Country Plot Read online

  Beyond those two rooms was the library – ‘Unusual to have it on the ground floor, but the first owner was an eccentric’ – and the passage ended in a small, panelled door. ‘That goes through into the cottage,’ Kitty explained. ‘Peter’s grandfather had such huge shooting parties, he used to use the cottage as extra guest accommodation. But Bill Bennett lives there now, so it’s locked. We both have a key in case of emergencies. You’ll meet him later – he gardens for me in exchange for living in the cottage rent-free.’

  On the other side of the passage were the kitchen and its attached sculleries, larders and storerooms, and the back lobby through which they had entered, which housed the stairs down into the cellars. The kitchen had been fitted out with modern units and slate work-surfaces, and there was a gas stove as well as an Aga, but there was also a massive old wooden dresser and an old-fashioned scrubbed wooden table in the middle of the stone-flagged floor. It was all spotless, and a rinsed-out dishcloth hung neatly over the edge of the porcelain sink. Mrs Phillips had finished and gone. Jenna would have liked to investigate the complex of rooms and cupboards beyond it, but they didn’t linger there. Kitty obviously had no attachment to kitchen regions.

  The other two rooms on the ground floor were at the back. Of the sitting room Kitty said, ‘This was the kitchen of the original house, but only until around 1820. I more or less live in here now. There’s a gate-leg table I use to eat on in the winter, and in the summer I’m in the conservatory most of the time, when I’m not outdoors.’

  The other room, which had floor-to-ceiling panelled cupboards built into the walls, was empty except for a large round table in the centre.

  ‘We call this the housekeeper’s room,’ Kitty said, opening a door on the far side and revealing a staircase. ‘You see, the backstairs come down here. The Everest who had the kitchen built was a bachelor until late in life, and his housekeeper had this room as her sitting room. The maids used to sit round that table and do their sewing in the evening, while she read to them from the Bible. Compulsory virtue. Fierce old thing, she was. There’s a watercolour showing the scene upstairs – I’ll show you when we get there.’

  Jenna asked what was in the cupboards.

  ‘Oh, just household china,’ Kitty said. ‘Dinners for twenty-plus take a lot of crockery. Shall we go upstairs?’

  ‘Oh please,’ Jenna said, ‘can we go up the backstairs? I always wanted to live in a house with two staircases.’

  Kitty laughed. ‘It is rather thrilling. I always wished I’d lived here as a child. Peter said he and his brothers used to race round and round, up the backstairs and down the main stairs, until someone caught them and gave them a clump on the ear. And they used to slide down the backstairs on a tray when they could get away with it. Boys have all the fun.’

  On the first floor there had been three bedrooms along the front of the house and three along the back. The middle one on the front had been turned into the two en-suite bathrooms for Jenna’s room and that occupied by Kitty. On the back, the middle bedroom had been turned into a bathroom, a cavernous place with a bath big enough to drown in.

  To one side of it was what Kitty introduced as Lady Mary’s Bedroom. ‘You have to give rooms names in a house like this, just as points of reference,’ she said. ‘But in fact there was a Lady Mary and she did sleep here. That’s her portrait over there.’

  The portrait showed a pale face and dark ringlets and what looked like muslin draped about the shoulders, with a background of parkland and trees. The room was furnished with the only four-poster in the house. A damask-upholstered chaise longue stood at the foot of the bed, and there was a Regency dressing-table with a delicate silver and crystal set, and a fine writing-bureau and chair in one corner, but the room was cluttered with more modern furniture and personal items.

  ‘It’s a pretty room,’ Kitty said. ‘Peter’s grandmother had it, and a lot of the things are hers, but the nicer bits date from Lady Mary’s day. The bed is earlier, of course, but we believe she did sleep in it. She was a niece of the Duke of Wellington, and married Sir Ralph Everest in about 1820. She came to a tragic end, poor thing, and her ghost is supposed to haunt the house. You don’t mind ghosts, I hope?’

  ‘I’ve never seen one,’ Jenna said. ‘Do you believe in them?’

