All around Blythe in the small, dark room whose stone foundations burrowed into ancient Cornish soil, the evil specters of the last seven months seemed to rise and mock her vain attempt to escape the hurt and humiliation she'd endured.
What hope for the future could there be when the past was so ugly and would probably remain with her, wherever she went?
Blythe stared at the relentless downpour slanting against the window and gripped the back of a Windsor chair to keep from fleeing into the night. Then, with a sudden sense of purpose, she rummaged inside her Vuitton suitcases and pulled out the bottle of duty-free Glenfiddich whiskey she'd impulsively purchased en route.
By midnight she'd drunk herself into oblivion.
***
The first sound Blythe became conscious of the following day was not the rhythmic surge of the surf a hundred feet below the cottage facing the sea. Nor was it the din of rain slapping against the slate roof above her head. What forced her to full consciousness was an irritating series of peremptory honks from a car horn that grew louder by the minute. The staccato beeping made the pounding in her head worse. This was soon followed by repeated thuds from someone thumping on the thick oak door studded with heavy wrought-iron hinges
and a large iron keyhole.
"Mrs. Stowe? Hello? Are you there?"
Blythe struggled to rise above the feather duvet smothering the double bed that was tucked under the eaves in the loft perched above the kitchen-sitting room downstairs. The square, European-style pillows supporting her neck did little to cushion her throbbing head, the unhappy result of downing half a bottle of single-malt whiskey.
And now, she thought, attempting to focus her bloodshot eyes on the rafters above her head, she was paying a very high price for achieving total insensibility. Her temples throbbed unmercifully as her stomach roiled in time with the fist thumping on her door.
Good God! That noise below was deafening!
"Hello… Mrs. Stowe? Anyone at home?" called a deep voice, accompanied by the incessant pounding that finally penetrated through her alcohol-induced haze.
For pity's sake, would someone have the decency to stop that infernal racket!
Blythe fumbled for her watch on the marble-topped night table beside her bed. The elegant roman numerals on the face stamped Cartier swam before her eyes. It was nearly onethirty. In the afternoon!
"Mrs. Stowe!" the voice rumbled a third time.
Silence.
"Ah, well…" someone muttered resignedly.
Soon she heard footsteps on the gravel path leading from the front door. Still in a drugged daze, she reached for her cotton dressing gown, shivering in the damp air. She stumbled down the steep, ladder-like stairway that connected the sleeping loft to the main floor of the cottage. Off to the side stood a twoburner cooker and a small microwave oven perched on top of a waist-high efficiency refrigerator. An ancient stone fireplace large enough for her to walk into—and where entire meals presumably had once been prepared—contained a neat stack of logs placed in readiness on its cold grate.
The dull day's light penetrated the cottage's dark corners, banishing most of the shadows that had cast such a melancholy spell over her the previous evening. Glancing hastily about the room, she spied an attractive folding screen, executed in needlepoint and placed around a claw-and-ball bathtub that faced a side window, offering a spectacular view of the jagged coastline. Through the "as advertised" floor-to-ceiling rainspattered artist's window, she saw a hulking automobile that faintly resembled an army tank parked ten feet from her door.
Sprinting across the cold slate floor, she flung open the wooden portal. "Excuse me!" she called, gasping as the cold air swirled around her ankles and bare feet. "Hello!" Then she sagged against the doorjamb for support, wincing in the anemic daylight filtering through the overcast skies above the cottage roof.
A man at least as tall as Christopher Stowe, in his late thirties, clad in tweeds and a well-worn stalking cap, paused at the door of a battered Land Rover. The oversized vehicle was painted the same shade of green as his knee-high rubber Wellington boots. Despite Blythe's unrelenting headache, she couldn't help noticing that her visitor could be a body double for some intriguing, nattily dressed British actor, familiar to American audiences through the auspices of
Masterpiece Theater
on public television. However, this man's superb bone structure and refined taste in chocolate-colored tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows and tan moleskin trousers were somewhat offset by blue-black hair in need of a trim. Just short of shaggy, the glossy jet strands grazing his forehead and brushing his ears contributed to his faintly piratical appearance. Perhaps there was even a slight Latin cast to his features, as well. Hadn't a few members of the Spanish Armada washed up on Cornish shores in Elizabethan times? Surely the man seemed tanned and tall enough to have come from conquistador stock.
"Well, good morning, Mrs. Stowe," her visitor said with impeccable courtesy, although he was obviously trying not to stare at her disheveled state.
She imagined she looked a bit like a Skid Row derelict as she attempted to push her unruly mass of hair off her forehead. Fortunately her polite visitor appeared determined to act as if everyone around these parts routinely slept till near teatime.
"H-hello…" she croaked, her voice startlingly hoarse.
"Welcome to Cornwall. Pity about the weather," he added, glancing up at the dark clouds churning overhead. Judging from its ominous cast, the skies threatened to renew the downpour of a few minutes earlier. "Taking advantage of the dull day to overcome that dreadful jet lag, are you?" he inquired, his voice edged with amused irony.
Jet leg, my grandpa's spittoon, she groaned inwardly. What she had was a hangover brought to her in seventy millimeters and digital sound. She looked and felt a mess.
The intruder had retraced the cottage path to her door. He was close enough to her now that she could see his gaze had shifted from her face to beyond her left shoulder, where he was in a position to see the cold hearth and her suitcases still scattered in the middle of the room. Where in blazes had she discarded that bottle of Glenfiddich?
Her uninvited visitor was staring at her expectantly now. She knew that she should offer an introduction, but her brain
was working in slow motion.
"Sorry to disturb you," he said at length. "I'm Lucas Teague."
"No. Really?" was all she could reply. She had incorrectly guessed that the stranger at her door might have been her landlord's property manager. Who else would force himself out in this disgusting weather to pay a visit to the recent arrival from America?
