Mariana (18 page)

'Yes.' I smiled back, in spite of myself. 'And yes, I do intend to bid on it.'

As it happened, when the box of books finally came up, I didn't bid very high. I took one look at the man who was bidding against me, pulled my hand down, and refused to go any further. Geoff nudged my shoulder,

'Why aren't you bidding?' he asked.

'Because that man is a dealer,' I told him. 'He knows full well what the book is worth, and I can't afford to pay that much.'

Geoff followed my gaze to the deceptively languid fellow standing in the middle of the crowd, his hands in his pockets, a well-used briar pipe clenched between his teeth, looking every inch the common farmer.

'You're sure?'

'I'm sure.'
He thought a moment. 'Do you want me to buy it for you?'

'No.' It came out too hastily, and a bit too harshly, but I did not want Geoffrey de Mornay to think I was at all interested in his money. 'No,' I said again, more softly this time, 'thanks very much, but it isn't that important to me.'

I bit my lip and looked on as the bidding escalated into the hundreds, until it seemed certain that the dealer would win it, then watched with delight as the smug expression was wiped from his face by a last-minute entrant who stole the box of books with an unheard-of bid of five hundred pounds. A ripple of excitement swelled through the
crowd
as the elderly gray-bearded man came forward to collect his purchase. The dealer, anxious but not
that
anxious, rocked back on his heels, folded his arms, and puffed furiously at his pipe, sending a succession of small blue-tinged clouds floating upward into the bright, clear air.

For my part, I consoled myself by entering in the bidding on the next item, a plain little oak lap desk that I eventually bought for rather more than it was worth. I hugged it close, triumphantly, while the auctioneer moved on.

'Here we have,' he said enticingly, 'a pair of Cary's library globes, dated 1828, of rosewood and painted beech with boxwood stringing all round. Who'll give me five thousand pounds to start?'

The dealers leaped at that one, and beside me Geoff nodded at the auctioneer, with whom he was obviously well acquainted. When the bidding stopped at twenty-one thousand, the entire crowd—myself included—seemed to exhale its collective breath, and not a few heads turned to stare at the handsome, unassuming young man who had made the final bid.

Geoff drew out his checkbook and went to pay, and I stood frowning for a moment, watching him and thinking of the yawning social gulf that separated us. He was lord of the manor, for heaven's sake, I reminded myself. And medieval as that might sound, there was nothing medieval about
the fact that his bank balance would make my own earnings look like mere pocket change. I had to be out of my mind.

But when he returned, I had only to look at his face and my middle-class misgivings were forgotten. At that moment, Geoffrey de Mornay looked nothing like a lord. He looked, I thought, exactly like a small boy—happy and carefree and terribly pleased with himself.

'Anything happen while I was gone?' he asked.

'Nothing much. A few of the older ladies fainted when they saw you writing that check, but other than that it's been pretty dull.'

He laughed, throwing back his dark head and regarding me warmly. He had told me once not to apologize for being clever, and he didn't apologize to me now for being rich. I liked him for that. Instead, he put his arm around my shoulder again and directed my attention to a nearby sideboard. 'The sideboard itself is nothing,' he said, 'but I'll wager that pair of urns sitting on it will go for at least six thousand pounds.'

I looked. 'You're on,' I accepted the wager. 'I'll bet you fifty pence.'

We stayed for another hour or
so
—long enough for me to lose my fifty pence and spend another twenty-five pounds on a totally unnecessary painting for my hallway—then, reluctantly, we made our way to the end of the drive, somewhat hampered by our cumbersome purchases.

The gray-bearded gentleman who had nabbed my box of books was leaning on the bonnet of Geoff s car, smoking a cigarette and gazing vaguely back at the continuing sale with a peaceful expression. He shifted as we approached.

'Sorry,' he apologized to Geoff. 'I'm just waiting for my son to come and collect me. Didn't fancy lugging
those'
—he nodded to the box—'any farther than I had to.'

