Great-Aunt Maud possessed not only an Edwardian bosom, but in addition an Edwardian attitude to life, and at her behest Rebecca had promised that she would try to be at Aysgarth for four o’clock in time for afternoon tea.
‘That will give you an ideal opportunity in which to meet the children,’ Aunt Maud had informed her, and Rebecca, suddenly remembering from her own childhood her great-aunt’s ability on occasions to put aside her vagueness and apparent fragility and reveal all the assets of a master tactician, wondered a little uneasily why it was that Maud required her assistance in managing the twins. After all, as she remembered very well, Great-Aunt Maud had had no difficulty at all in keeping both her and Robert under control.
That had been almost twenty years ago, though, when her aunt had been in her fifties. Now she was in her seventies, and it was hardly to be expected that she could keep a watchful eye on two energetic and by all accounts extremely difficult eight-year-olds.
Aysgarth was on the more distant side of Cumbria, far away from the popular Lake District, in what Rory had on more than one occasion disconsolately described as the back of beyond.
Rebecca, despite the fact that she had lived and worked in London for well over six years, did not share his views. In London she had a lifestyle she enjoyed and a job she loved, but, given freedom of choice, she knew that she could quite easily adapt to a more rural lifestyle.
It surprised her to see how far the motorway system had now penetrated into Cumbria, giving her the advantage of gaining a good half-hour on her estimated journey time. With that half-hour in mind, a couple of miles away from Aysgarth and halfway down a very narrow country lane that led not only to the house but to the several farms beyond it, she pulled her car in to the side of the road and got out, locking it.
Fifty yards or so down into the valley lay one of the favourite spots of her childhood and teenage years. The river ran through the valley, dammed at one end to form a small pool from which it spilled over a weir, dropping quite a formidable distance into the far end of the valley and beyond that the valley below it.
The valley was wooded, shadowy with trees and their secrets. Underfoot the ground was springy and resinous with pine needles and roots. Despite the fact that the weather forecasters had promised them a good summer, so far there had been very little evidence of it, and as Rebecca made her way down the steep-sided valley she saw that the river below was flooded from the heavy spring rains.
Down below her in the valley bottom, a movement caught her attention. She focused on it abruptly, frowning as she saw the two small jean-clad figures hurrying in the direction of Aysgarth House. The twins. She would have recognised them through their similarity to their dark-haired and dark-visaged uncle anywhere, and she mused ruefully on the oddity of heredity and the fact that it should be Rory’s children who had inherited so much of Frazer’s dark colouring. Rory himself took after his and Frazer’s mother, being fair-haired and blue-eyed, whereas Frazer took after their father, possessing the dark-haired, grey-eyed, hard-chiselled look which had always been formidably recognisable as Aysgarth features.
It was not their similarity to their uncle that brought a frown to Rebecca’s forehead, though; it was the fact that the two children, barely eight years old, were apparently free to wander the countryside at will. She could remember herself how very strict not only Aunt Maud but also Frazer himself had been about her liking to wander here in this remote and beautiful valley. How he had drummed into her the danger of going too near the weir, or being tempted to even think about swimming in the pool, which was extremely deep and possessed dangerous hidden currents.
It was true that the twins had not been swimming, but she seemed to remember she had been well into her teens before Frazer had lifted the ban that stipulated that she was never ever allowed to come down here on her own.
As the twins approached, some instinct made her draw back into the shadow of the enclosing trees. The path they were on ran several yards away from her, and as she knew, turned abruptly several yards away to veer in the direction of Aysgarth House. As they passed her she could hear Peter saying anxiously to his sister. ‘Are you sure it’ll work, Helen? Are you sure it’ll make her go away?’
Rebecca stiffened, knowing instinctively that they were discussing her own arrival.
Frowning fiercely, Helen Aysgarth was a minute replica of her formidable uncle.
‘Maybe not at first,’ she allowed judiciously, ‘but it won’t take long.’
‘Why did Aunt Maud have to send for her anyway?’ Peter muttered bitterly. ‘A schoolteacher! As if we didn’t have enough of schoolteachers when we’re at school!’
‘We’ll soon get rid of her,’ Helen comforted her twin. ‘After all, we got rid of Carole, didn’t we?’
Both of them giggled and Peter added victoriously, ‘And Jane. Uncle Frazer was really angry when we told him Jane wanted to marry him, wasn’t he?’
‘Furious,’ Helen agreed with obvious enjoyment.
With every word she overheard, Rebecca’s heart sank further. What on earth was she letting herself in for, and why?
‘Norty says Cousin Becky will soon teach us to mind our manners,’ Peter reminded his sister.
Helen said witheringly, ‘Cousin Becky! We’ve never even met her, have we, apart from that once at the wedding, and I bet she isn’t coming here because of us at all. I bet it’s because of Frazer. Norty says he’s the best catch in the area and it’s high time he settled down and had some children of his own.’
Furious, exasperated and conscious of a growing numbness in her cramped limbs, Rebecca stayed where she was.
Norty—Mrs Norton—was Frazer’s housekeeper. She had been with the family during Frazer and Rory’s parents’ lifetime, and Rebecca remembered her with particular fondness. She hoped it wasn’t from the housekeeper that the twins had got the idea that she had come up here solely on account of Frazer, and as for that idea—well, she decided grimly, she would very quickly disabuse them of it!
She wasn’t a shy eighteen-year-old any more. What she had once felt for Frazer had long ago died—perhaps a little more violently and cruelly than it would have done in the normal course of events, but its death had been a necessary one. Most girls went through a period of intense emotional adulation for some older man. Most of them, though, were far too sensible to fix that adulation on a member of their own family.
She had thought of Frazer as some kind of Olympian being, all-knowing, all-wise, allseeing. No virtue had been too high for him to reach. What a fool she had been when, desperate and trapped, Rory had begged her to help him, she had done so willingly, delighting in the opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Frazer’s greater good.
If she had expected that somehow or other he would divine the truth, she had been bitterly disappointed. If she had expected that he would not only divine the truth, but lavish praise and gratitude on her for that sacrifice, she had been doubly disappointed. What he had in actual fact done was to read her such a savage and bitter lecture that it had been months if not years before she had ever been able to hold up her head again.
At first shock had numbed the worst of her feelings of degradation and humiliation, but then, as the shock wore off, reality had begun to take its place; the reality of realising that Frazer condemned her for what he had termed as her criminal and idiotic folly in becoming involved in an affair with his brother.
If once she had hoped he would come to see the truth, now she no longer did. Now she doubted that it would make any difference even if he did know the truth. Frazer had never liked being wrong about anything, she remembered bitterly.
The children were walking past her now, and just as they started to move out of sight she heard Peter saying anxiously, ‘You don’t think she’ll