Sommersgate House by Kristen Ashley
She sat down and opened the desk. Someone, most likely Mrs. K, had thought to put some writing tablets, pens and pencils and other office supplies in the shelves and drawers.
Just a few days ago, Julia was the head of a grant-making foundation attached to a small group of three non-profit hospitals. She had been responsible for disbursing the profits of the hospitals. With her small team, they called for and assessed grant projects for everything from equipment for basic research laboratories to doctor and nursing fellowships to scholarships for students studying any kind of medicine, be it nursing, physical therapy, midwifery, or the like.
She’d worked there for twelve years. She loved it there. She would miss her staff, her duties, even her damned desk.
Julia shook her head again to oust the melancholy that always seemed threateningly close to drowning her and started to do what she’d always done when a project loomed.
She wrote a list.
She’d need a mobile phone.
She’d need a computer and e-mail.
She’d need a driver’s license and a car.
She’d need a work permit and to have her visa extended.
And she carried on writing everything she needed and then prioritising it.
She took out another piece of paper and she wrote down what she knew to be in her bank account and her investment accounts. She’d made a tidy profit from her house and car. She had some savings. She wasn’t destitute.
She started to budget her money, what she’d need, what she could afford. She’d have to have a talk with Douglas about a lot of things, including what she would put into the house. Keeping a house like this had to cost an extraordinary amount, anything she contributed would be a drop in the bucket. But she had not been brought up not to pay her way.
As she looked at the figures she realised that without a job she’d be out of money way too quickly. She had a six month visa but did not have the right to work or to healthcare. She’d need insurance… and it went on and on.
Julia started adding to her list and wondered how much insurance would cost and bent her head to the task of diverting her brain in the hopes of exhausting it so she could fall asleep and not thinking of anything else.
She put her elbow on the desk and touched the middle three fingers of her hand to her forehead, closing her eyes and rubbing away the gentle ache that had begun to throb there.
But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t keep the thoughts at bay.
She hadn’t expected very much out of her life. She never had big dreams or ambitions. She didn’t want fancy cars, huge houses, jetting around from exotic place to place. Sean had given her a taste of that and it wasn’t worth the price you had to pay to get it.
She was not a risk-taker. She liked things steady, familiar and normal. She liked her family close, her friends next door and to know exactly what aisle the cake mixes were in at the grocery store. All her life she did her utmost to keep everything just that way.
She had been pleased with her lot (after she’d divorced Sean, of course). She had a house she loved. She’d lived there five years and just the summer before had managed to renovate the last room so every inch of carpet, every piece of furniture, every last wineglass was exactly what she wanted.
And she had friends she was going to miss. She was going to miss Josie’s Margarita Mayhem Night that was held every year on the longest day. And the Christmas Party where they all trooped out in posh outfits to see the Nutcracker Suite and then came back to Tom and Mary’s to eat the vast array of delicious nibbles Mary spent days making. And Kelly’s Annual Birthday Extravaganza which was always a blast.
And of course there was Mom. She was really going to miss Patricia.
The three of them, Patricia, Gavin and Julia, had always been close. They had to be once Dad left them high and dry with only a token look back every once in awhile at the family he created and then abandoned.
Patricia was never the “cool” Mom. She was the stern and loving Mom and she was very wise. Life hadn’t dealt her a good hand, divorced young with two kids and an ex who forgot to pay the child support far more often than he remembered. He also forgot he had another family, vastly preferring (and not too concerned to show it) his two daughters and son from his beautiful, wealthy and upper class second wife. “The Izod Family” Gavin used to call them as a joke but it was too real to be truly funny and it always made Mom’s mouth tighten at the corners to hear him say it.
But, despite all this, Patricia had made a happy home, full of laughter, good times and support (with a great deal of meddling). She tried to fill the void (although sometimes failed) of an absent, careless father.
And as the years went by, Patricia and Julia’s relationship had changed from mother and daughter to confidants and friends.
Julia needed that. After she’d left Sean, her heart in tatters and her self-esteem so low she had to dig a ditch to drag it around after her, with the added burden of living a life as the unwanted daughter, Julia had decided she did not ever want another man. The men in her life had torn her heart out and kicked it around. Her father by not wanting her. In Sean’s case, four years she suffered his bad moods, cruel words, relentless attacks on her confidence, flirtations and infidelities. She figured she might find someone else eventually (although she didn’t really look). But Julia had rules. Whoever that someone would be, he wasn’t going to be handsome, wealthy or accomplished. He just had to be there. There to listen to her when she had a bad day. There to help her unpack the groceries. There to drive the car every once in awhile.
She was tired of always having to be the one to drive the car. She just wanted to get in and let someone else drive.
But now, any thought of that was far away. Now she had the children and this inconceivable situation and would likely be driving the car forever.
On that thought, she felt it and her head come up as her hand dropped.
What it was, she didn’t know. A draught against her ankles, but not just any draught, this was intensely cold and felt, somehow, menacing. She had kept the door to her room open just in case one of the children called, maybe it came from there.
