by Jodi Taylor
I sank into a sofa from which, I suspected, I would have great difficulty extricating myself when the time came. Mrs Harewood sat opposite me, plaiting the fringe of her shawl, pulling it loose, then replaiting it again . . . a woman with something on her mind.
She began by asking after Peterson. I reassured her as to his injury and mentioned a couple of other times he’d spectacularly hurt himself, avoiding all reference to the plague, obviously. And the pox, because he always tends to confuse the two.
She said vaguely that was good news and then, her mind obviously elsewhere, repeated herself all over again, which gave me the opening I needed.
‘Forgive me, Mrs Harewood, you appear to be considerably distracted and I can’t help feeling at least partially responsible.’
‘No. Oh, no. Not at all. I’m so sorry, Mrs Farrell – this is not a good time for us, that’s all. Nothing to do with your brother’s unfortunate accident.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ I said, ‘but if you’d rather not talk about it . . .’
Nothing ever gets people talking faster than an invitation not to talk about whatever is troubling them and, as I hoped, the appearance of a complete stranger whom she would never see again provided her with the ideal opportunity to unburden herself.
Details of the Ordeal of the Haunted Room tumbled over themselves, followed by her anxiety for her husband, her fears for the future and so on. ‘I mean, obviously, I’m completely confident that Henry will emerge unscathed, but after what happened to his father . . .’
‘But Mrs Harewood, please forgive my asking, but Mr Harewood senior was the legitimate heir, was he not?’
‘Oh yes. There could be no doubt. He was an only child of an only child.’
‘And there’s equally no doubt about this Mr Harewood?’
‘Absolutely none. Henry’s younger brother died some eight or nine years ago of an inflammation of the lungs. Something which had troubled him since childhood. Very sad but quite unremarkable. He always had a weak chest, I believe.’ She straightened her shoulders. ‘However, I am certainly well supported. Mr Chance, our family solicitor, is here – a very capable man – and the Reverend Lillywhite, an old friend of the family and always so kind.’ She turned to me. ‘I don’t like to make light of your brother’s misfortune but I must tell you how very grateful I am to have another woman in the house tonight.’
It struck me that telling her wild horses couldn’t drag me out of this house tonight might not be the sympathetic and supportive attitude she wanted, so I patted her hand and smiled reassuringly.
‘So,’ she said briskly, ‘shall we have afternoon tea?’
I thought I’d already had afternoon tea but it seemed I hadn’t. That had been ordinary tea. This was Afternoon Tea.
Barnstaple and two maids wheeled in not one but two tea trollies, laden with doilies, silver teapots, bone china plates, cups and saucers, cake forks, and enough food to feed St Mary’s for three days.
‘Barnstaple, could you tell Mr Harewood and our guests that tea is ready, please. I think you’ll find them in the billiards room.’
‘At once, madam.’
Mrs Harewood poured me a cup of tea. I couldn’t help noticing it was a different tea service to the one I’d had tea in upstairs. Perhaps they had an upstairs tea service and a downstairs tea service. Just imagine – if they weren’t living in such straitened circumstances there might even be a different tea service for every room.
Setting that aside, what we did have were dainty sandwiches cut in the shapes of clubs, diamonds, spades and hearts, very tiny cakes, a whole pile of brandy-snap things, a massive fruit cake fresh from the oven, smelling like heaven and served in the traditional manner with a slice of Wensleydale, some sort of creamy posset, fruit pastries – oh God, I wasn’t going to get out of this alive.
I tried to start small and pace myself, but believe me, there was no chance. I even tried to concentrate mainly on the sandwiches, on the grounds they’d be marginally less lethal than the cakes, but my hostess encouraged me to partake at every opportunity. Hospitality was obviously a big thing in the Harewood household.
Speaking of hospitality, two minutes in, Henry Harewood turned up, towing two black-clad figures in his wake.
The Reverend Lillywhite was a tall, thin and cadaverous man. I’ve never actually met someone with a grey face before – not outside a zombie movie, obviously.
