Lavender Morning

Lavender Morning

Book Jacket

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Lavender Morning

BOOKS BY JUDE DEVERAUX

The Velvet Promise

Highland Velvet

Velvet Song

Velvet Angel

Sweetbriar

Counterfeit Lady

Lost Lady

River Lady

Twin of Fire

Twin of Ice

The Temptress

The Raider

The Princess

The Awakening

The Maiden

The Taming

The Conquest

A Knight in Shining Armor

Holly

Wishes

Mountain Laurel

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The Duchess

Eternity

Sweet Liar

The Invitation

Remembrance

The Heiress

Legend

An Angel for Emily

The Blessing

High Tide

Temptation

The Summerhouse

The Mulberry Tree

Forever…

Wild Orchids

Forever and Always

Always

First Impressions

Carolina Isle

Someone to Love

Secrets

Return to Summerhouse

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A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is

entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Deveraux, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For

information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY

10020

ATRIA
BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Deveraux, Jude.

Lavender morning / Jude Deveraux.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3554.E9273L38 2008

813'.54—dc22 2008023637

ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-5853-1

ISBN-10: 1-4391-5853-3

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

Lavender Morning

Contents

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

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7

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27

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Prologue

H
ELEN?” ASKED THE person on the other end of the line. “Helen Aldredge?”

If anyone had asked her, Helen would have said that it had been so long since she’d heard Edilean

Harcourt’s voice that she wouldn’t have recognized it. But she did. She’d heard those elegant, patrician tones

only a few times, but each time had been significant. Because of who the caller was, Helen didn’t point out that

her married name was Connor. “Miss Edi? Is that you?”

“What a good memory you have.”

Helen visualized the woman as she remembered her: tall, thin, perfect posture, her dark hair never out of

place. Her clothes were always of the finest quality and of a timeless style. She had to be close to ninety now—

Helen’s father David’s age. “I had good ancestors,” Helen said, then wanted to bite her tongue. Her father and

Miss Edi had once been engaged to marry, but when Edilean returned from World War II, her beloved David

was married to Helen’s mother, Mary Alice Welsch. The trauma had been so great that Miss Edi turned the big,

old house her family had owned for generations over to her wastrel of a brother, left the town named for her

ancestress, and never married. Even today, some of the older people in Edilean spoke of the Great Tragedy—

and they still looked at Helen’s mother with cool eyes. What David and Mary Alice had done caused the end of

the direct line of the Harcourt family—the founding family. Since Edilean, Virginia, was so near Colonial

Williamsburg, losing direct descendants of people who had hobnobbed with George Washington and Thomas

Jefferson was a major blow to them.

“Yes, you do have good ancestry,” Miss Edi said without hesitation. “In fact, I’m so sure of your

capabilities that I decided to ask
you
to help me.”

“Help you?” Helen asked cautiously. All her life she’d been told of the feuds and anger that had come

about because of what happened in her father’s lifetime. She wasn’t supposed to have heard about it, because

everything was talked about in whispers, but Helen had always been a curious person. She’d sat to one side of

the porch, played with her dolls, and listened.

“Yes, dear, help,” Miss Edi said in a patronizing way that made Helen blush. “I’m not going to ask you to

bake a hundred cookies for the church sale, so you can get that out of your mind.”

“I wasn’t—” Helen started to defend herself, then stopped. She was at the kitchen sink and she could see

her husband, James, outside struggling with the new bird feeder. Someone should outlaw retirement for men, she

thought for the thousandth time. Without a doubt, James would come in angry about the feeder and she’d have to

listen to his tirade. He used to manage hundreds of employees across several states, but now all he had was his

wife and grown son to boss around. More than once Helen had gone running to wherever Luke was and asked if

she could spend the afternoon with him. Luke would give her that amused look of his and set her to weeding.

“All right,” Helen said, “what can I help you with?” Never mind that she hadn’t spoken to this woman in

what? Twenty years?

“I’ve been told that I have less than a year to live and—” She cut off at a sound from Helen. “Please, no

sympathy. No one has ever wanted to leave this earth more than I do. I’ve been here much too long. But being

told I have a full year left has made me think about what I still need to do in my life.”

