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There was a silence, then Rhianna collapsed in the first fit of genuine laughter she’d experienced since her return from Spain over a week before. Daisy joined her.
‘God bless our boy,’ Rhianna managed weakly at last, wiping her eyes. ‘Incorrigible, or what?’
She was still smiling to herself as she made her way back to the quiet road where the Jessops lived.
Mrs Jessop met her in the hall, her kind face concerned. ‘You’ve got a visitor, dear. A lady. She’s in the front room.’
Carrie, Rhianna thought as she pushed open the door and went in. Oh, please, let it be Carrie.
Instead, she saw a tall woman with silvered blonde hair, dressed in immaculate grey trousers, with a matching silk blouse, and a coral linen jacket hanging from her shoulders.
For the first startled instant, as her visitor turned from the window to face her, Rhianna thought that it was Moira Seymour, and braced herself for the inevitable onslaught. But this woman was smiling at her. Diffidently, perhaps, but quite definitely smiling.
‘So.’ It was a soft, clear voice. ‘Grace’s daughter. We meet at last.’
Oh, God, thought Rhianna, panic tightening her throat as she recognised the face from the portrait. It’s Diaz’s mother.
She said uncertainly, ‘Mrs—Penvarnon? I—I wasn’t expecting this. What are you doing here—and how did you find me? I don’t understand.’
‘To be frank, I hoped you’d never be obliged to,’ the older woman returned wryly. ‘But when Diaz sent me the photographs he’d found in your room and demanded an explanation, I knew I no longer had a choice.’
‘The photographs?’ Rhianna stared at her. As soon as she’d got back to London she’d realised they’d gone. That they’d somehow been missing from her bedside table when she cleared her room. ‘You mean Diaz had them?’ She added with constraint, ‘But why would he send them to you when they were mainly shots of his father?’
‘Mostly,’ Esther Penvarnon corrected her quietly. ‘But not all. There were—others.’
‘Well, yes,’ Rhianna agreed, still puzzled. ‘There were several of Mrs Seymour, plus a few taken with her husband. But I don’t see…’
‘No,’ the older woman said. ‘It wasn’t Moira with her husband. Those photographs were of me—with my lover.’
‘You?’ Rhianna looked at her, stunned. ‘You were having an affair?’
‘Yes.’ The reply was steady. ‘An affair with my brother-in-law, Francis Seymour. He and Moira had come to live at Penvarnon when I’d first become ill, to provide me with company and run things when Ben was away. He used to sit with me in the evenings and read to me, or we’d listen to the radio together. Gradually our relationship—changed.
‘It wasn’t a trivial thing,’ she added with emphasis. ‘We were both unhappily married and we fell deeply in love. Although I realise that is no excuse for the damage that was done.’
‘But you were in a wheelchair,’ Rhianna protested.
‘I had been, certainly,’ Esther Penvarnon returned. ‘But my health had been slowly improving for many months. However, I chose for my own reasons to maintain the fiction that I was helpless.’ She paused. ‘May we sit down? It might make what I have to say a little easier for me.’
Rhianna drew a deep breath. ‘I think that’s a good idea.’
Esther Penvarnon seated herself in the armchair on one side of the fireplace, and Rhianna occupied the opposite one.
‘Firstly,’ Mrs Penvarnon began, ‘my husband did not leave me because of some illicit passion for your mother. Grace Trewint was only ever resident housekeeper at his London flat—and a much needed friend. Ben told me so in a letter he wrote to me not long before his death, and I believe him. He left Cornwall, and the home he loved, because he too had been shown photographs, far more damaging ones than those Diaz saw, proving that I was being unfaithful to him, and he was devastated.
‘Your mother wasn’t dismissed because of any wrongdoing, either. She’d left of her own accord weeks before, because she suspected the truth and wouldn’t lend herself to such gross deception of a good man. And Ben Penvarnon was a good man, Miss Carlow. He was also very rich, dynamic, and extremely handsome, and he attracted women like wasps round honey. He was just—not for me.
‘I’d always been the quiet one, you see, living in my sister’s shadow. So I was flattered—dazzled—when Ben fell in love with me, not her, and I somehow managed to convince myself that I must love him too.’ She stared into space, as if she was contemplating an image too terrible to bear. ‘However, the realities of married life soon taught me differently. I felt—nothing for him. Eventually I became sick with dread whenever he came near me.’
