Free Cavalier Case by Antonia Fraser Page A

though he had seen an opening for a classic passing shot on the tennis court. To accompanying cries of "Me too, Daddy" from the Younger girls and a shout from Dessie, he turned to Jemima.
    The view from the battlements. I promised you that last time. I just look after - " He gave a vague indicative wave in the direction of Lady Manfred, who did not contradict him. "But Nell will take you, won't you? And she can tell you all about the ghost. She's seen it quite recently, or so she tells me. First the library with Aunt Zena, then the battlements with the Little Nell. A delightful family tour." He smiled at Jemima, that boyish grin which made it so easy to remember the Wimbledon favourite, Handsome Dan Meredith, he had once been. 
    "Delightful indeed!" said Zena Meredith sardonically to Jemima a little later when they were standing together in the Lackland Court library. "It would be—if I could get out of my mind that this is going to be the club room—including vast bar—for Dan's country club."
    It was a remarkably beautiful room, as dark as the spare and empty Long Gallery at the top of the house was light. Leather-bound books in predominantly sombre colours, books of carefully graded sizes, not only lined the shelves on every wall but the deep embrasures which led to the six long windows. There were only two pictures in the room—every other inch of space was covered by books: two full-length portraits of a man and a woman in eighteenth-century dress, he with a long gun under his arm and some kind of sporting dog at his heels, she with high powdered white hair, long dress of celestial blue and a bust to keep her company rather than a dog.
    "The Gainsboroughs!" exclaimed Jemima, remembering her conversation with Dan Lackland in the car before her first visit.
    "Copies," corrected Zena drily. "Since the originals went to the Met . . . Not too many originals here altogether, I fear, among the pictures. The famous Van Dyck at the head of the stairs is almost certainly a copy, if a historic copy, a few years later, after the Restoration perhaps. Although the Decimus Ghost doesn't seem to have noticed."
    A series of busts, similar to that depicted in the fake Gainsborough, stood at the tops of the book shelves. Philosophical worthies? Roman emperors? Under their sardonic gaze, the room, for all its beauty, had a feeling of sadness and neglect about it. Unlike the drawing room, which already showed signs of Charlotte Lackland's fashionably pretty Fulham Road taste (including copies of Taffeta cast about and new-looking lamps), the library betrayed no signs of the new ownership- Did any of the Present Meredith family ever visit it. Jemima wondered. Except Zena, of course. Would this room really become the club room—plus bar—in Dan Lackland's projected country club? The phost of Decimus, the real ghost, which was the memory of the poet in the room where he had once written his poems and where his manuscripts were still housed, would vanish. Copies of Taffeta , Vanity Fair and Vogue would invade; the books would recede and would perhaps be sold.
    Zena was standing in one of the shafts of light in the furthest window. Jemima could hear the cries of the gambolling younger Meredith children on the lawn outside. Zena's pale face looked quite haggard in the brilliance of the light. There were deep lines suddenly visible not only round her eyes but surrounding her mouth. Then Jemima realised that for all her light sarcasm she remained deeply angry.
    "Either you feel it or you don't," Zena was saying; she clenched her fist on the book in her hand—" Heaven's True Mourning " in a red eighteenth-century leather binding with the arms of the 8th Viscount (he of the Gainsboroughs) on it in gold.
    "The importance of inheritance?" Jemima, both of whose parents had died in a car crash when she was eighteen, had never inherited anything much in her life except her father's medals and her mother's photograph albums of life as an