Elizabeth Edmondson - The Villa in Italy - Escape to the Italian sun with this captivating, page-turning mystery

‘Now we’ve lost her,’ Jessica said to George.

‘I take it Miss Vaughan plays the piano?’

‘Delia is a professional singer. Opera.’

‘Then it is a shame that the piano is out of tune,’ said George. ‘Otherwise we might have had the pleasure of hearing her sing.’

Benedetta clearly considered they had spent enough time in the drawing room. She switched off the light above the painting, and went over to close the shutters.

‘It’s an evening room, with doors open on to that big terrace and a view of the sun setting over the sea,’ said Marjorie.

‘We can come in here after dinner,’ said George.

‘If Benedetta will let us,’ said Jessica. ‘She’s very bossy.’

As Benedetta led the way from the room, Delia lingered for a last look at the painting. She gazed up at it, the image of her mother’s portrait strong in her mind; one dissolved into the other, and she was back, far back in her childhood, looking at the picture of her mother while her parents had a furious argument.

She must have been very young. Three or so. Her nurse talked about it for years afterwards. She had never forgotten the day that little Delia wickedly escaped her eagle eye and scampered away, undetected, to the forbidden territory of the gate which led through into the churchyard.

The Georgian house was built, in true manorial style, next to the village church. In former days, the family would have walked to divine service along the path, through the gate and so on to church land. But her father had bought the house and not the religion. Lord Saltford had been brought up a Nonconformist, and he would have nothing to do with the Church of England, however close at hand. He even objected to the bells as being frivolous in their exuberant peals, but that was something he couldn’t fix, the village having a strong tradition of bell-ringing that no newcomer, however rich, was going to change.

So the gate was kept shut, but on the other side of the gate on that particular day was Pansy the donkey. Pansy was the love of Delia’s young life, and she considered it unfair that Pansy should be allowed into the churchyard as a neighbourly gesture to graze the grass and save the aged sexton’s labours, while she had to remain on this side of the gate.

The latch had not caught, the gate swung open, and Delia escaped through it. Wily beyond her years, she had closed the gate behind her, and it was several hours before the desperate nurse discovered her, curled up under an ancient yew, fast asleep.

The row was a distant memory, beyond her understanding then, but frightening as arguing parents are to a child, even to a child of her time who spent most of her life in the company of her nurse upstairs in the nursery. On that occasion, her nurse, distraught and sobbing in the kitchen, had left her with her mother, and there was her father accusing her mother of not caring for her at all, of deliberately letting her roam, of not immediately sending out searchers to look for her. The child might have been anywhere, could even have been abducted, held for ransom. She could, he bellowed at her mother, in a terrifying rage now, at least pretend to care for the child.

‘I care for her as much as you care for Boswell,’ had been her mother’s defiant words before she flew out of the room.

The remark hadn’t surprised Delia; even at three years old, she had known that her father didn’t like her thirteen-year-old brother, Boswell, any more than she did.

Odd, how a scene like that, from a quarter of a century before, when she was too young according to all the psychologists to have any memories of anything, should come so clearly to her mind. Buried all that time, only to emerge now, in a place so very different from her childhood home.

She was back in the present; there was Jessica at the door, calling to her to come. With a final glance at the portrait—how the woman dominated the room—Delia went to join the others.

Marjorie fell into step beside her. ‘You felt it,’ she said abruptly. ‘The atmosphere, the presence of this Beatrice Malaspina.’

‘It’s a remarkable portrait.’

‘It’s not just that. The whole place is filled with her presence.’

‘You mean photos, and her furniture; she probably had a lot to do with the way the house looks. Unless she employed an interior designer, and none of it reflects her true personality.’

‘That’s not what I mean,’ said Marjorie, and snapped her mouth shut.

Neurotic, Delia said inwardly. Neurotic woman on the verge of middle age, with a chip on her shoulder. I don’t see that she could ever have had anything to do with the woman in that portrait, talk about different worlds.

They gathered before dinner on the part of the colonnade they had named the fresco terrace, and Delia went in search of drinks. ‘There’ll be wine, but they might have the makings of a cocktail. Beatrice Malaspina looked a cocktaily kind of woman to me,’ Delia said. ‘Where did I put that dictionary?’

She came back triumphant, with Benedetta in tow, bearing a tray of bottles and glasses and a very up-to-date cocktail shaker.

‘No problem,’ said Delia, waving at the array. ‘The magic word, cocktail, and hey presto, Benedetta had this out and ready. The jazz age has a lot to answer for, don’t you think?’

George said he was absolutely no good at mixing cocktails, and he looked hopefully at the others.

‘I’ll do it,’ Marjorie said, adding that she’d worked behind the bar at an hotel at one time. Let them despise her; what did she care?

But Delia was full of admiration and interest. ‘Lucky you. I always wanted to do that,’ she said. ‘How come?’

‘My cousin was manager of a big hotel on the south coast. I was staying down there one summer and all the staff left, first one thing and then another. So the barman was rushed off his feet. He showed me what to do, and I got quite good at it.’

Marjorie was mixing the contents of the bottles and adding ice and a soupçon of this and that in a most professional way as she spoke. A final brisk flourish of the shaker, and she poured drinks for all of them.

‘Jolly good,’ said Delia. ‘I vote we appoint you cocktail-maker-in-chief while we’re here. And you can show me how you do it. I wish they taught you really useful stuff like that at school, instead of wanting you to arrange flowers and manage household accounts.’

‘We didn’t do those things at my school,’ said Marjorie. ‘I expect it was a very different kind of school from yours. I went to the local girls’ secondary.’

‘You probably learnt more than I did,’ said Delia cheerfully. ‘I bet you can spell, which is more than Jessica can, let me tell you. She’s a rotten speller.’

‘Was yours a boarding school?’ Marjorie asked, emboldened by her cocktail.

‘Yes. Northern and bleak. Jessica was there, too; that’s where we became friends. It was simply ghastly.’

George was sipping at his cocktail. ‘Don’t you like it?’ Marjorie asked. ‘Can I mix you something different?’

‘On the contrary, I am savouring it. It is an alchemy that you make among the bottles, I think. Also, I am interested in hearing about schools. I wasn’t educated in England, you see.’

‘I thought you weren’t English,’ said Marjorie.

‘I was brought up in Denmark. My mother is Danish. But I was educated abroad, at a Catholic school.’

‘Are you Catholic?’ Marjorie said. ‘I thought scientists were obliged to be atheists.’

‘You can be brought up a Catholic and then give it up as soon as you’re grown up,’ Delia said. ‘I was brought up a Methodist, but nothing would get me into a church now.’

‘The best thing to be is C of E, like me,’ Jessica said. ‘It means you can believe or not believe exactly what you want. And how odd that we should talk about religion, have you noticed that English people never do?’