Rumours

by Freya North

  ‘Open the door, woman! Open the door!’

  Stella panicked that the voice was shouting at her but even though she heaved her shoulder against them, the front doors were definitely shut.

  Did she dare ring that bell again?

  Luckily, a plump woman, wearing what her mother would call a pinny, opened one of the doors a fraction. She said nothing.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Stella.

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘I’m expected.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Stella – Hutton.’

  ‘One moment.’ The woman left the door ajar and disappeared. Was that Lydia? Lady Fortescue? Mrs Barbary?

  ‘Is it Elmfield?’ she could hear another voice asking.

  ‘No, it’s Stella Someone.’

  ‘Well, it’s probably Stella Someone from Elmfield’s. Gracious me!’

  That must be Lady Fortescue.

  The plump woman returned. ‘Are you from Elmfield’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stella. ‘Sorry – I should have said.’

  ‘Come this way, please. Coat.’

  But what Stella really wanted to do was stand still for a moment and take it all in. Beyond the entrance hall was the grand stairwell, lit from above by a beautiful glass lantern roof, a swooping double staircase leading upwards to a galleried landing. But her coat was being all but wrenched from her back.

  ‘I’m Mrs Biggins – I’m housekeeper here. Lady Lydia takes coffee at this time – would you like coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks. Well – just a glass of water, please.’

  ‘Or tea?’

  ‘Tea! Oh yes, please – I’m gasping for a cup.’

  The woman looked her up and down. ‘You’ll take it strong – like me.’ Stella was unsure whether she was referring to her own strength or a well-brewed cup, whether the woman’s remark was an observation, or a statement not open to dispute. If the housekeeper was this disarming, what could Lady Fortescue be like? Mrs Biggins opened the soaring double doors in front of them and gave Stella a little shove. The room was so stunning, in a thoroughly Alice in Wonderland way with everything oversized, that momentarily Stella forgot all about locating the owner of the house and making her introduction. It was dual aspect, occupying three bays of the east front of the house and one bay south, and the four magnificent sash windows, at least eighteen feet high, flooded the room with light despite the dreary day outside. Stella was, quite literally, dazzled.

  ‘Good morning.’

  Sitting in a wingback leather chair, Lydia slowly folded the Telegraph and placed it across her lap. Her knees were together, her legs neatly at an elegant angle; hair in a chignon with stray strands like spun silver. She wore a woollen skirt the colour of peat and a twinset the colour of heather. Her shoes were buffed and the decorative buckles shone. Neutral hosiery gathered just perceptibly in creases around the ankle – like a ploughed field seen from a distance.

  ‘Mrs Fortescue, I’m Stella Hutton.’ And immediately, Stella thought, oh God, I’ve addressed her incorrectly already. ‘Lady.’ No! That sounded plain rude.

  Lydia did not rise. Indeed, she sat motionless and expressionless. ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m here on behalf of Elmfield Estates.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Should she backtrack and apologize for the botched greeting? Stella was unsure. She didn’t know what she was meant to do next. Sit, stand, talk, wait, what? She was being looked at, assessed; she could feel it. It was as nerve-wracking as the one time she’d been hauled in front of the headmistress at the age of thirteen. She felt hot and self-conscious. Did she appear suitably estate-agenty? Or was the fact that she really didn’t do the navy skirt-suit and court-shoe thing actually in her favour? She was today wearing slim-fitting black trousers and black suede ankle boots with a Cuban heel and a white shirt. Perhaps she looked too much like a waitress. Damn it! She’d been in the pale blue shirt first thing, but had changed at the last minute. Perhaps Mrs Lady Barbary-Fortescue was waiting for her to be a little more estate-agenty. Perhaps she should deliver the Elmfield Estates mission statement.

  What Stella really wanted to do was to sink into one of the sofas and say, wow, what an extraordinary place, how long have you lived here, tell me about the house, who is the lady in the painting – is it School of Reynolds? The rug is Persian, isn’t it?

