by Anne Weale
‘Your grandfather thinks it would be a good idea for us to get married...’
Roderick Anstruther offered Flower everything she wanted: the beautiful house she had grown to regard as home, a. way of life which matched her natural inclinations and an attractive, exciting husband. There was only one problem: love wasn’t a part of the deal. And the more Flower got to know him, the more she realised how barren their marriage would be for her without that vital ingredient...
THE SINGING TREE
BY ANNE WEALE
MILLS & BOON PTY LIMITED
SYDNEY • AUCKLAND • MANILA
LONDON • TORONTO
First published in Great Britain 1992
Australian copyright 1992
New Zealand copyright 1992
Philippine copyright 1992
©Anne Weale 1992
ISBN 1 86386 063 0
CHAPTER ONE
Depending on the state of the traffic, it took about an hour for Flower to drive from the flat in London her grandfather had given her for her twenty-first birthday to the rambling country mansion which, for the past twelve years, he had leased from an aristocratic family too hard up to continue to live there themselves.
Flower had been ten when the old man had moved into Bosanquet Manor with his son and his daughter-in-law and their two children, soon to be orphaned by a tragic accident.
Now she was nearly twenty-three, the much-indulged grandchild of one of the richest men in England. Spoilt, some people would have called her. She had everything money could buy.
Her car was a scarlet Ferrari, the three-litre Mondial coupe, one of the most sophisticated pieces of engineering available to the privileged few who could afford it. Her watch was a handmade gold Reverse by Jaeger-Le-Coultre with her monogram ‘F J D’ engraved on the pivoting case. She bought her clothes in Milan, Paris and the most expensive shops in London.
What very few people knew was that, when she was in her late teens, Flower had suffered two serious reverses. At that age such things were deeply wounding. Although superficially healed, those early hurts had left scars.
Towards the end of her schooling she had set her sights on becoming a designer, an ambition encouraged by the school’s careers adviser. But her grandfather had insisted that, after a year at finishing-school in Switzerland, she should lead the frivolous party-going life of the debutantes of the 1930s.
For a long time she hadn’t understood why, when he often spoke with contempt of the way the idle rich had ignored the plight of the poor when he was a teenager before World War II, he had forced her to become a social butterfly.
Only later had she come to understand that it gave him a deep satisfaction to have a granddaughter who didn’t work for her living.
At the time she had protested, argued, cajoled, pleaded, even threatened to run away. Whereupon the old man had warned her that, if she did, he would not only cut off her allowance but also forbid her brother Stephen, who worked for him, to help her or even to see her.
In the end she had capitulated. At sixteen she had not been strong enough to defy someone she loved. For the strange thing was that, in spite of the unfair means he had used to bend her to his will, he had not destroyed her love for him. Although many people disliked Abel Dursley, and she could understand why, Flower herself had loved her grandfather from babyhood and always would.
But the frustration and misery he had inflicted on her when she was sixteen had been nothing compared with the anguish, only two years later, of her first real-life love-affair.
Before that, the man of her dreams had not been a living person. She had never spent time daydreaming about pop stars, actors or athletes. Her heart-throb had been Piers Anstruther who had been born at the manor in 1613 and died fighting for King Charles I at the Battle of Naseby in 1645.
Flower had never told anyone—not even Emily Fairchild, her only close friend—about her teenage fantasies about the blue-eyed Cavalier whose portrait hung in the dining-room. Or that they had never quite lost their hold on her imagination.
She knew it was ridiculous still to compare every man she met with the devil-may-care Royalist whose features gazed down at her every night at dinner.
He had been the younger, unmarried son of the titled landowner whose descendants had continued to live at Bosanquet until two generations of misfortune had forced the present owner to vacate the family home and take his invalid wife to a warmer, drier climate.
Surely, somewhere in the world, there must be a living man whose chin was as strong, whose mouth as firmly cut, whose eyes were as merry and amorous as those of Colonel Piers Anstruther?
But if there was such a man she had yet to catch a glimpse of him, let alone meet him.
Which was not to say that she had never been attracted to anyone. She had. For several years, after her first disillusionment, her relationships with the opposite sex had provided fodder for the gossip columnists. But always, always there had been something she couldn’t take about the men with whom her name had been linked. One had lacked any sense of humour. Another had been a snob who had made the mistake of patronising her grandfather.
There were times when Flower herself wished that Abel Dursley would eat less noisily and belch more discreetly at the end of a meal. But if anyone else showed disdain for his rough-diamond ways her grey eyes would sparkle with anger. She not only loved the old man; she admired his achievements and the immense strength of will which had lifted him from rags to riches.
As she drove home one autumn afternoon, after two days of concentrated shopping, she was thinking about her friend Emily, now pregnant for the second time since her youthful marriage to Andrew, her childhood sweetheart.
Emily could never believe that Flower envied her. Without wishing for such a life herself, her friend thought it must be marvellous for Flower to have the flat and the lavish allowance, and every winter to spend a month skiing and another month in the sunny West Indies.
