The weather was still fine on Monday morning. After lessons, the boys begged me to take them down to the lake with their skates. On our way, we met Mr Harmwell and Mrs Kerridge returning to the house.
“Skating?” Mrs Kerridge said. “Enjoy it while you can.”
“Why?” Charlie asked. “Is there to be a thaw?”
“It’s not that. The men are cleaning out the ice-house. Once they start filling it, there’ll be no more skating for a while.”
“To my mind,” Harmwell said, “it is a most insanitary arrangement.”
Mrs Kerridge turned to him. “Why ever so, sir?”
“The problem here derives from the fact that the lake serves many purposes – it is not only ornamental, but a source of fish, and used for skating in winter and boating and swimming in summer. I understand from the head gardener that it is nigh on eighteen feet deep near the centre. This makes the ice hard to extract, and indeed dangerous for those charged with the task. And the quality of the ice is inevitably poor, bearing in mind the culinary uses it is intended for. It often contains rotting vegetation, for example, and the corpses of small animals. No, I believe the Dutch method –”
“Lord, Mr Harmwell,” Mrs Kerridge broke in. “You talk just like a book.”
“What about the ice?” I asked. “Will they start cutting it today?”
“I believe not,” he said. “So I cannot see that there will be any objection to your skating. While you can.” He raised his stick and pointed towards the south-western quarter of the sky, where clouds were massing. “There may be snow on the way.”
We parted. The boys raced ahead. When I reached the lake, they were not in sight. I took the path round the bank to the defile leading to the ice-house. Edgar and Charlie were perched on the trunk of a fallen tree. Half a dozen men were engaged in emptying and cleaning the building. For a few moments we watched them carrying buckets of ice and muddy straw down the path to a hollow where they discharged their noisome burdens.
The foreman touched his hat and asked if we would like to see the scene of their operations. I followed him down the passage, with the boys behind me. The chamber was illuminated by half a dozen lanterns strung round the dome. Two men were working in the pit itself, shovelling the slush into buckets. As we watched, one neatly decapitated a rat with the blade of the shovel.
“It stinks worse than usual, sir,” the foreman said. “The drain was blocked.”
I looked over the edge. “It looks clear now.”
“We rodded it, and it’s draining slowly. But not like it should. If we can’t clear it properly from this side, we may have to wait till spring.”
“How so?”
He jerked his thumb outside. “The water runs into a sump and then flows through a drain to the lake. But it blocks easy on account of the grids that keep the rats out. There’s a shaft down to the drain so you can clear it. Big drain, look, you can crawl right up to the sump chamber. But we had a terrible storm in the autumn, and them trees came down, and half the bank besides. We’ll need to dig out the head of the shaft all over again.”
“The ground’s too hard at present?”
“Aye. Like iron.” He spat, narrowly missing one of his men, and squinted up at me. “We should have dug it out earlier.”
I returned outside and filled my lungs with fresh air. The boys were talking with another of the workmen and jigging up and down with cold and excitement. As I approached, they fell silent. These signs should have made me wary; but I was too taken up with my own thoughts to pay them the attention they deserved. A moment later, we walked back to the lake, where the boys skated slowly up and down, conferring privately together.
That afternoon, my spirits were at a low ebb, and I came close to despair. I reasoned with myself, saying that it was the height of folly that I should entertain any hopes with regard to Sophie; reminding myself that what had happened in Gloucester was exceptional, something that would never occur again; and advising myself to put it and her completely out of my mind.
Mr Carswall called me down to the library to take dictation and make copies. He was writing yet another letter to one of his lawyers, this time concerning the negotiations over the possible sale of his Liverpool warehouses to Mr Noak. I understood from the tenor of the correspondence that Mr Noak’s London lawyer had raised a number of questions with Mr Carswall’s man. The work was mechanical, leaving my mind prey to a succession of gloomy thoughts.
Yet, looking back on those few hours on Monday afternoon, as the sky grew steadily darker in the south-west, I now see the time for what it truly was: the calm before the storm that was about to break over our heads. With hindsight, I can fix the exact moment when I saw the storm’s harbinger approaching.
There had come a pause in the harsh, stumbling torrent of Mr Carswall’s words, and I was staring out of the library window. A movement caught my eye in the gathering twilight. Riding up the drive was a solitary horseman.