She opened her eyes as Faulkner came out of the house with the breakfast tray. She was eating light today. She’d refused anything cooked. She had to get her figure back, so it was simply toast, marmalade and a pot of tea – Earl Grey, of course. She loved the flavour made distinct by oil of bergamot, a type of orange; its connection with the one-time prime minister, Charles Grey, gave her a chance to show off her knowledge. ‘It was gifted to him by the Chinese, don’t you know. You may have heard of him. He was the prime minister who presided over the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.’
The butler laid the tray on the table and Agatha noted the tremble of his gnarled hands. He must be way past retirement age. It didn’t look good, keeping on someone so obviously past his prime. She must remember to ask Charles what the family did with ‘old retainers’. ‘Thank you, Faulkner.’
‘Madam,’ he said, turning back unsteadily.
Agatha reached for a cigarette. ‘Is my husband in the breakfast room?’
‘I’m sorry, madam. The master left for London early this morning. He said he’d be back at the weekend, I believe.’
Reaching for the cigarette lighter, Agatha dismissed him. ‘Thank you, Faulkner.’
As soon as the old man had gone, she poured herself some tea and relaxed again. Thank goodness she was alone. Now she could enjoy her lazy day. She yawned. A lazy and peaceful day.
The sound of a baby’s cry came floating across the lawn. Agatha looked up to see the nurse striding towards the house with the child in her arms. What the hell was she doing? She sat up straight and waited until the woman reached the patio. ‘What do you want?’ she said harshly.
The nurse, all smiles, glanced down at the squawking baby in her arms and said in a singsong voice, ‘We thought we would come and see Mummy, didn’t we?’
Agatha laid her cigarette on the ashtray and reached for her toast. ‘Well, now you’ve seen me, you can go back,’ she said without looking up.
The nurse blinked in surprise. ‘Wouldn’t madam like to hold her baby?’
‘No she would not,’ Agatha said coldly. ‘I employed you, Nurse Cowdray, to look after her.’
‘Madam is obviously tired after the birth. We’ll come back later in the afternoon.’
‘No, Nurse, you shall not,’ Agatha said firmly. ‘You feed her, you bathe her and you see that her things are washed; in short, she is your responsibility.’
‘But surely . . .’ Nurse Cowdray spluttered.
‘But nothing,’ Agatha snapped. ‘Now, will you please take the baby back to the cottage and remain there for the rest of the day.’ She pulled her negligee over her bound breasts but already the milk was seeping from her nipples. Damn the woman for bringing the child so near to her. The last thing she wanted was lactating mammary glands. She flushed with embarrassment. Thank the Lord that old fool Faulkner wasn’t still around to see it.
‘Mrs Shepherd,’ Nurse Cowdray began again, ‘it’s really important for mother and baby to bond with each other in the early days. I know you’d rather not feed her yourself’ – she had seen Agatha shudder at the thought – ‘but it really is no trouble to bring her up to the house for a little cuddle. That’s why I thought—’
Agatha drew herself up. ‘And I thought I had made myself perfectly clear at your interview, Nurse Cowdray. You are paid to look after the baby. You are the one to comfort it. When I want the child in the house, I shall send someone to tell you. Until then, will you please go back to the cottage and do your job!’
Visibly shocked, the nurse turned on her heel and walked back across the grass. With not one ounce of regret, Agatha shook the napkin out and laid it in her lap. For the next few minutes, she ate her toast and sipped her tea.
When she had finished, she leaned back in the chair. She would have to go back into the house in a minute. Already the leaking milk was drying into a stiff globule on her nightgown. She supposed it must have been her body’s reaction to hearing the baby’s cry. There was a slight sound in the doorway. Irritated, Agatha opened her eyes. A little soon-to-be three-year-old was hovering by the French doors, one foot on the patio and the other inside the sitting room. Agatha sat up. ‘Hello, sweetheart. What are you doing here?’
She could see a crisp white apron just behind her. ‘I hope it’s all right, madam,’ said Nanny Bloom, ‘but Pearl spotted you from the nursery window and was so desperate to see you.’
‘Of course she was,’ Agatha said, her tone softening. ‘Come over here, my darling. Come and give Mummy a cuddle.’
