silk butterflies, rose a foot and a half above her forehead.
“Weird hairstyle,” Jonny remarked.
“She was considered not only the most beautiful woman in the Colonies, but one of the best educated,” Pandy continued in a slightly schoolmarmish tone. “She was a spy for the Patriots during the American Revolution—”
“Seventeen seventy-six,” Jonny said by rote. He smirked.
Pandy suddenly felt foolish. “Well, she’s my great-great-great-something-grandmother. And she was supposedly a writer—maybe the first female novelist in the Colonies. When I was a kid…” On the verge of explaining how she used to stare up at this portrait of Lady Wallis Wallis, wishing she could magically be her instead of herself, she realized that Jonny was no longer by her side.
He was back at the drinks cart, uncorking one of the ancient bottles of alcohol.
Pandy stared in shock. No one had ever opened one of those bottles. She’d kept them for authenticity only; at close to a hundred years old, the contents must be suspect. Pandy took a step forward to stop him, but it was too late.
“Check this out,” Jonny said. He stuck his nose into the top of the bottle and took a deep sniff. His head drew back with a snap as if he’d inhaled something sharp and potent, then he cautiously took another sniff.
“It’s gin,” he said, with a sudden air of authority. At last, here was something he understood. “Possibly genuine bathtub gin.” He poured the liquid into a tumbler and took a sip, pressing his lips together to test the flavor. “Yep,” he said, with the confidence of an expert. “That’s pure 1920s bathtub gin. Maybe even made in one of the bathtubs in this place, huh?”
He took another sip and jerked his head at the painting. “Who did you say that was?”
“My inspiration. Lady Wallis Wallis.”
“Not her. The painter.”
“Gainsborough,” Pandy replied.
“What’s something like that worth?”
Pandy looked at him, sipping one ancestor’s gin while leering at another, and snapped, “I don’t know. What’s your inspiration worth?” as she walked out of the room.
Jonny caught up with her in the gallery that she and Hellenor had dubbed “the Hall of Ghouls,” due to the hundreds of portraits and photographs of the Wallis clan dating back to the early 1700s. “Pandy,” he said, coming to stand beside her. “I didn’t mean it, okay?”
“Sure,” Pandy said, accepting his apology, as the shrink had advised, while noting that Jonny had brought the tumbler of bathtub gin along with him. “Forget it. It’s not a big deal.”
“But it is. I said I’d do this for you, and I will. Just like the shrink said. So who are all these people?”
“Well,” she began, but Jonny wasn’t listening.
Leaning forward to peer at a photograph, he laughed like a frat boy and remarked cleverly, “Must be nice to have ancestors. I’ve only got assholes in my family.”
“Oh, Jonny.” She shook her head at his silliness. “Look,” she said, pointing to an ancient black-and-white photograph of two dozen people lined up in front of the house. “All those people. All those lives. And this is all that’s left of them.”
“So?” Jonny chortled, taking another swig.
“Henry says I should turn the place into a museum when I die.”
“Great,” Jonny exclaimed sarcastically. “Another one of Henry’s ‘brilliant’ ideas.”
Pandy did her best to ignore him as she considered what to show him next. The schoolroom with the window-seat nook where she had loved to read as a child? The conservatory, with its collection of rare butterflies? Old Jay’s bedroom, she thought suddenly; that always impressed men.
Indeed, you couldn’t get more manly than Old Jay’s bedroom. The entire suite—bathroom, dressing room, smoking room, and the bedroom itself—was paneled in dark mahogany. The enormous four-poster bed sat squarely in the middle of the room; Old Jay had apparently liked to sit in his bed in the mornings and watch the comings and goings from the French windows that faced out in three directions. Besides being somewhat of a busybody, Old Jay had also been a great traveler. His room was filled with astonishing souvenirs from his trips, like a Zulu spear and what was supposedly an actual shrunken head from a real, once-living human.
But Jonny wasn’t interested in any of that.
He strode into the room, took a spin around the bed, and then, as if he’d already decided to take possession of the space, went into the bathroom. He shut the door with a proprietary click; when it remained shut for several minutes, Pandy began to fret. That particular toilet hadn’t