by Mina Carter
Once the beds were made up, she headed to the kitchen for coffee and breakfast. She would be heading into Wimborne shortly. Thinking she should call ahead to the solicitors, Becky left a message on the answering machine to let them know she would be popping in to see the younger Mr Kennet fairly early, but if it wasn’t convenient her mobile number was . . .
With coffee and toast in her belly, she locked the house and went out to get in her car. Another car was coming up the drive. Becky frowned at it.
A woman in her thirties hopped out of the people carrier and smiled at Becky a little uncertainly, then her expression cleared to a beaming smile.
“I totally forgot you were coming!” she announced.
CHAPTER FOUR
“UM, WHO ARE you?”
“Helen. I’m the cleaner. Mr Kennet did tell me you would be here this week, but I had a total blond moment over it.” She giggled a little. “I’m a bit prone to them,” she added with a wink.
“I’m Becky Frippe. It’s nice to meet you. The problem is I don’t know if I can afford a cleaner.”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. I get paid by standing order. I just turn up twice a week and have a blast through. Tuesdays I do the bathrooms and kitchen and wash the hard floors. Thursdays I dust and vacuum through.”
Becky brightened. Knowing she didn’t have to do the cleaning in such a big house was rather a relief. “Do you know what happens about the garden?”
Helen smiled widely. “Oh, you’re going to love the gardener! Jimmy comes on Fridays, and he is hot! If I were you, I’d go up to Alice’s bedroom and make use of the binoculars she always kept by the window so she could watch him working.”
“Alice perved at the gardener?”
“Oh god, no! She always watched him to make sure he was doing things the right way, but that doesn’t mean you can’t perv!”
Sniggering, Becky unlocked the front door again for Helen to go in. “I might just do that,” she said with a grin.
“Right, I’ll get on. Don’t worry about getting back in time to lock up. I have a key for the back door, so I’ll let myself out.”
“Well, it was nice to meet you, Helen,” Becky commented. “I don’t think I’ll be out too long, so I should catch you before you leave.”
Wimborne was surprisingly busy so early in the morning. Becky had thought it would be like a ghost town, but then it occurred to her that everyone there had to get to work. She parked in the same car park she had used before and made her way to Mr Kennet’s office along West Borough, and opened the shiny black door with the brass plaque beside it. The building looked Georgian.
“Ms Frippe, it’s so nice to meet you,” a pretty young woman said enthusiastically, getting up from behind the desk of the reception area. “Uncle Xander told me you’d arrived and I got your message this morning.”
“It’s nice to meet you too,” Becky replied, a little surprised the younger Mr Kennet had a niece of at least twenty. She looked like him though, but her features were softer, lacking the gaunt finish to her face that her uncle and his grandfather had.
“Sarah Kennet,” the woman said, holding her delicate hand with its purple manicured nails out in greeting. Becky took it, feeling decidedly drab and unkempt in comparison.
“Uncle Xander will be with you in a few minutes. He’s only just arrived. Please, take a seat.” Sarah indicated to the line of functional blue chairs along the side of the wide hallway.
Dropping on a chair, Becky was surprised when Sarah brought her a cup of frothy coffee. “Thank you. Do you treat all your clients like this? The business must be very popular if you do.”
Sarah smirked. “Our families have been friends for a long time, Ms Frippe.”
“Call me Becky. How long have our families been friends?”
“Oh, rather a lot of generations now. The Kennett’s have been handling Frippe affairs for nearly three hundred years.”
“Wow, that’s a long time,” Becky responded. The working relationship must be good to last that long.
“Uncle Xander told me you have children?”
“Yes. One of each. Daniel is nearly eighteen and Imogen is sixteen. She did her exams this summer. That’s why I couldn’t come down sooner.”
“Imogen is a lovely name. Is their father around?”
Becky huffed cynically. “No, he had a cliché midlife crisis and now lives with a blond bimbo with no brains.”
“Me-ow,” Sarah said, making cat’s claws with her fingers. “Men have no idea how stupid they can be.”
“You won’t get any argument from me there,” Becky replied with a snigger.
“So, are you going to join in with the local society? There’s events and functions all the time.”
“Society? Sarah, I’m a nurse on a low income. I don’t think I’m really the society type.”
“What about your children? They can meet a lot of important people that way.”
“To be honest, I’m probably going to rent the house out. I have a life and a job in Reading.”
“You can’t do that. There has to be a Frippe in Frippe House,” Sarah told her solemnly. “Did Uncle Xander not tell you that?”
“His grandfather said I couldn’t sell, but no one told me I couldn’t rent.” It was starting to sound like Becky was going to be forced into living there. If she couldn’t sell or let, what was she meant to do? Leaving the house empty was a waste. Maybe she could do something useful with the rooms she wouldn’t be using. She was going to have to have a long chat with her family over the weekend and see what they could work out. Dan and Imy were of an age when having their friends around was important. Becky couldn’t make the decision to uproot them without at least talking to them first.
Feeling rather dejected, she went through to Xander Kennet’s office when Sarah told her he was free.
