Stronger than Yearning Page 3

  ‘Gone upstairs to see Lucy.’ He sighed faintly. ‘She’s going to have problems there. Lucy’s determined to oppose her for no better reason than setting her mind against everything Jenna is in favour of.’

  ‘Well, that’s teenagers for you. I don’t agree with Jenna buying the Hall, though. She’s not still doing it because it belonged to the Deverils, is she?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘I don’t think so. Oh, I don’t say that wasn’t what originally motivated her, but her desire to buy it now is entirely because she loves it. I could see it in her eyes. By the way,’ he added, ‘do you know anyone hereabouts that looks like James Deveril? You remember, we saw the portrait of him the last time the hunt ball was held there.’

  ‘Aye, I remember,’ Nancy agreed with a smile. ‘I doubt any woman looking on that face could forget. A right tearaway he looked. Dark as a gypsy with eyes as blue as cornflowers. No, there’s no one hereabouts who looks like that. Plenty with the Saxon Deveril looks, but he was a one-off, as I recall it.’

  ‘Yes, something of a black sheep of the family,’ her husband agreed. Since his retirement he had amused himself by studying the Deveril family with a view to writing about them, and he remembered that when he had questioned Sir Alan about his mysterious ancestor, his host had responded with thin-lipped displeasure.

  ‘Not a true Deveril at all. It was said at the time that his mother had been unfaithful to her husband, and he was the result. I have her diaries in the library. It seems she cared more for him than she did for her other children, although in the end she had to pay. He was caught poaching on a neighbour’s estate and shipped off to the West Indies. Bad blood always tells,’ he had added pompously.

  Poor lady, Bill had reflected, listening to his host, if her husband had been anything like as dull as the present holder of the Deveril title, no wonder she had been unfaithful. Sir Alan took a pride in the Deveril name which far exceeded its actual importance—at least that was Bill’s view. Personally, he found both Sir Alan and his son unpleasantly Victorian in their attitudes to life. Charles in particular had an arrogance that was intensely jarring. Bill had never liked him and had always considered there was something slightly shifty about Charles…something that aroused an atavistic dislike, and he could not deny that both the Deverils, father and son, had behaved extremely badly over Rachel. The poor girl had been too ignorant and young to realise that the law would have been on her side, and Sir Alan had managed to terrorise her into keeping her pregnancy a secret, claiming that no one would believe her story, and that she had been the one to entice Charles.

  Had he ever suffered any guilt? Bill wondered. The girl’s death had been a nine-day wonder in the village, especially when Jenna returned from York, with a baby she said was her dead sister’s, refusing to name the father, but insisting stubbornly in the face of her great-aunt’s outrage that the child was not going to be adopted. Both of them would have ended up in council care if he and Nancy had not stepped in. Jenna was like a daughter to them, Lucy a granddaughter, for all that they had not seen her since she was a child. He knew that Jenna was concealing Lucy’s parentage from her with the best of motives, but it was still wrong. He would have to try to talk to her again…Nancy would let him have no peace until he did so.

  CHAPTER TWO

  OUTSIDE Lucy’s room Jenna paused, gathering together all her self-control before she knocked and opened the door. Lucy was lying on the bed reading a comic. She turned her head sullenly in Jenna’s direction, scowling fiercely as she looked at her.

  ‘I don’t care what you say,’ Lucy burst out defiantly, ‘I won’t live here. I won’t!’

  Sighing, Jenna sat down on the bed and studied her niece’s turbulent features. Lucy took after her mother in looks, her hair the same warm, dark brown that Rachel’s had been. She also had Rachel’s grey eyes, but whereas Jenna remembered her sister’s expression as being a placid one, Lucy’s was normally defiant. She looked towards the window, not seeing the view beyond it, wondering why it was that she and Lucy seemed to be so constantly at loggerheads. Of course, she could understand Lucy’s desire to know more about her father, it was a quite natural one, but how could she tell her the truth?

  Perhaps it would have been wiser to have made up a father for Lucy when she was too young to question what she was told too deeply, but now it was too late for that.

  ‘Darling, you’re forgetting, you’ll be at school,’ she said in a placatory voice. ‘And you can always spend part of the holidays in London. I’ll probably keep on a flat there.’

