Mrs. Spencer sighed, her blue eyes fixed on a windowpane. She seemed to be relenting, or plotting. There was something very purposeful in the way she chose to humor Murray. It was quietly frightening.
“I’m not alone,” she said, and turned in his direction. “Have you forgotten Tom? He’s in the barn.”
“Yes. Tom. In the barn.”
“Tom!” Pru yipped. The ad mentioned only one person to look after. “Who’s Tom?”
Murray leaned in. Pru felt his breath hot on her neck.
“Some groundsman, allegedly,” he said. “Yet the landscaping is garbage. Presumably, this Tom is a figment of Mrs. Spencer’s highly acrobatic imagination.”
“I can hear you, you know.”
Murray pulled back.
“Until I see evidence to the contrary, what else am I to believe?” he asked, then looked again toward Pru. “Allegedly ‘Tom’ lives in a barn but no one’s seen him in a quarter of a century. He’s a Pole, by the by, a displaced person from the war. Mrs. Spencer spent far too much time with Germans in her younger years, I suspect. And now she has her very own Polish indentured servant. Dreams do come true in the end.”
“That’s quite enough. Lord Almighty. You pay Hitler one compliment and no one ever lets you forget it. I stand by my statement.”
“She lauded Hitler,” Murray said in a stage whisper.
“All I said was that he accomplished a lot!”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“When you think how hard it is to create a rising in a small village, well, he had the whole world up in arms. He was larger than Churchill. Churchill couldn’t have done that!”
“You and Adolf Hitler, birds of a feather. You both create risings in small villages to great success.”
Mrs. Spencer rolled her eyes, then grabbed a black cloak from a broken-down chair. Pru had been so hypnotized by the woman’s eyes and her back-and-forth with Murray, she’d nearly forgotten about Mrs. Spencer’s bare chest.
“So you insist upon staying,” she said and looked at Pru.
“I’m not sure if ‘insist’ is the word…”
“She does,” Murray said. “She insists. We all do.”
“Fine. Off with you, henchman to the awful Edith Junior. Miss Valentine, come with me. I’ll show you to your rooms.”
Nine
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
NOVEMBER 1972
Pru’s eyes sprang open.
It was early morning. The room was dead dark except for a single candle glowing above her head. Behind the flame was a pair of crystalline blue eyes. Behind the eyes, a face like rumpled tissue.
Pru scooted up onto her elbows.
“Mrs. Spencer?”
She was disoriented, out of breath, but not nearly as terrified as she should’ve been. Was she really so heartbroken, so numbed and paralyzed that she couldn’t muster a prudent level of panic?
“So you’re still with me,” Mrs. Spencer noted, holding the light close to Pru’s face.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I half expected you to flee in the middle of the night.”
“I’ve been hired to do a job, Mrs. Spencer. I plan to do it and do it well.”
Plus Murray had left that evening, her only opportunity for escape probably sitting in a lounge at Heathrow, if not somewhere over the Atlantic. Not that it mattered, or that she’d even go with him if given a second chance. The Grange was a pit but there was nothing left for Pru back in the States.
“Look to the right,” Mrs. Spencer barked.
“Excuse me?”
“Turn your head to the right. Do it!” She clonked Pru in the skull with the brass candleholder. “Now!”
“Sure thing,” she said, one eye fixed on the flame.
What this seemingly demented woman might do behind a partially turned back Pru couldn’t begin to guess.
“I gotta be honest,” Charlie wrote in a letter not received until after his death. “Out here it’s hard to tell the good from the bad. They all look the same.”
Damn if that wasn’t true about most things.
“My goodness,” Mrs. Spencer said.
Pru felt the heat of the flame alongside her cheek.
“You have the perfect Hellenic profile. It’s exquisite. You are a lucky girl.”
“Oh. Thank you?”
“You remind me of myself.”
Mrs. Spencer snuffed out the candle and reached over to flick on the bedside lamp. The woman smelled a little sweet, like baby powder, but also sour. Pru scrunched her nose though the scent wasn’t altogether unpleasant.
“What time is it?” Pru asked. “Maybe we should talk in the morning?”
“Don’t be such a pansy.” Mrs. Spencer dropped onto the bed with a small bounce. “It’s well after four o’clock. We rise early at the Grange. Bixby! Diamond!” She whistled through her teeth. “Up here! Up with Mama!”
First came the sound of nails clacking on the hardwood floors and then the zip of two tawny-coated spaniels into the bed. The dogs spent several seconds scrabbling and yapping about the yellowed lace coverlet before ultimately settling against Mrs. Spencer’s thigh.
“The animals are permitted on the furniture, I take it?”