Sins

Janey gave a small squirm of pleasure. She would have liked to have pleased Dan even more, and been even more adventurous than she was being but she didn’t dare risk it. Last term there had been two girls who had had to drop out of St Martins because they had got into trouble. She certainly didn’t want to end up pregnant, and then have to leave without finishing her course. Dan had said that he perfectly understood, which made everything especially wonderful; some boys could be very difficult and unkind to girls when they said ‘no’.

Janey loved London and St Martins; she adored being part of the King’s Road crowd that filled the coffee bars and pubs at weekends, and went to noisy parties in dark smoky cellars where beat music played. Already she had made up her mind that there could be no better place in the world to be than the King’s Road, Chelsea. It was just so exciting to be in the ‘know’, part of that select group of young people who were making the area their personal playground, and putting their stamp on it. It was the place to be, to see and to be seen. Everyone who knew anything knew that. Even the big fashion magazines were beginning to take notice of what was going on.

Janey’s ambition, once she left St Martins, was to join the ranks of the lucky young designers who had already set up shop on the King’s Road, following Mary Quant’s example and selling their designs from their own boutiques. She could hardly wait.

‘What’s that you’re reading, Ella?’

‘Nothing,’ Ella fibbed, trying to conceal the article she had been reading in Woman, about how eating Ryvita biscuits could help a person to lose weight.

She’d been so determined when she’d first decided that she would lost weight, but somehow the harder she tried not to eat, the more she wanted to do so, with the result that this morning when she had weighed herself on the scales in the entrance hall to the tube station she had discovered that she had actually put on three pounds.

‘Fibber,’ Libby, the art director’s assistant, retorted cheerfully. ‘Let me see.’ She tweaked the magazine out of Ella’s hold before she could stop her, Libby’s eyebrows lifting queryingly. ‘You’re trying to lose weight?’

Ella’s heart sank. Soon the elegantly slender Libby would be telling everyone and then the whole office would be laughing at her.

‘Well, you don’t need to waste your time eating Ryvita biscuits,’ Libby told her without waiting for her to reply. ‘What you need to do is go and see my doctor and get some of his special pills. I lost a stone in a month. They’re amazing.’

‘Diet pills?’ Ella questioned uncertainly. She hadn’t known such things existed. She’d seen advertisements for some kind of toffees one was supposed to eat three times a day, but nothing for diet pills.

‘Yes, that’s right. Everyone takes them, all the models, only of course no one admits to it. Look, why don’t I ring Dr Williamson now and make an appointment for you? But you must promise not to tell anyone that I told you.’

‘I…’

Before she could say anything, Libby was picking up the telephone receiver and giving the operator a number she was reading from her pretty leather-covered diary.

‘There, it’s all fixed,’ she announced triumphantly a few minutes later. ‘Dr Williamson can see you at lunchtime. He’s only in Harley Street.’

The man was still watching her. Not that Emerald was surprised. Of course he was. She was very beautiful, after all. Everyone said so. The visit to the Louvre, one of the cultural activities organised by the French finishing school she was attending, had threatened to be so dull that she had been tempted to find an excuse to escape from it, but now, with an admirer for her to tease and torment behind the back of the ancient art historian who was accompanying her round the museum’s treasures, the afternoon was promising to be far less dull than she had expected. Very deliberately, almost provocatively, she smoothed her hand over the neat fit of her fawn cashmere sweater. She would have preferred to have worn something in a more noticeable colour, but typically her mother had insisted that the neutral shade was far more elegant. Far more correct had been what she had really meant, of course. Far more likely not to draw the admiring male attention to Emerald’s figure that her face already received. How foolish of her mother to imagine that she could stop men admiring her, Emerald thought contemptuously. That was impossible. Not that her mother had ever come anywhere near acknowledging that. It infuriated Emerald that her family, her step-and half-siblings, but most especially her mother, should refuse to admire and pay homage to her undeniable superiority–of birth and breeding as well as looks. Her mother behaved as though she were no different from any of the others: Ella and Janey, the daughters of Jay; the twins, Cathy and Polly, still at school, who were her half-sisters, but most of all, Emerald’s half-Chinese cousin, Rose. Just thinking about Rose made Emerald feel furious. A half-Chinese bastard who, for some unimaginable and irritating reason, Emerald’s own mother actually treated as though she were her own child. Her mother had fussed over Rose and given her more attention than she had ever given Emerald, her own daughter. Emerald would never forgive her mother for doing that. Never. Both Nanny and Great-grandma had always said that Rose was a mere nobody; a child who should have been left to die, whilst Emerald was the daughter of a duke, one of England’s richest men; an honourable heroic man, whom everyone had admired, not like Rose’s father, a wastrel and a drunk. Great-grandmother had always said that the reason Uncle Greg drank so much was because he was so bitterly ashamed of Rose. By rights Emerald’s mother should have felt the same way instead of treating Rose as though she was someone special–more special than Emerald herself. That, of course, was impossible. Emerald believed that the reason her mother made such a fuss of Rose was because she was jealous of Emerald, jealous of the fact that Emerald had been born a duke’s daughter and had been so much loved by her father that he had left her virtually all his money. A fortune…

If she could have done so, during her childhood Emerald would have demanded that she be allowed to live in one of her father’s houses, as befitted her status, and not at Denham with her mother and Jay and the others.

