He saw the top of her dark head move up and down as she nodded. Sliding her hands into the pockets of her long black coat, she hunched her shoulders and started to move forwards. He fell into step beside her and, glancing down, saw that tears were coursing down her cheeks.
Gesù. Benedetto Gesù. Each tear was like the lash of the torturer’s whip. And he absorbed the blows without complaint because he knew he deserved them.
‘I’m sorry, Anna.’ Pitifully inadequate. But better than nothing.
She gave a bleak smile. ‘The thing is, it doesn’t really make any difference if I am pregnant or not. Because, you see, Angelo, I’m afraid that I would never, ever in a million years consider terminating a baby because it wasn’t convenient or it didn’t fit in with your plans. I’m surprised you’d even want me to, considering your past.’ They had reached the platform and her face in the harsh fluorescent strip lighting was pale grey. A gust of air lifted her hair from her face and he could see the last traces of pink, like the fading rays of sunset. He felt the darkness closing in around him, sealing him off from the rest of humanity with his guilt and his shame and his bitterness.
‘What do you mean, my “past”?’
Her voice was oddly apologetic. ‘Your mother. She must have been alone, terrified, devastated, to do what she did with you, but she still gave you the opportunity of a life. I hope that in the same situation I’d be brave enough to do the same thing.’
He stared straight ahead at the grimy tiled wall, his jaw clenched, not trusting himself to blink.
Anna couldn’t stop herself from gazing up at him. He looked like a tortured angel. Fliss kept telling her that anger was the only way to get through the pain, but as she looked at him she could find nothing inside her but love.
There was another gust of warm stale air and a surge of bodies signalling the arrival of the train. Pressed into him in the crush, she said fiercely, ‘If I was pregnant, nothing would stop me having the baby. Keeping it. And loving it like I love you.’
And then, head down, she slipped past him into the crowd. He spun round, searching for her, feeling that he’d been kicked brutally in the guts. He saw her standing by the doors of the train and strode towards her.
‘Dio, Anna! You don’t understand …’ His voice was harsh. Raw. ‘You don’t know!’
‘I do. I’m adopted too.’ She stepped into the carriage and looked back at him, smiling wanly through her tears. ‘And, believe me, at the moment it doesn’t feel like it, but generally I’m glad I’m alive.’
She stood back as the doors started to close, her eyes searching his face. He looked ashen. Stunned.
‘I’m not pregnant. So—there you are. Go and be happy.’
And in just a few seconds the platform had become quiet and almost empty as the train disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. Angelo stumbled backwards, leaning against the wall for support, fighting for breath.
I’m adopted too.
The implications filled his brain, too big, too wonderful to be easily comprehended. That was what she’d said, wasn’t it? Meaning that Lisette Delafield wasn’t her natural mother? That there was no blood tie between them?
Incredulously he rubbed his hands over his face, then stood up and began to walk quickly in the direction of the exit, back up towards the light. His mind raced. He felt like a prisoner who, having been kept for five long weeks in solitary confinement in the pitch blackness, was suddenly thrust back out into the open and had no idea which way to go.
He didn’t know where Anna had gone, where she was living, how to find her. Pushing both hands into his hair, he gritted his teeth and tried to focus. It was possible that her father would help him, but he had no telephone number for Ifford Park and his jet was waiting to fly him back to France tonight.
And then, with a flash of hope, he remembered Arundel-Ducasse. He had been on his way to a meeting there when he had bumped into her, and since they had dealt with the sale of the château they would surely have a contact number.
His pace quickened until he was almost running, trying to suppress the terrible weight of hope that was crushing his chest. He could have misheard. Misunderstood.
He had spent the last five weeks in a state of frozen numbness. As a small boy in the orphanage, he used to dream of the day when he would find his natural mother, but as he had grown older he had ruthlessly repressed his curiosity. How cruel then that he should discover Lisette—unsought, unwanted—and have to give up Anna as a consequence. Part of him had railed against the injustice, wishing he could not have seen the earring, wishing she had not chosen to leave the other half of the pair with him, wishing he had never known …
But then the consequences could have been dire, the curse of his own blighted life visited on the children he and Anna might have.
And that was when the real torment had begun. Night after harrowing night of lying awake, wondering … torturing himself. Instructing his solicitors to contact her had been the least personal, most brutal way of trying to extract an answer from her, but he had known the hurt it would cause her. From the depths of his own pain he’d ached for her, but had recognized that making her hate him was the best possible course of action, the one most likely to encourage her to end the pregnancy, should that be necessary.
He had, of course, not reckoned on her courage, her sensitivity, her capacity for love.
Or her own experience of adoption.
Racing up the steps to the Arundel-Ducasse office, he paused at the top with his hand on the door, breathing fast, and then pushed it open.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ enquired the girl at the desk at the front of the office, looking up at him with a polite smile. The smile faded slightly as she added, with a barely distinguishable acid tone, ‘Oh. Signor Emiliani.’
His gaze flickered over the little sign on her desk, on which her name was printed, and his face broke into a grim smile.
