"I can do that. How is Mrs Allard this morning?"
"She's very well, Mr Sutter, and it's nice of you to ask." My conversations with George are always somewhat stilted, except when George has a few drinks in him.
George was born on the Stanhope estate some seventy years ago and has childhood memories of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Crash, and the waning of the Golden Era throughout the 1930s. There were still parties, debutante balls, regattas, and polo matches after the Crash of '29, but as George once said to me in a maudlin moment, "The heart was gone from everybody. They lost confidence in themselves, and the war finished off the good times."
I know all that from history books and through a sort of osmosis that one experiences by living here. But George has more detailed and personal information on the history of the Gold Coast, and when he's had a few, he'll tell you stories about the great families: who used to screw whom, who shot whom in a jealous rage, and who shot themselves in despair. There was, and to some extent still is, a servants' network here, where that sort of information is the price of admission to servants' get-togethers in the kitchens of the remaining great houses, in the gatehouses, and in the local working man's pubs. It's sort of an American Upstairs Downstairs around here, and God only knows what they say about Susan and me.
But if discretion is not one of George's virtues, loyalty is, and in fact I once overheard him tell a tree pruner that the Sutters were good people to work for. In fact, he doesn't work for me, but for Susan's parents, William and Charlotte Stanhope, who are retired in Hilton Head and are trying to unload Stanhope Hall before it pulls them under. But that's another story.
Ethel Allard is also another story. Though always correct and pleasant, there is a seething class anger there, right below the surface. I have no doubt that if someone raised the red flag, Ethel Allard would arm herself with a cobblestone from the walkway and make her way toward my house. Ethel's father, from what I gather, was a successful shopkeeper of some sort in the village who was ruined by bad investment advice from his rich customers and further ruined by the failure of those customers to pay him what they owed him for goods delivered. They didn't pay him because they, too, had been financially ruined. This was in 1929, of course, and nothing has been the same around here since. It was as though, I suppose, the rich had broken faith with the lower classes by going broke and killing themselves with alcohol, bullets, and leaps from windows, or simply disappearing, leaving their houses, their debts, and their honour behind. It's hard to feel sorry for the rich, I know, and I can see Ethel's point of view.
But here it is, some sixty years after the Great Crash, and maybe it's time to examine some of the wreckage.
If this place doesn't sound quite like America, I assure you it is; only the externals and the landscape are a bit different.
George was talking. "So, like I was saying the other day, Mr Sutter, some kids got into the Hall a few nights ago and had themselves a party -" "Was there much damage?"
"Not too much. Lots of liquor bottles, and I found a bunch of those… things – " "Condoms."
He nodded. "So, I cleaned it all up and replaced the plywood on the window they got in. But I'd like to get some sheet metal."
"Order it. Charge it to my account at the lumberyard."
"Yes, sir. Now that spring is here-"
"Yes, I know." The hormones are bubbling and the local bunnies are in high heat. I used to get into abandoned mansions myself, to be truthful. A little wine, some candles, a transistor radio tuned to WABC, and maybe even a fire in the fireplace, though that was a giveaway. There's nothing quite like love among the ruins. I find it interesting that condoms are back in fashion. "Any sign of drugs?"
"No, sir. Just liquor. You sure you don't want me to call the police?" "No." The local police seem very interested in the problems of the gentry, but I find it awkward standing around a deserted fifty-room mansion with cops who are trying to look sympathetic. Anyway, there was no damage done. I got into my Bronco and drove through the gates, the tyres crunching over the thinning gravel. It will take five hundred cubic yards of crushed bluestone at sixty dollars a yard to get barely an inch of new topping on the winter-ravaged drive. I made a mental note to write my father-in-law with the good news. My house, the guesthouse, is about two hundred yards up the main drive and fifty yards from it, via a single-lane spur also in need of gravel. The house itself is in good repair, its imported Cotswold stone, slate roof, and copper-sheathed sash and drainpipes virtually maintenance free and nearly as good as aluminium siding and vinyl plastic windows.
We have ivy on the walls, which will be in need of cutting as its new pale-green tendrils begin to creep, and there is a rose garden out back that completes the image that you are in England.
Susan's car, a racing-green Jaguar XJ- 6, a gift from her parents, was sitting in the turnaround. Another merrie-olde-England prop. People around here tend to be Anglophiles; it comes with the territory.
I went inside the house and called, "Lady Stanhope!" Susan answered from the rose garden, and I went out the back doors. I found her sitting in a cast-iron garden chair. Only women, I think, can sit in those things. "Good morning, my lady. May I ravage you?"
She was drinking tea, the mug steaming in the cool April air. Yellow crocuses and lilies had sprouted in the beds among the bare rose bushes, and a bluebird sat on the sundial. A very cheering sight, except that I could tell that Susan was in one of her quiet moods.
I asked, "Were you out riding?"
"Yes, that's why I'm wearing my riding clothes and I smell of horse, Sherlock." I sat on the iron table in front of her. "You'll never guess who I met at Hicks' Nursery."
"No, I never will."
I regarded my wife a moment. She is a strikingly beautiful woman, if I may be uxorious for a moment. She has flaming-red hair, a sure sign of insanity according to my aunt Cornelia, and catlike green eyes that are so arresting that people stare. Her skin is lightly freckled, and she has pouty lips that make men immediately think of a particular sex act. Her body is as lithe and taut as any man could ask for in a forty-year-old wife who has borne two children. The secret to her health and happiness, she will tell you, is horseback riding, summer, fall, winter, and spring, rain, snow, or shine. I am madly in love with this woman, though there are times, like now, when she is moody and distant. Aunt Cornelia warned me about that, too. I said, "I met our new neighbour."
"Oh? The HRH Trucking Company?"
"No, no." Like many of the great estates, Alhambra had passed to a corporation, according to county records. The sale was made in February for cash, and the deed recorded for public view a week later. The realtor claimed he didn't know the principals involved, but through a combination of research and rumours by the old guard, the field was narrowed down to Iranians, Koreans, Japanese, South American pharmaceutical dealers, or Mafia. That about covered the range of possible nightmares. And in fact, all of the above had recently acquired houses and property on the Gold Coast. Who else has that kind of money these days? The defences were crumbling, the republic was on the auction block. I said, "Do you know the name Frank Bellarosa?"
Susan thought a moment. "I don't think so."
"Mafia."
"Really? That's our new neighbour?" That's what he said." "Did he say he was Mafia?"
"Of course not. I know him from the newspapers, TV. I can't believe you never heard of him. Frank "the Bishop" Bellarosa."
"Is he a bishop?"