‘Secret passages?’ Beatrice and Bianca cried, in chorus, but in very different tones.
The youngest Constantine sister went on, ‘I’m sorry for interrupting you, ma’am, but I am sure I would like nothing better in the world than a secret passage. I propose to spend the rest of the morning looking for one; Cecilia, you must feel the same, so you may help me. Bea, I believe Mrs Pritty has prospective maids and other staff coming to be interviewed after breakfast, and clearly we can’t all be present or we would horrify them. Shall you and Miss Macintyre take charge of that? You are the eldest, after all; you can wear your spectacles. And in the intervals between maids, you can subtly ask if Mrs P knows of any secret rooms and so on. Get her talking about the history of the place. She’s lived here for so many years; she must know most about the house.’
Bea found this speech deplorably high-handed, but could not find anything else in it to argue with, and so, as soon as everyone had done eating, she headed off, with the old governess to the servants’ quarters. Both of them bore trays to clear away the breakfast crockery and cutlery; there was once again very little food left uneaten.
‘We should be methodical,’ Cecilia said. ‘Make a note of each chamber, describe it, and then we can also use the exercise to decide which rooms we shall use, and for what purpose, in the long term. I’ll get a pencil and a notebook, and a sewing tape for measuring.’
Two hours later, the girls were both dusty, several pages of Cecilia’s notebook had been filled, but no secret passage, priest’s hole or hidden chamber had been discovered. A brief moment of excitement had occurred in the library when one of the carved wooden decorative elements around the mantelpiece had been found to move under Bianca’s fingers.Thismustbeit!they both thought. She prodded and twisted with determination, and they both held their breath in great suspense when a section of the wall swung open at her touch, but what was revealed was only a small hidden compartment, perhaps a primitive sort of a strongbox. It was interesting, but disappointingly empty, and nothing larger than a kitten could ever have been hidden there. The back of it was solid brickwork, unplastered, concealing no more secrets. Bianca, refusing to be discouraged, pointed out that its existenceprovedearlier owners of the house had used the panelling for purposes of ingenious concealment, and might easily have created far larger spaces too, and it only wanted a little energy in looking for them. But nothing else came to light apart from dust and cobwebs.
Cecilia said gloomily that if there really were secret ways into the house from outside, they might be sealed with wedges that prevented them being accessed by any searchers. ‘I suppose the people who ruthlessly hunted down Catholic priests and other fugitives must have been far more expert than we are; surely hidden places must have been constructed so that people could lock themselves securely in and simply wait until the danger had passed before they emerged into safety.’
‘You may be right, but I absolutely refuse to believe that someone is now lurking in a secret chamber, and has been all night, waiting for us to go away,’ Bianca replied stoutly. ‘Such an idea will destroy all our pleasure in having inherited the house, and I simply will not countenance it. We are not characters inTheMysteriesofUdolpho, but modern women living in the nineteenth century. Let us strive to be sensible.’
Cecilia sighed and transferred a smear of dirt from her hand to her slightly clammy brow. ‘I think we should go outside and take some air. I can’t bear to start on the upstairs yet. I’m not even sure Iwantto find anything, or what we should do about it if we did. We haven’t explored the grounds at all since we arrived, and it’s a lovely day we’re missing. If you need a justification for Bea, in case she accuses us of flagging in our labours when she is working hard, we can look for secret entrances concealed by creepers and that sort of thing.’
They went out through the main door and turned right, with some obscure idea that one should not walk widdershins around a building even if it wasn’t a church. The climbing roses were not yet so fully in leaf and bud that they could have concealed a door, or anything much at all, but as Cecilia had said, other parts of the house were more thickly covered in great mats of ivy. It had plainly been cut back by Mr Fisk on the ground level not long since, so that it did not obscure any of the windows too much, but it was making vigorous encroachments even there, branches and glossy leaves reaching out and tapping at the glass; it could easily have covered a door.
The girls were dustier yet, with twigs and more cobwebs tangled in their dark hair, before they reached the back of the house overlooking the bay. They had discovered no secret portals, only a great quantity of scuttling spiders, dead leaves, and abandoned birds’ nests. And there were no signs of footprints or broken branches, nor anything else that might have revealed the recent presence of intruders. But then, the ground was dry, and might not have shown any marks.