At that, Helen smiled. Miss Edi might no longer live in the town named after her great-something

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grandmother, but she’d made an impact on it. That the town still existed was due to Miss Edi. “You’ve done a

lot for Edilean. You’ve—”

“Yes, dear, I know I’ve paid for things and written letters and raised a ruckus when people wanted to take

away our homes. I’ve done all that, but that was easy. It just took money and noise. What I haven’t done is right

some wrongs that happened when I was a young woman.”

Helen nearly groaned aloud. Here it comes, she thought. The Story. The one about how her mother, Mary

Alice, stole Miss Edi’s boyfriend at the end of World War II. Poor Miss Edi. Rotten ol’ Mary Alice. She’d

heard it all before. “Yes, I know—”

“No, no,” Miss Edi said, yet again cutting Helen off. “I’m not talking about what your parents did back

when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. That’s done with. I’m talking about now, today. What happened then has

changed today.”

Frowning, Helen turned away from the sight of her husband kicking the bird feeder, which he couldn’t get

to stand upright. “You mean that if my father had married
you,
quite a few lives would be different,” she said

slowly.

“Perhaps,” Miss Edi said, but she sounded amused. “What do you know about the fourteenth of

November, 1941?”

“That it was just before the attack on Pearl Harbor?” Helen asked cautiously.

“Then I take it that your eavesdropping when you were a little girl didn’t let you hear everything, did it?”

In spite of herself, Helen laughed. “No, it didn’t. Miss Edi, would you please tell me what this is about? My

husband is about to come in for lunch, so I don’t have much time.”

“I want you to come here to Florida to visit me. Think you can bear to be away from your husband for that

long?”

“The man is retired. I may move in with you.”

Miss Edi gave a dry little laugh. “All right, but you can’t tell anyone where you’re going or who you’re

seeing. I have some things to talk to you about, and we have to figure out how you’re going to do what has to be

done. I will, of course, pay for everything. Unless you’re not interested, that is.”

“A free trip? Secrets revealed? I’m very interested. How do we arrange this?”

“I’ll send all the travel information to my house and you can pick it up there. How’s that handsome son of

yours?”

Helen hesitated. Should she give the stock answer she gave to everyone else? Hardly anyone knew the full

extent of what Luke had been through in the last few years, but Helen thought that, somehow, Miss Edi knew.

“He’s recovering slowly. Mostly he hides out in the gardens around town and digs holes. He doesn’t want to talk

to anyone about his problems, not even me.”

“How about if I change his life?”

“For good or bad?” Helen asked, but she stood up straighter. Her only child, her son, was in pain, and she

didn’t know how to help him.

“For good,” Miss Edi said. “All right, you better go give your husband lunch. Remember that you’re not to

tell anyone about me. The tickets should be there tomorrow by ten, so pick them up at the house, then call me.

When you get here, I’ll have someone meet you at the airport.”

“All right,” Helen said as the back door opened.

“Damned thing!” she heard James muttering. “I should write the attorney general’s office about that

worthless piece of garbage.”

Helen rolled her eyes. “Will do,” she whispered. “I have to go.”

Miss Edi hung up, sat by the telephone, looked at it for a moment, then she used the two canes to get out of

the chair. Her legs were causing her so much pain today that she wanted to lie down and never get up. She

hobbled to the big box that sat on top of the piano bench and thought of the photos inside and of the full stories

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of what had happened to all of them so very long ago.

She picked up the thin green book that was their high school senior yearbook. Class of 1937. She didn’t

need to open it because she could see all of them in her mind, and she was glad she hadn’t been to Edilean,

Virginia, in the last few years. She missed the place, missed the trees and the changing seasons, but what she

didn’t like was seeing the aging faces of her friends. Or seeing their names on gravestones. Who would have

believed that the last remaining people alive would be her and David and Mary Alice? And Pru—but she didn’t

count. Nearly all the others had died, some of them recently, some a ways back. Poor Sara died back in…Edi

couldn’t remember the date, but she knew it was a long time ago.

She put the book down and looked at the little box that contained photos of all of them, but she didn’t open

it. She was feeling worse than usual today, and she was sure the doctor was wrong. She didn’t have a year left,

but she was glad of that. The pain in her old, scarred legs was getting worse. On the days when she did get out

of bed, she had to force herself. And when she couldn’t make herself get up, she had that annoyingly cheerful

little nurse get her laptop computer, and she spent her whole day on it. What a glorious thing the Internet was!

And how very much she could find out through it.

She’d even looked up David’s family and seen that his eldest brother had made it through the war. He’d