory pint – though he would, of course, be having a pint. He was going there to tell Rosie, the pub’s most popular barmaid, that he
was leaving that evening for London – and that he wouldn’t be returning.

Unlike his former co-workers on the
Richmond Times,
Rosie was not likely to wish him good luck and certainly wouldn’t be envious. What she was most certainly going to be was very,
very upset – and then very, very angry.

The Black Horse had originally been an old Georgian coaching inn, and Hal liked the low beamed ceilings, the uneven dark wooden floors and the atmosphere it gave of being a little bit of old
Yorkshire.

There was nothing even vaguely old Yorkshire about Rosie Beck. Rosie was nineteen and as fresh as paint. In many ways she reminded him of Carrie. There was always a smile on her face and a
giggle in her throat. But in other ways Rosie was far different from Carrie, for Rosie was ‘fast’ – and she wasn’t too fussed who knew. It was her frank openness that had
appealed to him the first time he had chatted her up, nearly a year ago – that and the mesmerizing way she looked to be permanently on the verge of escaping from her clothes.

She looked to be escaping from them now as he walked into the public bar at what was, for him, an abnormally early time in the day.

Astonishment showed on her face, and then delight. ‘Blimey, sweetheart! To what do we do owe this pleasure? I wasn’t expecting to see you till this evening.’

He slid onto a bar stool, glad to see that the other occupants of the bar were all seated at tables. With no one at his elbow, it meant he would have relative privacy when he broke his news to
her. He hadn’t wanted too much privacy. Too much privacy and she was likely to do him serious harm.

‘A pint of Tetley’s,’ he said, knowing he was going to be in need of one.

With a happy grin Rosie began pulling his pint. Her dress was made of cheap, shiny red material. The seams were strained around generously curvaceous hips – no way did Rosie fit into the
fashionable ideal of a flat-chested flapper – and the neckline was a deep V, revealing a cleavage so luscious that Hal knew he was going to have his work cut out, if he was to remember just
why he was there.

‘So why are you here before midday?’ she asked, managing to imbue the mundane query with all kinds of erotic possibilities.

Hal felt a rising in his crotch. He was going to miss Rosie. There were countless men in Richmond who would crawl over broken glass to enjoy what he had been enjoying these last twelve
months.

She pushed his frothing pint across to him.

He closed his hands around it, grateful for its familiar feel. ‘I have news, Rosie.’

‘Oh, aye?’ She grinned at him, her eyes sparkling at the thought of a possible treat.

He took a deep drink of his ale, too fond of her not to care that he was about to hurt her. What else, though, could he do? He couldn’t take her with him to London and he couldn’t
promise her that he’d be back, because it would be a lie, and though he was every kind of a heel, he wasn’t a liar.

In his inside jacket pocket the contract rustled. It was all the encouragement he needed. In the spirit of soonest said, soonest mended, he said bluntly, ‘I’ve got a new job, Rosie.
In London. I’m leaving today.’

She sucked in her breath, speechless with shock. She wasn’t speechless for long.

‘And just how long have you bloody well known about this job?’ she demanded, her eyes blazing. ‘A few days? A week? A month? For just how long, Hal Crosby, have you been
behaving as if you’re going to put a ring on my finger, when all the time you’ve been planning to leave me in the lurch? And that is what you’re doing, isn’t it? It’s
not a case of “I’ve got a new job in London and I’m taking you with me, Rosie”, is it? No, it soddin’ well isn’t!’