Nightingales (Warrender Saga Book 11)

by Mary Burchell

  NIGHTINGALES

  Mary Burchell

  © Mary Burchell 1980

  Mary Burchell has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1980 by Harlequin.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter One

  ‘Oh, Nan!’ Amanda sniffed appreciatively as she came into the breakfast room of her brother’s small hotel. ‘How delicious your coffee always smells. And just look at the sunlight on that blossom——’ she crossed the room to the deep bay window and looked out with pleasure on the untidy garden. ‘It’s the sort of day when you feel just anything might happen, isn’t it?’

  For a moment neither of the other two people in the room showed signs of pursuing this optimistic line of thought. Then her brother grinned and said, ‘I presume you mean anything nice might happen?’

  ‘Does anything nice ever happen around here?’ his wife put in shortly. And Amanda swung round to exclaim reproachfully, ‘Nan, you know it does!’

  ‘For you perhaps.’ Nan pushed back her still gleaming fair hair with both hands, and Amanda noticed for the first time that there were a few fine lines on that once smooth forehead.

  ‘For all of us,’ asserted Henry firmly. ‘We balanced the books last month with even quite a bit in hand. We’re over the hump so far as the winter off-season is concerned—and here’s a letter from young Clive saying that school is super and do we feel like sending a small advance on his pocket money in view of the fact that he’s come top in French!’

  Nan laughed reluctantly, but she picked up the letter with a show of genuine interest, for if there was one thing in the world calculated to resign her to what she regarded as her rather unfair lot it was the existence of her nine-year-old son. Indeed, she immediately became absorbed in his schoolboy effusion to the exclusion of everything else, not even looking up when her husband pushed back his empty plate, got up from the table and limped out of the room.

  It was Amanda who looked after him with a faint shadow now on the usual brightness of her face and an irrepressible tightening at the corners of her mouth. For although there were times when she felt desperately sorry for her lovely sister-in-law, there were other times—like now—when she could cheerfully have slapped her. Admittedly life had dealt Nan some cruel blows. But then that was a way life had; and Nan was not the only one in the family to have had to discover that sad truth.

  Once, a few years ago, Amanda had ventured to point out that Henry too had had his share of ill luck. But Nan’s face had hardened and she had replied with astonishing bitterness. ‘It was Henry’s own fault. He should never have gone on as a racing motorist once he was a married man. I begged him to give it up. There were half a dozen things he could have done then. He was young and brilliant and the fittest thing on earth. But he wouldn’t listen to me.’

  ‘But he let you follow your chosen career,’ Amanda said, trying not to feel too resentful on her brother’s behalf. ‘He raised no objection to your going on with your training as a singer, did he?’

  ‘Why should he?’ was the scornful reply. ‘I wasn’t risking my life. Just living in perpetual fear because he was risking his. He would say, “You have fun with your singing, darling, and I’ll have fun with the cars.” As though the two things were in any way comparable!’

  ‘Nan, he wasn’t indifferent to your anxiety. It was just that—oh, he was always car-crazy. Even when I was a little girl I knew that.’

  ‘Yes——’ suddenly Nan’s voice was dejected rather than bitter. ‘He didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. It was like a drug. Then when I found Clive was coming I hoped the responsibility of a child might make Henry give up racing. But there was no question of it. He was sweet to me about the new situation, as anxious as I was that I shouldn’t abandon the career I was just starting. He would have given me anything—except peace of mind. No care or expense was too much to see that Clive was looked after perfectly so that I could be free. And then—the accident happened.’

  ‘Oh, Nan——’ Amanda had ached with sympathy for her sister-in-law at that moment. ‘I can just imagine——’

  ‘You can’t imagine at all,’ was the harsh rejoinder. ‘You were just a kid at school, with an elder brother who had had an accident. I was his wife—the mother of a young child—with my life in ruins. For those first few months he just lay there like a log, and they told me he would never even walk again.’

  ‘But he did!’ Amanda protested, her voice thick in her throat with emotion. ‘He did.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That at least was granted to us.’ Nan gave a short, not very pleasant laugh. ‘But precious little else.’ She was silent for a moment, as though contemplating again the depths of despair into which she had been thrust. Then she spoke again almost coldly. ‘You know that was what really killed your father, don’t you?’

  ‘It was nothing of the kind!’ Amanda spoke in pain and anger, her voice running up on to a high note of protest. ‘Father had a poor heart condition for the last three years of his life.’

  ‘And what do you suppose that sort of shock did for an elderly man with a poor heart condition?’ replied Nan drily. ‘I saw him when he stood beside Henry’s bed and realised the truth—that he could hardly even move his head. You didn’t. You were at boarding school. You were out of it all.’

  ‘I know you carried the heaviest burden of us all, Nan,’ Amanda said earnestly. ‘Particularly as Mother had died the previous year. But that was what administered the first shock to Dad’s weak heart, you know. You can’t blame Henry for that.’

