Page 5 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #1)
Gerald was saying something, and she roused herself from her reverie to ask him to repeat it. ‘I said, I wonder if your father will have left you something in his will. Do you know when it will be read?’
‘At the funeral,’ she said. ‘It’s traditional. Always straight after the funeral.’
‘You haven’t had the invitation yet, have you?’ he said, and she was annoyed at the anxiety in his voice.
‘I don’t suppose they can fix it until they know when Giles will be home. They can’t have it without him.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
He sounded so glum that she said, to cheer him up, ‘We can certainly stay at the Castle at least two weeks. I think Mama will expect me to be on hand to support her in her grief. She may even need me for longer – a month, say. And she’ll want to see the children. We’ll take them with us.’
‘A month,’ Cordwell said, brightening. Shut the house for a month!
Even the nursery! When they were invited anywhere for a Saturday-to-Monday they always had to leave the children behind, which meant coals and hot water and meals for them and the nursery staff.
But if they took them to the Castle, they’d take the nursery staff too, and they’d all be kept at the Castle’s expense.
And the other servants could be given a holiday, whether they wanted one or not.
‘You haven’t seen Giles for a long time,’ Cordwell said thoughtfully. ‘You always got on well with him, didn’t you?’
‘Whatever Papa left me in his will won’t depend on Giles,’ she said impatiently.
‘Yes, but there’s the question of future invitations …’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I can handle Giles. I’ll revive childhood memories with him, and make myself indispensable to Mama, and you – well, you only have to be affable. I’m sure Giles liked you when you last saw him.’
‘I can’t remember when that was.’
‘Never mind, people generally like you. And if he takes to the children, we might even persuade him to have them there permanently. It can’t matter to them to have two more.
And even when he marries and gets brats of his own, having cousins to play with is always a good thing.
I foresee a golden period opening up before us. ’
Cordwell could not quite reach her heights of optimism. ‘What about the allowance?’ he asked quietly – so quietly she almost missed the words. When she caught them, she frowned.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘I mean, was the allowance in your father’s will?’
‘You know damn well it was an informal arrangement between us,’ she said shortly. ‘He might have had it written into his will, but—’
‘But he didn’t know he was going to die so soon,’ Cordwell finished for her. ‘What if it isn’t?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ she said briskly, not willing to show him she was worried.
Without that allowance … ‘Even if it isn’t, Giles is bound to honour it.
He’s a very virtuous person, he’ll always do what’s right.
Anyway, I can talk him round. I could always make him do what I wanted when he was a boy. ’
She had offered too many assurances. Cordwell was not comforted.
Absently he finished his fish in one mouthful, instead of eking it out, and the footman and butler, who had been standing against the wall (he felt it imperative to keep up the style of a viscount, even if everything was crumbling about his ears) stepped forward to clear the plates and bring on the next course.
He looked in dismay at the leg of pheasant on his plate, knowing how little edible material there was among the tendons and sinews of a pheasant’s leg.
But they’d had the breasts yesterday. At least there’d be pheasant soup tomorrow.
He helped himself to potatoes and cabbage.
He’d hoped there’d be carrots, but perhaps they were being saved for the soup.
Linda was having a gloomy thought of her own.
They could not have a dinner-party, and trigger lots of invitations for the winter, because she’d be in mourning for six months.
Damn it! It was more than ever imperative that they got an invitation to stay on at the Castle after the funeral.
Once installed, trust her to stretch it out.
The journey had seemed interminable. The Imperator was a well-appointed ship, and Giles’s stateroom was luxurious – he’d have been happy with more modest accommodation, but by the time he booked his passage the cheaper cabins had all been taken.
Still, he’d enjoyed long baths in his own private bathroom, and even submitted, slightly shamefaced, to the ship’s barber shaving him.
The man had admired his razors – a rare present from his father when he had reached eighteen, a pair of ebony-handled blades from Truefitt and Hill, the very best that money could buy – but had shaken his head at the state of the edge, and had taken them away to sharpen them.
Giles could have explained the difficulty of keeping a strop from drying out in a desert climate, but would not demean himself further.
He did not have a manservant, which the barber, like the cabin steward, had already kindly overlooked, while making it clear that a gentleman of his eminence needed looking after by professionals.
The steward took away all his clothes to brush and clean and launder, which was agreeable, but Giles baulked at having his trousers held while he stepped into them, or his socks put on for him.
‘I’ve been dressing myself since I was four,’ he said, with good humour but firmly.
The steward gave him the sort of kind smile you accord the mentally incompetent.
Giles realised he was being written off as an English Eccentric.
Unused to being confined, he took his exercise by walking round the deck fifty times every morning, and again in the evening.
He’d avoided contact with the other passengers – it was one thing for foreigners to be outgoing, but he did not understand why being on a ship should make the normally reticent English so excessively sociable.
He had only to pause and lean on the rail for half a moment to find himself being wheedled to make up a table for whist or biritch, play deck quoits, or engage himself to eat dinner with this or that party.
News of his bereavement had somehow spread, and he was always receiving warm and sympathetic looks – especially from a Mrs Cadwallader, who was travelling with an unmarried daughter in her twenties.
Sometimes he feared actually to be embraced.
Fortunately he had books with him in his luggage, and could retreat to his stateroom and read.
For much of the crossing he was happily engrossed in a recently published tome by Professor Montalcini of the venerable University of Siena.
Montalcini documented similarities between Etruscan and Minoan wall paintings, quoting the Etruscan expert, Giles’s old friend and mentor Flavio Lombardi.
He proposed that they stemmed from a common influence, the Egyptian.
Civilisations that have been in contact for centuries may develop a common artistic vocabulary, whose origin is lost in time , he read.
The author compared fragments of wall paintings from Knossos with the Etruscan murals of the Tomb of the Roaring Lions.
The Egyptians were great painters of murals on lime plaster …
Asia Minor … Lydia … Herodotus … the Aegean region …
the island of Thera … Thucydides recorded that the Etruscans lived on the island of Lemnos in ancient times …
Absorbed in the world in which he felt most at home, he passed the hours happily.
When he did emerge from his cocoon, it was to find the weather gradually worsening as the ship ploughed westwards, leaving the eastern Mediterranean climate behind.
His walks around the deck were sometimes lively, as he found himself tipped against railings and having to cling to handholds.
It was a reminder of what he was going to: the iron grey of English winter skies, the iron weight of responsibility.
He had been Viscount Ayton all his life and was used to being addressed as ‘my lord’ and ‘your lordship’, but his new position was driven home to him when one of the passengers – an American, and almost as keen a deck-walker as himself – stopped him on the last morning, touching his hat and saying, ‘Morning, Earl! Brisk today, don’tcha think?
Fresh, I call it, but my wife won’t leave the cabin – thinks there’s a storm brewing! ’
Giles had given him a startled look, and murmured something vague.
His tormentor gave him a rueful grin. ‘Dare say you’ll be glad to be getting home to dear old England. I never liked being at sea myself. Not looking forward to crossing the Atlantic again, I can tell you. You’ll be home a lot quicker than me, Earl, and that’s a fact.’
‘Yes,’ said Giles. ‘I suppose I will.’
*