A village secret, p.1
A Village Secret, page 1
Also by Julie Houston
Goodness Grace and Me
The One Saving Grace
An Off-Piste Christmas
Looking for Lucy
Coming Home to Holly Close Farm
A Village Affair
Sing Me a Secret
A Village Vacancy
A Family Affair
A VILLAGE SECRET
Julie Houston
AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS
www.ariafiction.com
First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Julie Houston, 2022
The moral right of Julie Houston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781801101905
ISBN (E): 9781788549820
Cover design © Jessie Price
Illustration © Robyn Neild
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
Contents
Welcome Page
Prologue
ACT 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
ACT 2
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Act 3
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
The Final Act
Chapter 35
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
PROLOGUE
November 2020
‘Jen? I’m so desperately sorry you’ve had to sit through all this. All this utter rubbish that’s come out, in there, this afternoon.’ Laurie Lewis, my husband of sixteen years, ran down the steps and through the milling crowd towards me, pulling me towards him, desperate to protect me from the melee that was insistent on reaching out greedy, intrusive arms and hands in my direction.
‘You know, don’t you Jen?’ Laurie was vehement, pulling my face up towards his own, those incredible navy eyes of his blazing into mine, despite the crowd moving in on us. ‘I love you? Will always love you? That all this…’ he gestured an arm to the seething throng determined to reach its goal, ‘…means nothing. It’s you and me that mean everything…’ He broke off, arms still around me as the media reached us.
‘What do you think of the verdict, Jennifer?’
‘Did you know about all of this, Jen? What do you think about it all…?’
I batted away the intruding mikes and cameras, blindly pushing my way through the crowd, while Neville Sanderson, Laurie’s advocate, urged me none too gently towards the waiting car.
Neville stopped briefly, almost toppling from the wet and slippery leaf-strewn pavement into the road as the media surged forwards, on and around him like a baying pack of wolves. He was about to address the reporters, when Laurie himself pushed forwards and, arm wrapped protectively around me once more, began to speak. ‘This whole trial has caused enormous damage to myself and my family. My whole reputation has been besmirched, but we’re not leaving it there. This decision will be appealed…’ Laurie paused… ‘and we will fight on to show that I am, in fact, innocent of all I’ve been accused of here in court today…’
ACT 1
1
September 1999
‘I’m up here, Dad: East Range, staircase I up on Angel Court.’ I actually laughed at the expression on my dad’s face at the thought of his having to carry all my suitcases, bin liners, bags and other paraphernalia needed for my final year studying English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.
‘Aren’t you glad to be back in college rooms again instead of that awful house you were renting last year?’ Dad hauled in as much as he could in one go while my mum brought up the rear with a couple of black bin bags, one already split and in danger of spilling its contents of bras and knickers onto the floor of the double-set room I’d been allocated through the main ballot the previous term. Jeremy, my only brother, and roped in to help when he just wanted to be at home with his mates playing football, was plugged into his Sony Walkman and being absolutely no help with the bags. Or anything else.
‘Totally glad.’ Struggling with a mountain of duvet, pillows and bed linen, I dropped the stuff onto the floor before bouncing on the bed in order to ascertain its springs. ‘God, I reckon there’s been a whole load of others before me on this bed. Mind you, a veritable oasis of comfort compared to that dreadful bed I endured on Roxburgh Road last year.’
‘I’m glad you’re out of that place, Jenny.’ Dad frowned. ‘I worried about you all the time while you were living there. It was such an awfully dark and dismal road with those back entrances where anyone could have been waiting to jump out at you.’
‘Dad, stop treating me like a little girl.’ I tried again to find some bounce in the bed but without much success.
‘I’m not, darling. I just think, if you’re at Cambridge, you should be taking full advantage of living in these fabulously historic buildings, instead of some dingy backstreet terrace. Making the most of being right here, in the midst of it all.’
‘You know your father never got over ending up at a Midlands poly rather than a university.’ Mum laughed. ‘Just indulge him a bit, Jen. Let him live the dream with you a while longer.’
‘I think he’s done alright for himself despite that, don’t you? And he’s got three years of Jeremy being somewhere to indulge himself from next year.’ The three of us glanced at my seventeen-year-old brother who was now slumped, eyes closed, in the one somewhat tired looking armchair, and laughed.
