Книга - Power Play

Power Play
PENNY JORDAN


Eleven years had passed, but the terror of that night was something Pepper Minesse would never forget. Four men had taken something sacred from her. Now she was determined that each should lose what he most prized.Fury fueled her success. The files she held on each would destroy them. For three men, her death is the only solution. Only one man, who hides a truth more devastating than Pepper's own, is capable of defusing the time bomb she had set ticking…







The drawer contained her most private files. There were only four of them. Four very special files. Those who thought they knew her would have said it was typical of Pepper that she should carry the key to that drawer with her at all times—wearing it as other women might wear a lover’s gift.

There were no names on the files. She didn’t need them. Each had been built painstakingly over the years, information garnered in minute amounts until she had found what she wanted.

And now the final piece of information was in her hands, and from it she would forge the tool from which she would orchestrate her revenge.

Revenge—not a word for the squeamish.

An “emotional read…richly developed and intriguing.”

—Romantic Times on To Love, Honor and Betray




Also available from MIRA Books and PENNY JORDAN


FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

CRUEL LEGACY

POWER GAMES

A PERFECT FAMILY

TO LOVE, HONOR AND BETRAY

THE PERFECT SINNER




Power Play

Penny Jordan





www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)




Contents


Chapter 1 (#u50a4a75e-5ecc-5e8d-970b-fcbb400229b0)

Chapter 2 (#u88c9d00a-6edc-5e10-86a5-331cdb9caa6e)

Chapter 3 (#u79e3e0e0-d540-578b-8689-80808233736f)

Chapter 4 (#u1058ceb7-2d0b-505a-bad9-6b6f7e81c041)

Chapter 5 (#u7c3a0e0a-250a-58fa-b4da-99703225c03f)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)




1


In London perhaps more than any other city in the world there are certain streets whose names are immediately synonymous with money and power.

Beaufort Terrace is one of them; a graceful curve of stone-faced three-storey Regency buildings. Spiked black railings curve away from the flights of stone steps that lead up to each Adam door. These railings are tipped with gold, and rightly so—the rents for the suites of offices in these buildings are reputed to be the highest in the city.

Pepper Minesse was probably more familiar with this street than anyone else who rented office space on it. Her company had been one of the very first to move in when the renovators and interior designers moved out. She owned the three-storey building right at the heart of the Regency curve. As she paused briefly outside it she was conscious of the fact that a man walking down the opposite side of the street had stopped to look at her. She was wearing a black suit from Saint Laurent. It had a deep “V” neck and looked as though she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. In actual fact she was wearing a black silk camisole, but Pepper had learned long ago the value of distracting people she was negotiating with, whether those negotiations were for business or personal reasons; she was one of those few women who exude both sexuality and power, and men felt challenged by her. When it suited her she let them think she was a challenge they could master.

Expensive cars were parked either side of the road, testifying to its exclusivity. Merchant bankers and money men fought like rabid dogs for premises here. Minesse Management did not pay any rent: it earned it. In addition to the building she owned in the centre of the terrace Pepper owned two others.

It had been a long hard fight for her to get where she was today. She knew she didn’t look like a woman who headed a multi-million-pound empire; for a start, she looked too young. She was fast approaching her twenty-eighth birthday and there was nothing she didn’t know about the complexities of human nature.

Minesse wasn’t really her surname; she had adopted it by deed poll. It was an anagram of the word nemesis, and so, she thought, a fitting title for her business. She liked Greek mythology; its almost wholesale indictment of the emotions that ruled mankind appealed to the cynical side of her nature.

It struck her as ironic and very revealing that a society that could bury under the carpet child molestation and abuse could throw up its hands in righteous horror at the very sound of the word revenge. She liked it, but then she came from an old culture; from a race that knew the rightness of exacting a just penalty for a man’s crimes.

As she walked into the building the sun caught the coiled chignon of her hair, throwing out prisms of dark red light. When she stood in the shadows it looked black, but it wasn’t. It was a deep dense burgundy. An unusual colour; a rare colour even, nearly as rare as the dense violet blue of her eyes.

As she walked into the building the man across the road studied the slim length of her legs acquisitively. She was wearing sheer black stockings. They were pure silk and she ordered them by the gross.

As she caught sight of Pepper the receptionist smiled nervously. All her staff held Pepper faintly in awe. She set very exacting standards, and she was known to be a tireless worker herself. She had had to be. She had built up the agency from nothing, and now it handled some of the world’s top media and sports stars, negotiating for them advertising revenues that bolstered their incomes well into the millionaire bracket.

The girl behind the reception desk was twenty-one years old. She was a pretty blonde with the longest legs Pepper had ever seen. That was why she employed her. Looking at them kept the clients’ minds occupied while they waited to see her.

Beyond the cool grey and black décor of the reception area, with its discreet touches of white and its Bauhaus chairs, was a luxurious interview room. Concealed behind its banks of pared-down designer wall units was the most up-to-date video and sound equipment on sale anywhere. Anyone who wanted to use one of her clients in any sort of televised promotion had to prove to her first that they knew what they were doing.

Pepper skirted the waiting room, knowing that she didn’t have any appointments. Had anyone asked her she could probably have run through her diary for a whole month without missing out a thing; she had a brain that was needle-sharp and far more flexible than the most advanced computer.

Her secretary looked up at her as she walked into her office. Miranda Hayes had been with Minesse Management for five years, and she still knew very little more about her boss than she had done on the first day she started work there.

She caught the scent of the perfume that Pepper had specially blended for her in Paris, and envied the cut of the black suit. The body inside it was almost voluptuously curved, but Miranda suspected that her boss didn’t carry an ounce of surplus flesh.

She wondered if she exercised and if so where. Somehow Pepper Minesse didn’t look the type; Miranda couldn’t in a thousand lifetimes imagine her cool, controlled boss hot and sweaty after a physically demanding workout.

“Any calls?” asked Pepper.

Miranda nodded.

“Jeff Stowell called to remind you about the cocktail reception for Carl Viner at the Grosvenor tonight.”

A briefly upraised eyebrow suggested a certain degree of impatience that the young tennis star’s agent should find it necessary to remind her.

“He said there’s going to be someone there who wants to meet you,” Miranda added.

“Did he say who?”

Miranda shook her head. “Do you want me to get him back?”

“No,” Pepper told her decisively. “If Jeff wants to play cloak-and-dagger games he must play them alone. I’m too busy to join in.”

She opened her office door and walked inside, closing it behind her, leaving only the lingering trace of her perfume.

There was nothing feminine about the room. When she had commissioned the interior designer, she had told him she wanted it to exude a subtle aura of power.

“Power?” He had stared at her, and she had smiled back sweetly. “Yes—you know, the kind of thing that goes with being the person who sits behind that desk.”

“Men don’t respond well to powerful women,” he had told her nervously. Pepper reminded him of a large lazy cat just waiting to pounce, but then he was gay, and sexual women always made him feel nervously defensive.

Pepper hadn’t argued with him. After all, he was right, but there wasn’t a man born with whom she didn’t know how to deal. It was her experience that the more powerful the man, the more vulnerable his ego; learning how to turn that fact to her own advantage had been the very first lesson she had mastered.

Through the closed door she could hear the muffled, staccato sound of her secretary’s typewriter. The sun streaming through the window caught the delicate gold chain on her left wrist. She always wore it, and she looked at it for a moment with a strange smile on her lips before taking it off and using the gold key hanging on it to unlock one of the drawers of her desk.

This drawer contained her most private files. There were only four of them. Four very special files indeed, and they didn’t belong to any of her clients. Those people who thought they knew her would have said it was typical of Pepper that she should carry the key to that drawer with her at all times, wearing it as other women might wear a lover’s gift.

She paused for a moment before taking out the files. She had waited a long time for this moment; waited for it and worked for it, and now at last the final piece of information was in her hands, and from it she would forge the tool with which she would orchestrate her revenge.

Revenge—not a word for the squeamish.

In the writings of every religion known to man were warnings against the usurpation by man of that power belonging to the gods alone. And Pepper knew why. The pursuit of revenge unleashed into the human spirit a dangerous power. For the sake of revenge a human being would endure what would be inconceivable for any other emotion.

There were no names on the front of the files; she didn’t need them. Each one had been built up painstakingly over the years; information garnered in minute amounts until she found what she wanted.

She paused again before she opened the first one, tapping a dark red fingernail on the folder.

She wasn’t a woman who hesitated very often, and people who had heard about her were often surprised to discover how small she was, barely five foot two, with a delicate almost fragile bone structure. They soon learned that her fragility was like that of steel wire, but Pepper hadn’t always been like that. Once she had been vulnerable, and like any vulnerable creature…She moved her head and stared out of the window. Her profile was pure as an Egyptian carving, her skin moulded firmly to the perfection of her bones. Her eyes slanted slightly, giving her face a mysterious allure.

She looked at the files for a long time before putting them back and locking the drawer. A smile curved her mouth. It had been so long, but now the game was about to begin.

Her phone rang and she picked it up.

“It’s Lesley Evans,” Miranda told her.

The young skating star had only recently become one of Pepper’s clients. She was being tipped to win a gold medal at the next Olympics. Pepper had spotted her over twelve months ago, and had instructed her management team to keep her under observation.

It was said in the business that Pepper Minesse had a gift for putting her money on the right horse, and what was more she always backed outsiders, on good odds.

Pepper said nothing. It made good business sense to let the Press build her up into some sort of prophetess even if it wasn’t true. It added to the mystique that surrounded her, and in actual fact her decisions were based on carefully accumulated facts, leavened by a flash or two of the intuition she had learned to trust.

The skater had been approached with a contract to advertise a range of clothes intended for the teenage sports market. The company involved was well known to Pepper. They liked cutting corners and they tied their young stars up with punitive contracts. The mere fact that they hadn’t approached Lesley Evans through her told its own story.

The afternoon brought a rash of further telephone calls. Pepper’s clients were big stars in the sports and media world with even larger egos, and she was prepared to massage them—up to a point.

At five o’clock Miranda knocked on the door and asked if it was all right for her to go.

“Yes, do…I shan’t be here much longer myself. The reception at the Grosvenor starts at seven.”

Pepper waited until a quarter past five before she unlocked the drawer again. This time there was no hesitation as she took out the files and walked into her secretary’s office, sitting down at the electronic machine on her desk. Miranda would have been chagrined to see the speed and accuracy with which she typed. There was no hesitation; Pepper knew exactly what she was doing.

Four files.

Four men.

Four letters that would bring them here, all too anxious to see her.

In some ways it amused her that she retained enough of her mother’s racial heritage to feel this deep, atavistic need for retribution—for justice…Not justice as some people would see it, perhaps, but justice none the less.

The years had developed within her an ability to stand outside herself and observe and analyse.

Four men had taken from her something which she had deeply prized, and now it was only just that those four men should, each of them, lose what they prized most.

Each of the letters was perfectly typed on the thick headed notepaper of the company. Pepper folded them efficiently and put them in the envelopes, using the stamps she had bought especially for this purpose: part of the ritual.

The security guard smiled at her as she walked out into the early summer sunshine. She was his boss and he respected her, but he was still man enough to cast an admiring glance over her indolently curved figure and slim legs as he watched her stepping out into the street.

There was a post box on the corner where she deposited the letters. Her car was parked outside the building, a very dark red Aston Martin Volante with the number plate PSM 1. Pepper unlocked it and swung her body gracefully into the driver’s seat. The upholstery was cream leather, the seat piped in the same dark red as the coachwork. The cream leather hood was electrically operated, and as she started the engine she pressed the button that would lower it.

She drove as she did everything else; with economy and skill. It took her less than half an hour to drive through the traffic to her home in Porchester Mews. A special card was needed to operate the wrought iron gates that guarded the enclosed development. Like her offices, the buildings were Regency. It was one of the most exclusive housing developments in London, a collection of mews houses and apartments constructed round a shared enclosed garden. All the owners and tenants had access to the special sports facilities within the complex. The Olympic-sized swimming pool was one of the most luxurious in London. The gym had all the latest Nautilus equipment, and the squash courts had been designed by the world champion. In addition to her own home Pepper owned an apartment, which she kept for the exclusive use of her clients.

Her house was three storeys high. Downstairs was the drawing room, a dining room and the kitchen. On the first floor were two guest bedrooms with their own bathrooms, and on the top floor were her own private quarters—a huge bedroom, her bathroom, a sitting room, and a dressing room lined on both sides from floor to ceiling with mirrored wardrobes.

Her daily maid had already left. In the fridge was a blender full of the fresh ingredients of her favourite health food drink. Pepper took it out and switched it on. Her figure was the sort that could all too easily take on weight, so she was scrupulous about what she ate and drank. And she did exercise—discreetly.

She thought about the letters while she sipped her drink. Four men about whom she knew more than they knew about themselves. Years of painstaking detail built up layer upon layer until she could almost crawl inside their skulls.

She glanced at her watch. It had a plain gold wafer-thin bracelet and came from the Royal jewellers. She always avoided the obvious. Let others wear their Cartier Santos or their Rolex Oysters; Pepper didn’t need that sort of security. This watch had been specially designed for her and owed nothing to fashion’s whims. She would still be wearing it in twenty years’ time and it would still look good.

Her clothes for the evening were already laid out for her; she had left a note for her maid this morning, telling her what she would wear. She gave the same careful attention and thought to her clothes as she did to everything else, but once she had put them on she put them out of her mind.

Tonight she was wearing a Valentino outfit. Unlike many of the other top designers, Valentino acknowledged that not all women were six foot tall. The suit Pepper was wearing tonight was black—a black velvet skirt cut short and tight, and a black velvet long-sleeved top with a long knitted welt that reached from just under the full curve of her breasts to the top of her hips. The knitted welt was designed to hug her body like a second skin. On anyone with a less than perfect figure it would have been a disaster.

She showered first, luxuriating in the warm spray of the water, stretching under it like a jungle cat. This was the other side of her nature; the one that no one else saw—the sensual, sensitive side. The heat of the water brought out the evocative smell of her perfume. It was the only one she ever wore and it clung to her skin with subtle emphasis.

Pepper stepped out of the shower and patted her skin dry before carefully smoothing in body lotion. At twenty-eight her body must already be ageing, according to the laws of science, but she knew without having to look in the mirror that her flesh was luminously firm and that her body held an allure that few men could resist.

Her mouth tightened over the thought and she tensed abruptly. The male sex and its desire for her was not something about which she cared to think. She had been careful over the years to build up an image of herself as a highly sexual woman. It was an image that was so carefully constructed that as yet no one even thought to challenge it. And no one ever would.

A tiny silvery mark low down on her body caught her eye and she frowned, touching it uneasily with one fingertip. The Valentino clung far too tightly to her to allow for any underwear other than a pair of special stockings that hugged the tops of her legs. She had discovered them in New York long before they had been available in British shops.

While she waited for the body lotion to sink into her skin Pepper padded comfortably about her room. Here, alone in her own home with the doors locked and the windows closed, she felt secure enough to do so, but that security had been a long time in coming, and she was intelligent enough to know that no woman who professed to be as sexually experienced as she chose to appear could afford to seem ill at ease with her own body.

Men were like predators, and they had a predator’s instinct for female weakness. Pepper controlled the shiver that threatened her, tensing until only the tiny hairs on her skin showed any reaction, standing up sharply as though subjected to an ice-cold blast of air. Ignoring her betraying reaction, she put on her makeup with the ease of long habit, re-coiling her hair into a fresh chignon. Round her neck she wore a fine gold chain suspending a single flawless diamond. It nestled in the hollow of her throat, flashing fire against her smooth golden skin. Pepper rarely exposed her body to the sun; holidays were not something that held any appeal for her and a sunbed was far less hazardous to her skin. Her face she never allowed to tan.

At a quarter to seven she let herself out of the house and stepped into her car. The hood was back up. She inserted a tape into the machine in the dashboard and switched it on. As she drove to her destination she listened to the sound of her own voice relating every piece of information they had on file about Carl Viner. It was part of her credo to know everything there was to know about her clients. By the time she handed over her car to the doorman at the Grosvenor, she had virtually memorised the tennis star’s biography.

Over her suit she was wearing a short evening cape of black velvet lined with white mink, spotted in black like ermine. It was pure theatre—a necessary part of the façade she presented to the world, and although Pepper didn’t show it she was humorously aware of the looks people gave her as she walked indolently through the foyer.

One of the staff behind the reception desk recognised her, and within seconds she was being escorted to the suite where the private party was being held.

The party was being hosted and paid for by the manufacturers of the tennis shoes that the young star Carl Viner had agreed to endorse. Pepper had negotiated a six-figure advance payment plus royalties for the deal. She took ten per cent.

Jeff Stowell, the star’s agent, was hovering just inside the door. He grabbed hold of her arm.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.

“Why? It’s exactly seven o’clock, Jeff,” she told him coolly, detaching herself from him and allowing the waiter standing behind her to take her cape. She could see that Jeff was sweating slightly, and she wondered why he was so nervous. He was an ebullient man with a tendency to bully those beneath him. He treated his clients like children, exhorting and coaxing the very best out of them.

“Look, there’s someone here tonight who wants to meet you—Ted Steiner, the yachtsman. He’s with Mark McCormack, but he’s looking for a change.” Jeff saw her frown. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be pleased…”

“I could well be,” Pepper agreed coolly. “Once I know why he’s thinking of leaving McCormack. It’s only six months since he won the Whitbread Challenge Trophy and signed with him. If he’s into drugs and he’s looking to me to supply them he can forget it.”

She saw the dull flush of colour crawl up under the agent’s skin and knew that her information had been correct.

“Moral scruples,” he bluffed.

Pepper shook her head. “No. Financial ones—apart from the obvious potential hassle with the police and the Press, a sports star who’s hooked on drugs doesn’t stay the best in the world for very long, and when he loses that status he loses his earning power, and without that he’s no use to me.”

She stepped past him while Jeff was still pondering on her words and looked round for Carl Viner.

He was fairly easy to find. He liked women and they liked him. Half a dozen or more of them were crowded round him now, tanned long-legged beauties, all blonde, but the moment he saw Pepper walking towards him they lost his attention. He had a well-deserved playboy image and for that reason some of the other agencies were wary of him, but he was shrewd enough to know what would happen if he played too hard, and it was Pepper’s private conviction that he was a definite contender for next year’s Wimbledon title.

Unlike all the other men present, who were wearing formal lounge or dinner suits, he was dressed in tennis whites. His shorts were brief enough to be potentially indecent. His hair was blond and sun-streaked, and fell over his forehead in unruly curls. He was twenty-one and had been playing tennis since he was twelve. He looked like a mischievous six-foot child, all appealing blue eyes and smooth muscles. But in reality he had a mind like a steel trap.

“Pepper!”

He rolled her name round his mouth, caressing it as though he was caressing her skin. As a lover he would be the type of man who liked to kiss and suck. Pepper knew even before his eyes moved in that direction that his tastes ran to women whose breasts were high and full.

One of the blondes clinging to his side pouted, teetering between sulky acceptance of Pepper’s presence and aggressive resentment. Pepper ignored her and looked down at his feet. He was tall and muscular and took a size eleven tennis shoe. The grin he gave her when she lifted her eyes to his face contained pure lust.

