Scandals

‘What makes a person like that, Jay?’ Amber asked sadly. ‘It’s as though Cassandra enjoys being cruel and mean. I know that Greg was wrong to fall in love with Caroline, but no one need have known they had been lovers. Cassandra was the one who told Caroline’s husband about the relationship.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid that I too can’t bring myself to forgive her for the harm she did,’ Jay agreed sombrely.

Amber gave a small shiver. Despite the warmth from the logs burning in the grate of the elegant Carrara marble fireplace, the room suddenly seemed cold, as though the chill of past tragedies had somehow swept in.

‘We’ll never know if poor Caroline’s death was an accident, and she missed her footing and fell into the lake, or if she deliberately took her own life because Cassandra had exposed her infidelity to Lord Fitton Legh. Caroline and Greg paid such a dreadfully heavy price for their affair: Greg disinherited by our grandmother and sent to Hong Kong, and Caroline facing divorce and disgrace. I often wonder if Cassandra would have been more compassionate if it hadn’t been for her own feelings for Caroline. She was so passionately in love with her. Do you think Cassandra went on to marry Lord Fitton Legh because he had been Caroline’s husband?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jay admitted. His cousin was an enigma to him, a difficult spiteful girl who had turned into an embittered and cruel woman.

‘I do wish that she hadn’t married Lord Fitton Legh, Jay. She always was a very unkind stepmother for poor John, and she is even now, despite the fact that he and Janey are so very kind to her.’

‘John feels he has a moral obligation to carry out the terms of his father’s will, not just to the letter but above and beyond it, and his father did stipulate that John must provide well for Cassandra. You know how highly John thought of his father.’

‘Yes,’ Amber acknowledged, ‘but that makes it all the more upsetting that he was such a cold and distant father to John, although of course…’ She stopped and looked uncertainly at her husband.

‘Except that John may not be his child, you mean?’ Jay supplied. He saw her face and added quietly, ‘Yes, I know that your cousin Greg believed that John was his child—’

‘Because Caroline Fitton Legh had told him so,’ Amber pointed out, ‘but in truth she could have told Greg that he was John’s father because it was what she wanted to believe herself

‘None the less, Lord Fitton Legh brought John up as his son.’

‘And John worshipped him. Him and Fitton. Fitton is his life. Janey complains that sometimes she thinks the house and the land mean more to him than either she does or their sons. John isn’t very good at articulating his feelings and I do sometimes wonder if their marriage is as happy as we thought it would be when they first married. It would destroy John, I think, if he were ever to suspect that Greg, and not the late Lord Fitton Legh, was his father, and that he himself had no right to the title or to Fitton.’

‘So have we now finally accounted for everyone?’ Jay asked ruefully.

‘Yes,’ Amber confirmed, looking up as they both heard the familiar sound of the tea trolley outside the drawing-room door.‘Here’s Mrs Leggit with the tea,’she announced unnecessarily, smiling at their housekeeper as she came in. ‘We’ve just been discussing Christmas, Mrs Leggit. It would be lovely if we have snow.’

‘They’ve had some already up in Buxton, or so I’ve heard,’ the housekeeper answered, adding as she headed for the door, ‘Mind you, they are much higher up there, than we are down here.’

‘Christmas, the family and snow. Wouldn’t that be perfect?’ Amber smiled at Jay as she handed him his tea.

‘Perfect,’ he agreed.

Chapter Two (#ulink_493874d9-6b68-5905-9bcd-36475589a11a)

It was snowing and Olivia hated snow in New York. It wasn’t like proper snow at all – not like snow in Aspen, or Switzerland. New York’s snow made yellow cab drivers even more bad-tempered than they were ordinarily, and turned to slush on the sidewalks. She just hoped that it didn’t snow heavily enough to ground the planes at JFK so that her flight to Manchester was cancelled. To Manchester and to Robert.

Her rich chestnut shoulder-length hair gleamed with health as she stepped out of Vanity Fair magazine’s reception and waited for the lift to take her back down to the lobby. Tall and slender, her classically elegant features and blue eyes, enhanced by discreet makeup, Olivia carried with her an air of calm confidence that right now belied the excitement she felt inside. Soon she would be seeing Robert. She sighed ruefully at herself. When was she going to grow up and behave like a proper twenty-five-year-old and not a wide-eyed teenager in the grip of her first crush? Never, probably, where Robert was concerned, she admitted. She had loved him for so long that she couldn’t imagine not loving him, she admitted as she stepped out of the lift into the lobby of the building that housed Si Newhouse’s publishing empire of glossy magazines. She was wearing the new butter-soft leather boots she’d seen in Barneys and not been able to resist, and they were about as suitable for slushy pavements as a pair of high-heeled summer sandals. The hem of her long dark cream cashmere coat would also, no doubt, be marked, but she’d felt she had to wear it since that Mecca of fashion, Vogue magazine, also had its offices in the building. She was sure she’d seen Christy Turlington, one of the so-called supermodels, in the lobby when she’d come through.

