for others veered from mild contempt through disinterest to outright resentment and deep hostility.
In Max’s eyes, it was not his fault that others didn’t like him, it was theirs. Their fault and their loss.
Max glanced at his watch. He’d give it another half an hour and then he’d leave. Louise had originally wanted to get married on Christmas Eve, but the wedding had actually taken place a little bit earlier, primarily because it was the turn of Great-aunt Ruth and her American husband, Grant, to fly to the States to spend Christmas with Ruth’s daughter and her husband.
Great-aunt Ruth’s granddaughter, Bobbie, and her husband, Luke, one of the Chester Crightons, were going with them, along with their young daughter.
* * *
Several yards away, Bobbie Crighton, who had observed the way Max had looked at poor Maddy, reflected grimly to herself that Max really was detestable. She had once heard his cousin Olivia remark very succinctly, ‘Max is the kind of man who, no matter how attractive the woman he’s speaking with is, will always be looking over her shoulder to see if he can spot someone even better….’
Poor Maddy, indeed. Bobbie didn’t know how she could bear to stay in her marriage, but then, of course, there were the children.
She patted her own still-flat stomach with a small, secret smile; her second pregnancy had been confirmed only the previous week.
‘I think this time it could be twins,’ she had confided to Luke, who had raised his dark eyebrows and asked her dryly, ‘Women’s intuition?’
‘Well, one of us has got to produce a set,’ Bobbie had pointed out to him, ‘and I’m the right age for it now. Mothers in their thirties are more likely to have twins….’
‘In their thirties? You are only just thirty,’ Luke had reminded her.
‘Mmm … I know, and I rather think that these two were conceived on the night of my thirtieth birthday,’ she had told him softly.
Luke was one of four children—two boys and two girls. His father, Henry Crighton, and his father’s brother, Laurence, were the senior partners, now retired, in the original solicitors’ practice in Chester. Over eighty years ago there had been a quarrel between the then youngest son, Josiah Crighton, and his family, and he had broken away from them and gone on to found the Haslewich branch of the Crighton firm and family.
While Luke’s brother and sisters and the other Chester cousins and their Haslewich peers were extremely good friends, Ben Crighton, the most senior member of the Crighton family in Haslewich, was still obsessed by the family tradition of competitiveness with the Chester members, even if it was now in spirit only.
It had been a burning ambition of Ben’s all his life that initially his eldest son and then, when that had not been possible, his eldest grandson, Max, should achieve the goal that had been withheld from him and be called to the bar.
All through his growing years, Max had been alternately bribed and coerced by his grandfather to fulfil this goal, his naturally competitive spirit sharpened and fed by his grandfather’s tales of the injustices suffered by their own branch of the family and the need to restore the family’s pride by proving to ‘that Chester lot’ that they weren’t the only ones who could boast of reaching the higher echelons of the legal profession.
When Max had announced to his grandfather that he was to join one of London’s most prestigious sets of chambers, he had made Ben Crighton’s dearest wish come true.
As Bobbie surveyed the Grosvenor’s ballroom now, she couldn’t help remembering the first time she had attended another family occasion—Louise and her twin Katie’s coming of age, an event to which she, as a stranger then to the family, had been invited by Joss, Louise and Katie’s younger brother.
Max had behaved very gallantly towards her then. Too gallantly for a married man, as Luke hadn’t hesitated to point out. Conversely, she and Luke had clashed immediately, equally antagonistic towards each other.
She was glad that Louise had brought her wedding forward from Christmas Eve so that they could all attend. She would have hated to have missed the celebration, but she was looking forward to spending Christmas with her parents and sister as well. Her mother, Sarah Jane, would be thrilled when she told her about her pregnancy, and so, too, she hoped, would Sam…. A small frown touched her forehead as she thought about her twin sister.
Something was wrong with Sam’s life at the moment. She knew it, could sense it with that extraordinary magical bond that made them close….
In a small anteroom just off the ballroom, the youngest members of the Crighton family were having a small party all of their own, not so much by design as by accident. From her seat within watching distance of the door, Jenny Crighton was keeping a motherly eye on the events, though she knew they could come to no harm.
Who would have thought in such a short space of time that the family would produce so many little ones, a complete new generation.
Olivia, her husband’s niece and the eldest of his twin brother David’s two children, had started it all, and now she and Caspar, her American husband, had Amelia and Alex. Saul, Ben’s half-brother Hugh’s elder son, had Jemima, Robert and Meg from his first marriage and now a baby from his marriage to Tullah, and of course her own daughter-in-law, Maddy, had Leo and Emma.
Maddy … Jenny could feel her body tensing as she took a quick look at her daughter-in-law, who was seated between her and Ruth, her head bent down. Maddy might seem to the unaware onlooker calm and serene, but Jenny had seen the tears sparkling in her eyes several minutes ago and she had known who had been the cause of them.
Even now, after all these years, she still hadn’t come to terms with the reality that was her eldest son, and it hurt her unbearably to know that it was Max, flesh of her flesh, hers and Jon’s, who was the cause of so much hurt and pain.
She ached to ask her son why he behaved in the way he did. Why. What it was that motivated him to be the person he was, but she knew that if she even tried to talk to him he would simply give her that half mocking, half sneering contemptuous little smile of his and shrug his shoulders and walk away.
She had never been able to understand how she and Jon had ever produced a person like Max, and she knew that she never would. She knew, too, that every time she looked at her daughter-in-law and witnessed the pain her marriage was causing her, she was overwhelmed by guilt and despair.
Maddy was everything that she, Jenny, could have wanted in a daughter-in-law, or a daughter, and as such she was dearly loved by her, but Jenny would had to have had far less intelligence than she did have to be able to convince herself that Maddy was the kind of wife that Max should have gone for.
Max thrived on opposition, challenge, aggression. Max wanted most what he could have least, and poor Maddy just wasn’t … just couldn’t … Poor Maddy!
At her mother-in-law’s side, Madeleine Crighton had a pretty fair idea just what Jenny was thinking and she couldn’t blame her in the least.
Max had only arrived home at Queensmead this morning, the lovely old house that belonged to his grandfather and where Maddy and the children had now virtually made their permanent home, with only an hour to spare before the wedding began, having assured Maddy that he would be there early the previous evening. Not an auspicious start, and to make matters even worse, Leo was going through
