Forget-Me-Not Bride

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• Margaret Pemberton
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Epilogue
  

Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.

She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists' Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers'Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.

For MOLLY RUMBELOW

It was the first day of June 1900 but there was no June-like mood in Herbert Mosley's household, high on one of the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay.

‘That girl should be whipped!' he thundered as spilt milk ran in rivulets across the damask tablecloth and dribbled on to a hideously patterned Turkish carpet.

‘I'm sorry,' Lottie Stullen said contritely, looking not at her enraged uncle but towards her eighteen-year-old sister. ‘I didn't mean to do it, Lilli. I just caught the glass with the edge of my hand and …'

‘It's all right, Lottie,' Lilli said, already mopping the milk up with her napkin. ‘No great harm has been done …'

‘No great harm has been done?
No great harm has been done
?' Her uncle pushed his chair abruptly away from the breakfast table his heavy-jowled face choleric. ‘No child of mine would have ever made such a remark! That you have done so is typical of your regrettable upbringing and Irish blood!'

Lilli's face whitened. Since she and her ten-year-old sister and six-year-old brother had, of necessity, moved into her mother's sister's childless home, she had become accustomed to joylessness and petty tyranny. What she had not become accustomed to, and had no intention of becoming accustomed to, were derogatory remarks about her dead father.

‘Lottie has made an apology and that should suffice,' she said tightly, pushing her chair away from the table and rising to her feet with an abruptness equal to his own. ‘Your remarks about my upbringing and Irishness are totally unwarranted.'

Her Aunt Gussie gave a cry of apprehension.

Her little brother, Leo, began to cry.

Lottie clasped her hands tightly in her pinafored lap, hating herself for her clumsiness and hating her English Uncle Herbert even more.

‘Your father was a reckless nincompoop who made no provision for his motherless children,' Herbert roared, his hands splayed on the table as he stood, resting his weight on them, leaning bullishly towards her.

Lilli didn't flinch but her forget-me-not-blue eyes flashed fire. ‘My father was a gentleman, as any other gentleman would have been well aware!'

Herbert sucked in his breath, hardly able to believe his ears. ‘Into my study!' he hissed, ugly splodges of white mottling his flushed colour. ‘No-one talks to me like that in my own house! Especially not a slip of a girl who, if it wasn't for my charity, would be on the streets, begging!'

Only responsibility for Leo and Lottie prevented Lilli from retorting that begging would be far preferable to living with him in his tomb of a house. She had, she knew, already gone too far. If he wanted he could turn her out of his hateful house and then what would happen to Leo and Lottie? Her uncle would never allow her to take them with her. Childless himself, she had overheard him discussing with her aunt the possibility of changing Leo's surname from Stullen to Mosley. It was an action she had vowed he would take only over her dead body, but it had served to show the direction of his thoughts and it was a direction that filled her with dark foreboding.

As she followed him out of the room she wondered for the hundredth time how the three of them were ever going to escape him.

At eighteen she was old enough and capable enough to make her own way in the world, but to do so would mean relinquishing Leo and Lottie totally to her aunt and uncle's care. If only her Aunt Gussie were a little more forceful the dilemma might not be so great, but her mother's sister was anything but forceful. Whatever her husband said, she bided by. And she was hungry for children of her own.

As she crossed the hallway towards her uncle's study, Lilli was aware that in refusing to be brow-beaten by him she wasn't, in fact, behaving very sensibly. Such behaviour would merely provide him with the ideal excuse to disclaim responsibility for her and he would then have complete guardianship over Leo and Lottie. Hateful though the prospect was, she was going to have to apologise to him. And then she was going to have to think of a way in which she could care for Leo and Lottie without being beholden to her aunt and uncle in any way.

‘Shut the door!' he ordered as she walked into the room after him.

With her head high, her jawline tense, she did as he bid.

He was seated at a large desk that fronted a window through which could be seen a cloud-flecked sky and a corner of the fifty mile expanse of water that was the Bay. He breathed in deeply and then said unequivocally, ‘I demand an apology.'

