The Hidden Years (30 page)

'He gave me an address. I went… It was a filthy
place… and the woman there…' She gave another
shudder. 'Thank God it was all a false alarm. I learned afterwards from
a friend that several of the women who had been to her had
died…

'Kit hated women,' she announced. 'Oh, you'd never have
known it… he had all the charm in the world, all the right
words… but underneath he hated us. He liked hurting people.
Edward told me that once, but I wouldn't listen. I thought Edward was
just jealous of him—Kit had so much, and Edward so little.
Even before he was wounded, he could never compare with Kit.
Everyone— every woman who met him adored him. Perhaps that
was the trouble. Perhaps he could only despise us for our weakness in
wanting him. I don't think he cared about anyone other than himself in
his whole life.'

She grimaced. 'As soon as his father died, he stripped
this place of everything of any value in it. Brought his drunken pals
and their girls down from London and let them run amok. The couple his
father paid to look after the house left. Poor Edward. It must have
been more of a burden than anything else when he found he'd inherited.
Of course, what money there was in the family went to Kit…

'You're very young to have married a man like Edward. So
badly wounded…'

The blue eyes weren't friendly, and Liz heard herself
saying quietly, 'I knew Edward before… before…'

'And afterwards, when they sent him back to you, you felt
you had to go through with whatever promises you'd made him. How noble
of you. What's it like… marriage?'

Liz stared at her. She was frightened, she recognised.
Underneath the paint and expensive clothes she was scared.

'It's like life,' she told her wryly. 'It's up to you what
you make of it.'

Instantly the hard mask was back in place. 'Really?' she
drawled. 'Well, I shall have to see what I can do, then, shan't I? At
least Lee is rich enough to provide me with a good settlement if we
decided to call it quits and divorce. The boot is now on the other
foot, so to speak, you see,' she added with a brilliant, glittering
smile. 'My father has lost his money, and I've married Lee for the same
reason Kit wanted to marry me. I've shocked you, haven't I?
I—I suppose you think that after being treated the way I was
by Kit…'

'It isn't for me to sit in judgement,' Liz told her
quietly. How much of her attitude, her hardness had been caused by Kit?
How much destruction and pain had he been responsible for?

Only later would she realise that never once had she
questioned the other woman's revelations… never once had any
kind of denial of what she was saying risen automatically to her
lips… and she recognised that it was almost as though a part
of her had known, had always known what Kit was, but that she had clung
to her dreams like a child afraid of the dark.

'I must go—I don't really know why I came down
here…'

'To exorcise a ghost?' Liz suggested compassionately.

After she had gone, Liz sat for a long time simply staring
into space. She had sensed all along that Edward had not cared for his
cousin, and because of that, because she was sensitive enough to
realise that Edward wanted her memories of his cousin kept in the past,
she took care never to refer to Kit. Not even in her most private
moments with her son. She already knew how jealous Edward could be.

She had promised Edward… given him her word
that David would be his son, and she had never once broken that word.
Now she was glad… glad that her child would grow up in
ignorance of what his blood father had been… glad that
whatever had guided her life had pushed her in Edward's direction. Glad
that she had been fortunate enough to marry him. She shuddered,
remembering the other woman's brief but graphic description of the
place Kit had sent her to, and she thanked God that she had never been
given the opportunity to tell Kit of her own pregnancy.

As the afternoon wore on and she sat locked in her
thoughts, although she didn't realise it she was finally closing a door
on her youth… Closing it and sealing it as she vowed that
for the rest of her life she would strive to repay Edward for all that
he had done for her. David, Edward and Cottingdean… From now
on they were the boundaries of her life.

Kit had already robbed her of her right to her sexuality,
although she didn't realise it; now he had destroyed her dream as
well…

Just one final time, and as a punishment not a panacea,
she allowed herself to remember each second of time she had spent with
Kit… each whispered word…each
embrace…but this time she stripped from them her own naiveté
and innocence. This time she saw them for what they were and felt sick
with self-disgust. How could she have been so deceived? Kit had never
loved her… would have laughed in her face if he had ever
guessed how she had felt.

