“One moment, if you please. Andrew, why do we eat in here when there is a far more commodious dining room on the first floor?”
Andrew pulled a face. “I cannot bear the dining room… or the library, for that matter. I have no happy memories of either place. The rest of the house I can bear, but those two rooms… Lavinia and the Dowager Countess will put in hand a number of improving works, and then I shall be able to enter them.”
“It is a very sad thing,” Mrs Granville said, “that your father has squashed all the spirit out of you. This is your moment of triumph, Andrew. You should march into both those rooms and shout at the top of your lungs,‘Mine now!’.Because they are. Everything is yours. Even his name is yours — you are Edlesborough now. He is dead and you are alive, so celebrate. Make those rooms your own and wash away the bad memories. Take down those dreadful portraits of Elizabethan ancestors and put up your ship paintings. Burn his chair, if it will make you feel better, but take possession of what is yours and be glad you are free now. Unlike me, you never had the choice to leave, but you bore it nobly and you won in the end, so be glad.”
“Youchoseto leave?” Andrew whispered, his face ashen. “You chose to abandon your own children?”
She took a long, ragged breath. “It was the hardest thing I have ever done, but my life was unbearable. I could not bear it, anyway. If I had stayed, I should have killed myself — or him, possibly. I thought that divorce was the least destructive option.”
“Is it not a mother’s place to protect her children?”
“Protect you? From him? I could not protectmyselffrom him, so what could I have done for you? A father owns his own children, my dear, and nothing I could have done would have changed that.”
Andrew would have argued the point, but Simon’s mother reached across the table and rested her hand on his. “You must not blame her. She did what she needed to do to survive. I understand it, as you perhaps cannot. A wife experiences the worst of a man’s foibles, Andrew. And she is right about the house, too. You must not let your father cow you even from the grave. You have survived him — we have all survived him. Now let us do our very best to forget he ever existed.”
Andrew gave a shaky laugh. “I am sure you are right, both of you. Tomorrow, we will eat in the dining room.”
“And tonight?” Mrs Granville said. “Shall we withdraw to the library?”
“Let us all go there now,” Lavinia said. “The room is large enough that the men can take their port at one end while we discuss domestic matters at the other without hampering each other in the slightest. No need to look so nervous, Andrew. Let us lay the ghosts once and for all.”
So they all trooped in a long line up the imposing staircase to the first floor, Lavinia and the Dowager Countess leading the way, then the rest of the ladies. The gentlemen followed silently, while Spearman and his minions, laden with trays of port, glasses and sweetmeats, brought up the rear.
At the top of the stairs, they crowded into a modest ante-chamber, its carved frieze, gold-encrusted fireplace and rich carpets giving the barest hint of the glories to come. Here they waited while the servants scurried about lighting candles and fires before the great doors to the library were thrown open.
It was massive, three perfect cubes joined end to end, each with its own unique fireplace, a marble frieze running round the entire upper third of the three inner walls, the outer wall being almost entirely taken up by high windows. On the panelled walls, long-dead ancestors adopted regal poses and gazed sternly down at them. A few panels were taken up by floor to ceiling bookcases, to ensure that the room was not entirely misnamed, and on the ceiling, dimly seen by candlelight, nymphs and goddesses jostled amidst unidentifiable greenery below thundery skies.
“Oh, how hideous!” Juliet exclaimed, causing a certain amount of laughter.
“It is rather oppressive, is it not?” Lavinia said. “I suppose it must have been three separate rooms at one time. Perhaps we should restore it to its original state.”
“No, no!” Simon said in some alarm. “This is how it was designed. It is the Great Chamber, you see, where visiting dignitaries were taken to be awed by the power of the owner. When the monarch came to stay, this would be the royal receiving room, with the withdrawing chamber and bedchamber beyond. I love this room.”
Andrew shook his head in bewilderment. “You must be the only person who does, brother. His desk… I cannot even bear to look at his desk. I see him sitting behind it, berating me for my latest transgression, his voice so reasonable, so gentle, yet he always reduced me to jelly. Simon, I do not know how you can find anything to like about this room.”
“But it is beautiful,” he said, in surprise. “Look how perfectly proportioned it is, and the artistry that created it. It is magnificent. The walls would have been covered with tapestries originally, which is why the panelling is not so elaborate as elsewhere. It is this room that pushed me to become an architect. I used to bring paper and pencils, and draw thisand that — the whole room, sometimes. The outside, too, but the interior fascinated me, the way visitors would be led in procession from the hall down below and up the stairs to this room. I still try to do that in my own work, although the idea has largely gone out of fashion now. The paintwork on the ceiling is darker than I remember it, but the figures are still the wonder they always were. I used to come here early on summer mornings, before the light grew too harsh, and just lie on the floor admiring the ceiling.”
Andrew shivered. “This room will look better tomorrow. Spearman, take the port back to the dining room.”
“Ah well,” said Lavinia with a sigh. “Ladies, shall we go to the drawing room?”
Mrs Granville looked at Juliet. “The fires are lit, and it would be a shame to waste the heat, would it not? Charlie, find some brandy, will you? Shall we sit, and I shall answer all your questions?”
Juliet and Mrs Granville sat side by side on a pair of chairs so ornately carved and dripping with gilt they might have been thrones. Simon pulled up a faded footstool, while Charlie Granville and a footman moved about supplying brandy for Mrs Granville and claret for Simon.
“So what do you want to know?” Mrs Granville said.
“Everything,” Juliet said in a low voice.
Mrs Granville chuckled. “Everything it shall be, then. Let me begin at the beginning. I was barely seventeen when I married your father. I came straight from the schoolroom, knowing nothing of society or life or men, to this place. I did not mind, at first. Edlesborough’s parents were alive then, and they kept him on an even keel, I suppose, because he seemed normal enough to me then. He was well mannered, gentlemanlike, good company in society. He never showed me any affection, but that was not expected, on either side. Andrew was born, and he was pleasedwith that. Then Luke, a couple of years later. By that time, his father had died, his mother had gone off to sulk in some Cornish fastness, and good riddance, too, for a colder woman never breathed. But without his parents… Edlesborough began to show his true colours.”
She sipped her brandy thoughtfully, then laid it down on a table carved like a lion.
“You will not remember him, Juliet, I am sure, and so much the better for you. Simon will remember what he was like.”
“Not much,” he said. “He never took much notice of me, and I took great care not to do anything which would attract his attention. Andrew and Luke told me how best to evade his wrath, although they never seemed to manage it themselves.”
“Poor boys!” she said. “I felt dreadful leaving them behind, but it was the only way I could keep my sanity intact. Edlesborough had only three moods, you see. There was the genial face he showed the world when he entertained, making sure that everyone had a wonderful time. Then there was his cold displeasure, where he reduced one’s character to shreds, so that one felt like the veriest worm crawling about on the ground, worthy only to be crushed under his boot. And then there were the sudden rages, when he would be ill for days afterwards. And there was no predicting which mood it would be at any given moment. We all walked around on eggshells, as you may imagine. And then—”
