‘What happened to the baby?’ Sophie demanded in a curt undertone. ‘Did you have it adopted?’ and then more loudly, ‘I suppose you got rid of it once you got away from those old people!’
Kitty shut her eyes in mute distaste, wishing she could as efficiently shut out that ranting, hysterically shrill voice. ‘I had a miscarriage.’
‘That horrible old woman!’ Sophie gasped. ‘All these years. She should have told me instead of leaving me in ignorance.’
Since her concern hadn’t led her to visit Martha Colgan and ask, Kitty didn’t take the hint that Sophie had endured a sleepless night or two very seriously. ‘You said that Jake would blame you,’ she reminded her stiffly. ‘I don’t see why. I don’t even understand why we should discuss this. It all happened a very long time ago.’
Sophie’s pale blue eyes centred on her vindictively. ‘It wasn’t his baby, was it?’ she stabbed with offensive pleasure.
Kitty looked steadily back at her, unsurprised by the vicious attack. ‘It was. So I wouldn’t hurry to tell Jake otherwise.’
Sophie’s bright scrutiny dulled and she turned back to the window, her abrupt movements betraying that she was still in a very emotional state. ‘Did you know that your mother once worked in the estate office?’
‘My mother?’ Completely thrown once more by the peculiar change of subject, Kitty stared at her. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Jake was only two years old,’ Sophie continued tight-lipped. ‘I still had all my illusions intact about my marriage. It took your mother to disenchant me. Charles made a fool of himself over her.’
Kitty’s brows had knitted. ‘I don’t quite follow,’ she said, although she was terribly afraid that she did.
‘Don’t you? He wouldn’t leave her alone,’ Sophie rephrased in disgust. ‘Now I believe they call it sexual harassment. He was more than twice her age, old enough to know better! Your mother was very shocked by his behaviour.’
‘What happened?’ Kitty murmured uneasily.
Sophie loosed a choked laugh. ‘She handed in her notice. I will never forget the look of pity in her eyes when she told me that she was leaving. She felt sorry for me!’ she vented shrilly. ‘I despised her for it.’
‘But if she didn’t encourage your husband—’
‘Do you really believe that that made it any less humiliating for me?’ Sophie demanded. ‘Do you think other people didn’t notice how he was behaving? Your mother made a laughing stock of me. There were those who said there was no smoke without fire. I was glad when she had to leave home to find another job.’
In other words, her mother had suffered for something that was not her fault, Kitty reflected grimly. Impatience nipped at her. Sophie had imparted her sense of injury at great enough depth. Kitty had grasped that the older woman had transferred her loathing for her late mother to her, but she saw no reason for a lengthy discussion about a non-event that had occurred before she was even born.
‘I think we ought to concentrate on the present, Mrs Tarrant,’ she said gently, for unless she was very much mistaken Sophie had her back turned to her now because she was in tears.
She jerked round. ‘If only it were that simple,’ she muttered shakily. ‘You won’t believe me, but I didn’t really dislike you when you were a child. You didn’t harm me. It seemed like poetic justice when you fell in love with my son. I didn’t care because I didn’t think he was in any real danger. After all, I’d done everything I could to make him see that you could never fit into our lives, and I thought I had succeeded until I saw him kissing you at our last New Year party. I was appalled but I blamed you for it!’
‘Yes,’ Kitty said, wondering when Sophie’s ramblings would begin to make sense.
Mrs Tarrant’s face contorted with bitterness. ‘Believe me, it was a ghastly enough evening without that. Everybody wanted to know where Charles was and I couldn’t tell them. He’d said that he wanted a divorce but I didn’t realise he meant it until he failed to come home for the party. The last thing I needed that evening was to see you in my son’s arms.’
Compassion had touched Kitty in an unexpected surge. She screened her eyes, aware that sympathy would not be welcome. Sophie sank down almost clumsily in the seat opposite and pressed a hanky to her trembling mouth. ‘I thought I knew my son and I didn’t. I thought it was an infatuation he would soon get over. I believed that you had encouraged him to behave that way, but you must accept,’ she whispered with a slight sob catching at her voice, ‘I never dreamt that he might have slept with you or that you could be pregnant. I knew he wouldn’t listen to me if I told him to stay away from you. So I had to tell him something that would make him stay away. It was for his own good. I did it for him…’
‘What did you do for him?’ Kitty muttered tautly, finally realising that Mrs Tarrant was finding it very difficult to come to the point.
