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Rebecca turned her back on her, fidgeting with some papers on her desk.
‘Why should I? There’s no reason to. If he wants to believe the worst of me, then let him.’
‘Well, it certainly provides a very effective barrier to hide behind,’ said Kate obliquely, watching in compassion as the telltale colour ran up under her friend’s fair skin. It was an unusual combination, that blonde, silky fall of hair and that pale Celtic skin. Unusual and very, very attractive.
Kate had lost count of the number of men she had introduced to her flatmate, who had promptly all fallen head over heels with her air of fragile, almost haunted vulnerability. As far as she knew, Rebecca had never even come close to returning their feelings. She had often wondered why her friend appeared so immune to the male sex. Now she suspected she had found the answer.
‘I can’t do it,’ Rebecca suddenly burst out despairingly. ‘I can’t go up there!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kate told her dampeningly. ‘Of course you can, and so you should. You’ve already told your aunt you will. It would be unfair to let her down. What are you frightened of, Rebecca?’ she probed gently. ‘Even if this Frazer should return home early and find you there, he’s hardly going to physically throw you out, is he? I think in your shoes,’ she mused thoughtfully, ‘I should rather enjoy the opportunity to make him indebted to me.’
Rebecca gave her a despairing look. She didn’t know Frazer. She had no idea that Frazer of all people was the very last person to relish being indebted to anyone, and especially to her.
‘But then, of course, he’s already indebted to you, isn’t he?’ Kate added almost as though she had read the course of her thoughts, and when Rebecca stared at her she added softly, ‘You sacrificed your good name and feelings to protect that of his girlfriend and his feelings,’she pointed out wryly. ‘You’re not frightened of him, are you, Rebecca?’ she asked curiously, knowing full well the effect her question would have.
‘Of course I’m not,’ Rebecca denied robustly.
‘Good. Then there’s nothing to stop you fulfilling your promise to your aunt, is there?’
For a moment Rebecca was silent, then she agreed hollowly, ‘No. Nothing at all.’
CHAPTER TWO
KNOWING that and actually believing it were two very different things, as Rebecca quickly discovered as she made her preparations to leave for Cumbria. Instead of worrying about Frazer and his all too likely reaction to the discovery that she was installed in his home, it would be far more profitable for her to spend her time worrying about how she was going to control the twins, she reflected as she packed her small car for the journey north.
The class of ten-year-olds she taught were in the main intelligent and well-disciplined children. All the reports she had heard of Rory’s twins suggested that, although they might possess intelligence, they certainly did not possess any self-discipline, and by all accounts resented any attempt to impose it on them. Remembering her own and Robert’s feelings when their parents had to constantly go away without them, Rebecca wondered privately if their unruliness did not perhaps spring more from a desire to capture parental attention rather than from any inborn disruptiveness.
Great-Aunt Maud possessed not only an Edwardian bosom, but in addition an Edwardian attitude to life, and at her behest Rebecca had promised that she would try to be at Aysgarth for four o’clock in time for afternoon tea.
‘That will give you an ideal opportunity in which to meet the children,’ Aunt Maud had informed her, and Rebecca, suddenly remembering from her own childhood her great-aunt’s ability on occasions to put aside her vagueness and apparent fragility and reveal all the assets of a master tactician, wondered a little uneasily why it was that Maud required her assistance in managing the twins. After all, as she remembered very well, Great-Aunt Maud had had no difficulty at all in keeping both her and Robert under control.
That had been almost twenty years ago, though, when her aunt had been in her fifties. Now she was in her seventies, and it was hardly to be expected that she could keep a watchful eye on two energetic and by all accounts extremely difficult eight-year-olds.
Aysgarth was on the more distant side of Cumbria, far away from the popular Lake District, in what Rory had on more than one occasion disconsolately described as the back of beyond.
Rebecca, despite the fact that she had lived and worked in London for well over six years, did not share his views. In London she had a lifestyle she enjoyed and a job she loved, but, given freedom of choice, she knew that she could quite easily adapt to a more rural lifestyle.
It surprised her to see how far the motorway system had now penetrated into Cumbria, giving her the advantage of gaining a good half-hour on her estimated journey time. With that half-hour in mind, a couple of miles away from Aysgarth and halfway down a very narrow country lane that led not only to the house but to the several farms beyond it, she pulled her car in to the side of the road and got out, locking it.
Fifty yards or so down into the valley lay one of the favourite spots of her childhood and teenage years. The river ran through the valley, dammed at one end to form a small pool from which it spilled over a weir, dropping quite a formidable distance into the far end of the valley and beyond that the valley below it.
