Sins (54 page)

‘I know that I’m not really Robert’s daughter, but—’

‘That doesn’t come into it,’ Drogo stopped her, real emotion now in his voice. ‘It was you I wanted to marry, Emerald, not your genealogy.’

‘But now you don’t want to marry me any more?’

‘What would you do if that was the case?’

A small frown pleated Emerald’s forehead. ‘You are Robbie’s godfather. It wouldn’t be ideal but I’d ask for your word that you’d always make a place for him in your life, that you’d spend time with him.’ Her voice thickened, her eyelids dropping to cover her expression from him as she told him. ‘That you’d love him.’

It seemed an age before Drogo spoke again.

‘If we do marry there’ll be a condition.’

‘Anything,’ Emerald told him recklessly.

‘No more Max Preston. In fact, no more men of any kind.’

‘Is that all? I loathe the very thought of Max, and as for other men…I made a bargain–Robbie’s life for my promise to always put his best interests first. Don’t you see, Drogo,
that
Emerald, the old Emerald who thought only of herself and her own pleasure, has gone. Our marriage won’t be about me having a good time or…or enjoying sex. Drogo, what are you laughing for?’ she demanded, feeling affronted when he burst into laughter.

‘You’ve got an odd idea of what it takes to persuade a man into marriage,’ he told her, reaching out to catch hold of her hand and then gently tugging her towards him. ‘Of course I still want to marry you. I’ve never stopped wanting to, nor stopped hoping that one day you will. Much as I do love Robbie, it isn’t just for his sake that I practically camp out on your doorstep, you know.’

His voice was amused, tender, the timbre of it close
to her ear affecting her in the most unexpected and extraordinary way.

‘I’ll make a bargain with you, Emerald. Yes, I’ll marry you, provided the only man in your bed from now on is me, and provided you agree that we should at least try for good sex. I mean, we do have an heir to get, after all, Maybe an heir and a spare, and a couple of girls as well. May as well found a dynasty; there’s all that money to find a home for.’

‘Drogo,’ Emerald started to protest, and then stopped, had to stop in fact, because Drogo was kissing her, and suddenly it seemed the most natural thing in the world to throw her arms around his neck and hold him close so that she could kiss him back.

His hand had just burrowed under her sweater, his touch on her bare breast and her nipple pleasingly sure and skilled, when Robbie pushed open the door, coming to an abrupt halt.

‘Uggh! You’re not kissing? That’s for cissies,’ he said with disgust.

‘And would-be mummies and daddies,’ Drogo whispered in Emerald’s ear as he discreetly straightened her sweater and told her, ‘I think we should resume this affirmation of our agreement to provide Robbie with a father, my heir-to-be with a mother, Osterby with a mistress and my bed with the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to hold in my arms there, a little later on, don’t you?’

His hand was still cupping the side of her breast, aching tormentingly now for more of his touch whilst her lower body pulsed with the need he had aroused.
But she had made a promise to put Robbie first, she reminded herself, as she pulled away from Drogo and told her son, ‘Robbie, darling, guess what. Uncle Drogo and I are going to be married.’

‘You mean that we’re all going to be living together?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Emerald looked at Drogo.

‘Very good,’ he agreed. ‘In fact very, very good indeed.’

Amber was the only person in the hospital waiting room. Outside it was still dark. There had been snow on the road from the heavy fall earlier in the day and she had been terrified that the ambulance wouldn’t be able to get through.

How was it possible that Jay, who was so fit, could have had a heart attack? Amber shivered and squeezed her eyes tightly shut in prayer.

‘Please don’t take him from me,’ she begged silently. ‘Please let him live.’

They’d wanted her to go home. They’d said there was nothing she could do, but she wanted to be here; she wanted to be with Jay.

The family would have to be told, of course. Amber tried to concentrate on the practical issues that would involve. Janey and John and their two children, both boys, were close at hand at Fitton Hall. Robbie, who loved his grandfather so much, was away skiing with friends, taking a year out before going up to Oxford,
whilst Emerald and Drogo and their two girls would be at Osterby. Emerald, who was so desperate to give Drogo a son, and so angry because she had not done so.

