Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘It has been mentioned that you don’t particularly care for my countrymen,’ Bobbie agreed calmly.

‘They were over here during the war. Caused a lot of trouble, a lot of resentment, turning women’s heads whilst their own men were away fighting.’

Bobbie forced herself not to make any kind of response, instead simply listening.

‘You’re looking after young Amelia, so I hear,’ Ben commented gruffly.

‘For the time being,’ Bobbie returned.

‘Joss said he met you in the churchyard looking at the gravestones, our gravestones.... Interested in us, are you?’

‘You’re a very...interesting family,’ was all Bobbie allowed herself to be provoked into saying.

‘Saw you talking to young Max earlier.’

Bobbie waited, expecting to be told once again that Max was a married man, but to her surprise, Ben didn’t refer to Max’s marriage at all.

‘He’s the image of my son, David...always was,’ he related instead. ‘Much more like him than his own father. Same character...’

Bobbie said nothing. From what she had heard about David, Olivia’s father, she doubted that she would have liked him very much.

‘He’s abroad at the moment....’

Bobbie had no idea why she should be swept by compassion for a man she barely knew and who, from what she had heard, was as obstinate, narrow-minded and bigoted as any man could be. But whatever the reason, instead of pointing out that his son David was abroad—period—having simply disappeared in the night, leaving his family to deal with the havoc his disappearance had caused, she continued to say nothing.

The silence between them was only broken when Jenny suddenly appeared at her side, announcing, ‘Bobbie, there’s a telephone call for you...your sister... she sounded...’ She touched Bobbie’s arm gently. ‘She said she needed to speak with you urgently. You can take the call in the study. You’ll be private in there.’

Her mouth dry with apprehension, Bobbie followed Jenny as she weaved her way through the throng, her heart thudding nervously as Jenny guided her across the hallway and pushed open the door to a small, cosy room almost filled by a huge desk.

As Jenny gently closed the door and left, Bobbie walked over to the desk and picked up the telephone receiver, saying uncertainly, ‘Sam...?’

‘Bobbie. Thank the Lord. Listen, have you said anything yet?’

‘No...no, not yet. Sam, why are you calling me here? Is it Mom?’

‘No, or at least not in the way you mean. She’s okay. Look, Bobbie, you’ve got to do it today, confront her, show her, show them.’

‘Sam,’ Bobbie protested, ‘it isn’t that easy...I...’

‘Bobbie, you’ve got to, that’s why I’m ringing. Dad’s on to us and—’

‘What?’

‘Now don’t panic. Just listen up, will you? He found out I’d been ringing you in Chester, and you know Dad. He put two and two together and came up with four. He grilled me like he was one of his own Secret Service gorillas,’ she told Bobbie indignantly.

‘Oh, Sam, no...’ Bobbie had to sit down. Her legs, her whole body, had gone weak with shock and stress. She sank into the comfortable leather swivel chair behind the desk and clutched the receiver. ‘What did he say?’

‘Oh, you know Pop. There was a lot of idealistic stuff about how we should be above wanting to make others pay for their errors. How it should be simply enough for us to be aware of them and to feel sorry for them because of the way they are. He said that nothing we would do could make things any easier for Mom, and then Grandpa had to get in on the act and he said—’

‘Grandpa!’ Bobbie interrupted her twin on a stifled gasp. ‘Oh, Sam, no... How did Grandpa find out?’

‘He came in while Dad was reading me the Riot Act,’ Samantha confessed, ‘and of course, he had to hear the whole thing. Anyway, I told them it was too late to do anything now and I told them what you were going to do and—’

There was a sharp click on the telephone line as though someone had picked up another handset.

Nervously Bobbie asked her sister, ‘What was that? . Has someone come in...Dad or...?’

‘No. There’s no one else here,’ Samantha assured her. ‘We’re not going to give up, Bobbie, not now. We can’t afford to. She’s got to be made to pay.’

Bobbie bit her lip. She had never been totally happy with her twin’s plans but weakly she had allowed herself to be persuaded into going along with them. Knowing now that her father and her grandfather had discovered what they were doing brought home to her how much they would both dislike and disapprove of Samantha’s scheme.

