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‘I’ll be at my desk.’
‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘And shall I light a fire?’
‘No, I’ll manage.’
Barbara was used to his economy with words. He didn’t give himself away, not to just anyone. He was twenty-six this winter, and to all intents and purposes had removed himself from the world. He was a distant rock battered by storms, a locked door in a darkened corridor, a half remembered song.
After what had happened, how could it be different?
‘Very well,’ she said softly. ‘Will that be all?’
‘Yes,’ Mr Lomax replied, ‘that’s all.’
It was cool in the library; cellar draughts seeping through the floorboards, the damp in the walls making everything chill despite the heat of the day. Charlie dragged on a frayed Guernsey and lit the flames. His hands were broad and work-roughened, the flesh stained and splintered, chapped by outdoor grind. Sparks burst and crackled and he spread his fingers to warm them in the orange, spitting glow.
He settled at the morning’s post. Red warnings glared through envelopes, demands for payment and threatened court action. Sigmund padded over and absent-mindedly Charlie scratched the retriever’s head. The dog put both paws on his lap, resting his chops and gazing up at his master forlornly.
The books told a sorry story. Usherwood was in dire straits and despite Charlie’s initiatives—selling off his mother’s art collection; opening the outbuildings; renting the south field as a campsite—it scarcely touched the sides. Each cheque was engulfed by a rising tide of demands. The drive needed resurfacing, the greenhouse was suffering a leak, the roof in the old maid’s lodgings begged a restoration, the arch on the chapel was collapsing … He couldn’t keep up. Maintaining the occupied quarters was bad enough. They’d had neither heating nor hot water for over a month, and Charlie had taken to bathing early morning in the bitter spinney stream.
Of course he was meant to be rich. This was a mansion, after all—palatial, exquisite, the finest example of Jacobean architecture in the West Country—and its inhabitant aristocracy, heir to great fortune. But the upkeep had sapped every penny of that fortune. Huge chambers slept unused, locked away, spaces once bright and vital now relegated to the graveyard. Piece by piece the house was shutting down. It reminded Charlie of a night when he was eight, camping in the trunk of the withered oak with a blanket up by his ears. The house had seemed an advent calendar of golden windows, his father passing through to extinguish one light at a time until nothing was left but the stain of dark upon dark, the shell of a house sliced out of the night.
Amid a nest of paperwork, a red blinking caught his attention.
One message pending:
‘Can’t stop, old bean,’ came a familiar, hated voice. ‘Susanna’s been hankering after a taste of the Cornish Riviera and you know me—never one to disappoint a lady. We arrive tomorrow. Tidy the place up, won’t you? Oh, and do spare us by getting those rotten hounds on a leash; Susanna won’t like them a bit.’ He was about to ring off, before a parting: ‘Tell the girls to whip up something nice. Susanna wants British; you know the thing. Tarts. Shortbread.’
The line went dead.
Charlie listened to it a second time before hitting delete. His knuckles cracked.
Cato Lomax.
Movie star, icon, Casanova—but the world didn’t know him as Charlie did. His Cato was narcissistic, decadent, reckless, wicked; the grubby-palmed boy who had terrorised him, pushing him from the apple tree so he knocked his front teeth grey, dunking his head in the glacial lake one vicious winter, bolting him in the stuffy leather trunk they had taken to Harrow and feeding in a sack of crawling beetles, trapping him in the secret passage that ran between the pantry and the sword room …
And then, when they were adults, taking from him the one thing Charlie could never forgive him for. People said it hadn’t been Cato’s fault, but Charlie knew better.
Acid clutched his heart when he thought of that furious, thundery night … Cato’s tail lights disappearing down the Usherwood drive, rain slashing the windows, a red torch bleeding into darkness …
The very last time he had seen her.
The manslaughter charge had been dropped. Nothing more said about it. That was what money could do—it could buy justice, as rotten and corrupt as it came.
But by Charlie’s judgement, his brother could never be forgiven.
Whenever he read about Cato in the papers, posing with a new actress girlfriend, he swallowed fury like a knot of wire. Despite it all Cato still imagined himself to be emperor of Usherwood. By virtue of his age the true and righteous Lord Lomax, winging in whenever it suited to boast his heritage to a Plasticine army of Americans. Cato had no clue about the place or what it needed; all he cared for was his reputation and the social currency Usherwood awarded. Being gentry wasn’t about playing polo and hanging pheasants; it was about a birthright that had been passed through generations, this wounded house that Charlie toiled for night and day because he felt it in his soul, his true devotion and his true belonging.
