The warmth of the evening lapped around her, but she could not feel it. Her eyes were watching the slow progress of the two-car cavalcade driving away, down towards the lodge gates.
Princess Fatima was leaving.
But not without leaving behind a gift that was priceless to Diana.
A gift she had immediately, instantly demurred over.
‘Highness, I cannot! It is impossible. I cannot accept.’
An imperious raised hand had been her answer. ‘To refuse would be to offend,’ the Princess had said. But then her other hand had touched the back of Diana’s. ‘Please...’ she’d said, her voice soft.
So, with a gratitude she had been able to express only falteringly, Diana had taken the Princess’s gift. And now, as she watched her uninvited but oh-so-kind guest take her leave, the same profound gratitude filled her.
The black cars disappeared down the long avenue and Diana went back indoors. Went into the estate room—her office—sat down at the desk and withdrew her chequebook. With a shaky hand she wrote out the cheque she had longed with all her being to be able to write for so many long, punishing months.
The cheque that would set her free.
Free of the one man in the world she could never be free of.
However much money she repaid him.
* * *
Nikos sat in his seat on the jet, curving through the airspace that divided France from England. He stared out over the broken cloudscape beyond the window, his thoughts full. Emotions fuller.
She had been so frail, that woman in the hospital bed. So slender, so petite, it had hardly seemed possible that she had given birth at all—let alone to the two grown sons now standing at the foot of her bed. The son she had chosen over her baby, who had now brought that lost child back to her. And the son who had hated her all his life.
Who could hate her no longer.
Her eyes had filled with tears when they had gone to him. Silent tears that had run down her thin cheeks so that her older son had started forward, only to be held at bay by the veined hand raised to him. Nikos’s half-brother had halted, and she had lifted her other hand with difficulty, lifted it entreatingly, towards the son she had abandoned. Rejected.
‘I am so sorry.’ Her voice had been a husk, a whisper. ‘So very, very sorry.’
For an endless moment Nikos had stood there. So many years of hating. Despising. Cursing. Then slowly he had walked to the side of her bed, reached down, and for the first time in his life—the first time since his body had become separate from hers at his birth—he’d touched her.
He had taken her hand. For a second it had lain lifeless in his. And then, with a convulsion that had seemed to go through her whole frail body, she had clasped his fingers, clutching at him with a desperation that had spoken to him more clearly than words could ever do.
Carefully, he had lowered himself to the chair at her side, cradled her hand with both of his, pressing it between them. Emotion had moved within him, powerful, inchoate. Impossible to bear.
‘Thank you.’
The voice had been weak and the eyes had flickered—dark, long-lashed, sunken in a face where lines of illness had been only too visible—moving between them both.
‘Thank you. My sons. My beloved sons.’
She’d broken off, and Nikos had felt a tightening in his throat that had seemed like a garrotte around his neck. Antoine had come forward on jerky legs, sitting himself on the other side of the bed, taking her other hand, raising it to his lips to kiss.
‘Maman...’
In his brother’s voice Nikos had heard an ocean of love. Had felt, for one unbearable instant, an echo of the word inside himself. An echo that had turned into the word itself. An impossible word...an unbearable word. A word he had never spoken in all his life.
But it had come all the same. The very word his brother had spoken.
Maman.
He heard the word again now, sitting back in his seat as the plane banked to head north. He felt again the emotion that had come with that word. Felt again the spike of another emotion that had stabbed at him—at his half-brother, too—as their heads had turned at the entry of a man in theatre scrubs.
‘Monsieur,’ the cardiologist had said, ‘I regret, but it is time for you to leave. Madame la Comtesse is required in surgery.’