Silverbridge (19 page)

Ned said in a strange voice, “Surely the attack on your life is more important than the attack on the stable.”

Harry made an impatient gesture. “I want you to be extra vigilant, Ned. The horses may be the next targets.”

“All right. I’ll sleep downstairs, where they are stabled.”

“Keep your hunting rifle by you.”

The two men looked at each other. “Jesus, Harry, I can’t believe this is happening. With all the bastards in the world, why would someone want to pick on you?”

Because I own Silverbridge and someone else wants
it.

He didn’t say the words, however. He had no proof of anything, only a suspicion. He contented himself by repeating, “I don’t know, Ned, but I am damn well going to find out.”

19

M
eg wanted Harry to have lunch with the crew in the catering truck. “It’s fun, Harry,” she said as she met him on the front lawn. “You should make an effort to meet these people. You don’t want them to think you’re a snob, do you?”

He had absolutely no interest in what the film people thought of him, but he did care about his sister. “I’ll eat if you promise you’ll eat something, too,” he said.

“Done!”

“And I don’t just mean a half a cup of soup, Meg. I mean something substantial.”

Her eyes sparked with anger. “What do you mean by substantial? I’m not eating red meat!”

“I
don’t care what you eat: pasta, a sandwich, chicken salad
…
so long as it’s solid food. Do we have a deal?”

“That’s blackmail,” she protested.

He touched her nose and smiled. “I know.”

Reluctantly, she smiled back. “Okay, we have a deal.”

Harry hoped fervently that Tracy would be at lunch. If he could look at her, talk to her, then having to be polite to a group of people he didn’t know wouldn’t seem quite so horribly tedious.

His eyes found her the moment he stepped into the bus carrying his plate of food.
It’s like a magnet finding true north,
he thought wryly. She couldn’t be anywhere within his vicinity without his knowing it immediately.

“Hi, everybody,” Meg said. “This is my brother Lord Silverbridge. He’s come to join us for lunch today.”

The look she gave him was so full of happiness and pride that he was determined to be as charming as he knew how to be. He smiled at the faces around the table, and said, with just the right touch of deprecation, “Hello. I’m sorry I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had a chance to stop by and meet you.”

A jumble of voices answered, “Glad to have you, my lord,” and “Welcome to the crazy house,” along with an assortment of other greetings.

Unfortunately, the seats on either side of Tracy were taken, but the person who was sitting across from her stood up, and said, “I’ve finished, my lord, if you’d like my place.”

Harry gave this generous soul a heartfelt, “Thanks.” Meg went to take the empty seat one chair away from him, and he put his food on the table, sat down, and looked at Tracy.

“Are you sure you should be here?” she asked. “You’re awfully pale.”

He was getting sick of hearing how pale he was. “I’m fine.”

Jonathan Melbourne was sitting on Tracy’s left and
he said with a challenging note in his resonant voice, “Slumming, my lord?”

Harry met the actor’s angry hazel eyes and thought he knew what was bothering him. Jon probably had an interest in Tracy himself, and he didn’t like the possibility of an aristocratic rival.

Tough luck, old man,
Harry thought, and gave him a sunny smile. “Not at all. Meg has told me that both the food and the company are excellent, and I came to sample some of both.”

Tracy looked at his plate, which contained a small amount of pasta and a green salad. “You’re not eating very much.”

She sounded faintly maternal, which in any other woman would have annoyed the hell out of him. In her he found it enchanting.

He shrugged. “I’m not very hungry.” He glanced at his sister. “Would you like to introduce me around the table, Meggie?”

She looked radiant. “Of course.” She turned immediately to the person next to her, and said, “This is Liza Moran, one of the actresses.”

Liza Moran looked thirty, was probably forty, and was looking at him in a way that he found all too familiar. Normally he would have frozen her right out, but he had sworn to be charming, so he smiled, and said, “How do you do.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lord Silverbridge.” Her voice was husky, and the hunting look in her eyes became even more pronounced.

Meg was saying, “And this is Kim Hamilton, the script supervisor.”

