House of Trelawney: A novel

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Trelawney Castle

WEDNESDAY 4TH JUNE 2008

Trelawney Castle, home to the same family for eight hundred years, sits on a bluff of land overlooking the South Cornish sea. Since their ennoblement in 1179, the Earls of Trelawney used wealth and stealth to stay on the winning side of history; ruthlessly and unscrupulously switching allegiances or bribing their way to safety and positions of authority. The castle was their three-dimensional calling card, the physical embodiment of their wealth and influence. Each Earl added an extension until it was declared the grandest, if not the finest, stately home in the county of Cornwall.

In summer months, until the First World War, it was the custom of the family and guests to take the Trelawney barge from the Trelawney boathouse, through Trelawney land, past Trelawney follies and temples, to Trelawney Cove where they could use the seaside house (Little Trelawney Castle) or sail the yacht (the Trelawney). In the winter, the same ilk would hunt with the Trelawney foxhounds or shoot game raised on the Trelawney Estate. At that time, the family were so landed and powerful that they could travel from Trelawney to Bath, from the south coast to the Bristol Channel, without stepping off their own domain. This swathe of England became known as Trelawneyshire, an area of 500,000 acres including forty miles of coastline. With the advent of the railway, those family members who chose to go as far as London (most refused and who could blame them) would travel from Trelawney Station in a private train stamped inside and out with the Trelawney coat of arms.

By the early nineteenth century, the castle had expanded sufficiently to have a room for each day of the year, eleven staircases and four miles of hallways. After King George III’s favourite mistress became hopelessly lost in the maze of corridors and nearly died from hypothermia, guests were, thenceforth, given a miniature crested silver casket containing different-coloured confetti to sprinkle on the floor, so as to leave a personal trail to and from their bedrooms.

The Victorian diarist Rudyard Johnson, a regular guest, wrote: The castle is made of four main blocks, each built a century apart in markedly different styles. Part of the amusement of Trelawney is sleeping in an Elizabethan bedroom, breakfasting in a Jacobean hall, taking tea in a Regency conservatory and dancing in a Georgian ballroom. For those who like a morning constitutional, the battlement walk is a perfect 400-yard perambulation. The respected eighteenth-century architectural historian J. M. Babcock dismissed the castle as a vomitorium of conflicting architectural styles, reflecting the whims of wealthy, ill-educated and self-indulgent aristocrats.

Until the early twentieth century, rooms were lit by candle or oil lamps and warmed by open fires. Hot water was prepared in vast cauldrons on stoves in the basement and carried in buckets to the bathrooms. Even human waste, kept in porcelain dishes mounted in wooden boxes or cupboards, was disposed of by (a servant’s) hand. Eighty-five members of domestic staff were employed to carry out those tasks, including a butler, housekeeper, kitchen maids, footmen, chars and a clock man; outside there were sixty more, ranging from gardeners and grooms to mole catchers and coachmen, and even a bear and camel keeper. In 1920 the decision was taken to instal central heating, plumbing and electricity. It was a Sisyphean task, started but never finished. Only the Georgian wing was modernised, providing nine bathrooms for eighty-four bedrooms and a total of eleven radiators.

The castle made its own music: pipes hissed and gurgled; house-parties filled the septic tanks under the cellars; and a constant plop and gurgle underscored every activity. Wide wooden floorboards let out little squeaks and groans as they shrank and expanded in changing temperatures. Wind whistled round the crenellations, storms rattled windowpanes. The huge boilers in the basement shuddered while the water tanks in the attics bubbled and whooshed. Little wonder that the family thought of their home as a sentient being: in their eyes, Trelawney was far more than bricks and mortar.

The beauty of the interiors paled next to Trelawney’s setting. To the north of the castle were four hundred acres of medieval oak woods, set in deep cushions of moss laced with streams chasing over granite boulders. In the heart of the forest there was a perfectly round and deep lake, fed by a waterfall. At different times of the year, the glades were carpeted with flowers—crocuses, snowdrops, bluebells, wild garlic and rare orchids. In these Elysian settings lived native fallow, roe and red deer, thirty types of songbird, thirty-four varieties of butterfly, sixteen different species of moths, as well as foxes, badgers, otters, stoats, weasels, mice, voles, moles, slow-worms and snakes.

