The Perfect Sinner

Max had behaved very gallantly towards her then. Too gallantly for a married man, as Luke hadn’t hesitated to point out. Conversely, she and Luke had clashed immediately, equally antagonistic towards each other.

She was glad that Louise had brought her wedding forward from Christmas Eve so that they could all attend. She would have hated to have missed the celebration, but she was looking forward to spending Christmas with her parents and sister as well. Her mother, Sarah Jane, would be thrilled when she told her about her pregnancy, and so, too, she hoped, would Sam…. A small frown touched her forehead as she thought about her twin sister.

Something was wrong with Sam’s life at the moment. She knew it, could sense it with that extraordinary magical bond that made them close….

In a small anteroom just off the ballroom, the youngest members of the Crighton family were having a small party all of their own, not so much by design as by accident. From her seat within watching distance of the door, Jenny Crighton was keeping a motherly eye on the events, though she knew they could come to no harm.

Who would have thought in such a short space of time that the family would produce so many little ones, a complete new generation.

Olivia, her husband’s niece and the eldest of his twin brother David’s two children, had started it all, and now she and Caspar, her American husband, had Amelia and Alex. Saul, Ben’s half-brother Hugh’s elder son, had Jemima, Robert and Meg from his first marriage and now a baby from his marriage to Tullah, and of course her own daughter-in-law, Maddy, had Leo and Emma.

Maddy … Jenny could feel her body tensing as she took a quick look at her daughter-in-law, who was seated between her and Ruth, her head bent down. Maddy might seem to the unaware onlooker calm and serene, but Jenny had seen the tears sparkling in her eyes several minutes ago and she had known who had been the cause of them.

Even now, after all these years, she still hadn’t come to terms with the reality that was her eldest son, and it hurt her unbearably to know that it was Max, flesh of her flesh, hers and Jon’s, who was the cause of so much hurt and pain.

She ached to ask her son why he behaved in the way he did. Why. What it was that motivated him to be the person he was, but she knew that if she even tried to talk to him he would simply give her that half mocking, half sneering contemptuous little smile of his and shrug his shoulders and walk away.

She had never been able to understand how she and Jon had ever produced a person like Max, and she knew that she never would. She knew, too, that every time she looked at her daughter-in-law and witnessed the pain her marriage was causing her, she was overwhelmed by guilt and despair.

Maddy was everything that she, Jenny, could have wanted in a daughter-in-law, or a daughter, and as such she was dearly loved by her, but Jenny would had to have had far less intelligence than she did have to be able to convince herself that Maddy was the kind of wife that Max should have gone for.

Max thrived on opposition, challenge, aggression. Max wanted most what he could have least, and poor Maddy just wasn’t … just couldn’t … Poor Maddy!

At her mother-in-law’s side, Madeleine Crighton had a pretty fair idea just what Jenny was thinking and she couldn’t blame her in the least.

Max had only arrived home at Queensmead this morning, the lovely old house that belonged to his grandfather and where Maddy and the children had now virtually made their permanent home, with only an hour to spare before the wedding began, having assured Maddy that he would be there early the previous evening. Not an auspicious start, and to make matters even worse, Leo was going through a belligerent and rather touchingly possessive phase where his mother was concerned. Unlike his father, Leo didn’t seem to realize that her looks made it a visible implausibility that any man could ever feel possessively jealous about her—and he had glowered at Max when he had arrived, refusing to leave her side to go to his father.

In private Maddy knew that Max couldn’t care less whether the children ignored him or not. In fact, if the truth were known, the less he had to do with them, the happier he was. After all, he had never wanted either of them.

But in public, it was different. In public, in front of his grandfather and others, his children had to be seen to love their father, which Leo, quite plainly at the moment, did not. And then Emma had been sick. Not, fortunately, badly enough to harm her dress, but certainly enough to cause the kind of delay that had Max swearing under his breath and telling Maddy with chilling cruelty that she was as useless as a mother as she was a wife.

Maddy knew what the true cause of his anger was, of course. It was a woman. It had to be. She knew the signs far too well now not to recognize them. Max had left a woman behind in London whom he would far rather be with. And no doubt she was the reason he had not come down to Haslewich last night as they had agreed.

