Happily Ever After

Chapter 3

3

NORTHANGER ABBEY – NORTHANGER ABBEY, JANE AUSTEN

We mounted an enormous staircase, carved in twiddly dark wood, curving like an impressive eyebrow over the hallway and up onto a galleried landing which branched off in various directions. ‘This is the most haunted part of the house,’ Hugo said, leading me off to the right along an upstairs corridor. Occasional glances through the huge windows had told me that this wing of the house looked out over the gardens.

‘I’m sorry?’ As I spoke, the sun went behind a cloud and the wonderful roseate light died to leave us staring down a wood-panelled box into a murky dimness which was giving off a distinct smell of damp plaster.

‘Oh yes. Whole place is riddled with ghosts of course, but this is the worst bit.’ Complacently Hugo set out, touching closed doors and naming as he went. ‘My room, the Green Room, Scarlet Room…’ We rounded the end of the corridor and set out along another, which branched around to the left.

‘Hang on, hang on, can we go back to the “ghost” thing, please?’ I’d stopped moving now, frozen into immobility on the landing. ‘The house is haunted?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Hugo sounded completely blasé about the walking corpse potential. ‘Dreadfully, I’m afraid.’ Then he smiled. ‘No need for you to worry, though. Stay in your room after dark, don’t go wandering around – it’s all perfectly all right.’ Then he went back to his naming of the rooms. ‘The Panelled Room – Mother uses that one for the Sheraton collection, mostly forgeries of course – the Yellow Room – that one’s always kept locked, ah, and this is the Blue Room. We usually put guests up in here, you see.’

He turned the handle and the door swung noiselessly open to show a perfectly ordinary bedroom which had more than a little of the hotel-soullessness about it. There was a big double bed, horrible oak furniture which was too dark for the small amount of light which squeezed in through the inadequate window, and a kettle on a desk. I turned around. ‘It’s fine.’ It was fine. It had a bed. That was really all I asked for. Oh, apart from not being put miles away from the nearest occupants, in a house that was supposedly haunted. ‘Where does Lady Tanith sleep?’

‘In the other wing. She had a suite of rooms of course, originally, but actually she pretty much has the whole wing to herself now that Father’s no longer with us. She doesn’t like disturbance, you see.’ Hugo said this as though having an entire wing of a house so that you didn’t get woken in the night was perfectly normal. Well, of course, it was to him. The idea of just wearing headphones and listening to podcasts so that the drunks arguing outside didn’t wake you, wouldn’t occur to him because it didn’t need to. ‘We don’t usually go down that way.’ He closed the door to the Blue Room and we rounded the end of the corridor. ‘This is a storage room, not much used these days.’ He touched another door, then another. ‘And this is the bathroom.’

This door stood opposite my bedroom, and Hugo flashed me a glimpse of a tiled floor, a high-flush toilet with a cistern the size of a commercial water tank and the end of a roll-top bath. ‘This is why we put visitors in the Blue Room, it’s close to the facilities. En suite, sadly, rather passed us by.’

Unconcerned at my somewhat stunned reaction to his house, Hugo turned us back and we returned to the ‘haunted’ corridor, where I stopped again.

‘When you say “haunted”,’ I said cautiously, ‘what are we talking, here? Mysterious noises or a sheeted figure that moves inexplicably quickly towards you, or people showing you huge holes in their chests?’ M R James had had a hand in my adolescence and took some shaking off, especially in a house like this, straight from Lost Hearts .

Under my feet the scarlet carpet had given off little puffs of dust where we’d walked and these were winking and dancing in the sun that had now deigned to shine again through the huge windows.

‘Oh, there’s all sorts. Up here there’s supposed to be a lady who walks,’ Hugo said carelessly. ‘Fairly modern, that one, and she appears during the day as well as at night. A guest of Grandfather’s who fell off the balcony and broke her neck. Or something.’

I thought of the young woman I’d seen through the balcony window. The hair at the back of my neck tingled and the skin of my spine tried to crawl into my underwear and hide. No. Surely not.

‘And then there’s the noises, footsteps and so on, occasional ghastly scream, that sort of thing, all very standard in a house this old. There’s a ghost horse in the old stable block, but that’s mostly disused now, and we haven’t heard him for ages , and sometimes something moans in the Morning Room. I’ll show you that in a bit. Are you having your things sent on? Mother wants you to start as soon as possible, I gather.’

