Secrets of Nanreath Hall (24 page)

June 1941

L
ady Boxley's lunch consisted of a fillet of sole, new potatoes, and whipped carrots. Anna eyed it longingly as it grew cold on its tray. It certainly beat the tinned ham smeared between two slices of National Loaf she'd eaten two hours ago with her milkless tea.

Her Ladyship had been resting since just after breakfast, and Anna, albeit somewhat selfishly, had chosen to let sleeping ladies lie. She'd expected Hugh to stop in, but the morning and then the afternoon had passed with no sign of him.

While Anna preferred the quiet over the constant carping and demands of her patient, it made it hard to stay awake after only a few hours of stolen sleep on a beautiful if uncomfortable satin divan in the dressing room. In desperation, she'd taken to leafing through the magazines and books on the nightstand when she came across a large leather-bound photograph album lying open at the bottom of the pile. A small shock of excitement curled through her seeing
Nanreath's past—her family's past—encapsulated in pages and pages of sepia-toned moments.

Each photograph had been lovingly placed and captioned, though the glue at each edge was loosening. Holidays, weddings, christenings, and family get-togethers; Anna's gaze traveled over the faces of these affluent, fashionably dressed people she'd never known, unable to stop imagining herself growing up among them.

Hugh from chubby, towheaded infancy to dashing adulthood. Stiff studio portraits of the late Lord Boxley, though only two of husband and wife together: a wedding shot as the two of them left the church and a painfully awkward-looking picture of the new young family shortly after Hugh's birth.

Lady Katherine appeared in more than a few of the photographs. Taller than most of the women, she seemed to stoop to compensate for her height while her round almost childish face was strengthened by a firm chin, a straight, thin nose, and a pair of flashing eyes that stared down the camera like a challenge. Laughing, carefree. No sign of the shadows soon to overtake her and her family. Then she simply disappeared. No more pictures. No more references to her in the penciled captions. From the fall of 1913 onward, Lady Katherine ceased to exist.

Her absence seemed barely to be marked. Instead, the pages were taken up with images of a young and pretty Lady Boxley, always one amid a group in various poses in front of various landscapes from Italian villas to Paris cafés to the familiar Nanreath gardens. Every photo carefully captioned.

Then, on a separate page, Anna came across two or three smaller photos of Lady Boxley and a gentleman standing at the same rocky cliff ruins she'd seen in her mother's sketches. A line of sea lay behind them. His blond hair was tousled by the wind as he smiled
for the camera. She looked up at him, her gaze touchingly vulnerable and unsure. But unlike all the others, these pictures weren't captioned. She cast a swift glance toward Lady Boxley before picking the glue from the edge and pulling it away from the page. There on the back in faint pencil—
Eddie and me at the cliff ruins
. And more interesting, another photo lay hidden behind it.

“What have you got there?”

The sharp, barking question startled Anna into releasing the album. It slid onto the floor, the dried crumbling glue giving way to scatter pictures across the carpet.

Lady Boxley uttered a small shriek. “Clumsy girl. What are you doing?”

Anna dropped to her knees, raking almost everything back into the album. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Waiting for the perfect time to poke through my personal belongings?”

“The album was open on the table, my lady. I hardly had to snoop to find it.”

“So because I didn't have it locked away, it gives you the right to pry where you don't belong?”

Dipping her hand in and out of her apron pocket, Anna resumed her seat, replacing the album on the table. “Why are you so determined to push me away, my lady?”

Her Ladyship scooted herself up against the bolster. Small and frail within the starched white expanse of her bed, she was far less intimidating, but while she might have been physically weak, her manner maintained its razor edge. “Why are you so determined to shove your way in where you're not wanted?”

“Is it wrong for me to want to learn more about my mother and her family?”

“Of course not, but you'll not learn anything of value from
Minnie Smith. She's soft in the head, has been for years. Her drunken sot of a father is even worse.” Her breathing grew rough and Anna poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the lunch tray, which she helped her sip. Lady Boxley lay back against the pillows, her face drawn and hollow with exhaustion.

“How did you know I'd gone to see Miss Smith?” Anna asked.

