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“This makes me nervous,” Lou declared.
I didn’t know how to reply because I found what she said odd.
Though, thinking about it, perhaps not too odd.
Portia wasn’t Lou’s biggest fan, she hadn’t been since the very beginning. Even I was surprised my little sister asked Lou to spend this week in the country at the family home of Portia’s boyfriend.
Me? Yes.
The older sister. The only sibling. It made sense.
Portia and I had our times of strife (a lot of them), but like she always had her father’s devotion, she always wanted her big sister’s approval.
When Lou came along, she took some of the former, which was why Portia had never accepted Lou as part of our family. Dad had spoiled Portia, and when he took some attention from his youngest in order to shower Lou with his brand of love, Portia wasn’t happy.
As for my approval, it wasn’t often forthcoming, mainly because Portia didn’t often make decisions I approved of.
I wasn’t the stuffy older sister.
Portia was the mischievous younger one.
According to me.
Also according to me, that description was being nice.
In other words, Portia could often be a pain in my ass.
Lou’s invitation to this week in the countryside? The much-younger third wife of our now deceased father? A wife Portia had butted heads with for the last decade?
That made no sense at all.
Due to this, Lou feeling nervous wasn’t odd…as such.
However, she’d been a member of our family for a long time. She’d sat vigil at Dad’s deathbed right alongside Portia and me. And Portia knew I wouldn’t be thrilled if she cut Lou out of something as important as a meet-the-family with a man who Portia had been seeing for some months now, her longest-ever boyfriend.
So, Lou’s assertion was also odd.
I glanced from navigating the narrow, winding road edged in thick hedgerows to the passenger seat where Lou was sitting, and I saw she wasn’t just nervous. And it was important to note, former supermodel Louella Fernsby-Ryan didn’t often get nervous, or if she did, she knew how to hide it.
No, now she looked—there was no other way to put it—terrified.
Any normal person might be, considering all we were heading into.
That said, Lou wasn’t a normal person. She’d been hobnobbing with the rich and famous for the last twenty plus years. She was beautiful. She was confident. She’d been incredibly successful in her chosen career.
But we were to spend the next ten days at Duncroft House, the country seat of the Alcotts. That being Earl Alcott, Richard, his wife, the Countess, Jane, and Daniel, their youngest son, Portia’s new beau.
Then there was Ian, their oldest, the heir to the title, who Portia told me promised to make several appearances that week, but she and Daniel were hoping he’d spend the whole week and make it a real family affair.
Yes.
And then there was Ian Alcott.
Hmm.
These folks were old-school aristocracy, and unlike many of their ilk who had lost no status but a lot of capital and assets across the centuries, they were old-school, big-time money.
New American big-time money didn’t rub against old aristocratic money very well. It never had. And I had quite a bit of experience knowing that our progressive age hadn’t changed that.
This all didn’t include Duncroft House itself.
A well-known jewel in England’s heritage crown. Perhaps not Buckingham, Windsor, Sandringham or Kensington caliber, but not far off.
It was supposed to be extraordinary.
And it had a notorious past.
“It’s going to be okay,” I told Lou.
“I don’t think so,” she mumbled to the window.
“Portia’s grown up a lot since Dad died,” I pointed out.
“Mm,” Lou hummed noncommittally. As she would.
Yes, Portia had matured.
This might have had something to do with the fact that Lou and I both managed her trust. Although Portia had (even I had to admit) an insulting monthly allowance of two thousand pounds neither Lou nor I could touch, the rest of her substantial inheritance was doled out at our discretion.
Though, that discretion had instruction from Dad, and if Portia didn’t stay gainfully employed, she didn’t get a penny above that two grand until she managed that feat. Further, if Portia remained in a job for less than twelve months, there were strict limits set on what money was forthcoming,
again, until she’d accomplished what Dad demanded. Last, if Portia got into trouble with the police, with drugs or alcohol, or with unsavory characters or dubious projects, that money was frozen.