Maddy told herself that his infidelity didn’t have the power to hurt her any more, but deep down inside she knew that it wasn’t true.

Maddy knew that her mother-in-law and the rest of Max’s family felt very sorry for her. She could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices, and sometimes, when she looked at Max’s cousins and their wives with their families and saw the love they shared, she felt positively rent with pain for all that she was missing out on, although she tried to tell herself stoically that what you never had you never missed. She had certainly never been loved as a child as she had longed to be. Her mother was a peer’s daughter who had always given Maddy the impression that she considered her marriage, and with it her husband and her daughter, as somehow slightly beneath her. She held herself slightly separate from them and spent most of her time on a round of visits to a variety of relatives while Maddy’s father, a career barrister, made his way via the Bench towards his goal of being appointed Lord Chief Justice.

Maddy, their only child, had not featured very significantly in her parents’ lives. Now that she was married she hardly saw them at all, and to come to Haslewich and discover that there was not just a home waiting for her with Max’s grandfather, but also a role to play where she was really genuinely needed had, for a time at least, been a comforting salve on the open wound of her destructive marriage.

Maddy was, by nature and instinct, one of life’s carers, and when other people grimaced over Max’s grandfather’s tetchiness, she simply smiled and explained gently that it was the pain he suffered in his damaged joints that caused him to be so irascible.

‘Maddy, you are a saint,’ she had been told more than once by his grateful relatives, but she wasn’t, of course, she was simply a woman—a woman who right now longed with the most ridiculous intensity to be the kind of woman whom a man might look at the way Gareth Simmonds, her sister-in-law Louise’s new husband, was looking at Louise, with love, with pride, with desire … with all the things Madeleine had once mistakenly and tragically convinced herself she had seen in Max’s eyes when he looked at her, but which had simply been mocking and contemptuous deceits designed to conceal his real feelings from her.

Max had married her for one reason and one reason only, as he had told her many, many times in the years since their wedding, and that reason had been his relentless ambition to be called to the bar; an ambition that she had discovered he might never have fulfilled without her father’s help.

‘Maddy, why do you put up with him? Why on earth don’t you divorce him?’ Louise had asked her impatiently one Christmas when both of them had sat and watched Max flirting openly and very obviously with a pretty young woman.

Maddy had simply shaken her head, unable to explain to Louise why she remained married to her brother. How could she when she couldn’t really explain it to herself? All she could have said was that here at Haslewich she felt safe and secure … wanted and needed…. Here, while she had a task to complete, she felt able to side-line the issue of her marriage, to pretend to herself, while Max was away in London and she was here, that it was not, after all, as bad as it might seem to others.

The truth was, Maddy suspected that she didn’t divorce Max because she was afraid of what her life might be, not so much without him as without his family. It was pathetic of her, she knew, but it wasn’t just for herself that she was being what others would see as weak. There were the children to be considered as well.

In Haslewich they were part of a large and lovingly interlinked family network where they had a luxury not afforded to many modern children, the luxury of growing up surrounded by their extended family—aunts, uncles, cousins. The Crighton family was part of this area of Cheshire, and Maddy desperately wanted to give her children a gift that she considered more priceless than anything else; the gift of security, of knowing they had a special place in their own special world.

‘But surely if you lived in London, the children would be able to see much more of their father,’ one recent acquaintance had commented to her not long ago.

Madeleine had bent her neat head over the buttons she was fastening on Leo’s coat so that her hair fell forward, concealing her expression as she had responded in a muffled voice, ‘Max’s work keeps him very busy. He works late most evenings….’

Luckily the other woman hadn’t pressed the subject, but as she ushered Leo towards the path that cut across behind the building where he attended play school classes three mornings a week—Madeleine refused to use the car unless she absolutely had to, one of the pleasures of living in a small country town was surely that one could walk almost everywhere—Madeleine had felt acutely self-conscious. Within the family it was accepted that Max remained in London supposedly mostly during the working week, but in reality for much longer stretches of time than that, so that she and the children could often go weeks if not months on end without really seeing him.

Although her marriage was a subject that she never discussed—with anyone—Madeleine knew that Max’s family had to be aware that it wasn’t merely necessity that kept Max away.

