“If you want to understand what happened to Agatha, you must start with Daphne,” Elizabeth began, tucking her legs under her on the sofa, her stocking feet hidden underneath her dress. She had an old-fashioned way of dressing; woolen skirts and blouses, brooches and tights. On anyone else it would look fusty, but on her it seemed nonchalant and somehow timeless. Her sturdy boots and sensible garments matched the setting, but like all things at Barnsley, her style turned out to be carefully orchestrated. A clever costume. “I didn’t like her to begin with, not at all,” Elizabeth continued. “She was Australian, as you know.”
I nodded. Everyone seemed to think Daphne’s nationality was of interest to me. Was it just because I was also Australian, or had she spent her entire life in England being introduced in that way? “This is my wife, Daphne. She’s Australian.” It seemed to offer some elusive insight into her character that everyone else could decipher apart from me.
“Max met her in London. There were a lot of Australians in London then. Always a lot of Australians in London, I suppose. Max was floundering a bit under the responsibility of the house, and, well, everything. Even though we are twins, Max was born first. So they say. I’ve never been entirely convinced. Primogeniture and all of that. So Max inherited Barnsley. And that left Tom and me with a cottage. And the island.”
She must have seen the curiosity on my face, because she placed her cigarette in the dish and carefully squeezed the ember out of it. I followed her over to the window behind Max’s desk, trying to steal a look at the ledger on his desk as we passed. “Barnsley Accounts 2017,” the cover read. Hardly riveting, I would have thought, and yet Max had been engrossed.
“Minerva Island.”
Elizabeth pointed her tiny hand towards a landmass only metres off the coast. It was so close it seemed as if it must be connected to the mainland, yet, leaning forward, I could see a distinct and choppy patch of water separating the island from the land on which Barnsley stood.
“You live there?” There were no signs of life. Only a rudimentary-looking jetty on one side and then a thick mass of foliage partly concealing a deserted-looking stone building, a craggy stone fortress clinging bravely to the edge of the rising land. A flag stood strong against the buffeting wind, only its tattered ends giving any sign of the battle it fought daily against the elements.
“No. Don’t be ridiculous. If you look closely you can see the remains of my great-great-grandmother Elspeth’s attempt to grow grapevines. As you can see, it wasn’t a success. Have you had a nice Barnsley Pinot Grigio lately?”
I looked at her blankly, I couldn’t differentiate any one plant from that distance. “Didn’t think so. The rest of that greenery is mostly a jungle. Elspeth’s husband brought back ferns and bougainvillea, and some of them really took off.” She returned to the sofas, so I did too. I waited while she lit up another cigarette.
Time moved slowly. The island had stirred up a strange excitement in me. It was partly the romance but also the mystery; in any case I felt the spark of a connection with the landscape, a deep familiarity. Elizabeth spoke again. “There’s no house out there. No power, no water, nothing. We used to camp out there in the summer. The garden was perfect for exploring and getting lost. Tom and I thought about trying to make a home out there at one point, but it would have cost too much.”
Elizabeth crying poor seemed implausible to me. I had read Pride and Prejudice; I knew how it worked in English landed families, but I could hardly believe she couldn’t have come up with the money to make it happen. With her expensive-looking clothes and her obvious intelligence, it just didn’t add up. “Horses,” she said, sensing the confusion on my face. I nodded, as if I was familiar with the problem.
“Even Max could see it was unfair, him with all this”—Elizabeth gestured around, cigarette ash flying about—“and us with not much at all. He promised me we would work something out, but none of us had much of an income, and country houses all around were being sold, converted into flats. Port Perry over the way hosts a festival in the summer; Concoppel has a farm shop, that sort of thing. My father was adamant before he died that Barnsley remain a family home.” She paused. “He didn’t leave us a lot of choice. Tom and I agreed to stay here while Max went up to London to meet with the banks. Lawyers. Those sorts of things. There was a family from Spain interested in leasing out the property as a whole, leaving us the cottages to live in. Both of us were dead against the idea, but Max thought it was a good idea to meet them and see what the offer was before writing it off entirely. We had a disagreement about it, and he left for London in a foul mood. A real stink, wasn’t it, Tom?”
I had forgotten Tom was beside her.
“Terrible stink,” he agreed, neither moving the paper aside nor elaborating.
Elizabeth paused to light yet another cigarette, giving the process an inordinate amount of time and attention. At least it gave me a moment to process what she had said so far. It was interesting to me, but how interesting would it be to anyone else? To, say, a newly arrived nanny from Australia who had no connection to Barnsley?