"Really, truly," he calmly assured her.
By now the hereditary owner of the castle perched on the hill behind them had reached the broad slate step abutting her door. Sheep in the field surrounding Painter's Cottage grazed in the background, their faint bleating nearly drowned out by the sound of the surf awash against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.
Incongruously, she realized, the man dressed for a country outing was also carrying a slim briefcase. If I were designing this film, she thought suddenly, the scene would call for glorious sun to be shining down on that rakish black head of hair, and I would make sure the prop department found him a Purdey shotgun or a brace of pheasants to clutch in his gloved hand. I would also make him "Sir" Lucas Teague—a baronet, at least.
"Shall I come back later for you to sign the extension to your lease? Or better yet… perhaps you'd like to come up to the Hall today for tea?" he proposed in a tone of voice that had become entirely businesslike.
"Extension? Of my lease?" she echoed, mystified.
For the second time she attempted to tidy her auburn hair by running her fingers through its shoulder-length curls, made even more unruly by the moist air boiling up from the Channel. She groped for the open neck of her dressing gown and pulled at its flimsy fabric to veil her goose-pimpled flesh.
"Your solicitor—I mean lawyer—rang up late yesterday as I was about to leave for dinner. Said you were en route but would approve the new arrangement when you arrived."
Didn't one leave such lowly matters to an underling when one was lord of the manor? The owner of Barton Hall seemed to be a bit short on staff.
"That I would stay longer than a month?" she queried.
"Yes. Through September, she said," Teague confirmed patiently. "For a 'much deserved rest,' as she put it," he emphasized, regarding her even more closely.
The man had obviously concluded that his new tenant was a half-wit, Blythe thought with embarrassment. As she inadvertently met his gaze, she saw that he had blue eyes like Christopher's, only much darker and in wonderful harmony with his ebony hair. Then she silently scolded herself for making the comparison. He was her landlord, for God's sake, and he was undoubtedly wondering what in the world he had let himself in for by leasing this cottage to a whiskeyswilling American.
She blinked several times to clear her blurred vision. Spanish and Celtic, the man was, most probably, she concluded. An intriguing collision of cultures.
"Have you settled in all right?" he inquired, startling her from her thoughts.
"Hm? Ah… yes!" she blurted. "I mean… reasonably well, I'd say."
"You'll be able to stock up on food and supplies at Mevagissey or Gorran Haven, of course, a mile or so just down the road there. Have you had anything to eat?"
Blythe thought briefly of the bulging Cornish pastry, its half-moon pastry shell stuffed with congealed onion and braised beef, and nearly gagged. Once she had started on the whiskey, the housekeeper's offering had been utterly forgotten.
"Mrs. Quiller left me amply provided, thank you." Her mind was completely void of additional small talk, and she could think of nothing else to say. Instead she stared over his shoulder at his green car. Several dents the size of pie plates creased the fenders of his long-suffering vehicle. No wonder he had honked so persistently to warn the sheep out of his way. He'd obviously learned that lesson the hard way.
"Well, then… shall we conclude our day's business around Mrs. Q's tea trolley?" he suggested, looking slightly grim.
"Oh… tea," she said vaguely. "That sounds nice."
She
was
a half-wit, she groaned. And Lucas Teague was a slightly disapproving Jeremy Irons in
Brideshead Revisited.
"I can offer you a tour of the Hall and the gardens, if you like, and orient you to our bit of the Cornish coast. Perhaps you'd like to read over the extension of your lease then," he persisted.
The handsome Mr. Teague must need money, she concluded. Despite her obvious lack of promise as a sober, well-behaved tenant, Lucas Teague seemed positively anxious that she should sign on the dotted line to extend her lease by three months.
Here till September! Another media bombshell must have exploded in California, she reckoned, for Lisa to have committed her client without consultation to remain hidden in this remote outpost for such a long stretch.
"I am correct in understanding, aren't I," Teague persisted, "that you intend to let the cottage as planned? You haven't had a change of heart in the middle of the Atlantic, by chance?"
"Ah… no," she protested weakly. "Tea this afternoon sounds like a very sensible idea." A visit to the castle would allow her to call her attorney to discover what nameless horror was going on in La-La Land before she committed herself to such an extended exile. And, besides, she wagered that a strong cup of Darjeeling might be just the thing to counteract her hangover. Suddenly she shivered as the wind off the water once more blasted her bare ankles. "And do f-forgive my unkempt s-state," she added sheepishly, making a Herculean effort to stop her teeth from chattering. "I'm afraid I'm still on California time."
"I surmised it must be something like that when my rude pounding on your door didn't rouse you," he commented coolly.
"I crossed eight time zones or something…" she apologized, wondering, suddenly, if he had concluded she was some crazed Hollywood drug addict. In truth she hadn't suffered a hangover like this since she won the Barrel Racing Championships and took the Miss Wyoming Rodeo title her senior year in high school. "Is four o'clock okay?" she asked.
"Four-thirty would be more convenient," her landlord replied evenly. "We've a bit of a project under way up at the Hall. Take the path opposite the gate through the woods. It's a ten-minute walk. You'll come out near the stables. Follow the stone wall and you'll eventually arrive at the
porte cochère
at the front entrance."
When Blythe's hired driver had stopped to obtain the key to Painter's Cottage from Mrs. Quiller, she had duly noted that the granite canopy sported a crenellated top that matched Barton Hall's four round towers and the gatekeeper's cottage. From her studies in art design, she recalled that in centuries past, such arched entrances had shielded arriving coach passengers from inclement weather.
"Why is it called Barton Hall?" Blythe asked impulsively, letting her curiosity get the upper hand as the cold damp under her feet seeped into the marrow of her bones. "Why