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  Jay laughed. Mirry was so astonished, she could only gape at him. ‘From what I’ve seen of you simple country folk, you could run rings round us poor townies any day.’ He closed the car door on her firmly, then through the open window added, ‘And just for the record, Mirry, nothing’s settled yet.’

  Mirry didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry about this nugget of news, especially later in the day when Andrew seemed even more down than usual. He normally guarded his deepest feelings, so it was a measure of his despair that, at Mirry’s sympathetic prompting, he confessed he had phoned Annabel to ask her out that evening, only to be told by Mrs Frost that she rather thought her daughter was seeing Jay.

  Mirry offered herself as a substitute, suggesting they spend a few hours at a new roadhouse about five miles away. So it was ironic that they should return home to hear that Jay had spent most of the evening at the Dower House. Andrew and Mirry exchanged glances. So Jay hadn’t been with Annabel, after all.

  ‘Did he say why he’d come, Mum?’ Mirry tried to sound casual.

  ‘No specific reason. Just being neighbourly. Though he was asking about the property market locally,’ Cathy added as an afterthought. ‘So it looks as if he’s giving consideration to your conversion, Mirry.’

  That in itself was surprising enough. Even more amazing was that Jay had been at the Dower House at all, seeing that, in his opinion, it was her parents who had broken up his mother’s romance with his father. From their placid demeanour he hadn’t repeated those accusations. But still Mirry felt uneasy.

  The following morning there was a phone call from Abigail Minto, asking if Mirry could come over that afternoon and bring her clarinet. Since an injury to her hand had meant retirement from the concert platform, Abby had begun to climb a new career ladder as a composer, and such a request was not unusual when she was working on something she wanted to try out.

  This was an outing where Mirry could safely take Simon’s Lotus, and carefully parking it alongside Keir’s Mercedes on the gravel sweep she rang the bell. The housekeeper smiled a welcome and told her to go straight through to the sitting-room.

  Mirry burst impetuously into the large room at the rear, where the grand piano stood on a dais in the curve of the big window, and stopped dead, her heart seeming to somersault in her breast. Although vaguely aware of several people there, she noticed only one. Their gazes clashed and held, and surely it couldn’t be pleasure on Jay’s face?

  Even as she wondered, another voice, heavily accented, broke the thread of tension. ‘Mirree… ma petite, even more ravishing than ever!’ Two arms swept her into an enthusiastic hug, and her surprised mouth was thoroughly kissed.

  ‘Jules!’ Mirry exclaimed when he finally released her. ‘Abby, you clam, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I insist that we give you the surprise.’ Jules’ arm lingered possessively at her waist.

  A quick glance at Jay revealed that he didn’t share Keir and Abby’s amusement. His face was wooden, his eyes blank, and Mirry knew she had been mistaken that he had seemed pleased to see her.

  Though Jules Charpentier played the piano extremely well, it was as a cellist he was building a reputation in the concert halls, and because there was a limited repertoire for the cello he had become a regular visitor at the Minto home, Abigail composing several works especially for him.

  Mirry had come to know him well, to know he liked to play the Latin lover to the hilt, to know also it was just a game, so she had never been in danger of taking him seriously. But now, under Jay’s blank stare, she found herself playing up to him.

  ‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Jules. How long are you staying?’ Let Jay see another man could find her attractive, even if he didn’t.

  ‘Alas, only until tomorrow, ma chère,’ Jules mourned, his dark eyes gazing soulfully into hers, until Mirry had to suppress a giggle. ‘It is the work. The Festival ‘all on Sunday and back to Paris on Monday. But now we make our own music, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘You’ve finished something new, Abby?’

  ‘For cello, piano and clarinet,’ Abby said. ‘We’re going to record the piano and clarinet parts first, then add the cello to it, so if you’re ready…’

  ‘Come on, Jay, we’ll leave these artistic types to it,’ Keir said. ‘We have our own work to do, anyway.’ Mirry watched as the two men moved towards the study, Jay never once glancing her way.

