Happily Ever After

Chapter 4

4

GODSEND CASTLE – I CAPTURE THE CASTLE, DODIE SMITH

Contrary to my first impressions, the bed in the Blue Room was comfortable. The room had overtones of a Regency Premier Inn, with its functional furniture in the ubiquitous oak and I’d imagined that I’d spend my first night lying wakeful and restless, hearing strange occult noises and mysterious footsteps. But, in fact, I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow and, apart from a few minutes in the middle of the night, when I woke suddenly and heard some heavy creaking from the ‘always kept locked’ Yellow Room next door, which was probably just the wind, I slept all night.

I woke early to silence. I made a dash for the bathroom and managed to persuade some lukewarm water out of the antiquated shower fittings, then went downstairs.

Nobody was about and the whole house had a deserted feel. The air smelled of dust, with a slight undertone of damp plaster and neglect, and I stood in the huge hallway, wondering what to do. Running away was heading the list at the moment. Between Lady Tanith’s air of repression and Hugo’s lack of immediate attraction to me I was doubting the whole situation fairly hard. Only the lack of transport and anywhere to run to, plus my desire to show Jude and my parents that I really could make something of my life, stopped me from repacking my bag and heading off into the dawn.

A small beam of sunlight inched its way in through a side window and cast itself at my feet. The light made me feel better and I squared my shoulders. There was no such thing as ghosts. Lady Tanith was simply a besotted old woman and Hugo was a somewhat foppish heir to an estate. Nobody had murdered me in the night, the mysteriously mentioned Jasper hadn’t burst into my room begging to be rescued. Now, I was hungry. Did I dare try to find the kitchen and make myself some breakfast? I took a few steps along the dank corridor that led to where I remembered Hugo showing me the kitchens, scullery and various empty little caves which had once been grand and busy. Then I remembered the bad-tempered Mrs Compton and her legs, and decided to wait until I was cushioned by the presence of Hugo before encountering her again. My stomach still had the clench of nervousness and the fear of doing something wrong and being sent packing to live at Jude’s or, even worse, to take possession of the bus. That was currently languishing in a farmer’s field and my lack of a licence to drive large vehicles meant I’d have to live in it there, where bullocks peered in through the windows and there was no running water.

At least here, I thought, walking aimlessly around peering in the empty niches in case Oswald’s diaries had carelessly been pushed into one, I had a proper bed, running water and a lack of small children bouncing me awake at 4.30. And I was Doing a Job! My parents’ casual assurance that nobody needed qualifications these days, all you really had to have was a willingness to work and/or an eye for interiors had, so far, failed to be true. Apart from shifts behind the bar at the local pub, where I was unpopular because I didn’t know how to banter, I had singularly failed in the job-hunting world.

I pressed a few of the plaster mouldings that surrounded the walls, just in case a previously unsuspected secret panel slid out or a priest hole became visible. Nothing happened, apart from one plaster rose breaking beneath my fingers into dust and paint fragments. This wasn’t supposed to happen . None of it. Even this bit, the Templewood Hall and Hugo being the heir, was way down the list of how I’d expected life to go. I had thought, encouraged by the small local library near where we’d ended up before the Montreal offer, that I’d go to work for a local businessman who, despite my adorably ditzy ways with his appointments and some misunderstandings with another woman, would fall for me and give me promotion and an engagement ring. Either that, or a billionaire would need an emergency date for a society wedding and we would, via some humorous mix up, end up sharing a hotel room with the inevitable consequences.

What the novels I had devoured had neglected to mention was that, as I wasn’t gorgeous with long legs and an ability to quip, I was not heroine material. I didn’t have the curvy figure and incorrigible hair, the innate way with winsomely adorable orphans or the sparkly brilliant conversation that caused riotous laughter. Instead of inspiring lust or adoration, I mostly just made people annoyed.

So this, here, was my best hope for now. The sun, which had been beaming its cheering early light in through the upper windows of the double height hall and showing up the chips, cracks and scratches in the tiled flooring, went in. It illustrated my state of mind nicely – the dying of hope for any real future, a lack of inspiration and the dawning knowledge that my life was probably going to be lived in my sister’s shadow or a mouldering forty-nine-seater, forever.

