The Hidden Years Read online

  The Hidden Years

  By

  Penny Jordan

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE HIDDEN YEARS

  Sage could see the diaries now; all of them methodically numbered and dated, as though her mother had always known that there would come a time, as though she had deliberately planned…

  Her hands were shaking as she opened the first diary. She didn't want to do this, and yet even in her reluctance she could almost feel the pressure of her mother's will, almost hear her whispering:

  'You promised…'

  Sage blinked rapidly to clear her eyes and then read the first sentence.

  'Today I met Kit…'

  'Kit…' Sage frowned and turned back the page to check on the date. This diary had begun when her mother was seventeen. Soon after her eighteenth birthday she had been married to Edward. So who was this Kit?

  Nebulous, uneasy feelings stirred inside her as Sage stared reluctantly at the neat, evenly formed handwriting. It was like being confronted with a dark passage you had to go down and yet feared to enter. And yet, after all, what was there to fear?

  Telling herself she was being stupid, she picked up the diary for the second time and started to read.

  Penny Jordan Born in Preston, Lancashire, Penny Jordan now lives with her husband in a beautiful fourteenth-century house in rural Cheshire. Hers is a success almost as breathtaking as the exploits of the characters she so skilfully and knowingly portrays. Penny has been writing for over ten years and now has over seventy novels to her name including the phenomenally successful Power Play and Silver. With over thirty million copies of her books in print and translations into seventeen languages, she has firmly established herself as a leading authoress of extraordinary scope.

  Her previous novels in Worldwide are:

  POWER PLAY

  SILVER

  First published 1990

  First Australian paperback edition 1991

  ISBN 0 373 57989 6

  Copyright © 1990 by Penny Jordan.

  Philippine copyright 1990.

  Australian copyright 1990.

  New Zealand copyright 1990.

  PROLOGUE

  Judged by the laws of logic, the accident should never have happened at all.

  A quiet—or at least quiet by London's frenetic standards—side-street; a clear, bright spring morning; a taxi driver who prided himself on his accident-free record; a slender, elegant woman who looked and moved like someone ten years younger than she actually was; none of the parts that went to make up the whole was in any way logically vulnerable, and yet, as though fate had decreed what must happen and was determined that it would happen, even though the woman crossed the road with ease and safety, even though the taxi driver had seen her and logged the fact that she had crossed the road ahead of him, even though the pavement and road were free of debris and frost, for some reason, as she stepped on to the pavement, the woman's heel caught on the kerb, throwing her off balance so that she turned and fell, not on to the relative safety of the pavement, but into the road and into the path of the taxi, whose driver was safely and law-abidingly not driving along its crown in the sometimes dangerous and arrogant manner of taxi drivers the world over, but well into his correct side of the street.

  He saw the woman fall, and braked instinctively, but it was too late. The sickening sensation of soft, vulnerable human flesh hitting his cab was a sound he would carry with him the rest of his life. His passenger, a pinstripe-suited businessman in his early fifties, was jolted out of his seat by the impact. Already people were emerging from the well-kept, expensive houses that lined the street.

  Someone must have rung for an ambulance because he could hear its muted siren wailing mournfully like a dirge… He could hardly bear to look at the woman, he was so sure that she must be dead, and so he stood sickly to one side as the ambulance arrived and the professionals took over.

  'She's alive… just,' he heard someone say, and in his mind's eye he pictured the people somewhere who were still at this moment oblivious to the tragedy about to darken their lives.

  Somewhere this woman would have family, friends, dependants—she had had that look about her, the confident, calm look of a woman in control of her life and those lives that revolved around her own. Somewhere those people still went about their daily business, unaware and secure.

  Her mother, injured in a road accident and now lying close to death in a hospital bed—it seemed impossible, Sage thought numbly; her mother was invulnerable, omnipresent, indestructible, or so she had always seemed.

  Vague, disconnected, unreal thoughts ricocheted through her brain: memories, fears, sensations. The Porsche, which had been a celebratory thirtieth birthday present to herself, cut through the heavy traffic, her physical ability to control and manoeuvre the expensive piece of machinery oddly unaffected by her mental turmoil.

  There was a sensation in the pit of her stomach which she remembered from her childhood and adolescence: an uncomfortable mixture of apprehension, pain and anger. How dared her mother do this to her? How dared she intrude on the life she had built for herself? How dared she reach out, as she had reached out so very many times in the past, to cast her influence, her presence over her own independence?

  She wasn't a child any more, she was mature, an adult, so why now was she swamped with those old and oh, so familiar feelings of resentment and guilt, of pain and anger and, most betraying of all, of fear?

