Carole Mortimer - Joined By Marriage

She moistened her lips. ‘How did she die?’

‘The cause of death on the death certificate?’ Peter Landris returned hardly.

She frowned at him, at the way he had voiced the question. She knew all about death certificates—as a doctor, sadly her father had occasionally had to sign them—but from the way Peter Landris spoke there was clearly some doubt about her mother’s—Rebecca’s...

‘It’s usually pretty accurate,’ she said flatly.

‘Not in this case,’ Peter Landris countered. ‘The last I heard, they didn’t list a broken heart as the cause of death,’ he added bitterly.

‘Father, you’re too close to this,’ Nathan put in, stepping forward. ‘Too involved. Worse than that, you’re alarming Brianna.’

She wasn’t alarmed; she was confused. Just exactly when had her mother died twenty-one years ago? Obviously some time soon after Brianna’s arrival. But if she had died because of the birth of her baby, why hadn’t Brianna been taken in by relatives rather than put up for adoption. Who were her real family?

Peter Landris drew in a deeply controlling breath. ‘I’m sorry, Brianna. I just—It’s the waste!’ He shook his head, his face pale. ‘I was never able to accept the ending of that beautiful life. The utter futility of it all. You’re right, Nathan, I thought I could deal with this, but I—’ He gave a shaky sigh. ‘Seeing Brianna has brought it all back to me.’ He looked across the desk at her. ‘You look so much like—God, it’s unnerving!’

She looked like her mother... Like Rebecca...? And, from this man’s behaviour now, he had known her real mother very well...

Her mouth tightened. ‘Who was my father?’

Peter Landris grimaced. ‘Your mother refused to name your father.’

Brianna shook her head. ‘I find it hard to believe that no one knew.’

‘You wouldn’t if you’d known Giles,’ Peter Landris rasped with feeling.

‘Who was Giles?’ She sighed her impatience with this disjointed conversation. This was becoming more and more complicated by the moment!

‘Your grandfather. Rebecca’s father,’ Nathan told her without hesitation. ‘Rebecca was terrified of him.’

Brianna turned to him with shadowed blue eyes. ‘You knew my mother too?’ Twenty-one years ago Nathan would only have been fourteen!

‘I did,’ he confirmed curtly. ‘She was four years older than me, but—’

‘My mother—Rebecca,’ she corrected herself, ‘was only eighteen when she gave birth to me?’ No more than a child herself! ‘And when she died...’ Brianna realised dazedly. She had been far too young to die. And yet Rebecca had loved, and apparently lost, and had given birth to Brianna in those brief eighteen years...

‘I’m afraid this interview isn’t being carried out very professionally.’ Nathan gave his father a reproving look. ‘Ordinarily, in these circumstances, we would ask you for documentary proof of who you are. And then—’

‘She’s Rebecca’s daughter.’ Peter Landris was staring at her now as if he was seeing a ghost. ‘Without a shadow of a doubt!’

‘I agree with you,’ Nathan concurred. ‘I knew that the moment I saw her in Reception yesterday.’

‘You could have told me!’ Brianna snapped angrily. ‘Instead of which you carried out some sort of elaborate delaying charade. This all happened twenty-one years ago, isn’t that delay enough?’ she bit out accusingly, looking from one man to the other to emphasise the point that she was tired of this further prevarication. She wanted the facts, and she wanted them now. There would be time later, once she was alone, to sit and brood over the significance—or otherwise!—of them to her life now. ‘Nathan?’ she pressed. ‘You seem to know all about this, so you tell me what happened all those years ago!’ The need to return to work was right at the bottom of her priorities now!

‘Rebecca was my client—’

‘Rebecca is dead,’ Brianna coldly cut into Peter Landris’s protest. ‘I appear to be your client now—and I would rather hear this from Nathan.’ He, at least, appeared able to talk about all of this unemotionally.

‘Father?’ Nathan glanced at the older man.

‘Go ahead,’ his father invited dully. ‘I—Seeing Brianna, the likeness to—It’s been a shock...’

‘Have a cup of cold coffee and a rapidly curling sandwich.’ Brianna poured the coffee for him, before turning back to the younger man. ‘Nathan?’ she pressed again, his father forgotten.

Nathan sighed, pulling up another chair and sitting down on the same side of the desk as Brianna, his pale blue eyes strangely compassionate. ‘We have to start with your grandparents—’

‘Rebecca’s mother and father?’

‘This will be much quicker if you don’t interrupt after every statement,’ Nathan told her sharply.

Much quicker. Although she had pushed the need to return to work firmly to the back of her mind, time was still passing rapidly. ‘Sorry,’ she ventured.

He acknowledged her apology with an arrogant nod of his head. ‘Your grandparents—Joanne and Giles. Joanne was the daughter of a very rich man; Giles was a local farmer. But, nevertheless, the two of them apparently fell in love and married. A year into the marriage Joanne gave birth to Rebecca. There were to be no more children.’

This was much better, much easier for Brianna to deal with emotionally.

‘Despite its apparently romantic beginning—’ Nathan couldn’t seem to help the cynical twist to his lips that accompanied this statement ‘—it wasn’t a particularly happy marriage. Giles came to quickly resent the fact that it was his wife who held the purse-strings, and he didn’t care for his daughter, or the pull she had on her mother’s time and love.’

‘It should have read “broken heart” on Joanne’s death certificate too,’ Peter Landris muttered harshly.

Nathan glared his father into silence. ‘At the age of eight, Rebecca was sent away to boarding-school,’ he continued evenly. ‘Her mother, it seems, never got over the loss.’

‘But there must have been holidays—’

‘Giles always made sure they were out of the country for those.’ It was Peter Landris who answered her. ‘Leaving Rebecca in the care of a housekeeper when she was at home. Joanne rarely saw her daughter during the next three years.’

‘I—But that’s inhuman!’ Brianna protested. ‘How could anyone be so cruel?’

‘If I could just continue?’ Nathan cut in icily, his brows raised as he waited for Brianna’s attention to return to him.

‘But this is all so—it’s like something out of a Victorian novel.’ Brianna shook her head dazedly. ‘I can’t believe anyone could get away with treating his wife and daughter in that way less than forty years ago!’

‘Can’t you?’ Nathan said bleakly. ‘Then perhaps you should see some of the cases that come to court nowadays!’

She had seen some of the battered wives and children that were brought into the hospital. ‘But Joanne was the one with the money.’ She frowned. ‘Surely that gave her a certain amount of—freedom?’

‘Giles was Rebecca’s father—a fact he never let Joanne forget,’ Peter Landris put in baldly. ‘I can assure you, Joanne was by no means a weak woman, but she did have a weakness. And that weakness was her child.’

Not physical cruelty, Brianna realised, but emotional blackmail—who could say which was worse?

‘Go on,’ she invited gruffly, wondering what other horrors she was going to hear about her family; perhaps Rebecca had done her the biggest favour of all by keeping her well away from them!

‘When Rebecca was thirteen, her mother died.’ Nathan was now the one to continue. He shot his father another censorious look as he added, ‘In a car accident. But her death left Rebecca with only her father.’