Page 67 of The Christmas Retreat
Arwen
Letter from Arwen Madoc to Milly Vane, Tuesday 1 July 1919
Dearest Milly,
A great deal has happened to trouble me in the brief time since I last wrote and I find myself feeling very disturbed and uneasy.
It began over dinner on Sunday evening, after what had been a perfectly innocuous sort of day: it had been a misty, damp early morning, so I had just walked about rather than worked first thing and then, of course, had to go to church. Unfortunately, one or two of the artists I had met over tea in the Blue Parrot also attended and waved at me in a very friendly fashion, which of course I acknowledged, but it caused Cosmo to glower and then, as we came out, instead of striding off with Mr Jones to his house for Sunday lunch as he usually did, he stuck close by my side. This was tedious, for I barely had a chance even to speak to Lily or her sisters, let alone anyone else, before he ushered us all away to the car.
That afternoon Mr Jones had asked me to the studio at thepottery so that he might make a sketch or two of my head. He envisages me as Guinevere, of all people! He draws rather well, and Cosmo, coming in just as he had finished working, asked for one of the sketches, which he intends framing.
Mr Jones was at dinner that evening too – I don’t know why he doesn’t just take up his residence at Triskelion! – and told Maudie and Bea about my sitting for Guinevere. Bea said rather rudely that she had thought Guinevere was a great beauty, but Cosmo said I had a distinction of countenance that was more than mere prettiness, which made me blush a bit, the penalty of having such fair skin!
Mr Jones said that he was considering making some figurines of famous characters from Shakespeare, too, and if he did, perhaps Bea would sit for him in the role of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, which she seemed flattered by. Poor Mr Jones gives his feelings for Bea away all the time, and blushed even more deeply than I had.
Bea relapsed into one of her petulant, complaining moods, however, the chief cause of which seemed to be that she had heard that Miss Stretton, Mark Prynne’s correspondent on all things gardening, was arriving for a visit on 8 July.
‘He says it is to discuss the plans for the quarry garden and rare shrub nursery, although why he should care a fig for such things I have no idea,’ she said, then added that he seemed ridiculously pleased about the visit of one who she had discovered to be not only plain as a bun and nearly thirty, but who also dressed in shabby old clothes and had a weather-beaten complexion. As well as these drawbacks, she was only Lady Stretton’s daughter by an earlier marriage.
‘So she isn’t even an heiress, like me!’ she finished triumphantly.
I thought that while these attributes might seem like drawbacks to Bea and Maudie, Mark and Miss Stretton’s strong mutual interests might draw them together.
Cosmo, who had been looking sardonic, echoed my thoughts by saying that the strongest marriages were those where both parties had mutual interests and then, to my surprise, he looked directly at me and added: ‘What do you say, Arwen?’
‘Yes, I’m sure that is so,’ I agreed.
‘I don’t know what a chit like you can know about it!’ said Maudie, but Cosmo was now turning his dark, saturnine gaze on Bea.
‘I wouldn’t count on looks alone to win you a husband, Bea. And as to being my heiress, I would advise you not to count your chickens before they are hatched, for I am still young enough to marry and have more children.’
She looked quite dumbfounded, but probably not as much as I, when he then turned to me again and remarked that my parents must have had this strong bond of interests, for they had married when my mama was little older than I am now, and my papa twenty years the elder.
He said this with such a strange expression in his dark eyes, which held my own, that I felt flooded with confusion, but Maudie said snappishly that she didn’t see what my parents’ marriage had to say about anything!
I recovered my composure quickly, for I was sure his remarks were just to bait Bea – or even if he did think of remarrying, that he must have some other older and more suitable lady in mind.
He had not yet finished, however, for he then turned to Mr Jones for corroboration of his theory.
‘I’m sure you agree, Hugh, that these difference in ages among married couples do not matter in the least, in such circumstances.’
Blushing deeply, Mr Jones agreed that it was surprising how well some of those unions turned out, when the two parties had interests in common.
He was looking shyly at Bea, although if he thought he had anything in common with her, he was deluding himself.
‘Your papa and Mr Jones are merely teasing you, Bea. I should not take any notice,’ said Maudie.
Bea, however, had been looking quite stunned ever since her papa had suggested she might not be his sole heiress for long and was now, I discovered, staring from me to Cosmo in a suspicious way.
This made me feel uneasy all over again, for clearly she too thought his remarks particularly directed at me!
So now, dearest Milly, I hope you will pour cold water on these suspicions. After all, Cosmo does have a way of casting out sardonic and unnerving remarks so, as I said before, my imagination might have been running away with me – and Bea’s too.
I did not sleep well that night and still felt a little shy and uneasy when I went to the studio on Monday morning. I found him already there, preparing to continue work on a large canvas of Harlech Castle from a sketch he had done some time before my arrival at Triskelion, and his manner was just as usual.
I settled down to rendering in oils the latest in a series of studies of the sea and sky from my watercolour sketchbook. It is just as well that he never looks closely at that, for I am now in the habit of writing the date, time, place and weather conditions on the back of each study, which would give away that I am slipping out in the early mornings! Really, he must just assume all my sunrises are sunsets!
I had been so absorbed in my work that I had quite forgotten all about his cryptic utterances at dinner until, when I was cleaning my brushes before lunch, he asked me to look at his painting and point out any details he might have missed from the sketch.