To the east and west were undulating meadows dotted with sheep and cows and also arable fields. For eight centuries this rich and fertile area was the breadbasket of the West Country and provided added income to the family’s coffers. It was the southern perimeter, however—some sixty acres of landscaped garden leading down to the estuary—which guests recalled with awe. Successive generations of Earls and their wives had tamed and reshaped the terrain, creating walks and waterways, avenues, terraces, sunken gardens, raised beds, topiary, wild-flower meadows, exotic palmeries, carpet bedding and a 24-acre walled kitchen garden. Wending through the pleasure grounds were streams, waterfalls and, to the south, a vast rhododendron and azalea forest surrounded by ancient laurels. Vistas and views were punctuated with Doric temples and triumphal arches. There were secret grottos and fierce fountains that, by an ingenious natural system of displacement, shot jets of water more than fifty feet into the air. The combination of the manicured and the wild, the conflagration of man’s determined hand and nature’s attributes, created an unforgettable experience. Trelawney was, everyone agreed, the most captivating setting in the British Isles.

As the centuries tripped by, the Earls of Trelawney, their senses and ambition dulled by years of pampered living, failed to develop other skills. Of the twenty-four Earls, the last eight had been dissolute and bereft of any business acumen. Their financial ineptitude, along with two world wars, the Wall Street Crash, three divorces and inheritance taxes, had dissipated the family’s fortune. Bit by bit the accoutrements of wealth disappeared. Servants went to war, not to be replaced. Farms were sold along with the London mansion. The private train and barge were left to rust and rot. Wings of the castle were closed up. Little Trelawney Castle was sold and became a hotel.

The good paintings and furniture were auctioned off and all that remained were their scars: discoloured squares and rectangles on walls or awkward absences in rooms. The only objects left were those without financial value, testaments to the whims and enthusiasms of generations of Trelawneys—such as the enormous stuffed polar bear in the west entrance hall, its fur and fangs turned yellow by time.

The tapestries in the Great Hall and corridors, formerly a riot of vibrantly coloured woven silks, had faded to monochromic pastels and hung in shreds. Worn-through carpets revealed wooden floorboards. Horsehair stuffing and rusty springs poked out of sofas. Broken chairs lay where last used, wooden corpses in a losing battle against maintenance. Red velvet curtains, burnt by sunlight, had turned a uniform grey. Windows were obscured by the march of ivy and bramble on the outer walls. In some places the ceilings had fallen in, exposing floors above. Swathes of wallpaper flapped disconsolately in draughty rooms. The present incumbents chose to avoid setting foot in most of the castle. For them locking doors meant keeping decay at bay. Occasionally a great crash of avalanching plaster could be heard falling like a tree in a faraway wood. Once a child had nearly plummeted through a first-floor landing into the morning room below, but these occurrences were quickly forgotten, stashed away in the department of unhelpful memories.

Nowhere was the reversal of the family fortunes more evident than in the once-famous gardens: nature had slowly and inexorably taken back her land. The waterways were choked with lily pads; the ponds silted up; the hedges, now unclipped, spread across paths; the carefully manicured beds had gone to seed; the yew and beech hedges were blowsy; the rhododendron and azalea, fighting each other for light, had grown tall and raggedy. The fountains spluttered. Buddleia ran amok. The kitchen-garden vegetables had bolted years before. The temples and arches were covered with ivies and vines.

Amidst the chaos and decrepitude inside and out, one relatively small patch of garden remained beautifully and obsessively tended, and on this June afternoon of 2008, Jane, the Viscountess Tremayne, daughter-in-law of the 24th Earl of Trelawney, wife of the heir Kitto, worked diligently amongst the roses, refusing to admit defeat against the army of encroaching weeds. For her, keeping control of this area of garden was a form of therapy; she found double-digging and deadheading calming. That morning, a seemingly innocuous letter, written on two sheets of airmail onion paper, had been so upsetting that she’d taken the first opportunity to come outside with a trowel and a pair of clippers.

Jane Tremayne was forty-one. Her figure was kept trim by the endless stairs of the castle, by tending the garden, seeing to most of the domestic chores, looking after her ageing parents-in-law and her three children, as well as riding and mucking out the last horse in the stables. With fine brown hair beginning to grey around the temples, Jane had pale skin, eyes nearer the colour of grey than blue and weather-beaten rosy cheeks. Had she bothered to take the slightest interest in her appearance, she might have passed as a handsome woman. As it was, with her badly cut hair (kitchen scissors), faded overalls and rough, unmanicured hands, she looked more like a labourer than most people’s idea of an aristocrat.

