The Shape of Sand (3 page)

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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

BOOK: The Shape of Sand
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“I'd better take the train, my petrol's almost done.”
But before Harriet could leave the cottage to join them both for lunch, there was Guy on the telephone again. He sounded shaken. “Harriet. Harriet, my dear, prepare yourself for a shock.” He spoke hesitantly, unusually for him. “The builders at Charnley have found – something.”
“Something else? What is it?”
“I think you and Daisy will have to go down there. The police need to see you both.”
1910. The summer when King Edward died, and the new King George was proclaimed. When – except in Court circles, where everyone wore black – the women's hats were as frivolous and silly as usual, when the sun shone endlessly, or so it seemed in retrospect, and the Jardines and their friends played tennis in long skirts, when one could bear to play at all in the heat. When there was tea every day on the lawn under the cedar, with strawberries, sharp and sweet, dipped in sugar. Charnley's grey stones rising solidly, immutably, against the dark green background of the woods behind. The water playing delicately into the basin of the fountain on the terrace, where the stone Laocoon and his twin sons writhed futilely and everlastingly in the coils of a pair of sea serpents, sent to crush them to death and exact vengeance for the god Apollo.
There hadn't always been Jardines at Charnley. They had arrived there a mere sixty or so years ago, when the Rodhythes, minor aristocracy who had previously owned the house for centuries, having ruined themselves through an incurable inherited addiction to gambling and an indifference to property management, had been forced to sell their ancestral home, since it was in imminent danger of tumbling about their ears. Joseph Jardine, grandfather of the present owner, Amory Jardine, had stepped in and snapped up the house and most of its contents, with new money accumulated through his Scottish and Lancashire textile mills. Thereafter, abandoning his cotton empire, he sank an immense amount of money into repairs and renovations, made some neo-Gothic additions by way of towers and a mock-medieval gatehouse to the original Tudor wings and the later Georgian façade, played with his stocks and shares to recoup his expenses, buried his origins and began to live the life of a country gentleman. Three generations later, it had almost been forgotten that the house had ever been owned by anyone else but Jardines, and there
seemed no reason why they should not continue to live there for ever.
So it seemed to Daisy, at any rate, cooling off in the shade of the weeping ash after a hot bicycle ride back from the village, whence she'd been bidden by her mother to take horrid old Mrs Drake a jar of calves' foot jelly. Unmarried as she was determined to remain, she could see herself taking root here at Charnley, in the same way as that ancient old crone, Mrs Drake, with whiskers on her chin and her nature soured, had grown into the very fabric of her tumbledown cottage, refusing stubbornly to move into one of the recently improved almshouses. Silly old besom! thought Daisy. (The old woman had not been suitably grateful for the largesse from the big house, though her daughter-in-law had cried shame on her, and Daisy had ridden home the long way round, to punish herself for expecting Mrs Drake's gratitude, and for being mortified when it hadn't come.) But on arriving home, she'd flung her bicycle down in the stable yard and rushed into the kitchen for a glass of lemonade, by now feeling that her penance had been excessive – though she could never help the guilt feelings induced by comparison of her own comfortable living conditions to those of even the best-off villagers.
“Well, I never, Miss Daisy, bursting in like that, what a turn you gave me!” declared the cook, jumping up in a fluster from an afternoon doze in a chair by the window, her apron over her face. “I'm sorry, but my lemonade's all been taken down to the tennis court, and I've only some barley water I've made for old Nurse. I can squeeze you a lemon into some of that, though,” she added, relenting, for Daisy was spoilt by all the staff, who liked her unaffected manners and happy nature.
“Oh, bliss, Mrs Heslop, you're a brick!”
“I can be,” returned Mrs Heslop drily, “when it do take me that way.”
Daisy had downed the drink, cool from the dark pantry, in unladylike gulps, and then begged another, which she carried outside, into the shade of the ash. Still scarlet-faced, the blood beating under her fair skin, she sat leaning against the trunk, her slippery, unmanageable hair escaping from under her boater and sticking to her forehead in unattractive wisps, like
wet straw. She removed the hat and flung it to the ground, wishing she could do the same with the offending hair. Oh, why
couldn't
she have been blessed with hair like Vita's – dark, glossy and wavy, framing her pretty face even more beautifully now that it was up? Or like her mother's pale and shining, supremely elegant coiffures, which stayed in place exactly as she wished them to stay? But then, nothing, not even a stray hair, was allowed to interfere with Beatrice's calm intentions. Things always happened just as she wished, in the recognisable, organised pattern that defined her well-conducted, irreproachable life. Impossible to imagine Beatrice breaking out of the mould, as Daisy so longed to do. She was so effortlessly good.
