Saint Kate of the Cupcake: The Dangers of Lust and Baking (9 page)

The decor was perfectly maintained original. Even the imperfections were not corrected, in order to enhance the character of the whole. It was beautiful and, more importantly, appropriate. The sitting room was apple green, with tonal shades echoing in the furniture, which should have been relaxing but wasn’t, at least when it was occupied. Edwina rose from one of the wing chairs to greet us.

“You are late!” she thundered, her eyes bulging out of her reddened face.

“Sorry, Mother. Traffic was bad out of the city,” Jack said mildly, not even trying to remind her that we deliberately hadn’t specified a time for our arrival, saying it would be after dinner. She had no doubt thought up a time for herself and decided that that was when we should arrive, despite us having no knowledge of it. Logic held no sway with Edwina, so there was no point in arguing. My time would be better spent beating my head against a wall. At least then I might be unconscious and blissfully removed from having to deal with her.

“Well, I’m sure dinner is ruined, but we’ll all just have to suffer through it, particularly your poor father. You know how his digestion plays up,” she huffed ominously and fixed me with a baleful eye, as if the traffic had been my personal doing. Jack didn’t bother correcting her or telling her that we’d already had dinner. It simply wasn’t worth the effort. We would eat again. Edwina turned away to speak to Bellham quietly. I looked at Jack and raised an eyebrow. He just shrugged, confirming that there was nothing wrong with his father.

Edwina finished her instructions to the butler and gave him a sickly sweet smile.
Condescending cow
, I thought.

“Hello, dear.” Arthur had moved up to us quietly, kissing me gently on the cheek and shaking Jack’s hand.

“Help yourself to drinks,” Edwina said stiffly. “Now, where are my grandsons?” Finally a genuine smile, though slightly too bright, which made her look more than a little crazy. The boys were largely oblivious to her moods as they knew they were rarely directed at them, so they came up to give her a kiss without fear for their safety. I poured myself and Jack large Tomatin Whiskys, and we settled on the lounge, relaxed now that her attention was with the children.

Looking around, I realized Arthur had quietly left the room again. For as long as I’d known Jack, his father had been noted for his ability leave unobtrusively. Sometimes I speculated that he must be able to walk through walls, because the doors never squeaked for him like they did for the rest of us. I used to joke with Jack that his father was actually Bruce Wayne and that he was in reality disappearing to his bat-cave to go out fighting evil as Batman. Though the question of why he didn’t battle his wife remained unuttered. Maybe she was his nemesis and every superhero needs one of those to survive. If the nemesis were defeated, then all the fun and excitement would be over. It was the only reason I could think of for him not offing her years ago.

I was just starting to relax when Crispin walked in. He smirked annoyingly at us like the leprous toad he was and gave his mother a kiss hello. Something about the way his lips lingered on her skin was more than slightly unsettling.

“Hello, Crispin, darling.” She smiled at him dotingly and stroked his cheek.
Urgh,
I grumbled internally,
love is truly blind.

“Mummy. You are looking sublime this evening.”

She simpered in response; there was no other word for it. I wanted to throw up. How Crispin could act like nothing was wrong was beyond me, given the criminal nature of the things he was being accused of these days. At the moment, it was just rumors, but there was talk of the police being involved. I doubted that would happen, though. Despite, or maybe because of, the fact that the girl was so young, the whole thing would be hushed up. Edwina would pay for it to go away, and Crispin would move on, his depravity unchecked. Sure, he would be unwelcome in certain circles, but he didn’t care what they thought. There were always more innocents with stars in their eyes for him to move on to. He made me sick. The poor girl had been barely seventeen, and from the sounds of it was completely fucked up now.

“Jack, Katie, good to see you. Merry Christmas!” he said insincerely. I threw him a weak smile, and Jack just glowered. He tried to come in for a kiss, but Jack leaned forward to block him. Crispin straightened, and his lip curled in annoyance.

We made our excuses shortly after and went up to our room. An hour later and dressed appropriately, we entered the stately dining room for the obligatory four-course formal dinner. It was delicious, though ridiculously fattening with lashings of cream and butter ladled over everything. A haze of fat like lip gloss covered my lips, and only an after-dinner whisky could cut through it. Diet was not something that Edwina believed in, or rather, she had no idea what constituted healthy food, so she just assumed that the food she had grown up eating and liked was therefore good for her.

“I have been remarkably unwell,” she announced to the table in general. “I have gained so much weight because of my thyroid problem that I just feel awful and bloated all the time.” It was hard not to laugh at her self-delusion.

“Do you have a diagnosis yet?” I asked innocently.

“It’s so rare that they are still running tests. They’ve put me on a meat- and dairy-free diet.”

“But, my dear, you’re eating meat now,” Arthur suggested meekly.

“It’s just one little piece of lamb!” she exclaimed indignantly and ate it anyway, but you could tell she was put out by the general increase in glaring.

After dinner, we retired to the sitting room again to talk in the warmth of the fire while the staff cleared away our meal. The room was again in an immaculate condition. I found it intimidating, as I could never be completely at ease having servants to do everything. I didn’t find it relaxing to have other people cleaning up after me, and I worried about what they would think of me from the mess I left behind.

I also couldn’t help feeling responsible for not only the disruption I caused, but also that of two barely adolescent boys. I’m sure I had instructed them on the intricate function of a coaster, but it had yet to sink in. In perfect obliviousness, they put wetly glistening glasses down on a succession of priceless antique surfaces, thereby ruining them forever. The glances of death from their grandmother were reserved for me, along with hissed insults when there was no one else to bear witness, and the kindly façade she tried to cultivate cracked briefly before being quickly repaired so none of the men she favored saw.