Ella and Oliver were in New York with their daughter, and Rose would be in West Sussex. As always when she thought of Rose, Amber’s heart ached over the distance her niece had put between them, withdrawing from the close relationship they had once shared.

In the early years of her marriage Rose and Pete had always spent Christmas at Denham with the rest of the family, but more recently the problems with Pete’s health, caused by his drinking, meant that he was not well enough to go anywhere and as Rose virtually refused to leave his side, neither did she. Rose had put up a wall between them–between herself and all her family, in fact–fending off all Amber’s attempts to find out why, and Amber could only suppose sadly that it was because of her marriage, and out of some kind of loyalty to Pete, perhaps thinking that her family might be critical of him in an attempt to be protective of her. Rose was a very proud and a very private person, but Amber feared that she was also a very lonely person and her maternal heart ached for the niece she loved so much and still thought of as a daughter. And finally, of course, the twins. Polly would have to come from Venice, where she lived with her husband, Rocco Angelli, and their twin sons, whilst Cathy was living in St Ives with her artist partner and her two daughters from other relationships.

Jay loved their shared progeny so much, as they did him.

They couldn’t lose him. They mustn’t. How could such
a healthy man have a heart attack? Amber’s body shook violently.

It had been a perfectly normal February day. In the morning Jay had driven over to see one of their tenant farmers, and Amber had had a charity committee meeting. Then in the afternoon they’d gone together to the mill for their regular monthly meeting with its manager.

When they’d got home Jay had complained about an ache in his arm, she remembered. He’d thought he must have got it from chopping wood for the fire. They’d laughed about the aches and pains of getting older–Jay was in his early seventies now, and she was sixty-four–not old at all really.

Over dinner they’d talked as they always did about their family, especially their grandchildren. They’d been in bed before midnight.

It had been just gone two o’clock when she’d woken up to find Jay sitting up in bed, clutching his chest, his face pale grey and beaded with sweat in the light of the bedside lamp she switched on.

She known immediately then, of course, panic coursing through her to set her own heart beating heavily and too fast, as she’d rung 999, whilst Jay protested that there was nothing wrong with him, and that she wasn’t to fuss.

He’d still been protesting when the ambulance had arrived.

The door to the waiting room opened, the sight of the consultant, summoned from his own bed, sending Amber a surge of mingled hope and fear, the sensation
reminding her of a long-ago visit to Disneyland and the ride she had gone on there with her grandchildren. Then her terror had been limited to the duration of the ride and the knowledge that it would soon be over.

‘How is he?’

She had, Amber discovered, risen from her chair and was now clutching the back of it for support. How many times must the consultant have heard those anxiety-and dread-filled words and seen fear and grief in a relative’s face?

‘His condition is stable.’

The calm tone, the soothing smile meant nothing really.

‘Is he going to…will he live?’

Such simple words but ones so heavily weighted with her love and her fear.

The consultant’s smile was professional and meant to soothe but Amber could see behind it to the pity and the reality it tried to mask.

‘He has had a major heart attack, which he has survived. His condition, as I have already said, is now stable. The next forty-eight hours are crucially important. That is when patients are most vulnerable to further attacks.’

Further and
fatal
attacks was what the consultant meant, Amber knew. Her hand tightened on the back of the chair, her knuckles showing white through her skin.

‘I want to be with him.’ Somehow she managed to make her voice steady and calm.

The consultant was frowning. ‘Your husband is in intensive care.’

Amber knew all about the hospital’s intensive care ward. After all, she and Jay had done a great deal to help to raise the money to ensure that the hospital had such a facility.

‘I shan’t be a nuisance. Jay would want me to be with him. He would expect it.’