She felt it again. It wasn’t a chill throughout the room, just a draught at her ankles. It was mid-October, and cold, but even the chill outside was not of the fierce arctic of the draught at her ankles.
She looked around the room and saw nothing. She’d turned on most of the lights but had not drawn the drapes. She stared out into the dark night wondering if Douglas had come home and opened the front door letting in the cold. Surely she’d have seen the lights of his car as the length of her suite ran along the front drive.
She got up to look out the windows and then she saw them, two headlights coming down the hill and around the bend where the Chapel was ensconced. Douglas was just arriving home, Julia watched him park by the fountain.
Then she heard it.
A scream.
A frightening, terrible, blood-curdling, high-pitched woman’s scream.
“Dear God, the children…” Julia whispered and she ran out into the hallway as fast as she could in the direction of the scream.
Chapter Three
The Problem
Douglas Ashton drove his Jaguar through the winding country roads outside Bristol Airport.
Normally Carter would have collected him from the airport. However that morning when he left, Carter had to get to Heathrow to pick up Julia.
Douglas thought, at the time, this was likely the first in a long line of inconveniences he’d have to put up with concerning Julia.
Now he was glad for the chance to be alone, behind the wheel of the car, on the dark, deserted roads.
He thought ahead to the call he’d be getting from Japan in a few hours time, to his trip to Munich tomorrow, the meeting there in the afternoon and then on to the business he needed to see to in St. Petersburg. When he was certain that all plans were in place and nothing had been left to chance, he let his mind turn to
Julia Fairfax.
She’d changed her name back after she’d divorced her ass of a husband.
Douglas’s mother had loved Sean Webster. “How she would even dream of finding someone better than him is beyond me. She doesn’t know how lucky she was to trap him in the first place,” Monique had declared when she’d heard the divorce was made final.
Douglas had wondered distractedly why Julia had settled for the bastard in the first place. He was from money, as Monique mentioned more than once, but Julia very obviously outclassed him from the first.
What Monique didn’t know about Sean, and probably, Douglas thought, wouldn’t have cared about, was that Sean made a pass at anything in a skirt, including Tamsin.
Tamsin never told Gavin, but she told Douglas.
His sister had always been a smart girl. Gavin, being Gavin, mellow and good-natured most of the time, but fiercely loyal and, in Tamsin and Julia’s case, protective, would have immediately lost his mind and done something immensely stupid.
Douglas wasn’t so impetuous.
Julia may have been blinded by love (or, more likely, from Douglas’s vast experience of women, money) to fall for Sean Webster, but Douglas was counting on the fact that she was smart enough or, at the very least proud enough, not to keep him around.
She didn’t.
Everyone was surprised at Sean’s accident three months after the divorce was final.
Douglas was not.
He felt no remorse. He had ordered that Webster would not sustain a lasting injury. But there was only one human being that Douglas Ashton had ever loved in his thirty-eight years and that was his sister. He could not allow anyone to make her even the slightest bit uncomfortable.
Sean Webster had made that mistake therefore Douglas had made him uncomfortable.
Smoothly negotiating a deserted roundabout, Douglas allowed his thoughts, as they had for obvious reasons of late, to move to his sister.
Growing up, Tamsin had been the only bit of warmth in their cold home, save the Kilpatricks but they were servants and therefore, it had been drilled into Douglas and Tamsin at an early age, had their place and that place was not a familial one.
But Tamsin, she was like a changeling, not born of their family. Sweet-tempered, kind-natured and she loved Douglas openly. She thought he could move mountains, she thought he could rule worlds. Until Gavin, the sun rose and set for Tamsin through Douglas.
She saw the best in him even when Mother ignored him or after one of Father’s fierce tirades. Douglas rarely permitted his thoughts to turn to his father, mainly because there was no purpose to it. Maxwell Ashton was dead, but he had been dead to Douglas years before his father’s heart exploded. This, Douglas thought, was the ultimate irony because he’d always thought his father hadn’t had a heart.
His sister’s death meant certain unbidden, long-buried memories resurfaced, though Douglas had long since grown too detached for them to affect him. He allowed them to drift through his consciousness now but he was, as always, immune.
If Douglas brought home a poor grade (anything less than a first was an excuse for a screaming, red-faced lecture that lasted at least an hour) or he had not been made captain of the rugby or cricket teams (no matter that he was the best player at both) or any of number of the myriad other ways Douglas disappointed his father, Maxwell would unleash a verbal fury on Douglas that shook the windows.
And Douglas disappointed his father often.
Maxwell had never once used his fists on his son but back then Douglas often wished he would. Douglas had seen, and done, violence in his life and those kinds of wounds healed a great deal more quickly.
“Jesus, I look at you and wonder if you’re even my son,” Maxwell spat at him once, his eyes narrowed with contempt.
It was a ridiculous pronouncement. Douglas looked almost exactly like his father, except he was three inches taller and ten pounds leaner.
At first Douglas worked to prove his worth to his father, to make him proud, exhausting himself in the effort.
He’d stopped doing that somewhere in his teens, learning the lesson that no matter what, no matter how much, no matter how well, nothing would make his father proud.
