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‘What makes a person like that, Jay?’ Amber asked sadly. ‘It’s as though Cassandra enjoys being cruel and mean. I know that Greg was wrong to fall in love with Caroline, but no one need have known they had been lovers. Cassandra was the one who told Caroline’s husband about the relationship.’
‘Yes. I’m afraid that I too can’t bring myself to forgive her for the harm she did,’ Jay agreed sombrely.
Amber gave a small shiver. Despite the warmth from the logs burning in the grate of the elegant Carrara marble fireplace, the room suddenly seemed cold, as though the chill of past tragedies had somehow swept in.
‘We’ll never know if poor Caroline’s death was an accident, and she missed her footing and fell into the lake, or if she deliberately took her own life because Cassandra had exposed her infidelity to Lord Fitton Legh. Caroline and Greg paid such a dreadfully heavy price for their affair: Greg disinherited by our grandmother and sent to Hong Kong, and Caroline facing divorce and disgrace. I often wonder if Cassandra would have been more compassionate if it hadn’t been for her own feelings for Caroline. She was so passionately in love with her. Do you think Cassandra went on to marry Lord Fitton Legh because he had been Caroline’s husband?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jay admitted. His cousin was an enigma to him, a difficult spiteful girl who had turned into an embittered and cruel woman.
‘I do wish that she hadn’t married Lord Fitton Legh, Jay. She always was a very unkind stepmother for poor John, and she is even now, despite the fact that he and Janey are so very kind to her.’
‘John feels he has a moral obligation to carry out the terms of his father’s will, not just to the letter but above and beyond it, and his father did stipulate that John must provide well for Cassandra. You know how highly John thought of his father.’
‘Yes,’ Amber acknowledged, ‘but that makes it all the more upsetting that he was such a cold and distant father to John, although of course…’ She stopped and looked uncertainly at her husband.
‘Except that John may not be his child, you mean?’ Jay supplied. He saw her face and added quietly, ‘Yes, I know that your cousin Greg believed that John was his child—’
‘Because Caroline Fitton Legh had told him so,’ Amber pointed out, ‘but in truth she could have told Greg that he was John’s father because it was what she wanted to believe herself
‘None the less, Lord Fitton Legh brought John up as his son.’
‘And John worshipped him. Him and Fitton. Fitton is his life. Janey complains that sometimes she thinks the house and the land mean more to him than either she does or their sons. John isn’t very good at articulating his feelings and I do sometimes wonder if their marriage is as happy as we thought it would be when they first married. It would destroy John, I think, if he were ever to suspect that Greg, and not the late Lord Fitton Legh, was his father, and that he himself had no right to the title or to Fitton.’
‘So have we now finally accounted for everyone?’ Jay asked ruefully.
‘Yes,’ Amber confirmed, looking up as they both heard the familiar sound of the tea trolley outside the drawing-room door.‘Here’s Mrs Leggit with the tea,’she announced unnecessarily, smiling at their housekeeper as she came in. ‘We’ve just been discussing Christmas, Mrs Leggit. It would be lovely if we have snow.’
‘They’ve had some already up in Buxton, or so I’ve heard,’ the housekeeper answered, adding as she headed for the door, ‘Mind you, they are much higher up there, than we are down here.’
‘Christmas, the family and snow. Wouldn’t that be perfect?’ Amber smiled at Jay as she handed him his tea.
‘Perfect,’ he agreed.
Chapter Two (#ulink_493874d9-6b68-5905-9bcd-36475589a11a)
It was snowing and Olivia hated snow in New York. It wasn’t like proper snow at all – not like snow in Aspen, or Switzerland. New York’s snow made yellow cab drivers even more bad-tempered than they were ordinarily, and turned to slush on the sidewalks. She just hoped that it didn’t snow heavily enough to ground the planes at JFK so that her flight to Manchester was cancelled. To Manchester and to Robert.
