Kitabı oku: «Worthy Of Marriage»

CHAPTER ONE

ON THE morning of her release, Lucia Graham felt a mixture of exhilaration and dread.

She had been longing for freedom since the day she was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. As matters turned out she had not served the full term ‘inside’. She was being allowed an early release.

But she knew that the world she was returning to would not be the world she had left. Now she had a prison record, and little chance of supporting herself in any congenial way. Who would want to employ a convicted criminal?

After she had changed into her own clothes—they smelt musty after so long in storage—she was taken to the office of the prison’s deputy governor.

‘You are bound to feel apprehensive, Graham,’ said the older woman. ‘Try to put the past behind you and make a completely fresh start. Easier said than done, I know, but fortunately there is someone who wants to help you rebuild your life.’

‘Who?’ Lucia asked bewilderedly.

‘You will find that out shortly. A car is waiting outside. Goodbye and good luck.’

The deputy governor shook hands, making it clear she did not intend to explain her statement.

When, shortly afterwards, Lucia stepped through the wicket, an opening in one of the prison’s massive double doors, she expected the car waiting for her to be a small saloon of the kind run by social workers. She couldn’t think of anyone else who would want to help her.

There was only one car in the parking bay in front of the prison. It was an imposingly large and new-looking black limousine. As she stared at it, a uniformed driver got out and came towards her.

‘Miss Lucia Graham?’

‘Yes.’

‘This way, please, miss.’

He led her towards the limousine and opened the rear offside passenger door, holding it for her as if she were someone respectable, not a jailbird.

About an hour later, after passing through a pretty village in an area that seemed to have escaped the urban development of much of southern England, the car entered the grounds of a large old house partially covered with Virginia creeper. Near the house the drive forked, one way leading round to the back of the building, the other opening into a large oval of gravel. Slowly, in order not to splatter the gravel on the surrounding lawn, the chauffeur drove in a half circle, bringing the car to a standstill a few yards from the front door.

About five minutes earlier, Lucia had seen him make a brief call on a mobile telephone. Evidently he had been notifying someone in the house of their arrival. As he opened the door for her, the front door opened and a woman appeared.

Stepping out of the car, Lucia thought at first that the stranger was in her late forties or early fifties. She was wearing a white shirt and blue denim skirt. A braided leather belt circled her slim waist. Her fair hair was brushed back from her forehead and cut in a classic bob. Her only make-up seemed to be lipstick.

‘Miss Graham…welcome. My name is Rosemary.’ She held out her hand, taking Lucia’s in a firm clasp. ‘I’m sure you are longing for some coffee. Come in and relax and I will explain the situation. You must be curious to know why you are here.’

After releasing Lucia’s hand, she took her lightly by the elbow to usher her into the house as if she were a welcome guest.

As they entered a spacious hall dominated by a wide flight of stairs with its lowest steps gracefully curved, Lucia noticed at once that the walls were adorned with numerous paintings.

So were the walls in the large drawing room where coffee things were set out on a table near the open French windows overlooking a terrace and a large well-kept garden.

With a gesture inviting Lucia to seat herself in a comfortable armchair, Rosemary sat down in another and reached for the tall china coffee pot.

‘Miss Harris and I went to the same school,’ she said, referring to the prison governor. ‘She is much younger than I am. She was one of the new girls I had to take under my wing when I was in my last year. We’ve met and talked at several Old Girls’ reunions. If she hadn’t known me, she might not have let me persuade her to have you brought here.’

Lucia said nothing. Compared with the place she had come from, this beautiful high-ceilinged room seemed overwhelmingly luxurious. She felt as if she might be dreaming and, at any moment, would wake up to find it was all an illusion.

The other woman handed her a cup of fragrant coffee. ‘Please help yourself to cream and sugar, if you take them.’

It was then that Lucia realised Rosemary was older than she had thought. The front of the house had been in shade. Here in the south-facing drawing room, the mid-morning sunlight revealed a network of lines round her hostess’s eyes and mouth. She was at least sixty-five.

