The next few days passed quickly. When Sophie wasn’t out with Jeeves or agonising over the blank page that so far constituted the entirety of her attempt at a novel, she spent much of the time up on the top floor, sifting through the piles of stuff. She started by clearing one of the rooms completely so she could use it to store anything she felt might be worth keeping to be sold at the antiques fair. Things she deemed unsuitable for sale, she carried downstairs and soon a sizeable pile of unwanted rubbish was accumulating outside the back door. Rachel checked with Beppe to see what they should do with it all as there was far too much stuff for the normal bins and he advised them to let it mount up until it was all there and then he would rent or borrow a van and take it to the municipal dump.
The collection of things worth keeping grew at an alarming rate. Sophie found a set of fine-looking dining chairs upholstered in what looked like velvet. They were a bit worn, but still serviceable. There was a child’s train set still in its box and from the picture on the cover, it was quite old. In fact there were several boxes of children’s toys and Sophie wondered idly who their owners had been. There was a hefty wooden chest full of old magazines which was far too heavy for her to move, so she left it where it was and carried on piling up the smaller stuff. It certainly looked as though there would be no shortage of items to put on display at the antiques fair at the end of next month.
She contacted Signor Verdi about what to do with the proceeds of the sale and he assured her that Uncle George had already considered that. In his usual organised way, their uncle had specified that she and Rachel could split and keep any money they raised from the sale of items in the house. When she passed this news on to her sister, she suddenly found her only too happy to join in, no doubt hoping to happen upon an old master or a jewellery box crammed with gems. Alas, they found no paintings and no jewellery, although they did come across a couple of rather moth-eaten mink coats. It was clear that whoever had lived here prior to Uncle George had been wealthy, although, Sophie reminded herself, you didn’t normally find too many poor people living in a castle worth millions of euros.
As for her novel, she finally had a breakthrough moment one evening. She and Rachel had decided to treat themselves to dinner at the Vecchio Ristoro and it was as they reached the end of another excellent meal – this time including guinea fowl roasted in the oven with fennel and sweet potatoes – that the idea came to her. They were sitting at the same table as before, tucked to one side overlooking the castle gates, when she suddenly came up with the title.
‘Behind the Castle Gates.’
‘Sorry, what, Soph?’
‘That’s what I’m going to call my novel. As a title, don’t you think it sets the scene and hints at mystery? I can see the cover now – a forbidding-looking pair of gates with a medieval castle just visible behind.’
‘Forbidding-looking? I thought you were writing romance.’
Sophie paused for thought. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I think I’m going to write a mystery, with some romance of course, but a bit darker, maybe even with a supernatural element thrown in. And I reckon I’ll make it part-modern, part-medieval.’
‘I like the idea.’ Rachel winked at her. ‘So how about two modern-day sisters who inherit a castle and discover the secret history of what happened there way back in the mists of time?’
Sophie shook her head slowly. ‘I’m not sure – a bit too close for comfort, maybe?’
‘Well, instead of the two sisters, why not make it two or three cousins who barely know each other being forced to do what we’re doing? That could work.’
Sophie turned the idea over in her head and found she liked it. A lot. ‘That’s brilliant. So it can be the story of them getting to know each other, as well as discovering the history of the place.’
Rachel reached over and tapped the back of Sophie’s hand. ‘I suppose that’s what you and I are doing really – getting to know each other again after six years.’
‘On that note, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for days now.’ Seeing her sister still looking relaxed, Sophie took the plunge. ‘You’ve told me where you went and what you did after dropping out of uni, but you haven’t told me why. Why dump everything just a matter of months before graduating? I’ve never been able to get my head round that. Why, Rach?’ She sat back and reached for her half-empty wine glass. The smile had faded from her sister’s face by now and Sophie had to wait over a minute for the reply – and when it came it packed a punch.
‘If I’m being totally honest, there were a number of reasons, but the main one was you.’
‘Me?’ Sophie almost spilled her wine. ‘What did I do? I wasn’t even in Exeter then. I was working in London.’
‘You may not have been, but your ghost was.’
‘My ghost?’ Sophie felt herself struggling to understand.
