B004D4Y20I EBOK by Lulu Taylor Read Free Book Online

unless it was with at least two bottles of the famous fragrance, which was lavishly sprinkled over her pillows wherever she slept.
    Tea Rose, Tea Rose
, thought Jemima idly.
It’s funny how much that smell has shaped my life. And yet – I can’t stand it
.
    It was the smell of her mother’s bedroom, that pink satin creation with its swags and swathes and glass and crystal.
    Really, Mother was born about fifty years too late. She would have loved being a social butterfly of the twenties instead of a woman out of step with her time in the seventies and eighties
.
    While the rest of the world was embracing power dressing and shoulder pads, eating in glamorous restaurants and jetting round the world with no care for the consequences, Yolanda and Cecil Trevellyan were living a life that could have been from fifty years earlier. Cecil ran the company, Yolanda ran the home. They were childless until miraculously, it seemed, at the age of forty, Yolanda became pregnant with Tara. Two more girls quickly followed, with Poppy arriving when her mother was forty-six. She had thought she had begun the menopause and didn’t realise she was pregnant until six months had passed.
    The Trevellyans were torn between sadness that they had no sons and delight that they had any children at all. Their daughters would be brought up to be strong, successful women who could run the company when their turn came.
    But the parents forgot one important thing: the girls had their own personalities, their own dreams and desires. The forty-year age gap loomed between the parents and their children, between a mother who had been old-fashioned for her own generation, and her daughters of the eighties and nineties.
    When did it all start to go wrong?
wondered Jemima.
Was it Jecca? Was she the problem? Ha! If only it were that simple. Who am I kidding? It was wrong from the start. It must have been. Oh, Daddy … why? Why did it all have to happen? We only wanted you to love us, or to show us that you loved us. Was that so very hard?
    The Jaguar pulled under the great stone gate with its pretty hexagonal lodges on either side, and rolled smoothly down the long drive. The drive at Loxton was impressive but it was nothing like Herne’s. This was true English grandeur: a leafy avenue lined with ancient trees surrounded by lush green parkland and at the end, the house rising softly upwards, so natural in its landscape that it seemed as if it had always been there.
    Jemima remembered her first glimpse of the house. It had been at dawn. She and Harry had driven from a ball together, three hours in Harry’s ancient Roadster with only a strapless ball gown and some Gina heels to protect her from the cold – oh, yes, and Harry’s dinner jacket. The house stood cloaked in mist against a dawn sky. The rising summer sun had quilted the sky with pink and gold and gilded the ancient walls and dozens of brick chimneys with a rosy light.
    ‘Oh my God!’ Jemima had exclaimed. ‘What a magnificent house!’
    ‘It’s a castle, actually,’ Harry had said with a grin, turning to her. She had been in love with him then, pure, fizzing, tummy-turning-over love. It was hard to remember how it had felt, now that their relationship had deteriorated so badly.
    She’d loved Herne then, before she’d realised what it really and truly meant. It had looked like a fairytale, the kind of castle the heroine is taken to at the end of the story, where she will live happily ever after – but that was a disguise. The truth was that Herne was a burden; it was a parasite, ready to suck away the lifeblood of anyone who lived there, as they grappled with what caring for this great lump of stone, brick and glass entailed.
    And yet Harry loved it with a passion that he’d never been able to show for her.
    The car pulled up in front of the house, its windows glowing in the darkness. The door opened, illuminating the stone steps in front, and the housekeeper came down to greet them.
    ‘Lord