‘But you’ve never actually said it, written it or indicated it in a …
non-verbal
way to him yourself.’ He cleared his throat, a terrible prude when it came to discussing anything carnal.
‘No.’
‘Ah now there’s a thing. Men are awful thick eejits as well as having these terrible fragile egos. You might just have to spell it out to him.’
‘You think I should actually
tell
Rory that I love him?’
‘Yes, you should tell him! But not before Burghley,’ he added hastily, thinking of the fifty-euro bet he’d just laid on her horse at a hundred to one. ‘You need to keep a clear head, and so does that man of yours. Take old Fearghal’s advice and keep out of his way until then.’
She nodded, swallowing uncomfortably at the thought.
‘He’d be a fool to miss out on you,’ he told her, reaching out to take her hand and kiss it. ‘You are quite the most spectacular girl; so like your mother. Don’t tell young Roisin, but Anke was always the one that got away.’
‘Oh, I wish I’d known you all my life,’ Faith blurted, unable to contain her affection as she covered his face with kisses.
At this, Fearghal turned a surprising shade of beetroot and held on to her hand very tightly. ‘You have.’ He banged both their laced knuckles against her breastbone and then his. ‘In here, we’ve never been apart.’
‘Can I hide here for ever?’
‘You can stay as long as you like,’ he assured her, ‘but there’s no more hiding to be done. Sure, they’re bored with you already. You can come and go as you please now.’
He was right. Faith had spent less than a week in Ireland, but the press had already moved on from Dillon Rafferty’s mystery Caribbean blonde. There was a fully identifiable blonde on his father’s arm that was much, much more newsworthy …
‘Lord, what a trollop!’ Fearghal goggled over the photographs of Sylva Frost and the Rockfather canoodling by the River Odd with a champagne picnic. ‘Sure, he looks like that cockney fella who drinks in O’Flannagan’s Bar sometimes. And he’s old enough to be her father, so he is.’
At this, Roisin caught Faith’s eye and winked.
As soon as the Pete and Sylva story broke, Faith knew she had to get back to England to start riding White Lies again. ‘Dillon left him with Rory to work, but he’s no idea we’re headed for Burghley. I told him Blenheim was too much for us this year – we were begging a lift with the Beauchamps to Le Lion d’Angers before you came along and changed my plans.’ Her eyes flashed with fear.
‘Aim high and you hit less timber,’ Fearghal told her. ‘Now I have a couple of little keepsakes for your birthday, my darling lost daughter. Close your eyes …’
‘Oh my Lord!’ she shrieked a moment later, jumping up and down on the spot. ‘How do I fit those in my Ryanair baggage allowance?’
‘I’ll send them over with Ken Gamble next week. Happy birthday, child of mine.’
How Faith was going to explain to the Moncrieffs about the pair of fabulous grey, home-bred thoroughbreds he had given her was beyond her imaginings, but she decided to cross that bridge when she came to it. As Fearghal said, aim high … and aiming for Rory was still so high the air went thin and she couldn’t breathe when she thought about it.
The sun was still relentlessly bleaching the Loire from verdigris to almond as Tash pushed Beccy’s wheelchair along the rose walk striped by the shady, arched arbours. Beccy had Amery on her knee,
who was sporting a very dashing legionnaire sunhat, and Cora was running ahead dressed in nothing but a swimming nappy and checked flower-pot hat, picking up rose petals. Behind them, Henrietta and Alexandra were arm in arm, eulogising about David Austin Roses and weighing up the relative merits of full bloom versus single, old varieties versus new hybrids.
‘They’re in love,’ Beccy observed cynically, but there was laughter in her voice.
‘Daddy will be livid,’ Tash sighed.
Beccy reached back and touched Tash’s fingers, grateful to feel the pressure returned. It had been a hellish twenty-four hours, but she had finally come out the other side. She was appalled at the pain and damage she had caused, but they all knew that it was a mistake, a foolish, fumbling mistake. When she thought back to her awful, blundering attempts at seduction with what had transpired was a teenage boy, she wanted to curl up and die of shame, and she now couldn’t believe how she had possibly thought it was Hugo. But half-truths and misconceptions and believing what one wanted to believe had a way of escalating horribly, as she now knew.
