“Lord Belfrey doesn’t believe you took the jewels with you when you fled Mucklesfeld.”
“Doesn’t he?” pushing back her hair in a weary gesture. The thin white line of the scar tracing down from the corner of her eye to her cheek showed up sharply in the light coming in through the window framed in floor-length pale blue silk.
“No. You made a… very positive lasting impression on him the day he came to Mucklesfeld and saw you standing halfway up the stairs. When my husband and a friend and I arrived out of the fog the other night, he got the idea that I look something like you did then and still do in your portrait.”
“Yes,” she said, “I can see that.”
“If there is any resemblance, it has to be very faint. You were beautiful. And I have a strong feeling that without those bottle glasses, the scraped-back hair, and frumpy clothes you still are.”
“I don’t spend much time in front of a mirror. Not because of this”-she touched a finger to the scar-“I just prefer not to narrow my focus down to me. I’ve spent my life since Mucklesfeld staying constantly busy in unexciting ways. A nursing career, a small flat, and for the last three years Sophie.” The Sealyham twitched an ear, then reshuffled back to sleep in the basket. “I counted on being sufficiently uninteresting to have a good chance of getting away with this charade. At the start, fooling Celia was all that mattered. Once over that hurdle, I felt reasonably secure. Although sometimes I do wonder about Charlie Forester. He was always so kind, so eager to be of help to me. But,” she shrugged her shoulders, bunching up the cardigan, “it was a very long time ago. I’m not sure I would have recognized him; he’s over eighty now.”
“If Miss Belfrey hadn’t banned Lord Belfrey from this house, he would have presented a problem for you. No disguise or change in appearance would fool him. He seems to me a man of uncanny recall.” That wasn’t giving away more than was justified, was it?
“He… Aubrey made an indelible impression on me, too. For that one breathless moment, I thought I’d summoned up the man who would rescue me. It had been a quite dreadful day.” She removed the spectacles and rubbed her forehead above the bridge of her nose. Without them, her face seemed stripped naked and I caught my first glimpse… just a suggestion, really, of the loveliness that had haunted Lord Belfrey and the loss of which had played its part in driving his cousin Giles to madness. Nora finally asked the question I would have raised earlier were the situation reversed, but she did so without rancor. “What are you really? Some sort of private detective?”
“Occasional amateur. I’m at Mucklesfeld quite by chance, as I told you. But there was something in the atmosphere right from the beginning, something apart from the accidental death of one of the contestants that drew me in, and that was your story.”
“The absconding bride.” Something in her misty gray eyes told me talking would be a release now the cat was out of the bag and in my lap.
“Was your husband cruel from the start of your marriage?”
“Giles never treated me badly.”
“But Lord Belfrey thought… is still convinced you were terrified of your husband after being forced into a marriage contrived by your family.”
“That’s true. My father was in desperate financial straits as a result of some highly speculative investing. He was on the verge of losing everything and there was Giles offering to save the day in return for one small favor. Me. He’d been infatuated with me for several years after meeting me at Ascot on my twentieth birthday. I had no idea. He was older than both my parents by ten years. I suppose when I thought of him at all, it was as a courtesy uncle.” Nora again brushed her hair back from her forehead. A weary gesture. “I was aghast when my father told me, quite unemotionally, what was expected of a dutiful daughter. I railed, of course, but unlike my brother-there were just the two of us-I had always toed the line. Saving the family home for Jeremy to inherit along with an income to support it was of far more importance than any squeamishness on my part. After all, what did I have to complain about? I would be married to a lord.”
“So Giles dipped into the Belfrey coffers to replenish your family’s.”
“And I am supposed to have robbed them further by making off with the jewels.”
“You didn’t?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“No, but I suppose it would have been an understandable revenge against a brutal, merciless husband. But you say he wasn’t that.”
Nora resettled the glasses on her perfect nose. “I hated him at first, thought him unnatural for wanting me, knowing I had no feelings for him. Our wedding night is something I try never to think back on. Not because he forced me to submit, he was I suppose pathetically gentle, and there was nothing… out of the way, that could be considered deviant. But every part of me recoiled from his body… his touch. When I couldn’t block those times out of my mind, I told myself they would get better. But it didn’t happen, and after a few weeks he moved out of our bedroom. At least I had my nights to myself. He said, very kindly really, that it didn’t matter. That having me there, just being able to look at me, like a flower in a vase, was enough.”
“That sounds distinctly creepy to me.”
She stared straight ahead. “I might have grown kinder in my feelings toward him, if the days had not been so unendurable.”
I sat silent in the cobalt blue velvet chair. Sophie the Sealyham slept on. From the continued stare into nothingness, I gauged Nora to be no longer with us but back at Mucklesfeld, avoiding whenever possible the husband who filled her with revulsion, leaving her with only one other source of companionship.
“I understood,” Nora continued tonelessly, “that Celia would resent me. Having a stepmother a couple of years her junior and knowing exactly why I had agreed to marry him would have been enraging for anyone in her position. I expected to be either ignored or the recipient of snide remarks, but she went further than that. This,” pressing a finger to the scar on her face, “happened when she threw a cut-glass dish at me. It literally came at me out of the blue. Nothing apparent led up to the incident. Celia was sitting in the drawing room leafing through a magazine when she picked it up and aimed it at me. When she saw the blood dripping through my fingers, she said, ‘Don’t get that on the floor,’ and swept out of the room. She and I both knew that I would have made a bad decision in telling Giles. I believed then-and I still do-that she would have found a way to get rid of me once and for all given half an opportunity. I began seriously to fear my days were numbered when Giles bought this house for me.”
“Witch Haven? Yours?”
“In their arrangement with him-all very tidy and legal-my parents did seek to secure some protection for me in the event of his death; at which time of course I would’ve had to leave Mucklesfeld. I was to have a place of my own in waiting. Having paid substantially for the privilege of having a wife who couldn’t bear him to touch her,” Nora continued speaking without inflection, “Giles himself felt a financial pinch, so it had to be a reasonably priced house. Six months after our marriage, this one went up for sale and he bought it. To my surprise, having come to feel myself incapable of any positive emotion, I fell in love with the place despite its being in a shockingly run-down state. The only contented moments I spent after that at Mucklesfeld were occupied in planning how I would make Witch Haven my own-collecting ideas from magazines, positioning furniture choices on paper renditions of the rooms, deciding what colors I would use. Before leaving, I had an extensive scrapbook.”
I looked around the bedroom-the word
“Extremely close. Of course there are some things I would change, perhaps because I have changed, but surprisingly my anger against her didn’t spill over to infect my feelings for the house. Perhaps it has the sort of aura that can’t be tainted, however unpleasant the personality of the occupant?”
“Maybe.” The empathy I had felt for this woman upon first hearing about her, in good part because of my attributed likeness to her, was increasing. I also saw houses as personalities; it was what I brought to my work as a designer. “How did Witch Haven get its name?”
For the first time I saw Nora… Eleanor… really smile. “It may be a legend, but the story goes that back in the sixteen hundreds a young woman from this area was accused of witchcraft on the grounds that a young dairy farmer was savagely gored by his bull after she supposedly hexed him. Her version was that she’d had to fight him off on several occasions when he’d cornered her in the lane as she was passing. It was his wife who raised the village against her. On the day she was to be hanged, the squire’s son came galloping up to the prison yard waving a writ for her release and plucking her from the gallows as the noose was lowered.”
