Outback Bachelor (12 page)

There had to be a reason. All of a sudden Scott was determined on knowing what.

L
ADY
M
ARGARET
M
C
G
OVERN
was sitting in front of her triple-mirrored dressing table, staring sightlessly at her own reflection. It revealed a deeply troubled eighty-year-old woman whose features still bore the vestiges of great beauty. Lady Margaret was waiting for her beloved grandson Keefe to join her. She dreaded the thought of anyone overhearing their discussion. Rachelle wasn’t above eavesdropping. Neither, for that matter, was Scott, but they were downstairs with Jemma and her parents, playing cards. Rachelle adored card games and she was a very good chess player. Lady Margaret knew full well the Templetons and, of course, Jemma herself had their hearts set on a match with Scott. They had made that perfectly plain. Lady Margaret had wanted—had indeed tried—to speak to Jemma. To warn her? But she despaired of Jemma now. That young woman would be deaf to anything in the least negative she had to say about Scott. She was convinced Jemma knew in her heart that married life with Scott would be far from easy, but it was obvious Jemma preferred to be miserable with Scott than happy with anyone else.

So there it was! A marriage that would somehow endure or inevitably crash. Only time would tell.

This conversation with Keefe had to be kept entirely confidential. That was why it was being conducted in the privacy of her bedroom. Not that she planned to initiate anything. She would wait on Keefe’s questions, then try to steer a safe course through a sea littered with icebergs. Nothing much in Cathy’s background to be worried about. Her personal history was something else again. Stick with the background. The wonder of it was she hadn’t been called to account long before this. Such a heavy burden! She would be glad to lay it down. Keeping secrets was a curse.

Keefe knocked on the door then entered on his grandmother’s summons.

He had to smile. It was as much a command as a simple response to his knock. As long as he could remember, his grandmother had been very much in command. Keefe opened the door into the richly furnished bedroom, with its canopied bed, antique furnishings and fine paintings. The sitting room, equally opulent, was to one side, dressing room, bathroom to the other. His grandmother was seated in a splendid gilt armchair, one of a pair she and his grandfather had bought at a Christie’s auction many years before. The antiques had all but taken over, he thought. But his grandmother had always indulged her passion for collecting. Perhaps to a fault.

She was still wearing the violet silk dress she had worn at dinner but she had taken off her double string of perfectly matched pearls. They were so big that on someone else—outside Royalty—they would have been mistaken for costume jewellery. Not so his grandmother.

The expression on her face was mask-like as usual, but he knew the mask covered a seething cauldron of emotions. Either way it rent his heart. He loved his grandmother, even if he was aware of her manipulative qualities and secretive nature. She had such
presence
.

“Sit down, dear,” she said, indicating the other chair with a graceful wave of her hand.

Keefe laughed. “I think I’ll take the sofa, Gran. I’d hate to break one of those gilded legs.’

“Don’t be silly, darling,” she chided. “Your grandfather used to sit in them. Your grandfather bought them, for that matter. For me, of course.”

“A lot of years have gone by since then, I think.” Keefe chose to lower his six-foot-plus frame onto the sofa, which was covered in a beautiful, white patterned blue silk. “You look tense, Gran,” he began, knowing a moment of anxiety and regret that this conversation had to come about. Since his father’s death his grandmother, a permanent fixture in his life, was looking decidedly frail. “I don’t want to worry you or cause you upset, but there are some things I need to know.”

“You love Skye?” Lady McGovern cut to the heart of it.

He had no intention of denying it. That would be a betrayal of the woman he loved. “I’ve always loved her. You must know that. I loved her when we were kids. I’m madly in love with Skye, the woman. She’s everything I want.”

“So what is it you wish to know?”

The question was asked in such a way there couldn’t have been a thing in Skye’s background that wouldn’t bear scrutiny.

Keefe’s striking features grew tight with controlled anger. Here it was again. The long-maintained silence; the stonewalling, what had to be a cover-up. “I want to know all about Skye’s mother’s background,” he said in a quiet voice that nevertheless demanded she listen. “I want, Skye wants—and her wants are more important than mine—some kind of resolution on this. The not knowing is impacting heavily on our relationship. You were obviously very attached to Skye’s mother. It was on your say-so she was buried in the family cemetery. No one outside the family ever has been accorded that privilege—call it what you like.”

