The Hidden Years

• PROLOGUE
  
• 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
  
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  
• CHAPTER NINETEEN
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  

THE HIDDEN YEARS


Sage could see the diaries now; all of them methodically
numbered and dated, as though her mother had always known that there
would come a time, as though she had deliberately planned…


Her hands were shaking as she opened the first diary. She
didn't want to do this, and yet even in her reluctance she could almost
feel the pressure of her mother's will, almost hear her whispering:


'You promised…'


Sage blinked rapidly to clear her eyes and then read the
first sentence.


'Today I met Kit…'


'Kit…' Sage frowned and turned back the page to
check on the date. This diary had begun when her mother was seventeen.
Soon after her eighteenth birthday she had been married to Edward. So
who was this Kit?


Nebulous, uneasy feelings stirred inside her as Sage
stared reluctantly at the neat, evenly formed handwriting. It was like
being confronted with a dark passage you had to go down and yet feared
to enter. And yet, after all, what was there to fear?


Telling herself she was being stupid, she picked up the
diary for the second time and started to read.

Penny Jordan Born in Preston, Lancashire, Penny Jordan now
lives with her husband in a beautiful fourteenth-century house in rural
Cheshire. Hers is a success almost as breathtaking as the exploits of
the characters she so skilfully and knowingly portrays. Penny has been
writing for over ten years and now has over seventy novels to her name
including the phenomenally successful
Power Play
and
Silver
. With over thirty million copies of
her books in print and translations into seventeen languages, she has
firmly established herself as a leading authoress of extraordinary
scope.

Her previous novels in Worldwide are:

POWER PLAY

SILVER

First published 1990

First Australian paperback edition 1991

ISBN 0 373 57989 6

Copyright © 1990 by Penny Jordan.

Philippine copyright 1990.

Australian copyright 1990.

New Zealand copyright 1990.

Judged
by the laws of logic, the accident should never have happened at all.

A quiet—or at least quiet by London's frenetic
standards—side-street; a clear, bright spring morning; a taxi
driver who prided himself on his accident-free record; a slender,
elegant woman who looked and moved like someone ten years younger than
she actually was; none of the parts that went to make up the whole was
in any way logically vulnerable, and yet, as though fate had decreed
what must happen and was determined that it would happen, even though
the woman crossed the road with ease and safety, even though the taxi
driver had seen her and logged the fact that she had crossed the road
ahead of him, even though the pavement and road were free of debris and
frost, for some reason, as she stepped on to the pavement, the woman's
heel caught on the kerb, throwing her off balance so that she turned
and fell, not on to the relative safety of the pavement, but into the
road and into the path of the taxi, whose driver was safely and
law-abidingly not driving along its crown in the sometimes dangerous
and arrogant manner of taxi drivers the world over, but well into his
correct side of the street.

He saw the woman fall, and braked instinctively, but it
was too late. The sickening sensation of soft, vulnerable human flesh
hitting his cab was a sound he would carry with him the rest of his
life. His passenger, a pinstripe-suited businessman in his early
fifties, was jolted out of his seat by the impact. Already people were
emerging from the well-kept, expensive houses that lined the street.

Someone must have rung for an ambulance because he could
hear its muted siren wailing mournfully like a dirge… He
could hardly bear to look at the woman, he was so sure that she must be
dead, and so he stood sickly to one side as the ambulance arrived and
the professionals took over.

'She's alive… just,' he heard someone say, and
in his mind's eye he pictured the people somewhere who were still at
this moment oblivious to the tragedy about to darken their lives.

Somewhere this woman would have family, friends,
dependants—she had had that look about her, the confident,
calm look of a woman in control of her life and those lives that
revolved around her own. Somewhere those people still went about their
daily business, unaware and secure.

Her mother, injured in a road accident and now lying close
to death in a hospital bed—it seemed impossible, Sage thought
numbly; her mother was invulnerable, omnipresent, indestructible, or so
she had always seemed.

Vague, disconnected, unreal thoughts ricocheted through
her brain: memories, fears, sensations. The Porsche, which had been a
celebratory thirtieth birthday present to herself, cut through the
heavy traffic, her physical ability to control and manoeuvre the
expensive piece of machinery oddly unaffected by her mental turmoil.

