Cauldstane Read Online Free Page B

grey eyes serious. ‘Go carefully now.’ He made it sound like an instruction, almost an order. ‘The carpet’s worn into holes.’
    ‘ Thank you. I will.’
    He glanced round the passageway once more, then opened a door and was gone.

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
     
    The dining room was dark, oppressively red-walled and filled with polished mahogany pieces that looked as if they’d been in position for centuries. Possibly they had. It would have taken a small army of men to move them. Fergus was pouring sherry from a decanter for a woman who I assumed must be his Aunt Griselda.
    Zelda – as she was known – was Sholto’s younger sister and had been married in her youth to Jean-Claude Fontaine, a Formula One racing driver. She’d lived a glamorous jet-set life in southern France for many years, but maintained her independence by training as a chef, then running her own restaurant. She eventually divorced Jean-Claude but had never re-married. Zelda had sold up and moved back to her childhood home to help Sholto run the estate after his wife Liz had died. Since Sholto was often abroad on expeditions, sometimes for many months, the management of Cauldstane and the supervision of her nephews’ boarding school education had fallen to Zelda. Even after Sholto re-married, Zelda stayed on while Meredith MacNab pursued her singing career. It seemed she’d turned readily to Zelda for advice and support and they’d become good friends.
    Zelda ’s warmth and generosity were immediately apparent when Fergus introduced us. I declined his offer of sherry so he set about carving cold ham at the sideboard where a buffet lunch was laid out. Zelda shepherded me towards the table. We sat down, she at the head of the table and I to her left. Mrs Guthrie brought us soup, then hovered at the side of the room, doing her best to look invisible, but I noticed her eyes scanned the table, making sure we had all we needed. I wondered how often she sat down in a normal working day. Running shoes for travel on stone floors and polished wooden boards now seemed sensible attire. I was beginning to get the measure of Cauldstane.
    Zelda put me at my ease, chatting about books and how busy she was in retirement, running a secondhand bookshop for the Highland Hospice charity. I wasn’t fooled. I knew that, in the nicest possible way, I was being vetted. As I answered her numerous, sometimes probing questions, the writer in me couldn’t help noting that Griselda Fontaine must once have been a beautiful woman. Her outfit was the kind worn by smart countrywomen for the last fifty years: tweed skirt, cashmere twin-set and unobtrusive pearls. Her hair, which didn’t appear to be dyed, was a pale apricot colour, held back from her face by a black velvet Alice band. Her flawless skin was gilded with tiny freckles, so that even without a scrap of make-up, her face glowed, forming the perfect setting for a pair of opal-blue eyes. She was tall, slim and, despite a pair of mannish brogues, elegant. According to the MacNab family tree Zelda was sixty-seven, but she looked at least ten years younger.
    I tucked into ham salad while Zelda played a version of Twenty Questions, trying to wheedle the names of my subjects out of me, working her way through the list of celebrities whose memoirs apparently formed semi-permanent stock in the Hospice bookshop.
    ‘Now I do love a good biography but – forgive my being frank, Jenny…’ I doubted Zelda was ever anything else. ‘ Some of these celebrity books are good for nothing more than lining a budgie’s cage. I mean no disrespect to their authors, whoever they may be. It’s just that these folk haven’t lived! There’s a wee thing, an actress or model, I don’t remember her name now, but from the look of her, she can’t be long out of school. How can she possibly merit an autobiography?’
    Zelda turned her attention to her lunch, so I assumed the question had been rhetorical. I asked what kind of books did sell