by Liz Fielding
Despite her airy assurance that she would be fine, it was a huge old place, undoubtedly full of ghosts and, as she opened the glazed doors that led from the entrance lobby into the main reception hall, what struck her first was the stillness, the silence.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw something move, but when she swung round she realised that it was only her reflection in a dusty mirror.
Heart beating in her throat, she looked around but nothing stirred except the dust motes she’d set dancing in the sunlight pouring down from the lantern fifty feet above her and, just for a moment, she was back in the studio with Darius holding her, limp, sated in his arms. Reliving the desperate frustration when that wretched guard had turned up.
They were so not done.
No, no, no… Concentrate…
Beneath the mirror, an ornate clock on the hall table had long since stopped. Dead leaves had drifted into the corner of each tread of that dratted staircase. All it needed was a liveried footman asleep against the newel post and she would have stepped into the Sleeping Beauty picture book she’d had as a child.
As the germ of an idea began to form, she began to film the scene in front of her, panning slowly around the grand entrance hall with its shadowy portraits, an ormolu clock sitting on an elegant serpentine table thickly layered with dust, paused on the room reflected in soft focus through the hazy surface of the gilded mirror.
She opened doors to shuttered rooms where filtered light gave glimpses of ghostly furniture swathed in dust sheets, climbed the magnificent Tudor staircase—not a woodworm in sight—and explored bedrooms in varying stages of grandeur.
There was a four-poster bed that looked as if Queen Elizabeth I might have slept in it in the master suite. Next door was a suite for the mistress of the house—a comfortable, less daunting bedroom, a dressing room and bathroom and a small sitting room with a chaise longue, a writing desk and a bookshelf filled with leather-bound journals. Research material for his grandmother’s history.
The desk had just one wide drawer and nestling inside it was a heavy card folder tied together with black ribbon and bearing the title A History of Hadley Chase by Emma Hadley. She had just untied the ribbon and laid back the cover to reveal a drawing of the Tudor house that had been added to and ‘improved’ over the years when her phone pinged, warning her of an incoming text.
It was from Darius.
*
Darius stopped twenty yards from the main gate and the gatehouse cottage that Gary shared with his grandmother.
Mary Webb had been his grandmother’s cook and the nearest thing to a mother he’d ever had. She’d given him the spoons to lick when she was making cakes, stuck on the plasters when he’d scraped a knee, given him a hug when his dog died. And, like everyone else in this place, had known his history and kept it from him.
When he’d learned the truth he’d walked away from the house and everyone connected with it and never looked back. That had been his choice, but while he had a home, a career, there was no guarantee that Gary, a few years older, who’d made him a catapult, lain in the dark with him watching for badgers, taught him to ride a motorbike, would have either when the estate was sold.
This is my land…
The words had come so easily. But they were hollow without the responsibilities that went with it. Noblesse oblige. Natasha hadn’t used those words, but when she’d rounded on him that was the subtext.
She’d asked him how long it had been since he’d set foot on this estate. Almost as long as he’d lived here. An age. A lifetime. He would never have come back if he’d had his way and yet, because of her, he was here. Not for the land, but for a woman. The irony was not lost on him.
He took out his phone, sent her a two-word text and when he looked up Mary Webb was standing on the doorstep. Seventeen years older and so much smaller than he remembered.
*
Sixteen years.
The text was unsigned, but it came from Darius and could only mean one thing. She’d asked him how long it was since he’d last set foot on Hadley Chase. He hadn’t answered, but he had been listening.
Sixteen years…
The article she’d read about his commission for the sculpture of the horse had mentioned that he’d been at the Royal College of Art and from the date she’d been able to work out that he had to be thirty-one, maybe thirty-two. That meant he’d have been sixteen or seventeen when he left the Chase, long before his grandfather became sick or he’d left for art school. It suggested a family row of epic proportions. A breach that had never been healed. Scarcely any wonder he hadn’t wanted her digging around, poking in the corners stirring up ghosts.
But this was a tiny crack and through it other questions flooded in. Not just what had caused the rift, but where could a hurting teenage boy with no family have gone?
She tried to imagine herself in that situation. Imagine that instead of hiding out in the shed, she’d run away. It happened every day. Teenagers running away from situations they couldn’t handle.
