'Are you prepared for the gossip if he does make good his threats?' Anne asked. She felt she was prepared now, but she didn't want William suddenly caving in at the first whiff of scandal.

'I am, never more so. Come on, old girl, don't fail me now! We've got to do this or stay under his yoke for the rest of our lives.'

William knew by Anne's expression over breakfast that she thought he was going to excuse himself from dealing with Albert today as he'd promised.

She wasn't entirely wrong about that; he had lain awake half the night thinking up excuses. But it struck him that his whole life had been a series of excuses. He'd made a good marriage but failed Anne because of his s.e.xual deficiencies. He'd been born to a fortune and he'd gambled and frittered it away. He had only one thing he could be proud of and that was Rufus, for despite both his parents' weaknesses he'd grown into a fine young man, intelligent, strong, loving and hardworking.

His grandfather had built Briargate intending it to be pa.s.sed down to William and then to his grandson, but thanks to William's stupidity it was now more of a liability than an a.s.set. Yet he knew that Rufus would sooner inherit a worthless, crumbling estate surrounded by a wilderness, than have a father who was too cowardly to stand up to blackmail.

Fortunately Rufus's security was not under threat, owing to the legacy from his maternal grandfather, but even if it had been, Rufus had the intelligence, enthusiasm and knowledge to change Briargate into a profitable farm. He'd often said he found it immoral to have so many decadent flowerbeds when that land could be turned over to chickens, pigs or vegetables.

So even though William was shaking in his shoes at the prospect of what might happen as a result of dismissing Albert, he knew he had to do the right thing, for Rufus.

'Where are you going?' Anne asked as he got up from the breakfast table. They had barely spoken as they ate. He had looked at his newspaper; she had been reading a letter from her sister. They were usually silent at breakfast, but it was a comfortable silence; today it had been tense with unsettled business.

'To put on my garden shoes,' he said. 'You stay in here and watch in case I need you.'

'You're going to talk to Albert?' she asked. She sounded very surprised.

'I won't be doing much talking,' he said with a weak, boyish grin. 'I shall be giving him his marching orders.'

'Don't you want me to come too?'

William had thought long and hard whether it would be better or worse with Anne beside him. But he'd come to the conclusion he must do it alone. He couldn't subject Anne to Albert's foul language; he was sure to fire a volley of his favourite expletives.

William let himself out through the back door by the boot room, pulling on his coat as he went. It was very cold, and as he looked down the garden to see where Albert was, he noticed there was fog in the valley down by the river.

The sound of the saw told him Albert was in the woodshed at the back of the stables. It was the one place he really didn't want to be alone with the man. It was there that he had kissed Albert the first time and said that he loved him.

William couldn't bear to think what a prize fool he'd been. He'd given the man his heart and his money, and risked everything for him. But his biggest mistake was to romanticize him.

William had thought of him as a beautiful, gentle and creative archangel in a working man's smock, who out of grat.i.tude transformed the garden into the kind of Eden he felt William deserved. He even believed that Albert was an innocent; that he succ.u.mbed to William because he was the only person who had ever shown him any affection, or valued him.

Much later, when William began to realize the giving was all one-sided, he made excuses for his lover: he'd had a vicious mother; he'd been influenced by brutish men from an early age. Yet William still believed that if he showed him enough love, understanding and kindness, Albert would reciprocate.

Now he was well aware that Albert had never had the capacity to feel love. He might have a heart pumping his blood round like anyone else, but whatever it was in most humans that gave them emotional feelings towards others, this was missing in Albert.

He could play-act emotions superbly; in the past he had shown such tenderness, adoration and sympathy that William had stopped listening to his conscience and would have run off to live in the woods with the man if he'd asked. But in the end William had seen it was all a sham. The only emotion Albert was capable of was hate, for his humble origins and for anyone he considered more fortunate than himself.