And if this behavior didn’t cease by the time Portia hit age thirty-five, Lou’s and my trusts were each augmented by half of Portia’s, and she received no more. Not even the two thousand.
However, if she managed to keep her shit together for five straight years, the entire trust would be at her disposal without oversight.
At first, Portia took this not as Dad intended, his way to prompt her to shape up, but instead as Dad’s beyond-the-grave assertion that he loved Lou more than her.
But recently, she’d been pulling herself together.
Portia getting it together was not due to efforts from Lou. Lou wanted Portia to like her, always had from the first time we met her (that included me, but I was less of a challenge). Now, Lou was the soft touch when Portia asked for money.
No. Portia was learning to toe the line due to me being o-v-e-r over her antics.
Dad had given her that two thousand so she wouldn’t starve because he knew I’d be a hard-ass.
And hard-ass I was.
So Portia finally seemed to be pulling it together.
And now there was Daniel Alcott.
“Have you met the Alcotts?” I asked Lou.
“I know Richard,” she said in a weirdly hesitant voice.
I glanced at her again. “Well?”
“Sorry?”
“Do you know him well?”
“Not really. Met in passing at a party or a dinner here or there.”
She said this, but it sounded like a question, like I could confirm she’d met Earl Alcott at a party or dinner here or there.
I didn’t inquire further
about that.
“Not Jane?” I asked.
“No,” she murmured. “I’ve never met ‘The Countess.’”
Yes.
“The Countess,” capitalized and in quotes because this was how she was known in the media.
Jane Alcott was quite the mysterious character. Ethereally gorgeous, if the rare photo of her was anything to go by, and highly reclusive. Even when she was younger. Therefore, obviously, with beauty, a title and money, she was an object of fascination, which could explain why she was reclusive.
It was not the same with Richard. Or Daniel.
And definitely not Ian.
They weren’t reclusive, and as for the two sons, they didn’t shy away from the media at all.
I couldn’t say Ian sought it like Daniel seemed to, but it sure sought Ian.
“Have you heard about the house?” I went on, hoping to shake her out of her mood.
“Everyone’s heard about the house,” she answered.
“What have you heard?”
“It’s haunted.” I knew she’d turned my way when she asked, “Have you heard that?”
“Yes,” I said. “People tend to die there.”
“It’s been around for hundreds of years,” she reminded me. “There was a fortress there during William the Conqueror’s time, so a dwelling has been there for over a millennium. It’s bound to have had a death or two.”
A death or two?
“When Portia told us things were serious with Daniel and asked us to this week at Duncroft, I looked it up,” I informed her. “Some pretender to the throne was
tortured and killed in the castle that sat there in the thirteenth century. The torture was medieval, Lou, literally and brutally. Then they threw him in a pit and starved him to death. Apparently, the new house is built over that pit, and his bones are still there.”
“Why a week?”
From the subject I was talking about, I was confused by her question. “Pardon?”
“Why not invite us for a weekend? Or if she wanted more time for us to get to know Daniel and his family, a long weekend? Or, really, starting off with us all going to dinner in London? That would be easier for everybody. Why are we here from Friday to the next Sunday? That’s a long time, it’s a lot to ask, it’s a lot of pressure for everyone, and it’s strange.”
“It’s Portia.”
I heard Lou sigh.
Yes. The time suck. The drama.
All Portia.
“Then there was that earl’s daughter in the fifteenth century who wasn’t thrilled with the man her father chose for her to marry,” I continued with my theme to take us from Portia’s larks, which I found annoying and Lou had a lot more patience for, but they had to wear thin for her too. “So, on the eve of her wedding, she poisoned her fiancé, and not to leave them out, also poisoned her father, her mother and her husband-to-be’s father and mother. Not exactly the Red Wedding, but the story goes that the poison she chose made them expel everything from blood and bile to unmentionables from both ends until they died. I’d call that worse than the Red Wedding…by a lot.”
“It’s pretty gross,” Lou agreed.
“There was also that
countess and her lover. I forget his name.”
“Cuthbert.”