As for Daisy – nothing seemed right to her, that summer, half adult, half child as she was, lingering in the awkward hiatus between schoolroom and coming out. She had no one to talk to: Vita was too busy with her Bertie and their wedding preparations to have time to amuse a younger sister, and Harriet, as usual, contrived to bury herself in the library as much as possible in order to avoid the tennis- and tea-parties, picnics and other entertainments devised by their mother as a guise for match-making. Beatrice's admirable devotion to the onerous duty of marrying off three daughters was unswerving. But Harriet, Daisy thought, might already have made up her mind where her affections lay. There was a sort of tension between her and Kit whenever he was here, they were already linked in everyone else's eyes, though Harriet hadn't yet given her word to him. Perhaps, knowing him so intimately since childhood, she knew it wasn't wise to give in to him too easily. Or that was what Miss Tempest had shrewdly suggested.
Positively the worst thing of all about this summer to Daisy was that her governess, Miss Tempest, had astonished everyone (except Daisy herself) by departing to become a suffragette. Leaving Daisy, without her, to face the awfulness of her approaching season, which would not begin until next year, but already loomed as large in her mind as it did in her mother's. There would be her coming out ball to launch her upon the London social scene, followed by an endless round of events, with her mother or dread Great-aunt Edina acting as
chaperone to see that she behaved herself, the sort of events Miss Tempest scornfully dismissed as light-minded: Ascot and Henley Regatta and all the rest of it, dances and balls – house parties, dinner parties, after-theatre suppers, all simply in order to snare a young man like Bertie. Oh, misery, no, not like Bertie, please not, harmless though he was! Harmless and amiable - but such a ninny! Rich, however, and well-connected, already supervising the building of a lovely house across the valley where he would take Vita to live after their wedding, where they would have three or four children and live predictably ever after. Whereas what Daisy wanted – no, what she most passionately desired in the world at this moment – was to join Athene Tempest in that other London, far removed from the world of parties and dances and frivolities like that, and do great and worthy and wonderfully thrilling things by working for women's suffrage. Distribute leaflets demanding votes for women, sew banners (though alas, they would certainly be crooked if she had anything to do with the making of them!). Break windows and chain oneself to railings, perhaps go to prison for it. Throw bombs, even.
Frustrated, Daisy contemplated the impossibility of running away to do any of these things, finished Nanny Byfield's barley water and sat inelegantly, since no one was around to see, with her black-stockinged knees to her chin, and her skirts above them for coolness, showing her drawers; and trying to keep her thoughts from turning to the dreaded arrival of Miss Jessamy, who was to replace Miss Tempest. It was shady under the weeping ash, and though small insects constantly dropped from the canopy, and the roots made for uncomfortable sitting, she stayed where she was. The sounds of tennis being played drifted across to her, and she was far too hot to want to be drawn into a game. But then, as the clock over the stable struck four, came the agreeable realisation that it was too late for that. There would be tea in a quarter of an hour.
Presently, at precisely quarter past four, she saw Albrighton approaching across the lawn at a stately pace, wheeling the tea trolley, attended by the plump, pretty little parlourmaid, Cheevers.
 
“Ah, Bayah-tree-chay!”
Beatrice Jardine, presiding over the teacups, drew in a deep, steadying breath at the sound of that once-familiar voice. A faint tinge of colour appeared on her creamy white skin, a teaspoon rattled slightly against a saucer, but then she pushed back her chair, rose and walked, graceful and statuesque, across the lawn towards the speaker, extending a hand. “Valery!”
“So!” the young man exclaimed with satisfaction. “You knew me then!”
“How could I not? No one else has ever pronounced my name in that ridiculous way! And besides, we were expecting you.”
