Man Of Stone

‘What is it, Sara?’ she asked gently. ‘Every time I mention Luke’s name, you almost flinch.’

‘I didn’t realise he actually lived here.’ Sara bit her lip, aware of how breathless and nervy her voice sounded. ‘I suppose it’s just that I’m not used to such overpoweringly male men,’ she added in a brief attempt at humor, trying to cover her obvious dismay. She didn’t want to upset her grandmother by seeming to dislike a man she clearly held in high esteem.

‘Yes, Luke is very male, which makes it all the more surprising…’ Her grandmother broke off and grimaced faintly. ‘Well, I can tell you, Sara. After all, you are my granddaughter. I’m worried about Luke. He should marry again…’

‘Perhaps he prefers not to put someone else in his first wife’s place,’ Sara suggested gently, and earned herself a rather odd look from her grandmother. At first she thought the old lady was going to say something else, but obviously she had changed her mind, because she gave a small shrug and turned back to return downstairs.

Privately, Sara suspected there would be any number of women only too willing to fill the empty place left in Luke’s life by the death of his wife, with or without a wedding ring.

Of course, she herself was immune to his brand of raw sexuality.

‘Luke might be a very wealthy, very intelligent man, but he’s still human, and still vulnerable,’ her grandmother told her, shrewdly reading her mind. ‘Let’s go downstairs and have some coffee. Anna normally brings me a tray about this time.’

Anna was her grandmother’s housekeeper and cook, a pretty, plump woman in her late forties.

Anna and Harrison both apparently had their own flats in the converted mews building over what had once been the stables and were now garages.

‘When Luke comes back, he can show you the grounds properly. I don’t walk as much these days as I used to.’

‘Tell me about the house,’ Sara asked impulsively when they were sitting down. Instinctively, her glance went to the portrait of her mother above the mantelpiece. Seeing it, her grandmother said gently, ‘Another day, perhaps, when I can show you round, and then you’ll find it more interesting. After all,’ she teased, ‘it’s been here for close on four hundred years—it isn’t going to disappear overnight!’

‘I don’t know,’ Sara laughed. ‘It even looks like something out of a fairy-tale to me. I had no idea…’

‘There have been Fittons in this part of the country for many, many years. Shakespeare even wrote about one.’

‘Mary Fitton, of course,’ Sara supplied, remembering the tragic story of Shakespeare’s dark lady of the sonnets.

‘Why don’t I tell you about your mother, instead?’

‘Well, if you’re sure you won’t find it painful…’

Her grandmother shook her head.

‘No, my dear. After all, I’ve had over twenty-three years in which to accustom myself to the loss of your mother. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, in my darkest moments, I wonder if it’s true that the Fitton name is cursed—there have been so many small tragedies. But then your grandfather would remind me that in any family with a history stretching a long way into the past there are similar sorrows and worse.

‘Your mother was a delightful child—headstrong, pretty, very like you, physically.’ And although she didn’t say it, she acknowledged that her daughter had had an inner light, a brightness that had either been quenched in her granddaughter or never allowed to be lit.

Now that she had the full story of the tragedy that had struck the small family, she was doubly appalled at her son-in-law’s selfishness. To have made no provision for his family, especially when it contained such a young and physically vulnerable child…

‘It’s time I was in bed,’ she told Sara with a smile. ‘It’s been a very exciting day for me. Don’t worry about getting up in the morning.’

‘You mustn’t spoil me,’ Sara protested. ‘I ought to be thinking about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I should try and find out about some sort of training. I’ve got my secretarial qualifications. Do you think I might be able to find a job in Chester?’

‘That’s something we can talk about later,’ she was told firmly. ‘For the moment, you need to rest and relax. Goodnight, my dear.’

She had been so lucky, Sara marvelled as she prepared for bed; so much, much more lucky than she had ever dreamed she might be. That her grandmother should have welcomed both her and Tom so generously; that she should be so prepared to take them in and love them… She could hardly believe it was true.

There was only one thing to mar her happiness. Or, rather, one person.

Luke!

She shivered slightly beneath the fine linen sheets, reliving the sensation of his hands on her skin as he supported her. That he had been totally unaware of her as a woman she didn’t need telling. It had been there in the brief, dismissive glance he gave her before turning his attention to Cressy.

But then that indifference had changed to a fierce, biting contempt that had blasted her fragile self-confidence, leaving her acutely vulnerable to the dislike she had felt emanating from him.

Was it just because Cressy had misrepresented her to him? She told herself that a man who could be so easily deceived by her stepsister’s pretty face wasn’t worth bothering about, but she couldn’t dismiss him so easily.

If she stayed here, he was going to be part of the fabric of her life. Her grandmother plainly adored him. Sara was dangerously tempted to leave, but how could she? She had Tom to think about. Tom, who already seemed to have settled into his new environment.

