A Season of Secrets (46 page)

As, with the terrier skittering around their heels, they began making their way back to the house, it occurred to Kyle that he and Prince Edward had something in common. Both of them were deeply
in love and, for both of them, a happy outcome to that love was distinctly remote.

Other cars had now arrived. Parked on the gravel beside his own car was a plum-coloured Riley. A few yards further away was a Bentley Silver Goddess and, a little apart from them, Thea’s
distinctive little green Morgan.

Kyle felt his heart tighten. Whenever he and Thea had been going through an ‘off’ period, the first few seconds of any meeting were always crucial, because he could instantly tell by
her manner if there was any hope of a passionate reconciliation.

‘His Royal Highness and Princess Marina are in the drawing room, as is Mrs Simpson, sir,’ Edward’s butler said to him as they entered an octagonal hall with stark white walls,
a floor of black and white marble and with yellow leather upholstered chairs in each of its eight corners. ‘Mr and Mrs Metcalfe are with them. Miss Fenton arrived some minutes ago and has
been shown to her room. Lord Louis and Lady Edwina are yet to arrive.’

Edward nodded his thanks and, despite having come in straight from the garden and smelling of wood-smoke, bolted straight for the drawing room to greet his brother, Princess Marina and the woman
he found it so hard to be apart from, even for a second.

Not being royal, and not being able to be so careless about the smell of wood-smoke clinging to him, Kyle headed straight for his first-floor bedroom. The valet he had been allocated was waiting
for him and, aware of what Kyle’s occupation had been for the past hour, had already run a deep, hot bath for him.

Swiftly Kyle shed his clothes and sank gratefully into it. Then he leaned back, closed his eyes and thought of Thea.

The second he’d met her, on the doorstep of the Fenton town house when he had first come to London, he had been instantly smitten. Being Roz’s stepbrother, and therefore extended
family, he had automatically seen a lot of her even before they had begun dating. Everything he had come to know about her – her fierce social conscience, her shining honesty, her refusal to
back down from any stand once she had taken it – he had liked and admired.

In the early days of their courtship it had never occurred to him that it was the qualities he admired in her, far more than it was her infatuation with Hal Crosby, that would be the stumbling
block to their happiness.

Hal Crosby was someone Kyle was certain that, once they were married, Thea would soon have put firmly in her past. When he had told her so – when he had said that he didn’t give a
rap for whatever feelings she thought she still entertained for Hal and that he wanted to marry her, those feelings notwithstanding – she had been deeply shocked.

‘But that wouldn’t be an honest thing to do!’ she had said, her green cat-eyes widening. ‘I can’t stand in front of an altar and make sacred promises to you, when
we both know how I feel about Hal!’

‘Then we’ll get married in a register office,’ he had said, struggling for patience.

‘You don’t take any of this seriously, do you?’ She had hurled the words at him. ‘You certainly don’t take my feelings for Hal seriously.’

‘Why should I?’ He had barely been able to resist the urge to give her a good shake. ‘He was a childhood sweetheart who, for one year, at the most two, was something more when
you were a teenager. Whatever that something more was, you’ve told me yourself it was a typical first love that didn’t go far beyond hugs and kisses. You didn’t lose your
virginity to him in his father’s hay loft, or down on the banks of the Swale. And by the time you were eighteen – and on your eighteenth birthday – it was all over.’

She’d been about to shout something hurtful at him, but he hadn’t given her the chance.

‘It was all over, Thea, because Hal could see what you still can’t. He could see that the two of you came from entirely different worlds, and that if you had spent time living with
each other for even a couple of weeks you’d probably have fought like wild cats or been bored to death with each other.’

‘Never!’ she had shouted back at him. ‘Never! Never!
Never!
’

It had been a long time before things had got back to normal after that little scene.

He was, however, convinced he was right. Because she had spent so much time in Hal’s company as a child, Thea thought she knew him. She had never, though, spent any time with him in
company other than Olivia, Carrie and Roz, and she had never spent time with him anywhere else but at Gorton – and even at Gorton they hadn’t spent time in each other’s homes. He
doubted if Thea had even seen the inside of the Crosbys’ tied farmhouse and, though Kyle knew Thea’s father had no objection at all to Thea’s friendship with the son of one of his
tenant farmers, Hal had never been treated as one of the family at Gorton Hall in the same way that, until Lord Fenton’s second marriage, Carrie had.