“If you want to see if the adage is true, I’m more than happy to oblige.”

The gaggle of blondes erupted into sycophantic giggles. Pepper eyed him coolly.

“You already have,” she told him drily, “but as it happens I was just checking to make sure you’re wearing the sponsor’s shoes.”

Carl Viner’s face reddened like a spoilt child’s. She leaned forward and patted him on the cheek, digging her nails gently into his smooth flesh. “Real women always prefer the subtle to the obvious. Until you’ve learned that you’d better stick to playing with your pretty dolls.”

The sponsors were a relatively new company in the sports footwear field and they had wanted a racy, sophisticated image for their product. Pepper had read about them in the financial press, and it had been she who had approached them. Their financial director had thought that that gave him an edge over her, but she had soon disabused him of that. She already had several tennis shoe manufacturers clamouring with offers of sponsorship. She had never had any intention of allowing her client to accept an offer from anyone but the company she had chosen—they had the soundest financial backing; and they had also designed a shoe whose efficiency and style would soon outstrip the others, but they had allowed Pepper’s self-confidence and coolness to undermine their own faith in themselves, and Alan Hart, their Financial Director, had been forced to back down and accept her terms.

He was here tonight.

There had been a time when he had thought he could get Pepper into bed, and his ego still smarted from her rejection of him.

For a woman who wasn’t very tall, she moved extremely well. Someone had once described the way she walked as a sensual combination of leopardess’s feline, muscled prowl and a snake’s hypnotic sway. It wasn’t a walk she deliberately cultivated; it was the result of generations of proudly independent women.

Alan Hart watched her as she moved gracefully from group to group, and he also watched the effect she had on people around her. Men were dazzled by her, and she used her sexuality like a surgeon with a sharp knife.

“I wonder what she’s like in bed.”

He turned his head and said without smiling to the man standing beside him,

“She’s a tease.”

The other man laughed.

“Are you speaking from personal experience?”

He ignored the question, his eyes following Pepper’s indolent walk.

How had she done it? How had she built up her multi-million-pound empire from less than nothing? For a man to have achieved so much by the time he was thirty would be awe-inspiring enough. For a woman…and one who by her own admission had barely received the most basic sort of formal education, never mind gone to university…

Alan freely acknowledged his own sense of almost savage resentment. Women like Pepper Minesse challenged men too much. His own wife was quite content with her role as his mental and financial inferior. He had given her two children and all the material benefits any woman could possibly want. He was regularly unfaithful to her and thought no more about it than he did about changing his shirt. If he gave it any thought at all he assumed that even if his wife was aware of his infidelities she would never leave him. She would lose too much; she couldn’t support herself, and he had been careful to make sure that she never had more than pin-money to spend. He didn’t know it, but for the last three years his wife had been having an affair with one of his closest friends. He didn’t know it, but Pepper did.

She left after she had got what she had come for—a tentative offer of sponsorship for one of her other clients; a boy from the back streets of Liverpool who was one day going to win a gold medal for his speed on the running track.

The preliminary skirmishes were over; now the hard bargaining would begin. It was a game in which Pepper was a skilled player.

In a London sorting office, electronic machinery relentlessly checked and despatched the unending sacks of mail, and four letters slid into their appropriate slots.

It had begun. On the chessboard of life the pieces were being moved into position.




2


The first member of the quartet received his letter at nine-fifteen exactly on Saturday.

Although Howell’s bank did not open for business on Saturdays, it was Richard Howell’s practice as its chairman and managing director, to spend a couple of hours there checking through the mail and attending to any small matters of business that might have been overlooked during the week.

It was only a half hour’s drive from the Chelsea mews flat he shared with his second wife to the small private car park that belonged to the bank. A uniformed commissionaire was there to let him in. Harry Rogers had been with the bank since the end of the Second World War, in which he had lost his right arm. He was due for retirement at the end of the year—something he wasn’t looking forward to, despite the generous pension he knew he would receive. He liked working at Howell’s. For one thing, it gave him something to boast about when he joined his pals at the Dog and Duck on Friday nights. There were very few people who didn’t recognise the Howell name; the merchant bank was famous for its meteoric expansion and profitability under the chairmanship of Richard Howell. It was regularly quoted in the financial press as an example to others of its kind; and those financial correspondents who in the early days had dubbed him as “reckless” and “lucky” now described him as “a man with diabolically keen financial insight; an innovator and a challenger.” Howell’s had been behind several of the more dazzling takeovers in the City in recent years, and the clients who came to them tended to stay.

At just turned thirty, Richard Howell still had the same relentless energy and drive he had when he first entered the bank, but now it was tempered by caution and a discreet amount of guile.

He was a man whose photograph regularly appeared both in the financial pages, and more latterly in those gossip columns that focused on media personalities, but very few people looking at those photographs would have recognised him in the street. No photograph could convey that restless, highly strung energy that became so evident when one met him face to face. He was not a particularly tall man; just a little over five foot ten, with a smooth cap of straight dark hair and the olive-tinged skin that was his Jewish heritage.

Several generations ago the Howells had anglicised their name and given up their Jewish faith; judiciously they had married into the lower and even sometimes upper echelons of the British aristocracy, but every now and again a Howell was born who looked remarkably like the Jacob Howell who had first founded their empire.

Richard Howell had the sculptured, pared-down face of an ascetic. His eyes were a very intense shade of blue, and they burned like the incessant fires of ambition that burned inside him. He knew quite well where it came from; this desire to build and go on building. His father and his grandfather had both been ambitious men in their different ways. It was unfortunate that in his father’s case that ambition had not led on to success but to death! But that was behind him now.

His first wife had accused him of being a workaholic, and he had denied it. Workaholics were driven purely by the pedestrian need to work; Richard wanted more; he was and always had been driven by a particular purpose, and yet now that that purpose had been achieved he couldn’t stop.

Inside his traditional striped shirt and Savile Row suit was a man who was basically a gambler. But unlike those men who must win and lose fortunes across the baize-covered tables of the world’s casinos, he had had the good fortune to be granted an entrée into the most exclusive of all the world’s gambling circles—the world of high finance.

Richard picked up the letter and studied the heading thoughtfully. Minesse Management. He knew of them, of course; there was talk in the City that it wouldn’t be long before they went public, but privately he doubted it. Pepper Minesse would never give up her empire to others, no matter how many millions going public might earn her.

Richard had seen her once, briefly, at a cocktail party he had attended with his second wife. There had been something elusively familiar about her, but though he searched his memory all night, he hadn’t been able to recognise what. It had annoyed him, because he prided himself on having a good memory for faces, and hers was so strikingly beautiful that he couldn’t imagine how, having seen it before, he could possibly have forgotten where. In fact, he could have sworn that he hadn’t, and yet…and yet that elusive, faint tug on his memory told him that somewhere he had. Linda, his second wife, worked for one of the independent television companies. Like him, she was career-orientated. Pepper Minesse had been at the party with one of her clients.

Richard Howell wasn’t a man who had a bias against successful women, and Pepper Minesse had intrigued him. She had built up her business from nothing and no one seemed to know anything about where she had come from or what she had been doing before she signed on her first client, other than that she had once worked for the American entrepreneur Victor Orlando. She was a woman who was skilled at appearing to be completely open and yet at the same time remaining conversely secretive about her past and her private life.

Richard tapped the envelope thoughtfully on his desk. It wasn’t all that unusual for him to receive correspondence from people he did not know; it happened all the time. Howell’s bank was known to be extremely discreet about dealing with its clients’ affairs.

He opened the letter and read it, then got out his diary. There was nothing booked in for Monday afternoon. He made a pencil note in it. The letter intrigued him. Pepper Minesse: he was looking forward to meeting her. It could be very…interesting.

He went through the rest of his mail and then his phone rang. He picked it up and heard the voice of his wife. They had arranged to spend the weekend with friends and she was just telephoning to remind him.

“I’ll be home in half an hour.” That would just give them time to make love before they set out. The adrenalin bounced round his veins, released by the intrigue and anticipation of Pepper’s letter. It was always like this—the merest hint of a new deal, a new game, always gave him a sexual boost.

Linda was the perfect wife for him; when he wanted sex she was both receptive and inventive; when he didn’t, she didn’t pester him. As far as he was concerned they had an ideal relationship. His first wife…He frowned, not wanting to think about Jessica. Linda had accused him once of wanting to pretend that his first marriage had never happened. She put it down to his Jewish blood and his inherited need to preserve old-fashioned values, and he hadn’t argued with her. How could he? His marriage to Jessica was something he couldn’t discuss with anyone, even now. He felt the beginnings of anger build up inside him, draining his physical desire, and checked them automatically. Jessica was in the past, and she was better left there.

Alex Barnett received his letter when the postman dropped it off halfway through Saturday morning. His wife Julia picked it up from the hall carpet and carried it through to the sunny sitting room at the back of the house where they breakfasted in leisurely relaxation on weekend mornings.

Alex looked quickly at her as she came in, dreading seeing the now familiar signs of the depression which so often seized her. This morning there was no sign of it. She was still buoyed up by the visit from the adoption authorities. He and Julia had everything that an ambitious couple could want. Everything, but for one thing…

At thirty, Alex Barnett was known as one of the most forward-thinking and successful men in his field. The computer age had still been at the toddler stage when he took over his father’s sewing machine factory. From sewing machines to computers had been quite a leap, but he had made it safely, and although the big boys tended to look askance at some of his innovations, he held a very generous share of the market.

In less than six weeks’ time he would hear from the Government whether they intended to accept his tender and install his terminals in British embassies throughout the world. The contract was far more important to him than he had allowed anyone else to know. Their sales had slipped slightly recently—not enough to cause concern, yet enough for him to realise that they badly needed the profits from this Government contract to finance new development.

That was the key to success in the computer world, and it was a young man’s business; at thirty, Alex already felt years older than most of his design staff.

“Anything interesting in the post?” he asked as Julia walked into the room.

They had bought the house four years ago when he first became successful. They had been spending a weekend in the Cotswolds, celebrating both their wedding anniversary and the success of his new computer. They had seen the house and the “For Sale” board, and both of them had known immediately that it was just what they were looking for.

They had always planned to have a family. Alex was an only one himself and so was Julia. Children were important to them both, and this was a house specifically designed for a family. It had large private gardens, surrounded by shrubbery, and a paddock large enough for a couple of ponies. The village was only ten minutes away by car, and there were enough good private schools locally for their children to attend as day pupils.

They had managed to buy the house at a good price, and Julia had given up her job to settle down to the business of renovating and furnishing it, and of course, getting pregnant.

Only she hadn’t; and since the news last month that the second in-vitro fertilisation attempt had failed, Julia had developed a brittle gaiety that scraped on Alex’s raw nerves like wire.

What made it worse, according to her, was that he could have children, but she could not be their mother. He had tried to reassure her that she was more important to him than any potential child they might or might not have, but she wasn’t willing to be reassured, so they had come back to the possibility of adoption; something they had discussed and eventually discounted in the early days after they had first discovered Julia couldn’t conceive.

But now they had tried every alternative avenue, and none of them had worked.

The strain of the last few years with their hopes and bitter disappointments had scarred them both, but Julia more so than Alex. She had pinned everything on the in-vitro fertilisation working, and when it had failed, nothing had been able to rouse her from her depression.

But now at last she seemed to be recovering slightly. She was smiling at him as she handed him the mail.

“There’s a letter from the adoption people. A social worker will be coming to interview us soon to find out if we’re suitable candidates to adopt.”

She paused beside his chair to read through the letter again. The sunlight caught her blonde hair and Alex reached up to push it back off her face. He had fallen in love with her the moment he saw her, and he still loved her. Her unhappiness was his, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to give her the child she so desperately wanted.

“Mm…what’s this?” she asked him, holding out a cream envelope. He took it from her, his eyebrows lifting slightly as he studied the insignia.

“Minesse Management—those are the people who sign up sports stars to endorse sports equipment and the like. It’s very big business.”

“Why are they writing to you?”

“I don’t know…perhaps they’re arranging some sort of pro-am tournament and they want us to participate.” Alex opened the letter, read it and then handed it to her.

“Well, it doesn’t tell you much at all, does it?” she commented.

“No, not really.”

“Will you go and see them?”

“I don’t see why not. Advertising is always useful, although of course it depends how much it’s going to cost. I’ll give them a ring on Monday morning and see what it’s all about…” Alex stretched back in his chair, his muscles tautening, then laughed as he saw the expression in Julia’s eyes. They had always had a good sex life, although neither of them had really enjoyed those years when they had had to make love to a timetable in the hope that Julia might conceive.

“I thought you were due to play a round of golf.”

“Perhaps I’d rather just play around?” he teased her, ducking out of the way as she flapped the newspaper threateningly in his direction and then grabbing her in his arms. Even without children they had so much, but Alex sensed that Julia would never give up; they had come too far down the road to go back.

But if they weren’t accepted by the adoption people? He shivered suddenly and looked into his wife’s face. She was thinner and there were tiny lines drawn on her skin by tension. She had invested so much hope in this test-tube thing; they both had, and he had feared that she might have a complete breakdown when their last attempt failed.

She was so fragile, so vulnerable; he could feel her bones through her skin. A wave of love and compassion washed through him. He buried his face in the smooth warmth of her throat and said gruffly, “Come on, let’s go to bed.”

They went upstairs hand in hand, Julia praying that he wouldn’t sense her reluctance. Since it had been confirmed that their final attempt to conceive via the in-vitro fertilisation method had failed she had completely lost interest in sex. Sex, like marriage, was ordained for the procreation of children; knowing that there would be no children robbed the act of its pleasure; of that glowing excitement she had felt in those early days when every act of love had been enough to make her climax wildly, elated by the knowledge that this joyous climactic act was the start of human life.

That joy had faded over the years, but she had still enjoyed sex; still welcomed Alex’s body within hers, but now suddenly there seemed no point any more. No matter how many times he made love to her she would not conceive his child.

Upstairs in their room as Alex took her in his arms she closed her eyes so that he couldn’t look into them and see her rejection.

Simon Herries, Member of Parliament for the Conservative constituency of Selwick, on the northern borders between England and Scotland, received his letter just before eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.

A long meeting with a select and powerful group of Conservative lobbyists the previous evening had kept him out of bed until three a.m. and in consequence, it was well into Saturday morning before he walked into the breakfast room of his Belgravia home in Chester Square. As was his habit, the first thing he did when he sat down was to glance through his mail.

The butler had brought the mail in earlier on a silver tray, and the thick cream envelope with the Minesse Management crest caught his attention straight away.

As a politician it was his business to know those companies and institutions who discreetly funded the Conservative Party machine, and he remembered at once that there had been an extremely respectable donation from Minesse at the end of the last financial year.

Conservative Members of Parliament, in the main a product of the English public school system, are trained almost from birth to adopt the “under” in preference to the “over” statement. It is a British tradition that some say started with Drake playing bowls while he watched the Spanish Armada advancing. The “respectable” donation had in fact been close to a million pounds.

Even so, Simon didn’t open the letter straight away, but eyed it cautiously. Caution was a prime requisite of politicians, and in politics, as in every other power-based structure, favours have to be paid for.

The unanticipated cream envelope disturbed him. It was unexpected, and he wasn’t a man who adjusted well to anything that did not fall within the strict controls he set around his life.

At thirty-two he was privately being tipped, in all the secret and powerful circles that really matter, as a future leader of the Tory party. He deliberately played down his chances, smiling ruefully, adopting the role of impressed but humble student, to the political barons who had taken him up.

He had known since coming down from Oxford that nothing but the ultimate seat of power would satisfy him, but he had learned while he was there to harness and control his ambitions. Overt ambition is still considered both suspicious and ungentlemanly by the British ruling classes. Simon Herries had everything in his favour; he came from a North Country family with aristocratic connections. It was well known in the corridors of Westminster that no one could be an MP without an additional source of income—left wing politicians were financed by their trade union; establishment right-wingers got theirs from private sources. It was from trusts set up by his wife’s family that Simon Herries received the income that enabled him to live in a style which very few of his colleagues could match. As well as the Belgravia house he also owned over a thousand acres of rich farmland and an Elizabethan manor house near Berwick. The Belgrave Square house had been bought on his marriage by his new in-laws. It was conservatively valued at half a million.

He picked up The Times and turned to the first leader, but his eye was drawn back to that cream envelope.

At eleven o’clock exactly, the butler pushed open the baize-covered door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house and brought in his breakfast. Fresh orange juice, squeezed from the Californian oranges that he preferred; two slices of wholemeal bread and a small pot of honey that came from one of his own farms; a pot of coffee made from the beans that were bought fresh every day, apart from Sunday, from Harrods Food Hall and which Simon drank black. He liked his life to be orderly, almost ritualistically so. When people commented on it, Simon said it was the result of his public school upbringing.

He was as careful about watching his weight as he was about everything else. Image was important; one didn’t wish to project the glossy, too well packaged look of one’s American colleagues, of course—the voters would find that insincere, but Simon would have been a fool not to take advantage of the fact that at six foot, with a well muscled athletic build which came from public school sports fields, and rowing for his college, he possessed an enviably commanding presence.

His hair was thick and dark blond. In the summer the sun added distinct highlights, and his skin tanned a healthy brown. He looked arrogantly aristocratic. Women liked him and voted for him and for his policies, men envied and admired his success. He was known in the popular press as the only MP with sex appeal. He pretended to find the description distasteful.

His wife was probably one of the few people who actually knew how much he relished it, and why!

She was away at the moment, visiting her family in Boston. She was a Calvert and could trace her family back to those first arrivals on the Mayflower. She had spent a post-graduate year at Oxford, after graduating from Radcliffe. Her cool Bostonian arrogance had amused Simon; just as it had amused him to take her back to his family’s ancient stronghold in the Border hills, and show her the documents that traced his lineage back to Duke William’s Normans.

Elizabeth in turn had invited him to Boston. Her parents had been impressed with him. Her father was a partner in the family bank, and it hadn’t taken Henry Calvert very long to discover that Simon Herries came from a family that was almost as clever and conservative with money as his own.

The wedding had made headlines in all the Society papers—discreet ones, of course; after all, there was Royalty present. Simon’s godmother was a Royal, and she had graciously consented to attend.

Of course the ceremony had had to take place at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Mrs Calvert had been torn between elation and disappointment. It would have been very pleasant indeed to have hosted a dinner in Boston for her future son-in-law’s godmother, but Simon had been adamant: the ceremony was to take place at St Margaret’s.

There was a piece in The Times lauding the new legislation he was pressing for to tighten up the laws regarding child abuse. He was building up a reputation for being a fierce campaigner for law and order and a return to a more strict moral climate. He was known among his peers, sometimes acidly, as the “Housewives’ Choice.” He smiled as he re-read the piece. There were an awful lot of housewives, and all of them had the right to vote.

His assistant would no doubt cut the piece out for him and clip it to his PR file. She was a twenty-three-year-old Cambridge Honours graduate, and Simon had been sleeping with her for the past three months. She was intelligent, but a little too intense. His mind shifted gear. It was probably just as well that the long vacation was coming up; it would help cool things down a little. He had no intention of getting too heavily involved.

Simon opened the envelope, slitting it carefully with a silver-handled knife, which had been given to his grandfather by the monarch.

