Risk of Ruin

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Is Farleigh one of the easy ones to manage, or not?” Peter asked curiously.

  Scott took his time answering. “It depends on how you look at it, sir. In one regard, your father…Lord Farleigh is your father, yes? I did get that right?”

  “Yes, he is my father,” Peter said. “I am adopted. My father’s heir is William. He lives in Kirkaldy.”

  Scott nodded. “Right, I did get the gist of that from one source or another. Anyways, your father isn’t fond of the place…which I suppose you already know. That makes things a bit easier, because he isn’t here to second guess anything I do. On the other hand, it leaves things in my lap a bit much.”

  “You don’t like making decisions?” Peter asked curiously.

  “Oh, I don’t mind decisions,” Scott said easily. “I wouldn’t be doing this job if I did. It’s just that sometimes the responsibilities weigh on one a bit. The trust put in me, if you see what I mean.”

  Peter decided he liked the odd man. “I do see,” he replied. “I’m sure you’ve lived up to your responsibilities.”

  Scott looked troubled.

  “Better spit it out, Scott,” Peter told him.

  “Well, it’s just…you might take a look at the place and figure I haven’t been responsible at all. I’ve done the best I could with the money your father sent, but…well, you’ll see soon enough.” He fell silent, his gaze on the back of the horse.

  Peter let him keep his silence. He examined the fields they passed and the huge old oaks spreading their branches out twenty feet or more, in the middle of fields or beside brooks.

  All the streams and brooks and rivers they passed were running fast, the water up by the tops of the banks. Peter leaned over to check one as the road crossed a small bridge.

  “It rained for nearly a week,” Scott commented. “I don’t suppose you have a pair of field boots in that valise of yours, sir?”

  “I confess I didn’t think of such things when I left London. It was a steam bath there.”

  “Aye, it can be toward the end of the summer. Smelly, too, with the Thames all dried up, like. Well, I’ve got a spare pair of boots at the house, and we look to be about the same size. Better to save your shoes for city footpaths, sir.” He pointed with the whip. “That’s Farleigh land there,” he added. “Beyond that line of hawthorns.”

  Peter forbore to ask which bushes were hawthorns, for there was only one collection of tall shrubs arranged in a straight line. He looked at the rolling country beyond the bushes. “It isn’t farmed,” he observed, taking in the wild grasses.

  “No tenant farmers, sir. Not for a few generations, leastwise. Around the time of Napoleon, there were some families upon the estate—market men and upper-class folk, but farmers haven’t tilled this land for a long time.”

  “That seems a waste, to me,” Peter said.

  “And to a great many other folk, sir, if you don’t mind my saying. Tenant farmers, though, need a lord to hand or a steward who can take care of matters as they arise.”

  “You told my father that?”

  “Aye, sir. He thought the land was going to waste, too, but…” Scott shrugged.

  The coach turned into a wide dirt road with more hawthorn bushes on either side. The dirt was a bleached gray. Small puddles still remained from the week of rain, lingering in the twin ruts. The coach jolted and rocked.

  “I’ve been meaning to arrange for gravel,” Scott said, sounding apologetic. “Only, there’s so few vehicles use it, I’ve put it off longer than I should.”

  “That seems like sense to me,” Peter told him. “The road is still navigable, at least.”

  The road climbed a low slope and crested it. A wide valley opened up. It was perhaps two miles across, with the same gentle slopes on either side, and a narrow ribbon of a river in between.

  “There, sir,” Scott said, pointing to the other side of the valley and farther to the east.

  Peter picked out the darker bushes which marked the river. Farther up the slope was a thick collection of tall trees, deeply green with their mid-summer growth. Over their canopies could be glimpsed white walls and a gray slate roof.

  Farleigh Hall itself.

  The road wound down to the river and crossed a stone bridge which looked very old. Water swirled at the top of the bridge supports.

  “I’ve had the piers repaired a time or two,” Scott said. “The bridge was built over a hundred years ago. Another good flood like last week, and it’ll wash away, for sure.”

