Embrace Me (13 page)

‘Sir?’ he said.

‘We’ve been terribly dense about this evening, Sixsmith. This isn’t a dinner and dance affair, more dinner and a show-down. As in a Western movie.
Gunfight at the OK Corral
.’

Joe seemed more confused than ever but not Miss Plumm or Marguerite who had come forward to greet them. ‘I’m rather glad you’ve worked it out, Chief Inspector,’ their hostess told Harry and then kissed Miss Plumm.

She suggested that they put the cake box in the kitchen and so that was where Harry followed her. He undid the satin bow on the large box. ‘Better let me lift the cake out while you hold the box. It’s so sweet of Anthea to do the pudding for this meal. It was she who taught Miss Marble how to make it,’ Marguerite told him.

After greeting everyone, Miss Plumm arrived in the kitchen and stood next to Harry. She watched the pudding emerge from its box. Harry was astonished. It was a Pavlova: a honey-coloured meringue base with plump meringue roosting birds all round it and filled with fresh glazed raspberries. An astonished Harry looked from the Pavlova to Miss Plumm. She nodded, smiled, and gave a charming peal of laughter, then walked round the wooden table and patted him on the shoulder as she left the kitchen.

‘Have I missed something? You’ll have to tell me because Anthea never will. She does like her secrets and loves to tease, especially those who intrude on her privacy,’ said Marguerite.

‘I’ve already experienced that!’ said Harry.

‘Isn’t the pudding magnificent? Miss Marble is such a great pastry chef, but especially when doing something for Anthea.’

Marguerite went to the refrigerator, removed a bowl of
whipped cream and proceeded to cover the raspberries with it. Harry stood mesmerised by the pudding. It had been his uncle’s favourite. That look Miss Plumm had given him when they’d gazed across it? It implied an answer to Harry’s question about whether she had known his uncle. He understood now that she was the woman Sir Thomas Redburn had mentioned as being his Uncle Raymond’s travelling companion. How clever she had been to let him discover that on his own. She must have known he would recognise the pudding. It was an exact replica of the one that had arrived every year on his birthday by messenger.

Harry was charmed to think of his uncle and Miss Plumm loving each other during secret liaisons two or three times a year. He felt something akin to deep affection and respect for Miss Plumm, wanting to keep her love affair with his uncle secret, a very precious thing. It would most certainly have been what his Uncle Raymond would have wanted or he would have told Harry about his ‘travelling companion’. Harry could understand why they had kept their affair secret and sporadic; that way it was more romantic, exciting, new and fresh with every journey. It was both fantasy and real love, powerful and delicate.

James arrived in the kitchen with a malt whisky on the rocks and handed it to Harry. ‘Anthea asked me to give you this, she thought you might appreciate it.’

‘Miss Plumm is quite a lady,’ said Harry as he took a long swallow of the golden liquid.

He walked into the drawing-room where James introduced him to everyone he did not already know. While talking with Angelica and September, it was as if he’d been hit by a bolt of lightning. Lady Olivia’s accomplice, if she did indeed have one, had to have been Miss Plumm! It was pure instinct, but he was sure he was right. The faxes from South Africa? She could have arranged them, had been to Lalabella, loved and respected Olivia, and like the others wanted her never to be brought to justice.

‘You seem suddenly to have drifted away from us, Harry?’ Angelica observed.

‘A sudden moment of intuition.’

‘Can you share it with us?’ asked September.

‘Not for the moment. Maybe later this evening?’

Harry liked Angelica who had a more fragile beauty than September. She would most certainly not have ridden up to him on a white horse and seduced him. He saw her eyes dart to Neville Brett on several occasions in the short time he spent with the sisters. When James joined them it was to whisk Angelica away to meet someone. That gave Harry a few minutes alone with September.

‘It’s very difficult to keep quiet about us. I want to shout to the entire world how happy I am to love you. But prudence has suddenly come into my life along with love. I wouldn’t like to compromise your position here. But the moment we have driven away from Sefton Under Edge, I’ll shout it to the world,’ September told him, only just restraining herself from slipping her arms around him and kissing him passionately.