“Not much happens around here that I don't learn sooner or later, and Kitty's natural daughter taking tea with the village biddies makes for scintillating talk.” Lady Boxley ran a hand over her bedspread, her rings large on her thin, bony fingers. “Silas Smith was a gardener here on the estate when I first arrived as William's bride. A nice enough chap, whiz with flowers, but that changed after his sons were killed in action. Four within the same year. Shattered the man. His daughter, too. Neither of them recovered.”

“That's horrible.”

“But all too common when brothers joined the same regiment. William's father offered them a lifetime gift of the house at the harbor when work grew too much for him. An excessive sentimental bequest, he could ill afford it as it turned out. I suppose he did it out of sympathy. William had only just been invalided out and sent home to us.”

“That was the summer of 1916.”

“Yes, August. A horrible hot month. No respite to be found. Not even here at Nanreath.”

“Minnie told me Lady Katherine traveled down here from London when she had word your husband was ill, but they wouldn't let her see him.”

Lady Boxley's face stiffened. “None were allowed to see him.”

“Is that what you told her when you met her at Mrs. Vinter's?”

She barely blinked at the accusation before recovering her usual aplomb. “If you must know, I told her she was a fool to run off with
Halliday and a fool to think she'd be welcomed home again once he was gone.”

Forgive my love
. “Do you know what happened, Lady Boxley? Why my father left her when he knew she was pregnant?”

“Left her? No, my dear. You have it all wrong. Simon Halliday didn't leave her. She left him.”

T
he MO interrupted their conversation to listen to Lady Boxley's heart, and their moment's intimacy ended in whining complaints and peevish scolding, which lasted the rest of the day. The following morning Anna rose kink-necked and sore from her makeshift bed but twice as determined to question her further. Her chance came over Lady Boxley's breakfast of unsweetened porridge, a piece of plain toast, and prune juice.

“This mockery of a meal is that horrid excuse of a doctor's fault, isn't it? If he had his way, I'd be living on boiled parsnips the rest of my life.”

“Boiled parsnips aren't so bad. Have you tried the kitchen's carrot and pigeon surprise?”

“Death would be preferable.”

Anna fixed a fresh pot of tea on the spirit burner in Lady Boxley's sitting room and brought her a fresh cup along with a plate of Cadbury's milk chocolate biscuits. “Don't tell Captain Matthews, but this should make you feel a little better. Compliments of Mrs. Willits. She sent them to me in my last care package.”

“A friend of yours?”

“A neighbor in London. I believe she traded an onion she'd won in a raffle for two packages of chocolate and sent one on to me.”

Lady Boxley eyed them askance before shoving her breakfast tray aside in favor of tea and sweets. “Thank you.”

Anna drew up a chair. “When we talked yesterday, you mentioned that Lady Katherine left Simon Halliday.”

“Ah, so that's your ploy, is it? Chocolate for information.”

Anna offered her the plate. “Is it working?”

Lady Boxley glowered over the proffered biscuits before taking two and settling back with a prim smile of triumph. “You're an impudent little baggage, aren't you?”

“Just determined, ma'am.”

“There's little enough to say. Kitty kicked him to the curbstone—as she should have done from the first. Said it hadn't worked out. I could have told her it wouldn't. He smiled too much. A sure sign of an unstable temperament.”

“She didn't say why she left him?”

“Why, you ask?” Lady Boxley fiddled with the buttons on her bed jacket. “Not that I recall, but I didn't much care. We hadn't seen each other in more than three years and we'd never been close. It was all over and done with, the damage complete.” She eyed Anna up and down. “Kitty was round as a Christmas ham. There, now you have the whole sorry tale. Satisfied?”

Not even close, but what could she do? It was obvious Lady Boxley couldn't tell her anything more.

“Bring me a mirror,” she demanded, growing weary and waspish. “I'm sure I look a fright.”

Anna retrieved a silver-backed hand mirror from the dressing table.

“Dear God, it's worse than I thought.” She turned her face side to side, slid a hand up her sagging cheekbones. Regarded her gray roots with a frown before tossing the mirror aside, lying back with a dramatic sigh. “I look like a haggard crone with both feet dangling over the grave.”