The valley was wooded, shadowy with trees and their secrets. Underfoot the ground was springy and resinous with pine needles and roots. Despite the fact that the weather forecasters had promised them a good summer, so far there had been very little evidence of it, and as Rebecca made her way down the steep-sided valley she saw that the river below was flooded from the heavy spring rains.
Down below her in the valley bottom, a movement caught her attention. She focused on it abruptly, frowning as she saw the two small jean-clad figures hurrying in the direction of Aysgarth House. The twins. She would have recognised them through their similarity to their dark-haired and dark-visaged uncle anywhere, and she mused ruefully on the oddity of heredity and the fact that it should be Rory’s children who had inherited so much of Frazer’s dark colouring. Rory himself took after his and Frazer’s mother, being fair-haired and blue-eyed, whereas Frazer took after their father, possessing the dark-haired, grey-eyed, hard-chiselled look which had always been formidably recognisable as Aysgarth features.
It was not their similarity to their uncle that brought a frown to Rebecca’s forehead, though; it was the fact that the two children, barely eight years old, were apparently free to wander the countryside at will. She could remember herself how very strict not only Aunt Maud but also Frazer himself had been about her liking to wander here in this remote and beautiful valley. How he had drummed into her the danger of going too near the weir, or being tempted to even think about swimming in the pool, which was extremely deep and possessed dangerous hidden currents.
It was true that the twins had not been swimming, but she seemed to remember she had been well into her teens before Frazer had lifted the ban that stipulated that she was never ever allowed to come down here on her own.
As the twins approached, some instinct made her draw back into the shadow of the enclosing trees. The path they were on ran several yards away from her, and as she knew, turned abruptly several yards away to veer in the direction of Aysgarth House. As they passed her she could hear Peter saying anxiously to his sister. ‘Are you sure it’ll work, Helen? Are you sure it’ll make her go away?’
Rebecca stiffened, knowing instinctively that they were discussing her own arrival.
Frowning fiercely, Helen Aysgarth was a minute replica of her formidable uncle.
‘Maybe not at first,’ she allowed judiciously, ‘but it won’t take long.’
‘Why did Aunt Maud have to send for her anyway?’ Peter muttered bitterly. ‘A schoolteacher! As if we didn’t have enough of schoolteachers when we’re at school!’
‘We’ll soon get rid of her,’ Helen comforted her twin. ‘After all, we got rid of Carole, didn’t we?’
Both of them giggled and Peter added victoriously, ‘And Jane. Uncle Frazer was really angry when we told him Jane wanted to marry him, wasn’t he?’
‘Furious,’ Helen agreed with obvious enjoyment.
With every word she overheard, Rebecca’s heart sank further. What on earth was she letting herself in for, and why?
‘Norty says Cousin Becky will soon teach us to mind our manners,’ Peter reminded his sister.
Helen said witheringly, ‘Cousin Becky! We’ve never even met her, have we, apart from that once at the wedding, and I bet she isn’t coming here because of us at all. I bet it’s because of Frazer. Norty says he’s the best catch in the area and it’s high time he settled down and had some children of his own.’
Furious, exasperated and conscious of a growing numbness in her cramped limbs, Rebecca stayed where she was.
Norty—Mrs Norton—was Frazer’s housekeeper. She had been with the family during Frazer and Rory’s parents’ lifetime, and Rebecca remembered her with particular fondness. She hoped it wasn’t from the housekeeper that the twins had got the idea that she had come up here solely on account of Frazer, and as for that idea—well, she decided grimly, she would very quickly disabuse them of it!
She wasn’t a shy eighteen-year-old any more. What she had once felt for Frazer had long ago died—perhaps a little more violently and cruelly than it would have done in the normal course of events, but its death had been a necessary one. Most girls went through a period of intense emotional adulation for some older man. Most of them, though, were far too sensible to fix that adulation on a member of their own family.
She had thought of Frazer as some kind of Olympian being, all-knowing, all-wise, allseeing. No virtue had been too high for him to reach. What a fool she had been when, desperate and trapped, Rory had begged her to help him, she had done so willingly, delighting in the opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Frazer’s greater good.
If she had expected that somehow or other he would divine the truth, she had been bitterly disappointed. If she had expected that he would not only divine the truth, but lavish praise and gratitude on her for that sacrifice, she had been doubly disappointed. What he had in actual fact done was to read her such a savage and bitter lecture that it had been months if not years before she had ever been able to hold up her head again.
