The House On Willow Street (45 page)

Tess Power, meanwhile, was sitting in her kitchen going over the books. She’d tried to give the business one last chance, even bringing in Mara for another two days while she went auction hunting—a decision which had turned out to be a sound investment, because Mara had the gift of selling things to people. She’d read the description that Tess had written on the luggage label attached to each item, and from that snippet of information she’d weave the most fabulous stories. If a customer happened to glance at a silver-backed brush from the 1920s, Mara would be off: “Isn’t it beautiful? Can’t you just imagine an elegant lady, sitting at her dressing table while she . . . No, actually,” Mara would pause, correcting herself, “while
her maid
brushed her hair the regulation one hundred times. And perhaps all the while she’d have been secretly dreaming of getting her hair shingled. You see, her father really wanted it long and she was being modern . . .”

Soon everyone in the shop would be listening, rapt, as Mara brought the past to life. People bought things in frantic haste after listening to Mara, which was wonderful. Unfortunately it would take more than Mara and her brilliant selling skills to keep Something Old afloat.

People simply had less money to spare, and even though
there were far more antiques on the market because so many people were having to part with their treasures, many of them were way beyond Tess’s budget.

The fabulous faded rosewood breakfast tables and silver-plated candlesticks she’d seen at the auction houses were too expensive for her. The Regency mahogany side cabinets probably wouldn’t fit in the shop and, even if they did, she couldn’t afford them. They were soon snapped up by other dealers, along with any sought-after pieces of Imperial ware china; items that she would once have picked up for a song were selling at a premium now that the Chinese were trying to buy back their heritage. The things that were left, like the sad-eyed portraits from the eighteenth century, nobody wanted to buy these days.

She needed a miracle: she needed a piece like the beautiful Chinese blue-and-white porcelain dragon dish that had been hiding in somebody’s attic and had come out for sale at an auction with a 2,000–3,000 euro reserve price. It turned out that the dish was not only authentic Ming dynasty, but it bore the mark of Xuande, a fifteenth-century genius. That tiny mark had changed everything: the dragon dish sold for hundreds of thousands of euros.

A success on that scale was what she needed. Instead, she’d come away with two exquisite bronze greyhound pieces. She knew it was crazy, and she’d paid too much for them, but their elegant, sad faces reminded her of the stone greyhounds that used to sit on either side of the front door at Avalon House when she was a child. They’d been among the last things to go and Tess could still remember her sorrow at seeing them loaded onto a dealer’s truck.

Now she’d have to sell them on because there was no way anyone coming to her door would be prepared to pay or even transport the two exquisite dogs.

Strangely, she couldn’t help thinking about Avalon House these days, ever since Cashel had bought it.

There was talk of him all the time in the village. He wasn’t Mr. Reilly any more. No, he was
Cashel—Oh, Cashel’s doing a fabulous job up at the house
—the local-boy-done-good, come home to spread the riches.

He was a total sweetie, insisted Belle from the hotel.

Tess thought that Belle had rather set her eye on Cashel.
Watch out, Belle
, she wanted to say,
he’s not what you think.

But she could say nothing. Instead, she found herself overcome with a terrible longing to go up to the house again, to walk around it, to step through the rooms laying her fingers on the doors and staircases she’d touched carelessly as a child. She wanted to make a pilgrimage around her childhood, to revisit that time in her life when things had been very different.

Except, she couldn’t. She daren’t go up there in case he saw her.

She might manage it over Christmas, because he was sure to be away and there’d be no workers there. Perhaps.

Right now, however, there were more pressing matters at hand: money, Christmas and her mother-in-law, Helen.

“Tess, I wanted to tell you I’m not going to go to Claire’s parents’ house for Christmas. I simply can’t,” Helen had said tremulously on the phone a few days before. “It doesn’t feel right, it’s too soon, I’m not ready. You know me, I like to take my time over things and I don’t know them and Claire’s a sweet girl but it’s so upsetting.”

“Well, you could always come here,” Tess had said, her guts clenching, knowing that a distraught Helen might not be the best addition to the household, given that Kitty was already desolate because Tess, Kevin, Claire, Zach and herself were not all going to be spending Christmas together.

“Why not?” she’d said tearfully. “I mean, why not, Mum? They could come and stay. I’ll move in with you and they can have my bedroom.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Tess had said gently.

It was wonderful that Kitty was so marvelously innocent and yet at the same time Tess couldn’t shatter that innocence by explaining the truth or the facts.

“Claire wants to be with her mum and dad because she’s having the baby,” Tess explained.

“But what about me?” cried Kitty.

Tess hauled her darling daughter on to her lap and held her tightly. Christmas was going to be difficult this year, no doubt about it.

She and Kevin had talked about it one night when he came up to dinner with the family.

Tess had decided that there was no point in keeping him away from the house in some act of rage—it was far better for the children to see their parents getting on like adults.

As Tess had told Zach and Kitty over dinner that night: “We will always care for each other, but we will always love you two.”

And now it looked as if she’d be spending Christmas trying to console her mother-in-law too. Truly, life was strange.