‘Do you remember Doctor Grantham in the English department?’
‘The twentieth-century literature guy? Yes, I remember him. I always thought he was a bit full of himself. Fancied himself as God’s gift to academia.’
‘He remembered you well – very well in fact – and he never stopped rubbing your name in my face.’
‘What do you mean? Why my name?’
‘Because you were Miss Bloody Perfect, that’s why.’ There was a more bitter note in Rachel’s voice now as she stared down at her hands on the table top. ‘You’re the one who got the First-Class Honours degree; you won all the prizes; you were the star of the English Department. And it was always like that all the way through school as well. As for me – and Doctor Grantham spelt it out brutally clearly to me on numerous occasions – I was just a poor imitation of you.’ Sophie saw her look up from her knuckles and couldn’t miss the tears in her eyes. ‘There comes a time when always being treated as second best gets just too much to bear. It was when he told me my Christmas assignment was superficial and unimaginative and how you would never have handed in something so poor, that I just flipped. I told him where he could shove his assignment and I went out and got hammered along with Pablo – my Puerto Rican friend. The next day I packed my bags and we left.’
Sophie was flabbergasted. Of all the explanations she had been expecting, she hadn’t thought for a moment that she herself might have been responsible, however inadvertently. She reached across and caught hold of Rachel’s hands in both of hers.
‘Rach, I don’t know what to say. Doctor Grantham had no right to bring me into it, but I had no idea you felt so badly about living in my shadow. In fact, with you being so popular and getting the best boyfriends, I always felt it was the other way round. I can honestly say I’ve been living in your shadow for years, since we were teenagers – sensible Sophie, the teacher’s pet, the swot, that was me, while you were the one everybody wanted to be with. But, please believe me, if I’d thought for a minute that I was affecting you like that, I’d have done something about it.’
Rachel turned her hands so as to grip Sophie’s fingers gently in hers. ‘What could you have done, Soph? It’s just that you’re brighter than me.’ Before Sophie could object, she modified her statement. ‘All right, it’s not necessarily a matter of intelligence. Maybe it’s not that I’m thick. Looking back on it now I can see that the fault was my own. I just didn’t have the same attitude to work as you did. I mean, I didn’t skip lectures or anything, but I always found a million reasons for not doing any more than the bare minimum.’
After a pause for breath, followed by a mouthful of wine, Rachel continued.
‘I went skiing in Austria with a bunch of friends in January that year and I copied the Christmas assignment almost word-for-word off the internet the day I got home, just hours before the deadline. I still object to what Doctor Grantham said, but there’s no question I did deserve a very low mark. The trouble was that by that time everything had been mounting up and it was the last straw. I just couldn’t handle it any more and I knew I had to get away – or so I thought. If it helps, I very soon regretted it. I was crying my eyes out before the plane had even taken off from Heathrow. You know that feeling when you know you’ve screwed everything up and it’s all your fault?’ She produced a little smile. ‘Of course you don’t, because you don’t make those sorts of mistakes, but, believe me, it hurt.’
‘Of course I do. I’ve made all sorts of mistakes – starting with Claudio for instance. But you should just have got straight back on another plane and come home again…’
Even as she said it, Sophie knew that this would have been an impossible ask for her sister, whose pride simply wouldn’t have tolerated it. To have slunk back like that would have been an admission of defeat. But the good news was that she now appeared to have got her life back on track. Sophie reached for the carafe and emptied the remains of the wine into their glasses.
‘Well, I’m terribly, terribly sorry for my part in what happened. If only I’d known… Look, let’s drink to the fact that you’ve got yourself sorted out now – and a damn sight better than me, for that matter. At least you have a clear trajectory to follow while I’m still floundering about, trying to work out what I want to do.’ She leant forward and clinked her glass against Rachel’s. ‘Cheers, Rach. Here’s to the future, not the past.’
‘The future.’ Rachel took a sip of wine and wiped her eyes before looking up again with renewed optimism. ‘And it’s looking amazingly bright for both of us, thanks to Uncle George.’
Sophie raised her glass again.
‘Here’s to Uncle George.’