neglect the young girl he had married. ‘He disappeared for weeks at a time—told your mother he was looking for a job. But I knew better. I told your grandfather how it would be from the moment she met him. Thank the Lord he didn’t live long enough to see how right I was.’
Shelley knew that her grandfather had died before she was born. She also knew from her grandmother that shortly before she was born, her father had deserted her mother, leaving her alone at nineteen with no one to turn to apart from her mother.
‘Of course, they had been living with us right from the start of the marriage. I insisted on that,’ she had been told. ‘I wasn’t going to allow my daughter to be dragged off to some dirty one-room flatlet. She could have done so well for herself, too. All he was interested in was his drawing. Never even tried to get himself a decent job. Your grandfather and I never approved. Of course, your poor mother was heartbroken when he left, but I’d warned her all along how it would be. Six weeks and he was gone, without so much as a word. You were born prematurely, and my poor Sylvia died almost before you drew a single breath. Four weeks later we heard that your father had been killed in a road accident. Good riddance, I thought.’
Here her grandmother’s mouth would always tighten, and she would warn Shelley against giving her heart to any man.
‘In my day we had to marry,’ she would tell her granddaughter, ‘but for you it’s different. You have a choice. I don’t want the same thing that happened to your mother to happen to you.’
Gradually, as she grew up, Shelley had learned that her grandparents’ marriage had not been a happy one. There had been a long-standing affair between her grandfather and someone else in the early part of their marriage, which seemed to have soured the relationship. Her grandmother didn’t like the male sex, and she had brought Shelley up to feel the same way. As a young child she had felt the pain of her mother’s loss and betrayal as though it had been her own, her vivid imagination all too easily able to conceive the anguish her young mother must have known. And now she was being told that her father wasn’t dead at all, and that moreover, for the last eight years he had been searching desperately for her.
The story Charles Buccleugh revealed to her was almost too astonishing to be true. It appeared that, contrary to what her grandmother had told her, her father’s search for work had been genuine, and that, moreover, he had actually found a job in London. He had written to her mother, giving her the good news, and telling her that he would be coming home to collect her.
It was during that journey that he had been involved in the accident that her grandmother had claimed ended his life. He had been injured, quite badly, so badly that the hospital authorities hadn’t realised he was married until he himself was able to tell them.
Immediately they helped him to write a letter to her mother, telling her what had happened, but the reply he received to it came from her grandmother, informing him that both his wife and child were dead.
He had been too ill to leave the hospital to make the journey home, and a week later he had received another letter from his mother-in-law, advising him that the funerals had taken place and that she never wanted to see him again.
Stricken with grief himself, he could well appreciate that she must blame him for the tragedy, and gradually he had started to rebuild his own life. He had always wanted to be an artist, and with the compensation money he received for the accident he had gone out to Portugal to paint.
Several years later he had remarried—a widow with two children of her own, and then by the most amazing of coincidences he had bumped into an old acquaintance from his home town, who was holidaying on the Algarve with his family. It was from him that he learned that he had a daughter, but by that time her grandmother was dead, and Shelley had gone through a series of foster parents, and despite all his efforts he had been unable to trace her.
Now he was dead, and apparently it had been his dearest wish that somehow his lost daughter was found, hence the advertisement in the paper.
‘There is a bequest to you in his will,’ Charles Buccleugh had told her, ‘but you’ll have to get in touch with his Portuguese solicitors to find out about that. We’re only acting on their instructions to find you, or rather on the instructions of his stepson, the Conde Jaime y Felipe des Hilvares.’
Shelley had raised her eyebrows a little at the title, although she permitted herself to show no great degree of surprise or shock. Under the calm exterior she was showing the solicitor, she was still trying to come to terms with the fact that her grandmother had deliberately withheld the truth from her. She had long ago come to recognise that fact that her grandmother disliked the male sex, but to discover that she had deliberately lied to her about her father’s death was something Shelley was finding it very hard to accept.
All those wasted years…
She said the words out loud without being aware that she had done so as she drove through yet another dusty village. In front of her the road forked, one fork ribboning down towards the coast and the sea she could see glittering under the hot sun, the other reaching higher into the hills.
This was the fork she had to take. It would lead her eventually to the home of the Conde, and presumably the rest of his family. Her family…
All those years when she had ached for a family of her own, a real family, believing she ached for the impossible, when all the time… A different woman would have wept for all that might have been, but that was not Shelley’s way.
As a young child she had been too acutely aware of the fact that in her grandmother’s eyes she was somehow tainted with the blood of her father, and had learned young to hide her feelings and her pain. What she felt now was beyond relief in easy tears. It was too anguished, too tormented with all that might have been.
All those years when she might have known her father and had not. She wasn’t really interested in whatever it was he had left her in his will; that wasn’t what brought her to Portugal. No, what she had come for was to learn about the man who had been her father.
Had he too known this aching anguish that now possessed her? This mingling of bitter resentment and helpless compassion for the woman who had so deliberately kept them apart?
A signpost warned her that she must turn off for her destination, the road running between rows of well-tended vines. Her stepbrother was a wine producer, or so Charles Buccleugh had told her. This could well be his land. Was he, she wondered, as regimented and formal as his vines?
All she knew about her father’s second family was that his stepson was older than she was and his stepdaughter younger. It had been a surprise to discover that her stepmother was half English. What sort of woman would be attracted to a Portuguese conde and a penniless English artist? An unpleasant thought struck her. Could her father have married for money?
She shivered slightly, pushing the thought away. Hadn’t she already decided that it was foolish to prejudge the situation? She knew nothing about her step-family or the life her father had lived here in Portugal apart from the fact that he had continued to paint. Charles Buccleugh had known that much at least. Indeed, he had seemed almost amused by her own tentative questioning on this point, although she didn’t know why.
It had been the Portuguese solicitors in Lisbon who had informed her that her stepbrother wished her to travel to his home. Although his request had seemed a little high-handed, she had been due some leave, and there was no reason why, if she found her step-family in the slightest degree uncongenial, she should not simply get into her car and drive home.
The mingling of anticipation and dread she was experiencing was an unfamiliar sensation. She didn’t normally allow herself to be so troubled by ‘nerves’, but for once her notorious self-control seemed to be deserting her.
The road crested a small hill, and she caught her breath in shocked delight as she had her first glimpse of her destination.
Below her, nestling in the curve of the hills, lay a collection of buildings whose whitewashed walls and terracotta tiled roofs should have looked untidy, but instead looked entrancingly picturesque. So much so, in fact, that Shelley found