‘Then I shall have to call for Dr Monk from London again. I’m sure he’ll make a special visit on Boxing Day if I ask him to.’
‘I doubt that,’ muttered Ralph, ‘not if this weather keeps up.’
‘Did I ask for your opinion?’
‘No, but you can have it for free. Miss Casey, I’ll have another potato, please, if it’s not too much trouble for you?’
The woman actually looked to Arthur for permission and after he’d acquiesced, she dropped a potato onto his plate.
After she’d left the room, and in a valiant attempt to jolly things along for his stepbrother’s sake, Ralph suggested a game of cards after dinner. ‘Or better still, how about a game of Monopoly?’
‘Out of the question,’ said Arthur before the boy had a chance to reply. ‘Charles needs to go to bed early tonight. From what Miss Casey tells me, he’s been having far too many late nights since coming home from school.’
‘But it’s Christmas Eve,’ said Ralph. ‘Let the lad have some fun.’
Arthur crashed his fists down on the table, making them all jump. ‘Enough! You will not interfere in how this house is run. Charles, go to your room now.’
Julia’s lower lip wobbled as the boy did as he was told. He was probably only too happy to escape.
‘I think I’ll go to my room as well,’ Ralph said, tossing his napkin onto his plate.
Late that night, unable to sleep, and regretting he hadn’t finished his dinner, Ralph went in search of something to eat from the larder. Wrapped in his dressing gown, his slippers on, he padded down the wide staircase as quietly as he could. The wall to his left was covered with heavy,gold-framed oil paintings of hunting and moorland scenes, grazing Highland cattle, and noble stags. His father had bought the paintings from country house sales, the owners no longer able to afford to run their once great houses. From the same sales Arthur had bought most of the furniture and rugs to furnish the Hall, along with a plethora of stuffed animals’ heads and bronze statues. He would have taken enormous delight in every single purchase, gloating that he could afford to snap up these family heirlooms, as though they were cheap trinkets in a penny bazaar.
Ralph was back upstairs with a tray of cold meats and pickles as well as a bottle of wine from the cellar, when he heard noises coming from the floor above him – where Miss Casey had her rooms. Curious, he abandoned the tray and crept as stealthily as a cat burglar up the narrow flight of stairs.
On the top landing, he pressed his ear to the door of Miss Casey’s room. Holding his breath, he quietly bent down to see if he could look through the keyhole. But he was out of luck; his view was obscured by the key in the lock.
But he didn’t need to see what was going on inside the room. He knew. More importantly, he knew who was in there with Miss Casey.
His father.
ChapterSeventy-Four
Island House, Melstead St Mary
December 1962
Romily
Yet to go to bed, Romily was alone and sitting at her desk in the library. Behind her, the carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour, signalling that it washalf-past twelve and thirty minutes of Christmas Day had already passed.
Time was a strange phenomenon. As a child one thinks it passes with inexorable slowness and that there’s simply too much of it wafting around. But as an adult, time is an altogether different commodity, there isn’t enough of it and it slips away faster than water gushing down a plughole.
‘I’ve spent too much time dwelling on the past ...’
Those were the words Red had used this afternoon when he’d answered Isabella’s question about his visit here not being a trip down memory lane. He had said what he did for Romily’s benefit, giving her a clear message; why else the look he’d given her?
With a fire burning in the grate, she had been sitting here for the lastforty-five minutes, long after everyone else had retired to bed. She had been reflecting on what Red had said, knowing that there was a part of her that remained locked in the past.
In front of her was the wooden box which for all these years had contained Matteo’s letters. She lifted the lid, once more allowing the summery scent of lavender to escape. Was it now time to get rid of the letters? She would never be able to eradicate entirely that painful episode in her life, but would destroying them be a symbolic gesture, her way of finally laying that time to rest?
It was, she understood, part of the human condition to fall into the trap of looking back too much, no matter how hard one tried to look to the future. The trouble was, one was saddled with being the sum of one’s parts. It meant that everything a person did or experienced was thrown into the mix and affected one’s behaviour. But had Romily allowed the past, even unwittingly, to influence her too much?
Look how she had reacted at seeing Max with Isabella. The moment she set eyes on him, she had regarded him as the man she had known all those years ago; an inveterate womaniser. The thought of him playing fast and loose with Isabella’s affections appalled her. But as Isabella had rightly pointed out, Romily’s relationship with Jack proved that a person could change. The right person, as Jack had said, could actually change someone, so they became a better and happier person. She had done that for him, he had claimed. ‘You have transformed me,’ he’d said the day they married.
But how often did that happen? How many leopards were really capable of changing their spots? Was Max capable of undergoing such a transformation? Or was she doing him a disservice, had he already put his past behind him?
The bigger question she had to ask was far more difficult to answer – wasshecapable of changing? Could she shake off her own spots sufficiently in order to trust her feelings for Red?