“Ms Frippe, how can I help you?” he asked with a smile.
“I can’t rent the house out?” she opened with, scowling.
“Certainly not. Did you not read all the clauses in the deeds we left with you yesterday?”
“No. I don’t understand all that legal speak.”
“Then perhaps I should go over the basics with you so you know where you stand.”
“That’s probably a very good idea.”
Becky’s scowl deepened as Mr Kennet summarised the fact she was required to live in Frippe House now she was the legal owner of the property. There were all kinds of financial penalties if she didn’t. For a moment, she considered cutting her losses and going straight back to Reading when her scheduled visit was up. But she couldn’t shake the idea that the house needed to be used; needed to be lived in.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” she said dully when Mr Kennet had finished.
“I’m sure I have. Was there anything else?”
“I came in to talk to you about the money side of things. I’d like to get a builder out to check over the house and make sure it’s all up together, but I can’t afford to pay for that.”
“A very sensible precaution, Ms Frippe. It will take another day or two for all the formalities to be cleared up, but in the meantime, I can have the executors approve any work you need to have done. Perhaps I could recommend some local companies? If you would prefer, I can arrange it all.”
“That would be helpful.” Becky was sort of relieved not to have to deal with builders herself. Jeff had made her wary of them. It wasn’t fair to blame every builder for the fact her ex-husband was a total idiot, but she struggled to be rational on that one subject.
Content to leave it all to the solicitor, though decidedly discontent about not being able to rent Frippe House out, Becky did a little more food shopping and headed back. She could hear Helen singing along to the radio in the kitchen. It was nice to know there was someone else around.
Joining the cleaner, Becky put her bit of shopping away and started to make coffee for them both. Helen remarked that Alice had never done that and
mostly avoided Helen when she was there.
“Come and sit down,” Becky invited, dropping onto one of the six chairs around the old oak table.
“Are you going to come and live here?” Helen asked her.
“It’s starting to look like I won’t have a choice. I can’t sell, nor can I let. I’d intended to clear the house out and sell it off, but now that plan has gone out the window. This isn’t the sort of place I’d really want to live in, especially as it’s not in a town.”
“Oh, you’re a townie.”
“Through and through. I don’t really know what to do in the countryside.”
Helen smiled. “You just need to get to know people. If you go over to Furzehill, you can get to know a lot of locals in the pub there. It’s called The Stocks Inn. Most people just call it The Stocks.”
“I might do that one evening. How do I get there?”
“Head towards Wimborne, then take the first turn on the left into Grange, about a mile up the road. The pub is at the other end of that road.”
“What are the schools like round here? Imy is only sixteen, so if we do live here, she’ll need to enrol.”
“Q E School in Wimborne has a sixth form. It was rebuilt a few years ago. Now it looks a bit like a barren, modern hotel. It’s a pretty good school though. My kids go there.”
“Aren’t you a bit young to have kids in a school like that?” Becky blurted out.
Helen chuckled. “Nope. I’m blessed with good genes. My son is fourteen and my daughter is the same age as yours. Hannah will be in the sixth form this coming year too.”
“Maybe we could get her and Imy together? If she knows someone else, she might not feel so bad about leaving her friends.”
“Of course! I can bring Hannah with me another day.”
“My mum and Imy are coming down later today, so maybe you could bring her on Thursday?”
“Consider it done,” Helen assured her. “Unless I have another blond moment, that is.” She grinned at Becky and they both chuckled.
Leaving Helen to finish cleaning the kitchen, Becky headed back to the library. It reminded her about the email she’d sent to the book dealer. She checked her phone and found a reply. The dealer wasn’t sure when he would be free but was coming to the area on other business at some point in the next few days. He said he’d take a chance on her being home. He’d added a cautionary note about the Dickens volumes, explaining books like that didn’t tend to come up very often. Becky had actually forgotten what she’d found out about the books. Now she decided to look at some of the other old ones, though she would leave them on the shelves.
Many of the titles were unknown to her, but there were a lot she knew. There was a lovely set of Jane Austen books, several Brontë titles, Shakespeare, Orwell, Golding, Byron, Shelley. The library was a reader’s wet-dream. Going over to the desk, Becky checked through the draws, thinking she might begin an inventory. There was no need. In the bottom draw, there was a large heavy ledger and in it were all the book titles she’d seen on the shelves. It had been kept up to date; Alice had added in new titles with an increasingly spidery hand, right up to a Mills and Boon romance added in early May, only a short time before Alice had passed away.
Then Becky noticed a large, folded sheet of paper had been in the drawer under the ledger. She took it out and carefully unfolded it to find a family tree. It was up to date as far as Alice and Agatha. Becky studied it closely. She found what must be the George who had rejected Emily. He wasn’t actually a Frippe, but had been adopted at the age of twelve. A small note under his name said his parents had been Rosalind and Jermaine Dacome. She would have to see if she could find any more information about them.
The family tree had obviously been done by someone very skilled; all the writing was in a neat copperplate hand and around the edges were all sorts of family crests and emblems. Going up to the start of it, Becky found the name Durrand Frippe with a birth year of 1473. The Frippes really were an old family.
