by Penny Jordan
She saw the surprise in Jenneth’s eyes and shook her head laughingly. ‘No, not yet, stupid…but soon, we both hope.’
And then she was gone, bustled into the car by her protective bridegroom.
Jenneth waited until it had disappeared before turning away. Luke and Angelica were still beside her. She had hoped that by now they would have gone, and her heart quailed as she saw Louise’s mother approaching them with a determined look.
‘Jenneth, I’m so glad you’re still here…I know you’re staying at the Feathers overnight. We’re having a small get-together here this evening, and of course we’d love you to join us.’
Despairingly Jenneth shook her head. She could not endure another minute of her present agony…
That horribly evocative touch of Luke’s hand against her skin had awakened memories that were still making her pulses jerk and her blood run hot and giddyingly fast.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ she apologised, fibbing wildly. ‘I promised the boys I’d ring them, and besides, it’s a family affair…’
She couldn’t look at Louise’s mother as she made her escape, offering disjointed excuses for her refusal of her invitation…all too uncomfortably conscious of the small stir of interest caused by her departure.
Mrs Craven, the landlady of the Feathers, was obviously surprised to see her back so early. They were very busy in the dining-room, she announced regretfully, otherwise she would have invited Jenneth to tell her all about the wedding, adding that she had managed to slip out for just long enough to see the bride and groom emerge from the church.
‘I saw you standing with Luke,’ she said, adding, ‘That little girl of his is a real character, isn’t she? Pity about her mother dying when she was so young…’
To Jenneth’s relief, before she could say any more a harassed waitress appeared in the foyer to announce that there seemed to be a mix-up with the booking for one of the tables, and Mrs Craven had to excuse herself.
Jenneth went up to her room and unlocked the door. Outside the sun was still warm, casting long early-evening shadows over the courtyard. Tiredly, Jenneth leaned against the window, trying to ease the tension from her body. Her head was starting to pound with the onset of a sick headache, reminding her that she had barely eaten a thing all day. Even now the thought of food made her shudder with revulsion, an unwelcome reminder of the dangerous decline in her health after Luke had broken off their engagement, when her weight had plummeted to such an extent that her parents had been seriously concerned for her. Before that she had been softly plump, but even after she had started eating normally again she had never regained her previous weight, so that people who knew her now remarked enviously on the slenderness of her narrow-boned body.
The room felt hot and stuffy, and she opened the window, breathing in the fresh air thankfully, shuddering a little as she remembered how inadvertently she had breathed too deeply when Luke was standing next to her and had been instantly aware of the frightening familiarity of his personal, intimate scent. She shuddered in the soft breeze blowing in through the window, her body suddenly drenched in sweat…
As her fingers curled protestingly in denial of what she was experiencing, she realised that she was still holding the present Louise had given her. She stared at it blankly, and then forced herself to walk over to the bed and unwrap it.
The thin, square, silver-foil package inside the tissue-paper bore the name of a very exclusive London shop that she recognised from high-fashion magazines… Puzzled, she removed the silk ribbon closing it and frowned over its mysterious tissue-wrapped contents.
As she removed the tissue-paper, a sharp, shocked gasp of protest left her lips as she saw what Louise had chosen to give her.
Inside the tissue paper was a nightdress…a nightdress such as Jenneth had never worn in her life, nor could ever envisage herself having the occasion to wear.
She picked it up with numb fingers, the fine, pale grey silk satin slithering coolly through her fingers as she stared at the tiny, fragile bodice of satin and lace, and the thin, delicate shoestring straps that supported it. Satin-covered buttons like those on Louise’s chemise fastened the nightdress from floor-length to the top of the bodice, and it was cut, Jenneth realised, on the bias, so that it would mould and cling to whoever wore it, faithfully outlining every soft curve.
Jenneth stared at it in disbelief, wondering what on earth had prompted Louise to buy such a thing for her of all people, when she knew quite well that Jenneth was never likely to have the need or occasion to wear it.
