married at eighteen…’
‘That was different… There was the war…’
‘Which was virtually over when you married Father… Oh, what’s the use—you’re determined to keep us apart, you and Scott’s father. I hate you, I hate you both,’ she had finished childishly, racing upstairs to collapse in tears of anger and impotent and helpless emotion.
No, Scott might not have been able to stop his father taking him back home, but later…later, surely, he could have got in touch with her…come back for her…?
Now for the first time she was confronting a truth she had sought desperately and successfully to avoid for a long time.
If Scott had loved her, loved her with the intensity and passion she had felt for him, he would have found a way of coming back to her.
Never mind that he was his father’s only child…never mind the fact that he had been brought up from birth in the knowledge that one day he would be solely responsible for the vast sheep station owned and run by his father, and for all the complex financial investments that had stemmed from the profits made from those sheep. Never mind the fact that he had always known that it was his father’s dearest wish that he would marry the daughter of a neighbouring station owner, thus combining the two vast tracts of land. Never mind the fact that until he’d met her, Sage, he had been quite content with this future. Never mind anything that had stood between them. He had told her he loved her and he had meant it, she knew that. He had loved her as she loved him. He had wanted to marry her, to spend the rest of his life with her.
Or had he…? Had he had a change of heart back there in Australia? Had he somehow stopped loving her, stopped wanting her, blocked her out of his mind, started hating her for what she had done? She shuddered, remembering how his father had refused to see her that night at the hospital, how he had also given instructions that she wasn’t to be allowed to see Scott. He had blamed her for the accident, she knew that, but surely Scott, Scott who had loved her, understood her, been a part of her almost, surely he could not have blamed her? Even though…even though she deserved to be blamed!
She knew he had married… Not the neighbour’s daughter, but someone equally suitable from his father’s point of view. The daughter of a wealthy Australian entrepreneur. She ought to have been his wife…the mother of his children. But she wasn’t, and until now she had blamed her mother and his father for that fact. Now, abruptly, she was being forced to recognise that Scott’s love might not have been the all-consuming, intensely passionate, unchangeable force that was her own.
After the nightmare she did not get back to sleep properly and she was awake at seven when Jenny knocked on her door and came in with a tray of tea, served, she noticed, on one of the pretty antique sets of breakfast boudoir china that her mother had collected over the years. When her friends expressed concern that she should actually use anything so valuable Liz always smiled and replied that the pleasure of using beautiful things far outweighed the small risk of their being damaged by such use.
Sage frowned as Jenny put the delicate hand-painted breakfast set on her bedside table, and then said abruptly, ‘Jenny, that Sèvres boudoir set my mother likes so much—I’d like to take it to the hospital with me… I think once she’s feeling a little better she’d appreciate having something so familiar.’
‘Yes. That particular set always has been her favourite. She used to say that that special first morning cup of tea always tasted even better when she drank it from the Sèvres.’
She used to say… Sage felt her stomach muscles clench anxiously. Unable to look at the housekeeper, she said huskily, ‘Has there…? Have the hospital…?’
‘No, nothing,’ Jenny quickly reassured her. ‘And as they always say, no news must be good news. Don’t you fret…if anyone could pull through that kind of accident it would be your mother. She’s such a strong person. Emotionally as well as physically…’
‘Yes, she is,’ Sage agreed. ‘But even the strongest among us have our vulnerabilities… Faye and Camilla, are they up yet?’
‘Camilla is; she’s gone out riding, she said she’d be back in time for breakfast. I’m just about to take Faye her tea. I don’t think she’ll have slept very well… These headaches she gets when she’s under pressure…’
Faye… Headaches… Sage frowned. No one had ever told her that Faye suffered bad headaches… But then, why should they? She had long ago opted out of the day-to-day life of the house and its occupants. Long, long ago made it plain that she was going to go her own way, and that that way was not broad enough to allow for any travelling companions.
It was a perfect late spring morning, with fragile wisps of mist masking the grass, and the promise of sunshine once it had cleared.
The telephone was ringing as Sage went downstairs. She picked up the receiver in the hall, and heard a woman whose name she did not recognise asking anxiously after her mother.
‘We heard about the accident last night, but, of course, we didn’t want to bother you then. And it’s very awkward, really. There’s this meeting tonight about the proposed new road. Your mother was going to chair it… I doubt that we’ll be able to get it cancelled, and there’s no one really who can take her place…’
The action committee Faye had told her about. Sage suppressed a sigh of irritation. Surely the woman realised that the last thing they wanted to concern themselves with right now was some proposed new road…? And then she checked. Her mother would have been concerned; her mother, whatever her anxiety, would, as she had always done, have looked beyond the immediate present to the future and would have seen that no matter how irritating, no matter how inconvenient, no matter how unimportant such a meeting might seem in the face of present happenings, there would come a time when it would be important, when it would matter, when she might wish that she had paid more attention.
‘Faye and I have already discussed the problem,’ she said now, suppressing her impatience. ‘She suggested that I might stand in for my mother, as a representative of the family and the interests of the mill. I believe my mother had files and reports on what is being planned. The meeting’s tonight, you say…? I should have read them by then…’
She could almost hear the other woman’s sigh of relief.
‘We hate bothering you about it at such a time, but your mother was insistent that we make our stance clear right from the beginning, that we fight them right from the start. The Ministry are sending down a representative to put their side of things, and the chairman of the contractors who’ll be doing the work will be there as well… If you’re sure it’s not going to be too much trouble, it would be wonderful if you could take your mother’s place.’
Sage could hear the relief in her voice and wondered a little wryly if her caller would continue to place such faith in her abilities to step into her mother’s shoes once they had met.
‘No trouble at all,’ she responded automatically, as she made a note of the exact time of the meeting and promised to be there fifteen minutes earlier so that she could meet the rest of the committee.
‘Was that the hospital?’ Faye asked anxiously, coming downstairs towards her. If anything her sister-in-law looked even more drawn this morning, Sage recognised, turning to answer her, and even more frail.
Why was it that when confronted with Faye’s ethereal, haunted delicacy she immediately felt the size of a carthorse and twice as robust? And, even worse, she felt rawly aware that as
