Page 11 of The Fortunes of Ashmore Castle

‘She’s her guardian. That’s the law,’ Giles said. ‘I don’t see what I can do.’

Sebastian looked up from reading the flimsy message of doom. ‘Delay,’ he said. All heads turned. Rachel wiped her eyes on her napkin and looked at him with faint hope.

‘Delay?’ Giles queried.

‘Miss Taylor will have been travelling for days. It would be cruel to make her turn around and go straight back.’

‘She’ll probably have passages booked,’ Giles said doubtfully.

‘Passages can be changed. Meanwhile, think. Plan. Negotiate. Come, Giles, show a little gumption. The game’s not over until stumps are drawn.’

Rachel rose and ran round the table to give him a damp kiss. ‘Do you really think something can be done?’

‘We’ll see, Puss, we’ll see.’ He met Giles’s eyes and gave the faintest of shrugs. Even if, in the long run, the result was the same, it shouldn’t be done in this way.

Giles understood the message. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Delay.’

And you never knew what might happen. The dowager might change her mind. The unknown Russian might change his. Rachel might fall out of love, or Tullamore come into an unexpected fortune. A flaming meteor might destroy the earth and all their problems with it.

And it was certainly true that his mother a thousand miles away in Russia was less worrying than his mother actually in the house.

London was locked in fog. It came up from the Thames and met the chimney smoke coiling down to form a still grey blanket that muffled sounds and reduced vision to inches. It made haloes round the streetlamps, beaded the railings and bare tree branches with dirty drops, condensed on the roads and pavements and made them slippery. The sharp smell of horse-dung mixed with the sulphur of coal fires and the throat-clutching tang from exhaust pipes. Motor-buses loomed suddenly like mastodons, their headlights like glowing eyes. Timid pedestrians felt their way along railings; muttered curses told where bolder ones had collided with lampposts, pillarboxes or each other.

When Richard came up from the Underground at Piccadilly, there was a policeman with a flare directing traffic around the circus, which helped him get across. But he had to feel his way along the wall through Air Street and Lower John Street, and only knew he had reached Golden Square by the sudden sense of open space. Crossing to the centre he bumped into a horse and apologised to it, let the cart pass, then felt his way round the railings of the garden, glad that he knew the geography from his many visits.

‘I’m lucky to have got here alive,’ he told Molly Sands when he gained her drawing-room. ‘You see before you an explorer winning through against fearsome odds. Like those fellows on the Discovery expedition in the Antarctic. I feel quite unexpectedly dauntless.’

‘You’re such a fool!’ she laughed.

‘And unlike them, I didn’t have dogs . . . To think when I got up this morning I was merely intending to toddle through the metropolis like an ordinary cit to visit the most beautiful woman in the world.’ He caught her face in both hands so that his kiss landed on her lips and not her cheek.

She allowed one kiss and then pulled away. ‘Is it very bad out there?’

‘Fog, even more than snow, makes the familiar unfamiliar. And – ugh! – how it smells!’

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. The kettle’s hot – it won’t take a minute to boil.’

‘Hot water we need, but I have something better to put it in.’ From one pocket he drew a flat quarter-bottle of rum, from another a lemon. ‘Et voilà! I assumed you would have sugar. A rum toddy will go some way to convincing my feet they still belong to the rest of me. You’ve no pupil?’

‘Not this morning. I have one this afternoon, but he might not arrive if the fog’s as bad as you say.’

‘Then you can have one with me.’

‘I can’t have rum on my breath if he does arrive.’

‘It will have dissipated by then,’ he assured her. He made himself comfortable in a chair by the fire and she pushed the kettle on its trivet back over the coals. It was cosily domestic. How he wished . . .

‘You came up yesterday, I suppose,’ she said, with her back to him.

‘Last night. You are my first priority. You might show a little gladness to see me! My vanity is quite bruised.’

She turned her head to look at him. ‘Oh, I am very glad. I feel as though if I looked out of the window the sun would be shining.’

He grinned. ‘Better! Well, shall I tell you all the news? We’ve had exciting doings all over Christmas.’

He told her about Uncle Fergus and Angus, and his mother’s telegram.

‘Who is Taylor?’ she asked.