As usually happens to me when I mean to sleep in, I woke up really early.
I lay there in the dim light, Jeffrey watching me, thinking about The Kiss, A Happening So Significant It Deserved Capital Letters. I relived The Kiss about a hundred times, and then ran through every second of Henry escorting me, like a perfect gentleman, to the door of this very room, kissing me again on this very threshold, and saying goodnight.
I wondered now if it was a drunken kiss, but he had seemed entirely sober. Maybe then it was a consequence of the day of drama, a releasing of tension. But it didn’t feel that way – if it was, why didn’t he go and find Lara? You’re the fairest of them all, he’d said. I hugged the compliment to myself – but then I had another thought. Would Henry want, you know, more? We were here for the rest of the weekend. There were no parents, we had our own rooms, and the only adults that were here, the kids told them what to do, not the other way round. My stomach felt really icky and I put my hands on the place, which felt sort of fizzy inside, over the soft cotton of my pyjamas. What if there was a time when Henry didn’t say goodnight and go, when his feet crossed the threshold of Lowther? What if he stopped being a gentleman?
The thought was so terrifying, and so exciting, that I was suddenly wide awake and I had to get up. ‘Morning, Jeffrey,’ I said to the stag’s head and went to open the curtains.
The view looked quite different to how it had yesterday. It was still knock-your-eyes-out beautiful, but the sky was grey and overcast; one of those days where if it wasn’t raining yet, it would be soon.
The Cogsworth clock on the mantel said 7 a.m. I groaned. It had been after midnight when I’d left Nel’s room, so God knows what time it had been by the time Henry brought me back to Lowther. I must have had zero sleep.
I thought about waking Nel; such a luxury, after weeks of isolation, to have someone to talk to. But it was too early. Let her sleep. Besides, I felt a bit guilty – had she liked Henry too, before I stole him away? She’d seemed weirdly ready to exempt him from her paranoid notions of being hunted.
I got that fizzy feeling in my stomach again at the thought of Henry, and decided I must be hungry. But there was no sign of Betty – she had no doubt been instructed to let me sleep. Emboldened by The Kiss from her master, I looked around the room for something I knew must be there. Behind one of the curtain ties I found it: a marble button in an ornamental gilt surround. I pressed it, and in less than two minutes there was a knock at the door and Betty was in the room. She looked properly pissed off at being summoned by the likes of me, and gave me the evils even worse than usual, her lips pressed into their customary disapproving line. ‘Could I have some breakfast, please?’ I asked.
‘Of course, miss,’ she said stiffly. ‘I’ll bring it right away.’
And she did – the same silver tray, and silver dome, and silver coffee pot. In less time than it seemed humanly possible to make it. As she set it on the bed she said, ‘I’ll light the fire when you’re bathing, miss, so as not to disturb you.’
That was Betty’s deal. Everything she said was perfectly considerate and obliging, but I could tell she absolutely hated me underneath. She did it all with a look, old Betty. And the funny thing was, I was much nicer to her than any of the Medievals were. I never heard any of them saying please or thank you; they just barked orders at the servants. But if anything I overdid it, because she made me nervous.
I overdid it now. ‘Thank you so much, Betty,’ I said, gravely rehearsing, in my head, a Rebecca-type fantasy where I was the new bride of the lord of the manor, and Betty was that scary old bat of a maid. Except instead of being the young Mrs de Winter I was the young Lady de Warlencourt.
The idea of being the lady of the house wouldn’t leave my head. When I’d got dressed in the shootin’ gear that Betty had left out – similar to the huntin’ clobber except everything had about fifty pockets – I decided that since I had time to kill (it was a long time before lunch, before I saw Henry), I would explore the house.
