Sins

‘Yes, I think so,’ Ella answered her truthfully. ‘Janey is still convinced that Mary Quant is going to beg her to design for her, the minute she leaves St Martins, and Rose already has her own personal interior design commission.’

She explained to Amber what Rose was doing, and Amber was relieved that her niece was settling down so well. She always worried more about Rose than the others. All she wanted for the children was that they should be loved and love in return, and know the happiness that she knew with Jay. Young people, though, needed to spread their wings; to learn about life and to follow their dreams. Amber knew that too.

‘So when do you leave for Venice?’ she asked Ella.

‘Early next week. We’ll be travelling with the fashion editor and some models, as she’ll be doing a feature on travel and fashion, and fashion and Venice, so we’ll be going on the Orient-Express. I’m so excited about that.’

Amber laughed. ‘But you’ve travelled on it before, when Daddy and I took you all to Venice several years ago.’

‘Yes, I know but that was different. I didn’t realise then how lucky I was. Venice was just a place with lots of canals and a funny smell, where you and Daddy were going to talk to people about silk.’

She was excited about the coming trip, Ella acknowledged later after her stepmother had left to do some shopping. Although officially she was travelling to Venice in her capacity as the features editor’s assistant, she had managed to persuade the travel editor to let her do a ‘trial’ piece on the city from a potential visitor’s point of view. Determined to do a good job and prove that she could write a stimulating article, Ella had been reading up on the history of the city. She knew that the travel editor would expect her to write a piece that focused on the glamorous society side of Venice life, mentioning its elegant hotels and the private palazzos, where smart exclusive parties were held, including the kind of detail that would appeal to Vogue readers. However, privately Ella would have liked to write something more challenging than a tame piece about rich people and expensive clothes. The city had a fascinating history, and she was hoping that whilst she was there she would come across something that would enable her to give her article a true depth. Ella’s favourite newspaper was the Manchester Guardian, and secretly she longed to write the kind of gritty no-holds-barred articles she read in its pages, articles that spoke about hardship and oppression, and not expensive frocks and the right shade of lipstick. Ella imagined that the female reporters who worked on the paper would look and speak rather like the actress Katharine Hepburn, and in her daydreams she imagined herself working in a busy newsroom, filing copy of stories of immense social importance.

She knew that everyone at Vogue would laugh at her if they realised what she really longed for, but she wasn’t going to give up her dreams. One day she would write deep meaningful articles that would uncover social injustice and change people’s lives. One day.

Chapter Ten

The back of Rose’s neck was cold and bare and she felt oddly light-headed, as well as unable not to give in to the temptation to turn her head to sneak a look at her reflection in the shop windows she was walking past. The wind caught her hair, ruffling it in much the same way that Josh had done after he had cut it.

He had told her that on Monday he intended to shampoo it and go over it again.

‘I’d like to put a colour rinse on it as well, something to bring out the shine. A dark plum would look fantastic.’

Rose blenched a little now at the memory, and yet a smile was tugging at her lips as well. She felt so free and so…so different, tossing her hair in hesitant pride instead of ducking it down when she saw people turning their heads to look at her.

‘Hey, cool chick, I dig the hair,’ one of a pair of young Teddy boy rockers called out to her as they walked past her in the opposite direction.

She ‘dug the hair’ herself, Rose admitted, although it had been a huge shock at first to see what Josh had done.

He had cut her hair so short at the back that the whole length of her slender neck was exposed right from the nape. He had also fashioned it somehow so that it possessed an unfamiliar volume and movement, the sides longer than the back, caressing her jaw line in delicate little flicks. He had cut her a fringe too, and yet her new hairstyle had produced unexpected high cheekbones, now delicately flushed with happy colour.

She was on her way home, having left Josh and Ollie together, Ollie so eager to get back to his studio to develop the photographs he had taken of Josh in action that he had almost been ready to ignore the commission he had for the afternoon until Josh had reminded him that he owed him ‘ten quid’.