'I don't blame you,' Geoff said, trying
to
wrestle his coveted library globes into the boot without damaging them.

I smiled at the old man. 'That's quite a good buy you made back there.'
'I know.' He nodded sagely. 'My father wrote most of those mysteries. Can't put a price on that, can you?'

Geoff stopped struggling and sent me an apprehensive sideways look, but I had already spotted my opening.

'Oh, look!' I bent down and dislodged the Tolkien from the toppled books, pretending surprise.
'The Hobbit!
Look, darling, isn't that little Jimmy's favourite book?'

Geoff just grinned at me, refusing to play, and I turned a hopeful, inquiring face up to the gentle old man, hoping that I had retained at least some of the childish appeal I'd had
as a
seven-year-old.

'I don't suppose,' I said, faltering a little, 'I don't suppose that you'd ...'

'You can have it,' he said generously. 'It's the mysteries I want. You take that book, for your little boy.'

To my credit, I felt a tiny twinge of guilt.

'Let me pay you for it,' I offered, handing him a ten-pound note, which, to my great relief, he accepted. 'After all'—I smiled broadly—'it must be worth something.'

Geoff slammed the boot shut with a curious cough and opened the passenger door for me. 'Come along,
darling,
' he said. 'We have to get going.'

In the car, he gave me another long look before we both burst out laughing at my good fortune.

'You are shameless,' he accused me. 'Shockingly good, but shameless.'

'I had a wonderful teacher,' I explained, and for the next few miles I regaled him with stories of my father's auction-house exploits and the conniving duplicity that ran strong in my family's blood.

'I'd enjoy meeting your father, from the sounds of it,' said Geoff.

My reply was little more than a noncommittal mumble. It was just as well for Geoff, I thought, that my father was still out of the country. My previous boyfriends had run for cover at the sight of him, as a rule. Daddy could be rather difficult, at times, and he hadn't yet found any young man
who measured up to his exacting standards. The best thing, I'd found, was simply not to introduce them to him. It saved a lot of bother, all around.

The drive back to Exbury was far too short, and all too soon we were pulling up to the side of my house. Geoff reached into the backseat and handed me my lap desk and the small framed painting I had foolishly bought. For the first time that day, our speech became stilted.

'That was a lot of fun,' I said. 'I really enjoyed myself.'

"So did I.' He looked at his hands on the steering wheel. 'Listen,' he said, 'I have to go up north again for a few days, maybe even a week, but when I get back I want to see you again.' He turned his head to face me. 'I want to take you to dinner.'

'I'd like that,' I said, and he smiled, the full force of his charm making me momentarily dizzy.

It was a better kiss than the first. For one thing, I reasoned, we had known each other nearly two weeks longer, and we had just shared an absolutely perfect day in each other's company. When the kiss ended, I sent him a happy smile and reached for the door handle.

' 'Bye.'

He leaned across the seat, helping me with the door.

'You're sure you'll be all right with that?'

'Yes, thanks." I nodded, clutching my purchases more tightly.

'Right, then.' Again the smile. 'I'll give you a ring when I get back.'

I watched him drive away, feeling ridiculously happy, and all but danced around the house to the back door. In stubborn contrast to my own mood, the key refused to turn in my new lock, and in the process of wrestling with it, the oak lap desk slipped from my grasp and fell with a thud and a clatter to the ground, missing the stone step by inches.

'Blast!' I cursed my brother and the lock, and knelt in the grass to recover the lap desk. It had sprung open when it fell, and the loose velvet-covered writing surface lay
skewed on its hinges. I closed the box, and with my finger wiped a smear of mud from the elaborate letter
H
on the lid's brass nameplate.

When I picked up the desk, something rattled inside, and I groaned mentally, attacking the back door with renewed vigor. This time, the lock cooperated, stiffly. I pushed the door open with my shoulder, kicking it shut behind me for good measure.

Setting my purchases down on the kitchen table, I opened the lap desk once more and examined the hollow cavity beneath the writing surface. Nothing appeared to have broken, but a narrow secret drawer had been sprung by the fall. With curious fingers I pried it fully open.

