by Erica James
‘My dear girl, whatever you tell me stays strictly between us. I speak as a lawyer and as a friend. But is there anything I can do meanwhile?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do you know what you’ll do when your week here comes to an end? Because if I may be so bold, I don’t recommend you go back to Italy. Not with the threat of war hanging over Europe.’
‘Italy won’t join the war,’ she said with more certainty than she felt. ‘You don’t need to worry about me.’
‘But I do. I know what you’re like, Allegra, that you can be hasty, and that once your mind is made up over a thing, there’s no changing it. You’re just like your uncle in that respect.’
She laughed, in spite of being likened to, of all people, Jack Devereux. ‘Well, for now I have no choice but to remain here at Island House with Arthur and his insufferable arrogance,’ she said. ‘I can’t help but feel that Uncle Jack is punishing us all in some horrid way. As if we haven’t been punished enough.’
‘I assure you that wasn’t his intention; you must trust me on that. Through loving Romily, he came to appreciate just what his family meant to him. I know for a fact that had he still been alive when you arrived, he would have asked you to forgive him for all that he got wrong. The question is, can you do that now that he’s dead? Can you forgive him?’
Allegra thought of the inheritance Uncle Jack had left her, knowing that it would offer her a degree of security for many years to come. And of course now it might not just be herself she had to think of.
Her suspicions had been roused when the queasiness she had been experiencing at the shock of Luigi’s treachery had worsened, and always first thing in the morning. Before she left Venice, she had gone to the basilica in St Mark’s Square and prayed with all her being that she was mistaken; that God wouldn’t inflict this on her, not on top of everything else.
But now she was as sure as day followed night that she was expecting a child – a child, she was adamant, that like herself would never know its father.
Chapter Fifteen
In their room at the Half Moon Hotel overlooking the market square, his duty as a husband fulfilled, Arthur lay wide awake on his back next to his wife, who was now fast asleep and emitting a rhythmic guttural snore. Irene refused point blank to believe she was capable of such unedifying behaviour, and it pleased him no end to inform her that she snorted as charmingly as a pig in her sleep.
It was a shame he didn’t derive as much pleasure from the act of having sex with her. He found her about as arousing as a plank of wood, and it took a good deal of effort and imagination on his part to conjure up sufficient desire to get himself across the finishing line. If he’d been allowed to sample the goods before marrying her, as he’d tried to do, he might have thought twice about going through with the wedding, but her old-fashioned sensibilities had put a ban on anything more daring than a kiss and an occasional fondle of her breasts. She had known that he was the more experienced of the two of them and had believed that to be the natural and proper order of things. She just had no idea what he’d got up to before meeting her, and what he still did.
For the sake of his sanity, and his physical needs, he’d maintained his regular liaisons with an obliging, if somewhat mature, woman in Wembley. He had promised himself when he married that he would put a halt to his costly visits to Pamela in her shamefully suburban little semi-detached house, but the lure of her voluptuous body, which she offered so generously to him, had put paid to his good intentions.
He had lost his virginity to Pamela on his twenty-first birthday. His performance had not been up to much, but Pamela had been an enthusiastic teacher and he’d been a quick learner. Smiling, he closed his eyes now and thought with pleasure of the myriad tricks she knew when it came to pleasing a man and satisfying her own voracious appetite.
In comparison, the only appetite Irene had was driven by the desire to have a baby. Which struck him as odd, for she was utterly self-obsessed, and determined to keep her figure matchstick thin so that she would be the envy of all her friends, who, she claimed, had badly let themselves go now that they had children. But a baby was what Irene wanted, and Arthur knew to his cost that whatever Irene wanted, Irene got. He had her family to thank for that. Money had been no object for her while growing up, and she had only to snap her fingers and her wish would be granted. She seemed to think the same was true now: that Arthur should throw cash into the bottomless pit of her spendthrift nature. He had never known a person to get through money as fast as she did. Her wardrobes were full of the finest clothes, hats and shoes, and yet she still wanted more frippery.
‘Do you want me to go about town looking like a ragtag scarecrow?’ she would ask if he dared to suggest she couldn’t possibly need yet another new outfit. ‘Don’t you want me to look nice so you can be proud of me?’ Frankly, he’d pay good money to see her go round in rags!
His answer had been to remind her, yet again, that money did not grow on trees, and that his work at the War Office, while well paid, was not going to stretch to the lengths she believed it would. Moreover, he had his own pleasures to fund, namely Pamela, his club and his weekly card games. He had no intention of giving up any of those so that his wife could show off a new frock to her friends.
However, it was something of a tightrope he was forced to walk when it came to denying Irene anything, because infuriatingly, her trump card was always to shrug and say she would ask her father to step in and make good any financial deficit. Which Arthur could never allow to happen. A man had his pride, after all, and it would be too galling for him to be shown to be incapable of providing for his capricious wife.
He felt undermined enough by the Collingwoods as it was, with their constant harping on their superior ancestry – all the way back to God himself, if they were to be believed – without giving them any more cause to look down on him. Being the son of a former barrow boy from the East End was a millstone of shame Arthur was never going to lose. Certainly not in the eyes of his in-laws.