Finding a fresh sheet of paper and a pencil in one of the other drawers, Becky began to make a rough copy of the family tree. She didn’t want to be unfolding the old one too often. It occurred to her it should probably be looked at by someone who knew about document conservation. It wasn’t really old, but it needed to be preserved.
With her own scruffy version of the family tree, she would be able to track down names in any papers.
Just out of interest, she started to look in the next drawer down. Most of what she found was quite predictable: stationary, pens, ink pots. She spotted a very old leather wallet and looked inside. It was stuffed with twenty pound notes. Becky closed it quickly. Technically, it was her money, but she had no idea if she could use it or not. There was only one way to find out.
Sarah Kennet answered the phone and told Becky she would ask her Uncle Xander if Becky could spend the cash. She came back a couple of minutes later to say that the money certainly was Becky’s and she could do what she liked with it.
Taking all the notes out, Becky counted them and found she was now richer by three hundred and eighty pounds. She wondered about taking her mum and Imy out for dinner with it.
Going back to the kitchen, she found Helen was just finishing up washing round the cupboard fronts. Looking at the bundle of cash in her hand, she separated forty and put it on the table. “That’s for you,” she said when Helen looked at it with a puzzled expression. “Call it a bonus.”
“You really don’t need to do that.”
“I’ve just found it in the desk and Mr Kennet said I can use it how I like. I’d like you to have some of it. It’s a big relief knowing I don’t have to do all the cleaning here.”
Helen picked the money up hesitantly. “Thank you.”
“So, how much more do you have to do?” Becky asked as the cleaner seemed uncomfortable.
“I’m off to do the bathrooms now. They don’t take long when no one uses them.”
“I’ve been using one since I got here. It’s a bit of a pain having to walk so far to get to the loo though.”
Helen chuckled. “You haven’t found the downstairs one yet then?”
“Um, no. I had no idea there was one.”
“Let me show you. It’s not exactly visible.”
Leading the way out to the hallway, Helen pressed on a section of the wood panelling and a door popped open. Inside was a narrow corridor with two large cupboards either side and, at the end, a small water closet.
“If you want to remember which panel to press, it’s the fourth from the front corner of the hall,” Helen explained.
“Are there any more rooms like this?”
“Not on this floor. There’s one in the same place upstairs, but no one has used it for decades. The cupboards are full of junk.”
Becky shook her head, wondering how many secrets the house was hiding. “Are there secret passages or anything like that?”
Helen shook her head. “Not that I know of. I’ve only worked here for a couple of years though, so there could be. I’ve never poked around the corners.”
“Would you like to?” Becky offered.
Helen grinned. “I’d love to!”
“In that case, the bathrooms can wait. It’s not like they’ve been used. Let’s go and be nosy!”
CHAPTER FIVE
THEY DECIDED TO start in the upstairs hidden cupboards. Becky wanted to see what Helen had written off as ‘junk’ for herself. What she found was a collection of broken furniture, cracked dishes, old lamps that probably didn’t work; in other words, junk. Although Becky did think maybe someone who knew about collectables should take a look. Spotting a small cupboard with its door hanging at an angle, Becky pulled it open. Inside was an old sweet tin and she pulled the lid off, then gasped in shock.
The tin was full of jewellery. Even if it was all costume jewellery, it was still old enough to be worth something. Becky put the lid back on the tin and stashed it back where she had found it. It could looked through it ano
ther time with her mum and Imy. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last jewellery she came across in the house. Heaven only knew what she would find in Alice’s room.
“Where next?” Helen asked.
“I have no idea. Maybe we should do this a bit more systematically. We’ll start in the rooms behind the kitchen and work to the front.”
“Good plan.”
Behind the kitchen were four small storage rooms. Each one was filled with decades of housework innovation like old vacuum cleaners, endless bags of worn out dusters, a couple of old washing machines and lots of gadgets Becky couldn’t even put a name to. They wriggled around all the bits and pieces, tapping on the walls as they went to check for any hollow sounds.
“Over here,” Helen said triumphantly and Becky squirmed through the junk to join her. She knocked on the old tongue-and-groove wall and the sound echoed a little on the other side.
“There’s certainly some sort of empty space behind there,” Becky commented.
They felt, tapped and pressed their way over the whole wall until Becky finally found a tiny catch hidden inside a small hole that looked like a knot had dropped out of the board.
“We’ll have to move some of this stuff to open it properly,” Becky said, looking behind her at the junk.
It took them nearly half an hour to rearrange everything enough to get the door open. Behind the door, the space was pitch black. They were going to need torches to go any further.
Becky waited while Helen fetched a couple from the kitchen, and then they ventured inside. The space was long and narrow. More investigating at the back revealed a right-angle turn into a large room. In the middle of the room stood a dusty old coffin held up on two trestles.
“Okay, I wasn’t expecting that,” Becky commented uncomfortably.
“Should we look inside it?” Helen queried, sounding very nervous.
“I guess we should check whether or not it’s . . . occupied.” Becky wasn’t sure she actually wanted to, but it had to be done.