Serena Blyth-Templeton woke at dawn to the sound of an army of men hammering tent pegs into the ground to make gigantic marquees. She groaned and rolled over pulling a pillow over her head. It was the longest day of summer. The day Bedingham was to play host to the Rolling Stones, the Animals, a dozen lesser-known bands, and God alone knew how many thousands and thousands of fans.
‘Oh hell, oh shit,’ she said loudly. ‘I shouldn’t have driven home last night! I should have stayed in town!’
But she hadn’t stayed at her family’s town house in Chelsea; she had driven home through the English countryside, intoxicated on champagne and high on marijuana, and the fates had been kind to her, as they always were, and she’d had no accidents and no police cars had come screaming after her. Serena didn’t know whether this was a relief or a disappointment. Life was so boring, and a night in a cell sounded as if it might have a certain piquancy about it. It would certainly stir up her father, which was always fun, and it might even impress Lance.
Her twin brother had become obsessed with everything extremely left wing. If it was anti establishment, anti his father, anti his privileged upbringing and expensive education, then Lance was fervently in favour of it. The latest object of his contempt was the police, though Serena privately doubted that Lance had ever had anything to do with them apart from cursing them when they politely asked him to remove his Aston-Martin from the double yellow lines outside the house in Cheyne Walk. Nevertheless, for the past two months Lance had denounced all policemen, even their friendly local police, as ‘fascist pigs’, to his mother’s bewilderment and his father’s irritation.
The hammering continued relentlessly, the goosedown pillow no defence against it. With a groan of despair Serena flung it to one side and with an obscene lack of a hangover, sprang agilely from the bed. It was a day she had been looking forward to for months, though wild horses wouldn’t have made her admit it. To do so would have been uncool. She had decided early on in the planning of the concert that the only acceptable reaction to Mick Jagger’s presence and performance at Bedingham was to assume an attitude of sophisticated indifference. After all, she wasn’t a groupie, queuing all night for the privilege of seeing Mick at a distance of five hundred yards. She was Lady Serena Blyth-Templeton, and as such Jagger was surely her guest, just as much as he was her father’s.
With long, easy strides she crossed to the window and pulled back the curtains. The green sward that fronted Bedingham and stretched away gently uphill into a three-mile-long avenue of elms was nearly invisible beneath a stage swarming with technicians and groaning under the weight of expensive sound equipment. Seating around the stage was still being erected, though the punters, as Serena’s father always referred to those members of the public who paid for the privilege of visiting Bedingham would, for the most part, either sit on the grass or stand.
Serena smiled. Despite her indifference to almost anything and everything, she loved Bedingham passionately. It had been in her family ever since the sixteenth century when Matthew Blyth, an adventurer, had been rewarded by Henry VIII for dubious services rendered, and been given permission to acquire and domesticate the dissolved abbey of Bedingham in Cambridgeshire. He had done so with zest, transforming Bedingham into a house fit for royalty.
Under Mary’s reign, when upstart Anglicans were out of favour, Bedingham had suffered and lost the major part of its more glittering trappings, but under Queen Elizabeth I, favour had been restored and more land acquired. Through a satisfactory marriage alliance Blythes became Blyth-Templetons. Under Charles I, the Blyth- Templetons being royalist, Bedingham suffered a minor setback, but after the accession of Charles II, its star entered its zenith. The family was ennobled, an east and west wing were added, and the elaborate formal gardens around the house conceived and executed.
Under the boring rule of the Hanoverians, Bedingham had lost a little of its grandeur, declining to play host to a royal family undeserving of it. Under Queen Victoria it had continued to flourish. A long library had been added to the house, and more avenues and follies added to the grounds. Only in the last century had true difficulties arisen, and these, being financial, Serena’s grandfather had sensibly solved by marrying the only daughter of an American railway king of Swedish descent.
Serena patted the ancient stone sill of the mullioned window. After playing host to Tudors, Stuarts, Saxe-Coburgs, and Edward VII, Bedingham was now going to play host to the Rolling Stones. ‘You’ve seen a lot,’ she said affectionately to the ivy-covered bricks and mortar, ‘but in four hundred years you won’t ever have seen anything quite like this!’
There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and without waiting to be asked to enter, her brother strolled into the bedroom, his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans, his hair shoulder-length. ‘Hell of a lot of noise, isn’t there?’ he asked cheerfully. ‘The old man is going to open the gates at eight to relieve the pressure building up in the village. Apparently the local roads are already jammed. Hundreds of those coming to the concert camped in surrounding fields last night. I don’t suppose we’ll be at all popular with our farmers.’
Serena shrugged, indifferent to the wrath of the farmers who tenanted Bedingham land. ‘What time does the concert get under way?’