As William reached the open-fronted woodshed, Albert stopped sawing logs. Despite the cold he was glistening with perspiration, and he had stripped off to his smock and breeches. He looked dirty and unkempt, his hair tangled and almost reaching his shoulders, his beard studded with traces of past meals, and the smell of stale sweat was overpowering.

'Come to help me, Billie?' he asked with a sly smirk. 'The old girl's company got too dull for you?'

William felt nauseous that he'd ever lain with this man, for he could see so clearly now that he was just a cold-blooded wh.o.r.e.

'Lady Harvey is very good company,' William said. 'And I have come to tell you that you are dismissed. You will vacate the gatehouse and leave Briargate for good by Friday.'

Albert sat himself down on a log, reaching in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco as if he hadn't heard. 'You can't dismiss me,' he grinned as he packed the tobacco into his pipe. 'We're bound together for ever, Billy boy!'

William was every bit as intimidated as Albert intended him to be. He tried not to look at the man's rippling muscles that strained the sleeves of his shirt, or his powerful hands. He made himself picture Rufus's face, and the smile he knew he'd see when he told him Albert was gone for good.

'We are not bound together. You'll go by Friday or I will have you thrown out.'

'Now, come on.' Albert forgot his pipe and rose from the log, his lips drawing back in a snarl. 'You want me to go telling tales to Lady Harvey?'

'You can if you wish, but she already knows everything.'

Albert made a snort of derision, clearly not believing this. 'Don't f.u.c.king well try to bluff me,' he said, and he turned in the direction of the house.

William let him go on ahead a little way; then he walked just far enough across the lawn so Anne could see him from the dining-room window and beckoned her to come out.

Albert was almost at the back door when it opened and Anne stood there.

'Come on out, Anne,' William called. 'I'm having trouble convincing Albert that we have no secrets from each other.'

For the first time in all the years he'd known Albert, William sawhim look uncertain. His eyes narrowed and darted between William and Anne, like a cornered rat's.

William felt proud of Anne. She had flung a purple shawl around her shoulders and its regal colour, with her eyes like flint and her poised stance, gave her a queenly and composed appearance.

'I take it Sir William has given you the order to leave?' she said, her voice as crisp and cold as the morning. 'We are willing to give you a character; you have after all tended the garden very well.'

'Captain Pettigrew tended your garden well too,' Albert replied.

William sucked in his breath at that sly retort, knowing it was intended to make his wife scuttle inside in fright. But she just smiled, and walked straight over to William and took his arm.

'My husband is very well aware of my past relationship with Captain Pettigrew,' she said. 'You cannot hurt us, Albert.'

Albert's face grew dark with anger and he started to bl.u.s.ter and swear, threatening to go down to the village and tell everyone all he knew about both of them.

'How can you do that without incriminating yourself?' Anne retorted. 'Country folk don't like "nancy boys". We have only to tell the Renton men that you are trying to slander us and they'll willingly tear you limb from limb. You have no friends in the village, but we have many.'

'Master Rufus won't like what I have to say,' he said, and William could sense he was desperate now, completely thrown by the news that they had admitted their past sins to each other.

Anne laughed humourlessly. 'Really, Albert! What a silly goose you are! Do you really think he'd believe a word you'd say? He loathes you, and has always blamed you for Hope's disappearance. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't demand a new police investigation into that too. Pack your bags and be gone, Albert, your time here is up. You have nothing left now to blackmail us with.'

'You are forgetting I've got the letter from Captain Pettigrew,' he snarled. 'That's evidence.'

William moved closer to Albert. 'At times like this gentlemen stick together,' he said, putting a snarl into his voice. 'I grew up with the Captain, and he'll say that letter is a forgery. What's more, he'll come over here and give you a good hiding for your trouble.'

'I'll go to law,' Albert said wildly.

William laughed at him contemptuously. 'Do you really think a gardener could challenge a member of the aristocracy and win? You'd be shipped off to Botany Bay. Now, away with you! Leave the gatehouse before Friday morning and you shall have a character. But if you are still there, I'll have you thrown out without one.'

