CHAPTER ONE
‘REBECCA my dear…such a relief! For one moment when you didn’t answer the phone straight away I thought perhaps you’d decided to fly out to Australia to see your parents and brother. How is dear Robert, by the way, and Ailsa and the girls? They must be getting quite big now. How old are they? Four and two, isn’t it? It’s…’
‘Aunt Maud,’ Rebecca interrupted firmly, tucking the receiver under her chin, and trying to concentrate on the essays she was marking while at the same time following the convoluted drift of her great-aunt’s vague conversation.
‘Ah, yes…The reason I’m ringing you, my dear, is that I desperately need your help.’
Her help? Rebecca’s frown wasn’t caused entirely by the essay of a pupil who was destined to follow his father into the latter’s merchant bank, and yet at ten years old still seemed to think the word instalment possessed a double ‘l’.
‘My help?’ She couldn’t resist the faintly ironic underlining of the possessive pronoun. At the other end of the line in faraway Cumbria there was the kind of humming silence that told her that her point had been made.
‘Well, my dear, there was simply no one else I could turn to,’ came the dramatic response. Aunt Maud at her thespian best, Rebecca reflected ruefully, catching the note of pathos that had been added to her great-aunt’s original vagueness. ‘I would have got in touch with your mother, but since she’s in Australia…’
A slight suspicion of aggrieved irritation there, Rebecca suspected, and no wonder. She could well imagine that, whatever kind of help it was she needed, Maud Aysgarth would rather have approached her soft-hearted and far too put-upon mother than herself.
Her mind was more on her marking than her aunt’s conversation. Those people who believed that schoolteachers did nothing during the long school holidays really ought to see her desk right now, loaded down as it was, not only with the end-of-term essays from the pupils she taught at an exclusive co-educational private prep school, but also the uncompleted work schedules and plans for the coming autumn and winter terms, she reflected grimly. She loved teaching and always had, and counted herself privileged to have a job teaching in a school as well equipped and well run as the one she did…a private London prep school whose pupils were on the whole well-behaved and keen to learn.
Thinking of her work caused her to lose the thread of her aunt’s conversation; after all, what could there possibly be to worry about at Aysgarth with Frazer in charge?
Aysgarth was Frazer’s private kingdom, a kingdom in which nothing was allowed to go wrong, nothing allowed to intrude which Frazer did not want intruding, as she knew to her cost.
Aysgarth was a granite-hard house owned by a granite-hard man. And yet she loved the house, and once she had thought…
‘So you see, my dear, with Frazer away and myself in charge, there was really no one else I could turn to. I don’t know how long it will take you to get up here, but…’
Get up there? Had Aunt Maud gone mad or had she? She must know quite well that if Frazer hadn’t actually forbidden Rebecca to put as much as a fingertip on Aysgarth property, then he had certainly made it quite plain that her presence was not one he wanted or welcomed, and why. Rebecca laughed mirthlessly and soundlessly to herself. Why? Because once she had been idiotic enough to want to protect him from hurt. For that she had been condemned and ostracised, made to feel as though she were a Judas and worse.
Dear God, the last thing she needed right now was to start walking down that painful path again. It was over, in the past…totally without relevance to her life. A good life—a life filled with a job she enjoyed, friends who shared her interests and tastes, men who took her out, flattered her, flirted with her and, above all, did not look at her with cold grey eyes, the colour of ice, so dark with contempt and bitterness that they shrivelled her very soul.
She was happy, content; her life was rich and full. There was no room in it for useless daydreams, for might-have-beens. She was twenty-six years old, mature, well adjusted, self-sufficient.
Or she had been until Great-Aunt Maud had started interfering in her life, reminding her of things best forgotten. And then something her aunt had said hit her.
‘Frazer isn’t at Aysgarth? But he must be! Rory and Lillian left the children there because…’
‘That’s just what I’m trying to tell you, my dear. Frazer was here, but at the very last minute he had to take over from one of his colleagues, who was due to give a lecture tour in the States. Frazer had no option but to go in his place, as Head of the Institute. He’ll be gone for nearly three months.’
‘Three months?’ Rebecca was appalled. ‘What about the children?’ From what her mother had told her, Frazer’s niece and nephew, his brother’s children, were a pretty unruly pair, who required a very firm hand on the reins. Eight-year-old twins whose easygoing father had never made any real attempt to discipline them, and who with their mother had calmly dumped them on Frazer eight months ago, so that he could take up a new job in Hong Kong.
‘Well, Frazer did make proper arrangements for them,’ Aunt Maud was saying defensively. She had always hated anyone criticising Frazer. After his and Rory’s parents had been killed in an air crash she had moved into Aysgarth House at Frazer’s request. He had been eighteen then and Rory a much younger twelve. ‘He hired a young woman to take charge of them.’
A sniff accompanied the almost scathing words ‘a young woman’, and Rebecca, who had heard all about the twins’ exploits from her mother who regularly kept in touch with Frazer, her much younger cousin, repressed a faint sigh of sympathy for the girl concerned.