The letter was brief and uninformative. It simply invited him to present himself at the offices of Minesse at three on Monday afternoon, to discuss something of mutual benefit.

It wasn’t such an unusual letter; and he checked in his diary to see if he had the afternoon free. He had, and he pencilled in the appointment and a note to ask his secretary to produce everything she could on Minesse and its founder Pepper Minesse. He had never met her, but she had the reputation of being a beautiful and very clever woman.

Miles French, barrister at law, and quite possibly soon to be Judge French, didn’t receive his letter until Monday morning.

He had spent his weekend with his latest lover. He was a man who liked to concentrate on one thing at a time, and when he was with a woman whose company he enjoyed, he didn’t like anything else to distract him. He and Rosemary Bennett had been lovers for almost six months, which was quite a long time as far as he was concerned. He liked beautiful women, but he also liked intelligent conversation, and his mind frequently grew bored before his body.

Rosemary was an editor on Vogue, and occasionally if she felt he was stepping out of line, she liked to punish him by exhibiting him in front of her fashion trade cronies.

A barrister was a rara avis indeed in their enclosed world; the men derided his Savile Row suits and white-collared starched shirts, while the women eyed him sideways, stripped off the suit and shirt, and wondered how much of a chance they would have of stealing him away from Rosemary Bennett.

He was six foot two with a body that was solid with muscle. He had black hair that curled slightly. His eyes were the colour of iced water, and Rosemary claimed that it gave her the most delicious frisson of dread when he looked at her in his “courtroom” manner. They suited one another. Both of them knew the rules; both of them knew exactly what they could and could not have from their relationship. Miles didn’t sleep with other women, but she knew that the moment she began to pall he would drop her and that there would be no court of appeal.

He picked up the letter along with several others as he opened the door of the flat he owned, conveniently close to his chambers. Along with the rest of his mail he dropped it on his desk before going upstairs to shower and change. He had no appointments for the day. He was a man who didn’t like to rush anything he did; a man who was patient and thorough, and to those who didn’t know him, surprisingly passionate. He had a dangerous temper, although it was slow to be aroused.

His phone rang as he stepped into the shower. He cursed and went into his bedroom to answer it, dripping water on to the carpet. His body was strongly made and taut with muscle from his bi-weekly games of squash at his club. His torso was shadowed with dark hair, silky fine and alluringly sensual to the female sex.

The phone call was from his clerk, and Miles answered the query, then rang off.

Once dressed, he went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. He had a daily woman who kept the apartment clean and sometimes shopped for him, but he preferred to be independent. He had never known either of his parents. As a very small baby he had been abandoned on the steps of a Glasgow children’s hospital, and had eventually ended up in a children’s home, where he had learned to value his privacy and independence.

He took his coffee with him into his study. It was a spacious room, the walls lined with bookshelves, and it was one of the reasons he had bought this particular apartment. He sat down at his desk and glanced through his mail, frowning slightly as he came to the Minesse envelope, his bottom lip jutting out slightly, a habitual gesture he wasn’t particularly aware of but which women found sexy. The name of the company was familiar to him, but as far as he knew he had no legal dealings with them, and in any case most of his dealings with clients were via the medium of a solicitor.

Miles opened the envelope and read the letter with a smile. Intriguing, and he would have known that it was a letter from a woman even without his knowledge of who headed Minesse Management. He couldn’t recall if he and Pepper Minesse had ever met, although he had heard about her. He wondered what on earth she could want, tossing several possibilities around in his mind. There was only one way to find out, and he had a free afternoon. Miles picked up the phone.

Pepper spent the weekend with friends who lived just outside Oxford. Philip and Mary Simms were the closest thing she had known to a family since the death of her grandmother when she was fifteen. She arrived just after eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, having timed her journey to avoid the traffic.

The bright early summer sunshine had tempted her to put the hood down on the Aston Martin, and her hair, left loose from its chignon, had been tousled by the wind. She was wearing a linen suit in a soft shade of olive green, the skirt cut short and straight, and the jacket fitting the contours of her breasts and waist. Underneath it she was wearing a cream silk blouse. As she stopped the car engine and swung her legs out on to the gravel drive she saw Oliver Simms disappearing round the side of the shabby Victorian semi.

She called to him, and he turned and waited for her, a grave-eyed boy of ten. He blushed slightly as she approached him, but the good manners instilled by his parents made him wait until she reached him.

“Hi, Oliver.”

Of all his parents’ friends, Pepper was his favourite. She didn’t try to ruffle his hair, or worse still, to kiss him, and she always remembered his birthdays and Christmas with presents that were exactly what he wanted, plus a small sum of money for his post office savings account. At the moment he was saving up for a new bike. His birthday fell in June and he was hoping that as a present his parents would make up the shortfall on his savings.

“Mum and Dad are in the garden,” he told Pepper.

He had arrived in his parents’ lives when his mother was just over forty and his father was eight years older, and in all the ten years of his short existence he had never for one moment doubted how much they had wanted him. He wasn’t spoiled in the sense of being indulged with material possessions—his father taught at the local comprehensive and the family were comfortably rather than well off, but there had never been a second in Oliver’s life when he had not known the security of being deeply loved.

He was a good-natured boy who had learned quite young to analyse and judge logically, and already he knew that although there might be times when he envied those of his school friends who possessed the latest computer, or the latest BMX, in reality many of them came from families where their parents led such busy lives that their fathers and sometimes their mothers were almost strangers to them.

Oliver knew that it was a struggle for his parents to send him to the exclusive prep school he attended, but no matter what sacrifices had to be made there always seemed to be just enough money for things like a new school uniform, and extras, like the skiing holiday he had had just after the New Year.

Once he had seen Pepper safely round into the back garden, he excused himself, telling her gravely, “I’m just off to cricket practice…I might make it on to the first junior team this year.”

Pepper watched him until he had disappeared then headed into the garden.

“Pepper, my dear! You’re early…”

“The traffic was in my favour for once.” Pepper kissed Mary’s cheek and allowed the older woman to hold her close. Mary Simms was the only person she ever allowed to embrace her in that way. Instinctively Pepper always held herself aloof and remote from others, but Mary was different. Without Mary…

“You’re looking very well, Mary—both of you are, in fact.”

There was no emotion in Pepper’s voice as she studied their faces. No one looking at her could guess how close were the bonds between them.

Mary Simms, who had grown up in a rambling old vicarage near Cambridge, populated by not only her parents but a collection of ancient aunts and uncles as well, had almost from birth been used to showing her affection freely and physically. It hurt her more than she could ever put into any words that Pepper had been denied the love she herself had known as a child, and with which she surrounded her husband and son.

Philip Simms greeted Pepper with his usual absent-minded bonhomie. Philip was a born teacher; he had the gift of communicating to his pupils the desire for knowledge. He had taught her so much…given her so much. Here in this shabby house she had….

“Did you see Oliver?” Mary’s voice cut through her thoughts.

Pepper smiled at her.

“Yes. He was just leaving. He said something about cricket practice.”

“Yes, he’s hoping to be chosen for the school’s junior team.” Love for her son and pride for his achievements shone out of her eyes as Mary talked.

Philip was carefully transplanting some young plants, and Pepper watched him. He was always so gentle and careful about everything he did, so endlessly patient and understanding.

“Come on inside, I’ll make us all a cup of coffee.”

The kitchen had changed very little since the first time Pepper had seen it; true, there was a new washing machine and fridge freezer and a new cooker, but the large cupboards on either side of the fireplace and the heavy pine dresser were just as Pepper remembered them from long ago. The china on the dresser had belonged to one of Mary’s aunts, as had much of their furniture. Money had never been of prime importance in the Simms’ lives, and for Pepper coming back was like crawling back into the security of the womb.

As Mary made the coffee they talked. Neither of them ever ceased to marvel at Pepper’s success; they were as proud of her as they were of Oliver, in some ways perhaps more so, but they didn’t totally understand her—how could they?

As she sat on one of the battered formica-covered stools Pepper wondered what Mary would say if she knew what she had done. For a moment her eyes clouded, but it was pointless trying to apply Mary’s code of ethics to her own actions. Her life, her emotions and reactions were so complex that neither Mary nor Philip could ever really understand what drove her.

They had been so upset when she first decided to leave Oxford, but neither of them had ever tried to dissuade her. She had spent nearly a year living in this house, cared for, cosseted and protected by its owners. They had sheltered her and given her something that she had never experienced before in her entire life. They were the only true good and Christian people that Pepper knew; and yet she knew many who would disparage and deride them for their simple lives and their lack of interest in wealth and success.

Coming here was something she needed almost as much as she needed revenge. She had to force herself to limit her visits. Once a month, Christmas, and birthdays…

She and Mary drank their coffee in the sort of silence that only exists between people who know one another well and are completely at ease with themselves and each other. Afterwards Pepper helped Mary to wash up and then prepare the lunch, simple domestic tasks that none of her executives or her staff would ever have imagined her doing, but no one else was ever allowed to see her like this, vulnerable and dependent.

After lunch they all went out into the garden, not to sit down and drowse in the early afternoon sun, but to attack the weeds that relentlessly threatened Philip’s flower beds. As they worked, he talked. He was concerned about one of his pupils. Listening to him, Pepper was flooded with love and humility. But for this man she would still be exactly what she had been at sixteen, an uncivilised, uneducated, little savage, who knew only the laws of her gypsy tribe, governed by emotion rather than logic.

She left shortly after five o’clock on Sunday, after afternoon tea on the lawn, eating Mary’s homemade scones and some of the jam she had made the previous summer. Oliver was there with a couple of friends, who studied her car with amused nonchalance. While she watched them Oliver had grinned at her, a conspiratorial, engaging grin that showed quite plainly the man he was going to be. Already in Oliver Pepper could see seeds of great personal charm; of intelligence and drive, and more.

All his life, wherever he went, whatever happened to him, he would have these years to look back on; the love of his parents, the security they had given him, and all his life he would benefit from those gifts, just as a seedling plant growing in good, enriched earth would grow stronger and hardier than one that had to struggle in poor soil.

Handicaps of any kind could be overcome, but they left scars like any other injury. Oliver would grow into adulthood without those scars.

Pepper got up and bent to hug and kiss Mary and then Philip. All of them walked over to her car.

“It’s Oliver’s school’s Open Day in three weeks’ time,” Philip told her. “Will you be able to come down for it?”

Pepper looked at Oliver who grinned bashfully at her.

“Well, since he’s my godson, I suppose I shall have to make the effort.”

She and Oliver exchanged smiles. She knew that she had struck exactly the right sort of note in front of his friends. They had all reached the stage where any display of adult emotion was deeply frowned upon.

She got into the car and turned the key in the ignition. Ahead lay London, and Monday morning.

Would they respond to her letters? Somehow she felt they would. She had dangled a bait none of them would be able to refuse. All of them, for their varying reasons, would expect to benefit from a connection with Minesse Management. Pepper smiled grimly to herself as she headed for the motorway—a brief twist of her lips that held more bitterness than amusement.




3


On Monday morning Pepper overslept and was late. She could feel the tension building inside her as a traffic jam in Knightsbridge delayed her still further.

Up ahead of her she could see people milling in and out of Harrods, Knightsbridge, the Brompton Road, Sloane Square; all of them had become a shopping paradise for those with money to spend.

Elegant women in Sloaneish Caroline Charles outfits, wearing Jourdan shoes, paused outside shop windows. It was here in Harvey Nichols that the Princess of Wales had shopped prior to her marriage to the heir to the throne, and in nearly every department in the exclusive store were girls whose sharply cut British upper-class accents mirrored hers. American and Japanese tourists gathered outside Harrods’ main entrance. Pepper noticed absently that Arab women were much less in evidence now than they once had been.

She glanced impatiently at the clock on the car’s dashboard. She had no morning appointments, but she hated being late for anything because it implied that she was not in full control of her life. Even so, she fought down her impatience; impatience made people careless and led to mistakes. Mistakes—unless they were other people’s—had no place in her life.

It was so unusual for her to be late that the receptionist had already commented on it when Miranda went down to collect the post.

“Perhaps she’s had a heavy weekend?” Helena murmured suggestively as she handed over the envelopes.

Miranda was as curious as the other girl about Pepper’s sex life, but she was too well trained to show it. Gossiping about one’s boss had been the downfall of many a good personal secretary, and there wasn’t much that slipped Pepper’s attention.

“I wonder if she’ll ever marry?” Helena mused, obviously reluctant to let the subject go.

“A lot of successful business women do combine careers and marriage,” Miranda pointed out.

“Um…I saw a photograph of her in one of the papers with Carl Viner. He’s terrifically sexy, isn’t he?”

Miranda raised her eyebrows and said drily, “So’s she.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Pepper come into the building. There was no mistaking that distinctive, deceptively languid walk, a lazy flowing movement of hips and legs.

“Morning, Miranda—Helena.”

Pepper acknowledged both young women and walked past them towards her office, leaving her secretary to follow her.

“Miranda, I’m expecting four gentlemen at three o’clock this afternoon. I’ll see all of them together. Here are their names.” She passed a piece of typed paper to her secretary.

“Right…would you like coffee now?”

“Yes, please. Oh, and Miranda, you might alert the security guard to make sure he’s on the premises while they’re here, please.”

Although she was far too well trained to betray any surprise, Miranda tried and failed to remember a single other occasion when Pepper had made such a request. Curiously she glanced at the names, recognising only two of them. An MP and an entrepreneur. Mmm. She shrugged her curiosity aside, knowing it would be satisfied when Pepper dictated to her her notes from the meeting. Pepper was meticulous about keeping records of all her conversations, both with her clients and with potential sponsors.

Putting the piece of paper down on her desk, Miranda walked into the small kitchen hidden away behind her office. A staff room opened off it—an airy, attractively decorated room with bookshelves and comfortable seating. Minesse Management did not provide their staff with canteen facilities; the small number of employees did not merit it, although there was a formal dining room adjacent to Pepper’s office, where she sometimes lunched clients and sponsors. The food for these lunches was provided by a small firm that specialised in doing lunches and dinners for executive functions. It was often Miranda’s task on these occasions to check out their guests’ religions and preferences, and once Pepper had these facts to hand she would call in the caterers to discuss with them the type of meal she wanted them to serve.

In this as in everything else Pepper always displayed an insight and authority that was almost intuitive. If Miranda had ever expressed this view to Pepper, Pepper would have told her that she had long ago learned that attention to even the smallest detail was important when you were gambling for high stakes.

In the small kitchen Miranda made fresh coffee and poured it into a coffee pot. She set an elegant silver tray with the pot, a matching cup and saucer, and a tiny jug of cream. The china was part of the dinner service used in the clients’ dining room, white with a dense blue band and edged in gold. It was both very rich and severely restrained—rather like Pepper herself in many ways.

When Miranda took in the coffee Pepper put down the papers she was working on to say,

“If any of the men on that list telephone, Miranda, I don’t want to speak to them. If any of them cancel their appointments please let me know.”

She didn’t say anything more and Miranda didn’t ask her any questions. Pepper didn’t delegate. The success or failure of Minesse Management lay in her hands and hers alone.

She drank her coffee while she studied the newspaper clippings from the weekend’s newspapers. It was part of Miranda’s job to go through the papers and clip out any mention of their clients or sponsors.

At quarter to twelve she cleared her desk and rang through to her secretary.

“I have an appointment with John Fletcher at twelve, Miranda. I should be back around two, if anyone wants me.”

John Fletcher was an up-and-coming designer. Pepper had seen some of his clothes in a Vogue feature on new designers, and she had commissioned him to make two outfits for her. As yet he was not very well known, but Pepper planned to change all that. She had on her books a young model who was being tipped to go far, and it was in her mind to link model and designer in a way that could promote and draw attention to them both.

Louise Faber had introduced herself to Pepper at a cocktail party. She was eighteen years old, and knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. Her mother had been a model, and so through her Louise already had the looks and the contacts to get into the business. Several of her mother’s contemporaries had grown from modelling into other more powerful areas of fashion, and Rena Faber had been able to call on old loyalties to give her daughter a good start. But Louise was no ordinary dewy-eyed eighteen-year-old whose ambition was to get her face on the front cover of American Vogue.

Louise had her own ambitions. She wanted to own and run a Michelin-star restaurant, but for that she needed money, and training. Without money and influence she would have very little chance of being taken on at the kind of restaurant where she could get the training to fulfil her ambitions. Women were not chefs, they were cooks, but Louise aimed to prove that that was wrong.

Her parents had divorced while she was quite young, and from what she had told Pepper there was not enough money in the family anyway to finance either the training or the sort of restaurant she would eventually want to own. A chance remark by one of her mother’s friends, that she would make a good model, had led to her deciding that modelling would be an excellent way of earning the money she needed. Once having made that decision she was determined that if she was to model, then she wanted to be the best.

She needed an image, she had confided to Pepper, something that made her stand out from the other pretty, ambitious girls, and remembering John Fletcher, it had occurred to Pepper that designer and model could well have something to offer one another. If in her off-duty hours Louise wore only John Fletcher models, both of them would benefit from the publicity. Pepper had the contacts to make sure the press picked up on the story. She had already discussed it with John, and today he was going to give her his decision.

Initially she would make very little from the deal; but this was her forte, to spot original and new talent, whether in sport or any other field, and to nurture it towards success, and then to reap financial benefit.

No sponsor would ever risk his money on an un-proven outsider, but only let one of her outsiders start winning and Pepper was then in a position to make her own terms. That was how she had started off—spotting a potential winner before anyone else.

John Fletcher had premises just off Beauchamp Place, an enclave of designer and upmarket shops off the Brompton Road. Because of the lunch-time traffic, Pepper hadn’t used the Aston Martin, and her taxi dropped her off several doors away from her destination. Two model-thin girls emerging from Bruce Old-field’s premises turned to look at her. Neither of them was a day over nineteen.

“Wow!” one exclaimed to the other. “Now that was real class!”

There was no one in the foyer as Pepper walked up the stairs to John Fletcher’s showrooms. She knocked briefly before walking in.

Two men were standing by the window, studying a bolt of scarlet fabric.

“Pepper!” John Fletcher handed the silk to his assistant and came to greet her. “I see you’re wearing the black.”

Pepper smiled at him. She had chosen to wear the black suit he had designed for her quite deliberately. Wasn’t it a black skull cap that judges used to wear when pronouncing the death sentence? Miles French should appreciate the finesse of her gesture, even if the others didn’t, but somehow she was sure that they would.

The skirt of her suit had been cut in the new short, curvy shape that clung to her hips and waist. She allowed John’s assistant to help her off with the jacket. He was one of the most beautiful young men she had ever seen, sleekly-muscled, golden-skinned and golden-haired. A covert look passed between the boy and John which the latter acknowledged with a brief shake of his head.

Pepper intercepted it, but waited until she and the designer were alone before saying lightly,

“Very wise, John. I’d be extremely mortified if you were to offer me the services of your tame stud.”

“He hasn’t been with me very long, and I’m afraid he’s still a bit gauche,” John apologised.

“Do you get many clients asking for that sort of service?” Her voice was slightly muffled as she stepped into a cubicle and stripped down to her underwear.

