Sins

She couldn’t go. She had to keep her appointment with Dr Steptoe. If she didn’t the opportunity to harvest her eggs would be lost and she would have to wait until he was ready to begin a new programme, which wouldn’t be for many months. Drogo knew that. Jay wasn’t her father and she wasn’t the ‘child’ whose support her mother would most want. All the old familiar bitterness diluted by the intervening years suddenly resumed its full strength. Why should she sacrifice the chance to provide Drogo with an heir simply to be with her mother? What had Amber ever done for her to deserve that kind of sacrifice? The old emotional wounds, which for years now had seemed healed, had begun to ache again beneath the scar tissue, inflamed by fear and panic.

Drogo was coming back out of the bathroom bringing with him the scent of clean skin and rubbing at his damp hair with a towel. She loved him so much, and she knew what he would want her to do.

Inside her head she had a mental image of the man she still truly thought of as her father–Robert–smiling lovingly at her. He had given her so much love, so much more than just his name and legitimacy. His moral code might seem old-fashioned by modern-day standards but Emerald knew full well what he would have expected of her, and somehow it was important that she didn’t disappoint him or let him down, even whilst a part of her raged furiously that she could not lose this opportunity to begin her treatment. Jay was next to nothing to her, whilst the baby that could potentially become the future duke was everything. Surely Robert and Drogo could understand that?

But even as she opened her mouth to tell Drogo that she intended to keep her appointment she knew that she couldn’t.

‘I suppose I’d better go to Macclesfield.’ Her voice was tight with the effort it took to control what she was really feeling. ‘It isn’t what I want to do, but I know that I have to.’

Drogo put down the towel.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, and although he didn’t say it, Emerald knew that he had been hoping that she would make that choice. She could see his love for her in his eyes, and her own filled with tears.

‘Why now, today of all days, Drogo?’

‘I don’t know, but I do know how much it will mean to your mother to have you there.’

‘Jay isn’t even my father.’

‘No, and it’s because of that that she will need you, Emerald, and not just Amber but everyone else will as well. They will need your strength and your support. And as for this business of a son, how many times do I have to tell you before you believe me that I have all that I want, in you and the children we have–Robbie and the girls? You alone would be more than enough—’

‘No, Drogo. You say that but it isn’t true. You are the Duke of Lenchester. You need a son of your own to pass the title to.’

‘Emerald, I know how important that is to you but it never has been to me. Perhaps it’s because of the way I grew up–as an Aussie not knowing about the dukedom–I don’t know.’

‘You say that now, but what if you change your mind? What if you stop loving me because I haven’t given you a son?’

‘That will never happen. I will never stop loving you.’ He drew her close to him and wrapped her in his arms.

To everyone else who knew her Emerald was someone they thought of as formidable, but Drogo knew that hidden behind that outer defence was an Emerald who had grown up believing herself to be unloved and unwanted and who had reacted to that by being difficult and demanding, even arrogant and sometimes actively unkind, rather than let others know how alone and afraid she really felt. He knew too how much it mattered to her that she provided the dukedom with an heir. Sometimes he feared that that mattered more to her than anything else, including her own happiness.

‘I’d better go and ring the others,’ he told her, releasing her.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Rose wasn’t in bed when the telephone rang. She rarely slept much beyond six o’clock, and she never slept deeply any more. Her senses were too attuned to the need to listen, a habit she had d

eveloped in the early years of her marriage, waiting anxiously for Pete to return from the pub, and then counting the stages as they passed safely.

First, the sound of the car coming up the drive, her breath held tightly in her chest until he had stopped the car and she knew that there hadn’t been an accident. Then waiting for him to come in, knowing from the time it took him to get his key in the door how much he was likely to have had to drink. At first she had waited up for him, often falling asleep downstairs in a chair, having previously lost the battle to persuade him not to go out, not to drink and, if he did, not to drive, but then gradually–so gradually she hadn’t even realised that the habit had crept up on her until it was established–she had taken to going to bed when midnight came and went and he still wasn’t back. It was nothing for Pete to return at one or two in the morning and then to stay downstairs drinking even more.

