Memory and Desire (6 page)

“One last thing. Only a few doors inside the house have locks, the door to the cellars in particular. That's for good cause. The house was built atop the Norman dungeons, which were later expanded into a series of grottoes. The caves are none too stable today. And since there's a gate to the outside, bats roost there during the day. The Trust require that the volunteers stay in the main house."

He'd glided over that one very nicely, thought Claire. The grottoes had been built in the 1750's by Phillip Lacey in imitation of his friend Francis Dashwood's caverns in West Wycombe. Dashwood and his gentlemen friends—only aristocrats needed apply—amused themselves staging rites he called occult, but which were really excuses for orgies. They weren't so picky about the social status of their female “guests.” No wonder Phillip had died broke, so that his heirs had to sell the Hall.

What intrigued Claire was how this same cynical wastrel Phillip had managed to write the rational and yet sentimental “An Historie of the Apocalypse as Visit'd upon Summerstow.” Although if Cecil Lacey could change his philosophical colors in only a few years, she told herself, then why not his descendent Phillip? Whether their descendent Richard had inherited a tendency to multiple personalities she couldn't say. Not yet, anyway.

He glanced at his watch, lifted his clipboard, and tore off a couple of lists. “Very good, then. Fred and Janet, you were here last year, would you be kind enough to show everyone to his place?"

Obligingly Janet and Fred sorted the group by ability and enthusiasm, from carpenters, joiners, and glaziers to gardeners and masons to those people who were simply muscle power, put to work sweeping and scrubbing.

Everyone filed away. Claire stood her ground, watching Richard as he jotted down a few notes. If he hid any other secrets as poorly as he hid his love for Somerstowe Hall, even her meager detecting abilities should figure out why he'd turned on her when she said Melinda's name.

He looked up. They locked eyes, exchanging—what? Speculation? Challenge? She blinked. “Ah, they went on without me."

“You'll be working upstairs,” he replied, without commenting on her inability to play follow the leader. “Come along."

He steered her into the back door of the entrance hall, up the stone staircase, and into the gallery, a room several times as long as it was wide. The first time through, Richard had commented on how the long gallery was peculiar to England, a place to take one's exercise in the rain and cold. Today though, the room was sunny. The paneling glowed like silk and the elaborate mantelpiece over the empty fireplace was a riot of the light and shadow Richard had spoken of so feelingly.

He indicated a tapestry frame and a chair next to a window. “You can have a go at one of the new canvases, see how you get on."

“So I can establish my credentials?” Claire asked.

“Yes."

Well, give him one point for honesty. Claire bent over the frame. A new canvas? This is a William Morris ‘Strawberry Thief’ pattern, at least a hundred years old. It matches the wallpaper in the library."

“It's the newest we have. Some Cranbourne showed a bit of imagination by supporting the Arts and Crafts movement. Rather uncharacteristic of the family temperament. Unless it was Vincent, the black sheep."

Claire sat down next to the frame and checked out the supplies arranged on the broad, whitewashed windowsill. Numerous colors of tapestry wool—Paterna Persian, good—crewel wool and embroidery cotton for detail, blunt-end needles in a pincushion, a box of straight pins, a tape measure, and a graph and pencil so she could record what she'd done and where. Had Melinda left everything this tidy last year? Or was it Richard who'd sorted all the yarns by color and smoothed them into tidy rows? What she asked him was, “Did you know any of the Cranbournes?"

“I met Maud, the last of her generation, a time or two before she died. My father did some research for...” Something caught Richard's eye. He reached into the pocket of his jeans, extracted a penknife, climbed onto a paint-spattered step stool and probed the decorative end of a ceiling beam.

So exquisite was his touch, so intense his expression—eyes narrowed, teeth sunk into his lower lip—that his long, slender hands might just as well have been exploring a woman's body.

The pit of Claire's stomach went hot with the image. Quickly she looked down at the faded but still saucy colors of the canvas, telling her hormones, yes, cool is in.

“Just a wee bit of dry rot. Mercuric oxide in methyl alcohol, that'll set you to rights.” Richard stepped down, replaced the knife in his pocket, and made a note on his clipboard. “I'll leave you to it, then. Don't forget the chart.” And he was gone, the rush matting creaking faintly behind him.

