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  Geraldine Elizabeth Sophie Frances Fitzcarlton, Countess of Rothwell, each one of her Christian names marking her family’s allegiance to those who had held the English throne… apart from Geraldine… Geraldine had been her mother’s personal choice. Elizabeth was for the Tudors, Sophie the Hanovers, and Frances the Stuarts, and each one of them in turn had heaped fresh honours on her forebears.

  Her father had once said that he—or she—who carried the mantle of their inheritance carried a heavy weight indeed, not just of prestige and power, but of guilt and responsibility.

  The plane started to lift into the air, and Silver opened her eyes, wanting to let her thoughts drift, yet driven by some self-imposed discipline to accept the need within herself to go back, to examine her life, to study it as though she herself stood outside it, as indeed she now did.

  She closed her eyes again, concentrating her mind. She had been born in Ireland towards the end of an exceptionally hot summer, her arrival ill timed, coming in her mother’s seventh month of pregnancy.

  It had been so early as a result of the shock her mother had received when one of her father’s prize racehorses had broken free of its groom in the stableyard, lashing out at everyone who came near it with wicked steel hoofs and snapping teeth before clearing the main gates with a jump that Padraic O’Connor, her father’s head trainer, who had been little more than a trainee stablehand at the time, was still inclined to marvel over.

  Unfortunately, her mother had always been terrified of horses, a fear that sprang from a bad fall from a too highly bred filly at her father’s second cousin’s stud farm in Kentucky’s Blue Grass country. She had panicked and, thinking that the horse intended to harm her, had run across the cobbled yard, catching the heel of her shoe between the cobbles and pitching forwards on to the ground before anyone could save her.

  That night, while in the stables John Kincaid the vet laboured to save the recaptured filly, upstairs in the ancient keep of the original castle—a bleak, dark room, so the new bride always complained fretfully, despite its expensive refurbishment—the local doctor, summoned despairingly when Bridie Donovan, the housekeeper, had announced that the new Countess had begun to give birth, laboured to save the lives both of the frail, sweating woman lying in the ancient tester-bed that her husband’s ancestors had commissioned in France, and of the child she carried.

  He was an honest country doctor, used to dealing with births and deaths, but the young Countess was narrow across the pelvis, her hipless body as slender as a child’s, too slender for her ever to have been able to give birth easily, and the child inside her was a large one, fighting to be born too soon.

  It was Bridie herself who had told her the full story, not once but over and over again until she knew it off by heart.

  ‘Well, Geraldine Frances,’ she would say, because it was her father’s decision that she should be known by both her first and last Christian names, ‘Well, Geraldine Frances, it was like this… We had sent to Limerick for the ambulance and old Doyle was in a rare lather, that worried he was that it wouldn’t arrive in time. Your poor father was pacing the floor, cursing himself and the filly to damnation and back, swearing that he should never have brought your mother out of England… that he should never have taken such a risk, with her so near the time and knowing how much she hated the castle. Just about given up hope, we had, when we heard the ambulance, but you were too quick for them…’ Here she would always give a rich chuckle. ‘You knew where your rightful place was even then. Determined to be born here, you was, in the same bed as your ancestors before you.’

  Yes, she had been born in Ireland, in the grim, grey castle of those doughty warrior princes who had mingled their blood with the Norman line of her Elizabethan ancestors. She had been the first Rothwell to be born there in eight generations.

  The ambulance which had come too late for her birth had taken her mother to hospital, and she had gone with her. But she hadn’t stayed there long. Her mother had been too frail to withstand such an ordeal, and her life had seeped slowly away from her so that, within a week of Geraldine Frances’s birth, her mother was dead.

  She had little recollection of those early years, knowing only what she had been told about them by her father, and by the people who worked for him. How he had returned to London grim-faced and bleak… how he had refused to allow his American mother-in-law to take the responsibility of the child off his hands… How he had himself interviewed and appointed a nanny for her and how he had then retreated from the London social scene which he enjoyed so much to spend a year mourning the death of his wife and watching over the life of his child.

  She had had an idyllic childhood, with the almost constant companionship of her father, for he had refused to send her away to school, hiring tutors for her instead, taking her with him on his annual and fixed progression around his personal world. By the time she was ten she had learned, like him, to adapt herself to her surroundings, and to accept the almost chameleon-like change in her father as they moved from the almost austere formality of the great Palladian mansion of Rothwell to the casual, almost fecklessly relaxed lifestyle of Castle Kilrayne.

  And then there was formality of another kind when they visited the pampas country of Argentina, and she was obliged to speak the pure Castilian Spanish of their hosts.

  Until her grandmother’s death when she was seven, summer almost always contained an obligatory month of purgatory cooped up in the stiff formality with which her grandmother ran her Palm Beach household; it was no place for a young girl used to running free with the wind in her hair, a young girl to whom the music of life was made up of her father’s voice and the sound of horses’ hoofs, be it on the racecourse, on the polo field, or on the crisp, frosted hunting fields of the Belvoir Hunt, of which he was a member.

