Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series. PENNY JORDAN
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out of all of them Joss would probably be the one to most easily fulfil his grandfather’s most cherished hopes and ambitions.
The law for him wasn’t so much a chosen career path as an instinctive calling. On their rambling walks around the town and its environs, he had lectured her on the importance of the Romans to their own civilisation, focusing not as another child might have done on their fighting skills, their feats of technical engineering, but their laws.
Oh yes, Joss was a Crighton and potentially the best of the lot of them.
Olivia was a Crighton, too, of course, but in Ben’s world, female Crightons simply did not count.
Poor Olivia. Ruth had watched her growing up, had seen the hurt in her eyes when her father and her grandfather rejected her in favour of Max, when they praised him for achievements far, far below her own, whilst ignoring every single one of her triumphs.
Ruth sympathised with her. She, too, had once dreamed of a career in law. Certainly it had been much more difficult in those days, but she had been a clever girl and had determined to win a place at university. But the war had inevitably changed all that. She had had to help her father when Ben joined the RAF. She had provided an extra pair of hands in the office and had worked in the home, as well. No one would have dreamt of being so self-indulgent as to have domestic help when every available spare pair of hands there was was needed to provide for ‘our boys’.
Ah yes, her father had needed her help during those turbulent years. But once the war ended, things were different, very different in her case, because she …
She gave a tiny shake of her head. What was the matter with her? It didn’t do to dwell on the past; it couldn’t, after all, be changed. There was no going back, but seeing Jenny in the churchyard kneeling at the grave of her first-born son had …
She remembered the look she had seen on Jenny’s face the other day after she had left her small son’s graveside. Ruth and Joss had planted some tiny white scilla bulbs in the grass around it the previous autumn.
‘White is good for babies,’ Joss had commented sturdily as he drilled the holes for the bulbs.
They had planted bulbs, too, around the family crypt and beneath the monument to the town’s war heroes. Ruth’s fiancé had been one of those who had never returned from the war. She had originally met him through Ben. They had trained together as young fighter pilots. Charles had been shot down over France and reported first missing and then dead. He had been his parents’ only child and they had never really recovered from his loss. Initially opposed to their engagement because of the short length of time Ruth and Charles had known one another, they had longed desperately after his death for Ruth to tell them that the couple had broken society’s rules and that by some miracle she was carrying Charles’s child, but unfortunately she hadn’t been able to give either them or herself that hope.
Charles … she could barely even remember what he looked like these days and yet at the time …
The church bells rang out the hour, reminding her of the time. Quickly she finished showering. It wouldn’t do to leave Pieter to face Ben in one of his increasingly irascible moods.
Jenny was awake early, too, and like Ruth she breathed a sigh of relief and mentally thanked the powers on high for the clear sky and the bright golden rays of the early morning sun.
Beside her Jonathon was still asleep, but not totally peacefully. He had woken her twice in the night talking in his sleep, a habit he had whenever something was troubling him. She hadn’t been able to make any sense of what he was actually saying, only catching his brother’s name here and there in his muttered, anxious words. Typical, though, that it should be concern for David that was disturbing his sleep.
As she studied Jonathon’s sleeping face, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of tenderness and love. Very gently she leaned across and kissed him, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed when he continued to sleep.
It had, at various times during their marriage, infuriated, angered and moved her to helpless indignation to see the way her husband always put David first, even though she was well aware of the fact that this was an involuntary reaction, a habit, an instinct indoctrinated into him by his father virtually from the moment he was born. She had, after all, witnessed at firsthand the way David and Jonathon related to one another, not just as Jon’s wife but originally as David’s girlfriend.
David’s girlfriend. How thrilled she had been, how almost speechless her sixteen-year-old self had been when David had first asked her out. A year her senior he had embarked on his A level course while she had still to take her O’s.
She found out later that he had only asked her out by accident and that he had originally intended to date one of her classmates. But hearing on the school grapevine that she intended to turn him down, he switched his attention to her, Jenny, instead, simply because she sat next to the girl in class. They had laughed about it together when he told her, even though her own laughter had been slightly tinged with hurt.
She had known, of course, that so far as looks went she was not in David’s league and she had known, too, that by the time he had eventually admitted the truth to her, he did genuinely believe that he loved her. She had believed it, as well, for a little while at least and certainly long enough for her to …
She and David had started officially going steady just after her seventeenth birthday, and although they had outwardly accepted her, she had known that in the eyes of David’s father, if not his mother, she was not really good enough for him.
She could still remember the long, wet, winter afternoons when she had watched David playing rugby, his father standing at her side, ostensibly supporting his son but at the same time making good use of the opportunity it gave him to talk to Jenny about the plans and hopes he had for him. During these talks Jenny had learned all about the great future that lay waiting for David and how very far away from her it was going to take him.
There was no point to her, a hard-working Cheshire farmer’s daughter, hoping that she could follow David to university; her parents had her future mapped out for her as clearly as David’s did his.
Once she had left school after taking her A levels, she was going to train as a receptionist at one of the big hotels in Chester. Her godparents had connections there and through them Jenny was virtually assured of a job. In between times she would continue to help out on the farm, where there could never be too many pairs of hands and where there was certainly no time for any shirkers.
Oh yes, she had always known what was ultimately to come, Jenny reflected, had even perhaps hastened it on herself by calmly refusing to let him buy her an engagement ring to celebrate his passing the coveted Oxford entrance exams. Jenny was relieved. She realised quite well whom his parents—his father—would have blamed if he had not done so and it wouldn’t have been David.
The night she had told him—the night she had done what she knew his father expected of her, what he had been priming her to do for months—would remain for ever in her memory. David hadn’t believed her at first when she told him it was over, that it was time for them to part, and then, then he had been both angry and, she also sensed, slightly relieved.
David had never liked being cast in a bad light or being seen as anything other than totally perfect. Amongst their peers, their local circle of friends, he made sure it was known that she had been the one to end their romance and only Jonathon seemed to suspect the truth and guess that she had done it for David’s own sake, knowing that he needed his freedom and that once he was at university she would only become an encumbrance and perhaps even an embarrassment to him.
Unlike David, Jonathon was not going on to Oxford even though his A level grades were good enough to justify him doing so—better in fact than David’s. Not for Jonathon the higher echelons of the legal profession; Jonathon would be studying law, it was true, but at a far humbler level than David.
No one had seemed too surprised when Jonathon and Jenny had announced they were getting married and she suspected that Harry’s birth, less than seven months after their marriage, would have caused a lot more gossip