The family’s Labrador lay supine by the box hedge, occasionally raising its handsome black head to snap half-heartedly at a passing fly. A trained gun dog, Pooter spent most winter weekends with Jane’s husband at someone else’s pheasant shoot (their own had been abandoned in the late 1980s). Though he could not return invitations, Kitto was a valued guest in circles that admired a distinguished title, a first-class shot and a keen drinker. When his master was home, Pooter ignored Jane except at mealtimes. Jane’s three children took much the same line as the Labrador, using their mother as a glorified taxi and meal service. Her elder son Ambrose was in his last year at Harrow but, due to exorbitant public-school fees, her younger son Toby and daughter Arabella had been sent to the local comprehensive.

The letter, when it arrived after breakfast, had sat glaring at her from the fruit bowl on the kitchen table. Jane tried covering it with bananas, a dishcloth and other post. She knew from the elegant writing and the sender’s address who and where it was from. Some sixth sense told her that it was better left unopened or forgotten. Curiosity won; Jane ripped open the envelope. Seeing the writing was as disturbing as walking through a spider’s web; the invisible silken fronds unnerving, repulsive. Turning the pages over, she saw the script started small but became increasingly large and erratic. At school, its author had always won the Best Presentation Award and most other things. There had been prize days when only one child was called up to the podium to collect everything, from the gym to the maths and the history cup.

Jane sat down, cleared a space on the table and spread the pages out in front of her.

Dear Jane, I have often thought about you, Blaze and Trelawney over the last twenty years. Closing her eyes, Jane could hear Anastasia’s lilting voice, so quiet and conspiratorial that you had to lean in, letting her sweet breath brush your face and ears.

I have been living in a magnificent Indian palace called Balakpur, several hundred miles north of Delhi, with my husband the Maharaja and eight of his eleven children. I have two children but my own son is the youngest and won’t inherit the title.

Jane thought about her second son Toby, in many ways a more suitable candidate for the earldom than her firstborn but destined by birth to be the runner-up at Trelawney.

After such a long time, you must be wondering why I’m writing, Anastasia continued. Jane, I need your help desperately, even if it’s only for old times’ sake, for sentimentality, for human kindness, for the Three Musketeers. Jane’s heart contracted at the mention of their old nickname.

I am dying. Dengue fever has shut down my organs one after another, like lights failing on a dashboard. My husband died a few months ago. On the day of his death, his palace Balakpur, and all chattels, passed to his eldest son. The new Maharaja has banished me and my daughter Ayesha to a tiny cottage hospital on the outskirts of Calcutta. He has kept my son, Ayesha’s half-brother Sachan; I doubt I will ever see my darling boy again.

Jane tried to summon compassion for her friend and her children, but felt nothing other than a sense of foreboding.

As you know, dear Jane, I have no family, no parents, no siblings. You and Blaze and Trelawney will forever be my home. Ayesha has nowhere to go and I am flinging myself on your mercy. Please take her.

Jane read the last paragraph three times. Was Anastasia asking her and Kitto to take on her child? After twenty years? After all that had happened? Jane laughed out loud. There was no way that the daughter was coming to stay. She and Kitto could hardly afford to feed their own children, let alone anyone else’s. Besides, Jane didn’t believe that Anastasia was dying; she probably wanted a holiday from parenthood and who, Jane thought, could blame her.

Now, in the peace and tranquillity of the garden, Jane took out her anger on deadheading roses, including some wild snips at perfectly healthy blooms. Looking at the clipped rose heads around her feet, she decided they were metaphors for lost friendships which, once snipped, couldn’t simply be reattached. Real intimacy was a delicate cloth of shared experiences stitched together by tiny accretions of time, mutual trust and support. It wasn’t something that could be folded, put away and shaken out when the need presented itself. Whatever the three women once enjoyed had lain fallow and untended for so many years that it had shrunk and corroded. At best their friendship was like an old postcard, a tinted seaside scene, imbued only with memory and sentimentality. She, Anastasia and Blaze would never recapture their earlier affinity; their lives and circumstances were too disparate. Whatever Anastasia was implying in her letter, Jane owed her nothing. She also decided not to tell her husband. The less Kitto thought about Anastasia, the more confident Jane felt.