  But Mirry soon became too absorbed to brood on Jay’s antagonism. She and Jules played through the piano and clarinet parts several times under Abby’s direction, Mirry stumbling at first but becoming progressively more confident, though she would have preferred one more rehearsal when Abby insisted they could record.

  With that on tape, Mirry could sit back and enjoy Jules’ superb playing as he added the cello part. They were listening critically for the second time to the final recording of all three instruments, Abby following from the score and making notes where things didn’t please her, when Keir and Jay came quietly back into the room. There was a conscious relaxing when the tape had finished, and Mirry was astounded to find it was seven o’clock. The conversation ran on classical music for a while, Jay surprising Mirry with his knowledgeable interest. Yet why should she be surprised? He was obviously a well-educated and cultured man.

  He hadn’t yet spoken to her directly, so she was unprepared when he suddenly said, ‘You seem equally at home with jazz and classical music, Mirry. Have you never thought of taking the clarinet up as a career?’

  Having just spent several hours being shown her limitations by two professionals, she laughingly disclaimed, ‘Oh, I’ll admit to a certain facility, but there’s a very wide gap between even a talented amateur and a professional. Besides, I’ve had no musical education to speak of.’

  ‘The bouleversé life of the musician is not for her!’ Jules derided the suggestion. ‘Mirree is the home-loving girl, yes? Born to be the adored wife of some lucky man and the devoted mother of his children.’

  Jay shot him a narrowed glance, as if the other man had surprised him; then, shifting that silvery gaze back to Mirry in a lingering inventory, he drawled, ‘You could very well be right, Jules.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘You mean your brother actually trusts you with this?’ Jay stopped abruptly beside the low red monster gleaming in the light from the Mintos’ front door.

  It was a typical male chauvinist attitude, one that Mirry was used to and never allowed to bother her. ‘As his only chance of getting it back for weeks is to trust me to drive it to London for him, he didn’t have any option,’ she laughed, opening the driver’s door, but Jay still seemed to doubt the wisdom of taking the passenger seat.

  After Jules’ and Jay’s embarrassing dissection of her character, only Mrs Jameson’s timely announcement that dinner was ready spared her blushes. However, the meal had passed off without further embarrassment, conversation being general and Jay showing a much more relaxed side of his personality. The first time he laughed aloud at one of her sallies, Mirry was fascinated and pleased, encouraged to see if she could prompt a repeat of this phenomenon and elated each time she succeeded.

  By the time they returned to the sitting-room, Mirry’s sparkle had affected them all. A musical argument, and Mirry’s assertion that everything was grist to the jazz musician’s mill, had her demonstrating a jazzed-up version of one of the themes from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, to Jules’ cries of ‘Sacrilege!’

  Keir joined her on the piano and they romped through several jazz classics until Jules could stand it no longer and brought his cello into a spirited rendition of ‘The Dark Town Strutter’s Ball’, until a stifled yawn from Abby, whose pregnancy was only about eight weeks off full term, had Mirry putting her clarinet away and declaring it was high time she went home. It had been Jay himself who’d suggested she could give him a lift, as he didn’t have his car there.

  With a rueful, ‘I hope I don’t live to regret this,’ Jay folded himself into the
low-slung Lotus, and, stifling her laughter, Mirry slid in beside him, clipping on the seat-belt. Flipping a final wave at the three people standing in the doorway, and missing Jules’ parting riposte as the ignition fired with a throaty roar, she reversed neatly round Keir’s Mercedes and moved forward along the drive, pausing between the gateposts with their pineapple finials and turning into the winding, undulating lane that would take them back to Wenlow.

  ‘I suppose you know that Frenchman fancies you,’ Jay commented.

  Mirry gurgled with laughter as the car gathered speed, the powerful headlights slashing through the darkness. ‘You mean that Charles Boyer performance of his? Nonsense, he treats every female like that. He can’t help it.’