At least now she’d delivered the article she’d been working on for Vanity Fair, a real coup for her, and she was keeping everything crossed that they liked it, even if the deadline had meant that she’d had to stay home instead of accompany her parents and younger brother on their flight this morning.

Still, it wouldn’t be long before she was following them, and then there’d be Denham, her grandparents, Christmas, the whole family and Robert.

Engrossed in the pleasure of thinking about her cousin, she almost walked straight into the man heading for the lift, her stomach clenching in dismay and dislike when she looked up and recognised who he was.

Tait Cabot Forbes, political investigative reporter sans equal, sans pity for his victims, sans everything, really, that made a human being human. Tait was a walking, talking, writing law book, looking for someone to break one of those laws so that he could pillory them without mercy. He could have built a skyscraper out of the reputations he had shredded so mercilessly in his freelance newspaper articles and on his TV programmes, and she hated him.

There had been a time when Olivia had actually admired him, and even seen him as something of a hero for his brilliant exposés of those whose moral failings were damaging humanity, but that had been before he had decided to wage war on her parents.

Family meant a great deal to Olivia – all her family, but most especially her parents and her teenage brother. Olivia didn’t just love her parents, she respected and admired them, and to have their reputation besmirched all over the pages of the New York press by a man who was notorious for bringing down those he targeted had been an assault on them she could never forgive.

‘Well, well, if it isn’t the doggedly devoted daughter,’ Tait greeted her. ‘Still public enemy number one, am I? I don’t suppose that exchanging Christmas kisses is in order then?’ he teased when Olivia tried to step past him.

She hadn’t intended to lower herself to speak to him but his comment proved too much for her self-control.

‘I’d rather kiss a rat,’ she told him angrily.

‘Flattery. It does it for me every time,’ Tait retorted, giving her what she thought of as a shark smile, all polished white teeth in a face tanned by a lifetime of summers spent sailing off Cape Cod.

He was good-looking, Olivia acknowledged grudgingly, if one liked that big healthy Eastern Seaboard all-American male look. In fact his hair and eyes were dark enough for him to have Italian blood. Now wouldn’t that be a thing, a Boston Brahmin – top-of-the-heap WASP – with Italian immigrant blood in his veins?

Olivia knew that her antagonism towards him wasn’t shared by her female media colleagues. The word on the New York street was that Tait wasn’t just the bestlooking reporter, he was also the best in bed.

‘Your folks spending Christmas here in New York, are they?’

‘No. Not that it’s any of your business.’

The melting snow had slicked down his thick dark hair so that it hung over his forehead in damp spikes, the bright lights in the lobby highlighting the small lines fanning out from his eyes and the thickness of his eyelashes. He might have women falling over themselves for his attention, but Tait Cabot Forbes was exactly the kind of man who turned her off, Olivia thought. Unlike Robert.

Robert. It was comforting to be able to blot out Tait’s face by focusing instead on her own personal mental image of her cousin. Robert was her perfect man. The courtly behaviour he must have learned as a young boy living with his grandmother and stepgrandfather made him unique in Olivia’s eyes: a true gentleman of the old school, who set high moral standards for himself and who believed in such old-fashioned virtues as honour and loyalty.

And love? Olivia gave a small sigh. She knew perfectly well that all Robert felt for her was mere stepcousinly affection, even if he had been kind when she’d been in the throes of her painfully obvious teenage crush on him. The fact that the teenage crush had now become a carefully hidden woman’s love was her business and her problem, and definitely not something she would allow out into the open to humiliate her and embarrass Robert.

‘Tait.’ The sound of a woman’s voice, filled with delight as she spotted the reporter and came hurrying over, gave Olivia a chance to escape. A very welcome chance, she thought thankfully as she slipped past Tait and out into the street. Once there, without having intended to do so, she looked back, only to see Tait exchanging the ‘Christmas kisses’ she had refused with the pretty blonde who had hailed him.

