Memory and Desire (5 page)

Which still showed scars from Cromwell's cannon fire during the English Civil War. Royalist Somerstowe had at last fallen to treachery—a time-honored method if there ever was one, Claire told herself. Cecil Lacey had surrendered his house and its grounds, only to have it restored when Charles II regained the throne in 1660. Five years later Cecil had presided over the trial of Elizabeth Spenser, showing Puritan zeal worthy of Cromwell himself. Phillip Lacey offered a motive for Cecil's actions—Elizabeth had turned down his advances. As Alec had said, every murderer thinks he's justified.

The Lodge had once been the estate's gatehouse. Claire cast a wary glance toward its door, half expecting the most recent Lacey, Richard, to emerge with teeth and claws bared. But the door remained shut. It was five after nine—he was already at the Hall, no doubt glancing at his watch and tapping his foot. Claire hurried through the archway.

A flagstone walk cut across the green lawn. Against the enclosing walls lay banks of flowers. The Hall stretched its Elizabethan chimneys toward the sun. Behind it mammoth oaks and beeches made cascades of green lace against the sky.

The Play was always presented in the forecourt of the Hall, within the enclosing wings of the E-shaped building. Each pane of glass in the vast windows reflected the light at a slightly different angle, making them wink and flash in perception. Claire imagined those windows watching the dramatization as they had once watched the real events, like a sleeper caught in a cycling nightmare.

A calico cat was sitting primly at one end of the columned portico, its head tilted to the side, watching her. The
genius loci,
no doubt—the spirit of the house. Smiling at it, she stepped through the open door and into a still, dim interior scented with old stone, damp wood and potpourri.

“Good of you to join us, Miss Godwin,” said the crisp male voice she'd been both expecting and dreading.

Richard was standing before a huge fireplace that gouged one wall of the two-story entrance hall. A group of people was ranged in a semi-circle before him. A bulletin board made an anachronistic note to his right. “I hope you weren't waiting for me,” Claire replied.

“Not a bit of it.” He turned back to his audience and gestured with a clipboard toward the painted plasterwork crest above the mantelpiece. Its armorial bearings were taller than he was. “The leopard and the stag of the Laceys were unashamedly adopted by the Cranbournes, solid bourgeois industrialists that they were, when they acquired the Hall in 1786. Fortunately the later Laceys didn't have the money, nor the Cranbournes the imagination, to mess the place about. What the Cranbournes did was make a good fist of keeping it watertight, leaving us with a brilliant late Elizabethan house. Come along."

He started off across the black and white tile floor, steps ringing. His flock followed, Claire in the rear. Included in the group of volunteers were half a dozen college students and several elderly people looking for something interesting to do on vacation. And then there were the serious hobbyists like Claire—well, no, she thought, not like me, I have an ulterior motive. Even so, she gazed hungrily upward at the tapestries lining the upper part of the hall. Seventeenth century Brussels, she decided.
Wow.

“Great tapestries, aren't they?” said a plump young woman. “I'm glad I'm not working on them, though. All those tiny stitches would drive me crazy."

A tapestry was woven, not stitched. Needlepoint stitched on a very fine canvas only looked woven. But Claire wasn't going to play know-it-all. “Actually I find all those tiny stitches very relaxing. Each one is an accomplishment, I guess. I'm Claire Godwin, needleworker."

“Oh, hi! I'm Janet Harlow, painter, detailer, and gold leaf freak."

Janet? An American named Janet was here last year. And this woman's voice definitely had the flat buzz-saw whine of an American accent.

Richard took a hard right onto a staircase and started to climb. Its windows framed the area behind the Hall—topiary shaggy with new growth, weathered statuary, and a walled rose garden at the foot of a green lawn. “The Elizabethan house,” Richard said over his shoulder, “is a continuation of the late Gothic and Tudor brick or stone structure, with French and Italian Renaissance triangular pediments and decorative motifs such as the curved Dutch gables. The windows are a defining feature, large, regular, mullioned and transomed. The horizontal proportions and symmetrical façade look toward classicism."

Janet's round rosebud face was fixed on the back of Richard's sweater. “I was here last year. You gotta watch your step—he's a real perfectionist. I bet he'll be sitting pretty with the Trust if he can carry off the restoration of Somerstowe Hall."