  The road climbed the sharper slope to the high banks, then dived directly into the heavy copse of trees. Now they were closer, the square lines of the house were more distinct, with greater portions coming into view as they moved through the shady trees. They emerged from the trees into an area that once was likely well tended, but now was twenty acres of unmowed grasses and weeds. A raven lifted up from some luckless prey and flapped away with a rasping caw, his black wings shining in the sun.

  Peter studied the house they approached, trying to assess it fairly.

  The stone walls might once have been white. Now the carriage was closer, Peter could see the gray dirt of the road coated the house, too. The front façade was not symmetrical, or pleasingly arranged. There was a small front door, flanked by a pair of columns, also gray. The door looked to be seasoned wood without paint. With no portico or porch or roof to shield it, the door would be vulnerable to weather. The lack of paint was likely the result of too many seasons of neglect.

  All the windows were closed, of course. No maids had thrown them open to catch any breeze on this hot summer day. “No broken panes,” Peter murmured as the coach bumped onto the gravel and crunched toward the house.

  “I’ve stayed on top of window repairs,” Scott said. “Fastest way to let a house crumble is to fail to fix windows. Weather and vandals will see to its ruin, after that.”

  A sad, neglected air hung about the house, despite the whole windows. Weeds poked through the thin layer of gravel of the drive. No flowers nodded in garden beds. There were no garden beds.

  Scott halted the coach with a soft word to the mare, then put the whip away and jumped down to the ground. Peter climbed down and stretched his legs. The bench was uncomfortable.

  Scott pulled a large, old iron key out of his jacket and held it out to Peter.

  “Go ahead,” Peter told him.

  Scott moved over to the front door and inserted the key. It was no surprise to Peter when the lock squealed and the key rasped as it turned. The door also squeaked heavily as it opened. He heard the crunch of dirt being swept back.

  “The house hasn’t been cleaned?” he asked, moving over to the door as Scott stepped aside.

  “If I’d had a bit more warning, I could have rounded up some local lassies to whip through,” Scott said. “I can still take care of that.”

  Peter stepped into the house and looked around, intensely curious to see the monstrosity which had driven away two generations of Wardells.

  The interior looked quite harmless, at first. Like many such houses, there was a front hall, with the main staircase winding up to the next floor. Corridors shot off from the hall to the left and right, bright from the light of the front windows. Rooms would come off the corridors on the other side. At the far end of each, Peter glimpsed larger empty rooms. They would be public rooms—a drawing room, a dining room, and a morning room of some sort on the eastern side, to take advantage of morning sun. “Kitchen and service areas at the back?” he asked, looking around.

  “Aye, sir.”

  Slowly, then with more speed, Peter picked out the discordant notes in the hall. Sour inconsistencies which marred what might have been an elegant entryway.

  The tiles on the floor, the stairs and the walls were all a pink, veined marble. Only, the floor tiles were not quite a perfect match to the walls, or even a complimentary color. The stairs were yet another color which was not complimentary, either.

  Sometime in the past, one of the wall panels
had been replaced. The newer panel was yet a fourth, not quite matching, color.

  The joints in the marble were not perfect, speaking of bad craftsmanship, or indifferent maintenance. The marble on the stairs had lost its gleam, and was distinctly worn on one side, where the majority of feet would tread, with one hand on the balustrade.

  No cobwebs or abandoned possessions littered the floor, which Peter had been half-braced to find. A fine layer of dust laid upon everything.

  Large family portraits hung inside the sections of marble paneling on the wall, climbing up the walls to match the incline of the stairs. Only, one or two of the portraits had been badly hung, so they did not sit perfectly in the middle of their panel. It was a jarring note which made Peter twitch to adjust them.

  The portrait hanging in pride of place in the center of the back wall of the hall, over the stairs, was that of a man with a round face, small eyes and a halo of iron gray curls, which thinned upon the top of his head. The man seemed quite ugly and angry. Given that the artist would have done his best to flatter his subject, it meant the real man must have been extremely ill-looking.