  ‘I wasn’t blaming him, exactly. At least, I don’t think I was.’ Nan shrugged and gave a slight wry smile. ‘I suppose it’s just that one can’t help being bitter at times.’

  ‘I do understand,’ Amanda insisted eagerly. ‘And I simply don’t know what we should all have done without you.’

  ‘Well, nor do I,’ was the candid reply, but that time Nan’s smile was kinder and had a hint of real humour in it. ‘Anyway, I was glad when you came to live with us, Mandy—’ she seldom used that affectionate form of Amanda’s name, and it warmed Amanda’s heart—‘don’t ever think anything else, even when I’m in a foul temper. You’re a good kid. I doubt if many young girls today would work the way you do. And at such dreary tasks too! Domestic chores are the end, so far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I really don’t mind them,’ Amanda declared. ‘I like to see results for what I’m doing. And having our own small hotel is rather fun in some ways. Though, there again, so much depends on you,’ she conceded generously. ‘I daresay I do put in some hard work, and Henry is marvellous with the books and popular with all the guests. But without your fantastic cooking we wouldn’t be building up such a reputation. We’d just be another average, prettily situated hotel.’

  ‘Well—’ at the end of that conversation Nan had touched Amanda’s shoulder not unkindly, but she sighed too—‘that’s some consolation, anyway, when I recall my youthful visions of myself bowing from a stage or platform to a cheering audience, with my arms full of flowers.’

  Nan seldom spoke now of her earlier musical aspirations. But whenever she did Amanda experienced an uneasy twinge of conscience; for this was the one subject on which she had felt bound to be less than candid with her sister-in-law. Here
indeed she understood to the last degree Nan’s sense of frustration and grievance. For what, Amanda asked herself, would she have felt if her singing lessons—those almost surreptitious singing lessons which meant so much to her—had had to come to an end?

  Sometimes—on a bright, not too busy morning like this, for instance—she would allow herself to look back on what had happened, and even, with some trepidation, forward a little to what might happen.

  Amanda had been twelve when her adored elder brother had married, and she had been immediately willing to love her new sister-in-law without a trace of jealousy. Nan had been so gay in those days. Gay and charming and talented. And if her career was hardly more than in the budding stages, to Amanda it seemed she was already a star. It had been wonderful to be a bridesmaid to this gorgeous creature and later a proud young aunt to Clive when he made his unexpected appearance in the second year of the marriage.

  And then tragedy had struck—not once, but several times. First there had been the death of her mother, from pneumonia which followed with terrifying suddenness on a foolishly neglected cold.

  Amanda had always loved both her parents dearly, but she had never been in any doubt which was the dominant one in the partnership. Energetic, slightly managing and infinitely capable, the older Mrs Lovett had directed, loved, guided and cossetted her husband and daughter. Both of them had tended to lean on her (as indeed she wanted them to do), her charming, not very forceful husband to a greater degree than the daughter who had in her own composition something of her mother’s strength and energy. When she died so suddenly the shock to the very foundations of existence had been almost as painful as the grief and bewilderment which overwhelmed both father and daughter.

  Amanda was young enough to rally and come to terms with a very different home situation, and during her school holidays she had done her best to be a prop and comfort to her father. But the core had gone out of existence for him. And when the other fearful shock of Henry’s accident occurred, he seemed to give up even the wish to live and just faded out of a life which had ceased to be of much interest to him.

  Without doubt it was Nan who had borne the brunt of the family tragedies in those early days. But presently Henry, with the determination, courage and sheer will-power which had made him such a brilliant racing driver, fought his way back to a certain degree of health. He had some capital left—though as always in these sad circumstances rather less than had been anticipated—and, after one or two attempts to carve out a new profession for himself, he sank almost everything he had in the purchase of a charming private hotel in one of the most attractive parts of Hampshire. Secluded enough to be appealing but sufficiently near to the main roads to be easily accessible, it offered at least a fifty-fifty chance of good development.

  It was a gamble, of course. But then Henry was a gambler. He had been used to gambling with death in his time as a racing driver, and his incurable optimism carried him, and his family, through the first difficult years. Even optimism, however, would not have been enough if Nan had not proved herself to be, in addition to her other talents, a caterer with a touch of something like genius. Just as she had displayed style and charm and a sort of star quality in her early attempts at a public career, so she displayed the same qualities in the model kitchen which she insisted on having in their family hotel.

  ‘Most singers are good cooks,’ she had declared, with some truth, and she proceeded to prove the truth of this adage, at least so far as she herself was concerned. Today she could no longer lay much claim to being a singer, but she could certainly claim to be an outstanding cook, with a growing reputation in the country around and a capacity for astonishing the casual visitor.

  When Amanda left school she almost automatically joined the family enterprise, carrying with her the one secret she could not disclose to Nan, of all people. But it is hard to tread upon one’s dreams, particularly when one is young. So Amanda cherished her dreams, even if they sometimes had to be crowded into odd corners of her busy life.