In a sudden paroxysm of grief and rage, she balled it up in her hands and flung it across the room, before dropping face-down on the bed and howling like an angry child, muffling the impassioned force of her misery in the softness of the old-fashioned bolster pillow.
* * *
At her age she ought to have learned that the relief of bursting into tears was far outweighed by the destruction it caused, Jenneth recognised half an hour later as she surveyed her puffy face and pink eyelids with a grimace of self-disgust.
The bedroom, to which she had fled as a haven of escape from Luke and the memories seeing him conjured up, now seemed oppressively claustrophobic. She glanced at her watch. It was only just gone eight o’clock…
If she left now, she could be home in four or five hours, but caution reminded her that she was not really in any fit state to drive, and that the emotional trauma of the day had taken a severe toll on her.
Thanks to Luke, she was imprisoned alone in her hotel bedroom when she ought to have been forgetting the past and celebrating Louise’s wedding with Louise’s family, but how could she have joined them when she was so unbearably conscious of Luke and the frighteningly powerful effect he still had on her?
Beyond the roofs of the courtyard buildings she could just see the silver gleam of the river. Impulsively, she stripped off the expensive linen jacket and silk dress she had bought for the wedding, and changed into the jeans and cotton top she had driven down in.
No one paid any attention to her as she left the Feathers through a back door that opened on to the courtyard.
The village was quiet and empty as she made her way towards the river, and she silently blessed the fact.
The river had always drawn her; one of the things she loved about York was its river. Her parents’ house overlooked the Ouse, and when the boys were teenagers the three of them had spent many a happy Sunday afternoon fishing for tiddlers.
She stopped dead where she stood, blindly oblivious to her surroundings, remembering against her will that it had been Luke who had taught her to fish, exhibiting all the patience and thoroughness that she suspected must make him the formidable surgeon she had learned from Louise that he had become.
Luke, Luke, Luke…her every sense had been filled by him all day, even before she had looked up during the ceremony and seen him standing there looking back at her.
She started to walk again, her movements uncoordinated and clumsy, almost running towards the river as though she were trying to outrun her own thoughts.
If she had thought that the river’s placid flow would soothe her, she soon discovered that she was wrong. The sight of a pair of lovers entwined beneath the familiar canopy of the willows brought back too many heart-wrenching memories.
Once she and Luke had stood there like them…once Luke had held and kissed her, and she had kissed him back with innocence and desire, believing every promise he made her…believing that all the happiness in the world was hers. But it had all simply been an illusion, and she had been left with nothing.
Luke at least had his daughter, even if he had lost his wife, and deep inside her the ache intensified and Jenneth knew that there were some wounds that could never heal… Looking into the green eyes Angelica had inherited from Luke, Jenneth had bitterly envied the woman to whom Luke had given his child…the child he had once promised her.
CHAPTER FOUR
JENNETH had asked to be woken at seven so that she could make an early
start back to York, and when the brief rap came on the door she was already awake.
She had breakfast in her room, studiously avoiding looking out of the window towards the river, and was just finishing her packing when someone rapped briefly on her bedroom door and opened it.
The sight of Luke framed there, dressed like her in jeans and a T-shirt, stunned her so much that all she could do was stand there and stare at him.
Dressed casually, he looked so much like the Luke she remembered that it took an immense effort of will not to reach out to him.
His glance took in her frozen stance and the overnight bag already packed, and then moved back to her, and for a moment his eyes seemed to darken with an emotion that freed Jenneth from her shock, projecting through her body a violent desire to repudiate that brief lightning glance of pity. How dared he pity her? How dared he knock on her bedroom door and simply walk in as though…?
‘I’m glad I’m in time to catch you,’ he was saying easily. ‘Angelica was worried that you’d leave before she’d had time to say goodbye.’
