Country Plot by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Page B

Kitty. On the back, the middle bedroom had been turned into a bathroom, a cavernous place with a bath big enough to drown in.
    To one side of it was what Kitty introduced as Lady Mary’s Bedroom. ‘You have to give rooms names in a house like this, just as points of reference,’ she said. ‘But in fact there was a Lady Mary and she did sleep here. That’s her portrait over there.’
    The portrait showed a pale face and dark ringlets and what looked like muslin draped about the shoulders, with a background of parkland and trees. The room was furnished with the only four-poster in the house. A damask-upholstered chaise longue stood at the foot of the bed, and there was a Regency dressing-table with a delicate silver and crystal set, and a fine writing-bureau and chair in one corner, but the room was cluttered with more modern furniture and personal items.
    â€˜It’s a pretty room,’ Kitty said. ‘Peter’s grandmother had it, and a lot of the things are hers, but the nicer bits date from Lady Mary’s day. The bed is earlier, of course, but we believe she did sleep in it. She was a niece of the Duke of Wellington, and married Sir Ralph Everest in about 1820. She came to a tragic end, poor thing, and her ghost is supposed to haunt the house. You don’t mind ghosts, I hope?’
    â€˜I’ve never seen one,’ Jenna said. ‘Do you believe in them?’
    â€˜I’ve never seen Lady Mary,’ Kitty said, quite matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing birdwatching, ‘but I have seen the Weeping Child. She haunts the top floor – she never comes down here, so don’t worry about her. She won’t pop up in your bedroom. I don’t know who she is, but practically every old house that’s haunted at all has a weeping child. Children must have lived really quite dreadful lives in the old days for so many of them to come back.’
    Jenna wasn’t sure if she was being roasted, so she said nothing, only exclaimed instead over the massed blue-and-white china displayed on a series of stepped shelves over the fireplace.
    â€˜Lady Mary collected it, and Peter’s grandmother added to it. It always looks nice, I think, when there’s a lot of it all together.’
    â€˜It’s gorgeous,’ Jenna said. ‘It’s a shame more people can’t see it.’ A germ of an idea came to her, but slipped away before she could get hold of it.
    The other bedrooms were minimally furnished with modern pieces, but they all had pictures and objets d’art relegated from the main rooms over the years. Jenna could have pored over them for hours, but Kitty didn’t want to linger. The sun was shining and she seemed to feel it was her duty to get Jenna out into it.
    But on the top floor, Jenna couldn’t help exclaiming over a series of six handsome, glazed-fronted cabinets lining the wall of the corridor, because they were filled with undistinguished-looking, even quite ugly, lumps of rock that struck a chord with her.
    â€˜Oh, golly, look!’ she said. ‘Geological specimens! It makes me feel at home. My father had a collection just like this, only not so large. He was a palaeontologist.’
    â€˜Yes, I remember,’ Kitty said. ‘He was an academic when I knew him, but didn’t he work for an oil company later?’
    â€˜That’s right,’ Jenna said. ‘He was with BP. He had to study rocks to see where it was worthwhile drilling for oil – mostly in places like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. I think that’s why Ma’s so dedicated to the Mediterranean centres of civilization. She once went on one of Daddy’s trips and never got over the shock.’ She looked at the rocks fondly. ‘She hated Daddy’s specimens, but he did his best to get us interested in his subject. On wet Sundays when we were kids he tried to make us learn the periods off by heart – you know, Cambrian,