‘What’s happened to her?’Rebecca asked drily.
‘She’s left—handed in her notice and said that there was no way she was going to be responsible for the twins. Undisciplined brats, was how she referred to them.’
In her mind’s eye, Rebecca pictured her great-aunt’s magnificently Edwardian bosom heaving in righteous indignation at this slur on the Aysgarth line, but she was long past being intimidated by the long shadow that name had once cast across her life—a long, long time ago when she had been awed and impressed by the stories her mother had told her about her ancestors’ long-ago deeds of valour.
Holidays spent at Aysgarth had not helped to dispel the awe—not with Frazer there, ten years her senior. Darkly if rather grimly handsome even in those days, a silent spectator of hers and Rory’s games, a dark-visaged god who had walked casually into her life and her heart.
‘Well, aren’t they?’ she said wryly now, groaningly dismissing her own ridiculous vulnerabilities.
There was a moment’s silence and then her great-aunt admitted with obvious difficulty, ‘Perhaps they are a little high-spirited, but at their age…’
‘They’re out of control,’ Rebecca interrupted crisply, ‘and I suspect that one of the reasons Rory has dumped them on Frazer
is that he hopes that Frazer will apply some of that famous discipline of his on them. What they really need is to go to a good school where their energies and high spirits will be channelled properly.’
‘Exactly!’Maud pounced eagerly. ‘That’s just why I’m ringing you…with your teaching experience.’Much, much too late Rebecca saw the trap closing fast around her. ‘Of course, if your dear mother were here…However, I remember how much you enjoyed staying at Aysgarth as a child…all those long summer holidays…’
Rebecca silently and grimly acknowledged the application of a generous amount of emotional pressure to her aunt’s argument. Without actually putting it into so many words, her aunt was implying that it was her duty to drop everything and go haring off to Cumbria in order to take charge of Rory’s twins…that she owed it to the family to do so.
A dozen good reasons why she ought to refuse came readily and easily to mind; not the least of them the fact that she had already made tentative plans to spend at least part of her summer break touring Greece with some friends, but even as the words formed she found herself being relentlessly and determinedly dragged into her great-aunt’s carefully woven net.
She made one last bid for freedom, saying desperately, ‘Aunt Maud, you know that Frazer won’t like it!’
There was a telling silence and then her aunt’s voice, vague and faintly ominously tired, saying plaintively, ‘Oh, dear…but, Rebecca, that was all so long ago. I’m sure Frazer has forgotten all about it. He never was one to hold a grudge…such a silly quarrel anyway.’
Silly or not, it had been important enough to keep her away from Aysgarth for the eight years, and to keep Frazer from inviting her there.
They had met twice in all that time; once briefly at the twins’ christening…an appearance which pride alone had demanded she put in when, as she remembered all too well, Frazer had treated her with grim and very determined silence, as though she had physically ceased to exist.
The second occasion had been when her brother Robert and Ailsa had got married. She had been bridesmaid, Rory’s two toddlers attendants along with some of Ailsa’s cousins, and in the hurly-burly of looking after half a dozen assorted children, she had managed to avoid any kind of direct confrontation with Frazer very nicely indeed.
To have her presence requested, almost demanded, in fact, at Aysgarth after all this time was the last thing she had expected.
If Frazer had been there it would have been impossible for her to go…not because of his dislike of her, but for the sake of her own pride, but of course, he wasn’t there. If he had been there the problem wouldn’t have arisen in the first place; but the problem had arisen, and despite all her doubts, all the reasons why she ought firmly but pleasantly to refuse to go to her great-aunt’s aid, she knew that she couldn’t do it.
Illogical, ridiculous it might be, but there was a debt she owed, if not to Frazer himself, then at least to Maud, who had made both her and Robert so very welcome in the days when her father’s career had meant that he and their mother were so often out of the country.
Now it was her turn to repay that kindness…and repay it she must, if only to prove that whatever Frazer might think, it was by her own decision that she stayed away from Aysgarth, and not because of any stipulation of his.
Not that he had ever verbally announced that she was not to return; the veto had been more subtle than that, and more hurtful. And it had been there, no matter how much Aunt Maud might try to gloss over it now.
Knowing she was probably going to regret it, she gave in, but warned, ‘It will be the end of the week before I can get up there.’
* * *
IT WAS ONLY after she had replaced the receiver that Rebecca wondered what on earth she had committed herself to. Virtually three full months looking after two thoroughly undisciplined children, in a house whose owner both disliked and despised her.
Her flatmate was astounded when she told her what she had agreed to do.
‘But you had so much planned!’ she expostulated. ‘The trip to Greece, and…’
‘I know, but it is an emergency and I felt obliged to help out. A family emergency.’
Kate Summerfield frowned at her. ‘You’ve never mentioned having family in Cumbria before—and I don’t recall you ever going to see them.’
The two girls had shared a flat since leaving university, and when Rebecca had announced four years previously that she intended to buy her own small property Kate had readily agreed to become her lodger.