‘Ten o’clock, but what you really mean is what time does Jagger arrive?’ Lance flung himself facedown on the rumpled bed and rested his chin in his hands. ‘Two o’clock, supposedly. Until then, the fans have to be content with lesser mortals.’
‘He is staying on, isn’t he?’ Serena asked, turning away from the window and rummaging in the drawer of a George III mahogany chest for a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. ‘I mean, he is coming to the ball?’
‘He’s been invited and the word is that he’s accepted, but I can’t quite see it, can you?’ Lance asked, grinning at her speculatively as she pulled the jeans on beneath the discreet cover of her nightgown. Ever since she had returned home on vacation from her Swiss finishing school, she had been at pains to let him know how shockingly sexually experienced and liberated she had become. It amused him that her sexual liberation didn’t extend to himself and that, where he was concerned, proper sisterly modesty was still the order of the day.
Serena, aware of his amusement and knowing very well what had caused it, pulled her nightdress defiantly over her head, her breasts gloriously naked as she reached for her T-shirt with a studied lack of hurry, not bothering to keep her back towards him. ‘Why shouldn’t he accept?’ she asked. ‘HRH has accepted, hasn’t he?’
A flare of shock, like an electric current, had run through him. Her breasts were small and high, her nipples so pale as to be almost invisible. They needed biting into to gain colour. He found the mere idea cripplingly erotic. ‘Yes,’ he said, wondering why incest had never entered his thoughts before. ‘Prince Charles is coming.’
The ball that was to follow the concert was to be the kind of ball that Bedingham was accustomed to. Dress would be formal, the young bloods of England’s oldest families would be in attendance, a carefully selected sprinkling of stage and screen stars were invited to add glamour to the evening.
Serena pulled her T-shirt down over her head. Wondering why he had never before realized the strength of his sexual feelings for his sister, Lance said, ‘Why you should think Charles’s presence guarantees a fun evening, I can’t imagine.’ Lance’s views of the Windsors were on a par with his ancestors’ views of the Hanoverians. They were bores and he could well do without them.
Serena surveyed her reflection in a walnut-framed cheval glass. ‘I like Charles,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘He might be a stuffed shirt, but he’s a sincere stuffed shirt.’
Lance temporarily forgot the fascinating path down which his thoughts were taking him and rolled over on to his back, shouting with-laughter. ‘Oh, God, Serry! Don’t tell me you have ambitions in that direction! I couldn’t bear it! Queen Serena! What a hoot!’
‘I think I would make a very good queen,’ Serena said, sweeping up her long, pale gold mane of hair and piling it experimentally on top of her head. ‘A tiara would suit me.’
‘Bollocks!’ Lance said disrespectfully, ‘the days of Blyth-Templetons fawning to royalty are over, thank God. What we need in the family now is some good, unadulterated, revolutionary blood!’
Serena let her hair fall back down to her shoulders. She adored Lance and always had. He was the most important person in her life, but he bored her when he got on his political soapbox. She frowned slightly as she searched in the bottom of her French armoire for a pair of white leather high-heeled boots. Perhaps it wasn’t so much boredom as resentment. Until his political involvement with the far left, they had always been in complete agreement about everything.
As children they had often been left for long periods in the care of nannies and au pairs and housekeepers while their parents had cruised the Mediterranean, skied in Switzerland, or shot grouse in the Scottish Highlands. They had been totally dependent on each other for companionship and affection and had grown up with the unswerving attitude that it was the two of them against the rest of the world. The unity that bad been forged between them as children was still the most important thing in their lives, and Serena had tried hard to share his left wing passions. She had failed. Politics, even revolutionary politics, bored her.
She found the boots and pulled them on. Except for politics they had always been alike in everything. Both of them were tall and slender, light-skinned and blond-haired. In Lance this had resulted in a certain air of effeminacy, and Serena often thought that one of the reasons for his radical left wing views was that he thought they gave him a harder, more macho image.
There was nothing pale and washed out about the combination of Serena’s Nordic and Anglo-Saxon beauty. There was strength as well as delicacy in her fine-boned features, and the Swiss sun had given her skin a luminous honey-gold tone. Her eyes were grey, wide-set, dark-lashed, their smoky depths alight with fiery recklessness. When she moved she did so with utter assurance, carrying her tall, superbly proportioned body with the arrogance and ease of a dancer or athlete.
She lifted the two dresses that had been hanging on the front of her armoire, and that she had moved in her search for her boots, back into position. Both were white. One bore a Mary Quant label and was so minuscule as to border on the indecent; the other bore a Norman Hartnell label and was of heavy satin, ankle-length, and encrusted with thousands of tiny seed pearls. The Mary Quant was the dress she intended to wear for the concert; the Norman Hartnell was the gown she was to wear for the ball. She looked at the dresses in happy anticipation, knowing that they said a lot about her. They were at opposite ends of the fashion spectrum, yet she thought them equally wonderful. She liked extremes. It was safe, middle-of-the-road moderation that she couldn’t stand.
