The number of cars parked around Inglewood House has increased since the Sunday four days ago when Jane climbed the stone wall and snuck into the house with Sam. The church parking lot is full, even though there’s no service, and the two gardening company Transits that usually sit at the mouth of the old servant’s tunnel are boxed in by a long moving truck stationed at the foot of the front lawn. Two movers in white coveralls heft a sideboard down its ramp.
Jane hasn’t asked Blake anything about the Trust’s work because she is supposed to be involved in it. He’d asked her how long they thought the first stage would take and she’d said, “You know what these things are like …” fingering the dark fringe of his hair and ignoring his blank expression, the one that said, no, he didn’t.
The movers toggle the sideboard back and forth, shifting the weight of its heavy pedestals between them, and Jane follows them up the walkway. Just before she reaches the front steps and the Doric columns that flank them, she hesitates, roots around in her bag for her notepad and pen, flipping the pages over until she comes to a sheet of writing with the word Farrington underlined at the top. If someone asks her what she’s doing on the property she can always pretend to be a grad student doing research. The movers in front of her have stopped at the open door to finesse the angle of the sideboard.
“No, no. To your right,” the heavier-set of the two calls gruffly, and the sideboard shifts slightly.
“Got it,” the lankier one replies, and with the sideboard’s tall back perched at a precarious angle they inch inside the door and disappear around the corner into the entry hall.
Jane hesitates to follow them. She can hear the shuffle of their boots over the track of carpet laid down over the hardwood, the older of the two saying, “Easy, easy.” She can imagine the two of them tottering the sideboard past someone in the main hall whose job it is to check off all the chairs and desks and paintings; who would ensure that everything is deposited in the correct place. Someone who would know Jane has no right to be here. Her gaze drifts up to a heavy brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head — the very same one that Leeson would have rapped when the trio arrived here. This is where they stood, Jane thinks, this is the last place N was seen.
Over the past few days the main floor of the house has been filled with twice the amount of furniture that was here when Jane last wandered through it. Enormous desks, high-backed chairs and tables of every size and composition peek out from under sheets, blankets and plastic wrap; a new row of boxes and crates lines the main hall. Jane peeks around the corner into the library and is almost run over by the two movers who, released of the burden of the sideboard, are heading out again, the lean one laughing at something the older one said. They stop when they see Jane, as if the joke is inappropriate.
“Miss,” the lanky one says. He nods courteously as they pass through the entry, and then picks up the conversation again.
The library is half assembled: the furniture still draped but put in place so that Jane can make out the arrangement of a long sofa, three high-backed chairs and a screen; the round reading table where the butler would have placed the morning paper near the window, a pianoforte in the corner along with a stool with leaf-scroll feet. One of the armchairs, a bird’s-eye maple with brocaded yellow upholstery, is uncovered as if someone has just been sitting there, its fabric worn gently from use. There’s a trace of perfume in the room, and although Jane knows it probably belongs to the archivist she’s looking for, it’s floral enough that she can imagine it belonging to Prudence or coming in gusts from the rose bushes outside.
Another set of movers, younger this time, comes into the library. Each of them is carrying a wood-frame box, the kind you move paintings in. They set the boxes down gently in the corner, nod at Jane and then traipse out again, their voices, the easy chitchat of “Are you going to Jack’s after?” echoing down the hall. When they leave, Jane can hear the sound of someone typing. She follows it around the corner and through an open door into the old dining room where she finds a woman with dark hair cut into a fashionable bob sitting at a two-hundred-year-old table and pecking away on a laptop. When she glances up and sees Jane she jumps a bit, puts her hand over her chest and says, “Mother of God, you scared me.”
It’s almost four p.m., and even though she’s finishing up for the day, Gwendolyn is friendly. The references that give Jane some semblance of authority — Miranda at the records office, and William Eliot in London, who Jane says “is helping me with some research”—immediately put Gwendolyn at ease. She unwinds the woolly pink scarf she’s been wearing to make up for the cold of the room and says, “Miranda’s a laugh, isn’t she?” as if she assumes Jane has spent time with the woman socially. It turns out that Gwen and Jane did their postgraduate studies at UCL two years apart and had a number of professors in common, though the ones Jane didn’t get on with Gwen liked, and one of those had recommended her for this job.
The request to look at Prudence Farrington’s diaries is simple enough, and William Eliot’s name seems to carry some weight. Gwen says she’ll have to check with her supervisor—“liability and all that,”—but that it ought to be fine so long as Jane has an LRO card and works with the material here, supervised. When Jane first mentioned the “diaries” Gwen’s gaze had drifted over to a locked filing cabinet on the wall, an ugly metal thing wedged against the cherry blossom wallpaper beside two modern steel shelves crammed with cardboard boxes. “We’re not very organized yet, we just got electricity on Monday.” She points to the photocopier and fax machine sitting against a wall where the sideboard the movers carried in probably once stood. “I don’t think those have been plugged in yet. And we’re already two months behind. Anyway, do you want my mobile number or do you just want to stop in tomorrow to see if my supervisor at the Trust okays it?”
“Stopping in is fine.”
“Great, let’s say nine.”
Undressing that night in her room at the inn, Blake watching from where he’s flopped on the bed, Jane remarks that she hadn’t seen him on the Inglewood grounds when she looked from the library window.
Blake laughs. “I did go in. I was sent to the duck pond for fucking off, had to scrub my hands raw to get rid of the smell of Victorian goose shit.”
Jane pulls back the duvet and slips in beside him. He leans over and kisses her. After a minute he sits up and raises his hands, pretending he’s filming her, mimicking the crank style of an old-fashioned camera, one eye squinched shut as if with the other he’s looking through a lens.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to remember this.” He keeps filming.
“Remember what?”
“You, you idiot.” He drops the imaginary camera and kisses her eyelids, moves down her neck whispering into her skin, “Record, record, record.”
In the morning, just after eight, Jane slips out of bed to get something for breakfast — takeaway coffees, pastries. This is to avoid going through explanations again with Maureen: guests need to be booked in advance, paid for beforehand, their details taken so we know in an emergency who is staying in the rooms. Sam raises his head a few inches when she opens the door but he doesn’t get up, so she decides to leave him with Blake, who is snoring, slack-mouthed, into his pillow. She frames them there as she turns to go: Blake under the mountain of the duvet, Sam’s head pressed between his front paws at the foot of the bed, his white tail fanning out behind him.