Czytaj książkę: «Sins»

Chapter One
London, January 1957

Rose Pickford exhaled a small sigh of relief as she opened the door and stepped into the familiar scented warmth of her aunt Amber’s Walton Street shop, with its smell of vanilla and roses–the scent blended especially for her aunt.

One day–or so her aunt had told her–Rose would not just be managing the exclusive Chelsea shop where the furnishing fabrics from her aunt’s Macclesfield silk mill were sold, she would also be in charge of advising clients on the most stylish ways to redecorate their homes.

One day.

Right now, though, she was simply a raw, newly qualified art student, working as little more than a general dogsbody for Ivor Hammond, one of London’s most prestigious interior designers.

‘Hello, Rose, we’re just about to have a cup of tea. Would you like one?’

Rose smiled gratefully. ‘Yes, please, Anna.’

Anna Polaski, who currently managed the shop, had originally come to England with her musician husband, Paul, as refugees from Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. Anna was always very kind, and Rose suspected that she felt sorry for her–because she recognised that Rose, too, was, in a way, an ‘outsider’?

‘I hate January. It’s a horrid month, so cold and miserable,’ Rose said to Anna, as she pulled off the beautifully soft Italian leather gloves that had been a Christmas present from her aunt.

‘Pah, you call this cold? In Poland we have proper winters, with snow many feet deep,’ Anna told her. ‘We shall be having lunch soon,’ she added. ‘I have brought some homemade vegetable soup and you are welcome to join us.’

‘I’d love to,’ Rose replied, ‘but I can’t. I’ve got to be back by half-past one so that Piers can go out and measure up for a new commission.’

Piers Jeffries was Ivor’s senior assistant, a good-looking young man, who affected to like Rose and want to help her, but who at the same time seemed to have the knack of somehow working things so that whenever anything went wrong, she ended up being blamed. Piers might publicly sympathise with her and even take her side with their impatient and quick-tempered employer, but Rose suspected that privately he enjoyed her falls from grace.

‘I need to check the provenance of one of my great-uncle’s designs,’ Rose explained. ‘Ivor has a client who wants to use it and he’s enquired about its origins. The trouble is that he doesn’t know the name, he can only describe it.’

Anna gave a derisory snort. ‘And he thinks you’ll be able to find it in half an hour! Didn’t you remind him that we have over two hundred different designs available here from your great-uncle’s drawings?’

‘There’s a bit of a panic on. The client is impatient to get things moving, and Ivor has promised him the information this afternoon. Ivor doesn’t like it if we make things seem other than effortless. I think it’s one of the Greek frieze designs, so I’ll start with that book.’

‘You run upstairs then, and I’ll send Belinda up with a cup of tea for you.’

Whilst the ground floor of the Walton Street premises were used as a showroom, the pattern books were kept upstairs in the workroom, which was also used as an office.

Since her aunt kept meticulous record and pattern books, it didn’t take Rose very long to find the fabric for which she was searching. Decorated with an imposing Greek frieze border, the fabric came in four different colourways: a warm red, royal blue, dark green and a rich golden yellow. The border pattern came from an original frieze held in a London museum, which her great-uncle had sketched, the piece of stone frieze itself having been brought back from his Continental grand tour by the Earl of Carsworth in the 1780s, according to the notes with the samples.

After writing down this information Rose swallowed her now cold tea before making for the stairs.

Outside it was even colder than it had been earlier, with an east wind that knifed through her, despite the thick warmth of her navy-blue cashmere coat–a present from her aunt when she had started her job–a coat that created ‘the right impression’, Amber had said.

The right impression. Sadness shadowed Rose’s eyes as she flagged down a taxi. She would have to pay the fare herself, of course, but that would be better than risking being late back. What her aunt had not said, but what they both knew, was that with her physical inheritance from her mother, it would be all too easy for people to place her not as the niece of one of Cheshire’s richest women, a woman whose first husband had been the Duke of Lenchester and whose second was the local gentry, but instead as the daughter of a poor Chinese immigrant.

The truth was, of course, that her mother had not been anything as respectable as that.

