Obsession

by Claire Lorrimer

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Claire Lorrimer from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A Selection of Titles by Claire Lorrimer from Severn House

  BENEATH THE SUN

  CONNIE’S DAUGHTER

  DECEPTION

  THE FAITHFUL HEART

  DEAD CENTRE

  FOR ALWAYS

  INFATUATION

  NEVER SAY GOODBYE

  OVER MY DEAD BODY

  AN OPEN DOOR

  THE RECKONING

  RELENTLESS STORM

  THE REUNION

  THE SEARCH FOR LOVE

  SECOND CHANCE

  THE SECRET OF QUARRY HOUSE

  THE SHADOW FALLS

  TROUBLED WATERS

  TRUTH TO TELL

  A VOICE IN THE DARK

  THE WOVEN THREAD

  DEAD RECKONING

  OBSESSION

  OBSESSION

  Claire Lorrimer

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 by Claire Lorrimer

  The right of Claire Lorrimer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Lorrimer, Claire

  Obsession.

  1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)–Fiction.

  2. Widows–Fiction. 3. Nonbiological mothers–Fiction.

  4. Great Britain–History–Victoria, 1837-1901–Fiction.

  I. Title

  823.9’14-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8324-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-449-2 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Charlotte, Tom and Arthur with very much love and my thanks. C.L.

  PROLOGUE

  January, 1860

  ‘Bessie, I can’t wait to tell you. I’ve met him … the man I want to marry … I’ve fallen in love and he’s the handsomest man you’ve ever seen … and he smiled at me … and he asked Papa why he’d kept such a pretty daughter hidden in the schoolroom and wanted to know how old I was and …’

  Harriet broke off, too breathless with excitement to continue.

  The rosy-cheeked, freckled face of the gamekeeper’s eldest daughter was smiling as she helped the fifteen-year-old girl out of the pelisse jacket and dress she had been wearing for luncheon in her father’s shooting lodge.

  ‘Papa said that because I behaved so well at the luncheon, I might act as his hostess tonight at dinner,’ she continued, ‘so I want to wear my prettiest dress, Bessie.’

  She sat down at her dressing table in her chemisette and regarded her reflection in the mirror.

  ‘If only I was pretty!’ She sighed. ‘My mouth’s too big and my nose is too short and I just wish I had blue eyes like my sisters. Hazel isn’t a proper colour at all!’

  Never having heard Harriet pay any attention to her appearance before, her maid hastened to reassure her. ‘’Course you’re pretty, Miss Harriet. Haven’t I told you, you would grow up prettier even than those older sisters of yours?’ She reached for the silver-backed hair brush and began to untangle the young girl’s chestnut curls, adding: ‘’Cept when you’s all messed up playing with the little ones down the farm.’

  Harriet laughed. ‘But you know I love playing with the children,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have at least ten of my own when I get married.’

  Her face was glowing as she jumped up from the dressing-table stool and, grabbing hold of Bessie’s arms, waltzed her round the room in her chemisette and pantilettes.

  ‘He’s staying for the night!’ she said. ‘So I’ll see him again, and Bessie, I heard his father invite Papa to join him for grouse shooting in Scotland in the summer and I’ll be sixteen by then and maybe Papa will take me with him.’ Her face fell as she released her maid and sat down on the bed. ‘I just wish they didn’t live so far away from Sussex!’ She sighed. ‘He said Leicestershire is nearly two hundred miles from here!’

  A minute later, she was smiling again.

  ‘He said they had come on a train which was much, much faster than a coach and asked me if I’d ever ridden on one, Deerskeep Manor not being near a railway station, and he said he was sure I would enjoy it as it goes so quickly.’

  Bessie put away the discarded garments in the wardrobe and brought over the new dimity dress with cornflower-blue bows which her young mistress would wear that evening, saying: ‘You’ve not yet told me who this young man is you say’s going to be your future husband, Miss Harriet! Any road, I reckon you’s much too young to be having such fancies.’

  ‘Charity was only eighteen when she got engaged, so I’m not too young. I’m sixteen next birthday, Bessie, and he and his father are staying here tonight so you can help Mary take up the hot water jugs when they are changing for dinner and then you can see for yourself how handsome he is … oh, and his name is Brook, Brook Edgerton, and his mother died like mine but his aunt brought him up. He went to Rugby which is a boys’ boarding school and he has been to Jamaica because his family have sugar plantations there, and …’

  ‘You’s going to be late down to dinner if you don’t stop chattering!’ Bessie interrupted as she fastened Harriet into her hooped petticoat and then into the new dress, shaking out the layers of flounces that decorated the full skirt. She then fetched a lace collar, and a clean ribbon for Harriet’s hair.

  It was a long time, she thought, since she had seen her young mistress so animated. It was the first time that the young girl had ever been permitted to attend a shooting party luncheon as only the wives of the guns and servants who carried the food to the shooting lodge were normally present. Training to be a lady’s maid, Bessie had never been one of the household servants who attended these lunch parties.

