SARAH WAS AT A loss. After getting herself out from under Lillian’s wheels, she had wandered into the library (as distinct from her father’s study, which she would not have dared enter at any hour). Opening off the great hall with its macabre display of weaponry, the book-lined room always had an enormous fire crackling in the fireplace, and she often had it to herself. Only Albert shared her passion for books, one reason her bond to him was stronger than it was to the others. But Sarah’s magpie penchant for collecting esoteric tidbits of knowledge was something she felt she alone had inherited from Sir Adrian.
There was a second entry to the library via the smoking room, seldom used now. The layout of the house was a leftover from the days of clearly defined male and female territories: Across from the smoking room was the billiards room, where men at the turn of the nineteenth century often would repair after the ladies had gone to bed. Her father’s study was just next to that all-male bastion, but playing billiards was of course forbidden while Sir Adrian worked. The stairs to what had been called the “bachelor bedrooms” ran along the other side of the study, allowing easier access to the upper floors of the house.
Sarah now stood surveying the content of the shelves. Her father’s collection ranged widely among the classics, from Plato through Shakespeare, but then leapt the centuries to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, stopping somewhere in the 1950s. Few outpourings from the great minds of the last half or so of the twentieth century were in evidence, and only the Hemingway novels and Golden Age mysteries looked well-thumbed.
But Hemingway’s macho style held little comfort for Sarah today, and having Violet in the house, she felt, provided enough real-life mystery. She was turning away when she heard the door behind her opening from the hall.
“Oh! I’m so sorry; I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
The American accent was unmistakable, sounding rough to her ears, like the blat of a car horn. But the smile was friendly, the face open and guileless.
“Not at all. I was just leaving. I can’t seem to settle to anything this morning.”
“Yes, I know how that can be.” He came forward, hand outstretched. “It’s Miss Beauclerk-Fisk, of course. I’m Jeffrey Spencer. Your father’s assistant. Well, secretary, officially. Although in the States ‘male secretary’ is freighted with so many connotations I try to avoid the term.”
She smiled. “It’s Sarah. Pleased to meet you. How do you do?”
Having gotten through the conventions, she was at a loss to know what to say next. Fortunately, Jeffrey seemed anxious to talk. He sat down in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace and leaned forward on his elbows, his expression indicating he couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say for herself. He so clearly wanted company, she sat down across from him.
“Sarah, then,” he said. “Thank you. Wonderful name. It means ‘princess,’ you know.”
A man after her own pedantic heart. Sarah blushed to the roots of her hair.
“In Hebrew. Yes, I know. How extraordinary of you to know that. Doesn’t suit me, though.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I would have said it suited you wonderfully.”
“Only in the sense that my father is rather like a king, or thinks he is. I suppose that’s where it came from. I never bothered to ask him.”
“No, it’s just… I don’t know. Perhaps it’s your way of carrying yourself. ‘Queenly’ might be a better word.”
Sarah, completely unaccustomed to flattery, was dumbfounded. Her thoughts suddenly filtered through white noise, all she could register was the transparent grayish-blue of Jeffrey’s wide, candid eyes; everything else ceased to exist. She attempted to smooth back her hair, which as usual made the fringe stand on end. To her dismay, her lips emitted a little squeak of nervous laughter.
Shut up! she commanded herself. He’ll think you a fool.
Lips pressed firmly together, she glared at him, eyes wide with the effort of self-control.
Jeffrey was alarmed. “I say. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to give offense.”
“No!” she croaked. He jumped, startled. Damn! Clearing her throat, she tried again. “I mean, what I meant to say was, erm, thank you.”
After a long moment when Jeffrey, afraid to say anything more, did not speak, she mumbled again, “Thank you,” wondering if the little skip in her heart was happiness or an impending seizure. She turned away in confusion, stammering:
“I should go and help Mrs. Romano. Luncheon. Or dinner. She’ll-she’ll need me.” She jumped from her chair and scuttled crablike out of the room, unfortunately clearing only part of the open, carved double doors leading into the library. One of them crashed loudly against the inner wall on her exit.