For a moment he looked out of the huge window at the acutely angled balcony. I could see from this side that the windows were, in fact, full-length doors that opened, presumably so that the balcony could be accessed, although now it would only be accessible to someone with a desire to see the entire garden at ninety degrees. Below, in one of the borders, the gardener was clipping something with his deadly shears. He still looked scruffy, and the T-shirt clearly only fitted where it touched because it hung around him now like – I tried not to think – an affectionate ghost. The clipping looked to have a degree of ferocity about it too. I shuddered and added him to my list of ‘things to be avoided’, which was lengthening by the second.

Haunted. Of course Templewood would be haunted. I was overwhelmed with a sudden longing to leave. The bus might be inadequate, but at least it was a known quantity and not full of people who were, in the words of my taxi driver, ‘barking’. I could make the best of van life, I’d been doing it my entire life; it was a roof, of sorts, over my head and didn’t, as far as I knew, have any ghosts at all.

Ahead of us, where the ornately carved stairway ushered us down into the cavernous reception hallway, the cat appeared, waddling its way up along the carpet towards us, preceded by the smell of elderly fish.

‘I don’t really have much to send on,’ I said, trying to decide whether or not to mention that, as my parents were currently en route to Montreal and my sister, whose idea this whole awfulness was, lived in Cornwall, there was nobody to send anything anywhere. If I told Hugo that, at least it would establish my credentials as a single woman, available for matrimony. But it would also let him know that nobody would miss me, should the gardener lose what little sanity he had left and stab us all to death in the middle of the night. Or even Hugo himself for that matter. He had, so far, seemed perfectly well-balanced and normal, but you surely couldn’t be the offspring of Lady Tanith and live in a place like this without having an awful lot of something restrained under that smooth surface polish.

‘Oh. Right-o.’

With one hand on the Gothic balustrading, Hugo began to walk down the gentle half-oval of the polished staircase to the hall below. I followed carefully. The treads were uneven as though something very big and heavy had once walked up alternate steps.

‘I live alone,’ I said. I wasn’t sure now whether I was setting out my credentials for being marriage-worthy or establishing that nobody would come looking for my body for weeks.

‘That’s nice,’ Hugo observed vaguely. He didn’t seem inspired to plot my immediate demise, which was encouraging.

Behind us, the cat, disappointed at having reached the top of the stairs just in time for us to start descending, sat like a fat cushion and watched us go.

‘In a converted bus,’ I tried again for a reaction.

‘How very unusual.’ He still sounded vague and that annoyed me. This was my one point of interest, my one conversational opening. It normally got some kind of a reaction other than polite acknowledgement.

‘My parents are Ed and Iris. Of Road Life ,’ I went on, despite Hugo’s obvious lack of follow-up questions, and to let him know that I did have people who would miss me. Eventually. ‘You know, the TV programme?’

‘I don’t watch much television.’ Hugo gave me a beaming smile as we reached the bottom of the creaky staircase. ‘There’s one about somewhere, Mother keeps it for the staff. But this is the Morning Room, come on in and have a look.’

He crossed the hall, with its chequerboard tiling and niches, and opened the door to a small sitting room with yellow walls and a collection of mismatched tables and chairs dotted around, like a furniture orphanage. ‘Mother writes her letters in here.’

Suppressing annoyance from his lack of curiosity about me, I continued to follow him around the downstairs. Hugo enumerated the rooms, announcing their name and purpose as though he were an estate agent trying to sell me the place. I stared about me as we went, a little afraid of what I might see. All the rooms were big, with high, chilly ceilings and enormous windows that contained wonderful views like architectural postcards. Curtains that were made from enough fabric to form several circus tents hung, bedraggled and dusty in each, paint peeled in those rooms that were sunny and in those at the back of the house, where the view was of distant moorland safely restrained behind some extensive hedging, there was a smell of ash and burned wood. Either it was chilly enough to need to light fires in there even on summer evenings, or there had been a recent conflagration. From the state of the place, it was hard to tell which of these applied.

Reassuringly, no ghosts manifested, although the chill had begun to seem supernatural.

‘And here, obviously, is the library again.’ Ignoring the makeshift metal nature of the front door, Hugo swept me around back into the room in which I’d been interviewed and flung open the double doors. ‘Ah, Mother.’

Lady Tanith was sitting on one of the overstuffed chairs in a corner, with a book on her lap. She’d turned on the light over Sir Oswald, I noticed, so his slightly resigned features shone above the room, somewhat dimmed by the amount of dust in the air from the fallen curtain which still pooled beneath the window. She looked posed, as though she’d not been sitting reading, but rather waiting for us to come back in.