‘It is a glorious view,’ Cecilia said, pausing to look out towards the shining sea. The day was sunny but breezy, and small white clouds were scudding across the sky like so many lively sheep. There was a wide gravel path, or what had once been a gravel path before the weeds had taken over, all the way round the building, and beyond it, an overgrown lawn that sloped down a short way to a stone balustrade. Wild rosebushes had seeded themselves here and there, threatening to turn the garden into even more of a wilderness, and eventually, no doubt to swallow the house entirely like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Their gowns could not well be any dirtier than they were already, and so they picked up their skirts to avoid snagging them on brambles and walked through the wet, tangled grass. When they reached the boundary wall, they stood together, enjoying the fresh air and looking out across the wide expanse of sand, water, and distant shores that was now revealed to them.
They discovered that there was a flight of steps leading down at one side, the bricks mossy and split in places, but still usable; they made their way carefully to the bottom and through more tussocky grass, along a narrow path apparently made by animals, towards the edge of the sand. Londoners that they were, the sea drew them with its unfamiliar grandeur of scale.
Cecilia shaded her eyes with her hand and looked about her. It was exhilarating, she found, to survey such a large and open scene, while feeling the wind tugging playfully at her braided hair and blowing her narrow skirts hard against her body. They were both hatless and coatless, out in public in some sense, but on the edge of their own land, no one could criticise them for it, or they need not care if they did; they owed explanations or excuses for their unladylike behaviour to precisely nobody. The thought was unexpectedly liberating.
‘I wonder if Mama did not come with us just so as to allow us this feeling of freedom?’ she mused. ‘The house is not hers but ours, and because she is not here, we need defer to no one in our management of it, or our general conduct, except each other. Most young women, and older women too, will never be independent of their parents unless they marry; our situation is entirely different and I am only now coming to realise it.’
‘If so, that was unusually tactful of Mama,’ Bianca said, her dark locks whipping about her face. ‘But her blunt speaking has always been in one cause: we’ve always known all she wanted for us was security, since she never had any herself, due to poor Papa’s unfortunate situation. And she is free of all such cares too now, for the first time in forever. She has her independent income from all of us, without having to depend on handouts from anybody, as is only right. I do wish we could have met Mrs Albery. We have a great deal to thank her for. And most of all, I am glad that she has put us in a position where we must not think of marriage or courtship for a year. That too is freeing, don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ Cecilia said slowly. ‘Of course, if one of us should wish to, such a restriction would be irksome, and a year seem long. But that seems unlikely at the moment, I agree, and I shall not worry about such a thing. It’s a responsibility too, though, you know – the freedom. Most girls who marry in our station in life do so at the urging of their friends and relations, because they know that their choices are limited. Ours are not. If we make bad decisions, we will only have ourselves to blame.’
13
Alistair Bartrum knew, as did half the county, that Mrs Albery’s heirs – or heiresses, he supposed they should be called – had arrived in Suffolk yesterday afternoon to take up residence in their new home; whether this was to be a permanent arrangement or not, nobody knew yet. They were reported to be handsome girls all three, with fine figures, as his mother had recounted to him, smiling innocently, over breakfast.
If confirmation of their alien presence had been needed, he had observed lights in several upstairs windows of the Hall last night, for the first time since Aunt Augusta’s death. And now as he walked, he could see two of them upon the beach. He was too far away to be able to distinguish their features, but it must be them, taking stock of all they now possessed, and of the fine setting for it. He could tell, or thought he could, that they were youngish, and dark, dressed in hypocritical mourning – where had they been when Augusta Albery was alive and lonely? – rather than bright spring colours. One of them was grubbing about in the sand, stirring it with her foot and looking down, and the other was standing straight and tall, looking out at the sea, a raised hand shielding her eyes against the bright sun. If one were an artistic sort of fellow, which he emphatically was not, she would have made a fine picture, no doubt with some mawkish title to imply romantic sentiment.Watching For His Sail,The Young Widow’s Patient Vigil, or some such nonsense.
Alistair scowled as an unwelcome stab of interest – call it no more than that – shot through him. The fierce wind off the sea was plastering the young woman’s dark-grey gown about her body, revealing, even at this distance, more of her feminine form than he wished to have forced on his attention. And yet he could not look away; he found himself transfixed.