I shook myself. I was here now. This was a real job, and maybe I could persuade good enough references from Lady Tanith, whom I had already begun to call Tanith in my head, because I had read enough mythology to know where the name originated and to suspect that Thanatos might be hanging around in this house, to find myself something similar somewhere else. Or, I thought, with hope beginning to peep at me from behind the cloud of realism it had hidden behind, I could marry Hugo? I could see beyond the neglect and damp that this house had wonderful bones. Sixteenth-century history could be a draw too; perhaps it would convert into a luxurious, if somewhat cavernous B maybe cream teas on the lawns in the season? There would be a great deal of work to do, of course, to get it up to standard, but I could see myself cheerily beavering away, hair tied casually and cutely with a cloth, buffing woodwork and scouring floors to the accompaniment of an indie-rock backing track.

Then, once more, reality bounced back. I thought of Lady Tanith’s acerbic personality being faced with visitors and shuddered. Then I squared my shoulders and looked for something to do.

I could go back to the library, switch on the ageing computer which had turned out to be stuck in a corner forming a useful shelf for more books, and clear another tiny section. Or hunt about amid the volumes for anything that looked as though they might be diaries. I had my hand on the library door handle before the thought of the silence which lay in that room, overseen by the enormous figure of Oswald himself, gave me second thoughts. No, before work, before breakfast, I’d allow myself a few minutes of illusion and wander the acres, looking pensive. The fresh air, after all this dust and brooding, would be good for me and I could pretend to be an Austen heroine again, despite the lack of muslin, reticule and willing clergymen.

The front door was immovable. However the metal sheets were jammed in, I couldn’t budge them, and I had no idea where there was another door to the outside, so I improvised. I hauled at one of the long sash windows in the moan-free Morning Room until I wiggled it high enough for me to be able to squeeze myself through and managed, with a great loss of dignity, to clamber out and drop the considerable height down onto the narrow area of lawn which lay outside.

It was further down than I’d thought, and I landed awkwardly, pitching forward to lie on the grass, which was damp. But it felt wonderful to be out of the house and to feel the sunshine first hand, so I just lay for a moment, face down, enjoying the smell of the gardens, the soft prickle of the grass against my skin and the warmth on the back of my neck. Maybe it wasn’t so bad here, after all.

Then I rolled over and screamed.

The gardener was standing over me, armed, this time not with shears but with a huge metal rake with enormous tines. Backlit by the bright early sun, this gave him an Edward Scissorhands silhouette.

‘Are you all right?’ He looked down on me, shifting the rake so its metal teeth now lay level with my head.

‘Yes,’ was all I could say, still prone and now aware of dew seeping through my shirt.

‘Need a hand?’ He moved the rake again. I couldn’t take my eyes off its threatening shininess.

‘No, no thanks, I’m fine,’ I gasped.

He was wearing a slightly better-fitting T-shirt this morning, I noticed. His hair was longish and dark and his legs, which were very visible between his cut-off jeans and huge boots, were tanned. I was thwarted in my momentary recall of Lady Chatterley’s Lover , read furtively under the covers over a couple of very overheated summer nights, when he grunted, nodded to me briefly, and headed off away across the smooth acres of mown lawn, with the teeth of the rake bobbing and springing beside him like an enthusiastic metal terrier.

I waited until he was well out of sight before I stood up. Then, forgetting to be an Austen heroine, I went and sat by the edge of the pond for a while, until someone turned the fountain on, when I decided it was probably time to go back in and see if anyone was awake.

I wandered around to the back of the house, where I found an open door which led into the kitchen, where Hugo was sitting on a stool eating Rice Krispies dry out of the packet with his hand.

‘Oh, good morning!’ He sounded bright and breezy and not at all surprised to see me trailing in, slightly damp from the fountain’s unexpected resurgence, and dusted with more than a few grass cuttings from my close encounter with the lawn. ‘We’ll have to forage for ourselves this morning. Mrs Compton sometimes does breakfast, but she’s having one of her “moments” lately and only doing it for Mother. She’s devoted to Mother, for some reason. Perhaps she’s quietly putting rat poison in all her food, or something.’ He fisted another batch of Krispies into his mouth thoughtfully. ‘Wasting her time, of course, Mother’s immune to most of the major causes of death.’

He gave me another beaming smile which took the sting out of his words a little but did make me wonder about the familial relationships.

Marry Hugo , I thought. Turn house into hotel. Exorcise ghosts. Rescue imprisoned older brother. Never, ever have to throw myself on Jude’s mercy for somewhere to live… ‘How long have the family owned Templewood?’ I asked, trying for pertness, and sitting down on the stool next to Hugo.

