Return Match. Penny JordanЧитать онлайн книгу.
now fallen to her.
Her decision to try and write had been born of the mental starvation she suffered from, Lucy suspected, and certainly the hours she spent alone in the library on her research had been among the most fulfilling she had experienced since leaving university.
Now, though, she was likely to lose all that, unless Saul allowed her to use the library.
He was such an unknown quantity, she wasn’t really sure what to expect. Her memories of him were clouded by the animosity which had sprung up between them almost from the word go and when she pictured him mentally, it was with a truculent scowl on his face.
In looks he didn’t resemble the Martins at all, being very dark, almost swarthily so, his eyes grey and not brown, his transatlantic accent adding to his alienness.
Looking back on that disastrous summer, Lucy felt a twinge of sympathy towards him.
Poor boy, it couldn’t have been easy for him—thrown upon relatives he did not know, who moreover spoke differently and had a different set of rules to live by. That scowl, that stubborn indifference to all that the Manor had to offer, must have been defensive rather than aggressive, but of course at twelve she could not see that, and had only seen that he mocked everything that she held dear, while all the time reinforcing his own Americanness. The brash superiority had just increased her own dislike of him, so that she had willingly joined Neville in his tormenting of him.
Neville … so smooth and sophisticated to her then, so excitingly male and aloof, and yet undeniably a part of her world in a way that the American intruder was not. When Neville spoke, it was in the same way as her father, his accent public school and clipped, unlike Saul’s American drawl.
Even the way he dressed was different … alien … And how she and Neville had tormented him when they watched the way he rode! She had been unkind almost to the point of being cruel and had since regretted it deeply because it was not part of her nature to inflict hurt on others.
Poor Saul. How did he remember her? she wondered wryly. Well, she would have ample opportunity to make restitution for her sins once he arrived. Neville might speak slightingly of the Manor passing into American hands, but now she did not encourage him.
Tara had stopped crying and was watching her hopefully. ‘We won’t be too poor to keep Harriet,’ she told her firmly. ‘Richard was quite wrong.’
‘Are you going to marry him?’
That was Oliver, eyeing her truculently.
‘No.’
Relief showed briefly in the brown eyes before he turned away. Oliver had been closer to their father than any of them, something she had not really thought about before she knew the truth, and Oliver was the one who would miss his male influence the most. Perhaps Saul might be induced to take an interest in him. Perhaps he was married now with children of his own.
It was a shock to realise how little she knew about him. In all the anxiety and tumult of her father’s death, she had had little time to spare to wonder about Saul; little time to give to him at all apart from overseeing the sending of a telegram to advise him of what had happened.
She had half hoped he would attend the funeral and had been almost hurt when he had not. Towards the end her father had complained that Saul had never made the slightest attempt to learn anything about his heritage, but fair-mindedly Lucy had pointed out that he had scarcely been given much chance.
Certainly her own memories of Saul weren’t happy ones, but like her he had no doubt matured and mellowed, and probably also, like her, knowing the close proximity to one another in which they would be living, he would want their relationship to be an amicable one.
Despite all these sensible thoughts Lucy could not quite stifle the apprehension burgeoning to life inside her. As yet they had no idea when Saul would arrive, but she was being meticulous about vacating the Manor just as quickly as she could. She was also being meticulous about what she took with her—only the furniture which had been her mother’s and nothing more.
Fortunately the Dower House was furnished, although somewhat haphazardly as up until quite recently it had been tenanted, but no doubt the furniture that had been her mother’s would make it seem more like home.
With the help of Mrs Isaacs, their daily, Lucy had already cleaned the house from top to bottom. Nearly all the rooms needed redecorating and she had promised herself that this was a task she would tackle just as soon as she had time. With the income from the trust funds her father had established for Oliver and Tara they would be able to manage financially—just about. Oliver’s school fees would take a large slice of these funds, but Fanny had been adamant that her son must go to prep school at the start of the new term, as had been planned.
The school which had been chosen was George Martin’s old school, and even though privately Lucy thought it was almost an extravagance to pay out such a large sum of money annually just so that Oliver could be educated at her father’s old school, she had not had the heart to oppose Fanny.
It was her opinion that of the two of them Tara was the cleverer and inwardly she was determined that when the time came Tara would somehow be given the same opportunities as her brother. Fortunately at the moment that was one problem which could be shelved, unlike the jumble of packing cases now littering the ballroom floor.
She and Mrs Isaacs had brought them here mainly because of the large area of empty floor space, and tomorrow morning Mr Isaacs and his two large sons were going to drive up from the village with their van and spend the day transporting the cases over to the Dower House.
From the ballroom window it was possible to look right across the park that surrounded the house and Lucy caught her lip between her teeth as she glanced at the view. They had almost the same view from the Dower House, which was surrounded by a very pleasant garden.
With hindsight Lucy could recognise that her father’s decision to divorce the Dower House and a certain amount of land from the main house had probably originated with Oliver’s birth; even then he must have been planning to do everything he could for his illegitimate child, she thought wryly. But, in doing so, there was no getting away from the fact that he had stripped the Manor of anything that might usefully have been sold to provide its new owner with funds. The farmlands had now all gone, the last few acres having been sold just prior to her father’s death.
Those paintings which had not been sold previously to cover death duties had been auctioned at Sotheby’s eighteen months ago, along with the few good antiques they had left.
Now the house had a forlorn, neglected air, almost an air of desolation and desertion. What on earth Saul would do with the place she had no idea. Sell it most likely; she could not see how he could do anything else.
Sighing faintly she turned away from the view and surveyed the packing cases. She had written in chalk on each one what it contained, meticulously refusing to pack the Meissen dinner service or what was left of the family silver. Those went with the house and she was determined that they would stay with it.
Whatever wealth the Martin family had once possessed from trade and a sugar planation in the West Indies had been dissipated by the time of the First World War, and since then the family had survived by gradually selling off its assets. It was true that her father had held several directorships which had brought in a reasonable income, but the house simply devoured money.
The same Martin who had added the Georgian frontage to the house had also commissioned the Dower House, and its Georgian elegance had always appealed to Lucy. She knew their solicitor found it strange that it had been left to her and not to Fanny, but Lucy understood the reason why.
Her father had thought that the security of the family would be safer in her hands than Fanny’s and indeed her stepmother was, in some ways, very much another child. She had leaned on George Martin during their marriage and Lucy suspected that now she would lean on her.
Fanny didn’t really care for the country and spent as much time as she could in London, staying with friends. Neither was she particularly maternal, allowing Lucy