I nearly smiled. Of course she knew about the fortress, the castle and Cuthbert. She’d looked it up too.
“Cuthbert,” I repeated. “Found in flagrante delicto with the countess by the earl. They were quite into what they were doing, didn’t know he’d come upon them. He had time to get hold of a dagger, and then he gutted old Cuthbert in his cuckold’s bed while his wife watched in horror, before he turned the dagger on her.”
“Poor Cuthbert.”
“And poor Lady Joan,” I added. “Her blood pooled with Cuthbert’s as she bled to death beside him in that bed.”
“Yes,” Lou replied. “Poor Lady Joan.”
“Four people have hung themselves in that house,” I carried on. “At least two have died in duels in the forest surrounding it, though there could be more. After that practice was outlawed, it still went on. And then there’s what happened to Dorothy Clifton in the twenties.”
Lore had it that Duncroft was possessed of more than one ghost.
Dorothy Clifton, it was said, was the angriest spirit of the lot.
I could tell Lou was warming to my theme when she spoke.
Then again, I suspected she would. She was always trying to get me to cuddle up with popcorn and ice cream and watch things like Get Out and The Shining and It. She loved that kind of thing.
I hated it. That would be hated it, with a passion.
It took a while for me to love her, but eventually I did. I wasn’t as ugly about it in the beginning as Portia, but Dad marrying someone I could be friends with in the manner we were actually contemporaries was not fun.
Then we became friends, and things changed.
“What I don’t understand is, why the secrecy?” she asked. “From what I know, never, not once have they opened the house to the public. By invitation only. And those invitations have been scarce. Every generation, rabid privacy. It’s really unusual in a heritage home in England like Duncroft.”
“I know, right?”
“It’s like they’re hiding something.”
It totally was.
“I guess we’re going to find out,” she noted. “Ten days there, plenty of time to see a ghost.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Plenty of time. Plenty of time to uncover secrets too.”
“Yes,” she whispered, again sounding off, and I almost didn’t hear it when she finished, “Secrets.”
I didn’t push further on that either, though I thought it was weird, regardless of the fact I knew Lou had secrets.
We all did.
I didn’t dig for hers, mostly so she would return the favor.
As for what we were soon to face, I’d caved in watching Get Out and The Shining, because they were classics and I liked films. And I would admit I thought they were both really good. I put my foot down on such as It and The Ring (and others).
But I wasn’t concerned about Duncroft’s supposed ghosts because I didn’t believe in ghosts.
I was an avid member of the National Trust. I’d been in many a manor and castle in that country (and others). The mustiness. The draftiness. The dank darkness or shadowed corners or secret passageways. I could absolutely see how people could convince themselves they’d experienced a haunting.
But that didn’t make it real.
No, I was more worried about the patrician Richard. The withdrawn Jane. The ne’er-do-well Daniel.
The womanizer Ian.
And secrets.
Theirs.
And ours.
Yes, I was more concerned about the Alcotts than about their supposedly haunted country seat.
Them and us…we were not a good mix.
Dad had moved Portia and me to England twenty years ago. Although I went home frequently for visitations with Mom—and so Portia could have some sort of mother figure, I talked Dad into letting her go with me—for
all intents and purposes, we’d never left.
We were still proud Americans and the beneficiaries of massive inheritances of new money. My mother, Dad’s first castoff, had been and still was a schoolteacher. Portia’s mother, castoff two, had been an incorrigible gold digger.
And then there was Lou, who was only five years older than me.
This sojourn felt more like Lou and I had been called in as reinforcements for a week in the English countryside at the very famous home of a very wealthy and illustrious family.
But nevertheless, we were still outnumbered.
And if you believed in that kind of thing, outclassed.
In other words, I was feeling some anxiety too.
It didn’t help that we’d left the motorway forty-five minutes ago. We’d then turned off the A road twenty minutes ago, and not onto a B road, but a coiling, thin ribbon of C road. We hadn’t passed a town or village in miles. And according to the satnav, we had another twenty-six minutes on this lane, twisting through…nothing.