At least Luke wasn’t there all the time, if he constantly came and went on business. And if he really disliked her as much as she believed, he would be as anxious to avoid her as she was to avoid him.

So why did she feel this nagging sense of danger? Why did she find herself thinking of him as the serpent in her new-found Eden?

Although she hadn’t intended to, she did oversleep. Tom woke her up, announcing that he had had his breakfast and that he was ready to explore.

‘Harrison is going to show me everything,’ he told her importantly.

Did Harrison know not to take him near anything furred or feathered? Anxiously, Sara got up, instructing him to stay inside until she was ready to go out with him.

She donned her usual uniform of jeans and sweater, pausing only for a moment to admire the view from her bedroom window.

Her grandmother, she learned from Anna, always had breakfast in her own room.

‘It’s her heart,’ the housekeeper told her. ‘She must rest as much as she can, but she does not always do so. Although Luke does what he can to remove most of the burden from her shoulders, there is still much work involved in organising the maintenance and running of a house such as this one.’

Listening to her, Sara made a vow there and then that she would do as much as she could to remove that burden from her grandmother’s shoulders.

After breakfast, Harrison showed them round the gardens. How easy it would be to allow oneself to slip back in time here, if only in the imagination, Sara thought, marvelling at the intricacy and cleverness of a cleverly fashioned knot garden.

There was an avenue of clipped yews and quiet, shadowed pathways that led to small, secret, enclosed gardens with old-fashioned, wrought-iron benches. In one was a sundial, engraved with quotations from Shakespeare’s sonnets, and in another a white-painted summer-house, shaped like a small pavilion.

How could her mother have endured to leave all this? Sara could only marvel at the power of human emotions. Had she been brought up here, could she have turned her back on it and the love of her parents to go off with a man like her father?

Perhaps it was the insecurity of her own childhood from which had grown this deep-rooted need for security. Her mother, the child of such security, might not have experienced its need quite so sharply. It was true that familiarity could breed contempt.

The gardens had such serenity, such a sense of time and timelessness. She listened as Harrison told her how each individual garden had come into being.

He had been with her parents for many years. His family came from the village, he told her. He was in his sixties, a wiry, weathered man with a quiet voice and very sharp eyes.

Tom had taken to him immediately. Like her, Tom craved security… and love.

‘Do you have any dogs here?’ Tom asked earnestly, and Sara quailed a little, remembering Cressy’s unkind promise to him.

‘Not now,’ Harrison told him, shaking his head. ‘We did once, but your grandmother says she’s too old now for a young dog.’

They saw the peacocks and their wives, strutting beside the lake, fanning their tales in rage as humans invaded their domain. Tom stared at them in awe, fascinated by the iridescent ‘eyes’ in their tails.

‘A present from Queen Victoria, they was,’ Harrison told them, and Sara knew that he referred to the birds’ original antecedents. How many stories this house must hold, how many secrets! But it lacked the brooding quality that hung like a miasma over so many old houses.

With very little imagination she could almost believe she could hear the sound of children’s laughter; almost believe she could see all those long-ago children who must once have played in these gardens. As her children might, perhaps, one day play here.

It was an odd thought to have, and one that made her suddenly immensely aware of a deep inner loneliness she had been experiencing for some time.

She loved Tom and she loved Cressy. She knew she would love her grandmother as well, but Sara knew that that was not enough. She wanted to experience the same kind of love her mother must once have felt for her father; the kind of love that transcended everything else; the kind of love that was shared between a man and a woman.

Tom dragged slightly on her hand and she checked herself immediately. He must be tired, although already there was more colour in his face, a new happiness in his eyes.

‘I don’t know about Harrison and you, Tom, but I’m ready for some of Anna’s coffee,’ she said diplomatically, knowing how sensitive Tom was about his fragility.

She saw from the relief in his eyes that she was right, and that he was tired.

‘Let’s go inside, shall we?’ she suggested.

‘Do you know, Sara, I’m very glad we came here,’ he pronounced when they were sitting at Anna’s kitchen table, munching home-made biscuits and drinking coffee in Sara’s case and lemonade in Tom’s. ‘It makes me feel sort of happy inside being here.’

Sara knew exactly what he meant.

CHAPTER THREE

FIVE DAYS PASSED, a calm oasis of time, during which Sara grew to accept that she was not living in some impossible daydream, but that this was reality.

It was like watching a small, delicate flower bloom, Alice Fitton thought, watching her. She was too old now to harbour unforgiving feelings for anyone; life had taught her that it was too precious to be wasted in such fruitless emotions, but watching Sara exclaim over the beauty of a newly opened rose, seeing how hungrily she responded to every tiny gesture of affection, seeing her confidence grow almost in front of her eyes, she found it very hard indeed to understand her dead son-in-law.

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