‘Yes, Ms Hanson-Brooks, I think you can. Or may I call you Felicity?’
Fliss left the office early and hailed a taxi on the street outside. She had actually made a resolution to be less extravagant and had given up taxis, lunch-hour trips to Bond Street and champagne on weekdays, but hell, this had to qualify as Exceptional Circumstances.
Thrusting two twenty pound notes at the driver as he pulled up outside her flat, she slammed the door and ran up the path without waiting for the change. Throwing open the front door into the communal hallway, she clattered up the stairs as fast as her office heels would allow, unable to stop a huge giveaway grin from spreading across her face.
Finally she flung open the door to her own flat.
‘Anna! Anna, just guess what? Guess who I’ve spent the afternoon with?’
But her voice echoed around the dark flat, dissolving into the thick silence. She didn’t have to read the note on the kitchen worktop to know that Anna had left.
Darling Fliss
Am taking my misery away for a while. Sorry for being
such awful company for the last few weeks and thanks for
everything.
Anna. xx
Fliss swore succinctly. She wasn’t going to enjoy breaking the news to Angelo.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘AND so the prince and the princess were married, and they all lived happily ever after …‘
Anna shut the book and looked down at the small head nestled against her. ‘And now it’s time to go to sleep. Did you like that story, Suzette?’ she asked, lifting the little girl into her narrow bed and tucking the covers around her.
Suzette nodded, her dark eyes shining. ‘Oui. I love the bit where they get married. Her dress is so beautiful. I’ll have a dress like that when I get married.’
Anna smiled, feeling the familiar lump in her throat. ‘I’m sure you will, chérie. And you’ll have flowers in your hair and a big bouquet of roses and lilies … And you’ll look even more beautiful than the princess in the picture.’
‘Oui.’ Slipping her thumb
contentedly into her mouth, the little girl settled down beneath the covers and Anna bent to kiss the top of her head. The delicate sense of peace she had found during the last month at the convent and as a volunteer helper in its children’s home had come as a surprise to her. In the early days when she had first arrived there she had wondered how she would survive, but she had. And slowly she had begun to feel ready to face the rest of her life again.
But it was time to leave now. In her one hurried, panicked phone call to Fliss on the night she’d arrived she had told her she was taking one month away. One month in which she couldn’t be contacted, couldn’t be tempted to make any contact with home. She remembered how Fliss had tried to stop her, had tried to interrupt, but she knew that if she listened she would give in, and sobbing, she had apologized and cut the call. The kindly nun who had taken her in had simply sat in benevolent silence as she’d cried.
So now that month had come to an end. In the outside world it was nearly Christmas, and Anna tried to picture crowds of shoppers and hot, frantic department stores. The thought filled her with horror and she would have liked to stay where she was—safe in the quiet and simple routines of the convent. But she was growing too fond of the children, and for their sakes that wasn’t a good idea.
She stopped in the doorway, looking back at Suzette. ‘Sweet dreams.’
‘Anna?’ Suzette murmured. ‘Tomorrow can we have that story again?’
Anna smiled sadly. ‘I’m sure you can, darling. Maybe Lily will read it to you.’
‘Non. Want you.’
‘I’m leaving tomorrow, sweetheart, remember?’ she said with infinite gentleness.
There was a little pause. ‘Oh. Yes,’ Suzette said in a very small voice. And then she turned over and faced the wall.
Anna’s scarred heart turned over too. She longed to go back and hold the little girl, who had already learned that no one in life was to be relied on. But what comfort could she offer?
After all, it was pretty much the truth.
Later, sitting at the window in her bare, cell-like room, she looked out over the tree-tops towards the château as she had done every night since she had been here.
When she had first left Fliss’s flat she had no idea where she was going, only that she had to get away. Seeing Angelo like that, finding out that he was to be married, had been agony almost beyond endurance. She had tried to believe in the time after he had left her so suddenly at Ifford Park that the scars from his difficult past ran too deep and that he was simply incapable of love, but to find out that he was in love with someone else was unbearable. And she had found herself drawn back to the place where she had always felt safest.
The château.
It had been easy to get a seat on a flight for Nice that evening, and it was only as she’d stepped out of the familiar airport building and got into a taxi that she’d realised how stupid she was being. The château was sold—she knew that, but it would also be exactly where Fliss would think to look for her, and then she might contact Angelo, and …
She had pictured him pulling up in front of the château and getting out of the car. Leaning back in to say to the woman who waited in the passenger seat, Sorry about this, tesoro. She’s a bit unhinged …
‘Where to, mademoiselle?’ the taxi driver had asked.
‘The convent near to Belle-Eden.’
‘Sacre Coeur? Bon.’
And that was how she had ended up coming home—to her first and unremembered home: the place where she had lived as a tiny baby before Sir William and Lisette had taken her. Until then it was the last place she could have imagined coming to, but something had changed that afternoon on that dingy station platform. From the wreckage of her future she had managed at least to salvage something worthwhile about her past, which, she reflected sadly, was completely the wrong way round to do things. But fairly typical of her.
She’d said it. I’m adopted.
