A Season of Secrets

by Margaret Pemberton

  What had gone wrong within her father’s marriage to Zephiniah she didn’t know. In the early days Zephiniah had clearly relished her title of Viscountess Fenton and had seemed as eager as Gilbert that they would have a son who would carry on the Fenton family name and title. Then had come her long – and frequent – solo trips to European health spas.

  That she, Olivia and Roz suspected Zephiniah of having a lover – or even several lovers – when she was not in London or at Gorton was something they hadn’t spoken of to Carrie. Carrie was deeply fond of their father and they had known how the thought of his unhappiness would distress her. Carrie, though, had come to the same suspicion via servant gossip at Monkswood.

  ‘I’m not sure how to say this,’ she had said when, on one of Olivia’s trips home from Berlin, the three of them had met up on the banks of the river, by the vole place, ‘but there’s unkind gossip at Monkswood about your stepmother.’

  ‘There’s unkind gossip about our very own wicked witch all over the place,’ Olivia had said dismissively. ‘Unfortunately, I think most of it is true.’

  ‘Is it about men, Carrie?’ Thea had asked bluntly.

  Carrie had nodded, her eyes deeply troubled. ‘The sister of one of Monkswood’s footmen is Gorton’s parlourmaid. She’s told him Lady Fenton often holds house-parties at Gorton when Parliament is sitting and your father is in London.’

  Olivia had rolled over onto her back in the deep grass. ‘Well, there’s nothing too dreadful about that,’ she had said fairly.

  ‘Though other guests vary, there is one gentleman who is invited to every house-party,’ Carrie had continued unhappily. ‘He’s a friend of your stepmother’s from her days in Argentina. His name is Mr Di Stéfano.’

  ‘If Monkswood’s servants are only linking her name to one man, it’s probably something to be grateful for.’ Thea had known she was being nasty, but had been unable to help it.

  Carrie had bitten her lip. ‘It’s not only the servants who are talking, Thea. Lady Markham likes gossip, and when her lady’s maid told her how Lady Fenton’s name was being linked to that of Mr Di Stéfano, she said she’d heard similar gossip when she’d last been in Aix-les-Bains. Of course,’ she added hastily, ‘that doesn’t mean the gossip is true. Lady Markham was such a close friend of your mother that, in her eyes, no one could be good enough to fill her place and so she’s always been willing to believe the worst about your stepmother.’

  ‘The worst is probably true,’ Olivia had said, her eyes filling with sudden tears. ‘But whether Zephiniah is being unfaithful to Papa or she isn’t, and whether he knows about it or he doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do about it. Can you imagine his dear, kind face if we told him of what was being said?’

  All three of them had been able to imagine all too well.

  It had been Carrie who had ended their conversation. With her face set and pale, she had said fiercely, ‘I hope you’re wrong, Olivia. I hope everyone is wrong, because if anyone deserves to be happy it’s your father.’ And she had turned away quickly before they should see the expression in her eyes and correctly read the reason for the searing depth of her feelings.

  Thea opened the Morgan’s low-slung door and slid behind the wheel. Brooding over things she had no control over was of no use whatsoever. Her life was as full as she could possibly make it without Hal being in it, or, at the moment, Kyle.

  For the past few months she had been heavily involved in the running of the Feathers Clubs, a project close to Prince Edward’s heart. With his sincere and deep concern for his father’s unemployed subjects, he had suggested the setting up of clubs that would offer men on the dole some kind of social life. The name of the clubs came from the three feathers on his heraldic badge as heir apparent, and the person who had put his scheme into action was the woman who had been his first long-term mistress, Freda Dudley Ward.

  Thea, always looking for active ways to put her socialism into practice, had become Freda’s right-hand helper. Her long-term ambition, though, was to stand as a Labour Party parliamentary candidate. One thing in her favour was that she was a fiery and fearless public speaker. The things not in her favour were legion. Top of the list – apart from the fact that she was a woman – was that she wasn’t, and never had been, a trade-union leader; she had never chaired her local Labour Party; she wasn’t a local Labour Party councillor; she didn’t come from a working-class background; she didn’t have a university degree. The list of reasons why her standing for Parliament was a pipe-dream was endless. Thea didn’t care. In her mindset, obstacles were there to be overcome – and, one by one, she was determined to overcome them.

