I stole a sideways glance to check his expression, but his face was straight, concentrating on the uneven path ahead. We were striding along at a blood-warming pace, and I was sure from his deadpan delivery that Robert was using our lack of eye contact as a chance to wind me up. “Dance cards? As in . . . may I have this dance, Miss Bennet?”
“Yup.”
“You’re joking!” I paused. “You are joking?”
He shook his head. “You need a different partner for each reel, so to save embarrassment, there’s a free-for-all over dinner to get the evening booked. And before you say, ‘Ooh, how romantic,’ in reality it’s brutal. I’ve seen men get ditched right over the crème brûlée when a better dancer walks past.”
“You love it, really,” I said, tingling. “You know you’re the first one to get bagged.”
Robert raised his hands in pretend amazement. “Why, yes, Miss Nicholson! It’s every man’s dream to dress up in an orange, yellow, and black skirt, and tag-team wrestle to the sound of a fiddle being scraped with a cat. While trying to make small talk with some random woman who keeps hinting about settling down and what sort of horse do I have? When she knows full well I don’t even have a horse.”
We’d been walking along the leaf-covered track for several minutes, with green thickets on each side that rustled (rabbits? mice?), but now we’d reached a gate that opened onto a smaller stone path, leading deeper into the woods. Robert opened it for me with an old-fashioned flourish that might have been him taking the mickey. He definitely inclined his head as I thanked him. I wasn’t complaining, though: I’d had more doors opened for me in the past twenty-four hours than I had had all year.
“What a trial for you,” I went on. “Forced to suffer an evening of candlelight and champagne in your own ballroom. Boo-hoo.”
“Don’t get me wrong. Candlelight and champagne—fine,” he said. “It’s the dancing and the social machinations that aren’t my thing. Are you a keen dancer? Have you reeled?”
I laughed out loud. “God, no! I’m a shocking dancer. I make wardrobes look like slinky movers. I’d cause some kind of pileup if I ever tried reeling.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s not as hard as it looks, especially not for the girls. You just have to resign yourself to being spun from one place to the next. Fun for you, bloody hard work for the men.”
“From what I’ve heard, I’d break myself and probably someone else. I have issues around coordination.”
Ahead the trees thinned out, and in the clearing I saw a neat lodge behind a small cottage garden, a perfect chocolate-box house with a slate roof and a squat chimney and a weather vane in the shape of a fox.
“This is your house?” I breathed.
“No, Snow White lives here, I’m renting a room. Of course it’s my house.” Robert patted his pockets, looking for his keys. “Girls can get away with being rubbish in the reel, but you wouldn’t believe the criticism men get. I’m so bad, last year Lady Duffield commiserated with my mother about my ‘awful riding accident.’ Turns out she thought I was Dougie Graham—and he’d broken his leg in three places and was wearing a cast under his trousers.”
I’d heard this sort of thing before, usually before dancing classes where the “terrible dancer” turned out to be the tap and modern champion of East Sheen.
“Yeah, yeah,” I scoffed. “I bet you’ve never managed to split your own lip doing the Charleston.”
Robert turned round and looked straight at me.
“Do you want me to demonstrate?” he asked. His eyes had a twinkle in them that made my stomach loop suddenly up to my chest. I wanted to look away—and frankly, I should have, because I wasn’t completely sure what my face was doing—but something made me hold his gaze.
Robert pocketed his keys and held out his hands. He had nice hands, with long fingers under the wrist-warmers. “Come on, let me show you.”
I hesitated. The man had no idea what he was risking.
“Plenty of room out here,” he went on, glancing at the bare trees around us. “Not much to crash into. I can’t do the exact music, but if I screech a bit, it should give you an idea.”
If I hadn’t felt such a disorienting tremble inside, I’d have grabbed his hands without even thinking. If it had been Fraser, or even Max. But even though I’d already felt Robert’s chest against mine and his arms around me—albeit mistakenly—I was swamped with self-consciousness about touching him again.
