The Hidden Years Read Free Page B

shared—for some
reason it had stifled her, imprisoned her, and as a teenager she had
ached for wider skies, broader horizons.
    Cottingdean: Faye and Camilla would be waiting there for
her, waiting to pounce on her with anxious questions about her mother.
    How ironic it was that Faye, her sister-in-law, should be
able to conjure from her mother the love she herself felt she had
always been denied—and yet she could not resent Faye for it.
    She sighed a little as she drove west heading for the M4.
Poor Faye—life had not been kind to her, and she was too
fragile… too vulnerable to withstand too many of its blows.
    Sage remembered how Faye had looked the day she and David
married…a pale, fragile, golden rose, openly adoring the man
she was marrying, but that happiness had been short-lived. David had
been killed in a tragic, useless road accident, leaving Faye to bring
up Camilla on her own.
    Sage hadn't been surprised when her mother had invited
Faye to make her home at Cottingdean; after all, in the natural course
of events, David would eventually have inherited the estate. Faye had
accepted her offer— the pretty ex-vicarage in the village,
which David had bought for his bride, was sold and Faye and her
one-year-old daughter moved into Cottingdean. They had lived there ever
since and Camilla had never known any other home, any other way of life.
    Sage smiled as she thought of her niece; almost eighteen
years old and probably in the eyes of the world spoiled rotten by all
of them. If the three of them suffered deeply in losing David then some
of the suffering had been eased by the gift he had left behind him.
    One day Cottingdean and everything that it represented
would be Camilla's, and already Sage had seen that her mother was
discreetly teaching and training her one grandchild in the duties that
would then fall on her shoulders.
    Sage didn't envy her that inheritance, but she did
sometimes envy her her sunny, even-tempered disposition, and the warmth
that drew people to her in enchantment.
    As yet she was still very much a child, still not really
aware of the power she held.
    Sage sighed. Of all of them Camilla would be the most
deeply affected if her mother… Her hands gripped the wheel
of the Porsche until her knuckles whitened. Even now she could not
allow her mind to form the word 'die', couldn't allow herself to admit
the possibility…the probability of her mother's death.
    Unanalysed but buried deep within the most secret, sacred
part of her, the instinctive, atavistic part of her that governed her
so strongly, lay the awareness that to have refused the promise her
mother had demanded of her, or even to have given it and then not to
have carried out the task, would somehow have been to have helped to
still the pulse of her mother's life force; it was as though there was
some primitive power that linked the promise her mother had extracted
from her with her fight against death, and if she broke that promise,
even though her mother could not possibly know that it had been broken,
it would be as though she had deliberately broken the symbolic silver
thread of life.
    She shuddered deeply, sharply aware as she had been on
certain other occasions in her life of her own deep-rooted and
sometimes disturbing awareness of feelings, instincts that had no
logical basis.
    Her long fingers tightened on the steering-wheel. She had
none of her mother's daintiness—that had bypassed her to be
inherited by Camilla. She had nothing of her mother in her at all,
really, and yet in that brief moment of contact, standing beside her
mother's bed, it had been for one terrifying milli-second of time as
though their souls were one and she had felt as though it were her own
her mother's fear and pain, her desperation and her determination; and
she had known as well how overwhelmingly important it was to her mother
that she kept her promise.
    Because her mother knew she was going to die? A spasm of
agony contracted Sage's body. She