24

Andrea took Francis into the walled garden. It had been snowing and the snow was lying nearly three inches deep. The sun was shining but it was bitterly cold. The child scampered ahead of her along the path which ran up the centre of the garden, followed by Max, the liver-and-white spaniel. On either side of the path, now buried beneath a blanket of white, were the flower beds which Andrea had planted when she had first come to Ravenscourt. Before Robin had inherited, she had never set foot in Ravenscourt. She had seen it once from a distance from the edge of the park before they were married and they had looked at the empty and shuttered house. When they arrived from Rome and she had seen it close to, the size and scale of it had taken her breath away. She had not recovered when she walked through the vast rooms with the furniture covered in dust-sheets and looked out of the window at the pleasure garden which was a tangle of weeds and the park which was unmown and even uncropped by sheep. At first she felt daunted by all that would have to be done to make it their home, but she was happy to be there.

For she had been glad to get away from Italy. It was in Rome that, for the first time since the murder of her grandparents when she was a child, she had been deeply unhappy. It was when she had brought the newly born Francis back from her father’s home in Shropshire that she learnt of Robin’s brief love affair. He swore it was over. It was madness, he said. He had been overwhelmed by remorse and the marriage had survived. By the time of the move to Ravenscourt it had become, Andrea thought, as happy as before. So when she first arrived and set foot in the hall and saw on the walls above the great staircase the frames of the portraits hung with dark green sheets, her heart had leaped with excitement. The family had come home, to their rightful place, to the house built by the ancestors of her husband and her son.

She spent the first weeks exploring, planning which rooms to begin to restore and designing her garden. With the help of three women from the village they had battled during that first year to get straight the West Wing where they established the family rooms; next they turned to the library and sitting-room off the rotunda in the centre of the house; finally the state rooms, the great salon and dining saloon. With the gardener, Peachey, and a boy, she had transformed the pleasure garden so that it would eventually become a mass of blue and white foxgloves, delphiniums, veronica, and lobelia; with banks of red roses at one end, white at the other.

As she now followed Francis and the spaniel along the snow-covered path, she thought of that last summer with Robin. It had been a happy time, although a damp, wet summer unlike the summer after his death, the first summer of her widowhood when one scorching day had followed another until the rains had come in late September – and with the rain, the thunderbolt of the claim.

The shock, following so soon after Robin’s death, had for a time almost unbalanced her. It had even turned her against the house. As the autumn weeks passed, with the visit of the woman journalist and then the confrontation on the staircase and the mounting campaign in the press, she’d imagined in her misery that it was somehow the work of the house, as though the house resented their presence and the sounds of a child running up and down the great staircase and along the vast corridors; as though it preferred its years of silence and emptiness, and was punishing them. She began to think that it hated them and when recently gales had toppled some of the trees in the park and the wind howled and sang around the chimneys and crashed against the immense windows, she thought she felt a sense of hostility, of malevolence. She had moved her sitting-room from the ground floor to the first floor so that she could be near Francis’ nursery, and when he had gone to bed she would sit there with Alice, drinking chocolate in front of the fire. The Masons had their own quarters, a bedroom, bathroom and sitting-room in the East Wing, some way from the family’s rooms and the kitchen and pantry on the ground floor. Andrea had never trusted the whining Mrs Mason and her husband, but when she’d said this to Nicholas, he had demurred.

‘He’s a former policeman. He’s a good person to have in the house.’

But the past months had toughened her. Her anger at the effrontery of the claim, the wickedness of the impostor and the people behind her manipulating the media had strengthened her and helped her overcome her imagining about the house. She saw how foolish she’d been to attribute to the house her pain, and she began to make it her friend again. Now it was home, home for her and for Francis, the home of the Caverels; and she would fight with every ounce of strength to keep it, even if it meant bankrupting the estate and themselves. Nicholas had warned that Oliver kept demanding more and more sales in order to pay for the mounting costs of the defence. Sell everything if you have to, she had told him. Do whatever is necessary.

She brushed the snow off a stone bench and sat watching Francis as he tried to make a snowman. She got up to help him but it was growing too cold.

