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We’d officially arrived at Duncroft.
And I wasn’t feeling sterling thoughts.
Because the second we drove through those gates, a shiver slithered down my spine.
Two
THE PEARL ROOM
Lou took her first hit within moments of our arrival.
I’d swung the car around the drive made of carefully-edged and manicured blond gravel to come to a stop at the bottom of the wide front steps. We’d both gotten out of the car to see a tall, handsome young man wearing crisp, khaki pants, whiter-than-white trainers, and a light-blue, long-sleeved polo shirt bounding down toward us.
We’d also gotten out to be dwarfed into insignificance by the house and to be viciously bitten by the chill of a cloudless, autumnal, northern English afternoon.
The house had four wings in a cross shape, that being the Scottish cross, diagonal. It was said, the middle intersection was where the fortress had been and under which the bones of the pretender still lay.
It was four stories tall, a mix of red brick and Yorkstone, with two turrets at the ends of each leg of the cross, eight in total, all topped with green domes of tarnished copper. The rest of the roof was dark slate. There were parts of the structure on the ground floor covered in trailing wisteria. There were enumerable peaks and chimneys and gables. And in the center flew the Union Jack, underneath it, a light-blue flag with a golden shield on it.
It was sprawling, stately, handsome, but most of all, imposing.
It was not the genteel country seat of a long-standing aristocratic line.
It screamed wealth, importance…dominance.
It said, You don’t belong here.
The king himself could stand where I was standing and maybe hesitate before he approached those wide steps.
The young man made it to us, and I saw there was a logo stitched into his shirt over his left chest. A golden shield, the same as on the flag flying above us. It looked to be a profusion of sprigs of heather adorning the top edges, the requisite helmet from a suit of armor at the top middle, and in the shield was the full body of a clawing wolf in profile.
He looked between the two of us and delivered Lou’s first blow.
“Mrs. Ryan, welcome.” He then turned to me. “Miss Ryan.”
Lou couldn’t quite hide the flinch.
Then again, from ages seventeen through twenty-five, she’d subsisted on coffee and cigarettes to keep her curve-less frame. As she aged, this turned to restrictive dieting and obsessive exercise, but neither of these done with a mind to health and nutrition, but instead keeping her size 0.
Because of this, her youthful glow and tremendous genes had slowly morphed to the look of desperation. Now, her forehead seemed too wide, her eyes too far apart, the rest of the features of her face scrunched beneath both, and nothing moved due to regular Botox injections.
She was still beautiful, she’d never not be (at least in my eyes), but she no longer was the young, energetic, rail-thin model. Instead, she was the gaunt thirty-nine-year-old woman who looked thirty-nine and as if she was wondering if a life of living a maxim, “nothing tastes better than skinny feels,” might have been a life wasted.
I was thirty-four and apparently looked my age too, and I’d never met a treadmill I liked, so I avoided them, thus our relationship worked perfectly.
However, there’d been a time when people who didn’t pay attention thought I was Dad’s wife, and Lou was his daughter. It sickened me, and it never failed to irritate me that Lou would preen whenever it happened.
Things were different now, but I didn’t celebrate her pain. It made me sad for her that something so mundane meant so much to her.
Everyone aged, and unequivocally, the more you had of it, the more blessed you became.
The years we lived, people didn’t seem to understand, were the gift that kept giving.
Until they stopped.
“I’m here to show you into the house,” he announced. “The other Miss Ryan is being informed of your arrival and she’s to meet you in the Pearl Room for tea.”
“What about our suitcases?” Lou asked.
