Free Best Kept Secret by Jeffrey Archer Page B

supper.”
    Jessica refused to let go of Sebastian’s hand. “I don’t want any more food,” she said.
    Matron was lost for words.
    Harry led Jessica into the hall and helped her on with her coat. As Matron walked out of the front door, Jessica burst into tears.
    “Oh, no,” said Emma. “And I thought it had all gone so well.”
    “It couldn’t have gone better,” whispered Matron. “They only start crying when they don’t want to leave. Take my advice, if you both feel the same way, fill in the forms as quickly as possible.”
    Jessica turned around and waved before she climbed into Matron’s little Austin 7, tears still streaming down her cheeks.
    “Good choice, Seb,” said Harry, placing an arm around his son’s shoulders as they watched the car disappear down the drive.
    *   *   *
    It was to be another five months before Matron left Barrington Hall for the last time and headed back to Dr. Barnardo’s on her own, another of her waifs and strays happily settled. Well, not so happily, because it was not long before Harry and Emma realized that Jessica had problems of her own that were every bit as demanding as Sebastian’s.
    Neither of them had paused to consider that Jessica had never slept in a room on her own, and on her first night at Barrington Hall she left the nursery door wide open and cried herself to sleep. Harry and Emma became used to a warm little object climbing into bed between them not long after she woke in the mornings. This became less frequent when Sebastian parted with his teddy bear, Winston, handing the former prime minister over to Jessica.
    Jessica adored Winston, second only to Sebastian, despite her new brother declaring somewhat haughtily, “I’m far too grown up to have a teddy bear. After all, I’ll be going to school in a few weeks’ time.”
    Jessica wanted to go to St. Bede’s with him, but Harry explained that boys and girls didn’t go to the same school.
    “Why not?” Jessica demanded.
    “Why not indeed,” said Emma.
    When the first day of term finally dawned, Emma stared at her young man, wondering where the years had gone. He was dressed in a red blazer, red cap and gray flannel shorts. Even his shoes shone. Well, it was the first day of term. Jessica stood on the doorstep and waved good-bye as the car disappeared down the drive and out of the front gates. She then sat down on the top step and waited for Sebastian to return.
    Sebastian had requested that his mother didn’t join him and his father on the journey to school. When Harry asked why, he replied, “I don’t want the other boys to see Mama kissing me.”
    Harry would have reasoned with him, if he hadn’t recalled his first day at St. Bede’s. He and his mother had taken the tram from Still House Lane, and he’d asked if they could get off a stop early and walk the last hundred yards so the other boys wouldn’t realize they didn’t own a car. And when they were fifty yards from the school gates, although he allowed her to kiss him, he quickly said good-bye and left her standing there. As he approached St. Bede’s for the first time, he saw his future classmates being dropped off from hansom cabs and motor cars—one even arrived in a Rolls-Royce driven by a liveried chauffeur.
    Harry had also found his first night away from home difficult, but unlike Jessica, it was because he’d never slept in a room with other children.
    But the alphabet had been kind to him, because he ended up sleeping in a dormitory with Barrington on one side and Deakins on the other. He wasn’t as lucky when it came to his dormitory prefect. Alex Fisher slippered him every other night of his first week, for no other reason than Harry was the son of a dock laborer, and therefore not worthy of being educated at the same school as Fisher, the son of an estate agent. Harry sometimes wondered what had happened to Fisher after he left St. Bede’s. He knew that he and Giles had crossed paths during the war when they’d