  ‘School!’ Lucy’s voice was thick with loathing. ‘I hate that place, I hate everything about it. Why do I have to go there?’ She turned to face Jenna, anger turning her eyes almost black. ‘But, of course, we both know the answer to that, don’t we? If I wasn’t at boarding school you wouldn’t have so much time to devote to your precious career, would you?’

  It was an argument they had been through many times before and once again, patiently, Jenna explained to Lucy that she needed to earn a living for them both, that she needed to go out to work.

  ‘Yes, but there was no need to send me away to school, was there?’ Lucy challenged. ‘You could have sent me to a day school. I don’t suppose you ever really wanted me anyway, did you?’ she threw out bitterly. ‘If you’d been able to have an abortion in those days, I suppose that’s what you’d have done, isn’t it?’

  Genuinely shocked by Lucy’s outburst, Jenna could only stare at her. ‘Well, isn’t it?’ Lucy challenged fiercely.

  ‘Lucy, Jenna, lunch is ready,’ the calm interruption of Nancy’s voice cut through the tension in the small room.

  ‘You’re quite wrong, Lucy,’ Jenna said, fighting to appear calm, and not to betray the dreadful shaking that was threatening to overcome her. ‘But now isn’t the time to discuss this. We’d better go down and have lunch, otherwise Nancy will wonder what’s wrong.’

  ‘You mean she hasn’t already guessed?’ Lucy laughed bitterly as she got up off the bed and sauntered towards the door. Before she pulled it open she turned and stared defiantly at Jenna. ‘You needn’t think I’m going to leave it like this because I’m not. Somewhere I have a father, and one day I’ll find out who he is and nothing you can do will stop me!’

  She had gone downstairs before Jenna could call her back, and although over lunch Jenna made an effort to respond to Bill’s interested questions about the old Hall, her mind was not on them. There was, of course, no real way Lucy could find out about her parentage, but Jenna’s heart ached for the pain of the younger girl wishing more than anything else that she could tell her the truth, but fearing that she had left it far too late. The relationship between herself and Lucy was so delicate now that she half feared that if she did tell her the truth, Lucy would not believe her.

  And what good would it do, anyway? None that she could see.

  ‘So, what do you think the old Hall will go for?’ Bill asked when they were drinking their after-lunch coffee. ‘The reserve price?’

  Jenna grimaced, ‘I’m hoping so. Even at that it would take more than my existing cash resources.’

  Bill put down his cup and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Jenna, are you sure you’re doing the right thing? I accept that you’ve fallen in love with the house, and I can quite see that it would make an excellent headquarters from which you could expand your business, but in view of the fact that Lucy doesn’t want to move up here, and, well, the past…’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind,’ Jenna told him curtly. ‘Don’t ask me to explain why, Bill. I don’t really know myself.’ She made a tiny helpless gesture, oddly heart-tugging in a woman normally so invulnerable, and Bill could not help but be touched by it. ‘All I do know is that I must own the old Hall. For it to be mine will satisfy some need in me. I can’t explain it any better than that.’

  ‘Mmm, well…You know best.’

  ‘Dear Bill.’ Jenna got up and ruffled his grey hair. ‘What would I have done without you and Na
ncy to support me?’ He was the only member of his sex with whom she allowed herself to be herself—the only man she did not either dislike or despise.

  ‘We only did what any caring human beings would have done in the same circumstances, Jenna. It was your misfortune that in both your aunt and in Alan Deveril you came across two of the less attractive specimens of human kind.’

  Jenna shrugged. ‘I suppose I can’t really blame my aunt. After all, she was very much a product of her time. She’d done her duty as she saw it, by taking in Rachel and myself in the first place.’

  Bill watched her, noting the brief flash of pain that crossed her face. He had never been able to understand how Helen Marsden had been able to turn her fifteen-year-old great-niece from the door, especially when she had been carrying a two-week-old baby in her arms. Helen had known that the child hadn’t been Jenna’s, but that had made no difference. Thank God he had happened to be out walking the dog that night and had seen Jenna trudging down the lane, tears cascading down a small face that had been oddly fierce and determined despite her plight, even then. Lucy had been clutched in one arm, a battered suitcase in the other.