Her rich chestnut shoulder-length hair gleamed with health as she stepped out of Vanity Fair magazine’s reception and waited for the lift to take her back down to the lobby. Tall and slender, her classically elegant features and blue eyes, enhanced by discreet makeup, Olivia carried with her an air of calm confidence that right now belied the excitement she felt inside. Soon she would be seeing Robert. She sighed ruefully at herself. When was she going to grow up and behave like a proper twenty-five-year-old and not a wide-eyed teenager in the grip of her first crush? Never, probably, where Robert was concerned, she admitted. She had loved him for so long that she couldn’t imagine not loving him, she admitted as she stepped out of the lift into the lobby of the building that housed Si Newhouse’s publishing empire of glossy magazines. She was wearing the new butter-soft leather boots she’d seen in Barneys and not been able to resist, and they were about as suitable for slushy pavements as a pair of high-heeled summer sandals. The hem of her long dark cream cashmere coat would also, no doubt, be marked, but she’d felt she had to wear it since that Mecca of fashion, Vogue magazine, also had its offices in the building. She was sure she’d seen Christy Turlington, one of the so-called supermodels, in the lobby when she’d come through.
At least now she’d delivered the article she’d been working on for Vanity Fair, a real coup for her, and she was keeping everything crossed that they liked it, even if the deadline had meant that she’d had to stay home instead of accompany her parents and younger brother on their flight this morning.
Still, it wouldn’t be long before she was following them, and then there’d be Denham, her grandparents, Christmas, the whole family and Robert.
Engrossed in the pleasure of thinking about her cousin, she almost walked straight into the man heading for the lift, her stomach clenching in dismay and dislike when she looked up and recognised who he was.
Tait Cabot Forbes, political investigative reporter sans equal, sans pity for his victims, sans everything, really, that made a human being human. Tait was a walking, talking, writing law book, looking for someone to break one of those laws so that he could pillory them without mercy. He could have built a skyscraper out of the reputations he had shredded so mercilessly in his freelance newspaper articles and on his TV programmes, and she hated him.
There had been a time when Olivia had actually admired him, and even seen him as something of a hero for his brilliant exposés of those whose moral failings were damaging humanity, but that had been before he had decided to wage war on her parents.
Family meant a great deal to Olivia – all her family, but most especially her parents and her teenage brother. Olivia didn’t just love her parents, she respected and admired them, and to have their reputation besmirched all over the pages of the New York press by a man who was notorious for bringing down those he targeted had been an assault on them she could never forgive.
‘Well, well, if it isn’t the doggedly devoted daughter,’ Tait greeted her. ‘Still public enemy number one, am I? I don’t suppose that exchanging Christmas kisses is in order then?’ he teased when Olivia tried to step past him.
She hadn’t intended to lower herself to speak to him but his comment proved too much for her self-control.
‘I’d rather kiss a rat,’ she told him angrily.
‘Flattery. It does it for me every time,’ Tait retorted, giving her what she thought of as a shark smile, all polished white teeth in a face tanned by a lifetime of summers spent sailing off Cape Cod.
He was good-looking, Olivia acknowledged grudgingly, if one liked that big healthy Eastern Seaboard all-American male look. In fact his hair and eyes were dark enough for him to have Italian blood. Now wouldn’t that be a thing, a Boston Brahmin – top-of-the-heap WASP – with Italian immigrant blood in his veins?
Olivia knew that her antagonism towards him wasn’t shared by her female media colleagues. The word on the New York street was that Tait wasn’t just the bestlooking reporter, he was also the best in bed.
‘Your folks spending Christmas here in New York, are they?’
‘No. Not that it’s any of your business.’
The melting snow had slicked down his thick dark hair so that it hung over his forehead in damp spikes, the bright lights in the lobby highlighting the small lines fanning out from his eyes and the thickness of his eyelashes. He might have women falling over themselves for his attention, but Tait Cabot Forbes was exactly the kind of man who turned her off, Olivia thought. Unlike Robert.
Robert. It was comforting to be able to blot out Tait’s face by focusing instead on her own personal mental image of her cousin. Robert was her perfect man. The courtly behaviour he must have learned as a young boy living with his grandmother and stepgrandfather made him unique in Olivia’s eyes: a true gentleman of the old school, who set high moral standards for himself and who believed in such old-fashioned virtues as honour and loyalty.
And love? Olivia gave a small sigh. She knew perfectly well that all Robert felt for her was mere stepcousinly affection, even if he had been kind when she’d been in the throes of her painfully obvious teenage crush on him. The fact that the teenage crush had now become a carefully hidden woman’s love was her business and her problem, and definitely not something she would allow out into the open to humiliate her and embarrass Robert.
