Page 25 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle

‘You are not ancient or cracked.’

‘You, however …’ she returned. ‘Mon pauvre, what did my son leave you, aside from cares? Dragged back from your desert, where I dare say you were on the brink of wonderful discoveries.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘But I must tell you, by the by, that dry desert air is the worst thing for your complexion. You have not suffered any harm yet, but it is as well you are recalled to soft English dampness, before you begin to resemble your own leather portmanteaux.’

He laughed. ‘It’s good to hear you talk nonsense! I was afraid I would find you—’

‘Plunged in gloom?’

‘You have lost your only son,’ he said seriously.

‘At my age, one expects to lose people. And it is a long time since Willie and I shared any warmth. He was not a man to inspire tendresse. Of course one must feel it, to lose a child at any age, and it was a shock. But I am not broken, my dear. I am more concerned that you should not be.’

He sighed. ‘Things are very difficult. The more I find out, the worse it gets.’

He had received a further shock the previous day. The enquiries made of Garrard’s about the value of the family jewellery had received an answer: all the important pieces had been copied over the years, and the originals sold. His mother had been wearing paste and base metal – he didn’t know, and couldn’t ask, whether she knew.

Conversation paused as Chaplin entered with a tray bearing coffee pot and cup, and a plate of Durand’s moulinets, delicious little savoury pastry circles. Giles was particularly partial to them. ‘You must have known I was coming,’ he said.

His grandmother was incurably honest. ‘It is a delight to see you. But, no, Sir Thomas is to take me to luncheon, and he likes a glass of champagne here first. Moulinets are perfect with champagne.’

‘Sir Thomas – is he well?’

Sir Thomas Burton was twenty years her junior, the scion of an industrial family (Burton’s Little Liver Pills were found in every home). He had been a pianist and studied music at the Conservatoire in Paris, where he had first met Victoire on one of her twice-yearly visits. Some years later they had met again in London, by which time he had become a conductor, and was using his fortune to stage concerts and operas. She was by then a widow, but he was married, and the affaire they had embarked on had shocked society. However, it had been going on for so long now it was spoken of openly. His wife, Lady Violet, had made ill-health a lifelong hobby, and the unspoken assumption was that she was glad to have the vigorous, irrepressible Sir Thomas taken off her hands.

‘Tommy is always well,’ Grandmère said. ‘He only has too much energy and not enough to do. He talks now of founding his own orchestra, so that he shall never want for someone to conduct.’

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ said Giles. ‘London is thin of musical life.’

‘And thin of concert halls also,’ said Grandmère, severely. ‘The Queen’s is so dreary, and the Albert’s acoustics are so dreadful. He will have to build his own concert hall too, and then he can play in it to his heart’s content.’

‘You make him sound like a child in a sandpit,’ Giles said, smiling.

‘He is very child-like,’ she agreed. ‘He keeps me young. But, Giles, enough of me, tell me how things are with you. Maud is in Germany, I understand. Is that why you have come – to discuss things without her knowledge?’

‘You are very astute,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know how much she knows about anything.’

‘Very little, I imagine. She has always been one to look straight ahead and refuse to see what is to either side. You know your father had affaires?’

‘No,’ Giles said. He had suspected, since seeing his father’s London expenses, but to suspect was not the same as being told in plain words. He felt absurdly shocked. It was one thing for his grandmother to entertain an elderly lover (a man of fifty, his father’s age, must seem elderly to him, and it was beyond him to imagine that Sir Thomas and his grandmother did anything more now than keep each other company) but for his father to betray his mother in that way was something else. ‘I didn’t know, until now.’

‘No, I suppose you would not,’ Victoire said thoughtfully. ‘Maud’s guiding principle always was “Never complain, never explain.” She is so English.’

Maud was the eldest of the three Forrest girls, daughters of the 8th Earl of Leake. She was also the plain one, but had never allowed that to affect her in any way. To be a Forrest was to have reached the pinnacle of civilisation. The family motto, carved into the ancient, pitted stone lintel over the door of their Northumberland fastness was Manners Mayketh Manne, which they took to mean that you should behave exactly the same to all people – and indeed they did, since a Forrest looked down on absolutely everyone, including the Royal Family (who were, after all, parvenus.) To a Forrest, the Prince of Wales and a coachman were of equal unimportance, and both should be treated with the same chilly courtesy.

All three girls had made good marriages. Victoria, the prettiest, had married the Prince of Wittenstein-Glücksburg, with a winter palace and a summer palace and full access, through the vast network of cousinage that linked them, to all the Continental royal courts. Caroline, the youngest, had married Sir James Manningtree who, though only a knight, had been extremely wealthy. She had been widowed young, and had no children, and now lived in a lavish way in a large house in Berkeley Square. Maud had set her heart on marrying a duke, but when Stainton offered for her, the match had been thought good enough. The title was an old one – the barony went back to the seventeenth century, the earldom was late eighteenth – and the property was good.

Maud’s Forrest chilliness and disdain for all other human life might have been mitigated by a different husband, Victoire thought – after all, Caroline was a perfectly pleasant and agreeable woman. But she had to admit that her son Willie had had a self-sufficiency and arrogance that did nothing to soften his wife.

‘They say the children of lovers have a hard time of it,’ Victoire said now to Giles. ‘My William and I were so much in love, I fear we neglected poor Willie. He was left to nannies and tutors, who fed his self-consequence. He grew up thinking he could have whatever he wanted just for the taking. He and Maud – well, they each did their duty, but there was no connection between them. It was as if one lived on the moon and the other on …’ She paused, at a loss for another planetary body.

‘Jupiter?’ Giles offered.

‘Just so. And you children were all far away on earth and might as well have been orphans. My poor Giles! En résumé, your father did just as he pleased always, and I don’t suppose he told your mother anything.’

‘There is,’ Giles said, with delicate hesitancy, ‘the question of her jointure.’

His grandmother understood at once. ‘All spent?’ He nodded. ‘Hmm. Well, if she demands it, something will have to be done. But unless her sister the princess brings up the subject – she always was mercenary, you know – I don’t suppose she will think about it for some time. Is that what is worrying you?’

‘Not only that.’ Giles hesitated again.