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And ours.
Yes, I was more concerned about the Alcotts than about their supposedly haunted country seat.
Them and us…we were not a good mix.
Dad had moved Portia and me to England twenty years ago. Although I went home frequently for visitations with Mom—and so Portia could have some sort of mother figure, I talked Dad into letting her go with me—for all intents and purposes, we’d never left.
We were still proud Americans and the beneficiaries of massive inheritances of new money. My mother, Dad’s first castoff, had been and still was a schoolteacher. Portia’s mother, castoff two, had been an incorrigible gold digger.
And then there was Lou, who was only five years older than me.
This sojourn felt more like Lou and I had been called in as reinforcements for a week in the English countryside at the very famous home of a very wealthy and illustrious family.
But nevertheless, we were still outnumbered.
And if you believed in that kind of thing, outclassed.
In other words, I was feeling some anxiety too.
It didn’t help that we’d left the motorway forty-five minutes ago. We’d then turned off the A road twenty minutes ago, and not onto a B road, but a coiling, thin ribbon of C road. We hadn’t passed a town or village in miles. And according to the satnav, we had another twenty-six minutes on this lane, twisting through…nothing.
This was a long way from anything—and call me a city girl (which I was)—I didn’t like it.
Lou grew quiet along with me.
And we both (for my part, since I was driving, it was intermittently) watched the arrow on the satnav glide along the snaking road as we kept track of the countdown to arrival.
It was 2:37 and we were to arrive at 3:03.
We broke out of the hedgerows at 2:55 and into rolling countryside covered in green, with vast splotches of purple heather and jutting masts of gray, lichen-covered rocks punctuated here and there by an irregular tree malformed by wind.
Add some mist and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a frock-coated Heathcliff brooding astride his horse in the distance.
At 3:00, the moor gave way to a more cultivated and arboreal landscape.
At 3:02, Duncroft House became visible.
And…wow.
Okay.
Maybe Buckingham and Windsor were the biggest, shiniest jewels in England’s crown.
But in my opinion, Duncroft shone brightly as jewel number three.
It was beautiful.
It was huge.
It was sprawling.
And it was overpowering.
“Right. Now I’m nervous,” I admitted.
Lou reached out and squeezed my knee.
I drove my Mercedes between the tall, black, elaborate iron gates accented copiously by gold and attached on either side to a ten-foot-tall wall made of thick Yorkstone.