“Enough. But how did you know? Most people walking in here take one look at him and assume…”

“That you’re gay?” Pepper stepped out of the cubicle and flashed him a mocking smile. “I know when a man likes women and when he doesn’t, John, but I should have thought you were making enough profit from your clients without that sort of sideline.”

“Oh, I don’t provide it. Any arrangement my clients come to with Lloyd is their affair entirely.”

Pepper’s mouth twitched. “But word gets round, doesn’t it, and there are plenty of bored rich women who’ll patronise a designer who can do more for their bodies than simply clothe them.”

John shrugged. “I have to make a living.”

“Mmm. Speaking of which…”

As he worked, Pepper discussed with him her plans that Louise Faber should exclusively model his clothes.

“I like it.” He stood up and studied the dress he was pinning on her.

“Do you think you’ll be able to get the tie-in with Vogue?” she asked.

“I should think so. I’ve got several contacts there. There should be a number of their fashion editors at the charity do you and I are going to tonight. We could talk with them and if it looks good, then Louise and I can get together to thrash out the details.”

Pepper left half an hour afterwards, picking up a cruising taxi that deposited her outside her favourite restaurant. The head waiter recognised her instantly, and escorted her to a table that made her the focal point of all other diners.

The restaurant had originally been a decaying three-storey building in a row just off Sloane Square. Pepper had bought it when she first suspected that the rich were transferring their loyalty along with their cheque books and credit cards, from Bond Street to Knightsbridge. All three floors were let out at extremely good but not extortionate rents. She had provided the finance for the restaurant, and she had also been the one who had tipped off the chef manager that Nouvelle Cuisine was on the way out and something a little more substantial on the way in.

There wasn’t a day of the week when every table in the place wasn’t taken. A subtle PR campaign had made it the “in” place to go. Coveys of elegant well bred women sat round the tables, nibbling at food they had no intention of eating—their size ten figures were far too important. Anyway, they hadn’t come here to eat; they’d come to see and be seen.

An artist who was another of Pepper’s clients had transformed the drab interior of the building with outrageously erotic trompe l’oeil, and if one was sufficiently in the know it was possible to discern in the features of the frolicking nymphs and satyrs the facial characteristics of many prominent personalities. When a person faded from the limelight, their faces were painted out and someone else’s, someone who was new and newsworthy, painted in. It wasn’t entirely unknown for actresses and even politicians to discreetly suggest to Antoine that their faces would look good on his walls.

Pepper’s involvement in the restaurant was a well kept secret; her face did not appear on any of the gambolling nymphs, but as she followed the head waiter across the smooth dark grey carpet, every pair of eyes in the place marked her indolent walk.

She sat down and gave her order, without reference to the menu, her forehead creased in a slight frown. Most of the women lunching together were in their early twenties or late forties, young wives or bored divorcees. The other women, those with careers, those with money, spent their lunch hour dining clients or extending their range of contacts; the sort of business that their male equivalents carried out in their clubs.

Soon these women would need the cachet of the same exclusivity. As yet there were very few clubs catering for the new breed of career women; somewhere they could entertain their clients, have lunch and even stay overnight if necessary.

If Pepper’s clients had provided the bulk of her cash flow, then it was her own careful investment of those funds that had given her the very secure capital base underpinning her business. Pepper was always in the market for a good investment. She smiled to herself, her mind sliding easily into overdrive, exhilarated by the challenge of her thoughts.

Although she knew people were watching her, she ignored their covert looks, mentally weaving the threads which could form the pattern of a new business venture, at the same time thoroughly enjoying her fresh salmon and its accompanying vegetables. Pepper had gone short of food too often as a child not to appreciate it now. She was fully aware of how many of the women toying with their plates of salad were secretly gnashing their teeth over both her appetite and her apparent disregard for the effects of what she was eating on her figure.

What they didn’t know was that tonight she would eat a very meagre meal indeed, and then before she got ready to go out she would also have half an hour of tennis coaching on the indoor courts belonging to the private sports complex attached to her home. Dieting in public drew attention to a possible weakness, and Pepper had learned long ago never to let anyone see that she could be vulnerable.

She arrived back at the office at five minutes past two. Miranda followed her in to tell her that she had received phone calls from all four of the gentlemen on the list. Three of the four had asked to speak to Pepper personally, but on being told that she wasn’t available had settled for confirming their appointments.

“And the fourth?”

Miranda consulted her list.

“Miles French? Oh, he simply confirmed that he would be here.”

She thought as she left Pepper standing beside her desk that her boss was looking rather abstracted, but she knew better than to ask questions.

At two-thirty, Miranda prepared a trolley ready for the tea she would be asked to serve later in the afternoon. The fine china was Royal Doulton and like the coffee cups had been specially designed to Pepper’s specification.

All four of the men arrived within ten minutes of one another. The receptionist showed them into the waiting room, then rang through to Miranda to tell her that they had arrived. She glanced at her watch. Five to three.

Inside her office Pepper refused to give in to the temptation to glance through her files one final time. She had already checked her make-up and clothes, and she fought against a nervous impulse to check once more. At five to three her internal telephone rang, and her stomach lurched. She picked up the receiver and acknowledged Miranda’s advice that the four men had arrived.

Taking a deep breath, she said calmly, “Please show them in Miranda, then bring us some tea.”

Across the hallway in the comfortably furnished waiting room the four men waited. They had recognised one another, of course, each a little surprised to see the others, but acknowledging the acquaintanceship. Their lives touched only rarely these days. Only Miles French seemed totally relaxed. What was he doing here? Simon Herries wondered, frowning slightly as he studied him. Was he somehow connected with Minesse? Retained by them to handle their legal affairs, perhaps?

The door opened and an attractive brunette stepped inside. “Ms Minesse will see you now, if you would just come this way, please.”

When they were shown in Pepper was standing with her back to the door, pretending to study the view outside her window. She waited until Miranda had brought in the tea things and closed the door behind her before turning around.

All four men reacted to her, but she could only see recognition in the eyes of one of them.

Miles French. Pepper deliberately let her expression go blank, hiding from him her fury and loathing.

Across the desk Miles studied her with curiosity and amusement. He had recognised her face immediately, but it had taken him a few seconds to place her. He looked at his companions and realised that none of them had; his senses, honed by his legal training, picked up on her tension. She had come a long way since Oxford, a long, long way.

Simon Herries was the first to speak. Pepper let him shake her hand and give her his practised smile, a judicious blend of male appreciation, sincerity and seriousness. He had filled out since she had last seen him, and it suited him. He looked what he was—a prosperous and successful man. The others followed suit. Miles French was the only one to look directly into her eyes, trying to put her at a disadvantage, she acknowledged, her heart thumping unpleasantly fast as she met the recognition in his smile.

That was something she hadn’t anticipated. None of the others had recognised her, and that he should have done so threw her slightly off guard.

“I’m sure you’re all wondering why I asked you to come here.” Her smile was professional and tempting, promising that none of them would be disappointed in their anticipation. She had already unlocked the drawer that held their files, and now she reached down with one smooth practised movement and removed them.

“I suggest that it might facilitate things if you were all to read these.” The files held only copies, of course. Duplicates of them were safely deposited with her bank. Pepper had no intention of seeing almost ten years of work torn up in front of her eyes.

While she poured the tea she waited to see how long it took for the secure, self-satisfied smiles to disappear.

Richard Howell’s went first. She saw his eyes narrow and then leave the papers he was studying to stare at her.

“Milk, Mr Howell?” she asked him sweetly.

Each of those files held a secret that if made public could destroy their professional lives for ever. Each of them had thought that secret so deeply buried that it would never be uncovered. Each of them had been wrong!

Richard Howell was now a highly respected and respectable merchant banker; but once he had simply been a younger and much poorer relative in the banking empire run by his uncle David.

It had taken a lot of digging to discover how he had got the money that enabled him to secretly buy up enough shares to challenge and eventually overthrow his uncle’s control of the family business. It had taken Pepper months of painstaking work to discover that he had first started buying up shares while he was working in the safe deposit department of the bank.

For many people their safety deposit boxes are simply a place where they leave their valuables to prevent them from being stolen. There are, however, those who find that safety deposit boxes are excellent places to conceal funds—or other items—gained by other and often illegal means: tax evasion, fraud and sometimes outright theft.

It had been Richard Howell’s good fortune during the time he was in charge of the safe deposit department to come across a man who fell into this last category. In addition, since it was a rule of the bank that they should hold duplicate keys for their safety deposit boxes, he was able, by carefully choosing his moment, to unlock it and discover for himself exactly what was inside—but that had only come later, following the death from a heart attack of the man who called himself William Law.

“William Law” had had his heart attack in the street, half a mile away from the bank’s premises. The evening papers had carried his photograph and a small paragraph on his death, only his name hadn’t been William Law but Frank Prentiss, and he had at one time been a member of a gang who had been suspected of carrying out several wages snatches involving hundreds of thousands of pounds. The police had never been able to get enough evidence to convict Frank Prentiss and the other members of the gang, and when three months went by without either the police or the bank connecting Frank Prentiss with William Law, Richard Howell went painstakingly through the records, and then when he was sure that no one would ever know, he removed from William Law’s safety deposit box everything but a couple of hundred pounds.

He had no fears about the money being traced back to him—a man as clever as Frank Prentiss must surely have had the stolen notes laundered, and if the police did make the connection between William Law and Frank Prentiss, and find the safety deposit box, then they would just assume that Frank had spent the money.

There was now two hundred and forty-five thousand pounds in Richard Howell’s private account with Lloyds Bank, and by the time his uncle decided to query where on earth the money had come from it was already too late—Richard was the new majority shareholder of Howell’s bank, having used that original £245,000 as the basis of a fund which through clever and informed dealing on the Stock Exchange he very quickly managed to turn into a very large sum indeed.

Pepper smiled gently at him as she handed him the cup of tea. It amused and exhilarated her to see the panic in his eyes. No doubt he had thought himself safe and invincible—now he knew better.

And what of Simon Herries, the up-and-coming politician; the upholder of decency and family life; the closet homosexual who got his real sex thrills with young boys—the younger the better! When he was at Oxford he had been the ringleader of a select group, all bound to secrecy, who had dabbled in black magic among other things.

Pepper smiled dulcetly into the furious blue eyes that glittered dangerously across the width of her desk.

Alex Barnett had also been a member of that select group—if only briefly. Still, it was long enough to prevent any adoption agency from ever allowing him on their books. Pepper knew all about Julia Barnett’s desperate need to have a child, and she also knew how much Alex loved his wife.

And so, on to Miles French. He had disappointed her. It was true that he had a highly active sex life, but he was very selective when it came to choosing his partners and faithful to them while the relationship lasted. Pepper had waited a long time to get something sufficiently damning on Miles, but at last her patience had been satisfied.

Three months ago, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a friend had been smuggling cocaine into the country. She should have been caught. Pepper’s information was that she had got on a plane in Rio de Janeiro, carrying the illicit drug disguised some way in her back pack. But somehow when she arrived at Heathrow the cocaine had gone.

Her flight had put down briefly in Paris. Miles French had also been in Paris at the time, and the pair of them had returned to London together. Somehow Miles had managed to persuade the girl to give him the cocaine, Pepper was convinced of it, even though as yet she had no conclusive proof. Even without proof, though, there was enough on her file to irrevocably destroy both his career and his reputation. A potential High Court judge involved in a drugs scandal—he would be de-barred at the very least.

She waited until they had all finished reading. Only Miles French was still smiling. He had far more control than the others, she acknowledged, but she wasn’t deceived.

Simon Herries spoke first, flinging down the file and demanding savagely, “Just what the hell is all this about?”

Pepper didn’t allow herself to be affected by his rage.

“All of you will now have read your files, so all of you will, I’m sure, realise the precarious position you’re in. In those files is information which if it became public could adversely affect your reputation and careers.”

“So that’s it!” Simon Herries sneered. “Blackmail!”

Pepper froze him with an icy look.

“No, not blackmail,” she told him softly, “retribution.”

She had their attention now. All of them were staring at her, watching her without comprehension—all of them apart from Miles French, whose mouth was twisted in a very knowing smile indeed.

“Retribution—what the hell for?” demanded Alex Barnett acidly.

Pepper smiled and got up.

“For rape, gentlemen. Eleven years ago all of you, in one way or another, contributed to the fact that I was raped.” She paused as she saw their faces change, and offered mockingly, “Ah, I see you do remember after all!”

“Why have you sent for us…what are you going to do?”

It was Alex Barnett who spoke, struggling against his growing feeling of disbelief. He remembered the incident, of course. He had never forgotten it, but he had thought he had successfully buried it along with his guilt, and all the other unpleasant aspects of his past that he preferred to forget.

He looked at Pepper and saw the expensive groomed elegance of her, wondering at the transformation. The girl he remembered had been bone-thin, wearing shabby clothes, her accent thick and hard to understand. She had fought them like a wild animal, lashing out at their faces with her nails…He shuddered deeply, closing his eyes.

“What are you going to do?” he muttered.

Amazingly she was still smiling at them. “Nothing. Unless of course you force me to.”

Behind her calm smile she was alert, with adrenalin-based energy, watching and assessing.

Rape. To her it was the most vile four-letter word in existence, especially when it applied to the sort of rape that had been inflicted on her. The terror of that night was something she would never forget. She wouldn’t let herself; it had been her single motivating force for too long. It had brought her from poverty and deprivation to where she was today.

“You took from me something that was irreplaceable, and I’ve decided that it’s only just that each of you in turn should lose something of similar value.

“You, Mr Herries,” she told him, watching him with her mouth curved into a smile and her eyes as hard as metal, “will resign from the Conservative Party. I hear you’re tipped as being a possible candidate for their future leader. However, I’m sure they wouldn’t think you such a drastic loss if they knew the contents of that file, do you?”

Her smile assessed his rage and then dismissed him as she turned to Richard Howell.

“The bank means an awful lot to you, doesn’t it, Mr Howell? But I’m afraid you’re going to have to give it up.”

“Resign?” He stared at her in disbelief.

Her smile was gentle but implacable. “I’m afraid so. I’m sure your uncle will be only too delighted to step into your shoes.”

Alex Barnett waited, anticipating the blow falling, knowing what she was going to tell him. He had fought ever since leaving Oxford to establish his business; he had put everything he owned into it, all his energy, nearly all his time, and he felt a sudden savage desire to take that smooth white throat between his hands and squeeze until those full lips were silenced for ever.

One look at his face told Pepper he had already anticipated her ultimatum, so she passed on to Miles French.

“I know,” he told her drily, “but you’ve forgotten something, Pepper…” She frowned at him, disliking his use of her Christian name. Unlike the others, he seemed more amused than appalled.

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” he mocked softly. “You’re treading a very dangerous path, you know.”

Pepper turned away from him.

“You all have one month to consider my…suggestions. If at the end of that time I have not heard from you, the contents of these files will be revealed to the press. Of course, I need hardly tell you that they’re only copies.”

“And that you’ve left a letter with your bank and your solicitor to be opened in the event of your disappearance or death,” Miles mocked.

It irritated Pepper that he should continue to pretend that he was merely amused by her. He had as much to lose as the others. She met his eyes and shuddered, remembering. It had been his room she had woken up in that morning, his shirt had been wrapped around her bruised body; he had been standing looking down at her.

“You can’t get away with this, you know…” Richard Howell blustered.

Miles touched him on the arm and shook his head.

“A month, you say?” He looked thoughtfully at Pepper and then said to his companions. “A month isn’t a long time, gentlemen, so I suggest we don’t waste a moment of it.”

Pepper didn’t watch them go. She rang through to Miranda and asked her to come in and show them out.

“You may keep your files,” she told them mockingly, then she turned her back on them and walked over to the window.

It was over, and somehow she felt curiously empty…drained, and yet unsatisfied in a way she hadn’t expected.

She heard her office door open and knew they were leaving. Miranda came back five minutes later to remove the undrunk tea, but although her secretary waited for the rest of the afternoon Pepper did not call her in to dictate to her any notes on the meeting.

Outside in the street four men eyed one another.

“Something will have to be done.”

“Yes,” Miles agreed. “We need somewhere private where we can talk.”

“Where that bitch can’t overhear us,” Simon Herries swore savagely. “She must have had us followed…”

“I suggest we go back to my place and talk the whole thing over.” Miles flicked back a white cuff and glanced at his watch. “It’s half past four now. I have an engagement this evening. Is there anyone who can’t make it?”

They all shook their heads. They were each in their own individual ways very powerful and authoritative men, but now they were reacting almost like bewildered and dependent children. As he looked at them Miles suspected that none of them had really yet accepted what had happened to them. For him it was different; he had recognised her when they had not, and in recognising the tremendous leap she had made from what she had been to what she was, he had already been half way to acknowledging her power.

“I just can’t believe it!” Alex Barnett shook his head like a man coming up for air, confirming Miles’s private thoughts. “All these years she’s been waiting…” His face changed, shock giving way to reality.

God, what on earth was he going to say to Julia? To withdraw their application for adoption now would destroy her.

“She’s got to be stopped.”

Numbly he heard Simon Herries speaking, without monitoring the words, until he heard Miles saying coolly,

“What do you have in mind, Herries? Not murder, I hope.”

“Murder?”

“No way.” That was Richard Howell.

“She has to be stopped.” Simon Herries glared at the others. Inwardly his heart was thumping furiously. That bitch of a woman—she had enjoyed bringing them down, having them within her power. He could kill her for that alone, never mind the rest of it.

“If you are in agreement I suggest that we talk the whole thing over in private. Since I live alone my place would seem to be the best venue.”

God, how could French remain so calm! He seemed almost amused by the whole thing. Staring at him, Simon remembered how little he had trusted him in the old days, and how much pleasure it had given him to…

He realised abruptly that Miles was watching him, and quickly veiled the hostility and resentment in his eyes. For now it suited him to play along with everyone else.

It was Miles who found a cruising taxi and flagged it down, giving his address in a crisp, contained voice. As a barrister he had trained himself long ago to step outside his own emotions and reactions and study things logically, and he did so now. Viewed from Pepper Minesse’s—where on earth had she got that name from?—standpoint it was perhaps quite natural that she should want to punish them all for what they had done to her, but it took a remarkable strength of will to wait so patiently, and build so carefully.

He could feel the tension from his companions; Simon Herries was the worst, tense to the point of violence; he had always been a dangerous, volatile man. At Oxford he had been very much the gilded youth and very sought after, but beneath that gilding had lain something malevolent, cancerous even.

And the other two? Alex Barnett still looked blank and shocked. Richard Howell was sitting on the edge of his seat, hyped up with nervous tension.

None of them wasted any energy speaking until they were inside Miles’s study. “Drink, anyone?” he invited. All of them nodded.

Although they had seen each other casually over the years, they had not kept up the relationship they had had at Oxford, and each of them registered the changes in the others, as they waited for someone to speak first.

“She isn’t going to get away with this!” Simon Herries downed his whisky in one gulp and slammed down the glass. “I’m damned if I’m going to be told what to do by some upstart bitch of a gypsy brat!”

“I’m sure your female admirers would be very interested to hear that speech, Simon,” Miles remarked coolly, “but you seem to be forgetting that we aren’t dealing with an uneducated seventeen-year-old this time. Ms Minesse is an extremely successful and powerful woman.”

