The familiar wax on his Barbour jacket, the horsey tinge and the underlying musky male smell, with just a tinge of something woody on the top. She wished she could get closer to him and breathe it in deeply.
‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘Stop here. I’m going to take the blindfold off, but keep your eyes closed until I say to open them.’
‘Yes, boss,’ said Polly, as he pulled it away.
‘Open them,’ he said.
Polly did, and after blinking a couple of times in the light, she gasped. They were standing right in front of a vast grey house, two wings going off to the back, a huge fountain in front, throwing a plume of water high into the air, a formal garden around it.
‘Wow,’ said Polly. ‘It’s so beautiful.’
She glanced at Chum to see him beaming back at her.
‘This is your house, right?’ she said. ‘The one we saw from the hilltop?’
Chum nodded.
‘My family’s house, yes. This is Hanley Hall.’
‘It’s . . . spectacular,’ said Polly, taking in the way the sunshine was turning the grey stone golden on one side, the ranks of huge windows black against it. ‘So beautiful. No wonder all those girls at St Andrews were obsessed with you.’
‘I don’t know why,’ he said. ‘I’m the younger son, I was never going to inherit it.’ He paused, gazing at the building. ‘Now I’m not even allowed to go into it . . .’
‘Is that what I would have found out about if I’d googled you?’ asked Polly quietly.
Chum nodded. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘All that, but today we are going in.’
He turned and smiled at her and then, even though she didn’t have the blindfold on any more, he took hold of her hand again and started walking towards the house.
He skirted round the front, along the right flank of the building, then round a corner, where there was yet another, smaller wing, which looked older. He stopped at a flight of mossy stone steps going down to a wooden door.
‘Here we are,’ he said, leading her down.
He turned the old metal handle, and with a hefty push from his hip, opened the door.
‘Don’t worry about the dark,’ he said, leading her inside, closing the door behind him and taking hold of her hand again. ‘I can find my way to the light switch without illumination. Couple of steps up here, bit of a landing, two more steps . . . You OK?’
‘Yes,’ said Polly, thinking that as long as Chum was holding her hand, she’d feel OK anywhere.
She heard a click and a light came on, a bare bulb brightening a long flag-stoned corridor.
‘We’re in the back passages,’ said Chum. ‘It’s too complicated to go in the front door, so this is easier. It’s a bit of a walk to the main part of the house, but worth it.’
They carried on until the passage started to rise gently and they reached ground level, with natural light coming in between the gaps in old shutters on the windows.
After a few more twists and turns and a few steps up, Chum stopped in front of a door that was covered in green felty fabric.
‘Is that an actual green baize door?’ asked Polly.
Chum laughed.
‘I suppose it is,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave our boots on this side of it, anyway.’
Polly bent down to pull hers off and looked up again to see Chum pushing open the door, to reveal a marble hall, with pillars and a lavishly painted ceiling.
The walls were covered with huge paintings in gold frames: horses and battlefields – and people who looked quite like Chum. Several of them had his slender face, with a similar square jaw and wide mouth.
‘Bit of a family resemblance thing going on, I think,’ said Polly, peering up at an impressive fellow in full red and gold dress uniform, a feathered hat under one arm, a large sword on the other side.
‘He’s a great-great-great-great, I think,’ Chum said.
Polly came to a halt again in front of a beautiful woman, black hair in soft curls around her face, smiling as though she knew a wonderful secret.
‘I love her,’ said Polly.
‘Yes, she’s a pretty one,’ said Chum. ‘Great-great, if I remember correctly.’
‘Very great, anyway,’ Polly said.
From there he led her into a room of bewildering splendour with vast brocade curtains held back with silk tassels, elaborate inlaid furniture, ornate carpets and huge vases. From there they passed into a dining room with a table long enough to seat a couple of football teams, silver candelabra along the middle, and then into library full of old leather-bound books.
‘Now I see why you didn’t want me to bring Digger,’ said Polly.
