Her fingers crumpling the letter of refusal from the bank, Josephine Hamilton stared out of the attic window towards Belvedere, the palatial mansion adjacent to her own family home. It belonged to the Renzetti family and Gianni Renzetti was the biggest landowner and employer in the area. Technically, he was also their next-door neighbour. He owned almost every scrap of ground around them and what remained was the size of a postage stamp.
Dating back to Tudor times, Ladymead, the Hamilton family home, was dilapidated. While the Hamilton family fortunes had waned, the Renzettis’ fortunes had steadily risen. Over a century ago, someone on the maternal side of Gianni’s family tree had bought land from the Ladymead estate to build their lavish Edwardian property. Piece by piece over the years, Gianni’s ancestors had bought almost all of Ladymead’s original land. Only the walled garden, the outbuildings and the strip along the lakeshore still belonged to them, she reflected sadly, wondering if Gianni would now step in like the predator he essentially was to scoop up what was left of her home once debt forced them to sell. Ladymead would sell at a knockdown price, she conceded unhappily.
Slowly descending the rickety and narrow servant staircase, idly wondering when there had last been a servant in her dusty home, she suppressed her overwhelming sense of failure before straightening her shoulders and composing her face. She had to be strong for the sake of her nearest and dearest.
Jo settled the bank’s letter on the kitchen table in front of her grandmother and her two great-aunts, Sybil and Beatrix, better known as Trixie. It was a Hamilton family meeting.
‘Another refusal,’ her grandmother, Liz, registered in dismay, her creased and kindly face troubled beneath her halo of white hair.
‘But I lit a candle for success!’ Her witchy great-aunt, Trixie, exclaimed in furious disappointment, her earrings and bracelets clattering noisily, her long greying hair flying round her face as she shook her head. ‘Whydidn’t it work?’
The third and youngest sister, Sybil, rolled her blue eyes and lifted her false eyelashes high in true femme-fatale style. ‘It didn’t work because we’re a bad financial bet for a loan,’ she said with the innate practicality that was as much a part of her as her glamorous image. ‘So, what now?’
One hand toying anxiously with the end of the long braid of her blonde hair, Jo winced, her dark blue eyes strained in her delicate pointed face. She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve made an appointment to see Gianni and ask if he’s willing to loan us the money. I’ve tried all the banks. He’s our last hope.’
‘Not sure you’ll be safe seeing him alone,’ Sybil quipped, referring to the shocking newspaper article that everyone local had read and devoured.
Jo ignored that crack. ‘I’m seeing him this evening when he’s at home for the weekend. I thought it was best to keep it casual.’
‘I bet you’re wishing now that you’d said yes to dinner when he asked you out again last Christmas.’ Sybil sighed. ‘After all, it was thesecondtime he’d asked you and you rejected him. I shouldn’t think those rejections will dispose him to generosity.’
‘I think he would have been more shocked if I’d said yes,’ Jo countered, keen to kill that subject.
Jo knew herself well and she had always refused to allow herself to be tempted by the man she suspected was probably her equivalent of Kryptonite. Gianni was the original bad boy and she had been determined not to become another notch on his heavily marked bedpost. He tempted her when no other man had contrived to do so and she was painfully conscious that she was vulnerable with him. But she had also known Gianni since she was a child and she valued even their casual friendship too much to risk losing that unique link.
‘In some cultures, they believe that if you save a life, that person’s life belongs to you,’ Trixie mused absently. ‘Gianni hasn’t got much return from the effort he put in that day.’
Sybil’s eyes flared. ‘It didn’t happen that way, even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it. Jo savedhimfrom drowning, not the other way round!’ she argued.
Jo wrinkled her nose. ‘I was nine years old and he was thirteen,’ she reminded her great-aunts gently. ‘We were both stupid and we both survived. That’s all that really matters.’
Sybil parted her lips to argue and then glimpsed her eldest sister’s taut face and closed her mouth again. Liz Hamilton’s son, Abraham, had drowned himself in the lake and nobody liked to discuss that thorny subject around his mother.
Uncomfortably flushed by that reminder of the uneasy link she had formed with Gianni and the secret they had suppressed when they were both too young to do otherwise, Jo rose from the table. She had first met Gianni the year before that incident. Her grandmother had gone to visit his mother, who had endured a long struggle with cancer. Federico Renzetti had been less to everyone’s taste than his charming, friendly wife, Isabella, who had borne her illness with such stoicism. Gianni’s father had been a cold, distant man with no desire to mix in any way with the locals.
Liz Hamilton had brought roses, which Isabella had adored. High tea with all the trimmings had been served in a sunlit drawing room. Jo had been bored listening to the adult conversation and then Gianni had come in, a tall, rangy twelve-year-old with a shock of glossy blue-black hair and olive skin. Jo had seen the love in his eyes when he’d looked at his frail mother, a love that had been fully reciprocated as his mother had drawn him forward to introduce him, her pride in him patent.
He had been very polite and hadn’t grimaced when Isabella had asked him to take Jo outside to entertain her. He had asked her some awkward questions to fill the silence between them, such as why she lived with her grandparents. And she had told him that her mother was dead and that she didn’t remember her and that nobody knew who her father was. Gianni had been disconcerted by such honesty, but she had been too naïve to dissemble.
She had told him that she would rather see the library than the garden and he had shown her a shelf with English books and in no time at all she had been curled up in an armchair reading a children’s book that had once been his.
‘What age are you?’ he had finally asked her.
‘Eight,’ she had told him proudly.
‘You’re absolutely tiny,’ he had remarked.
‘I’m not. You’re just very tall. My goodness, you can read English as well as Italian,’ she had gathered, impressed to death by such an accomplishment.
‘If I speak English, I can read it,’ Gianni had pointed out. ‘My grandmother was English. My mother wanted me to be bilingual. That’s why I go to an English school.’
He had attended an elite boarding school, rubbing shoulders with the rich, the titled and the royal. In spite of his mother’s illness, he was rarely at Belvedere, and it was the following year before Jo saw him again and in circumstances she would have preferred to forget.
‘That poor boy,’ she recalled her grandmother saying to her sisters. ‘His mother has died and he never got to spend any time with her. He’s only home from school and it’s too late... She’s gone. Isabella said his father was extremely strict about his schooling and wouldn’t let him take time out to be with her during her last weeks.’
Jo had been sitting in a tree in the front garden when she saw Gianni in the distance striding down to the lake. Aware that he was grieving, she had not even thought of trying to approach him. She wouldn’t have known what to say in such circumstances and it wasn’t as though they were friends. There was too big an age gap for that. She had watched as he’d walked into the lake and she had leapt down from the tree, wondering if he knew that there was a very steep drop several yards out, wondering why he wasn’t wearing swimwear.
And as he had walked, she had remembered a conversation between her great-aunts that she had overheard, a conversation about her uncle Abraham’s death the year before.