The Eden Inheritance by Janet Tanner Read Free Book Online Page A

family.
    â€˜I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry if it upsets you. But I have to find out if this man is von Rheinhardt.’
    â€˜I see.’ Her breath came out on a sigh. ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t do it, Guy, but I think I understand.’ She paused, regaining control of herself. ‘ Would you like a drink? I’ve got a bottle of Glenfiddich in the chiffonier.’
    â€˜Yes, please.’
    â€˜To be honest,’ Kathryn said, ‘ I think we could both do with one.’
    After he had gone she sat staring into the fire until the last embers glowed and died.
    She had thought it was over, but it was not. No, correction, she had known it would never be over but she had learned to live with it. Now it was all going to begin again. Thirty years had gone by and she had a new life now, the life she had built for herself and for Guy in this quiet Hampshire village. A life that had revolved first around him and then around the pursuits that were all she wanted now – her little shop, her home, her garden. A life that had been spared to her in spite of all the odds. It was not the life she had envisaged for herself. But it had not been so bad. In the curiously acquiescent way of those who have lived through hell, lived more in a few brief years than some people live in a whole lifetime, she had accepted it and been grateful. She had Guy. She had seen him grow up, which was more than she had expected during those dark days. She had her independence, which she prized above all else. She had her memories, precious ones as well as the distressing ones which she had chosen to close her mind to.
    Now, suddenly, the chasm was threatening to open beneath her once more, the bolts on the dark door to the past that she had closed so firmly were scraping in their rusty housings.
    This man, this German of whom Guy had spoken, might not of course be von Rheinhardt. The odds must surely be stacked against it being him. Yet Kathryn had the most dreadful feeling that it was.
    The ogre had not been dead at all but merely sleeping. If Guy found him and managed to bring him to trial it would all come out, all the secrets she had fought to keep hidden. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now, except hope and pray.
    The last of the fire fizzed and died. Kathryn shivered slightly as she moved out of the aura of warmth it had thrown, collecting the empty glasses and taking them into her little kitchen for washing. But she wouldn’t do it tonight.
    As she passed the mirror in the tiny hall, wood-framed, slightly crazed, bought at one of her beloved auction sales because it suited the cottage, her reflection leaped up to meet her and for a moment it seemed she was looking not at her fifty-three-year-old self but at the girl she had once been, just as if what Guy had said was true and she had not changed at all. The soft light in the hall miraculously removed every trace of crow’s-foot and wrinkle, camouflaged the sprinkling of grey that was beginning to dull the bright golden brown of her hair at the temples, and she saw herself for a moment as she had looked then, all those years ago. Strange, she thought, that she should bear so few scars to tell the world of all she had been through. But then, she had been lucky. Others had not.
    Oh Guy, Guy, why won’t you leave it alone? she murmured to that other image, that other self. But the face in the mirror gave her back no answer other than the one he himself had given her.
    He would do what he had to do, for himself, for his father and for the dynasty of Savigny. That he did not realise the demons he might be unleashing, the fact that he might be doing a disservice to all concerned, was neither here nor there. Apart from telling him the whole unvarnished truth there was nothing more that she could do now, and she shrank from that prospect. The man might not, after all, be von Rheinhardt. If he was not she would have broken her silence to no