Chapter 4
Amelia
“Are you hurt?” the man said, his gaze dropping down Amelia’s body.
She shook her head. Words were … too hard.
“May I?” He reached for her cheek. “You look like you’ve had a run-in with a monster spider.
” He pulled a thick strand of cobwebs from her hair and transferred it onto the piece of railing clutched in her hand.
If she was hallucinating, she was impressed at her imagination’s command of detail.
His waistcoat alone—late Georgian, cream silk with tiny embroidered vine motifs in blue and green, veined with gilt threads that caught the light. It looked vaguely familiar.
“Uh, what century is this?” she said.
His dark eyebrows shot up. “Did you hit your head?” He rose a little and lightly examined her scalp, moving her hair around as gently as a breeze.
She’d definitely seen that waistcoat before.
Something in the museum’s collection, which her brain was whipping up on demand for this little fantasy? “I can’t see any wounds.”
“No, it’s just… Your clothes.”
He drew back, glancing at his clothing with a laugh.
“Oh, I see. Still the dull old twenty-first century, I’m afraid.
” His accent was deliciously “posh,” as they said in Britain, but not insufferably so.
More Prince Harry than King Charles. She could happily listen to it all day, if forced to.
Something nudged her butt and she squeaked, scooting away.
“And there’s the proof.” He pointed at a fat, white plastic disc.
“A robot vacuum cleaner. Nothing personal, it’s on a timer. ”
“Oh.” That was what nudged her foot after she fell.
“Also…” He pointed at the light bulb above them, from which a brass pull chain dangled. “LEDs. Not invented until the 1960s. There’s one at the top of the stairs too, for future reference, though it’s hard to locate in the dark. Ironically.”
“Do you normally dress like that?”
“Only for the Pemberley tour. You just missed my talk about the abbey’s architectural history, luckily for you.” He looked at her hairline. “Sure you didn’t hit your head?”
“I don’t think my head came into it at all.
” She tossed aside the broken stair rail and twisted to look up behind her.
She’d destroyed the lowest flight of stairs, leaving a seven-foot drop.
She was lucky she’d crashed down step by step, taking them out like dominoes, while breaking her fall. “I’m sorry about your stairs.”
“No, I’m sorry about my stairs.” He drew to his feet and held out two white-gloved hands. “May I help you up?”
Numbly, she took them, the smooth, firm contact confirming that he probably wasn’t one of the estate’s ghosts.
She let him help her to her feet, which left their faces inches apart, hers angled up, his down.
She had to remind herself to breathe. It was like the time she got tongue-tied meeting Mickey Mouse at Disneyland when she was four.
She promised herself that on this occasion she would not burst into tears and hide in her granny’s skirts.
“If you’re a thief, take what you like!” he said. “On second thoughts, don’t. Everything of value has been cataloged.”
“I, uh, got separated from the tour,” she said, her hands still in his gloves, which were made of the softest kid leather she’d ever touched.
“No, you didn’t.” He grinned, revealing a single deep dimple.
“Excuse me?” Her face warmed.
“You absconded. You’re not the first. It’s not a very good tour, is it?”
“The guide called Sense and Sensibility ‘Sense and Sensuality,’ and she kept saying ‘Darby’ instead of ‘Darcy.’ Also, she appears to believe that’s his first name.”
“Bless. My father gave Xanthe the contract before he died, and I didn’t have the heart to let her go when… It’s not easy to find work in this part of the country.”
“Wait, your father? Are you the ‘spare’?”
He laughed, an edge of bitterness in it.
“I mean, I’m sorry, the, ah, shit—”
“The ‘second son’? Two words to haunt a man for life. Thomas Calder. Just Tom, actually.”
“Nice to meet you, Just Tom, Actually.”
“And you are?”
“Ah, Amelia. Amelia Bennett.”
“Bennett?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“No relation to Lizzy in Pride and Prejudice. Plus, double T in Bennett.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Amelia Bennett with two Ts.” He seemed to consider something, and then smiled broadly.
“Now that we’re officially introduced, would you care to join me for a drink?
Something strong. It’s the least I can do after nearly killing you on my dodgy stairwell.
I was just on my way to the cellars, in fact. ”
“It’s eleven a.m.”
“Is it indeed? Well, where are you from?”
“New York.”
“What time is it there?”