  The whole evening had turned out so much better than she had feared; Jay had been so much more approachable and he was sitting beside her now, only a handspan away, the woody scent of his aftershave drifting towards her now and again, and something more, an indefinable male scent she had never noticed with her brothers. She felt sparklingly alive and quite ridiculously happy.

  ‘You seemed so delighted to see him, I thought he must be the man in your life.’

  So Jay had noticed not all men treated her as if she had a bad case of plague. ‘Of course I was delighted to see him. Jules is great fun. What girl wouldn’t enjoy having a famous musician flirting with her and kissing her hand?’ She changed gear as she approached the narrow, hump-backed bridge over the canal. ‘Hold tight!’

  Jay groaned as he left his stomach behind, but Mirry was busy smoothly negotiating the right-angled bend immediately beyond. ‘I must say you can handle this thing,’ he allowed grudgingly.

  ‘Why, thank you, kind sir.’ Mirry flashed him a cheeky grin. ‘As a matter of fact I’m really looking forward to getting it on the motorway next week.’

  ‘You were serious, then? About taking it to London?’ The car lifted slightly as they passed the much lower bridge over the stream that fed the lake at Wenlow.

  ‘Well, Heathrow,’ Mirry conceded. ‘Simon’ll drive us both into London from there. We’re going to have a night on the town before I catch the train home.’

  ‘When, next week?’ Jay asked, grabbing the dashboard to steady himself as the car snaked into a right-hand turn at the deserted crossroads.

  ‘Wednesday.’ Mirry put on a spurt along a comparatively straight stretch before braking smoothly for the bend and continuing to brake as she approached the Wenlow drive.

  Out of pure mischief she asked, ‘Do you want me to drop you at the gate, or am I to be allowed on Wenlow property long enough to take you to your door?’

  Jay made an explosive sound of annoyance, and for a moment Mirry was afraid she’d gone too far with her teasing. Then he said tightly, ‘You’ll take me to the door, of course, and then you’ll come into the house for a drink. I need to talk to you.’

  Mirry obediently swept past the little church and into the drive, speculating what he could want with her.

  Jay was out of the car before she had doused the lights and released her seat-belt, coming round to help her out. Her skin seemed to tingle under his touch, an entirely pleasurable sensation, and she made no move to pull away as he kept his hand beneath her elbow to escort her indoors.

  Jay made straight for the library. Nothing had changed since her last traumatic visit to the room when she’d been caught red-handed searching the desk, except now there was a computer squatting on top of it.

  ‘I need to keep in touch with things while I’m here,’ Jay explained as he saw her looking at it. ‘But that particular model’s not ideal. That’s what I was consulting Keir about today. He’s going to fix me up with one better suited to my needs. What can I get you to drink?’

  Because she was driving, Mirry had limited herself to one small glass of wine with her dinner, and felt she could indulge herself a little now, asking for a small brandy with a lot of ginger ale. ‘Nick’s the one who’s into computers,’ she said, examining the set-up on the desk with interest. ‘Or rather, he was…’

  Jay brought her drink across. ‘You mean he lost interest, or the ability to understand?’

  She shrugged sadly. ‘I wish I knew! We had to start from scratch with him, you know: teach him to sit up, to stand, to feed and wash himself and eventually to walk and talk.’

  It had been gruelling work, exercising Nick’s helpless body. For every waking minute he’d needed to be pummelled and stimulated. Disheartening work too, when each improvement had been so slow in coming and sometimes so infinitesimal that Mirry, impatient for miracles, had often cried tears of frustration into her pillow at night. But each small improvement had added up, so that by the end of a year Nick had been able to stand, supported by a metal walker, and even to shuffle a few steps. And the gymnasium they had fitted out in the old dairy had continued the improvement, as speech therapy was still improving his articulation.

  ‘As time went on he seemed to have more and more recall of things he knew before the accident, and of course we re-introduced him to his computer,’ she went on, ‘taught him to play some of the games because it helped his co-ordination. But he’s never attempted to do anything else with it, even though I’ve tried to prompt him.’

