by Penny Jordan
Susie, whose cheeks had started to flush the moment Isobel walked into the kitchen, said angrily, ‘Maggie’s not going back to London. She’s going to stay here to look after us.’
In the brief space of time it took Isobel to recover from the shock of Susie’s announcement and to swing round and glare at Maggie with open dislike, Maggie realised that Marcus had obviously not conveyed to Isobel the information that she was going to stay.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Isobel said to Susie, her voice suddenly much sharper and shriller. Her mouth hardened as Susie turned away from her, deliberately ignoring her comment.
Half-way towards the kitchen door, Isobel suddenly turned and swung round on one elegant and high heel to say commandingly to Maggie, ‘Bring some coffee to the study, would you?’
It was on the tip of Maggie’s tongue to refuse, and then, as though she was half expecting her to do so, Isobel added mockingly, ‘After all, if you are taking over as housekeeper here, it will be one of your duties, won’t it?’
As the kitchen door closed behind her, Maggie seethed. Housekeeper, indeed. If Isobel thought for one moment that she was going to be able to order her around, then she was going to have an awful shock coming.
She saw the look Susie and Sara exchanged and, not wanting to make the situation between Isobel and the two girls even worse than it already was, she suggested calmly, ‘Once you two have finished eating, why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air before you start your homework?’
‘You’re not going to make coffee for her, are you?’ Susie demanded in tones of deep disgust as she saw that Maggie indeed was.
‘Isobel is a guest in this house, and moreover she is Marcus’s fiancée,’ Maggie pointed out, fighting to keep her voice under control and not betray her real feelings. ‘I was just making tea for Marcus anyway,’ she added soothingly.
‘Well, I think she’s got a cheek, speaking to you like that,’ Susie told her, plainly in no mood to be placated, ‘and Marcus would be furious if he knew. He’s always telling us that you should be polite to everyone.’
‘Mmm, well, I think you’ll find that men in love rarely appreciate having the object of that love criticised by others,’ Maggie pointed out warningly to her, but Susie wasn’t really listening. Instead she was frowning, as though deep in thought.
‘You know, I know they’re getting married and that they must be in love, but, well they just don’t act like people in love, somehow.’
‘I don’t expect they do in public,’ Maggie agreed, shooing both girls out of the kitchen while she poured the coffee.
It wasn’t very far from the kitchen to the study, but nevertheless she had to stand outside the door and take a deep breath, counting slowly to ten, before she felt calm enough to knock on it and push it firmly inwards.
Marcus was standing by the window with his back to her. Isobel was standing in front of the fire looking furiously angry, whether at Marcus or at her interruption, Maggie had no way of knowing.
She almost stumbled as she put the tray down, and Marcus wheeled round, concentrating an icy look of dislike on her. Maggie couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. She didn’t know quite what she had been dreading when she’d hesitated outside the door. Perhaps it had been the thought of finding the engaged couple locked in a passionate embrace that had made her feel sick with dread.
Certainly she had not anticipated the angry tension which had greeted her, and she wondered if Isobel had yet discovered that, when Marcus had made his mind up about something, no amount of sulking or persuasion could get him to change it.
She was just on her way to the kitchen garden to check on the progress that the men had made when Isobel came hurrying out of the house. The other girl came flying towards her, flags of temper flying in her otherwise pale face.
‘This is all your fault,’ she announced without preamble. ‘Until you came back on the scene poking your nose in where it isn’t wanted, Marcus was quite happy with the idea of sending the girls off to boarding-school. But now…’ She took a deep breath and glared furiously at Maggie. ‘Of course I’m not deceived. I know exactly why you’re doing this.’
Maggie felt the earth lurch uncomfortably beneath her feet, a horrible faintness washing over her as she felt the blood drain down her body.
Surely Isobel hadn’t realised already? How on earth had she betrayed herself? The other woman must be far more perceptive than she realised, unless…unless Marcus himself… She shook like somebody with a palsy.
