Diamonds Forever

by Justine Elyot

  Jenna waited until Linda had put the tea mugs down in front of them. One of them said ‘World’s Best Mum’ and Jenna wondered for a moment if Linda had bought it for herself. The idea of Jason giving it to her was so poignant she almost felt tears well up. But perhaps that was just the stress.

  ‘Well, you know how he’s just dismissed the stuff about being Lawrence Harville’s half-brother out of hand,’ began Jenna.

  ‘Yeah, but I’ve told him, it’s the truth. Swear down.’

  ‘I believe you, Linda, really. And, deep down, I think he does too. But he just doesn’t want to.’

  ‘No,’ sighed Linda. ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘Anyway, I found something else out the other day, when I was at the county archive, and I wanted to ask you a few questions.’

  Linda looked surprised at this new tack, raising her eyebrows at her tea.

  ‘Fire away,’ she said.

  ‘Watson is your birth name, isn’t it? You didn’t change it by deed poll or have a previous marriage before Jason that I don’t know about?’

  ‘No, I were born Linda Watson and I daresay that’s how I’ll die as well.’

  ‘And are either of your parents still alive?’

  ‘Eh? Oh no. Both long gone. Dad had that lung thing miners get. Mum didn’t last a lot longer once he went.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. How old were you?’

  ‘Me? I were about twenty-four, twenty-five. Jason were a nipper. Doubt he’d remember much about them. Why?’

  ‘Sorry, but do you have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No, only child, me. It’s been me and Jase for as long as I can remember. Nobody else to depend on. Mum was good, though, when he were a baby. Used to help out a bit where she could.’

  Jenna nodded and supped at the tea, although the sweetness of it made her teeth protest.

  ‘So your dad was a Watson, and your mum …?’

  ‘A Craven. Rita Craven. Look, what’s all this about? Are you making an episode of that Who Do You Think You Are? thing about our Jase? ’Cos it’d make a pretty boring one. Nobody’d watch it.’

  ‘Not as boring as you think,’ said Jenna, leaning forward, her eyes alight with what she knew. ‘Rita’s mother’s surname was …’

  ‘Ooh, now you’re asking.’ Linda’s forehead crumpled with the effort of memory. ‘Her family were Nottingham people. Began with an M …’

  ‘Manning!’ said Jenna triumphantly.

  ‘Ah, that’s it,’ said Linda, regarding Jenna with some suspicion. ‘How do you know that then?’

  ‘It’s the same name as the woman in the diary,’ said Jenna. ‘The one who married Harville, then accidentally killed the maid and disappeared.’

  ‘What, you think we’re …?’

  ‘Related? Yes. Yes, I do.’

  Linda stared. ‘Go on, then. Why?’

  ‘When I went to the archive,’ said Jenna, all her anxieties forgotten in the pleasure of revelation, ‘I wanted to see if I could trace Frances. Find out what happened to her and her baby. The first thing I found was her death certificate – she died just a couple of years after the whole affair. The cause of death was given as diphtheria.’

  ‘Poor thing.’

  ‘Yes, awful. Ten years later, they found a cure for it. Tragic, isn’t it? She was so young.’

  ‘Very tragic, yeah. And the baby?’

  ‘Well, there’s the thing. I looked through all the birth certificates, but there weren’t any with Frances named as the mother. Then I looked again and there was a baby born in December of that year to her parents! Richard and Sarah Manning had a baby boy called David.’

  ‘But it wasn’t theirs really?’

  ‘No, that was just what they told the registrars. And Frances, when she died, wasn’t living at home. She was living at an address in a very shady part of town. I wish, wish, wish I could have been a fly on the wall at the meeting when it was decided to raise the child as her little brother. Can you imagine how heart-breaking it must have been?’

  ‘Don’t you think Harville ever went looking for her? Perhaps that’s why they registered the baby like that?’