Harry began to laugh. She was audacious, a free spirit, totally enticing to a man such as him. ‘Not very much daunts me, September, but you people here in Sefton Park do. You’re élitist, privileged, with the strangest set of morals I have ever come across. To marry you would be to become one of your unusual extended family: Miss Plumm, Marguerite, James, Angelica. Though I fear Neville and I will always be just outside the inner circle, never quite belong. But the rewards are great: love, passion, and you next to me for all my life.’

Harry could see tears of emotion in her eyes. Fighting them back, September told him, ‘Oh, Harry, you forgot Olivia? She was the heart and soul of all of us for most of our lives. Ever since the death of the prince and her disappearance, everyone in this room has had their life turned upside down. I have met and fallen deeply in love with you, Angelica had been in a love triangle with Neville and Marguerite and has given him up and sent him with her blessings to Marguerite. Marguerite’s in love with Neville and wants marriage, something she has run away from until now. And James has finally begun returning the calls of an American botanist, a Philadelphia socialite called Emily Warfield, who has been chasing him for years. And although I
don’t know them, I’m sure your detectives won’t leave this place untouched, whereas you arrived here, my dear love, already changed by your manhunt for Olivia.’

At that moment Marguerite approached her guests to tell them, ‘Dinner is served.’

Chapter 13

Anthea Plumm was seated at the dining table between James and Neville Brett. She gazed around it at each of Marguerite’s guests. They were a handsome, intelligent group of people, even the three detectives. They shone, all of them, with youth and beauty, and had years ahead of them to live their lives to the full. All the things she no longer had or was able to do.

Where had it gone, her life? It seemed it was no more and probably less than a fraction of a second in the big picture of time and eternity. James and Neville engaged her in conversation alternately. She heard herself talking with them but it was like being on automatic pilot: she was there but not there. She was aware of everything: the ramshackle house for which Marguerite was notorious, books piled high on every surface, dead flowers in vases with an inch of stale water, manuscripts stacked everywhere, a desk piled high with fan mail, a marmalade cat the size of a small dog who strolled round the house and a St Bernard dog who behaved like a pussy cat.

The dining table was a
mélange
of mismatched porcelain that Marguerite had collected, matching crystal glasses, crisp white linen cloth and napkins. The food was delicious because Marguerite grew everything she could in her garden and was a marvellous cook. All this was being played out before Anthea’s eyes and yet she seemed to be drifting away from it. Her past life kept infiltrating the scene around her. She was in a way quite frightened by what was happening because she was not usually one to look back and confuse her past with her present. It unnerved her, and she made a conscious effort to stop it. She couldn’t. Quite suddenly she had lost control of
her will to forget and move on.

James touched her arm, ‘Are you all right, Anthea?’ he asked.

Assuring him that she was, she redoubled her efforts to live in the moment and enjoy the evening. In vain. She tried to work out in her mind why this was happening to her. Olivia? It was true she was genuinely shocked by the murder of the prince and that Olivia was involved in that. There was not a day went by that she didn’t think of Olivia on the run for the remainder of her life, and how she would have to live with the knowledge that she had taken a man’s life. Anthea had loved her, had seen so much of herself in Olivia.

How different her own life had been! Everything had always come so easily to Olivia; so hard and, so unfairly to Anthea. She was talking with her dinner partner Neville but at the same time running her life through her mind. It was like a picture show. She could hardly relate to some of the scenes flashing before her eyes. They had been her secrets and she was going to die with them.

She had been the Buchanans’ head gardener’s daughter, or so everyone had thought. In truth she was the gardener’s wife’s daughter. She was born, as they say, on the wrong side of the blanket. Her father had been the present Lord Buchanan’s grandfather. Only her mother and His Lordship knew the truth of her birth, and then before she died Anthea’s mother had told her she was the product of a passionate love affair that had lasted years. An upstairs-downstairs romance that her gardener-father must never know about. Anthea had Buchanan blood running through her veins.

As a child she had loved Sefton Park. She ran and played with the Buchanan children as well as the villagers’, worked in the garden with her father and was taught by the various tutors hired for the Buchanan children. She wore Buchanan hand-me-downs, and learned her manners from Lady Buchanan as well as how to arrange flowers. Lost for a lifetime, all those idyllic days. Why, she wondered, were they coming back to haunt her now? Had those memories been triggered by the appearance of Raymond’s beloved nephew? Was she remembering things past before advancing years were about to rob her of that luxury?

