India Grey - Secrets

True, there was some furniture, old rather than antique, dusted rather than polished, but there were certainly no flowers, no perfumed scent, nor, not surprisingly, was there any cat.

‘What is it?’ Ran asked her.

Hard on the heels of the acute envy she had felt when she had first seen the exterior of the house came a pang of sadness for its inner neglect. Oh, it was clean enough, if you discounted the air possessing a sharp, almost chemical smell that made her wrinkle her nose a little, but it was a long, long way from the home she had so lovingly mentally created.

She heard Ran moving around in the hall behind her.

‘I’ll take you up to your room,’ he told her. ‘Have you got something for your headache?’

‘Yes, but they’re in my luggage which is in my hire car,’ Sylvie told him grimly.

In the excitement of seeing the house her headache had abated slightly, but now the strong smell in the hallway had made it return and with interest. She could no longer deny that lying down somewhere dark and quiet had become a necessity.

‘It’s this way,’ Ran told her unnecessarily as he headed towards the stairs.

Once they might have been elegant, although now it was hard to know; the original staircase no longer existed and the monstrosity which had replaced it made Sylvie shudder in distaste.

The house had a sad, forlorn air about it, she recognised as she reached the large rectangular landing, carpeted again in the same revolting dun-brown as the hallway below.

‘Did your great-uncle live here?’ Sylvie asked him curiously.

‘No. It was let out to tenants. When my cousin inherited he moved in here, and after his death … I thought about selling it, but it’s too far off the beaten track to attract the interest of a buyer, and then once I’d made the decision to hang onto the land and farm it seemed to make sense to move into the house myself. It needs some work doing on it, of course …’

Sylvie said nothing but her expressive eyes gave her away and Ran continued coldly, ‘Well, yes, I can see that to someone such as yourself, used to only the very best that money can provide, it must be rather a comedown. I’m sorry if the only accommodation I can offer you isn’t up to your usual standards …’ Ran’s eyes darkened as he reflected on the elegance of Alex’s home and the luxury she must have enjoyed with Lloyd, but to Sylvie, who was remembering how Ran had once seen her living in the most basic and primitive conditions, when she had been part of the group of New Age travellers who had set up camp on Alex’s estate, the look he was giving her seemed to be one of taunting mockery.

‘You’re down here,’ Ran was saying as he led the way down a corridor with doors off either side of it, pushing one of them open and then standing to one side as he waited for her to enter.

The bedroom was large, with two long windows that let in the glowing evening sunlight. The old-fashioned wooden furniture, like the tables in the hallway, was spotlessly clean but lacked the warm lustre that it would once have had from being lovingly polished by several generations of female hands. The empty grate in the pretty fireplace, which she would have filled with a collection of dried flowers or covered with an embroidered firescreen, was simply that—an empty grate. The curtains and the bedding were modern and, she suspected, newly purchased for her visit. The same depressing brown carpet as downstairs covered the floor.

‘You’ve got your own bathroom,’ Ran told her as he crossed the floor to push open another door. ‘It’s old-fashioned but it works.’

As she looked into the bathroom past him, Sylvie said wryly, ‘It may be old-fashioned to you, Ran, but this type of plain white Edwardian sanitaryware is very much in vogue right now.’

‘There are wardrobes and cupboards on that wall,’ he told her unnecessarily, indicating the bank of built-in furniture. ‘I haven’t had the chance yet, but tomorrow I’ll bring up a desk from downstairs.’

‘I’ll certainly need somewhere to put my laptop,’ Sylvie agreed. ‘But I will also need to have a room somewhere, I think preferably up at the Hall itself, to work officially from. But that’s something we can discuss later.

‘Where’s your housekeeper?’ she asked him. ‘I’d like to meet her …’

‘Mrs Elliott … She’ll be here in the morning. I can introduce you then.

‘Look.’ He glanced at his watch and then told her, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you. I have to go out, but if you’d like something for that headache …’

‘What I’d like is my own medication,’ Sylvie told him acidly, ‘but, since that’s not available, thanks but no, thanks. I need my luggage,’ she added pointedly.

‘If you give me the keys to your Discovery, I’ll go and get it for you,’ Ran told her promptly. ‘Just give me ten minutes to make a couple of phone calls.’

As she handed over the keys to her car Sylvie wondered where it was he was going to be spending the evening and with whom.

Ran was a very masculinely attractive man; even she had to admit that.

‘I doubt that Ran will ever marry,’ Alex had once commented.

‘Why not?’ Sylvie had questioned curiously, her adoring teenage heart thumping frantically at the thought of being married to Ran, of being his wife, of sharing his life, his bed … A delicious shiver of anticipatory pleasure had run through her as she’d willed her stepbrother to say that there was a mysterious someone in Ran’s life, far too young for him as yet, a special someone … herself …

But instead, disappointingly, prosaically, Alex had told her, ‘An estate manager’s salary and tied accommodation in a small cottage are hardly up to the standard or style of living that the women Ran dates are used to, and he’s far too proud to want to live off his wife …’

‘The women …?’ Sylvie had flared unhappily, whilst her mother, who had been listening to their conversation, had chipped in disparagingly.

‘Ran would be far better off marrying some farmer’s daughter, a girl who’s been brought up for that kind of lifestyle …’

Sylvie remembered how Alex’s eyebrows had risen at this display of snobbery from her mother. But now, of course, Ran’s prospects had changed. She knew how much Lloyd had paid him for the house and the estate. There had been death duties and other commitments to meet, of course, but even so he would have been left with a sizeable sum, much larger than the inheritance she had received from her father, which her over-anxious mother had been convinced would make her a target for potential fortune-hunters.

Yes, with the money he had at his disposal, and the living he would no doubt make out of the land, Ran would financially have a great deal to offer a woman.

Not that a man’s financial status had ever counted for anything with her. Love in a cottage might be an ideal, a daydream, a fantasy now relegated to her childhood, but secretly Sylvie still adhered to the belief ‘Better a humble home where love is than a mansion without it’— and, of course, there had never been any doubt in her mind whatsoever that when it came to the material things in life what Ran had to offer the woman he loved …

The woman he loved.

She bit her lip as Ran started to walk away from her. Once he had gone she stared out of the bedroom window. It overlooked the formal gardens to one side of the house. Like the house, they had an air of neglect; of being unloved. Sylvie’s vivid imagination soon filled the neglected borders with lush herbaceous plants and restored the overgrown rose garden to what must have been a haven of peace and perfume.

The air in the bedroom felt stale, but when she tried to open one of the sash windows all she managed to do was to break one of her nails. Cursing herself under her breath, she winced as the pain inside her head increased. Perhaps she had been rash in refusing Ran’s offer of some headache tablets.