  She was enamoured by everything: the carved frieze above the fireplace of cherubs apparently hunting down a deer; the wealth of photos from sepia, to tinted, to full colour, in a crowd on the grand piano, the thick velvet drapes, the Chinese paintings on silk. The glass-fronted book cabinet. The vast silk rug – yes, most certainly Persian – threadbare in one or two places but still magnificent, yet which went only some way in covering the impressive run of wide floorboards. Huge, heavy columnar curtains with flamboyant pelmets that reminded her of a theatre. More furniture than she, her brothers and her mother had between them. Finally, she noticed the archaic-looking electric bar heater standing in front of the capacious fireplace, trying valiantly to take the chill off the room and adding a warm down-to-earthness too. If there was so much to look at even in this one room, what delights could the rest of the house hold?

  ‘Let me look at you.’

  Stella felt like Tess being summoned by Mrs d’Urberville. But then she thought she remembered Mrs d’Urberville being blind and suddenly she felt very self-conscious that she really wasn’t smart enough and why had she popped her slightly greasy hair into a hasty pony-tail when she’d had the time to wash and dry it? As she approached, Stella decided to polish up her vowels and use words like ‘frightfully’ and ‘splendid’.

  ‘You’re not as I expected.’ Lady Lydia sounded disappointed. ‘But then, Mercy Benton’s powers of description have always been limited. She described her own daughter’s wedding dress as simply a “nice frock” and her son-in-law as a “nice lad”. She said you were a “fine woman” and “everything one could hope for” in an agent.’ She paused, as if waiting for Stella to take the bait. But Stella just nodded with a wry smile in a ‘Gosh, well – you know Mercy Benton’ kind of way.

  Lydia rose a little shakily. ‘You look like a girl – a waitress.’ She was not impressed.

  ‘That’s probably why my clients like me, Lady Fortescue,’ Stella said meekly. ‘I don’t boss them around. I take their order – be it for a house or a sale – and I deliver it to them.’ Stella thought about it. ‘With no spillage.’

  The women regarded each other. Though Lydia was pretty much the same height as Stella, her aquiline haughtiness made her appear far taller. Or perhaps Stella just felt small in this grand room in this phenomenal old house and, for the first time in her life, in the presence of someone titled.

  ‘And have you ever been in a house like this?’

  Stella was diplomatic. ‘There can’t possibly be another like it.’

  Lydia looked at her as if she’d seen straight through her words. ‘Mrs Biggins, wretched woman – she never came with my coffee. Would you care for a sherry?’

  ‘It’s a little early for me,’ Stella said as if she didn’t take her sherry until after lunch. Lydia looked at her witheringly, as if she’d heard sarcasm. She walked over to the walnut drinks cabinet and inadvertently chinked the crystal stopper against the decanter and then the decanter against the glass. She took her sherry and walked to the sofa, spilling a little on her skirt as she sat herself down. She motioned to the companion sofa opposite and Stella sat. Lydia took a thoughtful sip. And then another.

  ‘I detest Asians.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘All agents – whatever their industry.’

  Oh – agents.’ Stella’s relief was worn as an expansive smile which Lydia appeared to baulk at.

  ‘I am going to sell Longbridge,’ she said levelly, ‘or at least, you are.’

  Stella felt herself sinking into the sofa, as if her surroundings were suddenly growing and she was shrinking under the weight of the realizatio
n that this is why she was here. This couldn’t be real – this had to be Lewis Carroll. A joke. A dream.

  But Lydia was continuing. ‘I have been thinking about selling Longbridge for some time. Sometimes I stop thinking about it – but not because I’ve changed my mind. The whole concept is so very tiresome.’ She stared at Stella, who tried to nod purposefully and to stop gawping, wishing she’d said yes to sherry, just to have something to hold instead of her hands feeling like clodden sponges awkward in her lap.

  ‘I’m haemorrhaging cash in upkeep.’ Lady Lydia gave a little cough for emphasis. ‘It’s preposterous! All that money just to keep the rain out and the heat in.’

  The look she threw Stella as she knocked back her sherry suggested she was waiting for a response.

  ‘I hope I don’t sound ignorant or nosy –’ Or obsequious, Stella thought to herself. ‘But would a house like this not be handed down to the next generation?’

