Page 31 of One More Christmas at the Castle
Dido probably got her looks from her birth mother and I thought I’d get Mr Jarrold, the private detective I’d been using, to investigate her a little, just out of curiosity.
Dido’s manner is very cool and reserved, but I’m certain that she has no idea of our connection, so I can hug the secret to myself for as long as I wish, to reveal or not, as I choose.
Probably not.
When I got up, I opened the desk in my boudoir and looked again at the recent photo of Faye’s son – and the resemblance to my father was indeed there, in the brown hair and the slightly beaky nose, set in a narrow face.
I had so loved Daddy, until he married that woman, and so soon after Mummy died that later I’d realized they must have been having an affair all along.
And even though Mummy had left her fortune and the Castle to me, my father received an income from the estate during his life and he and the Usurper continued to live here … and Faye, when she came along.
Their presence had put me off coming home during my university years and after, even though I loved the Castle so. But then, not long after I’d married Asa, Daddy and the Usurper had been killed in a car crash on the way back from a race meeting and my half-sister, Faye, who was then fourteen and at boarding school, was left to the guardianship of the family solicitor and a relative of her mother’s.
And after that, Asa and I were free to divide our time between Mitras Castle and our villa on Corfu.
Happy days!
As to Faye, after that terrible summer when Asa was taken ill while diving, her name was never mentioned between us. It was as if she’d never really existed, except as a bad dream, pushed away into the darkest corners of our minds.
8
Brown Study
The door from the passage into Asa Powys’s study, which was opposite the dining room, was slightly ajar when we passed it on the way to the library and I caught the sound of Xan’s voice, though not what he was saying.
The library was empty and I looked around curiously. We’d had a glimpse of the room yesterday, of course, with its computer and printer looking incongruous among the antique furniture, dark wood bookshelves and richly patterned rugs.
Now I saw that it was a bigger room than I had realized, with squashy-looking sofas and armchairs, upholstered in delft-blue linen, arranged around an old carved stone fireplace. Any walls not covered in bookshelves were panelled in dark brown wood.
We didn’t have much time to take it in, though, because a door in the wall that adjoined Asa’s study suddenly swung open and Mrs Powys came in. I had a brief glimpse of Xan standing by a large filing cabinet, Plum at his feet, before she shut it behind her.
‘Ah,thereyou are,’ she said, as if we were late, which we weren’t, then invited us to take the two chairs opposite thesofa, where she sat down with a business-like air, holding a clipboard notebook, as well as a sheaf of papers she’d collected from the desk.
This morning she was dressed in upmarket country casuals, which would have looked frumpy on anyone less slim and elegant: a lavender twinset in silk-fine cashmere, teamed with a heather-mix tweed skirt, well fitted and coming below the knee, revealing slender, but still shapely legs and ankles. On her feet were thin glacé leather house shoes.
From long experience, I recognized that the necklace and earrings she wore were genuine, and hideously expensive, matched South Sea pearls of great size.
Her bouffant hair looked like a precious bird’s nest lacquered in pale gold, and since I’d seen her when I’d taken up her breakfast tray, she had put on a mask of make-up: her eyebrows were thin dark arcs, her pale blue eyes ringed in dark liner and her lips generously painted a deep rose.
Of course, her brittle, thin, age-spotted hands were a bit of a giveaway, though even there your eye was first drawn to the huge solitaire diamond ring that sat above a gold wedding band.
Come to think of it, her appearance was all about distraction: smoke and mirrors. I don’t think she’d ever been truly beautiful even when young, but simply projected the impression of it.
By now I suspected that doing her face and hair every morning was so automatic, she did it without even thinking about it, even when there had only been Maria here to see it.
By the time she looked up from her notes, we’d assumed our professional expressions: Henry’s was polite, slightly eager and deferential, with only a trace of the impertinent cherub about it, while mine, Henry has often told me, looks like someone started to blow life into a marble statue, but soon ran out of puff.
Mrs Powys didn’t waste any time in attending to the large clipboard and a pen and getting down to business, ticking things off as she went. We already knew from those extensive kitchen files that she was a great one for organization. But then so was I, so that should make things very much easier than in more chaotic households.
She ran us briskly through what she expected of us regarding the normal day-to-day running of the house, which was as agreed, and then she said, ‘Henry, you told me when I made the booking that you didn’t take a day or half-day off during your assignments?’
‘No, but instead we snatch an hour or two mid-morning and after lunch, if possible. Then, in the evening, we’ve usually finished for the day by nine.’
‘That sounds perfectly reasonable,’ she said, adding yet another tick to her list and moved on to the next thing.
‘I like to keep the Castle cosy – what is the point of being rich and cold? Besides, it would be a false economy if all the pipes froze up.’
‘Very true,’ I agreed, ‘and old houses can quickly get damp, too – they need to be kept warm and aired. The boiler is quite new and reliable and the oil tank is well filled.’
