37. THIRTY-SEVEN
The house was Jacobean, Poppy knew. She’d found the Wikipedia page. Malperton House. Built in the 1600s, Grade I listed. It possessed an Italianate sunken garden that had featured in several period dramas she’d never seen.
Roscoe’s great aunt’s house. Or his father’s house, really. Part of one of three estates belonging to the Earl of Carnford. George Blackton. The man she saw at work who asked her to fetch the glasses. Roscoe’s dad, who couldn’t remember her name.
They turned onto a long driveway and the house became visible beyond lush green lawns and summer-green trees. Sandy-coloured stone, a vast expanse of it with too many windows to count. Then another wing came into view as the drive curved, and another building, stables perhaps, and another—outbuildings and walls, the house itself rising above them all like a mother hen with a wayward brood, its many chimneys ornate and twisting.
Poppy said nothing, tried to summon her courage. Roscoe parked near a long, low building some distance from the house. They got out, he picked up their bags. “She’ll probably be in the garden, or the stables. We’ll check there on the way.”
Poppy nodded and followed.
The grounds were a little scruffier than she’d imagined. Not some picture-perfect wedding-brochure scene, but like a real place, where weeds grew and no one ever had quite enough time to mow the lawns. There were a dozen flowers she didn’t know the name of, trees everywhere. Grass and bees and fucking hell—
“Is that a dragonfly?”
Roscoe smiled at her surprise. “Yes. Probably from the duck pond. Or the ornamental pool. Aunt Mabel’s into that sort of wildlife-friendly gardening.”
Poppy tried to look less like a complete citified Londoner. But when had she last been in the countryside? Not for years. Over a decade. Since her grandparents last took her somewhere. The parks and commons of London were her green spaces, and she seldom even visited those.
Roscoe slowed as they passed a building Poppy guessed was the stable, given there was an actual horse looking out of one of the doors. An old woman dressed in faded purple trousers and a thick, grey shirt was tugging some weedy plant out of a crack in the old, weathered wall.
“Aunt,” Roscoe called, stepping forwards and putting down their bags to embrace the tiny, thin lady in a massive hug.
“Squash me, why don’t you, you big ox.”
He laughed, stepping away. “Aunt Mabel, may I introduce Poppy?”
The woman looked her up and down, frank and curious. She must have been eighty years old, but her gaze was sharp.
“Hello,” said Poppy, wondering if that one word betrayed her accent. Her status. She felt as though everything else did—her clothes, the way she stood.
“Hello. Welcome.” Mabel looked up at Roscoe with a lift of one eyebrow. “Well, nevvy. I’ve had two rooms prepared, just as you asked for. For you and your work friend. I hope you enjoy the extra space.”
Then she set off for the house, calling over her shoulder. “Come and have tea. Cook made biscuits.”
Work friendwas, of course, the most accurate description of their relationship and not remotely one which Poppy could be upset at. But she couldn’t make herself look at Roscoe as she turned to follow his aunt into the house.
“Poppy…”
“It’s fine.” Then she hurried to catch up with the old lady, using her frail figure between them as a deflective shield. Like the coward she was.
But she couldn’t have this conversation now. The I’m not your boyfriend and you’re not my girlfriend and we can’t ever really be that conversation. Not when her sense of self-worth was already suffocating under the weight of Malperton House. The reality of Roscoe’s life. Who he really was.
Anyway, there was no need to have that conversation, because just look around… It was obvious. All Roscoe’s fastidious care in reminding her that he was her boss, her landlord, it was all a polite way of saying this: there was an uncrossable gulf between them. He was out of reach.
Mabel led them to what must be the back of the house—Poppy had glimpsed the front from the drive: a square lawn with topiaried trees and a stone path leading to a large pillared porch. The back was hardly less imposing. They went into a large kitchen, the dark flagstones on the floor as old and polished as a church. A blue Aga occupied most of a cavernous old fireplace, wood stacked in the gap at one side.
“Sit,” said Mabel, and Poppy hesitated, wondering if she was talking to them or the three dogs that had appeared from nowhere and now clustered around, shoving wet noses into hands and knees and groins. But Roscoe sat at the big wooden table, and so did she.
Then Roscoe sprung up again and took the kettle from Mabel’s gnarled hands. She relinquished it with a tut and a roll of her eyes, then sat down stiffly and promptly took to staring at Poppy while Roscoe made them tea.
“Where are these promised biscuits?” he asked, looking in a cupboard, apparently without any luck.
“In the tin, obviously.”
“Ah,” said Roscoe dryly, spying it on the counter. “The one that says Coffee. Of course.”
“Boy’s a monster for biscuits,” Mabel confided in Poppy while Roscoe rolled his eyes—his protest ruined somewhat by the fact he had already shoved a whole biscuit in his mouth and had another in his hand. “Always have to hide them.”
Roscoe placed the tin on the table. Stole another.
“Thank you for letting me stay here,” said Poppy with all the ease of a terrified seven-year-old in the dentist’s chair. “It’s so beautiful.”
“I’m sure Roscoe will give you the tour in a bit. Do you ride?”
“Erm, horses?” Poppy had never been near a horse in her life. “No. Sorry.”
“Pity. No one does these days. Best way to see the countryside, though.”
Poppy just nodded, gingerly patting the head of a big brownish dog that had come to sit near her, looking expectant, pink tongue lolling from the side of its mouth. She jumped when the kettle started whistling—literally whistling, steam gushing from the spout. Roscoe poured the tea.
“Bag in the mug?” Mabel sniffed. “You savage.”
He dunked his biscuit in it and winked.