‘Your mother was a whore, a prostitute who sold her body to men for money,’ her cousin Emerald had once taunted Rose.

Rose knew that Emerald had hoped to shock and hurt her but how could she when Rose had heard her late father saying the same thing so often in his drink-and drug-induced outbursts.

She was the reason he had had to turn to drink, to drown out the despair and misery of the life her existence had forced on him, her father had often told her. Her, the child he loathed and detested, and who looked just like her Chinese whore of a mother.

After his death, Rose had been terrified that she would be sent away–back to China, where Emerald had told her that their great-grandmother wanted her to be sent, but thanks to her aunt she had been given a home beyond her wildest dreams.

Her aunt Amber and her husband, Jay, had been wonderfully kind and generous to her. She had been brought up at Denham Place, alongside her cousin Emerald, the product of Amber’s first marriage, Jay’s two daughters from his first marriage, Ella and Janey, and Amber and Jay’s twin girls. She had been sent to the same exclusive boarding school as Ella and Janey, and, like them, had gone to St Martins, the famous art and design college in London. She was made to feel just like one of the family–a blessed relief after her wretched early childhood, when her taking one step out of place had provoked her father into a rage–by everyone, that was, except Emerald. For some reason, she loathed Rose and even now, her barbed remarks were frequent and just as poisonous as ever.

Now Rose lived with Ella and Janey in a four-storey Chelsea house, Amber’s pied-à-terre during her bimonthly visits to London to oversee her interior design business.

Rose thought the world of her aunt. There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for her. Amber had protected her and supported her and, more than that, she had loved her too. So when Rose had realised how much it pleased her aunt that she enjoyed talking about interior design, Rose had determined to learn as much about that world as she could. That in turn had led to her aunt encouraging Rose to train as an interior designer so that one day she could take over the running of the business from Amber.

The knowledge that her aunt placed so much trust and had so much belief in her had filled Rose with renewed determination to do everything she could to repay her love and kindness. And that was why she was determined not to let anyone see how much she disliked working for Ivor Hammond.

Her aunt had been so pleased when her old friend Cecil Beaton had announced that he had recommended that Ivor Hammond take Rose on as a trainee.

‘You’ll learn so much more than I could ever teach you, darling, working with him, and I know that one day you will be London’s most sought-after interior designer.’

The taxi was coming to a halt outside the Bond Street showroom of her employer.

The window of the showroom was decorated with an impressive pair of Regency carver chairs, and a mahogany bureau on which stood a heavy Georgian silver candlestick.

Ivor specialised in the kind of furniture and décor that was already familiar to the upper classes, and which appealed to those who aspired to it. Rose’s own taste ran to a look that was less fussy and more modern, but she knew that she would never say so. If her aunt believed that Ivor was the right person to teach her about interior design then Rose was going to believe it as well, and she was going to crush down those rebellious ideas of her own that had her longing for something more exciting and innovative.

‘Oh, there you are, Chinky.’

Even though Piers’ words made her flinch inwardly, Rose did not voice any objection. She had been called worse, after all. Her great-grandmother had made no secret of the fact that she abhorred having ‘an ugly yellow brat’ for a great-granddaughter.

‘Got the info the boss wants, have you? Only I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if you haven’t ’cos he isn’t in a very good mood. The pools winner came in whilst you were out and cancelled her order.’

‘I thought he’d said that he didn’t want to take her on as a client anyway,’ Rose responded.

Their employer had been, Rose thought, unnecessarily cruel about the peroxide blonde, who had tripped into the shop wearing a leopardskin coat and too much scent, to announce that she and her hubby had had a win on the football pools and that they were buying a ‘posh mansion flat’ that they wanted redecorated for them.

‘He may not have wanted her, but he wanted her money all right.’ Piers gave a disparaging sniff. ‘Personally, I’m beginning to think that I really ought to think about accepting one of the other offers I’ve had. As dear Oliver Messel was saying to me only the other day, I really would need to think about my reputation and my future if I were to become too associated with the kind of new-money clients Ivor seems to be attracting these days. Word gets round, after all. And, of course, the fact that he’s taken you on doesn’t help. Well, it wouldn’t do, would it? I’m surprised we haven’t been inundated with requests for quotes for redecorating Soho’s Chinese restaurants.’