Inside the drawer lay a daintily worked bracelet of chipped and tarnished gilt, a linked procession of fanciful birds of paradise with eyes of blue glass that glittered like royal jewels.

Eighteen

With fingers that trembled slightly, I lifted the bracelet from the shallow drawer where it had lain concealed for ... how long? Centuries? It
was
the same bracelet, I knew it with a certainty that surpassed logic. The sight of it, the feel of it, the weight of it against my palm were so familiar to me, there was no question that the bracelet had once been mine.

But how had it found its way into a wooden lap desk that—if the maker's label was to be believed—had not even been crafted until the mid-1700's, seventy years or more after Mariana Farr had come to Exbury? Still clutching the bracelet, I closed the lid of the lap desk and looked again at the swirled letter
H
on the nameplate, frowning. Was it possible, I wondered, that the
H
stood for 'Howard'? Had this plain little box once belonged to one of the Howards of Greywethers?

I shook my head, bewildered. It all seemed so incredibly fantastic to me, beyond the realm of probability. Too much of a coincidence to be true, I thought. Or ... was it? I ran the bracelet through my fingers like the beads of a rosary, and the birds of paradise seemed to wink at me as their glass eyes caught the light. Maybe, I speculated, just maybe,
if everything was truly happening for a reason, and if there really was a mystical force that drove us on to fate or destiny, then my finding the bracelet was not much of a coincidence, after all. Maybe, in fact, it was
necessary....

A sharp, imperious knocking at my back door startled me out of my ponderings, and I thrust the bracelet back into the lap desk before moving to answer the summons. My mind had not yet fully abandoned its train of thought, and the distraction must have shown plainly on my features when I pulled open the door to face the man who stood on the step outside.

Iain Sumner filled the door frame, blocking out most of the sunlight, his expression accusing.

'You've been weeding,' he said flatly, 'haven't you?'

He was undoubtedly preparing to launch into one of the animated lectures that Vivien had warned me about, but I was saved at the last moment by a quite extraordinary occurrence—for the second time in as many weeks, I began to cry.

It was, I admit, not nearly as spectacular as my outburst at Tom's house in Hampshire, but nonetheless my eyes grew misty and my mouth trembled a little, and Iain abruptly stopped frowning to stare at me in concerned contrition. It was almost comical to see the self-possessed Scotsman so completely at a loss for words, and I couldn't stop my lips from curving into a small smile.

'I'm sorry,' I said, wiping my eyes, 'it's not you. It's just that ..." I hesitated, searching for an explanation, before deciding that there simply was no easy way to explain my overemotional state. 'Well, anyway,' I sniffed, 'yes, I have been weeding in your garden. Did I make an awful mess of it?'

Iain looked silently down at a limp, withered bit of greenery he held in one hand, considering, then seemed to think the better of it. Putting his hand behind his back he let the plant fall to his feet, and met my eyes levelly.

'No, it's not too bad, really,' he said.

He was a charming liar, and I told him so. Laughing, he put his head to one side and, satisfied that I had regained my composure, said, 'Look, I tell you what. If you're bent on helping me with my work, why don't you come on out for a minute and let me show you what everything is?'

'I thought you didn't like people mucking about in your gardens.'

'It's an ugly rumor, that.' He smiled. 'Come on, it won't take a moment.'

As I stepped across the threshold, following him, I bent to pick up the mangled plant that he had so gallantly discarded. This wasn't a South African something, was it?' I asked cautiously.

He looked at me with eyes that twinkled only slightly.

'It was not,' he assured me emphatically. 'If you'd pulled up one of those, you'd have heard about it, tears or no.'

