shrugged. ‘I suppose I can’t really blame my aunt. After all, she was very much a product of her time. She’d done her duty as she saw it, by taking in Rachel and myself in the first place.’
Bill watched her, noting the brief flash of pain that crossed her face. He had never been able to understand how Helen Marsden had been able to turn her fifteen-year-old great-niece from the door, especially when she had been carrying a two-week-old baby in her arms. Helen had known that the child hadn’t been Jenna’s, but that had made no difference. Thank God he had happened to be out walking the dog that night and had seen Jenna trudging down the lane, tears cascading down a small face that had been oddly fierce and determined despite her plight, even then. Lucy had been clutched in one arm, a battered suitcase in the other.
At first Jenna had refused to stop and talk to him, but he had managed to coax her into the house and once there, Nancy soon had the whole story from her. She hadn’t wanted to stay, but Nancy had insisted. The next morning, while Jenna was still deep in an exhausted sleep, he and Nancy had sat down and talked about the situation. Jenna was flatly refusing to give up her sister’s child, and there was no reason why she should, at least in Nancy’s eyes.
When Jenna eventually woke, they had put it to her that she stay with them, at least for the time being. At first she had been reluctant to agree. She knew Bill only as the headmaster of the local school and Nancy not at all and she was patently truculent — reluctant to trust them — but gradually Nancy had persuaded her.
Still too young to leave school herself, Jenna had had to leave Lucy with Nancy during the day while she attended her classes. She had always been a hardworking girl, and intelligent, but then she worked like someone driven, Bill remembered. He had found her one night in the sitting-room poring over her books. When he had questioned her as to why she was still working at that time of night, she had told him fiercely that she needed to leave school as quickly as she could with as many qualifications as she could get, so that she could find a way of supporting herself and Lucy.
‘And what will you do about Lucy, Jenna?’ he asked her quietly now, coming back to the present. ‘I’m afraid she isn’t going to accept coming to live up here very easily.’
‘No, I know, I’m hoping when she goes back to school she’ll settle down a bit better.’ Jenna bit her lip, an endearing childish gesture in so polished a woman, and frowned quickly. ‘When I was upstairs with her just now, she said she hated school. She even accused me of sending her to boarding school because I wanted to be rid of her. It wasn’t like that at all, Bill.’ She turned to him, her eyes appealing for understanding. ‘I could have sent her to a day school, yes, but that would have meant her coming home sometimes to an empty flat, crossing London alone, I didn’t want that for her. I thought at least at boarding school she would be safe and secure, with other girls of her own age.’
‘Lucy’s a teenager, Jenna,’ Bill reminded her, ‘and like all teenagers, she’s going through a very painful growing period — something I know you missed out on.’
‘I didn’t have time for growing pains.’ Jenna admitted wryly. ‘I was too busy fighting to prove I was grown up enough to keep Lucy. I was terrified the authorities would take her away from me. And so they would have if it hadn’t been for you and Nancy, agreeing to stand as our foster parents until I was old enough to adopt her legally.’
‘Well … we wanted to do all we could to help you, Jenna, but as far as Lucy’s concerned, now, today, I think the root cause of the problem is this conflict between you concerning her father.’
‘Yes,’ Jenna agreed quietly, ‘but what can I do, Bill? I can’t tell her the truth now. I just can’t. Perhaps I should have made up a mythical father for her years ago, but somehow I never thought about it. I ask myself, what would Rachel want me to do, and I can’t help feeling she would want me to protect her daughter.’
Bill sighed, knowing that Jenna’s refusal to tell Lucy the truth sprang from a genuine desire to protect her but not sure that he agreed with her. If she wasn’t told the truth, Lucy would go through life constantly wondering about her father. He accepted that to be told the facts now would cause her considerable distress, but Lucy had more of Jenna’s strong nature than either of them realised — enough he was sure, when the initial shock had died down, to accept what she had been told. He felt that in the long run it was better for Lucy to have the anguish of knowing the truth now, rather than the unhealed wound of not knowing her true parentage.
‘I hope there isn’t going to be a lot of competition for the house,’ Jenna commented, changing the conversation. ‘When I originally found out it was going up for auction I wanted it because it had been their house, but now I’ve been round it, seen it …’ She shrugged and smiled wryly. ‘Ridiculous, I know, but I want it so badly, Bill. Too badly, perhaps. When I went inside I … it was the strangest feeling, as though somehow I had come home.’
‘I haven’t heard that there’s been much interest locally.’ Bill was avoiding looking directly at her, and Jenna guessed that he was more affected than he wanted her to know by her brief revelation. She had never found it easy to talk about her feelings — Bill knew that. Jenna loved both Bill and Nancy with a love almost as strong as that she felt for Lucy, but she had never been able to put her emotion into words. She knew that people often found her cool and unapproachable and she preferred it that way. Not for the world would she have wanted to admit to anyone how frightened she was of emotional commitment, of laying herself open to pain and betrayal. Strange, she had not thought so deeply about her own innermost feelings for years, and now was hardly the time to become involved in the complexities of self-analysis, she reminded herself wryly.
‘Of course,’ Bill went on, ‘one never knows about out-of-the-district buyers. But I shouldn’t think you’ll have anything to worry about. After all, the building is extremely run-down and in a rather remote part of the country. Large houses such as the Hall are notoriously expensive to run. What time is the auction?’
‘Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning,’ Jenna told him. ‘I had intended to take Lucy with me, but in view of her present mood I was wondering if you and Nancy could keep an eye on her for me?’
‘Don’t worry about Lucy, she’ll be fine with us.’
Jenna bit her lip. She hadn’t missed the way Lucy had taken to watching Bill, and remembering her own early teenage years, she suspected that, like her, Lucy was suffering from the lack of a caring male presence in her life. Would Lucy also grow to womanhood seeing men as an alien and somehow threatening sex? That wasn’t what she wanted for her. So what could she do about it? she derided herself mentally. Marry?
Who? Harley? She repressed a brief grin at the mental picture conjured up by her thoughts. Poor Harley. There had been a time when he had fancied himself in love with her, but she suspected that if she made any romantic overtures to him now he would run a mile. Marriage wasn’t for her. She could never envisage herself giving up her freedom; her right to remain in control of her life and her career … and yet … seeing the looks Bill and Nancy sometimes exchanged, the depth of understanding and caring that existed between them, there had been instances when she had felt deeply envious.
Bill and Nancy were lucky, she told herself. She only had to think of half a dozen or more of her close acquaintances to remind herself of the disillusionment and pain that marriage could bring. She was right to remain contemptuous of the male sex. She would be far better employed worrying about what her accountants and the bank were going to say when she broke the news of her latest acquisition to them. She repressed another grin as she visualised herself telling them that she had bought the house because she had fallen in love with it. Hardly good business practice. No, somehow she would have to convince them that with the acquisition of the Deveril house her business would
