Sins (27 page)

Amber had never thought that she and Jean-Philippe would even meet again, never mind become lovers once more, but they had, and Emerald had been the result of that second coming-together. On that occasion Jean-Philippe had repaid any debt he might have owed her when he had helped her to protect Robert from his own folly.

‘Robert loved you as his daughter, Emerald; he loved you very much. He was proud of you and proud to call you his, but…’

‘Go on,’ Emerald demanded when her mother fell silent.

‘It was all such a long time ago, a different life. Robert was your father in all the ways that matter. It was his choice to treat you in every single way as his child. Please let that be your measure of his fatherhood.’

‘Is it true that he was a queer and that he let you fuck with a French painter?’

The ugly words burned Amber’s face as painful a red as though Emerald had physically struck her again.

‘That’s enough! You will not speak to your mother like that.’ Neither of them had heard Jay come back into the kitchen.

‘What is it about you?’ Emerald screamed at her mother. ‘Why is everyone so determined to protect you? Don’t you realise what you’ve done? You’ve ruined my life. Thanks to you, Alessandro’s mother is going to have our marriage annulled, and if I don’t agree then she’s going to tell the world that I’m a bastard with a father—’

‘Oh, Emerald…’Amber raised her hand to her mouth in shock. ‘But if Alessandro loves you then it won’t matter to him, darling.’ She reached for her daughter’s hand but Emerald snatched it away.

‘Don’t be such a fool. Of course it will matter to him, and it matters to
me
. Do you think I want people knowing…laughing at me behind my back…?’ Emerald gave a shudder. ‘My father, a common painter.’

‘Emerald, Jean-Philippe was respected as a painter. He was very gifted; I have some of his work.’ Amber looked towards Jay, pleading silently for his help.

‘It’s stored up in the attic. I’ll show it to you,’ Jay offered.

‘No!’

‘He was very brave, Emerald. He saved Robert’s life at one time, and through that he saved yours as well,’ Amber continued.

‘Did…did he…was it really an accident that they died, my father and Luc, or was it because he found out about you and couldn’t bear the thought of someone else’s bastard inheriting from him?’

‘No!’ Amber’s voice was raw with pain. ‘
No.
Robert adored Luc; everyone said how alike they were, how very much father and son. Luc worshipped Robert. They were so close.’

So very close in life and in death. In her head Amber could still see them as she had done that dreadful morning when she had arrived at the small cottage hospital where they had been taken. The wonderful matron had ensured that they had been made to look as ‘natural’ as possible. Luc’s unmarked face turned towards his father, Robert…Amber caught back her own protest as she remembered how she had reached out to touch Robert and then discovered what they had tried to protect her from knowing–that Robert had virtually been scalped when he had tried to protect the son he had loved so much, his last action, his last thought, his last love for Luc. No child could have had a better father; no woman could have wanted a better father for her children.

‘Perhaps the duke was hoping he might get to take him to bed. They like that sort of thing, don’t they, men like him?’ Emerald taunted her mother.

Amber’s face had gone white, the skin stretched tightly over her bones. Jay stepped forward, reaching for her protectively but Amber waved him away.

‘That is a vile thing to suggest, but I will forgive you. Yo u are hurt and angry, frightened, so I will tell you again. Robert loved you both as his children–Luc as his son and heir and you as his daughter. He was the one who read you your bedtime stories, who listened to your first words, who held you and loved you. Robert was your
father
.’

‘But not the man who fathered me on you. Not the man who stuck his prick into you and—’

‘That’s enough!’ Jay stopped Emerald, moving towards her.

‘Enough? Why, because I’m upsetting her? Oh dear. Don’t you think that
I’m
upset? Don’t you think that I’m affected by the filth of knowing that my father was some common seducer–worse than a gigolo, according to Alessandro’s mother? I hate you. I hate you for what you are and for what you’ve done. You’ve ruined my life. It’s because of you and your whoring that the princess can do what she is doing. I should never have allowed her to send Alessandro away without me.’