She had flatly refused to attend the same school as the others, and where they had treated their coming-out parties and presentation at court as old-fashioned rituals to be gone through for form’s sake, Emerald had deliberately held back from having her own until afterwards so that she didn’t have to share with them. Now she was insisting on having the kind of season that her great-grandmother had told her about when she had been younger. Blanche Pickford might not have possessed any blue blood herself but she knew its importance and she had made sure that Emerald knew it as well.

Well, it wasn’t Rose who had a title and a fortune, and it wasn’t Rose who would be the débutante of the season and who would marry a man who would make her even more important. Then Emerald’s mother wouldn’t be able to ignore her in favour of a Hong Kong gutter brat, or insist, as she had tried to do so often, that Emerald and Rose were equals. Emerald had always been determined that she must be the winner in every contest with a member of her own sex.

Always.

The man who had been watching her was standing up and looking as though he was about to come over to her. Emerald eyed him calculatingly. Her admirer wasn’t very tall and his hair was thinning a little. Disdainfully Emerald turned her back on him. Only the very best of the best was good enough for her: the tallest, the most handsome, the richest and the most titled of men. Her step-siblings, with their ridiculous plans to work, like common little shop girls, would have no option other than to end up with dull ordinary husbands, whilst Rose, of course, would be lucky if she found any decent man willing to marry her at all. But it was different for Emerald. She could have and must have the most eligible, the most prized husband there was.

In fact Emerald had already chosen her husband. There was in reality only one man it could be: the elder son of Princess Marina, the Duke of Kent, who was not just a duke like her father had been but, even better, a royal duke. Emerald could see herself now, surrounded by the envious gaggle of bridesmaids, all of them green with envy because she was marrying the season’s most eligible man.

They would be in huge demand, invited everywhere, and other men would look at her and envy her husband, other women would look at her and be filled with jealousy because of her beauty. Emerald intended to cut herself off from her family. She certainly intended to refuse to have anything to do with Rose. As a royal duke her husband couldn’t be expected to socialise with someone like Rose, and since her mother thought so much of her then she wouldn’t mind being excluded from Emerald’s guest lists so that she could keep Rose company, would she? Emerald smiled at the thought.

The young Duke of Kent had celebrated his twenty-first birthday only the previous year, and had already gained a reputation for being very difficult to pin down when it came to accepting invitations, but of course she would have no trouble in attracting him, Emerald knew. He wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with her. No man could.

It was a pity that the Duke of Kent didn’t own a proper stately home, not one of those dreadful ugly places that even the National Trust wouldn’t take on, but rather somewhere like Blenheim or Osterby. She would have to have a word with Mr Melrose, her late father’s solicitor and her own trustee, Emerald decided. It was surely only right and proper that, as a royal duchess, she should have the use of her late father’s property and estate; there was Lenchester House in London, where she was having her coming-out ball, and the family seat as well. Her mother had tried to prevent her from having her coming-out ball at Lenchester by saying that technically they had no right to use the house, which now had been inherited through the rule of primogeniture, along with everything else that was entailed to the dukedom, by the new ‘heir’: the grandson of her late father’s great-uncle, the ‘black sheep’ of the family who had been shipped off to Australia as a young man. Initially, it had been thought that this black sheep had died without marrying, but then it had come to light that there had been a marriage and a son, who in turn had produced a son of his own. Now Mr Melrose was trying to track him down. However, Mr Melrose had agreed with Emerald that there was really no reason why, as her late father’s daughter, she shouldn’t have her ball at Lenchester House. Her father would have wanted her to do so, Emerald was sure. And she was sure that he would much rather have seen her living at Osterby and Lenchester House than some heir he had never met. And who would now inherit Osterby and everything else, simply because he was male.

Lenchester House was magnificent. Until recently it had been let out to a Greek millionaire, and Emerald could see no reason why she and the duke shouldn’t lease it from the estate once they were married.