Anne's hand slipped into William's as they watched Albert slink off round the side of the house. 'Will he go?' she whispered.

'I think so,' William replied. He felt good about himself now, for he'd protected Anne, Rufus and Briargate. 'He really has no choice. Even if he does slink down to the ale house and tell a few tales, no one will believe them. Now, we must go in before you catch cold. I think we'll have a gla.s.s of sherry to celebrate.'

That night, in the dim light of a flickering candle, Albert sat at his table in the gatehouse with a large heap of money before him. As he counted it into piles, he took long swigs from a bottle of rum. Normally counting his money gave him immense pleasure, for he had enjoyed bleeding William dry for all these years. But tonight he was too full of rage to concentrate.

He had thought he was set up for life here; that he had William and Anne in the palm of his hand. His long-term plan was to wait until they were forced to sell Briargate, and he'd be waiting ready to buy it. He hadn't antic.i.p.ated that the worms would turn.

He had more than enough money to go anywhere; he had his health, strength and a keen enough mind to do anything he chose, but it was the garden at Briargate that he wanted. He had created it: every tree, shrub and flower was his. He'd toiled over it for sixteen years, nurtured it, dreamed and planned, and now they were s.n.a.t.c.hing it from him.

He had always thought himself as st.u.r.dy as an oak, that nothing could shock or dismay him. When weak, pathetic William turned up at the woodshed this morning, his first thought had been that the man wanted him again, even if he was glowering.

When he told him to pack up and leave, Albert wanted to laugh. William had said that before, and he'd always backed down after a brief reminder of how things stood.

He would have bet all the money on the table that William would never tell his wife what he was. Yet he had, and she'd told him about the Captain. They'd stood there together, smug as you like, and the final body blow was that remark of William's: 'Do you really think a gardener could challenge a member of the aristocracy and win?'

That made him savage. He didn't like reminders that he was a working man.

When he was a small boy he had hated his rough clothes, having to go barefoot and all that went with being born into a poor family. His mother used to say with scorn that he belonged in a palace.

At ten he was packed off to Hever Castle to work in the gardens there. Within just a few months he'd caught the eye of the head groom, and night after night he had to submit to the man using him like a woman.

He was fourteen when the head groom died suddenly of a heart attack, and Albert couldn't have been happier. He wasn't interested in girls, but he thought in the fullness of time the right one would come along and he would forget those acts which had shamed him for so long.

By the time he was sixteen, he was a strapping six feet tall, with glowing olive skin, black curly hair and smouldering dark eyes, and it wasn't only the female servants who looked at him longingly, but many of the grand ladies who visited Hever. Albert found he couldn't respond to them in any way, however. It wasn't shyness, he just didn't like them. Yet he could look at certain men and his pulse raced and his c.o.c.k twitched.

It was as if the groom had put a curse on him, and in his anger he vowed to himself that he would never let another man use him again. In future he would do the using and make it pay. Fortunately there were many distinguished men who came to Hever and who preferred boys to girls, and Albert found he could recognize them immediately.

He remained at Hever until he was twenty-one, and in between a series of lovers who gave him money and expensive presents, he was happy working in the gardens. He never thought of it as a menial job, to him a beautiful garden was a temple, and he worshipped in it. In his spare time he learned everything he could from the old experienced gardeners and from studying plant books. His vision for the future was to design and build a garden from scratch. He imagined a lake, woodland, formal flower gardens, sweeping lawns, rockeries with tumbling water and secluded bowers.

But the wealthy man who would provide the land for such a project eluded him, and when the whispers about his s.e.xual exploits began to circulate around the estate, Albert found himself banished to the gardens of the Bishop's Palace in Wells.

He never liked to dwell on the humiliations he met there, prayed over by pious men he knew were the same as him, worked to exhaustion by s.a.d.i.s.tic brutes and ignored by the rest. Then one evening in the neighbouring ale house he met William.

