Heirs of the Body (8 page)

Miranda and Oliver were old enough to enjoy waving to the colourful boats and watching the bridge open and close, she thought. When they all came in August, she would bring them here one day, even if it meant a battle with Nurse Gilpin.

Her own nanny had disapproved, saying it was unladylike. That had stopped Violet, though not Daisy nor, of course, Gervaise. How much fun one could miss through fear of not being considered ladylike!

Daisy got out of the car and, as the bridge closed, waved vigorously at the receding boat. She was gratified when the boatman took off his hat and saluted.

The bridge clunked into place. Daisy drove across and turned right, past the old church. A few hundred yards farther on, she turned into a narrow lane and wound about for a bit, between hedges adorned with sweet-scented dog roses and honeysuckle. She came to the village of Little Baswell and there she stopped at the smithy.

The smith, Ted Barnard, had married a favourite Fairacres nurserymaid. With the decline of the blacksmith’s trade, he had turned his hand to doing minor repairs for motorists, and he was more than willing to repair Daisy’s tyre.

“Won’t take but a few minutes, Miss Daisy. I know the wife’d take it kindly was you to pop in to say hello while ye’re waiting.”

“Of course.” She walked over to the neat whitewashed cottage next door. The garden was full of sweet peas and sweet william, as fragrant as the hedgerow flowers. The dog, a shaggy, tousled creature called Tuffet, greeted her with rapture. Mrs. Barnard was delighted to see her and at once set the kettle to boil. Daisy regretfully declined a cuppa. “Lady Dalrymple is expecting me for tea, you see. We’ll all be here in August, the whole family. I’ll bring the children to see you.”

Chatting about children made the wait pass quickly, and Daisy was soon on the road again. Fifteen minutes later, she turned in between the gates of Fairacres. Just beyond the lodge, she stopped under the shade of the first elm of the avenue and walked back to have a word with the lodge keeper, Mrs. Truscott, wife of the chauffeur.

They were all family, in a sense, the old servants. Their continued presence at Fairacres increased Daisy’s feeling of dislocation, of the world being slightly askew, when she visited. In spite of Edgar’s sincere and Geraldine’s consciously gracious assurances that she was always welcome, she hadn’t spent enough time there since Edgar’s accession to adjust to the changes and the many things that had not changed.

She was glad that almost all the old servants had been kept on. Apart from maids and garden boys, who tended to come and go, and the aged butler who had been pensioned off, the staff had barely changed.

Having assured herself that the Truscotts were all well, Daisy continued along the avenue to the house. She stopped in front of the impressive portico. Its marble pillars, pediment, and cupolas had been superimposed by an eighteenth-century ancestor to add consequence to an otherwise sprawling, multiperiod mansion. Brick built, it was clad in whatever stone happened to be convenient at the time, pinkish sandstone, amber Cotswold limestone, pale grey Portland stone, a patchwork mellowed by time.

Daisy had scarcely time to powder her nose before the footman ran down the steps to open the door for her.

“Hello, Ernest.”

“Good afternoon, madam. We’ve been expecting you. If you don’t mind me saying so, madam, her ladyship will be very happy to see you.”

Daisy laughed. “No, why should I mind?” She was on informal terms with the young man that would have horrified her mother, ever since he had helped her and Alec—and Tommy, come to think of it—to foil a dastardly plot. “Now if you’d told me the opposite…”

“As though I would, madam!”

“But I bet you’d manage to warn me.”

“A hint, maybe, madam. His lordship, of course, will be delighted.” He raised his voice for the benefit of the butler, who was waiting at the open front door. “Mr. Truscott will take your car round to the stables, madam, unless you was wanting it again this afternoon?”

“No, thank you. I may go down to the Dower House later, but I’ll walk. Good afternoon, Lowecroft.”

He gave a slight but stately bow. “Good afternoon, madam. May I say that your arrival is particularly welcome at this time.”

“Thank you.” Goodness, Geraldine must really be in a state!

“Her ladyship is in her sitting room, madam, not being at home to unexpected visitors.” He took the light coat she had worn for driving and handed it on to Ernest.

“I’ll pop in to say hello, but I must wash off the road dust before tea.”

“Certainly, madam. Your usual room has been prepared.”

“Thank you. You needn’t announce me.”

