by Penny Jordan
‘Why not, when it’s true?’ Susie protested, showing signs of the stubbornness she was cursed with possessing herself, Maggie recognised on a wave of sympathy for the younger girl.
‘It may not be so bad,’ she told her.
‘Yes, it will. Isobel hates us. She can’t wait to get rid of us. I heard her telling her mother that there was no way she was going to put up with having us hanging around.’ She scowled again. ‘Anyway, I think Marcus is only marrying her because he thinks we need a woman’s influence…’
‘Well, that’s what I heard Mrs Simmonds—she’s the vicar’s wife, you know—saying to him. She said she thought it was time we had a woman’s influence in our lives and that we were growing up very quickly, and then less than a month later Marcus and Isobel got engaged.’
‘I’m sure that was just a coincidence, Susie,’ Maggie told her firmly.
‘Well, I don’t think so. If Marcus really wanted to get married, why should he wait until now? He’s pretty old, you know,’ she told her with all a teenager’s scorn for anyone over the age of eighteen. He’s thirty-seven, and he’s never been engaged before…’
‘Yes, he was…a long time ago,’ Maggie said painfully, forcing herself to make the admission as she saw in Susie’s eyes the younger girl’s determination to do all she could to break the engagement. She could not allow it to happen…could not allow Marcus to suffer a second time, and it came to her as she looked down into the pretty, flushed face of her cousin that here, perhaps, was the means of her salvation…her way to make reparation and in so doing to free herself from the past for ever.
‘When?’ Susie asked her, immediately diverted. ‘Was it when you lived here? What happened?’
‘I…it’s all a long time ago,’ Maggie told her feebly, wishing she had never made the betraying comment, and then adding firmly, ‘And anyway, I haven’t come all this long way to talk about Marcus…’
‘But you don’t like Isobel either, do you?’ Susie asked slyly.
Her perception was almost frightening, Maggie acknowledged, unable to deny her assertion.
‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ Susie asked her, changing the subject, and Maggie shook her head quellingly.
‘No, and I don’t intend to discuss my private life with you, Susie. You asked me to come and I’m here, and while I’ll do all I can to try to persuade Marcus to let you stay at home, I can’t promise to be successful. However, you must promise me that if I’m not, you won’t try to do anything to hurt Marcus or to…’
‘To hurt him? as if I would!’ Susie was immediately indignant and Maggie shook, remembering how once she would have replied just as passionately.
‘You may not think of it as hurting him if you try to break his engagement, but it will,’ Maggie told her quietly, and then added thoughtfully, ‘Are you really so sure you don’t want to go to boarding-school? They can be great fun, and wouldn’t it be better to be there than to stay here and be unhappy?’
‘No,’ Susie told her stubbornly, but it was the tears in her eyes and not her vehemence that weakened Maggie’s heart. It had been years since they had last met and yet immediately there was a bond between them, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to open her arms and hold the coltish teenage body in them, while Susie sobbed out her frustration and fear.
‘Darling, I wish there was something I could do…but I’m not your guardian and Marcus is…’
‘There is something,’ Susie told her, sniffling and pushing her damp hair out of her eyes. ‘You could stay here and look after us, and then Isobel wouldn’t have any excuse for sending us away…’
‘Stay here?’ Maggie was stunned, and at first completely lost for words. ‘But, Susie, I can’t do that…’
‘Why not? You could work just as easily up here as you could in London, and you said yourself you don’t have a boyfriend or anything…’
It came to Maggie as she listened to her that this was what Susie had wanted all along, that she had had the whole thing worked out, and she looked at her cousin with grim respect. She had forgotten just how Machiavellian and single-minded in their determination teenage girls could be, not hampered, as the more mature were, by the ambiguous gift of being able to see other points of view that might contrast with their own, and she surely, more than anyone else, ought to have remembered…ought to have known the dangers of that single-mindedness.
‘Susie, it just isn’t possible.’