Telling her mother the truth about her father’s death had been a much, much harder task and she’d almost flunked it, letting the pressure build up until Henrietta had been helping her into bed the previous evening. Tears of shame mounting all the time for the pain she was about to inflict, Beccy had let her mother fuss around her, fiddling with her pillows and sheets. Then, as she bent down to press a kiss to her forehead, Beccy blurted it out.
‘Dad committed suicide.’
The kiss lingered over her head for a long time before it was breathed back into her mother’s lips. Henrietta straightened up and perched on the side of her bed, taking her hand between hers.
Out it came, the story she had hidden away for years, a cruel truth to blast away all the myths. She expected anger, denial, accusations of lies and mania, blaming her moods and her fantasy life, or her painkillers again. Yet Henrietta gave her nothing but support and love, grasping an opportunity that she wished she had been given during those ten long years her daughter had wandered in search of answers. She wasn’t about to let her go again. ‘I was married to him, I know what he was like. Oh, my little girl, keeping this in your heart so long. You are so brave.’
They’d talked until close to dawn.
Now, drooping in the sun, they were totally exhausted. Tash was desperate to set off back to England for Haydown and Hugo, but it was Amery’s birthday and Alexandra insisted she hold on a few more hours for Pascal to return from his vineyard so that she could host a picnic party by the river.
‘I’ve not had much luck with birthday parties this year,’ Tash said gloomily, looking at her watch.
‘Oh, Sophia was talking about that on the phone just the other day!’ Alexandra exclaimed. ‘She says—’
‘Alexandra!’ Henrietta interrupted rather desperately. ‘What is this wonderful scented shrub beside us here?’
‘It’s orange blossom, darling. Isn’t it obvious?’ She turned back to Tash. ‘Sophia wants Pascal and I to come to England for your—’
‘Alexandra!’ Henrietta sounded even more desperate. ‘Is there a
secret
to having good orange blossom?’
‘What?’
‘A
SECRET
?’ she was breathless with teeth-gritting effort.
‘Oh yes! Hmmm.’ Alexandra was exploding with anticipation, making her quite forget that Sophia had sworn her to secrecy about her plans for a party to celebrate Tash and Hugo’s eighth wedding anniversary in November, a rescheduling of the disastrous, cancelled fortieth birthday party. Sophia was going to extraordinary lengths to keep it hush-hush, and the family had even been summoned to Burghley to talk tactics in a way that wouldn’t alert the couple’s suspicions. But now Alexandra thought about it, there might not be much to celebrate. Tash still seemed terribly apprehensive.
‘All this waiting is so depressing!’ she announced suddenly. ‘Pascal can join us later. Let’s all go to the river for a birthday picnic!’
It was a glorious afternoon. Lounging in the shade of vast old chestnut trees, Henrietta and Amery fell asleep curled up together on a checked blanket with spaniels wedged around them; Cora and Tash waded in the water shrieking as they tried to catch minnows, and Alexandra sat on a folding picnic chair beside Beccy in her wheelchair.
‘You’re terribly pretty now, you know,’ Alexandra told her. ‘Quite exquisitely pretty.’
For a moment Beccy’s heart swelled stupidly large, but then she realised Alexandra had her eyes shut.
‘As I told Tash’ – the older woman reached out and took her hand without hesitation, before finally opening her eyes – ‘one sees best with one’s heart.’ She smiled at Beccy. ‘Is there a man in your life?’
Beccy turned predictably red.
‘Gosh, how lovely to be young and in love.’ Alexandra sighed, tilting her head back as she heard Pascal finally huffing up to join them, wine bottles clanking. ‘Almost as heavenly as being old and in love.
Chéri
! At last! Tash is so desperate to leave, we’ve had to hide her car keys. Don’t you think Beccy here is terribly pretty?’
‘
Bien sûr
.’ Pascal bent over to kiss his wife’s sun-warmed cheek, winking at Beccy as he did so. ‘She is the perfect English rose.’
‘Don’t let Henrietta hear you say that,’ Alexandra confided in a giggly whisper. ‘We spent most of yesterday arguing about Anne Boleyn and Jacqueline du Pré.’
‘Eh?’ Pascal’s cheeks puffed out in outrage. ‘You are telling me that she sinks a six-fingered harlot or a mad cellist more beautiful than her own daughter?’
