skin upright.
‘Stop being so jittery and stupid,’ she told herself as she put the car in motion again. ‘You’ve seen Igor, and he wasn’t so bad. No obvious fangs, and a horse and a dog instead of bats!’
Nick Peveril was clearly a good farmer. The fences were in excellent repair, as were the various buildings, and the grass in the paddocks lay thick and lush in its spring growth.
He was also a good employer. The farm workers’ cottages were big, well-cared-for, and set in substantial gardens.
But the homestead was breathtaking, a huge double-storeyed building that must have been built by that first Nicholas, for it was a Victorian structure of weatherboards, with more than a hint of the severe, satisfying proportions of the Georgian style it had supplanted.
Shading the front veranda was a wistaria vine that was probably as old as the house. Its thick stems were hazed by bronzed, gleaming new growth, punctuated by fat buds silver in the rain.
A wide flight of wooden steps led up to the veranda. On either side of a glass-panelled front door French windows with panes of glass above stretched in ordered pairs down the side of the house. This was one nineteenth-century villa that wouldn’t be dark inside.
And the garden was like something out of a fairy-tale, a bower of skilfully contrasted form and colour, each glowing flower, each leaf, sprinkled by crystals of rain.
Minerva switched off the engine and got out. From somewhere around the back of the house a dog barked, warning the inhabitants that a stranger was near. Heavy, unsettling scent from the roses mingled with the rich perfume of a white rhododendron beside the steps. More roses, miniatures planted in clay pots, ascended on either side of the steps; as she moved between them perfume billowed into the moist air, adding to the mingled scents that drifted from the plants in the wide bed beneath the veranda.
Minerva’s nerves tingled. Holding herself very erect, smiling sardonically because it was ridiculous to imagine that the place was welcoming her, she walked to the door.
Before she had time to ring the bell or use the knocker the door opened. A middle-aged woman with a harassed expression looked enquiringly at her.
‘I’m Minerva Robertson,’ Minerva said, smiling. ‘Mrs Peveril’s sister.’
‘Mrs Pev— Oh!’ For a shocking moment the woman looked appalled.
‘I met Mr Peveril along the road,’ Minerva said smoothly, struggling to hide a fierce, corroding anger. ‘I’ve just called in. I’m on my way north.’
‘Oh. Yes, of course. Do come in.’ Collecting herself with an obvious effort, Mrs Borrows held the door open.
Minerva, who had some experience of old wooden houses, braced herself as she walked into a wide hall decorated in paper the rich gold of Jersey cream. But instead of the damp rawness she expected, the place was warm and dry.
The temperature was a definite bonus. It wasn’t a centrally heated stuffiness, more a gentle, all-pervading warmth that banished the bone-chilling dankness Minerva had experienced in other old houses.
Over the years she’d worked in the kitchens of several very expensively decorated houses. Some she had liked, some she had found soulless. The homestead at Spanish Castle had been decorated by someone with great skill and a definite empathy for Victorian architecture. Minerva’s gaze skimmed a splendid console table on a mellow Persian runner. Reflected in the gilt-framed Regency mirror above was a bunch of apricot and yellow and white old-fashioned roses in a silver vase, their sweetness almost unbearably evocative.
Beyond the table an elegant staircase ascended to the first floor. Gilt-framed pictures, mostly of an age in keeping with the house, were displayed carefully, and there were flowers everywhere.
‘This is beautiful,’ she said softly, looking around her with pleasure. ‘How old is it?’
‘A hundred and twenty years.
‘It doesn’t show its age.’
‘Spanish Castle has always been well-cared-for,’ the housekeeper said as though she’d been accused of neglecting her duty. ‘Would you like to come in here?’
She led Minerva into a small formal parlour decorated in the same sunny shades, although here the colours were less intense as befitted a room where people spent time rather than passed through.
‘Would you like a cup of tea while you’re waiting for Mr Peveril?’ Mrs Borrows asked punctiliously.
Minerva was already regretting her impulsive decision to drive up that long road from Kerikeri. The house might be welcoming but its inhabitants certainly weren’t. Still, she was here now; she’d have a cup of tea, exchange a few words with Nick Peveril, and then leave.
‘Yes, thank you.’ Her throaty voice was just as impersonally polite as the older woman’s.
She didn’t look around until the older woman had left. The little room could have been too stiff with its delicately formal seats and desk, but the pieces of furniture had the air of having lived so long together that they had settled into an amiable, comfortable companionship.
Outside the French windows an emerald lawn swept to a wide band of sheltering trees thickly planted at the base with rhododendrons and daphne, pieris and more roses. Minerva’s eyes lingered on one particularly glorious golden one until it was blotted out by a thick curtain of rain, heavy and implacable.
She turned away.
Almost immediately the housekeeper returned with a tray; she had barely set it down when her employer walked in, instantly dominating the small, decorous room.
It was the unexpectedness of his arrival that took Minerva’s breath away, nothing else. She hadn’t expected him so soon; he must have taken a short-cut. When her heart had slowed down a bit she realised that he probably wasn’t much taller than her father, only a couple of inches over six feet. But that air of cool authority, allied to the cool, inimical survey of his strange colourless eyes, made her feel small and defenceless.
‘Hello,’ she said, producing a polite smile.
‘So you found your way here.’ He was amazingly handsome, in a remote, arrogantly patrician manner. ‘Welcome to Spanish Castle. Helen, could I have a cup, too?’
‘I’ve put one there for you,’ the housekeeper said.
He looked at her. ‘Any call yet?’
‘No.’ The housekeeper looked excited and worried at the same time.
‘Let me know when it comes through,’ he said.
Smiling, she replied, ‘Yes, of course.’
No formality there, Minerva thought as the older woman left the room.
‘Would you like to pour? Mrs Borrows’s daughter is in labour in Christchurch,’ Nick Peveril explained. ‘It’s the first grandchild, so she’s very excited. How did you enjoy sailing the world on your billionaire’s yacht?’
‘He wasn’t my billionaire,’ Minerva said lightly, smiling with more than a little irony at the memory of the portly,