Janey would adore her new hairstyle, Rose knew, but she wasn’t so sure what Ella would think.

A wolf whistle from a grocer’s boy cycling past from the shop further down the road made Rose laugh at his cheek, as she enjoyed the unexpected light-heartedness her new image gave her.

Well, he had done it now, Dougie acknowledged, unable to concentrate on what he should be doing, which was checking through Lew’s diary for the forthcoming week. He’d telephoned the lawyer bloke and on Monday he had an appointment to see him so that Mr Melrose could go through things with him and check him out.

He hadn’t said anything about having met Emerald, though, not even when Mr Melrose had told him that he proposed to invite the late duke’s wife to attend their meeting, as he felt that Dougie would need a ‘sponsor’ to help him adapt to society and his new role within it if it did turn out to be that he was indeed the heir. He’d cross that bridge as and when he came to it.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Emerald gasped, feigning an embarrassed self-consciousness she wasn’t feeling at all as her deliberately planned ‘accidental’ bumping into the Duke of Kent had him turning towards her, allowing her to continue with her plan by uttering a mortified, ‘Oh, Your Royal Highness.’

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry.’ The duke’s smile was polite rather than warm, and he was already turning away from her but Emerald wasn’t so easily put off. Ever since she had been formally and very briefly presented to him and to his mother, Princess Marina, earlier in the evening, she had been watching him and waiting for her chance to bring herself properly to his attention. A débutante party featuring an evening of chamber music would not normally have been something she would have wanted to attend, but that had been before she had learned that the duke was going to be one of the guests.

Emerald had had to be patient to make her move, waiting until the music was over, and the duke had moved to a quieter corner of the large formal reception room by one of the balconies. She certainly wasn’t going to let her prey escape her.

Speedily moving so that she was standing in front of him, she affected to breathe in the evening air coming through the open balcony doors, whilst telling him, ‘I seem to be dreadfully clumsy whenever I’m at one of these events. I suppose that’s because I’d rather be in the country.’ She gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Do you like the country, Sir?’

‘Yes, I do.’ The duke’s voice was slightly warmer now, and he was looking properly at her. Emerald felt a fierce surge of triumph. He couldn’t possibly be anything other than entranced by her. She had taken extra special care over her appearance. She was wearing her hair up in a deliberately semi-regal style (so perfect for a family tiara, she had thought happily to herself earlier). Her dress of pale lilac silk emphasised her small waist, whilst its matching bolero provided just the right note of modesty. The upturned style of its collar showed off the slender length of her neck and drew the eye down to the discreetly concealed curves of her breasts. Her nails were varnished pale pink to match her lipstick. Emerald knew that she outshone every other girl in the room.

‘It’s very generous of people to invite me to so many lovely parties,’ Emerald continued with fake modesty. ‘But I lost my father when I was very young and it makes me feel sad when I see other girls with their fathers.’

‘Yes, I can understand that,’ the duke agreed. Now she had touched his emotions, Emerald knew, because he too had lost his father at a young age.

‘I’m dreading my ball,’ Emerald confided. ‘It will be held at home at Lenchester House in Eaton Square, of course, just as my father would have wanted, but I won’t be able to enjoy it properly without him there.’

There, she had told him now where he could find her. There was only one more thing she needed to do.

‘I’ve always admired Her Royal Highness Princess Marina. She’s so elegant and gracious. I remember my father saying that. I’d love to meet her properly.’

Emerald managed to make her voice sound wistful and almost childlike. How could the duke refuse her? He couldn’t, of course.

‘Then please do allow me to introduce you.’

Already he was crooking his arm and politely waiting for her to place her hand on it.

