The Lynmara Legacy

by Catherine Gaskin

  The revelations had begun then. She had been driven to the house in Laurel Canyon. It was no bigger than when Anna had first bought it, a small, modest house on five acres in the middle of the houses of the rich. She had walked through the few rooms of the house, and come back to the living-room, the room with the books in Russian, the samovar, the jewelled icons. The man who had come to meet her was almost her own age, old enough to have known her mother for many years. ‘Can you tell me what she was like, my mother?’ She thought how strange it was that Anna had died so soon after the death of John Manstone, her first love.

  ‘Your mother, Lady Manstone, was a splendid woman. If you don’t mind the expression, she was a real character. Take this house ‒ we always pointed out to her that she was paying enormous taxes to hold five acres here, and a house that was not ‒ well, let us say, commensurate, with her wealth. She declared that privacy was her one luxury, and she would keep her five acres, and her small house. It didn’t matter, and not many people knew that she owned some of the choicest pieces of Los Angeles real estate. That acreage out in the desert … she bought it at a time when no one wanted desert land. When they did want it, it was worth millions. Those pieces she bought in San Diego before the war. They turned to gold. She had a genius for real estate … a very long vision. She came out here when this city was scrub land and bean fields and orange groves, but she was able to see it the way it is now. She was always at least ten years ahead of where the next area of development would be, and sometimes, like the desert property, she was a generation ahead. But I guess she had a real genius with money. It took lots of guts, Lady Manstone, to buy stock during the depression, but Mrs Ovrensky did. Just that purchase of IBM stock alone would have made her rich …’

  ‘And the man she married?’

  ‘Well, he was one of those guys we all sort of love, the sort of person you call “a prince of a man”. And the funny thing was that he really was a prince, only no one knew it until after he died. They were both American citizens. They never used the title. But it was there, and I never knew it until I went to help her register the death. But in fact, it didn’t surprise me. He was a gentleman, and while that’s an overworked word, I can’t think of a better one for him.

  ‘He built himself up until he became Los Angeles’s biggest Ford dealer. I think it had always been his ambition. He served in the Navy for a while, and lost a foot. Your mother carried on the business with whatever second-hand stuff she could get during the war, and had it waiting for him when he came back. He became the biggest Ford dealer because everyone knew that he was a nut about engines. He always paid top wages to his mechanics. He only wanted the best. Every new car he sent out had been so thoroughly checked he never had a dissatisfied customer. If you had a complaint, Mike ‒ everyone called him that ‒ would attend to it himself. If a mechanic was sloppy, he fired him. And he could always prove his point by being able to strip down an engine and put it together almost blindfolded. He had a favourite expression about engines ‒ perhaps it was the first Americanism he ever learned. “It should run as sweet as sugar.” By all logic he was too honest to have been as successful as he was, but there was some magic in his personality that brought people to his place in droves, so the extra money he spent on servicing cars was made up in sheer volume of business. Come to think of it, Lady Manstone, he was my idea of what a prince should be. He was never cut-rate …’

  She turned to face him, wanting to see his face as she asked the question. It was November, and for her, unnaturally hot. The smog hurt her eyes. She was tired after the plane journey, but she could not bear to delay any part of this new discovery she was making.

  ‘Do you … perhaps it’s not a question I should ask of you. But I would like to know. Do you think they were happy together? My mother and Michael Ovrensky?’