The solicitor, Mr Chance, short and bumptious, was far too cheerful to be a solicitor and his creaking waistcoat was evidence of too many afternoon teas at Harewood Hall.
‘Chance,’ he said, rolling across the room to shake my hand. ‘From Chance, Venture, Chance and Spigot. I’m the second one. What you might call “A Second Chance”. Eh? Eh?’
The universe failed to kill me now.
My first thought for Mr Harewood was that he was rather frail-looking for this Ordeal. His fair hair was thin and receding already. He looked very young for his twenty-five years and wore country tweeds, shabby but good. The reverend, obviously, wore clerical bands and Mr Chance announced his profession in a rusty black coat with a wing collar. A watch chain strained across his ample girth. A key hung therefrom.
Henry Harewood greeted me very politely. If he was concerned over his forthcoming Ordeal, none of that showed in his face. If I didn’t know better, I would swear he was utterly delighted to hear of our arrival. That the only thing his life had been lacking up to this very moment was the spontaneous arrival of three dubious-looking individuals and none of them with credentials of any kind. Letters of introduction were very important. In such a tightly interlocked society, everyone pretty much knew everyone else, and anyone venturing into a new area would bear letters of introduction, thus establishing them as proper and respectable people with mutual friends. Or, in our case – not. Obviously, we didn’t have any letters and they might easily have confined us to the Servants’ Hall or even turned us away completely, but fortunately, given the dreadful weather outside, kindness and charity had prevailed.
‘My dear Mrs Farrell, I do hope my wife has made you comfortable.’
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Harewood, we’ve been made most welcome. I can only apologise for disturbing you. Blame my brother’s lamentable inability to look where he is going.’
Mrs Harewood smiled at her husband. ‘I’ve had some tea sent up to him, dear.’ She turned to me. ‘If he is well enough to eat, of course.’
I refrained from telling her that even in death Peterson would still be well enough to eat.
The reverend clasped my hand in his clammy claw. As soon as I could, I detached myself from his grasp, picked up my plate to keep my hands out of his reach and prepared to listen.
Conversation was very stilted – polite enquiries after my brother, where were we from, had we any mutual friends or relatives – the usual stuff. I smiled, invented people and places with creative abandon and made a note to brief Peterson later. It would be so typical of him if, after I’d spent an imaginative ten minutes describing last summer with Batty Aunt Jemima at Harrogate, he turned around and told them she’d died ten years ago.
Every now and then the conversation would tail away and then they would remember their manners and it would all start up again.
‘And where was your destination, my dear madam?’ intoned the reverend, who had found a space on the sofa beside me, only very inadequately managing to conceal his disapproval of husbandless females roaming the landscape.
‘I’m on my way to join my husband,’ I said. A fit and proper activity for a wife. Even the church couldn’t object to that. ‘Mr Farrell is an explorer. At present he’s studying the Moche culture in Peru.’
He was horrified. ‘You are surely not joining him there? Among the savages? Hardly a fitting place for a gently born female.’
‘A wife’s place is at her husband’s side,’ I said primly,
embarking on an enjoyable stroll down the highways and byways of hypocrisy. ‘No matter the trials or tribulations, my womanly duty is always to my husband,’ and spent an enjoyable few minutes watching him struggle with the unreconcilable beliefs that a wife should always support her husband but that the proper place for said wife was in the home.
Determined to find something to criticise, he frowned at me. ‘And yet the weather is terrible, Mrs Farrell. What sort of brother brings his sister out on a day like this?’
‘Ah,’ I said gaily. ‘Now that you can blame me for, Reverend Lillywhite. We broke our journey at the inn and I suggested a walk after being cooped up for so long in the carriage. Barely had we gone a mile or so when my brother fell and twisted his foot. I don’t think it’s broken – just a bad sprain. He will probably be as right as rain tomorrow.’
‘You have nursing experience?’ he said, with a wary eye on Mrs Harewood lest I contaminate her with these modern ideas.