Now her voice was firm with conviction. Jay would want her to be there, and if they were not to be lucky and he was to be taken from her, then she wanted to be the one who was there with him, to surround him with her love in those last moments between life and death.

‘Very well,’ the consultant agreed. ‘Sister will arrange for you to be gowned up, but first I expect you’ll want to get in touch with your family.’

She should do that, of course, but Amber was more anxious to get to Jay. If these were to be Jay’s last hours on earth then selfishly she wanted them for herself; she wanted the luxury of concentrating on him alone, of communing with him in the silence of the dark hours; she wanted, she acknowledged, to be only Jay’s instead of having to be a mother and a grandmother, instead of having to juggle the complex needs of their family when all she wanted was to hold to her these precious last hours with the man she loved. But as always her duty to others commanded her. They too loved Jay and would never forgive her if a delay on her part meant that they were denied the opportunity to share his last hours.

She dipped her head in acquiescence, her ‘Very well’ reminding her of the youthful Amber she had once been, obeying the grandmother she had half feared. Jay would have recognised that tone and that dipped head because
Jay had shared those years with her. Now her fear had a stranglehold on her emotions and her thoughts, panic–a child’s panic, almost–of losing all her emotional security clawing at her. Jay was her life, her whole reason for being; she couldn’t lose him. She was trembling as she followed the nurse to the small room from where she could telephone the news.

Janey couldn’t sleep and she knew, although he was lying silently beside her in their big comfortable marital bed, that John wasn’t sleeping either. How could they after what had happened? Her heart started to race with a familiar mixture of fear, panic and disbelief.

In the ten years they had been married Janey had never once given any thought to their financial security. John was a careful and a prudent man, not the kind of man who would ever take any kind of financial risk, especially not with the estate that had been handed down to him which had passed through so many generations of his family and which he in turn would hand down to their own son.

He had believed his investment was safe, he had told her with tears in his eyes. He would never have made it if he had thought otherwise. Investing money with several other local landowners, people he had known all his life, had seemed, under the aegis of one of their number, such a good decision. And so it had been–at first–making enough profit to buy back some of the land that had been sold during his father’s time, but then
something had gone dreadfully wrong, and now all the money was lost. According to John they were virtually penniless.

John hadn’t told Janey at first, not wanting to worry her, but then he had come to her white-faced, his voice low with shame and despair, to tell her what had happened.

They had done their best. It was too late now to regret the money spent on the purchase of more land; on the expensive cattle-breeding programme inspired by the success the Duke of Westminster was having with his own prize herd; on the new roof for Fitton Hall–so very costly because the whole building was listed; on the modernisation inside. But like so many landowners they were land rich and cash poor. The estate barely covered its own running costs, never mind paid them an income, which was why John had wanted to try to generate more money in the first place. Over the years they had had to dip into Janey’s inheritance and now what was left was next to nothing, barely enough to pay the children’s school fees. Fitton Hall itself was mortgaged, the money raised used to modernise the estate, which had been so badly neglected by John’s father and his stepmother.

Lying awake in the darkness filled with fear and panic, Janey thought enviously of Emerald, whose own personal fortune ran into millions, never mind Drogo’s vast wealth. Emerald would never need to lie awake in her bed at night with her heart pounding with sick fear because there was no money.

It was so unfair that this had happened to John, who had only wanted to do his best for them all and for
Fitton. Her own father would understand that, and he would want to help them, Janey comforted herself. He and John had always got on well. They could go to Denham and talk to him. She would have to manage things discreetly, of course, so as not to humiliate poor John. Her panic began to recede.

Yes, her father would know what to do…

She was just drifting off to sleep when she heard the telephone ring.

Emerald lay beneath the smooth weight of her expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, her body completely still as she looked up through the darkness. The London house’s master bedroom had only just been refurbished using Designers Guild ‘Geranium’ fabric to create a luscious four-poster bed effect. Emerald had invited her mother round to see it, watching the faint shadow darken Amber’s eyes as she studied the fabric that had become so very desirable and praised.