Chapter 31
Jules felt nervous and gauche, having bought a fancy box of dark chocolate Florentines from Finn’s deli and a big bunch of
dusty-pink hydrangeas from the florist on the high street.
She had scuttled past the large stone porch and arched, studded oak door of the family home so often, slipping around the
corner to Roman’s pad, it seemed strange this time to stand in the gloomy vestibule and knock. The heavy cast-iron knocker
sounded louder than she intended, echoing through the house.
There was an anxious wait until, at last, the sound of firm, even footsteps. She breathed a shaky sigh of relief when Roman
himself opened the door.
“You needn’t have,” he said, regarding the gifts, after he had swept her into his arms for a knee-tremble-inducing kiss.
“I definitely did,” Jules said defensively. “Flowers for your mum, and chocolate for your dad. I’d have bought him a bottle
of something, but I didn’t know what he liked.”
“Anything alcoholic would have gone down a treat,” said Roman. “But don’t worry, they’re going to love you, full or empty-handed.”
As he spoke, he led Jules across a vast foyer with sweeping stairs rising to a balcony running the full width of the hallway, the back wall punctuated with wide Georgian paneled doors and portraits of ancient relatives.
There was a green baize-covered door tucked under the stairs, and it was through this that Roman took her. As soon as he pushed
it open, there was a wall of sound: barking dogs, clattering pans, and the crash and clash of a young woman, surely Roman’s
sister, banging knives and forks down carelessly on a long, heavily scratched, and pitted mahogany table. At the far end of
it was a well-covered and red-faced older man, gold-framed spectacles perched on his nose, and the Sunday papers piled on
the table in front of him. He lowered the paper he was engrossed in and peered over his spectacles.
“Aha!” he said. “So, my son finally brings in the reason for his distraction over the last few months. At last, my dear.”
He stood and came over, putting his hands on Jules’s shoulders and pecking her formally on both cheeks.
“Are those for me? You are a darling,” said an older woman, coming toward them from the stove, looking pink-faced and shiny from her cooking efforts.
She took the hydrangeas, wrapped in brown paper with a green Petersham ribbon, and captured Jules in a warm, one-armed hug.
“How did you know I adore hydrangeas?” she went on, looking around vaguely for something to put them in, before dumping them
absent-mindedly in the stone butler’s sink.
“Perdy,” she said to the young woman who was finishing setting the table. She looked up and shot Jules a welcoming smile.
“Darling, see if you can find that big cream enamel jug in the boot room,” Roman’s mother said. “We can put these divine flowers
in it and have them on the table with us. Ten minutes till we eat,” she added to Roman, who was watching the tableau of his
family in their natural habitat with detached amusement.
“And this,” he told Jules, with a sweep of his arm, “is my family.”
Jules’s nerves had eased a little by the time Roman’s father, Henry, had dug out an enormous wineglass and filled it to nearly halfway from the bottle of red he had on the table in front of him, settling Jules with it in the seat on his right-hand side.
It was unctuous—almost viscous—and warming.
Not having eaten breakfast, Jules felt it hit her bloodstream almost immediately.
She had better go steady, she thought. The last thing Roman’s family wanted to see was that his new girlfriend was a lightweight with alcohol.
The young woman, introduced to Jules as Perdita, looked pointedly from Roman to Jules and back again, apparently on the verge
of a remark that Roman quelled with a look.
“My younger sister,” he told Jules. “I urge you not to listen to a word she says, about anything.”
“Especially former girlfriends,” agreed Perdy, grinning back at Roman, who was scowling fiercely in her direction.
“ Especially them,” he agreed, breaking into a reluctant smile.
Perdy was essentially a younger, prettier version of Roman, with the same straight, dark brows, vivid blue eyes, and wavy
black hair. Henry, on the other hand, had little hair, and what there was had turned completely gray. In addition, his florid
complexion appeared earned through a love of red wine and good food and contrasted unfavorably with his children’s Celtic
pallor. It seemed clear to Jules that both Roman and Perdy had their mother to thank for their looks.
Roman’s mother, introduced as “Bunty”—not, Jules felt sure, her real name—was soon nagging her two grown-up children as if they were still small, getting them to bring a parade of steaming dishes to the table.
There were piles of green beans studded with crisply fried lardons, carrots gleaming with butter and maple syrup, perfectly crunchy roast potatoes, enormous, billowing individual Yorkshire puddings, and—the centerpiece—a proud four-rib piece of roast beef with a crust of golden-burnished fat.
Ruby-red juices ran from the delicate pink inner meat, revealed as Henry attacked it with a fiendishly long, sharp carving knife.
He piled slices of meat generously onto plates that were passed clockwise, followed by the vegetables and a large brown stoneware jug of port-wine gravy.
Jules, having gone from queasily nervous to ravenous, was happy to tuck in while Roman and his father exchanged notes about
business matters. The loss adjuster looking at the fire damage had, it transpired, challenged the rebuild amount. “He’s saying
we were overinsured,” Roman explained.
“Rubbish,” expostulated his father. “Tell ’em that building is worth two mil if it’s worth a penny. If Capelthorne’s value
is nine hundred k, which we know it is, then it stands to reason Portneath Books is more than twice that. It’s three times
the size, for a start.”
Belatedly, Henry seemed to notice his son’s stony face and realized mentioning Capelthorne’s was a faux pas.
“Sorry, my dear,” he murmured to Jules, beside him. “Sore point. Mea culpa.”