Kim wore a twin set and a tweed skirt, and Harry said apologetically, “I must confess to complete ignorance about filmmaking, Ms. Hamilton. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it is a script supervisor does?”

Kim was delighted to enlighten him, and then Meg went around the rest of the table introducing an assortment of actors and actresses as well as people who bore such peculiar titles as focus puller and grip and lighting gaffer.

It might have actually been a pleasant lunch if not for Liza Moran, who kept throwing out lures to him. She was not subtle, and he did his best to parry her remarks. He had never been able to stand her kind of woman, and it was even worse having to endure her in the presence of Tracy, who spent most of the lunch ignoring Harry and chatting with Jon Melbourne.

She's not fooling me,
Harry told himself.
She’s as aware of me as I am of her.

He tried an experiment. He focused his mind and thought,
Tracy, look at me.

He was profoundly shaken when, almost instantly, her eyes turned away from Jon’s and met his.

B
y the time Harry went into the house to watch the filming, his head was pounding. He made a trip upstairs to his bathroom to swallow three more aspirin, but he was feeling pretty ragged when he joined Meg in the staircase hall.

The scene for the day’s shooting was the great salon. The room had been built as a chapel, but in the eighteenth century the residing earl had turned it into a huge
state reception room, adding a projection bay to the south with a Venetian window. It was an elegant, stylish, and beautiful room,
w
ith pale blue damask walls, matching silk draperies, and priceless Chippendale furniture. The intricate carpet, which mirrored the ceiling’s design, had been taken up, baring the inlaid wood floor, which the film company had cleaned up and buffed till it glowed. Antonio Zucchi had painted the ceiling roundels with the seasons and mythological scenes; Thomas Carter had carved the chimneypiece; and Matthew Boulton had produced the tall candelabra, which stood in the four co
rn
ers of the salon. Two Van Dyke portraits, two landscapes by Claude, a Gainsborough portrait of Harry’s great-great-grandmother, all of which he had given to the National Trust to help pay off the death duties on his father’s estate, decorated the blue damask walls, along with a large, baroque-style gilt mirror and the room’s
pi
e
ce
de resistance,
a painting of Silverbridge done in the eighteenth century by Canaletto. Harry had fought to hang on to this last painting, which had been valued at ten million pounds, and he had won.

The paintings on the north wall had been removed, and the wall was completely covered with a drop cloth, with scaffolding erected in front of it. The scaffolding was awash with lights and cameras. The big crystal chandelier in the middle of the ceiling, which had been wired for electricity years before, had been taken down and in its place hung an old-fashioned cand
l
elit chandelier, which Harry didn’t recognize. Blackout curtains had been hung behind all of the windows.

The room was crowded with cameras and sound equipment and, looking at the mass of cables and equipment, Harry understood why the film crew had been so delighted with the enormous Silverbridge salon.

“
They’re filming the ball scene,” Meg said into his ear, and he nodded very slightly. The aspirin had not yet begun to work on his headache.

“That’s it, we’re ready,” the man who was in charge of the lights called.

“Great,” Dave Michaels said. “Greg, will you call the cast?”

A tall thin young man with a ponytail passed in front of Harry and walked toward the front drawing room. Very shortly, groups of people clad in period costume began to flow into the salon. To Harry’s complete surprise, he found that he recognized a number of them.

“Come to watch us, eh, my lord?” asked the wife of one of his tenant farmers.

Harry’s jaw dropped as he placed the face under the brown wig. “Good God. Elsie. What are you doing dressed up in that rig?”

The high-colored face of Elsie Morton beamed. “I’m in the movie, my lord. The film company put a notice up in the village asking for extras, and here I am!”

As Elsie moved into the salon, the woman who seemed to be in charge asked loudly, “Have all the dancers been fitted out with microphones?”

“That’s Jill Brown, the choreographer,” Meg told her brother. “Michael Hudson, the sound director, wanted to film the dancing along with the dialogue, so Jill had to fit each of the actors with microphones that will play the music in their ears so they can keep time. Then Michael will record the dialogue and the dance music on separate tracks.”