The ale house was mostly frequented by farm labourers; the gentry used the coaching house across the main street. William stood out like a thoroughbred stallion in a field of donkeys, for he wore a blue checked riding jacket which fitted his slender body like a glove, and his ripe corn curls were tousled and shiny. He was drinking with an older man who looked like a farmer, but his eyes locked with Albert's across the crowded bar, and suddenly it was as if they were the only two people in the room.

It wasn't difficult to find out who he was, where he lived, or to be outside when William finally left, the worse for drink. Albert was there to hold his horse steady and help him into the saddle. He asked him if he needed a gardener, and William told him to come out to Briargate the following day.

Albert knew he was taking a big chance leaving the Bishop's Palace for good the following morning. Sir William might not remember asking him to come; he might not even need a gardener, especially one without a character. But Albert thought only of the man's wide sensual mouth, periwinkle-blue eyes and firm, small b.u.t.tocks as he walked the seventeen miles.

As he turned into the drive past the gatehouse and saw Briargate ahead, Albert felt he'd fallen into his dream. The setting of the house was perfect; someone had already planted many lovely trees, but he could make it much more beautiful. This was the place he'd been looking for.

Luck, or fate, smiled on him that day. William was home, and he not only remembered Albert from the night before, but was delighted to see him again as he did really need a gardener. By night fall Albert was tucked up in a comfortable bed above the stables, already head gardener of Briargate at the age of only twenty-five, and w.i.l.l.y, the under-gardener, who was half-witted, would do exactly as he told him.

It wasn't hard to make William love him. He was a man so riddled with guilt that he only needed to be shown friendship and understanding. He was keen to work with Albert on the garden, and the hard physical labour of digging and clearing ground gave him new purpose. Albert let William make all the overtures, playing the innocent lad slowly falling for his master.

But Albert's only true love was the grounds of Briargate; to him William was no more important than a resident dog whose company he enjoyed. He was happy to romp with him, he showed him as much affection as he was capable of, but Albert sawhimself as master.

The only time William ever got the upper hand was when he insisted Albert was to court and marry Nell. Albert could see why William thought it necessary. But William never understood just howmuch Albert loathed women. William didn't share that repugnance, he liked their company, and young Rufus was evidence that he could, if necessary, even roger them. William's plan was that Albert should emulate him, impregnate Nell once or twice, and then no one could ever point the finger of suspicion at his master.

Right from the first time Albert met the whole Renton family he knew he could never carry it off. They were typical peasants strong, virile males and plain but earthy women, built for childbearing. Up against such men he felt inadequate, and even though he knew little of women, he sensed a female Renton would be like a b.i.t.c.h on heat.

The wedding and the party afterwards were torturous. His own family were cold and brooding, his mother a vicious, spiteful woman who had always belittled any displays of tenderness or affection. In contrast, the Rentons hugged and kissed, danced and sang, and he felt like a fish out of water. He shuddered as he overheard many innuendos about the wedding night and the baby they hoped would soon follow. For two pins he would have run away then, anything rather than face what he knew was supposed to come next.

He was aware he'd handled the wedding night all wrong; maybe he should have asked William how he'd managed it. He could bet William never told Anne she was a wh.o.r.e for wanting him, or pushed her away as he did Nell.

But marriage was for ever, and as mere servants they didn't have the luxury of separate rooms either. Sharing a bed with Nell turned his stomach, her soft flesh pressed against him, her repulsive female smell, and that desperate need wafting out of her.

The reproach in her eyes and her silent tears were unbearable and drove him mad with hatred. He knew she was a good woman, but that just made the situation worse, and he had to pick on her constantly to justify the rage inside him.

Then Hope came to live with them, and every time he looked at her pretty, innocent face he felt threatened. She wasn't like Nell, she was smart, sparky and brave and very likely to work out for herself that he wasn't a real man.

