Cont'd

‘Have you put up the new salt-licks yet, Jethro?’

‘No, Miss Emily.’

‘Well, perhaps you could do it now.’

Jethro was just about to chime, Yes, Miss Emily, when something in his mistress’ gaze arrested him.  ‘I were just explaining to this here gentleman,’ he began, ‘about the time you –’

‘The salt-licks, Jethro.  Please.’  There was a mixture of impatience and imprecation in Emily’s gaze.  She looked even younger than her eighteen years.

‘Yes, Miss Emily.’  Jethro picked up the bucket he had been carrying and set off towards the tack-room.  ‘Finnegan don’t need no salt-lick,’ he muttered, before he was quite out of earshot.

Left on their own, Emily and the visitor confronted each other in silence for a couple of seconds, not knowing what to say.  To each of them the moment had a foreign quality, and yet seemed strangely familiar.

‘I was going to send Digby to the station to pick you up,’ began Emily at last, brushing a fragment of straw from her black dress.  ‘It’s so far and so dusty –’

‘I was very glad of the walk,’ said the Baron, whose demeanour showed no sign that he had just trudged six miles along country lanes.  ‘It is so long since I have last seen the English countryside.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s changed much,’ said Emily, finding it hard to hold von Tilsbach’s eye.

‘Not in the least,’ said the visitor, and his spectacles flashed cryptically.

‘We were – I was – well, very surprised to get your letter ...  I never realised – I mean, we’d heard so many things.  We heard that you’d been killed in the War, and someone said that you’d gone mad, and someone else said that you’d been court-martialled – we really didn’t know what to believe, but …’

Von Tilsbach nodded, giving a slight shrug as if to excuse the fact of his corporeality.  ‘I was so sorry to hear about your mother, Emily,’ he said, indicating with a discreet tilt of his head Emily’s mourning-dress.  ‘Permit me to extend my condolences.  I had hoped very much to speak to her.  I had much to say to her.  May I still stay for a few days with you?’

‘Of course you can stay with us, Christoph.  You can stay as long as you like!  Goodness, we never get visitors here.’  Emily’s eyes were bright.

‘I would not wish to impose upon you,’ said von Tilsbach, ‘but there is a purpose to my visit which Mrs. Tremaine would have appreciated, I believe.’ 

Something about this formulation struck Emily as curious; but then, almost all of Christoph von Tilsbach’s utterances, couched as they were in his subtly artificial brand of Oxford English, had a curious ring to them.  She was pondering his words when she was interrupted by a presence at her elbow.  It was McGregor, who had that ability characteristic of butlers to be perceived without actually being seen.  Long-limbed, pale-skinned and bony, McGregor wore his ginger hair combed back in a tight skullcap and seemed to carry the chill of an Edinburgh stairwell with him wherever he went.

The butler breathed an observation into Emily’s ear.

‘I don’t think so, McGregor, no,’ Emily replied, somewhat over-emphatically. ‘The blue room, as I said.’

McGregor raised a sandy eyebrow, his weight shifting just perceptibly forward of the vertical.

‘No, the blue room, and we’ll take some tea on the lawn at half-past four.  That will be all, McGregor,’ added Emily, when the butler failed to move.

‘I understand Miss Radcliffe would like a word to you,’ said McGregor.  He spoke with a precise Lowlands accent, enunciating every syllable with care.  ‘She’s in the drawing-room.’

Emily flashed him a look.

‘Very good, Miss,’ murmured McGregor, and receded in the direction of the house.

The Baron’s spectacles glinted again in the sunlight.  ‘I trust, he said, ‘that I do not cause –’

‘Oh no, not at all,’ said Emily.  ‘Although things here aren’t quite as one might wish them ...’  Suddenly she gazed at him with such candour that von Tilsbach blinked.  ‘It’s just that I’m so surprised to see you, Christoph,’ she said.  ‘I really thought that everyone was dead.’

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