  It had been in her last year at school, just before her eighteenth birthday, that what she secretly thought of as The Discovery had been made. She had always enjoyed her school music lessons and had, for what that was worth, been a leading soprano in the school choir. The head of the music section happened to be not only a highly gifted woman but an ambitious and adventurous one as well. School concerts under her were neither conventional nor drably worthy. In with performances of the better known works for school choirs were mixed occasional modern works of genuine merit.

  ‘Nothing trashy or trendy just because it happens to have been composed last year,’ Miss Egerton once said to Amanda. ‘Always remember there is no virtue in anything just because it is new, any more than just because it is old. Though works which have stood the test of time are likely to surpass those which are untried. New works can prove to be great discoveries or great bores. More frequently the latter, unfortunately,’ she added drily. ‘However, I propose to take a chance this time on Jerome Leydon’s new cantata. You have heard of Jerome Leydon, of course?’

  Amanda said, with comparative truth, that she had. By which she meant that the name was vaguely familiar to her, but if he had turned out to be a distinguished scientist or politician (if such there be) she would not have been in a position to query the statement.

  ‘There is a beautiful little soprano solo in the work, and I propose to let you sing it,’ Miss Egerton went on. ‘It lies well for your voice and, if you work hard on it, you might make quite a success of it.’

  So Amanda, who fell in love with the eminently singable air as soon as she heard it, worked hard; and on the night of the concert she made more than ‘quite a success’ and was warmly congratulated by several parents. This was both comforting and encouraging since no one from her own family had been able to be present.

  Afterwards, when audience and performers were being regaled with weakish coffee and the kind of conventional sandwiches which would never have found a place on any menu composed by Nan, a tall young man with untidy dark hair and unexpectedly blue eyes came up to her and said, ‘You have a very unusual voice. Who taught you to sing?’

  ‘Well—no one, in the sense of private singing lessons,’ Amanda replied. ‘I have piano lessons here at school, but I suppose any singing lessons would consist of what I’ve picked up at choir practice with Miss Egerton, our music teacher.’

  ‘Then you must be a natural,’ declared the young man, which Amanda found less than flattering since she had always understood a ‘natural’ to be only two removes from the village idiot.

  ‘Vocally speaking, of course,’ added the young man, evidently reading her thoughts, and he smiled suddenly with a brilliance which lit up his face to an almost startling degree. ‘Have you any plans to have that voice trained? It’s worth it, you know. So far it’s a perfectly fresh, healthy organ which has had no harm done to it. There isn’t much subtlety, of course, and there are virtually no nuances. If you take my advice——’

  ‘Is there any special reason why I should take your advice?’ interrupted Amanda, nettled by his assumption of authority towards the ‘natural’.

  ‘Only if you know what’s good for you.’ he replied, and again that brilliant smile flashed out. ‘But I did compose the air you sang and have some idea of how it should go.’

  ‘Oh!’ she gasped, ‘You mean you’re Jerome Leydon? I’m terribly sorry. I had no idea——’

  ‘No need to be sorry. My sister tells me I’m often offensive when I’m laying down the law about my own profession. I expect it’s really I who should apologise. But I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to repeat—Have you any plans about having your voice trained?’

  Amanda shook her head slowly. ‘It would—be difficult,’ she said in a low voice, for suddenly she had remembered Nan.

  ‘Aren’t difficulties there to be overcome?’ he challenged her bracingly. ‘The artist who succeeds has usually had to tackle a good many of them. Where do yo
u live?’

  She told him, and he frowned consideringly and finally said, ‘You’re quite near Austin Parva, then?’

  ‘About three miles away. I sometimes cycle over there when——’

  ‘Oh, you cycle, do you? Come, that makes it easier,’ he interrupted with an air of arranging her future for her. ‘There’s a very good organist and choirmaster there at St Mary’s. Do you know him?—No?—Well, you might not. He’s only recently settled there. But he’s already doing very fine work with that choir. You’d better see if you can join, if only in your school holidays. He might give you some individual lessons, which would be very good for you. Contact him when you’re around there, and tell him I sent you.’

  And then he walked away, just exactly as though he had some sort of right to advise—even order—her what to do with her life.

  Amanda, who was not at all the doormat type of girl, was faintly annoyed. But she would not have been human if she had not also been intrigued. To have an interest taken in her musical development by a real live composer—a composer moreover who had written the lovely air she had just sung with such good effect—was both flattering and exciting. If only there had not been the complication of Nan and her frustrated ambitions! For how could she, who had been so cruelly robbed of her own musical hopes, be expected to accept into her home circle someone who was striving to succeed where she had failed?

  But Jerome Leydon had said that difficulties were there to be overcome. And, however little she felt inclined to take what had almost amounted to orders from him, what he had said had appealed strongly to Amanda’s own innermost beliefs. What were challenges for if one did not respond to them?

  It was some while before she was able to act on his advice—or her own inclinations. But, once her schooldays were over and she had settled into the routine of life in the family hotel, she began to look around for an opportunity to make some contact with St Mary’s Church in Austin Parva. Though how she was to do this without offence or hurt to her sister-in-law she really could not imagine.