For goodness’ sake, Jenna chided herself as she parked her car in the drive of the old school-house and climbed out, why was she getting in such a state over some country Lothario?
Since she had left the area her old school had been shut down but Bill Mather, the headmaster, had been allowed to purchase the school-house. Built in the Victorian era, it had an air of solid respectability and stability. This was the first house she had ever truly called home, she thought, as she ignored the front door in favour of walking round to the kitchen. She had come here as a frightened, ignorant girl of barely fifteen, having been virtually thrown out by her great-aunt, her clothes in a battered suitcase and a two-week-old baby in her arms. She sighed faintly, anticipating the conflict now to come with that same ‘baby’. Lucy had objected strenuously to coming to Yorkshire, mainly because Jenna herself had been so eager to do so. What had happened to the easy friendship that had once existed between them? Sometimes these days she felt as though Lucy almost hated her. Was she being selfish in wanting to buy the house? Lucy still had several terms to do at school, even if she decided to leave after O levels; she had always complained about the smallness of their London flat. Here she could have as much space as she wanted. Perhaps even that horse she had nagged her mother for last year.
There was no sign of Lucy as Jenna walked into the Mathers’ kitchen. No doubt she would be sulking in her room. Lucy had made her dislike of the Mathers more than plain, because, Jenna suspected, she believed that like Jenna herself they knew the identity of her father and were conspiring with her mother to keep it from her.
Of course Jenna could understand why Lucy wanted to know her father’s identity, but it was something she just could not tell her … She bit her lip wondering how many people living in the village could remember that summer nearly sixteen years ago. She had changed of course. Then, she had been a painfully thin, milk-skinned child with red hair and enormous, frightened eyes. All that was still the same was the colour of her skin … even her hair had turned from carrot to rich Titian. No, she doubted if anyone would recognise her. She hadn’t had many friends. Her aunt had never really mingled with the other villagers, and besides, she had always been content with Rachel’s company.
Rachel … pain pierced through her. Fifteen years her sister had been dead and even now Jenna’s grief was as fresh and sharp as it had been then. Rachel had been everything Jenna had not: three years older, warm and extrovert, with a personality that drew people to her. There had not been an ounce of malice in her nature. Naturally warm-hearted she had naïvely believed that everyone else was the same; trusting and eager to please, she had paid a terrible price for her naïvety …
‘Jenna!’
She tore her thoughts abruptly from the past as Bill Mather walked into the kitchen. ‘I thought I heard your monster of a car arrive. How did it go?’
The grey eyes weren’t quite as keen now as they had been fifteen years ago, but they were still kind and wise.
‘I fell in love with the place, totally and for ever,’ Jenna told him honestly.
He and his wife were her only bridge between the present and her past; she loved them with an intensity that went so deep that it was something she could never talk about. Without them …
The faded grey eyes showed concern. ‘Jenna, my dear, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’
‘If you’re questioning my motives, I admit that initially it was a macabre need to gloat that brought me here. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t harbour some resentment.’
Bill Mather smiled wryly. ‘No, of course not, but you mustn’t let your bitterness over the past mar the present, Jenna.’
‘You mean I should forget what happened, forget how the Deverils killed my sister … how they …’
Emotion boiled up inside her, pain reflected in her eyes as they met his.
‘Jenna … Jenna … of course not … but, my dear, Alan and Charles are gone … the family is gone …’
‘Not quite.’ She said it quietly, her face pale and strained as she looked at him. ‘There’s still Lucy …’
‘Yes. Jenna, do you think it’s wise to conceal the truth from her? The child has a right to know that …’
‘That what? That her mother was brutally raped by her father and left pregnant … abandoned and left to die giving birth to the child she should never have had? Is that what you want me to tell her?’ She was shaking with emotion, sick with the force of it. Fifteen years had done nothing to lessen the sense of sick despair she always felt when she thought about her sister. Beautiful, lovable Rachel. ‘I want to buy the house,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to buy it for Lucy, because it is hers by right.’ She remembered with bitter clarity how she had visited the house with Rachel, just after Rachel had discovered her pregnancy. Her sister had been distraught with fear and shame, frightened into telling Jenna about the brutal attack she had endured.
She and Charles Deveril had met by accident. Rachel had been attending college in York and he had seen her waiting at the bus stop and recognised her as someone from the village. He had offered her a lift, and Rachel had naïvely accepted, but instead of driving her straight home, he had taken her down a deserted farm track. There had been tears in Rachel’s eyes and voice as she described the way she had fought against him, only to be overpowered. Terrified by what had happened and too frightened to tell their aunt, Rachel had tried to put it from her mind. Their upbringing had been a strict one and neither girl was promiscuous: at eighteen, Rachel had still been a virgin.
It had been Jenna who had insisted that they must go up to the house, naïvely sure that when he knew what had happened Sir Alan would insist on Charles marrying her sister. But after ringing the front doorbell they had been sent round to the back, and Sir Alan had accused them of making the whole thing up and had even threatened to call the police, claiming that Rachel was trying to besmirch the Deveril name.
It was only later that Jenna discovered that Charles had something of an unsavoury reputation with women, and that he had been expelled from school because of certain allegations made against him by the parents of a girl in the village near to the school.
What had followed had been a nightmare of conspiracy and fear. Rachel had bound her to silence, making her promise to say nothing to anyone. A tall, slender girl, she had disguised her pregnancy with the then fashionable loose clothes, refusing all Jenna’s entreaties to visit a doctor or tell their aunt.
She had started in labour one Saturday afternoon when they were both in York; a passing policewoman realising what was happening had taken them both to hospital. What happened there had been a nightmare to Jenna, bewildered and confused, alone in the waiting-room until a doctor suddenly appeared, grave-faced, questioning her gently, until she broke down and told him the whole story. ‘My sister … please let me see her,’ she had begged when she had told him, and she had known instinctively by his silence and tension that something was wrong.
‘I’m sorry …’
‘She’s dead, isn’t she ..?’ Jenna could remember even now how those words had burst from her throat, panic and pain clawing desperately at her stomach. Rachel could not be dead. She was only eighteen — people didn’t die having babies these days.
But Rachel had. Rachel, whose narrow frame wasn’t built for easy birth, whose life might have been saved had the doctors known what to expect. ‘She should have had her baby by Caesarian section,’ the doctor had explained quietly to Jenna, but because it had been too late, there had been complications.
Complications which had resulted in her sister’s bleeding to death, her life flooding away on a dark red tide that the nursing staff had not been quite quick enough to conceal from Jenna as the doctor gave way to hysterical pleading and allowed her to see Rachel for one last time.
As she looked at her sister, she had heard a faint mewling cry, and had stared, totally stupefied at the tiny bundle held by one of