‘Tait.’ The sound of a woman’s voice, filled with delight as she spotted the reporter and came hurrying over, gave Olivia a chance to escape. A very welcome chance, she thought thankfully as she slipped past Tait and out into the street. Once there, without having intended to do so, she looked back, only to see Tait exchanging the ‘Christmas kisses’ she had refused with the pretty blonde who had hailed him.
Christmas kisses. She was in her mid-twenties and the last time she had had anything that came close to being labelled a ‘relationship’ had been during her first year at college. But she had her work, she reminded herself, and her ambitions, and of course her wonderful parents.
In London, at Lenchester House, the London home of the Dukes of Lenchester, the object of Olivia’s love was sitting in the library with his stepfather.
Drogo and Robert sat opposite one another at either side of the marble fireplace in the armchairs that had been commissioned from Hepplewhite by the third duke. Heavy silk velvet curtains in a rich shade of amber, woven especially at Denby Mill, home of Drogo’s wife’s family silk business, hung at the windows. The depth of their colour meant that the room was always filled with a warm golden glow, as though sunshine was pouring through the windows, no matter what the time of year.
The chairs were upholstered in a complementary pineapple-patterned cut velvet in amber and cream, the colour scheme originally chosen for the room by the previous duke, Lord Robert, in honour of his new bride, Amber. The Savonnerie carpet covering the parquet floor had been woven during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, its colouring of deep gold and blue on a beige background a perfect foil for the curtain and chair fabrics. Drogo could well understand why Lord Robert had chosen such a colour scheme over the more traditional dark red so often used in such masculine rooms.
‘So now that you’ve been to Lauranto and had a chance to discuss things with your grandmother and her advisers, how do you feel about stepping into your late father’s shoes officially?’ Drogo asked his stepson.
How did he feel about it? Robert suspected that if he answered his stepfather’s question honestly, Drogo would not only not understand him but would also be concerned for him. To outsiders their situations might seem similar: Drogo too had stepped into an inheritance ance and title he had never expected to be his, and in a culture and a country that was alien to him. That, though, was where the similarities between their situations ended. Drogo hadn’t grown up knowing that he had been rejected as not good enough to inherit. He had not had to endure the childhood taunts and mockery that Robert had known because of that public rejection. He had not grown up having to accept that his father did not want him. So how could Drogo be expected to understand the savagely visceral feeling of satisfaction it gave him to have his grandmother courting him, with a view to him stepping into his late father’s shoes, even if only because she had no choice as there was no one else? How could he expect Drogo to understand how much he now wanted what he was being offered, when he had not known himself until the first letter had been sent and the first approach to him made? It was his birthright, and he felt that a wrong had been righted by a higher authority than that of his father or his paternal grandmother, but above all, he was determined to prove that as Crown Prince of Lauranto he could be better than any Crown Prince before him, and certainly better than the father who had rejected him. That was what was driving him now – not altruism, which would probably have motivated both his stepfather and his grandfather, not Lauranto itself and its people, but ambition. He wanted this for the child who had been dismissed as unworthy even before his birth, and who had gone unwanted and unrecognised until desperation had forced his grandmother to recognise him.
He would make Lauranto his. He would stamp his personality on it, so that in future Lauranto would be him, and so that future generations would say that he had taken Lauranto to its greatest heights. He would leave his mark on it in everything he did, from its architecture, to its finances and its laws, and ultimately via the sons he would give it. No, his stepfather would not understand how he was now relishing the driving thoughts of retribution and triumph.
Drogo studied his stepson as he waited for his response. Tall, with thick dark hair, brilliantly blue eyes, and an almost classically perfect profile, with a strong jaw, neat ears and a well-shaped nose, Robert combined the good looks of both his parents, although his temperament was very different from that of his mother. Robert had a tendency to withdraw into himself and shut others out, and sometimes it seemed to Drogo that his stepson was at war with himself.