‘A little,’ I said, because as Markham frequently explains to Hunter, nursing is no job for a lady. ‘Nothing formal, of course, but with a husband, a brother, a son and clumsy friends, I have gained some experience over the years.’
He smiled, but his heart wasn’t in it and after this flurry of conversation, things subsided. An awkward silence fell. I chomped away. A prudent historian always eats when she can because she never knows where the next meal will be coming from. Mr Harewood stirred his tea. On and on and on . . . Eventually the silence was broken by Mrs Harewood.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she said impatiently. ‘Mrs Farrell is perfectly well aware of our circumstances. There really is no need for all this heavy-handed discretion.’ She turned to me. ‘As you are aware, Mrs Farrell, tonight is the night my husband takes part in a . . . a family ritual, the successful completion of which will lead to him coming into his full inheritance.’
She sat down with a defiant so there expression on her face.
I wanted to get them talking about the Ordeal, so I enquired of Mrs Harewood if this was a long-standing family tradition. Which, on reflection, might have been a bit of a mistake.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘On the first Winter Solstice after . . .’
‘Paganism!’ exclaimed the reverend and I nearly spilled my tea.
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘The Roman Saturnalia,’ he cried, eyes glowing with a strange and disturbing fervour, ‘with its licentious behaviour and overturning of the proper order. The Druids and their heathen sacrifices. And now this – the barbaric ritual with its overtones of darkness and devil-worship – I beg your pardon, ladies – but the violence of my feelings . . . I say again, Mr Harewood – this outdated superstition should find no place in the modern Christian household . . .’
I toyed with the idea of telling him Jesus had probably been born in March and the Christian church had piggybacked their festival on the existing Yule traditions. And probably best not to get him started on Eostre, either. We had enough melodrama without adding an unstable vicar into the mix and besides, little flecks of foam were collecting at the corners of his mouth.
‘. . . And the light of the Christian faith pushing back the shadows of cruel pagan practices . . .’
I could feel myself gearing up to compare cruel pagan practices to the compassionate ministrations of the Spanish Inquisition and Mrs Harewood was regarding her husband with a very wifely ‘Oh God, now we’ve set him off again,’ expression, when Barnstaple, obviously well versed in the vicar’s little ways, earned his pay for the day by offering him an enormous slab of fruit cake and a correspondingly colossal piece of Wensleydale. Rising to that challenge would certainly keep him quiet for a few minutes so I leaped back into the conversation before anyone could have the good manners to change the subject.
‘But you are not actually poor,’ I said, because, as has frequently been pointed out, I have no tact. I gestured around at their not opulent but still quite comfortable surroundings.
‘Oh,’ Mrs Harewood said, grasping my meaning. ‘The funds allow us enough to keep the estate going.’ She cast a dour look at Mr Chance. ‘But for such expenses as personal expenditure, Jamie’s future schooling and so on . . . my husband is not currently even allowed access to his own money.’
‘My dear,’ murmured Henry Harewood. ‘We have discussed this.’
The Reverend Lillywhite – whom I was really coming to dislike – abandoned paganism and prepared to mount what was obviously his other hobbyhorse – that women were not equipped to understand the law and how it worked. I slung him another slice of cake and a couple of brandy snaps.
Mr Chance was displaying signs of agitation. ‘Mrs Harewood, I understand your concerns, but we have been over this many times and I really feel we should not be burdening Mrs Farrell with our private affairs.’
She twisted in her seat to look at him. ‘Our private affairs?’
He blinked under her ferocity and then recovered himself. ‘As your husband’s solicitor, ma’am . . .’
This was interesting – there was obviously no love lost between these two – and I suspected she didn’t love the Reverend Lillywhite either – but unfortunately, I never found out how their little tiff ended because one of the maids, possibly reacting to the overwrought atmosphere, dropped a plate of cakes. The plate fell on to one of the many marble-topped occasional tables scattered around the room as thickly as ants on a jam sandwich.