This was a long way from anything—and call me a city girl (which I was)—I didn’t like it.
Lou grew quiet along with me.
And we both (for my part, since I was driving, it was intermittently) watched the arrow on the satnav glide along the snaking road as we kept track of the countdown to arrival.
It was 2:37 and we were to arrive at 3:03.
We broke out of the hedgerows at 2:55 and into rolling countryside covered in green, with vast splotches of purple heather and jutting masts of gray, lichen-covered rocks punctuated here and there by an irregular tree malformed by wind.
Add some mist and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a frock-coated Heathcliff brooding astride his horse in the distance.
At 3:00, the moor gave way to a more cultivated and arboreal landscape.
At 3:02, Duncroft House became visible.
And…wow.
Okay.
Maybe Buckingham and Windsor were the biggest, shiniest jewels in England’s crown.
But in my opinion, Duncroft shone brightly as jewel number three.
It was beautiful.
It was huge.
It was sprawling.
And it was overpowering.
“Right. Now I’m nervous,” I admitted.
Lou reached out and squeezed my knee.
I drove my Mercedes between the tall, black, elaborate iron gates accented copiously by gold and attached on either side to a ten-foot-tall wall made of thick Yorkstone.
We’d officially arrived at Duncroft.
And I wasn’t feeling sterling thoughts.
Because the second we drove through those gates, a shiver slithered down my spine.
TWO
Lou took her first hit within moments of our arrival.
I’d swung the car around the drive made of carefully-edged and manicured blond gravel to come to a stop at the bottom of the wide front steps. We’d both gotten out of the car to see a tall, handsome young man wearing crisp, khaki pants, whiter-than-white trainers, and a light-blue, long-sleeved polo shirt bounding down toward us.
We’d also gotten out to be dwarfed into insignificance by the house and to be viciously bitten by the chill of a cloudless, autumnal, northern English afternoon.
The house had four wings in a cross shape, that being the Scottish cross, diagonal. It was said, the middle intersection was where the fortress had been and under which the bones of the pretender still lay.
It was four stories tall, a mix of red brick and Yorkstone, with two turrets at the ends of each leg of the cross, eight in total, all topped with green domes of tarnished copper. The rest of the roof was dark slate. There were parts of the structure on the ground floor covered in trailing wisteria. There were enumerable peaks and chimneys and gables. And in the center flew the Union Jack, underneath it, a light-blue flag with a golden shield on it.
It was sprawling, stately, handsome, but most of all, imposing.
It was not the genteel country seat of a long-standing aristocratic line.
It screamed wealth, importance…dominance.
It said, You don’t belong here.
The king himself could stand where I was standing and maybe hesitate before he approached those wide steps.
The young man made it to us, and I saw there was a logo stitched into his shirt over his left chest. A golden shield, the same as on the flag flying above us. It looked to be a profusion of sprigs of heather adorning the top edges, the requisite helmet from a suit of armor at the top middle, and in the shield was the full body of a clawing wolf in profile.
He looked between the two of us and delivered Lou’s first blow.
“Mrs. Ryan, welcome.” He then turned to me. “Miss Ryan.”
Lou couldn’t quite hide the flinch.
Then again, from ages seventeen through twenty-five, she’d subsisted on coffee and cigarettes to keep her curve-less frame. As she aged, this turned to restrictive dieting and obsessive exercise, but neither of these done with a mind to health and nutrition, but instead keeping her size 0.
Because of this, her youthful glow and tremendous genes had slowly morphed to the look of desperation. Now, her forehead seemed too wide, her eyes too far apart, the rest of the features of her face scrunched beneath both, and nothing moved due to regular Botox injections.
She was still beautiful, she’d never not be (at least in my eyes), but she no longer was the young, energetic, rail-thin model. Instead, she was the gaunt thirty-nine-year-old woman who looked thirty-nine and as if she was wondering if a life of living a maxim, “nothing tastes better than
skinny feels,” might have been a life wasted.