  Theirs was an enclosed world, and she liked it that way. The obligatory Christmas visits of her father’s sister and her son, who always spent that time of year with them at Rothwell, were the only events that shadowed her life. For Charles, her cousin, six years her senior, tall, golden-haired and almost impossibly good-looking, she had mixed feelings, half of her inclined to hero-worship him and the other half just a little afraid of something within him that she didn’t really recognise, but which intimidated her. An older, wiser person would have discerned that towards Geraldine Frances Charles felt both resentment and jealousy, but, since he was careful to disguise those feelings whenever someone more astute might have recognised them, Geraldine Frances’s father was unaware of how his nephew really felt about his daughter.

  James himself had ambivalent feelings towards Charles, feelings which he freely acknowledged arose from his own guilt over the way his sister had been treated by their father after she had married, and the fact that Charles was so very much like the man who had fathered him, a man so far removed from their own social sphere that marriage to him had virtually reduced his sister to a social outcast.

  Willingly he had offered to pay for Charles to attend one of the country’s foremost public schools, but the school didn’t have a place for Charles and his sister had announced that she preferred to send him to another equally expensive but less regimental institution.

  Since the first choice had been his own public school, James had not been too pleased, none the less he had complied with her demands, and now Charles was attending a very prestigious public school which admitted both sexes.

  If Geraldine Frances wasn’t sure quite how she felt about her cousin, she knew exactly what her feelings were for her aunt. Between Geraldine Frances and her aunt there existed a mutual animosity that neither of them tried to conceal.

  Looking into her cold, pale blue eyes, Geraldine Frances found it hard to accept that this unlikeable, grim woman was her father’s sister. It seemed impossible that any blood relationship could actually exist between them, and she didn’t envy Charles, having her for a mother.

  Her annual visits to Rothwell always followed the same pattern. A week before
Christmas she would descend on them, sending the staff into a panic of preparation and bustle. She would sweep into the elegant oval hallway, studying it with gimlet eyes, reminding Geraldine Frances of an angry cat swishing its tail, waiting to pounce on its intended victim; and more often than not she was that victim.

  With her she would always bring Charles; a Charles whose attitude towards Geraldine Frances confused and puzzled her. There had been one year when he had wandered into the kitchen and found the place in turmoil, the reason being that one of the stable cats had brought in a live mouse and set it free.

  The maids were screaming for someone to do something, and Geraldine Frances, whose heart was tender, was desperately trying to catch the poor, terrified creature before the cat reached it, so that she could set it free outside.

  Panicked by fear, it ran straight for Charles as he opened the door.

  Geraldine Frances saw him lift his foot and cried out sharply to him, ‘No… don’t!’

  And he looked at her and gave her such a warm, tender smile that she forgot, as she always did when she was basking in the warmth of that smile, the other side of him, the cruel side, and rushed forward to pick up the mouse. He waited until she reached him, and then brought down his foot with deliberate and open purpose.

  She heard the crunching of small bones, felt the tiny animal’s fear and shock as though it had been her own, and while she stood there, transfixed by horror and anguish, she heard him saying solicitously, ‘Gerry, I’m so sorry… I thought you wanted me to kill it. I thought you were frightened.’ He gave her another smile. ‘Girls are always frightened of mice…’

  And as always within a tiny space of time he managed to confuse and upset her to such an extent that she felt the blame for what had happened lay on her shoulders; that she hadn’t made her meaning plain… that she had unwittingly orchestrated the poor little beast’s death.

  And underlying that was another fear, deeper, stronger—a fear that was somehow beginning to shadow her whole life. Whenever he saw her, Charles always managed to make her feel that somehow or other she wasn’t like other girls, those girls who attended the same prestigious school he went to himself… that she was somehow lacking, incomplete…

  His new school had taught Charles a great deal, including the fact that girls were often open to male mockery and criticism. That they could be subtly bullied and tormented, made to cry and plead.

  A victim of his mother’s domination himself, Charles relished the opportunity to dominate others in turn.

  The year she was eight, Christmas was overshadowed by the fact that her father was ill. James was one of those fortunate souls who rarely suffered ill health, but there had been an epidemic of mumps in the village, and Geraldine Frances had contracted it on an illicit visit to the gamekeeper’s cottage to play with his children. Because of her father’s peripatetic lifestyle she had no real friends of her own age and class, and was often lonely for the company of her peers without even realising it herself.

  The gamekeeper’s wife, who had been out shopping, discovered her in the sick-room when she returned, and was obliged to escort her back to Rothwell and explain to the Earl what had happened.

  Inevitably, Geraldine Frances went down with the virus herself, but what no one had foreseen was that she would pass it on to her father.

  For what seemed like weeks the house was shrouded in an unfamiliar silence, busy with the comings and goings of the doctor, who always seemed to wear a far more abstracted air when he attended her father than he had done when he attended her.

  Everyone within the house seemed to be affected by a strange tension, and then abruptly, one afternoon, much earlier in the month than expected, her aunt arrived.

  Standing outside the library door, waiting to see her father, who was now allowed out of bed, Geraldine Frances heard Aunt Margaret saying triumphantly to him, ‘Well, James, you only have yourself to blame. I warned you years ago that you should remarry, and now, of course, it’s too late.’

