we’ll get all this lot in the car.’
She looked at Elliott and saw to her relief that he was teasing her. She responded with a smile, her first proper smile in a very long time, she realised, her face muscles feeling slightly stiff.
The dark blue Jaguar was a new model, polished and shiny, but inside, on the back seat where Elliott had suggested she might prefer to sit for comfort, were a couple of books of nursery rhymes and some children’s toys.
‘You have a son and a daughter, I believe,’ she commented quietly once they had cleared the heavy traffic of the airport approaches.
‘Yes, Dominic and Rebecca. That’s why I’m meeting you, and not Bea. Henrietta, the mainstay of our household, is away having a few days holiday at the moment, but she will be back at the weekend. I take it that Lucia has filled you in with details of the Bellaire and Chalmers families?’
‘Yes. Your father married Beatrice’s mother, but she had been previously married to a fellow actor, Charles Bellaire, and after your father’s death and Charles’s subsequent divorce, they remarried…’
‘Yes, and went on to have four more children: the twins, Sebastian and Benedict, Miranda and last, but definitely not least, William. I dare say you will meet them all in due course, although probably not Lucilla, who is both mine and Beatrice’s half-sister. She’s the only child of my father’s marriage to Beatrice’s mother. She’s in the States at the moment with her husband, Nick Barrington. He has extensive interests and connections in Hollywood, and they’ve gone there to recruit a new star for a new film that is presently casting.’
Francesca had heard all about her hostess’s fascinating family background, so very different from her own with its staid ranks of ducas and contes; its many, many Valerian aunts and uncles; its traditions and its shibboleths.
‘Bad flight?’ Elliott asked her, glancing into his driving mirror and observing her too pale face.
She was a beautiful woman, even with the sculptured pared-down thinness of her face. Her hair was like polished silk, hanging thick and heavy on to her shoulders, her make-up immaculate, the golden eyes wary and shuttered, and yet for all her poise and beauty, for all the immaculateness of her appearance, there was none of the plastic dullness that sometimes characterised such perfection.
Her elegance was unmistakably Italian, and yet there was at the same time just a hint of her English heritage, in the mobility of her face and that faint, betraying wariness of her eyes.
He would have to warn Bea again not to expose Francesca to Oliver. He would make mincemeat out of her, and the girl was just vulnerable enough to be hurt by his abrasiveness.
He could see Oliver’s viewpoint, though; a man who had been deceived in the way that he had been deceived was bound to have been hardened by the experience and to want to hold the female sex at a distance.
The prettiness of the English countryside, even in the gloom of the damp October afternoon, was a surprise to Francesca. Her mother had come from the north, a small mining community to which she had no desire to return and with which she had no ties, since she had been orphaned young.
But this… this soft mingling of greens and golds, this pale sunlight that softened cream stone walls ancient with lichen… this very quiet delicacy of colour appealed strongly to her. Even the autumn melancholy of the landscape was in tune with her own sombre thoughts; not of the man she had lost, because she was honest enough to admit to herself that she had not loved him; not even for the honours that would have been hers as his wife. No… it was the loss of self she mourned most… the realisation that she had blindly and willingly allowed herself to be formed into the most suitable image for a granddaughter of the Duca di Valeria. She had even connived at the image-making herself, had willing allowed herself to be moulded and fashioned into an artificial role. It was the betrayal of herself that hurt the most; the realisation that through both laziness and cowardice she had abandoned her rights to be herself… to be independent and to make her own life.
Once while she was at university there had been a boy. He had wanted to be her lover… a wild ragazzo from the streets of Naples, sponsored by a wealthy benefactor because of his intelligence. She had not been able to hide from him her indifference to his feelings.
He had accused her then of not being ‘real’, of not being a person in her own right. She had listened gravely to his insults and then calmly cut him out of her life, relieved, if the truth was known, to end the acquaintanceship with him, because deep down inside her part of her had been disturbed by him, not sexually, but mentally, and she had resented that quiet ripple across the placid surface of her life.
How complacent she had been. How stupidly, wantonly complacent.
She closed her eyes, and Elliott, glancing at her through his mirror, was thankful that they were nearly home. If she was going to burst into tears, he would rather it was when Bea was there to cope and commiserate. As the thought formed, her eyelids lifted, and the golden eyes flashed proud rejection of his thoughts back at him.
So she was not as remote and serene as she appeared. She had pride and spirit. She would need them if she was to succeed in her plans to form a completely new life for herself, more in step with the modern world than the old-fashioned protected one of her grandfather.
‘Nearly there,’ he told her, turning off the main road and driving through the small Cotswold village that was only a handful of miles from his and Beatrice’s home.
The village delighted Francesca, and she swiftly recognised the Tudor architecture of the stone cottages. History was her love, and because her mother was English she had studied British history in almost as much detail as she had Italian.
‘Here we are.’
Elliott turned in through the gates of the mellow Cotswold house. Even before they had left the car, the front door was thrown open and a young woman came hurrying out. Older than Francesca, she nevertheless had an unexpected youthfulness that the Italian girl hadn’t anticipated, having heard many times of how Beatrice had been the mainstay and substitute mother to her family after her parents’ death.
She wasn’t as tall as Francesca herself, and was slightly plumper, a baby clutched in one arm while a blond-haired little boy ran forward to fling himself into Elliott’s arms almost before the car door was open.
‘Welcome to England,’ Beatrice greeted her with a warm smile. ‘Come inside. You must be feeling the cold after Italy. You must tell me if your room isn’t warm enough. The central heating’s on, but all the bedrooms have fires and we can light one for you if necessary. I hope you won’t mind dining en famille tonight. Henrietta, who runs the house and us, is away visiting friends at the moment, and I’m afraid everything is rather disorganised.
‘By the way,’ Beatrice asked her, as she urged her inside the house, ‘what are we to call you? Francesca… or do you have a nickname—Chessie perhaps?’
Beatrice’s warm, friendly smile touched something inside her that reminded her very much of her mother.
No one in il Duca’s household was allowed the informality of having their name abbreviated, and consequently all her life she had been Francesca; a graceful, elegant name, which she suddenly realised had often been a very difficult one to live up to. Chessie, now… Chessie conjured up a very different image indeed. A Chessie might be permitted all kinds of follies and foolishnesses never permitted a Francesca, and so, turning her back on the rigorous training of twenty-four years, Francesca returned