“She wants to destroy us!” Alex Barnett’s hand shook as he put his glass down. “We’ve got to stop her…”

“For God’s sake, we all know that. How the devil are we going to do it?” Richard asked impatiently.

Miles pursed his lips and offered mildly, “I have a suggestion.” They all looked at him. “As I see it, we need to be able to put Ms Minesse in a position where she will not only be willing to hand over those files to us, but where she will also refrain from attempting to gain…er…retribution again.”

“Threaten her in some way, you mean?” Alex Barnett looked uncomfortable. Miles ignored him.

“It seems to me that the success of Minesse Management rests entirely in the hands of its founder. If Ms Minesse were to disappear for a while, it follows that without her Minesse Management would slowly start to collapse.”

“If you’re talking about kidnapping her, it won’t work,” Richard interrupted flatly. “You heard what she said about that.”

“Yes, I did, and I agree. She can’t disappear. However, she could go away with her lover—and then stay away long enough for her clients to start losing faith in the company. Superstars have super-egos which need constant attention. Without Ms Minesse to provide that attention…” Miles lifted one eyebrow and waited for their reaction.

“Great idea!” Simon Herries sneered. “How the hell do you propose to make sure that her lover keeps her out of sight, or that she’d even agree to go with him?”

“Why, by making sure that her lover is one of us,” Miles told them silkily.

Stunned silence followed his words.

Richard Howell spoke first, turning restlessly in his seat. “For God’s sake, Miles, this isn’t the time to start making jokes! You know she’d never accept one of us as her lover…”

“She doesn’t need to accept it.”

They all stared at him.

“Of course she wouldn’t agree to going away with one of us—or with anyone else, if it meant leaving her business unattended, I suspect. But if we can convince her staff, and everyone else close to her, that she has gone away willingly with her lover, then her absence would not be considered a disappearance and consequently the instructions she has left with her solicitor and her bank would not be activated. And of course, once having abducted her, we would both have ample time and opportunity to persuade her to withdraw today’s ultimatums.”

“There’s only one problem,” Richard Howell interrupted sardonically. “Which one of us is going to play the part of the supposed ‘lover’?”

Miles raised his eyebrows.

“I thought I’d take on the role myself.” He smiled at them. “I’m single; I can take as much leave from my chambers as I wish without causing anyone to question my absence.” He smiled again and raised his eyebrows. “Of course, if one of you would prefer…” They were silent as he looked at each of them in turn, and then Simon Herries spoke.

“Very noble, but why should you do that for the rest of us?” he demanded suspiciously.

“I’m not,” Miles told him calmly. “I’m doing it for myself, and to be honest, I’d prefer to rely on myself rather than anyone else. However, if one of you has a better idea…”

“Short of murder I can’t think of a single thing,” Richard admitted bitterly. “God, she’s got us all by the short and curlies, and she knows it.”

No one disputed his comment.

“So, then it’s agreed.” Miles stood up. “I would suggest that from now on until her disappearance has been accomplished we don’t get in touch with one another. She’s obviously had all of us watched, at one time or another, and could still be doing so, if she thinks we plan to move against her.”

“Surely she can’t expect that we’d just accept her ultimatums?” Alex Barnett still looked bewildered, but now he was getting angry. The reality of what was happening had brought a thin sheen of sweat to his skin. He thought he had put all that business with Herries behind him long ago—God, what a fool he had been, but he had been flattered by Herries’ friendship—way, way out of his depth.

Richard Howell was engrossed in his own thoughts. How on earth had Pepper found out about that safe deposit box? He couldn’t give up control of the bank. He had fought too hard for it, but would French’s plan work? At the end of the day what they were talking about was abduction and kidnap, and if French couldn’t keep the girl hidden, if his plan didn’t work…He swallowed nervously. But what the hell alternative was there?

Simon Herries watched Miles. He didn’t trust him—he never had; he didn’t like him very much either. At Oxford French hadn’t been one of his court. That cunning bitch! Could French pull it off? He hoped so, he had fought too long and hard to give everything up now. There had to be another way, but until he found it he had to play along with French.

“Well, gentlemen, what do you say—do we go ahead with my plan, or not?” He looked at them all in turn, waiting for their responses.

“I don’t see that we have any alternative.” Alex Barnett looked almost ill, haunted in fact.

“I hope to God it will work.” Richard paced tensely. “Yes…Yes…All right, I agree.”

“And you, Herries?” Miles looked across at him.

“I agree.” But I don’t trust you, French, I don’t trust you one little bit, he thought silently, and I’m going to be watching you.

“Right. We have one month’s grace, and I intend to use that time to our advantage.” Miles shot back a white shirt cuff and glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry to be inhospitable, gentlemen, but I have an engagement for this evening.”

His engagement was with Rosemary. He would have to tell her that their affair was over. He wondered a little wryly how she would react. It was a pity that Pepper had managed to learn about Sophie, he had thought he had covered both their tracks rather neatly.

Pepper Minesse…Where on earth had she got that name? he wondered ironically again after the others had left. In their Oxford days he had known her simply as “Gypsy.” Everyone had called her that.

When and how had “Gypsy” become the founder of Minesse Management? Miles reached for the phone and then put it down. Tomorrow would be time enough to start uncovering the mystery of Pepper Minesse; tonight he would have to concentrate on disengaging himself from his affair with Rosemary. It saddened him that he was able to contemplate doing so with so very little regret. Hadn’t he always chosen the women in his life with a view to his ability for distancing himself from them?

Pepper Minesse…He remembered how she had looked that morning, huddled in a corner of his locked room. She had been a virgin; he remembered having to destroy his sheets. He closed his eyes and swore suddenly.

Pepper lay supine in her bath, letting the warm water soothe away her tension. She didn’t want to go to tonight’s party, but she had promised Louise.

Half of her couldn’t believe that it was over; that she had actually done it. Behind her closed eyelids images writhed and danced. She saw Alex Barnett’s shocked face; Miles French’s impassive one. Simon had been furious, and Richard disbelieving. What were they doing now? Probably trying to think of a way to stop her, but that was something they wouldn’t be able to do. She had had ten years to plan; they only had a month, and she had protected herself. If anything happened to her…But nothing was going to happen. She had the upper hand now. She wasn’t a semi-literate nobody now, of so little importance that she could be kicked about like a stray dog. Did they really think that she had forgotten; that they could get away with it?

She moved restlessly in the cooling water, wondering why she wasn’t feeling more euphoric. Beside the bath was the bottle of champagne she had taken out of the fridge. She had put it there this morning to chill so that she could celebrate, but now she didn’t want it. It irked her that she was able to take so little pleasure in her achievement. What was the matter with her? She had wanted to enjoy her triumph. Perhaps she would have enjoyed it had she had someone to share it with. The thought startled her and she examined it suspiciously, pushing it away from her as she got out of the bath.

The charity do was being held at the Grosvenor, in the ballroom. As her partner Pepper was taking one of her oldest friends. Geoffrey Pitt had been her financial adviser for several years.

She had met him just when Minesse Management was starting to grow from a small concern to a very much larger one, and it had been Geoffrey Pitt who had guided her first tentative steps when she started to expand. It had also been Geoffrey who had advised her to buy her premises rather than rent, who had helped her to invest her profits so that they too could make money for her.

These days she knew almost as much about the world of high finance as he did himself, but officially she still retained him as her financial adviser.

When Pepper first met him he had just been getting over a traumatic divorce. It had been inevitable that they should become very close, although Geoffrey, like those men who had come both before and after him in her life, had found that she had a trick of withholding from him the most essential part of herself. Most people thought she was frigid. But how could she give herself to any man after what had happened to her? It had left her with an acute and deeply rooted distrust of the entire male sex. Her fear of them she had managed to conquer, just—and only she knew what an effort of will it had been, but to allow one to be intimate with her; to even think about permitting for a second time the humiliation and degradation she had already suffered, made her flesh turn to ice.

She was not a fool; she knew that perhaps with counselling, with care, she could possibly overcome her fear, but Pepper didn’t want to overcome it. As an observer she had seen what their relationships with the men in their lives did for other women, and she didn’t want that kind of bondage for herself. All her life in so many ways she had been alone, and she had come to relish that aloneness—to see it in fact as the only way for her to live. And so cleverly, discreetly she had learned how to keep the whole sex at bay.

With Geoffrey it had been almost too easy, and now they had the sort of comfortable friendship that exists only between two people who both know and like each other and have no curiosity about one another sexually. There were still times when Geoffrey looked at her and ached to take her to bed, but he knew that Pepper did not feel a corresponding desire for him. And besides, since Nick Howarth had come into her life…

He grimaced slightly to himself. If Howarth hadn’t been abroad on business Geoffrey doubted that he would have been invited to accompany Pepper tonight.

He picked her up promptly at eight o’clock.

Geoffrey was the type of upper-class Englishman who looked his best in evening clothes, Pepper reflected as he helped her into his Rolls. He was tall, with mid-brown hair and kind hazel eyes, the sort of man mothers thought would make their daughters a good husband.

As they drove down Park Lane they joined the tail end of a convoy of cars, all disgorging their passengers outside the entrance to the Grosvenor’s Ballroom. The charity ball was for mentally handicapped children. Its patroness was the Princess of Wales, and she and the Prince were expected to be present.

As Geoffrey followed Pepper into the ballroom he couldn’t help speculating about her relationship with Nick Howarth. He knew that Howarth was one of her major clients. There was a discreet rumour among those in the know that they were also lovers, and it was certainly true that they partnered one another at a variety of social functions—functions often associated with the sport that Howarth sponsored.

Were they lovers? Geoffrey felt the old familiar jealousy at the thought of someone sharing Pepper’s bed, and then valiantly dismissed it. At heart he was a kind, rather gentle man; the kind of man who, he told himself wryly, could never hope to hold the attention of a woman like Pepper—a woman who was so intensely and vibrantly female that no man, surely, could remain immune to her.

Pepper would not have been surprised if she could have read his thoughts. Geoffrey wasn’t the only person who speculated about her relationship with Nick Howarth. They had known one another for several years now, and although both of them were regularly seen with other partners, it was generally accepted among their circle of friends that they were lovers.

Nick wasn’t like Geoffrey. Not so very long ago he had given her an ultimatum. He wasn’t the first man to do so; and he wouldn’t be the last.

He was away at the moment, but soon he would be coming back, and when he did…When he did she would find some way of dealing with him, Pepper promised herself. At the moment she had more important things on her mind.

A tense spiral of excitement began to wind inside her. In four weeks, but no, she mustn’t think about that now. There would be time enough when…She had long ago learned to control her thoughts and impulses, and so, dismissing everything else from her mind, she started to concentrate on her surroundings.

As she stepped inside the ballroom she saw that it was awash with Emanuel creations in tulle and chiffon. Her own ballgown had been designed by Bellville Sassoon. The rich blue raw silk skirt floated round her as she moved, the tightly fitting bodice just revealing the upper curves of her breasts. The off-the-shoulder sleeves and the hem of her skirt were trimmed with antique lace that had cost almost as much as the dress itself. She was wearing her hair drawn softly back off her face and caught back with a matching silk flower. Among the soft pinks and peaches of the other women her gown stood out dramatically.

The Duchess of York had made red hair fashionable, but that was not why so many of the other guests stopped to look discreetly at her as she walked into the room.

John Fletcher and Louise Faber were already seated at the table when Pepper reached it. She introduced Geoffrey to them and accepted the glass of champagne offered to her.

They all made small talk for several minutes while the tables around them filled up. A tiny frisson of excitement ran through the room when the Prince and Princess of Wales were announced. Chairs scraped back over the floor as everyone stood up.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Louise whispered to Pepper as they listened to the chairwoman’s welcoming speech.

John, who had been studying the Princess’s dress, announced, “She’s wearing a Bruce Oldfield. It must be a new one, I recognise his latest line.”

Over supper they discussed business. John had had time to consider Pepper’s suggestion and he liked it. He already had in mind the sort of wardrobe he would design for Louise.

“I spoke to Vogue after I left you today,” Pepper told him. “One of their assistant editors is here tonight, apparently—Rosemary Bennett—do you know her?”

“Yes, I do. In fact I’ve seen her somewhere.” John turned round and searched among the tables. “Over there—look, Pepper. The woman in the Giorgio Armani—the white satin. Do you want me to introduce you?”

“No…not here, I’ll go and see her at Vogue later in the week.” Pepper looked away from the table, and her body froze as she saw the man making his way through the tables. For one moment she thought he was heading for her, and her face lost all its colour, her body tense with shock.

“Pepper, what’s wrong?”

Somehow she managed to drag her attention away.

“Are you feeling all right?”

John’s forehead was creased in an anxious frown, his eyes dark with concern. God, what was the matter with her? She had everything under control, but just one unexpected glimpse of Miles French had thrown her so completely off guard that she was still fighting the shock.

This afternoon must have been more of a strain than she had realised. Miles French hadn’t reacted like the others. He had been far more cool, far more in control of himself, and he had also recognised her. That was something she hadn’t expected him to do. She had changed so much from the girl she had been that she had thought there was nothing of that girl left.

Miles French had shown her otherwise, and she had found the experience disquieting.

On the other side of the room Rosemary Bennett reached out and scored her long nails delicately over Miles’s wrist.

“You’re looking very pensive, darling, is something wrong?”

Miles gave her a perfunctory smile.

“Not specifically.”

There was something different about him tonight, Rosemary recognised; something distancing. She was far too experienced and knowledgeable about men not to recognise the signs. Miles was bored.

It was time to end their affair. She didn’t really want to lose him. As a lover, physically she doubted that she had ever met his equal, but emotionally there was always a part of him that he withheld, that remained aloof and unobtainable. Rosemary veiled her eyes and studied him. Miles was not the sort of man who could live without a woman for very long, which probably meant that he had already chosen her successor.

She wondered without rancour who the woman was. Whoever she was, she hoped she had the good sense not to fall in love with him. Miles turned his head and looked at her.

“I thought tonight we might leave early.”

Trust Miles to deliver the coup de grace with style! she thought wryly, and wondered if he intended to tell her before or after he had taken her to bed. Knowing Miles, it would probably be beforehand, then he would make love to her as a way of saying goodbye.

Once she had seen Miles, Pepper couldn’t relax. Sensing her tension but at a loss to understand the reason for it, Geoffrey asked her if she would like to leave once they had finished their supper.

She got up gratefully, making her excuses to John and Louise. “I’m afraid I have a rather bad headache,” she lied, letting Geoffrey take her arm and lead her away.

“You stay here. I’ll get your coat for you,” he instructed once they were in the foyer.

Pepper sat down on one of the small gilt chairs and stared abstractedly into space. Another couple walked into the room, the woman’s voice cool and faintly metallic, the man’s deeper, almost laconic and somehow familiar.

She tensed and looked at them.

“Pepper, what an unexpected pleasure!”

She saw Miles coming towards her and was conscious of a tight aching tension constricting her throat. She struggled to stand up, catching the heel of her shoe in the hem of her skirt, overbalancing slightly. Miles reached out to steady her, and she flinched beneath the unexpected warm pressure of his hands on her bare arms.

Five feet away Rosemary saw the way Miles was looking at the other woman and knew that she had seen the lady who was going to take her place in his bed. She smiled bitterly to herself. At least he had taste. Pepper Minesse was no pretty fluffy doll.

They had gone by the time Geoffrey returned with her coat, but as he helped her into it Pepper was still struggling to obliterate the small scene from her senses.




4


Pepper didn’t sleep well that night. The old nightmare haunted and pursued her. It always came at times like this when she was under stress. Long-suppressed memories surfaced and twisted through her mind, and she lay back against the tangle of satin sheets, her hand over her heart feeling it steady, as she forced herself to block out the too-intrusive memory of smothering darkness, of hands and voices, whispers pitched just too low for her to hear. In her nightmare she struggled to catch what they were saying, but in reality she had heard; had known what was happening to her.

Rape. The taste of the word on her tongue was sour and foetid. Her mouth twisted bitterly. It was a full mouth, wicked and sensual; men always looked at it, imagining its red moistness against their skin.

She was too hyped up to even try to go back to sleep. If she did she knew what would happen. She would be back in that shadowy room in Oxford with the door guarded by the men who had taken her there, while…

Her body shook, sweat glistening on her soft silken skin. Once more she felt the smothering sensation of fear engulfing her and fought against it, pushing away the terrifying memories of unseen hands touching her body, voices whispering softly just outside the stretch of her ears.

She reached out abruptly and switched on the lamp beside her bed, deliberately controlling her breathing as she willed herself to regain control. She was both hot and shivering, pursued by demons that owed nothing to any human life form. The May night was warm, but inside she felt deathly cold.

“You can have whatever you want from life,” Philip had once told her, “but there’s always a price to be paid for it.”

Pepper had paid her price, and now it was time that others paid theirs.

She got up and padded downstairs, ferreting about in the kitchen cupboard until she found the tin of drinking chocolate. It had been there since Mary’s last visit two years ago, for Christmas shopping. Mary and Philip had never felt totally at home in her London house. Its cool designer exclusivity overwhelmed them.

Happiness and contentment had always been the meter by which they had measured their own lives, and she knew that both of them in their different ways worried about her. Although they didn’t know it, they had good reason to be worried. Pepper grimaced faintly to herself, as she made a milky drink and carried it back to her bedroom, curling up against her cream satin sheets and pillows, her dark red hair spilling out over the antique trimmings. Without makeup, with her hair curling extravagantly round her face, she looked about seventeen, like a little girl who had strayed into her elder sister’s room. But she wasn’t seventeen…

At seventeen…

She sighed and compressed her body against the intrusive memories, but it was too late, already they were flooding back, drowning her in pain and fear. She let herself relax and admit them.

Perhaps after all it was only right that tonight she should remember, she thought tiredly, with the acceptance of her mother’s face, for the vagaries and implacability of fate.

Very well then, if she must remember, let her at least remember it all. She would go back to the beginning…to the very beginning.

In January of 1960 the gypsy tribe to which Pepper’s mother belonged was camped in Scotland on a tract of land belonging to the laird of the clan MacGregor. It had been a bad winter, with thick snow and howling east winds straight off the Russian seas. Sir Ian MacGregor was a kindly man brought up in a tradition that made him, as chief of his clan, as responsible for their welfare as he was for that of his own immediate family.

The MacGregors had never been a particularly wealthy clan; they owned lands, yes, but the land was fit for nothing but running sheep and renting out as grouse moors to rich Americans. When his factor told him that the gypsies had arrived and were camping in their usual valley his first thought was relief that they had arrived safely. The gypsies had been camping in that valley for more than two hundred years, but this year the heavy snowfalls had delayed them. His second thought was concern for their survival in the bitter cold, so he sent his factor into the valley with bales of straw for the ponies and some meat from the deer that he and his ghillie had shot just before Christmas.

Duncan Randall was not just the MacGregor’s factor, he was also his nephew and heir, a tall, rather withdrawn eighteen-year-old, with black hair and a narrow bony face. Duncan was a dreamer and an idealist. He loved his uncle and the land, and in his soul he carried the poetry of his Celtic heritage.

An overnight fall of snow had blocked the pass through the valley so that the gypsies were completely enclosed. Dark faces and wary eyes monitored his progress in the Land Rover as he drove towards their encampment. Smudges of smoke from their fires hung on the horizon, small groups of wiry, silent children huddled round their warmth.