Jeffrey, feeling he had once again somehow stepped into a bottomless puddle of British reserve, called after her.
“I say! I am sorry. I didn’t mean…”
She didn’t, couldn’t, turn back to look at him.
“Damn it all,” he said, under his breath.
“Sod it all,” said George. “Parking in Cambridge always was impossible.”
Natasha braced herself, neck whiplashing, as George again attempted to jackknife his car into a too-small space on St. Andrew’s Street.
“Ouch! Park in the garage, for God’s sake.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
George, as Natasha knew by now, had a high tolerance for pain-other people’s pain.
“Oh, forget it. Look, where shall we meet up? And when?” While she could usually trick George into giving his plans away, he had been maddeningly close-lipped about his reasons for this trip into town.
“The Eagle. In about an hour. Maybe two.”
Which meant closer to three.
“George, I really don’t fancy hanging around a pub by myself.”
“I’ll be there when I get there. Cheer up. Who knows? You might get lucky and meet another rich bloke.”
With an unpleasant laugh, he retrieved a Gucci backpack from the back seat, got out of the car, and slammed the door. A small avalanche of snow fell from the bonnet.
It took all her considerable control not to tell him to sod off. Something like prudence won out as she decided the better course of dealing with George-usually-was to ignore him. It was a long taxi ride back to Waverley Court and he was more than capable of leaving her stranded.
Not looking back, she started down Sidney Street, headed toward Market Square and the shops, preparatory to doubling back to see which way George was headed. A half-dozen awestruck undergraduates watched her silken progress. One of them wrote a highly derivative sonnet about her that night, something about women lovely in their bones.
She ignored them. She ignored traffic, with near-fatal consequences. One day, she thought, George would go too far. With the wrong person.
Violet was bored. Bored, bored, bored, and wondering how soon she could decently make an escape.
Redecorating Waverley Court, top to bottom, to which she had initially looked forward as the ultimate challenge, could wait, although as she looked around her sitting room now, she knew it couldn’t wait forever. With a delicate shudder-purple velvet draperies with gold tassels. Really!-she returned her gaze to the Vogue through which she had been flapping in a desultory way for the past half hour. That was boring, too, as she already owned nearly everything pictured in the issue worth owning, thanks to Adrian.
She stood up and stretched her lithe dancer’s frame. Smoothed her hair. Checked her makeup. Perfect, as always. Simple perfection. But… what, she wondered, peering closer, had happened to the girl who had set all of London on end? Where most people saw only the taut, transparent skin, Violet saw crow’s feet, the nap of loosening flesh at the jaw, and lines etching the brow and upper lip, despite the best efforts of the creams advertised on every other page of her magazines.
A phrase from a poem she had once read drifted into her thoughts. Something about “thy mother’s glass.”
When Violet had been young and aspiring to join the Aristocracy, as she thought of it, she had read straight through an anthology of famous poetry, trying to make up for her lack of formal education. But once she had breached the portals of the upper classes and realized most of them were far stupider than she was, she had given it up, specializing instead in the small talk that greased the wheels of cocktail and weekend parties, along with copious amounts of alcohol. Not that she really drank-bad for the complexion-but she had perfected the art of carrying around the same half-full highball glass for hours, flitting from group to group, laughing maniacally at jokes she only half understood. For some reason, this had gained her a reputation for wit.
What a long time ago it all seemed now. Looking back on the path her life had taken, she could only say now that she wouldn’t have changed a thing. Not really. Not even Winnie…
Perhaps a cruise…
Sir Adrian was stumped. He had scribbled away happily in his study for hours, rewriting the pages of the day before and adding a page or two more, but when it came time to write about the Chloe of his youth, he ran straight into a wall. It was not as though he had drained the well of his malice-far from it-but when it came to remembering Chloe as she once had been, he found only the haziest ghost could be summoned, like an out-of-focus photograph faded even more by time.