  The hospital wasn't far away, which was presumably why they had contacted her and not Faye. And then she remembered that she was her mother's closest blood relative… the next of kin. A tiny tremor of pure acid-sharp horror chilled her skin. Her mother, dying… She had told herself for so long that she felt nothing for the woman who had given birth to her—that her mother's treachery and deceit had made it impossible for any emotion other than hatred to exist between them—that it was doubly shocking to feel this dread… this anguish.

  She turned into the hospital, parked her car, and climbed out of it, frowning, the movement of her elegant, lithe body quick and impatient. A typical Leo was how Liz Danvers had once ruefully described her second child: fiery, impetuous, impatient, intemperate and intelligent.

  That had been almost twenty years ago. Since then time had rubbed smooth some of the rough edges of her restless personality, experience gentling and softening the starkness of a nature that weaker souls often found too abrasive. Now in her early thirties, she had learned to channel those energies which had once driven her calmer and far more self-possessed mother behind the wall of reserve and dignity which Sage had wasted so much of her childhood trying to batter down, in an effort to reach the elusive core of her personality which she had sensed her mother withheld from her; just as she had always felt that in some way she was not the child her mother had wanted her to be.

  But then of course she was not, and never could be,
another David. David… her brother. She missed him even now… missed his gentle wise counsel, missed his love, his understanding. David… everyone who had known him had loved him, and deservedly so. To describe his virtues was to make him appear insipid, to omit due cognisance of the essential sweetness and selflessness of both David the child and David the man, which had made him so deeply loved by everyone who knew him. But she had never been jealous of David, had never felt that, but for him, her mother would have loved her more or better… so the schism between them went too deep to be explained away by a maternal preference for a more favoured sibling. Once it had hurt, that knowledge that there was something within her that turned the love her mother seemed to shower on everything and everyone else around her into enmity and dislike, but maturity had taught her acceptance if nothing else, acceptance and the ability to distance herself from those things in her past which were too painful to confront. Things which she avoided, just as she avoided all but the most necessary contact with her mother. She seldom went home to Cottingdean these days.

  Cottingdean: the house itself, the garden, the village; all of them her mother's domain, all of them created and nurtured by her mother's will. They were her mother's world.

  Cottingdean. How she had hated and resented the place's demands on her mother throughout her childhood, transferring to it the envy and dislike she had never felt for David. Too young then to analyse why it was that her mother seemed to hold her at a distance, to dislike her almost, she had jealously believed that it was because of Cottingdean and its demands upon her mother's time; that Cottingdean meant far more to her mother than she ever could.

  In that perhaps she had been right, and why not? she thought cynically—Cottingdean had certainly repaid to her mother the time and devotion she had invested in it, in a way that she, her child, her daughter, never could.

  Cottingdean, David, her father—these had been the main, the important components of her mother's life, and she had always felt that she stood apart from them, outside them, an interloper… an intruder; how fiercely and verbally she had resented that feeling.

  She pushed open the plate-glass door and walked into the hospital's reception area. A young nurse listened as she gave her name, and then consulted a list nervously before telling her, 'Your mother is in the intensive care unit. If you'd like to wait in reception, the surgeon in charge of her case would like to have a word with you.'

  Self-control had been something she had learned long ago, and so Sage allowed nothing of what she was feeling to be betrayed by her expression as she thanked the nurse and walked swiftly over to a seat. Was her mother dead already? Was that why the surgeon wanted to see her? A tremor of unwanted sensation seized her, a panicky terror that made her want to cry out like a child. No, not yet… There's too much I want to know… Too much that needs to be said.

  Which was surely ridiculous given the fact that she and her mother had long ago said all that there was to say to one another… When she herself had perhaps said too much, revealed too much. Been hurt too much.

  As she waited, her body taut, her face smooth of any expression, even in repose there was something about her that reflected her inherent inner turbulence: her dark red hair so vibrant with life and energy, her strong-boned face quick and alive, the green eyes that no one knew quite where she had inherited as changeable as the depths of a northern lake under spring skies. The nurse glanced at her occasionally, envying her. She herself was small and slightly plump, a pretty girl in her way, but nowhere near in the class of the stunning woman who sat opposite her. There was elegance in the narrowness of her ankles and wrists, beauty that owed nothing to youth or fashion in the shaping of her face, mystery and allure in the colour of her hair and eyes, and something about every smallest movement of her body that drew the eye like a magnet.

