The Lynmara Legacy by Gaskin Catherine

Author:Gaskin, Catherine [Gaskin, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: family saga, secrets, love story, Second World War, romance, New York, London, ambition, passion, Russia
Publisher: Corazon Books (Historical/Saga)
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

LYNMARA

Chapter One

FEBRUARY 28TH, 1939

My dear Nicole. Tomorrow is your twenty-fourth, birthday, and I send you … Charles Gowing paused in his writing. What did he really send her that she didn’t know she had in abundance? London that evening was shrouded in fog, and as always some of its choking, sulphurous mass had seeped in at windows and doors, an acrid, unmistakable smell. It had been dark since three o’clock. The fire that burned in the grate did little to lighten Charles’s mood. He looked for a long time at the photograph in the silver frame which was the only one on the desk in this room which Iris had fashioned into a bedroom-study for him in the year that Nicole had spent her one brief summer flaming brilliantly on the London social scene, and then disappearing into what, if anyone now thought of her at all, was thought of as obscurity. He looked long and closely at the features he so often studied, the once too-delicate features which now were more slightly rounded, at the smile that was not forced or coy, but natural, as a happy woman smiles. He looked at the two young children ‒ one seated beside her, one on the lap, her arms closely about him. An ordinary enough picture, but to Charles, one infinitely precious. It didn’t matter that Lloyd Fenton himself was not in the picture; not only had he fathered these sturdy, good-looking boys, but it was he who was responsible for the air of calm serenity, for the naturalness of the smile that Nicole wore. If Charles sometimes cursed Lloyd Fenton for having taken her away from England, much more often he was profoundly grateful to him for what he had fashioned of this young woman whom Charles loved so much.

Charles had not grown used, over the years, to missing Nicole’s actual presence. The loneliness he had expected to experience on that day he had seen the liner slip off into the mist of Southampton had actually been worse than he feared, sometimes a physical ache, rather like that which afflicted his wounded leg, and, like it, did not go away. He had busied himself as best he could, but even the pleasure of an occasional weekend at Dencote was now not his. He had rented the lodge soon after Nicole had left when he discovered that he really could not bear its emptiness when there was no hope that she would join him. These were the times he acknowledged his jealousy of Lloyd Fenton, as jealous as he would have been of any man Nicole might have married. But the renting of Dencote had had a more practical side. He found he needed even the little it brought in so that he might have extra money for the gifts he wanted to shower on Nicole’s children, and in his frustration, could not. He found himself, almost from the beginning, practising little economies ‒ going less often to his clubs

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