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Jemima shrugged. ‘What choice did she have? Who else was there? We are the only ones with the Trevellyan name, after all.’

  Tara turned round to face her sisters. Now she was flushed and her eyes sparkled feverishly. ‘But the old bitch couldn’t leave it at that, could she? Nothing is ever simple in her world. She couldn’t leave us the company and be damned! She had to add her condition – her nasty, twisted little sting in the tail.’

  ‘Yes. That did come as rather a surprise, I must admit.’ Jemima remembered the murmur of astonishment that had rippled across the room when Victor Goldblatt had added Yolanda’s interesting proviso.

  ‘I didn’t really understand,’ Poppy said helplessly. She went over to Jemima’s chair and knelt down next to it, looking up beseechingly. ‘I know it’s something awful and it had to do with … her.’

  Jemima looked down at her younger sister and stroked her hair gently. ‘It’s really quite simple, Pops. We’ve been given Trevellyan, lock, stock and barrel. But there’s a catch. If we don’t triple sales in exactly one calendar year, then we lose it.’

  Tara sniffed as she angrily wiped at her damp cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. How can she set us such an impossible task? How can we possibly do it?’

  Jemima looked up and stared at her frostily. ‘Because if we don’t, then Jecca gets it all.’

  5

  JEMIMA WENT DOWN the staircase, as outwardly calm and self-possessed as ever, even if inside she was seething. She saw her husband waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against a fine marble-topped cabinet and tinkering idly with the inlaid clock that sat on the top of it. Above him was a full-length, life-sized portrait of Yolanda Trevellyan, dressed in a long, floating gown, the family jewels glittering at her ears, neck, wrists and fingers. She was porcelain pale with the same colouring as Poppy: the green-flecked eyes and dark hair with glitters of chestnut.

  Bitch, thought Jemima as she glared at the impossibly perfect painted face. What a hollow, miserable existence you must have had, to wish this on your daughters.

  Harry looked up as he heard her descend. ‘All ready?’

  ‘Ready for what?’ snapped Jemima, simply because she was in the mood to be argumentative.

  ‘Ready to come home.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m going back to Herne?’

  ‘Well – aren’t you?’

  Jemima stood and faced him for a moment and then turned to inspect her reflection in the gilt-edged mirror opposite. ‘As it happens, yes. All my things are at Herne. But I’ll be packing up immediately to return to London.’

  Harry gazed at her impassively for a moment. ‘Will you stay the night?’

  ‘I haven’t decided. It depends on what time we get back.’

  ‘All right.’ He said nothing more but simply waited, watching as she took her hairbrush out of her Mulberry Agyness bag and ran it through her blonde hair.

  ‘I can’t think where my bloody hat is,’ she said. ‘I took it off after we got back from the church and put it down somewhere.’ She felt a sudden flash of fear as she remembered what she had done not long after they’d returned from the church. Had she given herself away somehow? She flicked a glance at Harry, who appeared not to have noticed anything.

  ‘It’ll turn up,’ he said.

  ‘I’m perfectly aware of that.’ It’s always like this, she thought with a twinge of sadness, always speaking in bitter, sharp little nothings to each other. ‘You must be feeling pretty damned pleased.’

  ‘About what?’

  Jemima laughed joylessly. ‘Oh come on, darling. What? About your nice little legacy from my dear dead mother. She certainly didn’t forget you, did she?’

  ‘I’m very grateful to your mother for her bequest. She understood very well what it entails to keep a place like Herne going, and how I need all the help I can get.’

  ‘Whereas I don’t, I suppose,’ hissed Jemima, turning round to look him in the eye. ‘Well, I can tell you here and now that I bloody well do. That place has sucked up hundreds of thousands of pounds of my money. And you may have noticed that I got nothing in that fucking will!’

  ‘Unless I fell asleep and missed something, I believe you inherited a third of the family company.’