Sometimes she was sorely tempted to confide in Jenny, Max’s mother, but the natural reticence and quiet pride that were so much a part of her gentle nature always stopped her, and what, after all, could Jenny do? Command Max to love her and the children; command him to …

Stop it, Madeleine hastily warned herself, willing her eyes not to fill with tears.

Max was already in a foul-enough mood without her making things any worse. He might not be the kind of man who would ever physically abuse either his wife or his children, but his silent contempt and his hostility towards them were sometimes so tangible that Madeleine felt she could almost smell the dark, bitter miasma of them in the air of a room even after he had left it.

The first thing she always did after one of his brief visits to Queensmead was to go round and open all the windows and to breathe lungsful of clean, healing fresh air.

‘Where’s that husband of yours?’ she remembered Ben asking her fretfully recently as he shifted his weight from his bad hip to his good one. The doctor had warned him the last time he had gone for a check-up that there was a strong possibility that he might have to have a second hip operation to offset the wear-and-tear caused to his good hip by him favouring it to ease the pain in his ‘bad’ one.

Predictably he had erupted in a tirade of angry refusal to accept what the doctor was telling him, and it had taken Madeleine several days to get him properly calmed down again.

But despite his irascibility and his impatience, she genuinely liked him. There was a very kind, caring side to him, an old-fashioned protective maleness that she knew some of the younger female members of his family considered to be irritating, but which she personally found rather endearing.

‘I do not know how you put up with him,’ Olivia had told her vehemently only the previous week. She had called to see Madeleine, bringing with her Christmas presents for Leo and Emma, and she had brought her two small daughters, Amelia and Alex, with her.

‘Daughters! Sons, that’s what this family needs,’ her grandfather had sniffed disparagingly when she had taken the girls in to see him. ‘It’s just as well we’ve got young Leo here,’ he had added proudly as he gazed fondly at his great-grandson.

‘I will not have him making my girls feel that they are in any way inferior to boys,’ Olivia had fumed later in the kitchen to Madeleine as they drank their coffee.

‘He doesn’t mean anything by it,’ Madeleine had tried to comfort her, pushing the plate of Christmas biscuits she had baked that morning towards Olivia as she spoke.

‘Oh, yes he does,’ Olivia had told her darkly as she munched one of them, ‘and I should know. After all, I heard enough of it when I was growing up. He never stopped making me feel … reminding me … that as a girl I could never match up to Max, and my father was just as bad. Sometimes I used to wish that Max had been my father’s child and that Uncle Jon had been my father….’

‘Jenny’s told me how dreadfully Gramps spoiled Max when he was growing up,’ Madeleine remarked quietly.

‘Spoiled him is exactly right,’ Olivia had agreed forthrightly, momentarily obviously forgetting that Madeleine was Max’s wife. ‘Anything Max wanted he got, and Gramps was forever boasting about him to everyone else. Whenever we had a get-together with the Chester lot, there was Gramps singing Max’s praises, and woe betide anyone who tried to argue with him.

‘I hate to think what it would have done to Gramps if Max hadn’t got a place in chambers. I know that it was touch-and-go for a while, and of course, the fact that your father is so influential obviously helped in the end.’

‘Yes,’ Madeleine had agreed. She knew Olivia far too well to suspect her of any kind of malice or unkindness. She was simply stating what she saw as the facts, and her opinions were quite naturally tainted by her dislike of Max. She had always been completely open with Madeleine about her feelings for her cousin, explaining that they went back a long way, and that much as she liked Madeleine herself, she doubted that she could ever pretend to feel anything other than wary acceptance of Max.

Did Olivia know that the only reason that Max had married her had been to further his career? Madeleine hoped not. Olivia was basically very kind-hearted, and Madeleine knew she would never have deliberately hurt her by raising the subject if she had known the whole truth.

‘Gramps is going to be putting an awful lot of pressure on Leo to follow in Max’s footsteps,’ she started to warn Madeleine, but Madeleine stopped her, shaking her head calmly.

‘Leo isn’t like Max,’ she told Olivia quietly. ‘I think if he takes after anyone, it’s Jon, and I suspect that if he does go into the law he will be quite happy to follow Jon into the Haslewich practice.