Emma’s Secret (25 page)

‘You’re staring at me, Sarah!’

She laughed. ‘Admiringly so, cousin dear. I was thinking how really handsome you look these days. And much more distinguished than when you were merely a pretty boy, a sort of poor woman’s matinee idol’

He grinned at her. ‘You do have a quaint way of putting it, Sarah. Now, I haven’t asked, but how’re Yves and the delectable Chloe?’

‘He’s painting madly, and sends his best, by the way. He’s in the south, at our house in Mougins for a few months. He has a big show coming up and he needs to complete a number of canvases. As for your god-daughter, she’s just wonderful.’

‘You’ve been lucky, Sarah darling,’ he said, and made a face, then added ruefully, ‘Luckier than me.’

‘No one special in your life, Jonny?’

‘I have a nice girlfriend in Yorkshire’ He broke off. ‘I don’t think I’d better say another word about Ellie. Every time I boast about a woman she turns out to be a dud.’

‘You’ve just had one bad experience,’ she answered, and pushed her plate away, leant against the back of the chair, patting her mouth with her napkin.

‘Getting back to the store and the inhabitants therein,’ Jonathan said, ‘I do want to remind you that they’re all as mad as hatters. So you mustn’t become entangled with them ever again.’

Sarah stared at him and frowned, her auburn brows pulling together in a jagged line. ‘What do you mean? I don’t think I quite understand what you’re getting at.’

‘They’re bonkers, darling. Just think about it, cousins marrying cousins
ad infinitum.
Relatives committing suicide, or covering up murders in the bogs of Ireland—’

‘My God, Jonathan, that’s not true!’ she interrupted him, her voice rising shrilly. Sarah blew out air, and shook her head. ‘Your imagination’s getting the better of you.’

‘Then there’s that tendency towards immorality…Aunt Elizabeth and her
six
husbands, not to mention all of her lovers, most of them members of the bloody British government.’

‘I’m not really sure that the latter is true,’ Sarah protested.

‘It is! Dad told me all about it, and don’t forget he was a Member of Parliament most of his adult life.’

‘Yes, I do remember,’ she murmured, suddenly wondering what had started him off on this rampage about the family.

‘Do you want a pudding?’ Jonathan asked, after their plates had been cleared away, glancing at the dessert trolley nearby. ‘Gosh, they’ve got bread-and-butter pudding.
Ugh,
not for me. Reminds me of Eton.’

Sarah nodded. ‘I think I’ll just have herb tea. I’m off coffee, especially in the evening.’

‘I still like a cup of coffee after dinner, sort of settles me down.’ Jonathan threw her a small smile, motioned to the waiter and ordered for them both. Then, turning to face Sarah again, he went on, ‘Then there’s the tendency the Hartes have for vendettas: first Emma had one with the Fairleys for years, then Edwina had one with
her
for years. And only God knows who they’ve got a vendetta with at the moment.’

‘Probably nobody,’ she shot back succinctly, her eyes narrowing.

‘Maybe you’re right, but there’s a lot of gossip about a newly appointed executive.’

‘Who?’

‘Her name’s Evan…Evan Hughes. And she’s—’

‘Really a boy,’ Sarah cut in, smiling. ‘Evan is a Welsh boy’s name.’

‘We all know that, my dear. This Evan is an American. And she’s the spitting image of our dear cousin Paula McGill Harte Amory Fairley O’Neill, to give her her full name.’

‘She
is?’
Sarah made a
moue,
looking at him curiously. ‘Is she a relative?’

‘Nobody knows. She arrived as if from nowhere, was taken in by Linnet when she came looking for a job at Harte’s, and now everyone’s saying she’s a McGill.’

‘A McGill! That’s…preposterous!’

‘No, it’s not, Sarah. Think for a moment. What if the sainted Paul had an American mistress, who gave birth to his child, who grew up and gave birth herself to Evan. Or it could be a boy who was Paul McGill’s son, who married and had a child…it’s a real possibility. After all, he spent a lot of time in New York without Emma when he was building Silex Oil into a major corporation.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I have a…
source,
shall we say?’

