‘It’s not quite as bad as it looks,’ Richard murmured. ‘I swear there are actually several perfectly habitable rooms – if you aren’t excessively particular – along with many that are, as you can see, open to the rain and the seabirds.’
It did appear to be a complete ruin, on first sight – jagged walls and broken towers reached up to the sky, in a dramatic manner that the boys, at least, found highly satisfactory. Robin had been most anxious to know if there were dungeons, and Richard had reassured him that there were indeed, down a spiral staircase that was as steep and perilous as anyone could wish for, though he was sorry to have to say that there were no chained skeletons to be found once you’d made your descent. ‘Though perhaps I have not explored the subterranean regions fully, and you may make many gruesome discoveries when you do so – who knows?’
‘I can well believe that there are dungeons, now that I see the place,’ Viola murmured, surveying it. ‘Having heard your family history, I can only hope you do not mean to lodge me in one of them.’
Richard’s eyes gleamed wickedly, and she shot him a suppressing glance, but he said only, ‘Of course not. The finest chamber shall be yours, my lady. Though it will not be anywhere near as comfortable as where you slept last night, I’m sorry to say. There will be a fire in the grate, on a hearth large enough to roast an ox, though I can’t guarantee that the chimney won’t smoke. It all depends upon the prevailing direction of the howling gale, I’m given to understand.’
‘As long as there is a bed.’
‘Oh, I promise you there is. Trust me for that.’
They’d picked up the boys from a school a week or so ago. Ventris had with rare delicacy encouraged her to go alone to greet them, so that they’d been able to see, as he’d put it, that their mother was unaltered, even if she was now married to a man they’d never met. They’d hugged her fiercely on seeing her, this time, and she knew they probably wouldn’t have felt able to do so if their new stepfather had been present, so she could only be grateful for his tact. They’d needed that reassurance, she thought, and somehow, he’d known it.
It was idle to pretend that she hadn’t wondered a thousand times over the past years how it would be when father and sons encountered each other at last, if indeed they ever did. But there was no great drama, and no tears except the ones she fought hard to hide; the meeting was quiet, restrained, if inevitably slightly awkward. Robin greeted Lord Ventris cheerfully, and Ned with a little more reserve, but both boys were polite, and shook his hand without any appearance of reluctance, calling himsirin a formal way that made her heart ache. It was still quite usual for men of an older generation, Edward’s and Marchett’s generation, to require that their children addressed them so; it was not quite so common amongst the young, and she believed Richard would never have insisted upon it, in ordinary circumstances. But he could hardly ask them to call him Father.
He was wise enough not to force the pace or assume an air of false bonhomie that must sit uncomfortably with them. It was possible to imagine the pompous fatherly speech that Lord Marchett, say, would have made in his position, and how it would have set their backs up and done lasting damage, but Richard made no speeches. He was frank, straightforward, his voice was level and controlled, and only Viola guessed how deeply he was affected. He certainly did not show it.
The initial meeting having gone well, matters proceeded smoothly afterwards. Richard was being careful – hard to say how much of it came naturally and how much it cost him effort. Perhaps no better training could be imagined for suddenly becoming step-parent to two sons rising twelve than that of a spy. He took no chances, asserted no authority, deferred to Viola, but at the same time somehow made it clear that he was not to be trifled with. She didn’t think Ned and Robin were disposed to be scared of him, or even particularly on their guard after the very beginning, but she tried to look at him through their eyes and thought that though he was quiet, he was also formidable, and gave a sense of power held in reserve. They were taking his measure, and doing it cautiously.
The journey had in some respects been a godsend. They were all cooped up together for many hours, it was true, but this enabled them to talk in an unforced, desultory way, not least about the changing sights they saw from the carriage windows, and the places they stopped at night, lapsing into silence if they wished, with no pressure such as might arise in a more public setting.
Richard had taken them to explore some of these towns they spent the nights in, to run off their pent-up energy, and Viola sometimes let them go, and sometimes strolled with them, her arm in her husband’s, their children running ahead and circling back breathlessly to share some quaint fact or sight they had discovered. They looked, she knew, just like any wealthy travelling family.
