by Erica James
‘I suspect you don’t know the meaning of being nervous,’ she said. ‘You strike me as having an excess of confidence and chutzpah.’
‘Appearances can be deceiving, you know. How about you tell me three things I should know about you? Other than you can’t abide lateness in a person, rudeness, or a brash Yank.’
‘How very perceptive of you.’
‘That’s me. Perceptive as hell beneath the dumb exterior.’
‘Seeing as you have me thoroughly sized up, why don’t you tell me three things I should know about you?’
‘Fair enough. Firstly, and to quote your Oscar Wilde, I can resist anything except temptation. Secondly, I always tell it how it is; I never beat about the bush. Thirdly, my golden rule in life is, if in doubt, do it. Which is why I think we should—’
‘Work together,’ she finished for him.
‘Got it in one kiddo.’
‘Don’t ever call me kiddo,’ she said sternly.
‘Yes ma’am,’ he replied, giving her a salute. ‘I mean, no ma’am. So are we on? Are we going to do this thing?’
Chapter Nine
Melstead Hall, Melstead St Mary
October 1962
Julia
do you think your husband
could really love a pathetic
nobody like you?
The words of the anonymous letter had taunted Julia Devereux ever since that morning when she had opened it after breakfast, and thankfully when her husband wasn’t around. All day she had wondered whether she should tell Arthur about it, but in the end had decided not to. Not when it might send him into a furious rage.
She hated it when he was angry. And besides, it wasn’t good for his blood pressure. Better to keep quiet about the letter, to throw it on the fire and pretend it had never existed. More than likely it was the work of that careless girl who Arthur insisted Julia sack after she’d burned the cuff of one of his shirts.
As was often the way of their evenings, when he was home, Arthur was downstairs in his library and Julia was in her upstairs parlour. It was her favourite room in the entire house. During the day it gave her a beautiful view of the rolling parkland that surrounded Melstead Hall, all one hundred acres of it.
She had been married to Arthur for eight years, yet she still had to pinch herself that her life had been so transformed. One minute she had been a lowly nurse living in a two-bedroom semi in Bayswater, and the next she was the wife of Arthur Devereux.
Her father had always said that marriage wasn’t for her, that no man would treat her as well as he did. Her duty, he would repeatedly say, was to be a dutiful daughter and remain at home to look after him. He had encouraged her to become a nurse so that when the time came she would be better equipped to take care of him when he was old. He had been dead a year when she met Arthur and oh, how she wished he could see her now, mistress of Melstead Hall no less!
Listening to the carriage clock on the mantelpiece chiming the hour, she hoped that when Ralph, Arthur’s son from his first marriage, arrived later that evening for the weekend, he wouldn’t antagonise his father. He had a habit of provoking Arthur and creating an unpleasant atmosphere.
She put away her sewing kit and once more examined her stitchwork closely. Arthur liked his clothes to be just so. ‘I might well be rich enough to wear a new shirt every day of the week, but I’m not a spendthrift,’ he would tell Julia. ‘People who are careless with money don’t deserve to have it.’
Satisfied that the button she had sewn on was perfectly straight and secure, and that it would meet with Arthur’s approval, Julia put it ready for her to iron in the morning. After being forced to sack the servant who normally did the washing and ironing, it was now down to Julia to take care of the laundry, and any sewing that needed doing.
‘You’re the only one I can trust to care for my clothes properly,’ Arthur had explained to her. ‘I know I’m fastidious, but I can’t help the way I am. You understand that, don’t you?’ She had told him she understood perfectly.
There were many other tasks he didn’t trust the household staff to do and Julia willingly did them, wanting so much to please her husband.
A strict disciplinarian, her father had brought her up believing that nothing mattered more than obedience and duty. ‘No matter how insignificant the task is, or how difficult, it should be done to the best of your ability,’ he would say. For as long as she could remember, this was what Julia had tried to do.
So when Arthur insisted that she make a weekly inventory of the contents of the pantry and his extensive wine cellar, she did it with painstaking attention to detail. ‘This way,’ he claimed when he was checking the ledger books into which she recorded the inventories, ‘the household staff can’t pilfer from me and think they can get away with it. It’s important for me to have somebody running the house in my absence whom I can trust.’
That Arthur trusted her to carry out these jobs and not Miss Casey their housekeeper, filled Julia with pride and the determination to do everything just as Arthur wanted.
She wouldn’t dream of telling anyone this, for fear of appearing paranoid, but Julia could never shake off the suspicion that Miss Casey watched over her. She was convinced the woman looked down on her, and that the other members of staff talked about her behind her back. She often heard them whispering amongst themselves, but they fell instantly silent when she walked into the room. She never mentioned this to Arthur for fear that he might sack every member of staff, leaving her with all the work to do. She wasn’t scared of hard work. Not at all. It was just there were only so many hours in the day and this house was so very big to run. It was a maze of rooms and shadowy corridors that were difficult to heat. In winter, and when Arthur was away in London, he instructed that the heating was turned down. Ice would form on the inside of the windows and winds, straight from the North Sea, whistled through the gaping cracks.