‘Don’t you mean a spy?’

‘Call it what you will, my dear.’

‘Why are you digging up all this old family history tonight, Jonathan, and then relating the current gossip at the store to me? To what purpose?’

His face was very bland as he smiled at her off-handedly, and then shrugged. ‘I don’t know…Frankly, I thought you’d be interested to hear about the new executive who looks so much like your old rival.’

‘You’re not planning to make any crazy moves against Paula, are you, Jonathan?’ Sarah asked, giving him a piercing look through sharp and intelligent green eyes. ‘Because if you are…I wouldn’t, if I were you.’

‘How can I do anything to Paula? She’s got the business buttoned up like the vicar’s little sister’s knickers. And you know that from twenty years ago, when I almost sneaked the stores out of her grasp.’

‘I know she’s made everything very secure. But you and I still get treated properly when it comes to Harte Enterprises. We do get our dividends on time, and Emily’s run the company very well. We make a lot of money.’

‘Ah yes, she has indeed, and yes we do,’ he acknowledged.

Sarah sat back, studying him quietly as he waved elegant fingers at a nearby waiter, who came hurrying over to take an order for a Calvados. Her gut instinct told her that Jonathan was plotting
something
against Paula, although what that was she couldn’t possibly imagine. Since business didn’t come into it, then it had to be personal. Unexpectedly, Sarah felt slightly bilious.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE

P
aula O’Neill sat at the small, kidney-shaped Georgian desk in a corner of her bedroom at Pennistone Royal. Her face was thoughtful as she turned the pages inside a manila folder, studying them carefully. After ten minutes she closed the folder and set it to one side, knowing that she would find nothing of any consequence there, even if she read it ten more times.

Sitting back in the chair, she gazed out of the bay window, her eyes on a wooded hillside opposite. In spring it was covered with daffodils, which gleamed in golden streams rippling under the trees in the morning sunlight.

Wordsworth’s poem leapt into her mind…
‘and all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze,’
she said out loud to the empty room. It had been her grandmother’s favourite poem, and it had been Grandy who had planted the hundreds of daffodils over there under the trees on the hill. She herself had kept them going over the years. Now, in early May, the bluebells were out, creating another stunning carpet of colour.

Paula let her thoughts drift for a few minutes and then pulled herself back to the present. Opening one of the drawers in her desk, she placed the folder inside, then locked it. There was no evidence in the papers she had been reading to show that Jonathan Ainsley was plotting against her, yet she knew that he was. Even though the private investigator had turned up nothing, it was an instinctive feeling, lodged in the very marrow of her bones. And she trusted it implicitly. What he would do, when he would do it, she did not know, but he
would
move against her. Since he could not strike at her through the Harte holdings or the chain of department stores, it was obvious to her that he would strike at her through her personal life…but she could not conceive how.

Life has a funny way of coming at you, she thought. Who could have imagined that Jonathan Ainsley would return to England to live after all those years in Hong Kong and Paris. She did not believe he had come back out of concern for his father; it wasn’t in his nature to play the devoted son, therefore there had to be an ulterior motive. In the inner recesses of her mind, Jonathan’s voice echoed back to her. ‘I’ll get you, Paula Fairley. I’ll bloody well get you for this,’ he had threatened all those years ago. She had never forgotten his words…now they had come back to haunt her.

Rising, Paula walked across the room, paused at the large chest of drawers to look in the mirror which hung above it. But she did so absently, her thoughts still focused on her vindictive and treacherous cousin who had been her sworn enemy for so long.

As she half turned away, lost in her reflections, her glance fell on the casket which sat atop the commode, and automatically she smoothed her hand across its lid as she had done so many times in the past, and just as her grandmother had done before her.

It was a beautifully made antique box of highly polished fruitwood, the colour of aged cognac, intricately chased with silver scrolls and interlocking circles. In the centre of the lid there was a silver heart with the initials E.H. engraved upon it. It had been sitting on this chest for as long as she could remember, from the time she had been a young girl visiting her grandmother here at Pennistone Royal.