There was a sensation in the pit of her stomach which she
remembered from her childhood and adolescence: an uncomfortable mixture
of apprehension, pain and anger. How dared her mother do this to her?
How dared she intrude on the life she had built for herself? How dared
she reach out, as she had reached out so very many times in the past,
to cast her influence, her presence over her own independence?

She wasn't a child any more, she was mature, an adult, so
why now was she swamped with those old and oh, so familiar feelings of
resentment and guilt, of pain and anger and, most betraying of all, of
fear?

The hospital wasn't far away, which was presumably why
they had contacted her and not Faye. And then she remembered that she
was her mother's closest blood relative… the next of kin. A
tiny tremor of pure acid-sharp horror chilled her skin. Her mother,
dying… She had told herself for so long that she felt
nothing for the woman who had given birth to her—that her
mother's treachery and deceit had made it impossible for any emotion
other than hatred to exist between them—that it was doubly
shocking to feel this dread… this anguish.

She turned into the hospital, parked her car, and climbed
out of it, frowning, the movement of her elegant, lithe body quick and
impatient. A typical Leo was how Liz Danvers had once ruefully
described her second child: fiery, impetuous, impatient, intemperate
and intelligent.

That had been almost twenty years ago. Since then time had
rubbed smooth some of the rough edges of her restless personality,
experience gentling and softening the starkness of a nature that weaker
souls often found too abrasive. Now in her early thirties, she had
learned to channel those energies which had once driven her calmer and
far more self-possessed mother behind the wall of reserve and dignity
which Sage had wasted so much of her childhood trying to batter down,
in an effort to reach the elusive core of her personality which she had
sensed her mother withheld from her; just as she had always felt that
in some way she was not the child her mother had wanted her to be.

But then of course she was not, and never could be,
another David. David… her brother. She missed him even
now… missed his gentle wise counsel, missed his love, his
understanding. David… everyone who had known him had loved
him, and deservedly so. To describe his virtues was to make him appear
insipid, to omit due cognisance of the essential sweetness and
selflessness of both David the child and David the man, which had made
him so deeply loved by everyone who knew him. But she had never been
jealous of David, had never felt that, but for him, her mother would
have loved her more or better… so the schism between them
went too deep to be explained away by a maternal preference for a more
favoured sibling. Once it had hurt, that knowledge that there was
something within her that turned the love her mother seemed to shower
on everything and everyone else around her into enmity and dislike, but
maturity had taught her acceptance if nothing else, acceptance and the
ability to distance herself from those things in her past which were
too painful to confront. Things which she avoided, just as she avoided
all but the most necessary contact with her mother. She seldom went
home to Cottingdean these days.

Cottingdean: the house itself, the garden, the village;
all of them her mother's domain, all of them created and nurtured by
her mother's will. They were her mother's world.

Cottingdean. How she had hated and resented the place's
demands on her mother throughout her childhood, transferring to it the
envy and dislike she had never felt for David. Too young then to
analyse why it was that her mother seemed to hold her at a distance, to
dislike her almost, she had jealously believed that it was because of
Cottingdean and its demands upon her mother's time; that Cottingdean
meant far more to her mother than she ever could.

In that perhaps she had been right, and why not? she
thought cynically—Cottingdean had certainly repaid to her
mother the time and devotion she had invested in it, in a way that she,
her child, her daughter, never could.

Cottingdean, David, her father—these had been
the main, the important components of her mother's life, and she had
always felt that she stood apart from them, outside them, an
interloper… an intruder; how fiercely and verbally she had
resented that feeling.

She pushed open the plate-glass door and walked into the
hospital's reception area. A young nurse listened as she gave her name,
and then consulted a list nervously before telling her, 'Your mother is
in the intensive care unit. If you'd like to wait in reception, the
surgeon in charge of her case would like to have a word with you.'

Self-control had been something she had learned long ago,
and so Sage allowed nothing of what she was feeling to be betrayed by
her expression as she thanked the nurse and walked swiftly over to a
seat. Was her mother dead already? Was that why the surgeon wanted to
see her? A tremor of unwanted sensation seized her, a panicky terror
that made her want to cry out like a child. No, not yet…
There's too much I want to know… Too much that needs to be
said.