  Jemima waved a hand angrily. ‘That’s not an inheritance, it’s a fucking test. It’s a typically cruel practical joke from beyond the grave. A nasty little poke in the ribs from Hell, where I’m quite sure Mother is sizzling away nicely as we speak. I don’t want to run the fucking company, I just want the allowance I’ve always received – and so will you, if you know what’s good for you and for Herne. A hundred thousand and a couple of paintings may seem like a tidy lot but you and I both know it won’t last long. What about the roof for the east wing? What about the restoration of the Great Hall? What about the million other things that need doing?’

  ‘I know that,’ Harry said coldly. ‘But it still helps. I’m still grateful for it. And I’ll find other ways to deal with the rest. I don’t rely solely on you and your money, you know.’

  ‘You could have fooled me, sweetheart.’ Jemima spun round on the marble floor to face her reflection again. ‘Now let’s go home. There’s nothing more for us here.’

  She marched out of the hall towards the front door without a backward glance, as though it didn’t matter a bit that she was leaving her childhood home, perhaps for the last time.

  There was no guarantee that she would ever be back.

  They drove to Dorset in the same cold silence as they had driven up. Harry put some music on so that their simmering reluctance to speak was not so uncomfortably obvious. Jemima was glad, even if it was classical music.

  She leaned her head against the cool window, watched the countryside go by and tried to make sense of everything that had happened that day. She was exhausted by the tumult of emotions and the onslaught of information that was left in the wake of her mother’s will reading.

  Trevellyan. The great family company. Ever since she was born, the prominence and uniqueness of Trevellyan had been drummed into her. The family and its company was part of the very fabric of Englishness. Sometimes she allowed herself to think heretical thoughts: all this fuss over a bit of soap and perfume! But she could never sustain them for long. Reverence for the illustrious brand and all it stood for was too firmly ingrained in her, like childhood nursery rhymes, and she could never escape it.

  She knew the family legends like she knew her bible stories. They even had their very own God-like figure: Samuel Trevellyan, the man who had launched the family into prosperity with his cashmere business. Fate had led Samuel to a barber’s shop in Piccadilly one day and it had been a life-changing experience for him, and for his descendants. That day, he met Giuseppe Farnese, a wild, impetuous Italian from Tuscany who didn’t just shave and groom his customers. He also offered them the most intensely scented oils for their pleasure. Homesick for his beloved Italy, Farnese had sent for essences to remind him of it. Before long he was obsessively blending these essences, creating wonderful fragrances – sumptuous, luxurious and exotic. Trevellyan, instantly enraptured by the Italian’s skill, made him an offer for the whole business on the spot. Farnese, unable to believe his luck, accepted immediately. Trevellyan closed down the barber’s shop and reopened it as an elegant emporium selling the fragrances that Farnese created, and costly accessories for gentlemen and ladies – ivory combs, crystal bottles and leather travelling cases. He renamed it Trevellyan, keeping Farnese on to develop scents and bring in custom. Farnese’s eccentric ways and delightful wit brought hundreds of fashionable ladies and gentlemen to the shop, but it was the Great Exhibition of 1851 that marked the real start of the company’s success. The Trevellyan stand featured an imposing mahogany glass-fronted cabinet with an impressive display of crystal-bottled eaux de Cologne, accompanied by beautifully fragranced soaps pressed into exquisite patterns, talcum powders and hair oils. From the musky scents of India, the zesty aromas of
the Mediterranean, to the delicate bouquet of the English countryside, Farnese had developed an irresistible and inspired range of Trevellyan scents. It was the successful launch they needed and from then on the business prospered.

  Could he ever have guessed what he’d begun? wondered Jemima. Could he have imagined that over a hundred and fifty years later, his company would still be so successful and famous all over the world?

  The company had passed on from father to son and in the early twentieth century it saw its greatest breakthrough. Just before the First World War, Trevellyan launched the scent that was to define it over the next hundred years. With the upsurge in nationalistic pride, the time was exactly right for a fragrance that came to epitomise Englishness and all it stood for. That fragrance was Trevellyan’s Tea Rose, a rich floral bouquet, delicate enough for the day and intense enough for the evening. Ladies and shop girls alike went mad for it and the desire for Trevellyan’s Tea Rose grew into a craze. Its gentle scent was redolent of a civilised life in happier times; it evoked afternoon tea, village greens and pretty girls cycling down country lanes. It was said that soldiers soaked handkerchiefs in it, so that in the misery of the trenches they could, with just a sniff, be transported back home to the safety and warmth of their girl’s arms.