“
Privilege
is what
I
call it,” Lady McGovern said severely, attempting to hide her trepidation behind matriarchal power. She knew it wouldn’t work with Keefe. He was Master of Djinjara now. She was the McGovern dowager.

“Tell me who Catherine McCory really was. The little you’ve revealed over the years just isn’t so. She’s never been spoken about within the family. Dad, to my knowledge, rarely mentioned her, yet he was very kind to Skye.’

“Who wouldn’t be?” Lady McGovern raised her thinly arched brows.

“She
was
related to you, wasn’t she? Come out with it, Gran. We’ve all taken that on board. Was her maiden name really Newman? So far we have been able to find a record of a Catherine Newman entering the country from the UK for two years before she first came to visit.”

“We? You and Skye have been checking?” Lady McGovern’s expression turned steely.

“
I
have someone on it, Gran.” He cut her short. “I can’t allow you to override the fact I love Skye. I want to marry her but I need to be able to think ahead.”

“Dear God!” Lady McGovern threw up her hands in horror. “How could you betray
family
, Keefe? I don’t believe it!”

“With all due respect, Gran, you might be the one who’s been doing that,” he retorted bluntly. “It hasn’t been easy to go behind your back but you, yourself, are the cause of that. Would you answer the question please? What
is
the mystery? Was Catherine sent out here because of a certain incident, her behaviour perhaps? Could she have been a little wild in her youth? She was dead at twenty-two. She appeared to have had no one. No family. It’s as if she didn’t belong anywhere. You took charge of her. I want to know why. I believe it’s your duty to tell me. Skye certainly has a right to know. Far from investigating, Skye actually fears delving into her mother’s background. You must know that. It’s an instinctive thing, call it intuition. For the past couple of years Skye has been full of unease. So have I. But why
unease
exactly? Both of us have it in our heads we’re somehow related. It has stopped us from going forward. But it couldn’t be
close
surely, so what’s the problem? Now’s your time to tell me. Put certain issues to rest. I can’t lose Skye. I can’t allow her to move away from me. It’s not on. So tell me, what brought Catherine to Australia? What brought her to
you
? Djinjara is the McGovern spiritual and ancestral home, but it’s just about as remote as a young girl could get from a home in England. I should warn you to tell the truth. A lot rides on it.”

“Warn me?” Lady McGovern stared back at her grandson in shock.

“Yes, warn you, Gran,” he confirmed quietly, taking her thin trembling hand. “I fully intend to marry Skye, but not until this matter is cleared up. Can’t you see both of us need reassurance, Skye most of all? The mystery if there is one, needs to be solved. I need to set her mind at rest. I can’t imagine for the life of me why there has
been
all this mystery surrounding Catherine Newman. I need enlightenment right now.”

“Neumann,” Lady McGovern corrected, looking away from her grandson’s dynamic face. “Katrina Neumann. Katrina was a wild child. She was the daughter of a dear childhood friend of mine, Leonora Werner. We went to school together. I often vacationed at Leonora’s beautiful family manor as a girl. We were playing in the garden when we overheard a conversation between Leonora’s mother, Iona, and her husband, Axel. Axel was accusing Iona of being unfaithful to him. Leonora wasn’t his child. Previously he had doted on her and Leonora on him. Lord knows, Axel Werner had many an affair himself, but there again the double standard. He was quite the playboy, very blond, blue eyed, very handsome, German born. Leonora’s mother swore that whoever had told him such a thing was out for some kind of sick revenge. Perhaps one of
his
lovers?”

“That must have been terrible for your friend.” Keefe frowned, trying to process all this unexpected information.

“Terrible for us both, but naturally Leonora felt the shock most violently. We ran away as fast as we could. We had to stop when she was became ill. I could only kneel and hold her head while she retched her heart out. That was the start of it all. Leonora’s parents separated soon after that, divorced. Leonora wasn’t mentioned in her
father’s
will, although she was an only child. She never contested it, believing herself to be illegitimate. Who knows, maybe she was? One wouldn’t like to count the number of cases where the husband isn’t the biological father. I promised Leonora when she was dying that Katrina would have safe haven with me if she was ever in need of it. Iona blamed Leonora, shockingly unfairly, for the breakup of her marriage. Leonora left home at age seventeen, she’d been at boarding school with me most of the time. She and her mother never spoke again.”