“Impressive period blushing, Miss Nicholson,” he observed.
Stupid cheeks. Stupid pale face. Alice never blushed; she had special foundation that ensured she looked pallid and steely at all times.
I offered my hands, not even sure how I was supposed to hold them. “Um, is this the right way up? I honestly know nothing about—”
Robert reached out, turned my hands sideways, and circled my thumbs with his crossed hands, his fingers warm against my skin. “Grip my thumbs. That’s it.”
I’d been expecting some delicate drawing-room fingertip grip, and this robust physical contact made me swallow with surprise.
“The main move in reeling is the set and turn.” Robert started to lift our joined hands, pulling me nearer with a controlled force. “The man has to spin his partner round, then put her opposite her next partner. Whether she likes it or no.”
Through years of practice, my body recognized the opening moves of a Dance Step and went stiff. I was within breathing distance now of his thick jacket, and he was still pulling me closer. We were about as close as I’d hope to get at the end of a good date, and we’d known each other less than twenty-four hours.
“Just relax and . . .”
He was increasing the pressure on my thumbs, and I gripped his tighter too. “I don’t relax when I’m dancing,” I gabbled. “It’s dangerous for everyone if I stop concentrating.”
Robert grinned and leaned back. “Lean into it,” he said. “And turn . . .”
“And what?”
He raised his arms and started to turn me round. My arms went rigid with panic, and his phone rang inside his jacket pocket.
“You’d better get that,” I gasped.
“No, I’m on holiday,” he said. “Just move where I’m putting you.”
Twigs and leaves cracked beneath my boots as I shuffled on the woodland floor, and we performed a weird cat’s-cradle sort of thing with our arms.
This is not making me look good, I thought, filling up with regret.
The phone carried on ringing. And then my phone began ringing—we’d obviously wandered out of the reception black spot hanging over Kettlesheer and reentered the modern world.
Robert looked at me over our joined hands, which felt like the one warm spot in the whole forest. He didn’t let go, and I didn’t want to look rude by dropping his.
Okay, so I didn’t want to let go. Couldn’t actually let go. My sleeve was sort of caught on the button of his jacket.
“I can’t let go,” I explained. “I don’t want to rip your sleeve.”
We jostled awkwardly, trying to free ourselves, and by the time we’d got loose the ringing had stopped.
“Excellent,” he said, looking straight at me. “Now you have to do that ten times as fast and in heels.”
“I should think getting caught on a kilt’s a real recipe for disaster,” I said, and his mouth twitched.
“Depends who’s wearing the kilt.”
My cheeks flamed with a sudden blast of warmth as he winked at me.
An old-fashioned phone inside the house started pealing, and the moment was broken.
“Someone’s really trying to get hold of you,” I said.
“All the more reason to ignore them,” he said, and got out his keys again. He unlocked the front door and marched in, grabbing the phone from a table by the front door.
“Hello? . . . Oh, hi. . . .” The playfulness had gone from
Robert’s voice, replaced with a very businesslike clip.
I gave myself ten seconds t
o shake off my daze, and then I followed him inside.
Nine
The outside of the lodge might have looked like a gingerbread cottage, complete with ivy round the door, but inside it couldn’t have been more modern: clean and bright, and still smelling of new paint.
Robert was talking into an old green Post Office phone, which sat on a stunning glass sideboard that Alice had dragged me to worship at Heal’s in London. I couldn’t remember the name of the designer, but she’d had tears of pure joy in her eyes as she’d lovingly opened and shut the drawers in the manner of a game-show hostess. Robert had nothing in the drawers besides a Yellow Pages.
It looked perfect in his hall. But then, the hall was as sparse and tasteful as the showroom.
He motioned for me to go on in as he squeezed his forehead with his spare hand and tried to get a word in edgeways with whoever it was on the phone. I stepped through the perfectly cream hall (no pictures, no stags’ heads, not even a teeny claymore) and into the open-plan kitchen, marveling as I went at how empty it was, compared with the main house.