His easy, friendly manner was so different from the cool indifference with which he’d treated her outside the church that Jenneth couldn’t understand it.
‘You brought Angelica here at this time of the morning?’ she demanded huskily, her brain prompting the right responses while her body fought for survival.
‘We’re staying here,’ Luke told her, frowning slightly, and then added softly, ‘It’s a pity you couldn’t make it for dinner last night…’ And the way he looked at her made Jenneth’s heart pound with sick disbelief.
She blinked fiercely, terrified that she was beginning to imagine things that weren’t there, and that she had somehow or other transposed into the present the Luke she had known in the past. But when she looked at him again she saw that the whimsical, gentle warmth still lit his eyes and that his mouth was curling upwards with the rueful humour that she remembered so poignantly.
‘Jenneth, there’s something I want to tell you…’
She stared at him uncomprehendingly, and heard him curse softly under his breath, and then say unsteadily, ‘Oh, hell, don’t look at me like that…’
And then, as the hot, betraying colour flooded her skin, Angelica erupted into the room, saying quickly, ‘Daddy, is she still here?’
Jenneth’s powers of self-defence sprang up inside her; she picked up her case with one hand, hugging Angelica briefly to her, unable to resist the impulse to give back the warm kiss the little girl gave her so enthusiastically, and escaped while she still had the ability to do so.
Luke watched her go with a wry look in his eyes, while Angelica complained, ‘I wish Jenneth had been able to stay longer…I wanted to tell her about us going to live in York, Daddy, because that’s where she lives…’
‘I know,’ Luke agreed absently, his keen eye caught by the sliver of grey satin lying on the floor. He walked over to it and picked it up, and a slow smile curled his mouth as he studied it…
‘What’s that?’ Angelica asked him inquisitively.
‘A nightdress,’ he told her, adding with something approaching amusement, ‘Jenneth’s nightdress.’ And then, bending to pick his small daughter up in his arms, he asked her, ‘How would you like it if next weekend we went to York and took it back to Jenneth?’ never for one moment doubting what his daughter’s response would be.
She didn’t disappoint him, responding with such enthusiasm that he laughed, and Angelica, who was unused to the sound of her father’s untrammelled laughter, looked uncertainly at him.
Jenneth arrived home mid-way through Sunday to discover the twins waiting for her, together with a full-scale traditional Sunday lunch which they had cooked themselves. Her stomach churned nauseously as she smelled the roasting meat; the very last thing she wanted to do was to sit down and eat. Given a choice, she would much have preferred to escape to her studio and to stay there until she felt sufficiently in control of herself to face the rest of the world.
Seeing Luke when she had been so unprepared for the confrontation had reopened all the old wounds. The cool indifference with which his eyes had registered her presence and then dismissed it reminded her too sharply of the way he had looked at her when he had told her that he could no longer marry her.
Then, disbelieving and bewildered, she had denied what she was hearing, crying out that he couldn’t mean it. His face had turned white, she remembered, the bones standing out in hard relief, and as she had gone towards him he had fended her off, taking her wrists in such a cruelly painful grip that she had actually cried out in pain.
That pain, though, had been nothing to compare with the other, deeper pain he had caused her… A pain which had never truly been vanquished, she admitted now, as she forced herself to smile and praise the twins for their efforts.
Looking up in church, and seeing Luke standing there watching her so clinically and emotionlessly, had brought home to her so sharply how vulnerable she felt as a woman; and as she sat down at Nick’s bidding and accepted a glass of wine she really didn’t want, while Kit made a dry, teasing comment about her single state and their chances of getting her married and off their hands before they left for university, she acknowledged that for her there could never be a relationship that might lead to marriage, because Luke had destroyed forever her own ability to believe herself worthy of being loved. With a sudden, piercingly bitter shaft of insight, she recognised that the hatred she ought to have turned outwards towards Luke she had turned inwards upon herself.
