Page 124 of The English Wife

“You needn’t show me the way, Mrs. Van Duyvil. I know it already.” Giles Lacey smiled a wolf’s smile. “This is, after all, a copy of my house.”

“An improved copy.” Janie watched her mother struggling to maintain a pleasant countenance. After a day of Giles Lacey, even her mother’s vaunted control was wearing thin. “Without the inconveniences of the original.”

Janie was beginning to wish she had followed Mr. Burke’s advice and taken a train back to town. Snow had been falling all day, light flakes at first, and then heavier. It couldn’t be past three, but dusk was already beginning to fall, the uncertain light turning the snow-covered topiary into shambling snowmen, advancing on the house, pace by pace.

The temperature hadn’t risen, but the winds had, rattling the casement windows and finding the cracks in the masonry. Her mother was wrong. Mr. Pruyn had done far too faithful a job of replicating Lacey Manor, leaks and all. Baronial mansions might be all very well for show, but they weren’t very comfortable to live in with the mercury dropping well below zero.

“That,” said Giles Lacey, holding the door for Mrs. Van Duyvil, “is only because I refused to sell the original.”

“Bats in the belfry and all?” suggested Anne lazily, but there was a nervous energy about her that belied her languid air. The look she directed at the backs of her aunt and their guest was decidedly inimical.

“The belfry was torn down in 1648,” said Giles Lacey, in what was clearly a sore point. “A little matter of unpleasantness with some humorless souls in Parliament. And we didn’t have bats.”

“Everyone has bats,” said Anne flatly. “Some are just … battier than others.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Anne.” Mrs. Van Duyvil swept into the small parlor with a rustle of taffeta and a tinkle of jet beads. She was in high dudgeon at the prospect of being forced to take dinner in the breakfast room, the dining room having been so cold that a frost had formed on the soup at lunch. “We’ve never had bats on Fifth Avenue.”

“No, of course not,” murmured Anne, crossing into the small parlor, Janie behind her. “They wouldn’t dare, would they?”

Anne reminded Janie of the Nubian lion in the menagerie in Central Park, pacing warily in its cage, swishing its tail at perceived threats, ready to pounce if necessary. Because she also suspected Giles Lacey? Or because she feared being discovered? Hell hath no fury, Burke had said, and while it might be a cliché, clichés were clichés for a reason.

Or she might just be building a mountain out of a perfectly humdrum molehill. Anne and her mother had always sniped at each other. Being snowed into a Gothic replica was enough to make anyone edgy.

Janie coughed as she took a well-upholstered chair at the back of the room. The smoke from the fire wasn’t rising properly, making her feel as though she were being slowly kippered.

Mrs. Van Duyvil looked at the fire with disfavor. “This is unacceptable.”

Contrary to her expectations, the fire refused to reform its behavior.

“Mrs. Gerritt says we haven’t enough coal for the larger parlors.” Anne draped herself over one of the sofas farthest from the fire. “The roads are blocked. The coal men can’t make their deliveries.”

“Ridiculous,” pronounced Mrs. Van Duyvil. “And when it runs out, what then? Are we meant to take an ax to the movables?”

“I would start with that table,” said Giles Lacey, gesturing to a Louis XIV commode dripping with ormolu. “All that gold is hurting my eyes.”

“That,” snapped Mrs. Van Duyvil, “is a historic piece.”

“Historically commissioned by Bay,” Anne contributed from her spot on the sofa.

“No one,” said Mrs. Van Duyvil with a repressive glance at her niece, “is throwing anything on the fire.”

“Like a great big pyre…,” Anne murmured. When Mrs. Van Duyvil glared at her, she said, “Well, it would be fitting, wouldn’t it? Like a Viking chieftain being burned with his ship. Was it the Vikings who did that? I wouldn’t remember. Bay would know. Or are we not meant to speak of Bay?”

Mrs. Van Duyvil didn’t answer. She only paced on and on: from fire to window to chair and back again, her skirts rustling, her beads glowing dully in the red light of the lamps. Her hands plucked at the brooch at her neck, a mourning brooch, set with pale gold hair. Bay’s? Or the boys who hadn’t lived for Janie to meet them?

Janie couldn’t blame her mother for being restless. She could see Bay in every cartouche on the wall, every fold of the curtains. His shadow stretched over them like an extra person in the room. This house was Bay’s creation, even more than it was Annabelle’s, every piece chosen by Bay, and nowhere more so than this parlor. Janie half expected to hear Bay’s step behind her, to turn and find him standing in the doorway, watching them all. Not a ghost, but Bay himself, as he had been.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have had quite so much of Mrs. Gerritt’s venison in bayberry sauce.

“Shall we play cards?” suggested Anne. “Or would you prefer charades, Mr. Lacey?”

Janie rose from her chair in the corner. “I’ll just go to the nursery and see how Viola and Sebastian are getting on.”

“We can’t play bridge without a fourth.” Anne rose from the sofa with surprising alacrity. “If you must go, I’ll go with you.”

“Janie can go.” Mrs. Van Duyvil turned to the long French windows looking out over the river, one hand touching the bunched fabric of the red velvet drapes. Her knuckles were white against the rich material. “We must take care with Bay’s son.”

And what of Bay’s daughter? Janie thought. It wasn’t malicious, she knew. It was just the way her mother was. One took one’s family as one found them. Or so she kept telling herself. It was becoming harder and harder to believe it.