Chloe as she became, he could recall with clarity. Frequent child-bearing had inflated her, rounding her moon face like-yes, he thought: like a pink balloon. Sir Adrian laboriously scribbled the words in a margin of the page, stared at them a moment, and angrily crossed them out.
Let’s see. Tap tap tap went his sausage fingers on the desk.
The young Chloe had been tiny, with slim legs tapering down into narrow, elegant feet. A gust of wind could have blown her over. That had changed, too, the straight piano legs swelling into something like those umbrella stands made from elephant feet.
But apart from balloons, pianos, and umbrella stands, Sir Adrian had made little progress in the past hour, and the writer’s block remained cemented in place, impeding the normally smooth flow of vitriol onto the page.
He threw down his pen-that same special pen that had helped him so much in Paris. These were the times he most resented the aspic of writerly isolation. Maybe a talk with Mrs. Romano would help. Strangely enough, he did not think of going to see what Violet was doing. He was slightly afraid of Violet: Having captured his long-sought prize, he feared too much familiarity might breed contempt-on her part.
Sir Adrian reached for the tasseled bell pull to summon Mrs. Romano, then decided he would visit her in the kitchen instead.
Slowly, painfully, he raised himself onto elephantine legs and began his long progress to the back of the house.
Sarah was again at large in the rambling house, and without the book with which she had hoped to while away the hours. Having told Jeffrey she was needed in the kitchen, she felt morally obligated to be as good as her word, in keeping with her general inability to separate the white from the black lie, and her footsteps led her in the direction of Mrs. Romano’s domain, where she knew she was neither needed nor, probably, welcome.
The smell of something delightful on the cooker greeted her as she walked in.
“Oh, what’s this then?” she said, lifting the lid on a large saucepan.
“Sauce. For the cappelletti.”
“Alpine hats? Wonderful. I’ve published a cookbook, you know. It’s been quite well received. Perhaps I could help…”
Sarah rummaged in a drawer and produced a teaspoon. She again lifted the lid of the saucepan. Mrs. Romano, ruler of all she surveyed, watched her with growing annoyance. She had flipped through one of Sarah’s books one day at W. H. Smith’s in Cambridge. All lentils and dried grass and barley, from what she could tell. She wouldn’t have fed such food to a donkey.
“It needs some mace,” pronounced Sarah.
“Mace? Mace? Most definitely it does not need some mace.”
“I assure you-”
“This is a traditional dish. I make it always the same way. For years. Always. The. Same. No. Mace.”
“You’ll see. Mace is just like nutmeg, only slightly more robust. It’s actually made from the nutmeg shell. Few people realize that.” Sarah was now innocently rummaging among the spices over the cooker. She found the mace jar and, turning, held it aloft, beaming, triumphant, and blissfully unaware of the gathering storm.
“And you shouldn’t keep these spices right over the cooker, you know,” she went on. “They get overheated. Spoils the flavor.”
Mrs. Romano, ire thoroughly aroused, appeared to be the only thing in the kitchen in danger of overheating. Stepping smartly (for her) across the kitchen, she snapped shut the door of the cupboard over the cooker, nearly onto Sarah’s fingers.
“If I want to use nutmeg, I use the nutmeg,” Mrs. Romano said flatly. “No mace. No nutmeg. The sauce, it is perfect, just as it is.” She made a grab for the mace jar in Sarah’s hand, which Sarah held aloft, just out of reach.
“Give it to me,” demanded Mrs. Romano.
“No!”
“Testa di cavolo!”
“How dare you call me a cabbage head!”
Just then, the colossal form of Sir Adrian dropped anchor in the doorway.
“Hello, hello, what’s all this?”
“I’m just trying to help Mrs. Romano.”
“Mrs. Romano, if she needed help from the likes of you, would not be employed here.”