Pleased that she had resolved this issue so quickly and effectively, Jane looked over the rose bed towards the west wing of Trelawney Castle. The windows had turned golden in the late-afternoon sun and the whole of one wall, three storeys high and a hundred and fifty feet long, was covered with the last flowers of the purple wisteria. She listened to the hum of bees feeding on the pendulous blooms and caught sight of a flash of yellow as a goldfinch darted into a nest. A pair of curlews flew over, calling to each other—theirs was Jane’s favourite sound, part giggle, part siren. In the far distance a cow bellowed, perhaps to its calf, and in the village two miles down the estuary an ice-cream van played Greensleeves through a tinny loudspeaker. Looking around, Jane felt her heart swell with love. This was her husband Kitto’s Trelawney and one day it would belong to her eldest son Ambrose. It would never be her castle; this Viscountess, like many before her, was nothing more than a faint shadow passing over its history.

Her mobile phone rang. The screen said Clarissa, her mother-in-law. Tempted not to answer, Jane, impelled by duty and habit, took the call.

We will have supper early tonight. The Earl is feeling a little wan. Her mother-in-law hung up without saying goodbye.

Jane had become the house skivvy and had no one to blame but herself; always eager to please, she had been far too accommodating. At least old Aunt Tuffy kept to herself in a cottage in the park; Jane occasionally saw her scuttling around corners, both women keen to avoid each other.

She put the gardening gloves, clippers and trowel in the wooden trug and set off towards the kitchen. The smell of warm grass drifting on the breeze reminded her of her old life again: running over menus with Cook, discussing seeds and borders with the gardener, ordering fresh flowers for the bedrooms, going to London twice a year to buy new clothes. It was a relief to have lost contact with old friends; there was no one to witness what had become of her life.

She walked around the west wing of the castle, past the collapsed greenhouses and outhouses, along the cobbled pathways sprouting with dock and ragwort, until she reached the peeling side door. It was never locked; the key had been lost many years earlier. Even the walls of the inner passage were lined with moss. Rogue buddleia self-seeded in the cracks; Jane took comfort in the prettiness of its purple flowers. She followed the family custom of kicking her shoes into the mountain of wellingtons and trainers in the boot room.

In the kitchen, she put the clippers back on the dresser along with all the other detritus of family life: school reports, cricket balls, teapots, cracked plates, aspirin bottles, old photographs, keys to forgotten doors, incomplete packs of cards and a stuffed, moth-eaten rabbit (provenance unknown). To stave off winter gloom, when the Cornish sun hardly rose above the escarpment, Jane had painted the whole room an electric pea-green with a wide border of intertwined honeysuckle, wild roses and clematis; those who looked carefully could pick out tiny field mice and bumblebees hidden in the foliage. On the pine table, a radio with an aerial made from a coat hanger sat permanently emanating the comforting if barely audible sounds of Radio 4. The washing-up—saucepans and cups—stood upended on the scrubbed wooden draining board and, in the sink, there was a pile of broad beans, carrots and new potatoes dug up that morning from the kitchen garden. Wiping her hands on her trousers, Jane turned on the tap and scrubbed earth from the potatoes, cut them into chunky medallions and laid them in rows over the top of the minced meat. It was the third time in one week that they had eaten a variation on cottage pie. Jane was an incompetent cook, bereft of ideas and patience. On Monday mornings she bought a catering-sized pack of mince and a bumper carton of tinned tuna from the local cash and carry. For her, cooking was a duty that had to be endured. Spare minutes, and there weren’t many, were spent in her studio designing and printing wallpaper. This activity was her lifeline to sanity. The process of painstakingly transferring her ideas on to paper, etching into blocks and printing in a phantasmagoria of colours, was intensely satisfying. Here at least she could complete a task; in other areas of her life, the chores were seemingly endless.