‘Come on,’ she said and taking him by the hand she led him out of the walled garden.

In the warmth of the vast kitchen, Alice was by the Aga making tea.

‘Where’s Mrs Mason?’ Andrea asked.

‘Lying down, wore out by all the work, the poor old soul. We’re too demanding, my lady, so I’m getting the tea.’ She laughed and catching up Francis swung him around, sitting him on the giant kitchen table.

‘I know,’ said Andrea. ‘The three of us give the two of them far too much to do.’

‘The two of you,’ Alice said. ‘I looks after meself.’

Andrea poured herself some tea as Alice gave Francis a piece of cake. ‘How’s the fire in the sitting-room?’ she asked.

‘Fair enough. I put on some more logs on my way down.’

‘Supper?’

‘She’ll be back to do it. He’ll be off to the pub later.’

‘In this weather?’

‘That won’t keep him away.’

The telephone on the dresser rang. The telephone in the kitchen was the Masons’ outside line, with an extension to their flat. Alice went on feeding Francis cake. Andrea sat, her hands around her mug of tea. The ringing kept up.

‘They’ve forgotten to switch it through to the flat,’ said Alice.

‘Can you do it?’

‘No, I don’t know how.’

It went on ringing. ‘You’d better answer it,’ Andrea said.

Alice picked up the receiver. ‘Who is it?’ She made a face at Andrea. ‘George Headley, yes?’

Both of them knew what Nicholas thought of Headley.

‘No, it’s Alice. I’m in the kitchen. Yes, I’m alone.’ She winked at Andrea. ‘They’re in the flat and they’ve forgotten to switch it through. No, of course I can’t. I’m getting tea for Francis. Mason should be here later. All right, I’ll give him the message.’ She repeated what Headley was saying. ‘The friends from London will be at the Plough at Ansleigh at eight. All right. If I don’t see him, I’ll leave him a note.’

*   *   *

Ansleigh was eight miles from Ravenscourt. At a quarter to eight Andrea sat in her car in the darkness in the car-park of the Plough. She’d been curious about Headley’s message. Who were the friends from London that Headley and Mason were to meet? And why at Ansleigh and not at the Caverel Arms in the village? She thought she’d find out for herself.

She parked in the car-park between a van and the wall. There were no other cars. She switched off the lights and the engine. After twenty minutes she saw the headlights of a car coming down the lane, and she ducked below the windshield when the car turned from the lane into the car-park. It drew up on the other side of the van. The lights were switched off and when she heard the slam of the car door, she raised her head and peered through her side window. The front door of the pub opened and she saw the silhouettes of two men. To make sure that these were the friends from London, she waited another ten minutes. No other car came so she went to the side door of the public house. Inside a passage led to a door to the dining-room and beyond that to another door into the bar. The top part of the partition between the two doors was glass, a series of internal windows from which the inside of the bar could be seen. Behind the bar she saw the publican, talking to an elderly man sitting on a stool. At the far end, a couple were playing darts. There was no one else, except for a group of four men seated in front of the fire. One, with his back to her, was Headley. Next to him, also with his back to the bar, was Mason. Facing them were two other men, the friends from London. And she knew them both. One was the photographer, the other the reporter who had been with the young woman when she had been brought to Ravenscourt by the man with grey hair. It had been Mason, Andrea now remembered, who had let the party in through the front door. As she peered through the glass partition, she saw the reporter look around and, seeing they were unobserved, hand an envelope to Mason and another to Headley.

When she opened the bar door and came in, the group by the fire was engrossed in conversation. She walked slowly across the room and stood a few feet from them. The photographer was the first to notice her. He half rose. As he did so, Mason turned. So did the others. Mason got to his feet. She remained quite still, a few feet from them, looking from one to the other. No one spoke. She turned on her heel and left.

She was shaking as she got into the car. She drove straight to the dower house, praying that Nicholas would be there.

The Masons were packed up and gone by noon the following morning, after an angry, ugly scene. Headley was given notice and forbidden the premises or the woods. Until they could find another couple, Nicholas moved into the house.