It was, I realized afterward, exactly what I had needed—a half hour of messing about in the dirt, feeling the dry, dusty feel of earth against my fingertips and smelling the pungent sweet scent of leaves and flowers warmed by the sun. It comforted me, reassured me, grounded me once again in reality. Iain proved
to
be quite a good teacher, actually. With painstaking thoroughness he identified each flower and plant in the garden, pointing out the almost invisible shoots of flowers that would not be seen until late summer. He told me what needed to be done, and showed me how to do it, so that when he had finished I felt quite confident in my ability to at least weed the garden without destroying it.

'You'll get the hang of it,' he promised. 'It just takes practice.'

'You're sure you won't mind?' I wrinkled my forehead skeptically, and he turned an impassive face toward me.

'D'ye not trust me?'

'Well, Vivien and Geoff seemed to think that I was taking some sort of mortal risk....'

He grinned, and reached to snap a dead blossom off a
nearby stalk of iris. 'I won't mind,' he said. 'Besides, it'll do you good to get out here once in a while. Keeps you healthy, gardening does.' He checked his wristwatch and stood up, stretching. 'I'll leave you to it, then. Time I was getting home.'

I had no idea myself what time it was, but the sun was lying low in the sky and it must have been close on seven o'clock. I stood up with him.

'Thank you,' I said. I was thanking him for a number of things, really. For not being angry with me, for understanding my mood, for being so damnably
nice....

He just shrugged, and smiled.

'It's no trouble.'

He took his leave of me and strode away across the field, while I turned to face the dying sun, fitting my back to the smooth, crumbled stone wall behind me, half closing my eyes dreamily. It was a perfect, fairy-tale sunset, golden red with cotton-wool clouds whose gilded edges gave them an almost artificial appearance, as though they belonged in one of my own illustrations. To complete the picture, all that was missing was the rider under the oak, a romantic dark knight on his noble charger, watching the distant hills for dragons. I turned my head to look toward the hollow with eyes that were almost hopeful, but there was nothing there.

Above the oak, a hawk drifted lazily in an aimless circle, and his voice was a lonely cry.

*-*-*-*

The days passed, quickly and quietly, and I applied myself to my illustrations with a diligence that was completely foreign to my character. I was procrastinating, and I knew it. In a strange way, learning that I had the power to transport myself into the seventeenth century at will had made me reluctant to do so. All that week, while I sketched and painted and carried on with my normal routine, I think I was secretly hoping that something would just
happen
in a nice,
spontaneous way, so I wouldn't be consciously responsible for what might follow.

But of course, nothing did happen, although by the end of the week I was completely surrounded by watercolors in various stages of the drying process, which made me feel—if nothing else—terribly productive. On Friday, Geoff telephoned to let me know that his week up north had been stretched to two weeks, and did I mind waiting a little longer for that dinner? I told him of course not.

To be perfectly truthful, dinner was the furthest thing from my mind at that moment. My preoccupation with my work was, as usual, making me antisocial in my habits. For several days I slept and worked and saw no one, eating my meals from tins and crawling off to bed in the small hours of the morning. When Vivien rang me up shortly before lunch on the following Tuesday, she couldn't resist commenting on the rusty quality of my voice. My explanation— that I hadn't spoken in three days—only made her more curious.

'Don't you even talk to yourself?' she wanted to know.

'No.' I smiled against the receiver. 'I have a cousin who does that, and I'd rather not be bracketed with her, thanks all the same.'

'I see. Well, do you fancy getting out for a bit this afternoon? Or is the creative flow flowing at the moment?'

'Oh, I'm sure I could be persuaded to tear myself away for a few hours,' I told her. 'What did you have in mind?'

'Tea at Crofton Hall.'

I frowned. 'Geoff's not back yet, surely?'

'No, no, he's still up north. Actually, the invitation comes from my aunt Freda. She's been after me for several days now to bring you round for a chat, but this is the first day I've been able to take the time off. Ned's been down with the flu, you see.'

So the White Witch of Exbury was inviting me round to tea. It sounded a thoroughly delightful prospect.

'I'd love to come,' I said.
'Wonderful. Is three o'clock all right with you? You can drop by here if you like, on your way, and collect me.'