As I looked around Longcross, at some point as I moved from one enormous, gilded room to another, I morphed from Joan Fontaine in Rebecca to Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice. I was Elizabeth Bennet, nosing around Pemberley, absolutely gobsmacked at Mr Darcy’s riches. I wasn’t thinking Henry and I would really get married or anything dumb like that, but I did think, all the way round, what it would be like to be Henry’s girlfriend and have access to this place 365 days a year. Long summer holidays, Christmases; wow, Longcross would make a fantastic Christmas house, holly everywhere and a huge tree in the atrium reaching right to the top of the grand stairs. I imagined myself under such a tree, in a Christmas jumper, drinking mulled wine with Henry. Keira and Joan fled as I cast myself in the picture. It suddenly seemed totally possible. When Henry’d said he wasn’t with Lara any more, didn’t that mean he was with me?
From then on I went over the house like I owned the place. Now and then I’d see a servant, a maid, a butler, a secretary or something, but they would just say, ‘Good morning, miss,’ and respectfully stop what they were doing and sort of stand to attention until I’d left the room. It was as if the servants thought I was too lofty to be allowed to see them doing their menial tasks, and their behaviour just fuelled my fantasy – for that one morning, when there was no one around to challenge me, I was mistress of the place.
I went up to the long gallery at the top of the house, where I’d skated with Henry, but I couldn’t find the door in the panelling through which he’d led me to the roof. It was like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where one time you can find a door to Narnia in the wardrobe, and then when you look in the same place you can’t find it again. For a minute I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing: that incredible view, Henry giving me his coat, that conversation about The Shooting Party, and of course The Kiss. The thought of him never kissing me again, the door being closed on that too, made me suddenly go cold.
I continued my tour. There were dozens, hundreds, of rooms in the place, many of them bedrooms. Every one of them had a name – Grey, Bamburgh, Levens, Clifford, Fenwick. I didn’t know whether they were people or places but they all seemed to come from the world that Henry revered. There were no modern names. No room was called Kanye.
I went back downstairs and wandered around the ground floor. At the end of one flagged passageway I found a room with one wall entirely covered in an enormous, ancient-looking map, a huge walnut desk in front of it that looked like it belonged on a ship, and an antique-looking globe standing on that, as if Henry owned the whole world. I found kitchens, storerooms, laundry rooms, wine cellars, and all the time I didn’t see any technology anywhere. This cruise ship, this nation, of a house was obviously run without the aid of any state-of-the-art equipment. The kitchens had those old-fashioned Aga ovens. The wine cellars had dusty bottles on racks as you’d expect, but no electronic humidifiers or digital thermometers. And here’s another funny thing. I never once saw a phone. Not even a landline. Not even one of those old-fashioned ones with the rotary dial and curly flex, nor those even older ones you see in Ealing comedies, those black upright ones with the funny little trumpet that you unhook and hold to your ear. Maybe all phones were considered Savage, not just mobiles.
After the lower decks I went out of a back door and toured the stables, the kennels and the gun rooms behind the house. I stroked the velvety noses of the horses when they put their heads over the half-doors to greet me, enjoying their lovely hay-and-horse-poo smell. Their flanks steamed in the cold, but I imagined riding out with Henry through flower meadows on summer days, in jodhpurs and matching white shirts. Jeez. My fantasies were as old-fashioned as the world Henry inhabited.
I greeted the tumbling, tail-wagging crowd of black-and-tan hounds in their kennels. ‘Hello, Arcas. Hello, Tigris,’ I called, assuming the three dogs I’d met with Henry were somewhere in the seething mass. I couldn’t remember the other name. The dogs looked happy, harmless and completely different to how they’d looked in their Baskerville-mode, when they’d come baying after Nel. After a bit I turned away, and that’s when I saw a figure way across the stable-yard, watching me.
I knew him straight away by his sheer height and bulk. It was Perfect, dressed in his padded waistcoat that looked like a Kevlar vest, all ready for the shoot. I wondered why, if the shoot started as early as Henry said it did, he was back at the house. All his clothes were mud brown or moss green, and in the woods and spinneys I’m sure he’d be well camouflaged, but in the limestone courtyard he stuck out like a sore thumb. He didn’t seem to be trying to hide though. You know when you catch someone’s eye and they immediately turn away? Well, he didn’t do that. He just kept on staring. Perfect alone, of all the servants who had seen me nosing around, didn’t greet me or avert his eyes respectfully or stop what he was doing. He’d been staring before I spotted him, and he went on staring afterwards. I couldn’t tell whether he didn’t like me hanging with the hounds, or just didn’t like me. Either way it was unnerving. I quickly scuttled out of the stable-yard and out of his eyeline.
