A Fatal Winter (31 page)

She turned back to her mirror. The little outburst had dislodged a speck of mascara. She dipped a cotton swab in one of the little jars on her table and cleared away the smudge.

“Lamorna is free now, I gather,” said Max to her reflection. “Free to leave. Do you think she will?”

Gwynyth had been leaning away from the mirror for a wide-angle view. Now came the first flash of anger, one that almost sounded like spiteful jealousy. Perhaps she had been told about Lamorna’s inheritance.

“What a complete balls,” said Gwynyth. It was a voice that could have been used to flash-freeze vegetables; Max was to hear the tone more than once in the coming hours. “Lamorna has always been free to come and go as she pleased. She makes it sound like someone held her captive. For Oscar’s part, I know he didn’t like having her here. Certainly he’d have shed no tears over her leaving.”

“Like Dorothy,” said Max.

“Hmm?”

“
Wizard of Oz
. She only thought she didn’t know the way home. Anyway, why the anger, Gwynyth? Surely you didn’t have a lot of hope things would change during this holiday?”

“Didn’t I? He told me himself he was going to get that solicitor in here after the new year, and he’d make sure I was better compensated. What he meant by that exactly, I don’t know. But it sure would have been more than the nothing I got.” She was now busy applying some sort of metal curling device to her lashes. Max felt overall it was a task to be undertaken when she was calmer.

“At least your children are provided for. That must be a relief and a blessing.”

“Yes, I suppose there’s that,” she said vaguely.

“The boy seems to be coping well. So does Amanda. But I wonder if the stiff upper lip thing can’t be carried too far.”

“Alec’s always trying to prove how macho he is. When one has been simply
handed
everything in life there is more to prove, isn’t there? He’s got looks, now he’s got money. As for Amanda, she’ll be all right—don’t you worry about her. She’s tough as old boots.”

She set one of her makeup brushes down on the tabletop and reverted to the topic uppermost in her mind.

“I want someone to at least
try
to understand this. I know what they all say about me, about why I married Oscar—for money. Trading youth for money, isn’t that the expression? Even the twins think so—of their own mother! But they’re all wrong. Lots of rich men were after me, but I chose Oscar.”

Again she leaned toward him, as if desperate for his understanding. “I didn’t know which fork to use ’til he taught me,” she said. “Or what food to eat, and what wine to have with what food. You can’t get in the door without the right manners, for all I became Lady Footrustle when he married me. He taught me it was lower class to say I was completely whacked, upper class to say I was utterly exhausted. Things like that—things that give you away. Give
one
away, I mean.”

“Is that grounds enough for love?”

She shrugged. “I thought so.”

It seemed clear to Max that while she may not have loved Oscar in the conventional romantic sense, she appreciated that he had things to teach her, things she was smart enough to learn. She still dressed more like Lady Gaga than Lady Muck, yes, but he filed that in the category of youthful exuberance. It would soon be time to outgrow some of it, however.

“So he did a Professor Higgins number on you,” said Max.

“Higgins? Who’s he when he’s at home?”

“He’s a fictional character in a play. He transformed a flower girl into someone who could pass as a lady.”

“I was no bleedin’ flower girl,” she said, sounding remarkably like an Eliza Doolittle who has skipped a few lessons. “But I take your point. Funny thing is, he wasn’t a snob, Oscar. Not really. But his sister! It was as if everyone she met would of course know the place of the Footrustles in the constellation of royal personages, and God help anyone who didn’t.”

She screwed up her eyes in remembrance, risking another smudge to the mascara so recently and artfully applied. Then she swiveled round in her chair, her superb ankles and knees angled to the side in a ladylike pose, and looked at Max with a doggedly earnest sincerity. Again he was momentarily reminded of Lester.

“Oscar never gave up trying to improve me, you know. He said my history books were rubbish and he encouraged me to find something better in the library—take what I wanted so long as I left the rubbish books behind.”

“That would be books about the Knights Templar, would it?”

“How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” he said.