‘It will be a challenge,’ Robert answered him, having weighed up how much to say to his stepfather. Alessandro –’ Robert gave a dismissive shrug – ‘I just can’t think of him as my father. You’ve always been that, Dad, and there’s no way I’d ever want to change that – I suspect that Alessandro was something of a lightweight and dominated by his mother. He was a figurehead who allowed others to run the country for him. The country needs modernising and that will be a huge challenge. My grandmother and her advisers are absolutely dead set against any kind of change. The country is run on almost feudal lines, with the poorest treated almost like serfs, especially those working on the estates belonging to the clique of barons favoured by my grandmother. The children of these workers leave school at fourteen to work on the land, whilst the children of the “nobility”, and the very small professional and middle class, are in the main educated abroad. There is no crossing of social lines. The court lives by a formal routine more suited to the Victorian age than ours; the exchequer is almost empty. All that will have to change.’
‘Have you told the Dowager Princess how you feel?’
‘Not yet. We have agreed to have further meetings in February. By then I should have formulated my terms for accepting the Crown.’
‘So you do intend to accept it?’
‘I don’t see that I have any option.’ That much was true, although Robert knew that Drogo would interpret his statement as meaning that he felt he had a duty to step into his father’s shoes for the sake of the people, rather than because he had a driving need to take up the challenge for himself.
‘Oh, Robert, no. I can’t believe you are giving in to that old harridan and letting her persuade you into accepting the Crown, after the way she’s behaved,’ Emerald announced coming into the library in time to hear Robert’s comment.
She went over to kiss the top of Drogo’s head. ‘And I can’t believe how difficult it is to get this family organised. I’ve had to take Jamie out this morning and buy him new Wellingtons, he’s grown so much whilst he’s been at Eton. Emma is still fussing about what she’s going to take to Italy with her when she goes back there with Polly after the Christmas holiday, Katie isn’t even home from Oxford yet, and we’re supposed to be leaving for Macclesfield tomorrow morning.’ Whilst Drogo smiled indulgently at his wife, Emerald warned her elder son, ‘It’s your decision – I know that, darling – but once she’s got her claws into you Alessandro’s mother won’t rest until she’s taken over every aspect of your life, including finding you a wife. All she wants you for is to produce future heirs.’
Robert smiled, looking unfazed by his mother’s comment. Emerald sighed inwardly: why was it that her eldest child, conceived in the wild passion of her youth, should be so lacking in that wild passion himself? Like any mother she wanted to protect her children from emotional pain, but sometimes she found herself almost wishing that Robert would fall passionately and even hopelessly in love, if only so that he would know what passion was. Emerald couldn’t imagine how anyone’s life could be fulfilling without having tasted that emotion, even though as a mother that wasn’t something she would ever say to her children, especially not to Robert, who sometimes looked at her as though he was the older and wiser of the two.
‘The country has a population of three million, most of whom are scratching a living under the burden of a feudal system,’ Robert told his parents. ‘It’s practically bankrupt financially and the governing élite are certainly bankrupt morally.’
‘But that doesn’t mean you have to become Saint Robert and go riding to its rescue,’ Emerald pointed out.
Robert laughed. He knew his mother, and he knew all about the old enmity that existed between her and his paternal grandmother. They were both very strongminded and determined women who liked getting their own way.
‘I’ve agreed to go back and talk with my grandmother again in the New Year, once I’ve had a chance to think things through. The country does have potential, its people could be so much better off if things were handled differently. All the royal and government buildings in the old city are early eighteenth century and desperately in need of renovation. As an architect I’d love to get my teeth into that challenge.’
That was true, but Robert was deliberately promoting that project as a means of concealing from his mother how he really felt.
‘Think of it,’ he teased her. ‘All that scope for using Denby Mill silks. Surely that would be a form of revenge worth having? The mill could do with the business, after all, from what you’ve been saying.’
Emerald sighed, distracted, as Robert had intended that she would be.
‘That’s true. This current fashion for glazed chintz swagged everywhere has affected our sales, although we have had some success with the new Sweetpea design. I envy Angelli Silk, and their historical connections with Italy’s opera houses, which mean that they get the commissions when they need refurbishment.’
‘Denby Silk has its contracts with the National Trust,’ Robert pointed out.
‘We do have some contracts with them, yes, but they don’t use us exclusively. The American market is where the future lies and where we need to succeed. I’m going to have a word with Ella whilst she’s over about seeing if we can get some of the top-rank New York interior designers to start using our silks…and it’s all very well you sidetracking me, Robert,’ she continued, returning to their earlier topic of conversation, ‘but if you go ahead and become Crown Prince you will have to marry, because it will be your duty to produce an heir.’
