A Question of Inheritance (10 page)

Babs took no notice, shaking hands with Rupert before brushing past them and making her way down the rest of the stairs.

Sonia turned round and looked down at her. ‘So that’s Lady Barbara Fitzwarin. I cannot imagine what my father would have thought of her. Or rather, I can. He must be spinning in his grave.’ The thought seemed to give her some satisfaction.

Just as Hugo was wondering where Gus and Polly were, they came into the hall. Gus looked up at the figures on the stairs and called out, ‘Sonia, good to see you.’

Sonia leaned over the banisters and looked down. ‘Good evening, Gus.’ Her eyes were on Polly. ‘You must be Pauline.’

‘I’m called Polly, Aunt Sonia.’

‘Lady Polly! Hardly dignified. And let’s do without the “aunt” business, shall we? Put those cases in my room, Hugo, please. I’m dying to get out of my furs and into a bath. I suppose there is some hot water?’

Scene 3

Mrs Partridge and Freya had decided to open the South Drawing Room. Mrs Partridge was delighted to see the Castle coming back to life. ‘I never was here much in here in his late lordship’s day, of course, because then Mrs Hardwick was housekeeper. I used to come sometimes to help out when they had a big party on. Although not,’ she added regretfully, ‘on the night when his lordship was done in.’

Freya said, ‘Just as well, Mrs P. Don’t you remember the snow? You’d have been shut up for all those days with a murderer.’

Mrs Partridge said, ‘Put it like that, perhaps it was for the best. Now mind you fold that dust sheet properly. It’s murder to get them back on if they’re not folded up properly.’

Freya obediently adjusted her hold on the heavy dust sheet. She looked around the room, imagining how it would have looked back in the seventeenth century, with Cromwell’s troops battering the walls and the Countess and her servants manning the guns. The tapestry of the boar hunt would have been here then, and the intricate Jacobean plasterwork, but not the Gainsboroughs or the Reynolds with their elegant eighteenth-century faces.

Ben had lit a fire in the great Italian marble fireplace and, as dusk fell, Mrs Partridge went to turn on some of the lamps in the huge drawing room. Freya’s mind drifted back to that night in 1947, which was the last time that a group of people had assembled here before dinner.

‘I suppose we didn’t really need to do this for tonight, but it’s my favourite of the drawing rooms. It’s odd to think this is the last time I’ll be doing this.’

Mrs Partridge looked round with a keen and approving eye. ‘Looks a treat. It’s only right that his lordship should have things done properly.’

In 1947, the Castle was run with what was for those times an adequate staff, but a skeleton one compared to the days before the war. Freya remembered spending her school holidays here in the thirties when house parties were the order of the day. Then there had been a butler and an under butler, footmen, a hierarchy of maids, valets: the whole panoply of a great English house.

All gone. All gone, and a good thing, too. ‘It’s an anachronism, this place. I love it, and it’s the closest thing I ever had to a home, but it’s a nonsense to be living in a castle in this day and age.’

Mrs Partridge was having none of it. ‘His lordship can count himself lucky to have such a fine place to live in, when you think how many people there are up and down the land who haven’t got a roof over their heads worth talking of.’

‘Perhaps he should throw open the Castle to homeless people.’

‘Homeless people wouldn’t come and live here. Not with its history and those ghosts hanging round. You have to be born to it to appreciate it.’

Gus hadn’t exactly been born to it. How much did he appreciate the grandeur of the Castle? He liked the paintings, especially the ones with classical themes, and he honoured the history of it, but would he like living in it? Grandeur combined with impracticality didn’t make for comfort.

She picked up a silver-framed photo, breathed on the glass and rubbed it with a duster. Her cousin Tom. Taken on passing-out day at Sandhurst. Fresh-faced, fearless, eager. He’d grown into a tough and successful soldier, whose life was war. As was his death.

Freya sighed. Mrs Partridge said, ‘Either get on with polishing those photographs or find something else to do. We’ve no time for you to sit mooning over them and thinking of the past. It’s all gone, Miss Freya. Time to move on into the future.’

Freya laughed. ‘We’ll certainly all be moving on soon, Mrs P.’

Mrs Partridge said, ‘Yes, but we’ll go out with a bang. Make sure this Christmas is one you’ll remember.’

Scene 4

Freya hesitated over what to put on when she went upstairs to change out of her skirt and jersey. Were they dressing for dinner? She should have asked Gus what he wanted to do.