  ‘Perhaps. If Harville couldn’t prove the baby was his, then he couldn’t claim him. No DNA tests in those days. Besides – I looked up Harville. He married again within a year of Frances running off, and had another son a year after that, who went on to inherit Harville Hall. Except the real heir …’

  ‘Was alive and well and in Nottingham …’ Linda’s jaw dropped. ‘Are you saying …?’

  ‘David had two daughters,’ said Jenna eagerly. ‘Edith and Jane. Then he went and got himself killed in the First World War, God bless him.’

  ‘Edith’s my grandma,’ said Linda. ‘Edie Manning, as was – then Edie Craven. Came to Bledburn to do nursing and met Granddad Craven when she was looking after him after he broke a wrist down the mine. I remember her telling me her dad was killed at Mons. Bloody hell. Bloody hell, Jen. What does it all mean?’

  ‘It means a lot of things,’ said Jenna. ‘But one of them … an important one … is that you are actually the legitimate heir of the Harvilles.’

  ‘Bullshit! How can I be?’

  ‘Linda, you’re in the direct line of succession. David was Harville’s first born son. Your grandmother was that son’s older daughter. And so on down the line. You are Lady bloody Harville.’

  The pair of them burst into wild laughter.

  ‘That’s fucking funny,’ said Linda, once she was able to speak through her tears of mirth. ‘Me a Lady. C’mon, Jenna, you’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘I’m not,’ insisted Jenna. ‘I’ve seen all the certificates. I mean, I don’t suppose you’d ever be able to claim your inheritance because of David being registered as the Manning parents’ child, but all the same …’

  Linda clapped a hand over her mouth, her eye suddenly big with horror.

  ‘But that means that me and Harville …’

  ‘You’re cousins, albeit fairly distant ones now.’

  ‘All the same … ugh. It’s incest, isn’t it? What we did?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. That’s first cousins. Children of your aunts and uncles.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right then. I think. Still seems wrong though.’

  ‘It makes Jason a Harville on both sides, though. I haven’t dared mention it to him.’

  ‘I can’t take this in. It’s mad.’

  ‘I know. I nearly screamed when I put all the documentation together and realised what it meant.’

  ‘So bloody Lord High and Mighty Harville isn’t even the right bloke for the job,’ said Linda indignantly.

  ‘Ah, well, who knows? Perhaps there’s legal documentation to insist the Hall is always entailed away to a male member of the family. So you might never have got to live there and use the title anyway. But all the same …’

  ‘It’s quite a nice feeling,’ said Linda, lifting her chin and looking, despite herself, surprisingly regal. ‘Lady Linda. I like it.’

  Jenna smiled at Linda’s burst of pomp and circumstance, then put her cup down.

  ‘But it’s the whereabouts of Lord Jason I need to know about,’ she said. ‘Can’t you think of anywhere he might be?’

  ‘Well, let me think …’

  But Linda’s thinking was disturbed by a hammering at the door.

  ‘Is that him?’

  Jenna rushed to answer it, but quickly slammed it shut again on seeing the flash of bulbs from the landing.

  ‘Jenna, Jenna! What have you got to say about the picture in circulation all over the internet? Jenna!’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, running back to Linda. ‘We’re under siege. Somebody’s tipped the press off that I’m here.’

  ‘Oh dear. What are we going to do?’

  ‘I’ll call the police, see if I can get them thrown out of the building at least. They shouldn’t be in your communal hall.’

  ‘Shame that,’ said Linda. ‘I were going to run o
ut to the offy. If I’m Lady Harville, I ought to be on the champagne.’

  It had been a stupid idea to storm off without his mobile or his wallet.

  Jason could see that now.

  In fact, he could see that storming in general was a bit pathetic and childish really.

  He wished to God he hadn’t done it.

  If he’d kept his temper and stayed with Jenna, he wouldn’t now be crossing a wet wheat field with no idea at all whether he was heading in the right direction for Bledburn.

  He hadn’t taken the road back for fear of being pursued and picked up again by Harville and his goons. Luckily they had been so preoccupied with Deano, they had given him a head start. He’d been out of there like a bat out of hell.