‘Our house guests, the Andersons, arrived while you were living it up in town last night,’ Lance said, wondering if Serena would be disturbed if she knew the way his thoughts were turning, or if she perhaps shared his agonizingly erotic fantasy. ‘Pathetically small-town America despite their millions and their boast of being one of Boston’s oldest families.’
Since Lance had spent the last few months denouncing America and Americans with the same arbitrary passion he mustered to denounce the British police force, his verdict on their house guests was not surprising.
‘Where does their money come from?’ Serena asked with interest.
The American ability to rise from pauper to millionaire in a single generation fascinated her. Their own great-grandfather had been a penniless Swedish immigrant when he had arrived in America, yet when he had died he had left his daughter a fortune so large that Bedingham and they were still thriving on it.
‘Banking,’ Lance replied. He shrugged, then sat up on the bed, swinging his legs to the floor. ‘But the family fortune is bolstered by whisky. The grandfather picked up a whisky franchise in Scotland during the last days of prohibition. When prohibition conveniently ended, he became a millionaire overnight.’
‘He was taking a risk,’ Serena said, pulling a comb through her slick-straight hair. ‘What if prohibition hadn’t ended? What would he have done with his whisky franchise then?’
‘He was in politics,’ Lance said dryly. ‘He knew prohibition was going to end.’
Serena gave a deep-throated chuckle. ‘I think I would have liked the grandfather. What is the grandson like?’
Lance shrugged again, suddenly sure that Serena would also like the grandson. He didn’t like the idea. ‘He went to Choate, he’s at Princeton now and he thinks England is an anachronism.’
‘If he’s at Princeton, he can’t be that dumb,’ Serena said, tossing her comb down on to the Lalique tray on her dressing-table, ‘and if he thinks England an anachronism, I would have thought you would have been in total agreement with him. After all, you’re the one who wants to bring the country to its knees and revolution to the streets!’
‘Maybe so, but I don’t need a bloody American to help me do it!’ he said, throwing a pillow at her.
Serena sidestepped the pillow with ease. ‘Come on, brother mine,’ she said, striding towards the door, her breasts pushing tantalizingly against the thin cotton of her T-shirt. ‘Let’s make sure Bedingham is ready for its day of glory.’
That Bedingham would be among the first buildings to be put to the torch if Lance and his fellow revolutionaries ever had their way was something never mentioned between them. When Lance was with his left wing friends, he always and loudly disowned Bedingham, vowing that when his father died, he wouldn’t accept his hereditary title, and that for all he cared, the house could be reduced to a pile of rubble. It was a statement he never made in front of Serena. He knew how much and how deeply she felt about Bedingham. It was a measure of how deep his feelings were for her that he never talked rashly of Bedingham’s future in her presence. They walked down the sweeping staircase, through the large inner hall and then through the entrance hall, its floor tiles emblazoned with the Blyth-Templeton family motto and crest. Even though the concert was not due to start for two hours, they could hear music.
‘The music is coming from transistor radios,’ Lance said as they stepped out on to the stone steps of the south entrance. ‘My God! Look at the crowd pouring down from the gates! What is it going to be like when things really get under way?’
‘It’s going to be fabulous!’ Serena said, her eyes shining as she ran down the steps towards the gravel dividing the house from the lawns fronting it.
The gates that her father had opened at eight o’clock were so far distant they couldn’t be seen, but the first of the fans to stream through them were already making their way down through the avenue of elms, towards the lawns and the stage.
She Loves You was blaring out from a score of transistor radios, and Roy Orbison blared from dozens more on a different station.
‘Hey, want a joint?’ the first of the invaders to reach the front of the house, a long-haired individual wearing an Afghan coat and a multicoloured headband, shouted across to her.
‘I’d love one!’ Serena responded enthusiastically, accepting the sweet-smelling marijuana and drawing deeply on it while Lance looked at her, not knowing whether to be amused or annoyed, ‘Wouldn’t breakfast be more suitable?’ he asked. ‘It’s barely the crack of dawn.’
Serena sucked down another lungful of smoke. ‘It may be more sensible, Lance, but it will also be boring and I’m going to do nothing today which is boring. Today all I’m going to do is have fun, fun, fun!’
At tea o’clock her father announced that the concert was to begin – but he did so, Serena thought, with the air of a drowning man bereft of all help.
Masses of singing, shouting, dancing bodies covered the lawns surrounding the stage, and the grassy hill and avenue beyond. There was tight security around the house. Uniformed police were at every entrance, and there were large No Admittance signs on all the doors. Her father, after his dazed declaration that Bedingham’s pop festival was officially under way, had reeled into the house, unable to believe that his simple project for bringing in extra income could have turned into such a monster. Never in a million years had he expected so many thousands of young people to throng to Bedingham. He couldn’t even begin to imagine where they had all come from. And never had he imagined that music could be so excruciatingly, so shatteringly, loud.
