“You read Greek at fifteen?”
Ruth smiled, leading Willow from a warm corridor, through a door, and into what appeared to be a cold, vacant ballroom. “Indeed. My father is vicar in Harrogate, and my classical education began very young.”
Willow nodded, looking around the ballroom. The dusty floor was parquet, inlaid with geometrical pieces in half a dozen different woods and stains. The peeling, cobweb-strewn walls were paneled, the ceiling a veritable map of intricate raised scroll work. Tarnished chandeliers hung drunkenly at intervals.
“But is this room open to the weather?” Willow said, staring at the windows.
Ruth shrugged. “Glass remains in a few windows, but not many, I’m afraid. This part of the castle has not been in use, I believe, in Felix’s or Brent’s lifetimes.”
Willow nodded, spinning slowly in the vast, forgotten ballroom. “It could be stunning, this room,” she said.
“I cannot say what use would come of it,” Ruth said. “There are limited families of quality in Harrogate. Lady Cassin and the girls are friendly with the other gentry, but even if every last family turned up on the same night, children included, they would not fill this ballroom, not by half.”
Willow nodded, following along as Ruth led her to the next room, a long, thin banquet hall. In this room, the massive oak banquet table remained but only two or three high-backed carved chairs. Willow slowly walked the length of the room, running her hand down the sticky surface of the table. Two birds, nesting in the thick paneling, flushed from the ceiling and startled her. She watched in amazement as they flapped wildly through an open window.
Turning back, she saw that the walls here were paneled too. Willow squinted and leaned in.
But was there . . .
Yes.
The brushstroke outlines of a faded mural, painted sometime long ago inside each paneled square. She stepped closer. It was a landscape, something pastoral and light. She scraped at the dust and grime with her fingertip and retreated to take it all in.
Faded by age and elements, puckered in spots from water damage, she couldjustmake out a sprawling landscape, with blue sky and green hillside, a stand of trees and a pond.
“It’s a mural,” said Willow, smiling at Ruth, pointing to the wall.
“Is it?” Ruth said, stepping closer. “So it is. Felix never paid this part of the property any mind. About a thousand years too new for our tastes.”
Willow nodded, looking to the other walls. How breathtaking a giant mural would be, wrapped around the entirety of the room.
“Felix’s sisters have said you are a designer,” Ruth said, watching her. “That you select the interiors of great mansions in London.”
Willow laughed. “Well, mostly I was an apprentice to my aunt and uncle. You were an apprentice, in a manner, to Felix weren’t you?”
“Well, I was his assistant for a time,” Ruth said. “In the beginning. Until I was not.”
She smiled then and shared how, despite Felix’s most noble effort to resist her, they had eventually fallen in love. “We held off a year and a half,” Ruth said, smiling. “Until I was seventeen. It was torture.”
“I can tell you loved each other very much,” Willow said softly.
Ruth nodded. “We loved two things most of all,” she said. “Each other, and Roman artifacts. Would you like to see our very own Roman bathhouse?”
Willow nodded, her throat suddenly tight.
Ruth went on, “There are also some twenty-five bedchambers in this part of the castle, but each one is the same as the next, so perhaps we shall tour those another day.”
Willow nodded again and followed her through three doors and into the sunny rear garden of the castle. Pecking chickens squawked and flapped from their path, and dogs trotted up to trail behind them.
“That building is the kitchens,” Ruth said, pointing to an outbuilding. “The food we eat in the castle is prepared in the original detached kitchen. Staff carries our meals, or tea, or even an apple, if we call for it, across the garden and into the family quarters. Even in the rain.”
Willow shaded her eyes and looked at the grey stone outbuilding, its chimneys pumping smoke into the sunny sky.
“And that is the smokehouse; there’s the wood store; that’s the root cellar; the former arsenal, now used for Felix’s and my excavation gear—well, now just mine, I suppose—and that,” she finished, her voice rushing on, “is the bathhouse.”
“Oh yes. Cassin mentioned that the castle had its own bathhouse. How lovely.” They ambled toward it. The building had been built to match the castle, more grey stonework, a flat roof with a walkway lined with a gapped wall.
“Yes, and lovely it shall remain, I suppose. Felix and I were just about to dismantle it, brick by brick. Obviously that will no longer happen.”