  Trevellyan’s Tea Rose rode the wild wave of popularity to become an established classic. There were plenty of other Trevellyan fragrances, along with colognes for men such as the Chatsworth – created especially for the Duke of Devonshire – and Leather & Willow, as well as soaps, powders, bath oils and other unguents. But while all of these were successful, it was Trevellyan’s Tea Rose that made the company’s fortune. Trevellyan was stocked in Selfridges during its glory days and quickly became a bestseller in department stores across the world, with unprecedented sales in New York. It was said to be the favourite of the Duchess of York and Lady Diana Cooper; even the silent-screen siren of 1920s Hollywood Gloria Swanson had demanded personalised bottles be sent to her studio. Queen Mary refused to travel unless it was with at least two bottles of the famous fragrance, which was lavishly sprinkled over her pillows wherever she slept.

  Tea Rose, Tea Rose, thought Jemima idly. It’s funny how much that smell has shaped my life. And yet – I can’t stand it.

  It was the smell of her mother’s bedroom, that pink satin creation with its swags and swathes and glass and crystal.

  Really, Mother was born about fifty years too late. She would have loved being a social butterfly of the twenties instead of a woman out of step with her time in the seventies and eighties.

  While the rest of the world was embracing power dressing and shoulder pads, eating in glamorous restaurants and jetting round the world with no care for the consequences, Yolanda and Cecil Trevellyan were living a life that could have been from fifty years earlier. Cecil ran the company, Yolanda ran the home. They were childless until miraculously, it seemed, at the age of forty, Yolanda became pregnant with Tara. Two more girls quickly followed, with Poppy arriving when her mother was forty-six. She had thought she had begun the menopause and didn’t realise she was pregnant until six months had passed.

  The Trevellyans were torn between sadness that they had no sons and delight that they had any children at all. Their daughters would be brought up to be strong, successful women who could run the company when their turn came.

  But the parents forgot one important thing: the girls had their own personalities, their own dreams and desires. The forty-year age gap loomed between the parents and their children, between a mother who had been old-fashioned for her own generation, and her daughters of the eighties and nineties.

  When did it all start to go wrong? wondered Jemima. Was it Jecca? Was she the problem? Ha! If only it were that simple. Who am I kidding? It was wrong from the start. It must have been. Oh, Daddy … why? Why did it all have to happen? We only wanted you to love us, or to show us that you loved us. Was that so very hard?

  The Jaguar pulled under the great stone gate with its pretty hexagonal lodges on either side, and rolled smoothly down the long drive. The drive at Loxton was impressive but it was nothing like Herne’s. This was true English grandeur: a leafy avenue lined with ancient trees surrounded by lush green parkland and at the end, the house rising softly upwards, so natural in its landscape that it seemed as if it had always been there.

  Jemima remembered her first glimpse of the house. It had been at dawn. She and Harry had driven from a ball together, three hours in Harry’s ancient Roadster with only a strapless ball gown and some Gina heels to protect her from the cold – oh, yes, and Harry’s dinner jacket. The house stood cloaked in mist against a dawn sky. The rising summer sun had quilted the sky with pink and gold and gilded the ancient walls and dozens of brick chimneys with a rosy light.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Jemima had exclaimed. ‘What a magnificent house!’

  ‘It’s a castle, actually,’ Harry had said with a grin, turning to her. She had been in love with him then, pure, fizzing, tummy-turning-over love. It was hard to remember how it had felt, now that their relationship had deteriorated so badly.

  She’d loved Herne then, before she’d realised what it really and truly meant. It had looked like a fairytale, the kind of castle the heroine is taken to at the end of the story, where she will live happily ever after – but that was a disguise. The truth was that Herne was a burden; it was a parasite, ready to suck away the lifeblood of anyone who lived there, as they grappled with what caring for this great lump of stone, brick and glass entailed.

