Page 14 of Marble Hall Murders

She’d had to tell Jeffrey, of course – he was the lord of the manor – and of course he had objected. Had she forgotten who she was, what she had become? A return to the stage would be utterly demeaning, to him, to her, to the family name. She should have realised she had left all that behind her.

But just for once she had stood up to him and he had been shocked by the vehemence of her resistance. He would never have understood, of course, but Lola had come to a realisation. It was as if her two worlds had swapped places.The Chalfont estate, her title and Norfolk society were just an illusion. It was her life on stage that was real.

‘I’m going to call Dino today,’ she said. Dino Wolfe was the manager of Strand Productions, who were mountingGrab Me a Gondola. ‘I thought I might ask him to join us here.’

‘At the chateau?’

‘Why not?’

Jeffrey said nothing. Lola twisted round and saw that her husband had disappeared back under the bedclothes.

For a brief moment, Lola was angry. This was not the man she had met. She thought of the champagne and caviar, long drives in his SS Jaguar 100, that visit to the estate in Norfolk, how enthralled she’d been by the beauty of the landscape – so much land, all owned by him. Everything had seemed so perfect at the time. Was that what marriage and motherhood always did? Carve out the joy and ambition of young life and replace it with this … emptiness?

Lola put down the hairbrush, took one last look in the mirror and got to her feet. Right then, she could imagine herself in her dressing room, about to go on stage. The orchestra was warming up. The audience was murmuring excitedly. In a few moments, the lights in the auditorium would go down.

It was going to happen. She was going to make it happen. She had a plan and if it all worked out, everything would change.

There was just one problem. Where was she going to get two thousand pounds?

*

The sunlight was streaming in through the double windows of thepetit salon, glinting off the glass and silverware and turning the tablecloth into a blaze of pristine white. There were six people sitting around the antique dining table, which dated back to the seventeenth century and the time of Louis XIV, and it would have been easy to imagine them posing for a classical painting with perhaps Vermeer or Boucher standing in front of an easel, brush in hand, on the other side of the doorway. Béatrice had served the coffee and the breads, still warm from the bakery, along with honey (made by their own bees), toast, fruit and yoghurt, and quietly excused herself.

Elmer Waysmith had taken his usual seat at the head of the table with his son, Robert, on one side of him. Judith Lyttleton – Lady Chalfont’s daughter – was on the other, with her husband, Harry Lyttleton, next to her. Lola Chalfont had come in with her eight-year-old son, Cedric, who was staring out of the window, moodily swinging his legs.

It was not a comfortable scene. There was a distinct yet undefined tension in the air, as if they were all characters in a play, not quite sure of their lines and waiting for the curtain to come down so that they could all go their own way. But for the time being they were going through the motions, each playing their own part.

Elmer was sixty-seven, two years older than his second wife and still handsome, although his hair had turned a premature white and no longer matched his eyebrows. He had the physique and bearing of a military man even though he had never seen action, having spent much of the war in Washington, overseeing the vast export programme supplyingthousands of tanks, planes, weapons, uniforms, chemicals and food to the beleaguered Soviet Union. He had been a personal appointment of President Roosevelt: he claimed that the two of them had been close friends.

Elmer had come to the breakfast table in an ivory-coloured suit and bow tie with a pair of gold half-frame glasses balanced on a connoisseur’s nose. He was reading an edition of theNew York Timesthat was spread out on the table beside him. He didn’t seem to have noticed that the news was out of date, but nor did it matter to him. ‘So I see Churchill’s back,’ he muttered, spreading jam on his croissant and examining the front page at the same time. Sir Winston Churchill had resigned as prime minister in April.

‘I didn’t know he’d been away,’ Robert Waysmith said.

‘He was at the opening of Parliament. Everyone cheering him to the rafters.’ Elmer read another paragraph before making his next pronouncement. ‘The trouble is that these people never know when to stop.’

‘Well, he’s still very popular …’

Robert Waysmith, Elmer’s son from his first marriage, had inherited his father’s good looks. Slim and athletic, he had the waywardness of a poet, an adventurer or a Lothario, with a full head of hair and dark eyes that sparkled with intelligence. He had been educated at Winchester and Oxford and spoke with a perfect English accent, unlike his father, who had been born in New York and might never have left. Hearing what Elmer had just said, he smiled as if at some private joke. It was so typical of his father to stir up trouble for no reason at all.

‘I think Winston Churchill is quite wonderful,’ Judith said. ‘We certainly wouldn’t have won the war without him.’

‘You wouldn’t have won the war withoutus,’ Elmer corrected her.

‘Oh come on, Pa. Don’t start that again.’ Robert never called him ‘Daddy’ or ‘Father’. The two of them had lived together in New York and subsequently in London ever since the death of Elmer’s first wife, Marion. Tragically, she had taken her own life when Robert was just eleven. There were no other children and the two of them had the closeness that comes from years of living within the same walls. As a child, Robert had dreamed of becoming an artist, but that had never happened. His father had insisted he should train as a lawyer in his twenties, but that hadn’t suited his temperament either and, in the end, Elmer had taken pity on him and brought him into his business, putting him in charge of the day-to-day running of the two galleries in London and Nice. He was now thirty-two and still unmarried.

Judith Lyttleton’s husband, Harry, had overheard Elmer’s comment. ‘If he starts going on about Lend-Lease one more time, I’m going to chuck myself into the Med,’ he whispered to his wife.

Judith ignored him. As usual, she was studying a book she had brought with her to the table:Geoglyphs from the Paracas Phase in Peru and South America. It was a dusty volume, at least two inches thick. She picked up a pen and made a note in one of the margins.

‘What did you say?’ Elmer snapped.

‘Nothing, Elmer,’ Harry Lyttleton exclaimed, with a smile. ‘Can you pass the marmalade?’

The Lyttletons made a decidedly odd couple. Judith was shorter than her husband but she was also stouter, moremasculine. Slightly built and elegant, Harry took great care with his appearance. Today he was dressed in white trousers, an oyster pink jersey and the white tennis shoes he often preferred. He was a keen cricketer as well as a member of the Wimbledon tennis club, which, along with his visits to the South of France, might have accounted for his year-round tan. He had wavy fair hair that tumbled down in a way that looked careless but which was almost certainly the result of careful grooming. His eyes were a piercing blue, full of life if not quite intelligence.

His first connection with the Chalfonts had been with the older son, Jeffrey. The two of them had been best friends at Eton, sharing a study, and there had been some wags who had joked that he had only married Judith because it was the next best thing to marrying her brother. The two men still spent as much time as they could together. In Norfolk, they went hunting and shooting. In the South of France, they ate good food, drank too much wine, gambled and smoked cigars until the early hours of the morning.

Harry had been an only son with four sisters sharing the family home in Essex and he alone had been sent to boarding school. He had never been very wealthy, but marrying Judith had put him on an almost equal footing with the 7th Earl. She was, after all, a future heir to her late father’s considerable fortune, which included houses in London and Cap Ferrat and part ownership of Chalfonts, the exclusive bank in the City of London. At least some of this money would come to her and, frankly, Harry needed it. He was a developer, building a hotel between Cap Ferrat and Beaulieu that he insisted would rival even the Grand-Hôtel itself for luxuryand comfort, but after three years of construction only a skeleton stood in place, disfiguring the landscape.

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