Free A Dark Dividing by Sarah Rayne Page A

would have to find out about the operation to separate them. Simone appeared to have survived all right, but how about the other one? Sonia. Who is Sonia, what is she, that all our swains commend her? More to the point, where is Sonia? Harry scribbled a note to check the marriage and death columns for her name. He would have to look up details about the father’s political career as well. He had never heard of Joseph Anderson, but that did not mean Anderson had not finally got himself into Westminster, and walked the corridors of power at some stage.
    And what about the personalities of the twins themselves? Angelica had said Simone was sometimes fey, and that she had been strongly attracted to the Bloomsbury house, to the extent of saying they must have it. Why? What was there about the house that had so deeply affected her? Harry had a deep suspicion of females with a ‘must-have’ streak. They were usually enormously untrustworthy and monumentally self-centred, as well as being acquisitive to their eyelashes. Amanda had been a must-have in its highest form and because of it Harry had had to sell the London flat so that he could give her the half-share that Amanda said she must have, it was nothing less than her right and her solicitor had confirmed this. Harry’s solicitor had unwillingly confirmed it as well. After the building society had taken its cut of the sale proceeds, and after the lawyers had taken theirs, and after erratic house prices had diminished the property’s value by about ten per cent, Harry had been left with a measly thousand quid. Not enough to buy so much as a broom cupboard. So there you go, life’s a bitch, especially if you’ve married one.
    He poured himself another whisky, rummaged the bookshelves for a London telephone directory and the address of HM Land Registry office, and sat down to compose a letter of inquiry about the Bloomsbury house’s previous owners.

    Even with the cards stacked so strongly against them, even lying inside the incubator, Simone and Sonia were beautiful children; Mel saw that at once.
    Little russet-brown caps of silky hair. Small, sweet faces, with mischievous eyes. Like something out of a nineteenth-century fairytale, or that scene in Midsummer Night’s Dream about the bank with the nodding violet and the sweet musk-roses. She would see if Joe would agree to adding Violet and Rose as second names. There had been something of a fashion for flower names around the turn of the century; Mel had had a great-aunt, born around that time, who had been called Lily. And in one of the books she had been reading there had been a brief mention of conjoined twins born to someone called Charlotte Quinton a few minutes after midnight on 1st January 1900. The timing and the date—the very start of a new century—was probably the only reason they were mentioned and there was nothing about the twins’ lives, or whether they had ever been separated. But they had been christened Viola and Sorrel, which Mel found rather attractive. Viola and Sorrel Quinton. Had their mother thought they resembled mischievous, curled-up flowers as well?

    Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
2nd January 1900: 10.00 p.m.
    The beating of the invisible heart that I thought I had heard was inside my own head, of course. Panic, sending the blood thudding through my body, because despite what I said earlier, I really was frightened about seeing the twins.
    We went through horrid, soulless passages, and Dr Austin’s nurse, who was pushing the chair, tried to make bright conversation along the way, the silly creature. Or was she really so silly? Difficult to tell, because the pounding was all around me, and there was a huge suffocating weight pressing down on my head. A fine thing if I were to faint just as we reached the babies’ room. Edward’s mother would never let that one go unremarked! Poor Charlotte, no stamina. Always has to make a scene. No breeding, you can always tell.
    So I managed not to