‘I won’t keep you in suspense any longer,’ said Rosemary, smiling at her. ‘When I left school, I wanted to be an artist. During my first year at art college, I met my husband. He wanted me to concentrate on being a wife and mother. To please him—I was terribly in love—I let my ambitions go.’

She paused for a moment, obviously remembering the time when she had made that decision.

‘Two years ago my husband died. Like most widows, I found it hard to adjust to living alone. I have four very dear children who are enormously supportive. But they have their own lives to lead. One of them thought I should start painting again. So I did. Now I need someone to accompany me on painting trips abroad. I don’t fancy going on my own. I thought you might like to come with me…as a combination of painting companion and private courier. How does the idea strike you?’

From her own point of view, it struck Lucia as a gift from the gods, but also as an act of madness on Rosemary’s part.

‘Why me?’ she said.

‘Because, as I understand it, you have nowhere to go, and you have the right qualifications. You’re an accomplished painter and, equally importantly, a naturally caring person, as you proved by nursing your father so devotedly.’

Lucia stared at her, baffled. ‘How can you trust me?’ she asked.

‘My dear, you were convicted of fraud…not murder. In my view it was unnecessarily harsh to send you to prison. There are situations in which any of us may be driven to acts quite foreign to our normal natures. You found yourself in one of those situations. What you did wasn’t right…but it wasn’t the kind of thing to put you beyond the pale of decent society. At least I don’t think so.’

She had scarcely finished speaking when the door opened and they were joined by a tall, dark-haired man who would have been formally dressed in a city suit had he not taken off the coat, now slung over his arm, removed his tie and opened the collar of his shirt.

As he entered the room, his face showed the smiling expectation of someone sure of finding someone he liked there. This changed to surprise as he took in Lucia’s presence. It was clear that he didn’t recognise her.

She recognised him immediately. How could she ever forget him? This was the man who had played an important part in bringing her to trial and sending her to prison. His contemptuous glances as he stood in the witness box and she sat in the dock, listening to the evidence that had led to her conviction, had haunted her during the long, often sleepless nights in her cell.

‘Oh…hello, darling…I wasn’t expecting to see you today,’ said Rosemary, looking slightly disconcerted. She turned to Lucia. ‘This is my son Grey.’ She introduced him as if they had no previous connection with each other. ‘Grey, this is Lucia Graham.’

Clearly the name didn’t ring a bell with him. At her trial, he had struck Lucia as a man with an excellent memory. But the day of their previous encounter had not been as important to him as to her. Once she had been dealt with, he had probably deleted her from his mental database.

Also she had looked different then. Her hair had been fashionably short and colour-rinsed. Now it was long and back to its natural light brown. She was thinner. Few people would recognise her as the young woman whose face had appeared in both the tabloid and broad-sheet newspapers.

He came towards her.

Instinctively Lucia stood up, bracing herself for the moment when recognition dawned.

‘How do you do?’ He offered his hand.

She felt compelled to respond and to force a smile, but being friendly didn’t feel right. So this was why Rosemary hadn’t given her surname; knowing that, if she had, Lucia would have got to hell out of here.

After releasing her hand, Grey Calderwood turned his attention to his mother, stooping to brush a kiss on her cheek.

Straightening, he said, ‘It’s been a tough week. I felt like a day in the country.’

Someone else came into the room: a grey-haired woman in a plain blouse and skirt. She was carrying a cup and saucer. ‘I saw you coming from upstairs, Mr Grey,’ she said, smiling up at him.

‘Thanks, Braddy.’ He took the cup from her. As she was leaving, he filled it with coffee. ‘I’m not interrupting anything, I hope?’ The question was directed at both his mother and her guest. Then, to Lucia, he said, ‘Mine being the only car outside, I take it you live locally, Ms Graham?’

‘I hope Lucia is going to live here,’ said Rosemary Calderwood. ‘I’ve just offered her the job of being my painting partner.’

‘Oh really?’ Leaving the cup on the table, her son moved to the back of a nearby wing chair and pushed it closer to where they were sitting. As he sat down and crossed his long legs, he looked at Lucia more closely than he had before.

