The Silver Locket

Copyright © 2010 Margaret James

First published in hardback as
The Morning Promise
by Robert Hale in
 
2005

Published 2010 by Choc Lit Limited

Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB

www.choclitpublishing.co.uk

The right of Margaret James to be identified as the Author of this Work has
 
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the
 
public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90
 
Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

Print
ISBN 978-1-906931-28-5

Epub ISBN 978-1-906931-36-0

Mobi ISBN 978-1-906931-47-6

PDF ISBN 978-1-906931-08-7

To Jan – the best of sisters

Acknowledgements

If it hadn’t been for the eternally inspiring and totally wonderful RNA, I’d never have become a novelist, so a big collective hug to the entire organisation in its Golden
 
Anniversary year.

Thanks to everyone at Choc Lit for all their help and support. They’ve been brilliant in every way.

Chapter One

The view from the breakfast room at Charton Minster was of the most beautiful garden in the whole of Dorset, but on this bright March morning Rose Courtenay hated it.

The sight of golden daffodils in full flower beneath the spreading trees merely reminded her she was trapped, perhaps for ever. She turned away and was about to go upstairs again when she heard her mother on the phone.

‘Of course you must bring Alex,’ Lady Courtenay was saying. ‘Poor boy, it’s not his fault Viola Denham was his mother. We should be glad she let him come to Henry. If she’d left him with that painter fellow, he’d probably have turned out very badly.’

Alexander Denham – that’s all I need, thought Rose. She wondered if she’d dare to have a migraine which would get her out of going to her mother’s evening party. She couldn’t stand that silent, sullen boy who never seemed to do anything but scowl, but with whom she was expected to get on just because Henry Denham and her father were old friends.

Lady Courtenay’s parties were tedious enough at any time, but if she had to talk to Alex Denham or – appalling prospect – dance with him, this one would be purgatorial.

‘Well,’ she said to Boris the black Labrador, who could smell the bacon in its silver dish and was looking at her hopefully, ‘they can’t
make
me dance.’

‘What did you say, darling?’ Frances Courtenay came into the room. Tiny, plump and blonde, beautifully dressed and always smelling like a lily, at fifty she was still a pretty woman, with eyes as blue as cornflowers that sparkled in a face unlined and flawless as a peach. She’d kept the lissom curves of youth in places where most women of her age had flab and bulges. She always made her tall and slender daughter feel like a giraffe.

‘Nothing, Mummy,’ Rose replied, and sighed.

‘What do you plan to do today?’

‘Oh, I don’t know – be bored?’

‘Rose, don’t be ridiculous.’ Lady Courtenay nodded to the maid to pour her coffee. ‘I know it’s not the fashion these days, but I think girls of your age should be married. Then you’d have no time to brood and mope about the place, or read those frightful novels, which can’t be good for you.’

‘If I were allowed to do something useful with my life, I shouldn’t mope!’ retorted Rose. ‘You know how much I want to go to Oxford. Somerville has offered me a place, so why do you and Daddy insist I stay in Dorset?’

‘Darling, we merely want the best for you.’ Frances Courtenay shrugged expressively. ‘If you went to Oxford, and did all that silly studying, how would you find a husband?’

‘I don’t want a husband.’

‘You don’t know what you want. That’s why you need a husband, someone who’ll look after you and correct your taste.’ Lady Courtenay waved the maid away. ‘But the right sort of men hate clever women. So although you did quite well at lessons, I’d keep it to yourself if I were you.’

Then she noticed Boris, who was chewing at the fringes of a priceless Persian rug. ‘Rose, I wish you wouldn’t bring that horrid dog in here. Where are you going, darling?’

‘Only to my room.’

‘Well, don’t get your head stuck in a book. I promised we’d look in on Mrs Sefton, we must collect your dress from Dorchester, and there are a million other things to do today.’

Rose pulled a face behind her mother’s back. She edged out of the breakfast room, swiping a rasher of bacon on the way.

‘Here, good boy,’ she whispered, winking conspiratorially at Boris, who lumbered after her with drooling jaws.

As Alex Denham washed and shaved that evening, he scowled at his reflection in the pitted, freckled glass. Why was he bothering, he wondered. Why was he going to so much trouble, when he knew what they all thought of him?

If he’d burst in wild and dishevelled, dressed in poacher’s corduroys or the old tweed jacket he wore when he went hacking, they wouldn’t be surprised. They’d merely nod their heads and whisper, ‘Well, of course he’s Viola’s son. What can one expect?’

So he didn’t want to go to Lady Courtenay’s party. He’d always hated going to Charton Minster, the gracious honey-coloured mansion half a mile away, where the ghastly Courtenay family lived in regal splendour. He was going tonight to please his guardian, for Henry seemed determined that Alex should mix socially with the people who had snubbed his mother.

‘Let bygones be bygones, turn the other cheek,’ said Henry Denham. But Alex wasn’t made like that, and he could not forgive.

He wiped the flecks of soap away and then reached for his shirt. He wondered if he’d see the heiress, if he’d have to watch as she was fawned over and courted by the flower of the county.

