Tainted Tree Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Tainted Tree

  Also by Jacquelynn Luben

  Addie Russell's Family Tree (24th June 1991)

  Part 1

  Chapter One: The Old Man’s House

  Chapter 2: The Benefactor

  Chapter 3: Tea for Two

  Chapter 4: Pandora’s Box

  Chapter 5: The Housekeeper

  Chapter 6: Pieces of the Jigsaw

  Addie Russell's Family Tree (26th June 1991)

  Chapter 7: Addie Goes West

  Chapter 8: The Schoolmaster

  Chapter 9: Researching the Tree

  Chapter 10: The Paper Trail

  Addie Russell's Family Tree (29th June 1991)

  Chapter 11: Unfair Dismissal

  Chapter 12: Happy Families

  Chapter 13: Rodney’s Wife

  Chapter 14: Act of Faith

  Addie Russell's Family Tree (4th July 1991)

  Part 2

  Chapter 15: New Friends

  Chapter 16: Summer Storms

  Chapter 17: Visitors for Addie

  Chapter 18: Addie Goes Back

  Chapter 19: Lost and Lonely Years

  Chapter 20: The Power of the Press

  Chapter 21: A Door to the Past

  Chapter 22: Adrienne’s Diary

  Chapter 23: Adrienne at University

  Chapter 24: Adrienne in Love

  Part 3

  Chapter 25: Son et Lumiere

  Chapter 26: Dirty Weekend

  Chapter 27: Exits and Entrances

  Chapter 28: Family Business

  Chapter 29: Orphan in a Storm

  Chapter 30: Survivors

  Acknowledgements

  Tainted Tree

  Jacquelynn Luben

  First published by Goldenford Publishers Ltd 2008

  Electronic editions 2011 & 2012 published by Jacquelynn Luben

  This book is available in print and as an ebook at most online retailers

  Copyright 2008 & 2011 Jacquelynn Luben

  The right of Jacquelynn Luben to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of bind or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover design by Janice Windle, based on her original painting

  Tainted Tree

  Jacquelynn Luben

  Originally from London, Jacquelynn Luben lives with her husband in a Surrey village, their children having fled the nest, and she acts as her husband’s reluctant secretary. Tainted Tree, her fourth book, is her second work of fiction and follows her novella, A Bottle of Plonk. She has also written many articles and short stories. Having studied with The Open University and Surrey University, she gained a degree in 2002 with a dissertation on the Harry Potter series and other children’s books, but still prefers to write adult fiction. Tainted Tree was awarded Second Prize, Novel Section, at the 2007 Winchester Writers’ Conference.

  …an engaging narrative voice… I was immediately drawn into the story.

  Donna Condon, editor, Piatkus Books

  The atmosphere is skilfully built, humming with suspense…evocative images and well-chosen vocabulary…a page-turner

  Adrienne Dines, author

  …excellent family dialogue, which races along most satisfyingly…

  Historical Novel Association

  Also by Jacquelynn Luben

  Fiction

  A Bottle of Plonk

  Published by Goldenford Publishers,

  www.goldenford.co.uk and on-line

  Various short stories on-line at www.untreedreads.com

  Non-fiction

  The Fruit of the Tree

  Published by Nelson Houtman

  Jacquelynn Luben’s website:

  http://freespace.virgin.net/jackie.luben

  Part 1

  Chapter One: The Old Man’s House

  24th June 1991

  Addie saw the child’s photograph on the hall table as soon as she walked through the door. The schoolgirl in the picture was around ten or eleven, with blue eyes, uneven teeth and fair hair in braids. Addie felt a momentary sense of shock, followed by elation. The resemblance to herself was strong—the same oval shaped face and wide mouth—but the girl’s bright blue eyes bore no resemblance to her own green ones and her hair was much fairer than Addie’s. Even so, there could be no doubt they were related.

  ‘My mother,’ she breathed.

  The last few days waiting for information, the sleepless nights and then the flight from Boston—they had all been worth it for this moment. She felt tears start in her eyes.

  If anyone had told her a month ago that she would inherit a house in England, she would never have believed it. To take it even further into fantasyland, it was one of those mock Tudor places that showed up in English detective thrillers, with black painted timbers and leaded lights. She’d fallen in love with it as soon as she saw the name, Tamar, carved on to a timber signboard, and seen the sun’s reflection twinkling on the latticed windows. But all that paled into insignificance—it was just a property after all. Just bricks and mortar. Finding out about her mother, Adrienne Heron—that was the important thing. That was all important.

  Addie hadn’t known the late owner of this house, James Buckley. He’d willed Tamar to her mother, but she’d died 26 years ago—when Addie was born. Addie kept asking herself why he didn’t know her mother was dead, and what could be the connection between them. If only she’d known about him earlier. Now he was dead too, and couldn’t answer her questions, but surely, coming here was going to give her the chance to find out. About himself, about Adrienne—and all the other family that must exist.

