Fiercombe Manor (17 page)

I remembered Nan's words about Mr. Morton, the historian with all the books. Perhaps he had a copy.

“It was thought to be quite an ugly house,” continued Mrs. Jelphs. “Those who worked on the estate—there were still a good number of them then—as well as those from up the hill in Stanwick, they all hated it when it was first built. It had every modern convenience inside, and the garden was laid out in the Italian style by a famous designer who brought in marble statues. There was even an ornamental lake dug, with a great fountain installed.”

She stopped abruptly, and I heard her swallow. She was fighting with her own emotions, I could tell.

“It was the grandest house I'd ever been in,” she said softly, the tremor returning to her voice. “There were large houses in Cheltenham, but there was something about the setting here, against the steep sides of the valley, that made Stanton House particularly imposing.”

“But what happened to it all?” I said, as gently as I could. “I still don't see how a house like that can have just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“It didn't disappear. It was sold off.” Her voice was flat.

“But the building itself?”

“That was sold too. When the assets of an estate are stripped, they don't just get rid of every piece of furniture. The copper from the roof, the imported statues and Mediterranean plants—those that had survived the winters—the oak panelling from the billiards room, the books from the library and the shelves that had been hand-built to hold them, the metal from the gas generator, even those great huge blocks of grey stone. All of it was sold off. The silverware you have been polishing, for instance, was bought back by Sir Charles much later on.

“The auctioneers made a neat job of it, like meat picked clean off a bone. Apart from the walls of the old kitchen garden and the glasshouse, there's nothing left. It was pure chance that the valuers
didn't bother to look inside the old manor. They took one glance at the roof and the yews towering above it and wrote it off as a ruin, worth nothing.”

“But the other house. What a waste. Of money and time and—”

“Sir Charles was Edward Stanton's younger brother, by ten or fifteen years. I have said he was a prudent man, and that made him very different from his brother. He has done a good job of paying off the great debts that Sir Edward amassed.”

“He must have died quite young,” I said. “Sir Edward, I mean.”

“Yes,” she said. “He was young—not much more than forty.”

As with Elizabeth, I wanted to ask what had happened to her husband, but Mrs. Jelphs's bleak expression stopped me. I knew it would probably curtail the evening's conversation, but more than that, I also wanted Mrs. Jelphs to like me, to approve of me even as my own mother didn't. As intrigued as I was by whatever had gone so wrong in the valley all those years before, I didn't want to trample on the memories of the woman who had taken me in. All in all, steering the conversation back to Sir Charles seemed safer territory.

“Ruck seemed to say that it was the present Lady Stanton who wanted to go and live in France. I just wondered—if Sir Charles went to so much trouble to restore the manor, why would he ever consent to leave it?”

“He loved Fiercombe once—it was his boyhood home, as I think I have said—but I don't think his wife ever shared that. I remember very clearly their arrival. I was one of the few servants from the Stanton House days to stay on after it was demolished. One by one, the estate cottages emptied, until Ruck and I were the only ones left.”

She stopped to sip at her glass of water, and I realised how tired she looked, a trick of the dim light making her skin thin and sag as I watched.

“That's when I became housekeeper. Well, as much of a housekeeper as anyone can be, with one house razed to the ground and the other falling into ruin. I lived in one of the estate cottages and stayed there until Sir Charles began to restore the manor. He very kindly kept me on after his brother's death, and I've been here ever since. If someone had told me, on the day I arrived at Stanton House, what would become of it, I would not have believed them. It was so large, so . . . permanent-looking. But I suppose nothing ever is, not really.”

“And Lady Stanton—Sir Charles's Lady Stanton, I mean—she just never took to the valley?”

Mrs. Jelphs avoided my eyes. “It wasn't that she disliked it. But it was only a few years after the big house had been demolished, and, well, there had been some foolish talk that the valley was tainted—”

She stopped abruptly and got to her feet, lifting my empty plate and her almost untouched one, and shaking her head when I tried to help. When she returned from the kitchen, she was holding a pie fresh from the oven, the crisp pastry lid a deep golden colour. She cut me a large slice.