‘Well, we did always have dogs, growing up,’ said Chum, ‘but it seemed better not to risk our two going on a rampage today.’
‘Is there anyone else here?’ asked Polly, her only experience of such places being full of other visitors, guides and security guards.
‘Just us,’ said Chum.
‘So no one lives here now?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘And it’s not National Trust? We’re not going to run into a party of school children around the next corner?’
‘Not today,’ said Chum, ‘although it will be full of children and other worthy visitors if I get my way.’
‘More Google stuff?’ asked Polly.
He nodded and she thought for a moment.
‘So, if no one’s living here, and it isn’t open to the public, why isn’t it all covered in dust sheets? Don’t you have to close up a house like this?’
Chum beckoned to her with his finger, and she followed through a door in the panelling to what was clearly another servant’s passage: there was a great pile of dust sheets in it.
‘I took them off for you,’ he said. ‘And I got the silver out. Some of it.’
‘Well, I’m very honoured,’ said Polly.
‘I wanted you to see it properly,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll show you a room I really love.’
He led the way to a cosier one, with lots of squashy armchairs and sofas, small card tables and ottomans dotted around with old copies of Country Life on them. Decanters on a side table.
‘Oh, this is nice,’ said Polly.
‘This is a family room,’ said Chum. ‘I love the staterooms, but this is my favourite. This is where we used to have Christmas.’
Polly went over to the window and looked out to see the more formal gardens changing to parkland in the distance, mighty oak trees dotting the landscape.
Chum came and stood next to her.
‘Do you miss it horribly?’ she asked him.
‘Would you miss a leg?’ he answered, looking at her sadly before rallying. ‘I’ve still got to show you upstairs. Come on.’
They walked slowly up the stately staircase that swept up from the marble hall, and Polly paused at the top, gazing out at the fountain and the huge ornate gates beyond it.
‘This way,’ said Chum, and she followed him into a room off to the right.
Polly sighed when she walked in; it was so pretty – the walls painted with Chinese birds, ginger jars of different sizes dotted around, pretty white and gold furniture and a huge four-poster bed, nearly as high as the painted ceiling, hung with rich silk drapes.
In front of the central window were two chairs and a sofa with beautiful brocade seats next to a low table. On that was a picnic basket.
‘Lunch,’ said Chum. ‘Do sit.’
‘How lovely,’ said Polly. ‘Did you put this here?’
Chum nodded, starting to take things out of the basket.
‘Isn’t a house like this madly burglar-alarmed?’ asked Polly, sitting down on one of the chairs. ‘Are the police going to arrive just as I’m eating my first sandwich?’
‘I know how to turn them off,’ said Chum, lining up plastic-wrapped packages. ‘There aren’t any plates – although I suppose I could go down to the china store.’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Polly. ‘I’ll catch my crumbs. I woul
dn’t want an old retainer to find them and rumble you – I presume there is a caretaker of some kind? And there must be loads of gardeners, it all looks so perfectly kept.’
‘Yes,’ said Chum. ‘There’s still quite a large number of people needed to keep the place up, but I had a word with the key ones. They don’t mind my coming here – in fact they like it, most of them have known me since I was a little boy. No one’s going to disturb us, Polly.’
As he said it, he opened the picnic basket again and pulled out a bottle of Taittinger and two champagne glasses.
‘Shall we?’ he asked.
Polly nodded enthusiastically.
‘It will mean staying a while, if I have some,’ said Chum, ‘because of the driving thing after. Is that OK?’
Polly smiled at him. ‘I’d quite like to stay here forever,’ she said.
He popped the bottle and they toasted the joy of trespassing, then sat contentedly eating the sandwiches, sipping the champagne and gazing out at the view. Polly relished the slightly dizzy feeling as the alcohol hit her bloodstream, all her anxieties drifting away.
Chum held the bottle up in front of her empty glass with an inquiring expression. She nodded.
