remember him asking me if it was true that his father had left his mother because he didn’t want him. Poor little boy. Some other boy at school had taunted him about Emerald and Alessandro’s marriage being annulled.
Jay patted his wife’s hand. He knew that Robert, her first-born grandchild, had a very special place in her heart.
‘What about the others?’ he asked her. ‘Will Rose be coming?’
At the mention of her late cousin Greg’s daughter, from his relationship with his Hong Kong Chinese mistress, Amber’s face lit up. She had loved Rose from the minute she had seen her, a tiny, very sick, unloved baby, brought back to Denham by Greg.
Rose had grown up at Denham with Jay’s own daughters and Emerald, and she now lived in London with her husband, Josh, a very successful entrepreneur who had built his hairdressing business into a multimillionpound empire. Rose and Josh did not have any children of their own, but Rose had taken to her heart her husband’s illegitimate son from a brief affair he had had before he and Rose had met.
‘Rose and Josh are coming. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Rose here.’
‘So that just leaves Polly and Cathy,’ said Jay, referring to his and Amber’s own twin daughters.
‘Cathy and Sim are driving up from Cornwall with the girls, and Polly and Rocco will be flying in from Venice with their two boys. We are so very lucky, Jay. I am lucky,’ Amber stressed, reaching out to hold his hand, ‘because I have you.’
It was typical of her that she should say that, Jay thought.
‘No, Amber, it is I who am the fortunate one,’ he told her tenderly.
Theirs had been a wonderfully happy marriage, all the more so, Jay reckoned, because of the despair and heartache they had both endured before they had married one another, Amber through the betrayal of her first love, Jean-Philippe, then through the road accident that had resulted in the death of both her husband and dearly loved son, and Jay himself through an unhappy marriage to his mentally unstable first wife.
She had been so blessed, Amber thought gratefully in turn, and in so many different ways, but the blessing she valued the most had been Jay’s survival of the heart attack that she had feared would take him from her. They had waited so long to share their love and be together gether, that even now she still felt that every minute they shared was a precious gift. It grieved her that not all their children and grandchildren had found such happiness in their lives.
‘So that’s everyone accounted for then, is it?’ Jay teased.
‘Not quite. There’s still Cassandra,’ Amber reminded him.
They looked at one another and their faces fell.
‘I know that she’s your cousin, Jay, and of course John’s stepmother, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t forget the past and her cruelty.’
‘I know.’ Jay gave Amber’s hand a gentle pat. Its skin might be soft and loose and mottled with age now, but to him she was still the same beautiful girl she had been when she was seventeen, and his love for her had had to be a secret he could not share with anyone.
Cassandra! Jay had no more liking for his cousin than Amber did.
‘What makes a person like that, Jay?’ Amber asked sadly. ‘It’s as though Cassandra enjoys being cruel and mean. I know that Greg was wrong to fall in love with Caroline, but no one need have known they had been lovers. Cassandra was the one who told Caroline’s husband about the relationship.’
‘Yes. I’m afraid that I too can’t bring myself to forgive her for the harm she did,’ Jay agreed sombrely.
Amber gave a small shiver. Despite the warmth from the logs burning in the grate of the elegant Carrara marble fireplace, the room suddenly seemed cold, as though the chill of past tragedies had somehow swept in.
‘We’ll never know if poor Caroline’s death was an accident, and she missed her footing and fell into the lake, or if she deliberately took her own life because Cassandra had exposed her infidelity to Lord Fitton Legh. Caroline and Greg paid such a dreadfully heavy price for their affair: Greg disinherited by our grandmother and sent to Hong Kong, and Caroline facing divorce and disgrace. I often wonder if Cassandra would have been more compassionate if it hadn’t been for her own feelings for Caroline. She was so passionately in love with her. Do you think Cassandra went on to marry Lord Fitton Legh because he had been Caroline’s husband?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jay admitted. His cousin was an enigma to him, a difficult spiteful girl who had turned into an embittered and cruel woman.
‘I do wish that she hadn’t married Lord Fitton Legh, Jay. She always was a very unkind stepmother for poor John, and she is even now, despite the fact that he and Janey are so very kind to her.’
‘John feels he has a moral obligation to carry out the terms of his father’s will, not just to the letter but above and beyond it, and his father did stipulate that John must provide well for Cassandra. You know how highly John thought of his father.’
‘Yes,’ Amber acknowledged, ‘but that makes it all the more upsetting that he was such a cold and distant father to John, although of course…’ She stopped and looked uncertainly at her husband.
‘Except that John may not be his child, you mean?’ Jay supplied. He saw her face and added quietly, ‘Yes, I know that your cousin Greg believed that John was his child—’
‘Because Caroline Fitton Legh had told him so,’ Amber pointed out, ‘but in truth she could have told Greg that he was John’s father because it was what she wanted to believe herself
‘None the less, Lord Fitton Legh brought John up as his son.’
‘And John worshipped him. Him and Fitton. Fitton is his life. Janey complains that sometimes she thinks the house and the land mean more to him than either she does or their sons. John isn’t very good at articulating his feelings and I do sometimes wonder if their marriage is as happy as we thought it would be when they first married. It would destroy John, I think, if he were ever to suspect that Greg, and not the late Lord Fitton Legh, was his father, and that he himself had no right to the title or to Fitton.’
‘So have we now finally accounted for everyone?’ Jay asked ruefully.
‘Yes,’ Amber confirmed, looking up as they both heard the familiar sound of the tea trolley outside the drawing-room door.‘Here’s Mrs Leggit with the tea,’she announced unnecessarily, smiling at their housekeeper as she came in. ‘We’ve just been discussing Christmas, Mrs Leggit. It would be lovely if we have snow.’
‘They’ve had some already up in Buxton, or so I’ve heard,’ the housekeeper answered, adding as she headed for the door, ‘Mind you, they are much higher up there, than we are down here.’
‘Christmas, the family and snow. Wouldn’t that be perfect?’ Amber smiled at Jay as she handed him his tea.
‘Perfect,’ he agreed.
It was snowing and Olivia