Behind us, the cat marched determinedly into the room and jumped onto the library steps, causing several books to fall to the floor amid puffs of yet more dust and the cracking of aged covers.

I looked at the little tableau with an increasing feeling of trapped desperation. It wasn’t supposed to be like this! Templewood Hall was meant to be a shabbily lived-in house, with wonderful possibilities, window seats and comfortable nooks to curl up in. Lady Tanith was supposed to be a delightfully vague and dotty dowager, with amusing habits and a need for rescue. Narrative causality dictated that I would sweep in, being regularly called a ‘breath of fresh air’, and redecorate, befriend my employer – possibly causing her to start dating a winsome retired professor from a nearby village, but that was optional – before marrying Hugo and starting a new dynasty who would nurture the Templewood estate into the future.

What narrative causality had failed to mention at any point, was that Lady Tanith would be insanely besotted with a sardine-scented cat, that only demolition would serve to make Templewood more attractive and that I would be staring at a pair of painted knees seen through volcanic levels of dust, trying to impress. Ghosts and the air of incipient horror movie were almost the least disappointing elements.

So far, only Hugo was coming up to expectations.

There was a silence, broken by the sound of the cat beginning to lick itself again and a distant clock ticking.

Eventually, Lady Tanith put her book down on a side table, looked at me and sighed. ‘Well, you’re here now,’ she said. ‘You can get started. I need you to catalogue my books onto the computer. It’s in here somewhere.’ She gazed around as though the computer may be lying in wait under a table. ‘Hugo, would you go to the kitchens and tell Mrs Compton that there will be another person for dinner?’ She waved a hand of dismissal.

‘Of course.’ Hugo dipped his head in acknowledgement, but I was mildly encouraged to see him give me a small wink as he did so.

Lady Tanith continued to watch me as I stood completely disorientated. ‘Well? Go on then, girl.’

I decided that honesty was best and more likely to endear me to her than a continued failure to act. ‘I don’t know what you want me to do.’

‘Catalogue my books.’

‘But how ? I mean, in what way?’ I still couldn’t see any sign of a computer. The cat stopped its ablutionary activities and stared at me, twisted into a portly arabesque.

‘Just… catalogue. You know. Into… order.’

I began to suspect that she had no idea how one went about cataloguing a library either. ‘Shall I just make a list of all the books, maybe author, title and year of publication? On the – computer?’

She waved an irritated hand and the cat bent back to its flank, tongue still protruding. ‘Whatever you think,’ she snapped, then lowered her voice and leaned slightly forward as though she were about to offer me confidences. ‘Cataloguing the library isn’t the real reason you’re here, you know.’

I felt my shoulders loosen. This was where she confessed that she’d brought me in as a companion to her lonely son. He’d probably had a disappointment – been jilted at the altar or caught his fiancée in bed with another man and sworn to never love again. I was here to bring him out of his shell and teach him about the beauty of life; to fill him with a new positive attitude and, possibly, the desire to build a sanctuary for abused horses, or similar. My arms prickled with her unsaid words. Or maybe it was the dust and cat fur.

‘I need you to find something,’ Lady Tanith breathed.

Oh, even better ! A quest. A mysterious artefact. The whole ‘save Hugo from himself, fall in love’ thing was a subplot ! I hadn’t considered this might be the case. ‘Find what?’ I bent forward too.

She glanced up at the portrait hanging above us, as though Oswald could be listening in. ‘I was his muse, you know.’ Her voice had gone a bit dreamy, reliving a past only she could see. ‘I came as a companion to his wife Caroline – an invalid, poor woman. Before we knew it, Oswald and I had fallen in love. Of course, nothing could be said , and he wouldn’t have divorced her; he was utterly, utterly dedicated to Caroline. But we worked together closely .’ She gave the final three words such a weight and spin that I was imagining them having frantic sex on the tabletop in here before she went on. ‘When Caroline died, I thought… but he needed some time. He’d been married to her for most of his adult life, the poor darling, and he didn’t want to appear precipitate or cause any form of scandal. So…’

As though a little ashamed of confessing as much as she had, Lady Tanith looked down and began picking cat fur off her trousered leg. I waited. There had to be more.

