A Stranger's Kiss

‘you’re supposed to wait until after the wedding…’
    ‘Forever and day, Tara,’ he said, then took her hand and walked her in front of the registrar and repeated his promise for all the world to hear.
     

 
    More from Liz Fielding…
     
    ELOPING WITH EMMY
     
    TOM Brodie regarded the man sitting behind the ornate desk. It was the first time he had met Gerald Carlisle; clients of such importance were usually dealt with by partners who had pedigrees as long as his own.
    Brodie was the first to admit that he didn’t have a pedigree of any kind. What he’d achieved in his thirty-one years had nothing to do with family background, or the school he’d been to, it had been in spite of them.
    It was the source of infinite satisfaction for him to know that one of the City’s oldest law firms, the august legal partnership of Broadbent, Hollingworth and Maunsell, had been driven to accept him because of their desperate need for sharp new brains to drag them out of their Dickensian ways, bring their systems up to date and drag them into the twenty-first century.
    They’d tried offering him a consultancy. They’d tried a lump sum fee. He’d watched them wriggle with a certain detached amusement as they’d tried to buy his brains without having to take him and his working class background into their hallowed establishment, well aware that they needed him far more than he needed them. Which was why he’d refused to consider anything less than a full partnership.’
    One day, quite soon, he would insist that they add his name to the discreet brass plaque beside the shiny black front door of their offices; Broadbent, Hollingworth, Maunsell and Brodie. They wouldn’t like that either, but they’d do it. The thought made listening to Gerald Carlisle’s worries about his tiresome daughter almost bearable.
    Gerald Carlisle was not his client. Brodie was too egalitarian in his principles, too forthright in his views to be let loose around a client who had a family tree with a tap root that reached down to the robber barons of the middle ages, with land and money as old. It didn’t worry him. He had his own clients, companies run by men like himself who used their wits and their brains to create wealth instead of living off the past. Companies that brought in new money and big fees. It was the reason for his confidence about the brass plaque.
    But today was the twelfth of August. When Carlisle’s call for help had come through to the BHM offices, Tom had been the only partner at his desk. Everyone else had already packed their Purdeys and headed north for the grouse moors of their titled clients. It was tradition apparently, and BHM, as Tom was constantly reminded, was a traditional firm with old-fashioned values which apparently included shooting game birds in vast numbers in the middle of August.
    Tradition also required that when a client of Gerald Carlisle’s importance telephoned, he should speak to a partner; and so he had put through to Tom Brodie.
    Gerald Carlisle, however, did not wish to discuss business over the telephone and so Tom had regretfully cancelled his dinner date with the delectable silver-blonde barrister with whom he had been playing kiss-chase for some weeks and driven to Lower Honeybourne.
    Now, with the dusk gathering softly beyond the tall windows, he was sitting in the panelled study of Honeybourne Park, an impressive stone manor house set in countless acres of Cotswold parkland, while Carlisle explained the urgency of his problem.
    ‘Emerald has always been something of a handful,’ he was saying. For “handful”, Brodie thought, read “spoilt”. ‘Losing her mother so young...’
    Anyone would think, from Carlisle’s hushed tones, that his wife had expired from some tragic illness rather than running away with a muscular polo-player and leaving her young daughter to the tender ministrations of a series of nannies. She had been a bit of a “handful” too — still was if the gossip columns were to be believed. Like mother, like daughter apparently.
    ‘I can see your problem, Mr Carlisle,’ Tom said, his face blank of expression. He was well used to keeping his feelings to himself. ‘I just don’t understand what you want me to do about it.’
    Upon hearing the man’s proposed solution and the part he was expected to play in this, Brodie sincerely wished that he, too, had had some pressing engagement at the other end of the country that had taken him out of the office