Stronger Than Yearning

Closing the door for her he gave her a wide, taunting smile, and said, ‘Some cars are like women; they respond best to a man’s touch.’

Chauvinist! Much as she longed to throw the insult at him, Jenna restrained herself. Why get so het up about the sexual insolence of some village lout who obviously thought of the female sex as no more than male chattels.

She was still fuming when she reached her destination. Although deference wasn’t something she expected to receive from her peers — of either sex — there had been an air of insolent amusement about him, an easy, but none the less distinct, self-assurance that had jarred on her. Mere farm labourer he might be, but for all that he had made it plain that he considered himself superior to her simply by virtue of his sex, and that made her seethe. It had been a long time since she had come up against such blatantly arrogant maleness and it had unsettled her. Implicit in the look he had given her as she drove away had been the suggestion that had he so wished he could have mastered not only her car but her as well. No man could look at her like that and get away with it.

For goodness’ sake, Jenna chided herself as she parked her car in the drive of the old school-house and climbed out, why was she getting in such a state over some country Lothario?

Since she had left the area her old school had been shut down but Bill Mather, the headmaster, had been allowed to purchase the school-house. Built in the Victorian era, it had an air of solid respectability and stability. This was the first house she had ever truly called home, she thought, as she ignored the front door in favour of walking round to the kitchen. She had come here as a frightened, ignorant girl of barely fifteen, having been virtually thrown out by her great-aunt, her clothes in a battered suitcase and a two-week-old baby in her arms. She sighed faintly, anticipating the conflict now to come with that same ‘baby’. Lucy had objected strenuously to coming to Yorkshire, mainly because Jenna herself had been so eager to do so. What had happened to the easy friendship that had once existed between them? Sometimes these days she felt as though Lucy almost hated her. Was she being selfish in wanting to buy the house? Lucy still had several terms to do at school, even if she decided to leave after O levels; she had always complained about the smallness of their London flat. Here she could have as much space as she wanted. Perhaps even that horse she had nagged her mother for last year.

There was no sign of Lucy as Jenna walked into the Mathers’ kitchen. No doubt she would be sulking in her room. Lucy had made her dislike of the Mathers more than plain, because, Jenna suspected, she believed that like Jenna herself they knew the identity of her father and were conspiring with her mother to keep it from her.

Of course Jenna could understand why Lucy wanted to know her father’s identity, but it was something she just could not tell her … She bit her lip wondering how many people living in the village could remember that summer nearly sixteen years ago. She had changed of course. Then, she had been a painfully thin, milk-skinned child with red hair and enormous, frightened eyes. All that was still the same was the colour of her skin … even her hair had turned from carrot to rich Titian. No, she doubted if anyone would recognise her. She hadn’t had many friends. Her aunt had never really mingled with the other villagers, and besides, she had always been content with Rachel’s company.

Rachel … pain pierced through her. Fifteen years her sister had been dead and even now Jenna’s grief was as fresh and sharp as it had been then. Rachel had been everything Jenna had not: three years older, warm and extrovert, with a personality that drew people to her. There had not been an ounce of malice in her nature. Naturally warm-hearted she had naïvely believed that everyone else was the same; trusting and eager to please, she had paid a terrible price for her naïvety …

‘Jenna!’

She tore her thoughts abruptly from the past as Bill Mather walked into the kitchen. ‘I thought I heard your monster of a car arrive. How did it go?’

The grey eyes weren’t quite as keen now as they had been fifteen years ago, but they were still kind and wise.

‘I fell in love with the place, totally and for ever,’ Jenna told him honestly.

He and his wife were her only bridge between the present and her past; she loved them with an intensity that went so deep that it was something she could never talk about. Without them …

The faded grey eyes showed concern. ‘Jenna, my dear, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’

‘If you’re questioning my motives, I admit that initially it was a macabre need to gloat that brought me here. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t harbour some resentment.’

Bill Mather smiled wryly. ‘No, of course not, but you mustn’t let your bitterness over the past mar the present, Jenna.’

‘You mean I should forget what happened, forget how the Deverils killed my sister … how they …’

Emotion boiled up inside her, pain reflected in her eyes as they met his.

‘Jenna … Jenna … of course not … but, my dear, Alan and Charles are gone … the family is gone …’

‘Not quite.’ She said it quietly, her face pale and strained as she looked at him. ‘There’s still Lucy …’

‘Yes. Jenna, do you think it’s wise to conceal the truth from her? The child has a right to know that …’

‘That what? That her mother was brutally raped by her father and left pregnant … abandoned and left to die giving birth to the child she should never have had? Is that what you want me to tell her?’ She was shaking with emotion, sick with the force of it. Fifteen years had done nothing to lessen the sense of sick despair she always felt when she thought about her sister. Beautiful, lovable Rachel. ‘I want to buy the house,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to buy it for Lucy, because it is hers by right.’ She remembered with bitter clarity how she had visited the house with Rachel, just after Rachel had discovered her pregnancy. Her sister had been distraught with fear and shame, frightened into telling Jenna about the brutal attack she had endured.

She and Charles Deveril had met by accident. Rachel had been attending college in York and he had seen her waiting at the bus stop and recognised her as someone from the village. He had offered her a lift, and Rachel had naïvely accepted, but instead of driving her straight home, he had taken her down a deserted farm track. There had been tears in Rachel’s eyes and voice as she described the way she had fought against him, only to be overpowered. Terrified by what had happened and too frightened to tell their aunt, Rachel had tried to put it from her mind. Their upbringing had been a strict one and neither girl was promiscuous: at eighteen, Rachel had still been a virgin.