Chapter 1
26 April 1930
The cat flattened its ears back, hissing angrily, but thirteen-year-old Pearl ignored the warning. Pulling the doll’s skirt over the cat’s tail and back legs, she rearranged it so that it covered the animal’s lower abdomen. Cleo let out a throaty growl.
‘She doesn’t like it,’ Milly, her younger sister, cautioned.
The sisters were together in the summerhouse, which was at the other end of the extensive gardens surrounding their parents’ home. An old-fashioned building, dating from pre-Victorian times, it had four rooms: a bedroom, a fairly large living area and a small kitchen. There was also a tiny boxroom for storage. Their mother had spent the whole of the previous year, when Pearl and Milly were twelve and nine respectively, refurbishing it for them. When it was finished, it looked better than some of the cottages in the village and, best of all as far as Pearl was concerned, it was the envy of all their friends.
Though none of it was new, the cottage was elegantly furnished. It had a sofa and matching chair in the sitting room, a chest of drawers painted pale grey in the bedroom, lace curtains at the windows, and an assortment of rugs on the floor. The kitchen area had everything they might need for a meal: plates, cups and saucers, pots and pans. Not that the girls cooked for themselves. Even though they considered themselves quite grown up, their mother wouldn’t allow it.
‘But Martha in the kitchen cooks sometimes,’ Pearl had protested. Martha was only fourteen and in service. ‘I’ve seen her boiling eggs and helping Cook.’
‘You are a young lady,’ her mother insisted, ‘and young ladies do not work in kitchens.’ So that was an end to it. Nobody argued with Agatha, so they had to content themselves with Martha bringing a box of food over from the kitchen if they wanted to eat in the summerhouse.
Now the cat, its eyes wide in terror, growled again.
‘Oh Pearl,’ Milly protested. ‘She doesn’t want to dress up. You’re hurting her.’
‘She’s just a cat,’ Pearl snapped, ‘and she’ll do what I want.’ She was putting a bonnet over the cat’s head. Under the skirt, Cleo’s tail swished back and forth.
Pearl and Milly may have been sisters, but they weren’t at all alike. They didn’t even look alike. Of the two of them, Pearl was the stronger personality. Blonde with a slightly round face and green eyes, everybody agreed she was going to be tall and elegant when she grew up. Pearl was confident and authoritative, whereas Milly had a gentler disposition. Slightly on the plump side, Milly had long straight hair that was quite dark, and her eyes were brown. Her mother said her only asset was her pert little nose but, because she was forced to wear glasses, even that was spoiled.
‘Dorothy Parker says, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”,’ her mother had told her. At ten, Milly wasn’t sure what that meant but, judging by her mother’s expression, it wasn’t good.
The two girls also had very different tastes when it came to the games they played. Milly enjoyed dressing up in her mother’s old cast-offs. She would don one of her mother’s dresses and parade in front of the long mirror in the summerhouse, or dance to the music of the gramophone and pretend she was at a ball. Right now, she was wearing an old blue and red cocktail dress which was much too long for her, while on her head she wore a white turban with a long ostrich feather at the front. She also had a pair of her mother’s shoes (her whole foot fitted in the toe) which made a very satisfying click-clack sound as she walked about. Pearl never dressed up, and she had some strange ideas about what she considered ‘fun’.
Milly sighed. Surely her big sister was too old to be dressing an animal. Milly gave up doing that sort of thing when she was six. It was beginning to distress her as she watched Pearl put her whole weight onto poor Cleo’s body so that she could force the sleeve of a doll’s cardigan over her front legs. The cat’s ears flattened once more as she tried to wriggle herself away, her back arched.
‘Please, Pearl . . .’ Milly whimpered.
Her sister looked up crossly. ‘Oh, will you shut up!’
And then it happened. With a sudden movement, Cleo jerked her body forward and lashed out with her paws, letting out a loud and angry yowl as she did so. Pearl screamed as Cleo raked her claws down the girl’s face and bit her arm. Milly took in her breath noisily. There was a moment of stunned silence as Pearl let go of the cat and blood pooled on her chin.