Mademoiselle Jeanne was still droning on about the Mona Lisa. Emerald gave the portrait a dismissive look. She was far prettier. And anyway, she thought the portrait dull. She preferred the striking strokes of brilliant colour favoured by more modern artists, the kind of paintings her mother would never dream of hanging at Denham. Emerald rather thought that she might become a patroness of modern art once she was married. She could imagine the praise she would receive from the press for her excellent eye and taste, and the entries in the gossip columns that would confirm her status: ‘HRH The Duchess of Kent is London’s premier hostess, as well as being a well-known patroness of modern art.’

Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Kent. Emerald preened, thinking how well the title suited her.

Ella shivered as she stepped out of the building that housed Dr Williamson’s rooms and into Harley Street, not so much from the raw biting wind as from shocked disbelief and excitement that she had actually done what she had done.

She had been weighed and measured by a smartly uniformed nurse, had filled in a long form giving all her medical details, and had then been told by the serious-looking Dr Williamson that for the good of her health she really did need to take the course of medication he was going to prescribe for her in order that she could lose weight.

She was to take two pills per day, one after breakfast and one late afternoon, and then after a month she was to return to him to be weighed and measured and given another prescription.

It wasn’t cheating, Ella had reassured herself. All the diet pills would do was help her to control her appetite. And when she had controlled it and lost some weight, then no one, but especially Oliver Charters, would laugh at her behind her back ever again.

Chapter Three (#u5bb3405b-deb1-5343-9fd2-7ea4f47f6a12)

‘Janey, I’m still not sure that we should be going to this party,’ Ella protested, feeling irritated and exasperated when she saw that, instead of listening to her, Janey was concentrating on drawing a thick black line round her eyes, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly between her lips as she did so.

‘We can’t not go,’ Janey announced, proving that she had been listening all along. ‘I’ve promised.’

Promised Dan that she’d be there, was what she meant and she didn’t want to disappoint him. Not when things were getting so exciting.

Ella made no response. She knew there was no point. She wished, though, that her sister looked more conventional. Janey considered herself to be bohemian, or at least she had done until she had started frequenting Mary Quant’s shop Bazaar on the King’s Road, and had fallen in love with her signature style. It was Janey’s greatest ambition to have her own designs admired by Mary–designs that Ella thought quite frankly were far too daring. Take the short-skirted, A-line, striped ticking fabric dress Janey had made herself and had insisted on wearing this afternoon when she had bullied and coaxed Ella and Rose into going with her to her favourite coffee bar, the Fantasy.

The Fantasy, the only ‘proper’ coffee bar outside Soho, was owned by Archie McNair, friend and sponsor of Mary Quant, and Janey had told Ella and Rose excitedly that she hoped that her idol might come in and spot her in her new creation. That had not happened, but Janey had attracted a good deal of attention. No wonder people, or rather men, had stared at Janey so much. Much as she loved her younger sister, there were times when Ella couldn’t help wishing that Janey acted with more decorum and wore sensible proper grown-up clothes, not garments that made people stare.

Attracting attention of any kind was something that made Ella feel anxious. As they were growing up, whenever she and Janey had been the focus of their late mother’s attention it had been because they had done something ‘wrong’–something that had made their mother cross and for which Ella, as the elder of the two, always got the blame.

Her stepmother was nothing like her mother. Ella’s father’s marriage to Amber had been a blessed relief. Amber was a proper mother, who understood about things of importance, like not wearing wet socks or going upstairs in the dark without the light on.

At least one thing she would not be attracting attention for soon would be her weight, Ella acknowledged with a small spurt of pleasure. Dr Williamson’s diet pills had done everything both he and Libby had promised her they would, and already she was losing weight. Not that she had told anyone else about them, or about how much the cruel words and laughter she had overheard had hurt her. She would be lost now without her small yellow pills and their magical ability to make her not want to eat.

‘You can always stay here, if you want to,’ Janey told her sister. ‘You don’t have to come.’

The last thing Ella felt like doing on a cold winter night was going out to a party in some grubby smoke-filled cellar packed with people she didn’t know and with whom it was impossible to talk above the noise, but Janey’s words had aroused her suspicions.

‘Of course I’m going to go,’ Ella insisted. ‘It’s up to me to make sure that you don’t get into trouble, after all.’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not going to get into trouble,’ Janey defended herself indignantly.

Ella, though, wasn’t impressed. ‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ she told Janey. ‘I haven’t forgotten those men you brought back with you from that jazz club the other week, the ones I found sleeping downstairs.’

‘It was a freezing cold night, Ella, and they didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

‘We could have been murdered in our beds, or worse,’ Ella retaliated, her anger growing as Janey giggled.

‘Don’t be silly, they were far too drunk.’

‘It isn’t funny, Janey,’ Ella remonstrated. ‘The parents wouldn’t have approved at all.’

‘You fuss too much, Ella.’