CHAPTER 1
Perishable Goods
Victoria was sitting on the stone steps which led up to the front door of the Manor House. The steps were wide; some twenty feet at their widest and lowest point, and shallow, and had in their former, grander days, echoed and one time or another to the footfalls of most of the landed gentry of these islands, which the Tillington family had always called their home. Kings and Queens would have stepped upon them, having alighted from grand carriages, together with their loyal and sometimes not so loyal subjects. Now, some three centuries after their construction which had formed a part of the renovation of the much older house, they had fallen somewhat into a state of minor disrepair, and moss and lichen had taken a now well established hold, although the rounded edges, perfectly curving outer extremities and close-jointing of the stone slabs still bore testament to the skill of the craftsmen who had built them, who had in all likelihood been paid pennies for their workmanship.
She sat, in fact, on the third stone from the left on the second step down, just at the point at which the steps began to curve inwards towards the stone buttresses which marked their respective ends. She sat upon this particular stone for the simple reason that she had always done so. Ever since she could recall, which was ever since, at the age of six, she had been able to make important decisions for herself such as which step she should sit on, she had sat on this stone. She had sat here after she learned that she had passed her examinations during her years at Roedean, after she had graduated from University, when she had begun a new relationship or one had ended, and when she had heard the news about her beloved brother. In fact after more or less every significant event which had occurred in her life, she had looked over the same view of the garden; of the lawns that swept down to the boundaries of the Manor House grounds in the middle distance, and on to the fields and woods beyond.
The view had changed over the years, of course. The high brick boundary walls had fallen down or into disrepair in places and had been rebuilt, the new bricks looking incongruous with the setting. The trees which marked the garden boundaries and had been young trees when she was growing up had grown tall now, and some others beyond in the farmland which she could remember had been removed in the name of agricultural efficiency. Still, the view was more or less the same, and throughout all of the doubts, joy and disappointments of her still young life, this stone had been her comfort; her place, and now at the age of twenty seven she came here, especially when the emptiness took over. Here she could smoke cigarettes, carefully putting them out and placing the used filters in her jacket or coat pocket for later disposal. Her parents, Lord and Lady Tillington, knew of and disapproved of her smoking habit and would not allow smoking in the house, but beyond this they thought it better not to interfere or further impose upon or attempt to control their daughter, who had been difficult enough, after all.
So, she had sat here on her special days, but today was just another Saturday morning in mid-winter, at the beginning of a new year. She had put on a coat against the chill north winds, and her genuine Russian fur hat which had been given to her by a rich admirer from Moscow in a vain attempt to win her affections, and was deciding what to do with her day. Having graduated with degrees in Modern Languages and Art History, she worked as an assistant curator at one of the big galleries in London, specializing in escorted tours for Spanish, German and French tourists. In the former two she was nearly fluent; in the latter she was virtually flawless. Her work meant that she had every third weekend free, and although in truth the days of the week meant little to her, there was still somehow a deeply ingrained feeling that Saturdays were supposed to be special, which to her added an additional burden, and she must work especially hard against the emptiness on such days. She thought that she might go and investigate the new delicatessen which had apparently recently opened on the village green. News of village events filtered through only slowly to the Manor House, since neither her fathers' private secretary nor Jack, the head gardener, came from the village itself, but travelled in from the outskirts of town, and Molly and Susan, respectively the housekeeper and cook, lived in the servant's quarters. Thus the occupants of the Manor House and the people who lived in the houses which had once been its' mainstay had, in the course of the passing centuries, become strangers to one another.
Victoria Tillington was not what one might describe as especially pretty, but her high cheek bones and Roman nose which had for many generations been a feature of her family, at least if the ancestral paintings which hung in the dining room and up the central stairway could be believed, gave her a distinguished look, and she held herself with the airs of the aristocracy, albeit nowadays the lower aristocracy, in which she had been raised. Her youngest brother, Alexander, four years her senior, had had the good looks in the family. He had also had the wild nature and a love of fast cars and high living, the combination of which had ended his life in a car accident when he had been twenty two years old. This event, which might have brought some families together in a show of mutual support and shared grief had merely served it seemed to emphasize and perhaps increase its' emotionally dissipated nature. Her mother had become rather more highly-strung and unpredictable than before, traits which she had passed on to or perhaps gradually instilled in her only daughter, and her father had withdrawn further into himself. Victoria had lost the one person in the family to whom she had felt any real emotional connection during her formative years, and although relations between her and her eldest and one remaining sibling, Michael, had remained mostly cordial, they had never been close in the same way. After the funeral Michael had returned to Italy to continue his tempestuous relationship with his wife, the wayward and passionate daughter of an Italian Count and Countess, which Victoria had always read as her parents' last attempt to elevate the status of the Tillington family to something like its' former glory.
The match had, in the event and at times of brutal honesty, been a disaster from the beginning, and was only held together by a threadbare and transparent attempt to save face in the upper echelons of Italian and English society. No offspring had resulted from the marriage, and, despite her parents' best attempts to remain optimistic, nor was any likely to; the Tillington name which had been held in high esteem at certain times during the past three or four...
