Lovers Touch

She had been just twenty then, and that had been over four years ago. Four years during which she had been forced to mature abruptly, once she realised how precariously balanced her grandfather’s finances were.

The care of his son had eaten into his last small reserves of cash, and now with Gramps himself dead and the ominous threat of double death-duties hanging over Easterhay, Nell had no idea how on earth she was going to keep her promise to her grandfather.

Deathbed promises were like something from Dickens, she told herself as she watched her efficient staff close the entrance to the marquee. In a few mintues she would have to go down and preside over the buffet. No matter how much Grania might choose to deride today’s bride, her parents had still paid and paid well for their daughter to have her wedding reception here in Easterhay’s beautiful parkland, and the pride Nell had inherited from her grandfather, the sense of duty which living with him had instilled in her, would not allow her to do less than her very best for anyone.

‘Promise me you will keep Easterhay,’ Gramps had demanded almost with his last breath, and she, tears in her eyes and clogging her throat, had agreed.

But she still had no idea how that promise was going to be kept.

Oh, she was doing what she could … These weddings brought in a small income, kept the staff busy and paid, and also allowed her to give much needed weekend work to some of the youngsters from the village.

There was also her plan to take in weekend guests, but first some of the bedrooms needed to be renovated. She could hardly expect people to pay to use the one cold and very draughty bathroom installed on both of the two bedroom floors. Deftly she added up her small profit, wondering if she could manage to get three more bathrooms installed by Christmas. She had the workforce to do it … Gramps had insisted on keeping on a large staff even though there was little enough for them to do, other than to try to continually repair the fabric of the house as best they could.

Peter Jansen, the estate carpenter, had made the tables for inside the marquee. Harry White, the gardener, had supplied the flowers and helped her make the decorative arrangements. Mrs Booth, the cook/housekeeper, had organised the food, all of them only too glad to be doing something to lift a little of the burden from Nell’s shoulders.

Once, they and their children would have found well-paid work in Manchester or Liverpool, but those days were gone. Work wasn’t easy to come by anywhere now, and scarcely a week went by without Nell being asked if it was possible for her to find a job for ‘our Jane’ or ‘our Robert’ …

It was true that the staff lived relatively cheaply and well in the row of cottages owned by the estate, but the cottages were in need of repair, and Nell had no idea how on earth she was going to manage to finance her wages bill once it was winter.

It had occurred to her that she could always hire out the ballroom for private dances, but how many times? This was a very quiet part of Cheshire not favoured by the wealthy, and there was very little demand for such affairs, especially with Chester and the very prestigious Grosvenor Hotel so close.

Weddings were different, and there could be no better setting for a summer wedding than the parkland of Easterhay, with the house itself as a backdrop, sunlight reflecting on the ancient leaded windows set into their stone mullions.

It had been a Jacobean de Tressail who had added the impressive frontage and extra wings to the original house. One wing connected to the stable block, the other via a covered walkway to the orangery, now sadly denuded of its glass and in a state of disrepair.

‘I must go out and check on how thing are going …’

‘Do they pay extra for having the “Lady of the Manor” serve them?’ Grania asked her with a sneer. ‘They should do.’

Nell lost her temper with her. She had been under a constant strain since her grandfather’s death, and although she sympathised with her stepsister, she couldn’t stop herself from saying tartly, ‘You shouldn’t sneer at them, Grania, since it’s people like the Dobsons who have the commodity you seem to covet. They’re extremely wealthy.’

Compunction swamped her when she saw the way that Grania’s eyes filled with tears.

‘There’s no need for you to be so horrid to me, Nell,’ she complained tearfully. ‘It’s not my fault that I hate being poor. Mama always said that …’

She broke off and bit her lip, and Nell guessed that she had been about to say that her mother had always told her that the de Tressail family was a wealthy one.

Sighing faintly, Nell dragged her attention away from the wedding and turned to her stepsister.

‘Gramps always liked to pretend that there was more money then there was. His pride wouldn’t allow him to admit how bad things were. And then, when Dad died … the death-duties …’ She saw Grania’s mutinous face and reflected that, in her way, her stepsister was as stubborn as her grandfather.

‘You must have noticed just from the house how bad things are, Grania,’ she counselled gently.

‘I thought it was just Gramps being mean. You know how he was … if things are that bad why on earth don’t you sell this place? It would fetch a fortune. It’s not fair!’ she burst out passionately. ‘Why should Gramps have left it all to you? It should have been split between us …’

Nell stared at her, her heart sinking. She knew these temperamental moods of Grania’s of old, and winced mentally at the thought of the fiery outburst to come. Why was it that her stepsister always made her feel like such a pale shadow, a mere reflection when contrasted with her own glowing, brilliant colour?

Her stepsister had so many advantages … She was young, beautiful, intelligent … She had an excellent career, every advantage, and yet still she resented Nell. And why? Because she had inherited Easterhay.

Nell bit down on her bottom lip, gnawing at it, worrying at it as she tried to find words tactful enough to explain the reasoning behind their grandfather’s decision.

