The household had never been gay; it now became grim and melancholy. She would sit propped up in her chair in her sitting room on her good days and go through the accounts. She never allowed me to see them; she herself did most of the buying. She would allow me no authority although my knowledge was growing and was not far behind her own.

I began to experience once more that feeling that the Queen’s House was a prison; and just as in the old days I had dreamed of reunion with my mother as my means of escape, now I thought of that evening with Redvers and I told myself: He will come home from his voyage and when he does he will come to see me.

The months passed and I heard nothing of him. The autumn was with us — the smell of dahlias and chrysanthemums in the garden; the damp mist was rising from the river and it was the anniversary of that evening and still I heard no news of him.

Aunt Charlotte was getting more crippled, more irritable. Scarcely a day passed during which she did not remind me where my duty lay.

I went on waiting and hoping that one day Redvers would seek me out, but he never did.

It was Ellen who brought news to me. Her sister still worked for the Creditons. She had married the butler and had come up in the world. Lady Crediton was pleased with her and although she was not exactly a housekeeper, she was in charge of the maids which, being the butlers wife, was very convenient.

Ellen said to me one day when she was helping me to take some Ferrybridge pottery from one of the cabinets and pack it for a customer: “Miss Anna, I’ve been wondering whether to speak to you since yesterday morning.”

I looked at her in some alarm; she was clearly distressed and I wondered whether Mr. Orfey had grown tired of waiting for her legacy and turned to someone else.

“I went up to the Castle yesterday to see our Edith.”

I avoided looking at her; I must handle the pottery very carefully. “Yes,” I said.

“There’s news of the Captain.”

“The Captain,” I repeated foolishly.

“Captain Stretton. Something awful’s happened.”

“Not … dead?”

“Oh no, no … but some awful disgrace or something. He lost his ship.”

“You mean it was … sunk.”

“Something like that. They’re all talking about it up at the Castle. It’s something dreadful. And he’s miles away. And it’s some disgrace, but there’s something else, Miss Anna.”

“What, Ellen?”

“He’s married. He’s been married some time. He’s got a wife in foreign parts. He must have been married when he came here that night. Who’d have thought it!”

I didn’t believe it. He would have said so. But why should he discuss his private affairs? I must have misunderstood bitterly. I had thought … What had I thought? I was a simpleton. I was all Aunt Charlotte said I was. That evening had meant nothing to him. Two people could see the same event entirely differently. He had called on me because he had nothing else to do before he sailed. Perhaps he knew how I felt about him and was amused. Perhaps he had told his wife about that last evening. The meal by candlelight, the arrival of Aunt Charlotte. I suppose it could be seen as comic.

“How interesting,” I said.

“I had no idea, had you, miss?”

“Of what?”

“That he was married of course. He kept it dark. There’s trouble about that, too. Whoops! You nearly dropped that. There would have been trouble if that had been broken.”

Broken, I thought dramatically, like my dreams, like my hopes. Because I had been hoping. I had really believed that one day he would come back to me and then I would begin to be happy.


* * *

Captain Redvers Stretton was married. I heard it from several sources. He had married somewhere abroad, married a foreigner, so they said. He had been married for some time.

When Aunt Charlotte heard, which she did inevitably, she laughed as I had rarely seen her laugh before. And from that day she taunted me. She never lost an opportunity of bringing his name into the conversation. “Your Captain Stretton. Your evening visitor. So he had a wife all the time! Did he tell you that?”

“Why should he?” I asked. “People who come to look at the furniture don’t feel it necessary to acquaint one with their family history, do they?”

“Perhaps people who come to look at Levasseurs might.” She laughed. She was better tempered than she had been for a long time, but spiteful and malicious.

He came home I believe but I didn’t see him. I heard from Ellen that he was there. And the time passed — one day very like another, spring, summer, autumn, winter; and nothing to make one week different from another except perhaps that we sold one of the Chinese pieces which nobody seemed to want, for what Aunt Charlotte called an excellent price but which I believed was what she had paid for it. She was relieved to see it go. “You wouldn’t find another like that,” she said. “Carved red lacquer. Fifteenth century of the Hsüan Te period.”

“And you wouldn’t find another buyer either,” I retaliated.

We were like that together, constantly bickering; I was getting old and sour and so was everyone in that house. Ellen had lost some of her exuberance. Mr. Orfey was still waiting. Poor Ellen, he wanted the legacy she would get more than he wanted her. Mrs. Morton was more withdrawn than ever; she went off on her free days once a fortnight and we never knew where she went. She was mysterious and secretive in her ways. I was twenty-five — no longer young. Sometimes I thought: It is four years since that night. And it meant nothing to him because all the time he was married and he didn’t tell me. He implied … But had he implied or had I imagined it? Aunt Charlotte never forgot. She was constantly reminding me that I had behaved like a fool. I had been an innocent and he had known it. It seemed amusing to her; she would titter in an infuriating way when she spoke of it. It was the only subject she ever found amusing.