Rose’s face burned as he sniggered at his own wit. She longed for it to be the end of the day so that she could escape from the poisonous atmosphere of the shop.

The only time she felt totally comfortable and safe and accepted was when she was with her aunt Amber, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that she wanted to please her aunt so much, Rose would have begged her to help her find another job.

She got on well with Jay’s daughters and they had fun together but, despite their kindness, Rose was still very much aware that she was ‘different’ and an outsider, whose looks meant that people–men–often felt that they had a right to behave towards her in a way that made her feel vulnerable and afraid. They looked at her as though they knew about her mother, as though they wanted her to be like her mother. But she never would be, never…

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ella, do be careful. You really are so dreadfully clumsy.’

Clumsy and plain, Ella Fulshawe thought miserably, as she bent down to pick up the clothes pegs that had fallen off the desk where the fashion editor’s junior had left them. They were used to hold in the backs of dresses worn by very slim models so that, photographed from the front, the clothes appeared to fit.

Ella had never really wanted to work for Vogue in the first place; she had wanted to be a proper reporter on a proper newspaper. Her sister Janey might have been filled with envy when she had been offered the job, but then Janey lived and breathed fashion whilst Ella wasn’t the least bit interested in it. She wanted to write about important things, not silly clothes, but her father had been so pleased and proud of her when she had been offered the job that she hadn’t felt able to refuse.

‘I expect your father is hoping that working for Vogue will transform you from an ugly duckling into a swan, Ella,’ had been Emerald’s taunting comment.

Had her father thought that working for Vogue would turn her into someone pretty and confident? If so, his hopes had been bitterly disappointed. If anything working alongside pretty, glamorous models only served to emphasise her own plainness, she thought. The models, with their small bosoms and skinny legs, made her feel so clumsy and huge. She had grown to hate her own full breasts and the curves of her body.

‘It’s such a pity that if you had to inherit your poor mother’s facial features you didn’t inherit her figure as well. Frankly, Ella, there is something decidedly bucolic and almost common about so much fleshy excess. Your poor mother would be horrified if she could see you now; she was so slender herself.’

Her aunt Cassandra’s unkind criticism, delivered when Ella had entered puberty, had left its mark, hurting her far more than her stepsister, Emerald’s, catty comments ever could. It was, in fact, burned into Ella’s heart.

The models were so slim and pretty, and she could see the admiration in the eyes of the male photographers who worked with them, whilst those same photographers dismissed her with one brief glance. Or rather, most of them did. There was one who had made his contempt of her far plainer. Oliver Charters.

Charters was an up-and-coming young photographer who had just struck out on his own. He was, according to Vogue’s Art and Fashion Departments, amazingly talented and bound ‘to go far’. He seduced models and editorial staff alike with just one look from his brilliant green eyes.

But when that green-eyed gaze had been turned in her direction, all the careless interest with which it rested on other girls had been banished, to be replaced with a look of disbelief. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, the exclamation that had accompanied it had underlined his feelings, causing the assistant art director to snigger, and then later repeat the incident to what now felt like the whole of Vogue’s office staff.

Oliver Charters was here now in the small cramped office, where Ella’s boss, the features editor, and the fashion editor were surveying the pretty model wearing the cream woollen dress that was far too big for her. More Ella’s size than the model’s.

Ella tried her best to disguise her unfashionable shape, wearing large baggy sweaters over pleated skirts and white shirts–rather as though she were still wearing their old school uniform, Janey had once told her disapprovingly.

At home at Denham she was the eldest, and there she felt confident enough to take her responsibility towards the younger ones, especially Janey, who was so prone to doing things without thinking and getting into trouble, sometimes very seriously indeed. All the more so when it came to her taking on lame ducks of every description–both animal and human. But here at Vogue, deprived of the protection of her father and her stepmother’s love, Ella felt awkward and vulnerable and stupid. Now her clumsiness had her face burning and her throat closing on the threat of tears.