‘It’s unbelievable!’ he said weakly to Serena as they passed on the stairs. ‘A sea of unwashed, half-naked humanity stretching as far as the eye can see.’
‘It’s a hot day,’ she said practically, ‘and if the new class of punters is beginning to get you down, just think of all the lovely lolly they’re bringing in.’
Her father already had. It was his only consolation.
‘But the grounds,’ he moaned, clinging to the banister. ‘There won’t be a blade of grass surviving by the time it’s over!’
She patted his arm. ‘Bedingham survived the Civil War,’ she said comfortingly, ‘and it will survive the Stones. Stop worrying, Daddy. Enjoy yourself.’
‘Serena!’ he called out after her as she continued buoyantly on her way. ‘Our house guests! Are you taking care of them?’
‘Haven’t even seen them,’ Serena responded, not halting in her march for the door. ‘I should have a whisky if I were you, Daddy,’ she added over her shoulder. ‘It will steady the nerves.’
Her father groaned and turned toward his study. Serena’s was the first sensible suggestion anyone had made since the debacle had begun.
As Serena ran lightly down the sweeping stone steps of the south entrance, past the policeman on duty, she had a bird’s eye view of the rear of the stage. It was packed with sound equipment and back-up musicians, and one of them, a tall, languid-looking man about her age was so striking-looking he attracted and held her attention despite the press of people around him.
He was standing at the very edge of the rear of the stage, leaning nonchalantly against an amplifier, his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans, one foot crossed over the other at the ankle.
His negligent stance, and his air of bored indifference in the midst of such fevered excitement, reminded her of Lance, though that was as far as the similarity went. The musician’s hair was blue-black, falling low across his brow, and despite his slender build, there was a sense of power under restraint about him, an animal-like magnetism that Lance conspicuously lacked.
The Animals had just bounded on to the front of the stage; the roar of applause and shouting and stamping was deafening. As Erie Burden’s raw, unmistakable voice gave vent to the first line of House of the Rising Sun, Serena smiled to herself.
The musician might not be a famous name, but he obviously had other more than compensating qualities. And Serena saw no reason why she shouldn’t enjoy them. By the time she had reached the rear of the stage, Burden was reaching the last erotic, skin-tingling stanza of his song.
‘I’m Serena Blyth-Templeton,’ she shouted to the stewards who blocked her way. ‘Let me through!’
They responded to the authority in her voice almost immediately, but even so, by the time she squeezed around to the edge of the stage, her quarry had disappeared.
‘There was a musician here a few minutes ago,’ she shouted over the roar of applause to a still-perspiring member of the band who had preceded the Animals. ‘Do you know where he went?’
‘Haven’t a clue, love,’ he said, looking her up and down appreciatively. ‘Will I do instead?’
Beneath his stage makeup he had blemishes and there was a whiff of stale alcohol on his breath. ‘No,’ she said, softening the blow with a grin. ‘I’m sorry, but you won’t.’
He shrugged and laughed, and as Burden began to sing Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood she philosophically abandoned her search and moved to the front of the stage, squeezing into the centre of the crush, dancing on the spot to the sound of the music, cheering until she was hoarse when the song came to an end.
As morning edged into afternoon, the heat became almost unbearable. ‘I thought it was supposed to rain every day in England,’ a powerfully built Australian yelled to her as they stood, arms around each other’s waists, swaying to the beat of the music.
‘It usually does!’ she shouted back. ‘But sometimes, just sometimes, we actually have a summer! This is it!’
Some girls had dispensed with their T-shirts altogether, dancing bare-breasted, shrieking with laughter as the occasional cooling bottle of beer was poured over them. Serena was tempted to take off the Quant mini-dress she had changed into just before the start of the concert. If she had been anywhere else, she would have done so. Only respect for Bedingham restrained her.
When the announcement came over the loudspeakers that the Rolling Stones had arrived and would be appearing in approximately twenty minutes, a roar went up and the chant ‘We want Mick’ began to surge through the vast crowd.
Serena extricated herself from the sweaty hold of the Australian. She needed the bathroom and she had no intention of forcing her way to one of the many portable facilities that had been parked on the grounds. As the female group onstage pounded into a blistering rendition of Then He Kissed Me, she pushed and shoved her way out of the throng, running towards the house. She ducked beneath the barriers that had been erected, saying breathlessly to the policeman who ran towards her, ‘I’m Serena Blyth-Templeton! I live here.’
