Perfect Sins by Jo Bannister Page A

is too important for hurt feelings to be an issue. You need to be honest with your mother. I’d like to think she’d be honest with you in return.”
    â€œYou’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he said wistfully. “I know you’re right. It’s just … I haven’t got your moral courage. I know what you did in Norbold. You did what was right, what needed doing, even though it put your life in danger. I’m not that brave.”
    â€œPete.” She reached out and took his hand. She was surprised to find he was actually trembling. “You may have to be. If this thing goes pear-shaped, it’ll be your job to hold the family together. To look after your sisters, and Byrfield. You’ll need to be brave then, and strong. But you know, don’t you, you can count on your friends.”
    He managed a shame-faced little smile. “I’m glad you’re here.”

 
    CHAPTER 11
    C OUNTESS B YRFIELD, RETURNING late from a charity lunch in Cambridge, passed the strange dog on the stairs up to her apartments. Each turned her head to watch the other as the countess continued climbing and the lurcher headed toward the kitchen. The countess was thinking, In better days than these the gamekeeper would have shot a mongrel like that. Who knows what Patience was thinking?
    At least her own rooms remained a haven of peace from her son’s ridiculous friends: the one who was always covered in mud, the impertinent one with the dog, and the one who if memory served—and it always did—was actually the handyman’s brat! Alice Byrfield closed her door behind her with an audible sigh of relief. At least in here the world still operated according to the rules that had obtained for most of her life. At least in here things knew their place.
    At least here she had the privacy to consider how these new developments might affect her. How much, if at all, she should admit to knowing. She was alone—her maid didn’t come in on Sundays: how very different things were when she was a girl! So slowly, thinking all the time, she took off her jacket and hung it up, and took off her earrings and put them away, and pressed the button on the electric kettle, which was as close to domestic work as Alice Byrfield ever got.
    With the cup of Earl Grey thus provided, she sat down in her wing chair in the bay window, with its matchless view across the park toward the lake and the fields of Home Farm, and thought about the little hummock in the grass and whether the discovery of its contents had the power to disturb the life she had created here.
    *   *   *
    Finding herself at a loose end after tea, Hazel gravitated—as she had in spare moments through much of her childhood—toward the stables. The brick-built boxes were empty, but curious heads lifted from grazing in the paddocks beyond. She recognized Viv’s old hunter, twenty-five years old but still game for a day out if the opportunity presented; the old earl’s favorite broodmare, barren now, which Pete Byrfield occasionally threw a saddle on; even one of the old ponies Hazel had ridden. A quick calculation told her their combined ages must now be something over seventy. Don Jackson, the local knacker, who for years had looked forward to getting a call about them, had just about given up, suspecting that the three horses would dance at his funeral.
    A footstep on the cobbles behind her warned Hazel she had company, and she turned, to find Lady Vivienne Byrfield—unmarried despite her mother’s best efforts, highly successful as Something in the City—bearing down on her like a Corvette at full revolutions. She hadn’t been a pretty girl and she wasn’t a handsome woman, but she radiated a mixture of self-confidence, genuine competence, and a totally unsentimental kindness that made people like her anyway.
    â€œHazel!” she boomed as she strode across the stable yard. She