He went to the window and released the catch, grounding himself against the approaching storm.
That was it, then: the prodigal son returned.
Cato’s imminent arrival slid over the surrounding hills like an army on the mount. The air outside was fragrant. A cabbage white fluttered on to the sill, twitching its wings. Somewhere in the grounds a nightingale sang.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_9b7ff671-e6a6-59ca-988a-4a5672d94c0d)
OLIVIA SHOULD HAVE known that the car wouldn’t start. For most of the year Florence Lark had been using the battered green-and-white Deux Chevaux as an elaborate planter, filling it with sorrel and sage, parsley and peppermint, basil and bay. Olivia wasn’t sure if this arrangement was intentional or if her mother had just neglected to unpack the allotment spoils one day and things had grown from there.
‘Take the bicycle,’ Flo said from her position on the caravan steps, where she was busy peeling apples into a basin. She was an attractive woman with a stream of honey-blonde hair, bright blue eyes and the skin of a seventeen-year-old. ‘It’s a glorious afternoon; you could do with getting some country air back into you. I can’t imagine how you put up with The Smoke for so long. I never could.’
‘It was only a year.’ Olivia had a brief, strange pang for the Archway bedsit, and the top decks of buses she’d see sailing past her window as she ate breakfast.
‘Well, a year’s long enough.’
‘I’m not staying, you know.’ She yanked the pushbike from its moorings amid a hillock of grass. A slick of oil smeared blackly across her dress and she wiped it with the back of her hand. ‘This is just a stopgap.’
‘Hmm, you say that now …’
‘I’ll be saying the same in a month.’
‘But you love the cove!’
‘Nothing ever happens here, Mum. It’s full of the people who never left.’
Her mother pulled a face. ‘Like Adrian Gold?’
Olivia glanced away. ‘Maybe.’
‘You’re drastically out of his league.’
‘You would say that.’
‘And you’ll never see it, of course.’ Flo sighed. ‘There he is sailing about with a string of airheads in bikinis without a brain cell to speak of between them …’
Olivia rolled her eyes. So much for the sisterhood that had been drummed into her since birth—and anyway, what was wrong with wearing a bikini and being hot and having Addy Gold lusting after you? All her life she had been steered away from the tricks that helped a girl look nice, and suddenly she felt pissed off, as if she’d been robbed of her only shot, which was ridiculous because it was hardly as if a stick of gloss and a spritz of Dior would have made all the difference. Or would it? Natural is beautiful, her mother insisted, and besides, stuff like high heels and make-up were Crimes Against Women. They were alternative, remember? But alternative was fine when you were forty and wore moccasins and smoked damp roll-ups, and not when you were sixteen and just wanted to go on a date without having to explain why your shoes were made of hay (that was an exaggeration—but only just).
Olivia saddled up. Thanks to this conversation she felt every inch the grumpy adolescent: how did coming home always achieve that?
‘Wish me luck,’ she muttered, before she could mutter anything else.
‘Don’t let that Lomax give you any trouble,’ counselled her mother. ‘He’s meant to be downright insufferable. Any nonsense and you tell him what for.’
In finding her feet on the pedals Olivia almost toppled sideways. It was ages since she’d ridden and the squeaky brakes and cranky gears did little to bolster the confidence. Flo gave her a push and she teetered off down the path.
Olivia might find herself pining for the city, but even she couldn’t deny how free she felt flying down Lustell Steep with the wind in her hair, up on the handlebars, sheer momentum carrying her. She could taste the ocean and hear the swooping cries of seagulls as they wheeled overhead. Over the mount she passed the church. Sweet buds nestled in hedgerows and the back-end of a hare darted into the mossy verge.
