one of her murals was a prized feature of the décor. She was sought after and highly paid, working only on favoured commissions. Her life was her own…or so she had thought.
Why me? she had asked, and even in extremity her mother had not spared her. Of course, gentle, tender Faye would never have been able to bring herself to read another person’s diaries…to pry into their privacy. What was it, then, that made it so important that she read them…that they all read them…so important that her mother should insist with what might well be her dying breath that they do so?
There was only one way that she was going to find out.
There was nothing to be gained in putting off what had to be done, Sage acknowledged as she left the hospital. As chance would have it, she was in between commissions at the moment and there was nothing of sufficient urgency in her life to excuse her from fulfilling the promise she had made to her mother, nothing to stop her from going immediately to Cottingdean, no matter how little she wanted to do so.
Cottingdean, the family’s house, was on the outskirts of an idyllic English village set in a fold of the hills to the southeast of Bath. It was a tiny rural community over which her mother presided as its loving and much-loved matriach. Sage had never felt the same love for it that the rest of her family 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 millisecond 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 ought not to be feeling like this; she had dissociated herself from her mother years ago. Oh, she paid lip-service to their relationship, duty visits for her mother’s birthday in June, and at Christmas, although she had not spent that Christmas at Cottingdean. She had been working in the Caribbean on the villa of a wealthy French socialite. A good enough excuse for not going home, and one her mother had accepted calmly and without comment.
She turned off the motorway, following the familiar road signs, frowning a little at the increased heaviness of the traffic, noting the unsuitability of the enormous eight-wheel container trucks for the narrow country lane.
She overtook one of them on the small stretch of bypass several miles east of the village, glad to be free of its choking diesel fumes.
They had had a hard winter, making spring seem doubly welcome, the fresh green of the new hedges striking her eye as she drove past them. In the village nothing seemed to have changed, and it amused her that she should find that knowledge reassuring, making her pause to wonder why, when she had been so desperate to escape from the place and its almost too perfect prettiness, she experienced this dread of discovering that it had changed in any way.
She had rung the house from the hospital and spoken to Faye, simply telling her that she was driving down but not explaining why.
Whoever had first chosen the site for Cottingdean had chosen well. It sat with its back to the hills, facing south, shielded from the east wind by the ancient oaks planted on the edge of its parkland.
The original house had been built by an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a merchant who had moved his family from Bristol out into the quiet and healthy solitude of the countryside. It was a solid, sensible kind of house, built in the traditional style, in the shape of the letter E. Later generations had added a jumble of extra buildings to its rear, but, either through lack of wealth or incentive, no one had thought to do anything to alter its stone frontage with its ancient mullions and stout oak door.
The drive still ran to the rear of the house and the courtyard around it on which were the stables and outbuildings, leaving the front of the house and its vistas completely unspoiled.
Sage’s mother always said that the best way to see Cottingdean for the first time was on foot, crossing the bridge spanning the river, and then through the wooden gate set into the house’s encircling garden wall, so that one’s first view of it was through the clipped yews that guarded the pathway to the terrace and the front entrance.
When her mother had come to Cottingdean as a bride, the gardens which now were famous and so admired had been nothing more than a tangle of weeds interspersed with unproductive vegetable beds. Hard to imagine that now when one saw the smooth expanses of fresh green lawn, the double borders with their enviable collections of seemingly carelessly arranged perennials, the knot garden, and the yew hedges which did so much to add to the garden’s allure and air of enticing, hidden secrets. All this had been created by her mother—and not, as some people imagined, with money and other people’s hard work, but more often than not with her own hands.
As