Her phone pinged with a text from Kitto: he had an important meeting and would stay in London. Taking a carrot and a large knife, Jane chopped the vegetable with gusto. Pooter, eyeing her nervously, slunk off to sit in the corridor. No wonder Kitto wasn’t coming home; if only she could have a mini-break from this life of drudgery. She felt envious of his job as Chairman of the bank, Acorn, the tiny flat in Pimlico and the tedious business dinners. It brought in a necessary income, but there was an unfortunate consequence: Kitto’s time in the City inflamed his tendency to invest in unlikely schemes. A few weeks earlier, her husband had bounced through the kitchen door, slung his briefcase on the table and, grabbing his wife by her waist, planted messy kisses on her neck. Things were finally going to change, he assured her. He’d made a fail-safe, blue-chip, pukka, five-star investment in some kind of bond. He couldn’t explain what this thingamajig did—something to do with housing and mortgages. The more he told her it was bombproof, the greater her feeling of dread.

Jane had heard this kind of talk before: always a different concept, always the same result. Kitto had turned five hundred prime acres over to growing strawberries at a time when Spain was mass-producing the fruit at a fraction of the cost. His idea to host organic burials had led to a massive and expensive advertising campaign and only three takers. He built and self-funded a housing development but failed to get the proper permissions from the local authority: the buildings’ shells still stood empty. His hydroelectric scheme had cost many hundreds of thousands to implement but had lacked sufficient water pressure to make it viable. One Christmas he had bought the family expensive metal detectors on the assumption that, after eight hundred years, there was bound to be hidden treasure. After four days of divining and a lot of holes dug, the most exciting object found had been an engraved trowel which was valued by the local auction house at less than £20. Later, there was the sizeable investment in rare-breed animals that turned out to be rare because no one wanted them.

And now some new idea and a bigger mortgage. Frustrated, Jane banged the saucepan so hard that the handle broke. It was one of her last good pans, a wedding present given by a distant cousin. Looking at it, she wondered if it could be soldered back on. She had become good at mending things; the tractor, her car, the lawnmower had all been coaxed back into service. Filling the armless saucepan with cold water, she put it on to the Aga and noticed that neither of the hobs was hot. She bent down to check the pilot light and found that it had gone out. Taking a match, Jane tried to get it going: nothing happened. She turned on the electric oven, put the pie in and went downstairs to the cellar to check the oil tank. Flicking on the light, she walked along the musty corridor to the boiler room. Don’t panic, she told herself, four huge tanks can’t have run dry. She took out her phone and held it up against the oil gauge on Tank One. It was empty. She held the light up to the second tank and then the third and the fourth. There was no oil in any of them. No oil, no Aga, no heating, no hot water. At least it’s June, she thought miserably, and we still have electricity. The children can have showers at school. I can carry hot water to my in-laws. And as for herself and Kitto, they could take soap down to the estuary and pass it off as a newfangled health cure.

Fighting feelings of doom and despondency, Jane went back upstairs and turned left into the scullery to empty the washing machine. With Ambrose and Kitto away, at least there was less laundry. Emptying the machine, she put the wet clothes into a basket and took it out to the back courtyard to hang the things up to dry.

With the washing on the line and fifteen minutes to spare before the pie was cooked, Jane steeled herself for the inevitable. Spirits sinking, she went along the flagstone corridor to the office. Since they let the estate manager go, four years earlier, Jane had assumed the role of family accountant. In the beginning, she’d attacked the tasks with alacrity but, as the bills mounted and the possibility of paying them lessened, her enthusiasm for sorting waned. Her filing system was split into three categories: urgent, desperate and cataclysmic. It had started as a joke; Jane had never imagined that these words would be so prophetic or that their troubles could escalate as quickly and steadily as a platoon of ants marching up a sugary bun. Over the last few months, the cataclysmic tray had become as large as urgent and, if she were being honest, many of the desperates needed to be upgraded. Jane picked up the top unopened letter and tore out the contents. It was English Heritage threatening, for the third time that year, to put a condemned notice on Trelawney. We have repeatedly warned you that the upkeep of this Grade 1 listed building is falling short of even the most basic requirements. On our last visit, we counted fifty-six windows in urgent need of replacement. The buttresses on the east and the south wings were clearly subsiding. The Elizabethan roof is falling in. How did that esteemed body think the family could pay for the renovations? Crumpling the letter into a ball, she threw it across the room behind the filing cabinet. The next two letters were from banks offering interest-free credit cards for withdrawals up to £10,000. Jane slipped them into a drawer. Flicking through the other envelopes, she found one headed West Country Fuels. There, in red capitals, was the word Arrears. Her eyes spun down to the figure: minus £88,000. Minus £88,000! They had to be joking. She was about to sit down and write a holding letter when she remembered the cottage pie. Wearily, she got up and went to the kitchen.