The policeman recognized her and lifted the last barrier to allow her through. She ran up the south entrance steps and hammered on the enormous double doors there. The butler ascertained it was a member of the family and not a member of the mob and opened the door. Serena ran past him, saying between gasps for air, ‘Thanks, Herricot. Super fun, isn’t it?’
The butler didn’t demean himself by agreeing with her. Instead, he speedily relocked and bolted the doors and retreated to an inner sanctum where he could lengthen his odds of survival by placing cushions against his ears.
Serena took the steps of the great staircase two at a time. She was dripping with perspiration and she wanted to have a quick, cold shower before she returned to the fray. Even in the house the music was deafening. From her bedroom window she had a spectacular view of the sloping hillside and the avenue of elms, every inch of space packed with dancing, clapping, cheering, applauding fans. Banners were being waved, some emblazoned with ‘We love Mick’, others with ‘Peace not war’, and ‘Americans out’.
She giggled as she stepped out of her dress and danced, hips swinging, into her bathroom, hoping that the visiting Andersons wouldn’t imagine the banners were personally for them. American involvement in Vietnam had been escalating all summer, and so had the protests against it. Today, at least, Lance was surrounded by thousands of political sympathizers.
She stood, face upturned beneath the shower, the water turned on full blast. For once life wasn’t boring. She was blissfully high on a combination of alcohol and generously shared joints. In another few minutes Mick Jagger would be onstage. Later, there would be the ball, and Jagger would be there. She would meet him, and who knew what would happen after she did?
She stepped out of the shower, treading dismissively over the discarded white mini, yanking another dress from her armoire, this time a lemon-coloured one, equally short. To the best of her knowledge, the idea of a Bedingham pop festival was the first and only idea that her forty-six-year-old father had ever had. It had been stunningly well worth the wait. There were television cameras recording the event, BBC interviewers roaming through the crowd, and the festival was already being spoken of as if it were an established annual event. As it would be.
‘This year the Stones, next year the Beatles!’ she said zestfully to the house in general, striding out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
As she hurried down the main staircase, a door in the inner hall below her opened and a tall, dark stranger walked nonchalantly out of the salon and towards the door leading to the drawing room.
‘What the devil do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted indignantly, beginning to run down the remaining stairs towards him. ‘The house is closed to visitors! Didn’t you see the signs? The barriers?’
He turned unhurriedly, one hand on the knob of the living room door. ‘I would have had to be blind not to have seen them,’ he said dryly.
She stopped suddenly on the bottom step, her heart beginning to slam. She knew she had been right about his overpowering masculinity when she had seen him from a distance. Now, close up, his sexuality rushed over her in waves. ‘The house is closed to visitors,’ she repeated, walking towards him.
His eyes weren’t dark like his hair; they were a hot electric blue, and there was charm as well as insolence in the lines of his long, mobile mouth.
‘I’m not a visitor,’ he said, his eyes moving from her hair to her face, to her breasts, to her legs and back again with brazen appreciation.
The minute he spoke she knew that he was American, but an American with a very generous dash of the Celt. His tall, lean build, and his colouring, were those of a certain; type of Irishman and, like them, he had a whippy look to him that said he would be an ugly customer in a fight – and something else about him made Serena believe he wouldn’t need much of an excuse to join any fight.
‘I know damn well you’re not a visitor!’ She wanted to sink her teeth into his neck, to lick the perspiration from his skin, to see if he looked as magnificent naked as he did in his open-necked white shirt and his tight-fitting blue jeans. ‘You’re a musician. I saw you earlier, on the rear of the stage. Now, will you please leave the house? As I have already said, it is not open today to visitors.’
She had walked right up to him, with every intention of physically knocking his hand away from the drawing room doorknob. When he left, she would go with him. She wasn’t about to lose him again. But she would be damned to hell before she allowed anyone, even this excessively handsome man, to have the run of Bedingham.
‘I am not a visitor,’ he said again, leaning back against the door and folding his arms negligently across his chest. ‘And I’m certainly not a musician.’
‘Then who the devil are you?’ she demanded. Suddenly her eyes widened and her voice choked with laughter, she said, ‘Oh, hell! Don’t tell me! I know! You’re an Anderson!’
‘And you’re a Templeton,’ he said, eyes gleaming with answering laughter and with something else, something she knew was naked in her own eyes: unconcealed, instant sexual desire.
‘A Blyth-Templeton,’ she corrected him, her eyes moving over him with the same blatant appreciation he was showing. At five feet ten, she was nearly as tall as he. Slowly her eyes roved back towards his face, over the bulge in his crotch, the olive flesh tones of his neck and throat, the attractively self-deprecating quirk at the corners of his mouth. Their eyes met and held, and excitement raged through her. This wasn’t going to be just good! This was going to be sensational!
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Sabrina? Sophie? Selina? I can’t remember.’
