Winter's End (19 page)

Emma was quiet again.
“You will come, Lisa? To my wedding?” she mumbled.

Lisa caressed her
arms in assurance and then sighed sadly.

Downstairs, she heard
Hannah cry with delight, “Chris!”

She carried her
basket of dirty laundry down and saw how her young daughter was carried at his
waist, as he rubbed her nose with his, tickling her.

“Can I call you,
Dad?” she was asking Chris. “You’re going to marry Mum. So I can call you Dad,
right?”

He saw her watching
them. “If your mother doesn’t mind,” he said, indicating at Emma with his eyes.

She walked away to
the laundry.

“Looks as if she
doesn’t,” Hannah giggled.

Chris laughed. “Perhaps
Papa, since you already have a Dad?”

“Okay, Papa,” she
chuckled.

He gave her a kiss on
her cheeks and let her off. He wandered into the kitchen and found Emma there.

“What is it with you
Kinnairds
and make-believe relations?” she said, as she
rinsed her dirty dishes.

“I didn’t encourage
her, Emma,” said Chris. “She wanted it.”

“She wants many
things. But it doesn’t mean we can indulge her,” she said, bluntly. “Besides
this isn’t even a real marriage. It dies with Ethel, remember?”

“She’ll always be my
daughter,” Chris said. “Regardless of how either of us feel about each other, I
will always love her as my own.”

“Yeah,” she said.
“You celebrities do have an awful habit of claiming children who aren’t your
own.”

He grit his teeth,
trying to stamp the anger coursing through him.

“I’ve signed the pre-
nup
, if that’s why you’re here,” she continued, uncaring of
how she had affected him. “It’s there on the table. Don’t forget to take it
when you leave.”

He picked up the
brown envelope containing the documents he had given her a few days ago.

“Did you understand
the contents of it?” he asked, slowly. “You’re not going to contest any of it?”

“What is there to
contest? You’re going to give me three million pounds at the end of the
marriage in compensation for agreeing to this marriage. Not a penny more. And I
have the Kinnaird mansion to live in for the rest of my life. It couldn’t be
any clearer.”

Chris ran his fingers
on the edge of the envelope. His eyes traced the grains of the wooden floor.
“There are still two days to the marriage. If there is anything you want done…”

“I can’t wait for the
fifteen days of marriage notice to expire so I can have this whole wedding
thing behind me,” she said, tiredly. “It would be good just to get it over
with.”

“I meant, is there
anything you needed for the wedding?” he said.

She gave a careless
shrug of her shoulders. “It is a marriage of convenience. What could I possibly
need?”

A muscle twitched in
his jaw.

“And,” she rambled on.
“I have packed all I need to move into the Kinnaird residence. So if you don’t
mind sending someone to pick them up.”

Chris nodded silently
and walked out of the house, slamming the front door hard behind him.

*****

She deliberately opted
for a plain beige white blouse and a pencil skirt. She wore a printed floral
matching long dress jacket over it. She could easily be mistaken for a guest
rather than the bride, herself.

Standing now in the
centre of the Kinnaird living room, she tried to sound as cheerful as she could
as she attended to the guests at her small wedding reception. The civil
marriage completed earlier that day at the local civil registry office sealed
her status as Mrs. Chris Cameron.

She spotted Jai
sitting alone in the gazebo outside. After a few more rushed thanks, she
strolled towards him.

“Hi,” she said,
joining him at the bench.

“Hi,” he replied.

“It’s nice here,” she
said, admiring the yellow jasmine bush winding over the steel dome roof frame
of the gazebo and its strong sculptural stone pillars.

Jai shrugged his
shoulders. “It’s okay.” He hesitated and then said. “Uncle Richard called
again.”

Emma froze. “What did
you say?” she asked, carefully.

“I didn’t tell him
you were getting married. Why are you avoiding him, Mum?”

“It’s complicated,
Jai,” she said. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

He nodded his head. “I
see. Adult stuff. Probably, you’ll tell me when I’m older.”

“I promise, I will,”
she said. She bit her lips back. “Jai, you are okay with the marriage, though, right?”

He looked up at her
and smiled. “He came to ask me for your hand. What was I supposed to say?”

“He did?” she said,
surprised. “Why didn’t you tell me before? When was this?”

“When you returned
from London.”

She slugged him
softly in the arm and chuckled. “You shouldn’t have accepted.”

“Yeah, but he
promised me a drink,” he grinned.

“I’ll throttle him if
he did,” Emma growled.

“Chill, mum,” Jai
said, chuckling. “In eight years, when I’m eighteen. For today.”

Emma smiled. “That’s
nice of him.”

“He is nice, Mum,” he
said, thinking. “A little weird though. He turns his spoon upside down once he’s
had his last bite and he eats ice cream with a fork.”

“Hmmm…,” Emma said,
thoughtfully. “He has the perfect hair but he keeps running his hands through it
whenever he’s bothered.”

“And peels his apples
before he eats them,” Jai added.

They stared at each
other and then laughed.

“I guess he’s not bad
after all,” smiled Emma. “Hannah’s been calling him Papa.”

“I know,” Jai said.
He paused briefly before speaking. “Do you mind if I call him that too?”

Emma frowned. “You
like him that much?”

He shrugged again.
“It would be nice.”

“If it makes you
happy.” She put an arm around him and held him close to her.

In the distance, from
the living room, Chris watched them, an odd feeling sweeping over him as his
gaze lingered on the woman who was now his woman. His wife.