The silence hung in the brightly colored room for some seconds while they scoured each other’s faces for clues. Max had a sense of a woman looking down from a mountain, seeing how far she had come, and how far she had to fall back. She would be afraid of losing her tenuous hold on the social ladder, realizing her relationship with her children was her only chance at retaining that hold.

“Look,” she said finally. “I loved him in my way, at one time. But in the end there was no love lost between me and Oscar. He was ruthless in the divorce, as nasty as could be. But I didn’t kill him. To tell the truth, I don’t think I’d have the nerve to kill anyone. Not even in self-defense.”

Max could almost see what she meant. Killing someone would muss her hair. She was far too girlie a person for such exertions.

He said, “I gather this holiday, he was making some attempt to reconnect with the twins.”

“I thought so, too. Poor tykes haven’t had much in the way of fatherly influence.”

“You’ve not thought of remarrying?”

“What makes you think anyone has asked?”

It was a clear bid for flattery and he ignored it. Gwynyth’s beauty would ensure she would never lack for suitors.

But despite the expressions of concern for the twins’ health and morale, Max gained no impression that her children were anything more than a means to an end. It was an impression confirmed in the next sentence.

“Besides, until…” She waggled her fingers, trying to recall some minor detail. “Until What’s-their-names are grown and gone, there won’t be anyone willing to put up with them.”

Now she attached a necklace of what looked to be Murano glass, blues tinged with greeny-golds. He remembered seeing the jewelry everywhere in Florence, in Lombardy, most of all of course in Venice. It was similar in style to the necklace worn by Cilla Petrie. He complimented Gwynyth on it, mentioning Tuscany, to which she replied, simply, “We spend the winters there. We have a house…”

Thus did the wealthy speak, in that offhand way. Not bragging. “We have a house.” Didn’t everyone have a house in which to escape the winter? A town house and a country house, and for the very fortunate, a whatever house in another country altogether?

And it was always a house, in upper-class speak, as in weekend house—never home. Oscar must have taught her that.

That she had not escaped this winter but had chosen to remain in England seemed suddenly to have occurred to her.

“The twins were clamoring to see their father,” she said, to his unspoken question. “What could I do?” The winsome cat smile crept across her face. No doubt many men had told her it was a captivating smile, for it was. Warmth dissolved some of the iciness of before. He saw the charm, and felt it being exercised for his benefit.

“You say they were anxious to see him,” he took up.

“It helped that I promised them a shopping spree if they behaved while they were here. There was money riding on it.” She stopped, a pout on her shiny lips. “Well, for some people there was. At least, I don’t have a motive for killing him, now, do I? The police can’t pin this on me, something to be grateful for.”

She caught his eye in the mirror, turned, and said, “You think I’m silly, don’t you?” That was so close to what he had actually been thinking Max was momentarily at a loss for words, although “frivolous” was the word he had in mind.

“I think your priorities may have wandered a bit out of line,” he said at last, gently.

She shrugged. “As the saying goes, ‘Walk a mile in my shoes.’”

*   *   *

Gwynyth’s beautiful wide eyes with their coal-black liner followed him as he left. The door closed on his broad back. She noticed he was barely using the crutch and instead seemed to be testing his weight on the injured foot.

Good heavens, she thought. What a dishy parson or whatever the hell they’re called. I’ll have to start going to church.

But after a moment she leaned her head in her hands, exhausted and defeated.

Whacked.

To think I went through all that, for nothing.

CHAPTER 21

At Dinner

The pale December day had rapidly given way to a silvery gloom. Fading light iced the water, and a cold wind told the story of more snow on the way.

It was approaching the time of the full moon. Max, standing at a casement window in his room, saw the castle’s winter garden under a sky like a sheet of aluminum, dense and impenetrable. He thought with a sudden, sharp longing of Nether Monkslip, its fields and gardens filled with flowers in summer, when he would gorge on the colors of his newfound village.

He was turning back into the room when a sudden movement caught his eye. It was Lester, capering in the garden—there was no other word for it. First loping across the open area, limbs flailing, like a puppet guided by an indifferent puppeteer; now crouched and trying to hide behind a pergola, peeking out periodically. It was the darting movements Max had seen; a smoother operator than Lester might have gone undetected. With his slightly protuberant teeth, Lester resembled a rodent with curly black hair scuttling in the dark, a look of weak cunning on his face.