‘Serena. And you?’
‘Kyle.’
She nodded. She had been right about the Celtic blood. ‘I thought you were supposed to be old Boston, not Boston Irish,’ she said, so close to him that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek.
‘Our family is like yours,’ he answered her, white teeth flashing in a dazzling, down-slanting smile. ‘We turn a blind eye – when it suits us.’
She laughed throatily. ‘And would it suit you now?’ she asked, one hand on her hip, the line of her thigh knowingly provocative.
He grinned. It was very rare for him to meet a girl tall enough to face him eye to eye, and rarer still to be so flagrantly propositioned by one as beautiful. She had come down the broad, sweeping staircase towards him with all the speed and grace of a panther. His grin deepened. With her long mane of gold hair, and her honey-gold skin, she wasn’t a panther, she was a puma. Sleek and supple, and wonderfully predatory.
‘Why not?’ he said, easing himself casually away from the door. ‘How about a guided tour?’
Outside, the screams and shouts had reached cataclysmic proportions as the Stones belted out the opening bars of It’s All Over Now and Mick Jagger leapt onstage.
Serena’s smile widened. Incredibly she no longer gave a damn about Jagger. ‘Come this way,’ she said, opening the drawing room door with a flourish. ‘It will be my pleasure.’
This room was Bedingham’s formal drawing room, used only for receptions and soirées. An eighteenth-century Blyth-Templeton, eager for a room that would serve as a grand reception room for county balls, theatricals, concerts, and other entertainments, had commissioned the leading architect of the day and asked him to create one. He had done so by removing several internal walls and ceilings and the rooms above them, creating a grandiose room that rose the whole height of the house, culminating in a wide skylight dome, ecclesiastical in splendour.
Kyle whistled through his teeth. ‘Is the whole house as old as this?’
‘This isn’t old,’ Serena said in amusement, walking across to the white marble and ormolu chimney breast and standing with her back to the sheet of mirror that rose above it, one foot on the fender as Kyle looked around him. ‘This room was added in the 1770s, which is late in Bedingham’s lifetime. The house was originally built around the remains of a dissolved abbey in 1532.’
‘Okay,’ Kyle said as she led the way out of the room and through a door in the far corner to an adjoining room. ‘I’m impressed. What room is this?’
‘It’s known as the Red Room because of the colour of the walls. We use it as the family dining room.’
Unlike the drawing room, which had been light and airy, the walls covered in panels of yellow silk, the carpet a dove grey bordered in blue and gold, the Red Room’s walls and ceilings were painted a deep Pompeian red. The room was dark and oppressive.
‘It isn’t a colour I’d like to live with myself,’ he said with blunt frankness.
Serena laughed. ‘It wasn’t our choice either. It was painted like this in Queen Victoria’s reign and hasn’t been altered since.’
Kyle shook his head in disbelief, ‘My mother has the house painted every year. She’d have a stroke at the thought of eating in a room that hadn’t been changed in over a hundred!’
‘Oh, we refurbish it a little every now and then,’ Serena said, laughing and watching him, wondering where she would take him for the culmination of their tour. Her bedroom or a guest bedroom? She walked across to one of the windows looking out over the north lawns. ‘Do you see that yew tree? The one nearest the house? It was already fully grown when Henry VIII gave Matthew Blyth permission to domesticate the abbey. Wood from that tree provided bows for the weapons of the yeomen of England. That is how old Bedingham is.’
He looked across at her curiously. ‘You really love this place, don’t you?’
She turned away from him, the deafening sound of the concert a little more muted now that they were on the north side of the house. ‘Of course,’ she said simply. ‘It’s magnificent. Let me show you upstairs.’
They left the room by an opposite door, climbing the back stairs and coming out in a long gallery, the walls ornately decorated with plaster garlands of fruit and flowers and laurel wreaths.
‘I know where we are again,’ Kyle said as from outside the thunderous beat of Little Red Rooster was replaced by Not Fade Away. ‘My room is the little yellow room, just off the first landing.’
Serena ignored the guest rooms. They weren’t splendid enough as a setting for what was about to take place. Only one room was splendid enough.
‘This is the Queen’s Room,’ she said, throwing open a door and entering a large sun-filled room with a four-poster state bed standing in the centre on a small dais. ‘So called because Queen Elizabeth I is reputed to have slept here, and Queen Anne in 1712 most certainly slept here.’
There was a central canopy, the corona carved with Prince of Wales feathers. The bedposts were painted white and gold and the netted hangings were backed by crimson brocade edged with thick braid and a deep knotted fringe, and held at the corners by elaborate tassels.
‘It’s impressive, but a little small,’ Kyle said, standing at the side of the bed, one hand resting on a white and gold post.
