Sailing to Capri (4 page)

“He was a real good man and a good friend,” Ginny said, choking up, “despite what other folk might say.”

I nodded, wishing desperately I could smile or find the right words, but there were none.

“The Lord said ‘Blessed are the meek,’” Blunt said. “But if you ask me, it’s strong men like Sir Robert that are our blessing. He’ll be missed around here. Aye, that man will be truly missed.” And to my surprise he took my hand and pressed it to his cold lips. “Take care, Daisy,” he said. “And remember, everyone here in Sneadley will be looking out for you.”

Touched, I watched him walk away. In just five years I had become part of this village, a member of a small community where people still “looked out” for each other. Reg Blunt was telling me that if I needed help they would be there for me, and I was grateful for that. I was alone again in a cold, snowy world, unprotected by Bob Hardwick. And also, I realized, unemployed again, though at least this time I had a savings account amounting to a great deal more than the five hundred dollars I’d had in my purse when I first met Bob.

Rats was still staring into the dark hole where somehow he knew his master lay. “Come on, boy,” I said, tugging on his lead. He did not move. “Rats, come here, baby,” I said, but he lay down on the snow. I bent to pick him up but he clamped himself to the frozen earth. The villagers were gone and I could see the other mourners getting into their cars. They didn’t even look back. No one cared. He was just Hardwick’s old dog.

Bitter tears fell down my cheeks as I tried to get my hands under Rats’s middle but he clung like a limpet to a rock.

“Here, let me help.”

I glanced up through my tears. It was the stranger.

“Animals have a way of knowing,” he said quietly. “He doesn’t want to leave his master.”

“Nor do I,” I said, before I could stop myself.

The stranger’s dark eyes held mine in a long deep sympathetic glance. Then he turned to the dog, running his hand along the coarse white fur on his back. “Come on boy,” he said gently. “It’s time to leave. Everything will be all right now.”

The dog lifted his head to look at him for a second; then he put his snout firmly back between his paws and heaved a sigh that shook his stocky body.

“Now listen, old fella,” the stranger said firmly, “you have to look after Miss Keane, so let’s get on with it. Come on, it’s time to go.”

Whether it was the stranger’s no-nonsense tone or the mention of my name, or simply his charm with dogs, something got Rats to his feet. He sneezed loudly then gave himself a thorough shake, spattering the two of us with mud, and suddenly we were laughing.

“That’s better,” the stranger said, still smiling. “Now let me get both of you out of the cold.”

With his hand under my elbow, and with Rats dragging behind on his lead, we left Bob Hardwick in his last resting place.

We walked back down the slippery church path where the city folks’ footprints had already been obliterated by the heavily falling snow, and out through the lych-gate that in summer would be covered in heavy-blossomed purple wisteria. The village street was empty now except for my red Mini Cooper and a sleek black Jaguar convertible, both with a covering of snow.

I looked properly at the stranger for the first time. He was
in his early forties and very tall, about six-two, broad-shouldered, in a long loose black overcoat buttoned to the neck and black boots. His lean face was the kind that spoke of experience, and not all of it good, all planes and angles with a bluish hint of stubble already growing in. His nose was slightly hooked and his narrow gray eyes looked at me from under straight black brows. He was kind of offbeat attractive, a little sinister even, with furrows in his forehead and crinkles radiating from his eyes, and his hair was cropped almost to the skull, leaving just a dark haze over his well-shaped head.

“I don’t know who you are but thank you anyway,” I said.

“But I know who you are. Bob told me all about you.”

I was astonished. I thought I knew all of Bob’s business associates and social acquaintances.

“You’re Daisy Keane, helpmeet, social director, confidante, and good friend.” He gave me a slight bow. “And I am Harry Montana.”

I shook his hand. It wasn’t until later that I realized that while he had told me his name he had not told me who he was. “Look,” I said, brushing the snowflakes from my hair, “you must be as cold as I am. There’s to be no reception, Bob once said he’d never want that, but why don’t you come back to the Hall? At least let me give you some hot coffee before you drive back to …” I didn’t know where he was driving back to and he didn’t enlighten me.

