Sins

‘The consultant said that Jay is going to get better,’ was all she could manage to say when Amber had finally released her.

‘Yes. Thank God. Oh, Rose, you don’t know how much it means to me to have you here.’

‘Emerald felt that one of us should stay, although I know you would probably have preferred it to be Emerald herself. After all, she is your daughter.’

Rose had meant the words to sound cool, unemotional, level; setting the demarcation line between the past she had once inhabited and the present where she now lived, but to her chagrin instead they sounded more like the jealous reproachful outburst of a small child.

Amber looked at her niece, her heart aching for the relationship they had had before Rose had retreated from her.

Amber abhorred emotional blackmail and yet she couldn’t stop herself from saying truthfully, ‘Yes, Emerald is my child, the daughter of my flesh, Rose, and I love her as I love all of you, but you are and always have been the daughter of my heart, and as such you are very special to me.’

It was more than Rose could bear.

‘If that’s the truth then why have you never told me that John might be my half-brother?’

Amber’s heart was pounding so heavily, it felt like an unbearable weight. She sank into a chair, her hand against her chest. It all seemed so long ago now, that terrible time and its dreadful consequences. She never spoke of it, not even to Jay.

‘Ella and Janey’s aunt Cassandra told me, if you’re wondering how I know,’ Rose continued. ‘She’d recognised that I had a bit of a crush on John and naturally she wanted to make sure that I didn’t get any ideas above my station. Not that she needed to worry. I was quite content to hero-worship John from a distance. I knew that with my background I could never be anything to a Lord Fitton.’

‘Oh, Rose…’

The pain and bitterness in Rose’s voice pushed aside Amber’s own anxiety, her heart returning to its normal steady beat, her one desire to reach out to her niece. This was Cassandra’s revenge, of course, for what had happened so long ago. The destruction of a very precious bond, a lifetime of pain for an innocent victim, and for Cassandra herself the satisfaction of having delivered those blows.

‘Cassandra told me how you’d all hoped that I wouldn’t survive, how it would have been better for everyone if I had died.’

‘Rose, that isn’t true.’

‘How my own father hated me and wished that I had never been born.’

Amber’s throat closed on the lump of pity and love that had formed there.

‘Come and sit down. Please,’ she begged.

Rose gave in and sat down in one of the other chairs.

‘The whole situation is so complicated, Rose. Your father, my cousin, was a charming, self-willed and spoiled young man, handsome, indulged by our grandmother, and loved by me. I thought him the best and the kindest of cousins. But Greg’s outward charm concealed a great deal of inner weakness. He had an inability to accept the responsibility for…for his own mistakes and errors of judgement. There was an…an affair with Lord Fitton’s wife.’

‘John’s mother?’

‘Yes. But John had already been born when the scandal broke and our grandmother had to send Greg away to Hong Kong. There was to have been another child, but John’s mother…well, there was an accident, and she drowned in one of the Fitton Hall pools. Cassandra found her.’ Amber stopped and took a deep breath.

‘Rose, I must ask that what I am going to tell you now remains always just between the two of us.’

‘And if I can’t agree to that?’

‘Then I cannot tell you.’

They looked at one another.

‘Very well then,’ Rose agreed. ‘You have my word that I will never speak of it to anyone else.’

Amber nodded. ‘Greg wasn’t the only person with whom John’s mother was having a relationship outside her marriage.’

Rose tensed. This wasn’t what she had been expecting to hear.

‘There’s no easy way to say this, Rose, but the fact of the matter is that Cassandra was very much involved with her, almost obsessively so.’

Rose stared at her aunt, the colour draining from her face, her mind a whirlwind of barely possible thoughts.