  But he needed to get back to Bledburn as fast as possible. He couldn’t say he was Deano Diamond’s biggest fan, but he felt he ought to get him some help.

  Jumping a stile into a field of nervous sheep, he thought over Harville’s plan. Could it have worked for him? Would Jenna have believed that he, Jason, had decked Deano? And would she then have dumped him?

  He thought the answer to the first question was yes. It would be perfectly easy for Jenna to believe he was capable of using his fists on his rival.

  He had shown her time and time again what a mardy bugger he was.

  ‘You need to chill, son,’ he muttered to himself, start-ling a nearby sheep into bleating.

  But would she dump him over it?

  He found this question more difficult to answer, because it raised a few more, some of which he didn’t really want to think about.

  He didn’t doubt that she loved him now, wholeheartedly and passionately. But now was still only a few months distant from their first meeting. And he knew, from bitter experience, that a relationship can start as promisingly as it likes – it still doesn’t mean it will last.

  As he tramped through the fields, his mind went back, almost against his will, to those heady early days with Mia, back at school. They had been the Romeo and Juliet of the year, without all the suicides and suchlike. Always getting into trouble with the teachers for their public displays of affection and being told to ‘get a room’ by their eye-rolling peers.

  ‘Pretty hard to get a room when you’re fifteen and skint,’ he had said once. ‘But if you can get one for us, we’ll take you up on it, no probs.’

  In the end, a room had not been necessary.

  He and Mia had grown up together, their development into adults entwined with, and perhaps inhibited by, each other. Towards the end, she had accused him of suffocating her, and he had been hurt. She had never said she didn’t want him! He had assumed she wanted to spend all her free time with him, as he did with her.

  Perhaps there was a lesson in that. Perhaps he shouldn’t be living with Jenna at this early stage. Perhaps she would tire of him, as Mia had done.

  And then what would he do?

  It wasn’t as if his life had been great before he met her. It hadn’t. It had been shit, in fact. In many ways, she had saved him – so many ways.

  But he didn’t like the thought that he had been saved. Seeing himself as some kind of lame duck who needed Jenna to come and sprinkle her magic dust over him to make him something worthwhile was difficult and humbling. But … well … it was a way of looking at it. It was how lots of people saw it, especially Lawrence Harville, and probably Deano Diamond too.

  Without Jenna, he was nothing.

  But, hang on, no he wasn’t. He was really and honestly a good artist, and now he had clients and a portfolio and all that. He believed in himself more than he had ever done before.

  He was something.

  He just wanted to be that something with Jenna.

  But what if Mia was right and he was boring and suffocating?

  The thoughts rolled round and round in his mind as his feet blistered and his legs grew stiff with exhaustion.

  If Jenna would have dumped him for punching Deano Diamond, then that would mean that she still had a place in her heart for Deano.

  This, the idea that had been threatening him ever since Deano’s return, made him stop in his tracks and let it sink in.

  She and Deano had a history he had no part of, and he was jealous of that. He hated to think of it, especially hated to think of their young love when they were bursting with exhilaration and full of hopes for the future. He often thought of painting pictures of scenes from their early life together, just so he could have the satisfaction of painting over them. He wanted to paint over Deano, black him out, turn him into a lamp post or some other piece of scenery.

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ he said out loud.

  This time his audience was a trio of cows, which took no notice and continued to chew the cud.

  He needed to accept that Jenna had a past, as she had accepted his. She had never shown any signs of being jealous of Mia, or even interested in her.

  ‘It’s different for her, though,’ he said to the cows. ‘She can have anyone she likes.’

  One cow looked up at him with mournful brown eyes, as if to say, ‘But she likes you.’

  ‘God knows why,’ he muttered in reply to the imagined remark.

  The cow stared on. This time she seemed to say, ‘Take a look at yourself.’

  He grinned at that.

  ‘I’m not bad looking, if I do say so myself. Cheers, Daisy. Incidentally, can you tell me how far it is to Bledburn?’