“Do you take custard?” she asked. Her tone of artificial brightness was back.

I nodded. “Yes, thank you, it looks wonderful. But the house”—I couldn't help but press a little more—“it can't even have been that old when it was knocked down. How could things change so quickly?”

Something in Mrs. Jelphs's expression had altered, and I realised that her confiding mood had been broken when she left the room.

“That's right,” she said briskly. “It was quick. Stanton House stood for less than ten years. Now, I still haven't got to the point with all my rambling. We began by talking about the glasshouse.”

I leant forward expectantly again.

“The glasshouse that once belonged to Stanton House is still standing, but only just. Many of the panes have been smashed over the years, some of them simply falling out of their frames as they warp and weather. Others look secure enough but aren't, and the slightest disturbance will bring them down. On no account must you go inside—quite apart from cutting your feet to ribbons, you could bring the whole lot down on top of yourself. I have tried to tell Sir Charles that it must be pulled down, but . . .”

Even in the dim light Mrs. Jelphs looked pale, paler than she had been five minutes before. As she cut herself a small sliver of the pie, her hand shook. She put down the knife and looked up at me.

“I don't want you going there, Alice, is that understood? It's strictly forbidden.”

I nodded meekly, though my mind was full of the story she had just told me. The valley, now cloaked in the darkness of night, was all around us, witness to all that had happened. A single word came back to me as Mrs. Jelphs and I began clearing the table together.
Tainted
. It seemed to leach out across my mind, rusty like old blood.

I went up to bed soon after, and feeling something brush against my leg, I remembered the little hare. I had completely forgotten to ask about it. With a start I realised what else I'd forgotten: for the whole time Mrs. Jelphs had been talking, I hadn't thought once about James. In fact, my whole life in London—for all the city's bustle and press of people—seemed little more than an inconsequential blur. The valley and those who had lived here were weaving their enchantment around me already.

I
t was just as she was thinking that she really must go down and welcome their guests that she heard the gilt clock on the mantelpiece begin to strike seven, the sound like long fingernails plucking at a fork's tines. She remained sitting at her dressing table, her reflection staring back at her in triplicate. Edith had been and gone: she had fastened the dozens of tiny pearl buttons at the back of the new dress and pinned up her mistress's hair. Elizabeth turned to view it from the side and saw that she had done an excellent job. It shone deeply like molasses, and each coil was perfectly pinned so it would neither ache her scalp nor slip from its moorings halfway through the evening.

“Sir Edward will fall in love with you all over again tonight,” Edith had said when she finished.

“Is that all it requires?” Elizabeth had replied, too sharply. “A new way of putting up my hair and a silk dress?”

Edith's face had fallen, and Elizabeth thought for a horrible moment that the girl might cry.

To rescue the situation, she had forced out a laugh. “Dear Edith, I'm just teasing. You've worked a miracle with this unruly hair of mine, and I can't wait to show Edward.”

Edith had smiled tentatively, and by the time she had left to go downstairs her eyes were dry and lit with excitement once more.

In truth, it was hard for Elizabeth to gauge what her husband would think of her at these events, where she always felt as though she were walking a high wire. This feeling of precariousness was one of the reasons she dreaded them.

Last year she had attended a formal party at another, larger estate in the north of the county. The reason she had relented and accompanied Edward—as well as his brother—now eluded her. Possibly she had hoped it would grant her exemption from the next few such gatherings.

It wasn't far into the evening when things began to sour. She had been dancing with Charles, having assumed that partnering her brother-in-law would avoid rousing the jealousy she had always inspired in Edward. Any implied flattery in that had palled very quickly for her.

