Bones of the Buried Read Free Page B

surface – the evidence of a glorious ‘first night’ when she had glittered in a Gershwin
musical which looked set to run as long as she was prepared to star in it. ‘You and I will always be . . . a part of one another.’
    But she had not begged him to stay and so they had parted, still a little in love with one another, basking in a relationship from which both had drawn strength. Though Amy would not have said
it or even thought it out with cold, deliberate logic, it had helped her career to be seen with the wealthy, good-looking brother of an English duke. It had given her glamour and status –
made her invulnerable to the sneers of society matrons and eased her passage into the centre of what Edward called ‘Vanderbilt City’. She acknowledged in her heart that he gave her much
more than status: he was older than she, for one thing – almost thirty-five – and absolutely at ease with his own place in society. She had been brought up by two elderly aunts on
Canada’s new frontier and seen nothing of the world until she had come to London to meet the father who had abandoned her almost at birth. A few months later, she had been whisked off to New
York by a theatrical agent who had been taken to see her singing in a Soho night-club and had recognised star-quality when he saw it.
    It could be lonely on the Great White Way, even frightening. So much was expected of her and, when she delivered, they expected more and, inevitably, success brought enemies. The society gossip
columnists had interspersed adulation with little spiteful dagger-thrusts of speculation and rumour. She was the daughter of the Canadian press lord, Joseph Weaver, but there was something
mysterious there. She had appeared from nowhere. Was she his illegitimate child by a mistress he had turned away when he was quite a young man? There was certainly no word of any mother. Amy was
able to brush off the innuendoes and the spite but there were evenings when she would read some lie about herself and run and bury her face in Edward’s shoulder and sob as if she were still a
lonely, abandoned child.
    Now, back in London, lying in his bath in his spacious if rather spartan rooms, Edward hummed contentedly to himself one of his favourite songs from Girl Crazy : ‘Boy! What Love Has
Done To Me!’ Amy had sung it in the show and it still sent shivers down his spine. He could hear Fenton in the little kitchen preparing his breakfast. Unexpectedly, Fenton had adored New York
and had been reluctant to leave it. Edward had heard that he had been offered a position as butler to one of the city’s ‘royal families’ and had been touched that he had in the
end decided to stay as his gentleman’s personal gentleman. Nothing was ever said between the two of them about the temptation which had been resisted but Edward noticed that Fenton would on
occasion drop American phrases into his conversation and his breakfast eggs might be offered him ‘easy-over’ or ‘sunny-side up’.
    Edward resurfaced and made a determined effort not to think of Amy. He was content to be back in London. Or rather he was not content yet, but he was determined to find a cure for his
restlessness. While he had been in New York, he had received a letter from an old Eton and Cambridge friend with a high, if ill-defined, position in the Foreign Office, offering him what sounded
very much like a job. Basil Thoroughgood was too canny to commit to paper a form of words which might be construed as anything quite as definite but there was certainly the offer of lunch and
‘a chat’. Edward had cabled that he expected to be in London on February 18th and had been surprised to receive a ‘wireless’ half-way across the Atlantic which set one
o’clock at Brooks’s – the club of which they were both members – on the 19th, only his second day back in the metropolis. It hinted at urgency on Thoroughgood’s part
but Edward could scarcely believe it. Unless