‘You know something, Hippolyta,’ he said, leaning over to fill her glass, then putting the bottle down, ‘you’re a bit too far away over there on that chair. Come and sit beside me on the sofa here, it will be so much easier for me to refill your glass . . .’
He moved sideways and patted the seat next to him. Polly was there in a moment, sinking back and looking up at him, as he perched on the edge of the seat. He looked down at her and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t. Instead he gazed thoughtfully out of the window for a few moments, before turning back to her.
‘There’s a reason I brought you here today,’ he said. ‘Apart from just wanting to show off.’ He smiled.
‘Well, you’ve certainly impressed me,’ said Polly, reaching up to clink her glass against his and then taking a sip. ‘So what’s the other reason.’
‘I’m very touched,’ he said, ‘that you didn’t just jump onto Google to find out what my story is. It really a means a lot to me, that you respected my privacy, but now I want to tell you what it is myself.’
He reached for his jacket, pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket and handed it to her. It was a newspaper cutting.
‘This is how it was done pre-search engine,’ he said.
She unfolded it to see it was from the Daily Mail dated two years earlier. She read the headline:
EARL’S BROTHER STRUGGLES TO SAVE STATELY HOME FROM RUSSIAN OLIGARCH
She glanced back at Chum, who was looking pained.
‘Just scan read it,’ he said, ‘and I’ll fill in the details after. It just saves me going over it all again.’
Polly began reading:
The Hon. Edward Cliddington-Hanley-Maugham, younger son of the eleventh Earl of Hampford and cousin of Olympic Equestrian Team captain Rollo Cliddington, has started legal proceedings against his late brother’s widow, the Dowager Countess of Hampford, about the fate of the family’s historic stately home, Hanley Hall.
Mr Cliddington-Hanley-Maugham’s elder brother, the twelfth Earl, died in a shooting accident on the family’s Hertfordshire estate five years ago. His then three-year-old son inherited the title, with his mother as guardian.
The Dowager Countess, former model Flavia Cardoso, wants to sell Hanley Hall, which is ranked as one of the top twenty stately homes in the country, to a private buyer, rumoured to be a Russian oligarch.
Although the house is held by a trust, the Brazilian beauty’s lawyers have found a loophole that may allow her to sell the property, on behalf of her son.
‘Oh, Chum!’ exclaimed Polly, dropping the cutting onto her lap and putting her hands over her face. ‘This is terrible. I had no idea.’
He pulled a resigned face.
‘You can see why I couldn’t bear to talk about it,’ he said. ‘I try not to think about it unless I really have to. Where have you got to?’
‘Your brother dying and his widow wanting to sell this beautiful house to an oligarch.’
‘Keep going,’ said Chum. ‘There’s a choice bit coming up.’
Polly read on:
Even before the sale of the house – built by the first Earl in the seventeenth century and added to by subsequent generations – the Countess intends to sell the contents, with a separate sale planned for more domestic items and the contents of the extensive attics. Even family letters and photographs will be auctioned off.
Mr Cliddington-Hanley-Maugham, who is currently running a riding stable, has so far failed in all his bids to fight the sale. The house and grounds, which used to be open to the public, have had to be closed while the dispute is settled, seriously draining the estate’s finances.
A successful farm shop business the late Earl’s brother used to run has also had to be closed down, since the ownership of any of the produce or animals grown and raised on the estate is sub judice.
If the case continues for too long, the house may have to be sold anyway to settle debts against the estate. The late Earl’s brother has been paying the wages of the estate’s remaining members of staff out of his own pocket, as the Countess has failed to do so.
With support from a group of prominent well-wishers who have come together to help him save the house for the nation, Mr Cliddington-Hanley-Maugham is trying to persuade the National Trust to take the legal case on.
Mr Cliddington-Hanley-Maugham is making no claim on the property himself.