What Emily didn’t realise, thought Flower as the Ferrari zoomed along the motorway, was that a picnic on a park bench with the right man was more exciting than dining on lobster and champagne and dancing under a Caribbean moon with the wrong one.
Even the pleasure of wearing the new clothes in the pile of boxes beside her would be diminished by the fact that there was no man she wanted to attract. At the moment her love-life was a void; and, with her twenty-third birthday coming up in a few months’ time, she was beginning to feel she was destined to be single forever.
This would not have mattered had she had a career to occupy her. But with nothing to do except enjoy herself, and no one but Emily—now living in the north of England—with whom to share her deepest feelings, she often felt lonely and without any purpose in life.
It was late afternoon and the light was beginning to fade when, from a couple of miles away, she glimpsed the ancient stone walls and tall twisted chimneys of the manor.
Originally it had been a convent, and the building still contained the refectory where the nuns had eaten their meals and the calefactory or warming-room where, in the bitter winters of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they had sometimes been allowed to sit by the fire.
Like all the religious houses in England, the convent had been closed down by the six-times-married King Henry the Eighth and subsequently sold for eight hundred pounds to Piers Anstruther’s grandfather. In the following centuries his descendants had made many alterations to the property, adding wings and towers and fine oriel windows until now it was one of the most beautiful manor houses in the whole of England.
Flower loved the place. Each time she came back from London the sight of it reminded her of a line from a poem learned at school—’a haunt of ancient peace’.
When t
he sleek scarlet car drew up in front of the house that had been home for more than half her lifetime, another vehicle was parked on the gravelled sweep, an undistinguished saloon bearing the insignia of a well-known car-rental firm.
Flower wondered who was visiting her grandfather in a hired car. Overseas guests were invariably met at the airport by the second Rolls-Royce and, as far as she knew, Abel wasn’t expecting visitors.
The electronic device which opened the main gates to members of the household—other people had to announce themselves on an intercom—had also signalled her arrival in the staff quarters.
As she opened the driver’s door and swung out long booted legs, a young footman came out of the house.
‘Good evening, miss.’
‘Hello, John. How’s your cold?’
‘Better, thank you, miss.’
Flower gave him her keys. ‘Whose is that?’ she asked, with a nod at the other car.
‘I couldn’t say, miss. I’ve just this minute come on duty and, Mr Watson being on the telephone, I haven’t spoken to him yet.’
Watson was the butler. None of the servants had been in service with the Anstruthers. They had all been engaged by her grandfather through an agency for staff in London.
Leaving John to deal with her luggage and shopping and, later, to drive the car round to the garage in the former stable block, she went inside the house.
Before leaving London she had been to her hairdresser, who had added some silvery streaks to her naturally ash-blonde long hair and styled it in a silky mane which was not a la mode this autumn, but which suited the shape of her face, with its broad intelligent forehead concealed by a feathery fringe and obstinate jawline redeemed by a full, tender mouth.
At eighteen, nineteen and twenty, she had subscribed to every passing vogue. But now, having found her style, she ignored the vagaries of fashion unless they happened to suit her.
With one brief glance in a mirror to check that her lipstick was in order, she made her way to the drawing-room, a large and beautiful apartment not improved by the addition of two enormous velvet chesterfields and a number of over-stuffed armchairs upholstered in royal blue—which was Abel’s favourite colour—and whose bulbous shapes he preferred to the elegance of Hepplewhite and Chippendale.
The terms of his lease forbade him to make any structural alterations to the manor, but many of the Anstruthers’ furnishings had been consigned to the attics during his tenure and replaced with expensive modern pieces totally out of keeping with the style of the rooms, but which he thought an improvement.
Flower, whose taste had been educated during her visits to Emily’s house during the holidays from the boarding-school where they had met, had had difficulty in hiding her dismay when, during her absence, the charming four-poster in her room had been changed for a pop-starish round bed with a headboard incorporating various gadgets.
She had often wondered why her grandfather wanted to live in a historic house when he showed no appreciation of its finer points. He could have built an extravagant new house which would have served him much better in terms of comfort and convenience.
The explanation seemed to be that living at Bosanquet Manor gave him a sense of being not merely equal but superior to the class which, during his boyhood, had represented unattainable heights of power and grandeur. Now he was the top dog and they—as represented by the Anstruthers—were the underdogs.
To Flower, born two generations later, the social injustices of her grandfather’s youth were a thing of the past and better forgotten. She felt rather sorry for the dispossessed Anstruthers.
When she entered the drawing-room she found Abel ensconced in one of his royal-blue armchairs, holding a large cigar and speaking to a man who was seated with his back to the door.
Her grandfather did not rise from his chair when he saw her but she was aware that the visitor did, although she did not glance at him until she had greeted the old man with a smiling, ‘I’m back. How are you, darling?’ and a kiss on the top of his bald head.
‘Not too bad. Have you had a good time?’
‘Mm... super.’ She turned her smile on the man who was with him, the driver of the hired car.
The smile vanished from her face. Her eyes widened in disbelief.
