‘How did you . . .? I mean, you can’t have moved in the same circles.’
‘At the Gala. I were with a group, majorettes. I were only sixteen. You wouldn’t know it, to look at me, but I used to turn heads.’
Good God, was Linda really only forty-five? Jenna had to look hard, to see the girl she must have been.
‘I mean, I used it,’ said Linda. ‘Won’t claim I were an angel. My looks were all I had in life, so I got the most out of ’em. If I fancied a lad, I had him, and that were that. So George wasn’t my first, not at all.’
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‘Surely he was married?’
‘Yeah, with a little lad, three years old. But that wasn’t going to stop him taking what he liked the look of. Took me up into the attic, he did, the old servants’ quarters. I felt like Lady Muck, even though it was a dirty little secret thing. We met up a few times after that, in the fields, or down by the reservoir. Then I fell pregnant with Jason and I got scared. I told him it were over. He didn’t argue with me. A few months later, he sent me a letter, said he’d heard I was pregnant and I’d better not say a word to anyone about us or he’d have the kid taken off me and adopted by a childless couple he knew. I told him the kid probably weren’t his, and he seemed happy about that.’
‘And you never told Jason?’
‘I was going to tell him on his eighteenth birthday. But by then, he was so angry and everyone was so anti-Harville. I thought it’d only make things worse.’
‘I see. Yes. Fancy growing up on that estate and then finding out you were related to your worst enemies. Oh, Linda. What a thing to carry around with you all these years.’
Linda staggered gratefully into Jenna’s embrace. As she hugged the woman, her mind raced. This was crazy. Jason was a Harville, possibly even conceived here at Harville Hall, in the very attic where she had first found him.
‘God knows,’ sniffed Linda, ‘I don’t like the shower of bastards any more than the rest of Bledburn does. But they’re his family. What am I going to do?’
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ said Jenna. ‘Leave it now. The decisions all lie with Jason. Oh God.’ The little outburst was brought on by the repeated thought that Lawrence Harville was Jason’s half-brother. It was hard to say which of them would be more revolted by the idea.
‘Tell you what,’ said Linda. ‘I could murder a good strong brandy.’
And I could murder you, thought Jenna grimly. Turning Jason’s big night into some kind of alcoholic Jeremy Kyle turn.
Instead, she escorted the shambolic Linda to the back staircase and helped her up to the only bedroom that was properly habitable at the moment – hers and Jason’s.
Leaving her half-conscious on the bed, she went back down the front stairs to do the mingling she had once been looking forward to.
But how difficult it was to be charming and effervescent when her mind swarmed with thoughts of Lawrence Harville’s and Jason’s parentage. She went to stand by Jason, to join him amidst a crowd of potential investors from eight different countries.
He seemed to have shaken off his mother’s words and he laughed and joked with the art dealers as if nothing had been said at all.
As the group broke up so that Jason and Jenna could pose for magazine photographs, she spoke to him, low and without altering her expression.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Your mum . . . what she said . . .’
‘Pack of lies. Bound to be.’
He smiled for the camera, remembering everything he had been taught in his modelling session three weeks earlier.
‘And if you turn out to be a Harville?’ she said, once a variety of poses had been captured for posterity.
‘I’m not. It’s not happening. Drop it, eh, Jen?’
His tone suggested that to do otherwise would be unwise.
‘Get yourself a champagne and let’s try to get these freeloaders out of here,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I want you upstairs, as soon as I can. Mum, Lawrence Harville, and everyone else can all bugger off. I need to be alone with you.’
Jenna was taking a flute glass from a tray when the doorbell rang.