‘When Queen Anne slept here, she slept alone,’ Serena said, her tongue moistening her lips as she stood at the opposite side of the bed, barely four feet away from him, wanting him so much that she could barely stand.
‘Poor Anne.’ His glossy blue-black hair was low over his brows, his Celtic blue eyes holding hers. ‘Has anyone slept in it since?’
The dark, rich throb of his voice sent shivers down her spine.
‘Queen Victoria,’ she said, her vulva engorged and aching. ‘And one or two lesser notables.’
‘But no one recently?’
Her voice was hoarse, her eyes burning. ‘No one in living memory,’ she said, wondering how long it would take them to scramble out of their clothes, wondering if the state bed was strong enough for the punishment it was about to receive. To a roar of applause that could be heard a county away, Not Fade Away merged into I Wanna Be Your Man.
The light in his eyes was devilish. ‘Then let’s rectify the situation,’ he said, his hands on his belt, his buckle already half undone.
Without a further word of encouragement, without his even laying a finger on her, she pulled off her boots and unzipped her dress, sliding it off her shoulders in feverish haste, kicking it away from her, wrenching her panties down with trembling fingers.
He threw his jeans and shirt away from him, whistling low. ‘I knew you’d look fantastic naked,’ he said thickly, ‘but you look even better than I’d imagined!’ Without wasting any more time on words, he reached across the bed for her, pulling her down on it, rolling her beneath him.
Her nails clawed his back, her legs opening wide. She needed no preliminaries, no soft words or caresses. She had been ready for him ever since she had faced him at the foot of staircase. ‘Now!’ she demanded fiercely, twining her legs around him, her body straining toward his in primeval need. ‘Now, you bastard! Now!’
His mouth came down hard on hers, and the moment that he mounted her, he entered her, plunging deeply and unhesitatingly into her hot, sweet centre. Outside, Mick Jagger blasted into Come On, fifty thousand fans screamed and shouted, the ancient bed shook and shuddered, and as Kyle’s sperm shot into her like hot gold, Serena reached a climax that left her almost senseless.
For long minutes neither of them even attempted to move or speak. His heart slammed thuddingly against hers, beads of perspiration running down his neck and shoulders.
‘That …’ he said at last, easing himself away from her and rolling over on to his back, ‘… was quite … remarkable.’
Serena let out a long, deep, satisfied sigh, and opened her eyes. ‘I knew it would be,’ she said composedly. ‘I knew the minute I saw you, on the rear of the stage.’
He turned over on his side, resting his weight on his elbow. ‘That’s quite an ability,’ he said, grinning down at her. ‘If you could put it in a bottle and market it, you’d make a fortune!’
She giggled and then stretched languorously. ‘Before we make love again, I need a drink and a smoke. Stay here and conserve your energy and I’ll go on a foraging expedition.’
‘If you’re intent on making love again in anything like the same fashion as last time, make sure whatever you bring back is strong,’ he said teasingly.
She sat up and leaned over him, kissing him full on the mouth, her sheet of pale gold hair swinging down like a curtain around them. ‘I will,’ she said, her eyes dancing as she drew her mouth away from his. ‘Because I am. Again and again and again and again.’
He groaned in mock defeat, and she laughed springing from the bed and stepping back into her lemon mini-dress, saying, ‘I’ll be back in five minutes. Don’t move.’
‘I couldn’t,’ Kyle said, the hot afternoon sun spilling through the leaded windows on to his hard, lean body. ‘I doubt I’ll ever move again!’
‘You will,’ she promised, swinging from the room as Jagger launched into The Last Time.
Kyle grinned. He knew he would. His zest and vigour were more than equal to hers. He just didn’t see why she should take anything for granted.
By the time she returned, he was already hardening again at the mere thought of her. She was like some magnificent amazon. Beautifully proportioned, totally uninhibited.
‘Where did you learn to make love in such a hurry?’ he asked as she moved a couple of Staffordshire figurines from a rosewood side table to make room for two bottles of Margaux and two glasses.
‘I wasn’t in a hurry,’ she said impishly, taking off her dress and tossing a joint across to him. ‘If I’d been in a hurry, I would have made love to you on the steps of the great staircase!’
He laughed, watching her as she poured out the wine, the tousle of her pubic hair a rich wheat-gold. ‘Hurry or not, it was still pretty experienced.’ He lit the joint, inhaling deeply. ‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen,’ she said, walking across to the bed, a full glass of wine in either hand. ‘And you?’
‘Nineteen.’ He didn’t want to talk about himself; he wanted to talk about her. ‘Where did the expertise come from? Rollicking with the yokels in local haystacks?’
‘Certainly not. The expertise is from an extremely exclusive Swiss finishing school.’
He arched an eyebrow. ‘I thought they were for perfecting French and learning how to play hostess to ambassadors.’