‘After all, you’re not exactly in the first flush of youth, are you?’ Isobel was sneering, thoroughly confusing her. ‘I suppose the idea of coming back here and living off Marcus must have been too tempting to give up. Quite an opportunity those idiotic little fools have handed to you,’ she added savagely. ‘And if you think for one moment that I’m going to share my home with you or with them…’
‘Your home?’ Maggie interrupted her, filled with a sudden and glorious rush of adrenalin as she realised that Isobel had no idea of her real feelings for Marcus. ‘Perhaps I ought to point out to you that this house was left jointly to Susie, Sara and myself by our grandfather.’
Isobel stared at her in silence, an expression of astonishment slowly giving way to one of malice as she purred tauntingly, ‘Is that what you really think? If so, I’m afraid you’re way off beam. Your grandfather changed his will shortly before he died, leaving everything to Marcus.’
There was no way that Maggie could conceal her shock.
‘Of course it’s true that the girls have the right to live here until they come of age, but that proviso can hardly apply to you, can it?’ Isobel asked with evident pleasure. ‘I know all this because my father was asked to witness your grandfather’s will. I remember Daddy commenting at the time that it was probably the only way your grandfather could think of protecting the estate and Susan and Sara, and one could hardly blame him for disinheriting you, after all.’
Disinheriting her. Maggie felt even sicker than she had done before, and not just sick but terribly cold as well, as though a warm garment she had always carried with her had suddenly been ripped away from her. Until that moment she hadn’t realised how much it had always meant to her to know that she had a home here, where her family had lived for so many generations.
She didn’t question Isobel’s knowledge, nor her grandfather’s decision, but it hurt none the less to know she had been excluded.
‘So you see, this is Marcus’s home and not yours, and once he and I are married…’
Maggie couldn’t listen to any more. She pushed past the other woman, ignoring her sharp cry of protest, and stumbled her way towards the gate that led into the kitchen garden. Once there, she sank down on to the stone bench just inside the door, shivering and shaking, unable to do anything other than to try to keep at bay the acute feeling of despair welling up inside her.
One part of her brain registered the noise of Isobel’s car as she drove off, another the fact that the angling of the sun meant that time was passing, and then at last, when the numbing sensation of shock had worn off, she got clumsily to her feet and headed slowly back to the house.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY THE time Maggie had returned to the kitchen, her initial instinct, which had been to barge into Marcus’s study and demand to know why he had not told her immediately about her grandfather’s will, had faded, and in its place had come a complex tangle of emotions and reactions she was trying hard to come to terms with. Over and above the anguish she felt at knowing how Marcus must be laughing at her for her belief that she had every right to live in Deveril House was the knowledge that she had made a promise to Susie and Sara which she had come dangerously close to breaking when Isobel had dropped her bombshell.
Part of her could hardly bear the thought of staying on at the house now that she knew that she had absolutely no legal right to be there, and part of her ached to walk into Marcus’s study and tell him outright that, now that she knew exactly
what the position was, she wasn’t going to spend another night under his roof; and still another part of her, a mature and wise part she had come to heed during her years in London, cautioned her to say nothing which would prejudice her ability to give Susie and Sara the physical support of her presence. After all, this sane voice reminded her, had Marcus felt so inclined, there had been nothing to stop him telling her himself that she had absolutely no right to claim Deveril House as her home. The fact that he had not told her how wrong she was in believing that her grandfather had willed the house to herself and her two cousins prompted her to wonder if in his heart of hearts he was glad of her opportune arrival, and of the fact that it meant he now had a very good reason not to accede to Isobel’s demand that he send his two half-sisters away to school.
After all, if he had wanted them to go to boarding-school, surely he would have made such a decision before they started their secondary education?
She had decided that, rather than have dinner in the stiff formality of the dining-room, which she remembered as a large, chilly room on the north-facing side of the house, they would eat instead in the smaller breakfast-room, which looked out on the formal gardens, and which caught the whole warmth of the morning sun. Since the beautifully starched and laundered linen tablecloths which Maggie remembered from Marcus’s mother’s day were nowhere to be found, she simply decided instead to leave the polished oak table bare.