He rued the day that he ever saw fit to filch Irene from under his brother’s nose, but it had been an instinctive reaction. As children, anything Kit had possessed was automatically something to be taken in Arthur’s eyes; it had been a sport for him to reduce his pathetic weakling brother to a state of abject misery. Having power over his siblings, and his cousin, Allegra, had been one of the great lessons of Arthur’s life, having learnt it when he’d been sent away to school at the age of five.
He had hated the school initially, so much so that he had humiliated himself thoroughly by wetting the bed, which had led to Matron stripping him naked and beating him with a long-handled brush in front of his peers. In turn this had led to him being bullied, and in very short order he had discovered that the only way to survive was to toughen up and find somebody weaker than himself to torment. Even at so young an age he had grasped the basic law of both the animal kingdom and mankind – existence was all down to the survival of the fittest.
Since then, he had regarded any trial in his life as a challenge to be overcome, and with a bit of luck his latest trial, of lack of funds, was soon to be addressed, thanks to his old man dying so conveniently.
Trust his father to have left such an absurd will, but it had certainly spiced things up this afternoon when that dullard Roddy Fitzwilliam had taken forever laying out the exact terms of the bequests. Of course Arthur had had no intention of not going along with it, but he had thoroughly enjoyed watching the reaction on the other side of the table. Once again he had gained the upper hand simply by refusing to play along, by playing by his own rules.
Everybody was greedy for money, even his po-faced sister Hope, who advocated a life of selfless restraint in the belief that it would somehow make her a better person, and so it had been fun to see the looks of horror on their faces when they thought they might not get their hands on Jack’s lucre. The only face he could no
t read had been that of his father’s widow. He sensed in her an adversary, which only heightened the fun of the game ahead.
According to the terms of the will, Arthur would have to move into Island House tomorrow morning, and so straight after breakfast he would put Irene on the train for Scotland to join her family on holiday there. Once he’d seen his wife off, his next job would be to telephone the appropriate people at the War Office to explain his continued absence. Of course, with the threat of war hanging over them, there was the chance that his request could be denied. He hoped not.
In a strange way, he was looking forward to what lay before him. One thing he knew for sure: he would be at the centre of things, manipulating the others like puppets.
Just as he had in the old days.
Chapter Sixteen
Awake earlier than usual, Florence remembered with a start what day it was – the twenty-fourth of August, which meant it was her nineteenth birthday. Not that it would be appropriate for her to celebrate it in any way, not so soon after Mr Devereux’s funeral.
Last year Miss Romily had given her a pretty enamelled brooch, and the year before that a beautiful leather purse. She really was the most generous and thoughtful person Florence knew; not once did she overlook those who worked for her. Nobody ever had a bad word to say about her. Probably, and unfairly so, certain members of Mr Devereux’s family might prove to be the exception.
Through the open window, where the rose-patterned cotton curtains were swaying in the breeze, Florence listened to a cuckoo joining in with the birds giving voice to the dawn chorus. After a few seconds she was aware of another noise, and after straining to make out what it was, she realised it was the sing-song chatter of the baby in the room below. She was such a sweet little thing, and Mrs Partridge had been right yesterday to say that it must have been the most awful wrench for her parents to part with her.
But it was surprising what parents were capable of doing, and nobody knew better than Florence the truth of that. What was also a truth for her was that if she ever had a child, she would never abandon it, or treat it badly. She would treasure it as the most precious thing in the world.
When her mother had vanished without a word to anyone, Florence had convinced herself that she would one day return home from school and find Mum waiting for her with open arms. Another hope she had hung onto was that her mother had planned all along to sneak back in the night to take Florence away with her. For a long time she would lie awake in bed listening for her return, but eventually, when a year had passed and there was not so much as a letter or a birthday card, she accepted that her mother was gone forever, that she had never really loved her daughter. If she had, she wouldn’t have left Florence alone to cope with her violent drunkard father.
Not wanting to dwell on the past, Florence pushed back the bedclothes; it was time she was up. She had work to do.
As she quietly descended the stairs, the happy chattering from the baby in the room below her changed; there was a fretful tone to her voice now, as if she was anxious, perhaps hoping her mother or father would appear at the door.
Florence paused, waiting for the sound of Hope’s bedroom door opening, followed by footsteps across the landing, but there was nothing, only the cries of the infant now growing in volume and irritability. It seemed heartless to ignore the poor mite, so she judged it better to do something rather than have everybody’s sleep disturbed.
The baby fell instantly silent at the sight of her, but then her face crumpled, maybe because Florence wasn’t the person she had hoped to see. Even so, Florence leaned over the side of the cot that had been hastily found by Mrs Bunch in the village and scooped up the child. As she did so, she caught a whiff of an atrocious smell. She had never changed a baby’s nappy before, but now she looked about her for what she imagined was required. Somehow she managed to wrestle the revoltingly soiled nappy off the squirming infant, clean her up, pin a fresh one in place and then dress her, all the while making soothing noises that seemed to have the desired effect. Although perhaps it was purely being rid of the foul nappy that wrought the change.