Being Thea, she had done the typical Thea thing of taking a stand – this particular stand being that Hal was her first love and therefore her only real love – and sticking to the
conviction through thick and thin.

Not for the first time he found himself wishing that Hal had deflowered her on the night of her birthday ball. Thea would then have expected far more commitment from Hal than he would have been
prepared to give, and she would soon have stopped viewing him through rose-tinted glasses and seen him for the person he really was: a man with a great deal of cheeky charm who was also a natural
loner, and always would be.

Kyle heaved himself out of the bath and wrapped a generous-sized towel around his waist. What were the next few hours going to bring, where he and Thea were concerned? Was it time he, too,
stopped being hopeful and moved on? In so many ways it would make sense. He had been in London far longer than he could ever have hoped for, and it couldn’t be long now before he was posted
somewhere else, quite possibly somewhere on the other side of the world. A diplomat was automatically accompanied by his wife, but that wouldn’t work with Thea unless she abandoned her
intention of becoming a Labour Party parliamentary candidate. No marriage could work if the husband was resident in one country and the wife in another. Then there was her unflinching honesty,
which in the tricky social milieu in which a diplomat’s wife moved would far often be more of a handicap than a help.

Unlike Olivia, who saw her role in life totally in terms of being everything a diplomat’s wife should be, who was charm personified to absolutely everyone – no matter how boring they
might be – and who was always a picture of sophisticated elegance, Thea never hid her feelings, and high fashion was unimportant to her.

His clothes had been laid out for him and he began to dress, reflecting that, all in all, Thea had few qualifications for being the wife of an ambitious American diplomat. It made no difference.
His wife was what he was determined she would one day become.

What other option was there when, no matter how often the thought of moving on popped into his head, when it came down to taking action he simply couldn’t do it?

None of the far more suitable women he dated whenever the two of them were going through an ‘off’ period amused, exasperated or excited him as Thea did. In comparison to her, they
simply paled into insignificance. There was no rhyme or reason where love was concerned – and he loved Thea. It was as straightforward and as simple as that. Though she would be appalled at
the thought that she sometimes needed protection, he wanted to protect her. Wherever he was posted in the world, wherever his career led him, he wanted her by his side. He was bound to her with
hoops of steel and there was not a darned thing he could do about it.

He gave a last look in the cheval-glass, adjusted his bow-tie and smoothed a hand over blue-black hair that was already glossily sleek. All he had to do was make her see that what the two of
them shared was something deep and true that would last lifelong, and what she had experienced with Hal had simply been an extension of her childhood; that, precious as it had been, it belonged in
the past and that even if events on the night of her birthday ball had been different, her romance with Hal would never have survived into the present.

He grinned wryly. Set out like that, it was a simple enough task, and he left the room determined that, with an entire weekend at the Fort in front of him, this time he would achieve
success.

When he entered the drawing room it was to find all his fellow guests, apart from Dickie and Edwina, already gathered there. Thea was seated on a sofa deep in animated conversation with Wallis.
Both of them had a glass of whiskey and soda in their hands. Fruity Metcalfe and Chips Channon were over by the French windows, chuckling at something Princess Marina was saying to them. Baba
Metcalfe and Prince George were seated by the fire with cocktails and a half-finished jigsaw on a low table in front of them. There was no sign of their host, who was presumably still steaming in a
hot bath.

‘Nice seeing you again, Anderson,’ Prince George said, looking up from the jigsaw. ‘Baba and I could do with a bit if help here. I swear this damned puzzle has been waiting to
be finished for over a month.’

Without pausing in her conversation with Wallis, and without indicating that he was welcome to join them, Thea raised her eyes to Kyle’s. He lifted an eyebrow queryingly. She shot him a
look that told him they were going to be ‘on’ again and, with vast relief, he strolled across to join Prince George and Baba.