“Thanks, I’d like that” was all he said.

“Well, it’s not far. Sneadley Hall is right off the main street in the village, through the big iron gates on the right. You can’t
miss it.” I climbed into the Mini, which had always been too small for my long length. “Just follow me.”

I suddenly realized that, like me, Harry Montana was American. He had some kind of southern accent, Texan perhaps? Whatever, he was a long way from home. As I drove carefully down the snow-covered village street I wondered again what he was doing at a small funeral in a Yorkshire village in a snowstorm.

Sneadley Hall had been in the Oldcastle family for five generations before Bob Hardwick bought it. It was a large square Georgian-style building in the dark gray stone that was typical of Yorkshire, with a long straight driveway leading up to a columned portico. The casement windows were tall and the front door had two long windows with an arched fanlight over. It was not a pretty house but its square solidity had suited Bob’s personality.

“Everybody who owned this place was in wool,” he’d told me when he first brought me to see it. “There were sheep on these hills, as far as the eye could see and then beyond. Wool was what made Yorkshire rich and the day we turned from sheep to acrylic was the undoing of many of the fine wool merchants and mill owners in these parts. It was rags to riches and then back to rags again faster than you’d ever have thought
possible. And now it’s men like me, the cowboys of the financial world, the opportunists, the hardheaded what’s-the-bottom-line fellas, that own homes like Sneadley Hall.”

I heard the Jag’s tires crunching on the gravel behind me as I drove through the arched wrought-iron gates still embellished with the monogrammed
O
of the Oldcastle family. Mrs. Wainwright, the housekeeper and cook, had the front door open before I’d even parked.

“Eh, come on in, Miss Keane,” she said. “We were getting worried, leaving you there all alone in the churchyard. I was about to send Mr. Stanley back to fetch you.”

Stanley was the gardener. He lived in the gatehouse with his wife, while Mrs. Wainwright had her own cozy apartment in the annex. “No need to worry, Mrs. Wainwright, here I am,” I said, walking up the steps onto the portico. Behind me, I heard Montana parking. “And I brought a friend of Sir Robert’s back with me. Mr. Montana helped me with Rats. The poor dog didn’t want to leave.”

Mrs. Wainwright heaved a sigh. She was a big pear-shaped woman with a generous bosom, curling iron gray hair, a square jaw and piercing blue eyes that missed nothing. Including the man now coming up the front steps right behind me, carrying a laptop case.

“No doubt y’ll both be wanting coffee then,” she said briskly. “Though in my view, a nice cup of tea goes down a lot better, especially when you’re feeling under the weather. And I’ve made my jam sponge, I know it’s your favorite.”

She turned to walk away but I called out her name. Puzzled,
she looked back at me. I ran to her and threw my arms around her in a great big hug. “Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for caring,” I muttered into her wiry hair.

“Well then, it’s nothing, nothing at all.” She smiled, embarrassed, as I let go of her. Hugging was not in her Yorkshire vocabulary, though love was. “You’re dripping water all over my fresh-polished hall floor,” she admonished. “I’ll send our Brenda out with a cloth.” “Our” Brenda was her married daughter who lived in the village and who also worked at the Hall.

“Sorry, Mrs. Wainwright,” I said with a rueful smile. Then I remembered the man I’d invited back for coffee.

Harry Montana was glancing approvingly at the paneled walls and the polished chestnut floors, at the tall windows with the heavy gold curtains half-shutting out the snow, at the fire blazing in the massive stone hearth. “I half-expect to see foxhounds lounging in front of the fire and hear the hunt going by,” he said. “All those men in red coats on big black horses.”

“You’d never find hounds indoors; they’d be out in the kennels near the stables,” I said. “Anyhow, dogs are not allowed out with the hunt anymore.”

“Still, you get the picture. Isn’t it what we Americans always think about the English country life?”