‘You don’t have to stay forever… Just a few months, just until we can find a proper housekeeper to look after us. You see, since Mrs Nesbitt had to leave, no one wants to come and work here, because Marcus gets so bad-tempered, and Isobel is so horrid to them, always poking her nose in where it isn’t wanted. Please stay, Maggie. We need you.’
‘We need you.’ How sweet a temptation it was to give in. Deep in her heart Maggie knew there was nothing she wanted more than to stay here, to stay close to…to her family, she told herself, ignoring the betraying lurch of her heart. She couldn’t do it, though. Marcus would never let her, and even if he did, it could only be a temporary solution. Sooner or later he and Isobel would marry, and when they did…
Lost in a confusing maze of thoughts, she heard Susie say something and automatically nodded, and then to her shock she heard her give a whoop of pleasure and get to her feet, saying, ‘You will? I knew you would! Just wait until I tell Marcus.’
And she danced out of the room before Maggie could stop her, leaving her to race down the stairs after her, and arrive out of breath at the study door just as Susie bounced through it and announced happily, ‘Marcus, guess what… Maggie’s going to stay and look after us, so that we don’t need to go to boarding-school. Isn’t that great?’
From outside the room, Maggie heard Marcus’s grimly furious, ‘Oh, she is, is she?’
And out of nowhere, like a whirlwind conjured up out of nothing to devastate everything that lay in its path, came a thrill of anger so intense that she was through the door and in the room before she realised she had moved, her voice throbbing with the force of her emotions as she announced fatally, ‘Yes, I am, and before you start, there’s nothing you can do about it, Marcus. This is still my home, just as it is the girls’.’
At Marcus’s side, Susie started and looked up at him as though about to speak, but his hand on her arm restrained her.
‘I take it that nothing I can say or do will make you change your mind?’
‘Nothing,’ she replied fiercely, and it was only as the sound of her refusal died away on the tense air of the room that she realised that she had just deliberately closed her last escape route and that she was trapped. Trapped into staying…trapped into living here with Marcus…trapped in a situation she would have given the earth to avoid.
Fear flashed through her eyes and, as her gaze was drawn to focus on Marcus’s grim face, she saw in the cynical smile he gave her that he had seen her fear.
‘I’ve got several phone calls I need to make,’ she told him coldly, her chin tilting, only her pride keeping her standing where she was instead of fleeing.
What would he say if he knew that she had got herself into this mess more out of desire to protect him…to prevent him from suffering the trauma of a broken engagement a second time, than anything else? Would he even believe it? To judge from the look he was giving her, it hardly seemed likely.
CHAPTER FOUR
OF THE two sisters, Susie was very evidently the more forceful, Maggie reflected, listening without appearing to to the conversation between the two girls as they helped her to prepare supper.
She had been appalled to discover that, since Marcus’s accident, they had been virtually living on tinned and frozen food, neither girl, it seemed, having been taught to cook—something which Maggie intended to rectify just as soon as she possibly could. She was all for her sex forging its way in the world of commerce instead of being relegated to the supportive role of housewife and mother, but she saw no virtue in the girls’ inab
ility to put together a simple meal.
As she remembered how painstakingly her own mother and then theirs had passed on their domestic skills to her, she could have wept for all that Susie and Sara were missing. Why had it not occurred to her before that she might be needed here? That she might in some small way be able to repay the love and kindness she had received from her aunt and uncle after her own parents’ death by passing them on to their daughters?
Because she had been blind to everything but her own anguish…her own fear…her own inability to find the slightest excuse for what she had done.
All these years she had suffered nightmares of horrendous proportions in which she was forced by Marcus to confront the past and all that it held, and yet now that she was here he had made no reference to it. It was almost as though in some way he too preferred to forget what had happened. She could never forget…never…
‘What are you doing?’ Susie asked her curiously, interrupting her painful reverie.