  At first Jenna had refused to stop and talk to him, but he had managed to coax her into the house and once there, Nancy soon had the whole story from her. She hadn’t wanted to stay, but Nancy had insisted. The next morning, while Jenna was still deep in an exhausted sleep, he and Nancy had sat down and talked about the situation. Jenna was flatly refusing to give up her sister’s child, and there was no reason why she should, at least in Nancy’s eyes.

  When Jenna eventually woke, they had put it to her that she stay with them, at least for the time being. At first she had been reluctant to agree. She knew Bill only as the headmaster of the local school and Nancy not at all and she was patently truculent—reluctant to trust them—but gradually Nancy had persuaded her.

  Still too young to leave school herself, Jenna had had to leave Lucy with Nancy during the day while she attended her classes. She had always been a hardworking girl, and intelligent, but then she worked like someone driven, Bill remembered. He had found her one night in the sitting-room poring over her books. When he had questioned her as to why she was still working at that time of night, she had told him fiercely that she needed to leave school as quickly as she could with as many qualifications as she could get, so that she could find a way of supporting herself and Lucy.

  ‘And what will you do about Lucy, Jenna?’ he asked her quietly now, coming back to the present. ‘I’m afraid she isn’t going to accept coming to live up here very easily.’

  ‘No, I know, I’m hoping when she goes back to school she’ll settle down a bit better.’ Jenna bit her lip, an endearing childish gesture in so polished a woman, and frowned quickly. ‘When I was upstairs with her just now, she said she hated school. She even accused me of sending her to boarding school because I wanted to be rid of her. It wasn’t like that at all, Bill.’ She turned to him, her eyes appealing for understanding. ‘I could have sent her to a day school, yes, but that would have meant her coming home sometimes to an empty flat, crossing London alone, I didn’t want that for her. I thought at least at boarding school she would be safe and secure, with other girls of her own age.’

  ‘Lucy’s a teenager, Jenna,’ Bill reminded her, ‘and like all teenagers, she’s going through a very painful growing period—something I know you missed out on.’

  ‘I didn’t have time for growing pains.’ Jenna admitted wryly. ‘I was too busy fighting to prove I was grown up enough to keep Lucy. I was terrified the authorities would take her away from me. And so they would have if it hadn’t been for you and Nancy, agreeing to stand as our foster parents until I was old enough to adopt her legally.’

  ‘Well…we wanted to do all we could to help you, Jenna, but as far as Lucy’s concerned, now, today, I think the root cause of the problem is this conflict between you concerning her father.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenna agreed quietly, ‘but what can I do, Bill? I can’t tell her the truth now. I just can’t. Perhaps I should have made up a mythical father for her years ago, but somehow I never thought about it. I ask myself, what would Rachel want me to do, and I can’t help feeling she would want me to protect her daughter.’

  Bill sighed, knowing that Jenna’s refusal to tell Lucy the truth sprang from a genuine desire to protect her but not sure that he agreed with her. If she wasn’t told the truth, Lucy would go through life constantly wondering about her father. He accepted that to be told the facts now would cause her considerable distress, but Lucy had more of Jenna’s strong nature than either of them realised—enough he was sure, when the initial shock had died down, to accept what she had been told. He felt that in the long run it was better for Lucy to have the anguish of knowing the truth now, rather than the unhealed wound of not knowing her true parentage.

  ‘I hope there isn’t going to be a lot of competition for the house,’ Jenna commented, changing the conversation. ‘When I originally found out it was going up for auction I wanted it because it had been their house, but now I’ve been round it, seen it…’ She shrugged and smiled wryly. ‘Ridiculous, I know, but I want it so badly, Bill. Too badly, perhaps. When I went inside I…it was the strangest feeling, as though somehow I had come home.’