'Fine. Shall I bring anything?'

'Just yourself. And a healthy appetite,' she advised me. 'Aunt Freda's teas could sustain a hardworking family of four, and we'll be expected to eat what we're served.'

At three o'clock that afternoon, I was glad that I had taken Vivien's advice and skipped lunch, as I doubted whether I'd have had room to put everything otherwise. The table in front of me groaned beneath the weight of heaping plates of cakes and sandwiches and pickled relishes and cold ham pie.

'You don't have to eat it all, child,' Mrs. Hutherson assured me. She topped up the teapot with freshly boiled water and sat down facing me. 'No matter what Vivien's told you, I'm not quite as nasty as all that.'

We were sitting in the kitchen of Crofton Hall. Not the great, echoing kitchen that I'd seen during my tour of the manor house, but a smaller, more functional room in the private north wing, with scrubbed pine floors and lace curtains and plants spilling from every windowsill. Alfreda Hutherson obviously spent a great deal of time in this kitchen, and the room had absorbed much of her personal energy, radiating warmth and friendliness and comfort.

I found her quite fascinating—a tall, spare woman in a plain dark dress, with laughing blue eyes that were so like Vivien's that I wondered how I could have missed the resemblance before. She moved with a regal, wholly natural grace, and though her hair was nearly pure white I found it impossible to guess at her age. Like her niece, she was a wonderful conversationalist, intelligent and well-read, with a deliciously sly, quiet wit that surfaced from time to time.

'I must say,' she said now, passing the sandwiches round for the third time, 'it is nice to have company in the house. I always feel at a loose end when Geoffrey is away.'

'You've been feeding Iain instead, this week—he told me so,' Vivien said accusingly. 'He'll be putting on weight.'
'He works hard,' her aunt rationalized. 'He'll keep it off. And it's nice to see someone who appreciates good food.'

'You still live here, then?' I took a sandwich. 'In the manor house?'

She smiled. 'Oh, no. No, I have a small house of my own in the village. I just work days here, do the cleaning and watch over the younger girls, then before I leave I put Geoffrey's supper in the oven for him and he does the washing up. It's a very informal arrangement.'

'Aunt Freda's house is just the other side of the old vicarage,' Vivien put in. 'It was my gran's house, when she was alive. Little stone house with green shutters. Is that the phone?' She cocked her head suddenly, listening. 'Yes, it is. No, stay where you are, I'll get it,' she told her aunt, pushing her chair back and disappearing down the long dark passageway. She returned a moment later, shaking her head.

'Crisis,' she pronounced. 'That was Ned. The taps have apparently stopped working, and the lads are getting sober. I'd better run over and see what I can do. I'll be back as soon as I can.'

'No hurry, dear,' Alfreda Hutherson told her with a wink. 'Plenty of food to go round. We'll save some biscuits for you.'

Vivien laughed. 'I'll bet you will.'

The door closed behind her, and the woman across from me raised her teacup, her eyes suddenly thoughtful as they watched me over the brim.

'You look very tired,' she said, unexpectedly. 'Has it all been too much for you?'

I hesitated a minute before answering, not sure how to interpret the question, and struggling with a question of my own. I met her eyes uncertainly and she smiled, setting her teacup down in its saucer.

"You want to ask me whether I know, and what I know, and how I know it,' she said calmly, 'but you're afraid I'll think you're mad if you speak first. So I'll save you the trouble. Yes, I do know. I'm well aware of what's been happening to you since you moved here. I've been quite concerned about you, as a matter of fact,' she told me frankly. 'That's why I had Vivien bring you round to see me. I wanted to see for myself how you were getting on.'

After which remarkable speech, she lifted her teacup once more and waited for my response. She didn't have to wait long. I had been sitting bolt upright in my chair, staring, but now I blinked at her and smiled, raising my eyebrows.

'They said you were a witch.'

She laughed, but did not deny it. She poured me a fresh cup of tea and leaned back, folding her arms expectantly. 'You have questions.'