Sins by Penny Jordan

could remember having that feeling as a very little girl when, on one humiliating occasion in the nursery, when her motherhad been in one of her moods, Ella had wet her knickers because she had been too afraid to interrupt her mother to tell her that she needed the lavatory. How cross her mother had been. Ella had been made to wear her wet knickers for the rest of the day as punishment.
    Hidden away inside her memory where she kept all those shameful things she didn’t really want to remember were images of the black lace underwear she had once seen her mother wearing. It had been one hot afternoon when Ella was supposed to be having a nap. She had woken up feeling thirsty and, since her nanny hadn’t been there, she had got up to go downstairs to the kitchen to ask Cook for a drink. On the way she had heard laughter coming from her parents’ bedroom and she had paused on the landing outside and then opened the bedroom door.
    Her mother had been lying on the bed in her black lace underwear, whilst Auntie Cassandra, wearing a bathrobe, had been fanning her with a black feather fan.
    The minute they had seen her the two women had gone very still, and then her mother had screeched furiously, ‘How dare you come in here, you wicked girl? Get out. Get out.’
    Ella had backed out of the room and run back upstairs to the nursery.
    She desperately wanted to warn Janey how important it was not to emulate their mother and turn out like her, but at the same time she couldn’t find the words to explain just what it was about their late mother’s wildness that worried and upset her so much.

    Dougie let the girls in, grinning appreciatively at all three of them, introducing himself and asking their names.
    ‘Ella and Janey Fulshawe, and Rose Pickford,’ Janey answered.
    Fulshawe? Pickford? Dougie knew
those
names. He’d seen them often enough in the correspondence sent to him by the late duke’s solicitor. The solicitor had set out all the intricate details of the widowed duchess’s family connections in a lengthy letter, accompanied by a family tree, while Dougie had been in Australia. He hadn’t paid much attention to it at first, but since coming to London he had studied the family tree. He hadn’t expected his first meeting with young women listed there to come about like this, though. If it was them and he wasn’t jumping to the wrong conclusion. It must be them, he assured himself, giving Rose a quick assessing look. He remembered now that there had been something on the family tree to show that the duchess’s brother had a half-Chinese daughter, and Rose was beautifully Eurasian. Dougie cursed himself now for not having paid more attention to the finer details of the genealogy, such as the exact names of the duchess’s extended family. The only name he could remember was that of the duchess’s daughter, Emerald. Surely it had to be
them
, though?
    ‘You’re Australian,’ Janey guessed, breaking into Dougie’s thoughts.
    ‘I reckon the accent gives me away,’ Dougie agreed ruefully. He was desperate to find out more about them, to find out if it really was
them
.
    ‘Just a bit,’ Janey agreed, smiling at him.
    Rose tensed. She knew exactly why the young Australianwho had let them in had looked at her the way he had when she had given him her name. He’d assumed, as so many others did, that because of the way she looked she belonged to a different stratum of society, and her upper-class accent had surprised him. He probably thought, as she was aware people who did not know her family history often did, that she had deliberately changed the way she spoke in an attempt to pass for something that she wasn’t.
    The year Amber had brought them out, Rose had been shocked and hurt by the number of young men who had taken it for granted that they could take liberties with her that they would never have dreamed of doing with Ella and Janey.
    The white-painted sitting room was heaving with people, the pitch of the