Any moment now…she thought.

And a few seconds later it happened: he switched on a different part of his brain and it processed her name and came up with all the facts it had been ignoring.

His grey eyes suddenly cold, he said, ‘We’ve met before…in court. You’re the forger.’

Lucia said a silent goodbye to the gift from the gods. She ought to have known it couldn’t work out. Life just wasn’t like that.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘What the hell are you doing in this house?’ He didn’t raise his voice, but his eyes were like lasers.

‘Lucia is here at my invitation,’ said his mother. ‘I knew she was being released this morning. I sent Jackson to fetch her. As you know, I was never happy about the court’s decision, but now it’s over and done with. She needs help getting back on her feet, and I need help with my travel plans.’

‘Mother, you’re out of your mind.’

Before Mrs Calderwood could reply, a telephone on the small table beside her chair began to ring.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to Lucia. Then, ‘Hello? Mary…how nice to hear from you. Would you mind holding on for a minute? I’ll be right back.’ As she rose from her chair, she said to the others, ‘I’ll take this call in the study. Do help yourself to more coffee, Lucia.’ A moment later she had stepped outside and vanished.

With the instinctive reflex of a man brought up in a family where old-fashioned courtesies were maintained, Grey Calderwood had risen while his mother was leaving the room. Now, still on his feet, he scowled down at Lucia. ‘It isn’t a year since you were sentenced. What are you doing out of prison?’

‘I’ve been allowed early-release.’ She leaned forward to pick up the coffee pot. ‘Would you like another cup, Mr Calderwood?’

He shook his head. ‘Has my mother been in touch with you while you were in prison?’

‘No, never. This morning, before I was released, the governor told me there was someone willing to help me rebuild my life. A car was waiting outside the prison gates. I met Mrs Calderwood when I got here.’

‘My mother has a quixotic nature. Sometimes she allows it to overrule her common sense,’ he said coldly. ‘The governor would have done better to put you in touch with the various organisations that help released prisoners. While he’s taking you to wherever you wish to go, you can use Jackson’s mobile to call a Citizens’ Advice Bureau. They’ll put you in touch with the right people to help you.’

It took all Lucia’s concentration to keep her hand steady as she refilled her cup. Before her arrest and imprisonment, she had been a self-confident person, a good mixer. They were characteristics, once effortless and taken for granted, that she would have to relearn. She was all right with someone friendly, like Mrs Calderwood, but the son, now that he had turned hostile, was harder for her to handle. He sapped her shaky amour propre merely by looking at her.

‘I would like to accept the post your mother has offered me,’ she told him.

‘Out of the question,’ he snapped. ‘If my mother is determined to go on these trips, it’s essential she has someone with her who has impeccable references and will be absolutely reliable. Not someone fresh out of prison for a serious offence.’ His voice had the same cold ring she remembered from the court room.

‘But not the kind of offence that makes me an unsafe person to be in charge of young children or elderly people.’

‘That depends. In my judgment you are not a suitable companion for my mother.’

‘Isn’t that for her to decide?’

His mouth compressed in a hard line. The dark grey eyes flashed like steel blades.

‘Perhaps a hand-out will persuade you to see reason.’ He went to the chair where he had left his coat and took a cheque book from an inside pocket. As she watched he uncapped an expensive black fountain pen.

She watched him writing the cheque, wondering what he would consider a suitable pay-off. Although she had disliked the man from the moment he stepped into the witness box and looked across the court room as if, in his opinion, she was as despicable as a drug dealer or a child abuser, a part of her mind was forced to admire the articulation of his long strong fingers.

‘There…that should cover your overheads until they find you a job.’ He held out the cheque.

Lucia took it, curious to see what he was prepared to pay her. Her parents had not been well-off even when both were working, her father as a reporter on a provincial city’s evening newspaper, her mother as a public librarian. There had never been a time when Lucia hadn’t had to be careful with her own earnings. She couldn’t imagine being able to scrawl a cheque with three noughts as casually as people dropped spare change in a charity worker’s collecting tin.

