I’m at your disposal.”
“Ever loyal,” she said. She felt a wash of sympathy for this careful, precise man who’d shepherded the family fortunes for decades.
He shrugged. “Maizie’s been on me to retire. She’s a saver, she is. We’ll get by.”
She saw his lie, and knew what a blow the loss of his lifelong employer was, not to mention the loss of her father, his friend and biggest client.
“I’ll need your help, Mr. Timmons,” she said. “
That’s a comfort, actually,” he said, and closed the door behind him.
CHAPTER 16
Els poured two more fingers of scotch and went to the partners’ desk, the Laird’s seat of power through the generations, where Timmons had left a stack of files. She dropped into the desk chair and stared at the pink ears and corkscrew horns of the kudu shot by her great-grandfather, contemplating the fact that her tenure as Laird would be the shortest ever.
The top file contained a sales slip from Christie’s for ￡120,000 for the Melville portraits of her forebears. She’d always prized the one of her great-grandfather got up in “full Prince Charlie,” with the tartan and heirloom sporran and sgian dubh. She discovered that one Maxwell Tierney had purchased Auld George for his private armory collection and had him shipped to Kansas City. On it went—pieces of silver she’d never seen, paintings she barely remembered by artists she recognized, carpets that might have been rolled in the attic for generations. Her father’s attempts to stick his finger in the dike of debt. She wondered if he’d already liquidated the best of the best, leaving her so little of value that it would be more trouble to sell the rest than to let it go to the Russian.
The file marked Smirnikoff contained Mr. Vodka’s offer on RussOil letterhead for Cairnoch House, furnished, in exchange for Harald’s obligations. She imagined him, stout as a fireplug and a heavy smoker, sitting at this desk, and hated the idea of his loutish friends drinking here under the kudu’s glassy gaze.
At the bottom of the pile was a yellowed file marked “G. Borelli.” She opened it with trepidation as if her mother might waft out, genie style, from inside. Besides the details of the trust, there were letters from an Italian psychiatrist attesting to her mother’s improved mental state and requesting that Eleanora be allowed to travel to Italy during her school holiday.
“Eleanora,” Els said aloud, stringing out the syllables. She struggled for any recollection of her mother’s saying her name and found none.
Eleanora was twelve now, the letters said, surely old enough to make the journey alone, and her mother pined to know her daughter before she was fully a woman. There was a carbon of a two-line letter from Timmons in reply stating that Harald denied the request. And later a letter from the same psychiatrist saying Harald’s withholding of their child had caused his patient so serious a setback that she was once again in an institution. At the back of the file was a note in curlicue handwriting she imagined to be her mother’s, pleading with Harald to assure their daughter of her constant affection and mentioning the enclosure of “this year’s birthday painting.”
In the thirty-one years since her mother’s departure, Els had never received a single acknowledgment of her birthday, Christmas, or any achievement.
An unmarked key was taped to the inside of the file. Els tried it in every door, cupboard, and drawer in the study. Thinking the key must fit something private of Harald’s, she went to his bedroom suite—a place she’d rarely visited, and never alone.
In his dressing room, she fingered the ranks of jackets, suits, and shirts. The drawers of his huge mahogany dresser weren’t locked. She picked up his hairbrush, auburn and silver hairs trapped in its bristles, and the bay rum scent he wore hit her like a punch. She avoided her reflection in his full-length mirror. To its left, he’d hung a gilt-framed Constable depicting a bucolic scene with sheep, so evocative of the life at Cairnoch that she couldn’t bear the idea that the Russian might get it. To its right was a keyhole in the paneling.
The key fit. Behind the panel was a shallow cupboard crammed with envelopes and packages in brown wrappings that smelled of dust and old paper with a hint of perfume. She pulled out a flat envelope addressed to her with an Ischia postmark. Inside was a page of colored pencil sketches of animals—rabbit, fox, squirrel, stag—with names