“I guess so.” I smiled. “I’ve learned a lot in the past five years, about that English country life. But please, let me take your coat.”

He put down the leather laptop case and shrugged out of his almost ankle-length black overcoat. It was as light as a feather, cashmere I guessed, with an expensive Italian label, but underneath that coat was a different man. Narrow frayed
worn-in jeans, black boots, a black turtleneck sweater. His shoulders under the sweater were broad, his hips in the jeans, narrow, and on his right wrist he wore a silver and leather bracelet studded with turquoise stones. I felt a flutter in the pit of my stomach. With his cropped head and lean looks he should have been auditioning for the role of the bad guy in a Hollywood western, not attending the funeral of a Yorkshire tycoon.

I hung his coat in the hall closet alongside my own, then took out the old towel kept there for that purpose and went to dry off Rats who had already parked himself in front of the fire. “Good boy,” I murmured. “Good boy, Rats. It’ll be okay now, I promise. And I promise I won’t leave you.”

“You inherit the dog, then?” Harry Montana said from behind me.

“I’ve inherited nothing.” I scrambled to my feet. “I’m just an employee. But of course I’ll take care of Rats, because Bob would have wanted that. Anyhow, now I feel as though he’s my dog, even though I know that for him there’ll only ever be one master.”

I felt Montana’s eyes on me as I put the cloth away. I remembered I still didn’t know who he was or why he was here. I suggested we move into the drawing room and he held open the heavy door to let me pass.

This was my favorite room in the house. Even in a snowstorm it seemed sunny. Light ocher walls, golden brocade sofas with cushions squashed from much lounging around over the years, soft pale rugs a little frayed from wear, lamps that shed a warm golden glow and a fire sparking in the grate. In fact when
I thought about it, this wasn’t so far removed from the country-house comforts I’d first noticed in Le Gavroche, when I’d thought how nice it must be to come home to a place like this. Soon, though, I would be gone.

Mrs. Wainwright bustled in pushing a two-tier Victorian mahogany tea trolley piled with plates of tea sandwiches and biscuits and the famous jam sponge, plus the silver coffee things. She said good afternoon to Harry Montana and left me to do the honors. I poured steaming hot coffee into fragile blue-and-white Wedgwood china cups and handed one to my cowboy. He was completely relaxed, knees apart, long legs crossed at the ankles, sleeves pulled up, revealing a glimpse of a tattoo in what looked like Chinese script running around his forearm.

I ate a piece of the jam sponge. Usually, it tasted of summer strawberries. Today it tasted like dust.

“So how d’you know you didn’t inherit?” He stirred two sugars into his black coffee. “The lawyers read the will yet?”

I frowned, suddenly on the alert. I’d asked a perfect stranger into Bob’s home. He could be anyone! A business rival trying to find information. A reporter on the scent of a good story. A long-lost relative on the make. I stared at him again. He looked like a fashionable version of a Marine, with his haircut, his frayed old jeans, his bracelet, his tattoo. I pushed my heavy, still damp hair from my forehead, hot with anxiety. Had I inadvertently let the enemy within Bob’s gates? “Who the hell are you, anyway,” I snapped, “asking me all these personal questions?”

“I’m kind of a friend of Bob’s.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘kind of a friend,’” I replied tartly. “A friend is a friend and that’s it. How did you know him?”

“I met Bob ten years ago. He was having some personal problems. He’d heard about me from someone he knew. He called me in Dallas, and I flew to New York to meet him. He thought I might be able to help.”

I wondered what Montana meant by “personal problems” but decided it was better not to ask. There were some things Bob had not wanted me to know and I respected that. Still, I needed to know who the man sitting opposite me in Bob’s house really was. I was about to ask him again when he beat me to it. He got to his feet, took a wallet from the back pocket of his jeans, removed a business card and handed it to me.

“Harry Montana,” I read. “Risk Management. Security. Private Investigator.” There was a New York address and one in Dallas, and phone numbers, plus the usual e-mail info.