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‘After all, you’re not exactly in the first flush of youth, are you?’ Isobel was sneering, thoroughly confusing her. ‘I suppose the idea of coming back here and living off Marcus must have been too tempting to give up. Quite an opportunity those idiotic little fools have handed to you,’ she added savagely. ‘And if you think for one moment that I’m going to share my home with you or with them…’
‘Your home?’ Maggie interrupted her, filled with a sudden and glorious rush of adrenalin as she realised that Isobel had no idea of her real feelings for Marcus. ‘Perhaps I ought to point out to you that this house was left jointly to Susie, Sara and myself by our grandfather.’
Isobel stared at her in silence, an expression of astonishment slowly giving way to one of malice as she purred tauntingly, ‘Is that what you really think? If so, I’m afraid you’re way off beam. Your grandfather changed his will shortly before he died, leaving everything to Marcus.’
There was no way that Maggie could conceal her shock.
‘Of course it’s true that the girls have the right to live here until they come of age, but that proviso can hardly apply to you, can it?’ Isobel asked with evident pleasure. ‘I know all this because my father was asked to witness your grandfather’s will. I remember Daddy commenting at the time that it was probably the only way your grandfather could think of protecting the estate and Susan and Sara, and one could hardly blame him for disinheriting you, after all.’
Disinheriting her. Maggie felt even sicker than she had done before, and not just sick but terribly cold as well, as though a warm garment she had always carried with her had suddenly been ripped away from her. Until that moment she hadn’t realised how much it had always meant to her to know that she had a home here, where her family had lived for so many generations.
She didn’t question Isobel’s knowledge, nor her grandfather’s decision, but it hurt none the less to know she had been excluded.
‘So you see, this is Marcus’s home and not yours, and once he and I are married…’
Maggie couldn’t listen to any more. She pushed past the other woman, ignoring her sharp cry of protest, and stumbled her way towards the gate that led into the kitchen garden. Once there, she sank down on to the stone bench just inside the door, shivering and shaking, unable to do anything other than to try to keep at bay the acute feeling of despair welling up inside her.
One part of her brain registered the noise of Isobel’s car as she drove off, another the fact that the angling of the sun meant that time was passing, and then at last, when the numbing sensation of shock had worn off, she got clumsily to her feet and headed slowly back to the house.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY THE time Maggie had returned to the kitchen, her initial instinct, which had been to barge into Marcus’s study and demand to know why he had not told her immediately about her grandfather’s will, had faded, and in its place had come a complex tangle of emotions and reactions she was trying hard to come to terms with. Over and above the anguish she felt at knowing how Marcus must be laughing at her for her belief that she had every right to live in Deveril House was the knowledge that she had made a promise to Susie and Sara which she had come dangerously close to breaking when Isobel had dropped her bombshell.
Part of her could hardly bear the thought of staying on at the house now that she knew that she had absolutely no legal right to be there, and part of her ached to walk into Marcus’s study and tell him outright that, now that she knew exactly
what the position was, she wasn’t going to spend another night under his roof; and still another part of her, a mature and wise part she had come to heed during her years in London, cautioned her to say nothing which would prejudice her ability to give Susie and Sara the physical support of her presence. After all, this sane voice reminded her, had Marcus felt so inclined, there had been nothing to stop him telling her himself that she had absolutely no right to claim Deveril House as her home. The fact that he had not told her how wrong she was in believing that her grandfather had willed the house to herself and her two cousins prompted her to wonder if in his heart of hearts he was glad of her opportune arrival, and of the fact that it meant he now had a very good reason not to accede to Isobel’s demand that he send his two half-sisters away to school.
After all, if he had wanted them to go to boarding-school, surely he would have made such a decision before they started their secondary education?
She had decided that, rather than have dinner in the stiff formality of the dining-room, which she remembered as a large, chilly room on the north-facing side of the house, they would eat instead in the smaller breakfast-room, which looked out on the formal gardens, and which caught the whole warmth of the morning sun. Since the beautifully starched and laundered linen tablecloths which Maggie remembered from Marcus’s mother’s day were nowhere to be found, she simply decided instead to leave the polished oak table bare.
An impulse during the afternoon had sent her out into the garden to walk along the border of which Marcus and his mother were both so very fond, and she had judiciously removed from it enough sprays of flowers to make a very pretty table arrangement without spoiling the border’s perfection. Now softly arranged in a large blue and white jug, they enhanced the informal warmth of the pretty room.
At eight o’clock, Maggie left the kitchen and paused hesitantly outside the study door before knocking briefly on it.
‘Dinner in half an hour,’ she told Marcus shortly, opening the door and then closing it again before he could make any comment. Then she ran quickly upstairs, heading for the second floor and the school-room.
‘Dinner in half an hour,’ she told both girls, adding, ‘How’s the homework going?’
‘Almost finished,’ Susie assured her. ‘What are we having to eat? I’m starving.’
‘Casseroled lamb cutlets,’ Maggie told them promptly. ‘It’s a recipe your mother taught me.’
There was an odd silence, and then Sara asked her almost shyly, ‘Tell us some more about our mother. What was she really like?’
Seeing the faint hesitancy and uncertainty in both sets of eyes, Maggie ignored the fact that she herself had intended to get changed before dinner, and instead pulled up one of the small, straight-backed chairs and said thoughtfully, ‘Well, she was the sort of person who always seemed to make everywhere feel warmer just because she was there. It’s hard to explain really, but when I first came here just after my own parents had died, I hardly knew your mother. She and my uncle hadn’t been married all that long then, and I hadn’t wanted to come here to live at all, but it was as though your mother knew exactly how I was feeling. She didn’t fuss over me or anything like that.’ She broke off and then said with a faint sigh, ‘She did so very much for me, gave me so much.’
‘Is that why you’re going to stay here with us?’ Susie asked her, propping her chin up on her hands, elbows on the desk as she stared across the table at Maggie. ‘Because of what she did for you?’
‘Partially,’ Maggie agreed, after considering the comment and deciding that there was no harm in letting her cousins know that she felt a debt of gratitude towards their mother. ‘And partially because part of me has always wanted to come back here,’ she added, not wanting them to think that she was in any way making a martyr of herself in returning to take care of them. ‘And I suppose,’ she added musingly, ‘the fact that I’m not married and don’t have any children of my own means that there’s a space in my life which you two will probably fill in the same way that I hope to fill a space in yours.’
She wanted them to know that their relationship would be one of mutual give and take, and that they were not in any way to consider themselves a burden to her.
‘Why is that?’ Susie asked her. ‘That you’ve never got married, I mean?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Maggie fibbed, after she had subdued the sharp flare of pain the question brought. ‘I suppose I just never felt I wanted to.’
‘Oh, is that why?’ Sara interrupted artlessly. ‘Susie thought it might be because you had fallen madly in love.’