It had been a bad year for the tribe. Their leader had died in the autumn, leaving the tribe like a rudderless ship. He had been sixty-eight years old and it was to Naomi, his widow, that the rest of the tribe now turned.

There had been only one child of the marriage—a girl. Layla was fifteen and according to the custom of their tribe she must now be married to the man they had chosen as their new leader.

Rafe, her husband-to-be, was thirty years old, the younger son of a leader of another Lee tribe. To Layla at fifteen he seemed both old and faintly alarming. Her father had spoiled her, because she was the child of his old age, even though her mother had warned him against it, and she was a wild, almost fey creature, as changeable as April skies. Naomi worried for her, knowing that hers would never be an easy way through life.

Naomi had pleaded with Rafe to wait until Layla was sixteen before marrying her. Her birthday fell in the spring, and Rafe had reluctantly agreed, but all the tribe could see how he watched the girl with jealous, brooding eyes.

Layla had always been contrary and awkward; Naomi despaired of her. Rafe was a man any other girl would have been proud to call husband, but when he looked at her, Layla tossed her hair and averted her eyes, giving her smiles instead to the boys she had grown up with.

Since this was his first year with the tribe, Rafe had not visited the valley before, and he watched suspiciously as the Land Rover made its slow way in towards their camp.

“Who comes here?” he demanded of Naomi in their Romany dialect.

“It is the nephew of the MacGregor,” Naomi told him, putting her hand on his arm to stop him as he moved forward. “He is a good friend to us, Rafe.”

“He is a gorgio,” Rafe protested bitterly.

“Yes, but we have been made welcome here for many generations. See, he has brought fodder for our animals,” Naomi told him, watching as Duncan stopped the Land Rover and climbed into the back to unload the bales of hay.

The children ran to help him. Layla was with them, Naomi noticed, frowning as she watched the way her daughter’s skirts lifted as she ran.

To a Romany it is a wanton act for a woman to reveal her legs to any man other than her husband, and although she knew this very well there were times when Layla almost seemed to deliberately flout their conventions.

Layla didn’t want to marry Rafe, Naomi already knew that, but she had no choice, like must marry like, and Layla, like Rafe, was descended from one of their greatest leaders. Both of them carried his blood in their veins and it would be breaking an unwritten Romany law for Layla to marry outside her own blood. Even so, her heart was troubled for her wayward child.

The bales of hay were heavy and shifting them was hard work, but a year of outdoor activity had tautened and developed Duncan’s body so that he was able to take the weight quite easily. He was aware of the gypsies’ silent scrutiny, but he strove to ignore it even while it unnerved him.

Across the small clearing containing their fires he could see the old woman and the man watching them. He could feel the man’s resentment and dislike and it made him uncomfortable. Poor devils, it was no wonder that they resented him. He would hate to live the way they did, almost on the verge of starvation, constantly moving from place to place. He shifted his glance away from the brooding intensity of the man’s stare and saw the cluster of children staring up at him. Several of them had running sores on their faces, all of them looked thin and hungry. His uncle had sent down a sack of porridge as well as the meat, and as he reached into the Land Rover to get it out he saw the girl for the first time. She was standing slightly apart from the others, watching them as he did, but there was pride in her eyes and she had a way of holding her body that defied him to feel pity for her. Where the children were thin, she was slender and supple, reminding him of the reeds that bent beneath the wind at the edges of the lochs. Her hair was long and black, shining in the harsh sunlight, her skin smoothly golden. Her eyes flashed anger and arrogance at him as she met his stare; golden eyes like her skin. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The sack he was holding slipped in his slackened fingers and he caught it up, feeling the red tide creeping up under his skin and with it a fierce upsurge of desire.

Layla knew enough about men to recognise his desire. Although she hid it from him it excited her. There were very few young men of her own age in the tribe, and certainly none as handsome as this dark-haired, fair-skinned gorgio boy, who was so much taller and broader than the men of her tribe, and whose eyes betrayed his wanting for her.

She tossed her hair as she walked past him, filled with a sudden surge of exhilaration. She didn’t want to marry Rafe; he frightened her, although nothing would ever make her admit it. She sensed a cruelty within him that instinctively she feared.

Her mother called sharply to her and she scowled. She was not a child who needed to heed its parents’ every sharp word. She was a woman; and she would choose her own way through life. Avoiding Rafe, she darted through the snow and into the caravan.

Duncan saw Naomi walking towards him and knew from his uncle’s description that she was the wife of the leader of the tribe. Her English was thickly accented, but Duncan understood enough of what she said to realise that her husband was dead, and that Rafe was now their new leader.

Later, while he and Sir Ian ate the hot potato cakes smothered in melting butter and drank strong dark tea in front of the peat fire in his uncle’s study, Duncan told his uncle how surly and uncommunicative he had found the gypsies.

“It is just their way. They are very slow to trust us, Duncan, and you can understand why. They are in many ways a persecuted and little understood race, whose habits and customs are not ours. They adhere to a much harsher code than our modern laws allow for, but then their life is much harsher than ours. Their women are still cruelly punished for adultery, and they consider their marriage to be a sacred rite that can be set aside by death alone. They are a fascinating people, though, and a very proud one.”

It was on the tip of Duncan’s tongue to tell his uncle about the gypsy girl, but before he could, the housekeeper came in with a plate of fresh scones.

Sir Ian lived well but simply, and already Duncan was ceasing to miss his more sophisticated life in Edinburgh at the University. His mother was Sir Ian’s sister. She had married outside the clan, and her husband, Duncan’s father, was a solicitor.

Ian MacGregor was much older than his sister. His only son had been killed at the end of the war. His wife had died shortly afterwards, of a broken heart, so some said, and Ian had refused to marry again, so that now Duncan was his only heir. Duncan had willingly given up his law studies to take over the job as his uncle’s factor—a training for the inheritance which would one day be his.

Layla was bored and restless. She hated the confinement the snow enforced on them. She wanted to get away from Rafe’s brooding presence. She wanted to escape…She wanted to see Duncan Randall again.

No one else was stirring when she slipped out of the camp in the early morning light. She moved quietly and silently across the snow, climbing as agilely and sure-footedly as one of Sir Ian MacGregor’s sheep as she headed up the narrow track that led out of the valley.

It took her half an hour to climb to the top. From there the moors stretched all round her in every direction, bordered by even higher hills. Here and there a dark crevasse in the snow indicated where other narrow valleys might lie, and against the skyline she could see a smudge of smoke. Layla was drawn to it even while caution urged her to retreat.

Duncan was also up early. He wanted to drop feed off with the shepherds before they had a fresh fall of snow.

Layla heard the sound of the Land Rover engine long before she saw it, the noise carrying well on the crisp cold air. She watched as the blue grey smudge came towards her, her body outlined against the sky, her hair flowing back like a dark banner.

At first when he saw her Duncan thought there must be something wrong with the tribe, but when he stopped alongside her and looked at her, there was no mistaking the look in her eyes. He felt the heat run through his body, and silently opened the Land Rover door for her.

She had dreamed about the gorgio last night, and now this morning she had found him. He was her fate, suddenly Layla was sure of it. Marriage to Rafe was not for her, she wanted more from life than that.

Uneducated, inarticulate, knowing only the feelings that flowed through her blood, she knew nevertheless that the feelings inside her were the same ones that flowed through the body of the gorgio boy beside her.

Layla was a virgin, but she was not ignorant of the ways of a man and a woman together. Her mother had told her when she protested that she did not want to marry Rafe that she would know when she was ready to be his wife. She knew now that her body was ready for a man’s possession; she felt it in her responses to the way Duncan looked at her. She reached out and touched his arm and felt the muscles contract beneath his skin.

When he stopped the Land Rover they kissed as urgently and hungrily as though they had known and wanted each other for years. Despite their inexperience there was nothing fumbled or clumsy about the way they came together, both of them overwhelmed by a force stronger than their separate or combined wills.

Layla’s sharp cries of delight, her firm thighs gripping his body, the soft feminine scent of her; these were the things Duncan remembered late at night, lying awake in his bed, aching for her, wanting yet again to expend his life force inside her.

Curled up in her narrow bunk, Layla too was thinking of him. She had enjoyed the pleasure they had shared, but more than that she was exhilarated by what they had done. Now Rafe could no longer claim her in the ancient gypsy rite; now she would not have to bow her head to him or acknowledge him as her lord and master.

She knew that many of the others thought her proud and stubborn and said that her father had spoiled her. Maybe it was true, but she was not a horse to be sold into a man’s keeping. All the resentment she had experienced since Naomi had first told her that she was to marry Rafe surfaced and coalesced into fierce rebellion. She had taken the gorgio boy as her lover and in doing so had broken the most sacred of all gypsy laws, but she didn’t care. No laws could bind or chain her. She was Layla…she was free.

For over a week the young couple continued to meet and make love. Duncan became so obsessed with Layla that nothing else had any importance. He lived for the brief time they could snatch together, when she managed to escape from the tribe. The fact that she knew that Rafe was watching her only served to increase her exhilaration whenever she managed to sneak away to be with Duncan.

It was only when the snow started to thaw, and Rafe started saying that it was time they were on their way, that Layla began to fear the consequence of her actions. She confided her fears to Duncan one afternoon as they lay together in the hay loft of one of his uncle’s barns.

“Then don’t go with them,” he begged fiercely. “Stay here with me…we’ll get married.”

Layla moved restlessly in his arms. Marriage to Duncan? Was that really what she wanted? She loved him; she loved the smooth young feel of his body; she loved the desire he could make her feel; but she also loved the excitement of stealing away to be with him, the dangerous elixir of doing the forbidden.

If she stayed with him the tribe would reject her…her name would never be spoken by them again. Her mother…

Her mother had problems of her own. This Scottish valley had always been one of her favourite stopping places. Normally they spent two months or so here, but Rafe was now their leader, and Rafe did not like the valley. Rafe was also growing impatient and bitter about Layla’s foolishness, Naomi knew that, but Layla was so headstrong, such a child still, as wild and fey as the most spirited filly.

She was getting old, Naomi thought tiredly. Her bones ached in the cold wind, and life had lost its savour for her since she had lost her Leon.

Rafe’s surliness seemed to have infected the rest of the tribe as well. Some of the men were saying that the valley was not a good place any more. What was needed was a celebration of some sort to lift the tribe’s spirits…a wedding feast. But Layla was the only girl of marriageable age with the tribe, and she…

Sighing faintly, Naomi picked up the worn pack of Tarot cards she always carried with her, absently setting them out. One card stared up at her and her body froze colder than the snow outside her caravan. Death. She put the cards down with trembling fingers.

The Tarot cards never lied, she knew that. She shuddered deeply, sensing danger, aware of it waiting, lurking, not visible to the human eye, but there all the same, an indefinable presence that cast its shadow over the whole tribe.

One morning Rafe announced that they were leaving. No one queried his decision, not even Layla—no one could query the decisions of the leader of the tribe, but just as soon as she could she slipped away from the valley, heading for her meeting place with Duncan.

Only this time she was followed.

Rafe tracked her with the cunning skill of their race, keeping her easily in sight without letting her know that he was there. Panic had made her grow careless. Once they had left the valley behind Layla knew that Rafe would insist on marrying her. Now that she and Duncan had been lovers the idea of marriage to Rafe was even more abhorrent to her.

Duncan would marry her, she knew that, but to cast herself off from her mother, from their way of life…Her thoughts tumbled through her mind like a mill race in full spate. She was deaf to the tiny, betraying sounds Rafe made as he followed her.

Outside the barn, Layla hesitated briefly, glancing over her shoulder. There was no one in sight. She ran inside, and Duncan, who had heard her come in, hurried to meet her, taking her in his arms and kissing her passionately.

When he released her Layla told him of Rafe’s decree.

“Don’t go,” he urged. “Stay here with me.”

“I want to.”

Neither of them knew that their whispered confidences were being overheard. Rafe had crept into the barn while they were kissing, and was now standing in a shadowy corner, watching and listening.

A fierce rage possessed him. Layla was his…but she had shamed him by giving herself to this gorgio. She had broken the most important of the Romany rules. She was a wanton who would be cast out by the tribe if they knew what she had done. She wasn’t fit to be his woman, but even so he would take her and show her just what she had scorned by giving herself instead to her pretty gorgio lover. But first…

Neither of them saw him move until he was close enough to reach out and push Layla away from Duncan. His knife, so sharp and so deadly, slid between Duncan’s ribs with ease, and up towards the heart.

Duncan made a small sound, a choked protest, that brought a rush of blood to his lips as he dropped to the floor. Rafe had stabbed him through the heart, and as Layla watched with horrified, disbelieving eyes she saw him die in front of her, still reaching out towards her, his eyes so terrified and frightened that she knew she would carry their expression with her to the grave.

As Rafe bent to retrieve his knife, Layla whirled away from him, running as fleetly as a hare over the snow-packed ground, not daring to pause to look behind her.

Rafe let her go. After all, where could she run to? He wiped the blade of his knife clean of Duncan’s blood and stared emotionlessly down at the inert body of his rival. The gorgio had stolen his woman from him and it was only right that he should forfeit his life as punishment. Layla he would punish in a different way. His mouth curved in a cruel smile as he contemplated just how he would punish her. He would not take her as his wife now, of course; she was unclean, tainted by her physical contact with the gorgio, but she would lie in his bed nonetheless.

Rafe had a rare taint in a Romany; he liked to inflict pain. As a small child he had enjoyed setting traps for rabbits and other small animals, not because he needed the food, but because he liked seeing the tormented look of agony in the small creatures eyes.

His father had tried to beat the trait out of him, but all that had done had been to suppress it. Normally Rafe was only able to indulge his taste for inflicting pain on the women he bought whenever he had enough money to do so, but now Layla had provided him with a convenient opportunity to indulge himself to the full without restraint. By her own actions she had set herself apart from the rest of the tribe; by Romany law now, no one would lift a hand to stop him punishing her.

He was in no hurry to pursue her. Where could she go? Her gorgio lover was dead, the tribe would not allow her mother to shelter her from his wrath.

One look at her daughter’s face was enough to tell Naomi that something was wrong. She had a clear mental vision of the Tarot cards, and saw death grinning up at her.

Layla was too distraught to conceal the truth. Naomi recoiled from her in pain and shock when the girl revealed that she and Duncan Randall had been lovers.

“And now Rafe has killed him,” she told her mother.

Naomi’s mind worked furiously. Her first and most important loyalty was to the tribe. Through Layla’s folly, and Rafe’s reaction to it, they would all suffer. The tribe needed a leader…they needed Rafe. They would have to leave the valley, and quickly, and once they were gone from here some story could be concocted that would prevent the truth from coming out. Once the gorgio’s death was discovered the police would question them, of course, but somehow…there must be a way out.

“Go into the van and stay there until I come to you,” Naomi told Layla abruptly.

There was so much to do…and Rafe was not here. She went from van to van, urging everyone to pack up ready to leave. The camp fires were stamped out, the children and animals suddenly restless as they scented the imminent departure.

When Rafe returned to the camp half an hour later he saw from her face that Naomi knew.

“She has told you, then?” was all he said.

Naomi nodded, unable to meet his eyes, so great was her sense of shame. Layla…her daughter had shamed her. How grieved Leon would have been had he lived to see this day!

“We must leave here. The police will come. They will ask questions…”

‘To which our people will not know any answers,” Rafe warned her. He looked at her. “Tonight you will send your daughter to me.”

One look at his face was enough to silence Naomi’s protests, and she returned to her own van with a heavy heart. Layla had offended against one of the strongest of their tribal taboos, and it was only right that she should be punished, but the look in Rafe’s eyes had chilled her through to her bones, and Layla was after all her child.

She found Layla curled up on her bunk staring blankly into space. When Naomi told her of Rafe’s edict, she shook her head vehemently.

“I will not go to him!”

Pain and grief shadowed Naomi’s eyes as she looked at her daughter, so beautiful and so wild. Even now she held her head proudly…too proudly, perhaps. She was completely untouched by her own shame.

“I will not go to him!”

“My child, you will have no choice.”

“No choice.” The words hammered at Layla’s brain. She hated Rafe…if she could she would have killed him herself for what he had done, but she had no skill with a knife, and her strength was puny when compared with his.

Even now she could not comprehend what she had lost. It was impossible to believe that Duncan was dead, shock protected her from reality, and she had not yet accepted that she had lost him.

When the police came to the camp to question the gypsies, all of them responded stoically to their questions, each providing an alibi for the other. Rafe stood apart, silent, watching.

Sir Ian, who had come with the police, looked shrunken and old. Naomi pitied him sincerely. He had lost one who had been as a son to him, and she saw defeat written across the kindly face.

The police had already questioned Rafe. He had been hunting for game, he had told them, producing two other men as his witnesses.

No matter how many questions the police asked they could not break through the wall of silent suspicion emanating from the gypsies. They knew that one of them had killed Duncan; it had to be, and a knife, used so expertly and efficiently, had to have been wielded by a Romany hand.

“Clannish as the devil, if you’ll excuse me from saying so, Sir Ian,” the police sergeant said, as they walked back to the Land Rovers. “We’ll get nothing out of them.”

“But why…why? I don’t understand it. Duncan was such a kind boy…”

“That’s something we’ll probably never know.”

“One of them’s done it, for sure,” the sergeant told his superior later at the police station, “but I doubt if we’ll ever find out which one. They’ve given each other alibis that we’ll never break.”

At dusk, the tribe ate in silence, a pall of mistrust and fear falling over the entire camp. Not a word had been spoken to Layla since her return. She had eaten alone in her mother’s van, and now the time was fast approaching when Rafe would demand his vengeance.

She shivered as she contemplated what he might do to her. Duncan’s lovemaking had opened her eyes to her own sensuality. She had responded to him as joyfully as a flower unfolding to the sun, but she felt no desire for Rafe, only fear and hatred. He had killed the man she loved, and she hated him for that and always would, but she feared him as a woman always fears a man who she senses wants to inflict pain upon her.

“You must go to him,” Naomi told her quietly. “If you do not, you will be taken to him by the other men, and that will be worse. Better to endure what must be with your pride intact.”

“Even though my body might be destroyed!” Layla cried hysterically. She was still young enough to want to cling to her mother and weep tears of fear, but Naomi was right. And her mother would not be able to protect her, no matter how much the tribe might revere her.

It was a night that would haunt Layla for the rest of her short life. She went to Rafe’s van sick with fear. When she managed to crawl out of it hours later when he had finally fallen asleep her body was a mass of bruises and raised weals.

Naomi bathed them for her, her own eyes stinging with tears, but there was nothing she could say. Layla looked at her with the eyes of a wildcat caught in a snare. Her daughter’s spirit was as broken as her body.

Layla did not have the stoicism to endure such physical abuse; hatred for Rafe was the only emotion she could feel now. Not even to her mother could she describe the things he had done to her; the manner in which he had abused her, taking her not as a man but as a perverted animal. Her body shook as she tried to blot out what had happened. Naomi gave her a soothing potion to drink, thinking to help her sleep, but while her mother’s back was turned, Layla poured it away.

She could not endure another night like this one; she would not endure it.