Watching her daughter as she paced the kitchen in her fury, Amber looked at Jay, her beloved husband, her best friend, who knew all there was to know about her and always had done. To Amber, the relationship, the love she shared with Jay, was perfect and what she yearned for her children to know in their own marriages. But Emerald wanted different things and, looking at her daughter now, Amber acknowledged sadly that it was not love for her husband that was driving her daughter’s fury. But that did not stop her from feeling guilty. It wasn’t hard for Amber to recognise the motivation of a woman who was prepared to destroy her son’s marriage to suit her own ends. After all, her grandmother had been very much in the same mould, trying to force her own parents apart because she had not liked Amber’s father. ‘Perhaps if Jay and Mr Melrose spoke with Alessandro’s mother—’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Emerald replied. ‘She wants to end our marriage. I always knew she wouldn’t want Alessandro to marry me.’ Her face hardened. ‘But if it wasn’t for you, Mother, she wouldn’t be able to do a single thing about it.’

Emerald fumbled in her handbag, lit herself a cigarette and drew fiercely on it.

Even in her anger her daughter was beautiful, Amber acknowledged. Beautiful, but cold and hard, and knowing that increased Amber’s guilt, for wasn’t she, as Emerald had just accused her, responsible for her daughter’s personality, either through the genes she had passed on to her or the trauma of the months she had carried her, and her birth?

Was it because of those early weeks and months in her womb that Emerald seemed to have been born hating her? Was it too fanciful to think that somehow her daughter knew of how fearful Amber had been, how desperately she had wished not to have conceived her? Amber didn’t know, but she did know that the burden of her own guilt lay very heavily on her.

‘Emerald.’

Although she was awake Emerald pretended not to hear her mother when she came into the bedroom carrying a tea tray.

‘Your father, Jean-Philippe…’ she began, sitting down on the bed.

Emerald sat upright.

‘You are not to call him that. I shall
never
acknowledge him as my father.’

‘I have some of his paintings, if you would like to see them. He gave them into my safekeeping. They should be seen, not shut away in an attic. They are very good. When you were little, Robert did think you might have inherited his talent; you used to love to draw, do you remember?’

‘There is nothing of that…that peasant in me, do you hear me? Nothing. No, don’t touch me,’ she demanded when Amber reached out to take her hand. ‘I shall never forgive you for that. No one else must ever know about this. Have you…did you…? Thank God you aren’t a Catholic, otherwise I suppose the whole
world would know you’d gone snivelling to confess what you’d done. You’re that kind.’

She should rebuke her, Amber knew, remind her that she was her mother, and Emerald herself not yet even twenty-one, but she couldn’t. Emerald had always treated her with disdain, her strength of will magnifying everything she said and did.

‘If Alessandro loves you…’ she began hesitantly, wanting to find a way to help.

‘Don’t be stupid. It isn’t Alessandro who matters, it’s his mother. How dare she have me investigated, poking and prying? How stupid you were, Mother, not to have made sure that no one could ever find out. And now it’s me who has to pay the price for your stupidity.’

Amber was too distressed to defend herself and, knowing there was no use in trying to talk to Emerald, she stood up and left the room.

Emerald sat stony-faced and silent in the first-class compartment of the train taking her back to London. Somehow, someday, she would pay back Alessandro’s mother for what she was doing to her–and with interest. She looked down, a speck of something on her coat catching her eye. A tiny spot of brilliant colour, as brilliant as a St-Tropez summer sky against the cool beige of her outfit…She looked at it and then gave a cold hard smile as she brushed it away.

Back at Denham, Amber was sitting back on her heels in the dusty attic, her face covered with her hands as she wept.

‘Oh, no, Jay. Oh, no!’

Shortly after their return to Denham, having seen a sullen Emerald off on the train to London, Amber had had a sudden impulse to go up to the attic and look at Jean-Philippe’s paintings.

‘Perhaps to reassure myself that neither he nor I was as dreadful as Emerald implied,’ she had told Jay when she explained to him what she was going to do.

Naturally Jay had gone with her. He was anxious about his wife. She and Emerald had always had a difficult relationship but he wasn’t sure they could recover from this.