Where would she have run to? How would she have lived?
How would she have felt returning home after sixteen years, a stranger, changed beyond recognition from the cossetted girl who’d painted her nails, pinned up her hair, put on a new dress and sparkly shoes to go to a school disco?
He’d shown no interest, no emotional attachment to the property until that security guard had ordered him to leave but then the claim had been instinctive. Possessive.
‘This is my land…’
She looked around her. Darius had lived here while he was growing up, going to school. All his formative years had been spent roaming the estate. In this house. It had made him who he was, given him the strength to survive on his own. She would have expected a photograph on the desk, on the bedside table. There was nothing, but there had to be traces of him here. His room…
When she’d visited the Chase in order to prepare the details for the kind of glossy sales brochure a house of this importance demanded, there had been a team of them from Morgan and Black, walking the land, detailing the outbuildings, the cottages, the boathouse. Inside, she had concentrated on the main reception and bedrooms while junior staff had gone through the minor rooms, the attics.
She arranged the desk to look as if the writer had just left it for a moment, took photographs of that and the view from the window, then picked up the folder and went in search of the room which had been Darius Hadley’s private space.
She found it at the far end of the first floor corridor. Grander than most bedrooms, with a high ceiling, tall windows looking out over the park and furnished with pieces that had obviously been in the house for centuries. And yet it was still recognisable for what it was. A boy’s bedroom. Unchanged since he’d abandoned it.
Her brother Tom was about the same age and he’d had the same poster above his bed, the same books on his shelves.
The similarity ended with the books and posters. Tom had always known what he wanted to do and by the time he was seventeen he’d had a skeleton in his room, medical diagrams on the walls.
Darius, too, had been focused on the future. There were wall-to-wall drawings, tacked up with pins, curling at the edges.
One of them, the drawing of a laughing retriever, each curl of his coat, each feather of his tail so full of life that he looked as if he was about to bound off the paper after a rabbit.
On a worktable lay a folder filled with watercolours. Distant views of the house, the hills, the birds and animals that roamed the estate. The faint scent of linseed oil still clung to an easel leaning against a far wall. She opened a wooden box stacked beside it. Brushes, dried up tubes of paint. He’d moved on from sketches and watercolours to oil, but none of those were here.
She turned to the wardrobe and a lump formed in her throat as she saw his clothes. A pair of riding boots, walking shoes, battered old trainers bearing the shape of his youthful foot lined up beneath shirts, a school uniform, jackets, a suit and, in a suit
bag from a Savile Row tailor, what must have been his first tux, never worn.
What kind of a life had he had here? Privileged, without a doubt, and yet he’d apparently walked away from it, leaving everything behind. His clothes, his art, his life.
She’d been seven or eight when Tom was that age and he’d seemed like a god to her then, but when she’d been sixteen, seventeen, the boys in her year had seemed so immature, so useless. She couldn’t imagine any of them coping without their mother to do their washing, put food in front of them, provide a taxi service.
She sat on the narrow bed, rubbed her hand over the old Welsh quilt that he’d slept under, then kicked off her shoes, leaned back against an impressive headboard, putting herself in his place, looking out of the window at the view he’d grown up with, trying to imagine what had been so bad that it had driven him away. And failing. It was so beautiful here, so tranquil.
She sighed. No doubt her home life would have looked enviable to an outsider and in many ways it was. But she’d been older, an adult when she’d left. He’d been a boy.
She let it go and, propping the folder against her thighs, began to read his grandmother’s history of Hadley Chase.
Darius was right—nothing important had happened, no one of great significance was mentioned—and yet his grandmother had edited the journals, adding her own commentary and illustrations on events, providing an insight into the lives of those living and working in the house, on the estate and in the village since the seventeenth century. The births, marriages, deaths. The celebrations. The tragedies, changes that affected them all. Tash had reached the late eighteenth century when her phone rang.
‘Hi…’ she said, hunting for a tissue.
Darius, pacing Mary’s living room while she packed a bag, heard the kind of sniff that only went with tears.
‘Natasha? What’s happened? Are you hurt?’
