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Mrs Harris was waiting for her in the hall. ‘There’s a visitor for you, madam. A Mr Harvey and quite insistent about seeing you. I’ve put him in the drawing room.’
‘Harvey?’ Dana repeated slowly. ‘That’s vaguely familiar.’
Mrs Harris looked austere. ‘He seems a bit rough and ready to me.’
Dana smiled at her. ‘Well, let’s smooth the edges with some coffee, please, Janet.’
Mr Harvey, rising politely to his feet at Dana’s entrance, was a stockily built man, middle-aged, bald and deeply tanned, with a round cheerful face, currently unsmiling. He was wearing well-cut grey slacks, a florid shirt, and an expensive-looking linen jacket.
He said, ‘So you’re Dana.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed coolly. ‘And you are...?’
‘I’m Bob Harvey,’ he said. ‘Your stepfather.’
‘Stepfather,’ Dana echoed, feeling dazed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s simple enough,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I got married eight months ago. I knew her from years back when she worked for me at the Royal Oak, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I walked into this bar I was thinking of buying in Altamejo, and found her there serving the drinks. It was the best thing that’s happened to me in years.’
‘I—I see.’ Dana sat down on the opposite sofa. ‘Well, congratulations. I hope you’ll be very happy.’
‘We’re getting there,’ he said. ‘But it would be easier if you’d stop writing to her about—all this.’ He waved a disparaging hand at his surroundings.
‘I’m sure you mean well,’ he went on. ‘But your letters just remind Linda of things best forgotten, and do her no good at all, so I want them to stop.’
Dana sat up very straight. ‘Mr Harvey,’ she said, ‘I also have my mother’s best interests at heart. And I want her to know that she is welcome to come back to Mannion and take the rightful place she’s always been denied.’
‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, love,’ he said. ‘Because rightful doesn’t enter into it. That’s been the trouble all along.’
There was a tap at the door and Janet Harris came in with a tray of coffee and homemade biscuits, forcing Dana to dam back her flood of angry questions.
‘You think Jack Latimer was your father,’ Mr Harvey said as soon as the housekeeper had gone. ‘But he wasn’t. Linda lied about it—and to people who mattered and who knew better. And then, like a damned fool, she went on lying until there was no way back from the disgrace she’d made for herself.’
Dana set the coffee pot down with a bang. ‘How dare you say these things? I was with my mother. I saw the terrible effect that Mrs Latimer’s rejection had on her. How she grieved for my father.’
He looked at her squarely. ‘And I suppose you think I’m lying too.’ He shook his head. ‘Not so. Because I’m the only person on earth who does know the truth, which I heard from my Linda’s own lips before we were married.’
‘But why should she have lied?’ Dana demanded.
‘Do you have to ask?’ Another derisive wave of the hand. ‘Just look round you. She wanted all this. She wanted to be someone, instead of a struggling single mother, and Jack Latimer was her chance at the good life’ He paused. ‘And because he was no longer around to argue, poor lad, she took it.’
Dana sat for a long moment with her face in her hands.
Eventually she said huskily, ‘You mean there was never a relationship between them?’
‘Oh, there was that,’ he said soberly. ‘For a while. Just—no baby. He couldn’t, you see. He’d caught mumps just at the wrong time, and it had made him sterile. His family knew it, but Linda didn’t.’
‘But she was so sure. So bitter about the way she’d been treated.’
‘So guilty about what she’d done,’ he said.
‘You don’t know what it was like to be there—to live with it.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘And she’s still ashamed of what it did to you. Too ashamed to face you yet as well. But it will happen—maybe when she finds she’s going to be a grandmother.’
For a stricken moment, Dana felt what it must have been like to be Linda. To have made such a terrible mistake and realise there was no way back. To have to live with her punishment...
She said quietly, hopelessly, ‘But I believed all she ever wanted was Mannion.’