‘I can’t write about that. It looks dreadful,’ Ella’s boss was complaining. ‘I’m supposed to be covering exciting new young fashion; that looks more like something a county farmer’s wife, or a girl like Ella would wear. Where’s that dress we got from Mary Quant? Go and find it, will you, Ella?’ she demanded.

Oliver, who was standing in the open doorway, propping himself up as he talked to the model, was blocking her exit. The leather jacket he was wearing, combined with a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, gave him a raffish air that matched his overlong dark hair and the cigarette dangling from his mouth. Janey would have thoroughly approved of him but Ella most certainly did not.

‘Excuse me.’

He was so engrossed in the model that he hadn’t even heard her apology, never mind realised that she couldn’t get through the door.

Ella cleared her throat and tried again. ‘Excuse me, please.’

The model tugged on his leather-clad arm. ‘Ella wants to get past you, Oliver.’

‘Squeeze through then, love. I don’t mind if you rub up against me bum.’

He was being deliberately vulgar, Ella knew, hoping no doubt to embarrass her, so she gave his back a freezing look. The model giggled as Oliver arched his back to create a space large enough, perhaps, for her to wriggle through, but nowhere near wide enough for Ella.

‘Ella can’t get through there. Ollie, you’ll have to move,’ the model told him.

Now he was looking Ella up and down and then up again, his inspection coming to an end when his gaze rested on her now flushed face.

‘Going to make the tea, are you, love?’ he asked her, giving her a wicked grin. ‘Two lumps in mine,’ he added, before deliberately letting his gaze rest on her breasts.

As she left the office Ella could hear the model saying bitchily, ‘Poor Ella, being so huge. I’d hate to be like that. She’s the size of an elephant. I’m surprised she doesn’t try to lose some weight.’

This was followed by Oliver Charters’ laughter as he announced, ‘There’s no point in her trying. She’d never succeed.’

Her face on fire, Ella was rooted to the spot, forced to listen to them discussing her until she was finally able to make herself walk away. She hated them both but she hated him, Oliver Charters, the most, she thought bitterly. Horrible wicked man! She could hear their laughter following her down the corridor.

So, Oliver Charters thought that she didn’t have the willpower to lose weight, did he? Well, she’d show him. She’d show them all.

The Duchess.

Dougie Smith stared hard at the faded name on the prow of the ship berthed in the dry dock.

‘Laid her up because she ain’t wanted any more. Bin pushed out of her place by summat new,’ an old tar standing on the dockside, lighting up a Capstan Full Strength cigarette, told Dougie, before breaking into a fit of coughing.

Dougie wondered if the vessel’s silent, almost ominous presence in its enforced retirement was some kind of message for him. He nodded in acknowledgement of the sailor’s comment and then turned away, careful to avoid the busy activity on the dockside, with its smell of stagnant water, cargoes from the ships, and the familiar mingling of tar, oil, rope and myriad other aromas.

Ducking under hawsers and ropes, he huddled deeper into the reefer jacket he’d been warned to buy in the balmy warmth of Jamaica, where he’d changed ships.

The cargo ship he’d worked his passage on from there to London loomed up out of the cold January fog like a grey ghost. Dougie shivered. He’d been warned about London’s cold, foggy weather by the crew of merchant seamen he’d sailed with. Toughened old tars, most of them, they’d been suspicious of him at first, a young Australian wanting a cheap passage to the ‘old country’, but once he’d proved he could pull his weight they’d taken him under their wing.

He felt bad about the lies he’d told them and the truth he’d had to keep from them, but he doubted they would have believed him if he had told them. What would he have said? ‘Oh, by the way, lads, I just thought I’d better tell you that some solicitor in London reckons that I’m a duke.’ Dougie could just imagine how they would have reacted. After all, he remembered how he had reacted when he’d first heard the news.

He picked up his kitbag, turning his back on the grey hull of what had been his home for the last few months, and headed in what he hoped would be the right direction for the Seamen’s Mission he’d been told about, where he could get a clean bed for the night.

At least they drove on the same side of the road here, he acknowledged, as a truck came towards him out of the fog, its driver blasting his horn as a warning to get out of the way.

