Authors: Rosie Thomas

Tags: #Chick-Lit, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Modern, #Romance, #Women's Fiction

Bad Girls Good Women (106 page)

‘No,’ Julia told him. She felt the last, cold touch of fear, and the need to dispel it.

‘Are you afraid, Alexander?’

He smiled. ‘I love you,’ he told her.

‘I love you too.’

Her head was still against his shoulder. It was the greatest luxury she had ever known to let it rest there. Now that it was lifted, the weight of hoping seemed too heavy to bear. Looking back, the threads between them looked much too fragile to hold, too thin to draw them back together again. But they had held, and the drawing was done. Alexander lifted his hand and smoothed her hair.

The sundial shadow seemed to point away to the long border. The dead arms of the summer plants were tangled with bindweed, and spiders’ webs stretched between dry brown spikes that had once been flowers. Julia saw that there was work to be done, and the simplicity and satisfaction of it, turning with the seasons, filled her with pleasure. The earth was rich, and she enjoyed the fruits of it.

Alexander’s arms were still around her. ‘I never saw your Italian garden,’ he said.

‘It’s very different from this one. And it’s Tomaso’s garden now.’ Julia spoke of it fondly, without regret. ‘We could go to see it one day.’

‘One day,’ Alexander agreed. ‘Do you know what I would like now?’

Thinking that he was going to say, some breakfast, or, a cup of hot coffee, she smiled at him and asked, ‘What would you like?’

‘I’d like a son. For Ladyhill.’

Julia stood very still. Alexander’s hand moved to rest over her stomach, as gently as if there was already a son inside it. She thought,
I’m not forty yet. It’s possible
. She had believed that she was empty and dry, like the old leaves, but suddenly she understood that if she wanted it, she could be as rich as the earth itself.

‘A baby. Is that what you really want?’

‘I do.’

Julia laughed, amazed and delighted. She let the idea carry her. ‘Sir Felix Bliss,’ she murmured, joking.

Alexander went one better. ‘Sir Joshua Bliss. No, perhaps not. And I’m afraid that at least one of his names must be Percy.’

‘Sir Percy Alexander Bliss,’ Julia echoed. ‘And what if it’s a girl?’

‘You know that Lily has given me more happiness than almost anything else in my life. I can’t imagine loving any other child as much as I love Lily, but I know that other fathers succeed.’

Julia looked into his face. There were lines, and the corners of his eyelids had begun to droop, intensifying his sardonic air. His hair was grey at the temples, and thinning, but Alexander wasn’t an old man. She felt that he was still young, that they both were, and that she loved him unreservedly. She wanted to give him happiness, and to set the sadness of the years behind them. That was in her power. It had always been in her power, if only she had known it. The muted, English gardens would grow green again, and they would make the lovely, silent house alive once more.

If Alexander wanted a son to run through the rooms, and out under the trees, then she wanted the same with all her heart.

She looked beyond him, at the sweep of the garden and at the tall chimneys and pointed eaves of the house.

Ladyhill. Home.

‘Well,’ Julia said, composed in her delight. ‘Well. We’ll have to see what we can do, won’t we?’

Keep Reading

Available 27 Feb 2014

London 1870.

A terrifying place for a young, beautiful woman of limited means. But Eliza is modern before her time. Not for her the stifling if respectable conventionality of marriage, children, domestic drudgery. She longs for more. Through her work as an artist’s model, she meets the magnetic and irascible Devil – a born showman whose dream is to run his own theatre company.

Devil’s right-hand man is the improbably-named Carlo Bonomi, an ill-tempered dwarf with an enormous talent for all things magic and illusion. Carlo and Devil clash at every opportunity and it constantly falls upon Eliza to broker an uneasy peace between them. And then there is Jasper Button. Mild-mannered, and a family man at heart, it is his gift as an artist which makes him the unlikely final member of the motley crew.

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Within one exotic land lie the secrets of a lifetime…

Newlywed Nerys Watkins leaves rural Wales for the first time to accompany her husband on a missionary posting to India. Deep in the exquisite heart of Kashmir lies the lakeside city of Srinagar, where the British live on carved wooden houseboats and dance, flirt and gossip as if there is no war.

But the battles draw closer, and life in Srinagar becomes less frivolous when the men are sent away to fight. Nerys is caught up in a dangerous friendship, and by the time she is reunited with her husband, the innocent Welsh bride has become a different woman.

Years later, when Mair Ellis clears out her father’s house, she finds an exquisite antique shawl, a lock of child’s hair wrapped within its folds. Tracing her grandparents’ roots back to Kashmir, Mair embarks on a quest that will change her life forever.

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About the Author

Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including the bestselling
The Kashmir Shawl
. A keen adventurer, she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, trekked in the footsteps of Shackleton in South Georgia, and travelled in Ladakh and Kashmir. She lives in London.

Also by Rosie Thomas

Celebration

Follies

Sunrise

The White Dove

Strangers

Bad Girls, Good Women

A Woman of Our Times

All My Sins Remembered

Other People’s Marriages

A Simple Life

Every Woman Knows a Secret

Moon Island

White

The Potter’s House

If My Father Loved Me

Sun At Midnight

Iris and Ruby

Constance

Lovers and Newcomers

The Kashmir Shawl

The Illusionists

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First published in the United Kingdom in 1988 by Michael Joseph

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © APR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560561

Version: 2014-05-13

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