The Hidden Years

by Penny Jordan

  'I'm sorry, I shouldn't have intruded. I thought perhaps you were ill…'

  'A headache,' Faye told him shortly. It wasn't, after all, untrue.

  'I'm sorry. Perhaps a cup of tea…? There's a place a few yards down the road, and I have it on good authority—my mother's—that it serves excellent tea.'

  Faye opened her mouth to refuse. The last thing she wanted to do was to sit politely with this stranger drinking tea. She ought to be on her way home—it was getting late. She shivered.

  Alaric saw the look in her eyes and cursed himself under his breath. She obviously thought he was trying to pick her up. Was there no end to the vanity of women? he wondered cynically.

  Without any surprise at all he heard her saying quickly, her voice high and strained, 'Thank you, but no… I must be on my way. My daughter will be wondering where I am.'

  But not where she had been. He was too used to the traumatic effect mental illness could have on the people closest to its victims to question the state in which he had seen her leaving the house. But, since it did affect her so badly, what was she doing here alone? He paused for a moment, torn between irritation and concern…not specifically for her. If she was stupid enough to think he had been trying to pick her up, then… Then what? She didn't deserve his concern… his compassion?

  Was it something within himself that was causing this slow brutalisation of his humanity, or was it simply a symptom of the malady of modern-day life?

  Faye watched him, wishing he would go away. He had seen her at her most vulnerable and unprotected; that made her feel threatened and frightened. By what appalling coincidence had he had to be driving past the gate just as she'd opened it?

  She heard him saying stiffly, 'Well, if you're sure you're all right…'

  'I'm fine,' she lied. Why didn't he just go away? Couldn't he see she didn't want him there?

  He tried one final time. 'You know, if you're not… not feeling well, it might not be wise for you to drive…'

  Faye seldom lost her temper, but she was on the verge of doing so now, a backlash against the pent-up anxiety and fear, an emotional and unreasoning reaction that made her eyes flash and her body tense.

  'You're Liz's doctor, not mine,' she told him bitingly. 'I don't need your advice…'

  'And you don't want my company. Fine. I'll leave you to it.'

  She could see that he was angry too, and guilt touched her momentarily as she watched him walk away.

  Alaric had driven several miles before he realised that he was exceeding the speed limit. He slowed down automatically, trying to unclench his taut muscles. Stupid woman… and stupid him for trying to help her. God, did she really think if he had found her attractive he wasn't capable of letting her know it with a little bit more finesse?

  If he found her attractive… He scowled to himself, not wanting to admit his contradictory feelings towards her. After all, he barely knew the woman. Barely knew her at all…

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sage frowned. She had intended to spend the morning working on some preliminary sketches for one of her commissions. Her reputation for innovative work had not been gained overnight, and she could not afford to completely abandon her work, no matter how much she would have liked to spend the time on other things.

  Such as reading her mother's diaries. She put down her pencil but did not reach for a fresh one. What was it about the diaries that made them such compulsive reading?

  Reading them was like opening a door into an unknown world… The world of her mother as a young woman… as an equal with problems and pressures to which she herself could so easily relate. Why, when she had never been able to get close to her mother, was she now discovering that beneath the label of 'mother' and 'devoted wife' which she had pinned to her there was a fellow woman, someone for whom she could feel compassion and understanding? Did her mother know how much was revealed in her diaries? Not through the words themselves, but through the awareness that was coming to Sage of the feelings of the less central characters. Had her mother known then how very deeply dependent on her Edward was—that he loved her even if that love could never have any physical reality?

  She stared at her drawing-board. She had been commissioned to provide her own interpretation of a suitably Italianate seventeenth-century garden on the walls of a newly built extension to house a swimming pool. Nothing particularly adventurous; she suspected these particular clients simply wanted the cachet of telling their friends that they had commissioned her. It should have been easy, but for some reason the formal avenues and statuary refused to form beneath her pencil and instead she was drawing cottage garden borders, overflowing with a wanton tumble of flowers, set against a backdrop of crumbling mellow brick walls.

  Her mother's garden, she recognised irately.

  Perhaps she ought to do something else, she acknowledged, staring at her drawing in disgust.

  The problem of the new road was nagging at her. With so much heavyweight influence balanced against them, it was hard to see how any campaign the villagers mounted could be successful. Taking a more distant view, it was obvious that the road must go somewhere, and must cause some havoc wherever it eventually went.

  In the case of Cottingdean, though, the road could avoid the village altogether if it was diverted across the marshland beyond the water meadows, thus looping its way around the village instead of straight through it.

  The cost of such a detour would be a major factor against it; it wasn't just the extra length of road required, it was also the fact that the marsh would have to be drained, and adequate foundations built, all of which would cost a great deal of money.

  She got up, frowning, and walked round to her mother's desk, picking up the file she had prepared.

  In it were various clippings her mother had assembled, dealing with other rural objections to various building programmes, one section relating to those which had succeeded and another to those which had failed. The former was depressingly thin in comparison to the latter, even though in these far more enlightened and ecologically aware times people were fighting harder to protect their environment.