  ‘I’ve never seen Lady Mary,’ Kitty said, quite matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing birdwatching, ‘but I have seen the Weeping Child. She haunts the top floor – she never comes down here, so don’t worry about her. She won’t pop up in your bedroom. I don’t know who she is, but practically every old house that’s haunted at all has a weeping child. Children must have lived really quite dreadful lives in the old days for so many of them to come back.’

  Jenna wasn’t sure if she was being roasted, so she said nothing, only exclaimed instead over the massed blue-and-white china displayed on a series of stepped shelves over the fireplace.

  ‘Lady Mary collected it, and Peter’s grandmother added to it. It always looks nice, I think, when there’s a lot of it all together.’

  ‘It’s gorgeous,’ Jenna said. ‘It’s a shame more people can’t see it.’ A germ of an idea came to her, but slipped away before she could get hold of it.

  The other bedrooms were minimally furnished with modern pieces, but they all had pictures and objets d’art relegated from the main rooms over the years. Jenna could have pored over them for hours, but Kitty didn’t want to linger. The sun was shining and she seemed to feel it was her duty to get Jenna out into it.

  But on the top floor, Jenna couldn’t help exclaiming over a series of six handsome, glazed-fronted cabinets lining the wall of the corridor, because they were filled with undistinguished-looking, even quite ugly, lumps of rock that struck a chord with her.

  ‘Oh, golly, look!’ she said. ‘Geological specimens! It makes me feel at home. My father had a collection just like this, only not so large. He was a palaeontologist.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Kitty said. ‘He was an academic when I knew him, but didn’t he work for an oil company later?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jenna said. ‘He was with BP. He had to study rocks to see where it was worthwhile drilling for oil – mostly in places like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. I think that’s why Ma’s so dedicated to the Mediterranean centres of civilization. She once went on one of Daddy’s trips and never got over the shock.’ She looked at the rocks fondly. ‘She hated Daddy’s specimens, but he did his best to get us interested in his subject. On wet Sundays when we were kids he tried to make us learn the periods off by heart – you know, Cambrian, Devonian, Cretaceous and the rest.’

  ‘And did he succeed?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Jenna laughed. ‘And we still thought they were just ugly old rocks. Who collected these?’

  ‘Oh, one of the ancestors, in mid-Victorian times. Collections were all the rage at the time. There’s a huge one of butterflies, all in glass cases, in one of the bedrooms – rather more decorative. And Peter’s great-grandfather collected stuffed birds.’

  ‘I did wonder,’ said Jenna, who had noticed an unusual number of them in different rooms.

  ‘I’m rather fond of them, but they upset some people. There’s everything in this house, if you care to look for it. Well, I won’t drag you round the other bedrooms. Shall we go out while the sun is still shining and look at the gardens? That’s my real passion. I hate housework – you couldn’t force a duster into my hand without a gun to my head – but I don’t mind how long I toil in the garden and grub about in the soil. Somehow that never seems like work.’

  ‘I saw the woodland garden yesterday – was that your idea?’

  ‘Yes, pretty, isn’t it? Nice on hot summer days, if any. How far did you go? Did you see the walled gardens?’

  ‘No, I didn’t get that far.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Kitty with endearing enthusiasm. ‘Then I can be the one to show them to you.’

  Watch joined them as they left the house, and padded along with
them companionably. ‘Are you put off yet?’ Kitty asked. ‘Now you’ve seen how much there is to do?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Jenna said. ‘I’m looking forward to it. I love poking about in antique shops, and this’ll be like the most glorious antique hunt of my life. And for once no one will be hurrying me.’

  ‘Who hurried you before?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘Oh, Patrick hated old things. If ever I so much as glanced at an antique shop in passing he’d go spare. He said the English worship of old things was mawkish and stifled innovation. He thought all old buildings should be torn down and all antiques should be burned to make way for the modern.’

  ‘He sounds rather a challenging character,’ Kitty said carefully.

  Jenna looked rueful. ‘And I was determined not to think of him.’