He looked at her in wonder. “You really have learned a lot about this, Meggie.”

Her smile was brilliant. “I think it’s fascinating.” While they were speaking, an eight-piece orchestra had come in and taken its place in front of the Gainsborough portrait. The choreographer began to arrange the dancers in front of the Canaletto, the men lined up facing the women. Dave Michaels said from his position behind one of the cameras, “Where are Tracy and Jon?”

“Greg went to get them,” someone called.
“
They should be here in a moment.”

Jon Melbourne’s voice said, “We’re here now,” and he brushed past Harry, followed more sedately by Tracy, who looked surprised to see him.

Harry had never yet seen her in costume, and as he looked back at her, it was as if the bottom dropped out of his stomach. She wore an empire-style ice-blue satin ball gown, cut low enough to show the swell of her breasts. Her hair was her own, drawn into a topknot of golden auburn ringlets, with two wispy ringlets allowed to fall over her ears. Around her slender neck she wore a simple strand of pearls, and in her ears a pair of plain pearl earrings. A single white rose was tucked into her hair.

Meg said enthusiastically, “You look gorgeous, Tracy.”

“Thank you.” Her surprised look died, her eyes narrowed, and she said to Harry, “You should be in bed.”

And you should be there with me.
He said those words to her in his mind. Out loud, he replied, “I’m fine.” Even to his own ears his voice sounded hoarse—and
not because of the headache.
I could be on my deathbed, and she would stir me,
he thought with wonder.

She had colored up, an odd response to his spoken words. Then Dave impatiently called her name, and she had to go and take her place beside Jon in the midst of the dancers.

“Jill,” Dave said, and the choreographer stepped forward to talk to her troops.

“All right, everyone. As you know, this is a very complicated scene. We are doing a progressive dance in which each couple has to go right from one end of this huge room to the other, which takes a long time. We’ll cut to Martin and Julia for the dialogue when they are halfway down the line.” She looked up and down the lines of men and women. “Is everyone’s microphone working?”

“Yes,” the dancers chorused back.

“All right. Let’s rehearse it, please.”

The musicians picked up their instruments, which they pretended to play, the line of women curtsied to the line of men, who bowed back, and the dance began in eerie silence.

They rehearsed it three times, and
while the rehearsal was going on, Meg told Harry that this ballroom scene came at the beginning of the film.
“
Tracy’s character, Julia, is supposedly visiting in the neighborhood and has come as a guest to the ball,” she explained. “The moment he lays eyes upon her, Jon’s character, Martin, is bewitched. He asks her to dance, and sexual sparks fly.”

Harry watched the rehearsal and was surprised and a little disturbed by the potent sexual attraction that Jon
was able to generate ju
st by looking at Tracy’s pearl-
encircled throat. Tracy herself looked very young and vulnerable as she went up the line holding hands with Jon, and the dazzled expression on her face as she returned his smile portrayed perfectly the young, inexperienced, susceptible girl that Julia was at this early point in the movie.

An interruption occurred just as the mikes were to be turned on and the film to roll. One of the crew members rushed out of the room, and a moment later, Greg was at Meg’s side.

“Nancy is sick, and Dave wants to know if you could handle her job for this shoot,” he said.

Meg’s face looked illuminated. “Of course.” She turned to her brother, and said authoritatively, “You can sit in that chair, Harry, and you’ll be out of everyone’s way.”

As Meg hustled off, Harry took the seat she had indicated. Shortly after that, the director called, “Action,” and the actual filming began.

The aspirin had reduced Harry’s headache to a dull pounding, but he was feeling dizzy and clammy, and the heat from the lights was making him sweat. This was his condition when he experienced what had to be the mos
t bizarre moment of his entire l
ife.

It occurred at a point in the dance when each pair of partners had clasped their hands, raised their arms high, and were moving around each other rather the way carousel horses go around on a carousel. Harry had watched Tracy perform this movement during rehearsals, and as he focused his eyes in her direction, he
expected to see her innocently wondering face gazing at Jon as they circled their mutually clasped hands.