  Jay stared down at the glass in his hand. ‘I’d no idea things had been so bad for him,’ he muttered. ‘That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, to apologise for that cheap crack of mine about you living off your parents. It was indefensible when I knew nothing about you or your circumstances.’

  Mirry had no idea what had changed his opinion, but there was no stopping the pleased smile that lit her small face. ‘Apology accepted,’ she said promptly, then with an infectious smile added, ‘Don’t look so worried, Jay. With five brothers, I’m not such a tender little plant that an unkind word can throw me into a decline.’

  A reluctant smile hovered round the mouth that had been a lot less buttoned up tonight. ‘I can well imagine! All the same, if I’d known you’d given up your career in order to help your brother, I’d never have made that unfortunate remark.’

  Now he was embarrassing her. ‘Please… don’t make me out to be some kind of Pollyanna. I can assure you my motives were very selfish. If there was going to be a way back to normality for Nick, I meant to be part of it. In any case, it was Eleanor—William’s wife—who was responsible for his recovery. I only carried out her instructions.’

  ‘Look, won’t you sit down?’ Belatedly remembering his manners, Jay indicated the leather sofa in front of the empty fireplace. ‘Are you cold?’

  Mirry sank down on to the sofa, shaking her head, but Jay switched on the electric fire anyway before sitting down himself. ‘As this seems to be my night for eating humble pie,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you I went to see Mr Golding yesterday.’

  ‘The solicitor?’ Mirry’s eyes were round and questioning as she wondered what was coming next.

  Jay took a fortifying swallow of his drink and contemplated the heavy cut-glass tumbler. ‘It wasn’t only what you said—about checking with him where my mother’s income had come from…’ Mirry’s heart began to beat in slow, heavy thuds as she watched the frown gathering on his face. ‘There were a number of things that didn’t add up. The disconcerting friendliness of all you Greys, for a start, though one of them…’ that fugitive smile lurked around his beautiful mouth again ‘… had the sting of a scorpion when she was provoked.’

  Mirry gave a gasping laugh which she quickly stifled, reluctant to interrupt him.

  ‘I was puzzled why I should be the main beneficiary in Lady Jayston’s will when she had plenty of relatives of her own. It didn’t match the picture I’d always had of her, and neither for that matter did the way people talked about her here. But the real facer was learning she’d been confined to a wheelchair all those years, even while my mother—’

  He lifted his glass to his lips again, found it was empty and got up to refill it, offering replenishment to Mirry, who refused. ‘So yesterday I went
to see Mr Golding, and found what you’d claimed was true. Everything… our home, the food we ate, the clothes we wore, my school fees and the allowance that saw me through university, even the money I came into on my twenty-first birthday, were all provided by the man I’d always believed had betrayed my mother and turned his back on me.’

  ‘Oh, Jay…I’m so sorry.’ Mirry’s hand reached out to clasp his compassionately.

  He looked down at it. ‘Sorry?’ Although his words had been emotive, his expression had been devoid of any feeling, except now, a mild surprise. ‘Why should you be sorry when you’ve been proved right?’

  ‘Because it must have come as a shock to you,’ she said, her teeth worrying her lower lip. She ought to be pleased that Jay now knew the truth, but instead she was assailed by sudden doubts. ‘Because I’ve only just realised that being right doesn’t justify hurting someone, destroying their illusions.’

  ‘Illusions?’ Jay stared at her in blank incomprehension. ‘I’ve never been aware I had any illusions.’

  It was difficult, not knowing how close Jay and his mother were, but Valerie had brought him up, had been the only family he had known, and Mirry didn’t want to be responsible for damaging that relationship.

  ‘I—I’m sure your mother must have had reasons for— for not being entirely truthful with you, Jay,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘I mean, I can understand why she couldn’t let you go when you were a baby, and even why she wouldn’t ever want you to know she had refused to allow David and Georgie to adopt you. She must have been afraid you’d resent her for it.’

  ‘So you think you can see into my mother’s mind now, do you?’ His sardonic jeer shattered their brief rapport.