  ‘There is no next generation,’ Lady Lydia barked before going heavily silent, staring into her sherry glass as if, usually, it refilled spontaneously. ‘I am the eldest of four girls. Cordelia died young. Anne never bred. She was a lesbian – still is, I believe, though at her age that’s quite unnecessary. Margaret moved to Connecticut and remained barren despite landing herself three American husbands in quick succession.’

  ‘You have no children – offspring?’ She shouldn’t have said that – it sounded intrusive, impudent.

  ‘I had a son,’ Lydia said quietly. ‘And I have a daughter. She doesn’t want to live here. She lives with the Welsh.’ She made it sound as though her daughter had converted to an extreme religion and was living as part of a cult in a compound.

  What could Stella say to that? Though desperate to know more, she bit her tongue and looked at her hands. Lydia’s were bony and long; papery skin over navy veins like very old corduroy. A signet ring loose on the little finger of her right hand, an antique diamond ring and thin gold wedding band on her left. Stella had a very strange impulse to lean right over the coffee table and take Lady Lydia’s hands in hers, give them a gentle rub. Perhaps Lydia sensed it because she took to her feet and demanded that Stella follow her on a tour of the house.

  Sell? Sell all this? Is that really why I’m here? Me? Can’t be.

  ‘Of course, we’re the wrong way around,’ Lydia said of the drawing room. ‘When I was a girl, this was the dining room – one never had a south-facing drawing room because all the oil paintings would take a thrashing by the sun. That’s why the good paintings are currently in the dining room – which was once the drawing room because it’s north facing. That’s what my father told me – though my mother told me it was because my Fortescue ancestors were atrociously ugly.’ The slicing look Lydia sent Stella informed her that her giggle was inappropriate. ‘Hence them being consigned to a room less used.’ She was leading on, along the flagstone hallway, to the room in question. The same beautiful tall double doors and fanlight as the drawing room, the same lofty windows, but just two of them in here, east facing. The room was light but undeniably cold. The fireplace was bereft of logs, nor was there an electric heater in its place. The cherubs on the plaster frieze weren’t hunting stags here, but hefting urns about. Their naked little bodies made Stella feel the cold on their behalf. The eyes of generations of Fortescues appeared to glower at her from the confines of their florid gilt frames as if to say, who on earth do you think you are to sell our ancestral seat as though it’s a commodity akin to a sack of apples?

  ‘They’re not so ugly,’ Stella remarked diplomatically, ‘they just look a little – humourless.’

  She checked Lady Lydia’s expression. She looked horrified. Stella shivered.

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘Oh God – I’m so sorry – I didn’t mean … I only meant—’

  ‘Bastard bastard bloody dog! Barnaby! Mrs Biggins!’

  It was then that Stella noticed a furl of turd that had been deposited (quite some time ago, it seemed) on the floor just by the head of the table.

  ‘It’s testimony to the airiness of the room that one cannot – detect it,’ Stella said.

  Lydia stared at her, unblinkingly, before nodding slowly. ‘You are most certainly an estate agent,’ she said, but Stella was unable to tell whether this was a compliment or an insult. ‘You call it spin, don’t you. This way.’ They left the door open and the dog mess for Mrs Biggins to deal with; crossed the staircase and entrance hallway and went into the library. This room was as warm and inviting as the dining room was cold and uncongenial. Stella thought, I don’t care how common I might appear – and she said ‘Wow!’ out loud as she beamed at the three walls given over almost entirely to handsome mahogany bookcases – mostly carrying leather-bound volumes. Stella estimated the longest was at least twenty feet. Three leather Chesterton sofas at right angles to each other were set around a low table in front of the fireplace stacked with logs. A desk with a dark green leather inlay was positioned by one window, a writing bureau at the other. Stella perused the titles. French and English novels, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, atlases, monographs and a whole section of art books.

  ‘I studied art,’ she said quietly, as if to remind herself. She ran her fingertips gently over the routered wooden shelves right to the end. She stopped. It couldn’t be! She looked at Lydia and smiled.

  ‘May I?’ but she didn’t wait for an answer. Where the bookcase ended in a long, slim vertical column, Stella gave a little press and a pull and the front of the column popped open like a secret door to reveal that it was a false front – behind it, the shelves continued, with just three books’ width, for the full height of the bookcase. There were books on these hidden shelves too, but their spines were blank. ‘Are they very rude?’ Stella asked.

