Page 44 of A Season for Scandal

“This is my job, Lockhart. You may safely defer to my expertise. This is no lost cause: only a place that needs a little time and care.”

“Where would you start?”

“First?” I smiled. “I’d probably mow the lawn. I hear they even have machines for that these days.”

We fell quiet again, and I took a moment just to feel the sun on my skin, to absorb once again the pleasure of so much space. It was quiet here, the kind of quiet that never fell over the city. The kind that was broken only by the cheerful trilling of a robin, who sounded pleased not only with himself but with the whole world.

“Why did you bring me straight out to the garden?” I asked.

“You said you were most interested in the garden,” he replied nonchalantly. “I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. Most of the time I make myself forget it’s even here. It was … my mother’s favourite place.”

He doesn’t say any more, and I don’t ask him to. The pain in his voice is well hidden, but I hear it all the same, the jagged edges to the words.

“Even like this,” I said finally, “it’s still beautiful. Nature makes no mistakes.”

Oliver’s hand came up to cover mine, only briefly. It was barely a touch, but I felt it down to my toes.

“Sounds like something an optimist would say to me,” he said gruffly. Then, shaking his head, Oliver turned, pulling me with him and back towards the house. “Anyway, let’s go. Might as well show you the rest of this old wreck.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Oliver dragged me through several rooms, all of which had that same ghostly feeling of abandonment, and he casually reeled off phrases like: “This is the saloon.” “This is the smoking room.” “This is the pink room.”

“You have a room just for … being pink?” I asked.

He looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time, and shrugged. “It was a sort of sitting room. The walls are pink.”

“I see.”

“And through here is the gallery.”

We walked through to a long room bristling with oil paintings that covered the walls almost from floor to ceiling. It was … overwhelming. Particularly as many of the portraits in their heavy (and dusty) gold frames managed to make their subjects seem rather unsavoury.

“Horrid bunch, aren’t they?” Oliver nodded towards the paintings of many, many men who looked pleased with themselves, in various stages of historical dress. “Not a decent one among them. Made their money off other people’s misery – all to make this house bigger and bigger with the profits. I keep trying to find better ways to use the money. Improving conditions in the factory and the workers’ cottages has been a start, and of course there are various charities, but something sickening happens to very rich men after a certain point. They don’t need to do anything; their money only keeps making more money. More than anyone could need in a hundred lifetimes, but still less than most of the people who sit on it feel entitled to. I have seen greed that you couldn’t imagine.”

We stopped in front of a picture of a man, silver-haired and elegant, with hard, cold blue eyes that sent a shiver down my spine.

“My great-grandfather, for example,” Oliver murmured. “An extremely bad man. Very vocal in his opposition to abolishing slavery. Ironic, really.”

“Ironic?” I asked over the leaden feeling in my stomach.

“My mother’s grandmother was a slave in part of the Spanish colonies,” Oliver said, moving towards the end of the room, where a painting was hung, low on the wall, tucked away from the rest. “Which means his great-grandson who inherited the lot, including his precious house, is directly descended from slaves.”

This painting was different – not only because of the warmth it carried, the splash of colour in this horrible, gloomy room, but because of the subject matter: a woman and two young children.

I recognized Oliver at once. He was about eight years old and already frowning as if he held the artist – or, really, the rest of the world – in weary contempt. Beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder, was a woman who could only be described as dazzling. Here were Oliver’s features: the bold, dark eyes, the dangerous cheekbones, the dark, tumbling hair and golden skin. Unlike Oliver, however, there was a light about this woman, a smile in her eyes, a spark of mischief.

“My mother, Violante,” Oliver murmured.

“She was beautiful,” I said, and the words came out almost in a whisper.

“Incredibly so,” Oliver said, his posture rigid as he looked at the painting. “I imagine that even my father, cold-hearted bastard that he was, must have thought so when he met her in Spain and whisked her away to England. Enough that he married her despite the ‘blight’ of her heritage, as he so frequently called it later on, presumably when the spell wore off and he realized he wasn’t a man capable of love at all.”

The words were said coolly, but each one sliced like a keen-edged blade. So much pain delivered so calmly, so brutally, that I felt winded.

“That … that’s terrible,” I managed.

“Terrible for everyone involved,” Oliver agreed, and now he just sounded weary. “Terrible for my mother, terrible for my great-grandmother, terrible for the millions like her, and the legacy that lives within each of us now. That lives withinme.” Unthinking, he had pressed a hand to his heart. “Here, in a house built on all that pain.” He looked about him. “Sometimes, I think I should just burn the place to the ground and be done with it.” The words were quiet, as if he were speaking to himself.