THE HARGROVE INVITATION

Chapter One Dorothy The house had a smell in the mornings that Dorothy had never been able to name. Not damp, exactly, though the walls held water the way old stones do, drawing it up from the ground and keeping it. Not mould. Not the cold. Something older than any of those — something that belonged to the house the way the house belonged to the hill, which was to say: absolutely, and without apology. She had woken at five, as she always did. Dressed in the dark. Made her way downstairs without a candle or a lamp because she had not needed one in thirty years. The kitchen was the warmest room in Hargrove. It always had been. Even in January, when the upper floors were barely habitable and the pipes in the east wing groaned like old men in bad weather, the kitchen held its heat. Dorothy had her theories about why. The range. The low ceiling. The way the room sat tucked into the south-facing corner of the house, sheltered from the wind off the moor. She had never shared these theories with anyone because no one had ever asked. She filled the kettle. Set it on the range. Stood at the window and watched the dark. Today they were coming. She had been awake in the night — not with worry, she told herself, but with lists. The beds in the guest rooms, which she had aired yesterday and would air again this morning. The larder, which was full. The dining table, which seated twelve and would seat six, and needed the good cloth. The good cloth, which was in the cedar chest in the linen room and smelled faintly of the lavender bags she replaced each spring. She had thought of the lavender bags at two in the morning with something close to relief, because thinking about lavender bags was better than thinking about Roland. About what Roland had told her. The kettle began to murmur. Dorothy moved away from the window. She had worked for the Hargroves for forty years. She had arrived at nineteen — young enough that she could not now quite picture the girl she had been then — and had not seriously considered leaving since. She had watched the children grow. Had packed their trunks for school and unpacked them again at Christmas. Had sat with each of them at this very table when they came down in the night with bad dreams or bad news or the particular loneliness of being young and unable to say so. Clara had been the worst for that. Or the best, depending on how you looked at it. Clara had always needed more than the others. It was Clara she was thinking of when she heard the first of the floorboards settle overhead. Roland, already awake. She poured her tea and did not call up to him. In forty years she had learned precisely which of his silences wanted company and which did not, and this one, the silence of a man in his study at half past five in the morning, was not one she was meant to fill. She thought instead of the rooms upstairs, moving through them in her mind the way she would move through them in body once she had finished her tea. The blue room for Margaret, which had the best light and the best view and which Margaret had always preferred without ever once saying so. The corner room for the young man who had telephoned last week — Dominic Crane, who had not been invited, and who Roland had agreed to house with a brevity that had struck Dorothy as strange. The rooms at the end of the east corridor for the others, the cousins and the distant relatives whose names she had written on small white cards and placed on the pillows because she had learned, long ago, that people felt steadier when they knew where they were expected to be. And Clara's room. Dorothy's hand was quite still around her cup. Clara's room, which she had not entered in fifteen years except to clean. Which still had the books on the shelf that Clara had left. The hairbrush on the dressing table, the bristles of which Dorothy replaced every other year, not because anyone had asked her to but because it seemed important to maintain. A room waiting for its occupant the way rooms do — without impatience, without judgment, simply ready. She was coming back. After fifteen years of postcards and careful silences and the occasional telephone call that lasted exactly as long as it needed to and no longer, Clara Hargrove was coming back to her father's house. Dorothy knew why she was coming. She knew about the money — had known for longer than Clara would have been comfortable with, because Dorothy knew most things that happened in this house and had learned not to advertise it. She knew about the letters. The payments. The account that Clara thought was private. She knew about Roland. She set her cup in the sink and began. The kitchen first. Then the hall, which needed sweeping — the winds last night had pushed leaves under the front door and across the flagstones. Then upstairs, room by room, window by window, the slow deliberate work of making a house ready to receive the people who would unravel it. Outside, the sky was beginning to pale. The moor stretched away from the house in every direction — brown and grey and faintly purple at the edges where the heather still held on. No other lights. No other rooftops. Just the hill, and the house on the hill, and Dorothy moving through it in the half-dark the way she always had. She thought about Clara. She thought about the good cloth, and the lavender bags, and whether the range would need more fuel before noon. She thought about Roland upstairs, and what he had told her, and what she had said nothing about, and what she was going to have to decide before the day was out. She got to work. But for the first time in forty years, her hands were not entirely steady.