by Penny Jordan
Her aunt and Charles spent less and less time at the tall, narrow London house which belonged to her father, but which he allowed his sister to live in rent-free. They were almost constantly at Rothwell, and Geraldine Frances found herself drawing closer and closer to her cousin as a bulwark against her aunt’s dislike of her.
She began to see how burdensome her aunt’s possessive love of Charles must be to him, and she began to sympathise with him because of it. Yes, the year she was twelve was a watershed in her life. Her father had become distant from her again, and sometimes she saw him looking at her almost as though in some way he resented her.
Always acutely sensitive to the moods of others, she withdrew into herself.
She was fast developing a crush on her cousin, even though she herself wasn’t aware of it. Others had noted it though, older, more mature eyes, and Margaret was well satisfied with the results of her conversations with her son. The day she had discovered that her brother had no intention of allowing his daughter to be disinherited in favour of his only male heir, she had subdued the bitter rage and resentment burning inside her and determined that if Charles could not get Rothwell and the Rothwell fortune directly, then he would have them indirectly, through marriage to her, his cousin.
All this she had relayed to him, not bothering to mask her bitterness over what she considered to be the wrongful allocation of her brother’s title and assets.
‘Marry Geraldine Frances?’ he had sneered, and Margaret had looked back at him and told him explicitly and carefully exactly what his life would be if he allowed someone else to take what she believed was rightfully his.
She herself had no money, no assets, nothing. She lived virtually on the charity of her brother. Was that what he wanted from life, she asked him, when with only the very slightest effort he could have everything?
‘It should be mine without my having to marry her,’ he had responded bitterly.
She had tutored him well from the moment she had discovered that her brother would never have a son of his own; she had taught Charles that everything that was his uncle’s would one day be his—as long as he married Geraldine Frances.
With the onset of her teens, Geraldine Frances found herself putting on weight. Almost overnight her body seemed to change, thickening and softening from the hard athleticism of almost boyish slenderness into something she herself was repulsed by and unable to accept. She became moody and withdrawn without being able to understand why.
Her aunt announced that what she needed was to go to school, to be with girls of her own age, and for once her father seemed prepared to listen to his sister’s advice. Despairingly Geraldine Frances protested that she didn’t want to go to school, that she was happy here with him and her private tutors.
It made no difference. His sister had suddenly alerted him to the fact that his daughter was growing up alienated from her peers. No argument would sway him, and Geraldine Frances finally acknowledged that she had lost the battle and that she was going to school.
Looking sadly into his daughter’s pale, set face, knowing how much she hated the idea of going to school, James wished he could explain to her that he was only doing what he thought was best for her. He had seen for himself how alone she was.
Selfishly he had kept her with him, wanting, since he had made the discovery that she would be his only child, to prepare her for the burdens she would one day have to carry. It was true that for a while he had toyed with the idea of making Charles his heir, following the rule of succession in favour of the male heir, but Charles was not his son and Geraldine Frances was his daughter.
He had petitioned the Queen so that she could inherit his title from him. It had been done before, after all, and only one small estate in England was entailed, thanks to the forethought of his predecessors. No, it was best for Geraldine Frances now that she went to school and had a few years at least of finding out what it meant to be a young girl, and so he withstood the numb pleading he saw in her eyes and firmly distanced himself from her, so that she felt forlornly that he had deserted her completely, and that there was only Charles who understood how she felt.
Charles, who had changed so much towards her that she found it hard to believe she had ever disliked him.
James saw the crush she was developing for her cousin and wondered how much it had been engineered by his sister’s machinations. She had already pointed out to him how sensible it would be if Charles and Geraldine Frances were to marry, and she was right, of course. It would be an ideal solution. Too ideal, perhaps.
He was bringing his child up more boy than girl, his sister had accused him, and so for Geraldine Frances there were no more dawn rides through the woods and over the fields, no more midnight treks into the wood to watch the badgers, no more shooting rabbits in the cool haze of the summer dawn.
Geraldine Frances had to stay in and prepare herself for school, and when she wasn’t doing that she had to be dragged round London stores being equipped with new clothes.
It was on one of these trips that Geraldine Frances was confronted with the hateful image of herself that was to remain with her all through her teens.
Her aunt, out of temper and exasperated, had dragged her into an expensive children’s outfitters, insisting that the saleswoman produce the kind of clothes that Geraldine Frances loathed: smocked-bodice dresses in velvets and silks, velvet-collared coats, plaid skirts and cashmere sweaters.
Hot and furious, Geraldine Frances had glared mutinously at her aunt, steadfastly refusing to try on anything.
‘Well, if you won’t try them on, then we’ll just have to buy them without your doing so. What size are you?’ Margaret had demanded imperiously.
Geraldine Frances had had no idea. The clothes she most liked were made for her by her father’s tailors: soft riding jackets, jodhpurs, handmade boots, masculine, tweedy suits of a type favoured by the feminine members of the Irish hunting society… capable, useful clothes.
The saleswoman, sensing the impending storm, had interrupted unhappily.
