LITMIR.BIZ

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her own,’ she told them as she opened the door and climbed out. ‘They don’t know the extent of her injuries as yet. I spoke to the surgeon. He said we could ring again tonight…’

      ‘But when can we see her?’ Camilla demanded eagerly.

      ‘She’s on the open visiting list,’ Sage told them. ‘But the surgeon’s told me that he’d like to have her condition stabilised for at least forty-eight hours before she has any more visitors.’

      ‘But you’ve seen her,’ Camilla pointed out.

      Sage reached out and put her arm round her. She was so precious to them all in different ways, this child of David’s. ‘Only because she wanted to see me, Camilla…The surgeon was worried that with something preying on her mind she would—’

      ‘Something preying on her mind… What?’

      ‘Camilla, let Sage get inside and sit down before you start cross-questioning her,’ Faye reproved her daughter gently. ‘It isn’t a very comfortable drive down from London these days with all the traffic… I wasn’t sure what your plans are, but I’ve asked Jenny to make up your bed.’

      ‘I’m not sure either,’ Sage told her sister-in-law, following her inside and then pausing for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the long panelled passageway that led from the back to the front of the house.

      When her mother had first come to Cottingdean this panelling had been covered in paint so thick that it had taken her almost a year to get it clean. Now it glowed mellowly and richly, making one want to reach and touch it.

      ‘I’ve asked Jenny to serve afternoon tea in the sitting-room,’ Faye told her, opening one of the panelled doors. ‘I wasn’t sure if you would have had time to have any lunch…’

      Sage shook her head—food was the last thing she wanted.

      The sitting-room was on the side of the house and faced west. It was decorated in differing shades of yellow, a golden, sunny room furnished with an eclectic collection of pieces of furniture which somehow managed to look as though they were meant to be together. Another of her mother’s talents.

      It was a warm welcoming room, scented now with late-flowering pots of hyacinths in the exact shade of lavender blue of the carpet covering the floor. A fire burned in the grate, adding to the room’s air of welcome, the central heating radiators discreetly hidden away behind grilles.

      ‘Tell us about Gran, Sage,’ Camilla demanded, perching on a damask-covered stool at Sage’s feet. ‘How is she?’

      She was a pretty girl, blonde like her mother, but, where Faye’s blondeness always seemed fairly insipid, Camilla’s was warm and alive. Facially she was like her grandmother, with the same startlingly attractive bone-structure and the same lavender-grey eyes.

      ‘Is she really going to be all right?’

      Sage paused. Over her head, her eyes met Faye’s. ‘I hope so,’ she said quietly, and then added comfortingly, ‘She’s a very strong person, Camilla. If anyone has the will to fight, to hold on to life…’

      ‘We wanted to go to see her, but the hospital said she’d asked for you…’

      ‘Yes, there was something she wanted me to do.’

      Both of them were looking at her, waiting…

      ‘She said she wanted us…all of us, to read her diaries… She made me promise that we would.’ Sage grimaced slightly. ‘I didn’t even know she kept a diary.’

      ‘I did,’ Camilla told them. ‘I came downstairs one night when I couldn’t sleep and Gran was in the library, writing. She told me then that she’d always kept one. Ever since she was fourteen, though she didn’t keep the earliest ones…’

      Ridiculous to feel pain, rejection over something so insignificant, Sage told herself.

      ‘She kept the diaries locked in the big desk—the one that belonged to Grandpa,’ Camilla volunteered. ‘No one else has a key.’

      ‘I’ve got the key,’ Sage told her gruffly. They had given it to her at the hospital, together with everything else they had found in her mother’s handbag. She had hated that…hated taking that clinically packaged bundle of personal possessions… hated knowing why she had been given them.

      ‘I wonder why she wants us to read them,’ Faye murmured. She looked oddly anxious, dread shadowing her eyes.

      Sage studied her. She had got so used to her sister-in-law’s quiet presence in the background of her mother’s life that she never questioned why it was that a woman—potentially a very attractive and certainly, at forty-one, a relatively young woman—should want to choose that kind of life for herself.

      Sage knew Faye had been devoted to David…that she had adored him, worshipped him almost, but David had been dead for over fifteen years, and, as far as she knew, in all that time there had never been another man in Faye’s life.

      Why did she choose to live like that? In another woman, Sage might have taken it as a sign that her marriage held so many bad memories that any kind of intimate relationship was anathema to her, but she knew how happy David and Faye had been, so why did Faye choose to immure herself here in this quiet backwater with only her mother-in-law and her daughter for company? Sage studied her sister-in-law covertly.

      Outwardly, Faye always appeared calm and controlled—not in the same powerful way as her mother, Sage recognised. Faye’s self-control was more like a shield behind which she hid from the world. Now the soft blue eyes flickered nervously, the blonde hair which, during the days of her marriage, she had worn flowing free drawn back off her face into a classic chignon, her eyes and mouth touched with just the merest concession to make-up. Faye was a beautiful woman who always contrived to look plain and, watching her, it occurred to Sage to wonder why. Or was her curiosity about Faye simply a way of putting off what she had come here to do?

      Now, with both Faye and Camilla watching her anxiously, Sage found herself striving to reassure them as she told them firmly, ‘Knowing Mother, she probably wants us to read them because she thinks whatever she’s written in them will help us to run things properly while she’s recovering.’

      Faye gave her a quick frown. ‘But Henry’s in charge of the mill, and Harry still keeps an eye on the flock, even though his grandson’s officially taken over.’

      ‘Who’s going to chair the meeting of the action group against the new road, if Gran isn’t well enough?’ Camilla put in, making Sage’s frown deepen.

      ‘What road?’ she demanded.

      ‘They’re planning to route a section of the new motorway to the west of the village,’ Faye told her. ‘It will go right through the home farm lands, and within yards of this side of the village. Your mother’s been organising an action group to protest against it. She’s been working on finding a feasible alternative route. We had a preliminary meeting of the action group two weeks ago. Of course, they elected your mother as chairperson…’

      The feelings of outrage and anger she experienced were surely wholly at odds with her feelings towards Cottingdean and the village, Sage acknowledged. She’d been only too glad to escape from the place, so why did she feel this fierce, protective swell of anger that anyone should dare to destroy it to build a new road?

      ‘What on earth are we going to do without her?’ Faye demanded in distress.

      For a moment she seemed close to tears, and Sage was relieved when the door opened and her mother’s housekeeper came in with the tea-trolley.

      Afternoon tea was an institution at Cottingdean, and one which had begun when her parents had first come to the house. Her father, an invalid even in those days, had never had a good appetite, and so her mother had started this tradition of afternoon tea, trying to tempt him to eat.

      Jenny and Charles Openshaw had worked for her mother for over five years

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