Sins (6 page)

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.