  Sage had bought herself a large-scale map of the whole county and she had copied an outline of this on to black paper, putting in only the major towns and existing motorways. She grinned to herself as she unrolled it and pinned it to her drawing-board. At school the major complaint against her was that she had a good brain, but was lazy about using it. Privately she considered that her teachers had been equally at fault, since theirs had been the inability to motivate her… Once motivated, once challenged… She grimaced a little over her own turbulent and sometimes difficult personality, knowing how often her enthusiasm had been aroused by something only to wane just as quickly until she had taught herself, forced herself to grimly follow through and complete a project, no matter how arduous and dull. Before then her life had been littered with unfinished detritus of hundreds of rejected interests.

  It was the fatal flaw of her character, this inability to follow things through, to stick to one course, and it had only been once she had tasted the pleasure of actually completing a set task that she had begun to fight free of its taint.

  She had changed so much in these last few years… Matured. She grimaced to herself—in some ways perhaps but not in others; inside parts of her still held all the rebellious disorderliness of the old Sage.

  Sage… what a name to choose for her… Had her mother done so in the hope that her name might influence her wayward personality? Hardly. She could not have known then what a trial she was going to be to her…

  Had she welcomed her conception, her birth in the same way as she had David's? David… who was not after all Edward's child… but who had been so greatly loved by both her mother and by Edward. Not, she was learning, because of his parentage… but because of the person he was.

  She had often wondered if her father's detachment from her had been caused by the manner of her own conception. If the fact that she had been a
child born of one of modern medicine's very early miracles, rather than through the mystery of the physical union between two people, had been responsible for this… She must have been wanted at some stage for her parents, especially her mother, to have allowed her to be conceived…

  Sage moved restlessly around the room, frowning as she came to rest in front of the windows that overlooked her mother's favourite part of the garden.

  There was no sun today, the sky a soft English grey which seemed to melt perfectly with the equally muted colours of her mother's flowers.

  She had stood in front of this window many, many times. Normally staring mutinously out of it while listening to yet another of her mother's reasoned and calm lectures on one or other of her failings, and yet today it was as though she was seeing the garden for the first time, marvelling at the perfect blending of lilacs, pinks, blues, and whites, marvelling at how on earth her mother had ever found the time to plan such a perfection of colour and form, and not just the time but the knowledge as well. Her mother was an incredibly gifted woman. Strong and determined when it came to her business, cutting through red tape and waffle with the precision of a skilled surgeon, and yet somehow at the same time refraining—as Sage knew she herself had never learned to do—from bruising tender male egos.

  Her mother had been a pioneer as far as being a woman in control in a man's world went, and she had achieved this without endangering either her femininity or her values. Her mother had never, she recognised, played on the fact that she was a woman, had never used it, as Sage had seen so many many women do, and yet nor had she become a token male, eschewing her womanliness, contemptuous of her own sex. Somehow she had found and followed her own way, remained true to her own self. Her mother was rather like this garden, Sage recognised in surprise: at first glance perhaps too quiet and muted. It was only when one looked closer, observed in more detail, that one became aware of the true beauty and perfection, of the true skill and knowledge that made up the whole person.

  Suddenly Sage had a sharp, aching longing to have her here. She was frightened, she realised… not just frightened of losing her, this woman whom she was only just beginning to discover—to value, she accepted humbly—but frightened of not being able to live up to her standards, her ideals…

  The road, with all its complexity of problems, had somehow become a symbol of all that was lacking in their relationship. The sheer grind and perseverance required to even get as far as mounting a proper campaign against it required all the fine detailings of character that were not in her gift. Her skills were different. Not perhaps of less value, but different. She did not, she decided despairingly, have those abilities which made her mother such a master tactician… but it was to her that the role of stepping into her mother's shoes, of protecting Cottingdean, had fallen. And if she failed…

  She shivered suddenly, briefly seeing, not Cottingdean as it was: a perfect, almost magical, living, breathing reincarnation of the house as it must have been centuries ago when it was first built, lovingly preserved and cosseted by her mother—cosseted not as a museum, but as a home, a home that was so evocative of its own past that to step into it was to walk into a small piece of history—but Cottingdean as it could tragically become: its gardens destroyed, the house itself neglected…

  Stop being so stupid, she told herself—the road was not going to come anywhere near the house itself. It was the village which was at risk, and of course to her mother the village and the people in it were an extension of her field of responsibility. She would see it as her duty to protect them. Now that duty was hers…

  Restlessly she moved back to the desk, absently glancing at the framed estate map above the fireplace as she did so, and then something caught her eye.

  The map had different coloured sections to represent different kinds of land; that which was not owned by Cottingdean was coloured charcoal-grey, and there, to the north of the village, right next to the proposed site for the new road, was a large block of charcoal-grey. Sage paused and studied it, trying to visualise the actual land. Her mother had more modern maps of the estate somewhere… Sage found one neatly filed in an appropriately marked file and sighed a little for her own confused mess of paperwork on her own desk. Orderly she was not, as her secretary often complained, but she liked her disorder—it felt comforting, right.