Robert had dated any number of young women over the years but hadn’t as yet shown any inclination to settle down, and for a very good reason, but it was not one he could communicate to his mother. The early years of Robert’s life, before his mother had married Drogo, had been very turbulent. Emerald had partied hard and lived life to the full, as the saying went. One of her lovers had been a notorious East End gangster, Max Preston. Robert had been seven then.
Memories he preferred to keep safely locked away would surface abruptly against his will: his mother’s frightening changes of mood; the sound of slammed doors and screaming arguments; the sounds from her bedroom one night when he had woken up in the dark feeling afraid and alone, and had gone there seeking comfort. He had been afraid for her when he had heard the noise, the man’s voice thick and harsh, his mother’s begging over and over again, ‘Please…please…please…’
He had opened the door and seen…
Perhaps every child inadvertently witnessing a parent having sex retained the same feeling of revulsion that he felt. Perhaps, like him, they put those memories in a box and buried that box very deeply with a stone slab on top of it. Perhaps they also grew to adulthood too sharply aware of the danger of out-of-control passion, fearful of it and determined, like him, never to let it take control of them. Perhaps. But Robert didn’t know, because it wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone discussed.
Now, whilst sexually his taste ran to intelligent, feisty, exciting, passionate and even challenging women, his experiences as a child meant that he had decided that he would never want to commit permanently to such a woman. They were too intense, too adversarial, too demanding and high maintenance emotionally and mentally for the men who loved them, and to their families. Life with them was a roller coaster that mowed down everything and everyone in its path. Robert had no intention of allowing himself to ride such a roller coaster. Better to enjoy the passion and the excitement, but to keep the woman who provided it at a safe distance, to make sure she was dispensable. For that reason he had decided that he would not marry. There had been, after all, no need. But the death of his father and his grandmother’s approach to him had changed all of that. If he was to satisfy his now driving ambition to become Crown Prince of Lauranto then he would have to marry, as his mother had just pointed out.
His mother and his paternal grandmother would fight – virtually to the death, he suspected – to be the one to select his bride for him, so it was far better that he selected his own bride. He had, in fact, already done so. The right wife for him, as Crown Prince of Lauranto, would be a wife whose whole loyalty was to him, who supported him unquestioningly, and whose temperament was such that she would accept that her role must be a supportive rather than a leading one. She must love him and only him, but at the same time she must not be passionately possessive or openly sexual in her attitude or behaviour. She must have the intelligence, the education, the confidence and the right kind of nature to be his consort, and she must, of course, look good. It was a long list of requirements but Robert knew someone who filled them all.
Olivia, the cousin he knew already loved him. Olivia, who was elegant, well groomed, well educated, calm, and whose loyalty to him would be absolute.
However, he had no intention of telling his mother what was in his mind – yet.
It was only later, when Robert had returned to his own home – the penthouse apartment in a stylish new block for which he had been the lead architect – that Emerald showed Drogo how anxious she really was about her son’s future.
‘Is it selfish of me to hope that Robert will turn down Alessandro’s mother, and refuse the Crown?’
‘I don’t know,’ Drogo replied carefully, ‘but I do know that it won’t help if you keep running her down to him, because ultimately if he does decide to accept that could put him in an awkward position.’
Strong-willed Emerald might be, but she hated feeling that her husband disapproved of something she’d said or done.
‘But she is such a horrendous monster,’ she insisted, turning on the slender heel of her damson-coloured Charles Jourdan court shoes and walking towards the window, the cut of her Chanel tweed suit, flecked with lilac, damson and white against a black background, discreetly outlining her curves.
Even with the sharp winter light falling on her, to Drogo she still looked as stunning as she had done when he had first seen her.
When she finally turned and saw the look of love and concern on her husband’s face, she walked back to him and put her head on his shoulder.
‘I only want Robert to be happy, Drogo – is that so very wrong?’ She paused and then added in a voice shorn of her normal confidence, ‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s true what they say about being careful what you wish for.’
‘Meaning?’ Drogo invited.