‘A hale and hearty girl like you can withstand a little cold, can’t you, Julia?’ he would say. ‘I wish I had your constitution,’ he would add, ‘but as you know all too well from when you nursed me, I’m not blessed with good health like you.’ That was how they met, when she had nursed him through a severe bout of pneumonia.
She once remarked that their son Charles would fare better with a little more heat, but Arthur chided her for spoiling the boy.
This was Charles’s first term away at boarding school and Julia missed him terribly. He was such a sweet gentle boy.
‘The worst thing you can do to that boy is mollycoddle him,’ Arthur had claimed when she had suggested there was no hurry to send Charles away to school.
Julia would have liked a daughter. She felt sure Arthur wouldn’t talk of toughening up a daughter by sending her away to school. Every month that went by, Julia hoped that she was pregnant, but it hadn’t happened. Now that she was thirty-seven, time was running out for her. Perhaps it had already. For Arthur too, given that he was now fifty and his health was not as it should be. He really ought not to eat so much, but the slightest hint from her on the subject and he would fly into a rage.
When Arthur had bought the Hall from Sir Archibald and Lady Fogg and driven Julia here for the first time to see it, he had been jubilant in his ownership of the house. Taking her upstairs, he had insisted they make love straightaway in what would be their bedroom. ‘Start as we mean to go on,’ he’d declared as he instructed her to remove her clothes and lie down on the dusty floorboards. Their noisy coupling had embarrassed her acutely as the thump-thump-thump echoed around the empty house. She had been grateful nobody else had been there to hear.
His appetite for sex matched that of his love of food and she worried sometimes that she wouldn’t be able to satisfy him. But as always, and remembering her father’s stern edicts, she performed her duty to the best of her ability and with exacting diligence. She never complained about the bruises
to her body with which she often woke in the morning, or the pain that accompanied them. Complaining was not something she did.
And why should she complain when Arthur had given her so much?
Chapter Ten
London and Suffolk
October 1962
Ralph
Ralph Devereux would have set off earlier for Suffolk, but he’d had some unfinished business to attend to. That of ending things on the telephone with a girlfriend who’d started to imagine the ringing of wedding bells. The thought of marriage appalled him. He was twenty-two, had only come down from Cambridge this summer, and had no intention of settling down for a very long time yet.
His smart leather valise now packed, he locked the door of his Chelsea mews and hopped into his awaiting MG Roadster. With its 1600 engine, it packed a satisfying punch, and hopefully, given it was eight o’clock in the evening, the roads would be clear enough to give him the opportunity to get his foot down hard. He turned the key in the ignition and roared away down the cobbled street, taking a sharp right, and then an equally sharp left, the tyres squealing in protest.
Once he was out of London and had the open road ahead of him, the real fun started as he revved up the engine. Funny to think of Romily having been a racing driver when she was young. He had to admire her for that. Not that he’d ever say anything in her favour in front of his father. Arthur Devereux hated Romily, really hated her. He resented her for so much, but mostly for marrying his father, Jack Devereux, and, as he saw it, for stealing Island House away from its rightful heirs. This, Ralph was convinced, was the reason Arthur had bought Melstead Hall. It was his way of putting Romily in her place.
Situated a short distance from Island House, and easily the largest and most imposing property in Melstead St Mary, Dad revelled in the status the house gave him. He enjoyed lording it over the rest of the village, especially the rest of the family.
Ralph hated it when anyone in the family so much as hinted that he was a chip off his father’s block. He may have inherited the old man’s cunning for manipulating people to do what he wanted, but physically he was nothing like Arthur Devereux. He was taller and a lot slimmer, and a hundred times fitter. His dad was hugely overweight. He smoked too much and he drank too much. He had a vicious temper that frequently gave way to explosive outbursts, which doubtless sent his already high blood pressure soaring. In short, he was a heart attack waiting to happen.
The person who bore the brunt of his temper was Julia, his third wife. Much younger than Arthur, she had always struck Ralph as a very improbable choice of wife. She was, it had to be said, a rather pathetic creature who was firmly under her husband’s thumb.
When Dad had announced he was marrying for the third time, and to the nondescript nurse who had cared for him when he’d been ill with pneumonia, nobody was more surprised than Ralph. Quiet and timid, she was the last woman anyone would have expected Arthur Devereux to install as his wife at Melstead Hall. She lacked class or wealth, both things the previous wives had possessed.
Within a year of marrying, Julia dutifully produced a new son for Arthur. Charles was now seven years old and experiencing his first term away at boarding school. Ralph had been the same age when he’d been sent away.
During the few occasions Ralph went home, he saw how his father treated Julia more like a servant than mistress of Melstead Hall. For instance, he insisted that she lay out his clothes every morning for him. They had any number of servants to do such a menial task, including Miss Casey the house- keeper, but for some reason Arthur made it clear that Julia had to do it.