C
ashel held the glass of mulled wine in his hand and stared out at the snow-covered valleys below him. It was truly picture-postcard here in Courchevel, yet Cashel had never felt less Christmassy in his life. They’d been skiing most of the day and now they’d come in at five when it was darkening. The scent of some amazing meal was wafting up from the kitchens. The luxury chalet—in the elite Courchevel heights of 1850, naturally—had a French chef, along with a seemingly endless supply of young locals in and out cleaning and tidying, while a married couple from the Philippines ran the whole place. Cashel had to hand it to Rhona. She knew how to pick a luxury chalet for Christmas.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” She was beside him, resting her hand on his shoulder in a friendly manner. “You work too hard you know, Cashel,” she said. “You should do this more often. Come away with us. Spend a few days doing nothing.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful,” said Cashel automatically, because to say anything else would be rude. He didn’t envy Rhona’s existence, or even that of her new husband: a few weeks’ work here and there, then a trip to St. Bart’s, another few
weeks, then skiing perhaps. It was the sort of life Rhona had always wanted when she was married to him, and he could have given it to her from a financial viewpoint, but he wouldn’t have been there with her. The drive to work—to keep working to hide any gaps in his life—was too strong in Cashel.

“Aren’t you glad you came?” Rhona said.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, which was a lie because he wasn’t glad at all.

When Rhona had phoned him, wheedling, saying that she and some friends were renting a luxury chalet in the French Alps for ten days over Christmas, she’d made it sound so wonderful.

“An escape, Cashel,” she had said. And those were the magic words. He wanted to escape from everywhere, but particularly from Avalon, which was casting its spell over him again. He had tried to stay away and let that Mara girl deal with everything and liaise with one of his assistants, but somehow he couldn’t bear to leave it alone. He kept flying in, getting the helicopter down so he could look at the house, see what was happening, seek out Freddie and ask him why there wasn’t more progress being made.

“Ah, well now,” Freddie said each time, scratching his head. “These old houses are tricky, Mr. Reilly.”

Cashel became
Mr. Reilly
whenever there was a problem.

“We need to make the back of the house structurally sound before we can really get working. It’s a huge old place, so that’s going to take a long time. And even then, it’s going to be slow. Like with the walls, for example: you can’t throw up any old bit of plaster on the walls, you know. Myself and Lorcan, we’re working to make it
authentic.
”

When Lorcan, the architect, started talking about making the house authentic, Cashel had to stop himself from letting
fly with a left hook. Lorcan could bore for Ireland on the subject of authenticity. Any concept of making Avalon House into a home as well as a beautiful example of architectural heritage was entirely lost on him.

That’s why Cashel left dealing with Lorcan to Mara. He found himself getting very irritated by discussions over sourcing moldings, plaster versus plasterboard, original slates that were nigh on impossible to find and would cost a small fortune in the event they did find them. He simply wanted it done. He didn’t want to hear how it was to happen,
why
it was to happen and how far Freddie would have to go to get precisely the right thing.

Cashel had visited Avalon four times in the last month, which was unheard of, given his demanding schedule.

But the draw of home was proving too much for him. And he knew why that was. It wasn’t so much Avalon House, much as he wanted it to be finished, to be able to look at this gleaming, beautifully restored house and think:
This is mine. This belongs to the boy whose mother used to clean the steps here and used to polish the brass.

True, he wanted that fiercely, but there was another reason he kept going back to Avalon, a reason he didn’t like to admit.

He’d seen Tess in town a few times and tried not to look, not to watch her long-legged walk, not to look at the curve of her cheek or to catch her eye. He wouldn’t talk to her directly, no. Instead, he’d subtly questioned Mara about her, because he knew she helped out occasionally in Tess’s antique shop. Being new to the area, Mara didn’t have a clue about his history with Tess, so he was able to inquire idly about the Power family in general, throwing in the odd question about Suki and the girls’ father, to make it seem as if he was interested in all of them.

“Is there a good living to be made from the antique shop, do you think?” he’d ask, and Mara would look up from whatever bit of paper she was scanning and say, “I’m not sure, but times are tough, you know, Cashel. We’re not all loaded like you. I think it’s hard for Tess.”

If anyone else had spoken to him like that, Cashel might have fired them, but for some reason he could take it from Mara. Perhaps it was because she was here in Avalon, and he became a different person in Avalon.

“Tess . . . did you say she’d split up from her husband?” he asked another time, trying to invest the words with the required combination of interest and lack of interest. Apparently, he hadn’t managed it, because this time Mara looked up, stared him straight in the eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “She and Kevin are very definitely separated, and now he’s . . .” Mara paused.

“He’s what?” Cashel urged, unable to help himself.

“His girlfriend is pregnant.”

“Oh,” Cashel said. That was unexpected, and hopeful in some strange way.

Tess Power was no longer officially attached. She was available, theoretically, and his heart jumped at the thought. And then he knew he was crazy because he and Tess were finished.

He’d said so many times over the years that he’d never look back. In a way, Tess had done him a favor. He owed some of his drive and ambition to her: heartbreak and rage were powerful forces and, with his own innate drive, he’d been ready to take on the world. He’d grown rich and powerful, so powerful that he could have almost anything he wanted. And he owed a certain amount of that to the one woman he hadn’t been able to have.

“Cashel, there’s someone I want you to meet,” said Rhona,
dragging him out of his reverie staring blankly at the snow outside.

Beside his ex-wife was a tall brunette. She was slim and good-looking with an intelligent glint in her eye.

“Sherry Petrovsky, meet Cashel Reilly.”

“Delighted to meet you.”

Her handshake was cool and firm. She wasn’t, he decided, one of the glamour-puss friends Rhona sometimes brought along for fun. After talking to her for a while, he soon realized that she was anything but.

She was a commodities trader in London.

“Tough job,” remarked Cashel.

“Yes, but I like it,” she said coolly. “The biggest problem is the traders—they all want to be alpha dog and like to think my job is to be pack bitch.”

Cashel burst out laughing. From the way she spoke, he had no doubt that Sherry had no trouble handling a bunch of testosterone-fueled traders.