“Here we go, ready for a walk down memory lane, Piers?” Nolly rolled her eyes in a conspiratorial fashion.
“A finer walk could not be had—if our new friend could bear to join us.” Piers looked to Maisie.
“Of course. And I must say, this is an exquisite wine.”
“Yes, and hopefully there will be more of it—where’s Gower?” Nolly interjected again.
Two more decanters of Piers Bassington-Hope’s carefully crafted wine tempered the family’s tensions and, thought Maisie, made them sparkling company. By eleven o’clock they were lingering over the cheese course, Piers had loosened his tie at Emma’s request and the two sisters were finally at ease with each other.
“Do let’s tell Maisie about the big play. You remember, when Nick almost drowned dear little Harry in the river.”
“Should’ve held his head down a bit longer!”
“Oh, Nolly, come on!” Georgina reached across and tapped her sister playfully on the hand, and they both began to laugh. She turned to Maisie. “Now then, I think Nolly must have been sixteen, because Harry was only four.”
“I was sixteen, silly—it was my birthday!”
Piers laughed. “Sweet sixteen and we invited everyone we knew for the weekend. How many sixteen-year-olds have two members of Parliament, three actors, a clutch of poets and writers and I don’t know how many artists at her party?”
“And not one other sixteen-year-old!” Nolly turned to Maisie, giggling. Maisie thought that she was most like her sister when she laughed.
Georgina took up the story. “We decided to do a river play—all of us.”
Maisie shook her head. “What’s a river play?”
“A play on the river! Seriously, we had to compose a play that could be acted from the rowing boats, so we thought it would be a good idea to plunder Viking history.”
“Pity we didn’t know your friend Stig, then, isn’t it?”
“Now then…” Piers cautioned his eldest daughter, concerned that such a remark might annoy Georgina, who just waved her hand as if swatting a fly.
“There we were, all dressed up in our finery, the actors in boats, thee-ing and thy-ing and throwing hysterical fits of dramatic art back and forth, and Nick decided, on the spur of the moment, to bring some realism into the play. Harry, dear Harry, had just mastered the recorder and had been cast as a court jester—he was always either the dog or the court jester—” Georgina could hardly speak for laughing, aided, thought Maisie, by another glass of the somewhat lethal damson wine.
Nolly continued where her sister left off. “So, Nick picked up Harry, saying, ‘I shall cast yonder servant into the sea!’ and threw him in the river. Well, of course, Harry went down like an anchor, and there was a bit of laughing, until Emma screamed from the bank, which reminded us that he couldn’t swim! Very stupid, when I come to think of it.”
“Anyway, Nick leaped into the water—which wasn’t that deep—and pulled out poor spluttering Harry.” Georgina was now in fits of laughter.
Piers smiled. “Maisie, this is the sort of high jinks our children got up to when they were younger—terrifying at times, thoroughly mischievous in hindsight, but good for a laugh later on.”
Maisie inclined her head and nodded agreement, though she wondered if Harry found the experience mischievous, in hindsight.
“And,” added Georgina, “I remember poor little wet Harry screaming, ‘I hate you, Nick, I hate you! Just you wait until I grow up!’ Which of course incited Nick to even more teasing, along the lines of ‘You and your army, eh, Harrykins?’”
The laughter subsided and Emma suggested retiring to the drawing room for coffee. As they relaxed in front of the fire, Emma brought out photograph albums, telling detailed stories of this event or that. Soon, however, the wine that had aided such mirth an hour earlier now rendered the group more than a little soporific.
Maisie returned to her room, warm and cozy as Gower had made up the fire before retiring. A hot-water bottle had been placed in the bed and an extra blanket folded across the counterpane. She undressed, put on the nightgown left by Georgina and snuggled under the covers. Before turning off the light, Maisie leaned back on the pillows and gazed at the golden threads of the spider’s web above. She found the Bassington-Hopes almost as intoxicating as Piers’s homemade wine, though she had taken only a few sips at dinner. She was warmed by the intimacy of their stories, the sharing of family events and photographs. But was she captivated by the color, by the sheer audacity of the family? And if so, could she be blindsided by them, unable to discern something important with her usual integrity?
It was clear that Nick Bassington-Hope was the blue-eyed boy of the family. And despite their differences, Maisie detected a respect between Noelle and Georgina, as if each held the other’s strength and bravery in some account. Though Noelle might have thought that Georgina took enormous risks, and clearly disapproved of her way of life, she was proud of her sister’s accomplishments as a journalist. For her part, Georgina may well be frustrated by her sister’s bossy behavior, the disapproval even of her parents, but she was filled with compassion for the woman who had lost her husband to war, the young man she clearly adored. Georgina, too, was a woman alone, and understood Noelle’s quest to rebuild her life, the need to fashion a future with financial security, with companionship and with meaning.
Noelle had been completely honest with Maisie about her ambitions for the estate, and her belief that they should use Nick’s legacy to fund repairs and an income foundation based upon more than the leased farms and proceeds from the sale of various crops. It was evident that she considered both Nick and Georgina “troublesome” and Harry a lost cause. A musician, if you please!
And as Maisie replayed each and every sentence in their conversation, along with an image of the way Noelle moved when she made a point, or waited for Maisie to complete a question, she was struck by the fact that the eldest sibling—the one who tried, with limited success, to rule the Bassington-Hope roost, who acted more like a matriarch than her mother—had, apparently, never asked to speak to the person who discovered Nick’s body, had held back from visiting the gallery and had declined the pilgrimage to a London mortuary to say that final farewell to her brother. While the older sister was recounting events at one of Nick’s exhibitions, Georgina—who was more than a little tipsy and leaning toward Maisie on the soft-cushioned settee—whispered, “She didn’t even come to see him at the chapel of rest.”
No, Maisie had not finished with “poor Nolly” yet, any more than she had with any of the Bassington-Hopes, Georgina included. And then there was Harry. What was it that Georgina’s father had said about his younger son, when they were looking at photographs taken of the children in the summer of 1914? It was when he pointed out the photograph of Noelle, Georgina, Nicholas and Harry, who was about twelve years of age at the time, some ten years younger than the twins, and about half Noelle’s age. “And there he is, bringing up the rear. Harry. Always behind, always on the edge, that’s Harry.”
Burrowing under the covers, Maisie pondered the words before sleep claimed her: Always behind, always on the edge, that’s Harry.
Eight