Jules nodded her acceptance of his apology gracefully enough, but on the inside, she was shocked. Nine hundred thousand? That
was even more than the impossible sum she and Aunt Flo had already been thinking. Jules had harbored a secret hope that the
sale of the grimoire in just a couple of weeks would, in fairy-tale fashion, raise enough for Aunt Flo to triumphantly buy
the freehold and settle down to enjoy her tiny empire for the rest of her days. But that was ridiculous, of course. Especially
if the Capelthorne’s building was really worth what Henry was saying, and she had no reason to doubt him. Ah, well. She could
hardly expect real life to pan out like the pages of a novel. That would be too much to ask.
Tuning back in and trying to look alert and interested as she returned to her delicious lunch, she picked up that Roman was talking about the shop’s listed status.
“So, I had that meeting with the conservation officer I told you about. She’s fine with the rebuild and pleased we are going
to restore the stone fireplaces. They just need a really good, careful clean. I’ve got a proper stonemason on the case. Obviously,
a lot of the beams will need replacing, and the builder is sourcing those from a reclamation agent, but some of the ones in
the ceiling of the ground floor—which, as you know, was less badly damaged—look as if they can stay.”
“Really?” asked Henry with raised eyebrows.
“Yeah, they’re so old and hard, the structural engineer says what fire damage there is doesn’t change their load capacity.
They’re just a bit smoke-damaged, with a tiny bit of charring—plenty of material left to do the job.”
“Remarkable,” said Henry.
It was kind of compelling, watching the two men converse, Jules decided. Henry was imposing, but Roman clearly had no fear
of him. It seemed Henry was hardly the monster Maggie had told her about.
“Yeah, so the conservation officer is telling us not to do too much to clear off the charring, even,” Roman went on. “I offered
to get them sandblasted, but she said it was better for the beams to show signs of fire. The darkening adds to the story of
the building, apparently.”
“Hmm, I suppose it does,” said Henry, spearing a huge piece of Yorkshire pudding soaked in gravy and shoveling it in thoughtfully.
Business done, the men concentrated on their food while Bunty charmingly drew Jules out about her former career in publishing.
“It all sounds so glamorous,” she was saying, over a heavenly homemade pavlova with plump blackberries and a heady blackberry
vodka syllabub for the cream. “And you’ve actually met Fenella Richardson? I adore her books.”
Jules didn’t like to say that Fenella Richardson was a monster and that she was sure her former boss would have done her best
to render Jules unemployable throughout the whole of the London publishing scene. She had been thinking perhaps, when she
was confident Aunt Flo was fully recovered, she might look into getting a job at one of the regional satellite offices that
the larger publishers were now setting up. There was talk of a new Penguin Random House office in Exeter, she had heard. They
might not have heard she was a disaster. That could work. She didn’t want to give the impression of being an utterly hopeless prospect
for Bunty’s darling son to have committed emotionally to.
“I’ve been bullied into buying a table at this ball thing at the end of the month,” said Henry, once the London publishing
conversational thread had petered out. “I hope you will join us, my dear.” He nodded gallantly toward Jules. “It’s a family
compulsory service,” he went on, pointing his knife at Perdy, quelling dissent before she even spoke. “You,” he told her,
“can bring that vacant-headed young farmer chap that’s been panting around you recently.”
Poor Perdy blushed. “What? Rupert? He’s an idiot,” she muttered.
“Bound to be, if he’s as keen as Dad says,” taunted Roman.
Perdy stuck out her tongue at him.
“So that makes six of us,” interrupted Bunty firmly. “But it’s a table of ten, isn’t it, darling?” she asked her husband.
“Four more places to fill.”
“Not a problem,” said Roman. “All the usual crowd are going. I’ll see who’s handy.”
Jules’s stomach, filled with beef and meringue, roiled at the thought. Black-tie balls were daunting, with the complicated dress code and the noise and everyone else seeming to know what to do. The last two she had attended made her feel like an ink-stained twelve-year-old.
And she didn’t have a dress.
“Pretty girl,” Henry had harumphed when he and Roman were bringing their regular Monday morning meeting to a close.
Shuffling papers together on the long conference table in the main office, Roman stilled. “She’s a lot more than just a pretty
face,” he said evenly.
“I dare say she is,” Henry went on, failing to read the signals. “Pretty figure too, and they’re not short on native cunning,
the Capelthornes—never said they were—but is it enough?”
“Is what enough? Enough for what?”
“Just... her being attractive,” Henry went on insistently. “Which, as I am happy to say, she is. But there’s plenty of
other good-looking women around here, remember—although I reckon you’ve worked your way through a fair few of them by now.”
He chuckled. “Chip off the old block. Anyway, point being, looks fade, and then what are you left with? Just giving you the
heads-up to exercise a little caution, that’s all, old chap. Family comes first, and all that.”
A muscle was pulsing dangerously in Roman’s jaw. “Just so we are clear,” he said pleasantly, but with thinly disguised tension,
“Jules and I have a relationship I value above all else and am completely committed to. I hope Jules feels the same.” He faltered
momentarily. “I think she does,” he went on. “And I think it is important for you and Mum to realize that. If, for some reason,
you have a problem with it, then I advise you to give some serious thought to what your priorities are.
“Just so you know, though,” Roman continued as he strode to the door, a cardboard folder of papers under his arm, “if it comes to choosing between family and Jules?” He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “I choose Jules.”
And, with that, he closed the door firmly in his father’s astonished face.