clumps of white arum lilies, heavily funereal. A life-size white marble statue of a goddess stood on a marble plinth at its center, the base almost obscured by a purple mass of water iris. It should have been a romantic spot. In better days it had been. Her mother had loved it. Now the place bore a faintly haunted air.
Joel pulled up at the base of the semicircular flight of stone steps that led to the front entrance of the homestead. Eden was a departure from other historic homesteads. A large country house in the grand style, it showed more than a little of French influence with its great mansard roof and round viewing tower in the west wing. The first chatelaine of Eden, Adrienne, had been French. No expense had been spared to please her, uprooted as she was from a land of immense beauty and culture to a vast, arid, primitive wilderness, scarcely explored. Nevertheless, Adrienne had not only survived but flourished, bearing six living children. The French connection persisted. One of her great-aunts had married a distant French cousin and still lived in a beautiful house outside of Paris, Nicole’s base when in Europe. A Cavanagh relative had brought a French bride home from the Great War.
Now Eden faced her with its proud tradition of service to its country. Her grandfather had been knighted for his services to the pastoral industry, as had his father before him. No such honor for Heath Cavanagh even if the queen’s honor system hadn’t been disbanded in favor of Australian honors. Drake McClelland would have been in line for that.
The great columns that formed the arcaded loggia were smothered not in the ubiquitous bougainvillea, but the starry white flowers of jasmine. The perfume was a potent blast from the past. Jasmine and its terrible associations. The day of the funeral… She tried to block its cloying scent, deciding then and there to have the whole lot pulled down and replaced with one of the gorgeous African clerodendrums.
“Welcome home,” Joel declared, his hands on her shoulders possessively. “Let’s go up. They’ll all be waiting for you. Gran is nearly sick with excitement.”
“I’m excited myself. I can’t wait to see her.” Neither of them mentioned Heath. Nicole looked around at her luggage.
“Barrett can take care of it.”
“Who’s Barrett?” she asked halfway up the stairs.
“The Barretts,” Joel told her carelessly. “Mother hired them fairly recently.”
“So what does Mrs. Barrett do? Help Dot?”
“Dot? Mum pensioned her off.”
Nicole’s first reaction was outrage. “Without speaking to me?” She heard the heat, the bewilderment, in her voice. “Dot’s been with us forever.” In fact, Dot had been born on Eden to a couple in service to the family. They’d lost Dot for a few years when she was married to an itinerant stockman who regularly beat her up and tried to sell her off to his friends. Afterward she’d returned to Eden penniless, defeated, permanently scarred, to ask for her job back. It was given to her gladly.
“Dot looked after us as kids, Joel,” she reminded him. “She was our nanny. She was wonderfully kind and patient. Did she want to go?”
“Don’t ask me.” Joel shrugged the whole matter off. “I don’t interfere in the domestic arrangements. She was getting on, you know. Hell, seventy or thereabouts.”
“All the more reason to keep her. I thought you were fond of her.”
“Nikki, the only person I’ve ever cared about is you.” Joel gave her a strangely mirthless smile. “I thought you knew that. Don’t worry about Dot. Mum would have looked after her.”
“I should hope so,” Nicole muttered, thinking this wasn’t the end of it. Siggy had no business sending Dot on her way. Even if Dot had wanted to go, Siggy should have told her. Eden was hers, not Siggy’s, wasn’t it?
“Please don’t be cross, Nikki,” Joel begged with a quick glance at her face. “I just want you to be happy.”
“Who’s happy? Are you?” she asked briskly. “Occasional flashes of it are all we can expect.”
“I need you to be happy,” Joel said, putting much emphasis on you.
Once they were inside the huge entrance hall, the symbolic center of the house with its great chandelier, magnificent seventeenth-century tapestry and elaborate metalwork on the central staircase, a man and woman suddenly made their appearance. The woman was tall, rail thin, with short dark hair and deep-set eyes; the man was noticeably shorter. Neither of them looked particularly pleasant.
Joel introduced them briefly as Mr. and Mrs. Barrett. Dislike at first sight? Nicole wondered. It wasn’t until she moved closer that she registered that the blankness of their expressions was actually shock. They looked the way people did when they saw a ghost.
Ah. It was her mother’s portrait in the drawing room. Of course. She could have posed for it herself.
“Right, Robie, you can collect the luggage and take it up to Miss Cavanagh’s room,” Joel ordered sharply, irritated by the pair’s demeanor. “Where’s my mother?”
Mrs. Barrett was the first to recover. “Mrs. Holt will be here directly, sir. She asked to be told the minute you arrived. Lady Cavanagh is resting. I’ll let her know you’re here, Miss Cavanagh.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Barrett. I’ll see to that myself,” Nicole was quick to answer.
Mrs. Barrett inclined her head respectfully, now a model of deference. “Mr. Holt is in his study.”
In fact, Alan was coming down the central staircase that very minute. Nicole looked up quickly, caught his expression before he had time to change it.
It wasn’t welcome. It certainly wasn’t joy as in, Darling Nicole’s home! It was even possible he wasn’t happy to see her at all. Uncle Alan had always played his cards close to the vest. No one ever knew what he was thinking, and he didn’t even seem to have a past. Her mother had always said it was impossible to say what lay behind that bland exterior. Alan Holt escaped into his own world, but because of his fortuitous marriage lived exceedingly well.
Now around sixty Alan was still a handsome man, very elegant in his bearing. His full head of hair, once as blond as Joel’s, was an eye-catching platinum. Did he enhance it? She wouldn’t be in the least surprised, though Alan would keep them all in ignorance. His eyes behind his trendy rimless glasses were a frosty gray-green. “Fanatic’s eyes,” Heath Cavanagh once called them. Nicole thought that ridiculous. She’d never seen Uncle Alan get worked up about anything. Except after the tragedy, when he had sealed himself off in his own private tomb. Inside the extended Cavanagh family, some of them admittedly terrible snobs, no one could understand why Sigrid had married him. He wasn’t “solid, one of us.” He’d been an actor touring with an English repertory company when Sigrid, quite out of character, fell madly in love with him and married him before she’d had time to think about it; a quick private ceremony without benefit of family. Something she was never to live down. At least the marriage had lasted, though her grandfather had once remarked wryly, Alan would be terrified at the idea of going back to earning his own living.
Now he came down the steps holding his arms out to Nicole as though she was the nicest thing he’d seen in years. Pure theater. “Nicole, dearest girl!” An actor’s good carrying voice, plummy accent, real? Religiously acquired? Who knew? That was privileged information.
“Uncle Alan! How wonderful to see you again.” Hypocrisy