*****

She heard a soft
knock at the door and opened it. It was Ethel.

“I came to check if
you were settling okay,” said Ethel, studying the large bedroom.

“Thank you, Ethel,”
she smiled. “I’m absolutely fine.”

“And happy? I hope.”

Emma smiled again.
“How are you feeling? I hope the excitement wasn’t too much for your old
bones.”

“Too much?
Aww
lass, I have been waiting for this moment for so many
years. To hear the halls of this house fill with voices and laughter again,”
she sighed and sat on a small armchair. “Although, it saddens me seeing that
you both have decided to sleep separately on the first night of your marriage.”

“We need time, Ethel,
to get to know each other.”

“I suppose,” she
replied, sadly. “But I believe in you, Emma. I know that one day you will come
to love my Christopher.” Her hand held a small red box with a decorative lid. She
opened it and pulled out a gold necklace with an oval pendant. It had an ornate
filigree design with beadings and swirls and a beautiful, raised flower like
centre. “Come here, lass,” she said leaning forward in her chair.

Emma walked slowly to
her and knelt on her knees before Ethel.

“This is for you,”
Ethel said, handing over the necklace gently to her.

“Ethel, I can’t,” she
protested.

“Don’t be daft,
child,” Ethel said. “I’ve held on to it for a very long time, waiting to give
it to Christopher’s bride. I couldn’t be more happier it is you.” She placed the
chain around Emma’s neck and clasped shut the ends. “It’s been in my family for
four generations, passing down from mother to daughter. I too had once given it
to Anne on her wedding day. Now it’s yours. I hope one day you could pass it on
to Hannah when she gets married.”

Emma’s eyes filled
with tears. “I can’t… Ethel,” she whispered. “I’m not even a true bride.”

“You will be one
day.”

“I…don’t know…what to
say.”

“Say thank you.”

Tears flowed down
Emma’s cheeks as her fingers grazed the pendant.

“What’s the matter,
child?” said Ethel, worriedly.

Emma shook her head,
unable to speak for a while. “I’ve just never been given something so meaningful
like this before,” she said, finally. “I feel like I have family.”

“But you are family,
child,” said Ethel, cupping Emma’s face gently to look adoringly at her.

*****

Chris tugged at his
tie, loosening it from his shirt. Down the hallway, in a bedroom of her own,
slept his new bride.

He picked up a thin
envelope from his dresser and pulled out the documents.

“Max,” said Chris
entering the sitting room to shake the hands of his private investigator.

“Chris,” Max
acknowledged.

“So what have you got
for me?”

Max sighed. “I don’t
know, man,” he said shaking his head.

Chris frowned.
“What?”

“Of all the women
you’ve asked me to check out, she’s the cleanest,” he said, handing him a thin,
large envelope.

“What do you mean?”
he replied, pulling out the papers inside.

“Well, let me start
from the beginning. The girl grew up in a drug abusive home in a number of
places in East London. No record of father. No other siblings. Mother lived
with a man, Scott Miller, for three years until Emma was six years old. Miller
entangled himself with a group of drug dealers after he pocketed their profits.
They weren’t too happy and knocked him off in the middle of a children’s
playground, down the block from where he lived.

Mummy did the split
with Emma to Harlesden. Yep, she was a dang whack job,” he said, rubbing his
forehead. “She had a number of different partners during this period. Left little
Emma on her own on most days to feed herself. The girl learned very early on to
survive and by the time she was eleven, she was doing the odd jobs for cash.

Anyways, when Emma
was about fifteen, mummy dearest hooked up with an aging cokehead who thought
they would be better off without the girl. Emma woke up the next day and found
the flat empty of any saleable item of value. Would have gone foster, because
she was underage but her maternal grandmother took her in.

However, that’s where
her luck ended. Grandmother lived in
Southmead
. An
year later, grandmother also kicked it. Emma was sixteen now. She had good
grades in school. A handful of teachers saw potential in her and did what they
could to support her to university. She won a scholarship, moved out of the
flat and the rest is no mystery history.”

“That’s where she met
her husband,” said Chris. “In university?”

“Yeah,” he replied,
thinking. “I heard you’re hitching yourself to this woman?”

“I’m marrying her in
a week.”

“This isn’t because
of your grandmother, is it?”

Chris lifted a brow.

Max laughed
nervously. “Hey, they’ve been rumours about your grandmother trying to set you
up. This is not one of them, is it? You met her barely two weeks ago.”

Chris was quiet as he
filed through the papers.

“Listen, man,” said
Max. “For what it’s worth, your grandmother has my money on this one. I mean
the whole arranged marriage shit’s just too weird for me. But when it comes to
Emma Abbott nee Winston, she’s sweet. No smoking, no drinking, no criminal
records and for all we know, never done drugs. This girl
shouldn’ta
turned right. Everything was going wrong for her and she came out of it without
getting all messed up. She’s the real genuine deal man. Rags to riches shit. Or
would have been, had her dead husband not screwed up.”

Chris put his hands
in his pocket and ambled to the windows, silently.

Max shifted at his
feet. “Well, then, if there’s nothing more, I’ll be going. And congratulations,
Chris. It mightn’t be a bad thing after all.”

Emma
Abott
nee Winston. Emma Cameron.

He played her name in
his mind. He wanted to have left her penniless when their marriage ended.
Instead her past had changed his mind. He didn’t understand her at all. Well,
whatever it was, three million pounds and life tenancy at the Kinnaird mansion
was all she was going to get from him.