Carrying the child, Florence took the stairs carefully down to the kitchen, where she scrubbed her hands and set about warming some milk, as well as making herself a cup of tea. Both achieved, she sat to one side of the range and, with Annelise on her lap, administered the milk. At first the child closed her eyes and sucked on the bottle with intense concentration, her delicate pale eyelids fluttering, tiny bluish-pink veins visible just above her long eyelashes. With one hand resting on the bottle, the other patted it gently, her small fingers splayed.
Drinking her tea Florence marvelled at the child, in particular her trusting nature as she contentedly nestled in close. Or was it no more than a survival instinct? Either way, it gave Florence a strange feeling, one that she had never experienced before: a desire to protect and nurture something so vulnerable.
Continuing to suck on the bottle, the little girl had just opened her eyes and was staring with an unnervingly solemn and intelligent force directly into Florence’s gaze when the kitchen door opened and Hope came in. Still in her nightclothes, with a silk dressing gown tied loosely around her waist, she looked sleep-rumpled and cross. ‘You really shouldn’t have taken Annelise from her cot without speaking to me first,’ she said with a frown. ‘I was worried when I found it empty.’
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ said Florence, stung at the rebuke, ‘but she was crying and so I thought—’
‘It wasn’t your place to think. Annelise is my responsibility, not yours!’ She came over and roughly snatched the baby out of Florence’s arms, knocking the bottle of milk to the floor. At once, Annelise began to cry.
‘I call that a fine way to show your gratitude to somebody who was only trying to help,’ said another voice. It was Allegra, and she too was in her nightclothes, except in her case, with her bare feet and scarlet-painted toenails and her long black hair, she looked far from sleep-rumpled. Admittedly she was a little pale, but the silk kimono she wore, which was untied and revealed a cerise silk sheath clinging embarrassingly close to her body, gave her the appearance of a seductive starlet luring a handsome man to her bed. ‘I was tempted to see to the poverina bimba myself,’ she went on, ‘but Florence beat me to it.’
‘For a woman who only thinks of herself, I find that hard to believe,’ said Hope stiffly, at the same time jiggling Annelise in her arms to quieten her.
‘Believe what you want, Hope, but if you ask me, you owe Florence an apology, and a word of thanks might not be out of place. The poor girl did you a favour, allowed you to sleep in. Which is more than some of us were able to do, given the racket.’
‘Since I’m not asking you, perhaps you’d like to mind your own business.’
Allegra shrugged and turned her attention to Florence, who was trying her best to give the impression she wasn’t witnessing the unpleasant exchange. She wished they would stop turning up in the kitchen unannounced. Why couldn’t they stick to the rest of the house to air their differences? Was this how it was going to be for the rest of the week while the family adhered to the terms of Mr Devereux’s will? She hoped to God it wasn’t. And why was Hope so cross with her? She had seemed pleasant enough yesterday. What had got into her?
‘I wonder if I might trouble you for a cup of coffee? Black and with two sugars.’
‘Of course, miss,’ said Florence. ‘I mean signora. I mean signorina.’ Oh heavens, what was it Miss Romily had said she was to call Allegra?
‘You may call me Miss Salvato if it’s easier for you to remember,’ she said. ‘Or Allegra.’ Her voice might have sounded as sweet as honey, probably hoping to get on Florence’s good side, but Florence wasn’t going to be taken in. She knew how false familiarity could be; that more often than not it led to somebody taking downright liberties. Sometimes it was easier to cope with hostility; that way you knew where you stood. It was diff
erent with Miss Romily and the friendly way she treated Florence. Her informality had always been genuine; there was no side to her.
‘Thank you, Miss Salvato,’ she said politely. ‘Would you like anything to go with your coffee? Some toast, perhaps, before Mrs Partridge comes down to make breakfast for everyone?’
Allegra visibly blanched at the suggestion and she shook her head. ‘Just coffee. I’ll have it in the garden.’ She turned to go. ‘You’ll find me on the terrace in front of the drawing room.’
‘I hope you’re going to put some clothes on,’ remarked Hope, ‘instead of making an exhibition of yourself.’
Allegra gave her a cool look, her amber eyes narrowed, her lips slightly pursed. ‘Why? Who’s going to see me making an exhibition of myself, as you put it?’
Hope tutted. ‘You always did have to attract attention to yourself, didn’t you? You haven’t changed a bit.’
‘Unlike you, cara. You have become an embittered old woman who can’t be nice to anyone, let alone yourself.’
And with that, ensuring she had the last word, Allegra closed the door behind her, but not before Florence caught a look of grim satisfaction on her face.
Gawd! Could no one in this wretched family be nice and get along?
Chapter Seventeen
With Roddy on the train back to London, Irene heading north to Scotland and Arthur now installed at Island House, Kit was keen to escape his brother and had seized on the opportunity to do so by offering to post some letters for his stepmother.
Before Roddy had left for the station, his parting words had been to remind them why their father had wanted them to stay here for the week. ‘It’s so that you can put your differences aside and learn to be the family you should have been,’ he’d said.