Echoes of Love
Authors: Rosie Rushton
Rosie Rushton
lives in Northampton. She is a governor of the local Church of England secondary school, a licensed lay minister and passionate about all issues relating to
young people. Her hobbies include learning Swahili, travelling, going to the theatre, reading, walking, being juvenile with her grandchildren and playing hopscotch when no one is looking. Her
ambitions are to write the novel that has been pounding in her brain for years but never quite made it to the keyboard, to visit China and learn to sing in tune.
Other 21st Century Austens, by Rosie Rushton:
The Secrets of Love
Summer of Secrets
Secret Schemes and Daring Dreams
Love, Lies and Lizzie
First published in Great Britain in 2010
by Piccadilly Press Ltd,
5 Castle Road, London NW1 8PR
www.piccadillypress.co.uk
Text copyright © Rosie Rushton, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
copyright owner.
The right of Rosie Rushton to be identified as Author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 84812 054 9 (paperback)
eBook ISBN: 978 1 84812 172 0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque
Cover illustration by Susan Hellard
Cover design by Simon Davis
PART ONE
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
‘
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it . . .’
( Jane Austen
, Persuasion
)
A
NNA STARED AT THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINE, HER SHAKING
hands making the type wobble in front of her eyes. This was all she needed – why today of all
days, on top of everything else?
She glanced down the hall towards the half-open sitting room door. She couldn’t let her father see this, at least not right now. She knew exactly what effect the photograph and article
beneath it would have on her volatile parent; and considering the mood he had been in all morning, there was no way she was going to give him anything else to sound off about.
She scanned the headline, the full force of the wording making her even more certain that she had to keep it from her father. If she hadn’t taken a break from practising for her Grade 8
saxophone exam and come into the kitchen to get a drink, she might never have spotted it until it was too late. She couldn’t just bin the paper – he would be sure to scour the house
till he found it. Under normal circumstances, he’d have read it from cover to cover by now but the early arrival of Marina Russell, Anna’s godmother, and the ensuing argument that was
still raging between them in the sitting room, had put paid to any kind of normal Saturday morning routine and the paper had been left on the kitchen table untouched.
‘Hi – we’re back!’ The front door slammed and Anna, torn between the overwhelming urge to throttle her two sisters and the determination to keep this latest development
from her father, ripped out the offending page and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans. She tossed the paper to one side, just as her sisters, weighed down with a variety of brightly
coloured, and very expensive-looking shopping bags, burst into the kitchen.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Anna shouted, all the tension and anxiety of the past hour exploding in a stream of words. ‘Not that I need to ask. You know what? You two are
unbelievable!’
‘Calm down!’ Gaby, her older sister, protested, pushing past her and heading for the fridge. ‘You can’t complain – we did ask you to come and you said you wanted to
practise your sax.’
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ Anna stormed, cutting her short. ‘This is important, and all you two can do is go shopping. Marina’s been here for ages and . .
.’
‘Well, that’s one good reason for us not to be, then,’ Mallory, her younger sister by just thirteen months muttered, dumping her bags on the table and kicking off her sandals.
‘A morning spent in the company of the Voice of Doom or three hours’ retail therapy at Bicester? No contest!’
‘That’s the last place you should have been,’ Anna stressed. ‘We don’t have the cash any more.’
‘For God’s sake, Anna, chill out!’ Gaby sighed, slamming the fridge door shut and ramming a straw into a carton of blueberry smoothie. ‘We didn’t need cash. We put
it all on my card. Dad said he’d clear it.’
‘Oh, and you listened to him, right?’ Anna retorted in exasperation. ‘What planet are you on? Dad hasn’t had any work all year, remember?’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘He’s had to sell the racehorses, he’s got rid of the boat,’ Anna went on, ‘and Marina says he’ll have to —’
‘
Marina says, Marina says
,’ chanted Mallory, pulling a sparkly vest top from one of the bags and fingering it lovingly. ‘It’s none of her business. No way is she
going to spoil my weekend!’
‘Anyway, what’s the problem?’ Gaby asked, running her fingers through her long dark hair. ‘Selling all that stuff must have fetched thousands – I guess that’s
why Dad said we should get ourselves a load of new gear while we had the chance.’
She cast a somewhat disparaging glance at Anna. ‘Look, I can hardly turn up at modelling agencies looking like last year’s has-been, can I?’ she added. As well as studying
fashion design in London, Gaby had done a couple of low-key modelling assignments for a freebie newspaper and now had aspirations to become star of the catwalks as soon as possible. She glanced at
Anna’s faded jeans and downtrodden pumps. ‘At least Dad understands how important it is to look good, even if you don’t.’
‘It might be more to the point,’ Anna muttered, ‘if he realised how important it was to stay solvent.’
To her dismay she felt her eyes pricking with unshed tears as she wrenched open a drawer. ‘See this lot?’ she shouted, throwing a pile of envelopes on to the table. ‘Final
demands, letters from solicitors and . . .’
‘That is absolutely, downright ridiculous!’ Anna’s words were drowned out by the sound of her father’s voice booming from the sitting room. ‘Do you honestly expect
me to even consider such an outrageous suggestion?’
Anna’s stomach lurched. She hated confrontation and she knew full well that the biggest one ever was about to take place.
‘Walter, just let me finish.’ Even at a distance, Anna could detect a note of impatience under the softer tones of Marina, the woman who had attempted to inject a modicum of common
sense into the Eliot household since the death of the girls’ mother three years earlier. ‘And before I say any more, I really do think that the girls should be in on this.’
‘There’s nothing for them to be “in” on,’ she heard her father stress. ‘I’ve said my piece.’
‘Well, I disagree. Girls!’ The sitting room door flew open and seconds later Marina, ignoring his protests, came striding into the kitchen. She was a tall, imposing woman, with
silver-grey hair swept up in a chignon. Her obvious affection for the Eliot family had caused close friends to speculate that she might marry the widowed Walter. This was never going to happen,
partly because Marina was firmly of the view that men were all very useful in their place but that one wouldn’t want one under one’s feet all the time; and partly because she was far
too sensible to tie herself to a man who was not only a spendthrift, but too devoted to his own needs to have much time left for anyone else. She was, however, a frequent visitor to Hampton House,
and even had her own ensuite bedroom on the second floor – a leftover from when she had helped nurse their mother; and, as Walter was prone to grumble on a regular basis, she treated the
place – and the girls – as her own.