She broke off and bit her lip, and Nell guessed that she had been about to say that her mother had always told her that the de Tressail family was a wealthy one.
Sighing faintly, Nell dragged her attention away from the wedding and turned to her stepsister.
‘Gramps always liked to pretend that there was more money then there was. His pride wouldn’t allow him to admit how bad things were. And then, when Dad died … the death-duties …’ She saw Grania’s mutinous face and reflected that, in her way, her stepsister was as stubborn as her grandfather.
‘You must have noticed just from the house how bad things are, Grania,’ she counselled gently.
‘I thought it was just Gramps being mean. You know how he was … if things are that bad why on earth don’t you sell this place? It would fetch a fortune. It’s not fair!’ she burst out passionately. ‘Why should Gramps have left it all to you? It should have been split between us …’
Nell stared at her, her heart sinking. She knew these temperamental moods of Grania’s of old, and winced mentally at the thought of the fiery outburst to come. Why was it that her stepsister always made her feel like such a pale shadow, a mere reflection when contrasted with her own glowing, brilliant colour?
Her stepsister had so many advantages … She was young, beautiful, intelligent … She had an excellent career, every advantage, and yet still she resented Nell. And why? Because she had inherited Easterhay.
Nell bit down on her bottom lip, gnawing at it, worrying at it as she tried to find words tactful enough to explain the reasoning behind their grandfather’s decision.
Grania and Gramps had never got on. Gramps had never really approved of his son’s second marriage, and he had been even less pleased when he’d learned that his second wife already had a child from a previous marriage. Where was the grandson who would inherit the title? Where was the next Sir Hugo? he had demanded when the new bride announced that she didn’t want any more children. That had shocked him, Nell knew, and he had never really forgiven Lucia for not providing an heir for Easterhay.
In her grandfather’s eyes, Nell knew, Grania was not a de Tressail, and that was one of the reasons he had left Easterhay itself solely to Nell.
Now that title would go to Nell’s son … always supposing she had one. Always supposing she met a man willing to marry her and shoulder with her the problems of her inheritance.
At heart, she knew that Grania had a valid argument. The property should be sold either as a home to someone rich enough to afford it, or perhaps even to a developer. But Nell knew she would rather have torn out her own heart than agree to such a course of action. Perhaps after all there was more of her grandfather in her than she knew. Or perhaps it was simply conditioning … simply the fact that she had been brought up to put Easterhay and all that it stood for before herself and her own needs and desires.
Whatever the case, she knew that her grandfather had left her Easterhay because he saw her as its custodian, that to him she was little more than a trustee holding the house and its lands for the future. But could she hold it?
She had no idea … but she meant to try.
Trying was one thing, succeeding was another. Her initial approaches to the National Trust on the advice of her solicitor had proved fruitless. If Nell only knew of the houses they were offered, but had to turn down; houses of far more national importance than Easterhay.
The trouble was that Easterhay was too large to be run as home without wealth to support it, and yet too small to be developed in the way that some of the more well known National Trust houses had been.
And so it was down to her to find a means of keeping the estate going, to use what skills she had to bring an income into the bank account, with perilously little in it, to cover the looming death-duties.
She was doing what she could. These weddings that paid so well but demanded so much …
Perhaps next year they might even invest in buying their own marquee—that would save money in the long run, and …
As always when money worried at her mind, she became totally engrossed in the problems of maintaining the house, and it took Grania’s sharp voice to bring her out of her mental financial juggling.
‘Well, if you won’t be reasonable, I’m sure that Joss will … He is here, isn’t he?’
‘If by here you mean in the village, then yes, I believe he is at home at the moment,’ Nell acknowledged stiffly.
Grania laughed, her angry mood lightening as she teased, ‘Poor Nell, you’ve never liked him, have you? Far too much the rough diamond for you, I suppose. I must say, though, that he does have a rather exciting aura of sexuality about him. I wonder what he’s like in bed.’
‘Grania!’ Nell protested, her face suddenly hot. It was true that she had always felt uncomfortable in Joss’s presence, but not because she didn’t like him—far from it!
‘Poor Nell,’ Grania pouted. ‘Honestly, you’re like something out of Pride and Prejudice. Sex does exist, you know. And so does sex appeal, and believe me, Joss has it by the bucketful. All that and money too …’ She closed her eyes. ‘Mmm …’ She opened them again and looked at her stepsister, saying tauntingly, ‘You haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about, have you? You wouldn’t recognise sex appeal if it … Honestly, you’re archaic. I suppose you don’t even approve of me going to see Joss. You probably even think I should wait for him to get in touch with me. Poor Nell—you’ve no idea what you’re missing.’
Oh, but she had, Nell acknowledged painfully. She was all too well aware of what Grania described as Joss’s sexiness … She herself would have put it slightly differently, but in essence her stepsister was right. Joss had about him an animal quality of vitality and maleness that no woman could fail to be aware of. And Joss himself knew exactly what he had … and he used that knowledge ruthlessly.
He wore the beautiful girls who flocked around him as a hunter wore his trophies. He never seemed to be without some lissom beauty clinging to his arm, and was often photographed on the society pages of the newspapers with some scantily clad female clinging possessively to his dark-suited arm.
Nell often felt that they were deliberately posed, those photographs, for all their apparent artlessness; the girls were invariably blonde and frail, Joss invariably clothed in the dark formality of a business suit, his face in profile so that the hawlike, almost cruel harshness of his features was thrown into relief.
It was hard to imagine, looking at Joss today, that there had ever been a time when he had been forced to steal to get food … when his clothes had been little more than rags.
Now only the faint burr in his voice betrayed him, and even that was a deliberate policy, Nell was sure of it. He was an excellent mimic, and could quite easily have adopted the clipped, classless accent of her grandfather and his kind had he wished. But for some reason he didn’t choose to do so; for some reason, as she had good cause to know, he seemed to delight in forcing people to remember the life from which he had sprung.
Nell had once attended a local dinner party with her grandfather when Joss had almost shocked one of the female guests senseless by replying to her polite dinner-table queries about his life by telling her in graphic detail exactly what could happen to small children, both male and female, left
