She couldn’t argue with that. There were not one but two huge pine dressers, an enormous kitchen table, worn from years of use, and old-fashioned cupboards running almost the length of the long room, and that was before she even started opening various doors to find larders and the like.
‘Shame that we haven’t got anything to store, then, isn’t it?’ she said to him a little tartly.
Almost everything had gone into storage, and they had only brought with them what could fit in the car and its tarpaulin-covered trailer. ‘We won’t need much to begin with,’ Torr had said. ‘Just bring the essentials.’
The ‘essentials’ would fill one cupboard if they were lucky.
‘Better to have too much space than too little,’ he pointed out.
There was certainly space. The ground floor of Mallory’s house in Ellsborough would have fitted easily into the room. At one end there was an enormous fireplace, with a couple of cracked and battered leather armchairs in front of it which made a separate living area.
‘My great-uncle pretty much lived in this room on his own for the last few years, before his son moved him to a nursing home,’ Torr said when Mallory commented on it. ‘He couldn’t afford to keep up the castle, but he refused to leave until he was in his nineties and they couldn’t find anyone prepared to come in and care for him here.’
‘I can’t imagine why,’ Mallory murmured, with an ironic glance around the kitchen.
‘They put a bathroom in one of the old sculleries for him.’ Torr opened a couple of doors. ‘Yes, here it is.’
He stood back to let Mallory peer in. There was a rudimentary bath, half filled with droppings, dust and cobwebs, a grimy sink and an absolutely disgusting lavatory.
So much for her fantasy of a hot bath before falling into bed.
Charlie, who had been sniffing interestedly round the kitchen, put his paws on the loo seat and began slurping noisily at the water, obviously feeling right at home.
Look on the bright side, Mallory told herself. It can’t get any worse than this.
‘Where did your great-uncle sleep?’ she asked wearily.
‘I’ll show you.’
There was a short passage leading out of the kitchen, and Torr threw open another door. ‘I think this used to be a sitting room for the upper servants,’ he told Mallory, who had finally managed to drag Charlie out of the bathroom. ‘But, as you can see, it makes a perfectly adequate bedroom.’
That was a matter of opinion, thought Mallory.
‘It’s got a ceiling, I’ll give it that,’ she conceded.
‘And a bed,’ Torr pointed out, indicating a rusty iron bedstead complete with lumpy mattress. ‘And a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. What more do you want?’
Mallory thought of her comfortable bedroom back in Ellsborough, with its dressing table and the pretty little sofa. The curtains were swagged and trimmed, the colour and pattern of the fabric picking up the tones in the bedspread and upholstery perfectly so that the whole effect was one of freshness and tranquillity.
She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ she said.
Still, she was so tired that she thought she would sleep anywhere that night-until a thought occurred to her.
‘Where are you sleeping?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Right here,’ said Torr. ‘With you. There’s no need to look like that,’ he added roughly. ‘I’m well aware of how you feel. You made it clear enough on our wedding night, and frankly I’ve no desire to repeat the experience myself. It was like being in bed with a marble statue, which isn’t my idea of a turn-on,’ he added with a caustic look. ‘I won’t have any problem keeping my hands off you.’
Mallory stiffened at the asperity in his voice and lifted her chin, the appalling conditions momentarily forgotten. ‘If you feel like that, I’m surprised you want to share a bed with me,’ she said.
‘I don’t particularly,’ Torr told her, ‘but I don’t have much choice. These are the only habitable rooms at the moment, and one bed is all we’ve got. It’s too damp and cold to sleep on the floor, so we might as well be practical about it. If nothing else, we can keep each other warm,’ he went on as he led the way back to the kitchen.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about all this before we came?’ demanded Mallory, hating the fact that she always ended up trotting after him, but lacking the courage to be left on her own. ‘You must have known that we would end up sharing a bed.’
‘Would it have made a difference?’
She thought about how few options she had if she wanted to keep Charlie. ‘Probably not,’ she admitted grudgingly, ‘but at least I would have been prepared.’
‘I can’t see that it would have helped,’ said Torr indifferently as he retrieved the torch and clicked it back on. ‘You weren’t going to like anything about Kincaillie, so there was no point in giving you something else to feel miserable about. You were just going to have to accept it anyway.’
‘Because I can hardly walk out if I don’t like it, can I?’ said Mallory bitterly. She glanced up and caught a glimpse of Torr’s answering smile.
‘It would be a very long walk,’ he agreed.
Unpacking the car seemed to take a very long time. The wind shrieked and clutched at them as they toiled backwards and forwards, and by the time they had finished Mallory’s hands were numb with cold and the icy rain had plastered her hair to her head. She was wearing the waterproof jacket that she used when she walked Charlie, but the hood was worse than useless in this wind, and she had given up trying to keep it on her head. As a result the sleet had found its way around her neck and seeped horribly down her back. It wasn’t too bad as long as she kept moving, but the moment she stopped, she shivered with the clammy cold.
Torr had decreed that they could leave it until morning to unpack the trailer, but they still ended up with a pile of boxes in the middle of the kitchen floor. Mallory was ready to drop with exhaustion, but Charlie still had to be fed. It was long past his supper time, and he had been patiently accompanying them in and out to car in the hope that his bowl would materialise.
Peeling off her jacket with a grimace, she hung it over the back of a chair and began looking through boxes for the dog food. Torr had brought a portable gas ring with him, and connected it to the canister. His movements were quick and competent, and Mallory found herself watching him from under her lashes as she spooned food into Charlie’s bowl. She had never really noticed that about him before now. She had seen him as the brusque, successful businessman that he was, but she had never thought of him
She put the bowl down on the floor and Charlie waited, quivering with anticipation, for her signal that he could eat. Mallory smiled at his expression. ‘OK,’ she said, and the dog leapt for the bowl, wolfing down his meal in matter of seconds and then deriving a lot of enjoyment from pushing the bowl around as he licked it clean. The stainless steel rang on the stone floor, and Mallory made a mental note to find his plastic mat for next time.
Hunger satisfied, Charlie slurped water noisily, and then threw himself down on the tattered rug in front of the fireplace and rested his head on his paws with a sigh of contentment.
Torr glanced at him. ‘Must be a nice being a dog sometimes,’ he commented dryly, setting a kettle on the gas ring and lighting the flame.
‘I know. A bowl of dog food and somewhere to stretch out and he’s perfectly happy,’ said Mallory, swaying with tiredness. ‘I’ll pass on the dog food, but I wouldn’t mind somewhere to lie down myself. Did you bring in the bedding?’
‘I put it in the bedroom.’
‘I’ll make the bed, then.’
She might as well face up to it, Mallory had decided. Sharing a bed was obviously part of Torr’s punishment, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of making any more fuss about it. No doubt he was expecting her to insist on sleeping on her own somewhere, but she was so tired she had to lie down, and it looked as if the bed was her only option. It would take more than Torr to stop her sleeping tonight, in any case.
The little bedroom was freezing, and Mallory shivered as she covered the lumpy mattress with a blanket and then made the bed, layering it up with a duvet and three more blankets on top. Even in the meagre light of the single naked bulb it looked positively inviting.
To Charlie’s delight, Torr had laid a small fire, and the flames were just starting to take hold when she went back into the kitchen. The fire was dwarfed by the enormous fireplace, but it was surprising how welcoming it looked, and at least it gave the illusion of warmth, even if not the reality.
‘I’ve made some tea,’ said Torr. He nodded at the sagging armchairs in front of the fire. ‘Sit down.’