Half an hour later, when Dickie, Edwina and their host had joined them and they were all making their way from the drawing room to the dining room, he whispered, ‘You should always wear
shot-silk taffeta, Thea. You look ravishing!’

This time it was her turn to quirk an eyebrow. ‘You don’t think it would suit a blonde better?’

‘No,’ he said, with the amusement she always aroused in him. ‘And I’m no longer on any kind of terms with a blonde. Blondes bore me.’

Their little tête-à-tête was interrupted by Baba, who said in a low undertone, ‘David’s wearing his kilt. It means we’ll be enduring the pipes ritual after
dinner.’

Kyle shuddered. He found the sound of bagpipes agonizing even when they were being played by experienced pipers. What they would sound like when played by the Prince he couldn’t even begin
to imagine. As they entered the dining room he saw Thea’s full-lipped mouth tug into a wide grin and knew she’d read his reaction perfectly.

The table seating ensured they could have no more privately snatched words together. Princess Marina was seated on Kyle’s left, Edwina on his right. Thea was diagonally across from him on
the other side of the table, seated between Fruity Metcalfe and Chips Channon.

Over a first course of oysters the conversation turned almost immediately, as it always did when Edwina and Dickie were present, to Hollywood stars and Hollywood movies.

‘Why has your sister abandoned Hollywood for Berlin?’ Edwina demanded of Thea, in her habitually abrupt manner. ‘Charlie thinks she’d make a perfect gamine.’

Everyone around the table knew that ‘Charlie’ was the Mountbattens’ good friend, Charlie Chaplin.

‘Violet only does talkies,’ Thea said, ‘and so far Charlie hasn’t made one. Besides, I’m not sure Violet would relish playing the part of one of Charlie’s
lost little urchins. She’s more of a Sheba and Cleopatra type of girl.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought there’d be much demand for a Sheba / Cleopatra type in Hitler’s new Nazi Germany,’ Wallis rasped tartly, to much laughter.

The conversation moved from Violet to Rozalind who, with the exception of Princess Marina, everyone knew, and of the splendid photographs she had taken of the Yorks and their children, and of
how she was now in Spain photographing the civil unrest taking place there.

Kyle listened with only half an ear, unable to draw his attention away from Wallis. For the mistress of a man who was heir to the greatest throne in the world, she was not only middle-aged
– somewhere in her late-thirties – but was also remarkably plain. Whippet-thin, her hairstyle severe, her only claim to beauty was her eyes, which were a remarkable violet-blue. If
other people couldn’t see what attracted Edward to her, Kyle could. Quite simply, because she was an American, Wallis didn’t treat Edward with stultifying deference. She dared to
disagree with him. She even teased him. It was obvious to Kyle that Edward loved her forthright manner, sheer vitality and the way she so easily made him laugh. She was making him laugh now, saying
in a southern drawl to something he had asked of her, ‘Of course I will. God willing and the creek don’t rise!’

Her head was tilted towards Edward’s and the emeralds in her ears and at her throat caught in the candlelight. Jewels of such sumptuous size and quality couldn’t possibly have been
bought for her by her husband, and he wondered how Ernest felt at his wife being given such gifts. He also wondered if the Simpsons had the remotest idea that Edward was fantasizing about them
divorcing one day so that, when his father died, he could marry Wallis.

By now roast beef, with all its trimmings, had followed the oysters, and a sweet had followed the roast beef. Kyle looked down at his watch, trying to estimate how much longer it would be before
the evening came to a close and everyone retired to bed.

Not that he would be retiring to his own bed, and neither would he be reduced to corridor-creeping. When a couple were known to be having an affair their bedrooms were always thoughtfully
allocated close to each other. His bedroom and Thea’s would, he knew, be adjoining.

As white-gloved footmen served a savoury, he looked down the length of the candlelit table towards her. Whereas every other woman in the room was boasting sleek Marcel waves, Thea’s curly,
chestnut hair was as short and boyish as when she had first had it bobbed a decade ago. It should have made her look a lot less chic than the women seated so close to her, but it didn’t. It
merely made her look distinctively natural, and distinctively different.