The Master opened his pink mouth and yowled, a surprisingly human sound. ‘I am continuing, darling,’ Lady Tanith said. I eyeballed the cat with deep suspicion. ‘It was decided that he would go abroad for a time. To let the dust settle.’ There was absolutely no indication in her tone that this was meant to be anything other than a statement, when any other person would have used the opportunity for a joke, given that the levels of dust in this room were almost tomb-worthy. ‘Oswald died. In Switzerland.’ There was a lot of emotion behind those words. ‘It was very sudden. He never came home to me.’

In the following silence, more dust settled. From outside I could hear the sound of furious snipping , but that was the only noise that penetrated this stuffy, over-furnished room. Lady Tanith was gazing up at the portrait, her eyes shining with affection.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, wondering how the hell any of this could be anything to do with cataloguing a library, and hoping that she wasn’t going to send me on a quest to bring home Oswald’s remains or anything. Cataloguing a library was a suitably romance-heroine task. Grave robbing had not featured in my reading material.

‘So, I married his son Richard and stayed,’ she finished, as though this was the only possible ending . ‘Had the boys, and honoured Oswald’s memory every day.’ Another glance at the painted face. I forbore to point out that she seemed to have honoured his memory by allowing his house to slide gradually into dereliction, but then remembered Miss Havisham, and didn’t. A momentary twinge of pity for Lady Tanith and her disappointing love life plucked at my heart. She’d clearly loved Oswald very much and loving a married man only to lose him at the point when she thought he’d be hers must have hit her hard.

‘However, somewhere in here, are his diaries.’ Lady Tanith seemed to dismiss all extraneous details, like emotion or getting to the point. ‘Oswald used to work in here all the time, on his novels, the dear man. It’s my favourite room, you know.’ She gazed fondly around at the shelving.

I made another encouraging noise, hoping she would actually tell me what I needed to know soon. I could feel a sneeze coming, and sneezing hugely would break the mood of anticipation that Lady Tanith was clearly building, with rather too much foreshadowing for my liking. It felt a little like waiting for a terrible curse to be revealed.

‘I want you to find the diaries.’ Ah, here we go , I thought. Hardly lost treasure, but good enough. ‘I’d like to publish them,’ Lady Tanith went on. ‘It’s been fifty years this year, since he passed away, I think Caroline’s memory has been sufficiently honoured. Now is the time to let the world see what lay behind his creative genius.’

I was mentally trying to draw a timeline, work out how old she was; how old she’d been when Hugo was born, because he looked to be in his early to mid-thirties; whether Oswald had strayed into ‘dirty old man seducing young companion’ territory; and basically, what the hell had gone on here. ‘Just that?’ I asked. ‘Find the diaries?’

‘And catalogue the books, of course,’ Lady Tanith continued, as though this would be the work of moments. ‘But the diaries are the important thing, obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ I echoed faintly. There had to be thousands of books in here. ‘I presume you’ve already had a look.’

Lady Tanith pursed her lips at me and crossed her legs. She was still slim and elegant, like her son. Her face was mostly unlined and she had wonderful bone structure, if somewhat sharp-edged – yes, I could see what Oswald had seen in her. Older man with invalid wife, pretty young thing coming into the household. I bet he’d mused the hell out of her in every room. I had another momentary pang of pity for this woman, ageing away in this crumbling house and pining for her lost love. ‘Of course I have,’ she said, as though this should be obvious. ‘But I couldn’t have a very thorough look because I don’t want the boys to know. They understand that I had a very special relationship with their grandfather’ – another, beatific gaze at the portrait – ‘and that he took much of his inspiration from me, but I don’t want our love for one another to become…’ She stopped, as though groping for the right word. ‘Salacious,’ she finished. ‘I want to prepare the diaries for publication and I don’t want the boys reading them first. Oswald was always most discreet, but there may be – comments. I’m sure you understand.’

She didn’t enlarge on the nature of the comments, for which I was overwhelmingly relieved. My imagination was already on double overtime.

‘And the diaries are definitely in here?’ I looked around again. There could be an entire NASA space probe in here, plus astronauts, there was so much stuff.

‘Definitely.’ Lady Tanith also looked around. She clearly wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, because there was a wistful smile tugging at her cheeks. ‘Oswald did his best work in here.’

I tried very hard not to imagine her and Oswald ‘doing their best work’ in here.

‘He would have left the diaries with me, of course, but the trip to Switzerland was very impromptu; Oswald had friends in Geneva who’d invited him out, to help him get over Caroline’s death, you know.’ She stared mistily at the portrait again. ‘He always said that one day posterity would own him. He’d say it just like that, Andromeda – “One day Posterity will own me.”’

I blew out a silent breath. Posterity, clearly, had not known what it was letting itself in for.