Keefe shook his head incredulously. “It’s a sad story, Gran, but it hardly warrants all this secrecy. Unless Skye’s mother came to you pregnant with no place to turn?”

“No, no!” Margaret McGovern vigorously shook her pure white head.

“I’m asking you again, Gran,” he said tautly, wanting to keep her on track.

“Katrina wanted to put half the world between herself and the past.” Lady McGovern was showing her agitation. “She came on her own to Australia. She knew about me, of course, from her mother. It took great courage what she did. She could have had a splendid life. Personally I believe Leonora
was
Axel’s child. Axel was very blond, blue eyed. But then so was Leonora, Iona and Katrina,” she sighed. “The look and the colouring passed to Skye. I used to think I saw a resemblance to Axel Werner in my friend. Even in Skye.”

“DNA could have solved it but then it wasn’t available in those days.” Keefe frowned.

“Good enough reason for a lot of women to fear it now it is,” Lady McGovern shot back, her tone harsh. She began to flex her arthritic fingers.

“So what you’re saying is at some time Katrina aka Catherine met Jack McCory, who is still a fine-looking man, fell in love with him, maybe became pregnant before they got around to getting married. Is that it? Lift your head, please, Gran. I can’t see your eyes.”

Lady McGovern felt like she was suffocating, a pillow held over her head. Airless, struggling for breath, she answered, “I’ve always believed Katrina married Jack McCory when she found herself pregnant. What has caused me endless trauma over these long years is that I don’t believe Jack is Skye’s father.”

A deadly silence filled up the opulent room.

Keefe sprang up from the sofa, a man pole-axed. “
Dear God!
” His exclamation of shock resounded like a rifle shot.

“I can’t bear to say it again,” Lady McGovern told him, very piteously for her.

“Then who, Gran?” Keefe at that moment was laying full blame on his grandmother’s shoulders. “Put a name to your fears. But be very, very careful. My father was a great man. He was a married man. Maybe his marriage didn’t work out the way he hoped, but he was no adulterer.”

Lady McGovern blinked rapidly. “What are you saying, Keefe?” Her tone soared. “What are you thinking? Your father, Broderick, never! Please calm yourself.”

“I’m calm enough,” he retorted angrily. “I repeat. Who?” Keefe, realising he was shouting, reined himself in.

Lady McGovern drew a long quavering breath. “Jonty,” she managed at long last. “My dead son, Jonty. Your Uncle Jonathon.

As a revelation it had never crossed Keefe’s mind. He slumped back onto the sofa, holding his head in his two hands. “Uncle Jonty?” he asked in patent disbelief. Uncle Jonty, who had taken a fatal crash off his motorbike while rounding up a few head of cattle. Uncle Jonty, who had died at roughly the same age as Katrina Neumann.

Lady McGovern looked across at her splendid grandson, seeing his tremendous shock. “I could be wrong,” she said, very timidly. “But they fell in love.”

Keefe felt the tension in every knotted muscle of his body. “God, Gran! We’ve been focusing on Catherine and all along you’ve been worrying yourself sick thinking Uncle Jonathon could have been the father of Katrina’s child. Which would make Skye my first cousin.”

“Exactly.” Lady McGovern drew a jagged breath, wondering if she was about to have a panic attack. “Of course, first cousins have married, but—”

“A damned big
but
!” Keefe cried, making no excuse for swearing in front of his grandmother, something he had never done. Skye would be horrified. She could even call a halt to their relationship, even if he already knew he was prepared to go ahead.
No matter what
. His mind was working furiously. He wasn’t exactly certain but he was pretty sure there was no legal or moral impediment to first cousins marrying. If his grandmother’s revelation was true, he knew in his heart it would have a devastating impact on Skye. And Jack. No getting away from it! “Stop there, Gran,” he said with the voice of command. “Just stop. I need time to take this all in.”

Right outside Lady McGovern’s door, one ear pressed against the woodwork, a third party stood and listened. Keefe’s voice, deep and resonant, carried at any time. When he shouted—he did so rarely, no need to when everyone stood to attention—the sound carried into the carpeted hallway.