  “That’d be the previous Lord Farleigh,” Scott murmured.

  This was the man who had manipulated Mama Elisa and kept her son Raymond from her, in order to have her to himself. This was the man Papa Vaughn hated, still.

  Peter shuddered as cold, invisible fingers touched his spine.

  The stairs below the portrait looked as though they had tried to be elegant. However, the curve up to the second floor met the back of the hall, then abruptly and sharply turned again, to climb to the landing. It appeared the designer had run out of space for his majestic stairs, so had crammed the last dozen steps into the available space.

  On a hot August day, with every window in the house closed, the air in here should have been stifling but it was not. There was a distinct chill, bouncing off the cold marble and descending from the tall ceilings. The smell of dry dust scratched at the back of Peter’s throat. An aroma lingered beneath the dust, of something rotten. “Was food left here?” Peter murmured.

  “Aye, I can detect the stench,” Scott said. “Maybe a rat, or a squirrel which found its way in and couldn’t get out again. I’ll track down the carcass and get rid of it. A few open windows will help until then.” He strode along the corridor to the first window and tugged it up with a squeal of weather-swollen wood. Peter winced at the shriek.

  There were no drapes at the windows, no cushions or cloths to soften the hard lines of marble.

  Scott beckoned. “I’ll walk you around the house.”

  Peter nodded. He could feel the furrow in his brow deepening. He had taken only a few steps into the hall and already he felt uncomfortable. His boots crunched in the dust as he followed Scott down the long corridor to the right. There were darker patches on the walls. Paintings had once hung there long enough for the surrounding wallpaper to fade in the bright sun coming through the windows.

  Sconces on the walls held stubs of old candles and with a sinking sensation, Peter realized that gaslight had not yet been introduced to this house. In winter, the only warmth would be from fireplaces.

  The large room at the other end of the corridor was the drawing room. Peter took only two steps inside and glanced at the empty, echoing space. The windows ran along both sides of the big room, but they were not evenly spaced.

  “Next,” Peter murmured, anxious to move on.

  The public rooms at the other end of the house were similar—cold and empty and lacking in any sort of pleasing symmetry.

  The bedrooms, upstairs, were just as unremarkable. The master bedroom still contained a huge bed with a canopy which hung heavy with dust. The mattress looked lumpy and the cover was stained.

  Peter grimaced. “I will not use this room,” he declared.

  “Right you are, sir,” Scott said, closing the door. “There is a smaller master suite at the other end of the corridor.” He turned on his heel and moved down the corridor, which echoed without muffling carpets on the scratched floorboards.

  Peter paused as he passed the open door of the next room along from the master room. The bedroom was smaller and dimmer, for it was on the north side of the house. The chill was distinct, reaching through the door to bathe his face.

  “What is that?” Peter asked, stepping through the door.

  “Sir?” Scott called from farther along the corridor.

  Peter moved over to the window and peered through the glass. Behind the house was more unchecked weeds and grasses, with a trace of straight lines. There had been an attempt to develop a garden, once. The straight lines were formal and symmetrical. However, any garden which had once been there had long ago been swallowed by the wild growing things.

  It was the sight beyond the garden which caught his attention. The line of trees continued around the house, completely enclosing it. A path ran through the trees which had once been worn smooth. Through the trunks and leaves, Peter spotted riotous color and verdant green, and the straight lines of another building beyond the blooms.

  “Oh, that. That’d be the old grounds man’s cottage.”

  “I would like to see it,” Peter said, for it would get him out of this house.

  THE GROUNDS MAN’S COTTAGE WAS not the tiny white-daubed home Peter had expected. As they moved along the old path, the trees fell away and the view opened up, so he could take in the house all at once.