As Max watched, Lester straightened, spun unexpectedly to the left as if grabbed by unseen hands, and disappeared in a narrow walkway between the castle buildings.

What had the man been looking at? Wait—he saw it now. Two figures, both wearing coats, one male, tall and lanky, and one curvaceously female, headed for the door leading to the cliff path. The curving castle walls seemed to cup them in a wintry embrace. It was Randolph and he was with Gwynyth—there was no mistaking her fair coloring in the moonlight. As Max watched, Randolph bent toward her, intimately putting an arm around her shoulders. The sea far below made a distant swishing sound, barely audible through the windows set in the deep stone walls. He couldn’t hear what was said. It was like watching one of those old silent films, the kind Jocasta with her extreme gestures always reminded him of.

The pair reached the wooden door. Randolph pushed back his hair, a pointless exercise in the wind at water’s edge, but apparently an incurable habit. The moon moved from behind a cloud and Max could see his smile. That patronizing smile. Gywnyth’s face was blocked from Max’s view. They disappeared through the door.

Max turned from the window, a frown of concern on his handsome face. He hadn’t made the association before, but why wouldn’t Randolph take a romantic or sexual interest in Gwynyth?

He reflected how perfectly set up the castle was for spying on one’s friends, family, or servants.

And what in creation had Lester been doing out there?

*   *   *

Music drifted up the stairwell to Max’s room, and entered with a gush as he opened the door into the hallway. It was a stately tune he didn’t recognize, full of menacing strings and twiddly flutes, and suitable for background music in a costume drama. He realized the whole situation was like that, the shadowy castle walls casting a baroque quality over everything, adding to the sense of gathering menace. Entering the corridor, he was swallowed up by the darkness, the electric sconces offering faint illumination until he neared the top of the stairs into the Great Hall.

A gong sounded, echoing and ominous as it reverberated up the staircase. He found Milo near the foot of the stairs hauling back to give it another good whack, although the first might have woken the dear departed.

In the cavernous silence of the Hall, its oak walls darkened with the glaze of centuries, an aroma of onion mixed with garlic hung in the air, and that of seafood broiling in butter. Max realized he hadn’t eaten much since the morning and his stomach started to send hopeful signals of good tidings to his brain.

The room was in shadow, its small windows partially blocked by snow and casting a white gloom. This was only slightly relieved by the march of candelabra down the center of the table and by the Christmas-tree lights illuminating one far corner. He supposed Milo had felt the family needed cheering. The Great Hall had no windows at floor level, only openings high in the walls where the vivid hues of stained glass shone like gemstones. Just as no marauder could peer in, neither could anyone peer out. If you wanted to know what the weather was like, you had jolly well better go outside and see.

The dining table chairs were all massive and high-backed with large, carved wooden arms—suitable for a coronation or a royal wedding. Max tried settling back in one. It was like being strapped to a gurney. He shunted himself forward, sitting perched half on, half off the seat, thinking: Uneasy lies more than the head that wears the crown. Larger armchairs that looked like his-and-her thrones guarded each end of the central table.

There was a roaring fire, and crystal vases filled with plump, fragrant flowers. Plush chairs ranged around the sides of the room—chairs that looked as if they were never sat in. They kept company with a sideboard that he appraised at “Priceless.”

Gwynyth and Cilla entered more or less together, Gwynyth now wearing a white dress that ballooned around her hips and thighs like a failed parachute. Max gathered it was the latest fashion, since the rest of Gwynyth looked so fashionable. She smiled at Max, flushed and happy.

Cilla wore her usual somber, clingy black, nipped at the waist with a silver band. She had back-combed her hair into a trendy mare’s nest, deliberately mussed and moussed to suggest recent emergence from a wind tunnel following a skirmish with wild dogs. Women’s fashions would forever be a source of bafflement to Max. Max noticed for the first time she had a little butterfly tattoo on her neck.