‘They are also for learning how to ski,’ she said as if explaining everything.
White teeth flashed in a grin. ‘Okay. I give up. What has learning to ski to do with sex?’
She laughed huskily at his innocence. ‘Skiing itself has nothing to do with it, but oh, those Swiss skiing instructors! Those wonderful, handsome, athletic, adventurous, sex-mad, virile Swiss skiing instructors!’
‘If Swiss skiing instructors are responsible for the mind-bending experience of a few minutes ago, then I raise my glass to them,’ Kyle said, lifting his glass of Margaux high. When he put it down again he said, the mere tone of his voice making her damp with longing, ‘Finish your wine. It’s my turn to surprise you.’
She did. And he did. ‘Oh,’ she gasped, her eyes widening, the sensation in her solar plexus like a bomb that had been detonated. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’
They didn’t talk again for a long time. Outside, Mick Jagger was succeeded by Peter and Gordon, and after them Gerry and the Pacemakers.
In the Queen’s Bedroom, all through the long afternoon, Serena and Kyle made love with the zestful, undiminished appetite of two healthy young animals. He made love to her slowly, withdrawing whenever she neared satisfaction, teasing and arousing her until she screamed at him to come to a conclusion. He made love to her with his tongue alone, not allowing her to reach out and touch him, forcing her to remain completely and excruciatingly passive. By the time they lay exhausted, sheened with sweat, the ornate brocade covers of the bed half falling on the floor, the sun was sinking in the sky and both bottles of Margaux were empty.
‘What is the wildest thing you’ve ever done, Kyle?’ she asked, her head on his chest as the sweet smell of marijuana surrounded them.
Kyle squinted up at the canopy above him, and the carvings of the Prince of Wales feathers. ‘Making love on a bed Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Anne slept in while Mick Jagger and a score of other pop groups sing a mere fifty yards away comes pretty near to heading the list,’ he said dryly.
Serena moved her lips languorously over the smooth, sun-kissed flesh beneath his cheek. ‘But what else have done that is really wild?’
He frowned, his head so light with alcohol and marijuana that he could scarcely think straight. ‘I once flew my uncle’s Piper Twin Comanche under the Brooklyn Bridge.’
She giggled and he carefully killed the cherry in his joint and even more carefully placed it on the table at the side of the bed. ‘What about you? Or are your escapades so wild as to be beyond belief?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said modestly. ‘On the last night of term, the school’s head girl crept into my bed. She’s German and built like a Valkyrie.’ She giggled again, moving her hand lower down his abdomen. ‘That was pretty wild.’
Kyle would have liked to ask for more details, but he was having difficulty coordinating what he wanted to say with what he was able to say.
‘I wish we could do something wild, something really wild, together,’ Serena said, bending her head to his penis, her tongue circling it in long, lazy strokes.
‘You mean, like both of us going to bed with your German friend?’ Kyle asked, wondering who the fool had been who had said that English girls were frigid.
Serena paused in her ministrations. ‘No, silly. Something momentous and far-reaching and totally, totally shocking.’
‘We could always elope,’ he said, wondering if he was physically capable of making love one more time, and if he was, whether he could capture a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
‘Eloping isn’t shocking,’ she murmured, straddling him, holding his penis with one hand and moving herself teasingly and tormentingly back and forth over its engorged tip.
‘Believe you me, as far as my parents are concerned, it is,’ he said, wondering how long he could bear the pleasure before having to take action. ‘In fact, I can’t think of anything that would shock them more!’
She slipped the head of his penis into the mouth of her vagina. ‘You’re quite right,’ she said, her voice high and slurred from wine and marijuana. ‘My parents would be shocked to death. It would cause the most frightful fuss.’ She sank down on him, closing her eyes in ecstasy. ‘So why don’t we do it? Why don’t we elope?’
Kyle tightened his arms around her, deftly rolling her beneath him. ‘Because I don’t know any blacksmiths,’ he said reasonably, driving deep inside her in an agony of relief.
She laughed, twining her legs around him, suddenly sure that she loved him and that she would always love him. ‘Silly,’ she said, her diction very slurred now. ‘Marriages at Gretna Green over the blacksmith’s anvil haven’t been legal for years and years.’
‘Then why do people elope there?’ He gasped, his eyes tightly closed, an expression of intense concentration, almost of agony, furrowing his features.
‘Because …’ Serena struggled for breath. ‘Because… you can be married in Scotland without parental consent as long as you’re over sixteen.’
‘I’m over sixteen,’ he said unnecessarily, knowing that his climax was going to be the most shattering he had ever experienced. ‘Let’s forget the ball this evening. Let’s go to Scotland instead.’
‘I’d love to,’ she panted, lifting her legs over his shoulders. ‘Oh, Kyle! Oh, God! Oh, Kyle!’