Eva Ibbotson

“What do you mean, no, I don’t?” said the old woman angrily. “I may be old, I may be useless, I may be someone whom everyone would like to see dead and laid out on a slab, but I still know when I want to go to the lavatory and I want to go to the lavatory now.”

A hurried consultation followed. The butler, more bored than pained, issued instructions, holding out his mottled hand in case the information rendered might produce a tip. Mrs. Transom was led away on the arm of her unfortunate daughter—and the party trooped into the Library.

Oh, the poor books, thought Harriet, running her handkerchief surreptitiously along the dusty, calf-bound volumes on an open shelf. Here was Horace who had so loved the foolish Lesbia and Sappho who had turned loneliness into the most moving verses of the ancient world—and here Harriet’s own special friend, the emperor Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations she now pulled out and opened at random, to read:

Live not as though a thousand years are ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

Only, what is good? wondered Harriet. She had thought of it as submission, virtue, not setting up her will against others. But might it mean something else? Might it mean making yourself strong and creative? Might it mean following your star?

The butler glared at her and she replaced the book. However poor I was, reflected Harriet, I would always dust the books. And I would always find flowers, she thought, remembering the drifts of wild narcissi she had seen as they came up the drive. And once again she wondered what ailed this marvelous house.

They trooped up the grand staircase, admiring the carved newel posts, while from below came the anguished baying of Mrs. Transom’s daughter who had taken a wrong turning and lay becalmed in a distant hallway. Here were the private apartments of the family—the upper Drawing Room, the bedrooms—past which the cadaverous Mr. Grunthorpe, enjoining silence, now led them bound for the Long Gallery on the top floor.

Harriet had fallen a little behind the others, weary of the absurd antics of her “bodyguard” and planning, if a side staircase could be found, the rescue of the Transoms.

She was thus alone when a door was suddenly thrown open and a woman’s voice, high and imperious, cried out, “No! I don’t believe it! It cannot be as bad as that!”

Involuntarily, Harriet stopped. The luxurious room thus revealed, framed in the lintel of the door, might have come from a painting by Titian. There was a four-poster hung in blue silk, a dressing table with a silver-trimmed mirror, a richly embroidered chair… The covers of the bed were thrown back and beside it stood a woman in a white negligee with a river of dark red hair rippling down her back. She had brought up one of her arms against the carved bedpost as though for support, and a little silken-haired papillon lay curled on the pillow looking at her with anxious eyes.

“Even my idiot of a husband could not have gone as far as that,” she continued. “You are trying to frighten me.”

A maid moved about the back of the room, laying out clothes, but it was to someone unseen that the woman spoke—a man whose low-voiced answer Harriet could not make out.

“Oh!” The rapt exclamation came from Louisa who had returned to admonish her loitering niece. Her long face was transfigured; her mouth hung slightly open with awe.

A sighting! Here without doubt was the lady of the house, Isobel Brandon, in whose veins flowed some of the bluest blood in England. For while Harriet saw a beautiful and imperious woman driven to the edge of endurance by some calamity, Aunt Louisa saw only the granddaughter of the Earl of Lexbury whose wedding some ten years earlier at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, had required a double page of the Toiler to do it justice.

But Mrs. Brandon now had seen them.

“For God’s sake, Alistair, shut the door! You can’t go anywhere until those wretched women have stopped trooping through the house. And anyway, I sent all the documents to—”

The door closed. Harriet and her aunt joined the others. Mrs. Transom’s daughter had discovered another stairway and pushed her mother up it—and the party entered the Long Gallery.

A long, light room with a beautiful parquet floor… The walls nearest the door were taken up by family portraits of the Brandons. Among the dull paintings, varnished into uniformity, only two caught Harriet’s attention: a likeness of the old General, almost comical in the obvious boredom and irritation shown by the sitter at being compelled to sit thus captive for the artist; and one of Henrietta Verney who had linked the Brandons to her illustrious house—a vivid intelligent face defying the centuries.

“Is there no portrait of the present owner?” inquired Mrs. Belper.