  ‘Happy? Lady Manstone, with all respect, use your head. To the few people who ever were allowed to come here, your mother and her husband were a legend. You see this little house? Comfortable ‒ nice … but by Los Angeles standards, it’s hardly more than a shack. You saw that vegetable garden? Mike worked in that almost to the day he died. You see these rooms? Very simple. Only very happy people, who are also very rich, can afford to be that simple. They had something going for them, those two. None of us ever quite understood what it was, but I’ll tell you one thing ‒ we envied them, and it wasn’t because they were rich.’ She had asked to be left in the house for a while. He had promised to send back the car for her later. The woman who had cleaned, and in later years, done some cooking for Anna had come, and she had made her a simple lunch. The lawyer had left the keys of Anna’s cupboards and files. It was here, as the afternoon heat settled on Los Angeles, that Nicole found the envelopes full of clippings. Almost every year of her life since she had last seen Anna was charted here. The envelopes were marked with dates. She saw the old photo of herself from the Tatler seated at the piano. There were the pictures of herself and David at Lynmara. There was the announcement of her marriage to Lloyd, the announcement of the births of her children in Boston. There were the obituaries of Lloyd. There was the announcement, which must have come as the greatest shock of all to Anna, of her marriage to John Manstone. The births of each of John’s children was known to Anna. There was the big newspaper coverage of the first great party they had given at Lynmara when the restoration was complete. And how had she found out the sort of degrees her children had got at Cambridge? It was there, in Anna’s handwriting, growing a little stiff and crabbed with age. She must have taken great pleasure in the double First Judith had won. It was underscored heavily. She sat there all afternoon with the cuttings and the photographs, and tried to see it all through Anna’s eyes.

  She had heard the terms of the will; from them she knew that the use she had made of these years had pleased Anna. ‘To my beloved daughter, Nicole, Countess of Manstone, I give, devise and bequeath my entire estate …’ Nicole wished that, apart from the millions of dollars that that represented, there had been a letter from Anna, but there was none. Perhaps she had been right. The events of the years spoke for themselves. Then she came on the packets of letters Mikhail Ovrensky had written from the South Pacific. She held his photograph in her hand. There were the yellow sepia-tinted photographs of the Ovrensky children at that place called Beryozovaya Polyana. Among them, she could single out her mother’s face when she had been a child, growing up with them. She wondered if any of the members of that great law firm who had helped her mother knew that the prince she had married had been her childhood playmate. She doubted it. She had pieced together the story of Anna’s early struggle in her small real estate office. She saw photographs of MIKE’S NEW AND USED CARS ‒ each time the showrooms getting bigger, the lines of parked cars longer. They had come out of the old world of Russia in the last century, and they had conquered, in their own fashion, this new world they had embraced. And she knew from the letters that they had loved each other. With all this there had been no need for her mother to write to her; the story told itself. She felt that Anna had known that she would make this long journey to Los Angeles to see this place for herself. With a kind of reverence she replaced the stiff, browning newspaper clippings, the photographs. They would come back to Lynmara with her.

  She dragged herself back to the present from the remembrance of these things; she finally made her selection of jewellery, and prepared to go downstairs. She had asked that drinks be served before one of the fires in the Great Hall. It did not hurt to keep her children waiting, surrounded by the portraits of the Ashleighs, to sense again what their legacy was.

  On the way along the corridor she glanced from a window down to the lighted area that showed through the skylights of the new structure which had been built on the site of the old North Wing. No doubt Judith had been there. It was the last piece of work they had completed at Lynmara, and it housed the pictures which had been left to her by Gerry Agar. It was thought faintly unpatriotic of her to have named the collection after
its original owner ‒ a man believed to have been a collaborator with the Nazis, a man whose cousin, Brendan de Courcey, had been hanged for treason. But she had never cared what people thought, and to do her justice, neither did Judith. She took enormous pleasure in that collection. ‘How brilliant he must have been, Mother,’ she said. ‘Just imagine putting it all together ‒ and only the very best examples of their work. Imagine leaving it to you. Was he in love with you?’

  ‘I wish I could say he was. I never knew.’

  Judith had looked at her oddly, but asked no more. ‘At the prices these artists are fetching at auction these days you know they’re worth a king’s ransom, don’t you?’

  ‘Why do you think we built such a secure place for them? It’s fire-proof, and, they say, burglar-proof. I’m not a fool.’

  ‘No, Mother ‒ you’re not a fool.’

  Her steps slowed perceptibly as she neared the end of the corridor, and she could hear the low murmur of voices in the hall below. In the darkness she leaned over the balustrade and looked down at them ‒ at her children, and their wives. Judith wasn’t yet married. Nicole thought she was the sort who might have many lovers, and perhaps never marry. She had particularly asked her not to bring a man with her this weekend. ‘It is for the family only,’ she had said.