This was the way she used to come in the holidays, racing against her best friend Beth to reach the old bench first. Past the weathered seat there was a gap in the border, big enough for two girls to squeeze through. They called the field beyond the Hush-Hush—perhaps because it had been quiet as a lake on the day they’d found it, or perhaps because they’d sworn to keep its discovery a secret. In the hot months it was bright with corn and rape, kernels you could pick off in juice-stained fingers and pop their oily pods in your mouth. In winter it was rough with earth and churned up like the sea in a gale. This was where her mother had taken them when she’d first bought the 2CV, picking them up from school with a tray of eggs laid out on the rear shelf, pink and smooth as pebbles and lined up neatly in rows like a cinema for bald people. Flo had driven fast as a rocket across the field and the car had gone bouncing and bounding and leaping over the ridges, Olivia and Beth in the back, clutching each other and laughing till they cried, shrieking, ‘Slow down!’ even if they hadn’t wanted her to, and when they stopped they were amazed to see the shells still intact.
‘There you go,’ Florence had triumphed. ‘Best set of wheels on the market.’
That was before Olivia found out that Farmer Nancarrow owned the Hush-Hush land. She had never told the boys this, but once, ages ago, she had seen him kissing her mother at a barn dance, a dark, dusky giant of a man, and she had hid in the wings of the stage, wide-eyed and watching.
By the time she reached the foot of the Usherwood drive, the sun was lowering in the sky and early evening shadows were lengthening across the plots.
At the entrance a sign announced the house, faded with age and leaning to one side. Across the cattle grid the route opened up and Olivia rode faster, the track galloping away beneath her wheels. All her life the estate had been a distant wonder, perpetually beyond reach, the untouchable palace of the aristocracy. She’d been ten when Lord and Lady Lomax had died, and supposed she must have come once or twice when she was little, but the memories became eclipsed by their grim successors: TV crews descending; reporters on the streets; the canvas of shocked, sad faces as the cove had digested the news. People like that—rich, glamorous, exceptional people—didn’t just disappear. For months afterwards, Olivia had imagined divers scouring the ocean depths, finding nothing except a diamond bracelet winking on the seabed.
She had been too young then to appreciate what it must have been like for the children left behind. Losing her own father at six had at least spared her the pain of a proper understanding, the significance of it too big, too serious, to process. Even when Flo had held her close and told her Dad was never coming back, Olivia had secretly known that he would. He’d show up one day and surprise them. Got you, monkey! A game; like when he’d chase her round the garden and throw her over his head, forcing her to squeal her delight. But as the weeks turned into months and the seasons unfurled, so did the realisation that her mother had been right. Grief assailed her gradually; there had been no ambush. The Lomax boys had been ambushed.
Through a canopy of trees Usherwood at last came into view. It was beautiful and sad and majestic all at the same time. The entrance was arched, the exterior dotted with dozens of bay windows that gazed enquiringly back at her. Curvilinear gables, peaked like the spade suit in a deck of playing cards, adorned the ridges like icing. Close up, telltale signs of decay blushingly revealed themselves: chalky efflorescence on a renovated chimney, a weathered ox-eye on a central facade, twisted pillars pockmarked by age … Yet nothing could rob the mansion of its splendour.
The drive widened into an oval expanse of gravel, stones grinding beneath her tread, and Olivia climbed off to wheel the rest of the way.
She spotted a man up a ladder, his back to her. From what she could see he was fixing a gutter. She pictured how she must look, a stranger with a cloud of auburn hair and thistle scratches on her legs, pushing a bike whose pannier was stuffed with a beach towel and a crumpled sketchbook.
Two dogs bounded over, hindquarters bowed in excitement, their tails going frantically. She made a fuss of them, patting their flanks and scuffing their ears.
‘Hello,’ she called. ‘Hello there!’ She gave a pointless little wave, like someone on the deck of a ferry.
The labourer swore. He sucked the tip of his finger where he’d splintered it, or bashed it with a hammer, or whatever it was he was doing up there, and turned.
‘Can I help you?’ he hollered down irritably. His voice was very deep, and low, like a shout thrown back from the distant end of a tunnel.
Olivia couldn’t see his face, just a big black shape where he obscured the melting sun. ‘I’m, er, looking for a job,’ she replied uncertainly. ‘I saw the ad at the beach; you’re after someone to help with the gardens? I hope I’m in time …’
The man thought for a moment before climbing down. She could practically see his bad mood, sense it like a squall on the water when she was out on her board and the weather was changing. As he came nearer she was dwarfed by his size. He had a tousle of coal-black hair and his shoulders were treble the width of hers. He was so tall she barely came up to his chin. His eyes were darker than three a.m.