He’d rather liked her once – at least, as much as a boy of twelve could like a girl of ten. But since she’d left the schoolroom she had put her hair up, laced herself into a set of stays, and learned to look down her well-bred nose at him.

Perhaps, he thought, he shouldn’t be surprised. She’d probably heard a version of events that had shocked and horrified a sheltered girl like Rose, especially if she hadn’t suspected anything before.

Alex, on the other hand, had been collecting shreds and patches of the local gossip for almost twenty years. He’d stitched them all together to make his mother’s shroud.

‘She was always flighty from a girl.’

‘It was grooms and gardeners first of all.’

‘Then she had that artist chap, who was the boy’s real father.’

She’d been dead for eighteen months, but still the gossip flowed. In rural Dorset, friends and neighbours usually let the dead rest in their graves, but in Viola Denham’s case they made a rare exception.

‘Ready then, my boy?’ Henry Denham’s kind but foolish face appeared at the door of Alex’s dressing room. ‘Come along, old fellow. We’re going with Lizzie Sefton and her daughters. It doesn’t do to keep the ladies waiting.’

‘I’m coming now, sir,’ Alex said.

Although he liked Henry Denham very much, Alex was secretly quite glad the old man wasn’t his father. As well as a crumbling manor house and a decrepit, rabbit-bitten estate, he might have inherited those embarrassing jug ears, and that great, bulbous nose.

It has been a tedious process, being dressed and crimped and titivated by her mother’s maid. But when she looked in the glass that evening, Rose could see the hours of pain and boredom had paid off.

The riot of unmanageable black curls had been subdued, cajoled then tamed with bandoline, and her unruly brows were plucked and arched. Two discreet spots of rouge were carefully smudged on her pale cheeks.

Now she was laced into a cruel whalebone corset, she had a woman’s figure, not a gawky girl’s, and her new gown became her very well. Simply cut and artfully draped in the elegant fashion of the spring of 1914, the dress was made of softest salmon-coloured taffeta. The style rounded out her slender figure, while the colour warmed her sallow skin. A scatter of tiny crystal beads was sewn across the bodice, catching the light and adding sparkle to her large grey eyes.

When she met her father on the landing, Sir Gerard stood back to look at her, then nodded his approval. ‘You look enchanting, darling,’ he began. ‘That’s an exquisite gown.’

‘Thank you, Daddy.’ Rose smiled back at him, reflecting that he hadn’t yet seen the bill. But Sir Gerard might be worked on, she decided. She’d go to Oxford yet.

She walked down the great staircase, hung with portraits of the Courtenays going back to Elizabethan times. As she passed an earlier Rose Courtenay, dark-haired and grey-eyed just like herself, but formal and unsmiling in her starched white ruff and rich brocaded stomacher, she saw the Denham party coming in.

She knew she shouldn’t be unkind, but she couldn’t help noticing that poor Henry Denham looked his usual shuffling mess. Their neighbour Mrs Sefton’s purple gown had obviously been made for someone half her ample size, and her two beaky daughters were trussed up like dowdy hens.

But Alex looked quite striking in the scarlet jacket and tight black trousers of the Royal Dorset Regiment.

Of course, it had had to be the Royal Dorsets, and even then they’d had to pull some strings to get him in. There wasn’t the remotest chance they’d have him in the cavalry or the Guards, Rose had heard her mother whisper to Mrs Sefton, even if Henry had been rich enough – not with a family history like that.

She watched Alex moving through the crowd. He nodded to acquaintances, but hardly ever spoke and never smiled.

He’d grown up quite good looking, Rose decided. Those heavy eyebrows and that square, determined jaw, so unprepossessing in a child, were actually attractive in a man. As a boy, he’d scowled and frowned so much she had seldom felt the urge to go and talk to him. When she’d made the effort, he would grimace as she spoke, and rarely mutter more than a single syllable in reply. As Rose’s nanny had often said, young Master Denham was neither use nor ornament.

But it seemed that these days he was not entirely without manners. As Rose joined her mother to welcome some new guests, he came up to speak to Lady Courtenay, who said she was delighted he had come.

Then Lady Courtenay drifted elegantly off to go and speak to someone else, leaving Rose and Alex to look at one another.

It soon became apparent to Rose that Alex wasn’t going to speak, so she decided she must fill the silence. ‘What a delightful day it’s been,’ she said, without expression. ‘So warm and pleasant for the time of year.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Alex, who was fiddling with the braiding on his cuff.

‘I dare say you’ve been riding, or walking on the headland?’

‘No,’ he muttered.

‘Then perhaps you went to Dorchester?’

‘I had some things to do at home.’

He didn’t elaborate, and as Rose was thinking it would be much easier to swim through frozen treacle, the musicians hired for the night began to play. In a matter of minutes, almost everyone under thirty-five was up and dancing.

Alex had his back to them, and didn’t seem to notice. He stared down at his highly-polished shoes and gnawed his lower lip. Finally, when even fat, absurd Georgina Sefton had been asked and led into the waltz, he found his voice. ‘Miss Courtenay, if you mean to dance–’