Shirley Jump - A Christmas Letter - Snowbound in the Earl's Castle

Could she tell him? Would it really be as easy as that? She never wanted to talk about this. Not to anyone. And especially not to the rest of her family.

But he wasn’t family. And she was thousands of miles away in a soundproof cellar. Somehow it seemed safer to let the words out here than anywhere else.

Also, Marcus had shared something incredibly painful and personal with her, and she couldn’t ignore the sense of imbalance that left her with. She needed to get them back on an equal footing again so she could put her defences in place.

‘You …’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You’ve always known who you are, where you belong in the world. I don’t know if I can explain it …’ She swallowed. It had been so long since she’d talked about this with anyone that she didn’t know if the words were still there. ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she whispered.

He held her gaze. There was still fire in his eyes, but it was softening, brightening. ‘Try the beginning,’ he said in a low voice.

Faith nodded and moistened her lips. ‘My mom…She’s a bit of a …’

How did she put this? Calling your own mother a flake out loud, no matter how many times you did it in your head, did not seem right.

She shrugged. ‘She likes to move around, has sudden passions for hobbies or places—even people—that are all-consuming.’

Faith looked down at her denim-clad thighs. ‘While they last. And they never do last.’

Marcus gave her his half-smile, the one that curved the right side of his mouth so deliciously. ‘A bit like Bertie, then?’

She gave an exasperated puff. ‘No way! Bertie is sweet and charming. Mom…Well, Mom is just…infuriating.’

He laughed a dry little huff of a laugh. ‘And you don’t think I find my grandfather the slightest bit exasperating?’

Faith pinned her bottom lip in the centre with her top teeth. Okay, maybe he had a point there. But she doubted he’d find her mother sweet and charming. Nutty as a squirrel, maybe.

‘The same pattern applied to her marriage. She and my dad were on again, off again, for so long. And then one day he’d had enough of trying to make her see sense and he left. Or that’s what I thought at the time.’

Marcus nodded. ‘My mother left my father under very similar circumstances. She loved him, even though he was a bit of a cad, but she couldn’t deal with all that and this place as well. Eventually she had enough.’

A well of sympathy opened up inside Faith. She knew just what that was like, to see a parent leave, promising it was nothing to do with you, that it was the grown-ups who were to blame.

‘How old were you?’ she whispered.

‘Nine,’ he replied baldly.

She nodded. Almost the same age she had been when Greg McKinnon had left the family home for the final time. She reckoned she and Marcus had more in common than she’d first thought.

‘You stayed here?’ she asked.

‘I was at boarding school most of the time. And holidays were shared between both parents. I felt slightly divorced from the whole thing, to be honest, as if it wasn’t really happening—until I came home for my summer holiday when I was thirteen and there was a new, young, blonde Lady Westerham installed in my father’s suite, wanting me to call her Mummy, and the reality of the whole situation suddenly became very clear.’

‘Ouch,’ she said.

Marcus smiled grimly. ‘You have a gift for coming up with exactly the right word for the occasion, do you know that?’

Faith smiled softly back. ‘Gram says I may not say a lot, but what I do say packs a punch.’

‘Smart lady,’ he said, his mouth stretching into a proper smile this time.

Faith’s heart began to hammer.

She sighed. ‘That wasn’t all, though. But it seems so lame compared to what you’ve just told me.’ She got up, fetched her wallet from her purse and pulled out a crinkled photograph of three women. She pointed to the polished blonde on the right. ‘That’s Hope,’ she said, and then she tapped a blunt fingernail against the girl on the left, her fair hair caught in ponytail. ‘And that’s Grace.’

And there in the middle was Faith. Shorter, darker, not as pretty.

‘I can see the family resemblance,’ he said quietly.

Faith decided not to swallow her next comment, not to let it echo round her head as she usually did. Instead she said it out loud. ‘Between the two of them .’ She pulled in some dusty air and tucked the wallet into her jeans pocket.

The tiniest lift of Marcus’s eyebrows was his only response.

‘The reason my dad left was because he found out he wasn’t really my dad at all. Mom had an affair years earlier, during one of their frequent bust-ups. She never told him, and when he found out it was the final straw.’

Marcus didn’t say anything, but the fierce compassion in his eyes was enough to make her throat clog. When she’d first met Marcus she’d thought he was uptight and superior, but it wasn’t that at all. He wasn’t mean; he just was fiercely protective of those he cared about. And, dammit, if that didn’t make him more appealing. She’d always been a sucker for loyalty.

The penny dropped, and she suddenly understood why those glowering looks of his got to her so. She’d always yearned for someone to look out for her that way, instead of feeling she was on her own, always having to look out for herself. One of her fathers had vanished before she’d even been born, and the other had left before she’d become a teenager. She couldn’t imagine Marcus vanishing on anybody. Oh, how she could have used a man like him in her life when she was younger.

She looked at her feet, dangling off the edge of the table. ‘They didn’t tell me until I was eighteen, but I’d always suspected something was wrong.’

‘He carried on being a father to you after he left the family home?’

She nodded. ‘He’s a good man, but very practical and structured—not really a good match for my mom. All three of us girls used to go and stay with him at weekends, but I could tell even then. There was something about the way he looked at me—’

She broke off, unable to continue for a moment.

‘There was always this…pain in his eyes.’ A giant breath deflated her ribcage. ‘He didn’t look at the other girls that way,’ she added as she looked up at him and tried to smile. ‘It was a relief to find out in some ways.’

Moisture fell hot and fast from her lashes. This was stupid. She never cried. And how selfish to cry for herself, when she really should be crying for him and all he’d had to face.

She sniffed and dragged the back of her hand across one cheek and then the other. ‘I finally understood why I’d always felt the odd one out, but it didn’t stop me feeling that way. If anything I felt even more of a fraud.’ She shook her head and looked up at him. ‘I’m glad you’ve still got your grandfather after all that’s happened to you, to give you that sense of balance and belonging. It’s a horrible thing to not know who you are and where you fit in.’

He reached for her hand. She saw his brain working behind his eyes, and his gaze sharpened and became more penetrating as his fingers covered hers. ‘You said the first time we met that your father was English?’

She nodded. ‘He ran a bookshop in Beckett’s Run for a few years. I don’t even remember what he looks like, apart from the fact he has dark hair like mine and that he always smiled at me when we visited the store. He gave me a book once. Fairytales, with a picture of Rapunzel on the cover. Inside it was full of castles, princesses and noble knights.’ She paused and gave a self-conscious shrug. ‘Kind of like this one.’

Marcus’s eyes warmed. ‘Castle, yes. The princesses and noble knights are long gone.’