The Woman In The Golden Dress. Nicola Cornick
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more of his attention now. She hadn’t had a crush on him back then, not really. When you were stuck at an all girls’ school people’s brothers tended to be alien and exotic creatures, especially if they were older. Hamish had been… she searched her memory… nice, she thought, kind to Jessie in an absentminded sort of a way. Patient. He had helped them with their homework sometimes. He had not been so good-looking in those days, or at least she didn’t think so.
She wondered whether he was married. He hadn’t been wearing a ring but that meant nothing. Perhaps he was a player, like Jake had been, a man who hit on a different woman each night on the train home from work. She didn’t know. Although she’d seen Jessie quite a bit since she had come back to Swindon, her friend hadn’t mentioned her brother much. And since Jessie was called Jessie Madan now rather than Jessie Ross, it had taken a moment for the penny to drop.
Fen bit her lip. Damn. She had to hope that Jessie wouldn’t invite her to a party or something that Hamish would also attend. It would be awkward to try to explain how Fen Brightwell had morphed into the novelist Julie Butler. In fact it would be excruciatingly embarrassing. Still, it was unlikely to happen. Whilst Jessie had moved back to a village near Swindon and Hamish evidently lived in Newbury, they weren’t a family who were in each other’s pockets. They seemed fond enough of each other in a nice, mutually supportive way. They were so normal.
Fen sighed, narrowing her eyes against the glare of oncoming headlights, fighting the tiredness that snapped at her heels. She didn’t really know ‘normal’ that well. Her own family background was too fractured and as for her relationship with Jake, that had been so far from normal that there wasn’t a word for it.
She pulled onto the motorway. It was still busy with late night weekend traffic heading for the West Country. She only had one junction to go though. She stifled a yawn and turned on the radio to help her focus. A group of earnest people were talking about literary criticism. She turned it off. That was more likely to lull her to sleep than wake her up. Her sister Pepper was the bookish one with a first-class degree in Archaeology. Her eldest brother Jim was a high-achieving lawyer in Sydney and the younger one, Denzel, was a drifter last heard of surfing in San Diego. They were scattered in character and interests as much as in location, perhaps because they had all had such dislocated childhoods. It had not drawn them back together as adults.
Suddenly the orange haze of streetlights punctured the darkness up ahead and she took the exit, turning right towards Swindon, past the hospital and into upmarket suburbia, the big 1930s houses, the wide open spaces of the country park. After she had left Jake, she had relocated to Manchester and then to the Midlands but she had felt rootless and lost, so after eighteen months she had gone back to Swindon where she had grown up. It felt safe enough; she had not lived there for twelve years and had never told Jake anything about her childhood anyway. Besides, he was living abroad now and probably didn’t give a thought to where she was living or what she was doing. She had to try not to be paranoid. She didn’t want to spend all her life feeling hunted. If she thought about Jake constantly he would still dictate her life, he would have won. She was not going to allow that. Even so, she knew it was not that easy; so often he trod the edges of her mind like a ghost.
She slid the car down the narrow alleyway between the flats and the row of houses next door, a line of old cottages that tumbled down the hill towards the new town. As she turned into the entry, the arc of the headlights caught a man’s figure, stepping sideways into the shadows. She caught only the briefest flash of his features but it was enough.
Jake.
She slammed on the brakes and the car stalled, stranded half-in and half-out of the alley. Without conscious thought she threw open the door, so hard it scraped along the wall, and jumped out, running round the back of the car and out into the street. A horn blared, lights swerved. Someone swore at her but she barely noticed.
The street in both directions was empty. Only the faintest echo of receding footsteps came to her ears. Fen stood there irresolute for a moment then shook her head sharply. It could only have been her imagination. She had been thinking about Jake and so she thought she had seen him when she had not.
She restarted the car and drove around into the parking lot behind the flats, locked it, double-checked, and walked swiftly, head down, across to the entrance where she let herself in. Only when she was in the bright passage, with the door firmly shut behind her, did she allow herself to draw a breath. It had been her mind playing tricks. She told herself that, very firmly, and ignored the slight shaking of her hands.
Chapter 5
Isabella
Lydiard Park, Summer 1763
The clock on the stables was striking quarter past the hour of one as my carriage rattled into the coach yard at Lydiard Park. After so many miles the sudden cessation of noise and movement was shocking. The silence was loud, the stillness made me feel sick.
There was no light outside and no welcome. Not that I was expecting one. I had not sent ahead to warn the servants of our arrival. There had been no time.
The carriage swayed as the coachman jumped down. I wondered if he were as stiff as I, tired, filthy and bad tempered from travelling through the night. He had certainly driven like a man in a rage, sparing us nothing, which had made the journey all the more uncomfortable.
Constance stirred in her seat but she did not wake. Poor child, at the last change of horses she had looked so pale and hollow-eyed from exhaustion that I thought she might faint with the effort of carrying a cup of broth for me, and I made her drink it herself.
I pushed the window down. ‘Farrant! Drive around to the front. Do you expect me to walk?’
I heard him swear. I had suffered the coachman and groom’s snide disrespect all the way from London. How quickly the servants picked up on the mood of their master and acted accordingly. They all knew about Eustace’s treatment of me and so they thought that gave them licence to behave with insolence. But I was a Duke’s daughter; I knew how to deal with impertinent servants.
‘Ma’am—’ Tarrant’s surly response was interrupted as a wavering light appeared, a lantern held in the hand of a very young ostler who scuffed his way across the cobbles, yawning and rubbing his eyes. Behind him I saw the shadow of a cat slink away.
‘What’s to do?’ His Wiltshire burr was so thick I could scarcely make out the words. ‘Who calls at this time of night?’
‘It is my Lady Gerard.’ The coachman was peremptory, using my authority to bolster his own now it suited him. ‘Look sharp, lad, and send someone to wake the house, and fetch more men to help with the horses.’
‘There’s no one here but me.’ The poor lad sounded panicked, as though he did not know what to do first. I took pity on him, leaning from the window.
‘Farrant, open this door. I can announce myself at the house.’ Turning, I shook Constance awake gently. Her shoulder felt brittle beneath my hand and she turned her head against the velvet cushions of the seat as though for comfort.
‘Come, Constance,’ I said. ‘You are home.’
She opened sleep-dazed dark eyes and looked at me, waking suddenly, despite the care I had taken not to startle her.
‘Home? Lydiard? Oh, madam!’
She scrambled up and thrust the door wide, jumping down before the groom had stirred to come and help us. I smiled wryly to think that one of us at least was pleased to be here.
I had not been to Lydiard since the first year of my marriage. I had been happy enough then, although perhaps not as happy as I should have been as a new bride. Marriage had not been at all as I had imagined.
‘What on earth were you thinking, Bella?’ my sister Betty had asked bluntly when my betrothal was announced. ‘Were you drunk? Everyone says you must have been to accept Eustace Gerard.’
It