India Grey - Wicked Secrets

Kit looked up.

‘Without the name of the friend, her daughter or her daughter’s friend I can’t really confirm or deny that.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Tatiana said with a brittle, tinkling laugh. ‘How many hearts have you broken recently? I’m talking about Alexia. According to Sally Rothwell-Hyde, the poor girl is terribly upset.’

‘I’m sure Sally Rothwell-Hyde is exaggerating,’ Kit said in a bored voice. ‘Alexia was well aware from the start it was nothing serious. It seems that Jasper will be providing Alnburgh heirs a lot sooner than I will.’

He looked across at Sophie, wondering what smart response she would think up to that, but she said nothing. She was sitting very straight, very still. Against the vivid red of her hair, her face was the same colour as the wax that had dripped onto the table in front of her.

‘Something wrong?’ he challenged quietly.

She looked at him, and for a second the expression in her eyes was one of blank horror. But then she blinked, and seemed to rouse herself.

‘I’m sorry. What was that?’ With an unsteady hand she stroked her hair back from her face. It was still as pale as milk, apart from a blossoming of red on each cheekbone.

‘Soph?’ Jasper got to his feet. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’m absolutely fine.’ She made an attempt at a laugh, but Kit could hear the raw edge in it. ‘Just tired, that’s all. It’s been a long day.’

‘Then you must get to bed,’ Tatiana spoke with an air of finality, as if she was dismissing her. ‘Jasper, show Sophie to her room. I’m sure she’ll feel much better after a good night’s sleep.’

Kit watched Jasper put his arm round her and lead her to the door, remembering the two hours of catatonic sleep she’d had on the train. Picking up his wine glass, he drained it thoughtfully.

It certainly wasn’t tiredness that had drained her face of colour like that, which meant it must have been the idea of producing heirs.

It looked as if she was beginning to get an idea of what she’d got herself into. And she was even flakier than he’d first thought.

ROTHWELL-HYDE .

Wordlessly Sophie let Jasper lead her up the widest staircase she’d ever seen. It was probably a really common surname, she thought numbly. The phone book must contain millions of Rothwell-Hydes. Or several anyway, in smart places all over the country. Because surely no one who lived up here would send their daughter to school down in Kent?

It was a second before she realised Jasper had stopped at the foot of another small flight of stairs leading to a gloomy wood-panelled corridor with a single door at the end.

‘Your room’s at the end there, but let’s go to mine. The fire’s lit, and I’ve got a bottle of Smirnoff that Sergio gave me somewhere.’ He took hold of her shoulders, bending his knees slightly to peer into her face. ‘You look like you could do with something to revive you, angel. Are you OK?’

With some effort she gathered herself and made a stab at sounding casual and reassuring. ‘I’m fine now, really. I’m so sorry, Jasper—I’m supposed to be taking the pressure off you by posing as your girlfriend, but instead your parents must be wondering why you ended up going out with such a nutter.’

‘Don’t be daft. You’re totally charming them—or you were until you nearly fainted face down on your plate. I know the fish was revolting, but really …’

She laughed. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

‘What then?’

Jasper was her best friend. Over the years she’d told him lots of funny stories about her childhood, and when you’d grown up living in a converted bus painted with flowers and peace slogans, with a mother who had inch-long purple hair, had changed her name to Rainbow and given up wearing a bra, there were lots of those.

There were also lots of bits that weren’t funny at all, but she kept those to herself. The years when she’d been taken in by Aunt Janet and had been sent to an exclusive girls’ boarding school in the hope of ‘civilising’ her. Years when she’d been at the mercy of Olympia Rothwell-Hyde and her friends …

She shook her head and smiled. ‘Just tired. Honest.’

‘Come on, then.’ He set off again along the corridor, rubbing his arms vigorously. ‘God, if you stand still for a second in this place you run the risk of turning into a pillar of ice. I hope you brought your thermal underwear.’

‘Please, can you not mention underwear,’ Sophie said with a bleak laugh. ‘The contents of my knicker drawer have played far too much of a starring role in this weekend already and I’ve only been here a couple of hours.’ Her heart lurched as she remembered again the phone conversation Kit had overheard on the train. ‘I’m afraid I got off on completely the wrong foot with your brother.’

‘Half-brother,’ Jasper corrected, bitterly. ‘And don’t worry about Kit. He doesn’t approve of anyone. He just sits in judgment on the rest of us.’

‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’ said Sophie. ‘It’s Kit’s opinion you’re worried about, not your parents’.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Jasper said ironically. ‘You’ve met my father. He’s from the generation and background that call gay men “nancy boys” and assume they all wear pink scarves and carry handbags.’

‘And what’s Kit’s excuse?’

Pausing in front of a closed door, Jasper bowed his head. Without the hair gel and eyeliner he always wore in London his fine-boned face looked younger and oddly vulnerable.

‘Kit’s never liked me. I’ve always known that, growing up. He never said anything unkind or did anything horrible to me, but he didn’t have to. I always felt this … coldness from him, which was almost worse.’

Sophie could identify with that.

‘I don’t know,’ he went on, ‘now I’m older I can understand that it must have been difficult for him, growing up without his mother when I still had mine.’ He cast her a rueful look. ‘As you’ll have noticed, my mother isn’t exactly cosy—I don’t think she particularly went out of her way to make sure he was OK, but because I was her only child I did get rather spoiled, I guess …’

Sophie widened her eyes. ‘You? Surely not!’

Jasper grinned. ‘This is the part of the castle that’s supposed to be haunted by the mad countess’s ghost, you know, so you’d better watch it, or I’ll run away and leave you here …’

‘Don’t you dare!’

Laughing, he opened the door. ‘This is my room. Damn, the fire’s gone out. Come in and shut the door to keep any lingering traces of warmth in.’

Sophie did as she was told. The room was huge, and filled with the kind of dark, heavy furniture that looked as if it had come from a giant’s house. A sleigh bed roughly the size of the bus that had formed Sophie’s childhood home stood in the centre of the room, piled high with several duvets. Jasper’s personal stamp was evident in the tatty posters on the walls, a polystyrene reproduction of Michelangelo’s David , which was rakishly draped in an old school tie, a silk dressing gown and a battered trilby. As he poked at the ashes in the grate Sophie picked her way through the clothes on the floor and went over to the window.

‘So what happened to Kit’s mother?’

Jasper piled coal into the grate. ‘She left. When he was about six, I think. It’s a bit of a taboo subject around here, but I gather there was no warning, no explanation, no goodbye. Of course there was a divorce eventually, and apparently Juliet’s adultery was cited, but as far as I know Kit never had any contact with her again.’

Outside it had stopped snowing and the clouds had parted to show the flat disc of the full moon. From what Sophie could see, Jasper’s room looked down over some kind of inner courtyard. The castle walls rose up on all sides—battlements like jagged teeth, stone walls gleaming like pewter in the cold, bluish light. She shivered, her throat constricting with reluctant compassion for the little boy whose mother had left him here in this bleak fortress of a home.