  Just at that moment they stepped through the doorway into the walled garden, and Patrick was obliterated from her thoughts. It was impossible not to be impressed. It was planted with neat beds of growing vegetables, divided by gravel paths and edged with marigolds and herbs over which early butterflies flitted. On the far side was the impressive row of Victorian greenhouses, with their curly cast iron ridge decorations and pinnacles, and the other walls were covered with espaliered fruit trees.

  A man in blue French railwayman’s overalls was hoeing one of the beds, and looked up as they came in. Watch trotted towards him, wagging his whole back end in greeting, and the man put down his hoe on the path, patted the dog, and then straightened up, waiting with a smile for them to come to him.

  He was about Kitty’s age, Jenna thought, a well-built man of middle height, with a good head of hair, brown threaded with silver, and a weather-tanned face that had got so used to being handsome all its life that it was handsome still, and always would be. His eyes were blue and humorous, his smile was boyish and attractive. This, Jenna thought, must be the Bill Bennett who lived in the cottage through the door to which they both had a key. Her fertile imagination at once concocted a romance where one or other slipped through it at night to conduct a gentlemanly – but no less passionate for that – affair. The way they smiled at each other made her feel she had got it right, and she was happy for them, especially Kitty, to whom she had already grown attached. Why shouldn’t they have romance? But why didn’t they marry? Maybe like her mother they enjoyed the thrill of the clandestine.

  Kitty did the introduction. ‘This is Bill Bennett,’ she said. ‘Bill, this is Jenna Freemont.’

  Bill inspected his hand, wiped it on his trousers, and offered it. It was warm and dry and hard as a plank. ‘Delighted to meet you,’ he said in an educated voice. ‘How do you like Holtby House so far?’

  ‘I love it. And the gardens are wonderful. Do you do all this?’

  ‘The vegetables, yes,’ he said. ‘Kitty and I have this wonderful arrangement. I mow the grass and attend to the hedges for her, and in return she not only lets me live in the cottage for nothing, but allows me to take care of the kitchen garden for her.’

  ‘Which is a tremendous amount of work,’ Kitty chipped in, ‘as you can see.’

  ‘Not to me,’ Bill said. ‘This part is my hobby. I always wanted an allotment when I retired, and this is wealth beyond my wildest dreams.’

  ‘He grows all the vegetables and fruit I can possibly eat,’ Kitty said.

  ‘And she lets me eat all I want and give the rest away to anyone I like,’ Bill said. They were smiling, and outdoing each other in gratitude. ‘After a lifetime toiling away in an office for the Ministry of Defence, here I am in my very own secret garden, in a state of permanent bliss, and she doesn’t even let me pay her rent!’

  ‘It’s obviously a very good arrangement all round,’ Jenna said, thinking how well they were suited.

  Kitty’s next words killed the dream. ‘He hasn’t even mentioned that his wife does all my cleaning for me.’

  Emma Woodhouse, caught again, Jenna chided herself. Oh well!

  ‘For which you pay her,’ Bill was saying to Kitty sternly.

  ‘But you know she does far more than I pay her for. Honestly,’ she added to Jenna, ‘these two completely spoil me. Bill’s always on hand, not only for gardening but if there’s a fuse or a dripping tap or I think someone’s prowling round the grounds, and Fatty dusts and polishes and scrubs my floors as if she actually enjoys it.’

  ‘She does,’ Bill asserted. ‘The two things in life Fatty loves are cleaning and cooking. She couldn’t be happier.’

  Jenna hardly knew how to ask what she wanted to. ‘Um—?’

  Bill grinned, knowing what was on her mind. ‘It’s short for Fatima.’

  ‘She’s Turkish,’ Kitty said. ‘Bill’s first wife died tragically young—’

  ‘—and after years as a widower I scandalized everyone by turning up with a wife who’s not only twenty years younger than me, but a foreigner to boot.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘There were one or two comments at church after morning service.’

  ‘I’ll bet there were. I heard some near-unprintable ones down at The Crown,’ Bill agreed. ‘Exotic was the politest. In fact, that wasn’t far wrong. When I first met Fatty she was an exotic dancer at a club in Portsmouth.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean stripping,’ Kitty explained. ‘She was a belly dancer. It’s very skilled when it’s done right. Takes years of training.’