Ralph could not imagine his previous stepmother ever agreeing to do that. Arthur had married Caroline when Ralph was six, just a year after he divorced Irene, Ralph’s mother. Irene’s name was never to be uttered again in Arthur’s presence, and apart from a few letters, Ralph had no contact with her from the day she left their house in London and went to live in Paris with the man with whom she had been having a long-term affair.
For some time it was just Ralph and his father, along with the household staff, a nanny, and a stream of women who came and went. But then along had come Caroline Thurlesford, the sole heir to Thurlesford Brewery in the Midlands. She was a vain, vacuous woman who had no interest in Ralph. Ralph had always been of the opinion that his father married Caroline because she was so wealthy and would, one day, be wealthier still when her father died.
That day came sooner than anyone anticipated, but with a twist – both Caroline and her father died in an avalanche while skiing in Chamonix. As a result, Arthur inherited a considerable fortune and immediately gave up his cushy job with the Civil Service. The last thing he wanted to do was take on the running of the brewery, so he sold it to a competitor for an obscene amount of money.
If Ralph played his cards right and stayed in his father’s good books, he would one day receive a decent share of the Thurlesford inheritance. God knows he could do with it.
With only ten miles left before he would arrive at Melstead Hall, he thought about the weekend ahead. Before or after the party at Meadow Lodge he hoped to persuade his old man to increase his allowance. It was ridiculous that he should be so penny-pinching when he was loaded to the extent he was. He’d grumbled endlessly when Ralph had come down from Cambridge and asked if he could have his own place in London. From the way Dad reacted anyone would think Ralph had asked if he would buy the Taj Mahal for him. The wrangling had gone on for weeks until finally the old man had extracted a promise from Ralph; that he would put his expensive education to good use and find himself a job.
The promise made, Ralph moved into 4A Caiston Mews. Furnishing it had cost him an arm and a leg, and the housewarming parties he’d put on for his friends had made a huge dent in his dwindling finances. He had yet to land himself a job; not that his hunt for one had been that exhaustively thorough, and he had reached the unavoidable conclusion that he had to ask for an increase in his allowance. It would be a temporary arrangement, he planned to say this weekend, just to get him on his feet. It wouldn’t be easy and all he could do was hope to catch his father in a rare good mood.
Putting aside the slim chance of that actually happening, he contemplated his Plan B, that of approaching Julia. She must surely be given an allowance for the running of the household, as well as her own personal use, so it was just a matter of him applying his legendry charm and persuading her to lend him some money. It was a long shot, but worth a try. It would have to be an arrangement which they kept very much between themselves.
Chapter Eleven
Casa Santa Rosa, Palm Springs
October 1962
Romily
Darkness came early in Palm Springs and with surprising swiftness. The sunset, as glorious as it had been, had been fleeting and now the opaque velvety sky was studded with diamond-bright stars. With the air still scented with orange blossom, it should have been the perfect setting for a relaxing evening. But Romily was thrumming with restless energy.
Lunch with Red had gone on for some hours, during which he’d made it clear that he would enjoy the challenge of working with her.
‘What have you got to lose by giving it a go?’ he’d asked when she repeated her desire to think about their writing together. Which was her polite way of stalling, before finally ruling out the project.
‘My sanity,’ she’d told him, ‘that’s what I’d lose. Working with you would drive me mad.’
He’d laughed. ‘I’ve gotta give it to you, you tell it straight. I like that in a person. And I suspect you do too. Which is why I’m gonna urge you to loosen up and have a shot at relaxing. When was the last time you had any fun in your life? And I mean real fun?’
His question had outraged her. How dare he presume her life lacked fun! He’d been in her company for no time at all and had the temerity to think he knew anything about her. In short measure she had informed him that she wa
s perfectly happy with the quantity of fun in her life.
‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ he’d said. ‘Care to share with me the last thing that made you laugh out loud?’
To her great discomfort she had not been able to answer him. Not honestly.
It was that realisation that was causing her to pace like a caged panther on the terrace of the guest cottage at Casa Santa Rosa. When had she last laughed to the point her sides ached? Was that what age did? Stripped a person of the ability to laugh?
No! Age had nothing to do with it. Besides, fifty-five was not old. Jack had been older than she was now when they’d met and their brief time together had been full of laughter.
‘When I look into the mirror I see an ageing man with his best years long since past, but I look into your eyes and see myself still in my prime, young and invincible!’
Jack had said this on the eve of their wedding day, and just a few weeks before he’d died from a stroke. The age difference between them had never bothered Romily; all that mattered was that they loved each other and were happy together. And made each other laugh.
The ringing of a telephone from inside her guest accommodation interrupted her thoughts. She went to answer it.
‘Hey, Romily, is that you, honey?’
‘It is,’ she said cautiously, unsure who it was.
‘It’s me, Gabe. How’d it go today with Red? Did you get on like a house on fire, just as we said you would?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Oh?’
‘I might just as well be perfectly honest with you, Gabe, our writing together won’t work. We’re just not . . . we’re not simpatico.’