‘Oh, would you?’ Emerald was the epitome of sparkling delight. Out of the corner of her eye she registered the resentment in Gwendolyn’s expression, along with the astonishment and envy on the faces of her fellow debs as the duke led her across the floor to where his mother was standing talking with some of the chaperones. But of course her attention wasn’t on her rivals but on the duke. The look in her own eyes was carefully designed to show him her pleasure in his company, just as her manner was planned to reveal her as sweetly innocent and slightly helpless, whilst at the same time extremely well born; things Emerald was sure he was bound to find attractive in a prospective wife. In forcing a one-to-one conversation on him she had achieved for herself something that even the most determined of débutante mothers had failed to do, and she had every reason to feel very pleased with herself indeed, Emerald decided as they reached the duke’s mother and her small entourage.

Princess Marina was elegant, Emerald admitted, elegant and regal, and quite definitely coolly distant with Emerald as she was presented to her. Without a single word being said or a look given, Emerald knew that the duke’s mother was well aware that Emerald had manipulated the duke into presenting Emerald to her, and that her behaviour had not gone down well. Princess Marina would, though, be forced to change her tune once Emerald was the new duchess, she thought smugly.

Afterwards when she had rejoined Gwendolyn and Lydia and her godmother, Emerald entertained herself by mentally rehearsing her married name: Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Kent.

Edward and Emerald. How fortunate that they shared the same initial, almost as though it had always been meant to be, she sighed happily as Gwendolyn prattled on about tennis.

The duke was in the Royal Scots Greys, and now Emerald was intent on finding out discreetly who amongst the other debs might have a male relative with the Greys so that she could make a friend of her and suggest that some of the young officers were invited to one of the deb ‘teas’. It was, after all, customary for young officers from the household regiments to attend the season’s social events.

Yes, Emerald decided, all in all it had been a most successful evening.

Ollie straightened up, stretching his back in the cramped confines of his small darkroom as he looked at the prints he had just developed with growing excitement. It had still been light when he had returned from the birthday party he had been summoned to attend and capture with his camera by one of the Kray twins’ stalwarts, not so much an enforcer, this one, as a fixer, although he still knew how to handle himself. Ollie had remembered sparring with him in the gym when he had been in training. Heavily built, with a typical ex-boxer’s broken nose, he had delivered the twins ‘request’ in an affable enough manner but Ollie had known better than to suggest that he had another engagement for that afternoon.

In the event the party had been a chance for him to mix with a crowd of once familiar faces, including that of his younger cousin, Willie, who had ignored his advice and who had been strutting around obviously considering himself very much a part of the twins’ ‘task force’.

It wasn’t the Kray brothers or the photographs he had taken of their distant cousin’s seventieth birthday party that had been responsible for him working in his darkroom until the early hours of the morning, though.

He looked at the images again, a wide grin of delight creasing his face. There was no doubt about it, he was good, and one day–soon–he would be the best. The photographs he had taken of Josh cutting Rose’s hair, snapping frantically as he tried to catch each movement, were a bloody work of art, even though he said so himself. If he had any sense about him he’d charge Josh a fortune for them and no mistake, ’cos they would pull in the chicks wanting their own hair cut like Rose’s like no one’s business. There was no point in thinking of what he could charge Josh, though. His friend was as skint as he was himself, living virtually hand to mouth, hoping to keep going in the precarious world of self-employment in which they were both taking their first faltering steps.

On the other hand, if he could get Vogue interested…Not that the posh commissioning editors who worked there were likely to welcome him acting off his own bat. They had their own ideas about the images they wanted and they were quick to reject his ideas if they conflicted. Still, it was worth a try, seeing as he would be going to Venice with the art director, the fashion editor and the models who had been hired for the feature he had been commissioned to photograph on ‘The Fabled Train Journey to Venice on the Orient-Express’, as well as in Venice itself.

It was the largest commission he had received from Vogue, and it would be worth toeing the line just to get the money. The trouble was that once he got behind his camera he almost always had trouble reminding himself of the need to earn money and instead became totally lost in his own imagination.

God, but he rated what he had done with Rose and Josh. Sometimes he could hardly believe himself what a genius he actually was.

He couldn’t wait for Josh to see what he had done. He looked at his watch, frowning in disbelief and shaking his wrist when he saw that the time was four o’clock, thinking that the watch must have stopped during the afternoon, and then realising that it had not and that it actually was four o’clock in the morning.