  She put the Morgan into gear and spun back out onto the road. Very soon she was in Windsor Great Park and Fort Belvedere’s turrets peeped above the trees. All she had to think about now was Kyle. Would he be there, or would he not? And if he was there, was she going to maintain the standoff of the last few months?

  Kyle stood back from the bonfire of burning leaves, his eyes smarting. Edward was well known for being able to find things to do in the Fort’s gardens at any time of year, but he’d thought that on a late afternoon in October even Edward would have given his gardening passion a rest. Unwisely he had arrived at the Fort a little early, rather than a little late, and Edward had immediately pounced on him.

  ‘Jolly good show. An extra pair of hands is just what I need,’ he had said cheerily. ‘I’m just about to do a bit of leaf-burning. Change into something suitable and join me. There’s a good chap.’

  A royal command – even a royal command coming from a boyishly slight figure dressed in well-worn tweeds and with a pitchfork in one hand – was not to be ignored. Kyle had done as he’d been bidden and now the two of them were taking it in turns to fork piled-up dead leaves onto a slow-burning, pungent-smelling fire.

  ‘George and Marina are going to be with us this weekend,’ Edward said. ‘Dickie and Edwina, Fruity and Baba, Chips. Have you met Chips?’

  There was only one Chips in British high society, and that was a fellow American, Chips Channon. Though they had never met before at the Fort, Kyle knew him well. He had also met Edward’s younger brother, Prince George, though not George’s recently acquired fiancée, Princess Marina of Greece. Neither had he met Fruity Metcalfe and his wife, though he knew of them by reputation, and everything he had heard indicated they would be easy, amusing company. Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten he had met previously, though never when they had been together. Ernest Simpson’s name was conspicuously absent from the guest list, and Wallis was more the Fort’s permanent hostess than she was a guest.

  The other name missing from the list, and the one that was causing Kyle crushing disappointment, was Thea’s. Just as he was wondering why he had been invited, if Thea hadn’t, Edward closed a fair-lashed eye in a naughty wink. ‘Forgot to mention that Thea should be arriving at any time. Wallis likes her.’ He forked more leaves onto the fire. ‘She says Thea is the only blunt-talking, non-prevaricating, straight-to-the-point Englishwoman she’s yet met.’

  Kyle laughed. Where Wallis and Thea were concerned it was, he felt, a question of like being attracted to like. They both possessed the same kind of vitality, forthrightness and frankness of speech.

  One of Edward’s two small terriers came trotting up to join them and Edward bent down and scratched the back of its head, saying as he did so, ‘Like Wallis, you’re an American. What d’you think your government would make of it if, when I become King, I make Wallis my queen?’

  Kyle was about to laugh at what he thought was a joke, but something in the tone of Edward’s voice stopped him.

  He said, uncertain as to whether or not he was going to make a fool of himself by having taken the question seriously, ‘But that couldn’t happen, sir. Could it?’

  Edward stared broodingly into the bonfire of dead leaves. ‘I love Wallis,’ he said. ‘I’m going to marry her – and in English law a wife takes the title of her husband.’

  Kyle stared a
t him. As an American, his knowledge of British constitutional law was sketchy, but he knew enough to know that no divorced woman had ever been Queen of England – or was ever likely to become a Queen of England.

  As if reading Kyle’s mind, Edward said, ‘Nothing can happen – except perhaps Wallis’s divorce from Ernest – until my father dies. Under the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act, marriages of Princes of the Blood Royal are under the Sovereign’s control and – ultimately – Parliament’s. So you see, a veto power over my choice of a wife rests with my father. And because of the divorce thing – and perhaps also because of her being American – my father will never give his consent.’

  Kyle wondered if he should point out to Edward that where the ‘divorce thing’ was concerned, Wallis would – if she and Ernest divorced – have been twice divorced, for in order to marry Ernest, Wallis had had to divorce an American naval pilot, E. Winfield Spencer.

