Plain she might have been, but she had provided her first husband with five healthy daughters, and the rich and well-tended flocks of sheep that grazed on the lands that had been her dowry from her parents.
Philip Danvers had reasoned that a woman so evidently and bountifully fertile could well provide him with the sons he wanted, and the rich pastures her first husband had carefully nurtured during the years of the Protectorate would yield far more profit than an empty title.
The widow had no option but to accept this second husband with as good a will as she could muster. It was the King’s command that she marry his friend. She was under no illusions; Cottingdean was a rich property to a man who owned nothing but the clothes on his back and the sword at his side. Oh, no, she knew quite well why she was being married, and it was not to provide her lusty new husband with a bedmate.
Thus it came as something of a surprise to discover how attentive her new husband was in bed, and continued to be even after the birth of their first and then their second son.
Philip Danvers had quickly realised that his plain, dull wife, whom he had married for her wealth and for sons, had a sensual gift that many a courtesan would have welcomed and flaunted, and because he was a man with a sense of humour, he laughed to himself sometimes in the privacy of their bedchamber while they rested in one another’s arms, sated and relaxed, and when she asked him why he would tell her that it was because, in giving her to him, the King had given away one of the rarest treasures in his Kingdom.
It was not of his ancestors, however, that Edward was thinking as he sat motionless in his wheelchair, staring into space, but of those generations as yet to come…as yet unborn. Kit would marry and one day produce sons who would inherit Cottingdean, and he hoped they would love and cherish it as he had always longed to have the right to do.
Now, though, he was forced to admit that even if his father had been the elder…even if he had inherited, he would never be able to father sons for the house. Almost violently he clenched his hands and wished as he had wished so often that he might find the courage to end this dull misery that was his life.
Kit had made it plain to him that there would be no sanctuary for him at Cottingdean. He had even talked of selling up, damn him…of living permanently in London, as though Cottingdean was nothing more than a burden he wished to be rid of. How he resented him for that. How he almost hated him for it!
‘SAGE, I’m awfully sorry to interrupt you, but Alexi is on the phone and he’s insisting on speaking with you.’
Sage stared so blankly at her that for a moment Faye wondered if she had actually heard her.
The large, comfortably upholstered chair which had replaced Edward’s leather chair when Liz had taken over the library had been pushed away from the desk, and when she had opened the door Sage had been curled up in the chair, her knees drawn up into her body, a silky wing of hair falling across her face, so deeply absorbed in what she was reading that for a moment Faye had been reminded of that much younger and far more vulnerable Sage she had known when she herself first came to Cottingdean.
Now, though, as Sage raised her head, the illusion was shattered and Faye wondered to herself if Sage actually knew how very commanding and autocratic she could look when that cool, distant reserve shuttered her expression.
‘Alexi?’ she queried now, almost as though the name meant nothing to her.
She glanced involuntarily at the open diary she was holding and Faye felt a tiny flutter of apprehension stir in her own stomach. What was in the diaries that was so compelling that Sage was still here reading them hours after she had first walked into the room? The fire had burned low in the grate, and, apart from the pool of light cast by the reading lamp on the desk, the room was heavily shadowed; sombrely shadowed, Faye thought, shivering in a faint stirring of unease.
‘Yes. He was most insistent about speaking with you… Oh, and when you didn’t come out for your evening meal—we didn’t like to disturb you—I rang the hospital again. Liz is still holding her own…’
Holding her own… Sage slowly closed the diary, wincing as she felt pins and needles prickling her legs. She had been curled in her mother’s chair in a semi-foetal position for so long that her body had gone numb without her even noticing it.
She glanced at her watch, half shocked to discover it was gone midnight, and remembered that she had intended to ring Alexi at eleven, thinking that by that time she would have had more than enough of her mother’s diaries with their clinical, businesslike description of how she had run her life.
The reality couldn’t have been a greater contrast to what she had expected. In some ways she found it hard to believe that the girl who had written so openly and painfully in the diaries, pouring out her deepest emotions and vulnerabilities, was her mother. Even more astonishing was that her mother had wanted her to read them.
Would she in the same circumstances have been able to sanction such an intrusion into her past, into her life?
Perhaps if she had thought that she might be dying…if this might be her last chance to reach out…to explain.
She shivered suddenly. When Faye had interrupted her she had been so reluctant to stop reading, so very reluctant that initially she had resented her intrusion…but now, sharply, she didn’t want to read any more, didn’t want to…to what? What was she afraid of discovering?
‘Alexi,’ Faye reminded her diffidently.
Poor Faye. No doubt Alexi had been extremely rude to her, demanding that Sage be brought to the phone. Alexi was a very demanding man; despite his veneer, inwardly he still believed that man was infinitely superior to woman and that it was woman’s duty to pander to man’s needs and desires.
‘I’m sorry, Faye,’ she apologised now as she stood up, replaced the diary in the desk drawer and automatically locked it.
As she had anticipated, when she picked up the receiver Alexi was seething. ‘You said you’d ring this evening,’ he challenged her. ‘Where were you?’
Sage had an obstinate streak in her make-up which she herself considered to be a childish flaw and one which she had long ago mastered, but abruptly it resurfaced as she heard the arrogant challenge in Alexi’s voice. Suddenly those things which initially she had found amusingly attractive in him began to grate.
‘I said I’d try to ring you, Alexi,’ she corrected him flatly. ‘As it happens, I’ve been too busy. I’m sorry I had to break our date at such short notice…’
She could tell he was fighting to control his breathing and with it his temper, and she felt a brief resurgence of mocking contempt.
Poor Alexi, he must want her very much if he was prepared to tolerate her defiance. But his tolerance wouldn’t last very long or go very far. She had no illusions; Alexi desired and intended to dominate her, to subjugate her if he could. In bed he would be a powerful, commanding lover, and ultimately a selfish one. He would have no doubts or hesitancy about his prowess; her eagerness for his lovemaking, her desire to please him sexually would be things he would expect as his due. Oh, at first he would be prepared to indulge and coax her, but once he was sure of her…
It was a game she had played so often before…and yet suddenly she was tired of it, sickened by it just as though she had suffered a surfeit of a once favourite food, her nausea tinged with faint self-disgust.
Why? Because of the innocent outpourings of a girl so naïve, so trusting that to read them had brought into sharp focus the girl she herself had once been and the woman she now was?
Or was it simply that the times and their low-key sexual climate, their caution, their emphasis on separate contained lives geared