‘Female,’ Jenny had supplied dryly.
Personally she thought the views of the males of the Crighton family were decades out of date and that it was high time that someone challenged them. Olivia might be the first female of the family to do so, but she wasn’t going to be the only one.
Jenny knew that her own Katie already, at sixteen, had very strong views as to where her future lay. It was to be the Bar or nothing, she had told her parents emphatically. Louise, her twin, was less single-minded; she still hadn’t totally given up all hopes of becoming a film star. Failing that, she might well opt to study law, she had said judiciously.
‘But I wouldn’t want to stay here,’ she had told her parents.
‘No, neither do I,’ Katie had agreed. She was always the one who took control, and Louise, like her father before her, seemed quite happy to good-naturedly let her do so.
Jenny, however, had been determined from the moment they were born that there was not going to be a favoured child and a second best; that both of them were going to grow up knowing they were of equal importance, equal value.
‘I know,’ she had told Louise. ‘We’ll go to Strasbourg. That’s where all the important legal decisions are made on human rights….’
‘Does your father know that?’ Jenny had murmured sotto voce to her husband. ‘I sometimes think he has a hard time grudgingly acknowledging that even Chester has more impact on the legal world than Haslewich.’
‘Mmm … Dad is fiercely parochial,’ Jonathon agreed. ‘He inherited that from his own father, of course. Aunt Ruth says that their father, Josiah, never really got over being sent away from Chester in disgrace and that he always remained bitter about the way his family treated him.’
‘Well, your father certainly believes in keeping the old rivalries going,’ Jenny had agreed. ‘I was quite surprised when he insisted on inviting the Chester side of the family to your birthday do.’
‘Oh, that’s just because he wants to impress them and—’
‘Just like Max wants to impress Grandad and Uncle David,’ Katie had interrupted scathingly, tossing her sixteen-year-old head in sisterly contempt of her elder brother.
Over that head Jenny had looked warily at her husband. It was no secret that Max was very much the apple of his grandfather’s eye and that of his uncle David’s.
‘That boy should have been David’s son, not yours,’ Ben had once infamously remarked at a family gathering.
Jenny had never forgotten hearing him say it. Neither, unfortunately it seemed, had Max.
Much as it pained Jenny to admit it, her son had a streak of vanity and, yes, weakness in him that she felt had been exacerbated by his grandfather’s indulgence.
‘Max will never be called to the Bar,’ Katie had announced scathingly the day of Max’s twenty-first when their grandfather had beamingly made the announcement of his grandson’s career intentions and presented him with the keys to a Porsche Carrera that both Jonathon and Jenny had pleaded with Ben not to give him.
Max had finished his pupillage the previous year when he was twenty-three but so far had been unable to find a place as a junior in a set of chambers in London.
It would be left no doubt to Joss, their youngest child, to take his father’s place in the family business in due time, just as his cousin Jack would take David’s, but that lay well into the future. Jack was only ten and Joss an even younger eight.
As she walked back with her father-in-law across the lawn, Jenny paused to admire the outline of the house.
Originally a large farmhouse, it was built in a traditional hall house shape with the main central block from which two wings projected one at either end.
The rear of the property they were facing was the older portion built in the traditional Cheshire farmhouse style of huge oak beams infilled with wattle-and-daub panels. The front was a more modern seventeenth century instead of fifteenth in softly tinted locally quarried stone.
There had been those who had raised their eyebrows a little when Ben’s father had moved into the large farmhouse, wondering how on earth he had come to inherit such a valuable property. Valuable not so much because of the house, but rather because of the fertile Cheshire farmlands that went with it. And it had belonged to a lonely widow, as well.
One day, following the rules of primogeniture to which they all knew Ben intended to rigidly adhere, David, simply by virtue of the fact he had arrived into the world ten minutes ahead of Jon, would inherit Queensmead, but Jenny didn’t envy the inheritance. She was perfectly happy with their own much smaller house on the other side of town. Georgian in origin, it had once belonged to the church and Jenny particularly loved its walled garden and its proximity to the river that flowed through the paddock at the bottom of the garden.
She might not envy David and Tiggy their ultimate ownership of Queensmead but there was no doubt that it was the perfect setting for a large family gathering, she acknowledged.
In all, over two hundred and fifty people would be attending and over a hundred of them were in one way or another, however loosely, connected ‘family’. The rest were either friends, colleagues, clients or, in some cases, all three. Working out the table plans alone had taken Jenny the best part of a fortnight of winter evenings at her desk.
Fortunately Guy Cooke, her business partner, had been wonderfully understanding and accommodating.
Her work was still a source of acrimony between Jenny and her father-in-law. It had infuriated her that instead of taking the matter up with her, Ben had manipulatively attempted to dictate what she should do by objecting to Jonathon that he didn’t think it was a good thing for the family that she should be involved in a local business.
It was true that financially she didn’t need to earn her own living, but the business had brought her something she believed was equally vital to her: her own feelings of self-worth and self-justification. Her need to be something other than Jonathon’s wife, the plain one …
The plain one … How those words had once hurt. And still did?
No, not any more. In fact, if anything, she was grateful for the truth of them because they had forced her to fight against them, to look within herself, to find something there that she could hold on to and value.
She glanced at her watch. Jon wouldn’t be home yet and Joss was going straight from school to have tea with a friend. Katie and Louise had after-school tennis practice. She had a couple of hours in hand and her conscience had been pricking her for days about Guy and their business.
Being a partner in an antique shop and repairers might not have Ben’s approval but she enjoyed it. Even more she enjoyed the actual renovation and restoration side of the business, something that Guy freely admitted she had a definite talent for. Her career plans had been shelved when her mother had fallen ill within weeks of her sitting her A levels.
Her illness had mercifully been as swift as it was relentless. Within a few short weeks she was dead, but by then it was too late for Jenny to pick up the threads she had dropped and reapply for a course she had hoped to take—in more ways than one.
She and Jonathon had been married very quietly a matter of months after her mother’s death.
As she reached the main road, she paused and then turned right instead of left, heading for Haslewich instead of home. Guy had said he had picked up some silver he wanted her to see.
Tiggy exhaled in relief as she saw that the forecourt in front of the Dower House was empty. Good. David wasn’t home yet. She had stayed longer in Chester than she had planned. Guiltily she opened the boot of her car and removed the glossy carrier bags, grimacing as she stepped onto the gravel and felt it grate against her delicately pale high heels.