Exhaling, Claire bent over the canvas. Even though it smelled of mothballs, moths had still snacked on it, leaving quite a few frayed places. Half a dozen spots had already been mended, efficiently if not expertly. Melinda, no doubt, who regarded only finished work as an accomplishment. With a wistful smile, Claire picked up a length of red yarn. Thank goodness she hadn't been handed too difficult an assignment her first day on the job. She already had a difficult assignment.

She matched the yarn to a sewn strawberry and threaded a needle. Carefully she caught the frayed end of the broken yarn and secured both it and the end of the fresh yarn with her first stitch.

Seated next to the window Claire was no longer chilly. The musty odor of the lower stories was here more a faint scent of dust and dried rush. If she listened carefully she could hear a distant voice or the clink of trowel upon stone. But the sounds were filtered through the thick walls of the house. Filtered through time, as though from the corner of her eye she might see Elizabeth Tudor herself standing in the doorway.

Someone was standing in the doorway. Claire's shoulders prickled. Melinda had said something about a ghost—that was just one of her jokes, though ... She looked sharply around.

A body as lean as the leopard in the Lacey crest, clothed in RAF blue, armed with a clipboard, disappeared from the door almost before she saw it. Richard hadn't been simply walking by. He'd been standing there watching her, even his hair on the alert. She could still feel his heat of his eyes searing her back.

Leopards, tigers they were predators, not prey, she reminded herself. Anyone who went hunting a tiger had better be damn sure she wanted to catch him.

Right now Claire wasn't sure of anything, except that she wasn't leaving Somerstowe without finding Melinda. Setting her jaw, she scooted the tapestry frame and the chair around so that her back was to the window, and continued stitching with yarn as red as blood.

From the corner of her eye Claire watched the sunlight change from a clear gold tinted with green to a hazy white. When at last the cry of “lunch break!” echoed from the depths of the house she stood, stretched, and cleared her throat of the part-smell, part-taste, of mothballs.

Outside the mirror-like morning sky was now fogged blue-gray with humidity, as though the sun had breathed on it. Claire unlatched the window and swung it open. Only the faintest breath of moist air, heavy with the scents of grass, roses, and mud, entered the house. About time for a storm to clear the air, she thought.

Three times that morning her neck had puckered and her shoulder blades twitched, sensing a very physical presence in the doorway. So Richard was a control freak. If he wanted to check up on her work he could come into the room and look, already. But no. He was watching Claire just as surely as she was watching him.

Maybe he thought Melinda was guilty of dereliction of duty. Fine. Claire wasn't guilty by association. And if he'd harmed Melinda, or even sent her the threatening letter, wouldn't he be trying to deflect suspicion, not attract it by skulking around? He knew why Claire was here ... Yeah. He knew why she was here.

She stabbed her needles into the pincushion, shut the window, and headed downstairs. The silence in the house was so deep that the sound of footsteps in the entrance hall echoed up the staircase.

She rounded the corner. There was Richard. He stopped dead on the expanse of checkerboard tile, hunched over as though someone had hit him in the stomach, and cupped his hands before his face. “Damn!” he said, softly but distinctly, and peered down at the floor.

Oh.
“Lose a contact?” Claire asked.

Richard leaped straight up and spun around like Baryshnikov. He glared at Claire standing on the bottom step. Of course he'd glare at her for startling him, not be embarrassed for being startled. His eye glittered just as tigerishly whether he had a contact lens in it or not.

“Sorry,” she said. “Can I help you look for it?"

“No thank you,” Richard returned. “It's disposable. I'll fetch another."

“Okay.” She looked at him. He looked at her. “I tried to wear contacts once. My eyes are too sensitive."

“Are they?"

“I hear the disposable ones are easier to wear, but I guess I'm set in my ways. Wearing glasses and everything."

“Old habits die hard."

His voice was dry, his manner distant. At least he was polite. Maybe it was time for entente. She went on, “I guess everyone except us has already gone to lunch."

“You can catch them up at the pub or the tearoom, like as not. If you'll excuse me?” With a slight inclination of his head, almost a formal bow, Richard made an about-face and walked off toward the door.

