Read Online High Tide by Veronica Henry - Free Book Online Page B

today. Joy had been proud of everything Kate had achieved, of course she had, yet Kate felt a little like a stranger whenever her mum had come to New York. As if she was playing or pretending to be someone she wasn’t.
    Which was the real Kate? This one, natural and unmade-up, or the pimped-up version who had swept into town. Both of them, maybe. You could be more than one person, couldn’t you?
    Either way, the Kate in the mirror was the one she wanted to be today. The one who had come home to say goodbye.
    There was a discreet knock on the front door. She shut her eyes. It would be the undertaker. She knew if she looked out of her window, the hearse would be pulled up outside Belle Vue, her mother’s wicker coffin inside. People would gather outside the shops and houses and bow their heads. Pennfleet still respected tradition. Was she ready? She felt tears well up. She prayed she wouldn’t break down as soon as she opened the front door.
    ‘Buck up, love,’ she imagined her mother saying. ‘Crying won’t bring me back.’
    She pressed her fingertips underneath her eyes, as if to push the tears back in. She took in a deep breath. She shook out her hair and pushed back her shoulders, walked down the stairs and opened the front door with the bravest smile she could muster.
    ‘Miss Jackson,’ said Malcolm Toogood, the undertaker, holding out his hand, and she took it, and felt strong. Strong enough, at least.

    In the end, the funeral was rather wonderful. Or ‘Joy-full’, as the vicar had joked. It truly was a celebration of her mother’s life, and Kate felt uplifted rather than sad as she came out into the churchyard afterwards, to shake hands with mourners and read the heartfelt messages on the bouquets of flowers.
    ‘Kate.’ The voice of the next person in line was familiar. She looked up into a pair of light-green eyes. ‘I’m so sorry. Your mother was a legend.’
    Rupert Malahide. She was startled to see him. She hadn’t given him a thought for years. She took his proffered hand. What on earth was he doing at her mother’s funeral? Surely he lived in London? The Malahides only came down in the summer, to Southcliffe, the mad rambling tumbledown house they had further downriver.
    ‘I brought Granny. She wanted to pay her respects.’ Rupert was the sort of man who somehow managed to get away with saying ‘Granny’ without sounding ridiculous. ‘She thought the world of your mother.’
    Rupert’s grandmother Irene was the most redoubtable of matriarchs – his father’s mother, who ruled a roost of her unruly grandchildren over the summer while their parents did goodness knows what. The Malahide brood had mixed in with the locals when it suited them, for sport and entertainment, but they were a law unto themselves. Rich and beautiful and wild. Rupert, especially, had considered the local girls to belong in his own personal toy box.
    Including her. Kate shut out the memory for the time being. There were enough emotions swirling round inside her; she didn’t need another one. It was hard, though, for here he was, looking like a pillar of society in a dark-grey suit, the hair that had once been matted and bleached with salt now swept back. But still those fine features that could only come from the most patrician gene pool. And those devil’s eyes that could undo a button at fifty paces.
    ‘It’s very good of you to bring her,’ she said. She could see Irene, standing in the church doorway. She was wearing dark glasses and carrying a stick – Kate remembered Joy telling her Irene was losing her sight. ‘How is she?’
    ‘You can imagine. Absolutely refuses to believe there is anything wrong or that she needs to change her lifestyle one iota. She drives me nuts.’
    His smile contradicted him with its fondness.
    ‘It must be awful for her,’ said Kate.
    ‘I promise you, it doesn’t stop her doing anything she wants.’
    Kate watched Irene head down the steps. She could sense her