‘Has he told you anything about his mother?’
Jenna shook her head. ‘Very little. I know that she committed suicide.’
‘Yes, it was tragic. She was my cousin, you know, much younger than me, of course, the youngest in the family, in fact, and I’m afraid quite spoiled in the way that pretty little girls are. Her parents were comfortably off, but nothing like as wealthy as James’s father’s family. David fell madly in love with her the moment he saw her. It was during the war and he was posted over here. Christine liked him and was flattered by his obvious love for her, but I’m afraid she never really loved him in that same intense, devouring way.
It was really her parents who persuaded her to marry him. They were concerned about her safety if she stayed in England—during those early days of the war, the outcome wasn’t certain and they thought she’d be far safer in America. She was only nineteen when they married—and a very young nineteen at that. James was born in 1949. I remember how thrilled her parents were when they heard the news. They went over to the States to see them. They were killed in an aircrash on the way back.’ She paused and Jenna waited, understanding, knowing that her hostess was back among old ghosts, reluctant to let them go.
She sighed faintly. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. I heard fr
om Christine rather sporadically after that. Christmas and birthday cards, that sort of thing, the odd letter, and then David had to come to England on business. Christine and James came with him. We saw quite a lot of them that first summer. James was an enchanting child. Very sturdy and male, very sweet-natured too. He adored his mother—in fact, most men did. She was that sort of woman,’ Lady Carmichael told Jenna wryly.
‘David had to go from London to Paris for some business discussions and it was during that time that Christine must have met Alan Deveril.’
For the first time Jenna tensed. Her eyes widened fractionally, and as though sensing her concentrated interest her hostess asked, ‘Did you ever meet him? You came from his part of the world originally, of course.’
‘I knew him,’ Jenna said in a clipped voice, ‘but not socially if that’s what you mean. My great-aunt was not from the sort of social background that made her welcome in Sir Alan Deveril’s drawing-room.’
‘Yes, he was the most unmitigated snob,’ Lady Carmichael agreed. ‘I met him once with Christine. I bumped into them in the Ritz and she introduced him to me. I didn’t like him.
‘Of course, it didn’t take long for the gossip to start—David was busy in Paris, and Christine always had been headstrong. Alan seemed to exercise a kind of fascination for her that I’ve never been able to understand. After all, she had everything a woman could possibly want: an adoring husband, a delightful son, a very comfortable lifestyle…’
‘Everything but excitement,’ Jenna suggested.
Lady Carmichael’s glance acknowledged her shrewdness. ‘There was that, of course. Deveril did possess a certain reptilian brand of charm, I suppose. He certainly had an extremely bad reputation. He was married, of course. No one ever saw his wife. He kept her away from society at the Hall. It was commonly rumoured that he married her for her money, but that wasn’t all that uncommon. However, Christine wasn’t his first affair during his marriage. There had been talk of a young daughter of an acquaintance, hurriedly packed off abroad, hints of other relationships, but never anything as flamboyant as this affair with Christine.
‘She, poor fool, was besotted with him. God knows why, she was convinced that he intended to divorce his wife and marry her. She told me as much and the gossip press was full of hints and speculation. Of course, in those days divorce was much more shocking than it is today. I had my doubts even then. Lovely though she was, Christine had no money of her own, and he was a man notorious for his expensive tastes: gambling, drink, and the old Hall. God, how he loved that house. He could bore on for hours about it. It was almost an obsession with him, how it had been in the family for centuries.
‘Of course, when David came back from Paris the scandal finally broke. He confronted Christine about her affair—she told me this herself—and she told him she wanted a divorce and that Deveril and she intended to marry. David begged her to reconsider, but she refused.