Grania and Gramps had never got on. Gramps had never really approved of his son’s second marriage, and he had been even less pleased when he’d learned that his second wife already had a child from a previous marriage. Where was the grandson who would inherit the title? Where was the next Sir Hugo? he had demanded when the new bride announced that she didn’t want any more children. That had shocked him, Nell knew, and he had never really forgiven Lucia for not providing an heir for Easterhay.

In her grandfather’s eyes, Nell knew, Grania was not a de Tressail, and that was one of the reasons he had left Easterhay itself solely to Nell.

Now that title would go to Nell’s son … always supposing she had one. Always supposing she met a man willing to marry her and shoulder with her the problems of her inheritance.

At heart, she knew that Grania had a valid argument. The property should be sold either as a home to someone rich enough to afford it, or perhaps even to a developer. But Nell knew she would rather have torn out her own heart than agree to such a course of action. Perhaps after all there was more of her grandfather in her than she knew. Or perhaps it was simply conditioning … simply the fact that she had been brought up to put Easterhay and all that it stood for before herself and her own needs and desires.

Whatever the case, she knew that her grandfather had left her Easterhay because he saw her as its custodian, that to him she was little more than a trustee holding the house and its lands for the future. But could she hold it?

She had no idea … but she meant to try.

Trying was one thing, succeeding was another. Her initial approaches to the National Trust on the advice of her solicitor had proved fruitless. If Nell only knew of the houses they were offered, but had to turn down; houses of far more national importance than Easterhay.

The trouble was that Easterhay was too large to be run as home without wealth to support it, and yet too small to be developed in the way that some of the more well known National Trust houses had been.

And so it was down to her to find a means of keeping the estate going, to use what skills she had to bring an income into the bank account, with perilously little in it, to cover the looming death-duties.

She was doing what she could. These weddings that paid so well but demanded so much …

Perhaps next year they might even invest in buying their own marquee—that would save money in the long run, and …

As always when money worried at her mind, she became totally engrossed in the problems of maintaining the house, and it took Grania’s sharp voice to bring her out of her mental financial juggling.

‘Well, if you won’t be reasonable, I’m sure that Joss will … He is here, isn’t he?’

‘If by here you mean in the village, then yes, I believe he is at home at the moment,’ Nell acknowledged stiffly.

Grania laughed, her angry mood lightening as she teased, ‘Poor Nell, you’ve never liked him, have you? Far too much the rough diamond for you, I suppose. I must say, though, that he does have a rather exciting aura of sexuality about him. I wonder what he’s like in bed.’

‘Grania!’ Nell protested, her face suddenly hot. It was true that she had always felt uncomfortable in Joss’s presence, but not because she didn’t like him—far from it!

‘Poor Nell,’ Grania pouted. ‘Honestly, you’re like something out of Pride and Prejudice. Sex does exist, you know. And so does sex appeal, and believe me, Joss has it by the bucketful. All that and money too …’ She closed her eyes. ‘Mmm …’ She opened them again and looked at her stepsister, saying tauntingly, ‘You haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about, have you? You wouldn’t recognise sex appeal if it … Honestly, you’re archaic. I suppose you don’t even approve of me going to see Joss. You probably even think I should wait for him to get in touch with me. Poor Nell—you’ve no idea what you’re missing.’

Oh, but she had, Nell acknowledged painfully. She was all too well aware of what Grania described as Joss’s sexiness … She herself would have put it slightly differently, but in essence her stepsister was right. Joss had about him an animal quality of vitality and maleness that no woman could fail to be aware of. And Joss himself knew exactly what he had … and he used that knowledge ruthlessly.

He wore the beautiful girls who flocked around him as a hunter wore his trophies. He never seemed to be without some lissom beauty clinging to his arm, and was often photographed on the society pages of the newspapers with some scantily clad female clinging possessively to his dark-suited arm.

Nell often felt that they were deliberately posed, those photographs, for all their apparent artlessness; the girls were invariably blonde and frail, Joss invariably clothed in the dark formality of a business suit, his face in profile so that the hawlike, almost cruel harshness of his features was thrown into relief.

It was hard to imagine, looking at Joss today, that there had ever been a time when he had been forced to steal to get food … when his clothes had been little more than rags.

Now only the faint burr in his voice betrayed him, and even that was a deliberate policy, Nell was sure of it. He was an excellent mimic, and could quite easily have adopted the clipped, classless accent of her grandfather and his kind had he wished. But for some reason he didn’t choose to do so; for some reason, as she had good cause to know, he seemed to delight in forcing people to remember the life from which he had sprung.

Nell had once attended a local dinner party with her grandfather when Joss had almost shocked one of the female guests senseless by replying to her polite dinner-table queries about his life by telling her in graphic detail exactly what could happen to small children, both male and female, left to scavenge for a living on the streets of the country’s inner cities. He hadn’t minced his words and Nell herself had winced, not due to any distaste for the forthrightness of his speech, but for the vivid picture he was drawing.

Unfortunately he had misinterpreted her reaction, and had taunted her for it during the drive home.