  Too late for what? Geraldine Frances puzzled, bewildered by both the constrained excitement in her aunt’s voice and the grim anger in her father’s when he replied to her.

  Despite her curiosity, some sensitive inner knowledge warned her not to mention what she had overheard… not to question.

  After that Christmas Charles had not only spent the Christmas holidays with them, but others as well.

  Sometimes she had surprised him watching her, gloatingly, as though he knew some secret she did not. He confused her and continued to tease her, almost to the point of torment at times. But still he intrigued her, casting a spell over her which she was far too young to recognise.

  Charles as a teenager was a perfect golden god; handsome was far too mundane a word to describe him.

  In vain Geraldine Frances searched in her own mirror for some echo of Charles’s perfect beauty in her own face. There was none.

  ‘A plain little thing,’ was how she had once overheard one of the staff describing her, almost disparagingly. ‘Not like the other one… Handsome as a prince, he is.’

  The summer was cold and wet, her father distant with her, indifferent to her almost, in a way that hurt. She ached to ask him if she had done something to offend him, but couldn’t find the words, and so she suffered in silence, missing their old closeness, growing unhappy and afraid, sensing that somehow her life was changing but not knowing why or how.

  One afternoon, to escape from her aunt’s constant nagging about how far beneath the standards she herself had achieved as a child Geraldine Frances fell, she made her way to the long gallery. Here she liked to play imaginary games with the paintings of her ancestors, creating from their portraits three-dimensional companions to ease her loneliness.

  When Charles came into the gallery behind her, his presence surprised her. He too had changed towards her since Christmas; he no longer bothered to be kind, to charm… and deep down inside there was a small part of her that was almost frightened of him without knowing why.

  Instinctively edging away from him, she wished she were somewhere else.

  It seemed to her this summer that, whenever she saw her father, Charles was with him, the gold head close to the black, the blue eyes taunting her with the knowledge that he had formed a relationship with her father from which she was excluded… For the first time in her life she was being made aware of the fact that her father preferred another’s company, and it hurt.

  And, what was more, Charles knew that it hurt.

  ‘Poor Gerry,’ he mocked now. ‘All on your own.’

  Driven by a defensive impulse she could neither control nor explain, she said rudely, ‘Go away. Rothwell is my home, not yours. You have no right to be here…’

  She stopped then, suddenly afraid as she saw the look in his eyes, but even as she stepped back from him it vanished, and he said softly, ‘You’re wrong, Gerry. I have far more right to be here than you. The right of succession… One day, when your father is dead, Rothwell and everything else will be mine.’

  Geraldine Frances stared at him. She couldn’t imagine her father being dead… never thought about it nor considered it, and now, suddenly, with a few careless words, Charles had made her conscious of how very vulnerable her whole world was… But what did he mean about Rothwell?

  As though she had asked him, he added dulcetly, ‘Only a male can inherit Rothwell, you know, and your father can’t have any sons now… And that’s your fault… No wonder he can’t bear the sight of you any more.’ He was smiling at her, smiling as though he was being kind, and inside… inside she felt as though she were being ripped apart with sharp, poison-tipped knives. She wanted to deny what he was saying, to challenge him, but instinctively she felt a deep inner insecurity that made her hesitate, and then, to her relief, she saw that her father was standing behind Charles. She opened her mouth to appeal to him to defend her and then, when she saw the look of bitter fury in his eyes, she fell silent, quelled by an emotion she couldn’t totally unde
rstand.

  Charles, sensing that they weren’t alone, swung round, his eyes widening with shock as he saw his uncle standing there. He left the gallery without a word, and she, childlike, burst into tears and ran to her father, taking comfort from the safe, protective feeling of his arms round her as he picked her up and held her, telling her that everything was all right and that of course he still loved her.

  That evening her aunt and her father spent a long time in the library. But the seed of the destruction of her feeling of self-worth had already been sown. Her aunt emerged with anger in her eyes and a dark, hectic flush mantling her cheekbones. She and Charles left the next day.

  It had been shortly after that that her father had suddenly started talking seriously to her about the burden she would one day have to carry, of the need she would have to marry and produce a son who would carry on the family name, the family tradition. It had been then that he had started to tutor her in all she would need to know.

  It had been then that they had drawn closer together, and that year there had been no Aunt Margaret or Charles at Rothwell for Christmas. She had been glad to be relieved of their presence, sensing in both her aunt and Charles a resentment and dislike of her that fell on her like an oppressive weight, even while at the same time part of her missed Charles’s presence.

  It was almost a year before she saw either her aunt or Charles again, and when she did she was conscious of a change in their attitude towards her.

  Generously she had accepted Charles’s overtures of friendship, sensing that her father wouldn’t object to the new relationship that was developing between them, and then suddenly, the year she was twelve, her feelings towards Charles changed dramatically.

  She was at that age when the hormonal changes of her body were making themselves felt, and Charles, six years her senior, already so much more mature, enthralled her. She was lonely that year because, for the first time, her father had gone away without her. That had hurt her, and she had found an unexpected source of solace in Charles, who seemed eager for her company.