Distant Choices by Brenda Jagger Read Free Book Online

Hepplefield, my dear, for a while before the wedding. Quite ghastly. Although Mr Stangway’s village of High Grange is rather delightful …’
    Oriel had not found it so. Not really a village at all, in her eyes, with the dark smudge of industrial Hepplefield visibly looming in the distance and Low Grange Colliery only just hidden by a screen of low hills and wide-spreading chestnut trees. The sky, to the south, pierced by a growing line of factory chimneys and stained an unhealthy, sulphurous yellow by the smoke they generated so that even on days of sun and high white cloud to the north – beyond the grouse moors of Lord and Lady Merton – the direction of Hepplefield, would seem a foggy day.
    â€˜Oh dear,’ Evangeline had murmured. ‘But then – I suppose this is the price one pays for progress. And all that comes with it. But the garden is just as I remember it – thank heaven the wall is so very high. Only look at the peacocks on the lawn. And the house is lovely. Well – Oriel, darling – isn’t it?’
    Uncomfortable, Oriel thought, on the occasion of her first visit – some few weeks before her mother’s wedding – when, in her best ice-blue silk with its watered-silk sash and ribbons, she had sat, a restrained guest, in her father’s drawing-room, facing the hostility of his sisters; Miss Maud Stangway who, she quickly guessed, would have preferred death by torment to speaking one true word of welcome; and Mrs Saint-Charles, ‘Miss Letty’the servants still called her, who talked of nothing but the brilliance, the virtues, the golden prospects of her own eldest son.
    A fussy, faded, fidgety little woman, Oriel had judged ‘Miss Letty’, her flowered mousseline dress several shades too light for her and several sizes too big, her thin hair arranged, around her ageing countenance, in a brave attempt at the girlish ringlets of thirty years ago, her expression absent, not quite paying attention to anything one said to her until suddenly, her ears catching the sound they had been straining for, she clasped her hands ecstatically together and cried out, ‘Here is Quentin – my son.’ As if he had been the sole purpose of their visit, the one, indeed the only person who could possibly be thought worth waiting for.
    To his mother, Letty Saint-Charles, disappointed in her life and with little faith in her husband, her son Quentin was that person, her eyes very clearly seeing no one else from the moment he entered the room, her ears rejecting every voice but his, her mind aware of nothing but the impression he was creating. While even the sharp, shrewd eyes of his aunt, Miss Maud Stangway, were observed to be glowing with a satisfaction deep enough to merit the name of pride.
    â€˜This is Quentin ,’ said Letty breathlessly, meaning ‘ My Quentin. My hope for the future. My pride and joy.’
    â€˜My first nephew,’ said Maud, meaning just as clearly ‘The eldest male of the Stangway line, after Matthew who will not live forever. And after Letty’s husband, who doesn’t count. The head of the family, therefore, in due course, if I have my way.’ And she had smiled, very far from pleasantly, first at Evangeline who had long passed her final hope of bearing a son, and then at Oriel, the girl-child it could not possibly be worth her brother Matthew’s while to publicly acknowledge.
    So this was Quentin.
    Evangeline had offered a languid hand. ‘Delighted – charmed – dear Quentin. So like your father …’
    â€˜Like Rupert? Oh no – I hardly think that …’ cried Letty in anguish.
    â€˜Possibly,’ Maud said crisply. ‘But with the Stangway nature …’
    â€˜Not the name, though,’ murmured Evangeline so faintly, in such the barest whisper that, unless one particularly wished to do so, one had no need to hear.
    â€˜How do you do, Mr