Polly came to her rescue. She put her head round the door. ‘Georgia says, have you got a safety pin? She’s broken the zip fastener on her frock and she says it’s her only smart one. What are you wearing?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Mr Dauntsey’s wearing what he calls a dinner jacket, because Georgia and I heard him tell Sonia he was. I asked Hugo what that meant and he says it’s the English word for a tuxedo. So he’s wearing one, too, and I told Pops he’d better put his on.’

Freya handed her a safety pin. That answered her question and she opened her wardrobe to take out an evening dress she’d bought when she was last in London. She bathed and changed quickly and went downstairs. No one else was yet down. Where was Hugo? He’d promised to see to the drinks and at any moment now the others would be down wanting cocktails.

At that moment, Sonia appeared, ravishing in a purple and silver confection that shrieked Paris. ‘Don’t tell me no one else is down. Why are we in here? Were you overcome with a fit of nostalgia, or has Gus taken a fancy to it?’

She sank on to a sofa and gracefully swung her feet up. ‘Pass over that lighter, supposing it works.’

Freya handed her the heavy silver lighter. Sonia took a long cigarette holder out of her evening bag and produced a slim gold cigarette case. She waved it at Freya. ‘Want one?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Oh, I forgot, you don’t smoke.’ She tucked a cigarette in her holder, lit it and the pungent smell of the scented cigarette hung on the air for a moment.

Freya sniffed. ‘Goodness, what are you smoking? It smells like a lady’s boudoir.’

Sonia shrugged. ‘You have such a sensitive soul, Freya dearest. Wait until you catch a whiff of Oliver’s cheroots, only you won’t because I shan’t let him smoke them in the house. Where are the cocktails?’

‘Hugo is seeing to them.’

Sonia’s gaze swept round the room as though she expected to see Hugo lurking in a corner. ‘Does he add invisibility to his other skills?’

‘Don’t be tiresome; he’ll be here in a minute. He isn’t the butler.’

‘No, more’s the pity. I hope Gus is going to employ one. Does he drink, by the way? Or is he one of these puritanical teetotal Americans?’

Freya said, ‘He drinks.’

Her mind had slid away from the here and now. She’d be starting her new book in January and quite suddenly she saw her heroine Clarissa, clad in a purple velvet gown with silver lace. Coming slowly down a flight of stairs, while two figures watched her from the shadows. Candlelight. Late at night.

Sonia said sharply, ‘What are you thinking about? I don’t like that faraway look. How do you get on with Gus?’

Freya dragged her mind back to the present. ‘I like him. He reminds me a bit of your father, but there’s a side to him that’s quite different. He has a sense of fun, which Selchester never did.’

Sonia gave an inelegant snort. ‘Sense of fun? Father? Good heavens, no. Absolutely no sense of humour. Of course, he was so grand and had such a lofty reputation that it didn’t matter. I hear you took Gus into the town and introduced him to the Daffodils. Isn’t that all rather egalitarian? A wee bit too democratic? He is the Earl after all, even if he was brought up an American.’

‘He wanted to get to know some of the people in the town. It may be a good thing, his not being as aloof as Selchester was. Times have changed.’

‘If he’s going to live in the Castle and try to keep it all going, he’d better keep some standards.’

‘You sound like Priscilla.’

Sonia said, ‘I hope he’s not a socialist or a communist or anything awful like that. It’s no good him thinking that the Castle can become part of the town. It never has been, not in all the centuries it’s been here, and it isn’t going to be now.’

‘He’s the kind of man who finds it easy to get on with people, but I don’t see him walking into town to get all the latest gossip from the Daffodils.’

Sonia moved her shoulders restlessly and rearranged her dress over her legs. ‘You may like him, but I wish him at the bottom of the deep blue sea.’

‘You hardly know him.’

‘He could be a paragon of all the virtues, a wonderful man, but I can’t forgive his appearing from nowhere and taking my inheritance.’

‘If Tom had lived—’

‘If Tom.’ Sonia’s voice was full of bitter mockery. ‘If Tom. There is no “If Tom”, is there? He’s dead and I minded terribly, as did you. The only compensation was that Selchester died too and I thought I was going to inherit the Castle.’

‘If Selchester hadn’t been murdered,’ Freya said, ‘he might have in the end have divorced your mother and married again. And produced another son.’

‘He couldn’t ever have squared that with his Catholic conscience. Never mind all the other evil things he did, including the way he treated Mummy. To get divorced was a sin with a capital S.’