An impulse during the afternoon had sent her out into the garden to walk along the border of which Marcus and his mother were both so very fond, and she had judiciously removed from it enough sprays of flowers to make a very pretty table arrangement without spoiling the border’s perfection. Now softly arranged in a large blue and white jug, they enhanced the informal warmth of the pretty room.
At eight o’clock, Maggie left the kitchen and paused hesitantly outside the study door before knocking briefly on it.
‘Dinner in half an hour,’ she told Marcus shortly, opening the door and then closing it again before he could make any comment. Then she ran quickly upstairs, heading for the second floor and the school-room.
‘Dinner in half an hour,’ she told both girls, adding, ‘How’s the homework going?’
‘Almost finished,’ Susie assured her. ‘What are we having to eat? I’m starving.’
‘Casseroled lamb cutlets,’ Maggie told them promptly. ‘It’s a recipe your mother taught me.’
There was an odd silence, and then Sara asked her almost shyly, ‘Tell us some more about our mother. What was she really like?’
Seeing the faint hesitancy and uncertainty in both sets of eyes, Maggie ignored the fact that she herself had intended to get changed before dinner, and instead pulled up one of the small, straight-backed chairs and said thoughtfully, ‘Well, she was the sort of person who always seemed to make everywhere feel warmer just because she was there. It’s hard to explain really, but when I first came here just after my own parents had died, I hardly knew your mother. She and my uncle hadn’t been married all that long then, and I hadn’t wanted to come here to live at all, but it was as though your mother knew exactly how I was feeling. She didn’t fuss over me or anything like that.’ She broke off and then said with a faint sigh, ‘She did so very much for me, gave me so much.’
‘Is that why you’re going to stay here with us?’ Susie asked her, propping her chin up on her hands, elbows on the desk as she stared across the table at Maggie. ‘Because of what she did for you?’
‘Partially,’ Maggie agreed, after considering the comment and deciding that there was no harm in letting her cousins know that she felt a debt of gratitude towards their mother. ‘And partially because part of me has always wanted to come back here,’ she added, not wanting them to think that she was in any way making a martyr of herself in returning to take care of them. ‘And I suppose,’ she added musingly, ‘the fact that I’m not married and don’t have any children of my own means that there’s a space in my life which you two will probably fill in the same way that I hope to fill a space in yours.’
She wanted them to know that their relationship would be one of mutual give and take, and that they were not in any way to consider themselves a burden to her.
‘Why is that?’ Susie asked her. ‘That you’ve never got married, I mean?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Maggie fibbed, after she had subdued the sharp flare of pain the question brought. ‘I suppose I just never felt I wanted to.’
‘Oh, is that why?’ Sara interrupted artlessly. ‘Susie thought it might be because you had fallen madly in love.’
‘Come on, you two, I’m starving,’ Susie announced, cutting right across her sister’s comments and knocking her own chair over as she stood up, causing it to crash noisily to the floor.
Maggie felt as though the breath was being squeezed out of her lungs. She put a restraining hand on Susie’s shoulder and demanded quietly, ‘Who did you think I might be madly in love with, Susie?’
‘Oh, no one special,’ Susie told her airily, ‘and it was a long time ago, anyway, when we first found out about you. I thought perhaps you’d run away to London because you were madly in love with someone and Marcus and Grandfather wouldn’t let you marry him.’
‘But Susie,’ Sara protested, ‘you…’
‘Come on,’ Susie exhorted, ignoring her younger sister. ‘I’ve got to go and wash my hands. They’re covered in biro. And so are yours,’ she pointed out to Sara. ‘See you downstairs,’ she called out to Maggie, taking hold of Sara’s arm and practically dragging her out of the room with her.