  The young lawyer from Palfrey, Willow and Amery, the firm administering James Buckley’s estate, had followed her into the hall. He closed the door behind him and put his briefcase on the woodblock floor. She turned her gaze away from the picture, and, trying to look unmoved, walked into the living room. The lawyer trailed after her. Did he think she was going to steal something? It belonged to her now anyway. Irritated, she turned. ‘Would you mind? I’d like to be alone for a moment.’

  He looked surprised, but retreated to the hall.

  The sun was shining through the window, giving a warm glow to the elegantly furnished room, and outside, she could see the summer colours of an unexplored garden. She couldn’t believe her good fortune. There would be so much to see and discover. But above all, finding out about her English mother was something she had dreamt of for many years. She turned and walked back through the doorway to look again at the photograph. She still couldn’t resist gazing at it, even though she had returned over and over again, in the last few days, to the blurry newspaper replica, which had been responsible for her coming from Boston in the first place.

  The lawyer had been standing quietly waiting. Now he gave a polite cough, no doubt to remind her of his presence.

  Trying to stop her voice from shaking, Addie said, ‘You don’t know what coming to his house means to me. And to see my mother’s photo here.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d like to go upstairs and look around on your own. I’ll wait down here for you.’
>
  She liked the sound of his voice and the English accent, and she could see he was trying to be kind, but he looked as though his mind were elsewhere—to judge by his unsmiling face, somewhere rather unpleasant. What was wrong with him? He seemed irritated or angry about something. Still, that was not her concern today. Her interest was here, in the house—in Tamar.

  She walked up the stairs, trailing her fingers lightly along the highly polished banister rails. Someone loved and cared for this house or for its late occupant, James Buckley. And he—James, who only on his death had entered her life—he had lived here for twenty years or more; his hand had brushed this banister; his feet, too, had climbed these stairs. Her discovery of him had brought in its wake another unsolved mystery.

  Upstairs, Addie found two large bedrooms and a smaller one, all with pink floral covers on the beds and matching curtains. They didn’t fit in at all with her mental picture of James. But the fourth bedroom had been converted into a study, the walls adorned with prints of ships at sea. Somehow, here, she knew she had found the essence of the man. It was filled with sober masculinity. She could see James in her mind’s eye. A formal man; a very English man, like the pilots and naval men in old black and white war movies.

  A large mahogany desk took pride of place, the scars and scratches of years imprinted into the wood. For a moment, she could almost imagine James sitting there, his back straight, writing his letters with an old-fashioned fountain pen and a bottle of ink. But now the desk had been tidied up and was bare, with the exception of one or two ornaments. A faint scent of furniture polish lingered in the air, and there was none of the mustiness associated with an empty house. She wondered who it was that looked so carefully after the home of a dead man.

  Above the desk, a rectangular wall map showed the dragon nose of the west of England, pointing into the sea. And next to it were six small black and white photographs in oval frames. These, surely, were photos of people he had loved. She moved closer to examine the pictures and her eyes were drawn to two shots of a teenage girl. She couldn’t miss the resemblance to herself, and she knew that they were photos of her mother. These, and the other younger version of Adrienne, must mean that James had kept in contact with her, after all.

  What about the other photos? What clues would they provide? As she moved for a better view, she heard another contrived cough from below. The lawyer was hovering downstairs; she could imagine him pacing, even though she couldn’t hear his footsteps.

  Addie knew she would come back to this room to find out more about James Buckley and how he was connected with her mother, Adrienne Heron. But this wasn’t the moment.

  She was more composed now. She went down, feeling already as if he were an outsider, and she the gracious hostess. She could see from the speed with which he picked up his briefcase that he was impatient to leave.

  ‘Right, Miss Russell.’

  ‘Thank you so much for bringing me here,’ she said. ‘There’s really no need for you to stay any longer. Perhaps you could just bring in my suitcase from your car.’

  ‘Didn’t you book in at the hotel my uncle suggested?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘I decided I’d stick around here. I’d like to enjoy my little bit of British real estate.’

  He put the briefcase down again, his face tensing up. She could see he didn’t want complications; he wanted to wrap up this job.

  ‘You can’t stay here, Miss Russell. It’s probably damp. No-one’s slept here since Major Buckley’s death.’

  Why didn’t the man understand how important this place was to her?

  She touched him on the arm and smiled.

  ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my sleeping bag. I’ve camped in places all over the States, and I’ve got warm clothes specially for England.’

  He stepped backwards as she touched him. Was there some almost imperceptible spark between them? More likely embarrassment. Everyone said that Englishmen were so reserved. Anyhow, his voice was still cool.

  ‘Surely, you’ll want to create a good impression for estate agents. I’d have thought you’d want to get a good price for the place, and get back to Boston. Property values here are down at the moment, and they could drop further.’