His aunt shook her head. “No one rides. No one has any manners. But there are plenty of queers on TV, so I suppose that’s progress.”
Roscoe nearly choked on his biscuit, then hid it with a cough. Poppy just nodded again.
“Even on the adverts now,” Mabel continued. “Have you seen them? Marvellous stuff. I wish Sarah had lived to see it.”
“Me, too,” said Roscoe with such heartfelt warmth it made Poppy’s chest ache.
The old woman looked between them. “But it is progress,” she said seriously. “A better world. Not so many silly barriers as there used to be, hey? No barriers to love.”
And then she started talking about chickens.
Roscoe led Poppy from the kitchen and started showing her through the house to her room. He nearly took hold of her hand—wanted to take hold of her hand—because she was quiet and nervous and tense, but something held him back. The stiffness between them. The swirling confusion that brought the familiar tension rushing to his chest whenever he thought of everything that lay between them, the tangle of trenches and tripwires and barbed reproofs…
He was wrong to want her. He wanted her so badly he couldn’t breathe. His mind kept bouncing between those thoughts, blinding fast and deafening, and the anxiety in his chest unsheathed its claws.
Poppy stared around as they crossed another gallery, heading for the stairs. “Should I be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so I can find my way back?”
Roscoe managed a laugh. “No point. The dogs would eat them. Or the mice. There’s plenty of both.”
“Yay,” she said wanly, making him laugh again.
“Big, old houses are generally terrible places to live,” he told her. “Draughty and leaky and falling to bits.”
They were in an old hallway now, the walls panelled in warm brown wood, gilt-framed pictures heavy on the wall, summer light falling brokenly through a crooked, diamond-paned window to catch the dust motes like fairy magic.
“But beautiful,” said Poppy.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose they are.”
He led her up the creaking stairs, the carpet runner worn to colourless beige where they trod. The smell of dust and old oak and wood-polish lay thick on the still air. The smell of Conyers, of neighbouring Redbridge, of a hundred homes.
Poppy sneezed.
He chuckled. “And they’re very dusty. Mould spores everywhere, probably. Sending us all mad, like that stuff that grows on wheat.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” His thoughts were running away with him. Fractured and spiralling in all directions. This place didn’t normally remind him of Conyers, but he was seeing it now through Poppy’s eyes—all the things it represented. The age, the weight of generations. Earls of Carnford and Blackton after Blackton. Family and duty and honour and tradition and obligation.
You’re a Blackton of BlacktonGold. You need to remember that.
For the first time, he wished he was Hugo, the heir, who could do his duty merely by having been born first. His own inheritance felt far harder—his vocation to be his father’s son in spirit, not just name.
He opened the door to Poppy’s room, flashing her a tight smile. The Yellow Room. “You should have said she was a redhead,” his aunt had scolded him. “Yellow’s going to clash terribly.”
But, of course, it didn’t. Poppy walked into the room like a girl stepping into a fairy tale, taking in the high, canopied bed, the vast, plaster-scrolled ceiling, the two tall windows with their cushioned seats and gold brocade curtains that swept to the floor. She turned to look at him, cheeks pink, lips slightly parted, and he stared for a moment, her beauty painful.
He backed away, took her to see his room. Led her back out of the house and through the gardens. Something nameless and restless threatening to choke him if he stopped moving.
They walked to the sunken garden, where they found Mabel by the pagoda tying up roses bowing under the weight of their own blossoms. Poppy drifted away, attention caught by the water lilies blooming in the long, rectangular pool.
Mabel paused her work and said, “Tell me about this friend from work you’re in love with.”
Roscoe startled. “What?”
Mabel tutted. “Don’t play the fool. It’s obvious from the way you look at her.”
“I’m not… I mean… I like her, but…”
“But?”
“We’re not…together.”
Mabel gave him a scornful look uncannily reminiscent of Aubrey’s on the plane. “Which begs the question… Why not?”
“I’m her boss.”
His aunt pursed her lips, then shrugged, unreeling some more garden twine. “Half my generation—and your father’s—wouldn’t exist if bosses hadn’t married their secretaries. It’s hardly an untrod path. Used to be one of the commonest ways for a woman to meet a man.”
“It’s not the nineteen-fifties. And it’s not just that.” He shook his head, reached out in irritation to toy with the old twiggy stem of a jasmine plant trained to coil around the pagoda. It snapped off in his hand. He snapped it still further into tiny pieces as his aunt gave him an assessing look. “She’s living in my flat. Has no money. Nowhere else to go. Don’t you see how vulnerable that makes her? If she’s dependent on me and I…”
Mabel waited with a raised eyebrow for him to finish that sentence, but he didn’t. He glanced at Poppy, framed by roses beyond the pool. A Rossetti indeed. But not Ophelia, never Ophelia, dying tragic, drowning and pining, caught between father and lover… Maybe he was Ophelia. Maybe he was mad.
“I don’t know what the right thing is,” he told Mabel, embarrassed by the broken edge to his voice. “Or maybe I know, but I don’t know how to do it…”
Mabel’s coarse sigh drew his eyes away from Poppy. The old woman was scowling, the deep feathery lines around her mouth drawn tight. “As usual, nevvy, you’re over-thinking everything. You’d be twice as happy if you had half the brains.”
“I’m her boss, I can’t—”
“Yes, yes, and it’s complicated and people might whisper behind your back. But you know how you feel. Do you feel like you’re the creepy, predatory type? Or do you have every intention of treating the girl right? Because if Sarah and I had listened to the moral authorities of our time, we would have both thought we were sinners. But it never felt like it to us. It felt like love.”