The box was locked, and there was no key. Seemingly Emma had lost it long ago, but since it was empty she had not bothered to have the box prised open for fear of damaging it. Because it had been thus for fifty years or more, Paula had never seen a reason to tamper with it.

Turning away, Paula walked on into the upstairs parlour which adjoined the bedroom, crossed to the fireplace and stood with her back to it, warming herself.

A few moments later, when she felt less chilled, Paula turned around and looked up at the portrait of her grandfather, Paul McGill, which hung above the fireplace. He wore an officer’s uniform; it had been painted in the middle of the First World War when he was in the Australia Corps.

As she stared at the portrait she couldn’t help thinking how dashing and debonair he looked. Very handsome with his black hair and bright blue eyes. She had inherited his colouring, his eyes, and also the cleft in his chin and his dimples. There was no mistaking who
she
was descended from. In the picture he was smiling, and Paula knew that this painting had been her grandmother’s favourite…perhaps because he had looked exactly like this when they had first met and fallen immediately and madly in love. Her grandmother had once told her that he had been irresistible, and Paula could well imagine that he had been.

He had had the world at his feet, or so he believed, Paula now thought. But he hadn’t really, because he had not been able to marry Emma Harte, the love of his life. And so, after years of living with Emma in London, he had returned to Sydney to ask his wife Constance for a divorce, determined to legitimize his daughter Daisy by Emma, her mother. By some terrible misfortune he had been in a head-on crash with a lorry on a wet stormy night, and when the lorry driver had managed to extract his mangled body from the wreckage, he was paralysed from the waist down, his handsome face badly scarred, one side ruined beyond recognition.

Paula sighed under her breath, thinking of those awful events long ago. Because there was no way to treat paraplegics in 1939, he knew he would not live very long, that he would inevitably die from kidney failure. And so he had taken his own life. And Emma had never seen him again.

Paula knew from her mother that Emma had almost been broken by Paul’s death, and that it had taken her a long time to recover from her terrible grief. But eventually she had managed to pick herself up and go on, for Daisy’s sake, hiding her sorrow behind a brave front, finding comfort in her daughter by Paul.

Grandy had taught her that life was hard, and that it always had been, and that the important thing was to keep going no matter what, to fight back, to win in the end, and to triumph over adversity.

She had not had a lot of adversity in her own life, just those horrible problems with the venomous Jonathan Ainsley, and a truly bad marriage to Jim Fairley. For the most part, she had had a relatively easy ride as far as trouble was concerned, and of late things had been running fairly smoothly, both in the business and the family. There had been that great disappointment last autumn when Linnet had made the decision to ‘cool it with Julian’, as she put it. But now they were back together and all was well between them.

Her daughter Tessa worried her. There was something amiss in her marriage, Paula was quite certain of that; she was also rather curious about the bruised arm and shoulder. She had believed Tessa when she had said she had fallen at home. But how had that happened? Had she been pushed? Or had she and Mark been in a fight? Of course, most accidents did usually occur in the home, and were not always of a sinister nature. On the other hand, Mark Longden had long caused her worry. There was something about him that didn’t sit quite right with her, and she found him altogether too obsequious by far. As Emily put it, he was ‘a bit of a Uriah Heep’.

That Jonathan had unexpectedly returned and had been seen with Sarah was really upsetting. They had always plotted together, ever since their childhood; their sudden presence in London did not bode well for her, she was sure. Taking Uncle Ronnie’s advice she had hired a private detective to investigate him, but the man had turned up nothing. Seemingly her cousin led a blameless life, and Sarah only visited London occasionally.

I wish Jack Figg were around, Paula suddenly thought, remembering how talented and fearless the former head of security for the stores had been. But Jack had retired, more or less, and was enjoying his new home in Cornwall, where he sailed, fished and in general led a happy life by the seashore. She sighed to herself, and went and sat on the window seat, picked up their newspaper,
The
Yorkshire Morning Gazette
, and casually leafed through the pages.

