Wings of Fire - Charles Todd [5]
Cormac said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” And sat down again, impatient with the lot of them.
“I don’t want to stay the night here,” Susannah said, looking up at her husband as she changed the subject. “We’ll find rooms at The Three Bells.”
“Don’t be morbid!” Daniel told her. “Mrs. Trepol has already made up our rooms here.”
“I’m not morbid! This place is morbid! It’s like a hothouse where something unhealthy thrived. And it was never that way while Mother was alive.” She glanced up at the elegantly framed portrait over the hearth. Rosamund Beatrice Trevelyan, who’d had three husbands and children by each of them, loving them all with equal devotion, stared back at her with a half smile that captured both serenity and passion. The artist had found more than just beauty in the face he’d painted. “Mother had such life! Such warmth. There was always laughter, brightness, here. And that’s all disappeared, it—it drained away without our knowing it, after she died. I’ve come to hate the Hall. I never actually realized that until now. And after dinner we’re leaving.”
“I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind. I’d—rather not stay, either,” Rachel said, but for reasons of her own. There were ghosts here. She knew it now. She, who’d never believed in ghosts in her life, believed in them here. Not things in sheets that moaned and rattled chains. Those she could handle. These were . . . different.
“You haven’t decided—” Cormac began.
“Sell,” Susannah said, and Daniel nodded. After a moment, Rachel sighed and with a single movement of her head acknowledged her agreement.
“Over my dead body.” Stephen promised. “In the courts if need be, but I’ll fight you. This house ought to be preserved!”
“Selling is the soundest move you could make,” Cormac said. “Put it off, and you’ll find yourselves taking a loss. That’s a majority, then? When the wills are read tomorrow, you should instruct Chambers accordingly. As to the furniture, you might draw up lists of what you each want. And if there should be any conflict—”
“We’re not touching a stick of furniture until this has been settled,” Stephen said stubbornly, his jaw tight and his face flushed.
“Let Chambers work out a compromise. Agreed? What you don’t want personally, you should put up for sale. With the house, I think. It’ll bring far more that way. People with money enough to buy country houses these days don’t have the proper furnishings to put in them.” He looked around thoughtfully. “I’ve been considering a place in the country myself. I wonder...” With a shrug he let the thought die, then said, “I suppose it’s nostalgia. I spent a good part of my own life here too.”
“I want Mother’s portrait,” Susannah said immediately. “And there’s the Wedgwood coffee service. I’d like to have that as well. It was Grandmother FitzHugh’s.”
Her husband added, “I’d like to have the trophies for the horse races Rosamund’s stables won. Those ought to stay in the family anyway.”
Cormac said, “I haven’t any right to ask, but I’d like the guns. The ones that came from Ireland with my father. And his collection of walking sticks. They belonged to him before he married Rosamund, so in a sense I have some small claim on them.”
Susannah turned to Rachel. “Is there anything you particularly fancy?” Rosamund had loved Rachel like one of her own. They all had. Nicholas had been deeply fond of her, you could tell that, and they always said Richard—Susannah shivered and refused to think of Richard.
Rachel looked down at her hands, and the glass of sherry they were holding. “I don’t know. Yes, I do!” She lifted her eyes and regarded all of them. “I don’t have any claim on the Cheney side of the family. But, I’d like Nicholas’ collection of ships. The ones he carved. If no one else wishes for them?”
Her glance reached Stephen’s furious face and then she realized how callous it must sound to him, four people coolly coming to terms over the household goods of the newly dead. Her face flushed.
“They haven’t been decently buried for more than three hours!