Page 62 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle

‘You mean your estate?’ He nodded. ‘Don’t you love it? I mean, I suppose you grew up there?’

‘I’ve never had much to do with it. My father and I didn’t get on – one of the reasons I spent so much time abroad.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘I believe it’s a matter of chance whether a son likes a father and vice versa. There’s no rule about it. Mine disapproved of my academic bent. Now I find the estate’s in a bad way. My father left matters much involved, and I have to straighten them.’

‘You sound as though the job is not to your taste,’ Nina said.

He was silent a moment. ‘I confess that I felt very resentful when I was summoned home to take up the …’ He hesitated.

‘Burden?’

‘Yes.’ He looked around him. ‘I even hated England – all that wetness and greenness.’

‘I suppose you’d got used to a very different landscape,’ Nina said. ‘Your estate – Ashmore, isn’t it? Is it like this?’

‘No, not at all. Dene is the archetypal English park, laid out around all sides of the house. Pretty much flat, so it was an empty canvas to whoever designed it.’

‘Humphry Repton,’ Nina supplied. He was amused that she knew. ‘I looked it up before I came,’ she explained.

‘How thorough of you,’ he said.

‘You didn’t have Repton at Ashmore? Or Brown or Bridgeman?’

‘We didn’t have anyone. It just evolved. It has a long history – perhaps I may have time to tell it to you one day. But it’s built on quite a steep hillside, so there’s no room for “improvements” of the Repton sort. No park in the accepted sense. There’s a walled vegetable garden and small area of what you might call pleasure grounds to either side of the house, but apart from that it’s just the untamed hillside all around.’

‘It sounds rather nice.’

‘Oh, so you prefer the picturesque movement to the classical? More Emily Brontë than Jane Austen?’

She laughed. ‘You do like to put a neat label on people, don’t you? Put them in this box or that one, all nice and tidy.’

He looked at her with pretended shock. ‘Are you mocking me, Miss Sanderton?’

‘No, how could that be? You are the Earl of Stainton and I’m Miss No-one-at-all.’

‘I think you are very much a someone,’ he said seriously.

Almost for the first time with him, Nina felt self-conscious. She had to deflect him. ‘I’m just Miss Bayfield’s friend,’ she said. ‘Tell me more about your estate. Do you still hate it?’

‘Not hate. I … resent it, perhaps. It’s like a great boulder I have to roll uphill.’

‘And, unlike Sisyphus, you haven’t deserved it?’

‘Perhaps I have,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘We’re none of us without sin. I haven’t been as dutiful to my father and mother as I should. I’ve been determined to go my own way and do what I wanted. That’s why I stayed abroad so long. I have two younger sisters I hardly know, who now depend on me. Perhaps this is my punishment – to take up my father’s boulder and push it for the rest of my life.’

She was distressed by his melancholy. ‘But life is not all boulders,’ she said. ‘I’m not from your world, so I don’t know what it’s like to be you, but every life has responsibilities, just as every life has joys and pleasures. Isn’t Ashmore beautiful in its own way? Wuthering Heights rather than Mansfield Park, perhaps, but still beautiful and worth preserving?’

‘Yes, it’s those things. I suppose what angers me most is the measures I have to take to repair matters. I feel like a cad and a villain to be searching for a wife on the basis—’ He stopped short, with a heightened colour.

She started to say, ‘Won’t you feel satisfaction in caring for it and passing it on to your—’ And then she stopped short too. He was looking at her intently. She blushed, her fingers became nerveless, and she dropped her prayer book.

Dipping hastily to retrieve it, she bumped shoulders with him as he went down at the same instant. Their hands collided on the book; and his closed over hers. The world went still.

They both rose slowly. He was very close to her: she could feel his breath on her cheek. His face was inches from hers. Terrified, exhilarated, she thought What just happened? She was used to looking at him, knew every feature of that face, had often traced its lines with her eyes, admiring them in the abstract. But now it was different, and she knew with a blind instinct that the change was permanent. Those familiar features had taken on a significance that made looking at him a thing of agonised joy, a food for the spirit that she would crave from now on. He was no longer merely Lord Stainton, a man she enjoyed talking to: he had become simply him, the one person that the mind and the heart and the soul never needed to name.

He said, very quietly, ‘Oh, God!’