By now I was shivering a bit, partly because I’d left my waxed jacket in my room, and partly because of Perfect’s creepy gaze. So I ducked inside a place called the Orangery. (Most of the rooms at Longcross, not just the bedrooms, were helpfully named, like a Cluedo set.) The Orangery was blessedly warm, like a greenhouse, and crowded with vines and fruit trees. I counted the bright oranges and bunches of grapes dangling from the branches even this far into autumn. I went into the ice cellars, great subterranean stone rooms, now empty of ice and littered with old sledges and ice skates, but somehow still holding close a winter of their own. It was so cold there that I soon scurried back inside the main house.
There I found, on the ground floor, more drawing rooms with empty fireplaces, and a music room with silver-framed black-and-white photographs on the piano, of blond boys who might be Henry when young, or Henry’s father when young, or even Henry’s grandfather when young. I saw an armoury bristling with bows and arrows, and, best of all, a massive library, a vast room covered floor to ceiling with books.
I like libraries, with their leathery-papery-dusty smell, and this one was a good one, so I spent quite a bit of time in there. There was a polished wood floor, with small floorboards laid in a sort of herringbone pattern. There was a huge chandelier suspended from a soaring frescoed ceiling. A pair of big glass doors opened out onto the grounds, with an uninterrupted view across the lawn to a huge fountain. There was a little mezzanine deck above the main bit, with loads more books and little wooden ladders to reach them.
I looked at the shelves, and pictured the tiny blond Henry from the silver-framed piano pictures climbing on the ladders to reach the volumes he wanted to read. Sometimes it was hard, particularly when you saw Piers and Cookson at play, to remember how intelligent the Medievals were. But they all knew loads about everything and I thought I now knew why. If they all grew up with a crap-ton of books like this, no wonder they were brainy.
I had a look at some of the spines. Coleridge. De Quincey. Wordsworth. Southey. The poets I recognised from English lessons, the ones who’d been as knocked out by the Lake District as I was and couldn’t stop rabbiting on about it. And then I found other poets from further afield: Dante, Baudelaire, and our old friend Ovid. I browsed though some of the books for a while – man, they were old, probably should’ve been in a museum. But then again, Longcross kind of was a museum.
I climbed up to the mezzanine and had a little bit of a mooch around. The leather-paper-dust smell was most intense up there, as if that was where the real treasure lay. I had a browse and saw that, running along the bottom shelf of that whole level, almost hidden in the shadow of the balustrade, there was a whole bunch of books with no names but with dates. Rows upon rows there were, a whole collection of black books with tooled gold numbers on the spine, bound in that morocco leather. I ran my finger along the spines. They each represented a decade, and they spanned centuries, from the Middle Ages to the present day. I wondered if they were photo albums, and then told myself not to be a dummy; photographs weren’t invented back then, duh. I was about to pull one out and take a look when the chime of a wall clock brought me to myself. I had got so used to the library-silence that I jumped about a mile in the air, and looked at the clock.
It was twelve noon, and I was supposed to meet Lara in my room.
I slid the book back into place with a satisfying thunk, and while I clattered down the spiral staircase the twelve metallic chimes spurred me on like some sort of reverse Cinderella. It had taken just one morning to transform me, not from riches to rags, but from rags to riches. I was utterly sold on Henry’s world. What was not to like about a world uncluttered by TV, Google, YouTube, iTunes, the ringing of phones, the beeping of microwaves? Who couldn’t live like this, without all the noise and craziness of the modern world? If you needed a little excitement, there was always huntin’ shootin’ fishin’.