Before I had time to catch my breath, the day of the party was here.
31
The house and gardens were a flurry of activity all day. To our relief, the weather was calm and bright, so the events company had no problem putting up the marquee, which they then filled with round banqueting tables and chairs. Outside, on the lawn, a dance floor was assembled beside a stage for the swing band. Caterers prepared plates of canapés in the kitchen and set up a portable bar and barbeque on the terrace.
The Gals arrived just after lunch to help decorate. We dressed every available surface with simple glass containers filled with Riverbend-blue flowers. Spring blossoms covered the marquee ceiling, alongside shimmering silver lanterns, and we hung curtain lights across the walls. Together, we lugged elegant stands of flowers onto the edges of the lawn and terrace, added yet more lights, a few more sparkly touches and then we were done.
While Laurie, Deirdre and Kalani went home to get dolled up, I fetched Hattie from the boathouse, where we’d insisted she spend the day resting. Once she reached the house, it was all I could do to wrangle her away from oohing and aahing at the visual transformation, and herd her inside.
We had ninety minutes until the party began. Hattie insisted that it would take half an hour to get ready, so we had time for a cup of tea in the sunroom and, it turned out, the final – and most startling – part of her story.
‘Did I tell you that I arranged to meet Agnes in a restaurant in Lancaster?’
I nodded. That was where she’d become overwhelmed and had to stop, the last time we’d spoken.
‘It almost didn’t happen.’ Hattie’s slender fingers gripped her mug. ‘Only an hour or so before I was due to meet Agnes, she messaged to ask if Gideon could come too. Which, of course, I was delighted about. He was my cousin, my closest blood relation.’
She stopped, took a slow, careful breath.
‘Only, that’s not who he was.’
Her voice was so quiet, I had to lean forwards to hear her.
‘When he walked through the door of the Italian restaurant, I knew immediately. That smile. His build. The eyes. Blue, speckled with brown, like my river. Like my Aidan.’
I almost choked on my tea.
‘It was as though Aidan was walking towards me.’
A dozen questions fizzed on my tongue, but I swallowed them back, allowing Hattie to continue at her own pace.
‘How I got through that meal, I’ll never know. Making conversation and smiling while trying to force pasta into a stomach seized up in shock. I just knew. Iknew. This was my baby. My son. Right here, in front of me, chatting about farming.’
‘Gideon is your son?’ I mean, I knew that was what she said, but I had to ask.
‘When, later on, I could start to wade through the pandemonium that seeing him had unleashed inside my head, it all made sense. Why my father broke off all contact with his brother. The gift to Gideon in his will.’
‘Gideon mentioned that Leonard used to send them money.’
Hattie nodded. ‘Yes. Agnes told me that later when I had calmed down enough to speak to her. I went back at a time when I knew Gideon was away with his girlfriend. I was so desperate to see him that I almost drove back the day after the restaurant, and every day following that, but I was so raw, in so much turmoil that I knew it would end badly. I needed to speak to Agnes first. The way she’d so casually invited Gideon along, had spoken about him at the funeral, she must have believed I didn’t know who he was.’
‘Still, she took the risk that when you met him, you would see the resemblance to Aidan and make the connection.’
‘Except that she doesn’t know.’
‘What?’
I wasn’t so stunned that shedidn’tknow, but Hattie had used the present tense. As in, she still didn’t.
‘Before speaking to her, I realised that if my father had told her the truth, she’d have insisted on me knowing. More than likely, she’d have ensured that I had at least some involvement in my child’s upbringing. I thought very carefully about how to raise the topic of Gideon not being her biological child, but in the end, I couldn’t find any way that would allow me to be both tactful and truthful. So, I lied about having a medical condition, and that Gideon could also potentially carry the faulty gene, seeing as I inherited it from my father. After trying to fob me off, Agnes eventually confessed that Gideon was adopted, but that he didn’t know. It was such a relief for her to finally tell someone, she was almost grateful to explain how and why he came to be their son. It was, of course, more of Leonard’s lies.’
Hattie explained, with a grim expression and a glint of steel running through every word, how her father had conned his brother into taking on an illegal adoption. Chester and Agnes had long given up hope of conceiving a child and been resoundingly rejected as potential adopters due to Chester’s life-limiting condition. When Leonard contacted them about a young cleaner for the Riverbend estate expecting a married man’s child, they were more than willing to help. Hattie’s father explained how the man wanted nothing to do with it, and the girl’s parents were strict Catholics, so she dared not tell them. Why she decided to tell Leonard Langford of all people was anyone’s guess. Chester and Agnes were so thrilled at the prospect of becoming parents that, to Agnes’ shame, they didn’t ask too many questions.
After sowing the story amongst Agnes’ family and their limited circle of friends, followed by a fake extended stay in hospital for Agnes (in reality, she hid in her house for six weeks), the moment Leonard called, they sped down to Sherwood Forest to collect their baby son and his forged birth certificate, with the promise that they would never darken Riverbend’s door again.
‘You didn’t tell her that he was your baby?’ I asked Hattie, my head spinning.
Hattie shrugged. ‘I thought about it. I wanted to. I wanted to grab my son by his shoulders, look right in his eyes and tell him he was mine. That I’d thought about him, missed him, longed for him every day since he was stolen from me. But here was this frail, lonely old woman, begging me not to tell the man she had raised that she’d lied to him about who he really was his whole life. That she had no idea who his biological parents were, and no way of ever finding out. I was petrified that I’d end up losing him – and her. I couldn’t put any of us through the inevitable trauma. So, I decided to wait, at least until Agnes was no longer with us.’ Her face twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Fool that I am, thinking I would have plenty of time to decide what to do after that. Not considering for one moment that my aunt would outlive me.’