  Somewhere in this huge anonymous building lay her mother, Sage told herself, impossible though that seemed. Her mother had always seemed almost immortal, the pivot on which so many lives turned. Even hers, until she had finally rebelled and broken away to be her own person. Yes, her mother had always seemed indestructible, inviolate, an immutable part of the universe. The perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect employer—the epitome of all that her own peer group was striving so desperately to achieve. And she had achieved it against the kind of odds her generation would never have to face. Her mother was a woman thirty years ahead of her time, a woman who had taken a sick man, at one time close to death, and kept him alive for over twenty-five years. A woman who had become the mistress of a sick house and a dying estate and had turned them both into monuments of what could be achieved if one was single-minded and determined enough, if one had the skill, and the vision, and the sheer dogged willpower needed to perform such miracles.

  Was this perhaps the root cause of the disaffection between her and her mother? Not that her mother had not loved her enough, but that she had always unknowingly been jealous and resentful of her mother's gifts? Was she jealous of her mother's achievements? Was she masking those feelings by letting herself believe that it was her right to feel as she did… that the guilt, the betrayal, the blame were her mother's and not her own?

  'Miss Danvers?'

  Her head snapped round as the impatient male voice addressed her. She was used to the male awareness that momentarily overwhelmed this doctor's professionalism. It was a dubious gift, this dark, deep vein of sexuality that seemed to draw men to her in desire and need. Desire but not love. Something sharp and bitter moved inside her—an old wound, but one that had never healed.

  To banish it she asked crisply, 'My mother…?'

  'Alive. At the moment,' he told her, anticipating her question. He was focusing on her properly now, banishing his earlier awareness of her; a tall, thin man who was probably only six or seven years older than she was herself, but whose work had aged him prematurely. A gifted, intelligent man, but one who, at the moment, looked exhausted and impatient.

  Fear smothered Sage's instinctive sympathy as she waited for him to go on.

  'Your mother was unconscious when she was brought in—as yet we have no idea how serious her internal injuries are.'

  'No idea…' Sage showed her shock. 'But…'

  'We've been far too busy simply keeping her alive to do anything more than run the most cursory of tests. She's a very strong woman, otherwise she'd never have survived. She's conscious at the moment and she's asking for you. That's why I wanted to see you. Patients, even patients as gravely injured as your mother, react very quickly to any signs of distress or fear they pick up from their visitors, especially when those visitors are close family.'

  'My mother was asking for me?' Sage queried, astonished.

  'Yes!' He frowned at her. 'We had the devil of a job tracing you…'

  Her mother had asked for her. Sage couldn't understand it. Why her? She would have expected her to ask for Faye, David's wife—David's widow—or for Camilla, David and Faye's daughter, but never for her.

  'My sister-in-law—' she began, voicing her thoughts, but the surgeon shook his head brusquely.

  'We have notified her, but at this stage we have to limit your mother's visitors. There's obviously something on her mind, something distressing her… With a patient as gravely ill as your mother, anything we can do to increase her chances of recovery, no matter how small, is vitally important, which is why I must stress that it is crucial that whatever it is your mother wants to say to you, however unlikely or inexplicable it seems, you must try to find a way of reassuring her. It's essential that we keep her as calm as we possibly can.'

  The look he was giving her suggested that he had severe doubts that she would be able to do any such thing. Doubts which she herself shared, Sage acknowledged wryly.

  'If you'd like to follow me,' he said now, and, as she followed him down the narrow, empty corridor leading off the main reception area, Sage was amused by the way he kept a wider than necessary physical distance between them. Was he a little intimidated by he
r? He wouldn't be the first man to react to her like that. All the nice men, the ones with whom she might have found something approaching peace and contentment, shared this ambiguous, wary attitude towards her. It was her looks, of course: they couldn't see beyond them, beyond the dangerous sensuality they invoked, making them see her as a woman who would never need their tenderness, never make allowances for their vulnerabilities. They were wrong, though. She had far too many vulnerabilities of her own to ever mock or make light of anyone else's. And as for tenderness—she smiled a bitter smile—only she knew how much and how often she had ached for its healing balm.

  'This way,' he told her. Up ahead of them were the closed doors barring the way to the intensive care unit.

  Sage shivered as he pushed open the door, an instinctive desire to stop, to turn and run, almost halting her footsteps. Somewhere beyond those doors lay her mother. Had she really asked for her! It seemed so out of character, so unbelievable almost, and the shock of it had thrown her off guard, disturbing the cool, indifferent, self-protective shield she had taken up all those years ago when the pain of her mother's final betrayal had destroyed her reluctant, aching love for her.

  She shivered again, trying to recognise the unfamiliar image of her mother which the surgeon had held up for her. Surely in such extremity as her mother now suffered a person must always ask for whoever it was they most loved, and she had known almost all her life that for some reason her mother's love, given so freely and fiercely to others, had never really been given to her. Duty, care, responsibility… they had all been there, masquerading under the guise of mother love, but Sage had learned young to distinguish between reality and fiction and she had known then, had felt then that insurmountable barrier that existed between them.