The Hardie Inheritance by Anne Melville

looking in too much detail at individual items. Except perhaps family portraits: that would be interesting. And do you have any statues?’ It was Ellis Faraday’s claim that she was a sculptor which had made her curious to study what sculptors in other centuries had produced.
    â€˜Hundreds. Italian copies of Roman copies of Greek originals, mostly. They’re in the gardens and the orangery, so we’ll see them in the afternoon session. Right then, off we go. We’ll start at the top.’
    Doors opened silently in front of them as they made their way to the stone-flagged hall from which rose a double spiral staircase of extraordinary elegance and complexity. Grace felt her fingers twitching as she tried to work out its construction as though she were about to copy it in clay. But all her concentration was needed to keep up with her companion’s flow of information.
    â€˜Some oddities, you’ll find, in the way things are arranged. Beverleys never throw anything away. So of course they kept all the furniture and panelling and such from the Tudor house. Just tucked it away on the top floor of the new building to make way for the French stuff. There can’t be many places where something that looks like a French chateau has an Elizabethan long gallery, I don’t imagine. Now, let me introduce you to the family.’
    The panelled walls were covered with portraits, of every period from the sixteenth century to the present day. Rupert took them in order, giving brief biographies of those who were particularly distinguished or profligate and identifying others merely by their number in the line: the third earl, the seventhmarquess. Grace felt no great interest in them as individuals until they arrived at Rupert’s great-grandfather – and her own.
    He had been painted late in life. Grace stared at the heavy, expressionless face. She had met him only once, when she was a baby: the occasion had been described to her, but she had no memory of it. This large, white-haired gentleman had picked her from her cot and listened in dismay to the wheezing of her asthmatic chest, before giving orders that she should be moved at once from marshy Oxford to one of the hills which surrounded the city. According to her mother, he had saved her life. It seemed wrong that she should not remember him – wrong, too, that he should have been portrayed here with no sign of sympathy or affection in his expression.
    â€˜Nobody smiles,’ she exclaimed in surprise. ‘All these portraits, and not a smile amongst them.’
    â€˜It wouldn’t be properly dignified, would it? And I suppose it’s difficult holding a smile for as long as it takes to paint it. I mean, smiling alters the whole shape of the face, doesn’t it?’ He turned towards her, grinning in different, ridiculous ways until they were both laughing.
    Next to the old marquess hung a portrait of a young woman. Tall and slender, she was wearing what in the eighteen-sixties must have been fancy dress, making the picture look like a Gainsborough – except that her hair was not powdered, but hung in golden ringlets. Her eyes were blue, her lips were rosy, her complexion fair. ‘What a beauty!’ exclaimed Grace: and Rupert answered, ‘Your grandmother.’
    Grace stared at the portrait for a long time without speaking.
    â€˜My mother was beautiful in just the same way when she was young,’ she said at last. ‘Indeed, I remember her very much like that when I was a small girl and she had had six children. It’s always seemed unfair that I should inherit nothing from her or my grandmother except my height.’ Grace’s hair was black and straight. Her eyes were dark, her skin almost white. Although she was as slim as her mother had been, or the young woman in the portrait, it was a straighter slimness, lacking thecurves which seemed essential to feminine grace. To prevent her cousin from feeling