He supposed he should be grateful that such base animal feeling had not, in fact, been taken from him along with so much else. This was its first appearance in several months, his old acquaintance, sexual desire, and he had been so low in spirits during all that time that he had not even mustered the energy to mourn its passing. But he had no intention of giving in to such curiosity now, since there could be no good outcome for it. His mother would be calling on these young women soon enough, no doubt, as he’d told that impertinent cub Seb Pallant the other day. Mere civility obliged Mrs Bartrum to seek their acquaintance, even if curiosity and neighbourly kindness combined had not urged her on. He had absolutely no intention of doing the same. They could be as handsome and desirable as they wished, all three, and his mother could and no doubt would torment him past the point of endurance with talk of them and their many good qualities; still he had no desire to harbour the least spark of interest in them.
And was it not just as well that he was so resolved? Despite his parent’s doting fondness, he could not suppose himself any longer a man likely to catch the attention of a woman in a romantic fashion, least of all some new-minted heiress who’d be run after and flattered by half the world. His fiancée – hisformerfiancée – had made it sufficiently clear how repellent he must now be to any woman of sensibility, not in words but in the way she shrank from him in revulsion, so altered as he was; it would be nothing but self-lacerating folly even to think of another woman in that manner again. If he wanted feminine company these days, he would have to pay for it, and even then…
Alistair grunted and stumped on across the sand, concentrating on keeping his footing between the hard ridges and sudden treacherous pools, slippery with seaweed. The fact that he knew he was sinking into a funk of unattractive self-pity again didn’t, apparently, make it any easier to prevent. At least he was alive, unlike a lot of men, good friends of his and enemies both. At least he had two legs, more or less, and his eyesight, and the use of his hands and, apparently, various other previously important parts. He should be grateful, but wasn’t: yet another thing to reproach himself with.
His mother had said, gently, that any woman who would be put off by his scars, gained in honourable service, was a woman who hadn’t deserved his love in the first place, and he was therefore well rid of her and free to find a better mate who would appreciate him as he deserved. His betrothed Miss Whitehouse’s character had been sadly shallow, it was now clear to his indignant mama, and he had had a lucky escape. But mothers had to say that sort of thing to their children, he supposed, and possibly even believed them.
Thank God, at least, that he and Charlotte hadn’t already been married, as they easily might have been. Then she’d have been stuck with him for life, however much she’d hated the idea: a highly unpleasant thought for both of them. Just a month or so ago, she had wed, with what some people might have considered indecent haste after the breaking of their own engagement, her new husband a frippery fellow in the Seventh Hussars, who no doubt looked wonderful in his showy gold-laced uniform. She had not lost her taste for military men; it was justhimshe didn’t care for the look of any more. He could only wish them very happy. Of course, if the bridegroom were himself to be wounded in the coming hostilities, as he easily might be, that would serve her… but that was an unworthy thought, born of sick jealousy. He used to be a better person than that.
No, he would live and die single, and avoid – as should be easy enough – making the acquaintance of any fashionable young women who must look on him with pity at best – not that being the object of pity was something a man of spirit could be expected to welcome – and white-faced horror at worst. Doubtless, the Pallant brothers would be delighted to find themselves without local rivals in the heiress stakes; good luck to the whole damn pack of them. It was none of his affair and, no matter how hard his mother tried, he would not permit her to make it so.
14
Cecilia’s eyes had not been focused on any particular detail in the scene spread out before her, but some part of her mind had been aware for a while that there was a figure, not terribly far away, serving to add human interest – a man in a long, flapping greatcoat, slowly walking along parallel to the shore. And then he was gone with shocking suddenness. He must, she realised, have fallen, and as a second or two ticked by, it became clear that he wasn’t clambering up again and brushing himself off. Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he had suffered some grave attack of illness, or broken a limb. She picked up her skirts and ran.
Bianca, who had been wandering along, kicking at stones, shells and pieces of driftwood in a brown study, remained frozen in incomprehension for a moment, and then came hurtling after her, not wasting her breath on asking why they were now haring across the beach like a pair of zanies, as Bea would have done. They were hampered by their gowns, which were emphatically not designed for vigorous exercise, and by the pools of seawater they had to splash through, thoroughly soaking their muslins, but in a few minutes, they reached their destination.
There was a tall man lying immobile, on his back. He must have fallen face down and then managed to roll over, so at least he was not insensible or dead; his coat was wet and sandy, and he was looking up at them through ridiculously long, dark lashes as though he hated them.