I was thirty-four and apparently looked my age too, and I’d never met a treadmill I liked, so I avoided them, thus our relationship worked perfectly.
However, there’d been a time when people who didn’t pay attention thought I was Dad’s wife, and Lou was his daughter. It sickened me, and it never failed to irritate me that Lou would preen whenever it happened.
Things were different now, but I didn’t celebrate her pain. It made me sad for her that something so mundane meant so much to her.
Everyone aged, and unequivocally, the more you had of it, the more blessed you became.
The years we lived, people didn’t seem to understand, were the gift that kept giving.
Until they stopped.
“I’m here to show you into the house,” he announced. “The other Miss Ryan is being informed of your arrival and she’s to meet you in the Pearl Room for tea.”
“What about our suitcases?” Lou asked.
It was then I winced as the young man quickly hid his expression of revulsion.
One did not touch one’s own luggage in a setting like this.
Though, the distaste he was quick to hide was over the top, but perhaps not in a place like this.
Even so, I didn’t like it.
Needless to say, Lou had not grown up with money either. She’d lived the first sixteen years of her life on a council estate. For the last thirteen, Dad took care of everything, except, of course, for the eighteen months since he’d been gone. In the years in between, her life was a whirlwind of jet-setting between fashion shows and photo shoots, parties and dating Hollywood actors. Weekends in the country with the hoi polloi wasn’t on her agenda.
She didn’t know the rules because she didn’t have to bother to learn them.
I, on the other hand, had never been my father’s favorite, but I’d been adjacent to his
money, and as such had learned to make my own way in these worlds long ago.
It was too late to cover her gaffe, so I forged around the car, hooked my arm in hers and turned to the man. “We’ve been driving a long time. Tea and Portia sound perfect.”
He nodded, threw an arm toward the steps, but preceded us, jogging up as we followed more sedately.
Hit number two landed on us both as we entered Duncroft.
Particularly me.
I felt a jolt of electricity hit the second I stepped over the threshold.
I’d traveled widely, and I honestly couldn’t say I’d ever experienced something as audaciously beautiful, with the razor’s edge of exquisite taste, as the enormous entry of Duncroft House.
It was the joint of the cross, the entirety of it, and the ceiling rose all four stories and was topped with a glass dome. The sweep of the elegant staircase spiraled round and round to the top floor, making the space seem cavernous.
And embedded that feeling that we were insignificant.
The floor was a sea of pristine-white marble, the walls a shade of lilac gray so pale, if the crown molding wasn’t an immaculate white, I would have thought it too was that color.
In front of us, opposite the front door, beyond the sweeping staircase (also all white with a thick, dove-gray carpet runner clamped at the top edges of the treads by a thin rod of burnished silver, the color of that carpet having to be insanely difficult to keep clean), all you could see were windows that framed a massive conservatory. And well beyond that, barely discernable through the jungle of plants, were manicured lawns and gardens, and beyond that, heathered moors.
Four wide hallways led off of the foyer.
And at the foot of the stairs, atop the broad newel post, stood a figure carved in white marble.
I didn’t know who she was, Aphrodite, Hera, Persephone, some other goddess. She was walking tall atop grass and flowers, the flowers rising up to mingle
with the graceful folds of the shift that closely skimmed her feminine curves. Flowers also mingled in her flowing hair.
Her head was tipped back, and a serene expression was on her face.
Serene and…replete.
There was something sexual about her. It was nuanced, yet still managed to be overt. As if she was caught walking over the grass through the flowers while orgasming.
She was also tall. If she were on the ground, she’d be as tall as me.
She would seem curious and even wrong anywhere else but in that vast, bleached space, and if the person who sculpted her did it in that exact spot to make her proportions and impact as flawless as it could be, I wouldn’t be surprised.
“Your keys?” the young man requested.
I turned to him.
“I’ll get your luggage and park your car,” he explained.
I nodded, took my car fob off the ring and handed it to him.
He dipped his chin and said, “This way.”