Shorn of his dark flowing hair and curling moustache, and divested of his lace collar, there stood the hero of her girlish daydreams, Piers Anstruther. Well over six feet tall, with shoulders in proportion to his height, he was looking down at her with eyes so astonishingly blue that she realised the colours of the painting must have faded. But instead of looking amused, as he had while his portrait was painted, his expression now seemed rather stern.
‘This is young Anstruther, Flower. He’s come over from the States,’ said her grandfather.
He did not complete the introduction but left it to the younger man to say, ‘How do you do, Miss Dursley?’ and offer a lean suntanned hand.
Flower was still confused by his almost incredible likeness to the portrait. She felt he was Piers come to life, or Piers’ ghost; and as she responded to his gesture she was half afraid that before their fingers touched he would evaporate.
But the hand which closed firmly over hers was unmistakably flesh and blood.
Pulling herself together, she said, ‘You... you must forgive me for staring at you. It’s just that you’re so incredibly like the picture in the dining-room ... your ancestor Piers Anstruther. What brings you to England, Mr Anstruther?’
‘Mr Dursley’s letter to my father, offering to buy the house when the lease ends in nine months’ time,’ was his somewhat curt answer. ‘My father died a few weeks ago. The house is mine now. I don’t wish to sell it—or to renew the lease.’
‘As to that, I’ve an option to extend it for a further five years, which you’ll find it expensive to contest in a court of law,’ said Abel with rather malicious satisfaction.
Kind and generous when things went smoothly, he could be very unpleasant if his wishes were thwarted. Although nowadays not many people were in a position to thwart him.
As Flower sat down the other man resumed his seat. ‘I hope that won’t be necessary.’
If his father had died, he was no longer Mr Anstruther but Sir Whatever-his-name-was, she realised, looking him over.
He was dressed with comfortable casualness in a pale khaki cotton windcheater over a thin navy jersey and a blue cotton shirt, probably bought or mail ordered from Brooks Brothers’ shop in New York. Straight-legged trousers and soft leather loafers, immaculately polished, completed a mode of dress she recognised as what Americans called the preppie look.
His thick dark hair was brushed back and touched the collar of his shirt but was cut short in front of his ears. He had the slight five o’clock shadow of a gypsy-dark skin which took a tan quickly and easily. She could not see his teeth at the moment but she had no doubt they were those of someone who had always had regular checks and never eaten much sweet stuff. She put his age somewhere near thirty, and she seemed to have a vague memory that, at the time his parents had gone to live abroad, he had still been at Eton, the famous public school where generations of Anstruthers had been educated. Somehow, in spite of their financial difficulties, his parents had contrived to continue that family tradition.
Have you asked for tea, Dodo?’ she asked her grandfather.
‘You said you wouldn’t be late so I told Watson we’d ’ave it as soon as you arrived. He ought to have brought it by now. Give him a buzz, will you, Flower?’
In her first term at boarding-school Flower’s name had added to her unhappiness. The other girls had pretended to think it was spelt ‘flour’ and had made unkind jokes about it and about Dursley pork pies and her grandfather’s other food products. She had longed to be called Jane or Mary instead of what one girl had called ‘a silly, made-up, film star’s name’.
It was Emily’s mother who had told her this was not true; her ‘lovely and unusual’ name had been popular in the eig
hteenth century but used only rarely since then.
Before she could use the house telephone Abel had installed in every room the double doors opened and Watson entered with the tea-tray. He was followed by John, who closed the doors and quickly arranged a table beside her chair.
‘What part of America have you come from?’ she asked their visitor while these preparations were going on.
‘From New York.’
She thought he was going to leave it at that but, after a brief pause, he went on, ‘My parents lived in Arizona, where the very dry climate improved my mother’s health for some years. Have you been to America, Miss Dursley?’
‘Only to Palm Beach one winter. The shops were stunning but the average age was about eighty.’
‘So I should imagine.’
He looked away, his blue gaze scanning the room he had last seen in his teens.
She could understand his interest in it. At the same time she felt slightly piqued by his clear lack of interest in her. She was not vain, but she was a striking young woman who made the most of her assets, and she was accustomed to receiving some tacit acknowledgment of the fact.
As far as this man was concerned she might have been Abel’s sixty-year-old spinster sister rather than his granddaughter. He didn’t seem to have noticed that she had a good figure, long legs and an unblemished creamy complexion which more than one man had told her he’d wanted to stroke from the moment they were introduced.
‘Did your wife come over with you?’ she asked, seeking a reason for his indifference.
‘I’m not married.’
‘In that case I don’t see your objection to renewing my lease,’ said her grandfather. ‘If you were a family man I could understand it. But a bachelor’s got no need for a place this size. Unless the fact of the matter is that you’ve found an American girl whose father is willing to pay to keep it up in return for her being a Lady?’
Fortunately Watson and John had left the room by this time. Even so, inwardly Flower winced at Abel’s crudity. He shouldn’t have said that. It would only put the younger man’s back up.