‘I’m Olivia,’ she started. ‘Olivia Lark.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I know.’
She took in his paint-splashed work trousers and faded checked shirt. He had a clever, angular face, catching the sun on one side. His eyelashes were long. Sooty. She wondered if he had helped out on her mother’s allotment.
‘Could I speak to the owner?’
His frown deepened.
‘Or if now’s a bad time …?’
He continued assessing her in that peculiarly penetrating way. She had never been on the receiving end of such stark, unapologetic scrutiny.
‘The thing is,’ she forged on, ‘I’m an artist. That sounds massively wanky, but it’s the truth so I might as well be truthful, and the other truth is that I’m unemployed and I need to make money so that I can move back to London and get on with things.’ Why was she babbling? She never babbled. His frown became more of a scowl. ‘So I’m back for the summer, and I’m hardworking, and reliable, and I wouldn’t ask to be paid too much. I’m good with plants and stuff—and I cook a bit … though actually,’ she retracted it, ‘not very well; as a matter of fact I had a complete catastrophe with a macaroni cheese the other day. You should have seen it! All burned on the top and chewy as bootlaces …’ She trailed off. His expression was stony.
‘I don’t like macaroni cheese,’ he said eventually.
‘Whoever doesn’t like macaroni cheese?’
‘I just told you: I don’t.’
There was a long, difficult silence that he appeared entirely untroubled by. Olivia’s patience expired. What the hell was his problem? No wonder the house was going under with people like this charged with greeting outsiders.
‘I’m sorry I’ve interrupted,’ she said, prim as a debutante as she turned on her heel. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’
‘Don’t.’
Flabbergasted by his rudeness, she raged, ‘Bloody hell, you’re rude. You could’ve just—’
‘Now will do.’
He rubbed the stubble on his jaw. He was sexy, in a prehistoric sort of way. There was something very raw about him, like one of her pictures when she’d only done the most ragged outline in pencil. The top of his nose was cracked out of shape.
‘I’m looking to open the ornamentals at the end of the season,’ he said. ‘I’ve drawn up the plans, and I dare say you’ll be cheaper than a hired hand. It’ll be hard work and I won’t be paying more than I have to. Believe it or not, we’re in need of money ourselves, so that’s one thing we already have in common.’
She expected him to smile but he didn’t.
He named his price, concluding indifferently: ‘Take it or leave it.’
Olivia agreed before he could change his mind. ‘But shouldn’t I speak to Mr Lomax? I mean, I don’t know who you are, but—’
‘I am Mr Lomax.’
‘Oh.’
She looked away, embarrassed, as if he’d just taken all his clothes off in front of her. There were shades of Cato, maybe: a coarser, unpolished version. She had always envisaged the other brother as the hunchback in the attic, warty and stooped and living on a diet of pickled onions. The reality was rather different.
One thing was for sure: arrogance ran in the family.
‘Well,’ she said stiffly, ‘you could have said—’
‘Remember I didn’t ask you to be here. You asked me.’
She blinked. ‘All right.’
‘Be aware that this house owes you nothing except your pay. My brother doesn’t live here, so if that was your motivation you can leave right away.’
‘It wasn’t,’ she clarified hastily. ‘I don’t even fancy him!’
Her statement sounded impossibly stupid in the quiet that followed.
‘I’m Charlie,’ he gave her eventually. ‘Don’t bother with Mr Lomax or sir or anything like that. Just Charlie.’
‘OK. When do you want me to start?’
‘Not now, I’m expecting people.’
‘Right. So …’
‘So leave?’
Olivia bit back the smart retort he’d been begging for since she’d arrived. Did this man have absolutely no social graces? Deliberately he had put her on the back foot, watching her squirm because that was exactly the kind of enjoyment a person in his position preferred. She supposed life must become tiresome when you were king of all you surveyed, lord of a privileged, proud dominion that sprawled as far as the eye could see. Commoners like her were just a passing opportunity for entertainment. Wasn’t Mr Lomax—sorry, Charlie—meant to be an advocate for the upper classes? It went to show that all the huff and puff of an absurdly expensive education couldn’t buy manners. And anyway, Lomax or no Lomax, she wasn’t sure she could ever altogether trust someone who didn’t like pasta and cheese.
