Chapter 1 #2
After an endless time that would have been only ten minutes, they pulled up outside the pub. Pushing her last ten-pound note
into Terry’s hand—determined not to be indebted to the enemy for the fare—Jules clambered out. The car swept away, the arc
of the headlights briefly illuminating the whitewashed facade of the Middlemass Arms, now closed and shuttered for the night.
In a moment, Jules was left shivering and alone in the dark. Even the very few village streetlamps were off now, meaning it
must be well past midnight. She suddenly had a thought that her mother may not even be at home.
Of course! Jules realized. She would be wherever Aunt Flo was breathing her last, perhaps even in Portneath Hospital—in the little town Jules had just left—and now she had organized to have herself dropped several miles away in her home village of Middlemass instead.
Idiot. It was Roman’s fault. At the sight of him every sensible thought had dropped right out of her head.
Darn it, why couldn’t her mother answer her phone? Setting off down the narrow, rutted lane that led to her mother’s cottage—her
childhood home—Jules could only hope the spare key would still be under the stone frog by the doorstep. Draining the last
few drops of battery power on her phone, she used its flashlight to illuminate her path, night creatures skittering away from
the narrow beam and rustling noisily into the safety of the dark.
Jules breathed a sigh of relief as she approached the little cottage, set sideways on the dusty lane, with its low, thatched
eaves and whitewashed cob exterior. Even several feet away, she could see the glow of lamplight in the low, lattice-paned
window. Peering in, she saw the fire was lit in the grate against the chill of the March night, and the lamp by the plump,
shabby yellow sofa was on. Despite these encouraging signs, the room was, nonetheless, empty of human life. She picked her
way down the flagged path to the back door, the one that everyone used—Jules couldn’t remember the front door being opened
in the twenty-five years her mother had rented the place. That was nearly her whole life... Gamekeeper’s Cottage was the
only home she remembered.
Looking through the window by the back door, Jules saw, with a flood of relief, none other than Aunt Flo herself. Clearly
reports of her near death had been exaggerated. The old woman was sitting in the rocking chair in front of the Aga stove,
one leg, in a plaster cast, propped on a hard wooden chair.
“Aunt Flo!” Jules exclaimed as she tried the door, which was so unexpectedly unlocked, Jules burst dramatically into the room, nearly falling.
“I thought you were on your deathbed.” She dropped her handbag on the floor and went over to give the older woman a hug, breathing in her comfortingly familiar scent of geraniums and roses.
Straightening, Jules looked down at her aunt. It was not just the plaster cast on her leg that was unusual; Flo had one arm
in plaster to the elbow too, and her normally neat gray bun was rushed and clumsy, with stray tufts of hair sticking up at
all angles.
“What on earth have you done to yourself?”
“Ugh, too boring for words,” said Flo, waving her unbroken arm dismissively. “Clumsiness. Gravity. But never mind me—how are
you , my darling girl?”
“Fine, fine,” said Jules impatiently, dragging another of the wooden dining chairs noisily across the earthenware-tiled floor
nearer to her aunt and plonking herself down in relief. It had been a seriously long day. “Mum was texting that I should rush
down here before it was too late. ‘Life and death,’ she said...”
“Ha! You know what your mother’s like,” explained Flo, rolling her eyes, “always the drama queen.”
“ You’re the drama queen,” retorted Jules’s mum, Maggie, appearing from the darkness of the hallway. “You’re here,” she observed, stating
the obvious, as mother and daughter gave each other a dead-eyed duty hug, arms stiff, bodies a decorous three inches apart.
“I’m here because you told me to come,” said Jules with a note of accusation. “You said Aunt Flo was nearly dead.”
“Never mind her. I’m nearly dead from all the running around,” Maggie complained, holding the back of her hand to her forehead in a performative
attitude of exhaustion. “I’ve been working my fingers to the bone, cooking, cleaning...”
Jules looked pointedly at the remains of supper on the kitchen table, two plates smeared with the remnants of baked beans
on toast. It wasn’t exactly Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. There was evidence, though, that supper had been accompanied by at least a couple of glasses of red wine each.
Maggie picked up the bottle from the table and waggled it experimentally. “I’ll just get another one of these,” she said vaguely,
wandering back toward the hallway. “I expect you could do with a drink after your journey...”
“No thanks,” Jules started telling the disappearing figure, but Flo, reaching to grab Jules’s wrist, stopped her protestations
in their tracks.
“Your mother’s driving me insane,” she hissed. “You’ve got to get me out of here before we kill each other.”
“How?” protested Jules in a whisper. “I don’t even have a car.”
“Bus, taxi, whatever—I need you to help me,” Flo went on, her eyes imploring. “The bookshop’s been shut for a week while I’ve
been stuck here being alternately patronized and neglected by your mother. She says she’s been going in to feed Merlin, but
I’m not sure I believe her. She’s always hated that cat. Plus, I can’t afford to miss out on the Easter holiday trade. If
I don’t get the shop open soon, it won’t open at all. Ever.”
“Surely not?” Jules asserted soothingly. This must be her great-aunt taking her own opportunity to be dramatic. Things couldn’t
be that bad, could they?
