Penny Jordan - The Hidden Years

It was only when she woke up, sweating and shivering, after some time that she realised that in all the years she had experienced the dream before, out of all those times, never once had her lover turned and walked towards her as her mother had done. It was a simple, small thing, but it was like suddenly being confronted with a stranger in the place of a familiar face. She shivered, recognising a truth she didn’t really want to know. A truth she wasn’t ready to know.

As she sat up in bed, dragging the quilt round her to keep her warm, she wondered if it was reading about her mother’s first love-affair, and recognising in it the raw, painful fact that the man, Kit, had never really loved her mother as she had so naïvely believed, that had made her recognise that she too had made the mistake of loving too well a man who could not match that commitment.

She moved abruptly in mute protest at her own thoughts, her own disloyalty. The two cases were poles apart. Her mother had been callously and uncaringly seduced by a man who had never felt anything more than momentary desire for her.

She and Scott had been deeply, agonisingly in love. Physically that love never had been consummated, which was why… She bit down hard on her bottom lip, a childish habit she had thought she had long ago outgrown.

She had loved Scott… He had loved her… They had been cruelly and deliberately torn apart, and why? Was it because her mother had wanted to put the final social gloss on her own success…had wanted her to marry the only son of a peer? An impoverished peer, it was true, but possessed of a title none the less. And had she wanted that marriage for no better reason than to be able to boast of ‘My daughter, Lady Hetherby’? Sage remembered accusing her of as much, angrily and bitterly, flinging out the words like venom-tipped knives, but as always her mother’s reaction had been calm and controlled.

‘Jonathon would make you an excellent husband,’ she had said quietly. ‘His temperament would complement yours—’

‘Not to mention his father’s title complementing your money,’ she had snapped back.

‘In my view you’re still far too young for marriage, Sage,’ was all her mother had said.

‘In your view, but not in the law’s…which is of course why Scott’s father had him dragged back to Australia… We love each other… Can’t you see…? Don’t you understand…?’

‘You’re nineteen, Sage—you might think you love Scott now, but in ten years’ time, in five years’ time you’ll be a different person. You’re an intelligent girl… You know what the odds are against marrying at your age and having that marriage last.’

‘You married at eighteen…’

‘That was different… There was the war…’

‘Which was virtually over when you married Father… Oh, what’s the use—you’re determined to keep us apart, you and Scott’s father. I hate you, I hate you both,’ she had finished childishly, racing upstairs to collapse in tears of anger and impotent and helpless emotion.

No, Scott might not have been able to stop his father taking him back home, but later…later, surely, he could have got in touch with her…come back for her…?

Now for the first time she was confronting a truth she had sought desperately and successfully to avoid for a long time.

If Scott had loved her, loved her with the intensity and passion she had felt for him, he would have found a way of coming back to her.

Never mind that he was his father’s only child…never mind the fact that he had been brought up from birth in the knowledge that one day he would be solely responsible for the vast sheep station owned and run by his father, and for all the complex financial investments that had stemmed from the profits made from those sheep. Never mind the fact that he had always known that it was his father’s dearest wish that he would marry the daughter of a neighbouring station owner, thus combining the two vast tracts of land. Never mind the fact that until he’d met her, Sage, he had been quite content with this future. Never mind anything that had stood between them. He had told her he loved her and he had meant it, she knew that. He had loved her as she loved him. He had wanted to marry her, to spend the rest of his life with her.

Or had he…? Had he had a change of heart back there in Australia? Had he somehow stopped loving her, stopped wanting her, blocked her out of his mind, started hating her for what she had done? She shuddered, remembering how his father had refused to see her that night at the hospital, how he had also given instructions that she wasn’t to be allowed to see Scott. He had blamed her for the accident, she knew that, but surely Scott, Scott who had loved her, understood her, been a part of her almost, surely he could not have blamed her? Even though…even though she deserved to be blamed!

She knew he had married… Not the neighbour’s daughter, but someone equally suitable from his father’s point of view. The daughter of a wealthy Australian entrepreneur. She ought to have been his wife…the mother of his children. But she wasn’t, and until now she had blamed her mother and his father for that fact. Now, abruptly, she was being forced to recognise that Scott’s love might not have been the all-consuming, intensely passionate, unchangeable force that was her own.

After the nightmare she did not get back to sleep properly and she was awake at seven when Jenny knocked on her door and came in with a tray of tea, served, she noticed, on one of the pretty antique sets of breakfast boudoir china that her mother had collected over the years. When her friends expressed concern that she should actually use anything so valuable Liz always smiled and replied that the pleasure of using beautiful things far outweighed the small risk of their being damaged by such use.

Sage frowned as Jenny put the delicate hand-painted breakfast set on her bedside table, and then said abruptly, ‘Jenny, that Sèvres boudoir set my mother likes so much—I’d like to take it to the hospital with me… I think once she’s feeling a little better she’d appreciate having something so familiar.’

‘Yes. That particular set always has been her favourite. She used to say that that special first morning cup of tea always tasted even better when she drank it from the Sèvres.’

She used to say… Sage felt her stomach muscles clench anxiously. Unable to look at the housekeeper, she said huskily, ‘Has there…? Have the hospital…?’

‘No, nothing,’ Jenny quickly reassured her. ‘And as they always say, no news must be good news. Don’t you fret…if anyone could pull through that kind of accident it would be your mother. She’s such a strong person. Emotionally as well as physically…’

‘Yes, she is,’ Sage agreed. ‘But even the strongest among us have our vulnerabilities… Faye and Camilla, are they up yet?’

‘Camilla is; she’s gone out riding, she said she’d be back in time for breakfast. I’m just about to take Faye her tea. I don’t think she’ll have slept very well… These headaches she gets when she’s under pressure…’

Faye… Headaches… Sage frowned. No one had ever told her that Faye suffered bad headaches… But then, why should they? She had long ago opted out of the day-to-day life of the house and its occupants. Long, long ago made it plain that she was going to go her own way, and that that way was not broad enough to allow for any travelling companions.

It was a perfect late spring morning, with fragile wisps of mist masking the grass, and the promise of sunshine once it had cleared.

The telephone was ringing as Sage went downstairs. She picked up the receiver in the hall, and heard a woman whose name she did not recognise asking anxiously after her mother.