She crossed the hall, still hung with centuries’ worth of family portraits—of course, they were Edgar’s family as well as her own. Several of the oldest had obviously been professionally cleaned, revealing the long obscured features of Tudor and Stuart Dalrymples. The passage she turned into was also adorned with pictures she remembered: her grandmother’s collection of Quattrocento martyrdoms, from which she averted her eyes. In Daisy’s childhood, St. Sebastian had given her nightmares.

The new chatelaine respected the claims of history and had changed very little in the house. Unlike the grounds, Daisy thought with a smile, where Edgar fought an obstinate battle against his gardener and his bailiff to provide wild areas for the sustenance of his beloved lepidoptera.

What their successors would choose to do with the place remained to be seen.

The door of Geraldine’s sitting room, which had been Daisy’s mother’s, was ajar. Daisy tapped and went in.

“Daisy!” The letter Geraldine was reading dropped to the floor—uncharacteristic untidyness—as she stood up and came to meet Daisy, both hands held out in a warm greeting. She kissed Daisy on each cheek, also uncharacteristic.

In her late forties, Lady Dalrymple was a rather bony woman who moved without grace, though almost a decade of being a viscountess had imparted a somewhat self-conscious graciousness to her usual manner. She was always smartly and appropriately dressed, yet never looked quite at ease in her clothes. Her long-sleeved, shin-length linen frock was an unfortunate shade of mauve that did nothing for a pale complexion, unaided by cosmetics, beneath carefully waved iron grey hair. She wore a modest pearl necklace and a gold cloisonné brooch in the form of a butterfly, accurate to the last detail, Daisy was sure.

“Hello, Geraldine.”

“I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I hope I’ll be able to help you, Geraldine, though I’m not sure how. But I’ve only just arrived. I must go up and wash my face.”

“Of course, dear. I’ll ring for tea.”

Daisy went up to the bedroom she had slept in all through the years between the night nursery and leaving Fairacres after her father’s death. It, too, had changed little, though Geraldine had asked her permission a couple of years ago to have it spruced up. The curtains were still blue chintz with a pattern of wildflowers, though not quite the same; there was a new blue bedspread, and the two easy chairs by the fireplace had been reupholstered in the same shade of blue. The dark oak floorboards shone. The bedside and hearth rugs were the old ones but they had obviously been thoroughly cleaned.

Daisy was touched by Geraldine’s obvious care in making sure she still felt at home, especially as she usually stayed with her mother at the Dower House when she came down, unless Violet and her family visited at the same time.

In the miraculous way of well-run households, her bags had already been brought up and a maid was unpacking them. She promised to get the black marks out of Daisy’s driving gloves as well as the dust from her hat.

A few minutes later, cleaner and tidier, Daisy went downstairs. Tea had arrived in Geraldine’s sitting room, and so had Edgar. His pince-nez and baggy tweeds made him look the epitome of the absentminded professor.

“Look!” he greeted her, presenting a jar with a few leaves in it for her inspection.

“Hello, Edgar. What have you caught now?” She took the jar and peered through the glass. Among the hawthorn leaves was a brownish caterpillar with bumps on its back. “A country bumpkin butterfly?” she suggested, quite wittily in her own opinion.

“No, no, a moth, a Brimstone moth. More colourful than most, a vivid yellow.”

“Edgar, do let Daisy sit down and have her tea. Are you going to join us?”

“Tea? Is it teatime? Not now, my dear, thank you. I must see this little fellow settled in his case first. He’s quite large and may be almost ready to pupate. You see, if he—”

“I’m sure Daisy will excuse you, dear,” Geraldine said firmly.

“My dear Daisy, how kind of you to pay us a visit. We’re always happy to see you, you know.” Retrieving his jar, he patted her on the shoulder and trotted out.

“The White Knight,” said Daisy. “Oh, sorry, it just slipped out. I didn’t mean it unkindly. Cousin Edgar’s such a sweetie.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Geraldine with fond exasperation, handing over a cup of tea and waving at the selection of edibles on the tea table. “Believe it or not, he was a good teacher and very competent with the boys. But you understand why I’ve taken it upon myself to deal with this business of finding his heir.”