‘I doubt if we’ll have anything in mademoiselle’s size… She is rather large…’ Her voice had trailed off as all three of them had confronted Geraldine Frances’s image in the mirror. In silence their eyes had met and acknowledged the bulky, overweight reflection of Geraldine Frances’s teenage flesh.
A malicious smile had curled her aunt’s mouth. Her aunt was thin, brittly so, with sharp bones, a sharp mouth and sharp eyes.
‘Yes… Really, Geraldine Frances, you do look appalling… you’re enormous. It’s bad enough that you’re so plain, but this… We’ll have to put you on a diet…’ And then, in an aside to the assistant that wasn’t an aside at all, she had added disparagingly, ‘Heaven knows where she gets it from. But then, I suppose every family has its changeling.’
Geraldine Frances knew all about changelings… Ireland’s folklore was full of stories about them: ugly, unwanted children, usurping the rightful place of others…
She had looked in the mirror, hating her aunt with burning, loathing eyes, hating the assistant, who was trying to look everywhere but at her, and most of all hating herself.
When they had got back to Rothwell she had gone straight to the kitchen and eaten half a dozen freshly made scones thick with home-farm butter. With them she had drunk a pint of full cream milk.
It had made her feel better, for a little while… filled that craving empty space inside her, for a little while.
Her aunt had put her on a diet, knowing that Geraldine Frances would break it and feel worse for doing so. Charles loathed food as much as she loved it. She ate what he refused and her body, suffering anyway under the onslaught of its hormonal changes, became bloated and strained at the seams of her clothes. Her glossy russet hair dulled. Her eyes became small and round and her skin, overloaded with a surfeit of fats, broke out in a rash of spots.
She missed her father, who was away in Argentina, desperately, ached to be with him, sharing the companionship
they had always known. But now it seemed that he did not want her with him, and that hurt her, confused her. She felt as though she was in some way to blame for his withdrawal from her; that she had done something wrong. And her aunt, sensing this insecurity in her, subtly encouraged and fed it, as Geraldine Frances fed her increasingly bloated body, trying to subdue the ache of misery inside her with food.
She was so used to being a part of her father’s life, to travelling with him, that the sharp severing of the bond between them was an open wound she didn’t have the experience to heal.
There were short, uncommunicative phone-calls from him that exacerbated her misery rather than easing it. Her aunt always remained in the room while she spoke to him, and was quick to put an end to their conversations long before Geraldine Frances could say anything that might have alerted her father to what she was suffering.
And, although she didn’t know it, James was missing her too; he hadn’t realised how much he enjoyed her company, how closely attuned their minds were… how intelligent she was.
He felt unusually restless, unable to take his normal pleasure in life. Because he was still suffering the after-effects of his illness… or because he was missing Geraldine Frances?
Argentina wasn’t the same without her. James had picked up a fever that lingered rather longer than it should have done, making him fret and fume. He hated being tied down to any one place for too long. He had been born restless, his mother had always said, and it was true that he hated tedium. Already it was July… Soon it would be August, and he began to daydream longingly for Scotland’s heather-purple moors and cool, misty mornings.
The flirtation with his host’s daughter had grown more dangerously intimate than he wanted; sex was an appetite he indulged whenever he felt its bite, knowing without conceit that he was giving and taking pleasure in the act, choosing his partners with care and circumspection.
The discovery that he could no longer father a child had made it unnecessary for him to marry again. He had loved his wife, but he was not so sure that that love would have survived a lifetime of marriage. He grew bored easily… jaded… He liked young flesh, silken hair, soft eyes, and eager, hungry bodies, but he also liked women with intelligent minds, women skilled in the art of conversation, women who could keep him entertained over dinner with their subtlety and wit.
A young body and an old mind… the ideal combination, but he was not searching for an ideal… He had no intention of allowing himself to be inveigled into a second marriage. He had his child, his daughter… and if she was not a son… if there was never to be a son… well, there would be grandchildren, a boy to take up the reins when he eventually had to put them down. But Carmelita, so soft and passionate in his arms, was beginning to pout and sulk. The air was heavy with subtle persuasion and there was much talk of marriages among other members of Don Felipe’s extensive family.
James knew when a net was being cast for him. Fever or no fever, it was time for him to go.
He shifted uncomfortably in the smothering comfort of the high Spanish bed, the call of his blood stirring him into urgent activity.
The estancia, with its endless prairies, its black-eyed, dulcet-mouthed women, was beginning to cloy. He wanted to go home.
He could almost smell the crisp scent of heather and gorse, hear the soft Scots burr of his gillie, see the sharp blue arc of a northern sky…
He sent a telegram to warn them that he was coming home.
It had been a long flight, and the fever still gnawed at his bones. James had forgotten how grey and miserable London could be under rainy August skies. There were delays at Heathrow, and his chauffeur was late picking him up.
Feeling irritated and enervated, he settled down in the back of the Bentley and closed his eyes.