Now her body forced her to remember how it had not been
pleasure she had felt at the moment of possession, but pain…
pain and fear.

She felt no regret at the knowledge that her life with
Edward would be celibate. She had her son, she had a husband who was
compassionate and caring, she had a home which she would one day
restore to what it had once been. To cherish and protect these three
would be her goal, her destiny.

She was just nineteen years old.

The third surprise did not arrive in the form of a
visitor, but by letter. A typed letter, addressed to her personally,
and which she opened and then read with a deepening frown.

'Something wrong?' Edward asked her. . They were eating
breakfast in the small sunny room which she and Chivers had managed to
clean and refurnish from items they had found in the attic.

The attic was proving to be a treasure-house. Much of the
furniture stored there was old-fashioned and broken, but Chivers's
magical fingers always found a way of effecting a repair, and Liz was
gradually coming to find that she actually preferred the rich patina of
these old, often shabby pieces to the modern utility furniture that
seemed so ugly in comparison.

'No,' she replied to Edward's question. 'It's a letter
from my aunt's solicitors.'

Liz had written regularly to her aunt since David's birth
but had never received a reply. It was a shock to discover that her
aunt was dead, and that, moreover, she had decreed that Liz was not to
be told until after the funeral. What came as even more of a surprise
was the news that her aunt had willed to her her entire estate: the
small house and its contents, and a sum of money that made Liz gasp
with shock.

'Just over a thousand pounds! Well, it's a nice little
sum,' said Edward.

'It's a fortune,' Liz retorted indignantly, but Edward
merely smiled and shook his head.

He was more content than he had ever dreamed of being. His
wounds still bothered him, but now he had something he had never had
before. Now he had hope… Now he had Liz, he had David and he
had Cottingdean, and he loved them all. He had promised himself,
though, that he would never burden Liz with his feelings. What was the
point? He could never be a husband to her in any physical sense. And
yet jealously he watched her, wondering if there might one day come a
time when she would yearn for a physical relationship with some other
man. When she would fall in love with some other man!

'What shall we do with it?' Liz asked him. She was
thinking of perhaps buying a small car, if they could find
one… Something that would make life easier and more
enjoyable for Edward.

But when she said as much he frowned and told her curtly,
'No, Liz, that money's yours. You should spend it on something for
yourself—some pretty clothes,' he added vaguely.

Liz laughed. Pretty clothes… What need had she
for anything like that? Even if she could buy them… Men
really had no idea, and besides, she had been thinking recently that if
she could
buy
a second-hand sewing
machine—she couldn't keep borrowing Louise's—she
could utilise so much more of the vast amount of fabrics and clothes
stored away in the attic. However, she had already mentioned to Chivers
that a sewing machine wouldn't come amiss and when one mysteriously
appeared she wasn't surprised. She had stopped asking where he managed
to find the articles he produced, and now was merely grateful for them.

Spend it on yourself, Edward had said, but later on that
day as she stood in her garden looking out towards the hills she
suddenly knew exactly what she was going to do with her aunt's
bequest…

'But—a ram…' Vic stared at her.

'Not just any ram, Vic. We want the best, the very best
there is. If you could go anywhere in the world to buy him, where would
you go?'

'Australia,' he told her promptly. 'They've been doing
some cross-breeding there… I was reading about it a while
ago.' He shrugged. 'But it's impossible.'

'No…no, it isn't,' Liz corrected him.

It took a great deal of effort to persuade him, and even
more to convince Edward, but in the end she had her way. For a fee, a
neighbouring farmer agreed to run the flock with his own while Vic was
away, and letters were written, arrangements made.

'It's like Jason looking for the golden fleece,' Liz
teased him.

