Mistaken Mistress. Margaret Way

at small children playing on the swings that Owen began to relive the past….

      “My story, the central tragedy of my life is no means unique, Eden,” he told this beautiful young woman gravely. “It’s a story as old as time. Star-crossed lovers. Boy from the wrong side of the tracks meets and falls desperately in love with the adored only child of a rich man. You know your grandfather. He was, and I suppose remains, a man who had very exacting standards. Penniless young men of no family had no place in his scheme of things. Despite that, for long tumultuous months Cassandra and I were lovers. But in the end the pressure from your grandfather was all too much for Cassandra. She’d been reared like a princess. She couldn’t contend with a run-away marriage to me. I had absolutely nothing to offer her at that time. Save my love.”

      “It wasn’t enough?” Eden asked, the tears shimmering in her eyes.

      “Your mother did love me, Eden. I want you to know that. But your grandfather and security won out.”

      “How sad. My mother was always sad.” Eden stared sightlessly at the playing children. There was more. She just knew it.

      “As was I.” Owen sighed deeply. “It has been an unparalleled grief to me all these long years to know my beautiful Cassandra was carrying a baby when she married her store dummy.”

      Eden was electrified. “My God, what are you saying?” It came out like a plea. For a long moment she couldn’t speak until Owen put his arm around her shoulders.

      “I’m saying, my dearest girl, that baby was you. Had I known your mother was pregnant to me at the time, things would have been very different.”

      “You mean she didn’t tell you?” Eden shook her head, shocked and aghast.

      “Not for three long years into her marriage. I have a letter to show you. You will know her handwriting. It confirms what I’m saying. The letter was sent to my mother who died without even knowing she had a granddaughter. Cassandra couldn’t trace me. I was mad with grief after she married. I felt crushed by her betrayal. I packed up and left home. I went north of Capricorn to frontier country. My mother always regarded Cassandra with some trepidation. She foresaw what would happen.”

      “Yet she sent you the letter?”

      Owen’s voice was gentle. “She had great integrity. I never told her about you because I knew she wouldn’t have left things alone. She was the wise one. Your mother begged me in the letter to keep her secret just like the confessional. Though it opened the door to unimaginable pain, I did it. Cassandra could always manipulate me. She convinced me you were happy and secure. So was she. As some kind of sop, probably to diffuse the inflammatory nature of her revelation, she told me she had named you after my mother, of all people. Your grandmother, Eden Carter.”

      Eden was silent, trying to absorb her shock. “This is unbelievable,” she managed finally. “I can’t take it in.”

      “I understand. I understand all about pain, suffering and shock. Read the letter.” Owen withdrew the yellowed much-read, much-folded pages from his inside breast pocket. He passed it to Eden….

      As she read it her eyes became so filled with tears she had to pass it to Owen to finish aloud. How had her mother ever done him such a terrible wrong? Had she no courage? Whatever had persuaded her to remain with Redmond Sinclair? The marriage, so badly foundered, had never been happy but as a highly “social” couple they had maintained a public fiction. She herself had missed out on a father’s love. She could feel it pouring out of this man she now knew to be her real father. Redmond Sinclair had tried hard to find a place in his heart for her but he never could get the portals open. Such love as he had, more like obsession, had been reserved for her mother.

      It was a terrible story and they all had paid for it. Even her grandfather had been worn down, she now realised, by a sense of guilt. In persuading his daughter to marry “one of their own kind” he had committed her to a life of unhappiness and unfulfillment. A charade.

      “You know there’s been some speculation my mother’s death wasn’t an accident?”

      Eden turned her head to look directly into her real father’s fine dark eyes.

      Owen looked off abruptly. “Cassandra would never have left you.”

      “You didn’t know her all these long years. I expect my mother changed greatly from the girl you knew. She was a sad woman. But so gentle and beautiful, everyone loved her. The man I called Father all my life certainly did.”

      Owen’s rugged features hardened to granite. “I’m sorry, Eden. I don’t want to hear about him. Sinclair was the one Cassandra chose over me. From the look of him he hasn’t weathered the years well. He used to have a shock of golden hair. He was very handsome, very eligible, a promising lawyer. I never got past grade ten. I had to leave school before I was sixteen to learn a trade. There was little money in our house to go around. Today’s a different story. I’m a very rich man.”

      “Did you ever marry?” Eden asked, thinking of so many broken lives.

      Owen nodded. “I have a wife and child. A little boy called Robbie. Robert after my father. My wife, Delma—she has Italian blood—calls him Roberto.”

      “Then you’re happy.” She was glad.

      “I should be happy.” Owen frowned. “I would have been happy if I hadn’t had you and Cassandra perpetually on my mind. Often when I’m alone in my boat I have the habit of calling your name. Eden! My little girl. Sounds desolate, doesn’t it? It used to frighten the gulls away. But now by the grace of God I’ve found you. Cassandra’s tragedy has set us free.”

      They’d met regularly after that, a couple of times a month. Owen travelled from his home in far North Queensland to be with her. Such was the power of blood both found their relationship, though propelled forward at a great rate, an intensely accepting one. They talked easily and freely, both of them on the same wave length. In fact Eden had come to recognise she had inherited some of her father’s characteristics, even mannerisms, though she had grown up isolated from him. There was so much for them both to discover. They enjoyed hours and hours of discussions and confidences as they pieced together the past. Owen was determined she come to live with him, to be family. But Owen in his exultation at finding a lost daughter was running the risk of alienating his wife and the mother of his son, her half brother, Robbie. It was obvious in keeping his friend and partner, Lang Forsyth, in the dark he had done some considerable damage already. But Owen couldn’t be persuaded to speak out prematurely any more than she could. Both of them needed time to turn their lives around.

      While her relationship with Owen blossomed, her troubled relationship with the man she had called “Father” for all of her life deteriorated to the point Eden felt Redmond Sinclair no longer had anything to say to her. It was time to move out. Not hastily. People were talking enough already about her mother’s untimely death. She had no wish to cause Redmond extra pain and embarrassment. Six months after her mother’s passing it mightn’t seem such a desertion.

      She hadn’t confided in her grandfather. Had she any need to? Her grandfather doted on her almost as much as he had doted on her mother, but he had become so much frailer Eden held back from upsetting him in any way. He surely knew the truth. She was convinced he did. Her grandfather was a very clever, astute man. He and her mother had been so close; her mother would have poured out the whole sorry story. Then there was the time factor, though no doubt she had been passed off as premature. The depth of her grandfather’s grief—he was inconsolable—began to persuade Eden he had profound regrets at the way his daughter’s relatively short life had turned out.

      Eden rose from the armchair and returned to the bedroom where she finished dressing. She was looking forward to lunching with her friend, Carly. They had gone to school and university together. Like her, Carly had taken a degree in Law and joined a firm specialising in Family Law. Carly would have to get back to work, but Eden had taken accumulated leave from her grandfather’s firm not only to maximize the amount of time she could spend with Owen, but to spare Redmond Sinclair the painful memories the