Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [90]
No, she had no rights here, and Manette knew it. But she mourned something lost all the same.
Nonetheless, there were things to be seen to that went beyond her situation with Freddie, and she found that she was grateful for them, although she wouldn’t have thought so on the previous day after her confrontation with Niamh Cresswell. Something had to be done about Niamh, and while Manette herself was powerless when it came to the woman, she was not powerless when it came to Tim and Gracie. If she had to move a mountain to help those children, then that was what she intended to do.
She drove to Ireleth Hall. She thought there was a good chance that Kaveh Mehran would be there since he’d been long engaged in designing a children’s garden for the estate, as well as overseeing the implementation of this design. The garden was intended for Nicholas’s future children— and wasn’t that like counting chickens, Manette thought— and considering the size of the garden that had been staked out, it looked as if Valerie was expecting dozens of them.
She was in luck, Manette saw upon her arrival. She traipsed round to the location of the future children’s garden, which was north of the immense and fantastical topiary garden, and she saw not only Kaveh Mehran but her father as well. There was another man with them whom Manette did not recognise but reckoned was “the earl” that her sister had phoned her about.
“Widower,” Mignon had told her. Manette could hear the tapping of her keyboard in the background, so she knew her sister was doing her usual multitasking: e-mailing one of her online lovers while simultaneously dismissing what she’d reckoned was a potential offline one. “It’s rather obvious why Dad’s dragged him up here from London. Hope springs eternal et cetera. And now I’ve had the surgery and lost all the weight, he reckons I’m ready for a suitor. A regular Charlotte Lucas, just waiting for Mr. Collins to show up. God, how embarrassing. Well, dream on, Pater. I’m quite happy where I am, thank you very much.”
Manette wouldn’t have put it past her father. He’d been trying to offload Mignon for years, but she had him very much where she wanted him and she had no intention of making any changes. Why Bernard wouldn’t show her the door or give her the boot or any other figurative cutting of ties with Mignon was beyond Manette, although once he’d built the folly for her sister some six years earlier, Manette had concluded her twin was holding back something damaging that would ruin their father if she let it be known. What that was Manette couldn’t imagine, but it had to be something big.
Kaveh Mehran appeared to be showing the other two men the progress so far made on the children’s garden. He was pointing hither and yon at stacks of timber beneath tarps and piles of quarried stone and stakes driven into the ground with string strung between them. Manette called out a hello and strode in their direction.
Mignon was out of her mind, Manette decided as the men turned towards her, if she thought “the widower” had been brought up from London as a potential suitor for her, a sort of “gentleman caller” in the best tradition of Tennessee Williams’s psychodramas. He was tall, blond, exceedingly attractive, and dressed— even in the Lakes, for God’s sake— with that kind of understated rumpled elegance that fairly screamed old family money. If he was a widower out looking for Wife Number Two or Wife Number Two Hundred and Twenty-two, he wasn’t going to choose her sister to step into that position. The human animal’s capacity for self-delusion was absolutely amazing, Manette thought.
Bernard smiled a hello at Manette and made the introductions. Tommy Lynley was the name of the earl