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‘Good news, Master Jethro—Harry’s back on his feet again and ready for work.’ She smiled up at him, and at six-two he towered over her short, round person. To her he would always be Master Jethro, even when he was ninety. ‘And we can’t thank you enough for taking over. Harry was so worried. He was sure his clients would go elsewhere, the business being so new.’
It was barely six months old, started when the older man had been made redundant from the local factory. Harry had no intention of living off the state, not while he could work. Harry had his pride.
‘I was only too happy to do it, you know that.’ He watched as she watered the last of the pots. A week ago that hadn’t been true. He’d do anything for Nanny Briggs, but that didn’t mean that spending a week cleaning windows could be viewed as anything other than a pain. But he’d done what he’d seen as his duty, and duty obviously had its own rewards because he’d met Alissa again—or Allie, as he’d learned she preferred to be called.
‘You’ll be ready for a cup of tea. Wash your hands in the scullery while I make it.’ She headed into the house and Jethro followed. ‘Harry’s having his bath now. You can have yours before supper. I’ve made a shepherd’s pie. It always was one of your favourites.’
Jethro went to do as he was told. Some things would never change, and the dishing up of nursery food was one of them! But he grinned as he scrubbed up in the scullery, listening to the comforting rattle of china coming from the small but scrupulously clean kitchen.
She’d married Harry Ford when they were both in their fifties, but to him she would always be Nanny Briggs, the linchpin of his early years. The only mothering he’d ever had had come from her, his own mother having been too interested in enjoying herself to be bothered with either him or his younger sister Chloe.
He rubbed the moisture from his hands and face on a scratchy towel—Nanny Briggs didn’t believe in pampering—and walked back into the kitchen smelling of strong carbolic soap.
‘Drink your tea before it gets cold and tell me what your plans are,’ she invited. ‘I feel guilty enough as it is about breaking into your holiday, so I don’t want to hear you’re heading back to London, or Amsterdam or wherever. You work too hard.’
He pulled a chair out from the square scrubbed pine table and sat, long legs stretched out in front of him, smiling because she looked so stern. Then the smile faded because she looked something else, he thought with a pang: tired, careworn, more elderly than middle-aged.
His plans? Harry’s welcome recovery from a bout of summer flu left him free to go on his way, to get on with his life and to take that well-earned break at his cottage on the Shropshire/Welsh border, if he still wanted to.
He didn’t think he’d bother, because Harry’s recovery also left him free to step up his pursuit of the seemingly unwilling Allie. Unwittingly, he glowered at his empty cup. He also needed to do something more for Nanny Briggs and Harry. He had always thought of Nanny Briggs as being indestructible, but she wasn’t. It was time she started to take life more easily, and spent her remaining years free of financial worry.
‘I thought I might stay on with you for another couple of days, if that’s OK with you.’ He watched her closely as she reached for his empty cup and refilled it. ‘There’s a business proposition I’d like to put to Harry.’ And he’d figure out a way so it wouldn’t smell of charity.
Allie paid off the cab and stood on the pavement, staring up at her apartment block in a daze. She, who despised liars, had just told the biggest whopper in the history of the world!
Despite the cloud cover that blanketed London her skin felt as if it were on fire, perspiration beading her short upper lip, all her bones wobbling. She didn’t know how she was going to make it into the building.
But she managed it somehow, feeling distinctly queasy as the lift whisked her up to her floor, and practically hysterical when it took her a good two minutes to fit her key into the lock.
Which served her right for telling the solicitor such a barefaced lie!
Tottering into her small, minimally furnished sitting room, she told herself to calm down, and fast. She had very little time to turn the lie into truth, and getting hysterical was wasting it.
Walking out of her high-heeled pumps, she headed for the bedroom, releasing her shimmering blonde hair from the pins that had held it in a sophisticated coil at the nape of her long, elegant neck.
Out of the classy suit she’d worn for the meeting, she pulled on a pair of old blue jeans and a baggy T-shirt. Now she felt more like herself and less like a super-model, and that helped the calming down process.
Cleaning off her make-up, she reviewed the situation objectively, recalling her initial mild curiosity when she’d complied with her late uncle’s solicitor’s request for a meeting.
‘Perhaps he left you something in his will?’ Laura, her mother, had suggested. She never said her brother-in-law’s name; ‘Fabian’ was a word that hadn’t crossed her lips since what had happened several years ago. ‘Maybe towards the end he felt guilty.’ Her voice hadn’t carried much conviction.
‘Pigs might fly!’ Allie had smiled into her mother’s deep blue eyes, so like her own. ‘Knowing him, he’s probably left me a shovel to dig my grave with!’
So, only mildly curious, she’d broken into the long summer break she’d given herself in order to spend time with Laura, whose deepening depression was worrying her, combining the meeting with Uncle Fabian’s solicitor with an overnight stay at her modest London apartment and a working dinner with her agent.
Leaving the cramped terraced house on the outskirts of Shrewsbury, which Laura now shared with her sister Fran, Allie had caught the connecting train to Euston and spent the journey doing sums in her head.
A year ago she’d been on the point of giving up a modelling career that had seemed to be going nowhere when she’d suddenly hit the big time. Since that day she’d been saving hard, and now she had enough to put a hefty deposit on a home in the country for Laura and Fran to share.
Close enough to town for Fran to commute to her job in the council offices, with a large enough garden for Laura to indulge the passion for plants that had developed during the years they’d spent at Studley, when she’d transformed the neglected gardens into paradise. Her mother would never be remotely happy living in town; she needed open spaces and birdsong.
So, providing the high-paying assignments continued to come her way—and at just twenty-two she still had a few good years ahead of her—she could take on a mortgage and make her mother a generous allowance. She hated having to see her taking on any cleaning work she could get just to pay her way.
Which was why she’d taken this break from international catwalks and photographic studios. Apart from recouping her energies after a year of unremitting hard work, she knew she would need time to persuade her mother to accept the money. Only last night, after Fran had gone to bed, she’d broached the subject.
‘I refuse to let you spend your money on me. It’s sweet of you, darling, but I can’t let you do it.’ Laura’s eyes had misted with the tears that now never seemed far away, but Allie had insisted.
‘The money wouldn’t be wasted; property’s a good investment. And as for the allowance—what else have I got to spend my money on?’