  Harriet sat down once more at her dressing table whilst Bessie braided the back of her hair, entwining it with the blue ribbon and then
anchoring it securely into a smooth knot with a pearl pin, and started once more to regale the maid with further descriptions of the luncheon, and of the handsome Brook Edgerton.

  ‘He’s Sir Walter Edgerton’s son,’ she elaborated. ‘He’s been abroad these past three years and he told me he was twenty-four years old.’ Finally running out of breath, she came to a halt.

  Bessie shook her head. ‘Best you stop thinking too much about the young gentleman,’ she cautioned as she completed the arrangement of Harriet’s hair. ‘If he be as handsome as you say, like as not he’ll have found himself a wife long afore you’s old enough to be wed.’

  Harriet sighed. ‘I just wish I was older now!’ she repeated wistfully. ‘I’m tired of people saying, ‘Goodness me, all your sisters married and you still a little girl!’

  She paused for a moment, her expression thoughtful.

  ‘I suppose if my sisters hadn’t been so much older than me, I would never have been allowed to have you as my friend, Bessie.’

  Nor would she herself be so blessed! the older girl thought, recalling the beautiful sunny day some ten years ago when she had first set eyes on the little girl from the manor. Miss Harriet had been leaning over the farm gate watching her as she came out from her house with a plate of scraps for the hens. Their cottage had been given to her father by Harriet’s father, Sir Charles Drake, when he had employed him as his gamekeeper. Bessie was the eldest of his eight children.

  Although in the past she had often seen the family from the big house in church on a Sunday, Bessie had only very occasionally caught sight of the youngest girl as she came out of church, her hand held by the Drakes’ nanny.

  On a bright spring afternoon, Bessie had been astonished to see the five-year-old child unaccompanied, although she knew the nanny had recently left Sir Charles’ employ in order to go to Ireland to look after his eldest daughter’s babies. A governess was now in charge of Miss Harriet, the one remaining child.

  According to Bessie’s mother, the woman, having first been employed when Miss Una, the eldest of the young ladies was only six, was well into her sixties now and ready to retire, but Sir Charles had begged her to stay on as his motherless youngest would be feeling the loss of her familiar nanny and might need the security of someone she knew to give the little girl lessons in the morning and supervise her daily routine.

  Sir Charles had agreed that the governess should enjoy a rest in the afternoons after settling the child with suitable activities not requiring adult supervision. These were of necessity indoor occupations, and Mary, the nursery maid, reported that she often saw the little girl looking wistfully out from the schoolroom window, and heard her say how much she wished she could spend the afternoon outside picking blackberries or strawberries in the summer, or that she had a friend with whom she could play.

  It was on one such day when the sun was dancing on the white pages of the book Harriet was tired of reading, that she had crept quietly down the servants’ staircase, past the butler’s pantry and out through the garden door.

  She had known at once where she was going – across the lawn, through the vegetable garden and down to the gamekeeper’s cottage. She had heard the parlourmaid say that the gamekeeper, Mr Benson’s Labrador had birthed thirteen puppies, and that he intended to keep the most promising two to train as gun dogs.

  Agog to see them, Harriet had slipped out of the house unnoticed.

  Although Bessie’s numerous brothers and sisters ran all but wild round their yard and the nearby farm, the older ones looking after the younger, she knew from her mother’s accounts of the days when she’d worked as a parlourmaid at the manor that the young ladies were never allowed to go out of doors unsupervised. Their late mother, Lady Drake, had been extremely protective of her offspring, but after she had died in childbirth Sir Charles had taken no interest in nursery affairs.

  By the time Harriet was old enough to escape from the schoolroom that spring day, Bessie, the gamekeeper’s eldest daughter, was fifteen years old and more than happy to show the little girl where to find the hen’s eggs, how to feed the ferrets and, best of all, she took her to play for a while with the lively pack of golden-haired puppies. With natural hospitality, she invited Harriet into the kitchen to sample her mother’s home-made scones and freshly baked bread still warm from the oven.

  Mrs Benson threw up her arms in distress when Bessie explained Harriet’s presence and the child confessed that she’d not had permission to leave the house.

  ‘Lawk’s-amercy!’ she’d gasped. ‘Whatever can you be thinking of, Bess? Now take Miss Harriet straight back to the manor, quick as you can. Like as not they’ll all be out searching for her!’ She’d glanced at the kitchen clock on the mantelpiece above the range and looked even more anxious. She had turned then to Harriet, adding: ‘It’s not that I’m not wanting you here, Miss Harriet, but …’

  ‘But I like being with Bessie!’ Harriet had pleaded. ‘I want her to be my friend. I haven’t got any friends!’

  Mrs Benson had shaken her head, her expression compassionate, as she’d said gently, ‘It wouldn’t be proper, Miss Harriet.’