  As she unrolled the map she sat down, looking for the boundaries of their own land, trying to isolate that section of charcoal-grey. Whoever owned it would stand to make a good deal of money from the new road. That piece of land, if she remembered correctly, was right where one of the existing A roads would join the new motorway. An ideal spot for future development… The kind of development which would eventually run into and swamp Cottingdean itself.

  She soon found the appropriate section, and saw that it was marked neatly in her mother's handwriting with the name of the owner.

  Agnes Hazelby… she nibbled the side of her finger, remembering that her mother had surely mentioned that the elderly woman had been seriously ill and had needed to sell in order to move into a nursing home.

  Had she done so? The best way to find out was to speak to her mother's solicitor, which reminded her that sooner or later someone, either herself or Faye, was going to have to go down to the mill to see Henry Brading.

  He was perfectly capable of running the mill side of the business without any interference, but he had made anxious enquiries about her mother's health, and she knew that in her shoes her mother would have been quick to reassure him.

  She picked up the phone and dialled the number of her mother's solicitor.

  He had no idea who owned the land in question, he told her, but it should not be too difficult to find out. He remembered that her mother had wanted to buy it, but that it had gone to auction, and that the bidding had risen way above the price she had decided upon.

  'I know it went for way, way above the price for agricultural land. How is your mother, by the way? Any further news?'

  'She's holding her own,' Sage told him, the words falling almost automatically from her lips—she had repeated them now so many times to so many anxious enquiries. 'They're hoping to operate soon… Once she's stable. There's still some pressure on her brain…'

  She heard her voice faltering as she said the words, knowing what they concealed. Her mother's hold on life was so very fragile, a fine, fine thread that could so easily be broken.

  'Don't worry, Sage,' he comforted her. 'Your mother's a fighter. If anyone can pull through something like this, she will… I'll ring you back just as soon as I've got that information. Hopefully it shouldn't take too long.'

  While she was waiting for him to ring back, Sage studied her files again, trying to analyse what it was that the successful campaigns had had in common.

  A certain amount of influence in the right places, the ability to bring their campaign to the attention of the media, and gain the maximum publicity—but what stood out most of all was that all of the successful campaigns had had something in their favour other than the fervent desire of the campaigners not to have the road or development on their territory: generally something of historic importance, although there was a small village which had been saved from the planners by virtue of the fact that it was an area of outstanding natural beauty— one of only three places in the country where a certain species of rare wild flowers grew.

  Sage pushed her hand into her hair. As far as she knew, no wild flowers of spectacular importance nor birds of rarity made their home in Cottingdean or its environs, and the house and village, although old, were not of any particular historical importance.

  Looking at their case from an entirely unbiased viewpoint, there was no reason why Cottingdean should not have its unwanted new motorway other than the fact that—albeit with considerable extra expense and work— the road could be diverted to run harmlessly several miles away.

  The phone rang as she was mulling over what she had just read.

  'I've managed to discover
who now owns the lands,' the solicitor told her drily. 'I suppose it shouldn't have come as quite the surprise it did. Does the name Hever Homes mean anything to you?'

  'No,' Sage told him truthfully. 'Apart from the fact that they're obviously builders.'

  'Mmm…they have a reputation in the City for snapping up first-rate building sites—not for large estates; they seem to specialise in small developments of individually designed homes, and as builders they have a surprisingly good reputation. However, that's not the interesting point. Hever Homes is in actual fact a small division of a much larger company—Cavanagh Construction.'

  Sage gripped the receiver.

  'But that's Daniel Cavanagh's company—the one building our section of the new motorway.'

  'Exactly… Too much of a coincidence, wouldn't you say, that Mr Cavanagh just happens to buy a piece of land, as yet without planning permission for the type of development favoured by his company, but very conveniently placed for the new motorway and its feeder road? And with the Government's present attitude to the releasing of agricultural land for house building, I shouldn't think Mr Cavanagh will have too much difficulty in getting the planning permission he needs.

  'Very astute of him, of course, to have got in ahead of the field, so to speak, and snapped up the land, and quite a risk. If another route had been chosen… As it is, he, or rather his company, stands to make a good deal of money from such a venture. If they can break Agnes Hazelby's stipulation about leaving the Hall intact. The motorway will encourage people to move further out of London, and the appeal of moving to a brand new luxury house on the outskirts of a village like this one will add to that attraction. Of course it will mean that the village will cease to exist in its present form… I know your mother hopes to fight off the road proposal, but she's got an awful lot of power ranged against her…'

  And a good deal of influence, Sage recognised sickeningly, remembering that possessive feminine hand on Daniel's arm. Which had come first, she wondered cynically, his purchase of the land or his relationship with the woman from the Ministry?