Her younger son and her daughter, fresh and hungry from school, came bounding in. Jane’s genes hardly showed in her children, who all had their father’s auburn hair and hazel eyes.

Oh no, not bloody cottage boring pie again. Arabella slung her bag on the kitchen table and kicked off her shoes.

We haven’t had it for ages. Jane picked up the trainers and threw them on to the shoe mountain.

Not since last night anyway, Toby said, shooting a warning look at his younger sister. Jane smiled gratefully at her son.

This kind of food could stunt my growth. It’s 4 per cent meat and 98 per cent fur and foot, Arabella said, piling her plate high with grey cooked meat and slightly burnt potatoes.

That makes 102 per cent. Toby took a smaller helping and cut himself three large slices of bread.

Please leave some for your grandparents, Jane said.

They never eat anything. Arabella sat down at the table and squeezed the tomato ketchup bottle until all the mince was covered.

Gross, Toby said, smearing salad cream on his bread.

It’s so I can’t taste it. Arabella looked reproachfully at her mother.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll make tomato ketchup pie and you can sprinkle some mince on it.

Remind me to laugh.

Jane bit her tongue. For five years, she’d been waiting for her daughter to pass out of this phase. It was no comfort that the teachers at school also found her impossible. Wolfing down the food in a few minutes, Arabella dumped her unwashed plate in the sink and left the room.

How was your day, darling? Jane asked Toby. After the shock of oil tanks and Anastasia’s letter, she longed to have a conversation with someone other than Pooter.

All right.

Who did you hang out with?

No one. Toby wiped the last of the pie up with a piece of bread, got up, kissed his mother on the cheek and vanished.

Jane looked at the leftover corner of the pie: just enough for her parents-in-law. To fill in the silence, she started to sing; and to work out some of her irritation, she beat the tops of the pans with a wooden spoon.

In the television room down the corridor, Arabella and Toby listened to their mother and rolled their eyes. It’s the gizzards and intestines they mash into that cheap mince. It gets into your brain and sends you tonto, Arabella said knowingly.

Mad cow disease, Toby agreed.

Do you think we’re going to be orphaned?

No such luck.

On the ground floor in another part of the castle, known as the Mistresses’ Wing, Enyon and Clarissa, the Earl and Countess of Trelawney, sat side by side on a small sofa in front of a four-bar electric fire. Even in June, the room was cold and Clarissa had flung a fur coat over a tweed skirt and twinset. Her husband wore a corduroy suit with leather patches at the elbow, buttoned up over a thick woollen sweater and two scarves. Above the fire there was a mantelpiece with a clock and a family portrait of an ancestor, the 12th Earl. On the lintel, there were rows of stiff, wildly out-of-date invitations as well as some old Christmas cards. On the right, a side table was piled with books and papers, a small boxed television set, and sherry and gin in cut-glass decanters. In another corner, there was a roll-top desk over which were more family portraits. The windows were framed by green velvet curtains: one ripped, one intact, both faded brown by sunlight on the inner edges. The well-trodden Turkish carpet had been worn through in certain places and there was a dog basket for a long-departed canine friend.

I’ll redo my will tomorrow, Enyon said.

Have your thoughts changed since yesterday? Clarissa asked, not unkindly.

I’m going to leave the Gainsborough portrait to Bella.

Who’s Bella? She didn’t remind her husband that the Gainsboroughs had been sold a long time ago.

My granddaughter, you silly old bat. Honestly, Clarissa, I do wonder about you.

You don’t have a granddaughter called Bella, the Countess said. Ambrose, Toby and Arabella.

Who the devil is Bella? the Earl said crossly.

Come to think of it, it might be Arabella.

Ha! There’s life in the old boy yet. Enyon slapped his thigh. Come here and I will search you, all over, particularly in those nice lace knickers.