Everything about him was tense: his voice; the set of his shoulders; the way his hands were clasped together in front of him, the knuckles white. With a tightening of her stomach muscles she realised that he anticipated her refusing to do any such thing, and that he then intended ordering her from the house.

‘I apologise,' she said, forcing the words through lips that felt frozen, her only solace the bitter disappointment that flared though his eyes.

‘The devil you do!' Once again, like a malevolent Jack-in-the-Box, he sprang to his feet. ‘You're being insolent, young lady, and don't think I don't know it!'

‘You demanded an apology and I gave it,' she retorted icily, keeping her temper well-curbed, knowing how fatal it might be if she were to lose it. Down in the distant Bay the sun sparkled on the white of furled sails. With a pang she remembered the leap of excitement she had felt when her father's lawyer had told her that San Francisco was to be her new home. Compared to the small Kansan town in which her widowed father had died, it had seemed to promise so much …

‘'49ers,' Leo had said, his eyes rounding. ‘Don't you remember the stories Pa told us about the Gold Rush? That was San Francisco! Do you think there's still gold to be found there, Lilli? Do you think
we
might find gold?'

Leo's thick thatch of hair was nearly as dark as her own and she had laughed and ruffled his curls. ‘The San Francisco Gold Rush took place long ago, in 1849,' she had said lovingly. ‘That was why the gold prospectors called themselves ' 49ers.'

Lottie had said, a catch in her voice, ‘If Pa hadn't been ill, I know he would have taken us to Alaska looking for gold, because he told me so.'

Neither Leo or Lilli had doubted her. Going to Alaska, panning for gold, was exactly the sort of adventure to have fired their father's imagination. And if he had lived long enough to have embarked upon it he would most certainly have taken them with him, for he took them everywhere with him.

They had all fallen silent, thinking of the father they had loved so much. An immigrant to America, he had been an incurable optimist, always certain that things were ‘going to look up' and that good fortune lay ‘just around the corner'.

Sometimes his optimism had been well-founded. There had been a time, when their mother had been alive, when home had been an exceedingly comfortable ranch-hand's cabin in Wyoming. Like nearly all Irishmen, Connor Stullen had had magic in his hands when it came to horse-flesh, and it had been when he was working with horses that he had been happiest.

His brother-in-law, an immigrant of a very different stamp, had had no time for a man who earned his living in such a gypsyish fashion. Herbert liked to think of himself as being a businessman, though exactly what his business was remained a family mystery …

Nearly as tall as he was, her eyes holding his, Lillie faced Herbert across the solidly built surface of his leather-topped desk. From the moment she had stepped across his threshold, holding Leo and Lottie by the hand, she had known that she was not welcome. The knowledge had shocked her, but it had been a shock her resilient nature had quickly come to terms with.

What she had not been able to come to terms with was the growing realisation that though she was definitely not wanted, and Lottie was only tolerated under sufferance, Leo was wanted very much indeed.

At first she had thought the favouritism shown towards her little brother was simply the favouritism often shown towards the youngest of a family, especially if the youngest were a boy. Then, as she became more attuned to the tense atmosphere in the childless household and to a better understanding of her uncle's character, the ugly truth dawned. Herbert believed Leo was young enough to be moulded by him; young enough to have all traces of Irish accent eradicated from his speech; young enough to be reared as his son and for the world to be duped into believing that he
was
his son.

‘You're an insolent chit and you've sponged on my generosity long enough,' her
bête noir
said now, with savage vehemence, spittle forming at the corners of his thin-lipped mouth. ‘If your father's boasting about how talented and educated you are were true, you'd be able to find employment quick enough, though as he alone was responsible for that education I don't imagine it amounts to much!'

Lilli, steeped in an upbringing that had embraced her father's idiosyncratic view of world history, the very best in Irish literature, a detailed knowledge of Greek mythology, a wide understanding of botany and the medicinal use of herbs, the ability to play both an accordion and a fiddle and the ability to care for and cure sick horses, remained silent. She also knew her Bible and she had no intention of casting her pearls before swine.