‘All I wanted to do was knock any foolish ideas he might have about you right out of his head. I was determined to stop it going one step further,’ Sophie confessed tearfully. ‘Nobody knew who your father was and I didn’t care that I had to lie. I knew it wouldn’t go any further. I told Jake that you had the same father. I told him that you were his half-sister…’
Kitty’s heartbeat had lodged suffocatingly in her throat. In sick horror and disbelief she stared at the older woman, but Sophie wouldn’t meet her eyes.
‘I also knew that if Jake approached Charles he would deny it. But my husband would have denied anything like that. I knew that Jake would still believe me,’ she asserted, tearing at her hanky with restive fingers and then sobbing accusingly at Kitty, ‘I did it for him, and then he went off and married that little tart because he couldn’t have you!’
Kitty had sustained such a shock that Sophie had swum out of focus. ‘And he actually believed you?’ she mumbled in nauseated turmoil.
‘Yes. I made it a good story with plenty of details,’ Sophie admitted without remorse, drying her eyes, calming now that she had reached her climax. ‘I convinced him.’
‘And when did you tell him the truth?’ Kitty demanded with sudden ferocity.
‘When I was ill. I didn’t mean to tell him. I was never going to tell him but somehow I did.’ She cast Kitty a glance of barely concealed hatred. ‘He accused me of ruining his life. If it weren’t for you, my son and I would still be close.’
Waxen-pale, Kitty murmured, ‘Why didn’t Jake tell me all this?’
Sophie tautened. ‘When he came to my sister’s I begged him not to tell you. I persuaded him that it was only fair to let me explain. I made him promise me.’
‘Because you were afraid that I’d mention the baby.’ The syllables hurt Kitty’s aching throat.
‘Why should you tell him?’ Sophie snapped. ‘You’ve got him now. Can’t you be satisfied with that? I’m the one who has suffered.’
Kitty stood up, too dazed to feel anger, too shaken to want more than to escape Sophie’s venomous presence. She had spun an unforgivable web of lies and she wasn’t particularly sorry that she had done so. Kitty didn’t believe that, at the time, Sophie had cared very much more about how those lies affected her son. Her most powerful motivation had been to ensure that Jake put Kitty out of his life, and the depths she had sunk to in obtaining that end suggested to Kitty that Sophie had been punishing her son for daring to go against her.
‘I suppose you weren’t well at the time,’ Kitty allowed painfully. ‘But don’t blame me for causing trouble between you and Jake. That, at least, can’t be laid at my door.’
CHAPTER TEN
KITTY turned off the lane to walk through the fields. All those lives affected, all that suffering, she reflected in a stupor. Jake had loved her and his mother had made that love a forbidden emotion to be suppressed and denied. On the brink of losing her husband, Sophie had fought not to lose her son as well. What a farce it must have been when Jake had gone off at a tangent and married someone else! His mother hadn’t planned for that eventuality.
The wi
nd stung her wet cheeks. She was crying. How much had he loved her? If Sophie hadn’t interfered, what would have happened between them? Would he have wanted her child? Would he have asked her to marry him? Or had his mother’s lies supplied him with an unpalatable but not unwelcome escape route from an extremely difficult situation?
She walked all the way to Lower Ridge. She didn’t want to see anyone until she had regained her equilibrium. The cottage was a blackened shell with gaping windows. Sophie, she registered painfully, had changed the entire course of her life. Eight years ago, Jake would have married her—whether he’d wanted to or not. He would have married her because she’d been carrying his child. And his mother and his sisters would have made her life hell behind his back.
Her father had been ashamed of her as she had been then. Would Jake have been the same? Jake, whose manners were so ingrained that they were second nature to him, Jake, who had never known what it was to feel self-conscious in any kind of company…Jake. Suddenly she needed him with a violent intensity that shuddered through her.
What on earth was she doing here? She was her own worst enemy. What was the point in these agonised thoughts of what might have been? She started home. There was so much she wanted to tell him now, so much she needed to ask. The Range Rover was in the yard, parked at an angle as if Jake had vacated it in a hurry. Delighted that he was back, she pushed through the back door. Tugging off her muddy boots, she sniffed appreciatively. The kitchen was tantalisingly full of the smell of roast lamb. She could hear Jessie vacuuming upstairs.