Penny Jordan - Unwanted Wedding

As she replaced her own receiver she stared sadly around the room.

Four hundred years of history were encapsulated in this room, this house. It had stood here since Elizabeth I had bestowed the land on Piers Wyndham, a gift, so the official story ran, for courtly services; a gift, so the unofficial one went, for something far more personal and intimate.

Piers had called the house he had built Queen’s Meadow, in acknowledgement of Elizabeth’s generosity. It wasn’t a very grand house, nor even a generously large one, but in Rosy’s view it was certainly far too extravagantly large for one person or even one family—especially when she knew from her work at the shelter how many people were homeless and in desperate need of a roof over their heads.

‘So what would you do, given free choice?’ Guard had taunted her the last time she had raised the subject. ‘Turn the place over to them? Watch them tear out the panelling and use it for firewood; watch them…?’

‘That’s unfair,’ she had protested angrily. ‘You’re being unfair…’

But even Ralph, who was in charge of the shelter, had commented on more than one occasion that she wasn’t streetwise enough; that she was too soft-hearted, too idealistic, her expectations and beliefs in others far too high. She suspected that Ralph was inclined to despise her, and at first he had certainly been antagonistic towards her, deriding her background and her accent, condemning her comparative wealth and lifestyle and comparing it to those of the people who used the shelter.

‘Makes you feel better, does it,’ he had jeered, ‘spending your time doing good works?’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Rosy had told him honestly. ‘But my money—my wealth, as you call it—is in trust and I can’t touch the capital even if I wanted to. If I found a “proper” job, paid work, I’d be taking that job away from someone who needs to earn their living.’

She and Ralph got on much better these days, although he and Guard loathed one another. Or rather Ralph loathed Guard; Guard wasn’t human enough to allow himself to feel that kind of emotion about anyone. In fact, she sometimes doubted that Guard had ever felt a human emotion in his entire life.

She knew how much Ralph resented having to go cap in hand to Guard for money towards running the shelter, but Guard was the wealthiest man in the area, his business the most profitable.

‘He’s a very rare combination,’ her father had once told her. ‘An entrepreneur—successfully so—and an honest man as well, highly principled.’

‘An arrogant bastard,’ was what Ralph called him.

‘Sexy,’ was what one of Rosy’s old school-friends had breathed enthusiastically when she had come down to pay Rosy a visit. Married, and bored with her husband already, apparently, she had eyed Guard with an open, hungry greed that Rosy had found not just embarrassing, but somehow humiliating as well. It was as though Sara, with the hot, burning looks she was constantly throwing Guard’s way, the none-too-subtle hints and sexual innuendoes, the physical contact of deliberately contrived touches, was somehow underlining her own sexual immaturity, and reinforcing all the taunts that Guard had ever made about her.

She was well aware that Guard thought her naïve and unawakened—but so what? All right, so his comments and taunts might fluster and sometimes even hurt her, but she had made a vow to herself a long time ago that she was not going to rush into a sexual relationship before she was ready for it; that she was not going to experiment with sex for sex’s sake; that when she finally explored the world of her own sexuality it would be with a partner who felt as she did, a man who loved her and who was not ashamed to acknowledge that fact and with whom she could let down her guard and reveal the vulnerable, romantic, loving side of her nature.

So far she had not met that man, but when she did, she would know him, and she was not, after all, in any hurry. She was only twenty-one. Twenty-one and still a virgin. Twenty-one and about to propose marriage to Guard, who was most definitely not anything of the kind and who—

She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock. She knew that Guard often didn’t leave his office until well after everyone else had gone, which meant it could be seven o’clock or even eight before he came round. All those hours to wait. All those hours nerving herself to deliver her proposal.

What would he say? Laugh himself silly, no doubt. Her face burned hotly with chagrin at the thought.

It was all her solicitor’s fault, she decided crossly. If Peter hadn’t suggested—

She walked over to the window, remembering Peter’s last words to her before he left: ‘Promise me that you’ll at least ask him, Rosy.’

‘Sacrifice myself to save this place? Why should I?’ she had demanded angrily. ‘It isn’t even as though I want the house. You know how I feel…’

‘You know what will happen if Edward inherits it,’ Peter had countered. ‘He’ll destroy this place simply for the pleasure it will give him.’

‘And to get back at Gramps. Yes, I know that,’ Rosy had agreed.

Edward was her father’s cousin; he and her grandfather had quarrelled long before Rosy was born—a bad quarrel over money and morals which had resulted in her grandfather’s banning Edward from ever setting foot inside the house again.

Every family had its black sheep; theirs was no exception. Even now, in middle age, despite his outward air of respectability, his marriage and his two sons at prep school, there was something unpleasant about Edward.

He might never have actually broken the law in his financial dealings, but he had certainly crossed over the line under cover of darkness on one or more occasions, her father had often stated.

Her father.

Rosy turned her attention away from the window and looked towards the desk. Her father’s photograph was still on it. The one he had had taken in uniform shortly before his older brother’s death.

He had left the army then and come home to be with his father—he had been no stranger to death himself since the death of Rosy’s mother.

Queen’s Meadow had meant everything to them, her father and her grandfather. She loved the house, of course—who could not do?—but she felt no sense of possessiveness towards it, far from it.

It wasn’t pride she felt as she walked through its rooms, but guilt.

If only things had been different. If only Edward had been different, she could have so happily and easily have walked away from here and bought or rented herself a small place in town and given all her time and attention to working at the shelter.

But how could she do that now?

‘Edward will destroy this place,’ Peter had warned her. ‘He’ll tear the heart out of it, sell off everything that’s worth selling, and then he’ll tear it down brick by brick and sell off the land to one of his cronies who’ll—’

‘No, he can’t do that,’ she had protested. ‘The house is listed and—’

‘And, knowing Edward, he won’t find it at all difficult to find someone who’s willing to claim that they misunderstood the instructions they were given. Just how long do you think this place could stay standing once it was assaulted by half a dozen determined men with bulldozers? And of course Edward would make sure that nothing could be connected with him. He hated your grandfather, Rosy, and he knew how much Queen’s Meadow meant to him and to your father.’

‘Too much,’ Rosy had sighed. ‘No, this place is an anachronism, Peter. No matter how beautiful it is, for one family to live in a house this size… Oh, why couldn’t Gramps have listened to me and deeded it to a charity? Why couldn’t he?’

‘So you don’t care what happens to the house? You don’t mind Edward inheriting it and destroying it, destroying four hundred years of history?’