Despite the image she tried to present to the world, Edwina had grown up in more modest, though to my understanding still well-to-do, circumstances and had inherited the bulk of her money from an uncle who had become rich from inventing some sort of glue. She would have been considered new money, but she’d leveraged the capital she had into a very good marriage and respectability with Lord Preedy, who came from a very old family whose finances were distinctly threadbare and in need of cash to fund the upkeep of the family home.

Arthur was gentle and softly spoken, and I’m not entirely sure he was
all there,
so to speak. A few sheep may have been missing from the top paddock, to use a distinctly Australian colloquialism. Still, he was perfect for Edwina as he didn’t seem to mind being bossed about continuously. There must have been some deep seated insecurity in Edwina to need to control everyone, but she made a particular effort to punish me for the crime of marrying her son. I think she had decided the way to do that was to appear to the manor born by continually implying my inferior status, having come from
the colonies
. I just kept the smile on my face, and focused on being sunnily charming, which unsettled her more than allowing her to see that she bothered me, which I’m sure she would have enjoyed.

Still, she had helped us buy our house when we married; otherwise there was no way we would have been able to afford an admittedly run-down terrace in Chelsea. A ridiculous amount of time, love, and money later, we had something truly beautiful to live in, and it gave me pleasure every time I walked in the door. I just had to remind myself what I was grateful for when she became particularly painful.

Mind you, there were times when I wished we could have just bought what we could have afforded at the time and not had to owe her the money. Any time she came to visit, she would run a proprietary hand over the woodwork and tell me what I needed to change. I had to try not to throw myself in front of her to stop her molesting my house.

It’s hard to enjoy Christmas when someone is hissing at you that you are devil spawn at least once a day. I’m not sure exactly what I’d done to become evil incarnate, except marry her son, thereby cutting back the thorny tangle of the umbilical cord. I’d say it was my career, but she was like that from the beginning. At first, I took it to heart, but after being nothing but pleasant and accommodating, I’d had to conclude that it wasn’t me. Still, I kept giving in to all but the most ridiculous requests, but her playing the “it is her last Christmas” card was wearing a bit thin, given she looked in the pink of good health and it had been ten years since she’d first tried to convince us she was on death’s door.

So, there we all were, sitting around this draughty old pile, pretending to enjoy each other’s company and that there was nowhere else we would rather be. Our boys, being teenagers, were masters at wriggling away, and I hadn’t the heart to subject them to more of it than absolutely necessary. I would have escaped if I could too. The immaculate house was more museum than comfortable retreat, and it was too cold and miserable to go out. I pretended to be engrossed in my book and drank a lot.

On the morning of Boxing Day, I gently pulled the long floral curtains back so they rested behind the brass circles beside the window, unbarred the wooden shutters, and opened the room to the gray light of a winter morning, relieved that Christmas was over once again and we would be going home today. Jack had already left to go down for breakfast, and I had a few minutes of peace to myself before continuing the happy family farce.

I watched the river flow silently on the far side of the open fields which lay beyond the formal gardens. Sheep grazed in the distance, unaffected by the cold, their black faces impassive. The view was distorted slightly as I turned my head, the glass so old it was pooling slightly at the bottom and creating small ripples in the middle of the panes. I looked at the flocks of gray and black birds wandering the sky, silhouetted against the streaky clouds. I had no idea what they were called, whether they were pests or helpful to the farmers.

I couldn’t imagine ever being more than a stranger here, in this house that was built before Australia had even been founded. The foundations the house was built over were even older, the stone floors concave with the passage of feet and time. As beautiful as it was, I had never found Clouston Hall mentally comfortable. There are too many memories here, and they are not mine in any sense. Paintings of angelic blond children hung in hidden corners, no names or dates to identify them to outsiders. They freaked me out a little, not knowing what had happened to them. Were they represented in paintings somewhere else, grown to adulthood? Or were they reminders of tragedies that had befallen my husband’s ancestors? Had their mothers stood before these paintings and cried, or had they looked on them with nostalgia and pride at the men and women they had become? I don’t think Jack would have understood my discomfort with the paintings, and one crazy lady in the house was more than enough.

When I first came to this house, I thought I was entering the world of Austen, but it only took a few years to recognize that it was more Brontë. The melancholy and madness barely suppressed that came with this ancient, isolated house made me want to run screaming back to the comfort of the city with its perpetually renewing youth and bright lights and availability. The stillness and quiet that I thought I should enjoy was just a little too complete and serious. I was not bred for this. Maybe if I’d been brought up somewhere less sunny, where old didn’t mean something from the sixties, I would have loved it unconditionally rather than ambivalently.

Still, there was no certainty I would ever have to live here. Edwina was forever changing who she was leaving the money to, and without the money, there would be no hope of keeping the house. Jack was the elder son and, without a major trip off the rails, could not be prevented from inheriting the house and the title. However, Edwina held the purse strings, savvy enough to have kept control of her money in the marriage. She was just mad enough to not care what happened after she was gone and vindictive enough to make life difficult for Jack, if the mood struck her on her deathbed. Jack was attached to the house, and it would kill him to have to sell it. At least it would be protected and not demolished, but like so many of the stately houses, it would lose something by no longer being a family home if he was forced to give it up.

Unfortunately, Edwina picked this morning to corner me and confide her intentions, almost like she was trying to reassure me—or win me over. God knows why, though. There was no possible way that I would take her side over Jack’s.

“I will leave Clouston Hall to you and Jack,” Edwina said solemnly, grabbing my hand and giving it a pat as we sat at breakfast. Unfortunately, we were alone as the menfolk had already left to look at a horse or a ewe or something. Edwina’s words would have meant more if I hadn’t known she had said exactly the same thing to Crispin, who had revealed her intentions when drunk last night.