  She couldn’t.

  He laughed and walked on, mildly invigorated by the exchange.

  He couldn’t answer the question about whether Jenna would dump him for hurting Deano. But he could ask her. And that’s what he’d do.

  Everything out in the open, cards on the table. Then, a fresh start. Maybe they should leave Bledburn, go to London, leave all this Harville shite behind for good.

  He reached the top of a ridge and exhaled with relief.

  Below him was the complex of lakes, made from the old pits, and landscaped to provide a leisure and water-sports park for the people of Bledburn, who mostly couldn’t afford it.

  ‘My kingdom,’ he said, spreading his arms wide.

  He squinted down at the huddled town, trying to find the spire of All Saints Church, from which he would be able to place Harville Hall. Yes, there it was.

  ‘Hold on, Jenna,’ he shouted to the birds wheeling overhead. ‘I’m coming home.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  AN HOUR-AND-A-HALF LATER, after running through the fields that surrounded Bledburn, arriving at Harville Hall and finding it empty, and leaving in search of Jenna, Jason found himself passing the police station.

  The sight of it made him consider something that hadn’t even occurred to him yet – of reporting what had happened at Harville’s cottage.

  Jason’s record with the police was such that he would do almost anything and everything possible before involving them. But his plan had been to tell Jenna everything and leave the course of action to be taken up to her. And Jenna would surely have called the police.

  Or would she? Bad publicity, of which she’d had more than enough lately, might put her off. Perhaps it was best to keep the boys in blue out of it. But then again … who else was going to charge up and rescue Deano?

  He was pondering this question – safely out of sight of the front of the station – when a back door opened and disgorged none other than Mia.

  ‘Jay,’ she exclaimed, stopping stock still on the pavement.

  His heart skipped a beat.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said through cold, somewhat stiff, lips.

  ‘Have to sign in every week. Probation type thing, you know.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, looking up the street, unable to meet her eye.

  ‘So … you all right, then?’ she said diffidently.

  ‘Not so bad. You?’

  She laughed sadly and looked down at the pavement.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said.

  There was an awkward paus
e.

  ‘Fancy a coffee?’ she blurted.

  Jason stared at her, startled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Might be nice to catch up,’ she said, with a defiant edge in her voice. ‘I do think about you, you know. A lot.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I haven’t got any money on me …’

  ‘No probs. I’ll pay.’

  He frowned. ‘What’re you after? Anyway, I can’t, really. Kind of an emergency. But I don’t know what to do about it.’

  ‘Maybe I can help?’

  He was about to laugh scornfully and say he didn’t think so, when it occurred to him that perhaps she could.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Coffee. A quick one.’

  She smiled, as if she couldn’t believe her luck.

  ‘Yay!’ she said. ‘Come on then.’

  She led him to a kind of fancy tea-room, not a Bledburn kind of place at all, if you asked him, and it didn’t look cheap either, but then she was paying, so who cared?

  ‘So you’re a famous artist now, then,’ said Mia, as they took seats away from the window. ‘I saw you on the local news.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yeah. Always said you were talented, didn’t I?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She sighed. ‘I know you hate me, and you’ve got good reason …’

  He waved his hand, cutting her off.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter any more anyway.’

  ‘No,’ said Mia, sighing again. ‘It was her that got me into this place.’

  Jason made an exasperated sound.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jenna Diamond. She brought me here once.’

  ‘Jenna Myatt,’ Jason corrected. ‘And what? Jenna brought you here?’

  ‘When you were in prison. She thought I could help …’

  ‘But you didn’t. It was Kayley who had the guts in the end.’

  ‘I know. I felt bad. But I was so scared, you know.’

  She broke off to order two coffees.

  ‘You were scared?’ said Jason hotly, but then he remembered his mission and tried to calm down. ‘Yeah, well, Lawrence Harville isn’t exactly Mr Nice Guy,’ he conceded.

  Mia nodded miserably.

  ‘It’s him I want to ask you about,’ said Jason. ‘As it goes.’