Lovers Touch

The pointer had been a birthday gift from Joss to Gramps, and with the loyalty of her breed had attached herself to him devotedly. She had pined after his death, and although Nell walked her and fed her she came way down the list in the pointer’s affections. She was a man’s dog, and never failed to place herself at Joss’s feet whenever he came to visit. It was unusual for her to show such affection to Nell, but today, sensing her despair, she had come to sit beside her and Nell welcomed the warmth of her body, hugging her in her arms as she rocked slowly to and fro, trying to come to terms with Joss’s proposal.

Even now she could hardly take it in. Joss wanted to marry her, and how brutally he had made sure that she was not likely to harbour any illusions about the reasons behind his proposal.

He didn’t want her … No, what he wanted was her home … her name … her family title … for his son … their son … And he had made no apology for wanting them either; but then, why should he? To Joss, everything in life was a commodity with a price on it. The price of the gift he wanted to give his son was marriage to her. It was as simple as that.

The phone rang abruptly, making her jump. It was the vicar’s wife, reminding her that she was bringing the Young Wives up to the house to tour round the greenhouses later in the week.

If only there was someone she could turn to for advice and counsel. Her closest friend throughout her schooldays was now married, with a busy household, her husband being a doctor. They lived near Cambridge, and as well as her own baby girl there were also two older children from Robert’s first marriage. It hadn’t been easy for her friend to make the decision to take on a widower with two young children, and there had been many long telephone calls between Liz and Nell before Liz had finally decided to commit herself to Robert.

Now she was blissfully happy, and fully deserved to be, and yet for all the confidences they had shared over the years, Nell had never told her how she felt about Joss. Perhaps she had hoped that by keeping silent she could somehow pretend that those feelings didn’t exist?

But they did, and today Joss had scoured her soul by what he had said to her; by the ruthlessness he had displayed; by his total lack of any consideration of her own feelings.

How could she possibly marry him? And yet, how could she not …? She had promised Gramps that she would do everything in her power to hold on to Easterhay; how could she live with herself if she refused to honour that promise?

It was easy to tell herself that her grandfather was the product of a different age, that her promise need not be kept … that no one would blame her for refusing Joss, bearing in mind his reasons for marrying her. It should be the easiest thing in the world for her to simply say ‘No’, but she couldn’t. Conscience … pride … or just sheer, stubborn love for her home and her family … She didn’t really know which, or if it was a combination of all three. Or even perhaps if she had inherited more from her reckless ancestress then just her blonde hair, and, for the first time in her life, was actually going to throw herself blindly into the arms of fate.

The morning papers brought in the shocking realisation that Joss wasn’t leaving anything to chance. There was a photograph of him prominently displayed on the society page of The Times, and underneath the caption, ‘Millionaire entrepreneur Joss Wycliffe announces that he is shortly to be married. The bride is not Naomi Charters, the actress whom he has currently been escorting, but the daughter of an old friend, Lady Eleanor de Tressail. The couple will marry within the next few months.’

Nell sat down at the breakfast-table, feeling faintly sick. How dared Joss take her acceptance for granted like this! He wasn’t allowing her anything … no pride, no compassion … nothing.

She pushed away her bowl of cereal and reached for the coffee-pot, her hand trembling.

There was a large pile of mail beside her plate, and it contained far too many ominous buff envelopes. She picked up the top one, her heart sinking as she recognised the familiar Inland Revenue stamp. When she opened it her heart sank even further.

It was a reminder that there were still death-duties to be paid, and the sum seemed astronomical. On the other side of the panelled dining-room was a lighter piece of panelling where a Gainsborough had once hung. It had been sold when her grandmother died. Now there was nothing more to sell … Other than herself … She shivered tensely. Dear God, why on earth couldn’t Joss have at least tried to make it easy for her … at least pretended to feel something for her, even if they both knew it was a pretence? This way … this way … he was making sure that she knew exactly what it was he wanted out of their marriage, and it wasn’t her.

The phone rang, and she knew before she picked it up that it would be Joss.

She was right; his clipped, slightly accented voice was abrasive on her ear.

‘I’m coming over at twelve, and I’ve arranged for Williams to be there at one. There’ll be certain legal arrangements to be made and I thought you’d want him there, seeing as he’s your solicitor …’

He was moving too fast. Bullying her … pushing her in a direction she wasn’t sure she wanted to go; but when she tried to protest he hung up on her. She could picture him without even trying. He would be standing in his study, an anonymous square room, which like the rest of his house looked more like an expensive hotel than a home.

He would probably be wearing one of those fine Savile Row wool suits in some dark, formal fabric. Joss liked good clothes and he wore them well, but nothing could totally disguise what her grandfather had described as his buccaneering quality; that arrogant maleness that no amount of city suiting could tame.

His dark hair would be lying flat to his skull, thick and clean, his mouth curled into that thin, taunting smile he gave her so often; nothing like the smile he gave other women.

She got up unsteadily and called to the dog, Heicker. She came to heel obediently. Joss had trained her.

Outside it was one of those crisp September days when frost and the scent of woodsmoke mingled in the air and the sky was a clear pale blue with the sun dappling yellow and bright through the turning leaves.

Deliberately Nell avoided walking past the greenhouses and the stables which had once housed her grandfather’s hunters. She herself liked to ride, but she did not enjoy hunting other than for its pageantry. She was too squeamish, too conscious of the purpose for which the hounds were bred, and as a teenager she had always drawn a sigh of relief when the day ended without the fox being caught.