‘Making pastry for a steak and kidney pie,’ she told her obligingly. She had found the tin of meat in one of the cupboards and, remembering the mouthwatering pastry her aunt used to make, had decided to use it to make the tinned meat a little more appetising. Marcus had always loved his mother’s steak and kidney pie, and the first time she had made one he had praised it generously, despite the fact that it had not rivalled her aunt’s.
‘But why are you doing that?’ Sara asked her as she skilfully dabbed small pieces of butter on to the pastry she had rolled out.
‘Because this is how you make puff pastry,’ Maggie told her, and then asked thoughtfully, ‘Didn’t Mrs Nesbitt make it this way?’
‘She always used to buy frozen pastry. She said making it herself was a waste of time,’ Sara informed her, adding, ‘She wasn’t a very good cook, was she, Susie?’
‘She was all right… Better than Mrs Bakes…and better than Isobel.’
‘Who was Mrs Bakes?’ Maggie asked, deliberately ignoring this reference to Isobel, and the challenge she could see in Susie’s eyes. She had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being manoeuvred very cleverly by the older girl, but dismissed the thought, telling herself that she was becoming neurotic.
‘She was our housekeeper after Mrs Nesbitt left. She didn’t stay long, though.’
‘No, after Marcus had his accident he was really grumpy, and when he complained about her coffee she told him she wasn’t standing for any more and that she was going,’ Susie told her with relish.
‘And since then there hasn’t been a housekeeper, is that it?’
‘Marcus advertised, but couldn’t find anyone suitable. We’re too far out from the village for someone without their own transport, and he really wanted someone to live in so that they could keep an eye on us. Why are you doing that?’ she asked curiously, watching Maggie work.
‘Because…because this is how your mother taught me to cook,’ Maggie told her.
‘Did she? Tell us about her, Maggie. What was she like?’
‘Yes, tell us,’ Sara begged, echoing her older sister.
Maggie looked at them in some surprise. ‘Hasn’t Marcus told you? I only lived here for a few years, you know.’
‘Well, he has…but you know what he’s like,’ Susie commented. ‘Men don’t understand really, do they?’ she said with an earnest maturity that made Maggie’s lips twitch a little.
‘I’m sure Marcus would if you explained just what you wanted to know and why,’ she said firmly, subduing a combined urge to laugh and cry at the same time. Marcus had loved his mother very dearly, but he had been adult when the girls were born and his memories of her would be those of a solitary and mature little boy remembering a very young mother whom he had almost exclusively to himself.
The woman she remembered, on the other hand, had been wise, with the experience of her forty-odd years of living. She had been both a mother and a wife, a woman striving hard to balance all the different aspects of her life.
She had been very interested in antique china, Maggie remembered, and very knowledgeable about it.
As she worked, she tried to communicate to the girls her memories of their mother.
‘She loved gardening,’ she told them. ‘She used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen garden. She grew all her own vegetables, I remember, and fruit. We used to spend weeks in the late summer and early autumn bottling and freezing.’
‘I like gardening,’ Sara told her, ‘but John, who comes in twice a week to look after the grounds, likes to be left on his own.’
‘Tell us some more,’ Susie pressed, elbows on the table, hands cupping her face as she stared at Maggie. The heat from the kitchen had flushed her normally pale skin, and an errant lock of hair had curled forwards to brush her cheek. Maggie pushed it out of the way automatically, watching the pleasure come and go in the young face at her instinctive action. How starved these girls must have been of all the things she had taken for granted, she thought guiltily. It was true that she had lost her parents, but all her life until she left home she had been surrounded by love and warmth…had never doubted that she was cared for and cherished. In that startled look of pleasure in Susie’s grey eyes she had seen more clearly than any amount of words could convey how desperately her cousins wanted her to stay…wanted her to love them.
‘I should have come back before.’
She wasn’t conscious of saying the words out loud until a harsh voice from the kitchen door answered her rawly, ‘So why the hell didn’t you?’