“You've been ill.”

“That's no excuse for lack of grooming. If only Mademoiselle Rousseau were here to color my hair. Or that lovely girl at the Max Factor counter at Harrods. No wonder Hugh won't come near me. It's like being in the presence of a corpse.”

“I can't do anything about the color, ma'am, but I can arrange your hair and do your makeup if you like.”

Lady Boxley's expression remained frosty, but Anna noted the gleam in her eyes. “Let's start with a bath. That should make you feel human again.” Without waiting for approval, she passed into the adjoining bath. Despite its size and outdated grandeur, the room was chilly, the paint faded, and the tiles chipped along the base of the enormous claw-foot tub. But the hot water was ample, and there were jars of bath salts in a cupboard. Soon steam rose from jasmine-scented water.

“Come along. A good scrub will make everything better,” Anna said as she helped Lady Boxley out of her dressing gown and hunted out towels, thin with use and rough as sandpaper, which she placed alongside the tub.

“I'm perfectly capable, Miss Trenowyth.”

“Of course you are. So I'll see to my mending while you soak. When you're finished, give a shout. We can get you settled in a fresh nightgown, and then I'll see to your hair and face.”

For the next half hour, Anna knitted and listened through the old cathedral radio's static to Tommy Handley bumble his way around the Ministry of Aggravation and Mysteries accompanied by Mrs. Tickle and Funf.

“What's that horrid noise?” Lady Boxley appeared from the bath pink, damp, and jasmine scented.

“
ITMA,
ma'am,” Anna said, snapping off the radio. “Thought we could use a chuckle.” She gathered up what she needed from the
dressing table and set it all out on a tray beside the bed. “This might hurt. You've more than a few tangles back here.”

“I have a scalp like iron.”

Anna used slow, easy strokes, only tugging when she had to in order to free a rat's nest or two. Lady Boxley held her head still, her shoulders slowly relaxing, her body going pliant. “Did Hugh happen to stop by while I was bathing?”

Anna could sense the effort it took for Lady Boxley to unbend enough to ask this. She almost felt sorry for her—almost. “No, ma'am. I haven't seen him since the day before yesterday.”

Lady Boxley sniffed. “He claimed he had a meeting in Newquay. Does he think I'm stupid? Meeting, my foot. I know where he goes. One of these days not even that old swaybacked nag of his will save him from breaking his neck.”

Hair dried and brushed out, Anna worked a row of pins across the back. “He needs something besides alcohol to take his mind off the fact that his mates are all away fighting while he's trapped at home.”

“You mean safe at home.”

First, Anna rolled one side up and over the pins, securing it in place. Then the other. “I don't think he sees it that way, ma'am. Prue used to say, ‘Idle hands are the devil's workshop.'” Then taking a section at a time, she rolled the back up and over the pins and sprayed the whole with lacquer. “There. How's that?”

Lady Boxley checked the arrangement in the mirror. “Adequate for the boudoir, though you'd not catch me in public looking this way.”

“Now your face?”

Lady Boxley nodded, quite happy now to let Anna set up the tray of cosmetics beside her and begin applying foundation and powder. She seemed to relax under the quiet hypnosis of the hairdresser's
confessional, her eyes drooping, her face losing its taut almost squirrelish nervousness. “It took every ounce of determination I had to keep this place going after my husband's death, Miss Trenowyth. The last earl was no help. He was a wreck after William died. He let his business managers and lawyers nearly run things into the ground. Lady Melcombe couldn't rein him in. She was just as bad. Spent as if there was no end to the wealth.”

Scandal, debt, death; that was what Sophie had said. Despite their callousness, Anna couldn't help but feel sympathy for her mother's parents. They must have felt as if their world were crumbling from under their feet, the privilege and power they had always thought was theirs by divine right stripped away within a few tumultuous years.

“It was left to me to keep things from coming apart,” Lady Boxley continued almost peevishly. “No one believed a woman had any chance of managing the reins, much less recovering from such staggering losses, but I did it—for Hugh. All for Hugh. He won't be handed an empty title with nothing to show for it but debt. Not if I can help it.”