‘It’s not ancestral or anything.’ Hugo pushed the Krispies box towards me and shook it, but I averted my eyes. There was a loaf of bread sitting on the long oak table and I’d spotted a toaster. ‘Well, it is, sort of. It was Grandma’s family home, although Mother tries to spin it so that it was Oswald who bought it. But really it came when he married her, although I think her father bought it from an impoverished aristocrat in eighteen hundred and something. Hardly Norman conquest stuff.’

I got off the stool and began to make toast. I had been hoping that the bread would be a handmade artisan loaf, although I had to work hard to imagine the irritable Mrs Compton handmaking anything that you couldn’t use a steamroller to manufacture, but it turned out to be a supermarket loaf deprived of its wrapper.

‘And it’s just you and your brother? No other siblings?’ Hugo was easy to talk to anyway, which was encouraging. And he wasn’t married, unless his wife was chained up in the attic. Which absolutely wouldn’t surprise me.

‘Yes, and there’s nine years between us. But, as I said, Jazz doesn’t want the bother of managing the estate or the house; he has a cottage out there, in the estate village.’ A vague thumb indicated the window. ‘And Mother won’t change anything that was here in Oswald’s time. So we live with crumbling tiles and peeling walls, in case the Great Man gets upset, even though he’s been dead for fifty years.’ Hugo sighed.

‘What would you like to do with the place? When…’ I stopped myself in time from saying ‘when your mother dies’, because I was half-convinced that Lady Tanith kept herself going with the blood of virgins already. ‘…When you inherit.’

The kitchen was beginning to smell of toasting bread now, a little bit more homely and less like a post-apocalyptic Pride and Prejudice.

Hugo sighed again. ‘Honestly?’

I nodded.

‘Sell it. I want to go and live in Paris. Or America. Anywhere but here. Or, maybe, travel around, see places. I envy you your upbringing so much, always somewhere new, new things to see and experience. I never go anywhere.’

He was looking at me now as though I were some shining example of ambition. As though being born in a bus and never staying anywhere long enough to make friends, or form any social connection of any kind, was something laudable. But then, if he sold this place he’d be able to afford to travel first class and stay in hotels where, presumably, he wouldn’t have to fill the water bowser every morning and chip the ice off the blankets in winter.

I was enjoying feeling as though, in Hugo’s eyes at least, I was an achiever. I had something of value – I’d travelled. ‘Yes,’ I said, determined to Kerouac my childhood as much as necessary, ‘it was full of wonderful experiences.’ Also some pretty shit ones, but we won’t go into those right now.

The toast popped, and Hugo and I sat side by side on wooden stools at a table which could have seated twenty, eating. I kept looking around, agog at so much space just to prepare food; at the massive range oven along one wall, the racks of pans suspended from the ceiling and the dusty shelves of plates and serving ware filling the walls. I tried to ignore the ominous crack which ran the width of the ceiling and the fact that the fridge humming to itself in a corner, like an unattended child, was tiny.

‘Right.’ Hugo jumped up at last, folding the now-empty packet into a small square of cardboard and dropping it neatly into a plastic tub. ‘I’ll be upstairs, if anyone wants me, not that they will, but Mother may ask.’

‘I’ll go and start work in the library, again.’ I’d only done about an hour so far, and was already dreading that echoing silence.

‘Cheerio, then. I’ll see you at lunch.’ Hugo waved a hand and sauntered out of the kitchen, leaving me wondering what he did around here all day. Did he work? Was he managing the estate? Although I found it impossible to imagine him giving orders to staff. There was a kind of floppy reticence to Hugo that made me think he wouldn’t be that effective at management.

But that didn’t matter. We got on. The possibility of our falling deeply in love and doing lots of staring into the depths of one another’s eyes to see our souls reflected still existed. I wouldn’t object to Templewood being sold either, I thought, looking at the fractured ceiling and the row upon row of unused crockery. Hell, I’d hold the flamethrower myself, if it came to it.

I thought, mistily, of all those books where the heroine had set sail for foreign parts and imagined myself on the deck of a yacht, clamping a large-brimmed hat tightly to my head whilst my skirts blew in the breeze of transit. I couldn’t somehow imagine Hugo traipsing up a mountain wearing a sweaty rucksack in search of a view; he had far more of the organised helicopter tour about him. And with that thought satisfyingly in place, I tipped my toast crumbs into the sink, rinsed off my plate, and went off to the library and more data entry.