At first shock had numbed the worst of her feelings of degradation and humiliation, but then, as the shock wore off, reality had begun to take its place; the reality of realising that Frazer condemned her for what he had termed as her criminal and idiotic folly in becoming involved in an affair with his brother.
If once she had hoped he would come to see the truth, now she no longer did. Now she doubted that it would make any difference even if he did know the truth. Frazer had never liked being wrong about anything, she remembered bitterly.
The children were walking past her now, and just as they started to move out of sight she heard Peter saying anxiously, ‘You don’t think she’ll see the glass and stop, do you?’ and her heart somersaulted in sudden shock and outrage as she heard Helen telling him matter-of-factly,
‘She can’t, not where we put it.’
‘Do you think she’ll know we’ve done it?’Peter demanded. ‘Do you think she’ll tell Aunt Maud?’
‘No,’ Helen assured him, ‘but later on, when she realises that we intend to make her leave, then she’ll know we did it,’she added with relish.
‘But she isn’t like the others,’ Peter told his sister. ‘She’s our cousin.’
‘Our second cousin,’Helen contradicted flatly. ‘And you know what’ll happen if she stays. She’ll just be like all the others, mooning about after Uncle Frazer, and then, if he gets interested in her and marries her and they have children of their own, what’s going to happen to us?’
All the anger and disbelief Rebecca had been experiencing as she listened to the twins plotting vanished abruptly as she heard the fear and loneliness behind those last words. What was going to happen to them indeed? By all accounts Rory and Lilian’s marriage was not a happy one. The reason that Lillian had agreed to accompany Rory on this Hong Kong contract in the first place, according to what Rebecca’s mother had confided to her, was that she felt it necessary to keep an eye on her errant husband.
Since the children were not allowed to go with them, it had been necessary to find somebody else to take charge of them. Frazer, of course, had been the natural choice.
Having herself been the child of parents who of necessity had had to spend long periods of time out of the country, her father before he had retired having been a diplomat, Rebecca was very familiar with the attacks of isolation and loneliness that could hit children separated from their parents for long periods of time. That was one of the reasons she made such a good teacher, or so her head had told her. She readily understood the fears and anxieties of those children who actually boarded at the school and seemed to have the knack of being able to soothe and comfort them. However, while she and Robert had had parents who had been absent for long periods during their childhood, they had never for one moment doubted their parents’ love and concern for them.
Helen and Peter, it seemed, did, and perhaps with good reason, she acknowledged uneasily. It was no secret in the family that Lillian had been annoyed when she’d discovered that she was pregnant a matter of months after she and Rory were married.
She had been twenty, Rory twenty-two—two spoiled and self-indulgent young people who had married on a whim and conceived the twins without a moment’s thought for the future responsibilities they would bring.
Rory had always been lightweight compared with Frazer, eager to taste every one of life’s pleasures, self-indulgent to the extreme. Fun to be with if fun was all one wanted from life, but with no substance to fall back on for life’s difficult and unhappy times.
‘If Frazer gets married, his new wife won’t want us living at Aysgarth. Everyone says that,’ Helen reminded her brother. ‘That means we’ll have to go away to boarding school or go and live with Gran and Gramps in Brighton.’
‘Perhaps Mum and Dad might come back and Dad will get a job here in England,’ Peter suggested hopefully, but Helen quelled his suggestion with a stern frown.
‘You know he won’t,’ she told her brother. ‘We heard them arguing about it last Christmas, don’t you remember? Mum said she’d leave Dad if it wasn’t for us. Anyway, I don’t want them to come back, because they’re always quarrelling and arguing. I want to stay here at Aysgarth with Frazer.’
Their voices faded as they made their way along the path away from her, and Rebecca felt her heart turn over with pity and compassion for them. Adults forgot how much children saw and heard and felt. Only when she was sure they were safely out of sight and earshot did she make her own way back to her car.
The lane from here to Aysgarth was straight, apart from one particularly bad bend about fifty yards away. Thoughtfully she left her car where it was and walked towards it. As she had suspected, as she rounded the bend, she saw on the road in front of her some dangerously sharp shards of glass which, had she driven over them, must surely have severely damaged if not completely destroyed her tyres.
What neither of the twins could possibly know was that eighteen months before their birth, a very severe accident had been caused on this very bend by broken glass, though not left deliberately in that instance. A bottle which had fallen accidentally from a crate and not been noticed had broken on the road and the young couple in the car had been killed when their tyres had punctured and the car had swerved out of control off the road, plunging down into the valley, where it had burst into flames.