‘Bobbie,’ she heard her sister warning her grimly, before pausing and then telling her bitterly, ‘Look, over fifty years ago, Ruth Crighton pretended that she’d fallen in love with Grandpa and even promised to marry him. He believed her, they were lovers and then he got a message—not from her, mind you—but from her father via his own commanding officer announcing that Ruth never wanted to see him again, and when he tried to telephone her to talk to her, she told him that it was true and that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

‘No explanations were given, no reasons, no apologies, but worse than that, a thousand times worse, she never even told him that she was already carrying his child. She simply took herself off to the other side of the country, gave birth to Grandpa’s baby, our mother, in secret, and then walked away...walked away... abandoned Mom totally, leaving her to be given away for adoption like...like an unwanted kitten.

‘If Grandpa hadn’t been visiting an injured airman in that same hospital, if he hadn’t happened to overhear two nurses gossiping about “that poor little motherless Crighton baby” and made enquiries, he would never even have known that Mom existed. When I think of what might have happened to her, it makes my blood run cold.

‘You know what a hard time Grandpa had convincing first his commanding officers and then the British authorities that he was Mom’s father and that he had a right to bring her up himself. You know the hardship that both he and Mom suffered when he first brought her back to this country. How first his family treated her and then Pop’s. You know what it’s done to Mom, knowing that her own mother didn’t want her...that she hadn’t even left so much as a letter for her...a note...anything...so that at least Mom could have felt that she had been loved by her...that she hadn’t wanted to part with her. It’s like Mom says. It’s not just the fact that she’s never known her mother that hurts. What hurts much, much more is that Ruth has never, ever wanted to know her...that she’s never, ever tried to find her, to make even the most basic enquiries to find out what happened to her.’

‘It was a very difficult time, Sam,’ Bobbie told her sister in a low voice. ‘The end of the war. British servicemen were coming home. Perhaps Ruth felt guilty about the fact that she’d been involved with an American. She had been engaged to someone else and...well, as Mom always says, she couldn’t have had a more loving father or been a more loved child.’

‘So guilty that she abandoned her own child? That’s some guilt,’ Samantha told Bobbie bitterly. ‘Pity she hasn’t felt even a quarter of it for what she did to Mom. We have to see this through, Bobbie. She has to be made to pay...she deserves to pay. We agreed....’

Bobbie was just about to try to convince her sister that they should abandon their plan when the study door opened. Her eyes widened in shock as she saw Luke striding towards her. It wasn’t so much the total unexpectedness of his appearance that left her speechless and virtually unable to move as he snatched the receiver from her hand and slammed it down, cutting her off from Samantha, as the look of murderously cold fury in his eyes.

‘So, you’re going to make Ruth pay, are you,’ he demanded, thin-lipped as he took hold of her upper arm in a painfully hard grip. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. In fact, what I think you are going to do right now is to leave.’

‘Leave...?’ Bobbie protested squeakily. ‘But—’

‘My God, I was right about you all along, wasn’t I?’ Luke charged, overriding her nervous protest. ‘But even I hadn’t realised just how...how much you were going to demand from Ruth to keep quiet about her past.’ His mouth twisted as though soured by something foul tasting.

‘Blackmail... In my book it’s the shabbiest, meanest, most heartless crime of them all, but I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked. After all, it’s not the first time I’ve come across it, although thankfully the closest contact I’ve had to have with the perpetrator has been when I’ve refused to handle his defence.’

‘Blackmail!’ Bobbie’s eyes rounded with horror. ‘Luke. You’ve got it all wrong—’ she started to deny it but then broke off to wince in helpless protest as his angry grip on her upper arm tightened as he swung her round to face him.

‘No. You’ve got it wrong,’ he contradicted her flatly, ‘and if I were you, I shouldn’t bother wasting my breath trying to convince me otherwise, Bobbie. I’m not quite that much of a fool. Come on...this way....’

To Bobbie’s chagrin, she found that she was actually being compelled to walk and, in fact, almost run as he positively dragged her out of the room and down the corridor in the opposite direction she had originally come.

‘Let me go...what are you doing? Where are you taking me?’ she protested in panic as she tried in vain to wriggle free.

‘Let you go? No way, and as for what I’m doing...I’m doing what I should have done the first time I met you if I’d had any sense,’ he told her grimly, stopping so abruptly in front of a small, almost invisible door set into the wall that Bobbie cannoned painfully into him.

When he opened it, Bobbie saw that it led into the garden. Her legs shook with relief. For one awful moment she had actually wondered...dreaded... feared...that he might be going to imprison her somewhere.

‘This way,’ he instructed, yanking her round and virtually marching her along a narrow path. Beyond the hedge in front of them, she could just make out the glimmer of car roofs.

Without giving her the chance to say anything, Luke forced her across to his own car, using his body as well as his constraining arm to imprison her between the car and himself as he unlocked the passenger door.