Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [50]
“Mrs Butter,” Marsh told her, “this is Miss Russell, visiting from Sussex for a few days. You must be nice to her, and let her have a slice of bread. She saved my life once.” Which was an exaggeration, although it impressed the servants.
“And nearly took mine,” Alistair added, which was not, and impressed them even more.
“You probably deserved it,” she retorted, and slapped an inch of buttery brown bread into his hand. “Pleased to meet you, miss.” My bread came on a plate, as did Marsh’s. She stood over us until the bread was no more than oil on our lips, then she took back the plates.
“If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace, luncheon isn’t going to cook itself,” although to my eyes the work had gone on unabated. She, however, whirled around and started snapping out commands. Obediently, we faded away.
“There can’t be too many kitchens like that left in England,” I said, referring as much to the organisation as to the facility itself. Marsh chose to apply my remark to the latter.
“My stepmother tried to renovate the kitchen in the nineties. It is, after all, essentially a Mediaeval room—the only thing that’s changed is the motor running the spit, which I clearly remember in my childhood being harnessed to a dog.”
After the steam room of the kitchen, the cold November house bit at us. We’d walked back past the chapel and turned into the hall, with an eye to going upstairs for a proper introduction to Mr Greene’s library, when Marsh glanced out the window overlooking the drive and fountain. Whatever he saw there first rooted him to the spot, then sent him running—running—along the bust-filled corridor to the Great Hall and out of the front door, passing the sedate Ogilby in a couple of bounds. Alistair and I reached the door in time to see Marsh slow, then halt on the step above the drive. The approaching car circled the fountain and came to a halt in front of him. The driver’s door opened, and a woman unfolded herself.
Ogilby hastened to lift his umbrella over the newcomer, but she seemed not to notice. She had eyes only for Marsh, and he, it seemed, for her. He descended the last step, opened his arms wide, and wrapped them around the woman.
I couldn’t help an involuntary glance sideways to see Alistair’s reaction; astonishingly enough, the man so jealous of his cousin’s energies and attentions had a smile on his face, and strode forward into the rain to greet her as well.
She looked remarkably ordinary for this extreme response, I thought as I watched them come up the steps (Ogilby fretting at the impossibility of keeping all three of his charges dry at once, despite the large umbrella and the closeness of the three walkers). Tall and slim, her hair cut short but not in the fashionable shingle style, wearing a skirt and coat the colour of milky coffee, with a common wool overcoat across her shoulders (not even fur trim). She looked a bit like me, in fact, had my hair been cropped short and dark—with, I saw as she entered the porch, threads of white here and there. Mahmoud’s age, more or less, in her mid-forties. No powder or lipstick, her only jewelry a gold wrist-watch and a silver band on the ring finger of her left hand; she had cornflower-blue eyes with laugh-lines around them, the vigorous step of a tennis-player and, I found in a moment, a strong and callused grip.
Marsh gave her my name, which she seemed to recognise. Then Marsh withdrew very slightly from me, to put his hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“This is Iris Sutherland,” he told me. “My . . .” He paused to glance at her, and they exchanged an expression of mischief, as at a private joke shared. He turned back to me and completed his sentence.
“My wife.”
CHAPTER TEN
I