Chapter 5: Three Small Towers

ARIA

"My mother didn't arrange anything," I said, and the words came out thin in the cold air.

"Didn't she?" Gideon Hale kept one gloved hand on the top of the open door, the way a man holds a gate for a lady he has no plan to let through. "She told me you would be on the early train, so I thought I'd save you the walk."

"I never told her which train."

"Then she guessed, mothers are good at that."

He was tall and lean in a long camel coat that had never seen rain, with dark blond hair combed back and green eyes that waited a little too long between blinks. He smiled the way a man reads a menu he already knows by heart.

"You left the blue letter at the porter's lodge," I said.

"I did, I prefer to hand things over myself, it saves misunderstandings."

"There's nothing to misunderstand, I'm not Mrs. Dawson."

"No, you're the guarantor." He said the word gently, as if it were a gift. "Miss A. Dawson, page three, signed and dated."

"I never signed anything."

"Your signature says you did."

"Then somebody else wrote it."

"Then take it up with somebody else." He shrugged, and the coat moved like water. "I only collect, Miss Dawson, I don't ask where a name came from."

"Why me?" I asked. "My mother's the one who borrowed, why not knock on her door?"

"Because your mother is married to Charles Rothwell, and a man like Charles can make a lender's life very difficult." He said it kindly, as if explaining the weather. "A quiet girl with no husband, no savings, and no one to shout for her is a much gentler place to knock."

My hands had gone cold and stupid, but my voice stayed level, which surprised me; years of keeping quiet in a loud house will teach you that much. "How much?"

"Four hundred and eighty thousand pounds, with the interest that started yesterday."

"Yesterday?"

"Your mother missed a payment on the fourteenth, she's very good at dates she can't keep."

The fourteenth. The paper band around the cash had said the fourteenth too, and I felt the three hundred pounds sitting in my bag like a swallowed stone.

"Did you give my mother money yesterday?"

"A courtesy," he said. "She told me her daughter would need a first month somewhere, and I'm not a monster."

"You lent her money to send me away."

"I lent her money, what she buys with it is her own business."

Behind him the mist lay flat across the gravel, and the first birds had started in the hedges, loud and cheerful and no help at all. Far off in the house a door closed.

I took one step back. "I'm not getting in your car."

"Nobody said you must." His smile didn't move. "I asked shall we, and you're free to answer no; I find a patient man collects more than an impatient one."

"Then be patient somewhere else."

"I will, when you're a little less tired." He reached into his coat and drew out a plain white card, and in the corner I saw three small gray towers. "Take it."

"No."

"It has a number that's answered at any hour, you may want it when your mother stops picking up."

"She'll pick up."

"Will she?" He tilted his head. "When did she last tell you the truth about anything?"

My mouth opened and nothing came out of it; there was only the mist, and the birds, and the engine ticking under the bonnet.

"Morning, miss."

Doyle had come around the corner of the kitchen garden, a short, broad man in a flat cap, a flask in one hand and a rake in the other, and the rake was held at a slant that wasn't quite casual. He had kept the gate at Rothwell House for thirty years, and the first winter I lived there he had carried my suitcase up three flights of stairs without being asked.

"Mr. Doyle."

"This car's not on the list." He nodded at the long black bonnet. "Nobody stops at the kitchen gate on a gala morning without the pass Mr. Charles signs."

"I'm certain Mr. Charles would sign one for me, if I asked," Gideon said.

"Mr. Charles is asleep and Mr. Kellan is poorly, so you'd best ask next week." Doyle set the feet of the rake in the gravel. "Or not at all."

"Poorly?" Gideon's eyebrows rose, politely, like a curtain. "Dear me, I do hope it isn't serious; give him my best wishes."

"I'll give him your number plate, sir, that's what I'll give him."

Gideon laughed, softly, the sound of a coin put down on a counter. He laid the white card on the stone gatepost, where it sat looking at me, and he slid in behind the wheel.

"Your mother owes me money, Miss Dawson," he said through the open window, "and you owe me your name; of the two, the name is the one that costs more."

"I owe you nothing."

"Then we'll find that out together." He touched two fingers to his forehead, and the window slid up, and the long black car rolled away through the mist as quietly as it had come.

Doyle watched it until it passed the gate. Then he walked over to the post, picked up the card between two fingers like something dead, and put it in his waistcoat pocket.

"I'll keep this, if you don't mind, Mr. Kellan will want to see it."

"Please don't tell him."

"Miss, I've served this family a long time, and I've learned there's a list of things you keep from the family and a list of things you keep from Mr. Kellan, and they aren't the same list." He unscrewed the flask and poured tea into the cap. "Drink."

"I'm fine."

"You're shaking so hard the gravel can hear you."

"My things are still upstairs," I said, between sips, "my suitcase, my sketches, the photograph of my mother."

"Then fetch them, miss, quick and quiet, before the house wakes." He tapped the side of his nose. "I'll bring the estate van round to the laundry door, and nobody needs to know where it went."

"Mr. Doyle, you can't."

"I can do a good deal at my age, I've found; it's the one advantage."

I took the cap with both hands. The tea was black and sweet and hot enough to hurt, and it was the best thing I had ever tasted.

"Where did you sleep last night, miss?" he asked gently, not looking at my crumpled dress or my bare ankles.

"I didn't, really."

"No, I don't suppose anyone did." He sniffed, and looked at the sky as if it had asked him a question. "Gala nights are like that."

"How long was that car here, Mr. Doyle?"

"Since a quarter past two."

"Since two? And nobody sent him away?"

"I rang the house straight off, I did, and the night butler said Mrs. Dawson had been told the car was expected and that nobody was to trouble you."

"Told by whom?"

"By Mrs. Dawson, miss." He looked at the floor of the cap, the last brown drop of tea, and then up at the house. "That's the part I can't put down, you see; I stood at this gate with the telephone for an hour, and she stood at that window the whole time, with a lamp behind her."

"Which window?"

"Her dressing room, miss, the one over the herb beds." He rubbed his jaw. "She never rang me, and she never came down, and when you walked out of the back door and that man opened his car, she was still standing there, watching."

My fingers loosened around the cap, and a little tea ran over my wrist, over the small scar, over the silver anchor.

"She wouldn't," I said. "She wouldn't watch."

"I'm only telling you what I saw."

"She gave me three hundred pounds yesterday, for a room, she cried, she held my hands..."

"I believe she did, miss." He took the cap from me before it fell. "A person can do both."

I turned and looked up at the second floor, past the ivy and the herb beds and the dark glass catching the first gray of morning. In the window of my mother's dressing room, a pale curtain was still swinging, very slowly, back into place.