I don’t know about anyone else but I nearly jumped through the roof. Plate and sandwiches bounced off the table on to the carpet and disintegrated. Jane gave a cry and dropped to her knees. To pick up the pieces, I hoped, rather than beg forgiveness.
‘It’s all right, Jane,’ said Mrs Harewood calmly as Barnstaple surged forwards like the Wrath of God. ‘Please don’t scold, Barnstaple. I think we’re all a little on edge today.’
Having picked up the pieces, Jane fled, spurred on her way by Barnstaple’s disapproving frown. I suspected he was a much sterner disciplinarian than his mistress.
‘I should be rejoining my brother,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Dinner this evening will be at the usual time.’ She raised her voice a little. ‘We won’t change, as a courtesy to Mrs Farrell, but otherwise everything will be exactly as usual, Barnstaple. Exactly as usual,’ she added with emphasis.
‘Very good, madam.’
‘My brother believes he will be recovered enough to join us,’ I said, diplomatically translating Peterson’s declaration that nothing would make him miss this, even if his entire leg fell off.
‘How delightful,’ she said vaguely. The gentlemen rose and I left the room.
Peterson was still reclining on a plate-bestrewn bed. ‘I have to keep my strength up,’ he said before I even uttered a word.
‘You’re expected at dinner. If you think you can make it.’
‘Of course I can.’ He gestured at a duck-headed walking stick. ‘Donated by the master of the house.’
To pass the time, I took another look at his minty-smelling foot and told him he probably only had an hour to live. We discussed events downstairs – I described Lillywhite and Chance in a manner that wasn’t flattering to either of them. I peered out through the curtains – I don’t know why because it was pitch-black out there. Peterson discovered a Bible in a drawer in his bedside table and began to read out the good bits. I wandered around, bored. ‘Do we know where buggerlugs has got to?’
Peterson looked up from the Whore of Babylon. ‘Disappeared under a sea of adoring housemaids, probably.’
‘I heard that,’ said Markham, entering at that moment. ‘And actually, I’ve been gathering intel. With Barnstaple out of the way they couldn’t wait to gossip. I gather your husband’s an explorer, Max. Now then,’ he added, hunting through the plates in the vain hope Peterson might have left something uneaten, ‘this Haunted Room . . .’
‘Will you stop doing that?’
‘What do you think?’ said Peterson. ‘Anyway, what about this Haunted Room?’
‘It’s located on the ground floor between the library and Mr H’s study. Probably a ladies’ parlour once upon a time. Now kept locked at all times. For obvious reasons. No one ever goes in there except on the night of the Ordeal.’
‘Does anyone know what’s inside?’
‘According to Margaret – who, to the admiration of her co-workers, contrived to be present on the night of the last Ordeal – and from the quick glimpse she caught as they broke down the door – it’s quite a small room. Dusty, obviously. She saw a fireplace with an ornate mantel, one end of a table and what she persisted in referring to as the Armchair of Death because Mr Harewood was sprawled in it, head back, arms hanging, his face a terrible colour, and, I quote, “Quite, quite dead, Mr Markham”.’
Peterson frowned. ‘He hadn’t cried out at all?’
‘Nope. And there had never been a problem with the Ordeal before. I gather no one was expecting anything untoward. They locked him in – there was a lot of joking about the ghost – and then they retired to wait in comfort.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Mr Henry Harewood. Not Mrs Letitia, for some reason. Those two cheerful buggers, Chance and Lillywhite. Mrs Victoria, Harewood senior’s wife, was present too. She screamed and fainted and Margaret said she never saw any more because Chance slammed the door and told her to look after her mistress.’
‘Wow,’ I said again. ‘Right – plan of action for this evening. Peterson and I will go down to dinner. You’ll help Peterson get downstairs. Having done that, make yourself scarce and hang around the Haunted Room . . .’
‘Dum . . . dum . . . dum,’ said Peterson valiantly.
‘. . . to make sure no one’s setting up any funny business.’