‘But I have to edit them sensitively. They cannot be left for the boys to find. And you’re not to tell Hugo, obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ I echoed faintly.

‘So, you can start now.’ Lady Tanith stood up. ‘The Master will leave with me.’

‘Good,’ I muttered.

The cat gave me a stare that could have stripped paint, and Lady Tanith frowned. ‘I firmly believe,’ she said, with extreme hauteur, ‘that Oswald has come back to me, in the form of The Master.’

With that, the pair of them stalked, heads high and with regal bearing, from the room. I stuck my tongue out at their retreating backs, and began the hunt for the computer.

* * *

Dinner was… interesting. We sat in the dining room, although Lady Tanith’s demeanour rather indicated that she thought ‘The Help’ should eat alone in her room, and spooned up obviously tinned soup from a tureen in the centre of the table. After that, a doughty lady wearing a brightly coloured pinafore overall, marched in, slammed down a plate of cold meat and salad and said, ‘You’ll have to serve yourselves, I’m off home, my legs is playing up something cruel.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Compton,’ Hugo said as calmly as though she’d curtsied and served us personally.

‘I’ll be in to do her ladyship’s breakfast,’ Mrs Compton said, giving me a wicked, narrow-eyed glare, ‘but the rest of you can fend for yourselves.’

‘I am sure we shall rise to the occasion, Mrs Compton. Goodnight.’

Mrs Compton ‘harrumphed’, which I’d never heard done in real life before. And, whilst I was trying to decide whether she was more Mrs Danvers from Rebecca , or Mrs Reynolds from Pride and Prejudice , she marched out of the room and closed the door behind her with a firmness that told of a wish to slam it, but too much class to do so.

Nobody remarked on this behaviour, so I presumed it was Mrs Compton’s normal way of communicating. Hugo passed me the plate of cold meat. ‘So, you said that you lived in a converted bus, Andi?’

‘Er,’ I said, wishing that I hadn’t mentioned it. Did Hugo have to choose now to find me interesting? ‘Yes.’

‘And your parents are television personalities?’

Now Lady Tanith raised her head. ‘You have famous parents, Andromeda?’

I gulped. ‘They have a television programme. They started out making programmes for YouTube on living in a converted bus and travelling around Britain and Europe and the show got picked up by the BBC. It’s apparently cult viewing.’ I cut my meat into tiny pieces and tried not to notice that there seemed to be a caterpillar on my salad.

‘Hm. Are they well off?’

‘Mother!’ Hugo remonstrated, but gently. ‘We don’t talk about things like that, remember? It’s déclassé.’

I poked at the caterpillar and it wandered off over the edge of my plate. Once it had gone, I ate the salad. One thing you learned from growing up with my parents, was to eat what you were given, when you were given it. They could be a little lackadaisical about meals and mealtimes when they were busy.

‘Oh, Andromeda doesn’t mind,’ Lady Tanith said, blithely. ‘The working class are always keen to discuss how much money they make.’ She folded a lettuce leaf, speared it with her fork and tucked it into her mouth in one movement, without looking at it first. I hoped my caterpillar hadn’t had friends in that salad bowl.

‘My father’ – I didn’t know quite how to go about phrasing things – ‘made a lot of money in the city. When he was younger. Then he married Mum, took very early retirement and they bought the bus. They had me and my sister, and then they started a blog about life on the road – that turned into the YouTube channel and then they got taken on by mainstream TV. They’ve gone to Montreal, to tour Canada in a Winnebago, for the new series.’

Hashtag OnTheRoad, I thought, bitterly. Hashtag LeaveYourDaughterToManage. Hashtag WhatTheBloodyHellAmIDoingHere.

‘Their loss is our gain,’ Hugo said, with an admirable attempt at levity. With a flash of horror I wondered if they were going to kidnap me and ransom me back to my parents. Should I have revealed as much as I had? Had I put myself in danger?

Then I thought of my parents being presented with a ransom demand for me, and reality cut back in again. They had probably forgotten that I’d moved out by now and any attempts to extort money for my return would be met with puzzled stares and a feature-length episode. While my parents were lovely people and undoubtedly fond of me and my sister, the alternative lifestyle they led meant that they could be somewhat vague about details, such as where I was currently living and why.

‘I didn’t go to school much.’ I thought I might as well just come out with all of it now and save the embarrassing Q&A session. ‘We moved about all the time when I was young and I never really had the chance, so I read a lot instead.’