Not that she was all that anxious to have lunch with him, Claire told herself, it was just that he was a witness. He was intelligent. He was dedicated. He filled out a pair of jeans very nicely. And he was hiding something, maybe something about Melinda.

Frowning, she turned and saw the cat again. It was sitting on the hearth of the huge fireplace, washing its face with a paw. “Kitty, kitty?” Claire called.

No, even he—she?—wasn't feeling communicative, but whisked away into the shadows. Wondering if she should change her deodorant, Claire walked out into the glare of noon. After a quick reconnaissance she discovered a narrow gateway in the surrounding wall that opened onto a row of back gardens in the village. Good—she could get in and out of the Hall without going past the Lodge. She zigged around a line of washing, zagged down an alley, and emerged on the high street.

Claire didn't have time to go looking for Alec and news about the threatening letter. Instead she bought a sandwich and a newspaper from Roshan and took them up to her flat. She sternly told herself she didn't have time to look through any of Melinda's letters, either, on the chance that a casual word or two might take on new meaning now that she'd seen the Hall.

The bottom line was that someone had wanted Melinda out of the way.
She was constantly asking questions. Nothing got by her.
And her computer and camera had disappeared with her. “Did you find out something you weren't supposed to know?” Claire asked the letters. They didn't answer.

She ate and scanned the newspaper. A speech by the Prime Minister. A train derailment. A Muslim policeman suing the Derbyshire Constabulary for discrimination. A photo of the Chief Constable showed an older man whose tucked-in chin and clipped moustache had been time-warped in from World War Two. Claire wondered if he carried a swagger stick, and how a contemporary cop like the shopworn Blake felt about working for him.

When she headed back to the Hall she met Fred and Janet next to a bedraggled flowerbed just inside the postern gate. His clothes were bedaubed with mortar, hers with paint. “Sorry we missed you,” Janet said.

“I'll catch up with you tomorrow,” replied Claire.

Fred eyed the flowers and their companion weeds as though contemplating metaphors of beauty and sin, and returned to his work. Janet went back to the chapel. Claire greeted a couple of other workers on her way upstairs. In the gallery nothing moved but dust motes.

The air was as deep and still as a warm pool. She opened the window, admitting a bumblebee that buzzed up and down the sill like a drinker uncertain of his way home from the pub. Smiling, Claire reached for a length of green yarn.

By the time she'd mended several leaves she was mesmerized by her repetitive stitching and by the buzzing of the bee. Only the occasional voice from outside or downstairs jogged her brain out of a timeless, spaceless, fugue state. Until the hair rose on the back of her neck.

In spite of the warm day, she felt a distinct chill. Every nerve suddenly alert, she glanced toward the far doorway. Nothing. Or was it nothing? She might be seeing a reflection of the sunlight through the windows of the high great chamber next door, a sinuous shimmer in the air. And yet she could swear the shimmer had a shape. Long skirts and puffed sleeves sketched themselves in light upon nothingness. A faint rustle of cloth tickled her ears as the shape moved in utter silence down the room toward the far door. She caught a whiff of some kind of pomander, a floral fragrance much lighter than the scents of earth and mothballs. Her hands, her head, her body felt like dry ice, steaming into the afternoon warmth.

She blinked. Nothing was there.
Oh wow.
Melinda had mentioned a ghost. She hadn't been joking or trying out some plot twist for her book. There was something there. Someone. Elizabeth Spenser?

Steady footsteps came from behind her. Claire spun around. Alec came pacing down the gallery as calmly as he'd pace down the sidewalk outside. “Oh, well then,” he said, as though it was seeing Claire that was startling. “How're you getting on?"

Did you see that?
she wanted to ask. He must've just missed it. “Ah—er—fine, thanks."

He walked on by and disappeared out the far door. More footsteps rang across the high great chamber. Richard walked briskly through the door. He halted at her elbow and started inspecting the needlework canvas.

Claire forced herself to take a stitch and then another. Warmth rushed into her face and hands.
So,
she imagined saying,
tell me about the ghost.
But that was one question she wasn't sure she wanted answered. She'd almost dozed off, yes. She hadn't dreamed that unworldly presence. Apparently Melinda hadn't dreamed it up, either.