I’d picked up enough of Mum’s “ ‘Less is more’ costs more” principles to know that the simple oak kitchen units were probably handmade and extortionate, along with the impressive array of matte black appliances, most of which didn’t even have visible controls. I did like the kitchen table—an old thing amidst all the newness, with two long benches and a wooden bowl full of apples in the middle.
I set my laptop bag down on it and checked my own phone, which had sprung to life in the fertile technological atmosphere of Robert’s modern house.
Seven new voice messages, four new texts.
I clicked onto my voice mail, keeping one eye on the hall, where Robert was saying nothing but tapping his finger on the sideboard as if he wanted to drill a hole through it.
Sunday, 10:07 p.m.: Alice, wanting details of the journey up.
Monday, 9:10 a.m.: Max, demanding details of the table.
Monday, 9:21 a.m.: Max again, looking for the “other” receipt book. And telling me he now had a bet on with Charlie Sykes about the table being part of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s “lost” furniture.
Monday, 10:37 a.m.: Alice, furious that I hadn’t already called with details of the journey up. Reminding me to remind Fraser about some dinner party or other.
Monday, 11:10 a.m.: “It’s Caryl, your mother. We need to talk, darling.” No, we didn’t.
I hung up as Robert finished his call and came in.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “No peace for the wicked.”
“Work?” I asked.
“If only.” He flicked on the kettle.
“Pleasure?” I hazarded.
But Robert wasn’t so easily cracked as Max. Something had flicked a switch in him. He wasn’t unfriendly, just closed off.
“Tea? Coffee?” he asked. “Dad said you needed to e-mail some photos back to London—be my guest. I’ve got Wi-Fi and a signal booster for mobile reception.”
“So I see. Tea, please.” I opened my e-mails and plugged in my camera to download the photos I’d taken of the drawing-room table. “What is it you do for a living that you need all this technology?”
Robert paused, kettle in hand, as if I’d asked an odd question, then said, “I’m in storage.”
“What? Like . . .” My mind went blank. “Cupboards?”
“I run storage facilities, long-term, short-term, specialist.” When I nodded blankly, he elaborated, “ParkIt? The big red warehouses?”
“Oh, ParkIt! My mum’s always on at me to move my flat into a ParkIt bay,” I exclaimed. “It’s her weapon of mass decluttering—she gives clients one packing box, and everything else has to go into storage, and she ‘allows’ them half a box at a time, while she supervises. That’s you, is it?”
“It is.” Robert put a white mug down in front of me. He’d done tea-bag-in-a-mug tea, despite having about three million china teapots back at the house. “Clutter is the biggest hurdle to productivity, at home and at work. It’s one of the reasons I find Kettlesheer such a colossal headache—I just want to shove it all into boxes.”
He made frantic shoving gestures, then paused and looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry about last night, by the way. I didn’t mean to sound so negative about the place. It was a combination of stress about this ball, and work, and Dad’s revolting carrot schnapps.”
“Don’t worry. You couldn’t put me off Kettlesheer if you tried,” I said. “And if I can find some things to sell, won’t that make you and your dad happy? Cash and some clear space?”
“That’ll be the first thing we’ll have agreed on since he moved up here,” he said.
I picked up my tea and peered at him over the edge of the mug. “Are you not running the place together? I thought that was how these things worked. Father and son, working side by side at the country-house coalface.”
“Maybe a hundred years ago.” Robert squeezed his tea bag meticulously in his cup. “Dad and I are too different. He’s a teacher, I’m a businessman. We can’t even agree on how to get the accounts sorted out, even though I’ve got a bookkeeping qualification! Basically, he thinks I should still be going back to law school, despite the fact that I’ve run my own companies since I was twenty-two.”
I raised an eyebrow at the sharp edge in his voice. “Well, perhaps that’s why he wants you to take an interest in the castle.”
“Sorry?”