The docks were busy, no one paying Dougie any attention. Seamen didn’t ask questions of one another; like outback drovers they shared a common code that meant that they respected one another’s right not to talk about the past.

Dougie had been grateful for that on his long voyage to England. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the fact that he might be a duke. His uncle, who had despised the British upper class for reasons he had never properly explained, would have told him in no uncertain terms to ignore the solicitor’s letters.

But what about his parents–what would they have thought? Dougie didn’t know. They had been drowned in a flash flood shortly after his birth, and if it hadn’t been for his uncle, he would have ended up in an orphanage. His uncle had never said much to him about his parents. All Dougie had known growing up was that his uncle was his mother’s brother, and that he hadn’t really approved of her marrying Dougie’s father.

‘A softie, with an English accent and fancy ways, who couldn’t shear a sheep to save his life,’ had been how his uncle had described Dougie’s father.

It had been a hard life growing up in the Australian outback on a large sheep station miles from the nearest town, but no harder than the lives of plenty of other youngsters like himself. Like them, he had done his schoolwork sitting in the station kitchen, taught by teachers who educated their pupils over the airwaves, and like them too he had had to do his bit around the station.

When he had finished his schooling and passed his exams he had been sent by his uncle to work on a neighbouring station as a ‘jackeroo’, as the young men, the next generation who would one day inherit their own family stations, were known.

Times had been hard after the war, and had continued to be hard. When his uncle had fallen sick and had been told by the flying doctor that he had a weak heart and should give up work, he had flatly refused, dying just as he had wished, one evening at sundown on the veranda of the old dilapidated bungalow, with its tin roof on which the rain rattled like bullets in the ‘wet’.

As his only relative, Dougie had inherited the station, with its debts, and his uncle’s responsibilities towards the people who worked for him: Mrs Mac, the housekeeper; Tom, Hugh, Bert and Ralph, the drovers; and their wives and families.

It hadn’t taken Dougie long to work out that the only thing he could do was accept the offer of partnership from a wealthy neighbour, who bought a half-share in the station.

That had been five years ago. Since then the station had prospered and Dougie had taken time out to finish his education in Sydney. He had been there when the solicitor’s first letter had caught up with him and he’d been disinclined to pay it any attention.

Half a dozen letters down the line, and with a growing awareness of just how little he knew about his father or his father’s family, he had decided that maybe he ought to find out just who he was–and who he wasn’t.

The solicitor had offered to advance his airfare. Not that Dougie needed such an advance–he had money of his own now, thanks to the success of the station–but he had been reluctant to get involved in a situation that might not suit him without knowing more about it. And more about himself.

Working his passage to England might not have been the swiftest way to get here, but it sure as hell had been the most instructive, Dougie acknowledged as he walked out of the dock gate and into a fog-enshrouded street.

He was Dougie Smith, Smith being his late uncle’s surname and the name by which he had always been known, but according to his birth certificate he was Drogo Montpelier. Maybe, just maybe, he was also the Duke of Lenchester, but right now he was a merchant seaman in need of a decent meal, a bath and a bed, in that order. The solicitor had explained in his letters the family setup that existed here in England, and how the deaths of the last duke and his son and heir had meant that he, the grandson of the late duke’s great-uncle–if that was who he was–was now the next in line.

But what about the last duke’s widow, who was now remarried? What about his daughter, Lady Emerald? Dougie couldn’t imagine them welcoming him, muscling in on what he guessed they must think of as their territory. He might not know much about the British upper classes, but he knew one thing and that was that like any other tight-knit group of people, they would recognise an outsider when they saw one and close ranks. That was the way of the world, and nature’s way too.

A young woman with tired eyes and shabby clothes, her hair dyed bright yellow, her skin sallow, pushed herself off the wall on which she had been leaning and called out to him, ‘Welcome ’ome, sailor. ’Ow about buying a pretty girl a drink, and letting ’er show you a good time?’

Shaking his head, Dougie walked past her. Welcome home. Would he be welcome? Did he want to be?

Hefting his heavy kitbag further up on his shoulder, Dougie straightened his back. There was only one way he was going to find out.