“Things are that bad,” insisted Aunt Flo, as if Jules had spoken her thoughts aloud. “Never worse... and here I am, stuck... I’m
not getting these blasted casts taken off for at least another five weeks, and they say my leg is going to take months to
recover. It’s a disaster. Look,” she pleaded, “just get me back to the shop and we’ll work it out from there.”
“I’ll go down there first thing tomorrow and see what’s what,” promised Jules, resting her hand on Flo’s good arm comfortingly.
“But with three flights of stairs up to the flat, I honestly don’t see how you are going to manage.”
The specter of not being back at her desk by eight in the morning on Monday floated before her eyes. How on earth was she going to sort out this mess in a single weekend?
A thought seemed to strike Maggie as she came back into the room with her prize: another bottle of red wine. “How did you
get here from the station?” she queried.
“Taxi. I’d have asked you for a lift if you’d been answering your phone,” said Jules accusingly, seeing her mother’s phone,
dark and lifeless, on top of a pile of junk mail on the end of the kitchen table.
“Too busy. Forgot to charge it,” her mother admitted without remorse.
In the face of interrogation, Jules revealed, in dispassionate tones, how Roman had insisted on sharing the one taxi and how,
in extremis, she had been forced to agree.
“How could you?” Maggie exclaimed, clutching the bottle of wine to her chest in outrage. “Now we are indebted to the Montbeaus, of all
the ghastly people. God , what a nightmare.”
“Now who’s the drama queen?” muttered Jules, and then, louder: “I wouldn’t worry, I paid my share. And anyhow, he clearly
didn’t have a clue who I was.”
Well, well, well, thought Roman. Of all the railway stations in all the world...
He smiled at the memory of her, as he slipped past the grand facade of the main family house, which rose up, full of elegant Georgian consequence, at the head of the circular gravel drive.
His destination was not the heavy oak door between the pillars of the colonnaded porch, but a small, freestanding stone building just a few yards farther on.
Once the family’s private chapel but now long deconsecrated, he was grateful to have returned from the frenetic pace of New York City to the serenity of his own space.
Also, he found it easier to love his family when he saw less of them.
He had not wanted to come home. It was not his father’s demands but his mother’s tears that had persuaded him.
He could withstand anything but that. Anyhow, he reminded himself, his father had been right, much as it pained him to admit it.
His mother and his loyal friends were missing him, and he them, if he was honest. Plus, it was time to accept the responsibility of taking up the business reins
and preparing to become head of the family one day. Not just “the family” but the Montbeaus. The name behind generations of
power and influence in this little corner of Devon. So... no pressure.
The layout of the chapel was simple: a large, vaulted flagstone space downstairs, with the kitchen up two steps at one end
and a long wooden dining table hammered together from scaffolding planks across the middle of the room. There was a seating
area at the far end, with a thick Persian rug, glowing lamps, and fat feather cushions on a matching pair of sofas placed
on either side of a woodburning stove. This part of the space was made more intimate by its low timber ceiling, created by
the sleeping platform above. Reached by a cast-iron spiral staircase, this space—once the organ loft—was now furnished with
little other than a vast bed up on a dais and overlooked the living room below. A walk-in wardrobe and a spacious shower room
tucked away behind a false wall completed the accommodation—perfect for one person, or perhaps even a love nest for two.
Roman had supervised the last details of the refurbishment himself, and now his sole focus was using business skills, honed
in the States, to turn around his family’s diminishing fortunes. And work was a welcome distraction too. It helped him forget
just how much he had left behind in New York, just how much freedom he had lost by being compelled to return.
But business was the last thing on his mind this evening as he lounged in front of the wood burner, eyes gazing through and beyond the flames.
Nursing half an inch of smoky scotch whisky in his hand, he let his mind wander, and it knew exactly where it wanted to go.
.. to that evening—what?—twelve years ago?
More? There he was, messing around with his mates, taking the mickey out of the provincial dance in the village hall, drinking beer, watching the girls parading by, eager for his attention.
.. And then he had seen her, walking past, aloof and angelic—ignoring him and his idiot friends—with her fox-red hair piled high and creamy-white shoulders spilling out of that shiny green dress with its tight bodice and its full, swirly skirt.
She had looked at odds with the rest of the girls in their figure-hugging jeans and false eyelashes—and so much more beautiful, even with that toilet roll trailing from her foot.
No, she had been different. And he had been enthralled.
Of course, she was a Capelthorne, so it was a hard no. Obviously.
Strange how memories of that night were still so vivid, though. He had had wild thoughts, then, about going over to her, striking
up a conversation, and he had wondered over the years what might have happened if he had. But, by the time he had mustered
the resolve, she had disappeared. He left for university in the States the following week, and now, all these years later,
he was back, and so, it seemed, was she.
What were the chances?
But then he sighed. It might seem to an outsider—to a sappy romantic—that their stars were aligned... but he knew better.
No, the sight of her again this evening may have been beguiling, may even have seemed like fate, but business was his priority
now. Business—and family—came first. Liaisons with members of the Capelthorne family, however tempting, were contrary to his
objectives.
He drank deep, the peaty spirit warming him.
And, in any case, when she realized what he had done, when he revealed his latest project, the enmity would intensify beyond
anything yet seen in the history of the two sparring families over the last two hundred years...
It would be war.