"Of course. Would you like to look around for a little and then come downstairs?"
"No, do let me come and help-well, at least talk to you while you make it."
The kitchen, unlike many of its kind, was bright and cheerful, its walls crowded with pots and pans and crockery. French windows opened onto a flagged courtyard, with an expanse of grass and shrubbery beyond. She made Harry sit at the scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the room, and took down an apron, thinking, he may as well get used to seeing me in it. The words passed through her mind so naturally that it took several seconds for the implication to surface.
"I say, this is very jolly," said Harry, "Er-do you do everything for yourselves?"
"We do all our own cooking, since Mrs Green died. She was our housekeeper for ever and ever, practically one of the family. Molly-a girl from the village-comes in to help with the washing and cleaning; and Mr Grimes does the garden."
She answered his questions almost mechanically while she worked, shaken by the speed with which her emotions had run ahead of her. Yet it did no good to tell herself, But I hardly know him, or, We've only just met: already she felt as if they had been intimate for a long time. She carried the tray out to her favourite seat at the far edge of the lawn, where she learned that he had grown up in Plymouth and had one sister, who was now married and living in Canada. His father had died before the war; his mother five years ago; he had lived in London ever since, and was sharing rooms with a friend in Coptic Street, close by the Museum. He was just thirty years old, and-according to every indication she could divine-quite unattached. Her own history seemed to lead quite naturally into that of her grandmother, and so, while the shadows lengthened around them, she came to tell him almost everything she knew about Imogen de Vere and Henry St Clair and the evil that had overtaken them, and the strange story of the bequest, praying, every so often, that Uncle Theodore was giving Beatrice and Aunt Una dinner in town. Though it was after sunset before Harry Beauchamp said reluctantly that he supposed he really must be getting along, the air was still warm as she walked with him to the station, where they continued talking through the open window of his carriage until the train pulled away from the platform.
Cordelia was quite unable to conceal the fact that something momentous had happened, and before Harry's return she had confided her feelings to her aunt and uncle (though not to Beatrice, who, to her immense relief, would be spending the weekend in London with an old friend from school). To distract herself during the interval, she spent a great deal of time in the room with the pictures, thinking about how Henry St Clair's studio might have looked when he was painting her grandmother's portrait in the summer of 1896. Uncle Theodore, with some misgivings, despite her assurance that the trustees would not object to the bequest being housed in two adjacent rooms, agreed to let them store some of the furniture in the empty bedroom next door. He was plainly troubled, not only by her having formed an attachment to the lawyer representing the trust, but by her determination to-in her own phrase-restore the studio.
"I just feel this is something I must do," she said to him, struggling to explain why it seemed so important. "It will be-it will be like Henry St Clair painting his exorcisms. The room has always been left as Ruthven de Vere would have wanted it-everything cluttered in a heap and shut away in the dark. If we make it look as if-well as if Henry could come back and work in it-light and airy and clean-then de Vere will have lost his power over us."
"But my dear-you don't expect him back, do you?"
"If we can find him-I mean if he is still alive, yes. Don't you think it would be wonderful? And then we would have undone some of the wrong my grandfather did him. Just to restore the studio will be a start."
"I fear that only trouble will come of it. This Henry Beauchamp-"
"Harry, uncle-"
"Harry, then-seems to be taking a very cavalier view of his responsibilities to the trust. If we lost-that is to say, if you lost your income through some breach of the trust-well, we should have to sell this house."
"I know Harry would not put us at risk, uncle; you will see for yourself when you meet him. And please, please promise me that you will do your very best to like him."
"I shall, my dear, for your sake. But I wish you would leave that room alone."
Walking back with Harry from the station on Saturday morning, Cordelia was quite overcome with shyness; he too seemed ill at ease, and she performed the introductions wishing she had never said a word about him. Though she could tell he was making a good impression upon her aunt and uncle (she had intimated to Harry that the subject of the pictures had best be left until later on), her discomfort grew worse in their presence, so much so that she was compelled, several times during lunch, to hide in the kitchen on the pretext of arranging dishes she had actually prepared beforehand.
Yet as soon as they entered the studio, their intimacy was restored as completely as if no time had passed since they left it four days ago. Harry seemed to understand, without her having to explain any further, exactly why she wanted to restore it, and to agree entirely with her intuition as to what ought to go where. And he did not try to prevent her from lifting things, but worked alongside her on equal terms. Getting covered in dust and grime while hauling furniture about also helped to disguise her renewed attraction to him; it was natural that her colour should be high, and that they should touch frequently; and as the afternoon went on, she felt increasingly certain that all of her feeling was returned. At one point she caught herself thinking that if they were to marry and live in London, the pictures would go with her. A few moments later, Harry had remarked, seemingly out of the blue, "of course if you were ever to move to London, the pictures would come with you; you could have a room like this, you know, your own private gallery, and invite people to see them. There's nothing in the trust to prevent it." He spoke with such warmth that she felt sure his thought was running beside hers.
By the end of the day, they had sorted through everything that had been stacked in the centre of the floor. The bed now stood beneath the windows; Cordelia had been amazed to discover that the bedding, despite thirty years in storage, had escaped the attentions of moths, silverfish, and damp, and was only a little musty. She had placed the table and two upright chairs between the bed and the door, and a small sofa against the wall to the right of the doorway. An empty easel stood in the middle of the room, with Henry St Clair's palette-tray attached to it. The tubes of colour had, of course, long since dried up, but she set them out anyway, along with his brushes and palette knives and other implements. Some of the unfinished or scraped-out pictures, along with pieces of board and canvas and framing were still stacked along the other two walls, so that it would look as much as possible like a real working studio.
They had made a preliminary selection of about twenty finished paintings for display, so that the pictures would no longer be jammed together. Cordelia had wanted to consign all of the exorcisms to the room next door, but Harry persuaded her that even the darkest aspects of his vision ought to be represented, and so several of the night scenes remained, along with "The Drowned Man", resting on its lectern in the corner opposite the door.
With everything swept and polished, and light filling the room, she felt that the malignant spirit of Ruthven de Vere had at last been banished for good. They had looked through every box and bundle and found nothing sinister; other than bedding and linen, the various boxes and bundles yielded only more painting materials, including a set of carpenters tools, presumably for fashioning frames. Aside from "The Drowned Man", the only object that Cordelia had felt slightly uneasy about retaining was a box-or rather a cube, since there seemed to be no way of opening it-made up of panels of dark polished wood, about fifteen inches square. It was not very heavy, and clearly hollow. The panels gave slightly when you pressed them, and if you rocked it to and fro, you could hear-at least Cordelia was half-persuaded she could hear-a very soft rustling noise. But it was so elegantly made that she decided to keep it in the corner nearest the sofa.