The first course arrived at the table via two village girls who worshipped Marguerite for her fame. They were her waitresses when she needed them, her under-gardeners, her post runners for those late manuscripts, articles, and charming rejections to lecture invitations she did not care to take on. They brought in two enormous broccoli soufflés, impressively high enough for Marguerite to receive an ovation. The girls went around the table serving; Neville rose from his chair and followed them, filling glasses with perfectly chilled Chablis. There was never a dull moment at Marguerite’s table and the guests, fortified with drinks and wine, were animated and clearly enjoying themselves.

Anthea Plumm forked some soufflé into her mouth and sheer delight washed away her memories. She felt herself relaxing. She even told an amusing story about Marguerite’s passion for gardening and most especially her
potager
. Everyone laughed and someone else took over with an amusing tale.

Once more Miss Plumm was distracted by the past. This time she was remembering the first time she saw Olivia’s grandfather. She was a child of fifteen and unusually beautiful, innocent and vulnerable. It had been, for the young girl, love at first sight. He had been handsome and charming, a dashing figure of a man, an adventurer who made intrepid journeys to romantic places. The Cinderses and the Buchanans were great friends and the Cinderses, when His Lordship wasn’t travelling, visited often. He had always had a soft spot for Plumm’s little girl, watched her grow up and finally became besotted with her. She was a sensuous little thing: that charm of country girl combined with aristocratic mannerisms and speech enchanted him.

Anthea never hesitated for a minute when he asked her to run off with him. He had planned it carefully so that the scandal could be hushed up. No one in Sefton Park or Sefton Under Edge heard a word about it. So far as anyone knew the gardener’s daughter had been sent to finishing school in Switzerland, a gift from the Buchanans to a faithful servant’s only child. In truth, they travelled the world for a year. He taught her how to dress, or rather the great Parisian couturiers taught her. A sensualist and libertine, Lord Wallingford Cinders taught her all things erotic, some of them depraved, and how to enjoy sex with
total abandon. She never did understand that to him she was a plaything, a toy he would toss away when he tired of it.

He abandoned her in Venice, leaving her in the care of a Venetian count, one of his best friends, who saw her through the trauma of rejection on a grand scale, deception on an even greater one. That Wallingford had loved her she had no doubt, but he’d loved his long-suffering wife, his children and his freedom more. Olivia’s grandfather was a cad with women but a well-mannered and generous one. He provided Anthea with a bank draft in her name for a tidy sum of money which would keep her for years. The count invested this wisely for her. Broken-hearted, it took her several months to come to terms with her situation, which she could never have done without the count’s kindness and generosity.

She had not thought of that tumultuous time for more than sixty years. Now she smiled to herself. The experience had made her very strong and not unlike the man she’d loved. Anthea had always looked upon her life as being one driven by fate. She felt lucky to have loved with such passion and that, after decades, she should have experienced that again with Raymond Graves-Jones.

As suddenly as her memories had come flooding back, they faded. Anthea sighed with relief. She was here and this was now and that sensation was like coming home from a long journey. She looked around the table and was astonished to think that she was intimately connected to so many of the guests round that table: the Buchanans, Olivia, who was certainly there in spirit, and Harry Graves-Jones. It was of course Olivia and her dreadful act that had brought them all together.

The girls had just finished serving the main course: poached salmon on a bed of steamed cucumber, Hollandaise sauce and coconut rice. Anthea rose from her chair and raised her glass. The others rose to join her. She announced, ‘A toast to absent friends – may they be safe and well, wherever they are.’

Her friends were taken aback. It was unlike her to do anything so provocative. It was so obvious that she had meant the toast for Olivia. The three detectives were being made to understand that, no matter what, Olivia’s friends would remain loyal to her in their hearts and minds.

Joe and Jenny were furious at the arrogance of Miss Plumm and Olivia’s friends. If it were up to Joe he would put them all in their place, declare them an immoral lot and use the full power of the law to push them around a bit until someone gave them a clue to Olivia’s whereabouts. And Jenny? She detested the lot of them, believing they were thumbing their noses at the law. It upset her that they had somehow outflanked the police and had better control of the situation than they did. Both the young detectives, quite prepared to walk out at that moment, looked to Harry for guidance.

‘Hear, here,’ he said, and drank from his glass. The others round the table followed suit. Joe and Jenny reluctantly remained and raised their glasses.