Rebecca was far too sensible and knew far too much about children of the twins’ age to imagine for a moment that they had thought far enough ahead to realise the possible outcome of their plans to get rid of her. Death, if they thought about it at all, was to children of that age a concept outside their grasp, unless they were unfortunate enough to suffer the loss of someone close to them.
As she picked up the glass and carefully put it in her handkerchief, carrying it back to the car with her, she pondered on how best to deal with the problem facing her.
All her desire to return to London was now gone. The twins needed her help, even if they themselves did not recognise it.
She got back into her car in a very thoughtful frame of mind indeed. The twins might not be able to recognise their need, but others might. The Great-Aunt Maud she remembered, despite her assumed vagueness and love of drama, had possessed more than her fair share of her nephew’s astuteness. Could it be that Maud had summoned her, not so much because she needed help in keeping the twins under control, but because she saw that they needed something more than mere discipline, and perhaps because she was hoping that, given the similarity of their childhood, Rebecca might be able to reach out and give the twins the reassurance and love they so obviously needed.
She was still turning these thoughts over in her mind as she drove in past the gates to Aysgarth. The house had been built by a Victorian Aysgarth who had made his money from the boom in railways and promptly retired to Cumbria with his wife and family.
It was a large, square building, more sturdy than elegant, three storeys high with deep, ample cellars. The sturdy Victorian furniture had been retained by the various generations of Aysgarths to inhabit the house, so that the rooms possessed an air of solid comfort rather than fashionable luxury.
It was a house in which one instantly felt at home, or at least that had always been Rebecca’s impression of it as a child. As she drove past the front door to park her car, she saw that the back door was standing open.
Aysgarth was remote enough for its inhabitants not to need to worry about the intentions of any passing caller, and as Rebecca got out of the car she heard a familiar shrill barking and kneeled down just in time to wad off the ecstatic welcome of a spaniel of rather large size and dubious parentage.
The best thing that could probably be said about Sophy was that she was extremely affectionate, the worst that she was also extremely scatty. As an adult Rebecca had always been rather surprised that Frazer of all people, so meticulous, so hard-edged and determined about everything he did, should actually have given house room to this overexuberant little stray who had wandered into the grounds of Aysgarth House a few weeks before Rebecca’s own eighteenth birthday. She had been the one who had found her and who had taken her into the house, bundling her shivering, soaking form in a towel and rubbing her dry till she stopped shivering.
She had pleaded with Norty to be allowed to keep the dog until Frazer came back from the Institute. In those days he had not headed the impressive and very important scientific institute whose work was always shrouded in so much secrecy, but he had still worked hard with very long hours, and it had been almost nine o’clock that evening before he had put her mind at rest and announced that yes, she could keep the stray, providing no one turned up to claim it.
Within twenty-four hours of being in the household, Sophy had firmly and determinedly attached herself to Frazer, becoming not her dog, but Frazer’s. However, it seemed she had remembered her, Rebecca reflected as she bent down and scratched behind the long floppy ears.
‘Ah, Rebecca! I thought it must be you.’ Silver-haired, pink-and white-skinned, dressed always in lavender, cream or black, Great-Aunt Maud, Rebecca had often thought, would surely look far more at home in some genteel establishment in Bournemouth rather than up here in the granite hills of Cumbria.
Indeed she had for a time after being widowed lived in the south of England, but immediately upon Frazer’s request to her to come and take charge of the house she had given up that life and had remained at Aysgarth ever since.
‘Ten to four—excellent!’ she announced approvingly, waiting for Rebecca to join her, ‘I’ve already warned Mrs Norton that you would be here for afternoon tea. The twins are upstairs washing their hands and faces and changing out of those disgusting jeans all children seem to insist on wearing these days. I can’t think what the world’s coming to. In my day little girls dressed like little girls,’ she added disapprovingly, ‘not in this ridiculous dual-sex uniform of jeans that everyone seems to favour these days.’
Rebecca, remembering her own mother’s gentle remonstrations and explanations when she herself had protested bitterly about the smocked velvet dress Aunt Maud had insisted on buying for her the Christmas she was twelve years old, considering herself far too grown-up for such a childish outfit, repressed a small smile.
‘And while I think about it,’Aunt Maud continued, ‘that’s another thing that will have to be sorted out. Both of them need new clothes. Such a nuisance, that girl Frazer appointed leaving the way she did.’
‘Why did she leave?’ asked Rebecca quietly, curious to hear what her aunt would say, wondering exactly how much Maud knew about the twins’ plans.
