The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [33]
Lord Beecham’s first view of Shugborough Hall fulfilled what she had said. Not only was it a graceful manor house, it was also set atop a gently rolling hill that sloped down on all sides, the incredible green lawn ending only at the edge of a fast-flowing stream that ran east to west. Massive old willow trees framed the stream, with oak and lime trees dotted over the rest of the lawn. The home wood beyond was a thick collection of maple trees. The carriage drive was narrow, an afterthought, Lord Beecham suspected—that, or no owner had ever wanted a graveled drive to cut into the beautiful flowing green lawn. The ivy on the cream brick walls was kept neatly trimmed. No danger of it overwhelming the house.
“It is very nice,” he said to Lord Prith when they were both standing in front of the manor.
“Thank you, my boy. A snug little property, if I do say so myself. Been happy here. So was my Matilda, God bless her beautiful soul.” He gave a lusty sigh, then yelled, “Hinkel! Get your scrawny buttocks out here to help with the luggage.”
“Our long-suffering footman,” Helen said close to Lord Beecham’s ear. “The thing is, he is very skinny, especially from behind.”
“Sort of like a windowpane?” He turned to smile at her. It still made him start that he didn’t have to look down at the sound of a woman’s voice. No, she was right there, her mouth on a level with his, not more than five inches away.
“Exactly.”
He did not realize he had been staring at her, but she did, and leaned even a bit closer. “Shall I tell you about what I fantasize you to be doing while I am pulling off your right boot?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes glazed.
She gave a merry laugh and went into Shugborough Hall.
One hour later, after a light luncheon of sliced chicken topped with apricot chutney, crunchy fresh bread with the sweetest butter Lord Beecham had ever tasted, and orange and pear slices sprinkled with roasted almonds, enjoyed with Lord Prith’s favorite drink, champagne, a treat that Lord Beecham declined, he found himself sitting at Miss Helen Mayberry’s charming gilt-and-white Louis XV desk in a sunny back chamber that didn’t enjoy the presence of many gentlemen, she had told him. It was her estate room, where she conducted all her business. It was also her library, where she read and thought and dreamed about the lamp and what it really did.
She carefully placed the iron cask on the desk in front of him. “It’s very old. But solid. After all these hundreds upon hundreds of years, it is still strong.”
“I wish there was some way we could tell just how old it really is,” he said. Slowly, with infinite care, he pulled the fraying leather strap off its hook and lifted it, then gently raised the domed lid. He breathed in deeply. It was an ancient smell, he thought, ancient and something else. Not only did it smell very old, the hundreds of years leaving a vaguely yeasty scent with perhaps just a hint of the smell of olives, but also it didn’t seem quite to belong here in this modern world where everything was explained by science and there were no more mysteries, no more magic, no more strange phenomena that boggled a man’s brain.
Olives, he thought. Yes, there was the faint but distinct smell of olives. And something else as well. It nearly overwhelmed him, this feeling that the cask was, in and of itself, important—very important. He felt it deep inside himself. It was also frightening because it did not feel to him as if it was of this world.
What did he mean by that? That this cask had somehow floated down from another world? One of the millions of stars he looked at in the heavens? It had come from one of them? Oh, certainly not. Just breathing in the smell of this ancient cask with its scent of olives and yeast was making him more fanciful than Helen’s little jest about pulling off his boots had done.
“I wish,” he said, “that we could find a person who has been around something magical, something exquisitely different from everything we know. He could perhaps