While the rest of the camp slept she crept silently away. The constable on duty at the police station listened to her story in stunned shock, wondering whether or not to believe it. The sergeant, woken from his bed and brought grumbling to the station, took one look at Layla’s white, bitter face, and knew that he had found the motive for Duncan’s death.

They arrested Rafe at dawn; and he was sentenced to death two months later. He never reached the hangman’s noose. Somehow, from somewhere, he obtained a secret poison. He was found dead in his cell one morning, his body already stiffening, his eyes glaring bitterly into emptiness.

The rest of the tribe shunned Layla. They elected a new leader, who decreed that Naomi must be allowed to stay among them, but that Layla must leave.

When Naomi discovered that her daughter was pregnant, she pleaded with the tribe for clemency, and it was granted; Layla would remain as an outcast from the tribe, but she would be allowed to travel with them.

Her daughter’s frail, wraithlike condition appalled Naomi. The thought of the coming child was the only thing that kept her alive. Duncan’s child. Layla said the words over and over again to herself like a mantra.

“It could be Rafe’s child,” Naomi told her.

Layla shook her head, and looked at her mother with eyes far too old for such a childish face.

“No, it could not. He did not take me as a man takes a woman; he did not spill his seed inside me.”

Rachel Lee was born to her mother during her eighth month of pregnancy. To see Layla’s thin, almost sticklike body bloated almost obscenely with her pregnancy caused Naomi almost constant pain. Some fierce spirit seemed to burn in Layla, giving her a pride and a determination she had never thought to see in her fey, spoiled child.

The birth was a difficult one, and although they paused to listen to the cries coming from the caravan, none of the other women came to help. Naomi did not mind. She was an experienced midwife, and the child was well positioned, although perhaps a trifle large for Layla’s emaciated frame.

It was only when she placed the child in her daughter’s arms that she saw Layla smile properly for the first time since Duncan’s death.

“She is beautiful,” she told her mother. “You will call her Rachel, and you will love her for me, won’t you, Mother?”

Already a swift-flowing river of red blood was carrying Layla away from them, and Naomi knew it could not be staunched; that her daughter was dying. She had known it from the moment Layla gave birth. In some ways she felt her daughter had willed herself to stay alive only as long as she carried her child. She had in any case been as one dead to the rest of the tribe from the moment she betrayed Rafe.

There was no burial pyre for Layla, no grieving or lamenting for the brief life so quickly extinguished, and although the tribe accepted Naomi, little Rachel grew up knowing that she was not truly part of it; that there was something mysterious about her own birth and the death of her mother, that set her apart from the others.

She soon learned that her mother’s name was one that must never be spoken and that she and Naomi were allowed to stay with the tribe as a favour rather than as a right.

Her pain at the way she was excluded was something she learned to cloak with pride and indifference, and she was soon being described as far too much her mother’s daughter. She was not popular with the other children, and she knew it. It made her only more aloof and withdrawn. Only Naomi loved her, only Naomi stood between her and the hostility of the others.




5


Yes, she had learned young what it meant to be an outcast, Pepper reflected wryly.

Almost from the moment she could toddle she had been shunned by the other Romany children, but through their cruelty she had learned two valuable lessons.

The first had been to conceal her hurts. As a child she had been sensitive to a degree that had meant the other children’s contempt and dislike of her had constantly lacerated her. She had known as children always know that they neither accepted nor liked her, but she had not known why, and so she had learned to cover her feelings with a protective stoical acceptance. That had been the second lesson she had learned—not to let others see that they had the power to hurt her.

Not that the others had deliberately wanted to hurt her; it had simply been that she was not one of them; that her mother had offended so far and so deeply against their code that her child would never be one of their number.

Pepper’s childhood had been spent moving with the tribe through the country in their nomadic annual journeyings; formal schooling for gypsy children in those years had been spasmodic at best—not even the most ardent of school inspectors could spare the time to check up on the constantly caravanning tribes and their children—but Naomi had been taught to read and write by her husband and she was immensely proud of her skill.

She too had seen what was happening to her grandchild, and while she grieved over it, she knew that according to the rules of her people they were not being deliberately unkind.

Occasionally it crossed her mind that she should approach Sir Ian MacGregor, but she doubted that he would welcome Rachel any more than her own people did, and then the winter that Rachel was seven Ian MacGregor died and the land passed to a very distant member of the family.

Since Duncan’s death, the gypsies had not revisited the Glen, knowing that they would not be welcome, and the loss of the privileged campsite was chalked up as another black mark against Rachel.

It was Naomi who insisted that she learn to read and write; who sent her to school whenever the tribe stopped long enough for her to do so.

Knowing how proud her grandmother was of her own ability to read and write, Rachel never told her of the purgatory her own schooldays were. Just as she was unacceptable to the tribe, so she was also an outcast to the non-Romany children. They laughed at her clothes, calling them rags, and they sneered at her heavily-accented voice and the gold rings she wore in her ears. The older boys tugged on them until her lobes bled, and called her a “dirty gypsy”, while the girls huddled together in giggling gaggles to gaze at her darned jumpers and patched skirts.

With no man to protect them or hunt for them, Naomi and Rachel were forced to depend on whatever Naomi could make from telling fortunes and selling pegs. Occasionally in the depths of the night, one of the women of the tribe would knock on her door and ask Naomi for the special potions she made in the summer months from wild flowers and herbs.

Rachel watched these transactions wide-eyed and curious about what it could be that brought the women of the tribe to her grandmother’s door late at night, but all Naomi would say when she asked her was that she was too young to understand. The herbal lore which she had learned from her own mother and which she had tried to teach her own feckless daughter was something Naomi was not going to pass on to her granddaughter. None of the women of the tribe would come to Rachel for advice and potions the way they did to her. She was, after all, one of them, and still respected, although now their respect was tainted with pity, but Rachel never would be; she was the daughter of a gorgio, and it had been for the love of this man that Layla had betrayed one of her own, breaking the sacred gypsy code. Now when she grew older Rachel’s life would lie apart from that of the tribe, and this troubled Naomi.

She was getting old, and her bones ached in the cold and the damp. She hoped that by sending Rachel to school she could in some way prepare her grandchild to enter into the gorgio way of life, and because Rachel loved her grandmother she didn’t tell her that she was derided and disliked as much by her father’s people as she was by her mother’s.

School, which had been a place of fascination and delight at first, when she had absorbed everything the teachers could tell her, had now become a hated prison from which she escaped as often as she could, often spending her days in complete isolation in the hills and the fields.

When she was eleven her body started to change, and with it the reactions of her peers. Boys at school who had pulled her hair and jeered at her now tormented her in different ways, trying to pinch the small swellings that tightened the fabric of her shabby clothes.

Her hair, always thick and lustrous, seemed to darken and curl with a vivid life of its own, her body alluringly changing shape. Rachel knew what the changes portended; her tribe lived close to nature, and its girls were taught to be proud of their womanhood.

Even one or two of the young men glanced at her sideways as she helped her grandmother to gather kindling or worked with her on her pegs and baskets, but they didn’t forget who her mother was, or what she had done.

While the other girls of her age in the tribe tested their new-found femininity, laughing and flirting with their male peers, Rachel instinctively suppressed hers. She was a child of the shadows, her grandmother often thought sadly, watching her pensive face and too knowing eyes. As though she had been gifted with second sight Rachel knew instinctively that the rest of the tribe were looking for signs of her mother in her; as long as she was quiet and unobtrusive no one bothered about her.

But some things are impossible to hide, and the way her body was blossoming and developing was one of them.

The pinches and lewd remarks of her schoolmates was something she quickly learned to ignore, just as she had learned to ignore their jibes about her clothes and her speech. She wasn’t the only girl who had to endure this rough male teasing, but the others all had friends, families, supporters and protectors whom they could call upon if the boys’ tormenting became too familiar. Rachel had no one; she knew it and her tormentors knew it.

The gypsies’ progress through the country was an annual one. At the time of the Whitsun fairs they were always in the north of England; among the mill towns of the north-west; grimy, enclosed ribbons of towns set in stark valleys, whose inhabitants were the inheritors of the Industrial Revolution; a grim and starkly realistic people who had often known the harsh bite of poverty.

The lives of the people were as enclosed as the hills surrounding their valleys; their minds as narrow as their habitat.

The mills were closing, being driven out of existence by imports from Pakistan, cheap cloth produced by cheap labour. The secondary school in the valley was overflowing with teenagers who would have no jobs to go to; the mills that had employed their parents and grandparents were closing, and the atmosphere within the valleys was one of resentment and bitterness.

This particular stopping place on their annual pilgrimage was one that Rachel had always detested. The poverty of the people in the valley was almost on a level with that of her own tribe, and because of it the valley people jealously guarded their rights and privileges. Outsiders weren’t welcome whoever they were; and the gypsies were disliked and detested here much more than they were in the richer south of the country.

There were few pleasures to be had for the people inhabiting these valleys full of “dark Satanic mills”. Whitsuntide was one of them.

The religious persuasion of many of the inhabitants sprang from Methodism, the cornerstone on which the Industrial Revolution had been built, but this did not prevent the people from throwing themselves into their Whitsuntide celebrations with enthusiastic vigour. The highlight of these celebrations was the Whit Walks. For weeks beforehand the females of the family would gather round to gaze consideringly at the “catalogues” to choose the all-important outfit for the Walk. The Whit Walks were an unashamed opportunity to show off. A new outfit was an absolute essential, if family pride were to be upheld. Everyone would line up to walk through the streets in their new clothes; afterwards families would gather for high tea, and then later still the teenagers would be let loose to attend the fairs that had set up in the market squares.

It was these fairs which brought the gypsies to the north-west. There were rich pickings to be had from them, what with fortune-telling, working on the fairs themselves and selling their wares.

Rachel hated the whole thing. She hated the taunting looks the other girls in her class gave her while they giggled behind their hands about their new outfits. She hated knowing that she was an outcast, that she was being made fun of, but now this particular spring, with her body burgeoning into that of a woman, she hated it even more. The girls resented her glowing prettiness, and the boys lusted after the growing development of her body. The fact that she wasn’t one of them, that she was an outcast, made her an easy target for their malice and male vulgarity.

She had long ago perfected the art of ignoring all that was said about her, of pretending that she simply hadn’t heard the insults. But this particular morning, knowing that the whole school would be seething with excitement over the coming Whitsuntide break, she knew she could not face them. Always sensitive to the opinions of others, she had found that with the onset of puberty her sensitivity had increased. Sometimes the effort of forcing herself not to cry in the face of the jeering taunts of her schoolfellows made her drive her nails deep enough into the palms of her hands to draw her own blood.

The northern valleys possessed three modes of transport; the road, the railway and the canal. Rachel was walking alongside the latter, pausing now and again to watch a moorhen with her chicks or to study the fleeting shadow of tiddlers as they changed direction at the sight of her shadow. The canal had been abandoned as a transport route long ago, and the rotting lockgates and weed-filled waters gave silent testimony to its decay. Mills long abandoned by owners who could no longer afford to compete with foreign imports reared up darkly alongside the towpath, casting dark shadows, their windows gaping emptily, the glass broken, their interiors long silent.

Occasionally a golden bar of sunlight slatted through the bleakness of the building. Rachel liked walking. It soothed her, gave free rein to her thoughts. She shivered as she walked beneath one of the narrow bridges, feeling the cold and damp seeping down through the stone. She passed few people as she walked. The occasional old man walking his dog; courting couples, giggling. Across on the other side of the valley she could see men working in their allotments alongside the railway lines, the narrow black lines of terraced houses blotting out the sunlight.

This particular valley was very long and narrow, the hillsides treeless. It was a grim and depressing place and Rachel hated it. Whenever they came here she suffered a sense of being shut in; she loathed the oppressive atmosphere that infiltrated the place.

Outside a row of terraced houses overlooking the canal she could see one woman donkeystoning her steps. She was wearing the all-enveloping pinafore that was the uniform of the married woman here. She looked up and saw Rachel and scowled at her.

“Be off with you!” she called out harshly. “We don’t want no dirty gypos round here!”

Rachel was impervious to her insults, and walked on to where the river Calder ran alongside the canal. The towpath had crumbled away at the edges here. On one side it was level with the canal and on the other it dropped away to where the river ran sluggishly below, its progress choked with the detritus of human living—old rusty prams and bicycles, tin cans, and a variety of other rubbish that had been slung out of back yards and into the river.

She paused by a gap in the dismal line of terraced houses to enjoy a warm bar of sunlight. In front of her was the back door to a small pub. A man came out and staggered across to the gents’, and then changing his mind, instead relieved himself into the river.

Rachel moved on, ignoring him. One day she would escape from all this, from people who disliked and taunted her. One day…

Daydreams were the only things that made her life bearable, and she escaped into them whenever she could. She enjoyed reading and from the books she read she knew that there was another way of life, very many other ways of life, and one day…

Her daydream was brutally crushed when she heard someone call out her name in a jeering voice. Her whole body tensed as she recognised the harsh male voices and came to an abrupt halt in front of a gang of boys she recognised from school. They were all older than her, due to leave school at the end of the summer term. They were all dressed in grubby jeans and cheap leather jackets. The rank smell of young male bodies closed offensively round her as they came closer. Resolutely Rachel stood her ground, deliberately avoiding any form of eye contact. Her heart was pumping like a terrified rabbit’s, but her body was completely still.

“Lost yer tongue, gypo?” one of them taunted. His eyes shifted from her face to her breasts. “Got a fine pair of tits growing there, ain’t yer? They say gypos make good lays…”

The coarseness of his comments and the laughter of his friends increased her terror, but Rachel knew it would be madness to even try to run. That was what they wanted her to do. They could hardly rape her here in broad daylight, she reassured herself stoically, as the lad reached out and pressed a filthy hand against the front of her dress. She had to fight against her instinctive desire to tear at him with her hands and nails, to rid her body of his unwanted presence, but long after they had jeeringly let her go past, calling out obscenities after her, she felt tainted by the encounter, her body still shaking with a mixture of outraged pride and feminine fear.

During the Whit week festivities her grandmother was busy telling fortunes, and Rachel escaped to the hills, ranging over the moorlands where thin half-wild sheep foraged and the land was barren and bare. Here and there the remnants of some long-ago drystone wall boundary darkened the landscape, but in the main it was untouched by man’s hand apart from the odd reservoir mirroring the swift movement of the clouds across the hills.

At Whitsuntide the people of the valleys went on holiday, the more affluent of them sometimes for as much as three or four days, the poorer just on a day trip, but all of them to the same venue—the Lancashire coast and Blackpool. Rachel watched the coaches depart filled with them, and heard them come back at night. The gypsies were camping on a spare piece of land, close to the market square where the buses terminated, and late at night the coaches would disgorge their passengers, replete on beer, candy floss and fish and chips.

Here in the small town centre a viaduct spanned the canal and road, carrying the railway overhead, and at night these arches were the haunt of eager lovers. The tribe looked down on the gorgio teenagers and their lack of modesty, but Rachel knew that many of the young men, especially those who worked on the fairs, slipped away late at night to enjoy the favours of the girls who gathered in giggling masses beneath the viaduct.

One night as she walked beneath them on her way back to the camp, she recognised one of the intertwined couples. Ann Watts was in her class at school, although she was two years older than Rachel. Ann Watts was described as “slow”, but there was nothing slow about the way she responded to and attracted the opposite sex. Jealous of her position as acknowledged sex queen of the school, Ann Watts was one of Rachel’s most vindictive enemies.

It would be many years before Rachel would be able to recognise the other girl for what she was and to pity her for it, that night as she saw Ann voluptuously pressing her body against Tyler Lee.

Tyler Lee was the oldest of the three brothers; tall for a gypsy, with a shock of wildly curling black hair. At seventeen his body was hardened and well muscled by the work he did on the fairs and labouring in the fields during the summer. His skin was brown, his eyes black as jet. He was proud of his Romany blood and destined to marry his second cousin. Rachel knew this, but Ann Watts did not. To her Tyler Lee epitomised the glamour she saw every week when she visited the local flea pit. He was the best-looking boy she had ever seen, far better-looking than the lumpy dull boys she was at school with; and better still, Tyler was dangerous. He rode a motorbike that he had put together from parts garnered here and there during his travels, and he knew exactly the effect he had on a girl when he looked at her from out of those night-dark eyes.

Although Ann Watts didn’t know it Tyler despised her, just as he despised all the gorgio women who desired him, and Ann Watts was very far from being the first. Tyler had first realised the potential of his sexuality when he was fourteen years old. He had lost his virginity to a bored, thirty-odd-year-old housewife in Norfolk, exchanging it for his motorbike and enough money to buy himself the coveted teenage uniform of black leather jacket. Since then there had been more bored housewives and Ann Watts than he had cared to count.

Ann Watts was not destined to remain in his memory for very long. She wriggled against him provocatively, enjoying the rhythmic thrust of his hips. Tyler would be the third boy with whom Ann had “gone all the way”, and already she was enjoying savouring what she was going to tell her friends afterwards. She liked the shocked, wide-eyed way they listened to her confidences. They were all younger than she was, and still virgins.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched Rachel go past, and glared at her. She disliked the proud way the younger girl moved, almost as though she thought that somehow she was better than anyone else. How could she be? Everyone knew that gypos were nothing better than thieves, and that they never washed.

Ann had a bath once a week, in the new bathroom that had just been installed in the terraced house. Theirs was the only house in the street to have an indoor lavvy as well. Ann’s father was a foreman in one of the few mills still working and her mother served school dinners at the local Tech. And Ann was their only child. Already Mrs Watts was boasting proudly that her Ann would marry young, she was that pretty. All the boys were after her.

Sensing that he had lost her complete attention, Tyler pushed her firmly against the hard stone of the viaduct wall, thrusting himself against her open thighs, demanding, “Who you looking at?”

“That Rachel Lee.”

Ann saw the expression on Tyler’s face and realised that he liked Rachel no more than she did herself.

“What’s up?” she asked him curiously. “What you got against her?”

“Her mother was a murderer,” Tyler told her.

No one in the tribe had talked about Rachel’s mother, but they all knew the story, and Ann’s eyes widened in malicious glee. She had always known there was something odd about Rachel Lee. Just wait until she told the others at school about her! At that moment Tyler moved more determinedly against her, pushing up her skirt and pulling down her pants with one experienced movement, and Rachel was forgotten…but not for long.

Rachel knew the moment she walked into the schoolyard that something was wrong. Her senses, always attuned to danger, alerted her to the menacing quality of the silence engulfing her the moment she walked into the tarmacadam yard, but she looked neither to the right nor to the left as she walked past the silent huddles of watchers.

Ann Watts waited until Rachel drew level with her before launching her first salvo.

“Whose mother’s a murderer, then?” she sang out, swiftly followed by her friends, as they picked up the taunting chorus and rang it across the schoolyard.

By now Rachel knew the story of her conception, but she still felt sensitive about it, and about the cloud hanging over her birth. She lashed out instinctively and her open palm caught the side of Ann Watts’ nose, and almost instantly blood spurted from it.

Almost as though the scent of blood drew them like hounds to a fox, the schoolyard was in an uproar. It took four teachers to separate the seething mass of bodies, and when they dragged Rachel out from beneath her attackers, she had a broken collarbone and three cracked ribs.