His first thought was to kill her that day she caught him with Sir William. He could have wrung her neck like a chicken and buried her in the woods and he would have had no qualms about it. But then he sawthe letter and knew there was a better way to get rid of her. He wanted her to suffer degradation and isolation just the way he had at the same age, and with no money or character there was only one route open to her. There was the bonus that he retained the letter from the Captain too, a little insurance in case he ever needed it.

It worked out even better than he'd expected. He got rid of the girl and Nell. He had the gatehouse to himself at last. He wasn't in the least concerned when William wanted to end their affair as he had already become very tired of his heavy drinking and his dependence on him. He was fast becoming a liability.

For six years now he'd been supremely content. He took great pleasure in watching the standards at the big house falling and Anne and William clinging together like shipwrecks as their friends, neighbours and servants abandoned them. Their looks were fading, and it was only a matter of time before their money would run out too. And through it all Albert kept the garden at the peak of perfection, knowing the whole estate would be his one day.

But his plans were shattered now.

He picked up the bottle of rum from the table and took a long, hard swig.

'I won't leave here,' he muttered. 'It's mine. I worked for it.'

Getting up, he lurched drunkenly across the kitchen, pulled open the door and looked up the drive towards the big house. He could only see the dark shape of it for the moon was behind cloud and there were no lights in any window.

There'd been a time when every window was lit, just as there were horses in the stables, wine in the cellars and a dozen servants scuttling around. Now just William and Anne were there, with only old Baines tottering around still trying to pretend he was running the place. Mrs Crabbe and her daughter who helped out by day would be back in their hovel in the village.

He had spent so many evenings, summer and winter, gazing up at the house and dreaming of the day when it would be his. He had never once considered that anything could change them from the weak, fearful and guiltridden people he knew so well, not before their money ran out and they were forced to sell up.

But he hadn't known them today. They were proud, confident and determined, and they had an answer for everything. He had no idea what it was that had given them this sudden strength, but he did know they meant what they said.

'I'd sooner burn the place down than let you two beat me,' he muttered, taking another swig from his bottle.

The cloud obscuring the moon swept away, and all at once Briargate was illuminated. He could even see the ghostly white of the marble statues in his rosebeds, and that taunted him still further. Even though his mind was befuddled with drink, the thought of a fire stayed with him.

The estate would have little value to anyone without the house. Master b.l.o.o.d.y Rufus was too busy lording it up with his flashy friends in Oxford to want to rebuild it. But it would have value to him, and he'd get it even cheaper then. No one would suspect him; they'd think it was just a burning coal that fell out of a fire. And he'd make sure he was up at the house doing his best to put the fire out when people on the neighbouring farms sawthe flames and came running to help.

The study! A few books and newspapers left on the hearthrug would soon catch everything else alight. Leave the study door open and the flames would be across the hall and up the stairs in no time and they'd be trapped.

Of course old Baines was up there too, but he was so frail now that he was no more use to anyone.

Just a few minutes later, Albert was making his way through the field outside the railings of the drive as he didn't want William or Anne to be woken by a scrunching noise on the gravel. He had it all planned now. There was a spare key to the kitchen door kept under a box in the yard. In the past, Baines or one of the other servants had always locked and bolted the door from the inside at night, but for a year now Albert had seen Mrs Crabbe fishing a key out in the morning to unlock it. He'd go in that way, set the fire, and then relock the back door and go back to the gatehouse. He could watch the fire from there, and only run to attempt putting it out once it had really got going.

'A stiff wind tonight too,' he said aloud gleefully, turning his coat collar up. 'That will help spread it.'

Chapter Eighteen.

Matt Renton hesitated by the gatehouse of Briargate. He had spent the evening with a farmer friend at Chelwood, and as it was now well after midnight, and very cold and windy, he was anxious to get home quickly. Going up Briargate drive and skirting around the back of the big house was a shortcut, while the other way through Lord's Wood was much longer and treacherous in the dark; he'd come that way earlier and got plastered in mud.