Scandals of an Innocent. Nicola Cornick

needed a good clean and left a line of dust on the sleeve of his jacket—and reflected how uncomfortable the other occupants of the room looked. Philip was fidgeting and looked thoroughly bored to be so confined. Miles wished his mother had left Philip in London with his tutor. The boy should really be at school, but Miles could no longer afford to pay for his brother’s education and had only been able to afford the services of Mr. Appleby because he was a distant connection of the dowager and had grudgingly offered to reduce his fees out of family feeling. It was something, Miles thought, when even the tutor was patronizing his poor relations.

      Lady Vickery, meanwhile, looked as though she was sitting on a bed of nettles. Clearly the news of Miles’s imminent betrothal had excited her considerably and she could not wait to hear the details. She huddled on the sofa in her winter pelisse, holding her hands out toward the fireplace in a vain attempt to get warm. In this drafty medieval castle it seemed almost impossible to build up any heat at all. The stone fireplaces were all broad enough to house an army, and the fire that Miles had coaxed into life in the red drawing room today could not be felt beyond a radius of three feet.

      Mr. Churchward shuffled his papers again for no particular reason and cleared his throat simply to break the silence. He looked as though he would be happier taking refuge behind a desk and preferably one a long way away from this shabby castle with its uneasy atmosphere. He, too, was a man who preferred the bustle of city life, and Miles knew that the isolation and harsh beauty of these Yorkshire hills was not to everyone’s taste, particularly in winter. And then there was Drum Castle itself, which seemed so different from Miles’s childhood memories. He had spent a great deal of time here in his holidays from Eton, for his cousin Anthony had been an almost exact contemporary of his and the castle had rung with sounds of their martial games. Miles was not remotely superstitious, but even he was forced to admit that there was something strangely oppressive about these dark rooms now, crisscrossed as they were with spiders’ webs and trails of dust. Drum Castle seemed positively Gothic now, weighed down by its heavy furnishings and by the dark curtains that closed off the dusty windows. Today, with the wind lifting the hangings from the old stone of the walls and making the building creak and groan, it felt like a castle in a nightmare. Really, Miles thought, one would hardly need a family curse to send one demented in a very short space of time.