The woman’s voice was louder. She came out onto the terrace, a tall woman in an old flowered gown, her hair beneath the lace cap a rich brown with just the faintest hint of gray. She was smiling. She took each child by the hand. And as they turned back toward the door, Merryn saw her face and the world stood still.
For a moment it felt as though she was looking at Kitty Farne, Kitty grown older and grayer and more lined but still with that pretty rounded face and smiling demeanor. Merryn knew that she must have made some involuntary movement because the little group on the terrace saw her and stopped. The child called Susan was looking straight at Merryn now. Her eyes were a clear, vivid blue, the blue of Merryn’s eyes, the blue of Joanna’s. She smiled hesitantly and Merryn saw that she had dimples in her cheeks just like Tess’s. Merryn’s fingers were tight about the iron fence now. The hard metal bit into her hands through her gloves. She could hear a strange roaring sound in her ears, as though she was about to faint. Down on the lawn the nursemaid was still playing with the babies. Merryn could hear their calls and their laughter but they seemed to come from a very long way away indeed.
Panic possessed her. She wanted to run, away from the sunlit garden and the child with the same blue eyes and golden hair that she possessed. Suddenly the images in her memory started to unreel like a spool of cotton. It was odd, she thought, how the tiniest details that one forgot in time could come back at any moment. For now she was remembering how very rounded Kitty had looked on the last afternoon she had seen her. Kitty, the thirteen-year-old Merryn had thought, had looked fat. She had even wondered if Kitty, unhappy in love, had been eating too many sweetmeats.
Kitty, Merryn thought now, had looked pregnant.
She willed her legs to move but they felt heavy, leaden. She found that she was trembling deep inside her pelisse, racked with shivers. She felt cold all over, cold all the way through. This, then, was Stephen’s legacy, a child whose existence none of them had guessed, a child whom Garrick must surely have known about but whom he had gone to great lengths to keep from her. She felt a vast desolation seep through her, as bleak as the winter night. She thought of how much she loved Shuna, Joanna’s daughter, and how much love she would have lavished on this other niece she had never known and she thought that her heart would break in two.
And then she heard the crunch of carriage wheels on the road behind her and felt a frisson of premonition touch her neck. She turned very slowly. She knew it would be Garrick. She knew that he had come, as he must, to protect Kitty’s family and Kitty’s child, just as he had done for the past twelve years.
Garrick jumped down from the curricle and took several steps toward her. The snow was starting to fall all about them now in huge white flakes. Garrick looked tired, his eyes strained, the stubble once again shadowing his cheek. Merryn realized that he must have driven through the night.
“Merryn,” he started to say. He put a hand out to her but Merryn stumbled back. She was aware of nothing but the most excruciating pain.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew how desperately I missed Stephen. I had nothing of him left, not one thing.” Her voice broke. “And all the time you knew that Stephen had a child. You were going to marry me and you were never going to tell me.” The snow was swirling about her now and she brushed it angrily from her face, brushed away, too, the hot tears of fury and despair. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the woman who looked like Kitty coming down the steps now toward them. She saw Garrick’s gaze flick toward her and then back to Merryn’s face.
“If we could talk,” he began but he fell silent as Merryn shook her head in a tiny gesture of repudiation.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. “I never want to see you again.”
The woman had reached the gate now. “Garrick!” she called. She was smiling. “We did not know you were coming,” she said. “You should have sent word.” She looked at Merryn. Her smile started to fade.
Merryn turned and walked away. She felt numb and cold. All she could think of was Stephen, and the child that was his, and of Garrick’s silence. It made perfect sense, she thought. Garrick had told her that there had been an argument. He had discovered that Kitty was pregnant with Stephen’s child. Perhaps Kitty and Stephen had told him they were to elope together and so Garrick had shot Stephen through jealousy and revenge. And then he and Kitty’s family had formed a conspiracy of silence to keep Kitty’s child a secret from her father’s relatives forever.
Misery twisted in Merryn again, as violent as a knife. She had not known she could feel like this. It hurt so much, the anger and the raw pain. And yet there was something else there, too, a tiny voice that in the face of all the evidence whispered that she was wrong, that the man who had protected her and stood between her and death could not behave in such a way. It whispered to her to think again, to keep faith, because she had loved Garrick for a reason and although her faith was battered that love had not completely died.
There had been three shots, she remembered. There had been two bullets in Stephen’s body, but what had happened to the third? Garrick had told her that Stephen had tried to kill Kitty and she had wanted to disbelieve him because she had been so sure that Stephen and Kitty had loved one another. But if she had been wrong then Garrick had defended Kitty. He had tried to save her from Stephen. And if Kitty had been pregnant then perhaps Garrick had taken her abroad to shield her from the scandal as later he had tried to shelter and protect her child …
The hot tears scalded Merryn’s throat. The instinct that had prompted her to trust Garrick with her life, with her heart, started to unfold within her again, tentatively and a little fearfully. She knew she would have to go back, be brave, confront Garrick and hear the truth at last. And if that truth meant that all she had believed about Stephen and Kitty had been based on a lie then she would have to finally confront that, too.
THE TRACK ALONG THE CLIFFS was wild and lonely on a winter afternoon. Eventually the path descended through patches of sea clover and thrift and the short springy grass and Merryn came down onto the beach below Shipham and stood for a moment inhaling the saltladen air. It was so cold it felt as though it cut her lungs. Her tears had gone now. She felt numb and tired. She sat down on a rock at the edge of the sands. In a moment she thought she would turn and go back. She would find Garrick. She would listen to what he had to say.
There was a crunch on the shingle beside her. Merryn jumped and spun around. For a moment she thought she was imagining things. Tom Bradshaw was standing behind her, Tom in his London clothes looking debonair and tough and not particularly friendly.
“Hello, Merryn,” Tom said. He smiled, his dazzling, charming smile, but his eyes were opaque.
“What on earth are you doing here, Tom?” Merryn said.
“I followed you from the house,” Tom said. “I wanted to talk to you.” He half turned away from her, driving his hands into his pockets. “Quite a shock, isn’t it,” he said conversationally, “to discover that not only did Garrick Farne kill your brother, but he stole his child, too.”
“Stop it,” Merryn said sharply. “Don’t say that.”
“I suppose he’ll present it to you as being frightfully honorable,” Tom said, grinning. “Impossible choices, a promise of silence given on his wife’s deathbed, a child he knew could never bear his name because she was born too soon to have been his …” He shrugged. “You should appreciate all that, Merryn. I seem to recall that you were always frightfully keen on honor and justice and all those high-flown ideas.”
“What do you mean?” Merryn said, frowning. “How do you know all this, Tom?”
“Oh,
