Her innocent comment was greeted by another snort, and silence descended again.
There was little other traffic—some cyclists, a lorry piled high with bales of hay, a few cars and a couple of horseboxes. Occasionally they were brought to a halt by sheep and cattle wandering across the road in front of them.
Rain splattered across the windscreen, and O’Flaherty swore under his breath, and flicked on the wipers, before turning off on to a side road bordering yet another enormous lake. The clouds were down so low now that only the lower slopes of the mountains were visible.
‘What are they called?’ Sandie asked, pointing.
‘The Twelve Pins.’
The road unwound in front of them, like a narrow grey ribbon, edging the water. Sandie watched the rain dancing across the flat surface of the lake, and shivered a little, not from cold, but a sudden swift loneliness.
If she was at home now, she thought, she would probably be helping her mother in the garden, with its neat lawns and beds and well-pruned trees. And instead, here she was driving through a wilderness of water and peat bogs, to what?
She hadn’t expected Crispin to be at the airport to meet her, but she wished with all her heart that he had been. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been feeling quite so strange—and desolate, she thought swallowing a lump in her throat, as she realised just how far she was from home and everything familiar.
‘There’s Killane,’ said O’Flaherty abruptly, and gestured towards where a broad promontory jutted out into the lake. Peering forward, Sandie could see a thin trail of smoke rising above the clustering trees and, as they got closer, could make out the outline of a house. He turned a car across a cattle grid, through empty gateposts, and up a long drive flanked on each side by tall hedges of fuchsia, growing wild in a profusion of pink, crimson and purple.
And then the house was there in front of them, big and square, like a child might draw, with long multi-paned windows. Stone steps, guarded by urns filled with trailing plants, led up to the double doors of the main entrance. It looked grand, forbidding and slightly shabby, all at the same time, Sandie decided wonderingly.
O’Flaherty brought the car to a halt at the foot of the steps. ‘Away in with you,’ he directed. ‘I’ll see to your luggage.’
Sandie flew through the raindrops up the steps, and turned the handle on one of the doors. It gave more easily than she anticipated, and she nearly fell into a wide hall, with a flagged stone floor.
‘God bless us and save us!’ exclaimed a startled voice.
As Sandie recovered her equilibrium, she found she was being observed by a tall grey-haired woman in a flowered overall, carrying a tray laden down with tea-things.
She said, ‘I was told to come straight in. I am expected …’
It was beginning, she realised with exasperation, to sound a little forlorn. It was also irksome to find the woman gaping at her, rather as O’Flaherty had done at the airport.
Sandie straightened her shoulders. ‘I’d like to see Mr Sinclair, please,’ she said with a trace of crispness.
‘He’s in Galway, and won’t be back till night. I’ll take you to the madam.’ The woman continued across the hall, to another pair of double doors, and shouldered her way through them, indicating that Sandie should follow.
It was a big room, filled comfortably with sofas and chairs in faded chintz. A turf fire blazed on the hearth, and a woman was sitting beside it. She was dark-haired, with a vivid, striking face, lavishly made up, and was wearing a smart dress in hyacinth blue silk, with a wool tartan scarf wrapped incongruously round her neck. Sandie recognised her instantly and nervously.
‘Here’s the young lady come to play the piano for Mr Crispin,’ the woman who’d shown Sandie in announced, setting the tray down on an occasional table.
Sandie found herself being scrutinised from several directions—by the woman beside the fire, by a tall, dark girl, bearing a strong resemblance to Crispin, and also by two children, a boy and girl barely in their teens, bent over a jigsaw puzzle at another table.
‘Oh, dear,’ Magda Sinclair said at last. ‘Oh, dear. This is too bad of Crispin. This really won’t do at all.’
Sandie knew an ignominious and overwhelming urge to burst into weary tears. She’d set out with such high hopes, and come all this way, and now Crispin wasn’t here, and his mother disliked her on sight. She remembered Crispin had said she was temperamental.
‘Now, now, Mother.’ The dark girl got up from the window seat where she’d been sprawling, and came forward. ‘The poor kid will think she’s landed in a lunatic asylum!’ She held out her hand. ‘Hello, I’m Jessica Sinclair. Welcome to Killane. This, as you probably realise, is Magda Sinclair, and the brats are James and Steffie.’
Sandie swallowed. ‘How do you do. I’m Alexandra Beaumont.’ She was beginning to feel like something in a zoo.
Magda Sinclair seemed to shake herself, and got up. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, if we seem a little odd, but we just didn’t expect you to look so—so …’
‘Young,’ her daughter supplied, with a hint of dryness, giving Sandie the impression this was not what Magda Sinclair had intended to say at all.
‘Yes, of course,’ Mrs Sinclair said. She gave Sandie a brief smile. ‘I expect you’ve had a terrible journey. Why don’t you let Bridie show you your room, then come down and have some tea with us.’
Sandie had been expecting to be shown the door, rather than the place where she was to sleep.
She said, ‘Thank you. That would be marvellous.’
Bridie led the way back into the hall. As Sandie followed, the strap of her bag caught on the ornately carved doorknob, and she paused to disentangle it.
Through the half-open door, she heard Jessica Sinclair say in a low voice, ‘Don’t look so worried, Mother. Everything will be fine.’ She paused, adding flatly, ‘Just as long as Flynn stays a thousand miles away.’
SANDIE’S ROOM WAS at the back of the house. Vast and high-ceilinged, it contained a cavernous wardrobe in walnut with elegant brass handles, and a matching dressing-table, tallboy and old-fashioned bedstead of equally generous proportions. Sandie felt almost dwarfed as she unpacked and put her things away.
Tea had been an awkward meal. Having behaved so strangely when she arrived, the Sinclairs now seemed embarrassingly over-eager to put her at her ease, Sandie found ruefully. In spite of that, she’d managed to drink two cups of the strong, fragrant tea, and sample some of Bridie’s featherlight scones, and rich, treacly fruit loaf.
Bridie, she’d learned, was the cook-housekeeper, and the mainstay of the household.
‘She came here as a kitchenmaid when I married Rory Killane,’ Magda Sinclair explained, ‘and she’s been here ever since. She knows more about this family than we do ourselves, and she’s incredibly loyal.’
‘She likes Flynn best,’ said James, passing his cup to be refilled.
‘What nonsense,’ his mother said coldly. ‘She adores us all. Anyway, Flynn is never here.’
‘Bridie says he’ll be here soon. She saw it in the tealeaves,’ put in Steffie, heaping jam on to her fruit loaf.
Sandie saw Magda’s exquisitely reddened lips form something that might have been ‘Damnation’ and hastily looked elsewhere. She hadn’t intended to overhear that brief snatch of conversation before she went upstairs, but she couldn’t help being intrigued by its