‘I’ve bought you one of these new mattress toppers,’ Mum said, rummaging around in a bin liner as I jumped off the bed and wandered over to look at the view from my window, hoping to get a glimpse of the Trinity College clock, Chapel Fountain or the statue of Henry VIII.
I was over the moon I’d been allocated Great Court for my final year at Cambridge. I loved the feeling of actually living within the history of the place, to be a part of what was reputed to be the largest enclosed courtyard in Europe, completed in the early seventeenth century.
Disappointed that I couldn’t see the actual Chapel Fountain itself, I was about to turn back to the room and suggest Jeremy might like to get the hell off my bed – where he’d now moved himself to – and make himself useful, when I both heard and saw a crowd of students gathered in the court below. I was immediately drawn to the dark head of the taller of the two men whose arm was thrown nonchalantly round the shoulders of a tiny brunette. ‘Lucky girl,’ I thought wistfully as the dark-haired man, obviously sensing he was under scrutiny, looked directly up at my window. He apparently didn’t see anything of interest and immediately gave all his attention back to the girl at his side, turning her towards himself and kissing her so thoroughly I felt myself grow quite hot with lust.
Had I finally found Byron?
Two years previously, after A-Levels and wildly excited about leaving home and taking up the offer of three years at Cambridge to study English Literature, I’d taken the usual flight with my parents and Jeremy in order to spend the summer at our house in Kefalonia. Three weeks in, and bored with the premise of yet another day sitting under the relentless, seemingly inexhaustible heat of the Greek August sun, I’d decided I needed some time to myself and had taken the early morning three-hour ferry and bus ride from the island across the water to Missolonghi. I’d crossed to the mainland lots of times before of course, but always accompanied by my parents and Jeremy, who they’d inevitably had to entice with promises of ice cream or coke in order to get him to visit the historical sites for which Missolonghi was famous. Now, with a new sense of freedom and independence, I looked across at the breath-taking natural landscape of the mainland, feeling the hot late-morning breeze in my hair as the ferry creaked its way slowly into port.
English Literature had always been my main love, but History came a close second and that morning, suffused with the hot Greek sun and the heady tang of lemon balm, fresh bread and coffee fighting for precedence, I fell in love.
With a two-hundred-year-old man.
Well, to be accurate, a man who had been dead alm
I made the return ferry journey back to Kefalonia a different girl – no, I told myself, a sensually aroused woman – determined, once I got to Cambridge in the following weeks, to find a Byron of my own. And how fortuitous, I sighed deliciously to myself, that Byron had actually himself been at Cambridge. And at Trinity too. It was an omen, I knew.
*
Despite constantly searching for my own living manifestation of Byron, I was, it seemed, set to be disappointed on that score. My first two years at Trinity College passed like any other student’s there. I made new friends, had several affairs, broke a couple of hearts – including that of the mainstay of the Cambridge Blues, Beau O’Farrell from Texas. Bloody daft name, I’d thought, as I finished the relationship after six months, much to my parents’ chagrin – they’d adored him more than I ever had. At the end of each term, I took back to Berkshire not only the mandatory piles of dirty washing, but also a disappointment that my heart had yet to be captured by a living embodiment of the Byron oil paintings that had so entranced me in the museum in Missolonghi: the mad, bad and dangerous to know lover I so longed for remained, two years on, simply a figment of my over-romanticised imagination.
I glanced across this new room of mine where my parents, totally unaware of this iconic moment in their daughter’s life, were bouncing a truculent – and unfortunately flatulent – Jeremy from the rigid single bed in order that Mum could try out the new mattress topper which she’d bought for a fortune in John Lewis the previous week. Mattress topper? I closed my eyes briefly, despairing at the very notion of such banal, everyday goings on when George, Lord Byron’s double, had just passed by outside my window.
‘Right, darling? Usual place for lunch is it, before we set off back down the M11?’ Dad picked up his car keys and wallet and smiled in my direction.
‘Fine, yes, lovely.’ I could feel myself almost at fever pitch to get lunch over with, say final farewells to my parents – who were always reluctant to let me go again after four months back in their company – and then sort myself out in my new room before setting out to find friends in adjacent courts. ‘Let’s go.’ I gave Jeremy, who was now slightly more animated at the mention of food, a sisterly punch on the arm to make sure he really was alive and, taking one final glance out of the window in the hope that Byron might still be under it, followed my parents and brother back down the stairs and into the early autumn sunshine.
