Chapter One
Whiting swung closed the great oak double doors, cutting off the view of the funeral cortege as it began its stately progress down the long drive to the Southwood family chapel.
The late March sun had not yet reached the front of the Hall and the last sound the Dowager Lady Longminster heard as the door closed was the sharp crack of carriage wheels breaking the icy puddles on the gravel.
‘Shall I bring tea to the small parlour, my lady?’ The butler’s voice sounded strange, Marissa thought, then realised it was sympathy she could detect. She gazed around the familiar black and white marble of the great entrance hall, at the towering classical statuary and wondered, rather wildly, if her husband would have approved of the way she matched the colour scheme.
She almost yielded to the temptation to retreat to the cosy sanctuary of her morning room, the little fire, her pile of books, the undemanding affection of Gyp, her King Charles spaniel. Then her sense of duty, as always, reasserted itself. ‘No, Whiting. Please bring my tea to the Long Gallery. I must be there when they return from the chapel.’
Holding her prayer book in her clasped hands, Marissa moved slowly across the hall, up the curving stairs into the Red Salon, then through into the Long Gallery which ran the entire length of the west front of the house.
After two years of marriage she was too used to the chilly splendours of Southwood Hall to look around at the towering columns, the perfect geometry of every room and the exquisite correctness of each detail of decoration and drapery. Restoring his grandfather’s Classical masterpiece to its original impeccable state had been an obsession of the Earl’s but try as she might, although she could admire the Hall she could never love the soulless integrity he had created.
To reach her chair in the Long Gallery Marissa had walked almost a hundred yards. She was nineteen years old, yet today she felt nearer ninety. Every step dragged as if she had a lead weight attached to her black kid slippers and she sank down gratefully on a red satin chair.
She opened the prayer book at the Psalms and composed herself to read, but when the footman brought in her tea she realised that she had not taken in a single word.
‘Thank you, James.’
‘My lady. Will there be anything else?’
‘Not for the moment. Go and see if Mrs Whiting needs any assistance with the refreshments.’
As he left James inadvertently let the heavy panelled door slam. Marissa startled in her chair. How her lord would have hated that. She almost expected to hear his voice issuing a quiet, chilly rebuke. But she would never hear the third Earl of Longminster speak again. She shivered. By now another door – the vault – would have slammed shut with force and finality, leaving him to the silent keeping of his ancestors.
Marissa chided herself for her morbid, almost Gothic, thoughts but her usual self-discipline had deserted her today. Unable to sit quietly for another moment she moved to the window to gaze out over the sweeping view across the trees of the park to the salt marsh and the faint line of the grey sea beyond.
The movement behind the bare trunks of the limes of the Great Avenue marked the return of the cortege of carriages bearing the gentlemen mourners. They would be back soon. As she watched, her hand resting on the fringed brocade of the draperies, another carriage approached from the east. No doubt this would be her husband’s Aunt Augusta, a formidable spinster, coming to pay her respects to a nephew to whom she had hardly spoken a word during the latter part of his forty-five years.
She hardly knew Augusta, but Marissa was grateful to have some female support during the ordeal of the funeral meats and the inevitable reading of the will. The late Earl had opposed the idea of a female companion for his wife as an intrusion upon his privacy and the spinster cousin she had invited to join her in her widowhood had not yet arrived from Cumbria.
Marissa stepped back from her vantage point before anyone saw her staring from the window, not behaviour becoming to the Countess of Longminster. She paced slowly back to the head of the flight of semi-circular steps which led down to the hall and waited for her guests.
As she stood, smoothing her skirts of dull black silk, she was aware of the subdued bustle of the staff all around her. Footmen were carrying trays into the Long Gallery, Whiting was supervising the arrivals and the maidservants were whisking away heavy coats, hats and gloves from the chilled guests.
‘My dear child!’ It was Aunt Augusta, red-faced from the cold and long days in the hunting field, her clothes curiously old-fashioned. But she is so alive, thought Marissa with envy. She was alive, vital, noisy and interfering, a woman who seemed to have spent almost sixty years caring not a fig for convention or anyone else’s opinion.
Marissa smiled at her gratefully as she took her hand.
‘Chin up, girl. You are doing splendidly. And you look perfect.’ Aunt Augusta nodded towards the long glass panel opposite where they stood.