Despite questioning from her teachers and from the police Rachel refused to say what had caused the fight. The police constable was only young—he had recently been moved into the area from Cumbria and he was finding the brooding violence of the valley difficult to take. There was poverty where he came from too, but it was a different sort of poverty from this, just as his people were a different sort of people. Privately he felt sorry for the little gypsy girl, but his expression betrayed nothing of this when he questioned her. She looked very forlorn and alone in the starched hospital bed, and he suspected that the nurses weren’t any kinder to her than her peers had been.

It was after her stay in hospital that things began to change for Rachel. She saw the change in her grandmother almost from the moment she came out. Naomi had aged, but more than that, there were new lines on her face that could have only been put there by pain. For the first time in her life Rachel knew the terrible fear of being all alone. What would happen to her if her grandmother should die? The tribe didn’t want her.

Would she have to go into a home? Rachel knew very little about these institutions other than the fact that they were held over the heads of hapless gypsy children as a threat of what could happen to them if they misbehaved. Somehow in Rachel’s mind, children’s homes had become confused with prison, and she thought of being sent away to one of them as a form of punishment.

Every day she saw her grandmother fade away a little more. Sometimes when she thought no one was watching her Naomi massaged the outside of her breast. She was in deep pain, Rachel knew that. She also knew that her grandmother had to drink some of the special poppy drug she made to help her sleep at night.

Rachel was frightened, but as with everything else she learned to lock the fear up inside her.

Naomi knew that her time was short. There was pain inside her that ate into her, a gnawing, bitter pain that was destroying her from within. The pain came from the lump she had discovered in her breast, she knew that. She was going to die, and when she did what would become of Rachel?

Winter came and the tribe was once again in the far north, not camping in the tranquil valley on the MacGregor lands this time, but on a barren piece of waste ground outside a small town.

Where once they had commanded a certain amount of respect and fear, gypsies were now almost consistently reviled. The townspeople called them “dirty thieves”, and Rachel was more conscious than ever of the way others looked at them. She had never felt more alien and alone. There was no one she could turn to. Naomi was dying, but Rachel still doggedly hoped that somehow her beloved grandmother would grow well and strong again.

She spent hours searching for special herbs that were supposed to have magic properties to heal her. She saved the choicest pieces of meat for her, but none of it did any good; Naomi was dying.

The spring that Rachel was fifteen they stopped off in the north for the Whitsuntide fairs again. Ann Watts was still at school, but now she was in her last year. Last year’s plumpness had given way to unsightly fat, and she eyed Rachel with spite and bitchiness when she arrived at school.

“I see the gypos are back,” she sneered, giving Rachel a wide berth. “I thought I could smell something bad!”

Blotting out the laughs and jeers, Rachel held her head high and walked into the classroom. She loved the deep tranquillity of its silence almost as much as she hated her fellow pupils. Inside her something was yearning desperately for knowledge, but her lessons were so fragmented that in all her years of schooling she had learned almost nothing.

To the teachers she was just another gypsy brat, who would be gone before she could learn anything worth knowing. She could read and write and add up simple columns of figures, which in a school like the one she was in now was as much as many of their pupils would achieve by the time they were ready to leave.

They had been back in the valley for almost a week when one afternoon Rachel was struck by the knowledge that Naomi needed her. When the class stood up and the teacher left, Rachel darted out after him, taking the short cut to the gypsy camp, along the canal tow path. She ran all the way, and arrived out of breath and scared out of her wits. This was the first time she had felt for herself the power that ran so strongly in the women of her family.

As she had known she would, she found her grandmother close to death. Naomi recognised her, and forced away her pain for long enough to take her hand. She had spent many hours worrying about this child, this changeling who was neither Romany nor gorgio.

Pulling Rachel close to her so that she could whisper in her ear, she told her where she had hidden the small amount of money she had managed to scrape together since she had realised she was ill. She had saved the money with one purpose only in mind, and now she told Rachel what she was to do.

“You must leave here now, before…before I die. You must pretend that you are older than your years. You must get yourself a job and live as a gorgio would, Rachel. The Romany way of life is not for you, and I do not want you to become any man’s whore. Remember always that my spirit goes with you.”

Hot tears fell on her cold hands as she pushed Rachel away from her. Rachel was losing the only person on earth who cared about her, but if she stayed the tribe would reject her, and the school authorities would come and she would be put in a home. Naomi was right…she had to leave.

Alternately shivering and crying, Rachel found the small store of money. She bent down to kiss Naomi’s cheek and murmured the secret Romany words of farewell. She would not be here to see her grandmother’s funeral pyre; she would not be here to wish her spirit well.

Naomi opened her eyes and saw the indecision on her grandchild’s face. Summoning the last of her strength, she took Rachel’s hand in hers. “Go now…go with my blessing, my child…Go now.”

From the moment she had learned to read Rachel had realised that it was education that was the only escape route from poverty, and now she was drawn as countless thousands of others had been drawn before her to the gilded spires of Oxford.

She had passed through the town many times with the tribe. She knew from her reading what it was…but in her ignorance she knew nothing of the taboos and rituals it represented; just as strong and damning as those of her own people.

Rachel reached Oxford in the late summer of 1977, when she was just short of her seventeenth birthday. She travelled mainly on foot, using the ancient Romany paths, carefully eking out the money her grandmother had given her by taking casual work along the way—mostly on farms, but always taking care to choose a farm where she could be sure of being taken under the wing of the farmer’s wife. Rachel had learned enough about the male sex in her short life to make her wary of putting herself into any man’s powers. She still remembered the hated sensation of being touched by male hands, and it was a man who had led to her mother’s rejection by her people. Men of any age were to be avoided.

By the time she reached Oxford she had added to her small hoard of money and had two hundred pounds tucked away in the leather bag she had tied to the inside of her skirt. Her clothes were in rags, too short, too skimpy, augmented here and there by the odd cast-off given to her by kind-hearted farmers’ wives who had taken pity on her.

Where once their pity would have offended her, now she accepted it with a brief smile, because Rachel was realising for the first time in her life the power of freedom. Oh, she missed her grandmother, but she didn’t miss the oppressive disapproval of the tribe, which she was only just beginning to recognise for what it was; nor did she miss the contempt and dislike of the people in whose towns they stayed. Here in the country it was different—she was different, because she no longer wore the hated tag of “gypsy”.

Only now was she coming to realise that she was free; that she had the power to choose what she would be. The farms where she stopped off to work thought she was just another of the itinerant band of teenagers who spent their summers working in the fields; gypsies didn’t travel alone, and her skin was pale enough, her hair dark red enough for her not to be picked out immediately as a member of the Romany people.

She was willing to work hard and she was consequently awarded respect by the farmers’ wives who employed her. Rachel didn’t mind what kind of work she was asked to do, just so long as it didn’t bring her into too much contact with any male members of the households where she stopped, and that too was a point in her favour. Several times she was asked to stay on, but she was slowly coming to realise that there might be more for her in life than the drudgery of such menial tasks.

At one farm where she stayed in prosperous Cheshire she was allowed to sleep in a room which had once belonged to the now adult daughter of the family, and this room came complete with its own television. Several members of the gypsy tribe had had television, of course, but her grandmother had not been among them, and Rachel spent her free time absorbing information via this new source like a desert soaking up rain. She watched all manner of programmes—education, political, cartoons, American cops-and-robbers series, and everything she saw only confirmed to her that there was another form of life out there.

She remembered how her grandmother had always told her that education was the key that unlocked many doors, and how she had believed her. But how could she get the sort of education she needed? Because now Rachel had a goal. She wanted to be like the women she saw on television, polished, glamorous…loved. How did they get like that? They were like no women she had ever seen before, with their long blonde hair and their pretty faces—and their clothes.

Up until now as far as Rachel was concerned clothes had simply been something she had worn to protect her body from the weather, but now she was seeing girls wearing pretty clothes, and she ached to wear them herself.

When she wasn’t working she spent more time than she had ever done before exploring the various towns she passed through on her way south. She stared in through shop windows and watched…and soon she had plucked up the courage to walk in through the plate glass doors of one of the stores. If the girl who served her was shocked by the state of the clothes she was wearing, or surprised that Rachel didn’t even know her own size, she kept it to herself.

Rachel spent her money carefully. She knew exactly how she wanted to look. When she came out of the store she caught sight of herself by accident in a plate glass window, and froze, shocked by this new image of herself. She no longer looked different—poor. She looked just like everyone else.

She turned her head to make sure. All around her young girls dressed in the timeless uniform of the young strolled, flirted and laughed, and she was now one of them. She stared down at her jean-clad legs—her grandmother hadn’t approved of girls wearing any form of trousers—then touched the soft fabric of her new T-shirt. The feel of clean new fabric beneath her fingertips was sensuously pleasing. It felt good to know that no one had ever worn these clothes before her, that they were hers and hers alone.

By the time she reached Oxford Rachel had lost all but the faintest tinge of her Romany accent, and she had also removed her gypsy earrings. She was dressed just like any other teenager, and wore her new-found confidence like a patina of pleasure.

Oxford drew her like a magnet. She had seen a programme on television about it, and that had increased her yearning to be there.

She arrived just before the start of the Michaelmas term, and the town was almost empty of students; the bicycles that later would fill the narrow streets were few and far between, and the pubs and discos that later would be the haunt of the young were almost empty. During the long summer recess Oxford belonged to its inhabitants and its tourists—American in the main, come to stroll among the colleges, and examine the quaintness of this ancient seat of learning.

Rachel found a job easily enough in one of the hotels, but the pay wasn’t as good as it had been on the farm, and the work was hard. The majority of the other chambermaids were foreign; an Irish girl with an accent so thick that Rachel could barely understand it made friendly overtures towards her, and by the end of the first week she was beginning to feel she was settling in.

When she complained to Bernadette about the poorness of her wage the Irish girl grinned at her.

“Well, why don’t you do what I do? Get yourself a job in one of the pubs in the evening? They’re looking for someone at the place where I work. I could take you along and introduce you if you like?”

Rachel agreed. Although the hotel provided its chambermaids with board and food, the meals they were served were very meagre indeed, and she was almost constantly hungry.

She got the job in Bernadette’s pub. The manager was a plump cheerful man in his late forties, with two girls of his own who were away at university, and his wife kept a stern eye on the more flirtatious of the barmaids.

Rachel felt happier than she had ever been in her life, but when she shyly asked Bernadette if she knew how she might go about joining a library, the Irish girl filled the dormitory they shared with the other chambermaids with her rollicking laugh.

“Joining a library, is it, you’re wanting? Well, sure there’s a fine thing! Oi’m thinking that a pretty girl like you can get all the learning she wants from the men…”

Bernadette was a flirt, Rachel had quickly realised that, but she hadn’t realised until now how great a gap yawned between them. For the first time since she had left them she felt homesick for the tribe. They were, after all, her people.

When Bernadette asked her if she wanted to go to a disco she refused.

“Ah well, suit yourself, then…I’m sure I don’t mind having all the boys to meself.” Bernadette tossed her dark hair as she walked out, and Rachel knew she had offended her.

Fortunately Bernadette had a mercurial temper and a kind heart, and by morning she was her normal friendly self, chatting animatedly to Rachel about the boy she had met the previous evening, as they worked.

“Keep away from Number Ten,” she warned Rachel. “Helga…you know, the German girl, she was telling me that when she went in this morning he came out of his bathroom stark naked and asked her if she’d mind giving him a rub down! Dirty old man, he’s fifty if he’s a day…and married. I mind he’s stayed here before with his wife…”

All the chambermaids gossiped, although Rachel tended to keep herself aloof. She wasn’t used to such friendliness, and she treated it with caution, half expecting them to change and turn on her, unable to forget what she had suffered during her schooldays, but now she was different, now she wasn’t a despised gypo but simply another young woman like themselves.

The seventies were a good time to be young; the world was full of optimism, and youth was petted and fêted by all. To be young was to hold the world in the palm of your hand. Rachel was constantly meeting other young people who, like herself, cherished their freedom, but who, unlike her, had travelled the world. They came into the pub in their faded jeans, carrying their backpacks, the men thin and bearded, their girlfriends long-haired and kohl-eyed, drinking beer while they told their tales of Kathmandu, and worshipping at the feet of the great ashrams. Everyone who was anyone was into meditation; Rachel read the magazines left behind by the guests and learned that she was living in an almost magical era.

As the summer heat faded into autumn, and mists began to hang over the river in the early morning sunlight, Oxford gradually began to stir back to life. Students arrived in dribs and drabs, trickling back into the town; life began to stir beneath the somnolence of the summer, as the tourists left to make way for the undergraduates.

By the beginning of Michaelmas term life in the town had changed, its pulse hard and heady. Bernadette was delighted.

“Now we’ll see some foine young men,” she promised Rachel one morning as they finished their work. “You wait and see!”

It was impossible not to respond to the surge of excitement beating through the air. Rachel felt it in her own thudding pulse. The crisp tang of late summer with its nostalgic undertones of autumn hung on the air. Almost every night the pub was full of young men in shabby jeans or corduroy trousers, University scarves wrapped round their necks, their long hair brushing their shoulders. They talked with a multitude of accents, but almost always in the same studiedly throwaway fashion; they were the cream, the jeunesse dorée, and they knew it.

In some of the staider colleges it was still necessary to have permission to run a motorcar, and so the traditional bicycles were very much in use. Rachel had to run across the road to avoid being knocked down by one of them one evening as she hurried to work. Behind her she heard a great shout and then a crash, and turning round she saw a tangle of jean-clad legs and bicycle wheels.

Instinctively she started to walk away, until a plaintive voice halted her.

“I say, don’t go and leave me here! I might have broken my leg…”

His voice was cultivated and teasing: the voice of a male used to being courted and flattered. As she turned her head to look back at him Rachel caught the blond flash of his hair. She hesitated.

“Come on…it was your fault I fell off, you know. I haven’t ridden one of these damn things for years, and when I saw you…pretty girls oughtn’t to be allowed to cross the roads in front of learner bicycle riders!”

He had called her pretty, and immediately Rachel stiffened, but there had been none of the hated near-violence and dislike in his voice that she had heard from the other men.

Caution urged her to walk away, but something deeper, stronger, and much more potent, urged her to stay. Slowly she walked towards him and watched him disentangle himself from his bicycle. He was tall, over six foot, with shoulder-length fair hair, and the bluest eyes Rachel had ever seen. They were the sort of eyes that always seemed to be full of light and laughter. He was laughing now, grinning ruefully as he brushed himself down.

“Damn! I think I’ve twisted my front wheel. That’ll teach me to look at pretty girls!” He moved and then winced, taking his weight off his left foot. “I seem to have twisted my ankle as well. My rooms aren’t far from here…If you give me a hand I should be able to make it to them without too much difficulty.”

At any other time Rachel would have found his assumption that she would automatically agree to help him off putting, but for some reason she found herself responding to his smile and walking towards him.

“If I could just put my arm round your shoulders…”

His arm was muscular but thin, and she could smell the scent of his body mingling with the oily odour of wool from his sweater. He smiled at her, his teeth white in the tanned darkness of his face. For some reason she almost wanted to reach out and touch him. Shocked by her own reaction, Rachel dragged her gaze away.

He was like no other boy or man she had ever known. There was an aura about him that she could feel herself responding to. She looked at his hand, cupped round the ball of her shoulder. His fingers were long, the nails well cared for.

“Cat got your tongue?” he demanded with another grin.

Rachel shook her head. He was going to make her late for work, but recklessly she didn’t care.

He said it was only a little way to his rooms, but in actual fact it was half a mile. Rachel gazed up in reverence at the ancient buildings of his college. She had explored them all during the summer recess, combining her walks through their hallowed grounds with knowledge she had gained from the books she had borrowed from the library. It had been the publican’s wife who had come to the rescue and shown her how to join the library, and now she touched the weathered stone as they rounded the corner of the building and entered the enclosed quadrangle.

“Tom Quad,” her companion told her cheerfully, glancing sideways at her.

Rachel only smiled. She knew all about the history of Christ Church College; that it had first been commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey, four years before he fell from Henry VIII’s grace. Christopher Wren had added the Tower over Wolsey’s gate, in 1682, and Rachel glanced up towards it automatically, just as Great Tom, the bell, tolled its curfew.

“Bang on time as usual! Come on, my rooms are up here.”

His weight was beginning to make her shoulder ache, but it never occurred to Rachel to refuse to go with him. During the summer recess she had learned to parry the flirtatious remarks of the pub’s patrons, but both Bernadette and the landlord’s wife had warned her that Oxford’s students could be remarkably persistent.

“You’d think they’d have better things to do with their time than spending it trying to get you into bed with them,” Bernadette sniffed disdainfully.

It was from Bernadette and the other girls at the hotel that Rachel had gradually learned to be a little more worldly. Now when she worked she often hummed the latest pop tune. She wore make-up—something her grandmother had always disapproved of, and she was gradually adopting the manners and fashions of her peers.

For the first time in her life she felt that she was actually accepted on equal terms with her peers, and she liked that feeling, but Rachel was by nature cautious. When the other girls disappeared for the evening with flurried giggles, and didn’t appear until the following morning, Rachel listened to their whispered confidences about the boys they had been out with, but when anyone tried to date her she kept them firmly at bay. She wasn’t interested in boyfriends and romance; there wasn’t time in her life for them. She had so much to do; coming to Oxford had opened her eyes to all that was missing from her life.

These students who flocked through Oxford’s streets would one day go out into the world and become people of eminence, secure and respected. The bitterness of her childhood haunted her and Rachel was determined to make herself inviolate. The only way she could do that was by achieving financial security.

She had a quick intelligence and had soon realised that she could never be content with the goals Bernadette and the other girls set themselves. They were happy to drift from day to day, spending their wages on new clothes, dating a different boy every night. They were like the poppies that bloomed in the cornfields in the summer, Rachel thought wryly—pretty and giddy, blowing this way and then that at the will of the wind, but once summer was gone they wilted and died; they could not survive without the sun, without warmth.

“Think you can get me up the stairs?”

Rachel frowned and looked consideringly at him. He wasn’t the first student who had shown an interest in her, and caution warned her to tread carefully.

“I have to get back,” she told him. “I should be at work.”

“You work?”

He said it with such amused condescension that Rachel could feel her skin flushing with resentment.

“Yes,” she told him curtly, “at the King’s Arms.”

“Ah…Yes. I see.”

He was looking at her differently now, consideringly; and Rachel knew what was going through his mind. In her almost teenage uniform of jeans and cotton peasant blouse, her long hair down on her shoulders, he had mistaken her for a fellow student. Now that he knew she was not, he was looking at her in much the same way the village children had regarded her and her contemporaries when they camped near their homes. Only the suspicion was absent from his eyes, and in its place was an intense glitter of sexual speculation.

“So you’re not a student.”

Her head lifted, her eyes coolly meeting his and dismissing the look of desire he gave her.

“No.”

“What’s your name? Mine’s Tim…Tim Wilding.”

His abrupt change of tack caught her off guard, and unwillingly Rachel found herself telling him,

“Rachel.”

The blue eyes laughed down into hers. “I don’t like it…it’s far too biblical for you! I shall call you Gypsy…it suits you far more.”





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