Christmas kisses. She was in her mid-twenties and the last time she had had anything that came close to being labelled a ‘relationship’ had been during her first year at college. But she had her work, she reminded herself, and her ambitions, and of course her wonderful parents.

In London, at Lenchester House, the London home of the Dukes of Lenchester, the object of Olivia’s love was sitting in the library with his stepfather.

Drogo and Robert sat opposite one another at either side of the marble fireplace in the armchairs that had been commissioned from Hepplewhite by the third duke. Heavy silk velvet curtains in a rich shade of amber, woven especially at Denby Mill, home of Drogo’s wife’s family silk business, hung at the windows. The depth of their colour meant that the room was always filled with a warm golden glow, as though sunshine was pouring through the windows, no matter what the time of year.

The chairs were upholstered in a complementary pineapple-patterned cut velvet in amber and cream, the colour scheme originally chosen for the room by the previous duke, Lord Robert, in honour of his new bride, Amber. The Savonnerie carpet covering the parquet floor had been woven during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, its colouring of deep gold and blue on a beige background a perfect foil for the curtain and chair fabrics. Drogo could well understand why Lord Robert had chosen such a colour scheme over the more traditional dark red so often used in such masculine rooms.

‘So now that you’ve been to Lauranto and had a chance to discuss things with your grandmother and her advisers, how do you feel about stepping into your late father’s shoes officially?’ Drogo asked his stepson.

How did he feel about it? Robert suspected that if he answered his stepfather’s question honestly, Drogo would not only not understand him but would also be concerned for him. To outsiders their situations might seem similar: Drogo too had stepped into an inheritance ance and title he had never expected to be his, and in a culture and a country that was alien to him. That, though, was where the similarities between their situations ended. Drogo hadn’t grown up knowing that he had been rejected as not good enough to inherit. He had not had to endure the childhood taunts and mockery that Robert had known because of that public rejection. He had not grown up having to accept that his father did not want him. So how could Drogo be expected to understand the savagely visceral feeling of satisfaction it gave him to have his grandmother courting him, with a view to him stepping into his late father’s shoes, even if only because she had no choice as there was no one else? How could he expect Drogo to understand how much he now wanted what he was being offered, when he had not known himself until the first letter had been sent and the first approach to him made? It was his birthright, and he felt that a wrong had been righted by a higher authority than that of his father or his paternal grandmother, but above all, he was determined to prove that as Crown Prince of Lauranto he could be better than any Crown Prince before him, and certainly better than the father who had rejected him. That was what was driving him now – not altruism, which would probably have motivated both his stepfather and his grandfather, not Lauranto itself and its people, but ambition. He wanted this for the child who had been dismissed as unworthy even before his birth, and who had gone unwanted and unrecognised until desperation had forced his grandmother to recognise him.

He would make Lauranto his. He would stamp his personality on it, so that in future Lauranto would be him, and so that future generations would say that he had taken Lauranto to its greatest heights. He would leave his mark on it in everything he did, from its architecture, to its finances and its laws, and ultimately via the sons he would give it. No, his stepfather would not understand how he was now relishing the driving thoughts of retribution and triumph.

Drogo studied his stepson as he waited for his response. Tall, with thick dark hair, brilliantly blue eyes, and an almost classically perfect profile, with a strong jaw, neat ears and a well-shaped nose, Robert combined the good looks of both his parents, although his temperament was very different from that of his mother. Robert had a tendency to withdraw into himself and shut others out, and sometimes it seemed to Drogo that his stepson was at war with himself.

‘It will be a challenge,’ Robert answered him, having weighed up how much to say to his stepfather. Alessandro –’ Robert gave a dismissive shrug – ‘I just can’t think of him as my father. You’ve always been that, Dad, and there’s no way I’d ever want to change that – I suspect that Alessandro was something of a lightweight and dominated by his mother. He was a figurehead who allowed others to run the country for him. The country needs modernising and that will be a huge challenge. My grandmother and her advisers are absolutely dead set against any kind of change. The country is run on almost feudal lines, with the poorest treated almost like serfs, especially those working on the estates belonging to the clique of barons favoured by my grandmother. The children of these workers leave school at fourteen to work on the land, whilst the children of the “nobility”, and the very small professional and middle class, are in the main educated abroad. There is no crossing of social lines. The court lives by a formal routine more suited to the Victorian age than ours; the exchequer is almost empty. All that will have to change.’

‘Have you told the Dowager Princess how you feel?’

‘Not yet. We have agreed to have further meetings in February. By then I should have formulated my terms for accepting the Crown.’

‘So you do intend to accept it?’