Her Hand in Marriage. Jessica Steele

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      Jessica Steele

      Her Hand in Marriage

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER ONE

      ROMILLIE opened her eyes to a bright sunshiny morning and knew it was going to be a good day. Wrong! Well, perhaps not totally. Her mother, a poor sleeper, was already up and about when Romillie went down the stairs.

      ‘Any plans for today?’ Romillie asked gently. Eleanor Fairfax had suffered for some years with general low spirits and feelings of inadequacy, but of late there were more good days than bad.

      ‘If this weather holds I thought I might do a spot of weeding or…’ she hesitated ‘…I might take a sketchpad outside.’

      Romillie’s spirits soared. Her mother was a professional artist—portraits mainly. She was truly gifted but had not so much as picked up a sketching pencil in an absolute age.

      ‘The forecast is good,’ Romillie answered lightly, taking a quick glance at her watch and getting up and taking her cereal bowl over to the kitchen sink. ‘Better be off. Don’t want to be late.’

      It was not far to the dental practice where she worked. But because she liked to return home in her lunch hour, and since her mother had given up driving, Romillie made the journey in her mother’s car.

      They lived in the village of Tarnleigh on the Oxfordshire and Berkshire borders. Her receptionist-telephonist job with Yardley, East, and—now—Davidson, was well within her capabilities. It was not a job she would have chosen to do, but it was convenient.

      Five years ago she had intended to go to university. But everything had suddenly gone catastrophic at home. She had been coming up to eighteen, her place at university assured, when her grandfather Mannion, her mother’s father and a man who had never had a day’s illness in his life, had suddenly died.

      She had been upset, her mother distraught. It had not ended there. They had always lived with Grandfather Mannion. Romillie’s father, despite his frequent absences, had lived with them, too.

      Her mother had adored Archer Fairfax and had put up with his womanising, his idleness, his spendthrift ways, making excuses for him whenever Grandfather Mannion would frown in his direction.

      Romillie had known her father had other women. She had seen him driving along one time with a pretty blonde by his side. And another time, when he was supposed to be in Northampton for a job interview, and she had been in the school coach some miles from home after playing in an away game hockey match, she had seen him arm in arm, with a brunette this time.

      He had returned home the next day, having not got the job but related that, after a very detailed and extensive interview, it had been felt that he was too well qualified for the job. Her mother had swallowed it all and Romillie just hadn’t had the heart to tell her that he had been nowhere near a job interview.

      But it became plain that Grandfather Mannion had been wise to his son-in-law in that when Archer Fairfax was of the opinion that he would now rule the roost, he discovered that his well-to-do father-in-law had left him not one penny. The bulk of his estate had gone to his daughter, Eleanor, with money left in trust for his granddaughter until she attained the age of twenty-five. The house, the large rambling house, had been left to Eleanor during her lifetime, or until she no longer required it, when it was then to be handed down to her daughter.

      There had been shouting matches before, mainly Romillie’s father roaring away when Grandfather Mannion was not around. But then, with no one there to keep him in check, Archer Fairfax had given his temper free rein. The consequence being that Eleanor, highly sensitive to begin with, shrank deeper and deeper into her shell. She lost heart, and gave up painting altogether.

      Romillie had tried to intervene, only to discover that instead of helping she had made things worse. As a child she had suffered bouts of sleepwalking—but that had not happened in a long, long while. The last time had been on the night before she had been due to leave for university. There had been another tremendous row that night, her father yelling, drowning out her mother’s cries of protest. Stressed and worried about leaving her mother with her bullying father, Romillie had gone to bed, only to awake the next morning to find that in her sleep she had got up and taken everything out from her suitcase. She knew then what she supposed she had known for some while—university, for the moment, was out.

      One year passed, and then two, and things in the Fairfax household did not get any better. Her mother became more and more reclusive and leant more and more on Romillie. University seemed as far away as ever. Romillie thought about getting a job but did not know how she could leave her.

      Grandfather Mannion’s money kept them afloat for three years, but, what with Eleanor giving in to her husband’s constant demands for money, at the end of those three years the money had gone.

      When the money went, so too did Archer Fairfax. Guiltily, Romillie had been glad to see him go, but it was he who had brought her mother to the state she was in. For the next year they struggled on, Archer Fairfax appearing frequently, to make sure he was not missing out on anything.

      And then out of the blue, one morning when Romillie and her mother were doing nothing in particular, Romillie had felt her mother’s eyes on her and had the feeling that something momentous was taking place.

      ‘What is it?’ she remembered asking, certain as she was that she was picking up some pretty gigantic vibes.

      Eleanor Fairfax had continued to look at her for some seconds more, and had then calmly enquired, ‘I wondered, Rom, would you mind very much if I divorced your father?’

      Wow! That was momentous! ‘I’ll get the car out and drive you to the lawyers, shall I?’ she’d volunteered.

      Oddly, once that decision had been made, Eleanor had seemed to gain some confidence. Archer Fairfax hadn’t liked it, did not like losing control, but Eleanor had remained firm. She’d still had her ‘off’ days, but she was no longer at rock bottom.

      She had not been able to resume her painting, though, and by then the need of an income had become a pressing need. Romillie knew then that university was definitely out. Instead she found herself a job.

      She could probably have found a more interesting job, one that paid better, but that would have meant working further afield. And the chief bonus of working so close to home was that because of her mother’s occasional ‘off’ days, she could return home at lunchtime.

      There was another bonus, too. Jeffrey Davidson—her boyfriend. He was the new junior partner at the dental practice, a replacement for the soon to be retired senior partner. Jeff had been with the firm only three months, and she had been going out with him for two of them, which was a long time for her. She liked him, and believed she might even be a little in love with him. He was a good dentist, considerate to his patients and staff, and understanding when, because of her dislike of leaving her mother on her own for too long, Romillie seldom stayed out late. Her mother, Romillie realised, seemed relieved and happy that she was ‘seeing someone’.

      So it was on that bright sunny April morning that Romillie parked her car and went swinging into the large old Victorian house that had been converted into a dental practice.

      She stowed her bag behind the receptionist’s desk and was taking her first call before she’d had chance to turn on her computer.

      It was eleven o’clock before she