LITMIR.BIZ

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Max in hospital and eventually take his son home. Life was so precious, and because he was becoming increasingly aware of just how frail his own physical strength was getting, the priest prayed that Jon Crighton would find it in his heart to welcome home his twin.

      ‘I can’t go,’ David was saying, but the older man knew not just that he could but that he would.

       CHAPTER TWO

      ‘YES, MRS CRIGHTON … very well, Maddy,’ Honor corrected herself into the telephone receiver with a warm smile as she responded to her caller’s request that she use her Christian name. ‘I’d be very happy to come and see your father-in-law, although I can’t promise …’

      She paused. Over the years she had grown used to the fact that her patients and their families, having failed to find a cure for their illnesses through conventional medicine, tended to expect that she could somehow produce something magical to restore them to full health.

      ‘Herbal medicine is not some kind of black art. It’s an exact science,’ she sometimes had to tell them severely.

      Many modern drugs were, after all, originally derived from plants even if more latterly scientists had discovered ways to manufacture them synthetically in their laboratories. In her view, synthetic drugs, like synthetic foods, were not always sympathetic to the human system, and to judge from the increasing number of patients consulting her, other people were beginning to share her views.

      Honor had not always been a herbalist. Far from it. She had been at medical school studying to become a doctor way back in the seventies, a sloe-eyed brunette burning the candle at both ends, studying and partying and desperately trying to deny her aristocratic background and connections to become part of the London ‘scene’. Ironically, it had not been on the London scene that she had met her late husband but through one of her mother’s friends.

      Lady Caroline Agnew had been giving a coming-out party for her daughter, and Honor’s mother had insisted that Honor had to attend. Rourke had been there photographing the event. Lady Caroline had contacts at Vogue and he was the ‘in’ photographer of the moment, more used to photographing long-legged models than chubby adolescent debs.

      Honor had been fascinated by him. Everything about him had proclaimed that he belonged to the world she so longed to join. His clothes, his hair, his laid-back manner and, most of all, his sharp cockney speech. Somehow or other she had managed to catch his eye and they had left the party together.

      Three months later they became lovers and three months after that they married and she dropped out of medical school.

      For two years she had been so passionately and completely in love with him that she had blinded herself to reality, his unfaithfulness, his drinking, the drugs he was taking with increasing regularity, the bills that mounted up because he refused to pay them, the unsavoury characters who hung like dark shadows on the edges of his life, their lives, and then she had become pregnant.

      Their first daughter Abigail had been less than six months old the first time he left her.

      Her parents, who had never really forgiven her for her marriage, had refused to have her home, but her father had given her a tiny allowance just enough to cover the rent on a small flat, and she had found herself a job working in a small family-owned chemist’s shop. It had been whilst working there that her interest in medicine had been reactivated. The shop was old-fashioned, its upper room stuffed with all manner of things amongst which Honor, who had been sent upstairs to tidy it, had found the herbal book that once opened she had been unable to put down.

      Rourke, his affair over, had turned up on her doorstep one dark, wet night and foolishly she had taken him in. Nine months later Ellen was born. Rourke had already embarked on another affair with a rich older woman this time.

      On her own again, Honor had become fascinated by herbal medicine and cures, so much so that when she learned of a local herbalist in a magazine she was reading in the dentist’s waiting room, she made a note of her address so that she could get in touch with her.

      Now a fully trained herbalist herself, Honor always made a point of advising her patients to make sure they went to similarly trained and accredited practitioners whenever they chose alternative forms of healing.

      Her own training had been long and thorough and one of her main reasons for coming to live here in the rather dilapidated house she had just moved into on her second cousin Lord Astlegh’s Cheshire estate was because of the land that went with it—land on which she would be able to grow some of her own herbs in a way that was completely natural and free from pesticides and any kind of chemicals. The house, which was miles away from any other habitation, might have drawn cries of despair from both her daughters, who had protested at its lack of modern amenities and creeping damp, but Honor had assured them that once she had time to get someone in to repair and improve the place, it would make a very snug home indeed.

      ‘It’s a hovel,’ Abigail had said forthrightly.

      ‘A wretched hovel,’ Ellen had agreed.

      ‘The locals will probably think you’re some kind of witch,’ Abigail had joked.

      ‘Thank you very much,’ Honor had told her daughter drily. ‘When I want my ego boosted, I shall know where to come.’

      ‘Oh, no, Mum, I didn’t mean you look like a witch,’ Abigail had immediately reassured her. ‘Actually, you look pretty good for your age.’

      ‘Mmm … Nowhere near forty-five,’ Ellen had agreed.

      ‘Forty-four, actually,’ Honor had corrected her with dignity.

      ‘Honestly, Mum,’ Abigail had told her. ‘With all the money you inherited from Dad, you could have bought yourself somewhere really comfortable. I know you had to scrimp and scrape whilst we were growing up, but now …’

      ‘Now I have chosen to come and live here,’ Honor had told them firmly.

      She was still not totally over her shock at the amount of money she had inherited from Rourke. She hadn’t expected him to die so relatively young and certainly not from something so ridiculous as a cold turned to pneumonia. She was even more surprised to discover that since they had never divorced, she was his next of kin. The young leggy model he had been living with had been quite happy to accept the fact, simply shrugging her sparrow-like shoulder-blades and gazing at Honor with drug-glazed eyes as she shook her head over Honor’s concern and explained in a small, emotionless voice that she was really quite rich herself.

      Rourke’s unexpected wealth had come not from his current work as a photographer but from his earlier and highly original work as a young man, which had now become extremely valuable collector’s pieces, selling for thousands upon thousands of pounds.

      She had insisted on sharing the money with the girls, her daughters … Rourke’s daughters. Both of them were adults now and they often tended to treat her as though she were the one in need of parenting. Whilst both of them loved their mother’s elderly second cousin and thought that his Palladian home, Fitzburgh Place, and the philanthropic way in which he was developing the estate’s resources were both worthy of their highest approval, they were united in disapproval of the ramshackle place their mother had chosen to make her home.

      ‘I can’t bear to think about your living like this,’ Ellen had said, grimacing in distaste as she wiped a fastidious finger along one grimy window-sill the weekend her mother had moved into Foxdean.

      ‘Then don’t think about it,’ Honor had advised her gently.

      Much as she loved them, her daughters, both wonderful girls, clever, independent, good fun to be with and undeniably beautiful, could, at times, in their attitudes and conversations, remind her disconcertingly of her own mother.

      ‘Honoraria has always been … way ward,’ her mother had been fond of saying exasperatedly, and Honor knew how pained and bemused

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