‘When Robert was born I felt triumphant because no matter what Alessandro’s mother might choose to think, Robert would always be Alessandro’s first-born son and his rightful heir. Since then I’ve wished so often that you had been his father. That way he’d always be here, with us, part of us and our way of life.’
It was so unlike Emerald to show any hint of vulnerability or regret, that Drogo took her in his arms, wanting to comfort her.
‘If he accepts what Alessandro’s mother offers him,’ Emerald went on, ‘then he won’t be part of us any longer. I worry for him, Drogo. We’ve brought him up to be comfortable in the life he has here in England; Alessandro’s mother will want him to be Alessandro’s son, charming but weak, royal but malleable, a handsome puppet prince.’
‘You’re underestimating Robert,’ Drogo tried to comfort her. ‘He is his own man, Emerald.’
‘It would all have been so much better if he had been your son – not that I’d want James disinherited, of course – but, Drogo, how on earth am I going to face owning up to a son who is the Crown Prince of somewhere as ridiculous as Lauranto? Everyone who’s anyone knows that a European title is merely a joke compared with a British title.’ Emerald gave a small shudder, reassuming her normal mantle of assured superiority. ‘We can’t let him make even more of a Ruritanian comedy of himself by marrying some girl with the trumped-up title of “Princess” just because it suits Alessandro’s mother.’
‘No, better by far that he marries someone we have chosen for him,’ Drogo agreed straight-faced.
Emerald leaned back within the circle of his arms and looked up at him. It’s all very well you laughing, but these things are important, Drogo.’
‘I’m prepared to agree that if Robert does step into Alessandro’s shoes then it will be important that he marries someone he loves, someone who understands the demands of his role and her own, and who can deal with the problems those demands may cause them both, but as for us choosing that someone – just think how you would have felt if your mother had chosen your husband for you.’
Still looking up at him, Emerald told him derisively, ‘She did – she chose you, even if she has never said so.’
‘Mmm. Well, there are exceptions to every rule,’ Drogo allowed, with a grin, before bending his head to kiss her.
Chapter Three (#ulink_d4175e01-b17e-54bd-9154-021219ba4ea1)
‘It’s definite then, Nick? This separation, I mean. There’s no chance of the two of you…?’ Rose Simons asked her stepson sadly.
‘No, none. Sarah has made that more than clear. She’s even had the locks changed. Her father’s idea, no doubt.’
Nick’s voice might be as crisp as the shirt he was wearing – laundered, no doubt, professionally rather than by his wife – Rose thought wryly, but she knew her stepson, and she knew the vulnerabilities and insecurities Nick was so adept at hiding. Too adept? Was that part of the reason why he and his wife had separated? Because the experiences of the first twelve years of Nick’s life had made him wary of trusting others?
To the outside world Nick might be an aggressive and very successful corporate raider, whose photograph appeared regularly in the financial press, accompanied by articles praising his economic acumen, but to her he was still, in part, the troubled orphaned child she had taken to her heart.
Nick pulled out one of the matt chrome bar stools from the kitchen island unit where his stepmother had been chopping vegetables for the curry she planned to make for supper. The kitchen of the Chelsea town house Josh and Rose had bought together after their marriage, with its streamlined and highly individual chrome and glass décor, might not look as cosy and domesticated as the hand-painted, extortionately expensive Smallbone kitchen Sarah had insisted on having fitted in the overpriced house in The Boltons she had fallen in love with, but Nick knew which kitchen he felt most at home in and where he felt most valued.
His stepmother had her own unique style, which owed much to the fact that she was a very successful designer of both commercial and private house interiors, working from the family-run Walton Street shop, first opened by her aunt Amber, and something to the oriental genes inherited from her Chinese mother. To those who didn’t know her, from the top of her polished still-black pixiecut hair, to the hem of her strikingly simple black dress, Rose Simons breathed a style that appeared intimidating, but Nick knew the loving heart Rose concealed beneath her couture clothes and her businesslike manner.
He couldn’t think of any other woman he knew and he knew plenty – who, on opening her front door to a scruffy, dirty, snotty-nosed unknown boy of twelve, who was announcing that her husband was his father, would have reached out, as Rose had done to him, to say calmly, ‘Well, I am pleased to hear that because if there’s one thing this house lacks, it’s a boy living here.’
‘Nick…’