“I just want to preserve the house with its historical associations and important art collections for the nation,” he said. “I’m not looking for anything out of it myself. It’s what my brother and my father would have wanted and I feel I have a duty to protect it for them and all my ancestors – and for my nephew.”
Polly sat staring down at the press cutting for a moment, not knowing what to say. Poor Chum, indeed.
‘I can see why you don’t want to make light conversation about this,’ she said. ‘It must be horrendously stressful. Have you got anyone to share the load with you? Do you have any other siblings?’
‘No,’ said Chum. ‘It was just Charlie and me.’
‘And your father must have died quite young . . .’
Now she knew the details of his situation, Polly realised that, far from finding it off-putting, she wanted to hear all of it. So she could support him.
‘My father was only sixty-two when he died,’ said Chum. ‘He had weak lungs from a childhood illness and a bout of pneumonia was too much for him. Mum married Bill a couple of years later; they’d known each other since they were young, and his wife had died, so that was lovely. They lived in the Dower House just a couple of miles from here and it was all great. I worked for the estate, running the farm shop and food brand, which was quite a big thing; we were in Fortnum’s and Harrods and all that.’
‘Hang on a minute – Hanley Hall, of course. I used to buy your marmalade.’
For David, she thought. It was his favourite.
Chum smiled. ‘Ah yes, the award-winning marmalade. Even President Obama liked it. The British Ambassador gave him some – he was Charlie’s friend at school, which helped – and we got a letter of thanks on White House writing paper.’
‘So when your brother died that all just had to stop?’ said Polly.
Chum nodded.
‘Flavia closed it – well, her ghastly lawyers did, using the excuse mentioned in that piece, but really just to spite me – and I had to put a lot of people out of work. It was dreadful. I’m very lucky that an old friend gave me a job right away, running his livery yard, but a lot of the people I had to lay off are still unemployed. I lose a lot of sleep over that.
‘I was offered other jobs in the bespoke food world, but I needed to stay near here,’ he continued. ‘I would have felt like I was abandoning the estate if I’d gone to live in Scotland, or
Cornwall. I’m viscerally attached to this land and to the other people connected to it. I have to live on it, or at least near it.’
‘Tell me about Flavia,’ asked Polly. ‘Is she really evil? What she wants to do – and what she’s already done – is so awful, but I always find it hard to believe that people can be fundamentally bad. Can’t she see there’s a lot more to this house than being a valuable piece of real estate?’
‘You’re right, said Chum. ‘She’s not evil so much as easily influenced. And flighty. Very flighty. None of us really understood why Charlie married her – well, there were the obvious reasons, she’s an exceptionally attractive woman and Charlie was always a sucker for that. He was blinded by her looks and she loved the idea of having a title and swanning around London being the Countess of Hampford. She wasn’t a blatant gold-digger – that’s come later – and she did genuinely love Charlie, but she doesn’t have great judgment.’
He picked up the champagne bottle and held it up to Polly with his eyebrows raised. She nodded. Reading the press cutting had sobered her up rather and she hoped another glass might lift her mood again.
‘We had an inkling things might be tricky when she insisted on having the wedding featured in Hello! magazine,’ said Chum, thrusting the empty bottle back in the picnic basket upside down, as though it were an ice bucket.
‘I couldn’t believe Charlie gave in to that, but he just thought it was funny. I found it mortifying. I’m not being snobby, it was just so embarrassing. We had to pose for all these cheesy photos – hundreds of them – and my friends really roasted me about it. Every time I saw them for years afterwards, they’d shout “Hello!” at me. I was actually glad my dad wasn’t around to see it.
‘So she loved all that side of it – what she hadn’t understood was how much living in the damp, muddy country there’d be, and she just didn’t take to that. Mummy and Bill and I really did our best to get on with her, but once Charlie died, it all just fell apart. In her grief, she moved to London full-time, met some awful people, who introduced her to some even more gruesome lawyers, and the next thing we knew, the house was shut up and we were all thrown off the estate.’
The Scent of You Page 30