The hallway to Aysgarth was large and square with a parquet floor and an impressive carved wooden staircase running up three sides of it. At the rear of the hall was a large stained glass window, depicting various scenes of relevance to the original builder of the house, including one displaying the arms and colours of the railway which had made him his money.
‘Oh, I expect it was the usual thing,’ snorted Maud, startling Rebecca for a moment until she added in explanation, ‘too few young men and not enough to do on her days and evening off.Young girls these days don’t know how fortunate they are,’ she continued severely. ‘In my day, a girl was expected to get married whether she wanted to or not. We didn’t have the freedom you do these days. I’m glad to see you haven’t rushed into marriage, Rebecca,’ she added approvingly, then rather spoilt the effect of this phrase by adding musingly, ‘How old are you now? It must be nearly thirty, surely.’
‘Twenty-six, actually,’Rebecca told her, feeling irritated with herself for her own defensive correction of her aunt’s over-estimation of her age.
‘Twenty-six—mm…A very sensible age for a young woman, I’ve always thought.’
Rebecca wasn’t sure if she actually liked being described as sensible, but she put aside the thought to examine later, following her aunt into what was always described as the small sitting-room, although in fact it was a well-proportioned room that faced south and because of that was a favourite room for the family’s daytime use.
The yellow damask curtains had faded over the years to a soft appealing primrose. Rory and Frazer’s mother had replaced the original covers on the settees and chairs with new ones in a rich blue which had now also faded pleasantly. The walls were hung with straw-coloured silk and a faded blue and gold rug covered the parquet floor.
The familiar sight of her aunt’s embroidery frame standing to one side of the fireplace took Rebecca back to her own childhood. She had never actually seen a piece of embroidery completed by Aunt Maud, and she had a shrewd suspicion that the old lady adopted the embroidery as a skilful means of extricating herself from any duties she didn’t wish to perform.
‘Mrs Norton will bring tea through in a second. In the meantime, tell me, my dear, how are your parents and Robert and his family?’
‘They’re very well,’ Rebecca told her, describing the exploits of her niece and nephew to her as relayed to her through the medium of her sister-in-law’s latest letter.
‘Such a pity you couldn’t have gone to Australia with your parents,’ Aunt Maud commented, then pursed her lips and added thoughtfully, ‘although in the circumstances…’
She broke off as Mrs Norton came in, pushing a tea trolley. The housekeeper beamed when she saw Rebecca, who quickly and fondly embraced her, asking her how she was. It was a good five minutes before she left, confirming that she would go upstairs and find out what was delaying the twins.
‘So why didn’t you go with your parents, my dear?’ Aunt Maud pursued as she poured the tea. ‘Is there perhaps a young man in London?’
Mischievously Rebecca deliberately pretended not to understand, frowning and looking quite as vague as her aunt as she asked innocently.
‘A young man? London is full of young men, Aunt Maud. Which one was it in particular?’
‘You know exactly what I mean, Rebecca,’ Aunt Maud interrupted her sternly. ‘Is there a particular young man in your life whose presence there made you prefer to stay in London rather than to accompany your parents?’
Cautiously Rebecca hesitated, then said lightly, and not altogether untruthfully, ‘There isn’t one particular young man, Aunt Maud, but I do have several men friends whom I date from time to time.’
‘Date?’ snorted Aunt Maud. ‘What kind of word is that, and you an English teacher as well? These young men—are their intentions towards you serious, or…’
Rebecca couldn’t help it—she burst out laughing.
‘They’re friends, Aunt Maud. People whose company I enjoy.’ She broke off as the sitting-room door opened and the twins came in. A complete metamorphosis appeared to have taken place, not only in their clothes but also in their attitude. Nothing could have been more friendly or appealing than the way they both welcomed her, Rebecca acknowledged, and perhaps because of that and because of what she knew she deliberately decided to punish them a little, waiting until Maud had performed the necessary introductions and the twins were settled with their milk and biscuits before opening her handbag and removing the handkerchief as though to blow her nose.
When the shards of glass fell on to the floor, she looked at them in feigned surprise, meanwhile watching the twins’ faces. Peter’s showed a sharp stab of fear and guilt; Helen’s on the other hand remained impassive after one brief lightning look into her own face.
‘Rebecca, what on earth…?’Aunt Maud began.
Rebecca quickly apologised, getting down on the floor to remove the glass and saying quickly, ‘Good heavens, I’d forgotten about that! I found it on the road. Luckily I’d stopped the car to look at the view—if I hadn’t I would have been bound to have run over it, doing heaven alone knows what damage to the car.’