No one had laughed. No one had sneered. No one had moved away from her in the carriage, even though most of them must have heard. To be perfectly honest, there hadn’t been much room to move away, but no one had tried. Somehow saying it like that had been a relief, and had planted in her head the seed of the idea which had brought her here.
She had used to come with her mother when she was very small, she remembered, no more than five or six. Looking back, she thought her mother had probably brought her back to maintain contact with the nuns who had looked after her as a baby and arranged her adoption, and then the visits had stopped when she had grown old enough to ask questions.
The shame. That was where the shame had begun.
But it was over now. For the first time ever, she felt at peace with herself.
OK, so everything else about her life was like the aftermath of an earthquake and her heart was lost in the rubble, but at least she knew who she was.
Roseanna Delafield, Spinster of this Parish.
Great. Just great.
The nuns did not encourage emotional goodbyes. People came and went, and Anna had been just one of a constant trickle of the lost and the lonely and the broken-hearted through the small number of guest rooms at the convent. They had accepted her departure with the same serene impassivity as they had accepted her arrival, giving her a bunch of late flowering roses and anemones from the walled garden and wishing her well.
Getting into the waiting taxi, she took the mobile out of her bag for the first time in a month and turned it on. Without even checking her messages, she dialled Fliss’s work number.
‘Good morning, Arundel-Ducasse, Felicity speaking. How may—’
‘Fliss. It’s me.’
‘Anna. Anna! Where are you? How are you? Oh, my God—where have you been?’
‘I’m OK. I’m just outside Cannes, but I’m coming home. But first I’m going to stop off at the château. I want to put some flowers on mum’s grave and then—’
‘You’re going to the château? Now? Oh, God. OK, Anna, I have to go. Call me soon, d’you promise? Soon.’
The phone went dead and Anna was left staring out of the window as the car sped along the last familiar miles to the château. The landscape that she knew so well in its green, high summer glory looked different now, stripped of its lusciousness. It was stark, uncompromising, but somehow more honest.
To her surprise, the tall wrought iron gates of the château were open—she had expected them to be shut and locked—but even so she asked the taxi driver to stop at the foot of the drive so that she could approach on foot. She wasn’t sure what she would find. A busy building site perhaps, crawling with earth-movers and men in hard hats? A brand-new, pristine-looking clinic, built around the old château, obscuring it so that it was barely recognizable?
Rounding the last corner of the drive, she felt her footsteps falter and a gasp of disbelief spring to her lips.
It was like stepping back in time.
The château looked the same as she remembered it when she was a child, when it had been clean and cared for and scrupulously maintained under Grandmère’s watchful eye. The rotting woodwork had been repaired and repainted, broken pipes and missing slates replaced, clumps of moss and weeds removed from gutters and cracks in the masonry. The place gleamed.
Still carrying the flowers she had come to put on her mother’s grave, she hesitated, wanting so much to go in, but hardly daring to hope …
With shaking hands, she took her keys from her bag and, stepping up to the front door, tried the largest and oldest one in the polished lock. He would have changed them … surely … He wouldn’t risk …
It slid in. And turned.
And then she was standing in the hall and it was just as it must have been over a century before when her great-grandfather had first brought his new bride to the home he had built for her. The limestone floor had been cleaned and buffed to a soft sheen and the walls painted a soft duck-egg blue that exactly matched the colour of the silk that had rotted and decayed. And the whole space was imbued wi
th that magical light from the dome above, like the shadows of birds of paradise flitting through sunlight.
Walking in a daze up the stairs, Anna trailed her fingers up the newly stripped and polished wooden banister. Any minute now she expected to wake up in her hard little bed at the convent and find she had dreamed all this—it was almost too wonderful to take in. Wandering into Grandmère’s room a second later, she gave a gasp and had to grip the door-frame for support.
The furniture that had been sent to the auction house that day was back—the grand bed with its delicately gilded wicker headboard was made up with piles of pristine white linen pillows and bolsters, covered in a chalky pink silk eiderdown, just as if Grandmère were expected to come and slip between its sheets at any moment. The dressing table stood in its old position beneath the window, and the vast heavy mahogany wardrobe had been replaced against the wall beside the doorway.
But then the dream slipped inexorably into a nightmare and Anna’s blood ran cold.
There, hanging up on the wardrobe, swathed in layers of protective tissue and polythene, was a dress. A long ivory dress.
A wedding dress.
She heard her own cry of anguish as it was wrenched from her throat, felt her hands fly to her mouth to stop the sobs that spilled out of her as the truth dawned.
Angelo’s plans had changed. The château was not to be used as a clinic, but as his own home, the place where he and his bride would live together and raise their family.
They would get married from here. Just as she had always wanted to do.
For a moment she couldn’t move. It was as if her brain, unable to deal with the horror of the situation, had simply shut down for a moment, leaving her immobilized in the centre of the room, unable to think what to do next. Outside, she was faintly aware of noises—of a car door slamming and feet crunching on gravel—and that broke the spell. Looking wildly around her, she made a run for the stairs as below the front door burst open.
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