away.
He was walking ahead of them now, pausing to hold aside the vicious brambles blocking the path, his frown deepening as he saw the way Robert clung to her side.
It was twenty minutes before they were in sight of the village, but Gray Philips didn’t walk towards it, instead branching off on to an even narrower and more overgrown path, which came to an abrupt end outside a solid wooden gate set into a high brick wall.
Gray Philips opened the gate for her, standing to one side so that she and Robert could precede him through it. Out of good manners, or as a means of ensuring that…that what? That she didn’t pick Robert up and run off with him…What chance would she have had of outpacing a tough adult male like him?
The garden inside the brick wall was overgrown, the brambles even thicker than those on the path outside. Beyond the wilderness of undergrowth a cordon of trees guarded a green lawn and formal flowerbeds, and beyond that lay the house, all mellow brick and unevenly leaded windows.
It was old, Sarah recognised, Elizabethan, and much, much larger than her cousin’s farmhouse.
Whatever Robert’s father might not be, he was quite obviously a very wealthy man. But wealth did not buy happiness, and, even while she was admiring the house, she was not envying him the money that had enabled him to buy it. What good was money when his son was so obviously afraid of him…when his wife had presumably left him? Had she been afraid of him as well? But she must have loved him once. She had married him, after all…they had had a child.
A tiny shudder went through her as she recognised the dangerous course of her thoughts. To question someone’s personal life so intimately and intensely, even within the privacy of her own thoughts, was so alien a response within her that she instinctively recoiled from acknowledging what she was doing.
Robert’s footsteps lagged as they crossed the lawn. He was holding back, dragging his feet. His father stopped, frowning down at both of them.
‘Is Mrs Jacobs still here?’
Sarah found she was holding her breath, praying that Gray Philips would deal sensitively with his son…would hear as she did the thread of fear that ran beneath the words.
If he did, he gave no sign of it.
‘No, she isn’t,’ he told Robert curtly, and then, as though unable to stop himself, he dropped down on one knee in front of the small boy and placed his hands on his shoulders, demanding gruffly, ‘Robert, why did you do it? Why did you run away? You must have known how worried Mrs Jacobs would be. You know you aren’t allowed to go outside the garden…you know.’
Robert was still clinging to Sarah’s hands. He had started to tremble violently, and tears poured down his face as he burst out passionately, ‘I don’t like it here. I want to go home…I want Nana…I want Mrs Richards. I don’t like it here.’
Immediately his father’s hands dropped from Robert’s shoulders. His face was in shadow as he turned slightly away, his voice harsh and low as he said roughly, ‘Robert, your grandmother is dead. You know that.’
He stopped as Sarah made an instinctive sound of shocked distress.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he challenged her. ‘Lie to him? Pretend that none of it happened…that his mother, her lover and his grandmother are still alive?
‘Come on, Robert. Let’s get you inside, and this time no running away.’
As he stood up he took hold of Robert’s arm, firmly taking charge of him, but Robert still clung to Sarah, pleading with her not to leave him.
His father might not be actively unkind to him, but he seemed to have little or no idea of how to deal with him, Sarah recognised as she instinctively tried to soothe Robert’s panic, smoothing the soft hair back off his hot face as she promised, ‘If you’re a good boy and go with your father now, Robert, I’ll come and see you tomorrow if you like.’
‘There’s no need for that.’
She met the look Gray Philips gave her with an equally challenging one of her own.
‘Not according to you,’ she agreed coldly. ‘But Robert—’
‘I don’t want you to leave me. I want you to stay with me,’ Robert said, and burst out crying.
Kneeling down beside him, she tried to comfort him as best she could.
‘I can’t stay now, Robert,’ she told him. ‘My cousin will be wondering where I am, but I promise I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’
She looked defiantly at Gray Philips as she said the words, challenging him to refuse to allow her to see his son, and then, before Gray could say anything to her, and desperately trying to blot out Robert’s tearful pleas to her to stay, she turned her back on both of them and hurried back towards the wooden gate.
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