And everything I know about life comes from books. I had to teach myself how life worked, the conventions, how to behave, from sitting for hours in local libraries. I didn’t have friends, I didn’t go to parties, because we never put down roots. I just sat, and I read.

It was beginning to dawn on me that perhaps Jane Austen, the Bront?s and Daphne du Maurier hadn’t been the best preparation for life in general.

‘So, you have siblings?’ Hugo asked. He’d put his elbows on the table and was looking at me as though he was fascinated.

‘Yes, I’ve got a sister. Judith. She lives in Cornwall now with her husband and two children.’ Whom I narrowly escaped having to move in with, I didn’t add, and it was only because Jude had found the advert for this job, and you didn’t seem fussy, that saved me from that fate. Although now, I thought, looking at Lady Tanith eating a tomato with a knife and fork, and Hugo watching me as though I were some kind of scientific experiment, maybe I would have been better off moving into Jude’s granny annexe and taking a cleaning job, as my parents had suggested.

‘Andromeda and… Judith?’ Lady Tanith speared another tomato. ‘Not exactly a duo that rolls off the tongue.’

‘Mother!’

‘She was actually called Nebula,’ I said, happy to drop my sister in it. ‘But she decided when she was five that she was going to be called Judith. She got my parents to send her away to school too.’ That was how she’d got a normal life, I thought sadly, remembering my sister, aged about seven, hands on her hips and a copy of Malory Towers on her lap, insisting that our parents should send her to boarding school. My sister’s life had been affected by reading as much as mine had, but her books had given her courage rather than the knowledge of how to tie a cravat and how to conduct oneself at balls.

Maybe, if I had discovered school stories before Northanger Abbey and Dickens, I would have turned out like Judith. Then I caught Hugo’s eye across the table. He gave me a broad, angular-cheekboned smile, and I stamped down the feeling that I’d been ill-used. Jude was married to a marketing director, whose rugby playing physique had long since turned to podge. Hugo was definitely better looking than Ollie. And he was heir to all this…

The handle fell off my fork and I hastened to try to attach the two bits back together. Hugo’s smile increased, and he passed me another fork from the stack on the sideboard behind him. I thanked him silently, and the smile got even wider.

‘Judith is a nice name,’ Lady Tanith said. ‘You might have been a Judith, Hugo.’

There was a sudden noise as Hugo knocked the pile of forks off the sideboard and they clattered to the floor. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘caught them with my sleeve.’

‘Your brother, of course, was always going to be Jasper.’ Lady Tanith turned to me again. ‘Jasper is my elder son, you see.’

Oh. That meant that Hugo wasn’t the heir to the estate. Oh, bugger. I’d been brought in to marry the second son. I had to remind myself that, these days, this no longer meant that he’d have to go into the army, and I could find myself as a soldier’s wife, a calling that I was fairly certain I would not be suited to. Although, right now I was beginning to waver in my certainty that marrying Hugo was my happy ending in waiting. The atmosphere was definitely leaning towards the ‘acid bath’ finale.

‘Jazz renounced the estate in my favour,’ Hugo said. ‘The bastard.’

‘Hugo! Language!’

‘Sorry, Mother.’ Then, turning back to me. ‘He lives in a cottage on the estate now. But he didn’t want to take on the management and all that entails, so I will take it all on, after Mother… um… Father left the estate to her, you see.’

‘Richard was very forward thinking.’ Lady Tanith pushed her plate away with a sigh. ‘And, of course, you were both so very young when he died. Oh, there you are, my darling.’

I looked up. I didn’t know who I expected to see coming in, possibly the elusive Jasper, but it was just the cat. It forced the door open sufficiently to allow its creamy-furred bulk through, wandered across the floor, and jumped up onto the table, presenting me with an unwanted view of a backside, tail held high in the air.

Neither Hugo nor Lady Tanith reacted as though this was anything other than a perfectly reasonable occurrence.

‘May I… may I go to my room?’ I asked faintly. The cat’s tail was sweeping generally around the salad plate and I was horribly afraid that the front was licking the remaining ham. ‘I’m a little tired after the journey.’

‘Of course.’ Hugo half stood. ‘Would you like me to help you with your bags?’

‘There’s only the one and it’s out in the hall,’ I said. ‘The Blue Room is mine?’

‘I thought you were going to continue work tonight,’ Lady Tanith sniffed.

‘I’ll carry on first thing tomorrow.’ I was already through the door. Hugo gave me a small bow as I passed. ‘I promise.’