Oh, the dreariness of the Queen’s House with four women growing old and sad, all waiting for something to change their drab and dreary lives. I knew what it was: Aunt Charlotte to die. Ellen could marry Mr. Orfey. Mrs. Morton was no doubt waiting for what she would get. And I … At least I thought I should be free. Why didn’t I go away? Could I have found a post? Perhaps somewhere in England there must be an antique dealer who could make use of my services; and yet much as I hated her — for hate her I did at times — I felt a responsibility toward Aunt Charlotte. If I went she would be bereft. I was doing more and more of the essential work. I could run the business alone — except of course that I was never allowed to see the accounts. But in my heart I believed that I had a duty to her. She was my father’s sister. She had taken me in when my parents left me in England; she had looked after me when I became an orphan.

The clocks ticked on. There was a very special significance in their ticking now.


* * *

Aunt Charlotte had grown worse; she could not move from her bed. The injury to her spine had aggravated her complaint, said Dr. Elgin. Her bedroom had become an office. She still kept a tight hold on the books and I was never allowed to see them; but I was taking over all the selling and a great deal of the buying, though everything had to be submitted to her first and accounts passed through her hands. I was very busy. I devoted myself passionately to my work and if ever Ellen or Mrs. Buckle started to talk about what was happening up at Castle Crediton I implied that I was not interested.

One day Dr. Elgin asked to see me; he had just come down from Aunt Charlotte’s room.

He said: “She’s getting worse. You can’t manage her without help. There’ll come a time very soon when she’ll be completely bedridden. I suggest you have a nurse.”

I could see the point of this but it was, I said, a matter I should have to discuss with my aunt.

“Do so,” said the doctor. “And impress on her that you can’t do all that you do and be an attendant in the sick room. She needs a trained nurse.”

Aunt Charlotte was against the idea at first but eventually gave in. And then everything changed because Chantel Loman had arrived.

4

How can I describe Chantel? She was dainty and reminded me of a Dresden china figure. She had that lovely shade of hair made famous by Titian, with rather heavy brows and dark lashes; her eyes were a decided shade of green and I thought her coloring the most arresting I had ever seen. She had a straight little nose and a delicately colored complexion which, with her slender figure, gave her the Dresden look. If she had a fault it was the smallness of her mouth but I thought — and this had occurred to me with some of the finest works of art I handled — that it was the slight imperfection which added something to beauty. Perfect beauty in art and nature could become monotonous; that little difference made it exciting. And that was how Chantel seemed to me.

When she first came into the Queen’s House and sat on the carved Restoration chair which happened to be in the hall at that time, I thought: “She’ll never stay here. She’ll not come in the first place.”

But I was wrong. She said afterward that the place fascinated her, as I did. I looked so … forbidding. A regular old maid in my tweed skirt and jacket and my very severe blouse and my really lovely hair pulled back and screwed up in a way which destroyed its beauty and was criminal.

Chantel talked like that — underlining certain words and she had a way of laughing at the end of a sentence as though she were laughing at herself. Anyone less like a nurse I could not imagine.

I took her up to Aunt Charlotte and oddly enough — or though perhaps I should say naturally enough — Aunt Charlotte took a fancy to her on the spot. Chantel charmed naturally and easily, I told Ellen.

“She’s a real beauty,” said Ellen. “Things will be different now she’s come.”

And they were. She was bright and efficient. Even Aunt Charlotte grumbled less. Chantel was interested in the house and explored it. She told me later that she thought it was the most interesting house she had ever been in.

When Aunt Charlotte had been made comfortable for the night Chantel would come and sit in my room and talk. I think she was glad to have someone more or less her own age in the house. I was twenty-six and she was twenty-two; but she had lived a more interesting life, had traveled with her last patient a little and seemed to me a woman of the world.

I felt happier than I had for a long time and so was the entire household. Ellen was interested in her and I believe confided in her about Mr. Orfey. Even Mrs. Morton was more communicative with her than she had ever been with me, for it was Chantel who told me that Mrs. Morton had a daughter who was a cripple and lived with Mrs. Morton’s unmarried sister five miles from Langmouth. That was where she went on her days off; and she had come to the Queen’s House and endured the whims of Aunt Charlotte and the lack of comforts because it enabled her to be near her daughter. She was waiting for the day she would retire and they would live together.

“Fancy her telling you all that,” I cried. “How did you manage to get her to talk?”

“People do talk to me,” said Chantel.

She would stand at my window looking out on the garden and the river and say that it was all fascinating. She was vitally interested in everything and everybody. She even learned something about antiques. “The money they must represent,” she said.

“But they have to be bought first,” I explained to her. “And some of them have not been paid for. Aunt Charlotte merely houses them and gets a commission if she makes a sale.”

“What a clever creature you are!” she said admiringly.

“You have your profession which is no doubt more useful.”

She grimaced. At times she reminded me of my mother; but she was efficient as my mother would never have been.

“Preserving lovely old tables and chairs might be more useful than preserving some fractious invalids. I’ve had some horrors I can tell you.”

Her conversation was amusing. She told me she had been brought up in a vicarage. “I know now why people say poor as church mice. That’s how poor we were. All that economy. It was soul-destroying, Anna.” We had quickly come to Christian names, and hers was so pretty I said it was a shame not to use it. “There was Papa saving the souls of his parishioners while his poor children had to live on bread and dripping. Ugh! Our mother was dead — died with the birth of the youngest, myself. There were five of us.”