‘They’re rose varieties,’ Beccy explained shyly, deciding she liked Pascal very much indeed, especially now as he quoted Shakespeare in that fantastic French accent.
‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ He smiled at her.
‘Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d,’ she sighed, thinking of Lough and wishing that she had told him her real name the first time they had spoken.
Starting out on her long drive back that afternoon, desperate for Haydown and Hugo, Tash regretted that she could not enjoy her mother longer. She cheered her up like a rainbow bursting through dark clouds.
But she knew she had to hurry back to Hugo. She caught a late-night ferry across the Channel. The children, who had been fast asleep in the car, started mewling and bleating when they were dragged out in to the noise and bustle of the ship.
The drive from Portsmouth to home was shattering, the blip-blip-blip noise of driving over cat’s eyes making her jump each time as she realised that her concentration and the car were drifting off course.
They finally arrived home in the early hours. The back door was unlocked, but the house was in steely, near-dawn darkness, the dog
packs yawning squeakily, stretching and fussing around her as she carried the children inside, breathing in the smell of home like the first life-saving breath after nearly drowning. By the time she’d put them to bed it was light outside. She wandered in to her bedroom to find Hugo already getting up.
‘Welcome back,’ he said coolly, glancing over his shoulder as he pulled on a pair of jeans. ‘You’ve caught the sun.’
With a passing kiss so perfunctory and swift it almost took her ear off, he walked out of the room.
On the fake-fur counterpane, Beetroot was milky-eyed and delirious with happiness to see her mistress again, rolling upside down with such spine-wriggling, tummy-proffering excitement that she fell off the bed.
In France, as dawn started to break, Beccy heard a motorcycle engine approaching Le Manoir, drowning out the sound of the crickets that had kept her company as she drifted in and out of uneasy dreams, the pain still so acute that it was hard to sleep.
Lying in the Salle Bienvenue, staring out and up through her open balcony windows at a huge, round moon suspended in the cloud-streaked sky like a pearl on a blue-black satin cushion, she heard footsteps. Then a cough. She held her breath.
When a cockerel crowed almost directly underneath her balcony she almost fainted with shock. Whoever was outside obviously felt the same way as she heard a whispered oath and then the squawk of a rooster being chased away.
‘This is bloody hopeless,’ a voice muttered in the darkness.
Beccy would know that voice anywhere.
She was trapped in bed just inches from the open window, yet far too far to be seen and at least ten feet above ground level outside. The footsteps were starting to retreat.
‘Talk to me!’ she called out.
The footsteps stopped and then retraced their way to just beneath the balcony.
Beccy heard the pages of a book being flicked and then a voice spoke, a lovely, husky New Zealand accent, as deep as thunder over the North Island:
‘“
And what is a kiss, specifically? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of a lip, a rosy circle drawn around the verb ‘to love’. A kiss is a message too intimate for the ear, infinity captured in the bee’s brief visit to a flower, secular communication with an aftertaste of heaven, the pulse rising from the heart to utter its name on a lover’s lip: “Forever.”
’
She let out a little squeal of pleasure.
He went on, reading from a battered book he had kept with him all the way from Auckland to Berkshire eight months earlier, and then all the way from there to France this past night. ‘
“How obvious it is now – All those beautiful powerful words, they were you!
…
The voice from the shadows, that was you
…
You always loved me!”
’
Beccy was crying too much to speak.
There was a long pause. ‘Beccy, are you there? It is you, isn’t it?’ He suddenly sounded worried.
She mopped the tears that were coursing down her cheeks. ‘I’m up here. I can’t come out – I’ve got a broken pelvis, remember?’
‘I’m coming up. Don’t go away.’
Laughter joined her tears as Beccy heard a crackling of leaves and breaking twigs, and curses and groans of effort before a long silhouette appeared over her balcony. He had ivy in his hair and was carrying a very battered bunch of sunflowers.
‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ Lough apologised. ‘But I said I’d visit.’ His huge, turbulent eyes were positively luminous with love and triumph for having made it across the Channel and through northern France to find the house, and to find her, on nothing but a rusty Bandit bike without a sat nav.
Crouching down beside her bed he dropped a kiss on her lips that made her feel as though her mattress was spinning around with massive centrifugal force then whizzing up and down.
‘Wow.’ She looked up at him.