She shivered, and Nick, who was busy carving the meat, exchanged a concerned look with his twin.
Both of them knew that Jenneth had once briefly been engaged to Louise’s cousin, but neither of them were aware of the true circumstances surrounding the ending of the engagement, and both of them had always assumed that it had been by mutual agreement… Now, silently, both of them asked one another what had happened at Louise’s wedding to send their sister back looking as though she was about to collapse.
Looking up just in time to catch the concerned glances they exchanged, Jenneth forced herself to smile. She had grown so used to being responsible for her brothers, to protecting them and loving them, that she instinctively sought to hide from them her own pain and confusion.
She forced herself to talk about the wedding, telling them how surprised she had been by the un-Georgeiness of Louise’s bridegroom. She told them that Louise and her parents all sent their love, and that Louise and George were going to try and pay them a fleeting visit later in the year.
In fact, she talked all through lunch, but never once mentioned Luke’s name, stumbling only once, when she was describing how Angelica had handed her her handkerchief, biting her lip sharply as she remembered how the little girl had gone on to attach herself to her.
Nick and Kit, seeing the small, betraying gesture, said nothing but watched her worriedly.
After lunch, Jenneth told herself that she had wallowed in self-pity for long enough, and that if she was stupid enough to let herself get into such an emotional turmoil over a man who had cold-heartedly rejected her in favour of someone else, then she deserved all the anguish she was undoubtedly going to suffer; firmly she turned her mind to other matters, reminding the twins that they still had to come to a joint decision on whether or not to sell the house.
‘We’ve already discussed it,’ Kit told her promptly, acting as spokesman. ‘And we don’t want to sell… This house is our home, Jen,’ he told his sister urgently. ‘OK, so we’re going away to university, but we’ll be coming back…’
‘If we sold, you’d both get a very useful lump sum of cash,’ Jenneth reminded them, but they both shook their heads in unison.
‘If money really is tight, you could always take in a lodger.’ Nick told her thoughtfully, adding with a look at his brother that Jenneth intercepted and recognised, ‘As a matter of fact, we’ve got a new teacher at school looking for somewhere to stay. Mr Alderson…’
Jenn
eth, who had come to recognise the moves her brothers made when they were trying to matchmake on her behalf, made an explosive sound in her throat, her emotions caught somewhere between laughter and tears.
‘Look, you two,’ she told them tartly, ‘if…and I mean if…I should ever want to find myself a man, I’m perfectly capable of doing it—myself…’
She had learned years ago that where the twins were concerned only blunt speaking served any useful purpose, and she spoke as forcefully as she could, ignoring the small, mocking voice inside her that told her she was lying, especially if her past experience was anything to go by.
After another mutually exchanged glance, Kit told her wryly, ‘Then why don’t you?’ And then, seeing her face, he got up and put his arm around her awkwardly, saying, ‘Sis, it isn’t that we want to get rid of you. It’s just…it’s just that we both think you need someone of your own. Some people need to be married,’ he carried on, finding it difficult to vocalise the instinctive knowledge both he and his twin shared… ‘You’re not like Louise…’
‘Thanks,’ Jenneth told him shakily. ‘What am I, then? A dependent, clinging vine who can’t exist without a big strong man to lean on?’
Nick grinned—his sister was almost stubbornly independent when it came to practical matters, much more so than either he or Kit, but emotionally…well, that was a different matter entirely.
Jenneth was made for giving love and sharing it. They only had to see the way people responded to her…the way their friends responded to her… She had a gentle warmth that drew people, and she nurtured them, but they were too male and too young to be able to put what they felt into words. Jenneth meanwhile told them as forcefully as she could that, although the suggestion of taking in a lodger was potentially a good one, not so much from a financial point of view as from one of providing some alternative human companionship once the boys had gone, she was perfectly capable of finding such a lodger herself.
‘I know you mean well,’ she told them. ‘But please try to understand… I’m happy as I am…’