Authors: Kaye C. Hill
She left by the kitchen door and headed down the track, checking her phone at intervals until she got a signal.
“Lexy!” Edward had the manic voice again. “We’ll come and pick you up now. Where are you, exactly? Peter and I have talked about this Gerard business, and we think we
might have to resort to violence. I know someone who...”
“Edward... Edward... it’s OK.”
“... might be able to get us a...”
“Edward. Kinky’s back,” Lexy shouted.
“What?”
“He’s back with me. Arrived at half five this morning. On his own.”
Lexy had been wondering whether Edward and Peter had been involved in Kinky’s mysterious reappearance, but it seemed unlikely, judging by the loud sobbing coming down the phone.
“Thank god – finally we can sleep!” she heard Peter wail.
“Yes – you two do just that, and I’ll... catch up with you later. Er... Edward... would you really have held Gerard at gunpoint for me?”
“I have been quite overwrought about all this, sweetie.”
“Bloody lucky you came back when you did, Kinky,” Lexy muttered, as they went back up the hill. “Otherwise I’d have had a gay version of Bonnie and Clyde on my
hands.”
Gabrielle was just leaving in the van. Steve waved from the door.
Lexy frowned, her hand slipping into her inside jacket pocket. But this time she didn’t take out the photograph of Steve, Gabrielle and Rowana.
She took out the one of Elizabeth Cassall, the one she should have looked at properly in the first place.
After all, it had been staring her in the face all the time.
“So, when were you going to tell her?”
“What?”
“I said, when were you going to tell her?” Lexy had to shout to make herself heard.
She and Steve had walked to the summit of the hill.
It was a fresh, breezy morning, with low white clouds scudding across the sky, but it wasn’t the wind that was giving them hearing problems.
It was the sheep.
Lexy couldn’t understand how she’d missed them on her previous trips up the hill – the summit was seething with brown and white ovines all bleating hoarsely at one another.
Luckily she had a lead for Kinky, or rather a piece of string she kept in her bag for emergencies, seeing as the chihuahua’s usual lead had disappeared during the incident at the Jolly
Herring. The dog was uncharacteristically uninterested in the sheep though, and stuck close to Lexy, a worried frown seeming to furrow his brow.
“Rowana. When were you going to tell her who her real mother was?”
Steve caught her arm, his face grey. “Who told you...?”
“Let’s go over there.” Lexy pointed to a free patch of ground close to the cliff edge.
The sheep parted like a woollen version of the Red Sea to let them through.
They could finally hear each other.
The sea undulated below, white-cuffed waves reaching greedily to the soft sand at the foot of the cliff.
“Elizabeth told me.” Lexy took out the photo.
Steve took it from her, and this time he looked at it for a long time.
Lexy inspected the ground, kicked a couple of dried sheep droppings over the cliff and sat down facing the sea. Steve dropped down beside her. Kinky paced around behind them.
“Jackie couldn’t conceive," Steve said, without preamble. "We tried for two years. Really tried. I’m talking practically every night.”
“That’s a lot of detail," said Lexy.
“I was.
..
knackered. Literally.
..
”
“So is that.”
“
...
and Jackie was distraught. Doctors, fertility clinics, old wives’ tales, we did the lot. She got suicidal in the end, even though we had Gabrielle, and.
..
I
thought.
..
everything to live for.”
The breeze tugged at the photo in his hand.
“Then, one day, when I was just about at the end of my tether, Jackie got a phone call from an old friend of hers." He inclined his head. “Elizabeth Cassall. Said she was in some
kind of trouble, and Jackie went straight off to visit her on the next train out of London, leaving me with Gabrielle to look after and a shop to run.”
He paused, a muscle twitching in his cheek.
“When Jackie came back a week later, there was a change in her. Suddenly life was good again. She was almost manically happy. Every couple of weeks she’d go to Suffolk, and
she’d come back happier each time.”
Lexy frowned. The explanation wasn’t going quite how she expected.
“Then after a couple of months had passed, she announced she was going to stay with Liz for six weeks. By which point I started to wonder what the hell was going on.”
So was Lexy.
Steve stared hard at the photograph again. “I couldn’t have even imagined the truth. It was the time of the Gulf War. 1990. Elizabeth’s husband Robert had been over there in
the thick of it. And while he’d been out on manoeuvres, Elizabeth had a very ill-advised one night stand with ...”