He was tired and hungry–very hungry. Stifling a yawn, he padded barefoot across to open the door.

The place he was renting was the first he had had all to himself. He had seized on it because the single large room that, along with a long narrow bathroom, comprised the flat, had access to the roof space, and he had been able to persuade the landlord to let him turn part of it into a darkroom.

When he could afford it he planned to move into somewhere where he could have a proper studio, but that was still just a pipe dream at the moment.

In his living quarters, he opened the food safe and removed several rashers of bacon, dropping them into the blackened frying pan, which he then put on top of his single-ring gas cooker, turning the heat up high and adding a dollop of lard. Whilst the bacon sizzled and spat noisily, depositing fat on the double row of tiles stuck haphazardly onto the bright yellow painted wall behind the cooker, Ollie removed an already started loaf from the breadbin on the tin dresser that held his meagre supply of china and kitchen utensils. The dresser was a gift from his mother, who had nearly cried when she saw what her son had given up his room in her lovely immaculate terraced house to live in, denouncing the flat as ‘a hovel’.

Cutting himself a couple of thick slices, Ollie buttered them generously and then removed the rashers of bacon from the frying pan, flattening them firmly between the thick wedges of bread.

By the time he took his first bite he was practically drooling with hungry anticipation. A bacon butty, there was nothing better. Except the sweet taste of success. It was something he hoped would become a regular event for him now.

Chapter Eleven

They were travelling from the Vogue office to pick up the boat train to Paris, where they would transfer to the Orient-Express, and Ella had naturally been up early, checking her small case over and over again in nervous anticipation. This trip meant so much to her–the opportunity to be noticed, to be given a senior assignment. She had everything crossed it would all work out as well as she hoped.

She didn’t have to be at Vogue’s offices until ten, but she was too anxious to sleep, sitting instead in the kitchen in her dressing gown, her feet tucked into her slippers whilst she sipped a cup of tea. The thought of eating made her feel even more nauseous.

She could hear Janey and Rose coming down the stairs. Soon it would be time for her to leave. She stood up, carrying her now empty cup over to the sink as Janey burst into the kitchen, complaining about the cold floor.

From the minute she had seen Rose’s new hairstyle on Saturday, Janey had not stopped demanding that Rose tell Josh that she wanted her own hair cutting in exactly the same style, and she was still doing so now, only breaking off to say to Ella enviously, ‘Lucky you, going to Venice, where the sun will be shining and it will be warm.’

‘I shall be working, not sunbathing,’ Ella pointed out, checking her watch. Yes, it was definitely time for her to leave, but first she must make one last check of her handbag, just to make sure that she really hadn’t forgotten anything.

Seated on the opposite side of the heavy old-fashioned mahogany partners’ desk in Mr Melrose’s office, Dougie tried hard not to stare too obviously at Emerald’s mother.

Physically she presented no surprises to him. He had not worked for Lew for several months without learning something, and it hadn’t taken him much effort to source some reasonably recent newspaper photographs of Amber. If he had been asked to describe her in one word, that word would have been ‘classy’. From the top of her elegantly styled chignon to the toes of her navy-blue leather shoes, Amber almost glowed with a special patina of good looks, good manners and a gentleness that spoke of the kindness that Dougie was sure he could see in her eyes.

It was that softness and the kindness allied to it that had surprised him. It hadn’t been obvious from the press photographs he had seen, and it had taken him off guard. All the more so because Emerald was her daughter. How could two women so closely related be so very different?

Amber eyed the young Australian seated opposite her sympathetically. She had warmed to him instantly, feeling rather sorry for him as he explained the chain of events that had led to him being orphaned. It had been interesting to learn about his life in Australia. He was a wealthy young man in his own right, and from one or two comments he had let drop, it had been plain that he had been brought up to look unfavourably on the British upper class, with its archaic practices.

‘I’ll admit that when I first got your letters I didn’t altogether like the thought of me being this duke bloke,’ he had told them.