Last night, the talkative landlady at the inn had complimented Richard fulsomely on his fine sons. ‘The spit and image of you, sir!’ she’d gushed. After a tiny, almost imperceptible hesitation, as one who stood on the edge of a precipice and looked down into the yawning depths at his feet, Lord Ventris had thanked her gravely, saying nothing more. He had not replied that they were his stepsons only, and the boys, who’d both overheard – they could scarcely avoid it, since she was patting their blushing cheeks fondly as she spoke – did not correct her either.
Ned had said thoughtfully when he and Viola had a moment alone, taking the air after dinner, ‘Do we look so much like Lord Ventris, Mama? That woman seemed to think so. It is odd to think she believed him truly to be our father.’
She had prepared herself for this, and did not mean to over-react. ‘Well, she made a natural assumption, seeing us all together, but yes, I think you do,’ she said calmly. ‘You more than Robin, perhaps. It is not to be wondered at – you must see yourself how much Ventris resembles your father, and indeed many of the old portraits in the gallery at Winterflood. They are his ancestors too, of course, on his father’s side.’
‘Papa’s face has faded a little in my memory,’ the youthful Duke confessed, his tone suggesting that he was sorry. ‘I was only eight years old… But I have seen the picture that was painted of him when he was young – he wears a powdered wig in it, like a regular old quiz; it must have been the fashion – and I suppose it does favour my stepfather a good deal.’
‘The Angelica Kauffman portrait? It does, though I think Lord Ventris resembles your father more now that he is a little older than he did when first I knew him. Something to do with the bones of the face.’ Viola had had to accustom herself to sayingyour fatherlong ago, referring to Edward, and it had almost become natural to do so, but now she found it freshly harder. She looked forward to a day when she could use those words and mean Richard; she knew that many women who remarried came to refer to their new husbands in such a way, and the stepchildren the same, and nobody thought anything of it. But it was far too soon yet.
The coach had rumbled on while she had been lost in reflection, and now they were passing over an actual drawbridge into an inner courtyard, under the rusting remains of a portcullis. ‘I had to have it replaced,’ Ventris said; the boys were staring down at the bridge and could not fail to notice that the wood was new, and reassuringly – or perhaps from their point of view disappointingly – solid. ‘My aunt neglected such essential repairs. In later years, she rarely left the Castle, and if the worm-eaten old planks had broken suddenly and some unfortunate soul had plunged to his death in the ravine below, I don’t believe she would have cared overmuch. Especially not if it had been me. But I do care, and it was one of my first priorities on coming here. One can take a fondness for the Gothic altogether too far, I find.’
They hardly seemed to heed him; they had sought permission to alight and were tumbling eagerly out of the carriage almost before it had come to a stop. One could hardly blame them – it was a young boy’s dream, a genuine ruined castle, and they were to make their home here, at least for now. What could be more delightful to a child of spirit?
The medieval fortress must have been close to impregnable once, Viola thought, with the wild sea surrounding it on three sides, but many of the walls had crumbled away with the effects of time and the elements, and at some stage, it was plain that the decision had been taken to let them go, and save only a part for human habitation. This section lay to her left, and was reached up a flight of worn stone steps. It was growing dark now, and the great door stood open in anticipation of their arrival, light spilling out, staff waiting to greet them. However primitive it might prove to be inside, the sight was pleasant after so long a journey.
‘Welcome to Ventris Castle,’ Richard said, leaning down to address them. ‘Let’s go inside and see if food has been prepared for us, as I’m sure it has. Boys, there is a great deal to explore, but the more ruinous parts are best seen in daylight, unless you wish to break your necks before you’ve been here five minutes. I assure you, there are enough passages and staircases and ancient chambers even in the more modern quarters – modern in the local sense of dating from the fifteenth century rather than the twelfth, you understand. Come and see! There is supposed to be a priest’s hole, though I have never been able to find it.’
His invitation was well calculated to be irresistible, and they did not wait to be asked twice, but ran up the stairs to introduce themselves to the waiting butler. Richard jumped down lightly from the carriage and extended his hand to Viola. ‘My lady…’ he said, smiling. ‘Your new home awaits you. And the bed, in due time, as promised.’