General conversation resumed but there was a sudden change in the tone of the evening. Harry had ridden out the arrogance and gained control by being the first to join in the toast, wrongfooting Olivia’s friends at the same time. Joe sensed the change and not for the first time was in awe of the way his superior’s cunning and subtle approach worked.

The Pavlova was served and declared a wonder of a pudding. When not a morsel was left the guests adjourned to the drawing-room where the village girls served coffee and cognac. There was something quite beautiful and rare about the people draped around the room. Without even trying, they created an air of vivacity. Here were sensuous women and handsome men with an intelligence about them that was inspiring. It was not just in their looks, it was in their sureness of self, a grasp on life that made them able to spin any way they liked. Yes, they were privileged people but they worked at being privileged; it was not just a case of being born into it, it was using privilege to enrich their lives.

As Miss Plumm looked round the room she was proud of what her friends were doing with their lives, what they had learned from Olivia as she had learned from Olivia’s grandfather and Harry’s uncle: how to be a free spirit, to use everything to add and not take away from one’s life. They were individuals who did not have to run with the crowd, follow the rules when those rules were wrong for them.

She looked at Harry and saw so much of his uncle in him. He was a special kind of man in the same way as Raymond had been. He had lived two lives simultaneously: that of a Superior Court Judge and the life of a man who liked to indulge himself in a world of erotic happenings once he had met Anthea. She had learned the joys of sexual freedom and bliss, sexual debauchery, even depravity, from Olivia’s grandfather.

Once more the past danced into her brain and she was reminded of being young again, brave and courageous, when she and Raymond had been befriended by an Ottoman prince living in Alexandria in a palace on the sea. The man lived for nothing but sex and the excitement that went with the most adventurous, sometimes bizarre, kinds. For him such depravity was nothing more than a way of reaching oblivion. Under his influence, the staid, very conventional Englishman Judge Raymond Graves-Jones vanished when he and Anthea were behind closed doors.

For a few minutes, she relived a night on the Nile, sailing under a white crescent moon, having sex with Raymond and the prince. On a bed of cushions spread on the desk of the prince’s yacht, she gave herself over completely to their sexual fantasies. They were no longer young but their sexual desires were. Erotic madness took them over and it had been a case of more, there must be more. Depravity took them over: bondage and tantalising light whippings that drove the three into another kind of sexual ecstasy. A handful of large oriental pearls inserted into her cunt gave Anthea enormous pleasure when she was riven by her lovers, such exquisite ecstasy that she was breathless from the many orgasms she had, one after the other. Her lovers insisted she wear her pearls in that manner for several days so as to enjoy having orgasms whenever she wanted them. It took nothing more than the squeezing of her most intimate muscles against the pearls.

Anthea began to laugh aloud and the memory faded with her laughter. She touched the pearl necklace round her throat, unable to stop laughing. It was September who pleaded, ‘Oh, do share your joke with us,’ as she went to Anthea and sat on the arm of her chair.

‘Too private and personal, dear, but I will tell you one thing.
We are all indebted to ourselves for the privileged life we have lived, for being courageous, by making our lives rich and full and packed with adventure, for following our dreams and desires, living in the moment and taking the consequences, good or bad.

‘We all love and are indebted to Olivia because she was the bravest of us all in living life to the full and giving herself over to the ones she loved. It would be good for us to admit that we are much the same kind and might ourselves make a similar error in allowing ourselves to take a life. We must love ourselves for who and what we are. Poor Olivia. If she had loved herself more, she might never have turned to such a violent act.’

Marguerite rose from her seat and walked around the room to stand between Angelica and Neville. She felt extraordinarily happy. Her life was about to take another turn; she finally had the man in it she had always wanted but had never found till now.

Neville was besotted with Marguerite and although he had meant not to be obvious about it, the way he looked at her revealed as much to everyone.

Angelica would always love Neville but she was relieved to have had the courage to give him up to the woman he loved. She had been aware of the couple’s unhappiness at being apart for so long. It was no sacrifice for her, she was ready to move on in her career and needed love affairs that were frivolous and without commitment at this time in her life.

She whispered to Marguerite, ‘What’s happening to us? Our lives are turning upside down and new events are crashing in on us. I don’t mind your announcing that you and Neville are now an item, bent on a future together.’