Her grandfather had had no such qualms, of course. To him, fox were vermin and hunting a sport. Right up until his death, the local hunt had started their Boxing Day meet at Easterhay. The traditional stirrup cup prepared in the kitchen for the huntsmen came from a recipe supposedly brought back from France by a de Tressail who had been exiled there by Henry VII and whose French wife was supposed to have been connected to the powerful de Guise family, uncles of Mary Stuart through her French mother. Whatever its true origins, it went down well with the huntsmen. She wondered if Joss would want to continue the tradition. Did he hunt? she wondered. Certainly not from birth as her father and grandfather had done, but at some point or other in his life Joss had taken enough time away from making money to acquire a sophisticated degree of polish.

Despite Joss’s taunts, Nell was no snob. Although he didn’t seem to realise it, she admired Joss for what he had achieved, and her doubts about the wisdom of marrying him had nothing to do with the fact that he had been born in a Glaswegian slum and she in an expensive private nursing home.

Twelve o’clock, he had said … it was gone ten now. And then David arriving at one … He was determined to make her agree, then. Even to the extent of involving the family solicitor. Poor David, how little he understood the Josses of this world. Nell suspected that David was terrified of Joss, although he hid it beneath a stiffly formal manner more suited to a man of fifty-odd than one of twenty-six.

Like her, David had been brought up in an old-fashioned tradition, knowing almost from the cradle that he was destined to succeed his father as a country solicitor. There had been a time when she had wondered if she might fall in love with him. But that had been before she saw Joss.

For some reason she couldn’t entirely analyse herself, she chose to wait for him, not in her grandfather’s library, the room with which she was most familiar in the house, but in a small, north-facing sitting-room which three centuries before had been the preserve of the ladies of the family, and which was now never used, as testified to by the fine film of dust on the small French escritoire. She touched it idly, admiring the delicate marquetry work. This desk had been part of the dowry of the family’s second French bride, Louise, a shy, prim-looking child of fourteen who had died giving birth to her first child, and whose portrait hung next to that of her husband in the long gallery.

The air in the room was faintly musty. A distinct chill penetrated through Nell’s thin blouse, and when she saw Joss drive up she shivered violently, hugging her arms around her body.

He wasn’t in his Rolls, but driving the Aston Martin. Its rich plum paintwork went well with his dark colouring, she noted idly, as after swinging long legs from the car, he straightened up and closed the door.

Even the way he moved had a certain animal assurance; no hesitation or doubts there, Nell reflected wryly as he walked towards the main entrance looking neither to his left nor his right, his head not downbent as so many people’s were when they walked, but tilted at an arrogant angle.

Anyone not knowing him would think he was more at home here in this house than herself, Nell acknowledged.

Her grandfather’s staff were old-fashioned and set in their ways, and she knew that Johnson, who had been her grandfather’s batman and then his valet, and who was now supposed to be retired, but who had begged her to allow him to stay on at the house, rather than retire to the estate cottage her grandfather had left him, would insist on announcing Joss formally to her before allowing him admittance to the room.

Against one wall of the small room, painted to pick out the soft colours of the faded blue silk wallpaper, was a small table decorated with gilded flowers, and above it a matching mirror.

It gave Nell back her reflection with the cruel honesty of the room’s northern light. Not plain precisely, but certainly not lushly beautiful like the women she had seen photographed with Joss. Her features were neat and regular, surprisingly dark lashes surrounding the clear grey of her eyes, her skin, that delicate, translucent, very English skin that looked its best under softly rainwashed skies.

All her life, almost, she had worn her hair plaited, and the neatly twisted coils lying flat against her skull heightened the delicacy of her bone-structure, but Nell saw none of the rare delicacy of her features, seeing instead only that she was a pale, washed-out shadow of her stepsister’s dark beauty.

As a teenager she had experimented with make-up, trying to copy the effects she had seen in magazines, but on her the effects had been garish, and so now she rarely wore more than pale pink lipstick.

Liz had tried to persuade her into Harvey Nichols the Christmas before last when they had met in London for a shopping trip, telling her that modern make-ups with their subtle colours were far more suited to her delicate colouring than those which had been fashionable during their early teens, but, all too aware of the fact that Grania was coming home for Christmas, Nell had shrunk from inviting Joss’s mockery by doing anything that might be construed as an attempt to catch his attention.

The salon door opened and Joss walked in, making her step back from the mirror.

‘Where’s Johnson?’ she asked him huskily, flustered to see him standing there when she had anticipated a few more moments’ grace.

Something gleamed in Joss’s eyes, something predatory and intimidating, but when he spoke his voice was cool and distant.

‘Since I’m shortly to become a member of the family, I told him there was no need to stand on ceremony.’

Nell gripped the edge of the table.

‘You told Johnson that we’re going to be married?’

‘You object? Why? We are going to be married, aren’t we, Nell?’

She looked mutely at him and then said sadly, ‘Do I have any choice?’

‘No—and I haven’t said a word to Johnson,’ he told her calmly. ‘I’m not totally without awareness, Nell … some of the rough edges have been rubbed off, you know. I know you will want to tell the staff our good news yourself …’

There was an ironic look in his eyes as he said the words ‘our good news’ and, despite her firm determination not to do so, Nell felt herself flushing … although surely there was nothing for her to feel guilty about. Joss was the one who had proposed their marriage. Joss was the supplicator, no matter how hard she found it to visualise him in that role. When she gave him her answer … And then she realised that she already had. Her lips parted on an uncertain breath, and, as though he read her mind, Joss said mockingly, ‘Too late, you’ve already committed yourself, Nell. Besides——’

He broke off as there was a discreet tap on the door and the housekeeper came in carrying a tray of coffee.

‘Thank you, Mrs Booth.’ Joss reached out and took the tray, giving the older woman a far warmer smile than Nell had ever received from him, making a faint flush of colour rise up under her plump cheeks as she left.