In Charles she had discovered a very different character. He was neither as handsome nor as mercurial in temper as Edward—who called him “the plodder” in private—but Elizabeth found him soothing. There was a palpable ease in Charles; he was a picture of contentment in his own skin. Given the choice, he would always prefer to be outdoors on a walk or taking a brass rubbing in the chapel, but the social whirl did not concern him either. He was always himself, wherever you put him. His older brother, in contrast, might reveal half a dozen different faces on a night like this. It all depended on whether he was talking to a pretty girl, a man who owned a more important estate, or Elizabeth herself.

The curious thing about her husband was not that he could be as charming as he was arrogant and intolerant when he chose—his parents had bequeathed him all those characteristics. No, it was the fact that their worship of him, along with his fine figure and
privileged position, had not made him either content or assured. Elizabeth sometimes wondered whether it was London that had shaken his sense of himself: its sea of men more wealthy, brilliant, and extraordinary causing him to despise his own rural backwater. If not London, then what? A natural propensity to dissatisfaction?

She had thought it safe to dance with Charles—surely this wouldn't cause offence—but when she glanced over at her husband, he was looking directly at her over the head of their hostess, who was futilely trying to engage him in conversation. He wanted Elizabeth to go to him, she knew, but that night she chose not to. Instead—because she was damned if she did and damned if she didn't—she recklessly accepted dance after dance with anyone who asked her.

It was airless in the ballroom. To create a romantic effect, mountains of candles had been lit everywhere, great clusters of them on every available surface and in the chandeliers high above. Despite the January chill outside, their collective heat was almost overpowering, and had turned the tall arched windows blind with condensation. The room reeked of sweat and scorched wax: she could see the sheen of perspiration on the faces around her, could feel her own hair curling tighter in the humidity. Late on in the night, when she hadn't exchanged a word with Edward for hours, one of the chandelier candles had dripped onto her bare shoulder. She flinched as it landed, a pinprick of pain before the wax set as a pale disc only a shade or two lighter than her own skin. The man she had been dancing with, whose name she hadn't absorbed, unthinkingly reached out to touch it, only drawing back his hand at the last moment. She didn't need to look over to the drinks table to confirm that Edward had witnessed the near intimacy.

On the way home, the carriage hurtling along alarmingly fast, Edward kept up a ceaseless flow of conversation with Charles that
deliberately excluded her, despite the latter's attempts to bring her in. Brought up by parents who had always sought her opinions and her approval, who simply enjoyed admiring their blossoming daughter, she found it disconcerting to be rendered invisible. It was not a sensation she had grown more inured to over the years with Edward, either. She stared out the window at bare winter fields brushed silver by the moon and thought she could not feel any lonelier if she was pushed out of the carriage and abandoned there.

That time it was an endless three days before he deigned to speak properly to her again, and then she was so suffused with relief that she let the injustice of it melt away. Something was always left behind after these banishments, though, and it was rather like hardened wax—another drop setting each time she found herself exiled. She finally understood that he derived some perverse pleasure in striding away from her or looking impassively on as she tried to make amends.

After the relief came anger that time, and she realised that it had been there all the time, lying dormant. That was a revelation: like being lifted high on the crest of a boiling wave. Never again would she follow him about the house, begging for scraps of affection, beseeching him, “But what have I done?” In the early days, their reconciliations had made her passionate. Once she learnt to match his coldness with her own, it was disquieting how quickly her ardour for him had ebbed away.

Now, in her bedroom, the larger of the clock's hands showed it was ten past the hour. By the sound of it, more than a few of their guests had already arrived. She couldn't help but think of them as circling vultures, out there on the pristinely rolled lawn. The first glimpse they got of her would be worst, their beady eyes drinking her in thirstily, searching for signs of damage. She wished Charles
had been able to attend; his presence in the valley was always a comfort.

She should go now, or she might never go. If she hesitated much longer, Edward would notice and be alert to the possibility that her health was failing again—that she was failing again.