A Reason For Being. Penny Jordan

‘I’ll go upstairs and unpack. I take it my old room is still empty?’

      She saw from the look on Marcus’s face that he hadn’t anticipated her question, and moreover that he was shocked by her decision to stay. Well, let him be. Everything she had just heard in this room confirmed her feeling that Susie would never have written so desperately to her if she had not genuinely felt she needed help.

      At Isobel’s mention of a boarding-school, warning signs ten feet high had sprung up in Maggie’s brain. In the old days, the housekeeper had kept a motherly eye on Susie and Sara, and Marcus himself had taken on the role of parenting them. A deep bond had always existed between the two little girls.

      Maggie had had the opportunity to get to know Ruth, Marcus’s mother, very well, after her own parents died. She had married very young for the first time, and Marcus had been born when she was just eighteen.

      By all accounts she had been very much in love with her older husband, a major in the army. He had been killed in action when Marcus was ten and, after all those years of being alone with his mother, it must have been very difficult for him to adjust when she eventually married again, especially when the two girls were born. He had been an adult when Susie arrived; there was a twenty-one-year gap between them, and Maggie wondered if he had ever felt any resentment. If so, she had never seen any evidence of it.

      In those early days of her uncle’s second marriage, she and her parents had only been infrequent visitors at Deveril House, and Marcus himself had been away at university. It was only when her parents died that she had come to be more familiar with her uncle and his family, and certainly in those days she had discerned no resentment of his two half-sisters in Marcus’s manner towards them; rather, he had been very much the indulgent older brother. As he had been to her…only their relationship had been very different. She had clung to Marcus after she had overcome the shock of her parents’ death, seeing him as someone she could rely on…someone who wouldn’t abandon her…someone who cared for her. If only things had stayed that way. If only she had continued to look upon him as an older brother-cum-father instead of as a man.

      It made her uncomfortable even now to think of the adolescent fantasies she had woven around him, fantasies she had pushed to the back of her mind until Isobel’s catty tongue had recalled them.

      Fantasies which had eventually led to the destruction of her whole world. Fantasies which had caused scars she bore even now. Fantasies which had caused her such pain…such guilt…and not just her. Marcus, too, had suffered. She could never allow herself to forget that. She wondered if Isobel knew that he had been engaged before…that he had contemplated marrying someone else. She realised with a slight sense of shock that she hadn’t even known the name of her rival…hadn’t even allowed Marcus to tell them exactly who it was he was getting engaged to; she had been too shocked, too hurt to do any more than protest that he couldn’t, he mustn’t mean what he was saying—not when he loved her!