Alison Fraser - Her Sister's Baby

She managed to make phone calls to a great aunt and her mother’s cousin—the only known relatives left—before the cousin’s well-meaning words overwhelmed her. When the phone rang shortly afterwards, she didn’t pick it up. She was crying too hard to talk to anyone.

It was much later when she remembered the call and lifted the receiver to find a message had been left for her. In fact, there were three messages, timed throughout the day, each more terse than the last. They were all from Drayton Carlisle, requesting that she call him on his mobile to discuss funeral arrangements.

He had obviously lost what little sympathy he’d had for her. Cass told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t need his concern. He had never understood her or her relationship with Pen. He knew nothing of the past which had linked them inextricably before driving them apart.

Sometimes secrets did that to families. Pen had wanted to take hers and parcel it up tight and bury it so deep no one would ever discover it. The trouble was Cass. Cass knew the secret, had lived with it, helped her over it. Cass would have kept it, too, but Pen had never been sure of that. Pen hadn’t been able to keep other people’s secrets. She’d assumed Cass was the same and lived in fear of the day Cass would tell. So Pen had kept her at a distance, away from the Carlisle family and her new life.

Cass had accepted this, because she felt partly responsible for the past. If she’d controlled Pen better, she wouldn’t have been pregnant at sixteen, five months gone before realising, sobbing her heart out and suddenly a little girl again. Cass had concealed her own horror and offered comfort rather than recrimination until Pen had become resigned, then excited about the life moving inside her. She’d talked endlessly of possible names and impossibly expensive baby clothes.

It was not to be, however. The baby had made a sudden entrance to the world in a bedroom upstairs. He had struggled and gasped for life. Cass had tried and failed to breathe life into his small perfect body. Pen had been left empty-armed and devastated.

Cass, questioning her very vocation, had abandoned her studies to concentrate on getting Pen through the dark times. For a while it had seemed her sister would stay broken, defeated, unable to get over the pain of it, but in time she had emerged from the whole affair with a new, tougher edge.

Pen had decided she wanted to be a model. Cass had quelled any doubts and happily paid for a portfolio of photographs—anything rather than have Pen aimlessly sitting around. She’d sold her textbooks and stethoscope, believing she’d never go back to medicine. It had been money well spent when Pen had come home in seventh heaven at having been accepted on the books of a modelling agency.

But dreams of being a supermodel hadn’t quite become reality. Pen hadn’t been tall enough for catwalk and had been too slim for glamour. She’d managed to win a few catalogue assignments, mostly for the teen market, and when they’d dried up she’d settled for PR work at trade shows.

It had been through promotional work she’d met the Carlisles and, almost from day one, what had once been a joke—marrying money—had turned into a mission statement. Initially the talk had been of a Drayton Carlisle until Pen had decided he was too ancient and had subsequently transferred her affections to his younger brother, Tom.

Cass should have been appalled and had been really, but it had kept Pen happy. She hadn’t anticipated Pen being successful. Pen had still been only seventeen and, though scarred by experience, had been surely transparent to any man with insight.

She hadn’t reckoned on Thomson Carlisle. Some years older than Pen, but oddly immature. A privileged childhood fractured by the loss of his parents. Sweet, if a little weak-natured.

Had Pen loved Tom Carlisle? Cass had never been certain. Pen had appeared in triumph, waving a diamond engagement ring. At that point Tom had been an unknown quantity, and Pen had been infuriatingly vague. He’d been around twenty-two or -three or -four, had had a flat somewhere in South Ken and had been something in the family engineering business. She’d been more specific about the sporty Merc he’d driven and his two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year trust fund.

In fact, Cass hadn’t met Tom first, but Drayton Carlisle. He had appeared on the doorstep one evening, this tall, immaculately dressed, studiously polite, breathtakingly handsome creature from another planet. Cass had felt this curious twisting sensation in her stomach, seconds before her normal barriers had gone up.

She’d already been in a bad mood; his uninvited presence had put her in worse. She’d spent the day cleaning the house and worrying about Pen who had been out all night, and in ten minutes she’d been due to start an evening shift as a checkout girl at the local supermarket where she’d been working since abandoning her studies.

‘Yes?’ she’d fairly barked the word at this stranger.

He returned politely. ‘I’m not sure if I have the right address. I’m looking for a family called Barker.’

‘Yes,’ Cass repeated, without committing herself.

‘Are you Penelope’s sister?’ he added after studying her face.

He sounded mildly surprised. He’d possibly expected a petite, short-skirted blonde like Pen, and ended up with a tall, nylon-overalled mouse.

‘You’re Tom?’ Cass was surprised, too. This man looked far too mature for Pen.

He shook his head. ‘I’d better introduce myself. I’m Drayton Carlisle, Tom’s brother. And you are…’

Confused, that was what she was. She had yet to meet Tom and here was his big brother on the doorstep. She smelled a rat.

‘Cass,’ she replied abruptly.

‘Cass?’ He checked he had it right, ‘That’ll be short for…?’

Cass thought it fairly obvious and said with irony, ‘Castleford.’

‘Castleford?’ he repeated quizzically.

‘Town up t’North,’ she relayed, exaggerating her Yorkshire vowels.

His eyes narrowed briefly. Did he realise she was winding him up?

‘How unusual,’ he commented dryly.

‘And Drayton isn’t?’ she couldn’t resist countering.

‘Family name,’ he grimaced. ‘My mother was a Drayton.’

‘Really.’ Cass pretended to be impressed. ‘One of the Draytons?’

Of course, she’d gone too far. She’d put him down as an upper-class twit. She was right on one count but not the other.

He stared straight at her for a moment. It was an intense scrutiny. His eyes were ice-blue and hard and intelligent.

‘More Northern humour, I presume,’ he finally concluded before directing at her, ‘Is Penelope in?’

‘No, sorry.’ She shrugged into the jacket already in her hand. ‘Is there a message I can pass on?’

‘Are you expecting her back soon?’ he persisted.

How to answer that? Pen came and Pen went. Cass had long since lost any control over her movements.

Cass confined herself to a shrug.

‘In that case, perhaps you and I could have a talk about matters?’ he suggested, a hint of steel now behind the polite, well-modulated tones.

Matters being his brother marrying a nobody that he’d known five minutes. Even Cass could see the family would be less than thrilled.

‘Look—’ she glanced at her watch ‘—I don’t mean to be rude, Mr Carlisle, but can we make it some other time? I have to be in work in fifteen minutes.’

‘Is your work close?’ he asked as she shut and locked the door behind her.

‘A mile or so.’ She was going to have to run.

He must have read her mind as he said, ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

Cass was briefly tempted, before replying, ‘It’s all right. I can be a little late and I don’t want to put you to any bother—’