Stung, Sarah said, “I have written a best seller about cooking, and my publishers think the next one-”
“My books are also best sellers. That doesn’t mean I’m an expert on killing people, any more than it means you’re an expert at cooking. Stay out of this kitchen.”
“They even want me to do a cooking show on the telly,” Sarah persisted.
“Really? Then I have a title for them. One Fat Lady.” Deciding this was rather a good one, he laughed uproariously; then, seeing the injured look on her face-her sadness always infuriated him, especially when he was the cause-reverted to his former cold manner. “I’m not saying it again. You are to stay out of this kitchen and leave Mrs. Romano alone.”
“It’s my kitchen, too, isn’t it?” she said.
This he didn’t bother to answer. Mrs. Romano, a person quick to anger and quicker to forget, felt sorry for the girl. Woman, she corrected herself. Sarah so clearly wanted her father to admire her intellect and achievements, while these were the last things Sir Adrian cared about in a female. Like all fathers, he wanted Sarah to make a good marriage and produce basketfuls of chubby grandchildren, to Mrs. Romano’s way of thinking.
Funny, how all of Sir Adrian’s children had let him down in that regard. It was, in her opinion, the real reason behind all this messing about with the will, like Henry VIII fiddling with papal bulls. A grandchild, especially a male, would have put an end to all that nonsense. His posterity assured, Sir Adrian might have been a happy man.
Albert had found the liquor cabinet, but he had found it locked, perhaps in anticipation of his visit. Mrs. Romano, he felt, and not for the first time, took a bit more upon herself than met her official job description. But Albert knew where the cellars were, and moreover, he had long ago taken the precaution of having an extra key made.
Getting to the cellar itself posed no problem, as it opened off the main hall, with entry through a narrow door, designed for tiny medieval priests, built into the paneling under the stairs. Looking exaggeratedly to left and right like a burglar in a silent film, Albert painfully opened the creaking door, exposing the stone stairway to the bottom. Good thing, he thought, he was usually sober on his way down. Coming up was another story.
The cellar, the inspiration for which might have been Tales from the Crypt, was original to the house, and Sir Adrian’s pride. Collected in temperature-controlled rooms and cabinets fitted snugly against the cold stone walls were vintage bottles-some, Albert reflected, worth more than his annual income in a bad year. Most years, he amended.
The small keys to the cabinets containing the most expensive bottles remained firmly in the care of Mrs. Romano. Albert suspected they nestled all day somewhere in the vicinity of her redoubtable cleavage. For all Albert knew she slept with them dangling from a chain around her neck. She did not appear to have a man in her life to object to that-odd, when he thought about it, because she exuded such an earthy appeal. Maybe giving birth to a shit like Paulo had put her off sex forever.
But for Albert’s purposes, the keys to the actual cabinets didn’t matter. There were plenty of good-quality spirits lying about that were not deemed worth locking up. They would do just fine. With any luck he’d be awake and sober in time for the cocktail hour.
It was a little early for whiskey, even for Albert, but he spied several cases of Guinness stout tucked against the wall. He reached up to drag a case off the top of the stack. As he did, he dislodged the case underneath, tumbling it to the floor. Bracing himself for the inevitable crash of broken glass, Albert was surprised when the box fell with a delicate thud on the stone tiles. Setting aside the top crate of beer, he bent down and pulled back the cardboard flaps of the fallen box.
Paper. A small stack of thin blue paper, slightly disarranged by the fall. The top page carried only a few words. A title page, laboriously printed in capital letters. Albert held it up to the light from one of the crenellated windows high in the wall.
“A Death in Scotland,” he read aloud. “By Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk.” It bore a recent date across the bottom of the page.
His latest manuscript, presumably. He flipped through the pages. Page after page of scrawl. Perhaps the light would be better in his room. Albert tucked the pages in his pockets, hoisted a case of the beer, and headed back upstairs.