“Not restoration,” said a young man with the droopy brown eyes and awkward gait of a giraffe. “Remember his lecture on restoration being in the eye of the beholder and doing more harm than good? We're here for, quote, ‘conservation, preservation, and maintenance.’”

Janet turned to Claire. “This is Fred Siebold. Mason and gadfly."

“Hello,” Claire said to Fred, who was obviously another American. “If anyone needs a gadfly, Richard does. How did it go last year?"

“Fine, until our needleworker went AWOL,” Fred answered mournfully. “The police asked around, but this is England, after all. Civilized country. Richard was in a real aristocratic snit. I expected him to get up and give a speech about blood, sweat, toil, and tears. He didn't, though, just put away the tapestries and never said another word about it."

All right, chatty witnesses!
But she'd better be honest with them or they'd never trust her. “I was a friend of Melinda, the woman who disappeared. I guess that's more or less why I'm here.” Claire tried a casual wave of her hand that didn't seem at all convincing to her, but might have fooled her compatriots.

Fred was a head taller than Janet. Even so they managed to exchange a significant look Claire couldn't interpret. Caution? Or was she reading too much into ordinary puzzlement?

“I thought maybe Melinda left as a joke,” said Janet. “She had a weird sense of humor. One time she found a newt in the garden and put it on my lunch plate. There it was, curled up next to the pickled onion."

Fred made a face. “A ploughman's lunch with pickled newt. Sounds like some kind of witch's spell."

“When she and her husband broke up he gave her her luggage and reminded her that the terrace house in Chiswick was his,” Claire said. “She moved out all right, but before she left she dialed the time and temperature computer in Tokyo and left the phone switched on. He didn't find it for three days."

Fred and Janet laughed. Claire couldn't manage more than a rueful smile. Melinda loved to gut stuffed shirts, true. And yet the same day she'd moved out of Nigel's house she'd called Claire and cried bitterly at the failure of her marriage.

“To tell you the truth,” Janet went on, “we thought Melinda simply got tired of slumming with us artisans. She had so many other projects—the travel articles, the TV shows, the novel. Not that she wasn't nice. A lot of fun. And that smile of hers—you felt it was for you alone, didn't you?"

The staircase rose through the house like Ariadne's thread transformed to stone, tying together block after block of sunlight and the bars of shadow between them. Several doors were ranged around the third story landing. The one Richard pushed open responded with a piercing squeak. “This is the high great chamber. The plaster frieze, the tapestries and needlework, the mantelpiece were all designed to complement and contrast with each other. The Elizabethans loved drama, not subtlety. Their houses were stage sets."

Oh yes, Claire thought with a sigh of delight. The colors had faded, the plasterwork was chipped, and the tapestries—Mortlake, obviously—were threadbare. Still the huge room had a lusty exuberance that suggested Francis Drake had just stepped out to defeat the Armada and would walk back through the door at any moment.

She had to force herself to focus. “I knew Melinda was here researching a novel about the Elizabeth Spenser story—she even got here a week early, just to poke around—but I didn't know she told anyone else about it."

“Oh yeah,” Janet said. “She mentioned it to several people, I guess to explain why she was constantly asking questions."

“She was curious as a cat,” said Fred. “Nothing got by her."

Claire waited a beat, but he didn't add,
curiosity killed the cat.
“She was a journalist. Questions were her stock in trade.” And had Melinda's curiosity bordering on hyper-vigilance rattled a few skeletons in closets? Everyone had skeletons—well, Claire herself didn't ... Someone sure had a skeleton in his closet now. Literally.

Richard led the way through a withdrawing room and two bedchambers. The rush mats on the floors squeaked faintly beneath the numerous feet, but not as loudly as the floors themselves creaked. One expanse of planks sagged perceptibly. Richard made them walk across it one at a time, explaining that workmen were installing steel jack posts beneath it.

In the next room a false wall was framed a foot in front of the original. “Sometimes there's no other way to install wiring. I once worked at a medieval manor house where we tied a cable round the neck of a ferret and lured it through a conduit by waving a dead rabbit at the far end."