Geraldine Frances knew all about her father’s temper… ‘A black temper he has, and there’s a fact,’ Bridie Donovan had told her more than once, half admiringly, half disapprovingly. ‘Oh, your father suffers from the curse of the Celts,’ Padraic O’Connor had said, and in Scotland the gillies and beaters said that the Earl could be a dangerous man to cross when the mood was on him. But Geraldine Frances had never experienced at first hand that fierce pulse of pride and rage that could possess her father and overwhelm all the carefully garnered, land-honed accoutrements of civilisation and training, peeling them back to reveal the essential man: the dangerous blending of Scots and Irish, Saxon and Norman blood… stirred through with their combustible Angevin inheritance… It had been said that, even before Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Plantagenets were all descended from the devil; that they were dangerous and volatile and that none could withstand the smite of their fearsome temper.
A long hold-up on the motorway; the discovery that he was not immortal, and that his flesh was as vulnerable to the aches and pains of ageing as the rest of the human race, did nothing to ease his temper.
He was just pouring himself a glass of whiskey when the library door opened and Geraldine Frances walked in.
He didn’t recognise her at first, and in the crystal light from the chandeliers made in Bohemia to the special design of the Georgian dandy who had commissioned them Geraldine Frances saw the shock and distaste widen his eyes as he stared at her.
He stood and stared at her in disbelief. He had always known her to be plain. She lacked her mother’s beauty and the finely drawn autocratic looks of his own family, but he had never in a thousand lifetimes imagined she would become this… this bloated parody of everything feminine… She looked grotesque… like a gargoyle… inhuman almost… and the cruel clarity of the crystal light faithfully relayed to her every one of the emotions crossing his face.
‘My God,’ he asked thoughtlessly, ‘what have you done to yourself?’
It was the beginning of the end… the first hurtful severing of a bond she had foolishly believed could never be severed. Both of them suffered for it: he because she was his child and he loved her, but could not reach out across the chasm of his instinctive revulsion of her physical appearance to find the spirit he had cherished and tutored; she because she had never quite forgotten the fear Charles had instilled in her, the fear that her father loved her because he felt he had to, because she was his only child… his heiress. And she wanted to be loved for herself.
Only she knew how desperately she strove these days to make up to her father for all that she was not and never could be.
Charles had intimated that, as a girl, she was unworthy of her father’s love, and she was haunted by the fear that it was true.
Sometimes she managed to forget the fear, to push it to the back of her mind, but too frequently these days it resurfaced, larger, more dangerous, threatening her… and on these occasions she would creep into the kitchen and comfort herself with food.
Her father wanted her to go to school, and she could not rid herself of the belief that perhaps he wanted that because he no longer wanted her with him. And because she loved him and wanted to please him, she kept these thoughts to herself and stoically accepted what she knew was going to be a time of intense misery and loneliness for her.
School was everything she had dreaded and more. She lacked the ability to make friends, distancing herself from those who would have befriended her out of shyness and the fear that they too, like Charles, would quickly discern her feelings.
As a scholar she was intelligent… too intelligent in some ways, her teachers believed, with a knowledge far too sophisticated for a girl of her age… with the kind of education more suited to a boy… The school was old-fashioned and heavily into role-models, something which the Earl, in his ignorance of girls’ schools, had not realised… But Margaret had. She was determined to destroy the close relationship between father and daughter.
She hated her brother almost as much as she hated his child. Ten years older than James, she had become used by the time he was born to considering herself the only child her parents were going to have, with all that that implied. And then James
was born, and overnight it seemed that everything changed. She was no longer important, no longer wanted almost; she was relegated to a secondary and far less important place. She had now a brother… a brother who was far more important than she would ever be. And gradually, as she grew older and realised all that James’s birth meant to her in terms of inheritance and importance, her resentment of him grew.
She should have been the one to inherit Rothwell… not James.
It had been in a mood of bitter defiance, following an argument with her father over her allowance and the fact that she, as a mere girl, merited little if anything from the estate, that she had met Irvine Leyland. She had seen him… wanted him, and she had made a mistake that, because it was her misfortune to have been born into an age where girls of her class had to be seen to be pure and virginal until they were married, was immensely catastrophic.
That she of all people had succumbed to the facile charm of a man like Irvine Leyland was still something Margaret hated to acknowledge. Even now, more than eighteen years later, she still found it almost impossible to understand how he had managed to undermine her defences, to make her fall in love with him and allow him to seduce her, both of them knowing that it was the only way her parents would ever accept a marriage between them… both of them knowing that, without her father’s financial support, there could be no marriage.
Irvine Leyland was one of that breed of men commonly known as fortune-hunters; he lived on the fringes of society, generally supported by a doting older woman all too eager to pay for the pleasure of having him as her lover… At thirty years old, with the way he had lived his life beginning to show on the face and body that were his only assets, he needed to find himself a wife… a rich wife… And then he had met Margaret Fitzcarlton, only daughter of the Earl of Rothwell, and he saw in her his opportunity not only to marry money, but into society as well… real society… not the kind that his past activities limited him to.
