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She tried writing a note—but could find no words for what she wanted to say. To berate him for having betrayed her and broken her heart would be unnecessarily cruel to a man who had surely suffered enough. To tell him that she had loved him and suspected she always would might give both of them false hope. Because she had spoken the truth earlier and they did not have any kind of future. Not together.
The diamond ring she slid from her finger and laid in the centre of the table by the window, where it winked reproachfully at her—a cold and precious symbol of all that would never be hers.
But it wasn’t until dawn brought with it the concealing sound of birdsong that she made her way downstairs. Like a ghost, she slipped through the back door and as she did she heard the shrilling sound of the phone. Briefly, she wondered who on earth was ringing at this time of the morning—but the business of Blackwood was no longer her business. Quietly, she shut the door behind her and said a silent goodbye to her old life.
Skirting the main lawns, she was soon swallowed up by the trees which bordered the lane. The light was pearly grey and it was a chill morning, but Ashley didn’t notice anything other than the frantic beat of her heart and the urgent need to get away. Far away—even though something seemed to be pulling her back towards the black-eyed man who probably was not asleep either.
She’d thought about what Jack might do if some sixth sense alerted him to her absence and sent him running after her. The nearest railway station was the first place he’d look. So she carried on walking—her ears alert to the sound of approaching cars… or horses… And only when she’d put several miles between herself and Blackwood, did she risk sliding her mobile phone from the pocket of her jeans and dialling a taxi company.
The cab arrived twenty minutes later and she slid onto the back seat.
‘Where to?’ questioned the driver as he looked at her in the rear mirror.
Ashley swallowed. Where to? Where could she run to and seek refuge? London, she guessed. She had friends there and it was big enough and anonymous enough to lose herself if Jack should try to find her.
She leaned forward to speak to the driver while outside the sun struggled to break through a heavy grey sky and nothing but an empty future seemed to lie ahead of her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LONDON looked different and it felt different, too. After the wildness of the moors and the pure, clean air the city seemed to crowd in on her. As she alighted from the train Ashley could see people everywhere—and she wondered if they could read the bitter heartache written on her face.
She had friends in London—friends who would have willingly taken her in and given her a sofa to sleep on. Who would have opened a bottle of wine—or two—and told her that there were plenty more fish in the sea and she would soon get over Jack Marchant.
But Ashley knew it wasn’t as easy as that. Just as she knew that she couldn’t face any of her friends—no matter how well intentioned they might be. Her grief was too big and intense and personal to allow anyone else to intrude on it. And her feelings for Jack were too complicated by love. She might silently curse him for having broken her heart—but she wouldn’t allow other people to do the same.
So she checked into one of the small hotels which could be found tucked away in the less salubrious parts of every city, and there she curled herself up in a soulless room, on a narrow bed. For two days, she alternated between fitful sleep and tears, and existed on cups of hot, sweet tea made on a hissing little kettle which sat next to the TV.
By the third day, she knew she needed strength and went out to buy herself food—forcing herself to go to a café, where she ordered a plateful of bacon and eggs and hot, buttered toast. It was comfort food—and it had the desired effect. She ate every mouthful, knowing that afterwards she would feel better. Because Ashley was an old hand at recovery. She’d had setback after setback many times in her life, and every time she had managed to bounce back. It took effort—a big effort—and never had it seemed as difficult as it did this time. Her heart and her spirit had never felt this shattered before—but what choice did she have? To fade away and cease to exist? To become a shadow of a woman, letting her doomed love affair ruin the rest of her life?
No. She would never forget Jack and she didn’t want to—but she had strived too hard in the past to allow herself to cave in now.
It was tempting to find a brand-new employment agency and to start all over again—but she’d worked for Julia at Trumps since she’d left school and she had a proven work record with them. And so she risked paying the office a visit. Would Jack have contacted them? she wondered. Told them that she’d behaved unprofessionally by walking out without giving notice—knowing that she would probably never dream of telling them the reason why?
But he had done no such thing. Her salary had been paid in full—right to the end of the contract—and he had even provided a glowing reference without being asked. And wasn’t there a part of Ashley’s spirit which sank when Julia passed on this particular piece of news? She had told him that it must end and that she didn’t want to be contacted—but hadn’t she thought that he might at least try?
And then what? Put herself through the torture of having to send him away—and make her heart break into a thousand pieces all over again?
Trumps Agency lived up to its name and quickly found her a live-in post, working for the general manager of a smart boutique hotel in a small Dorset town in the south of England. It was a pretty little place and the countryside was fairly tame when she compared it with the wild and rugged beauty of the moors. But Ashley wanted that. Maybe she needed that. She didn’t need an untamed wildness which reminded her too poignantly of Jack. And this time she had the sea—with its ever-changing beauty and the endless sound of the waves, which soothed her troubled heart.
Two months into her new job and she discovered to her surprise that her smiles felt much less of an effort than they had done in those first early days of leaving Jack. But she’d known how important it was to keep smiling. If you didn’t smile then people asked you questions. They wanted to know if you were miserable—and then why, and she hadn’t wanted to answer that.
Ashley knew that life had to go on—and that time healed. She had to put her faith in all the old clichés which had always comforted people in times of trouble. So she did her new job as best she could. She was calm and efficient and her work seemed to please her boss—and at least spring had come at last. It brought with it all the fresh, bright bulbs bursting through the bare earth and filling the warm air with their delicate fragrance. And surely that boded well for her future? In time, wouldn’t the changing of the seasons wash away more and more of the pain she felt at being parted from Jack?
She joined a French evening class and started taking swimming
lessons at the local pool, and slowly began to make friends. Her life felt quiet and uneventful—but that was exactly what she wanted.
And then two things happened which changed her world. The first was that a lawyer contacted her through the employment agency and Julia said no, she didn’t have a clue what it was about, but that there was a phone number for Ashley to ring.
Cautiously, Ashley did so—withholding her number and prepared to hang up if it was anything to do with Jack. But it was not. It was to do with her mother—or, rather, the family of her late mother who had decided that her neglected offspring must be traced.
It was strange, thought Ashley—as she sat opposite a well-spoken lawyer in his London office one afternoon—how death could sometimes help heal the quarrels of the living. Her maternal grandmother seemed to have been struck by a death-bed bout of guilt and remorse and had amended her will accordingly. She was determined in some small way to compensate the granddaughter she had failed to acknowledge during her lifetime. In fact, she was more than generous—and extremely wealthy. It transpired that Ashley had inherited a substantial amount of money—as well as an extended and scattered family who were curious to meet her.
The money was enough to ensure that Ashley could banish some of her uncertainty about her future. She would certainly need to keep working—but at least now she was going to be able to buy a property of her own. For the first time in her life she could afford a roof over her head—her own place at last. It was her first real experience of security and she discovered she liked it—and that it went a long way in helping her shake off some of her ingrained feelings of inferiority.
Her habitual reserve initially made her baulk at the thought of getting to know a whole batch of newly discovered relations—but the aching hole in her heart left by the end of her affair with Jack made her make a tentative move towards meeting them. A large family party followed—a confusing and noisy affair which left Ashley feeling faintly bemused. But to her surprise, she was welcomed into the fold and she quickly began to know and to love her little nieces and nephews. Her weekends now began to include occasional trips to Gloucestershire, where many of them were based—and having her own family gave her another unfamiliar taste of security, and of roots.
But the second thing which happened rocked Ashley’s world far more than an unexpected inheritance. Another phone call arrived from the agency—with Julia moaning that she felt like her personal secretary—telling her that Christine had been in touch and was pleading with Ashley to ring her, urgently.