Her head snapped round, shock rounding her eyes as she saw Marcus standing in the doorway.
‘Marcus, Maggie has just been telling us about Mum,’ Susie told him excitedly, completely ignoring his question. ‘She’s been telling us about the garden…and freezing things.’
‘Yes, and she’s been showing us how Mum used to make pastry,’ Sara added.
As she saw the look in his eyes, Maggie’s heart went out to him. She ached to go up to him and touch him, to tell him that he was not to blame, that he could not have known how important these things would be to them. That he, manlike, was scarcely likely to have noticed all of his mother’s domestic expertise, her gift for turning a house into a home, other than to simply take the comforts she provided very much for granted.
Instead she quelled the urge and said quietly instead, ‘It isn’t just boys who need an adult to pattern themselves on, you know.’
And then she went white with shock and self-disgust as she remembered that, but for her, Marcus would long ago have provided them with a feminine role-model in the shape of his wife.
What had happened to her, that long-ago girl to whom he had been going to get engaged? It was scarcely the kind of question she could ask. Had she, like Isobel, heard of her own crush on Marcus?
Looking backwards did no good at all. She couldn’t alter what had happened, no matter how much she might wish it.
‘Supper won’t be long,’ she told Marcus in a stifled voice, turning her head away from him and concentrating on her pastry-making.
‘Good. Afterwards, I’d like a word with you in the study.’
There was a tense silence, into which Susie jumped, saying defiantly, ‘You aren’t going to try to persuade Maggie not to stay, are you, Marcus?’ When he made no reply, she added desperately, ‘Sara and I want her to stay. That’s why I wrote to her. Oh, why do grown-ups have to be so difficult?’ she added crossly. ‘Everyone knows that you and Maggie quarrelled and that she ran away, but whenever I ask anyone why, they all try to pretend they haven’t heard. If you did quarrel, why can’t you make it up again? After all, that’s what you’re always telling us to do.’
She had to say something. She couldn’t let this go on, Maggie thought frantically. Not with Marcus standing there looking as though he had been turned to stone, his face almost bone-white, his eyes blind and staring right through her.
‘We didn’t quarrel, Susie,’ she said quietly. ‘I did something very, very wrong indeed…an
d…’ Helplessly she looked towards Marcus, silently begging for his help.
‘You’re quite right, Susie,’ he said heavily, limping over to the table and putting his arm round the girl’s thin shoulders. ‘In actual fact I wanted Maggie to come home a long time ago, and I promise you that, now that she is here, I’m not going to drive her away. Shouldn’t you be making a start on your homework, by the way?’ he asked drily.
The girls left the kitchen with reluctance, and as the door closed behind them Maggie had a cowardly impulse to call them back. She didn’t want to be left alone with Marcus, not right now when her emotions were threatening to overwhelm her. The sound of his voice saying that he had wanted her to come home, in that husky, almost despairing way, had completely undermined her.
‘There was no need for you to say that,’ she told him shakily. ‘I wasn’t going to leave anyway…and they’ll find out sooner or later that you don’t really want me here.’
‘Is that why you came back, Maggie…because you knew I wouldn’t want you?’
Her face flamed.
‘Of course not… I’m not a child, Marcus,’ she told him indignantly. ‘Neither am I so petty or small-minded as to…’ She broke off, flushing even harder as she saw the way he was looking at her. ‘All right, I know you must find that hard to believe after what I did…oh, hell, haven’t I paid enough for that?’ she demanded in a tortured voice. The feelings she had fought to hold at bay ever since her arrival were completely overwhelming her. ‘What I did was wrong…terribly wrong…but don’t you think I’ve suffered for it…don’t you realise?’ She broke off, gritting her teeth and tensing every muscle against the plea she longed to make. She was no longer a child and Marcus her mentor; he could no longer remove all her hurts with his touch and his love. These were wounds she had to bear for herself…wounds she fully deserved.