30
It wasn’t the first time Viola had come into a great house as mistress in the place of a woman who was now dead. But this was different – worse in some ways, and better in others. Mostly, it was better. She wasn’t replacing the beloved and much-missed Duchess Elizabeth at Edward’s side, nobody was looking at her as though she was little better than an imposter, and above all, she wasn’t a nervous seventeen-year-old with barely a clue of how she should go on and no one to help her find her feet. She might be a southerner, which she couldn’t mend, and Richard might in some sense be an interloper too, but she was a grown woman now, and had run a household much larger than this one for many years. And as for her late predecessor being missed by her former employees, she soon discovered that this was only partly true. She’d been ‘a rare character’, with all that that implied. Viola knew all about rare characters – her mother was one. Living with them wasn’t always easy or comfortable.
It quickly became clear that what she had first taken for unfriendliness, even disapproval, in the Castle’s inhabitants’ attitude towards her was, at least partly, sheer embarrassment. The rooms that were in use were spotlessly clean, and the food served to the family was hearty, well-cooked and decorously presented, but that was all that could be said. She found Ventris Castle to be barren of what most people would consider the necessities of existence, let alone the luxuries. Life there could only be described as primitive, for everyone, family and staff alike. The servants’ quarters, when she saw them, took her breath away; they could have come straight from the Middle Ages, and presumably had. It might have been picturesque to see, in an antiquarian volume or portrayed upon the stage in a fairy tale – as a reality in the nineteenth century, in the home of a wealthy woman, it was shocking.
The building and repair work was under way, at least the most urgent parts of it, as Richard had told her, action that would make sure the Castle survived another winter without crumbling into utter ruin and sliding into the sea. But Richard and the boys seemed to think it was either a matter of indifference or a great adventure that there was not a piece of linen or a curtain anywhere in the house that was not practically in tatters, and that items of furniture – chairs, for example, or beds – were as likely to collapse into piles of firewood at moments of maximum inconvenience as to bear a person’s weight in a reliable way. For her part, she would prefer less excitement and fewer splinters, though she was prepared to admit privately that she and Richard continued to make some heavy demands on the fixtures and fittings of their bedchamber.
Once the butler and housekeeper, a married couple named Codling, had realised that she did not blame them for the many deficiencies caused by their former mistress’s miserly ways, and that furthermore, though the new Lady Ventris had once been a duchess, she was not at all high in the instep, they got on quite comfortably together. It was apparent that they’d feared for their position and their home – such as it was – under the new regime, and now could relax as it became clear that Viola had no intention of putting them out of doors in their late middle age and replacing them with smart London servants of her own. She meant instead to make their lives more comfortable along with her family’s, and told them so.
Mrs Codling had been heard to comment that it was good to see children in the old place again – that they brought it to life after a-many years of sad emptiness – and Viola could see that this was a rare encomium, by Yorkshire standards. She could hardly hope for more. Her sons were boisterous, but the Codlings did not appear to mind the disruption they caused, but rather to see it as perfectly natural, and even, on occasion, entertaining. Mr Codling was largely silent unless circumstances absolutely required communication, as though somebody might be going to charge him a ha’penny a word, and he only had a shilling. But Mrs Codling had a wide repertoire of highly expressive sniffs, which could mean anything from extreme disapproval to grudging praise; there was even one that seemed to signify that she was highly if reluctantly amused, and Ned and Robin’s antics often provoked her into deploying it. The boys had at first thought that she was suffering from a severe cold in the head, but had grown accustomed to her odd ways now, and showed alarming signs of wrapping her around their little fingers.
Viola was also aware that the woman – who was plainly nobody’s fool – sometimes eyed her shrewdly up and down as they talked together, as if to ascertain whether her mistress’s plumpness disguised the fact that a little Ventris might be expected to make an appearance in due course, to add even further to the bustle of the Castle. But she resolved to show no sign that she had noticed this scrutiny. Time would tell, and her body and its secrets were her own, for now.
And if the housekeeper or any of the other, junior staff thought that the young Armstrongs resembled their stepfather more closely than mere cousins should, they did not give the slightest hint of such a suspicion. They were sharp, she thought; if it were obvious, they’d have noticed it. Probably she was worrying too much about that particular matter, and could lay it to rest, if Tarquin Armstrong remained silent and inactive, as he appeared to have done so far. Maybe he was indeed intimidated by his half-brother’s unsavoury reputation, as she had hoped. Or perhaps her fears, and Edward’s on his deathbed, had always been fanciful and entirely without foundation.
