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‘To be honest, I had wondered. He has a look of your father. I think Fanny should tell him the truth and as soon as possible, but she doesn’t agree with me—at least not yet.’
Lucy did though and she had told him so. The sooner Oliver knew the truth the less traumatic it would be for him, and she had every faith in Tom’s ability to make Fanny see the wisdom of telling, him.
Conventional to the last, Fanny was insisting on waiting until she had been a widow for a full year before she and Tom married, which meant that Lucy would have to shelve her plans for putting the Dower House on the market, she decided as she prepared for bed. Her aunt and uncle had assured her that she would always have a home with them, but she felt that she could not stay cocooned in their protective love for ever. Before the baby was born she would have to come to some decision about their future. If she sold the Dower House, she could buy something smaller and invest the remainder of the money to bring in a small income—but would that be enough for them to live on? Her book would, hopefully, bring her in some additional income. She wanted to be independent, she realised, as she lay sleepless in her bed. She wanted to prove that she was capable of supporting herself and her child. But to whom? Saul?
Even thinking his name was like a sword in her flesh, the pain almost unendurable.
She was awake early—too alert to go back to sleep, but reluctant to disturb her aunt and uncle whom she knew enjoyed a well deserved lie-in on Sunday mornings.
Outside, the sun shone, dispersing the faint mist hanging over the distant hollows in the landscape; an early warning that summer was waning and autumn was on the way.
Autumn was normally one of her favourite seasons, but now she contemplated its faintly melancholy nostalgia that mourned the loss of summer with more acute sensitivity. Shivering a little she got up and dressed, hurrying downstairs to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee.
When she had drunk it, an impulse she knew she ought to master but could not urged her outside, her feet automatically taking her along the familiar path to the Manor.
She had walked this drive more times than she cared to remember, but this morning the only journeys she remembered making along it were those which had taken her to Saul.
The house stood, as it had always stood, solid and impervious, but for once she looked at it without seeing all the countless generations of people who had lived within its walls and instead saw only herself and Saul. Like someone unable to resist the lure of something known to be dangerous, she walked towards the house. The front door was open and yielded easily to her touch, but there was nothing odd in that—it was rarely locked.
Inside, the hall had that cold desolateness of houses without inhabitants. The bowl for flowers which had always graced the hall table was gone, a faint film of dust coating the mahogany surface.
Slowly Lucy walked into the drawing-room, mentally reliving the moment when she had found Saul here and he had accused her of plotting against him with Neville. There had been a time immediately after their quarrel when she had hoped that his cruel words to her had been the result of anger and jealousy caused by this belief, but she knew that if that had been the case he would have come looking for her once his anger had cooled.
The very fact that he had not proved beyond any doubt that he had never really loved her. She could have forgiven those cruel, hurtful words of his if she thought they had been flung at her in the heat of the moment and then regretted—loving him as she did she could well imagine herself reacting in a very similar way had their positions been reversed—but Saul hadn’t reacted in anger and primitive jealousy. He had acted callously and cold-bloodedly, wanting to hurt and destroy her.
She shivered, placing a protective hand against her stomach. Whatever else happened, she was not going to allow her child to suffer for its father’s omissions. Her child. Saul’s child… A child who would never know its father.
‘Lucy.’
For a moment she was sure she must be hallucinating, imagining that the voice she heard was Saul’s, and then she turned round and saw that she was not.
He was standing less than ten feet away from her, just inside the door, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, his face oddly sharp-boned.
She swallowed, fighting down an insane urge to rush into his arms, and then as he took a step towards her, her composure shattered completely and she stepped back, her whole world exploding in shock and pain as she realised that he was real, that he was actually here, speaking to her as unemotionally as though they were nothing more than distant cousins.
The now familiar wall of blackness roared up around her, her last thought as faintness rushed sickeningly over her that she must somehow contrive to stop behaving like the heroine of a Victorian novelette. Fainting was the coward’s way out, and ridiculously over-dramatic… but very, very effective, she thought tiredly as the darkness overwhelmed her completely; very, very effective.