  As Edward made no attempt to put further leaves on the smouldering, charred pile in front of them, Kyle thought of another major barrier to Edward’s dream of marital bliss with Wallis. When he became King, Edward would also become titular Head of the Church of England. And the Church of England didn’t recognize divorce. With such an obstacle in his path, even his father’s death wouldn’t be enough to enable Edward to marry Wallis. He was simply never going to be able to marry her. Not ever.

  As, with the terrier skittering around their heels, they began making their way back to the house, it occurred to Kyle that he and Prince Edward had something in common. Both of them were deeply in love and, for both of them, a happy outcome to that love was distinctly remote.

  Other cars had now arrived. Parked on the gravel beside his own car was a plum-coloured Riley. A few yards further away was a Bentley Silver Goddess and, a little apart from them, Thea’s distinctive little green Morgan.

  Kyle felt his heart tighten. Whenever he and Thea had been going through an ‘off’ period, the first few seconds of any meeting were always crucial, because he could instantly tell by her manner if there was any hope of a passionate reconciliation.

  ‘His Royal Highness and Princess Marina are in the drawing room, as is Mrs Simpson, sir,’ Edward’s butler said to him as they entered an octagonal hall with stark white walls, a floor of black and white marble and with yellow leather upholstered chairs in each of its eight corners. ‘Mr and Mrs Metcalfe are with them. Miss Fenton arrived some minutes ago and has been shown to her room. Lord Louis and Lady Edwina are yet to arrive.’

  Edward nodded his thanks and, despite having come in straight from the garden and smelling of wood-smoke, bolted straight for the drawing room to greet his brother, Princess Marina and the woman he found it so hard to be apart from, even for a second.

  Not being royal, and not being able to be so careless about the smell of wood-smoke clinging to him, Kyle headed straight for his first-floor bedroom. The valet he had been allocated was waiting for him and, aware of what Kyle’s occupation had been for the past hour, had already run a deep, hot bath for him.

  Swiftly Kyle shed his clothes and sank gratefully into it. Then he leaned back, closed his eyes and thought of Thea.

  The second he’d met her, on the doorstep of the Fenton town house when he had first come to London, he had been instantly smitten. Being Roz’s stepbrother, and therefore extended family, he had automatically seen a lot of her even before they had begun dating. Everything he had come to know about her – her fierce social conscience, her shining honesty, her refusal to back down from any stand once she had taken it – he had liked and admired.

  In the early days of their courtship it had never occurred to him that it was the qualities he admired in her, far more than it was her infatuation with Hal Crosby, that would be the stumbling block to their happiness.

  Hal Crosby was someone Kyle was certain that, once they were married, Thea would soon have put firmly in her past. When he had told her so – when he had said that he didn’t give a rap for whatever feelings she thought she still entertained for Hal and that he wanted to marry her, those feelings notwithstanding – she had been deeply shocked.

  ‘But that wouldn’t be an honest thing to do!’ she had said, her green cat-eyes widening. ‘I can’t stand in front of an altar and make sacred promises to you, when we both know how I feel about Hal!’

  ‘Then we’ll get married in a register office,’ he had said, struggling for patience.

  ‘You don’t take any of this seriously, do you?’ She had hurled the words at him. ‘You certainly don’t take my feelings for Hal seriously.’

  ‘Why should I?’ He had barely been able to resist the urge to give her a good shake. ‘He was a childhood sweetheart who, for one year, at the most two, was something more when you were a teenager. Whatever that something more was, you’ve told me yourself it was a typical first love that didn’t go far beyond hugs and kisses. You didn’t lose your virginity to him in his father’s hay loft, or down on the banks of the Swale. And by the time you were eighteen – and on your eighteenth birthday – it was all over.’

  She’d been about to shout something hurtful at him, but he hadn’t given her the chance.

  ‘It was all over, Thea, because Hal could see what you still can’t. He could see that the two of you came from entirely different worlds, and that if you had spent time living with each other for even a couple of weeks you’d probably have fought like wild cats or been bored to death with each other.’

