She had found peace here after her parents’ death, and she had bonded herself to the land which had belonged for so long to her family. That she had bonded herself also to Marcus she preferred not to think about, because to travel down that path meant travelling down into the mouth of Hell itself. It struck her like a bitter taste in the mouth that, concealed within her desire to help her cousins, there might also be a kernel of her old abject and foolish need to receive absolution…to receive forgiveness…to be freed from the burdens of her past and able to walk upright once more, no longer chained by guilt and pain.
But no, that wasn’t so. She had learned the hard way to come to terms with what she had done, to acknowledge that, after the way she had injured Marcus, there could be no absolution. Not from herself, and certainly not from him.
As though it was yesterday, if she closed her eyes she could still see the fury in his eyes, smell his rage like sulphur in the air, feel the shock of her pronouncement as it ricocheted around the room.
‘No!’ he had cried out passionately. ‘God, no. None of it is true!’
And her grandfather, looking into her face, had seen for himself that she had lied. She would carry the memory of the look in his eyes with her for the rest of her life. That, and the knowledge that she had deserved every acid barb, every cruel word Marcus had thrown at her.
She leaned her head on the steering wheel, sweat dampening her upper lip, nausea clawing at her stomach, while her whole body shook with the violence of her emotions as the memories she wanted to suppress tormented her from behind the barriers she had erected against them.
But she had not wasted the last ten years, and the hardy way she fought back and regained her self-control showed the value of the lessons she had learned. Hard lessons…necessary lessons… sometimes shockingly abrasive lessons to a seventeen-year-old who, until she ran away to London, had experienced very little reality.
Guilt had motivated her in those early years, fuelling a cool independence as she fought not to give in to her need to go home.
‘Get out. Get out of this house and never come back,’ Marcus had said…and she had done just that, losing herself in the harsh anonymity of London’s seething streets.
What might have happened to her if Lara hadn’t found her? Lara, who had been toughened by her parents’ divorce and the reality of travelling the world with her journalist father, living in nearly every one of its great cities. Lara, who had come across her crying her eyes out in one of London’s famous parks. Lara, who had insisted on dragging her home with her. Lara, who, on learning that, like her, Maggie should have been starting art school that autumn, had prevailed upon her father to finance them both.
He was living in Mexico now, John Philips, married and retired, and they rarely saw him, but Maggie knew she would never forget him.
Financially she owed him nothing, she had paid him back every penny, and he had let her, knowing how much it meant to her; but there were other debts…and none as great as the one she owed Lara. She felt guilty that she had not confided in her friend, but right from the start she had been grimly determined that no one else should know of her folly and humiliation. Because, despite the fact that she had known what she had done was wrong, she had genuinely believed that Marcus loved her. She had genuinely believed that.
It was selfish, this dwelling on the mistakes of her past; she had come here for one reason and one alone. She had missed her two young cousins, the children from her uncle’s second marriage to Marcus’s mother, but she would never have tried to make contact with them if Susie hadn’t chanced to see her name on the jacket of a book she had illustrated, and written to her care of the publisher.
They had been corresponding for eight months now. Letters she was quite sure Marcus knew nothing about.
The sickness gradually wore off and she started the engine wearily. These dauntingly draining bouts of nervous reaction had gradually lessened over the years; she had learned to recognise the symptoms which heralded their arrival and to take evasive action. It was noticeable that she was far more vulnerable to them at such times as Christmas and family celebrations…times when the past refused to stay locked away in the deepest recesses of her memory.
She looked in the driving mirror and saw that her face was reflecting her tension. She must put the past to one side and concentrate on the present.
What would be waiting for her at Deveril House? Why had Susie written to her so dramatically, begging her to come home? It occurred to her that it was all too probable that her young cousin knew nothing of the events which had caused her to leave.
Only three people had been witness to them: herself, Marcus and her grandfather. Her grandfather was now dead. It grieved her that she had been unable to attend his funeral. She had only known of his death because in those early years she had not been able to stop herself from buying Border Life, a monthly glossy based in her home county, which had carried the news of Sir Charles Deveril’s death. It had carried something else as well, a message so stark and poignant that it was carved in her heart.
‘Maggie, please come home.’
She had ignored that message, dreading what it portended, dreading facing Marcus…too proud and too hurt to acknowledge even to herself how very, very much she wanted to be with him.
It had taken her years of ruthless mental self-flagellation and self-control before she had finally been able to eradicate that need, but now it was eradicated, she reminded herself firmly. That teenage passion had finally died, and she had scattered the ashes so thoroughly that no embers remained to burn. Her coming back had nothing to do with the love she had once had for Marcus. It was for her cousins’ sake…because of their plea…because she knew all too well the follies of which teenage girls were capable that she had come home. Home! How her own heart betrayed her, that she should still think of the weathered stone house as that.
Deveril House had been built on the spilled blood of betrayed Jacobeans, or so rumour had once had it. It was certainly true that the Deveril who had built it had heeded the advice of his cautious English father-in-law and kept himself free of any entanglement in the uprisings of forty-five, which proved so disastrous for the Stuart cause.
Whatever her ancestor’s political affiliations might have been, he had been a good builder. The house stood four-square to the world, its stone walls mellowed by the seasons. Ivy clung to the east-facing side wall as though protecting it from the harsh winds that buffeted across the North Sea.
A regency rake had added an impressive Palladian entrance before the gaming tables had claimed the rest of his fortune, and his Victorian ancestor had managed to recoup what he had lost by judiciously investing in the new boom in railways.
Two world wars had depleted the family’s resources; much of the land had now been sold off, leaving just the home farm, which was tenanted, and the house and its grounds.
The property had not been entailed, and her grandfather had left the house and its land in trust for all his grandchildren.
And that included her.
Yes, she probably had more legal right to call Deveril House home than had Marcus, who only lived there by virtue of the fact that he was his two half-sisters’ legal guardian and their trustee.
The future of houses like Deveril House was not a good one; even during her own short lifetime, Maggie had seen many similar houses fall into the hands of property dealers, their owners exhausted both emotionally and financially by the burden of maintaining them.
That wouldn’t happen to Deveril House. At least, not during Marcus’s lifetime. Her grandfather had been prudent with his money, and Marcus, whatever else his faults, would be scrupulously honest in honouring the responsibility her grandfather had placed on his shoulders.