He raised her soft, be-ringed hand to within a quarter of an inch of his lips, and they surveyed one another, for a moment not smiling. His eyes assessed the woman before him: Beatrice, on the eve of her forty-fourth birthday, was still a beauty, exquisitely dressed in cream shantung, cool and smelling of lily-of-the-valley, gracious and welcoming, the society hostess personified. She saw Valery Akhmet Iskander as the others must see him: milky-coffee skin and a pair of sharp, light-blue eyes, high cheekbones and tight, dark curls, a sloping profile and a wide, white smile, a handsome though unexpected combination due to his mixed Russian and Egyptian parentage. Unusual but, given the melange of nationalities in Cairo, not unheard of. He had put on a little weight since she last saw him. No one would have guessed how uncomfortably hard her heart was beating as she led him forward. “Welcome to Charnley. Come, let me introduce you to the others. I see you and Kit have already met.”
“At the station,” said Kit, stepping forward to greet her in his turn, taking her long white hand in both of his, and dropping a light kiss on her scented cheek. “Had we known, we could have travelled down together.”
As their hands touched, Beatrice experienced as always the tender rush of emotion for the orphaned small boy Kit had been when first she had seen him and drawn him into the bosom of her family. She almost reached out to smooth the wayward black hair that fell in a comma over his forehead. He
raised his intensely blue eyes to her face, eyes of a blue that was very like her own, and with lashes that any girl would have envied, not disguising his obvious admiration for her, and causing a distinct but not unpleasant flutter of pleasure in the region of her breastbone. Rather quickly, her hand was withdrawn from his clasp. She patted his sleeve in a motherly fashion, and turned away. Iskander was led to the tea-table and presented: “Valery Iskander, an eminent Egyptologist whom I met some years ago while wintering in Egypt.”
Smiling, the newcomer bowed his head over the hands of several young ladies in straw boaters and high-necked, long-sleeved muslin blouses with cream serge skirts, shook hands with gentlemen still in tennis whites, who nodded a little stiffly and watched him covertly. It was difficult to say how old he was, though certainly not more than in his mid-thirties, which seemed young to have reached the eminence Beatrice had stated. She was perhaps simply being polite. His dark suit was just a little too impeccable in this gathering, his collar too stiff, his moustache narrow and sleek above the full, sensuous lips. But then he was, after all, a foreigner.
Introductions over, a place was found for him next to his hostess, more tea was ordered, more scones, and, as the conversation resumed its generality, Iskander was given time to study his new acquaintances. The bevy of young women resolved itself into no more than three, all of them Beatrice's daughters: there was Harriet, the eldest, in no way a beauty but striking, tall like her mother, and with a crooked smile and a pair of serious brown eyes under level dark brows: a clever girl, no doubt. Little Vita, the prettiest of the three – endearing pansy face, small white teeth, carnations-and-cream complexion, wearing a large diamond cluster on her engagement finger, indulging in playful asides with her young man, Bertram Rossiter, rosy and rather self-satisfied, who was seated next to her. The other man was a neighbour, a fattish, damp young fellow called Teddy Cranfield, the effect of whose exertions on the tennis court could only be guessed at.
At that moment Cheevers arrived with replenishments, and an urgent question for Beatrice from Mrs Heslop, apparently about the fish for dinner. With a little cluck of annoyance,
Beatrice rose and stepped aside to deal with the matter, while the conversation round the tea table continued.
“Mr Iskander, how fortunate that you will be here for Mama's birthday next week! Are you any good at play-acting?” Vita dimpled at him. “I warn you – Harriet will try to rope you in, she's of a managing disposition and we're woefully short of men—men who are willing, that is,” she declared in mock reproof at her future husband, and the perspiring Teddy Cranfield.
“An ability to stand still would be more useful than playacting, since it's a
tableau vivant
we're to do! Barely a week to prepare for it – and we haven't yet decided on a subject!”
That was the youngest daughter, Daisy. An untidy child, her long hair not yet up, her features not fully formed into those of the woman she would become, the only one of the three who had Beatrice's gold silk hair, her pale creamy skin, maybe the only one with the promise of their mother's true beauty, but who could tell? She was as yet an unfolded bud. Her looks did not quite accord with her ways, however, that much was apparent even to a newcomer such as Iskander. Like her elder sister Harriet, a lively intelligence animated her face, and she spoke with a vehemence and conviction that could never have come from Beatrice. There was nothing in the least remote and cool about her.

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