  ‘I haven’t heard that there’s been much interest locally.’ Bill was avoiding looking directly at her, and Jenna guessed that he was more affected than he wanted her to know by her brief revelation. She had never found it easy to talk about her feelings—Bill knew that. Jenna loved both Bill and Nancy with a love almost as strong as that she felt for Lucy, but she had never been able to put her emotion into words. She knew that people often found her cool and unapproachable and she preferred it that way. Not for the world would she have wanted to admit to anyone how frightened she was of emotional commitment, of laying herself open to pain and betrayal. Strange, she had not thought so deeply about her own innermost feelings for years, and now was hardly the time to become involved in the complexities of self-analysis, she reminded herself wryly.

  ‘Of course,’ Bill went on, ‘one never knows about out-of-the-district buyers. But I shouldn’t think you’ll have anything to worry about. After all, the building is extremely run-down and in a rather remote part of the country. Large houses such as the Hall are notoriously expensive to run. What time is the auction?’

  ‘Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning,’ Jenna told him. ‘I had intended to take Lucy with me, but in view of her present mood I was wondering if you and Nancy could keep an eye on her for me?’

  ‘Don’t worry about Lucy, she’ll be fine with us.’

  Jenna bit her lip. She hadn’t missed the way Lucy had taken to watching Bill, and remembering her own early teenage years, she suspected that, like her, Lucy was suffering from the lack of a caring male presence in her life. Would Lucy also grow to womanhood seeing men as an alien and somehow threatening sex? That wasn’t what she wanted for her. So what could she do about it? she derided herself mentally. Marry?

  Who? Harley? She repressed a brief grin at the mental picture conjured up by her thoughts. Poor Harley. There had been a time when he had fancied himself in love with her, but she suspected that if she made any romantic overtures to him now he would run a mile. Marriage wasn’t for her. She could never envisage herself giving up her freedom; her right to remain in control of her life and her career…and yet…seeing the looks Bill and Nancy sometimes exchanged, the depth of understanding and caring that existed between them, there had been instances when she had felt deeply envious.

  Bill and Nancy were lucky, she told herself. She only had to think of half a dozen or more of her close acquaintances to remind herself of the disillusionment and pain that marriage could bring. She was right to remain contemptuous of the male sex. She would be far better employed worrying about what her accountants and the bank were going to say when she broke the news of her latest acquisition to them. She repressed another grin as she visualised herself t
elling them that she had bought the house because she had fallen in love with it. Hardly good business practice. No, somehow she would have to convince them that with the acquisition of the Deveril house her business would flourish, as indeed she believed it would.

  It had been hard work to go from being a shorthand-typist, working in a pool with other girls, to owning her own business. It had been her good fortune that she had soon grown bored with the humdrum routine of the typing-pool and had applied for another job. That job had been the first stepping-stone to her present career. She had been exultant when John Howard took her on as his personal secretary, and had made an excited telephone call to Bill and Nancy to tell them all about it.

  ‘An interior designer?’ Nancy had been inclined to be slightly disapproving, thinking that Jenna would have been wiser to stay with the insurance company, but Bill had supported her. Her plans for going to university had been abandoned when Rachel died. Bill had tried to argue her out of it, telling her that he and Nancy would take care of Lucy for her, but she had been adamant. Lucy was her responsibility, her only link with her dead sister. If she went to university Lucy would be five or six before Jenna was qualified.…Lucy would not be Rachel’s child but Nancy’s and Bill’s, so instead Jenna had concentrated on gaining some secretarial skills, determined to find a job and a home for them both just as soon as she possibly could.

  Getting a job had been relatively easy. In those days, secretarial jobs weren’t that hard to come by, and by studying the national papers she had managed to secure an interview with a London-based insurance company without too much trouble. Finding somewhere suitable for herself and Lucy to live in London was a different matter. And who would look after Lucy while Jenna was at work? Her salary was small…not large enough to support both of them, but instinct told her that if she was going to succeed anywhere it would be in London, and not the quiet local market town in Yorkshire. So she had been forced to agree with Nancy’s view that Lucy should stay with them. It had been hard, those first six months in London, saving every penny she could from her salary, living in a dismal but cheap women’s hostel so that she could travel back to Yorkshire every weekend to see Lucy…And then had come the job with John Howard. He had paid her well, delighted to discover that she had an almost instinctive flair for colour and design. It had been at his suggestion that she had attended night school, and she had learned a good deal from him, sensing that he was not a man who represented any threat to her.