So what had made him change his mind, Amber wondered. He had told them that he worked for a society photographer and the young Australian had admitted himself that he often felt ill at ease amongst the upper-class set. His admission had increased Amber’s sympathy for him, reminding her of how out of place she herself had sometimes felt as a young woman growing up amid wealth but not aristocracy. Despite his rough edges, though, Dougie had a natural pride in himself that Amber admired, even whilst she acknowledged that if he did prove to be the duke he would need a lot of help getting used to his new role.

He would, she felt, bring a freshness to the dukedom, like a clean gust of air blowing into a dusty room that had been closed up for too long. Robert would have liked and approved of him, she thought, considering her late husband. Jay would like him too. They would be able to talk together about farming matters. As those thoughts formed, Amber knew that she had already accepted him as part of her extended family, and equally that she already felt a maternal sense of protectiveness towards him.

He was obviously used to standing up for himself and living his own life, but he would be vulnerable in his new role, and the sharks that would swim close to him would not always be easily recognisable. He would need support, and who better to provide that, Amber decided, than the family he already had.

‘Well, there are several things that need to be confirmed before a formal announcement can be made,’ Mr Melrose was saying, ‘but…’

He looked at Amber, who smiled back at him before turning to Dougie to say warmly, ‘I don’t quite know whether to congratulate you or commiserate with you, Dougie. Or should I say, Your Grace?’ she added, teasing him gently.

Dougie shook his head, half bemused and half embarrassed.

‘You’ll want to see the Eaton Square house, I expect, and Osterby, of course,’ Amber continued. ‘I have a confession to make with regard to the London house. I’m afraid that I’ve allowed my daughter to move into it for the duration of her season and that her coming-out ball is to be held there.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Dougie began, and then stopped as both Mr Melrose and Amber looked curiously at him. ‘That is to say, I remember reading about it,’ he amended, ‘and of course I’m delighted. That is, I mean that I don’t…well, there’s no problem at all with your plans, so far as I’m concerned.’

‘That is very generous of you,’ Amber told him. ‘I know you’ll have made your own friends here in London but I’d like to introduce you to the rest of the family soon, if you think you could bear it. My stepdaughters and my niece live here in London, in Chelsea, and I know they would love to meet you. Jay, my husband, spends most of his time at Denham, our estate in Macclesfield, and our twin daughters are still at school. They’ll be home for Easter in a few days, though, and if you haven’t made any other arrangements it would be so nice if you would join us at Denham.’

Amber had caught Dougie off guard. He hadn’t made any plans for Easter, and in many ways he would be very happy to accept her invitation. As he was beginning to realise, there was going to be a lot more to being a duke than being called Your Grace. However, whilst Amber seemed ready to welcome him into the family, Dougie couldn’t see Emerald being equally welcoming. She wasn’t going to be at all pleased when she learned that they were related.

Before he could say anything Mr Melrose was announcing with evident relief, ‘Amber, my dear, that is an excellent suggestion and typically generous of you.’

It was, Dougie admitted. After all, she owed him nothing, not really.

‘You must give me your address and your telephone number,’ Amber was saying, ‘and I shall give you ours so that we can make arrangements for your visit.’

It was too late to back out now; it would be too rude, Dougie realised.

Outside in the thin April sunshine he mounted his motorbike, kick starting it. He had followed his employer’s example and bought himself the sturdy but sleek chrome machine, and had soon learned to weave it in and out of the busy London traffic at high speed.

‘Shit!’ Ollie cursed as he stared in bleary-eyed disbelief at the alarm clock, before sinking back against his pillow. How the hell had he managed to oversleep so badly?

It was almost midday. He was due at Vogue’s offices at noon for a briefing, before leaving for Venice with a bunch of models, Vogue’s fashion editor, makeup artists, staffers, and no doubt trunks full of clothes. He ran his hand over his stubbly jaw. His eyes felt as though someone had throw a handful of grit in them and his mouth felt like the bottom of a birdcage.