“Out where?” Mitzi demanded, but Ezra didn’t seem to have heard her question. He took a giant bite of Richard’s toast, tossed the crust onto the table, and then strode out into the hall.

“He’s impossible!” Mitzi exploded, as the door slammed behind him. “Harding—are you going to let him get away with that?”

“Dammit, Mit. What do you want me to do?” Harding pushed away his plate. “Anyway, he’s right.”

“What do you mean? He stole Richard’s toast! And how dare he accuse you of hypocrisy!”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Harding stood, marched over to the toaster, and shoved in two more slices of bread. “Happy? The toast is hardly the most important thing here.”

“Accusing you of hypocrisy, then—what cheek!”

“I think that was a general remark, Mit—and much as I find him deeply irritating, he’s not wrong on that particular point, is he? All of us in that church yesterday, with our carefully glum faces—and I doubt there was one person there who was sorry she was gone.”

“How dare you.” The voice came from the doorway, and all heads at the table turned, to see Mrs. Warren standing in the doorway, a coffee jug trembling in one hand. “How dare you, you little sniveling good-for-nowt.”

“Mrs. Warren,” Harding said stiffly. He drew himself up to his full height. “What I said was intended for my wife, and in any case—”

“Don’t you ‘Mrs. Warren’ me, you despicable little arsehole,” she snarled, her Cornish accent somehow making the last word into a kind of foreign invective.

“Mrs.—” Harding began, but he didn’t get to finish. Mrs. Warren set down the coffeepot on the table with a crack that sent drops spattering across their plates, and slapped him around the back of the head, like a recalcitrant child.

Hal’s face felt frozen in shock. The whole scene was surreal—Harding standing there like a pompous schoolboy caught swearing in the corridor; Mrs. Warren, her face twisted with fury; Mitzi, Richard, and the other children wide-eyed with shock.

“Mrs. Warren!” Harding bellowed furiously, rubbing the back of his head, and at the same time his daughter called out, “Daddy!” and then, when her father did not respond, more urgently, “Daddy! The toast!”

They all turned to look at the ancient toaster on the end of the table, to see smoke pouring out of the opening at the top. As Hal watched in horror, the blackened slices burst into flames.

“That goddamn thing!” Harding roared. “It’s a death trap—Mother should have thrown it away years ago.” He marched across to the wall socket, pulled out the plug, and then threw a place mat over the smoking toaster. The flames went out. A strong smell of singed cotton joined the scent of burned toast, and Mitzi let out a shuddering breath.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Is there nothing reliable in this house? Mrs. Warren, can you—”

But then she stopped, breaking off in exasperation. Mrs. Warren had gone.

CHAPTER 18

* * *

The rest of breakfast had a stifled, edgy quality, as if no one wanted to refer to Mrs. Warren’s outburst and Ezra’s disappearance; and although she knew she should have been using the time to winkle out vital facts about Maud before her interview with Mr. Treswick, Hal found herself bolting down her toast, and then excusing herself from the table as fast as possible.

In the hall outside she paused for a moment, trying to decide what to do. She had no desire to go back up to that coffin-like bedroom, but wandering around the house as if she already owned the place felt painfully presumptuous.

She needed to get out, clear her head, try to work out her next move.

Farther up the corridor she could see a door to the garden standing open, presumably where Ezra had made his exit, and she followed the stiff breeze and crunched her way out onto the gravel at the front of the house. Ahead of her was a wide sweep of drive, dotted with weeds and self-seeded saplings. To the left was a block of low buildings—garages, or perhaps former stables, she thought—but the smell of cigarette smoke filtering around the corner told her that that was where Ezra had gone, and she had no desire to face him just now. In fact, she needed a break from them all.

Instead she turned right, past a rather dismal shrubbery with a strong scent of cats, and round to the façade she had seen on that postcard, the long low house, the lawn falling away to the sea. We had a very good tea at Trepassen House. . . .

What had happened to that house, and that family? The picture-postcard tranquility she had seen in that photograph, tea on the lawn, like something from an Agatha Christie novel, all that had vanished—swallowed up in decay and something stranger and more worrying. It was not just the sense she had of a house long neglected. It was something darker, the feeling of a place hiding secrets, where people had been terribly unhappy, and no one had come to comfort them.

Wrapped in her thoughts, Hal crunched across the frosted lawn, feeling the frozen blades of grass crackle beneath her boots. The air was crisp and cold, and she huffed out, watching her white breath disappear. When she stopped to look back at the house, she realized how far she had come, and how large the grounds really were—from her attic room it had been hard to see where the garden ended and the surrounding countryside began; but now that she had walked almost to the copse at the bottom of the lawn she was a good couple of hundred yards from the house, and she could see that the copse itself formed part of the grounds—a cluster of trees with something at the center. Hal thought she could see something dark glinting through the trees. Could it be water?

“Admiring your domain?”

The voice, coming from behind her up the slope, made Hal jump, and she jerked her head around to see Abel walking down across the lawn, his hands in his pockets.

“No!”

The word slipped out defensively, before Hal had properly considered her reply, and she felt her cheeks flush with something that was not just cold; but Abel only laughed. He pulled at his mustache.

“I’m not Harding, you don’t need to worry about me on that score—there’s no ill feeling on my part, I assure you. I had no expectations anyway.”

Hal wrapped her arms around herself, unsure of what to say. It struck her that for someone who kept stressing how very unconcerned he was about being cut off, Abel talked about it a lot. She remembered Mitzi’s words in the library: Oh, Abel, stop being such a saint! Was anyone really that selfless? Could someone survive being disinherited by their only parent and honestly feel no bitterness at all?

Abel seemed to feel her equivocation, or at least her discomfort about the topic, for he changed the subject.

“But tell me, what happened at breakfast?”

“At breakfast?” Hal faltered. She remembered Harding and Ezra’s near fight, and felt herself hedging, unwilling to get caught in the complicated web of resentments and loyalties she sensed between the brothers. “I—I’m not sure what you mean. Harding and Ezra had . . . well . . . a bit of a . . . disagreement.”

“Oh, you needn’t worry about them,” Abel said with a laugh. He fell into step beside her. “They’ve been sparring since Ezra could first talk. By the way, if we head to the left here, I can show you the maze.”

“There’s a maze?”

“Not a very good one. It’s over there.” He pointed away from the copse of trees, towards the far side of the lawn. “But that wasn’t what I meant, actually—I was talking about the plumes of smoke floating up the stairs.”

“Oh, that!” Hal said. She echoed his laugh, relieved to be on less touchy ground. “The toaster caught fire.”

“Oh, was that it. I thought perhaps Mrs. Warren had tried to burn the house down rather than let it pass to the unworthy.”

Hal felt her cheeks flush in sudden shock at the word, and Abel’s face changed.

“Oh God, Harriet, I’m sorry—that was incredibly crass of me. I didn’t mean you—I just meant—well, look, Mrs. Warren’s always had a touch of the Mrs. Danvers about her. I don’t think she would have been happy with any of us inheriting—except maybe Ezra.”