The Dottie I had spent three months with in Europe had been disagreeable, but she had been energetic and edgy, unable to sit still. I now saw that that woman had actually been the happier version of herself—marshaling her luggage from train platform to train platform, negotiating with hotel clerks, clipping briskly down cobblestoned streets with a map in her hand and a cigarette between her lips, haggling for hours over works of art. In her way, she had seemed to thrive. This still moodiness, this introspective unhappiness, was new, and it made me uneasy, because clearly something at Wych Elm House was the cause of it.
In silence I followed her gaze, tearing my own gaze away from her profile. She was staring past the driver and through the front windshield, where, as the thick trees parted and we juddered along the unpaved drive, a house was coming into view.
Dottie took a long, slow drag of her cigarette, exhaling smoke like a dragon. She blinked slowly, the lines of her face settling into tension, and when she opened her eyes again, they were shuttered, impenetrable, whatever had been on the surface sinking back into the depths again.
“Well, then,” she said to no one in particular. “There it is. Home.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It just looked like a house to me. Big, with buttery yellow brick and gables and large, double front doors at the head of a circular drive. The center of the building, above the entrance, was crowned with a high gable, thrusting upward through the canopy of trees. It was not one of those rolling, manicured estates you saw in newsreels of the royal family, the kind of place that had been there for centuries, attended by throngs of gardeners. Instead it was an expensive house built in a tangle of woods, dappled by the encroaching trees that tapped the roof, surrounded by browning thickets of brush adorned with dying flowers. It had a forlorn air of emptiness to it. The house itself worked to impress with its rich blood, but if a gardener had been here, it wasn’t for a very long time.
The driver helped me from the motorcar, and as I straightened, a full breath of brisk country September air hit my nose. It smelled like dead leaves and brisk sap, and it was strangely cold. I was used to the woolly heat of a European summer mixed with the stale air of travel and the eternal stink of London. I took another breath and fancied I caught a whiff of the sea.
Dottie, papers clutched under her arm, discarded her cigarette and marched up the steps to the house. She vanished inside without a backward look at me. I followed her, hurrying to keep up, and came through the front door with an ungraceful clatter. I had nothing but my handbag with me, as our luggage was following in a separate van.
The front hall was dim, the only light coming indirectly from the high windows in the adjacent room, to which glass doors were thrown open. I glimpsed an umbrella stand, a sideboard, floors of dark wood covered with clean, matched rugs, a few mediocre paintings of landscapes on the walls. It was dusted and tidy, the air smelling close, with the pungent edge of cleaning vinegar. There were no coats thrown carelessly over hooks, or hats hung by the door, or any other signs of people coming and going. I realized that with Dottie in Europe, her husband God knew where, and her son in a hospital, no one had actually lived here for some time.
I followed the sound of Dottie’s clunking oxfords down the corridor, past a sitting room and a study, a small parlor with uncomfortable antique chairs squeezed into an awkward arrangement, where a maid, bent over with a dusting cloth, looked up surprised as I passed. The furniture everywhere looked immaculate and new, even the pieces in antique style, and each room seemed filled with expensive bric-a-brac—lamps with glass shades, ornate vases filled with expensive flowers freshly arranged, clocks and shepherdesses and brass lions and painted silk screens placed just so in corners. Dottie’s acquisitions, I guessed, accumulated over the years. I had seen her in action, and she was very good at buying expensive things.
There was no time to stop and gape. Dottie would charge full speed wherever she wanted, then expect to turn and find me at her shoulder; she was like clockwork. I hurried faster.
I watched her spindly frame stop at the entrance to a dining room, pausing only a moment before she plunged over the threshold and inside. “I see you made it,” I heard her say.
I followed her and found a man sitting alone at the dining table, a plate of beef and a glass of wine before him. He was fiftyish, trim, with light brown hair cut short and curling naturally. He had blue eyes in a face that made a fair attempt at handsome, though there was a tinge of dissipation around the edges of his features, like a piece of paper that has been foxed over time. He wore a suit of tawny brown that had been expertly tailored to his frame and a silk tie that gave a dull gleam in the electric light.