“Absolutely. And I’m perfectly willing to … um … stand in for him in London, to the best of my ability. I’m not sure what I can do here, though, as Raymond has already refused to accept my ‘credentials,’ so to speak.” She bit into a watercress sandwich. The cress was crisp and green, quite unlike the limp, yellowish substance sold by that name at the greengrocer’s in Hampstead.

“He can hardly ban you from any room here into which I invite you, even if he is a millionaire!”

“A millionaire? Is he? Tommy told me only that he’s a businessman in the diamond trade.”

“Mr. Pearson’s last letter said he’d been making enquiries. All the diamond people know all about each other, it seems. Mr. Raymond Dalrymple is an extremely wealthy magnate.”

“If he’s filthy rich, it explains his expecting to have it all his own way.”

“The truth is, I have no idea how to handle the man. I get on comfortably enough with the local gentry—I’ve been a viscountess long enough to learn how, though sometimes it still seems like a dream. I have no ambition to scale the heights of London society.”

“I don’t blame you!”

“And I can handle a large staff with a degree of success; that is to say, the servants are not constantly leaving for greener pastures.”

“I noticed you still have Ernest. Footmen are hard to keep, or so I’ve heard.”

Geraldine flushed. “I confess I have a soft spot for Ernest, though I trust he’s unaware of it. He hasn’t the sedate temperament of the ideal footman, but he reminds me of the boys at school.”

“Do you miss them?”

“Not the school, but the best of the boys. And their liveliness. You might not think it, but I got on well enough with most of them, and with their parents when they visited. They were mostly professional people and successful business people. No millionaires, though! I have no experience with millionaires.”

“You’re forgetting Mr. Arbuckle, Geraldine. The American whose daughter was kidnapped? He was charming when he wasn’t worried half to death.”

“You got on well with him, I remember. I didn’t see much of him. And I daresay the Americans are quite unlike the South Africans in character. You’re at ease with everyone, without even trying. I don’t know how you do it.”

“I don’t exactly
do
it. It just happens. And not absolutely everyone. I must admit I’m a bit fed up with Cousin Raymond—assuming he’s really a cousin—before I’ve even met him. But who knows, perhaps he’ll turn out to be charming in person.”

“Perhaps. More likely he won’t care to take tea with a couple of women.”

“Won’t Edgar join us?”

“Who knows? I never venture to predict or dictate Edgar’s movements. After twenty years ruled by bells, from rising to lights-out, he deserves his freedom.”

Politely agreeing, Daisy privately wondered whether it might be more a matter of Geraldine recognising the limits of her ability to control her husband. “If Raymond wants to ask nosy questions about your finances, as I gathered from Mr. Pearson, it might be an idea to sic him on to Cousin Edgar.”

“Edgar knows next to nothing about … Ah yes, an excellent idea. Perhaps a lecture on British lepidoptera will send him quickly back to South Africa, or at least to London, where he can pursue his claim through the proper channels.” Geraldine sighed. “It would be so much easier just to refuse to see him, but I suppose that would be unthinkably discourteous.”

“Probably not wise,” Daisy agreed. “You won’t want to deliberately alienate him. He may, after all, turn out to be Cousin Edgar’s heir.”

EIGHT

“A jeweller,
an innkeeper, and a seaman.” The Dowager Lady Dalrymple’s lip curled. “Each worse than the one before. And descended from a black sheep! Wasn’t it bad enough when a mad schoolmaster set himself up in your father’s place?”

“Cousin Edgar is not mad, Mother.” Daisy’s protest came automatically, having been repeated many times over the past nine years. She didn’t know why she bothered. “Nor did he ‘set himself up.’”

“At least he wasn’t in trade, I’ll allow him that much. But he could have chosen an acceptable heir. Tradesmen!”

“A millionaire, the owner of a luxury hotel, and an officer of the Merchant Navy. They’re our relatives as much as they’re his.”

“Had your father lived, he would never have permitted such a disgraceful state of affairs.”

Daisy thought it wiser, as well as kinder, not to point out that her father had left a mess of a different kind. Shattered by the death of Gervaise, he had failed to alter his will to provide for Daisy, having earlier assumed that her brother would take care of her. Though, when the flu pandemic bore him off in his turn, Edgar had been willing to correct his omission, Daisy had not been willing to sponge on her then newly discovered relative.

Choosing to work for her living had led to her meeting Alec, so all had turned out for the best—in her eyes, if not the dowager’s.