  And yet Harry loved it with a passion that he’d never been able to show for her.

  The car pulled up in front of the house, its windows glowing in the darkness. The door opened, illuminating the stone steps in front, and the housekeeper came down to greet them.

  ‘Lord Harry, welcome home.’ She bowed her head slightly in Jemima’s direction. ‘Your ladyship.’

  ‘Hello, Teri.’ Jemima coolly stalked past their housekeeper into the front hall. Teri had always hated her. They all did – all of the staff who’d worked here since before she and Harry had married. She knew what they thought of her: that she was a flighty, fluff-headed socialite who cared only about fashion, money and parties. They all worshipped at the shrine of Harry’s mother, the late viscountess, who’d been an angel on the earth, helping the poor, opening hospitals, raising money for the sick, and, above all, had been loyal to Herne to her very last breath.

  Well, they can fuck off, all of them. I’m not changing my ways, especially not for a pack of bolshy servants.

  Jemima had less than no interest in acting the lady of the manor. She did what she had to do and then scarpered back to London as fast as she could, back to the life she knew and where she felt secure.

  How could she be happy in this huge, draughty, dark house, with a husband who loathed her guts? No way. She remembered one time early in their affair when Harry had brought her to Herne. He’d been showing her round the house when some bell or other had summoned him away. He’d left her in front of a painting of the River Thames at Abingdon and told her to wait there; he’d be right back. She’d lingered for a while in front of the picture, studying every aspect of the old church and the riverside, the swans and the boats. Then she’d started to become wary of the quiet and gloom, and wondered where on earth she was, and where Harry was, and how she would find him again. She began to walk down the corridor but must have missed a turning somewhere and ended up in a dark, narrow little hallway lined with locked doors. The house became suddenly frightening, menacing. She thought of the people who had once lived in this place, the ghosts that perhaps lingered on, and she began to spook herself. Turning back the way she’d come, she started to run along the corridor, breathless and cold, but found herself again somewhere entirely new, somewhere she hadn’t been before.

  ‘Harry! Harry!’ she’d cried, almost sobbing. Where was he? Then she’d burst through a heavy red baize door and appeared on the grand walkway above the great marble staircase.
She ran down, relieved to recognise her surroundings. She found Harry, talking away to Guy in the estate office. He always forgot the time once he and Guy got talking about all the business of the day. She’d fallen into his arms and he’d hugged her tightly. Burying her face in his neck, she had at once been comforted by his sweet, musky smell, his rough wool jumper holding the scent of bonfires and pine needles. The fear vanished. She was safe again.

  Now she knew Herne much better. Although there were plenty of rooms she’d never entered and whole wings she’d only wandered round once, she was unlikely to get lost. But she’d never forgotten how threatened she’d felt that day she lost Harry. Whenever she was at Herne, she could never entirely shake that fear away. It was why she couldn’t wait to get back to London.

  She went straight to her bedroom. It was the one room in the house that Harry had allowed her to redecorate. She had been given free rein and had indulged herself with creating a simply gorgeous boudoir, and it was now the only room in the whole castle where she felt comfortable. Her vast white bed dominated the room. The stone walls were freshly replastered and painted a soft chalk white, and the ornate plasterwork on the ceiling had been picked out in black, so that it was dramatically accentuated against the white. Her bedroom was part of the original Elizabethan house with walls six feet deep and arched stone windows with tiny, diamond-shaped panes of glass – beautiful but draughty in winter. Thick oatmeal velvet curtains with an oversized purple damask pattern shut out the cold and the icy stone flags on the floor were covered in a pale sisal wool carpet and then finished off with lush white rugs. A chaise longue designed by Philippe Starke curved sensuously at the end of the bed. Jemima had had her pick of the most exquisite antique furniture in the house and her bedside table was a heavy Jacobean carved chest, the contemporary glass and silver lamp on top of it providing a wonderful contrast against the dark wood.

  She sat down for a moment in front of her Linley dressing table, a simple piece of sycamore with rosewood stringing and burr ash inlay.