No Angel (Spoils of Time) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Part One - 1904 – 1914

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

Part Two - 1914 – 1918

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

Part Three - 1918 – 1920

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

EPILOGUE

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Into Temptation
The Dilemma
Something Dangerous
Almost A Crime
An Outrageous Affair
Sheer Abandon
An Absolute Scandal
Forbidden Places

This edition first published in the United States in 2003 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com

For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in
writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote
brief passages in connection with a review written for
inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN: 9781590207987

For Paul: with love. Not to mention huge appreciation for some particularly crucial structural advice.

Acknowledgements

As always, a long list of people without whom this book would not have happened. Probably top of the bill should go to my agent Desmond Elliott (no relation to the villain of the piece) for his encyclopaedian knowledge of publishing, after a wonderful lifetime in the business. Stories, anecdotes, facts and figures tumbled down the wires from his office to mine; the book would have been much the poorer without him.

I owe a big debt too to Rosemary Stark who gave me an extraordinarily insightful view of twin-ness, as did Jo Puccioni.

I would like to thank Martin Harvey for taking me round the Garrick Club and acquainting me so patiently with its history and its connection with publishing, and Ursula Lloyd who once more guided me through the complexities of medicine in the early part of the century, and Hugh Dickens for an immensely authoritative over-view of military matters.

For legal and other advice, I owe, as always, huge gratitude to Sue Stapely who either knows whatever I need to, or someone else who does; and to Mark Stephens who adds zest and originality to his fearsome knowledge of libel law and publishing.

I have delved into some particularly wonderful books for information: most notablyDespatches from the Heart by Annette Tapert, In Society: The Brideshead Years by Nicholas Courtney,The Country House Remembered edited by Merlin Watterson, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami and the marvelousRound About a Pound a Week by Maud Pember Reeves. Huge thanks to my four daughters Polly, Sophie, Emily and Claudia who continue to endure my self centered and panicky ramblings as publication draws nearer with kindness and sympathy, never indicating for a moment that they find (as they must do) the annual repetition of the drama rather tedious. I am and always will be immensely grateful to them. And to my husband Paul who has to endure even more of it, and (almost) never indicates it either…

I owe everybody a great deal. It has, as always, in retrospect anyway, been tremendous fun.

Part One

1904 – 1914

CHAPTER 1

Celia stood at the altar, smiling into the face of her bridegroom and wondered if she was about to test his vow to cherish her in sickness and in health rather sooner than he might have imagined. She really did feel as if she was going to vomit: there and then, in front of the congregation, the vicar, the choir. This was truly the stuff of which nightmares were made. She closed her eyes briefly, took a very deep breath, swallowed; heard dimly through her swimmy clammy nausea the vicar saying, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’, and somehow the fact that she had done it, managed this marriage, managed this day, that she was married to Oliver Lytton, whom she loved so much, and that no one could change anything now, made her feel better. She saw Oliver’s eyes on her, tender, but slightly anxious, having observed her faintness, and she managed to smile again before sinking gratefully on to her knees for the blessing.

Not an ideal condition for a bride to be in, almost three months’ pregnant; but then if she hadn’t been pregnant, her father would never have allowed her to marry Oliver anyway. It had been a fairly drastic measure; but it had worked. As she had known it would. And it had certainly been fun: she had enjoyed becoming pregnant a lot.

The blessing was over now; they were being ushered into the vestry to sign the register. She felt Oliver’s hand taking hers, and glanced over her shoulder at the group following them. There were her parents, her father fiercely stern, the old hypocrite: she’d grown up seeing pretty housemaid after pretty housemaid banished from the house, her mother, staunchly smiling, Oliver’s frail old father, leaning on his cane supported by his sister Margaret, and just behind them, Oliver’s two brothers, Robert rather stiff and formal and slightly portly, Jack, the youngest, absurdly handsome, with his brilliant blue eyes restlessly exploring the congregation for any pretty faces. Beyond them were the guests, admittedly rather few, just very close friends and family, and the people from the village and the estate, who of course wouldn’t have missed her being married for anything. She knew that in some ways her mother minded about that more than about anything else really, that it wasn’t a huge wedding like her sister Caroline’s, with three hundred guests at St Margaret’s Westminster, but a quiet affair in the village church. Well, she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind in the very least. She had married Oliver: she had got her way.

‘Of course you can’t marry him,’ her mother had said, ‘he has no money, no position, no house even, your father won’t hear of it.’

Her father did hear about it, about her wish to marry Oliver, because she made him listen; but he reiterated everything her mother had said.

‘Ridiculous. Throwing your life away. You want to marry properly, Celia, into your own class, someone who can keep you and support you in a reasonable way.’

She said she did not want to marry properly, she wanted to marry Oliver, because she loved him; that he had a brilliant future, that his father owned a successful publishing house in London which would be his one day.

‘Successful, nonsense,’ her father said, ‘if it was successful he wouldn’t be living in Hampstead would he? With nowhere in the country. No,...