I noticed that Lou tore her gaze off the statue when we followed him left, down the hall that led along the front southwestern leg of the house.
We walked to the very first door, and he stood outside it, again with arm extended, inviting us in. “The Pearl Room,” he stated. “Miss Ryan, I’m sure, will join you shortly.”
He did not enter the room, but we did.
The name of the room was apt. There were more colors here than in the entry, but they were all in the same theme, oyster, and the shimmering golds and pinks and silvers and greens of mother of pearl. The massive chandelier that fell from the ceiling rose in the center of the room looked made of swags of actual pearls.
“Holy shit,” I muttered
“Agreed,” Lou muttered in return, moving her attention from the chandelier, toward the door.
I looked that way too, to see the young man was no longer there.
“Am I wrong?” she asked under her breath. “Should he have introduced himself?”
It wasn’t the first time I wished my father had been less…my father.
It was his narcissistic, alpha tendencies that not only made his first wife bitter, twisted and angry, and his second wife banished and forgotten, it had also dispatched his last wife and youngest child as incapable of dealing with the world he’d left them in.
“Yes, he should have,” I told her. “I can’t even imagine how big the staff is in this place, but if he was sent to greet us, and he’s taking care of our bags and my car, we’ll probably see him around while we’re here, and I should know who to ask for by name if, say, I want my car fob back.”
“Okay,” Lou replied, drifting further into the room while taking it in.
I stayed where I was, trying to put my finger on why all of this rubbed me the wrong way.
The room was spotless, as was the entry. There not only wasn’t a speck of dust, but also nothing was out of place. And the two porcelain-white sofas looked like no ass had sat in them since they’d been laid facing each other. They were set perpendicular to the white marble fireplace with its veins of gray and lilac and gold. The same unused look with the two armchairs covered in pearlescent leather that sat at angles at the apex of the couches, facing the fireplace.
I knew the living quarters of houses like this tended to be a lot homier than the formal areas.
Daniel and Portia had been seeing each other just over six months. We were to be there for ten days. It wasn’t lost on anyone what this week was about.
We’d barely stepped into the house, and the choice of this room to be our landing spot for tea upon arrival spoke volumes.
And every word was an insult.
“This room is…scarily beautiful,” Lou noted.
She wasn’t wrong.
“All the white is…a lot,” she continued.
She wasn’t wrong about that either.
“Daphne!”
I turned at my name, then froze, because Portia was sailing through the door.
Though, the reason I froze was spying this version of Portia, a version I didn’t know, who was sailing through the door.
She was wearing an ivory sweater, the deep fold of the top made it off the shoulder, the matching skirt was a swish of falling ruffles of ivory tulle. It tumbled in an uneven hem to her ankles, exposing the ivory, velvet, Mary Jane ballet flats with a thin strap and delicate rhinestone buckle.
Her honeyed hair was pulled back at the crown, the rest toppled in waves and ringlets down her shoulders.
For a moment, I felt such an overwhelming sense of nausea, I was worried I’d throw up.
My sister did not wear tulle. Or ruffles. Or velvet ballet flats.
My sister was the cutting edge of Prada mixed with the nuanced macabre of McQueen.
Our citizenship and accent set us apart in this country, and Portia leaned into the rock and roll aspect to make sure no one forgot she was different, she was cool. She’d come over when she was young, but she carefully nurtured her accent so she’d never lose it.
And when it came to the American version of her that she wanted to convey, she was Miley Cyrus, not Taylor Swift.
She threw her arms around me and hugged me.
I was so surprised by her appearance, I had to force myself to return the gesture.
When she broke away, she grabbed both my hands, beamed up at me and said, “I’m so glad you’re here.”
I opened my mouth but didn’t have the time to say anything before she let me go, turned to Lou and greeted disinterestedly, “Hey, Lou.”
“Hello, lovey,”
Lou replied, sounding choked.
At the note in her voice, I glanced in her direction to see she wasn’t injured by Portia’s attitude (she was very much used to it). Her eyes were wide and aimed at Portia’s outfit.