She hadn’t looked at the paintings for a very long time; there had been no need. To Amber they had always been something she held in trust, the physical memory of the man who had painted them with such passion and skill.

The disturbed dust had told its own tale, as had the packing case, which had been left carelessly open.

The knife marks that scored deep into the paint and the canvas had been deliberately cruel and destructive.

‘Emerald…’ Jay exhaled as he stared at the damaged canvas. ‘How did she know they were here?’

‘I told her. It’s my fault. I thought…I thought she might find it comforting to know, to see how good he was…Oh, Jay…’

‘It’s only the two canvases,’ he tried to comfort her, as he checked through the packing case. ‘She obviously didn’t touch the others.’

As Jay looked at the now scarred and knifed flesh of the young figure in the painting and then at the face
of his wife, who still looked so remarkably like the girl she had been then, he felt an anger towards Emerald that he had rarely experienced in his life.

‘Poor Jean-Philippe. I have let him down so badly. These are all that is left of him. What are we to do about Emerald, Jay?’

Understanding all that she could not say, Jay took Amber in his arms and held her whilst she wept.

‘So it’s agreed then?’ Emerald’s mother-in-law demanded.

They were in the sitting room of Alessandro’s mother’s suite at the Savoy.

‘With immediate effect your marriage to my son is over, and will be annulled. Poor Alessandro, I’m afraid I have already had to prepare him for your defection.’

She was dressed in her customary black, just like the horrid old crow that she was, Emerald thought bitterly.

‘Alessandro was shocked, of course, to learn that you had confessed to me that your marriage to him had been a mistake, undertaken by you on the rebound from another lover,’ she continued.

Fury spiked in Emerald’s eyes. ‘Alessandro would never believe that. He knows perfectly well that there was no one else before him.’

‘Does he? I shall have to warn him that girls can be very clever about pretending to be what they are not, shan’t I?’ Her mother-in-law’s smile was malevolent. ‘I think it best if you and I don’t see one another again after today, Emerald.’

Come back here, to this dreary suite with its
heavy Victorian furniture, its stuffy atmosphere, and Alessandro’s mother waiting in it, like a spider at the centre of a web waiting to pounce? Emerald looked round the oppressive room, its heavy dark curtains shutting out the light and trapping her where she didn’t want to be, just as the princess’s Victorian values were shutting her out of Alessandro’s life and trapping her in their rigid respectability.

‘Oh, and a word of warning. Should there be any consequences, shall we say, of your relationship with my son then I must point out to you that any such child will naturally be considered illegitimate–rather like you, Emerald. Maybe you should follow your mother’s example and look for a man willing to give you the protection of his name?’

Emerald didn’t say anything. Anger burned inside her, savage and corrosive, but she couldn’t allow it to escape. Not without risking further humiliation. Unceremoniously and ignominiously she had been stripped of her marital status and the title that went with it, and her humiliation was going to be made public. She was consumed with a burning hatred for Alessandro’s mother. She renewed her vow to turn the tables on her and make her pay.

‘It is not so very bad, Emerald,’ Alessandro’s mother mocked her. ‘As I have already told you, publicly we shall say that the marriage was a mistake entered into by two young people who didn’t realise the significance of the protocols of Alessandro’s position and the laws of our country and our religion. Think how much worse it could have been for you had I had to go public about your
conception and your real father. Of course, you have my word that no one will know anything of that, just so long as you continue to abide by our agreement. There, I think we have said everything that needs to be said, don’t you?’

Her mother-in-law’s smile was calmly triumphant as she rose from the high-backed chair she had deliberately taken as her seat, leaving Emerald obliged to take a much lower chair, or remain standing in her presence as though she were a servant.

Watching the princess walk towards the door, Emerald had never felt so much hostility towards anyone before. Her mother-in-law had outwitted her because she had been too clever for her, too Machiavellian. As Alessandro’s mother waved in the direction of the door, signalling both that the ‘interview’ was over and that she was far too socially above Emerald to open the door for her, Emerald made herself a promise that never again would anyone be allowed to humiliate her as Alessandro’s mother had done.

Emerald was still fuming as she sat in the cab taking her back to Lenchester House.