Thea, aware that the moment for saying something crushing to Carrie had passed, said impatiently, ‘If we’re going to be pirates, let’s find something pirate-like to wear.’
Energetically she began rummaging in the hamper, tossing things in Olivia’s direction. Carrie didn’t help in the search. Instead she looked around her.
The room was large and packed with things she itched to take a closer look at. There was a huge rocking horse with flaring nostrils and a long swishy mane and tail in one corner. In another was the largest doll’s house she had ever seen. There was a long shelf stacked higgledy-piggledy with books, including one she recognized because she had been given the same book, The Wind in the Willows, as a present two Christmases ago. On other shelves there were jigsaw puzzles and board games and on the bottom shelf was a row of beautifully dressed dolls. Beneath the dolls was a gaily painted wooden box crammed with toys. Spilling out of it were a train, a spinning top, a musical box and a monkey-up-a-stick.
Just as she was about to go and have a closer look at the monkey-up-a-stick, Thea said, ‘I think we have enough stuff now to be going on with, but as I could only find one pair of breeches, you and Olivia will have to be lady pirates.’ She stuffed a pile of garments into Carrie’s arms. ‘There’s a red-spotted scarf you can tie around your head like a bandana, a striped shirt, a fringed orange sash for tying round your waist and an eye-patch that belonged to Mama’s Uncle Walter.’
Olivia was already clambering into an outlandish selection of garments, and Carrie, beginning to get into the spirit of the thing, pulled the man’s shirt over her head, anchoring it around her waist with the sash.
Olivia giggled. ‘You look first-rate, Carrie. All you need now is a big black moustache. There’s a stick of burnt cork somewhere. Let’s see if we can find it.’
‘So we drew moustaches on our faces with the burnt cork,’ she said to Hal, much later in the day. ‘And we had enormous fun jumping from the table onto a chair and then onto other chairs, pretending the floor was the sea and that we would drown if we touched it.’
Hal made the kind of sound in his throat that he always made when he wasn’t impressed. ‘Doesn’t sound like much of a game ter me.’ He scowled so hard his eyebrows almost met in the middle. He was herding his father’s cows in for their evening milking and bad-temperedly switched the rump of the animal nearest to him. ‘Aren’t you going to do ’owt else this summer but go ter Gorton? The vole pups were out this afternoon, but it weren’t much fun watching ’em all on me own.’
Carrie tried to feel sorry about not having been with him, but she’d enjoyed herself so much she couldn’t quite manage it.
‘Before I came home Lady Fenton introduced me to Mr Heaton,’ she said as the cows headed up the narrow tree-lined track towards the farm buildings and the summer sky now smoked to dusk. ‘Mr Heaton is the butler. She told him I was Miss Caroline Thornton, that I was a guest of Miss Thea and Miss Olivia and that I would be at Gorton Hall every day until mid-September.’
Instead of being impressed, Hal forgot about his bad mood and hooted with laughter.
Carrie punched his shoulder. ‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded hotly. ‘Mr Heaton was very nice to me. Everyone was very nice to me – apart from Thea, but that was only in the beginning. And Lady Fenton is like the Good Queen in a fairy story. She’s . . .’ Carrie struggled to find words that would do Blanche Fenton justice. ‘She smells of roses, and she talked to me as if I was a grown-up. Apart from Granny, I think she’s the most special person in the whole wide world.’
‘You’re barmy.’ Still chuckling, Hal fastened a rusting iron gate behind them so that if the cows decided to head back to the meadow they wouldn’t get very far. ‘And you’re not the only one. My Uncle Jim says Lady Fenton isn’t right in the head, and that her having you up at Gorton every day is proof of it. I know you don’t want to go there, getting above yourself, because you told me you didn’t.’
It was true. She had. But that had been yesterday. It had been before she’d fallen under Lady Fenton’s spell, and before she’d known she was going to be best friends with Olivia and possibly a friend of Thea’s, too. It had been before she’d sensed that, where the Fenton family was concerned, she had started on a long and very special journey.
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Author’s Note
I hope those that know and love the high, grassy green triangle of south-east London that is home to Magnolia Square will forgive the liberties I have taken with their local geography. Magnolia Square, Magnolia Terrace and Magnolia Hill are all fictitious, though Blackheath Village and heath, Greenwich Park and Lewisham and its High Street, are most decidedly not. It is an area I have lived in for nearly all my adult life. I hope I have done it justice.
Coronation Summer
Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.
She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers’ Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.
Also by Margaret Pemberton
Rendezvous with Danger
The Mystery of Saligo Bay
Vengeance in the Sun
The Guilty Secret
Tapestry of Fear
African Enchantment
Flight to Verechenko
A Many-Splendoured Thing
Moonflower Madness
Forget-Me-Not Bride
Party in Peking
Devil’s Palace
Lion of Languedoc
Yorkshire Rose
The Flower Garden
Silver Shadows, Golden Dreams
Never Leave Me
A Multitude of Sins
White Christmas in Saigon
An Embarrassment of Riches
Zadruga
The Four of Us
The Londoners
Magnolia Square
A Season of Secrets
First published 1997 by Transworld
This electronic edition published 2015 by Pan Books
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ISBN 978-1-4472-3045-8
Copyright © Margaret Pemberton 1997
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