Yes, this version of Portia did not jibe.
“C’mon, they’re going to be bringing tea in soon, we need to talk before they get here.”
She dragged me to the porcelain-white sofas and completely ignored Lou.
I didn’t, capturing her gaze as we moved, holding my hand her way.
When Portia noticed Lou coming with us, she instructed, “You can sit over there,” and gestured to the couch across from us.
Lou was much better at hiding the hurt Portia’s behavior caused her, so she didn’t balk before she shifted her trajectory to the other couch.
“Okay, so, you have to be, like, really cool with Daniel and his folks, all right?” Portia demanded before I’d even settled into the sofa.
“Hey, thanks for taking off for a week and driving over four hours from London to meet my new boyfriend and his family in the middle of nowhere. And by the way, you both look lovely, but do you need anything? I know you’ve been in the car for a really long time, so would you rather stretch your legs or something?”
I spoke these words and they were an admonishment because Portia should have said them.
Portia’s eyes narrowed, and she stated, “Yes, things like that. Don’t say things like that in front of Daniel and his parents.”
She didn’t miss my point, so I didn’t belabor it.
“What are you wearing?” I asked instead.
She peered down at herself. “I’m trying a new look.”
“For Daniel?”
She didn’t quite catch my eyes. “He likes more feminine clothes.”
“What do you like?” I pressed, even though I knew what that was, and it wasn’t a ruffled, tulle skirt, as pretty as it was.
She caught my gaze.
“Daniel,” she stressed.
“Portia—” I began, but I got no further because she leaned into me.
But it wasn’t with anger or attitude, as it usually would be.
It felt like what had been filling the car from Lou on the way there.
Fear.
“I like him, okay? Don’t mess this up,” she begged. “I need you guys,”—she turned her head Lou’s way—“both of you guys, to be really cool and not mess this up.”
“How exactly would we mess this up?” I inquired.
“Portia.”
At her name intoned in a man’s cultured voice coming from the direction of the door, we all looked that way.
And I knew exactly what we might mess up.
Yes, Richard and Jane, the Earl and Countess Alcott, were the upper crust. Tall. Straight. He was ageing almost preternaturally well: his dark hair only touched with silver, his perfect bone structure offering the foundation for his continued good looks even though (I’d looked him up), he was nearly sixty-five. And she was a goddess. Cool and blonde. Ethereal didn’t describe her. The house didn’t need to be haunted, her beauty was haunting enough.
They walked into the room, and we all stood.
“Your family has arrived,” Richard stated like an accusation.
“Yes, I sent word,” Portia said.
“Which is why we’re here,” Richard replied frostily. He turned to Lou. “You must be Louella.”
You must be Louella?
I thought they’d met.
Lou didn’t remind him
of that.
“Yes, yes. Hi. Hello.” She moved forward, holding up a hand.
Both Richard and Jane stared at it for a scant moment as if trying to cypher some way to avoid touching it before Richard reached out and took it briefly and let her go.
Jane did not.
Richard also didn’t look Lou in the face.
Then again, Lou managed the whole encounter with her eyes pinned to some point beyond Richard’s shoulder.
Weird.
“Welcome to our home,’ Richard droned.
“And this is Daphne,” Portia declared, pushing me a bit toward them.
I, however, did not offer my hand.
“My Lord, my Lady,” I said aloofly, matching their welcome. “Thank you for having us.”
Richard’s attention was sharp on me. Jane remained expressionless.
Richard looked to Portia. “You’ll explain the rules?”
The rules?
And, hello, how do you do to you too.
Asshole.
“Of course,” Portia assured quickly.
“We’ll let you catch up,” Richard declared. “And we’ll see you at dinner.”
With that, breathing not another word nor gifting us with another look, they left the room, Richard closing the door like he didn’t want someone passing and seeing us in there.
Slowly, I turned my head to regard my sister.
She read my expression.
“It takes a while for them to melt,” she explained.
“Have they melted toward you?” I demanded to know.
She shrugged.
Meaning: No. ...