Working in the City of London, my dad was often given recommendations for the best places to eat both in and outside of the capital and once I started at Trinity, and being a bit of a foodie himself, he had been more than willing to take up the recommendation suggested by one of his company’s accountants that they give Midsummer House, a newish restaurant on Midsummer Common right on the banks of the River Cam itself, a visit. With its elegant and spacious, light-drenched conservatory dining room, the Victorian villa had immediately become a firm favourite and was traditionally booked at the start of each new term that I was taken back to university.
Both Dad and Jeremy would have preferred to drive the distance to the restaurant but Mum, wanting to stretch her legs before the two-hour drive back to Berkshire, and I, desperate to bump into Byron, as I’d now dubbed the beautiful dark-haired man, both insisted we walk the three-quarter of a mile route via St John’s Street.
‘Are you looking for someone?’ Mum asked as she and I walked behind the other two. ‘Your head’s going left and right like a dyslexic nodding dog.’
‘I was hoping I might see Gudrun or Annabelle,’ I lied, forcing myself to look ahead and stop this daft searching for someone who probably, when it came down to it, looked nothing like Byron at all. I’d only seen the top of his head and, briefly, his face, but the way he’d been kissing that girl had sent shivers right the way down to my toes and back up to where it really mattered.
The maître d’ greeted Mum and Dad like long lost family, ushering us to our reserved table in the choicest part in the restaurant, flapping starched white napkins like starter flags and generally making us feel like we were the only people that mattered. Even Jeremy deigned to unplug himself from his music, his seventeen-year-old boy’s appetite trumping his desire to appear cool and laidback.
‘I love this place,’ Dad beamed, as he always did. ‘You’ll have to make sure you get that place at Cambridge, next year, Jeremy. I want at least another three years of all this once your sister leaves…’ He broke off from perusing the menu as the restaurant door opened and six people walked in to accompanying laughter and banter, rendering Jeremy’s – not overly polite – retort to Dad inaudible. The four of us looked up, as did everyone else in the restaurant, and my heart started hammering. He was here. Byron was actually here and every bit as gorgeous as I’d thought from that very first glance up at me from below my college room window. He still had his arm around the incredibly tiny girl who was apparently confident enough in her own – beautifully tanned – body to wrap it in tight satsuma-orange pedal pushers topped with a white corset-type bustier. Only someone as slim and self-assured as this dark-haired beauty could get away with an outfit like that. The pair were very obviously the main act while the other four – three men and one other girl – were merely walk-on attendants. As my heart continued to hammer, I found I was unable to take anything more than shallow breaths and, for a moment, actually wondered if I could possibly be having a heart attack. I buried my crimson face in my glass of water while attempting to breathe normally once more.
‘What’s up with you?’ Jeremy was staring as only a post-adolescent can stare. ‘Seen someone you know? Someone you fancy?’ He lowered his voice, ‘Someone you’ve shagged?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Jeremy, behave yourself.’ Mum, catching this last retort, slapped my brother round the head with the heavy menu.
I peered over my own menu at the laughing, chattering party of six opposite, willing Byron to turn so I could examine his features more clearly. When he did, stroking the brunette’s face sensually with a lightly tanned hand, I found I couldn’t look away and when, sensing again he was under strict scrutiny, he turned slightly in my own direction, I blushed scarlet once more, diving behind the maroon leather-bound menu, the words swimming before my eyes in a maelstrom of confusion.
On my third attempt at saving all his features for future reference – the sharply chiselled cheekbones, the longish, black curling hair, the startlingly navy eyes – Mum glanced from me and then back to the object of my scrutiny.
‘Your Byron at last, darling?’ she whispered, taking in the beautiful dark-haired man as well as the obvious effect he was having on me. While Mum had been fully aware of my long-running passion for George, Lord Byron, she’d always been mightily relieved, she said, the man was a fantasy from the realms of history and actually dead, unable to wreak havoc on her innocent daughter. This new Byron, she eventually admitted, this imposter, this flesh and blood young stud stroking the arm of the girl on the opposite table, had appeared a very different matter: very much alive and, from the quivering mass that I had become, quite possibly nothing but trouble ahead.
*
