Indecent Deception

‘Stop that, Rosie. You can’t have it,’ Chrissy admonished by rote. ‘Are you saying that I can have the job on your recommendation?’ she said, turning back to Blaze.

Rosie got her mushroom.

‘If you want it, it’s yours.’

‘He must be a very good friend.’ As bait, it failed, drawing no response. Sensing that Blaze was becoming bored with the subject, Chrissy asked, ‘How soon could I start?’

‘As soon as you can get yourself up there.’

Rosie was now casting languishing looks at the fried tomato.

Blaze surrendered and cast Chrissy a look of reproof. ‘You should have let me order her a proper meal. She’s starving!’

‘She just likes eating off other people’s plates.’ She watched him sipping his coffee, the cup cradled elegantly in one lean hand.

If this job panned out, she would probably see him again. Torbald Manor, his late grandfather’s home, would only be about ten miles away. Did he still live there? Her brow furrowed. She wasn’t very well up on the rules of aristocratic inheritance. The title, she was aware, had gone to his uncle, and even if Blaze had been next in line, it couldn’t have gone to him. His mother had never married his father.

‘He’s illegitimate!’ Elaine had gasped when she found out. ‘Would you believe it...? I mean, in a family like that!’

‘Are you finished?’ Blaze regarded her expectantly.

‘Yes.’ She pushed away her cup as though she had finished. She could feel his impatience.

‘I have to be in Brighton by noon.’

In the cab, he got a call on his mobile phone. Something about a horse-box and an accident. His language was choice. Chrissy wanted to cover Rosie’s ears. She sent him a dirty look but he was too intent on the call to notice. The cab dropped them off seconds before he completed the call.

Sending a fleeting glance at his watch, he breathed, ‘Transport...that’s a bit of a problem...’

‘Transport?’ she repeated uncertainly.

‘Can you catch the train to Reading?’

She nodded.

‘Right, make it tomorrow afternoon, OK?’ He unlocked his car, reached in for a notepad and scribbled something down on it. ‘Call that number when you arrive and someone will come and pick you up. Ask for the head lad—’

‘The head what?’

‘Ask for Hamish,’ he rephrased tersely. ‘He’ll ferry you back to the Hall.’

Ten seconds later he was in the driver’s seat. Ten after that, he was gone. Rosie’s bottom lip wobbled alarmingly. They had been dumped without ceremony.

Mrs Davis was hovering in the hallway, quite an achievement in so cramped a space. ‘You seem to have solved your problems,’ she said archly.

‘Sorry, I—’

‘Don’t think I don’t know who he is. Well...well...well, I thought to myself last night,’ she confided. ‘Fancy it being him,’ I said to my Stan. He’s decided to meet his obligations, has he? Not before time—’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Chrissy was trying to edge past the older woman.

Mrs Davis pursed her lips, her sudden congeniality waning at the lack of feedback. ‘He doesn’t want anyone to know, does he? But anyone with eyes in their head could tell she was his kid. Same hair, same eyes. You should have sold your story to a newspaper. They pay a lot for that sort of stuff...’

As the penny dropped, Chrissy’s jaw dropped with it. She was implying that Rosie was Blaze’s child. ‘Of course she’s n-not his,’ she stammered in horror. ‘She’s got absolutely n-nothing to do with him!’

Mrs Davis stepped back but she had the last word. ‘But he pays your rent when he has to,’ she said with a smirk.

Just because Rosie had black hair and blue eyes! On such slender possibilities to assume... The cheek of the woman! Clearly she spent too much time reading the murkier tabloids. However, Mrs Davis didn’t have the power to hold Chrissy’s thoughts for very long.

She swept Rosie up into an exuberant hug. ‘We’ve got a job, Rosie! Use of a car, did you hear that bit? This man is going to eat as if he’s staying at the Ritz,’ she swore feelingly. ‘Whatever it takes, we’ll stick it out.’