A ripple of amazement greeted that statement. Either Richard knew his stuff, Claire told herself, or he could bullshit for Britain.

His audience well in hand, he guided them down a back staircase and past more bedrooms. Broken-down bedsteads lined the walls. Racks held embroidered and appliqued linen hangings whose dilapidation filled Claire with both anticipation and anxiety. Empty picture frames lay propped in corners, bits of furniture were shoved together and covered with drop cloths, wooden crates were labeled in the same precise handwriting as Richard's notebooks: “Delftware,” “Prints,” “Curtain Fittings.” In more than one room segments of ornate wood paneling had been peeled away from its lathe and daub backing. A couple of bathrooms nestled in odd corners, their Victorian porcelain looking obscenely bald.

Richard threw open a double door. “The low great chamber, made into a library by Phillip Lacey in the 1770's, redecorated by the Cranbournes in the 1880's."

Between the tall shelves loaded with books, the room was papered with a William Morris Arts and Crafts print. The blue-green leafy patterns spoke to a more modern taste, making the library seem intimate rather than intimidating. The house as stage set, thought Claire, had gone out of fashion, as perception scaled itself down from theatre to television.

Next door was a chapel. Its walls were partly painted with Biblical scenes, partly sketched in charcoal. “Here's where I'm working,” Janet whispered. “We're having to recreate the original pictures—the plaster was too cracked and damp to save."

Down more stairs they went, and along a narrow, twisting hallway. Richard waved at the doors as they passed. “Lumber room, public loos, cellar. That's the butler's pantry where we store the cleaning supplies, paints, and so on. Don't go messing about in there, some of the chemicals are right dangerous. And here's the kitchen."

A long vaulted stone chamber was lined with cabinets and cooking implements. At least Claire assumed they were cooking implements. The brass pots and pans and assorted dishes she could identify, but some of the more arcane items might just as well have belonged to an Inquisition torturer. A set of relatively modern appliances was grouped along one wall, behind a trestle table as long as a bowling lane.

Richard was thoroughly warmed up. His eyes shone and his face glowed like those of a worshipper in a medieval religious painting. “The plaster decorations, the marble mantelpieces, the wooden paneling, the diamond panes of glass in the windows were made for the play of candlelight and shadow. Imagine how Somerstowe Hall once looked, glass glittering, shadows dancing, the ‘lightsome, airy, and spiritous’ rooms filled with lute music and the laughter of folk wearing velvets and brocades. The house is a time machine."

Under her breath Claire muttered to Fred and Janet, “Imagine how the rooms smelled. No one took baths in those days, you can't wash velvet and brocade, and the flush toilet wasn't even a gleam in Thomas Crapper's eye. No wonder the inventories are full of perfuming pans and pomander cases."

They grinned. A couple of other people looked around. Richard opened another door and waved the group out onto the forecourt. He must have a tiger's ears as well as eyes, Claire told herself. He'd heard what she said. As she passed him he fixed her with a long look, one brow arched, a corner of his mouth tucked, stifling a laugh.

With a wry smile and a shrug—so he had a sense of humor after all—she swept past him.

“Mr. Lacey,” called one of the older women. “How thrilling it must be for you to come back to your ancestral home. No wonder you love it so."

Richard's face went blank. “Ah yes—just that, Mrs. Zielinski. On around to the back, please. Mind the scaffolding."

Mrs. Zielinski looked puzzled. Fred and Janet rolled their eyes indulgently. Claire suppressed a smile. Richard did love the old house. But it wasn't the done thing to admit to passion, was it? Cool was in.

The sunlight was warm after the chill inside. Bits of ancient mortar littered the mud and gravel at the back of the house. Pulling a pen from his clipboard and pointing to the interstices between building stones, Richard launched into an explanation of rising damp and weatherproofing. The masonry was being repointed with mortar made to his own recipe of lime, sand, and cement, copying the compound originally used. “Portland cement not being compatible with an early house like this one,” he concluded.

Claire suspected that the silence of his audience was less respect for his knowledge than bewilderment at his topic.

“Remember,” Richard went on. “The main principle of conservation is the retention of as much of the original historic fabric as possible, with the least amount of intervention."

A respectful murmur answered him, although no one actually raised their right hands and swore.