‘You can’t blame Gus. It’s not as though he exactly pushed himself into the Earldom.’

‘No, my sweet, that was done by you and Hugo Hawksworth and that interfering priestly uncle of his. Poking your noses in where they had no business to be, and not letting sleeping dogs lie. I’m sure Gus was perfectly happy with his life as it was; I didn’t get the impression that he was overjoyed by his inheritance. It would have been much better if you’d left well alone.’

Freya didn’t answer. She sat down closer to the fire, feeling the chill in the air even though the room was heated by the big cast-iron radiators tucked away out of sight.

Sonia puffed a little circle of smoke into the air. ‘Father Leo gives me the jitters. Rupert tells me he’s some kind of a distinguished scientist. It’s a most unsuitable thing for a priest to be. And if he is a scientist why isn’t he vague and absent-minded like brilliant scientists are supposed to be? I don’t like it at all, a worldly and experienced priest and then studying the stars or whatever he does on top of it.’

Freya had to laugh. ‘You don’t like him because he stirs your conscience.’

Sonia said, ‘Wrong on that one. I don’t have a conscience.’

They fell silent and then Sonia said, quite abruptly, ‘Have you told Gus about Selchester and what he got up to?’

Freya’s head shot up. How much did Sonia know? They’d been at pains not to let word of that spread.

Sonia said, ‘No need to look at me like that. I knew what Selchester was doing. All very sordid.’

‘Is that why you hated your father so much?’

Sonia’s face became a mask. ‘That side of things wasn’t so bad. He liked to manipulate people and just went too far. Which is why he got bumped off, but no, that’s not why I hated him.’

‘He treated your mother badly.’

‘He did indeed. Even that wasn’t the worst of it. Never mind. How much do Gus and his daughters know?’

‘I expect Gus read or has looked up the newspaper reports of Selchester’s murder. I know Polly has.’

‘How I dislike precocious children.’

‘I haven’t said anything more to him about his father. Why should I? He didn’t know him so what’s the point of raking up the past. Let sleeping murders lie.’

Scene 5

Leo said Grace, and they sat down to enjoy the delicious food. Mrs Partridge had done them proud with her cooking. She was on her mettle with extra guests, and with Pam to help her in the kitchen had prepared four courses. Most of the food came from the estate, and leek soup was followed by trout from Lord Selchester’s stretch of the river.

As Freya tucked into to her chicken fillets cooked in lemon and herbs, she listened to the buzz of conversation. Polly and Georgia were arguing about fishing; Leo was talking to Rupert about particles; Hugo and Oliver were discussing books; and Sonia was telling Gus the scandalous doings of a great-aunt who now lived, mercifully, in the south of France. Babs, clad in her habitual black, stared morosely down at her plate.

How like her uncle Gus was, Freya thought – feature for feature with his haughty nose and blue eyes. But his mouth was less rigid and he looked like a man who smiled a great deal more than his father had. A different kind of looks from Rupert’s rugged handsomeness. And from Hugo, who was of a more wiry build than either of them: dark-eyed, watchful and amused. Oliver was dark, too, but his was a sallow colouring.

Pam came in with the trolley. ‘The pie’s a cherry one, made with the Castle cherries,’ she announced. ‘Auntie bottled them in the summer, and they’re really good. Oh, and Auntie says she’s sorry, my lord, but this came earlier for you and she quite forgot about it. Mr Bunbury brought it up, special; he thought it might be something important, with all those stamps and a seal and everything.’ She handed Gus a parcel and began to collect plates with a cheerful clatter.

‘Who’s it from, Pops?’ Polly asked.

Her father was turning it over in his hands. ‘It was sent to our address in America and then airmailed back here. It’s from Verekers, the solicitors.’

‘Open it,’ Polly urged.

Gus hesitated, and then said, ‘I may as well.’ He slid his butter knife under the seal and eased the string off. It was packed in thick layers of brown paper.

Georgia said, ‘Your lawyers don’t seem to know that there’s a paper shortage.’

Even Babs was showing some interest now, and the table fell silent as Gus removed the outer wrapping.

One was always curious about parcels; Freya wanted to laugh at the look of eager interest on the faces around the table. Sonia had an intent look on her face, as did Rupert. Polly and Georgia looked expectant, Hugo alert, Leo was wrapped in his usual calm, and Babs was frowning to show she didn’t care about such mundane articles as a parcel. Only Oliver didn’t seem at all interested.