Free A Woman of Consequence by Anna Dean Page B

suspicion. And the visit to Miss Fenn’s bedchamber had aroused even more questions in Dido’s mind …

Chapter Nine
    There had been no time to visit Miss Fenn’s chamber before tea, and when tea was over the card tables were placed immediately. So it was not until Mr Portinscale, Silas and Lucy had all gone home that Dido was able to go to the room with her hostess.
    All was quiet within the house as they set off from the drawing room, candle in hand; but outside, the wind was rising, driving handfuls of rain hard against the windows with a sound like thrown gravel. Mr Harman-Foote had been for some time shut up in the library talking with Captain Laurence, but as the two women crossed to the stairs he came out of the library door, pipe in hand, looking rather displeased and breathing port wine and tobacco smoke. Dido could not quite escape the idea that he had been listening and waiting for their leaving the drawing room.
    ‘Well, my dear,’ he bellowed across the echoing hall, ‘what are you troubling poor Miss Kent with now?’
    His wife coloured a little but named their errand calmly enough.
    ‘It is very late,’ he said, drawing out his watch. ‘Very late indeed. Do you not think I had better order thecarriage and have it take our guest home. I am sure she is very tired.’
    ‘We shall not be ten minutes,’ said his wife.
    He looked as if he might protest again, but Dido declared that she was not at all fatigued and he knew his manners well enough not to hold out against her. ‘Well, well, have it your own way! Have it your own way! Ought to know better than to try to change a lady’s mind! But I shall ring for Thomas immediately and have the carriage at the door in ten minutes.’ There was another look at his watch. ‘There’s a storm coming on. You had better not delay any longer than that, Miss Kent.’
    ‘He thinks,’ said Mrs Harman-Foote as they climbed the stairs, ‘that I would be less distressed if I left matters alone. He thinks I should forget all about my poor friend. He means well, I don’t doubt, but he does not understand my feelings. So I shall tell him as little of our investigations as I can.’
    At the top of the stairs they turned along a broad, carpeted passageway, into the east wing – where the best rooms were – and Mrs Harman-Foote threw open the door of a chamber close to the one which had been given over to Penelope. It was a fine, large room – a room such as a woman of consequence might be given on a visit – a room such as Dido had never been offered in any country house. There were mahogany wardrobes, a large mirror, tall sash windows, very pretty wallpaper and bed-hangings embroidered with fabulous Chinese birds.
    The room had the musty smell of a place seldom entered; but there was also a faint scent from old lavender laid in the bed and closets … And there was something else too,very faint, another sweet scent which was familiar, but so very out of place that it was a moment or two before Dido could identify it – as tobacco smoke …
    ‘It is a pretty room, is it not?’ said Anne as she set her candle down upon the toilette table.
    ‘Oh yes! Your father must have held Miss Fenn in high regard, to have placed her in such a room.’
    ‘He held her in the highest regard possible. She was quite part of our family.’
    They were both conscious of the ordered carriage and began to look about them as quickly as they might. Dido could not help but feel the strangeness of entering the domain of a woman so long dead, and the few plain possessions – the wooden-backed hairbrush on the toilette table, the simple writing desk upon a window seat and the black bible and prayer book lying on a table beside the bed – all had the air of things but just laid aside, whose owner might return at any moment.
    She walked about touching things here and there, keenly aware of the character which seemed still to inhabit the room – austere in the midst of luxury. Above the bed