“Because this is something you have got in common: your family. It’s not something money can buy, belonging to a house like this.” I realized I’d probably overstepped the mark, so I added quickly, “My dad’s a bit like that—not understanding why I do what I do, I mean. He’s always on at me to get a proper job, with a career ladder. He and Mum aren’t into antiques. Alice and I are officially the oldest things they possess. Even our house is newer than me.”
Robert’s tense forehead uncreased slightly. “My dad can’t get his head around the fact that ParkIt also stores computer data. He wants to know what sorts of boxes it goes in.”
“Have you tried showing him?” I asked. “I once took Dad to Christie’s, thinking some of the excitement might rub off. He got into a row with the auctioneer when he grabbed the phone off a proxy bidder and told them not to waste space on the Duchess of Gloucester’s old Meissen tea service when they could put the same money into a savings account and get a guaranteed return and not have to dust it.” I sighed. “Sometimes I think there must have been a mix-up at the hospital. Somewhere out there, there’s a rock star with a daughter desperate to be a dental nurse.”
“Can’t be. You look just like Alice,” said Robert, and I felt quite flattered.
“Is that how you know Alice, through Simplify?” I asked. Some things were falling into place. Robert wasn’t really my type, but he was much more Alice’s frequent-flyer ideal. He even wore the sort of expensive but fashionable clothes she was forever buying for poor Fraser and his rugby-playing neck.
“I’m how Alice knows Fraser, actually. I handled Simplify’s storage account for a while. I invited her to a party where she met Fraser, whom I’ve known since we were kids, and the rest is, as they say, history.”
“But you don’t deal with Simplify anymore?” The more I looked at Robert’s cheekbones, the more baffled I was as to why she hadn’t mentioned him when she sent me up here. Unless she didn’t want me to meet him. …
“Alas, no.” He opened and closed some cupboards, then turned round with a sardonic look. “Well, I say ‘Alas.’ Alice nearly broke the sales director with her negotiations. Should we be braced for some paint-strippingly honest plain talk from you too? Does it run in the family?”
“No.” I sighed. “I wish something interesting did run in our family, but the only thing we all have in common is freakishly long feet.”
“Well, I envy you,” said Robert. “There’s nothing worse than going out for a pint round here, and having total strangers coming up to you and saying, ‘You must be the
McAndrew lad’ just because of the way you look.”
The tension had returned to his face, so I thought it best to change the subject.
“How long have you been here?” Judging from the sparse furnishings, Robert was either very tidy or had everything still packed up in cases somewhere.
“A year, on and off. I’ve been tied up in London with work. My idea was to renovate this place, then rent it out to provide some income, then maybe do other cottages on the estate as holiday rentals.” He paused. “And, of course, it gets me out of the main house.”
“The clutter must have been driving you mad up there,” I said. “You’ve got a very distinctive style. Very . . . tidy. Very chic.”
“Oh, I can’t take credit for this, Catriona did it all.” He waved a vague hand around. “She gutted the place, pulled out the old range, the hooks in the beams, stuck in new floors. But that’s her job, interior design, so it was a weekend project for her.”
“Right.” I hesitated, not wanting to sound nosy but at the same time burning with curiosity. “And . . . she doesn’t live here?”
“No,” said Robert. “She lives with her parents. They’ve got a similar sort of country pile, about twenty miles north. Her dad’s a property developer. They’ve got a helipad where the old tennis court used to be.”
He said it in a way that put a stop to any more Catriona questions.
I looked round the kitchen, trying to picture what it had looked like before the makeover. It was hard to imagine any scullery maids here now, with the halogen strip lights and chrome fittings. It was smaller than the kitchen in Kettlesheer, but nowhere near as cozy, somehow. “Who lived here before you?”
“My great-grandmother. She was shunted in when Carlisle took over the main house—with his wife, of course.”
“Was that Violet?” I asked eagerly. “The blonde in the drawing-room portrait? The American heiress who married the army officer?”
Robert looked slightly unsure. “Er . . . yes?”
“Robert,” I said, pretending to be reproachful. Well, sort of pretending. “Haven’t you studied the family tree in the hall?”