He swears a wind blew through his office though all the doors were shut and all the windows down, and it opened a sales catalogue to a page for an Ancient Greek kylix. She loves Greek mythology, so he thought this would be perfect. He found one for Lia, and then a collector came and tried to buy it from her. Now she and that art collector are married.”
“So Lord Malcolm plays matchmaker. Anything else?”
“Mum’s not the only one who’s had dreams about him that have come true. Dad dreamed Lord Malcolm came to him and said, ‘Ditch that girl you’re after. She only wants you for your title.’ Turns out that was all she wanted. Then Dad met Mum. Like I said, Mum’s dreamed about him and…I’ve had my own encounter with him.”
“You dreamed about him, too?”
“When I was very little, about four or five, I think? My parents had a party and the house was full of people. I snuck out of the nursery and wandered to the landing on the stairs to watch what was happening. Just a load of people drinking and talking and laughing. This man saw me and walked up the stairs and asked if he could hide up there with me. I remember the two of us putting our faces up to the balusters, looking down at the people below.”
Arthur put his hands to his face, miming a small boy’s face pressed between the spindles on the landing.
“The man asked me questions about Mum and Dad and Lia and Charlie,” Arthur sad. “He asked if I liked Wingthorn and what I wanted to be when I grew up. The sort of questions any adult asks a child to get them talking.”
Arthur took a breath. He didn’t want to tell the rest of this story or Regan might never speak to him again. She’d call the men in white coats to take him away.
But he went on.
“After a few minutes the man said he had to leave. At breakfast, I told Mum and Dad I’d met a nice man in a black suit called Malcolm, and I thought they should invite him back because I liked him so much. Mum dropped her coffee cup. It shattered everywhere. Dad didn’t hesitate. He took me immediately into the picture gallery and showed me the painting.” Arthur looked over his shoulder at Lord Malcolm. “I said that was him. Dad said I must have dreamed the whole thing since that man had been dead a long time.”
“But you didn’t dream it.”
Arthur shrugged. “Maybe I did. More likely than I had a nice long talk with a man who’s been dead since 1939.”
“When that young man from security joked we had a ghost in the suite, your eyes flicked upstairs.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Arthur said. “Do you?”
“No, but you still looked.”
“I looked,” Arthur admitted. “And you’re still shaking.”
She lifted her whisky to her lips but didn’t drink. She turned, set the glass on the mantel, didn’t turn back.
“You told Charlie you dreamed about him, too,” Arthur said.
She sighed, but didn’t turn around. “It was the night after Sir Jack’s funeral. Soon as he died, I moved into the hotel. Couldn’t stand to spend another night in our house at Ferry Hill. This suite, Lord Malcolm’s old flat. Supposedly it looked just like this when he lived here.”
She gestured with her hand at the fireplace, the bed, the wingback chair.
“In the dream, I was in a beautifully decorated room,” she continued. “Like a lady’s morning salon. There was a breakfast table with a pink and white chintz tea set on it and a…”
She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge her memories.
“A small roll top desk, antique. A red sofa and a fireplace with a white mantel. Lord Malcolm was there, and I knew him. I knew who he was the way you know who people are in dreams. He was standing in front of the fireplace looking up at something. When he saw me in the doorway, he smiled and invited me in. I went to stand beside him and there was an empty frame on the wall, a large gilt frame, right above the mantel. Like this.”
She waved her hand to show the painting of The Psyche Mirror still hanging over her bedroom fireplace.
“That’s what we were looking at, this empty frame,” she said. “I asked him whose painting was going into the frame. He smiled and said, ‘Yours.’ Then I woke up.”
“‘Yours’? So a