Here we go. So he was going to own up to having an affair, after all. Lexy had suspected it for a while, but it was still disappointing to find that...
“... Archer Trevino.”
“What?” Lexy felt a wave of shock pass over her. “But... ?”
“I know.” Steve closed his eyes briefly. “Two months later she realised she was pregnant. She also knew that when Robert got back from the Gulf he would realise the child
couldn’t possibly be his. She wasn’t even going to think about telling Archer – he was a drunken, womanizing... libertine.” He shook his head. “But she didn’t
want to take a life. So she called her old friend Jackie, desperate to work out what to do. And, unbeknown to me, Jackie had this great idea.”
He gave her a grim look.
“My god,” whispered Lexy.
“Yes. Somehow they managed to keep it quiet between them. It didn’t show on Elizabeth until the final months. At which point, she shut herself up here at the cottage, and Jackie
looked after her. Helped her give birth, then they called a doctor in Clopwolde just afterwards and said Jackie had unexpectedly gone into labour.”
“
Jackie
... not Elizabeth,” Lexy whispered, incredulous.
“Yup. And she came back home to me with a newborn daughter.”
Lexy shook her head in disbelief.
Elizabeth Cassall. Rowana Cassall. Or perhaps, Lexy reminded herself, Rowana Trevino. Daughter of the painter who lived in the thatched cottage in Nodmore and drank whisky. Perhaps he’d
stop now he had someone other than himself to consider.
“Must have been something of a surprise.”
“Tell me about it.” Steve picked up a stone and flung it at the sea far below.
Kinky’s ears pricked up. Lexy tightened her hold on the piece of string to which he was still attached. “It explains that big mutual favour between Elizabeth and Jackie,” she
said, half to herself.
“Yes. Elizabeth gets to keep face, and Jackie gets what she was prepared to do anything for. A baby.” His mouth jerked. “At first Jackie tried to convince me Rowana was ours. I
almost believed her, god knows, I wanted to. She was a beautiful baby – and Jackie was in seventh heaven. But I knew I had to make her and Elizabeth put it right between them. Tell the truth
to everyone involved. I came down here – spoke to Elizabeth. I thought perhaps Jackie and I could try to legally adopt Rowana. But Elizabeth told me to go and never to contact her again. And
the irony of all this was that Robert never came back from the Gulf anyway. I didn’t find that out till years later.
“Then Jackie got ill. It was so... quick.” He shot a look at Lexy. “I couldn’t put her through any more pain than she was already in. So I promised I’d look after
Rowana as my own. It was my last promise to her.”
They were silent for a while.
“Did you tell Elizabeth that Jackie had... passed away?” Lexy said.
He shook his head.
“Whose names are on the birth certificate?”
“Mine and Jackie’s.”
“It must have given you a hell of a shake up when you heard about this inheritance out of the blue.”
Steve nodded. “I’d been living in denial for nearly seventeen years. As far as I was concerned, Rowana was my daughter and that was the end of it.” His fingers pulled at the
short grass surrounding them. “Elizabeth and I never did have any contact. But there was a part of me that lived in fear of something happening one day. Old sins cast long shadows, and all
that.
“In a way, the worst of it was hearing that Elizabeth had died. I opened that letter from the solicitor two months ago and I looked over at Rowana and it finally struck home that
she’d had a mother who’d lived and died just two counties away from us, and she’d never known a single thing about her.”
Lexy felt herself reach out and squeeze Steve’s hand.
He shot her a grateful look. “Like I said, I’d no idea that Elizabeth had left her estate to Jackie, let alone Rowana. Couldn’t get my head around it at first. Even made me
angry that Elizabeth had put us in this position. And through it all, I had to keep up this pretence that I was surprised, you know, this ‘how amazing that an old friend of Jackie’s has
left Rowana this huge inheritance’ routine.”
He frowned. “One of the oddest things was the way Rowana reacted to it all. I mean, you would have thought she’d be just the tiniest bit pleased that she’d inherited all this
money from someone she’d been told was a friend of her mother, someone she’d never met, so would never mourn. And at a time when we were so desperate for money.”
“You’d have thought so.”