  ‘It was love at first sight,’ Bill said. ‘I must be one of the few men in Britain today who actually did say to his future wife, “Let me take you away from all this.”’

  Kitty smiled at him fondly, and said, ‘Well, we won’t keep you from your work. I just want to show Jenna my flower garden.’

  ‘Do. It’s a work of art,’ he told Jenna.

  They left him, and Kitty led the way through another gateway at the far side and into a second walled garden of the same size and proportions as the first; but in this the beds were planted with such a glorious array of flowers and shrubs that there was no earth to be seen. On the walls climbed roses and clematis, just coming into bloom; everything else was a tapestry, beautifully designed to make the most of different heights, shapes and colours. Jenna felt she could never have enough of gazing.

  ‘You do all this?’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s wonderful!’

  ‘You like it?’ Kitty said, looking modest and pleased. ‘I must say I’m rather pleased with it – though there are things I’d like to change. But one always feels that about one’s garden. It wouldn’t be the same without a project.’

  ‘You ought to open it to the public,’ Jenna said.

  ‘We used to have an open day years ago, when Peter was alive,’ Kitty said. ‘Once a year, in the summer, when the village had its annual fête, we used to open the grounds and take a collection for Princess Alexandra’s fund. We used to do quite well. Goodness, it all seems so long ago now.’

  ‘Does the village still have a fête?’ Jenna asked.

  ‘No, sadly it lapsed. I wish someone would start it up again.’ She looked round as someone came in through the doorway. ‘Oh, here’s Fatty.’

  It was a plump, olive-skinned woman, with dark eyes and black curly hair and a look of contentment which gave her face beauty, though it was not strictly pretty. She was wearing a pale green cleaner’s overall over her summer dress, but her legs and feet were bare, and she had silver rings on four of her toes, a nice mixture of the prosaic and the exotic.

  ‘Visitor for you, Miss Kitty,’ she said, in a soft and liquid accent.

  ‘Fatty, dear, this is Jenna, who’s come to help me with the cataloguing.’

  ‘How do you do,’ Jenna said, and the woman smiled shyly and ducked her head in greeting.

  ‘Who’s the visitor?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘Mr Alexander,’ Fatty said, though as she pronounced it, it sounded like ‘Sikander’.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Kitty.

  Fatty nodded, and then added, rather like someone slipping a dose of medicine into the honey, ‘And Miss Caroline is with him.’

&nbs
p; ‘Ah. Good,’ said Kitty, but it sounded quite different from the first one.

  Seven

  ‘Nice wheels,’ Jenna commented. A black drophead coupé with the roof down was parked on the gravel before the front door. Watch and Barney sniffed round it and then urinated lavishly on the rear tyres.

  ‘Caroline’s,’ Kitty said briefly. ‘Xander drives a Volvo estate – he needs it for his work.’

  ‘What is his work?’ Jenna asked, picking out one of the many questions she wanted to ask before they got inside.

  ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? He has a shop in the village, selling antique and reproduction furniture, with a workshop behind it for repairs and restorations. He does all the big antique fairs and finds pieces on commission. He does some restoration work for the National Trust as well, so it all keeps him busy.’ She seemed almost defensive about it, as if someone had questioned his choice of career. Jenna was piqued as to why. It seemed perfectly respectable to her.

  ‘It sounds interesting,’ she said encouragingly.

  ‘Well, I think so,’ Kitty said.

  There was no time for more as they were entering the drawing room. The female half of the visiting pair was at the window with her back to them, and the male half was standing in front of the fireplace. Jenna stopped at the doorway in sheer surprise, for he was tall, dark and so absolutely gorgeous it was impossible for a moment to look anywhere else. A wave of pure pheromones seemed to come from him and set Jenna’s receptors twitching. He was mid-thirties, his chiselled features were firm, his dark hair exquisitely cut and just wavy enough to be interesting, and his eyes, in exciting contrast, were swooning blue. He was wearing a very formal charcoal business suit, but his tie was well judged, modern without being too challenging.