She thought for a few seconds. “Six a.m.”
“There you are, you see? Prime drinking time. Come on, let’s find something good.” He dropped her hands and started walking. “Or at least stupidly expensive.”
“Prime drinking time? If I was drinking at six o’clock on a Thursday morning, something would have to have gone very wrong.”
Amelia brushed herself off and followed him through a stone archway into a dimly lit basement—not much more than a tunnel bored through the earth, reinforced with walls of stacked rocks.
A vocal minority of her brain wanted to flee, if she even knew which direction to go, but she told it a very firm no.
That would be giving in to fear. And hey, she was the intruder here.
“Amelia, this estate is a week away from being sold to a tech bro who plans to turn it into a twenty-first century Playboy Mansion. I think that’s the definition of things going very wrong.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Unless I find thirty-one million pounds before the sale becomes final to repay some eye-watering debts—and even that will only just keep us afloat—we have no option but to go through with it. The new owner came up from London first thing with an engineer and a demolition contractor.”
“Demolition? How is that possible? Isn’t the place protected?”
“Only the front facade, it turns out. An oversight, in hindsight. The rest will go, unless this caveat magically kicks in. So, yes, I’m drinking at eleven on a Thursday morning, unless you happen to have thirty-one million pounds you wouldn’t miss?”
“I could spare thirty-one bucks, at a stretch?”
Off the main tunnel were several alcoves, with wide raw-timber planks laid roughly over the compressed-dirt floor, and crates and barrels lining the stacked-rock walls.
In one alcove, an exquisite hand-knotted pile carpet covered the timber.
A central medallion with an acanthus motif marked the middle, spanning out into scrolling floral trails.
But it was the colors that lit up Amelia’s brain: rosy pink, ice-blue, and green.
She crouched and brushed loose dirt from the carpet’s fringe.
Sure enough, a name was woven into the edging.
“Well, holy shit. You have a Thomas Moore carpet—in your basement!”
“Er, I do?”
“There’s a date on it. Looks like … 1769! Same date as a carpet of his I saw last week at Syon House. Different design, but the colors are an exact match.”
“Syon House?” he called back. “In London?”
“Where they filmed some of the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma. This alone has to be worth tens of thousands, if not more.”
“A drop in the bucket compared with what this place owes, I’m afraid. Hopefully, they’ll flog it off to an antiques dealer rather than toss it in a skip.”
“You can’t fight the sale?” she said, jogging to catch up.
“I’m out of options, and out of time. Demolition is booked for next week.”
“So soon?”
“Oh, it’s been a long time coming.” Something creaked, above them. “Yes, yes,” he called, looking at the low ceiling, “I know you’re not happy about it.” To Amelia, in a whisper, he added: “Best not use the ‘d’ word. She’s very sensitive about it.”
He walked through another archway and halted. Amelia almost ran into his back.
“Is this a tunnel?” she said. It looked like it had been dug out of the earth by hand.
“Pretty much. It was the estate’s air raid shelter in World War II. Before that, legend has it that it was used for smuggling, or to hide the servants when the tax collector came.”
“Hide the servants?”
“In George III’s time, you paid two pounds per servant in taxes.
These days, the space is put to far better use.
” He pulled a brass chain and a bare overhead bulb clicked on, revealing a narrow passageway.
Its walls were lined with a honeycomb of wooden wine racks that disappeared around a dark corner.
“Which was probably the purpose intended by the monks who dug it under the original abbey. What do you feel like?” he said, scanning the racks.
“Claret? Champagne? Maybe a La Sainte Trinité Burgundy. Or an 1899 Chateau Angélus?”
“Can I hazard a guess that this wine collection is worth quite a lot?”
“Things are only worth as much as the intersection between what someone is willing to pay and how desperate the seller is to liquidate. Unfortunately, in this case, the latter prevails. It’s all earmarked for the new owner.
His many, many lawyers brought in assessors to make a register of every valuable item on the estate, and I’m forbidden from removing any of it.
But my lawyer confirmed that there’s nothing in the fine print to prevent me from consuming the valuables.
” He pulled a bottle from a slot and studied the label.
“I can’t eat a Picasso or a Chippendale, but as long as we relieve ourselves on the estate, we’re good.
I plan to liquidate as much of this as possible in the short time I have left here. ”