“Or I could drive you,” Tom offered.
“Thank you.” Mrs. Malloy inclined her royal head and adjusted her robes. “But if it’s all the same with everyone we’ll leave things as planned. Suit you, Mrs. H?”
I told her I was ready when she was, to which she replied that first she needed to find her handbag. When this turned up alongside her chair, after being stepped on and subsequently picked up by Tom, she whispered in my ear that she could do with going to the lav before setting off. In fact, it would be a real treat. Betty, who obviously had good ears, encouraged her to go and freshen up. There were two powder rooms off the hall, she told us.
Lovely as these were likely to be, we were not destined to use them at that time. Ariel insisted on escorting us to our assigned bedrooms, each of which had its adjoining bathroom. Betty disappeared to have a word with Mrs. Cake. Ben and Tom went companionably outside to bring in the luggage from the Land Rover. And Ariel led Mrs. Malloy and me up the lovely curve of staircase, in the manner of a tour guide in the employment of the National Trust.
Looking at her prim self-important back, I took in the magnitude of what had happened to her. The sudden wealth, the move to splendid surroundings: yes, it all sounded wonderfully exciting in theory. But to suddenly find herself a rich kid without having been brought up to it, her former life swept away as if rolled up in newspaper and put out in the dustbin, people treating her differently… it had to be overwhelming and possibly frightening.
We’ve all heard of people whose lives have been ruined by too much money and insufficient guidance to keep them anchored to reality. Then again, might their problems also be blamed on personality flaws? Was there something fundamentally malicious about Ariel’s peeking glances and frequently voiced dislike of Betty? Should I feel sorry for her or be warily on my guard against her schemes? Both, I determined, thinking about my own children and how I always needed to keep one step ahead of them, however dear their little faces and sweet their voices.
We were now walking down a long gallery with the banister railing to our left overlooking the great chandelier-lit pool of the hall below. There were doors to our right, interspersed with portraits and gilded electric lamps on the wall. At a word from Ariel, Mrs. Malloy scuttled into the room that was to be hers, heading directly for the lav, tossing the information over her shoulder that she would wait for me at the top of the stairs, but I wasn’t to rush because she planned on enjoying the moment.
Sincerely hoping she would find the lav provided a throne worthy of her, I followed Ariel past two more doors until she came to one she opened for me. But we didn’t go inside immediately. I had halted before a portrait. Given the subject’s hairstyle, it would appear to have been painted some thirty or forty years previously. It was of a lovely young woman, seated at a small table, looking out a window. Winsome, I thought; that was the word for her: fine-boned, shadowy-eyed, and graceful, even captured as she was in immobility. The turn of her head, the pensive gaze, conveyed a quiet sorrow.
“She looks like she’s watching for someone, hoping he’ll come.” Ariel’s voice made me jump. “Well, it has to be the boyfriend, doesn’t it?”
“You think so?”
“She wouldn’t have that dippy look on her face if it was the milkman or just any old person, would she? I suppose you’ve guessed who she is.”
“Lady Fiona?”
“She asked if she could leave the portrait here until she finds somewhere permanent to live. I must say she’s not bad-looking even now. Her hair’s still fair, not much gray at all really. Betty thinks she’s too skinny for her height and age, but she would; she wants everybody to be fatter than she is. That’s why she’s always trying to get me to stuff myself with food. Especially things I hate, like tapioca and rice puddings.”
I let this pass. “You think her ladyship is looking out that window, hoping to see Mr. Gallagher come riding up on his white horse?”
“No, I think it was the other one.”
“Who?”
“The man she was madly in love with, the man her parents wouldn’t let her marry because he was too common. Mrs. Cake told me about him. She’s a great one for reminiscing about the past: quite fun, really. She said the two of them met on the sly down by the old mill and used to hide love letters in a hollow tree, just like in a book. Only to be really exciting, they’d have had to run off and get married and then been found out and dragged home-”
“By her hard-hearted parents, blast their interference!” I thought of Tom’s parents, who had objected to his first love on religious grounds.
“And he’d have been murdered by them.” Ariel was warming to her theme.
“Or the jealous rival. That would be Mr. Gallagher. Oh, the horror of it!” Obviously, I was also getting caught up in the story.
“Lady Fiona would never have recovered from the tragedy.” Ariel reclaimed her narrative.
“Whatever really happened she appears to have done so, at least sufficiently to marry Mr. Gallagher.”
“That would have been on the rebound. Mrs. Cake says that one person who didn’t attend the wedding was Miss Pierce-”
“Nanny?”
“That’s right. She claimed to have the flu, but I bet that was an act. I think she hates Lady Fiona. You can see it in her eyes, even when she’s pretending to talk nicely about her. She didn’t think her good enough for her Nigel. Mrs. Cake says the title and the fortune didn’t cut any ice with Nanny. Only a princess would have been up to scratch, and there’d probably have been something wrong with her.”
“Maybe what Nanny wanted was to keep Nigel all to herself in the nursery.”
“Ugh!” Ariel pulled a face. “That’s really creepy.”
As was the idea of Lady Fiona murdering her husband. I kept this thought to myself while continuing to look at the face in the portrait. Surely it was a travesty to imagine that lovely girl committing so monstrous an act later in life. Giving myself a mental shake, I said cheerfully that Mrs. Cake sounded like a great conversationalist.
“Having lived in Milton Moor her whole life, she knows everyone in the area.”
“That helps.”
“She does know stuff. Like Sergeant Walters being too busy knitting to get married. And the butcher being a closet vegetarian. Anyway, I find it interesting. And there’s no one else for me to talk to around here. Mavis hardly ever looks up from her work.”
“There has to be an enormous amount for her to do.”
“Yes. It isn’t fair for Betty to say she’s useless.”
I kept my mouth shut. In former times a place of this size would have employed dozens of servants. Housekeeper, butler, footmen, upstairs and downstairs maids, boot boys… the list went on. Finding people eager to do that sort of work these days probably wasn’t easy. But that should have led Betty to value Mavis more highly. Were she and Tom reluctant to spend their newfound money on sufficient hired help? They’d managed to avoid paying for an interior designer, hadn’t they?
Ariel read my mind. “We do have a team of cleaners come in every other week for three days. They go through the whole place, except for the west wing; it’s shut off and there’s hardly anything in there. On the off week, it’s the gardening people. Betty didn’t want a lot of people underfoot all the time. Mavis is all right. I don’t see what’s wrong with her, except she’s so quiet. But Mrs. Cake is better. She says she has a soft heart and a fondness for romance, but she knows when it’s important to keep her mouth shut.”
“I hope she won’t feel that way when talking to me and Mrs. Malloy. Speaking of whom”-I reluctantly withdrew my gaze from the portrait-“it won’t do to keep her waiting when she’s eager to set off to see her sister.”