Through all of this, Monique blithely went her way, never once defending her son (but often defending Maxwell), never once dirtying her hands with the sordid little secret their family shared (but often accepting bribes to keep her silence or to encourage her to go on her way).
After he’d given up on his father, the only thing Douglas had to prove was Tamsin’s faith in him.
Through all these times, Tamsin had been there. She soothed his brow when they were children and she cheered him on when they were older. After an episode, she’d seek him out and try to make him smile or she’d defend him fiercely in whispers, hidden away from Maxwell or Monique’s ears.
“Doug, you’re worth ten of him! Maybe fifteen! Don’t listen to a word he says,” she would say.
Douglas never knew what he’d done to deserve such devotion from his sister.
On the other hand, Maxwell had adored his beautiful daughter. She’d never borne the brunt of his anger and scorn. She had her own tortures to endure from a Mother who simply didn’t care. But Tamsin held little love for her father, always loyal to Douglas and the two of them grew up like children without parents. The adults who bore and sired them being necessary evils on a path that they both hoped would lead to freedom.
Douglas allowed himself a rare moment to feel pleased that Tamsin enjoyed a taste of that freedom if only for awhile.
For his part, he had found his own escape. If Tamsin had known what he did or how he spent a great deal of his time, Douglas had no idea how she would react. Perhaps proud, he thought, and frightened, to be certain. She, and everyone else, thought he was bent on money and power, and this was true, he enjoyed the tactics of business. But it was not a challenge and Douglas was very like his father in many ways, he enjoyed a challenge.
Now Tamsin would never know (not that he would have ever told her, he wasn’t free to tell anyone).
His sister was dead and she left him responsible for a mess. What possessed her, he’d never know. Tamsin’s mind worked in mysterious ways and her wishes for her children, Julia and Sommersgate was just another one of those mysteries.
Or perhaps, Douglas thought absently, not so much of a mystery.
Tamsin had always been a hopeless romantic and since she was a little girl she believed in the legendary Myth of Sommersgate, its awful history and its alleged curse. She’d told him more than once she’d hoped he’d free the house she loved from the curse and free the long line of barons who presided over it from the tragedy and unhappiness that plagued them.
In other words, his sister desperately wanted Douglas to fall in love.
This desire increased substantially after she’d found Gavin, wanting some of the bounty she had for her beloved brother. Douglas thought this had to be her reasoning, throwing Julia into his life. Douglas had little doubt that in Tamsin’s romantic imaginings he would fall for Julia and end the curse she foolishly believed rested on Sommersgate and, in so doing, afflicted Douglas himself.
Driving by a still-lit country pub going about its business of closing down for the night, he turned his thoughts to his current challenge.
Julia Fairfax.
He was surprised Julia hadn’t remarried. It couldn’t be for lack of offers.
He wished she had. If she’d had a loving home with two parental substitutes to offer the children, no doubt Tamsin and Gavin would have left them to Julia alone.
Douglas would have accepted that, unless she’d made another foolhardy choice in husbands, which seemed to run in her family. Patricia Fairfax had married a philanderer who had run off with an heiress but he continued to work as a surgeon at the same hospital where Patricia was a nurse. Trevor Fairfax set up house with his new woman, having three more children and daily rubbing h
Gavin and Julia rarely saw their father when they were growing up; Trevor Fairfax was so consumed with his other family. By the time Gavin had his assignment in England as an electrical engineer with a multi-national construction company, his brother-in-law hadn’t seen his father in years.
According to Douglas’s research (and he most definitely investigated his future-brother-in-law), Gavin and Julia hadn’t missed much with their father. Trevor wasn’t invited to the wedding and had never seen his grandchildren. And, as far as Douglas was concerned, that was the end of that.
Which meant, of course, that, indeed, was the end of that.
But now, the Fairfax family was causing another problem and Douglas may have had a great deal of patience with a lot of things but he had no patience with problems.
Julia Fairfax would be living in his house, with his mother, and that was not going to work.
He had no affection for his mother but she was his mother. He owed his existence to her if nothing else. But she was a difficult woman and even though she tolerated Gavin, barely, she loathed his mother and sister.
Julia was Gavin’s sister and Douglas liked Gavin. He was one of the few acquaintances who held both Douglas’s regard and respect. Julia was also the chosen guardian of Tamsin’s children and that, in addition to his regard for Gavin, meant Douglas had to find some way to make the situation work.
In any other circumstances, he would have been happy to settle a monthly amount of money on Julia and allow her to take the children to whatever backwater town she lived in. Or settle an even larger amount of money on Julia and have her just go away. If she had taken the children, Douglas would have been content with Samantha gathering progress reports and sending appropriate gifts during holidays and birthdays. He quite liked Tamsin’s children, even held some affection for them, but he had no desire to raise them.
However, that wasn’t what Tamsin wanted. Tamsin wanted her children to be raised at Sommersgate and for himself, and Julia, to do it and Douglas would respect his sister’s wishes, regardless of how inconvenient they were.