The amount he had written in figures and numbers took her breath away. Particularly as there was no element of kindness involved. Clearly, he didn’t want to help her. She felt he wouldn’t have cared if her sentence had been ten times as long.

‘But don’t take it into your head that there might be more where that came from,’ he said cuttingly. ‘It’s a one-off payment that will never be repeated. I’m making it on condition that you vanish from our lives and don’t reappear…ever. In the circumstances, it’s exceedingly generous of me to offer you any help. If you show up again, you’ll regret it. I can make big trouble for you—and will. You had better believe that.’

‘Oh, I do. You already have,’ she said dryly, folding the cheque in two and then in four.

‘You brought that on yourself, though I dare say you’ll never admit it. You’d rather believe the sob story cooked up by your lawyer.’

There was no point in arguing with him. He was the type of man who, privileged from birth, could never understand the actions that had led to her arrest.

Mrs Calderwood rejoined them. ‘I’m sorry I had to leave you.’

‘Ms Graham has changed her mind about the job you offered her,’ said Grey. ‘She realises it wouldn’t suit her.’

His mother was not a fool. She obviously knew that her son liked to have his own way.

Looking disappointed, she said, ‘Did Grey make up your mind, or is that your own decision?’

Acting on instinct, Lucia had palmed the cheque before Mrs Calderwood saw it. Knowing that Grey would make a dangerous enemy but still impelled to defy him, she said, ‘Mr Calderwood would like it to be my decision, but it’s not. If you’re really sure I will suit you, I’d be happy to work for you.’

‘That’s splendid,’ said Rosemary Calderwood, ignoring her son’s silent but visible fury. ‘Now I’m sure you must be longing for a bath and a change of clothes. I’ve already sorted out some things left here by my daughters that you can wear till we have time to go shopping.’

‘I thought you might need some more coffee,’ said the grey-haired woman, coming back.

‘This is Mrs Bradley, my housekeeper,’ said Rosemary. ‘Miss Graham is joining us, Braddy. Would you show her where she can bath and change before lunch?’

‘One moment,’ Grey said sharply. ‘Mother, I don’t often interfere in your arrangements, but this time I must. I cannot allow you to employ this young woman.’

He looked so stern and fierce that Lucia half expected his mother to yield to the force of his authority. She had already admitted to letting her late husband quash her youthful ambitions. It seemed unlikely she would resist her son if he chose to put his foot down.

But it seemed that Rosemary’s will had strengthened not weakened with age. She said pleasantly, ‘I appreciate your concern for my welfare, my dear, but please don’t use that dictatorial tone to me. Your father laid down the law for fifty years. From now on I shall do as I think best.’ With a sweeping gesture of her hand she sent Mrs Bradley and Lucia on their way, before saying to her son, ‘You are staying to lunch, I hope, darling? I’m the cook today. We’re having lamb cutlets with tapenade.’

It was a long time since Lucia had had a leisurely wallow in a bath of warm scented water. Even then her bath accessories had not been of the quality provided for her use in this luxurious bathroom. As well as a pale blue face cloth to match the thick fluffy towels, there was a huge sponge and a two-handled strap with a strip of loofah on one side and towelling on the other. On a recessed tiled shelf in the wall behind the bath there were bottles and tubes of foams, gels and bath oils. There was nothing anyone could want in the way of toiletries that hadn’t been provided, including the pretty shower cap still hanging on its peg and the white terry robe draped over a heated towel rail at one end of the bath-cum-shower alcove as an alternative to the towels.

Seeing a hair dryer on the counter surrounding the handbasin, she had asked Mrs Bradley if there would be time to wash her hair. The housekeeper had said yes, plenty of time. Lunch would be served at one, leaving an hour to spare.

The bath, designed to accommodate a tall male house guest, was long enough for Lucia to slide down and immerse her hair. As she was doing this, there was a peremptory knock on the unlocked door and Grey Calderwood stalked in.