  She sought Thomas’s face from among the gathering. Thirty-two, he was, and the new Earl of Manstone. His half-brothers Dan and Timothy had always been close to him. Dan had done extremely well in the City, and it was his tips which propped up Thomas’s quite modest fortune in the years while he had waited for his inheritance. Timothy, to everyone’s surprise, had joined the Church. He was what they now called ‘trendy’. He was quite famous as a television personality, giving the modern version of religion, writing books which got him into trouble with his bishop. People had tipped him to become a bishop himself. Nicole wondered how many remembered that he was still an American citizen. Peter was making his way, slowly, determinedly, up the Army ladder. George had headed his own public relations firm, was a journalist, and almost as frequently seen on television talk-shows as his half-brother. It was he who, Nicole thought, would quite soon face Judith across the aisle of the House of Commons. He was as passionate a Conservative as she was a Socialist. Yes, her children were doing very well. But she wondered if they were all quite honest in acknowledging how much the background of Lynmara had helped them in the climb. Judith refused to use her courtesy title of Lady Judith. George did not at all mind using his; being a younger son of a peer would not keep him out of the House of Commons, and it was a useful handle.

  Worldly, sophisticated, quite brilliant in their own fashions were her children. But they were beginning to be aware that Lynmara was an anachronism in this day. A part of England, yes ‒ but was it a part they could afford to keep? Nicole was aware that a weekend guest Thomas had brought down about six weeks ago had been the American representative of Middle-East oil interests. She suspected that Thomas had brought him with the idea of dangling Lynmara before him as a potential showcase for the company, a place where they might entertain, a valuable piece of real estate to hold for the future. The spectre of the still unpaid death duties which the death of his father had brought on the estate, loomed before him. The Commissioners of Revenue were in no particular hurry, and in the few months since John had died, his children were only beginning to learn the intricacies of the Barrington trusts. All they knew of Cynthia Barrington and her son David were the portraits of them which hung in this hall ‒ that and the vaguely legendary name of Lord Barrington, self-made millionaire, which still circulated through the City.

  No one understood better than Nicole that the estate was entailed, and that Thomas was the heir. What was not yet untangled was how far the Barrington trusts reached, and how much they had been diminished through the years. As long as John had lived, they had been secured for Lynmara by his presence. No one yet knew if they had provided for a succession which did not come through Cynthia Barrington, or through her son, David. There was a wicked legal tangle to unsnarl.

  Who could afford a house like this any more, they asked? And she asked, ‘Could England afford to let it go?’ She was prepared to listen to almost everything. She would let the public walk through each day, tramp along the Long Room, look at the Turners in the Great Saloon, view the Gerald Agar Collection. She would do anything, but she would not let Lynmara go.

  Her arthritic hand touched the banister only lightly as she began her descent. Let them not see her leaning or faltering. Gradually, as she came down into the light of the Great Hall, the talking stopped. The heads turned to look at her. She brought with her the knowledge and the strength of her mother, the woman who had almost been the mistress of this house a long time ago. She brought with her the fighting power of the money that Anna and her husband had earned. And the jewellery she had chosen to wear on this night was the simple gold chain with the upturned horseshoe, and the great diamond-studded star, which had been among her mother’s possessions, the Grand Cross of St George, awarded to the father of Mikhail Ovrensky by the Tsar of all the Russias.

  She believed that she brought equal forces to battle with her children.

  Preview: The Property of a Gentleman by Catherine Gaskin

  Prologue

  About half of the ninety-three passengers, those in the tail section, of the flight out of Zürich bound for Paris and London survived when the plane ploughed into a mountainside shortly after takeoff. Among those killed was a Junior British Cabinet Minister, half of a Dutch football team, an antique dealer from London by the name of Vanessa Roswell, and a man, presumed to be a Dutchman, whose body no one came to claim, and whose passport the authorities, after close examination, found to be forged.

