Going to the long study at the end of the gallery, which Mr. Nicholas and Miss Livia shared, Mrs. Trepol knocked and waited, then reached for the knob as she had twice before.
And then fright turned suddenly to terror. She quickly drew her hand back, bringing it to her flat chest almost protectively, her heart thudding uncomfortably beneath her fingertips.
She stood there for several seconds, staring at the shut door, her voice refusing to call Mr. Nicholas’ name, her hand refusing to reach again for the brass knob.
Whatever was behind that door, it was something she couldn’t face, not alone, not with her heart hammering like it was going to jump out of her chest and run away.
She turned and fled down the stairs, stumbling on the old, worn treads, nearly falling headfirst in her haste, thinking only of the safety of the kitchen but not stopping there, rushing down the passage, on into the early sunlight and back the way she’d come, toward the village and Dr. Hawkins. Only then did she remember her coat, but nothing would have taken her back into that house. Shivering, on the verge of tears, driven by uncertainty, she ran heavily and awkwardly through the gardens, heedless of the cabbages, and towards the copse of trees where the path to the village began.
What was left of the family gathered in the drawing room for a drink when everyone else had finally gone home, but conversation was stilted, uneasy, as if they were strangers meeting for the first time and had yet to find common ground. The truth was, they felt like strangers. In the circumstances. Unsettled, uncomfortable. Isolated by their thoughts.
Then Stephen said abruptly, “Why do you suppose they did it?”
There was an odd silence. No one, thank God, had asked that all the long day! Not through the services nor the burials nor the reception at the Hall afterward, where friends and villagers had mingled, talking in subdued voices. Remembering Olivia and Nicholas, recalling some small incident or ordinary encounter, a conversation—all safely in the past. Avoiding the how and why of death, as if by tacit agreement. Avid curiosity dwelt in their eyes, but they were sensitive to the delicacy of the situation. Suicides.
No one had spoken of the poems, either.
Susannah said quickly, “What business is it of ours? They’re dead. Let that be the end of it.”
“Good God, Nicholas and Olivia were your brother and sister—”
“Half brother and sister!” she retorted, as if that might distance her from real pain.
“All right, then, half brother and sister! Haven’t you even wondered about it? Don’t you feel anything?”
“I feel grateful that they could be buried with Mother in the family vault,” Susannah answered. “Thanks to the rector’s kindness! In the old days, it wouldn’t have been allowed, you know that. Suicides weren’t buried in the churchyard, much less in the crypt! And we’d have been ostracized along with them. It’s still bad enough, God knows. London will be an ordeal, facing all my friends, knowing pity’s behind their sympathy—” She stopped, unwilling to lay her emotions out, raw and painful, for the others to paw over. “I don’t want to talk about it! What we’ve got to face now is, what’s to become of the house?”
Daniel said, “I’d always understood it was left to the survivors to sell.” He glanced around the room. Susannah. Rachel. Stephen. Himself. He was Susannah’s husband, but he’d always been treated as one of the family. That had been a source of great pride to him. With feelings running so high over the Troubles in Ireland, he might have been seen as less, well, acceptable socially, without the Trevelyan connection behind him. Not that the Trevelyans were so high and mighty, but they were old blood, respected. His eyes moved on. Cormac. Olivia and Nicholas’d left Cormac out of their wills. Daniel had found himself wondering, sometimes, who Cormac’s Irish mother had been—if it had made a difference. Cormac was a FitzHugh, but not a Trevelyan. Not Rosamund’s child. Nor wed to one of Rosamund’s children. Nor, like Rachel, a cousin on the Marlowe side.
Rachel said, “Yes, that’s what I’d been told. Unless they changed their minds. At the end.” As they’d changed their minds about living ... She took a deep breath and refused to think about it. And instead found herself listening again. To the sounds of the house. Since she’d walked through the door two days ago, she’d felt it. Swallowing her, drawing the very breath from her body. Frightening her with a stillness that wasn’t stillness ...
Stephen said, moving his cane along the pattern of the Persian carpet’s intertwined medallions. “Well, I for one know what I think we should do. We should turn this place into a memorial. A museum in Livia’s memory.”
Susannah stared at him in surprise.
Cormac said, “Don’t be ridiculous! It’s the last thing she’d have wanted! Olivia spent her entire life hiding from people. Do you think she’d be pleased to have strangers wandering about in here now?” He moved gracefully around the room, tall and oddly beautiful in a very masculine way.
“It isn’t up to you,” Stephen retorted. He tried not to watch. He tried not to resent that grace. And couldn’t help it. The war had left him with half a foot. And this damned cane. Trenchfoot and gangrene, for God’s sake, not honorable wounds! No more long walks over the Downs, no more tennis, no more dancing, no more riding to hounds. He could still bowl at cricket, but awkwardly, terrified he’d lose his balance and fall flat on his face.
“All the same, Cormac’s right,” Rachel said. “I can’t imagine this place a museum. Livia would feel it was a betrayal.”
“Think of the cost,” Daniel added. “You’d need money for upkeep, repairs, staff. A trust of some sort. Olivia may have been famous, but she wasn’t that rich! In her own right, I mean.”
“We could afford it,” Stephen persisted. “Or perhaps the National Trust would be interested.”
“Not without a handsome endowment,” Cormac replied, stopping by the windows, his back to them. “It would take more than three quarters of your inheritance.”
“What are you saying? That we divide up the furniture— the sideboard for me, the piano for you, and who’s going to take the grandfather’s clock?—then sell the house and grounds? Pretend Olivia and Nicholas never existed, that the family—what’s left of it—doesn’t care?” Stephen was steadily losing his temper.
“You want a museum to your own memory, not hers,” Susannah said suddenly. “It’s your immortality you’re thinking about, don’t pretend it isn’t!”
“Mine?”
“Yes, yours! The war’s changed you, Stephen—and not for the better. Oh, I’ve heard you at dinners since she was found out, simpering when someone asks who the love poems were written about. You think it’s you, her darling, her favorite!” There was heavy sarcasm in her quiet voice. He’d been Mother’s favorite too. He was Susannah’s twin—and always so much more than her equal.
“Well, what if they were written about me? I’ve as much right as any of you to think what I please. You’re greedy, that’s what it is, wanting the money, wanting every penny you can squeeze. And that’s why she left her literary estate to me. A pity she didn’t include the house as well!”
“Who died last?” Rachel put in diffidently, not sure she wanted to know. “If it was Nicholas, then it’s his will we’re haggling over, not hers.”
“They were the same. Everything to each other, and if that failed, the poems to Stephen, and the house to the four survivors, jointly,” Cormac told her over his shoulder. There was no resentment in the level voice that he hadn’t been included.