Once he was safely home the other anxieties began: that he would drink more, that he would fall over and hurt himself, that he would fall asleep downstairs and then be sick in his sleep and choke to death. To protect him from those fates she had to be constantly on guard, on duty, to cajole and coax him upstairs to bed, half supporting his weight, half dragging him up the stairs, collapsing sometimes under his dead weight, her heart filled with a mixture of burning anger, shame and despair, streaked with pity, guilt and her instinctive need to try to love him despite everything.

Perhaps if they had had a child, children, things might have been different, but Rose had been too afraid to take the risk for that child. It would have been difficult enough for him or her to deal with the reality of Rose’s own background and everything that meant, without further burdening the child with an alcoholic father. That had been the emotional reason she had stuck so determinedly to taking her contraceptive pill, but there had been practical reasons as well, once Pete’s drinking and consequent dependence increased. How could she look after a baby when she already had a husband who needed looking after like a child?

That had been in the early years of his drinking. For the last six of them there had been no need for her to worry about using contraception, and no opportunity either for her to reconsider her decision not to have children, because Pete had lost both the interest in and the ability to have sex with her–another consequence of his alcoholism. Drink was his lover, his beloved, his friend, his tormentor–drink was his world and his everything –and as Rose had learned once she had taken their doctor’s advice and attended local Al Anon classes, there was nothing she could do to alter Pete’s behaviour. Only Pete himself could do that. The only person whose behaviour she had any control over was herself. That had been dreadfully hard for her to accept. In the early days she had still believed that she had the power to stop him drinking and make him ‘well’ again.

Mixed up with her despair over Pete’s drinking there was also guilt: did he drink because he regretted marrying her? Did he wish he had married someone else? Was she the cause of his drinking? She had even questioned whether her marriage to Pete was in some complex way an attempt on her part to rewrite her own past and her father’s problems with alcohol. Had she, at some deep-rooted level, believed that if she could help ‘cure’ Pete then she would somehow have paid back her ‘sin’ of being born and being hated so much by her father that he himself had turned to drink to drown out his bitterness? Who knew what motivated anyone to do the things they did?

The truth was that she knew that she should be guilty–guilty of marrying him out of numb despair because she thought she had lost Josh. Guilty of wishing she had not married him when Josh had told her that he loved her. The weight of that guilt had made her feel like a thief, stealing from someone. She had married Pete because she had been afraid of being alone with what she was and what she had lost. She had used him to give her what she’d thought was a new identity that would protect her–not consciously, of course, but nevertheless that was what she had done. Never ever during their marriage had she let Pete know that she still loved Josh, never once had he indicated that he had guessed that she did, but always at the back of her mind was the guilt of knowing that she could not give him what marriage to her entitled him to, because she had already given it to Josh. She had tried to compensate for that, devoting herself to him, making him her whole life, but it was a life that had an emptiness at its heart. For that reason she couldn’t blame Pete for his drinking. He had tried to give up in the early years of their marriage. Twice he had voluntarily gone into a private hospital to be dried out. The second time he had suffered such violent seizures that the staff had thought he was going to die.

But he hadn’t.

He was, though, according to his doctors, killing himself. Destroying himself was a truer description in Rose’s opinion, a slow painful relentless destruction of his own body and mind that left her feeling helpless and anguished.

After his first ‘drying out’ attempt they had gone to Hong Kong for a holiday that was supposed to mark the beginning of a fresh start. It had been Pete’s suggestion. He had wanted to give her the chance to ‘find’ the Cantonese side of herself but the trip had left her feeling far more of an outsider in Hong Kong than she now did in England. In Hong Kong she had discovered that the unwritten rules separating not just the Caucasian from Oriental, but marking the many divisions that lay within each of those categories, were complex and fiercely adhered to and protected. There was no defined ‘place’ for someone like her, with her wealthy Western background and upbringing, and the blood in her veins from a mother who had been amongst the lowest of the low. She had been treated with a mixture of suspicion and disdain, and had found nothing of the mother she had lost as a baby.

Unlike her father, Pete was not a violent alcoholic. He simply withdrew into himself and into a place where, in his rare moments of sobriety, he swore he was comfortable, even though the process of getting there was destroying him.