A door slamming somewhere in the distance made her sit up with a start, and she listened attentively, wondering if Shane had arrived. He was driving up from London this morning, and he had told her he would arrive in time for lunch. She looked at her watch…it was almost noon.

A look of expectancy settled on her face as she sat staring at the door, but when Shane did not appear she went back to the newspaper and began to read it again.

Quite soon thoughts of Jonathan Ainsley began to infiltrate her mind; she discovered she could not concentrate, and so she laid the paper on the padded cushion of the seat and gazed out of the window, looking towards the moors.

It was still a brilliantly sunny morning, the arc of the sky the colour of speedwells, those tiny blue flowers she loved so much. It was such a pretty spring day outside, and yet she began to shiver involuntarily when an unexpected sense of foreboding swept through her, taking her by surprise.

Paula jumped to her feet, hating this feeling, and hurried over to the fireplace; she stood warming her hands over the flames flying up the chimney back, still shivering and chilled to the bone.

Deep within herself she was convinced that Jonathan’s return signified trouble; she was always just that little bit apprehensive when he was around. But he can’t
do
anything, not really, she told herself, and then thought, but I do have five children and a grandchild, and a husband, not to mention many other family members I am close to…accidents
could
be arranged, couldn’t they? She had long been aware that he would stop at nothing to wreak his revenge on her for
twice
bringing him to his knees…

Years ago her grandmother had said that there was a dazzle to Shane O’Neill, an intense glamour, adding that this sprang not so much from his extraordinary good looks as from his character and personality. Paula remembered Emma’s words now as Shane came rushing into the room. He had a bright smile on his face as he walked towards her.

Paula watched him as he travelled the length of the floor, thinking that Grandy’s pronouncement, made when he was about twenty-seven years old, still held today. And next month he would be celebrating his sixtieth birthday. What a wonder he was, unbowed by time, hardly aged, tall, broad shouldered, with a barrel chest; a fine figure of a man, as his father was wont to say. Shane’s jet-black hair was tinged with grey these days, and there were a few lines around his eyes and his mouth, but otherwise he looked much the same as he had when he was that dashing young man her grandmother had so admired. And he still had that dazzle, the intense glamour.

Even though he was wearing his Saturday casual clothes, he was, nevertheless, still impeccably dressed. Well-tailored grey gabardine slacks were teamed with a red cashmere turtleneck and a black blazer. He looked as smart as ever, right down to his highly polished brown loafers.

His presence filled the room, and she felt that sudden rush of excitement she always experienced when she had not seen him for a while. She stood up and went to meet him, full of genuine pleasure at the sight of him, wanting to touch him, to hold him close. A wide smile enlivened her normally serious face, and he smiled back at her lovingly as he swept her into his arms and brought her closer to him.

After a moment, he held her away, kissed her lightly on the lips, and said, ‘Sorry I’m late, darling. Heavy traffic on the way up from London.’

She nodded. ‘But you’re here now, and it’s just wonderful to see you, to have you home at last. I do so hate it when you’re in London and I’m not.’

He glanced down at her, a small, puzzled frown pulling his dark brows together in a jagged line. ‘I’ve only been gone a few days. And somebody has to run O’Neill Hotels International, you know.’

‘But I always miss you so much, Shane. It seems to get more acute the older I get.’

He chuckled as he walked with her to the sofa where they sat down. ‘I would have thought that by now you’d have had enough of me…all these years we’ve been together.’

‘All these years indeed! Thirty years married, and the time that went before when we were growing up.’

He smiled and took her hand in his, looked into those unique violet eyes and murmured, ‘You sound a little tremulous, Paula darling. Is something bothering you?’

She was not at all startled by his perception; he knew her far too well, and she realized there was no point in denying it. ‘I had an awful premonition of trouble brewing a while ago, to do with Jonathan Ainsley,’ she admitted.