  He didn’t seem to realise that momentous things were happening to her and the value of the property was trivial by comparison. She wondered fleetingly if these English lawyers ever behaved like human beings. The senior partner of Palfrey, Willow, etc. had already talked at her for more than forty minutes on her arrival at the office, right after the flight, in such incomprehensible jargon that she felt her eyelids weighing heavy even as she sat there. Surely he should have known she wasn’t taking it in. Perhaps he was deliberately trying to confuse her.

  She’d woken up a bit when this other lawyer appeared; he was younger; he looked attractive. She’d noticed he was about thirty, with grey eyes—yes nice eyes—and fairish brown hair. And she’d had to look up at him as they walked from the office to the car, so he was quite tall—probably six foot. But it seemed he was no better. Maybe they were both trying to keep something from her.

  She interrupted him. ‘Mr uh…’ She realised she’d forgotten his name. Unforgivable. She was normally so good about that.

  ‘Amery. Jonathan Amery.’

  She was more tired than she’d realised; she couldn’t remember if the older man had already introduced them. She bluffed.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought the other lawyer was Mr Amery.’

  ‘As I said, he’s my uncle. The other partners left the business years ago. We just kept on the name. My father was the only other partner.’

  ‘Oh, your father is in the business, too,’ Addie said. ‘So there’s even more Amerys.’ She joked, ‘I guess there was no room left for Mr Palfrey and Mr Willow.’

  She saw that the lawyer’s face had stiffened again. ‘My father died a couple of years ago. It’s just my uncle and myself now.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Addie said and there was a silence.

  She started again. ‘Mr Amery, the value of the property is not a priority for me. There’s just one thing I’m interested in—why this James Buckley should leave me this house. I guess what I want to find out is whether he could be related to my mother. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘I’m afraid I never actually met Major Buckley. And my uncle has been handling all the paperwork.’

  She interrupted him, trying to explain, wanting to share her feelings with another human being.

  ‘You see, I don’t know anything about him at all—except that my mother was important to him in some way. Most of the time, I didn’t even think about her being English.’

  His voice now had an impatient edge to it. ‘I’m sorry, but my uncle hasn’t really filled me in with any details about your family. He simply asked me to bring you here and make sure everything was all right. It’s not the sort of thing I normally deal with.’ He was still not smiling and she realised now he had been irritated by the errand. But she couldn’t let him go—not without trying to find out more.

  ‘I appreciate that, and I’m really sorry to have taken up your time. But your uncle spent most of the time I was with him explaining some of the legal stuff that was in the will. I guess I’m still a bit jet-lagged, because I couldn’t really follow what he was saying.’

  She was aware she was putting on a ‘little girl lost’ routine, hoping to win around this man—get some warmth or reaction from him, even if she didn’t gain any information. She wasn’t used to this lack of response from a man. But the lawyer didn’t say anything. She wondered again if he was deliberately hiding information from her.

  She went on desperately, ‘This Major Buckley has left me nearly everything he owned and I never even knew him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get too excited about it. The property market is so bad at the moment. In fact, what I would recommend…’

  Addie, irritated with the lawyer’s apparent incomprehension, tried
to provoke him into a different sort of response. ‘I guess lawyers are always recommending things that will provide them with business,’ she said.

  ‘I can assure you, I don’t believe in behaving unethically,’ he said quite sharply. ‘I don’t know what sort of lawyers you’ve mixed with, but I hope I would never recommend anything that was not beneficial to my client.’

  Well that had certainly achieved the desired effect. There was a human being behind the legalistic front, after all. It seemed as if she’d hit a raw nerve.

  ‘I certainly didn’t mean to upset you, Mr Amery,’ she said, though she had.

  ‘It just so happens,’ he replied, ‘I’ve had my fingers burnt with a property purchase. My own flat’s lost several thousands of pounds in value.’

  ‘Really? Well can’t you just hold on till things improve?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, why is that?’

  He glared at her. ‘What was it you were asking me before?’

  She had a feeling that despite having annoyed him, she had somehow penetrated his armour.

  ‘What I wanted to know was whether James Buckley had any children. I mean adult children that would be my mother’s age now, if she were alive—say about fifty.’

  He thought for a moment. She could tell he had relented a little; perhaps he was embarrassed at snapping at her.

  ‘Look, Mr Amery, your uncle told me that my mother was Major Buckley’s goddaughter. And he said the same thing to my Mom—my adopted mother, that is—when she called him. But in the newspaper clipping it said “daughter.” And that’s really what I want to get straight. It’s very important to me.’

  The tiredness was getting the better of her. She tried to control the tremor in her voice. ‘I—I never knew my mother.’

  A look of sympathy came over his face. ‘I’m sorry. How very sad for you.’

  He was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘As a matter of fact, I do remember my father talking about Major Buckley a few years ago, when he was drafting a document for him. He said something about the Major’s child dying in tragic circumstances.’