  Within hours of the crash the daughter of Vanessa Roswell and a friend, Gerald Stanton, were on their way to Zürich, with the desperate unspoken hope that Vanessa might be among the survivors; they had only just learned that Vanessa had been on that flight. Before he left London, Gerald Stanton put through a telephone call to an associate in Mexico City, who in turn managed the difficult feat of reaching by telephone a remote hacienda in the mountains south of Taxco; then a man who hated cities, and hated flying, went to Mexico City and took the first plane to Europe – any city in Europe which had a connection to Zürich, he wearily told the booking clerk. It was the day after the crash when he arrived, and it was snowing, the snow blanketing the terrible debris. The man shivered and longed for the Mexican sun. The bodies of the victims were in the school of the small village near to where the plane had come down. The body of Vanessa Roswell had already been identified, so he went to a hotel five miles away to which the police directed him. There he found, sitting in silence before a fire in a private sitting-room, Gerald Stanton and a young woman, a beautiful young woman, he thought, gauging her with his painter’s eye, whose face now wore the numbed expression of shock and grief. She looked at him without recognition. That was not surprising; he hadn’t seen her for twenty-seven years.

  ‘Joanna,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m Jonathan – your father, Jonathan Roswell.’

  The Property of a Gentleman … a poignant and thrilling tale of intrigue, mystery and romance, set in the dramatic landscape of England’s Lake District. From the internationally bestselling author Catherine Gaskin.

  Shortly after her mother’s death in a Swiss plane crash, Jo Roswell is sent from the London auction house where she works to the remote and mysterious Thirlbeck – stately home of the Earl of Askew. Jo’s task is to evaluate the house’s contents for a sale, but she soon finds herself drawn into the complex lives of Thirlbeck’s past and present inhabitants, each with their own secrets and desires.

  Robert Birkett, the Earl of Askew, has returned to Thirlbeck after many years abroad. A decorated war hero, he has also spent time in prison after a fatal car accident for which he was blamed. Carlota, the Spanish Condesa, is the Earl’s sophisticated yet possessive companion.

  Meanwhile, Nat B
irkett, a distant cousin of the earl, is the reluctant heir to Thirlbeck. A local farmer, his passion is for the land rather than titles and possessions. Following his wife’s mysterious demise at Thirlbeck, he is also the single father of two young boys.

  George Tolson is Thirlbeck’s brooding keeper, who jealously guards the property from unwelcome strangers. By Tolson’s side is Jessica, his intelligent but fragile granddaughter, who must be protected from herself.

  During her stay, Jo is absorbed by the tragic story of The Spanish Lady, whose young life was cut short at Thirlbeck many centuries before. She also encounters La Española, the brilliant diamond which, according to legend, brings disaster to all who try to possess it. And she is shocked to learn of her own mother’s connection to Thirlbeck.

  Jo will struggle with difficult discoveries as she unlocks the puzzles which link Thirlbeck’s past and present residents.

  Now available as an ebook on Amazon

  Learn more about Catherine Gaskin and her other novels at www.catherinegaskin.com

  Sara Dane by Catherine Gaskin

  The international bestseller available as an ebook for the first time

  Sara Dane is the story of an eighteenth-century young Englishwoman who is sentenced for a crime she did not commit and transported to Australia. The novel follows Sara’s struggle to raise herself from the status of a convict to a position of wealth and power. She faces many challenges, from the savage voyage aboard a convict ship to the corruption and prejudice rife in New South Wales. Life in the Colony is harsh, and Sara has to contend with natural disasters and convict outbreaks, as well as the snobbery of the high society she wishes to enter.

  Sara’s life is also influenced in often surprising ways by the men who love her, childhood sweetheart Richard Barwell, ship’s officer-turned-landowner Andrew Maclay, Frenchman Louis de Bourget and the Irish political prisoner Jeremy Hogan. Sara Dane is a sweeping historical novel full of adventure, romance, rivalries, double-dealing and murder.