old nanny and present housekeeper, Betty Roberts, bustled into the room. Standing with her arms akimbo, the plump woman glared up at the large hole in the ceiling, and then at the oil paintings which had been so hastily pulled down from the walls, their gilt frames casually piled high on a dry part of the floor, as if ready for a bonfire.
‘Well, this room is a right shambles, and no mistake! Your grandmother was always so proud of this house. She’d surely turn in her grave if she could see this mess,’ Betty muttered angrily.
‘I know,’ Angelica agreed, sighing heavily as she surveyed the chaotic scene. ‘It’s really depressing. There’s so much to clear up that I simply can’t seem to think exactly where to begin.’
“You look tired to death,’ the older woman told her brusquely. ‘Why don’t you pop down to the kitchen and make a nice pot of tea? I reckon that we could both do with a cappa.’
Realising that Betty was right, and that they both needed a break from cleaning up the storm damage, Angelica slowly made her way down the flights of stairs to the kitchen in the basement.
Hardly touched since the house was first built in 1723, the large cavernous kitchen still possessed an ancient black cooking range, which was still in working order—although Betty had long ago badgered Angelica’s grandmother into providing a modern, up-to-date cooker and refrigerator. Together with a tall Welsh dresser, holding row upon row of copper bowls and saucepans, and an enormous scrubbed pine table surrounded by comfortable, high-backed chairs, the old kitchen was a warm and cosy room, which had hardly altered since the days of her great-great-grandfather, Sir Tristram Lonsdale.
A very successful and wealthy artist, Sir Tristram had specialised in painting highly romantic scenes from medieval life, loosely based on ancient legends and fables. After inheriting a large private income, and being knighted by Queen Victoria—a great admirer of his more gloomy paintings—Sir Tristram had begun travelling far and wide across the globe, returning from his many journeys with a re markable assortment of weird and wonderful objects. To these he had added a collection of ancient Greek and Roman remains, which his wife had inherited from her family, the original owners of the house.
Although Angelica wasn’t too keen on some of the paintings, which she thought decidedly depressing, she deeply loved the eccentric house—and its even more eccentric contents. Because, as she frequently explained to visitors when the house was open to the public, the really marvellous thing about Sir Tristram’s legacy was not only that he’d been an uncontrollable collector of just about everything under the sun, but that he had never allowed anything to be thrown away! As a consequence, the large house still contained not only a very valuable collection of Victorian paintings, but practically every room was full to overflowing with an extraordinary assortment of strange objects.
Realising that there ought to be a proper catalogue of all the various items—instead of the original, dusty labels written in Sir Tristram’s spidery handwriting—Angelica had once attempted to compile a list of each room’s contents. But after spending three weeks on the job, she had been dismayed to find that she’d barely scratched the surface—and had abandoned what seemed a hopeless task. Quite apart from trying to describe all the Greek and Roman statues, Peruvian pottery, Egyptian mummies, Chinese ceramics, rough gem stones and various objects in silver and gold, Angelica hadn’t a clue where the collection of shrunken heads came from—Borneo, perhaps?— and she could only hazard a wild guess as to the use of some of those frightening, horrific-looking scientific instruments.
However, quite determined that his collection should be kept intact, Sir Tristram had formed a complicated trust—backed by a very large sum of money—to preserve the house and its contents for the interest of future generations. Unfortunately, almost one hundred years after his death, Sir Tristram Lonsdale’s legacy was providing considerable difficulties for both his trustees and Angelica.
‘Haven’t you got that tea made yet?’ Betty grumbled as she bustled into the kitchen. ‘I don’t know… a young girl like you, daydreaming all the time. What you need is a nice young man,’ she added, sighing thankfully as she sank down into a comfortable chair.
‘The last thing I want is a “nice young mian”, thank you very much! haven’t forgotten that rat, Nigel Browning, even if you have,’ Angelica retorted grimly as she poured boiling water on to the tea-leaves in the pot.
‘Yes, well…’ Betty muttered, two high spots of colour flaring in her cheeks. ‘I made a bit of a mistake there.’
‘Let’s face it, Betty—he charmed the socks off both of us,’ Angelica sighed, reaching up into a cupboard for some cups and saucers.
How could she have been so foolish as to fall, hook, line and sinker, for that smooth-talking bastard Nigel Browning? Even now, almost a year later, Angelica simply couldn’t understand why she’d been such an idiot. She’d had lots of casual boyfriends at university, of course. But her grandmother’s long terminal illness had left her very little time for any private life. So maybe it was her youth and inexperience which had led to her becoming so blindly infatuated with the attractive rogue? Although even Betty—who was normally a very shrewd judge of character—had also been captivated by the rotten man’s overwhelming charm.
Looking back at the distressing episode, she could still feel almost sick with embarrassment. It was humiliating to have to acknowledge what a fool she’d made of herself—and over a man who was, it transpired, nothing but a professional con man! So professional, in fact, that it had taken Angelica some time before she could bring herself to believe the police, when they’d told her that Nigel had been caught red-handed, trying to sell part of Sir Tristram’s valuable collection of gold snuff-boxes.
‘That’s the way it goes, sweetie. It was just my bad luck to get caught,’ he’d admitted with a shrug and one of his charming smiles when she’d rushed to the police station, quite convinced that he must be the victim of a terrible mistake.
But it was clearly she who’d made such a terrible mistake. Deeply scarred by the shame of having been so easily duped, Angelica was determined that she would never, never again allow herself to fall so disastrously in love with anyone—let alone Betty’s idea of a ‘nice young man’!
‘Do you know what I need at the moment?’ she told the other woman as she poured them both a cup of tea. ‘What I really need is to get my hands on a very large sum of money.’
Betty nodded. ‘All that work on the roof isn’t going to come cheap. Do you reckon you’ve got insurance cover for the storm damage?’
‘I hope so,’ Angelica sighed. ‘But now that a problem has also arisen over the roof timbers, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the trust will pay for the necessary repairs.’ She gave an unhappy shrug. ‘If only we could find Mrs Eastman, maybe she and I could get together and really put this house in order.’
Following her grandmother’s death over two years ago, Angelica had discovered that she was one of two heiresses to the property, sharing her inheritance with a very distant relative who apparently lived in America. Although the trustees had done their best to trace the woman—a Mrs Elizabeth Eastman, aged approximately sixty years of age, who was descended from a brother of old Sir Tristram—they had drawn a blank so far. However, until the other beneficiary had been found, the trustees had agreed that Angelica could continue to live in the house and receive a small income from the trust, providing that she maintain the house and open it once a week to interested visitors, as outlined in Sir Tristram’s will.
None of which was a problem, Angelica told herself as she sipped the hot liquid. Having lived in the large old house with her grandmother, ever since her