‘For a very good reason,’ Rebecca told her wryly, and proceeded to explain.
‘You mean he actually banned you from visiting the house? What on earth had you done?’
Rebecca shook her head.
‘It wasn’t as obvious as that. There was no direct ban as such. It was far more subtle than that…just the intimation that my presence was no longer welcome.’
‘Why? What had you done? Pawned the family jewels or something?’ Kate joked.
‘Not exactly.’ Rebecca bit her lip. She had never discussed the reason for Frazer’s ban with anyone, not even her parents, who, like Maud, presumed that they had quarrelled about something far less serious.
‘It’s rather a long story,’ she said slowly, groping for the right words, suddenly almost desperately wanting to unburden herself to someone. Her conversation with Maud had resurrected old hurts, opened old wounds, and the need to share them with someone overpowered her normal reticence on the subject.
Kate looked speculatively at her and said, ‘I’ve got plenty of time. Come on, tell me all about it.’
‘Well, it was just after my eighteenth birthday. My parents were away at the time out in South America. I was going to spend the summer holiday at Aysgarth as usual. Rory came to collect me from school. He wanted to show off his new car. He’d been married about six months then, and Lillian was expecting the twins.
‘Frazer hadn’t wanted him to get married. He thought he was too young at twenty-one to make such a commitment, but Rory overruled him. I could tell the moment he picked me up that something was wrong—we’d always got on very well together.’
‘Just like brother and sister?’ Kate interposed questioningly.
Rebecca returned her look and said truthfully, ‘Exactly like brother and sister. I asked him what was wrong and on the way home he told me. He’d been having an affair and Frazer had found out. They’d been seen together and somehow or other Frazer had got to know about it. Frazer was demanding to know who it was that he was involved with.’
‘And?’ probed Kate as Rebecca’s voice slowed down.
‘And Rory didn’t want to tell him.You see, the woman he’d been involved with was actually Frazer’s girlfriend. She and her family had only recently moved to the area and Rory seemed to think that Frazer was pretty keen on her.’
‘And?’ Kate probed again.
Rebecca shrugged her shoulders tiredly. ‘It’s all very simple really. Rory asked me if I’d let him tell Frazer that it had been me he’d been involved with.’ She gave a faint sigh. ‘I suppose it was naïve of me, but when Rory said how much Frazer loved Michelle and how much it would hurt him if he found out that she and Rory had been having an affair—well, I…’
‘You were eighteen years old, desperately in love and only too anxious to do anything you could to save the object of that love from pain,’ Kate hazarded wryly.
Rebecca laughed a little sadly. ‘Was I so very obvious?’ she questioned.
Her friend shook her head. ‘It all fits. I take it you were in love with this Frazer.’
‘I certainly thought I was,’ Rebecca agreed drily, ‘although, in the light of the events that followed, that love very quickly turned to hatred. It was never any more than a teenage crush really,’ she added dismissively.
It had rather jolted her that Kate had so easily recognised her true feelings, and she wondered how many other people at the time had known exactly how she’d felt about Frazer. She had certainly done very littl
e to hide her adoration of him.
‘Are you trying to tell me that this Frazer actually believed you were having an affair with Rory?’ Kate asked in some astonishment.
Rebecca frowned. ‘Well, yes. Well, yes, he did. He was furious about it, of course—accused me of trying to break up Rory’s marriage, pointed out that Rory’s wife was expecting, said all the usual sort of things one might expect.’
‘And he really genuinely had no idea that you were making it up?’
‘No,’ Rebecca told her blankly. ‘Why?’
Kate shrugged and said drily, ‘Well, no reason. He seems a bit of an idiot, though—first of all he doesn’t realise the girl he’s in love with is having an affair with his brother and then he believes that the girl who loves him is having an affair with his brother. A bit dense, is he?’ she questioned.
Rebecca’s frown deepened. ‘No, he isn’t. In fact if anything he’s extremely perceptive—too perceptive sometimes.’
Kate said nothing, but the look she gave her friend said it all for her.
‘He would have wanted to believe me,’ Rebecca told her defensively, without even knowing why she should want to defend Frazer. He certainly didn’t deserve it, nor need it, not when she remembered the tongue-lashing he had given her when Rory had confessed to him that it was she with whom he had been involved.
‘You mean it was preferable to believe that you were guilty of enticing his brother into an extramarital relationship rather than his girlfriend?’ Kate demanded scathingly. ‘That isn’t perception, Rebecca, it’s sheer bloody-minded stupidity. What happened?’ she asked offhandedly. ‘About his relationship with the girlfriend, I mean.’
Rebecca frowned again. ‘That’s the odd thing about it all, really. It just sort of petered out. Well, at least that’s the impression that the rest of the family seemed to have. I suppose pride kept Frazer from admitting the truth to anyone, that he’d loved her and lost her.’
‘Mmm,’ Kate commented absently. She appeared to be concentrating on a small speck of fluff on the carpet. ‘And the two of you kept your distance from one another ever since, is that it?’