  ‘Never!’ she had shouted back at him. ‘Never! Never! Never!’

  It had been a long time before things had got back to normal after that little scene.

  He was, however, convinced he was right. Because she had spent so much time in Hal’s company as a child, Thea thought she knew him. She had never, though, spent any time with him in company other than Olivia, Carrie and Roz, and she had never spent time with him anywhere else but at Gorton – and even at Gorton they hadn’t spent time in each other’s homes. He doubted if Thea had even seen the inside of the Crosbys’ tied farmhouse and, though Kyle knew Thea’s father had no objection at all to Thea’s friendship with the son of one of his tenant farmers, Hal had never been treated as one of the family at Gorton Hall in the same way that, until Lord Fenton’s second marriage, Carrie had.

  Being Thea, she had done the typical Thea thing of taking a stand – this particular stand being that Hal was her first love and therefore her only real love – and sticking to the conviction through thick and thin.

  Not for the first time he found himself wishing that Hal had deflowered her on the night of her birthday ball. Thea would then have expected far more commitment from Hal than he would have been prepared to give, and she would soon have stopped viewing him through rose-tinted glasses and seen him for the person he really was: a man with a great deal of cheeky charm who was also a natural loner, and always would be.

  Kyle heaved himself out of the bath and wrapped a generous-sized towel around his waist. What were the next few hours going to bring, where he and Thea were concerned? Was it time he, too, stopped being hopeful and moved on? In so many ways it would make sense. He had been in London far longer than he could ever have hoped for, and it couldn’t be long now before he was posted somewhere else, quite possibly somewhere on the other side of the world. A diplomat was automatically accompanied by his wife, but that wouldn’t work with Thea unless she abandoned her intention of becoming a Labour Party parliamentary candidate. No marriage could work if the husband was resident in one country and the wife in another. Then there was her unflinching honesty, which in the tricky social milieu in which a diplomat’s wife moved would far often be more of a handicap than a help.

  Unlike Olivia, who saw her role in life totally in terms of being everything a diplomat’s wife should be, who was charm personified to absolutely everyone – no matter how boring they might be – and who was always a picture of sophisticated elegance, Thea never hid her feelings, and high fashion was unimportant to her.

 
His clothes had been laid out for him and he began to dress, reflecting that, all in all, Thea had few qualifications for being the wife of an ambitious American diplomat. It made no difference. His wife was what he was determined she would one day become.

  What other option was there when, no matter how often the thought of moving on popped into his head, when it came down to taking action he simply couldn’t do it?

  None of the far more suitable women he dated whenever the two of them were going through an ‘off’ period amused, exasperated or excited him as Thea did. In comparison to her, they simply paled into insignificance. There was no rhyme or reason where love was concerned – and he loved Thea. It was as straightforward and as simple as that. Though she would be appalled at the thought that she sometimes needed protection, he wanted to protect her. Wherever he was posted in the world, wherever his career led him, he wanted her by his side. He was bound to her with hoops of steel and there was not a darned thing he could do about it.

  He gave a last look in the cheval-glass, adjusted his bow-tie and smoothed a hand over blue-black hair that was already glossily sleek. All he had to do was make her see that what the two of them shared was something deep and true that would last lifelong, and what she had experienced with Hal had simply been an extension of her childhood; that, precious as it had been, it belonged in the past and that even if events on the night of her birthday ball had been different, her romance with Hal would never have survived into the present.

  He grinned wryly. Set out like that, it was a simple enough task, and he left the room determined that, with an entire weekend at the Fort in front of him, this time he would achieve success.

  When he entered the drawing room it was to find all his fellow guests, apart from Dickie and Edwina, already gathered there. Thea was seated on a sofa deep in animated conversation with Wallis. Both of them had a glass of whiskey and soda in their hands. Fruity Metcalfe and Chips Channon were over by the French windows, chuckling at something Princess Marina was saying to them. Baba Metcalfe and Prince George were seated by the fire with cocktails and a half-finished jigsaw on a low table in front of them. There was no sign of their host, who was presumably still steaming in a hot bath.