  Lydia laughed. It was an unexpected warm, earthy cackle. ‘Eye-wateringly so – that is, if you were a dainty eighteenth-century lady prone to fainting at the very thought of even a naked forearm. Hardly the Kama Sutra. They’re frightfully tame to me, so goodness knows what you’d make of them.’ Insult or compliment – again Stella wasn’t sure and Lydia’s voice had become cool by the end of her sentence.

  ‘Have you had them valued?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Cart the lot off to Christie’s for them to be pored over so publicly? Lady Lydia, your collection of two hundred years of pornography might fetch one hundred pounds at auction.’ Stella laughed – but Lydia gave her a look to silence her. She led on, back through the hallways and up one side of the double staircase.

  ‘Now that,’ Stella murmured, ‘is a backside to behold.’

  ‘You insolent young woman.’ Lydia rounded on Stella who, for a split second, feared she might be pushed down the stairs. She’d already tripped over a threadbare section of runner.

  ‘Lady Lydia – no! I didn’t mean—! I was referring to – that.’ Stella was holding on to the banister with both hands so she moved her head fast as if banging it against an imaginary wall, to signify where she was looking. It was a huge oil painting of a horse and rider, portrayed from behind. Only an eye and an ear of the horse were visible, while the rider looked most uncomfortable turning around in an already cumbersome military get-up. It was the horse’s rump which all but filled the canvas, its tail mid-swish, revealing its arsehole.

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’ Stella glanced at Lydia who was staring at her. ‘I studied art. It was my world before I—’ And then Stella thought, Oh, for God’s sake, the woman’s not going to bite you. And then she thought, I studied art before all the shit fell on me from a great height and I clawed my way out and am where I am today. And then she thought, But this woman doesn’t need to know that. ‘Before I went into property.’ She made it sound like a sensible choice, that her current career was as dignified and hallowed as the study of art. Lydia’s ice-pale blue eyes were still scoring straight through her, like a welder’s flame through sheet metal.

  ‘This painting was a gift – to Lord Frederick Makepeace William Fortescue, t
he first Earl of Barbary, who built this house.’

  ‘Is it Mallory Beckinsford?’

  ‘As I just said,’ Lydia said slowly, witheringly, as if Stella was dim as well as deaf, ‘Lord Frederick Makepeace William Fortescue, the first Earl of Barbary, who built this house.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, I meant the artist – is it Mallory Beckinsford?’ Stella could tell Lydia hadn’t a clue who the artist was, and hitherto hadn’t been remotely interested.

  ‘Beckinsford,’ Lydia said, in what she thought was a cleverly non-committal way. ‘It’s a portrait of the Prince Regent.’

  Stella dared to take one hand from the banister. ‘It’s just Beckinsford was taught by Reynolds – and Reynolds painted a similar portrait of the Prince Regent.’

  Lydia brushed the air. ‘Longbridge is full of portraits. Fortescues, royalty, Fortescues with royalty, with swords, guns, with horses, dogs – it’s who we are.’

  Stella worked hard to keep her tone conversational, but she was excited. ‘I think this painting would have been given to Lord Frederick Makepeace William Fortescue, the first Earl of Barbary – but as a rather barbed gift. It’s a slur – an elegantly concealed two fingers – from the Prince Regent. He did it to others. A very nicely painted insult, quite literally shoving his horse’s great big bum in the face of Lord Fortescue. But no doubt the Earl knew that and turned the joke on its head by graciously accepting it and hanging it right here, pride of place.’

  Lydia was looking at the painting again, her eyes travelling over it in little bursts. She turned to Stella and nodded.

  ‘So one oughtn’t to look a gift horse in the mouth – but up the arse?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Stella smiled at the painting. ‘You might want to have it valued. Do you know of any fracas between the Prince and the Earl?’

  ‘There is some salacious family rumour about the Earl and one of the Prince’s mistresses and the billiards table right here at Longbridge.’ Lydia’s tone suggested it was all beyond ridiculous. ‘I’ll be sure to call Christie’s,’ she said. ‘They can come and sift through all the historic backsides at Longbridge – human and equine – whether hidden in the library or hanging, bold as brass, right here.’