  “It’s bigger than I expected,” Peter said, taking in the pleasant ochre-colored stone and mortar walls, the tall dormer windows and the steep pitches and angles of the slate roof. There was a deep bow window in the front of the house, and all the window frames were painted a cream color which blended nicely with the walls.

  A split timber fence ran around the house, marking off the borders of an extended garden, which had not a single formal line anywhere.

  “I believe the house was the original Farleigh Hall,” Scott said. “Until the late Lord Rufus Farleigh built the new hall, that is.”

  “The garden is enormous,” Peter said, studying the explosion of flowers and bushes behind the low fence. It was a typical, traditional domestic garden. The front yard was a riot of blooms of every kind—roses, lavender, carnations, hollyhocks, lilies and massive pink peonies nodding their giant heads in the sun. Marigolds, sweet williams and oxeye daisies. Dark green leaves of ivy grew up the walls of the house, tangling with honeysuckle vines.

  Peter recognized only a few of the blooms—flowers which were often included in the many bouquets he had sent to prospective partners over the years, for their symbolism and beauty. There were many others he didn’t know at all, yet they were just as attractive.

  “The last grounds man’s wife, Mrs. Rosemary Smith, was an avid gardener,” Scott said. “The garden was already here. She brought it along for twenty years or more. Now, it takes care of itself. I doubt there’s room for a single weed to take root. You like gardens, sir?”

  “I’ve never noticed gardens before,” Peter admitted.

  “This one does catch the eye,” Scott admitted, scanning the garden with a judicious expression.

  They stood silently for another moment, studying the place. Peter found more and more to notice. Almost hidden pockets of greenery. A birdbath tucked in amongst bright green leaves which he would have overlooked, except for a robin splashing and flitting in the fresh rain water.

  Butterflies and bees hovered over a watering can by the front door. It would be filled with rainwater, too.

  “If you like this, you’ll appreciate the back of the house even more, sir,” Scott said.

  “Oh?” Peter nodded. “Show me.”

  “Through the house, or around it?” Scott dug inside his jacket. “I have the key.”

  “Oh, around,” Peter said. He wanted to see the rest of this intriguing garden. There was nothing like it in London. Public gardens were formal, regimented places. There was not the space or soil for private gardens, although in the middle-class sub
urbs, families did try to grow their own produce in the pocket handkerchief sized spaces in front of and at the back of their houses.

  Even the formidable gardens at Innesford could not compete with this tangle of blooms and buds and frantic color. He had played amongst the rows of the garden at Innesford as a child, during gathers, and could remember the way lavender smelled when he brushed up against it.

  Peter had never seen anything like this garden before. Intrigued, he followed Scott around the edges of the split-rail fence, listening to the buzz of bees and chirp of crickets. Birds cooed and called from within the garden and from among the surrounding trees.

  He spotted a hummingbird hovering beneath pink, hanging bell-shaped flowers, its long beak thrust up inside.

  With every step, Peter shrugged off the uneasy effects of the cold mansion behind him. He felt as though he had stepped into a different world.

  There were narrow paths laid out amongst the flowers and bushes. Trails of stones had been laid into the dirt and were almost smothered by more tiny plants. The paths curved and wove, beckoning one to follow them.

  Scott, though, stuck to the fence. They rounded the corner and moved into the area behind the house.

  Peter halted, astonished.

  Running along the back of the big house were more garden beds, blooming with flowers. Against the wall of the house, instead of vines, were the flattened shapes of trees, which had been trained to grow against the walls, their branches running in lines out around the main trunk. Golden apples were forming on the nearest one, the fruit still small, yet with the promise of sweet globes by season’s end. The remains of previous years’ crops laid on the ground at the foot of the tree.

  His gaze drew to the large area beyond the walls of the house. It had been boxed off with a low hedge which once would have been well trimmed, but now was shaggy with runners and sprouted branches. Over the fuzzy tops of the hedge he could see into the square. Here was where the formal lines were to be found. Straight paths divided large rectangles of earth. Tripods and trellises ran down the middle of the beds.