'Aye… you're not wrong. Gold is what our
fleeces will be worth if I can bring one of Australia's finest rams
with me. It won't be easy to buy one, though…'

'No,' Liz agreed, and smiled at him. 'But you'll do it,
Vic.'

Half of her almost envied him the adventure which lay
ahead of him, but she had her own world. Cottingdean was her world, and
if sometimes it seemed small and enclosed… well, she put
those thoughts out of her mind and reminded herself how much she had to
be grateful for.

A shadow
chased across the face of the moon, and out across the fields the vixen
paused, sniffing the air. Her cubs were independent now, but she had
grown used to feeding them… caring for them. She was lean
with the leanness of a diligent mother, her own hunger coming second to
that of her young.

In her sleep Sage frowned, her dreams jumbled and
confused. The diary lay face down on the carpet beside her bed where it
had slipped when she'd fallen asleep, too exhausted to read on, and yet
so enthralled, so gripped by what she was reading that she had fought
off her need to sleep as long as she could.

In her dreams she was standing in the hallway of the
house, but it was not the hallway as she had always known it, mellow
and graceful with its polished panelling, its heavy oak antiques, its
rich Persian rugs… This hallway was empty, its panelling
stained and damp, its halls festooned with cobwebs, just as her mother
had described it in her diary.

Outside the vixen howled, a mournful sound that penetrated
Sage's dreams. It was the eternal sound of the female yearning for her
mate—for succour…for companionship… for
love. In her dreams she wept and then cried out.

'Scott… no… no, don't leave
me…' But the once-familiar face of her lover was already
fading, vague, and suddenly its image was overshadowed by those of
other men…more men than she cared to remember…so
many men that she would not allow herself to remember. Men whom she had
taken to her bed, but never to her heart. Men who had served for a
little while at least to make herself forget how she had been
abandoned… rejected. Men who had been more than willing to
share with her the physical pleasures she and Scott had never been
allowed to know…

How easy it had been to fool them, to let them believe
that they mattered to her. How stupid they were, how vain.

All of them. But no… not all of
them… there had been one, one who had seen through her, had
recognised… Who had rejected her. Who had recognised the
false coin she was offering and who had thrown it back at her.

She could see him now, towering over her, furiously angry;
so angry that for a moment she had thought he might actually hit her.

That he hadn't done so had been to his credit and not
hers; she had watched as he had battled against his rage, fought it and
won that inward battle, and as he walked away from her she'd had a
stupid impulse to call him back, to… to what? Apologise?

In her sleep she moved impatiently, as though seeking an
escape from her own dreams, from the knowledge which was shattering the
barrier she had always kept between herself and others. And the root
cause of the destruction of that barrier was her mother's
diary… the new perspective she was getting on her mother,
not as a parent, but as a woman, a vulnerable, courageous, likeable
woman… the kind of woman she would have welcomed as a friend.

In her narrow hospital bed Elizabeth Danvers surfaced
briefly from the drug-controlled sleep. A nurse, alerted to her
awakening, hurried to her bedside. It was imperative at this stage that
their patient was kept sedated and calm.

With quick expertise she soothed the distressed movements
of Elizabeth's hands, while monitoring the technological battery of
life-saving equipment surrounding the bed.

Elizabeth opened her eyes, knowing instinctively that she
was somewhere alien and unfamiliar…knowing there was
something she must do… someone she must see…
something important that awaited her attention… but already
the nurse was deftly sliding the needle into her skin, injecting the
drug, and then watching the ever-wakeful monitors.

Only when they told her that her patient was once again
locked in a calm, protective sleep did she leave her bedside.

Faye couldn't sleep. It was always like this on the first
Monday night of the month, and sometimes for several nights before and
afterwards. Sage had given her the first of Liz's diaries. She had
started to read it when she came to bed. For a while it had distracted
her.

The young Liz, her hopes and dreams, her belief that she
was loved, had touched a tender place in her own heart. Unlike Sage, it
had not come as an abrupt shock to her to discover that Edward had not
been David's physical father.