Page 81 of Pride and Privilege

Roscoe managed a laugh. “No point. The dogs would eat them. Or the mice. There’s plenty of both.”

“Yay,” she said wanly, making him laugh again.

“Big, old houses are generally terrible places to live,” he told her. “Draughty and leaky and falling to bits.”

They were in an old hallway now, the walls panelled in warm brown wood, gilt-framed pictures heavy on the wall, summer light falling brokenly through a crooked, diamond-paned window to catch the dust motes like fairy magic.

“But beautiful,” said Poppy.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose they are.”

He led her up the creaking stairs, the carpet runner worn to colourless beige where they trod. The smell of dust and old oak and wood-polish lay thick on the still air. The smell of Conyers, of neighbouring Redbridge, of a hundred homes.

Poppy sneezed.

He chuckled. “And they’re very dusty. Mould spores everywhere, probably. Sending us all mad, like that stuff that grows on wheat.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” His thoughts were running away with him. Fractured and spiralling in all directions. This place didn’t normally remind him of Conyers, but he was seeing it now through Poppy’s eyes—all the things it represented. The age, the weight of generations. Earls of Carnford and Blackton after Blackton. Family and duty and honour and tradition and obligation.

You’re a Blackton of BlacktonGold. You need to remember that.

For the first time, he wished he was Hugo, the heir, who could do his duty merely by having been born first. His own inheritance felt far harder—his vocation to be his father’s son in spirit, not just name.

He opened the door to Poppy’s room, flashing her a tight smile. The Yellow Room.“You should have said she was a redhead,”his aunt had scolded him.“Yellow’s going to clash terribly.”

But, of course, it didn’t. Poppy walked into the room like a girl stepping into a fairy tale, taking in the high, canopied bed, the vast, plaster-scrolled ceiling, the two tall windows with their cushioned seats and gold brocade curtains that swept to the floor. She turned to look at him, cheeks pink, lips slightly parted, and he stared for a moment, her beauty painful.

He backed away, took her to see his room. Led her back out of the house and through the gardens. Something nameless and restless threatening to choke him if he stopped moving.

They walked to the sunken garden, where they found Mabel by the pagoda tying up roses bowing under the weight of their own blossoms. Poppy drifted away, attention caught by the water lilies blooming in the long, rectangular pool.

Mabel paused her work and said, “Tell me about this friend from work you’re in love with.”

Roscoe startled. “What?”

Mabel tutted. “Don’t play the fool. It’s obvious from the way you look at her.”

“I’m not… I mean… I like her, but…”

“But?”

“We’re not…together.”

Mabel gave him a scornful look uncannily reminiscent of Aubrey’s on the plane. “Which begs the question… Why not?”

“I’m her boss.”

His aunt pursed her lips, then shrugged, unreeling some more garden twine. “Half my generation—and your father’s—wouldn’t exist if bosses hadn’t married their secretaries. It’s hardly an untrod path. Used to be one of the commonest ways for a woman to meet a man.”

“It’s not the nineteen-fifties. And it’s not just that.” He shook his head, reached out in irritation to toy with the old twiggy stem of a jasmine plant trained to coil around the pagoda. It snapped off in his hand. He snapped it still further into tiny pieces as his aunt gave him an assessing look. “She’s living in my flat. Has no money. Nowhere else to go. Don’t you see how vulnerable that makes her? If she’s dependent on me and I…”

Mabel waited with a raised eyebrow for him to finish that sentence, but he didn’t. He glanced at Poppy, framed by roses beyond the pool. A Rossetti indeed. But not Ophelia, never Ophelia, dying tragic, drowning and pining, caught between father and lover… Maybehewas Ophelia. Maybe he was mad.

“I don’t know what the right thing is,” he told Mabel, embarrassed by the broken edge to his voice. “Or maybe I know, but I don’t know how to do it…”

Mabel’s coarse sigh drew his eyes away from Poppy. The old woman was scowling, the deep feathery lines around her mouth drawn tight. “As usual, nevvy, you’re over-thinking everything. You’d be twice as happy if you had half the brains.”

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