‘She went to Deveril that night—to his London flat. When she told him what she had done—that she had left David—he went crazy with her, told her he had never had any intention of marrying her, that for one thing if he did he would probably lose the Hall because he would not have access to his wife’s money if they were divorced. Poor Christine could not believe him. She asked him if he honestly expected her to believe that a mere house was more important than their love. Their love…He laughed at her, she said…told her that like all women she was a fool, that nothing mattered more to him than keeping the Hall, that it was the only reason he had married his wife in the first place. He would kill to keep it if he had to, he told her.
‘She couldn’t go back to David—not then. So she came to me and was too distraught to conceal anything from me. She told me everything.
‘Eventually, I persuaded her to go back to her husband. He still wanted her and was prepared to make a fresh start.’ She sighed again. ‘I sometimes wish I had not done that. It didn’t work, it couldn’t. She wasn’t the same person. She was like a broken mechanical toy, completely unable to function. She and David had only been back in the States a matter of weeks when she committed suicide. James found her.’ For a long time there was silence and then Lady Carmichael said emotionally, ‘Now, perhaps, you can understand why this obsessive desire of his to possess the old Hall so distresses me.’
‘Perhaps now that he does possess it, he will be able to put the past behind him,’ Jenna suggested quietly.
‘Maybe. Certainly he’s strong enough to do so if he wishes…but does he wish? I sometimes think it’s just as well there are no Deverils left alive, because if there were.…’
There was a roaring noise in Jenna’s ears, a feeling of weakness sapping her strength but she fought it back. Lucy, Lucy, she thought achingly, as wronged by the Deverils as James himself and yet at the same time part of them.
Knowing this should make her feel closer to him, but it merely increased her fear of him. He had an unnerving talent for burying his deepest feelings very thoroughly, but they were there and they were strong enough to motivate him to pursue a course relentlessly until it got him what he wanted. But thankfully he did not want her, she reminded herself. She had nothing to fear. The Hall was what he wanted. The Hall, that was all.
CHAPTER TEN
‘WITH my body I thee worship…’
Tiny frissons of sensation ran down Jenna’s spine. It was cool in the small Norman church and the scent of the roses decorating it almost overpowered her. She still could not believe that this was her, actually marrying James. But it was. And now the vicar was turning to her, telling her that she and James were man and wife.
There was a tense expectant pause, a waiting silence from the others in the church with them that stirred fingers of apprehension along her spine. Instinctively, she started to move away from her new husband, tensing in shock as James’s fingers curled round her wrist and he drew her towards him.
His head bent and before she could define his intentions, his breath, cool and fresh stroked her skin, his mouth unexpectedly warm as it touched hers. A curious tension gripped her, pain coiling achingly through her stomach. It was nerves, just nerves, she told herself as she jerked tensely away, and James released her. Only the wedding breakfast to get through now. She mustn’t let herself think about that unanticipated and unwanted kiss. All it had been was a gesture, a sop to convention, something she mustn’t even think about now. James surely wouldn’t be.
The wedding breakfast was being held at the hotel that had once been Lucille Carmichael’s home. Bill and Nancy were staying there courtesy of James. They had a room with a four-poster bed, Nancy had told Jenna only that morning, as she helped her to dress.
Her dress! Jenna stared down at it, closing her mind to the excited babble of their guests. She had found the dress in a small shop in South Molton Street, after an exhausting search. She had not wanted to wear white, in fact she had not known what to wear. A church ceremony seemed to call for something more than a simple suit, however expensive. In the end she had settled on a cream lace blouse with a high neck, delicately tucked and flounced, very Edwardian in appearance with long sleeves and deep cuffs also tucked and frilled. The matching skirt was full length and faintly A line in design, again with an unmistakable Edwardian flavour about it. It had a deep waistband which had had to be taken in—Jenna had lost weight in the weeks before the wedding from all the work she had had to do, not to mention the endless succession of sleepless nights. The skirt was plain apart from the decorative waistband and the deep, pin-tucked and lace-trimmed flounce at the hem.
Maggie who had gone with her to buy it had raved over it. Jenna herself had felt a little uncertain about wearing something so different from her normal style.