Page 57 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I don’t get many visitors out here.’ Their eyes met again. ‘You can come any time.’

She couldn’t hold his gaze. She looked down at her hands and felt herself blushing, hastily turned Pharaoh, and rode away.

Aunt Caroline’s list was showing the signs of age. Names had been crossed out, others added, notes and question marks littered it. The paper was growing soft with use.

‘What are you doing, Giles?’ she said, one morning at breakfast. ‘Are you even taking this seriously?’

‘Of course I am,’ he answered automatically, then added, ‘I do know the whole future of the estate rests on my marrying.’

‘But you reject girl after girl, for no reason that I can discern. Do you think there is an unlimited supply?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You seem to me to be determined not to like any of them. All perfectly nice, good girls.’

‘But they’re so difficult to talk to,’ he excused himself. ‘I try, but there’s so little response—’

‘You’re not supposed to talk to them,’ she interrupted testily. ‘You’re just supposed to marry one!’

‘And spend the rest of my life with someone who bores me? With whom I can’t share a single interesting conversation?’

She looked at him with exasperation. Then her expression softened. ‘Giles,’ she said, quite kindly, ‘the trouble is that you’ve had so little contact with women. School, then university, then off on your digs in foreign places. Nothing but men around you, all the time – tutors and dons and academics and so on. You can’t expect a relationship with a woman to be like that. Men and women lead quite different lives. You have your interests, and we have ours. There’s no common ground for conversation.’

‘Then what’s the point of marrying?’ he said bleakly.

‘It’s different after marriage. There’s the home, and children, and social events to discuss. Common experiences. Even so, husbands and wives lead separate lives. We meet in the bedroom and at the dinner table.’ He looked morose. ‘Come, my dear,’ she said, smiling, ‘I didn’t expect you of all people to be foolishly romantic! It’s not Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra. It’s a simple matter of mutual comfort and providing heirs. Choose a healthy, good-tempered girl – that’s all you need to do.’

‘A healthy, good-tempered, rich girl,’ he amended.

She sighed. ‘Will you never get over that? Yes, in your case. Her fortune for your title. I assure you she won’t feel hard-done-by. But, for goodness’ sake, cease this obsession with conversation,’ she said the word witheringly, ‘and get on and choose somebody. The more you think about it,’ she added wisely, ‘the harder you’ll find it. Don’t think. Just pick one and be done with it.’

‘Thank you for your advice, Aunt Caroline,’ he said tonelessly.

She couldn’t tell whether he was employing irony or not. She hoped it was not.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dinner with the Sandses was indeed simple, and there was no wine. It was a long time since Richard had sat down to a meal without the lubricant of alcohol. Not since nursery days, he supposed. They ate around a gateleg table, which had been set up in the centre of the drawing-room, and Miss Sands brought each course up in turn from downstairs: curried eggs with lettuce, stewed veal with mushrooms and peas, and a savoury of herring roes with biscuits.

‘Is this Mrs Gateshill’s cooking?’ he asked.

‘My daughter and I did it together,’ said Mrs Sands.

He was impressed.

‘We were quite accustomed to cooking for ourselves in our last home,’ she explained. ‘But we had a kitchen there.’

There was no sweet or dessert, but by that stage, deep in conversation, he hardly noticed.

Miss Sands, he discovered, was not shy so much as reserved. There were many subjects on which she had no opinion, and would merely listen, answering, if pressed, in monosyllables, eyes averted. But on a subject she cared about, she could be eloquent, and would meet his eyes frankly. As he observed her through the evening, he was astonished again by her beauty, and her long, eloquent fingers in particular fascinated him. But it was Mrs Sands with whom he had the majority of the conversation.

She told him that she had already given some lessons. ‘Some of my old pupils who haven’t yet found a new teacher – I contacted them as soon as your lovely piano arrived. And two new ones, recommended to me by an acquaintance. It feels good to be independent again.’

They talked about the war, Richard tempted into eloquence by Mrs Sands’s intelligent interest. Since the beginning of April, it had been clear that the Boers had to come to terms. ‘Conditions on the veld are terrible for the women and children,’ he said, ‘and it takes the stuffing out of the fighting men, knowing their families are suffering.’

‘I thought the women and children were put into camps,’ Mrs Sands said. ‘I read a report in The Times …’

‘Yes, we did round them up in the beginning,’ Richard said, ‘but last December Lord Kitchener ordered that they were to be left alone. It means the Boers have to take care of their own, you see. It slows them down. And now we’ve learned to fight like them – living on the veld, making lightning strikes – we’re better at it than them. We live harder and move faster. We chase them from pillar to post, never letting them rest. They’ve got nowhere left to go and no hope of winning.’