  The same words were repeated by Harriet’s governess when the distraught woman caught sight of the somewhat grubby figure of her missing charge standing in the big hall of the manor, and heard the child’s rebellious voice insisting that she be allowed to spend time with Bessie when she wanted.

  ‘And I SHALL go there!’ she’d stated, not a little frightened as she heard herself rebelling outright for the first time against a grown-up’s ruling.

  The day had ended with one small tearful child standing in front of her father in the drawing room. A quick look at his bewhiskered, unsmiling face had undermined her confidence.

  ‘Miss Perkins has told me about your escapade this afternoon,’ he said, ‘for which very serious misdemeanor she wishes me to punish you. However, I do not intend to do so as I understand you were never actually forbidden to leave the house on your own.’ He cleared his throat, touched quite unexpectedly by the child’s likeness to her dead mother. ‘However …’ he repeated, ‘… I have my suspicions that you were aware of such an embargo. No matter! You are quite old enough now to have the ways of the world explained to you – or perhaps I should say the way society expects us to conform to its rules. You may sit down.’

  He waited until the little girl was sitting facing him in an armchair which looked far too big for her small person. He cleared his throat a second time, unsure suddenly how to explain the somewhat complicated division of the populace in simple enough fashion for the child to understand.

  ‘It’s like this,’ he began. ‘The population is divided into three main classes depending on their parents’ status. We, people like ourselves, belong to the upper classes, who employ people to look after us and our properties; then there are the people in trades or businesses, who are in the middle classes, and then those who serve us. They belong to the working class. These classes do not mix with us – er, that is to say with ladies and gentlemen like ourselves. We do not as a rule speak to lower-class people unless it is to those to whom we give orders such as our servants or the tradesmen and craftsmen who provide our needs and we pay them to do so.’

  Harriet had regarded her father wide-eyed. She herself talked happily to all the servants in and out of doors. Her father’s words did not make a lot of sense, nor did they answer the important matter on her mind.

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ she said, hoping to please him, ‘but why mustn’t I be friends with Bessie? I haven’t got anyone to play with except that stupid boy who comes with the vicar’s wife when she calls, and silly Cousin Jane who screams when she sees a spider. And I’m bored of Miss Perkins’s lessons and the books she wants me to read and I know she only does it to keep me from bothering her when her legs hurt!’

  Sir Charles regarded the pretty but rebellious face of his youngest daughter – the unwanted after-thought who had been responsible for his wife’s death – and wondere
d if the child apprehended what he had attempted to explain to her about the strict divisions of the classes. He attempted a more forthright explanation, saying, ‘That girl who took you under her wing this afternoon … Benson’s daughter, I gather … well, as you know, Benson is my gamekeeper so he works for me and therefore he and his family belong to the working class. As I told you, they are quite separate from us and it would be against the rules for you to visit them socially. Do you understand?’

  Harriet shook her head. ‘I just want Bessie to be my friend, Papa! I know Miss Perkins is old so it’s not her fault she doesn’t like doing the things I want to do, and there’s no one for me to play with and Bessie showed me how to feed the chickens and where the squirrels build their homes called drays and …’

  As he continued listening to all the harmless enjoyments of his errant daughter’s afternoon, her father found himself questioning his own dictates. Benson’s wife had been their senior parlourmaid before she had left to marry him and, as a consequence, she should know the social boundaries. It was highly unlikely that his small daughter would suffer any harm or disrespect in the company of their offspring.

  Thus it was, Sir Charles decided that such visits could do Harriet no harm whilst she was so young. Having relented, as much for his own need to be free of the problem, as for Harriet’s sake, he was obliged to send for her disapproving governess and inform her that Harriet might be permitted, whenever she had no lessons or piano practice to perform, to spend an afternoon twice a week visiting the Bensons.

  Ten years had passed since that day, and by now the two girls had grown close despite the difference in their ages and social standings. Harriet regarded Bessie as a friend, but despite Harriet’s wish to be called by her Christian name, the older girl never forgot what she knew to be her place. Being trained now by the housekeeper as a lady’s maid to Harriet, this allowed the two girls to spend some time together in Harriet’s room.

  Whilst Bessie was assisting Harriet to get dressed, Sir Charles’s valet was also busy laying out his master’s evening clothes and thinking him unusually silent. As a rule, Sir Charles would have been either enthusing or complaining about the day’s bag, but his thoughts were not on the afternoon’s beat – they were centred upon his young daughter. He had been surprised when, having half-heartedly agreed to permit her to join the ladies for luncheon in the shooting lodge to see how ably she had conducted herself, he had noticed how much time his friend, Walter Edgerton’s, son had spent chatting to Harriet, and questioned how the young man’s attention could possibly have been captivated by so young a girl. As his valet slipped his black tailcoat over his frilled white shirt and waistcoat, he decided that Edgerton’s boy would make a good match for her in a few years’ time.