The Hotel Riviera(58)
There were baskets too, filled with bright wools and knitting needles, and doggie toys and chew bones scattered around. This was a true home, with all the love and chaos that went into creating it.
In the kitchen a bright-red Aga stove murmured softly, sending out wafts of heat, and next to it was Little Nell’s bed, a soft blue cushion that she instantly climbed on. She circled three times, then curled up in a tight little ball, head on her paws, watching us with bright dark eyes.
The kitchen was softly lit and cozy with a long pine table that could seat eight comfortably, a couple of old leather armchairs that Miss N said had come from the manor, and red and white checked curtains at the Gothic-arched windows.
A small hallway divided the living room from the kitchen and a central staircase, carpeted in red, obviously Miss N’s favorite color, ran up from it. The staircase walls were lined with school photos, and Miss Nightingale told me they were her Queen Wilhelmina’s girls, a photo for every year she had been headmistress.
Miss Nightingale’s room had a surprising red-lacquered Chinese marriage bed in an ornate cupboard, which was almost like a little room in itself, and Miss N told me she had slept in it as a child in Shanghai, where, she astonished me by saying, she had been born.
She lifted the lid of an old leather trunk and showed me silken cheongsams and old fans, and tiny little shoes worn by the bound-foot women, and which looked suitable only for dolls. There was a splendid Queen Anne chest with the luster of generations of careful polishing, soft Persian rugs, and heavy linen curtains patterned with more roses, which matched the sofa next to the Victorian iron fire grate. Leading off was a comfortable modern bathroom, and down the hall and up another couple of steps was my sweet little room, tucked under the eaves with a sloping ceiling and a pair of those dormer windows, diamond paned and looking like something from a fairy tale.
There was a regular bed, not a Chinese one, covered in a green and white patterned quilt and piled with pillows. A shaggy white rug on dark chestnut boards, a lovely old dresser in blond burled walnut with an oval mirror, a comfortable chair, a reading lamp, a small table by the bed, piled with books. I checked the titles: Lawrence Durrell’s Justine; the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay; Steps in Time, Fred Astaire’s 1960 biography, a first edition at that, signed by the man himself; a leather-bound memoir of the Blakely Nightingales; The Leopard Hat, the story of a daughter’s relationship with her mother and their Park Avenue life in the sixties, written by Valerie Steiker; and a couple of the latest novels by Anita Shreve and Nora Roberts.
“Plenty to choose from,” I said, smiling.
“Sometimes the nights can be very long, my dear,” Miss N said.
“And here’s your own little bathroom.” She showed me the tiny room where the ceiling sloped so steeply no man could have ever stood up in it without cracking his head on the massive oak beam that ran through it.
“Everything a girl could need,” I said, smiling at my friend. “It’s like a cottage in a fairy tale.”
And she laughed and said, well, maybe not quite, then she led me back downstairs where she made us both a cup of tea. The fire crackled and spit and flared up nicely, settling into a delightful orange-red glow that warmed our feet, while the tea warmed the rest of us. It was time to say good night. “How can I ever thank you?” I said, hugging Miss N. “This is so lovely, so different…”
“It’s always good to get away when things are a little difficult,” Miss N said, throwing another log on the fire. “A little distance between you and your problems can put a different perspective on things.”
Curled up in that comfortable bed, my head on the soft pillows covered in lavender-scented linen pillowcases so old and soft they felt like silk, I thought about my life and my worries, and about Patrick who was alive after all.
I wondered whether it was he who had set fire to the hotel. Did he have something to do with Scramble’s death? Was he still involved with Giselle, or with Evgenia Solis? I could think of no answers, only that now I was afraid of him. I did not know what he might do. But here, in my cozy room, curtains drawn, rain spattering on the windows, with the duvet pulled up to my chin, I felt safe.
Chapter 56
Miss N
Mollie Nightingale sat on the rose-patterned sofa in front of the fire, gazing into the flames and thinking about the past. Returning home always brought back memories of the old days, when Mr. Hemstridge, the head gardener of Blakelys Manor, had lived in this very cottage and where she, the daughter of the manor and the granddaughter of Sir Blakely Nightingale, would come by to visit on her pony. She would stop for a chat with Mrs. Hemstridge, and a glass of milk, fresh from the cow, still warm and smelling almost as good as the fresh lemon cake Mrs. Hemstridge somehow always had tucked away in her pantry, and which Mollie doted on.
“Ah, how times have changed,” Miss Nightingale said to Little Nell, who shook her long bronze hair out of her sharp little dark eyes and cocked one ear, listening. “You never knew Blakelys Manor, Nell, but it was a fairly grand house,” Miss Nightingale said, and the little terrier climbed onto her knee and settled down, anticipating perhaps a long night of reminiscences. “Though it wasn’t by any means a stately home,” Miss Nightingale added, “just a rambling seventeenth-century stone pile surrounded by acres of parkland.”