I haven’t worn lace knickers since 1962, the Countess giggled. She was eighty, while her husband was eighty-five. Today, his wrinkled face and gizzardy neck stuck out of a collar many sizes too large, making him look like an old tortoise. In his youth, Enyon had been a towering man with a neck as thick as a telegraph pole, who’d thought nothing of lifting up small heifers and could exhaust three fresh horses on a day’s hunting. His roar of laughter or shout of displeasure could be heard half a mile away. During their long marriage, the Earl had been constitutionally, almost pathologically, unfaithful. The combination of great looks, supreme self-confidence, a title and a monumental libido meant that few were safe; over the years his conquests included wives of friends, actresses, housemaids, girl grooms—so many that his nickname had been the Earl of Tres-horney. Nevertheless, his wife, determined to turn a blind eye, counted their marriage as uncommonly happy and content. There had only been one near-irreversible mistake, when both her husband and the girl had lost their heads and threatened to elope. The young lady, like a few others before her, had been dispatched to the Colonies with a sizeable pay-off. Now, looking at her beloved, shrunken, desiccated version of her husband, Clarissa knew that she’d been right to disregard the peccadilloes. How lucky for her that she had been born without any romantic aspirations.

Is the yardarm at the right place? Enyon asked.

It’s 5 p.m. One hour to go.

Can’t we pretend it’s 6?

Standards, darling. Standards.

The cold wrapped itself around their old bones so viciously that neither could move.

Is it just me or is time going particularly slowly today?

Maybe a little slower, Clarissa had to admit.

Their lives had been narrowed by age and infirmity. They rose at 7, washed and took a short constitutional walk around the castle’s perimeter. After that they sat by the small fire and had a race to complete The Times crossword (they lived in hope). The monotony was broken by a stiff sherry at 12 and the lunchtime news at 1 p.m. There followed a brief nap and then correspondence (largely letters of condolences). There was a second constitutional at 3 p.m., a flannel bath at 5, another snifter at 6 p.m., supper at 7 and bed by 8:30 p.m.

What do you think Mulligan will prepare tonight? Enyon knew perfectly well that there was no cook but couldn’t bear to break his wife’s heart. Clarissa minded desperately about standards and staff. Enyon knew this was a woman’s lot; they didn’t have the brains or brawn to do more than worry about domestic life. Looking over at his wife, he thought how damned lucky he’d been. Clarissa had kept her figure and her counsel; a husband couldn’t ask for more than that.

Let’s hope we don’t get wretched cottage pie again.

She had never told her husband that the chef these days was their daughter-in-law. Mrs. Mulligan, the cook, had retired nearly ten years ago, but Clarissa was pleased that the Earl imagined a significant number of staff in the kitchen.

Shall we change for dinner? she asked. It took at least sixty minutes for them to get out of their day and into the evening clothes.

Do we have to, darling? It’s so damn cold.

If we let things slip, what hope is there for the next generation?

What hope indeed? Clarissa thought silently. She knew that the future of Trelawney hung on a thread that might break at any moment. She prayed her husband would die before seeing the entire castle sold to a foreigner and she had resolved some time ago to place a pillow over his head rather than let him hear the death knell on eight hundred years of tradition. If only Enyon hadn’t been such a philanderer; all those women they’d had to pay off. Damn her stupid, self-indulgent son for failing to make something of his life; all that time footling around with unpublishable poetry and that ridiculous bank job. Marrying Jane was the best thing Kitto had done, even if her fortune had not been as large as they all hoped.

She patted her husband’s arm. Come on, darling.

Enyon tried to struggle to his feet but his knees gave way and he slumped back in his chair. The most important thing is to make sure that the next generation has a clean slate and no surprises.

Did I ever tell you what a good and kind man you are? the Countess said, kissing her husband on the cheek.

Maybe I should leave the Gainsborough to Blaze. Is she coming down soon? I do miss my girl.

The Countess’s heart gave a lurch at the mention of their daughter. It had been twenty years since they had last seen her in London for their annual tea, on her birthday at Fortnum and Mason. Since the Earl refused to leave Trelawney and Blaze refused to visit the castle, contact had dwindled to a phone call at Christmas.

I will try to persuade her to come soon. But you know how busy she is with work.

She’s breaking my heart, the Earl said.

I know, the Countess echoed.

What did she and Kitto row about? Enyon asked.

It was the bedroom issue again.

The Earl’s face flared with anger. "Why can’t the bloody spares realise that this is a family tradition. If we didn’t move the spinsters and second sons along, this place would be