It had been Jenna who had insisted that they must go up to the house, naïvely sure that when he knew what had happened Sir Alan would insist on Charles marrying her sister. But after ringing the front doorbell they had been sent round to the back, and Sir Alan had accused them of making the whole thing up and had even threatened to call the police, claiming that Rachel was trying to besmirch the Deveril name.

It was only later that Jenna discovered that Charles had something of an unsavoury reputation with women, and that he had been expelled from school because of certain allegations made against him by the parents of a girl in the village near to the school.

What had followed had been a nightmare of conspiracy and fear. Rachel had bound her to silence, making her promise to say nothing to anyone. A tall, slender girl, she had disguised her pregnancy with the then fashionable loose clothes, refusing all Jenna’s entreaties to visit a doctor or tell their aunt.

She had started in labour one Saturday afternoon when they were both in York; a passing policewoman realising what was happening had taken them both to hospital. What happened there had been a nightmare to Jenna, bewildered and confused, alone in the waiting-room until a doctor suddenly appeared, grave-faced, questioning her gently, until she broke down and told him the whole story. ‘My sister … please let me see her,’ she had begged when she had told him, and she had known instinctively by his silence and tension that something was wrong.

‘I’m sorry …’

‘She’s dead, isn’t she ..?’ Jenna could remember even now how those words had burst from her throat, panic and pain clawing desperately at her stomach. Rachel could not be dead. She was only eighteen — people didn’t die having babies these days.

But Rachel had. Rachel, whose narrow frame wasn’t built for easy birth, whose life might have been saved had the doctors known what to expect. ‘She should have had her baby by Caesarian section,’ the doctor had explained quietly to Jenna, but because it had been too late, there had been complications.

Complications which had resulted in her sister’s bleeding to death, her life flooding away on a dark red tide that the nursing staff had not been quite quick enough to conceal from Jenna as the doctor gave way to hysterical pleading and allowed her to see Rachel for one last time.

As she looked at her sister, she had heard a faint mewling cry, and had stared, totally stupefied at the tiny bundle held by one of the nurses. Until that moment she hadn’t given a thought to Rachel’s child.

‘A little girl,’ the nurse told her softly.

‘Give her to me.’ Jenna had been barely aware of making the demand, but as she looked upon the tiny screwed-up face of her niece she made a vow that somehow she would find a way to keep her sister’s child, and that somehow the Deverils would be made to pay for Rachel’s death.

It hadn’t been easy — far from it … Painfully, Jenna dragged her thoughts away from the past.

‘I’d better go up and see her,’ she told Bill, referring to Lucy. ‘Oh, by the way, the most curious thing … I saw a portrait in the house — of a James Deveril, quite unlike the rest of the family — very dark … and then just as I was leaving this man came up to the car. He was almost identical to him … the living image in fact.’

‘A trick of heredity,’ Bill told her. ‘It must be. There are no Deverils left. The solicitors made an exhaustive search before putting the Hall up for sale. It happens occasionally.’

‘Yes … After all, Lucy is far from being the only Deveril bastard to be born around here.’

Bill Mather heard the bitterness in her voice and sighed. The effect of her sister’s death had left scars on Jenna that he doubted would ever heal. Fifteen was such a vulnerable age to be exposed to the agony of losing a deeply loved sister, and especially in such circumstances. He had never ceased to admire the way Jenna had shouldered the responsibility of her niece, the way she had forged a new life for herself — and a very successful one at that — but it grieved him that she was still alone, still so wary and sharp with men. They couldn’t know, as he did, that it cloaked a very real fear, a dread of betrayal that had been burned into her soul with Lucy’s birth and her sister’s death.

It would take a very special sort of man to break down the barriers Jenna had built around herself: a man with the strength to appreciate her need to be self-sufficient, to have her career, her escape route from the pain of emotional commitment. He would need patience too … patience to undo the wrongs of the past, and the intelligence to see past the beautiful façade Jenna presented to the world, to the woman beneath.

The kitchen door opened and his wife walked in. They had been married for over forty years and were still as happy together as they had been on their wedding day. Their one regret was that they had no children.

‘Have you spoken to Jenna?’ Nancy asked him. He had met her, a brisk Yorkshirewoman, during his first teaching job near Thirsk. A farmer’s daughter used to hard work and the uncertainties of life in the Dales, she had a down-to-earth common sense that was sometimes worth more than any educational degree.

‘I tried to … but it’s very difficult.’

‘It’s not difficult at all,’ Nancy corrected him crisply. ‘You simply have to point out to her that she must tell Lucy the truth. The child has a right to know. Jenna’s always listened to you before.’

‘She isn’t sixteen any longer, Nancy,’ he said gently. ‘I can only advise her now, not command. She wants to protect Lucy. Think how you would feel learning that your mother had been the victim of a vicious attack by your father.’

‘Jenna should have told her years ago. I mind I told her often enough. Has she made up her mind about the old Hall?’

‘She says she’s fallen in love with it.’

‘Fallen in love with a pile of stones and mortar?’ Nancy Mather snorted derisively. ‘She wants to find herself a man to fall in love with. It’s past time she did. Unplucked fruit only withers,’ she added forth-rightly. ‘You only have to remember that great-aunt of hers to know that. Where is Jenna now?’

‘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 Nancy 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.’