‘This man’, she repeated to herself. For goodness’ sake, Blaze hadn’t even given her his name! ‘The Hall’, he had said. Her brow furrowed. It didn’t ring any bells of recognition, yet she would have believed that she knew every sizeable house within a ten-mile radius of her former home.

‘I’m sorry that we were so late,’ Chrissy said again, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

‘Aye,’ Hamish responded dourly and that appeared to be the height of his conversational ability since she had got little else from him since he’d picked them up in a Land Rover at the station. A bomb scare had thrown the trains into chaos. They had been lucky to get on a train at all. But the explanation hadn’t cut much ice with Hamish.

He was a wiry little Scotsman with the build of an ex-jockey. He had taken one look at her and Rosie and his astonishment had been palpable. Evidently they weren’t what he had expected. She had seen him squinting at her naked wedding-ring finger, watched his weather-beaten face go tight with disapproval. The chill in the air was not her imagination.

Chrissy’s nerves were starting to respond to that chill. What if Blaze had taken too much upon himself in hiring her? What if Hamish’s boss was as taken aback by the sight of them as Hamish had been? Rosie was asleep under her arm, a dead weight of toddler exhaustion. Chrissy didn’t feel much livelier. All she wanted was a bed for the night. Tomorrow she would worry herself to death about the future, not tonight.

The headlights illuminated trees and hedgerows and little else, but she knew exactly where they were even if she didn’t know where they were going to end up. Then Hamish turned off the road into the village and up a long, steep lane. In her time, it had been overgrown and pot-holed. Now it was trimmed and surfaced.

‘Mrs Easton’s house!’ she exclaimed involuntarily.

‘Westleigh Hall,’ Hamish corrected.

‘But I thought it was derelict.’ Chrissy had never seen the house because it was so far from the road, but she did recall the old lady in the funny hats in church. She had died and the house had lain empty ever since.

‘Practically. The guv’nor’s got vision.’ Hamish looked as if he might actually have said more, and then he glanced at her and compressed his lips.

They drove past a brightly lit lodge. The Hall was a grey stone edifice, built on irregular lines. That was all she saw in the flare of the headlights because it was in complete darkness.

Hamish took her cases and Chrissy struggled out with Rosie, trying not to wake her. The front door wasn’t locked. He reached for a light switch and then muttered, ‘Electric must still be off.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ Chrissy groaned.

He disappeared and she heard him banging about through cupboards. He returned with a torch and showed her into a vast, cheerless kitchen. ‘There should be some food in the fridge. I’ll be leaving you, then,’ he said.

And he did. She sank down on a chair with Rosie. She wanted to put her head down and cry. There was no heat, no light. Well, what did you expect, Chrissy? she asked herself. You’re not a guest, entitled to expect a three-star welcome. You’re the housekeeper. Rising upright, she settled Rosie into a huddle on a sagging armchair. She covered her with her coat and prayed that she would stay asleep while she searched out a bed for them both.

Climbing those stairs was the creepiest experience Chrissy had ever had. The torchlight cast weird leaping shadows and accentuated dark, forbidding doorways. She shone it into room after room and discovered three sparkling new bathrooms, but there appeared to be only one furnished bedroom.

At the end of the huge landing, a corridor ran off unexpectedly to the left and a narrow flight of stairs disappeared up into the gloom of the attics. At least, she assumed they led to the attics, for her explorations had been forced to a halt by an untidy stack of floorboards. Between her and the remainder of the upper floor stretched a ten-foot-wide chasm of bare joists.

The discovery gave Chrissy quite a start. Just suppose that she hadn’t been looking where she was going? Blaze hadn’t been joking when he’d said that the house was in a state. And presumably the one furnished bedroom was for her.

She lugged up the cases, scanned the room with a sigh and then hauled a battered chaise-longue over to the side of the king-size divan. Opening up their luggage, she made up a bed for Rosie on the chaise-longue. Rosie, who twisted and turned all night long, was murder to share a bed with.