She was an idiot to keep imagining everyone knew how she felt about Marcus, Maggie chided herself as she herself went back downstairs. She paused on the first floor and hurried into her own room. The dusky pink silk dress she had intended to wear lay across the bed. She touched the fabric, and then looked at her reflection in the serviceable cotton blouse and skirt she was already wearing.
Why did she suffer from this foolish need to subject herself once again to a pain she already knew was almost unendurable? Marcus wouldn’t look any differently at her if she wore silk or rags. Marcus was far too intelligent, far too astute to love a woman simply for the way she looked. As the thought formed, it was followed quickly by another one.
If Marcus was really so astute, how on earth could he have fallen in love with a woman like Isobel, who was so shallow and heartless that she could contemplate sending two teenage girls to a boarding-school they had no desire to attend simply because she did not want the responsibility of them?
She picked up her brush and tugged it impatiently through her hair, brushing it so hard it crackled with electricity and turned to living fire in the dying rays of the sun. In the end she refused to allow herself the vanity of getting changed, simply exchanging her blouse for a nice blue jumper that matched her skirt. A delicate embroidered detail ran from the shoulder to the wrist, but apart from that the sweater was completely plain. Oblivious to the way its softness outlined the gentle curves of her body, Maggie went back downstairs. She found Marcus in the kitchen, looking at the bare table with some perplexity and irritation.
A feeling of pain and confusion swept over her as she watched him. This was the man she loved. She ached to be able to go up to him and put her hand on his arm, to look at him with all that she felt showing plainly in her face and her eyes. She longed to be able to wipe away the bitterness between them, to tell him simply and truthfully how very much she regretted the pain she had once caused him; but most of all she longed for him to turn and smile at her the way he once had done, and once again admit her to that small and privileged circle of those close to him. But that door was barred to her forever, and in her heart of hearts she acknowledged that it was better so, once he was married to Isobel.
‘I thought you said we were eating at half-past eight,’ he said harshly, interrupting her thought-flow.
‘Yes, everything’s ready,’ she responded, and then realised what he meant. ‘Oh, I thoug
ht we’d eat in the breakfast-room.’ Hot colour flooded her face at the way he looked at her. ‘If you’d like to go to sit down in there,’ she suggested uncomfortably, ‘I’ll bring dinner through.’
It occurred to her as she watched him limp painfully away that he was probably mentally cursing her for making him walk the unnecessary distance between his study and the kitchen. She also wondered worriedly if he ought to be putting quite so much of a strain on his as yet unmended bones. She knew she was fussing, but she ached for the right to be able to fuss over him properly, to insist that he sit down and not work so hard, to insist that he tried to relax so that those deep furrows marking his forehead would go away and the hard lines etched alongside his mouth ease, and, as the thought formed, she wondered a little bleakly how many of those lines she herself had been responsible for.
She had bought some plump Ogen melons while shopping. Their flesh was sweet and juicy, and, scooped out of the halved fruit and mixed with the sharp freshness of raspberries, it would make a refreshing appetiser for such a hot June night.
She saw Marcus’s eyebrows lift a little in surprise when she brought in the starter. Mrs Nesbitt and the temporary staff who had followed her had not bothered with the niceties of three-course meals, she suspected.
Her suspicions were confirmed when the girls’ eyes rounded with pleasure.
‘Melon…my favourite,’ Sara murmured rapturously, eyeing her bowl with the appealing greed of the young.
‘Mmm, good for my skin as well,’ Susie added. ‘All that stodge we get at school, I’m lucky not to be covered in spots.’
‘Some of the girls take meals prepared at home by their mothers,’ Sara told her guilelessly and, hiding a tiny smile, Maggie promised, ‘Well, maybe not this week, it will take me a little while to get settled in properly, but in a couple of weeks’ time we’ll have a talk about it…’
To her astonishment, Marcus cut in harshly, ‘Maggie’s going to have enough to do without pandering to the pair of you like that. If you want to take your own lunches to school, then I suggest you make them yourselves.’