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How to make a prize fool of yourself in four easy movements, Maggie reflected savagely as she got up. What on earth had possessed her to carry on like that? Of course it had been a shock…but surely she had enough self-possession, enough self-control to… To what? To pretend she didn’t care?
The cup she had picked up off the table to take over to the sink slipped through her fingers and crashed to the floor. She stood staring at the broken shreds without really seeing them.
Why did she need to pretend? She didn’t care. Hadn’t cared for a long, long time. The only reason she had been able to let herself come back was because she knew that she didn’t care.
She bent to pick up the broken mug, her movements slow and awkward, as though she had suddenly turned into an old woman. Kneeling on the floor, gathering the china, she suddenly stopped what she was doing and pressed her hands to her face as her body shook in silent anguish.
She didn’t care. She couldn’t care. She must not care. But she did… She always had, and she always would.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LATER, when she was rational enough to care who might have witnessed her self-betrayal, she was glad that Marcus had been fully occupied in his study and that the girls were at school; that way at least she need not fear that anyone else had witnessed the total disintegration which had torn her apart when the truth sank in.
She wasn’t yet strong enough to admit whether it was love or hatred she felt for Marcus, but what she could no longer deny was that it was the strongest emotion she had ever experienced in her life. Far too strong an emotion, and as she carefully placed the shards of broken pottery outside in the dustbin her movements were those of an old woman, not one of not quite twenty-eight.
The sun warmed the ancient walls of the house and the rough cobbles of the courtyard, but its heat failed to penetrate through the intense cold which had gripped her.
How could she stay here in the knowledge that she was as still as dangerously capable of focusing her whole life on Marcus now as she had been ten years ago? How could she stay, and yet, how could she not?
She wasn’t a teenager any more, but a mature woman with loyalties and responsibilities. She couldn’t simply turn and run away any more. There were the girls to think of… Her promise to them that she would stay… Herself to face if she broke that promise. And this time, surely, forewarned was forearmed?
It wasn’t going to be as it had been before. Marcus was already engaged. She was not that same child who had misguidedly persuaded herself that he loved her.
Oh, God, why on earth had she come back here? Why on earth had she allowed herself to give in to that crazy need to make atonement…to reach out to her past and bridge the distance between it and her future?
Unless this was to be her penance…this the payment which would be exacted from her for the past: that she must stand and watch, a silent, anguished witness to Marcus’s love for and life with someone else.
She realised she was still standing in the courtyard. She turned her head and the brilliance of the sunshine blinded her. She shaded her eyes instinctively, her hand betraying her agitation with its fine tremor.
Dear heaven, this couldn’t be happening, but it was… While she stood here as motionless as the stone doves on the rim of the drinking fountain, her world had turned full circle around her, leaving her defenceless to the enormity of what had happened.
‘Boss said you wanted to have a word about the kitchen garden.’
The Northumberland accent was familiar to her, but the voice wasn’t, nor the man who addressed her, shocking her out of the bewilderment and into the realisation that anyone could have walked out of the house and read her unguarded face.
Luckily he had approached her from behind, and before she turned round she managed to compose herself a little.
He was about sixty, with sparse, grizzled grey hair and sharp blue eyes. His skin was burned by years of exposure to sun and wind.
‘John Holmes,’ he introduced himself. ‘I come round a couple of times a week to do the gardens. Not the lawns. My lads do that…but the borders. Fine borders you’ve got here, planted by…’
‘My grandmother,’ Maggie supplied for him, pulling herself together.
She saw from the shrewd look he gave her that he knew of her connection with the house. No doubt the entire village knew she was back by now.
In her grandfather’s day they had employed a full-time gardener, but he had died some two years before she left, and after that the gardening had been done by a local firm of contract gardeners.
‘Don’t do much myself these days… Rheumatism doesn’t allow me. But yon borders, now…’
‘They are lovely,’ Maggie agreed, and he gave her another sharp look.
‘Lovely they might be, but they takes a lot of hard work. Borders allus do…’
Maggie remembered being told that her grandmother’s perennial borders had been her pride and joy. Planted against immaculately clipped yew hedges, either side of a brick path, they stretched for thirty yards along the front of the house, just beyond the terrace, and were a blaze of colour all through the summer months. Her grandmother had apparently been a keen gardener and had adapted one of Gertrude Jekyll’s plans for a one-colour border.
These at Deveril were all in blues, from the palest white-blue to the darkest purple of larkspurs and delphiniums, so tall that their spikes topped the green backcloth of the hedge against which the borders were planted.
‘What is it exactly you’ve got in mind for the vegetable garden? A rare sight it is now, choked with weeds and nettles.’