“But right from the start she treated it like a poisoned chalice. She didn’t even seem to want to come here and see the place, which made two of us, frankly – but at least I
had good reason. I was very worried that Rowana was going to find something here, a letter or... diary... or... god knows what... that would reveal the truth about her parentage. I didn’t
even want her seeing snaps of Elizabeth.”
“I can understand that.” They both glanced down at the photo Steve still held in his other hand.
He sighed. “Gabrielle was the one who chivvied us into coming straight down here, even though we didn’t have a key, and the paperwork wasn’t signed off. Naturally, she
couldn’t understand why Rowana and I were dragging our feet. We had a look around the outside, and I discovered the back door key under a pot, when they were round the other side of the
cottage.”
Lexy’s lips twitched. Rowana had found the front door key under one pot, and Steve had found the back door key under another one. Elizabeth didn’t believe in sophisticated security
measures.
“I didn’t want Gabby knowing,” Steve continued, “because she’d be straight in there, so I pocketed it, and that first night, when they were asleep, I nipped back to
the cottage and gathered up all the letters and photos I could find, in every drawer and cupboard.”
So that explained the strange absence of paperwork in the place. “Lucky the Gallimores didn’t spot you,” said Lexy.
“Would have taken a bit of explaining, wouldn’t it? But as luck would have it, I got the whole lot back to my room in the B&B at Clopwolde, unseen, and I sat up for the rest of
the night sifting out everything I thought might give a clue to Rowana’s background.”
“Find anything?”
“Not really. Elizabeth had been pretty careful. There were a couple of photos of her, looking just like Rowana, which I got rid of. But I think the most incriminating thing of all was that
one I missed – the one of Rowana, Gabby and me.”
They looked at one another.
“Wonder how Elizabeth came by it?” said Lexy. “Guess she must have gone up to London and taken it in a mad moment.”
“A moment of regret, more like.” Steve stared hard at the grey-green sea below.
Lexy still had hold of his hand. They sat like that a while. She wondered whether to tell him about the inscription in
The Language of Flowers
. No – perhaps she’d leave him to
find it himself one day.
The language of flowers. Lexy smiled.
“Unusual name, Rowana,” she remarked.
“Yes. It was the only thing Elizabeth requested.”
Lexy thought she knew why. It was so that Elizabeth could remember her daughter whenever she looked out at the tree she’d planted sixteen years ago in the garden of Four Winds Cottage.
The mountain ash, otherwise known as the rowan.
“So when were you going to tell her?” Lexy asked, again.
Steve shook his head. “I wasn’t. And now she’s off to art college in London in a couple of weeks. I want her to go with an untroubled mind. Whatever it was that was bothering
her when all this business started seems to be over, and she’s happier than she’s been for a long time. Elizabeth, god bless her, is dead now. Why upset the apple cart?”
“Archer Trevino?” suggested Lexy.
“He doesn’t know.”
Lexy hesitated. Archer’s ravaged features swam before her eyes. Did he know? Or perhaps guess? What was it he’d said as they parted?
‘... speaking of the Unicorn, you know that night you were all in there... the two girls... Steve’s daughters, weren’t they?’
When Archer looked across the pub that night and recognised Steve, did he also see Rowana and make the connection? Did he recognise Elizabeth in her? Or even himself?
“He very nearly did, though,” Steve continued.
“Really?”
“A couple of weeks before we learned about this inheritance I came down here intending to see him.”
Lexy sat stock still.
“I was going to beg money from him,” said Steve. “Because he was rich, and I’d spent the last sixteen years bringing up his daughter. Stupid idea, and dangerous. I would
never have gone through with it. I think I just needed to get away for a while. I got as far as Clopwolde, booked myself into a fussy little B&B for the night, sat in my room and drank a bottle
of Scotch. Woke up fully clothed on my bed the following morning with the landlady standing over me.”
“Er... about what time was it?” Lexy asked. “When she was standing over you?” She realised she was squeezing Steve’s hand with some force now.
He looked down at his crushed fingers. “Nine? Quarter to? I hadn’t shown for my pre-booked breakfast. Major sin at the Wharf View B&B. Apparently the cleaning lady had let
herself into my room when I was meant to be at the breakfast table, thought I was dead, and started having palpitations.” He paused. “Er... my fingers are starting to go black, by the
way. Not that I don’t like you holding my hand.”