‘No…’ Another sniff. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘You’re crying.’
‘I was just reading about an outbreak of smallpox in the village in 1793. Seven children died, Darius. One of them was the three-year-old son of Joshua Hadley. He wrote about him, about the funeral. It’s heartbreaking…’
She’d found the history. It had figured heavily in his education as the heir to the estate and the death of small children had been a fact of life before antibiotics.
‘It was over two hundred years ago,’ he reminded her.
‘I know. I’m totally pathetic, but your grandmother drew a picture of his grave. It’s so small. This isn’t just a history; it’s a work of art.’
‘And full of smallpox, floods, crop failure.’
‘Full of the lives of the people who’ve lived here. Not just the bad bits, but the joys, the celebrations. Your grandmother’s illustrations are exquisite. Clearly it’s in the genes,’ she prompted.
He ignored the invitation to talk about his grandmother. ‘You’ll find Joshua’s portrait in the dining room.’
‘Actually, I’m looking at some of your early work right now,’ she said, not giving up. ‘Watercolours.’
‘Chocolate-box stuff,’ he said dismissively.
‘That’s a bit harsh. I love the drawing of your dog. What was his name?’
What was it about this woman? Every time he spoke to her, she churned up memories he’d spent years trying to wipe out. The only reason he was even here, being dragged back into the past, was because of her.
He should have just signed the whole lot over to the Revenue and let it go. It wasn’t too late… Except there were things he had to do. People he had to protect.
‘Darius?’
‘Flynn,’ he said. ‘His name was Flynn.’
‘He looks real enough to stroke.’
Even now, all these years later, he could feel the springy curls beneath his fingers. Smell the warm dog scent. Leaving him behind had been the hardest thing, but he’d been old—too old to leave the certainty of a warm hearth and a good dinner.
He’d mocked her sentimentality over a child who’d died two hundred years ago but now he was the one with tears stinging at the back of his eyes.
‘Darius, are you okay?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Yes…’
‘So, can I use all this stuff?’
‘Will a smallpox outbreak help to the sell the house, do you think?’ he asked.
‘I’ll probably miss out that bit.’
‘Good decision.’
‘So that’s yes?’
‘That’s a yes with all the usual conditions.’
‘You’ve already got me naked,’ she reminded him.
He’d meant the ones about keeping his name out of it but, just as easily as she could dredge up the sentimental wasteland buried deep in his psyche, she could turn him on, make him laugh. ‘You’re naked?’ he asked.
‘Give me thirty seconds.’
He gripped the phone a little tighter. The temptation was there, but the thought of walking back into that house was like a finger of ice driving into him. ‘Not even thirty minutes, I’m afraid. I’ve hit a complication.’
‘Where are you?’ she asked, as quick to read a shift in tone as body language.
‘I stopped at the gatehouse to visit Mary Webb, Gary’s grandmother,’ he explained. ‘He lives with her.’
‘Oh… That was kind.’
‘It was a duty call. She used to be my grandparents’ cook. I couldn’t just drive past.’ He’d thought he could. He’d spent the last seventeen years mentally driving past.
‘Kindness, duty, it doesn’t matter, Darius, as long as you do it.’
‘I’m glad you think so. She’s five-foot-nothing and frail as a bird these days but it hasn’t stopped her from reading me the riot act.’
‘Give her a cookie,’ she said, not asking why she was angry. No doubt she understood how a woman would feel who’d lost—been abandoned by—a child she’d cared for, loved since infancy. Who, as a result of what happened that day, had lost her own grandson. His grandfather had not been a man to cross… ‘People from the village are keeping an eye on her, doing her shopping, but she needs more than that so I’m taking her to see Gary, then driving her down to stay with her daughter in Brighton.’
‘That should be a fun drive.’
‘I’ll blame you every mile of the way.’
‘If it helps,’ she said.
No, but thinking about her might. ‘I’ll survive,’ he assured her. Probably. ‘But I have no idea how long I’ll be.’
‘Don’t worry about it. You take care of Mrs Webb. I can sort out some transport for myself. There’s a bus to Swindon and I can catch a train from there. Don’t give it a second thought. It’s not a problem. Piece of cake—’
Her mouth was running away with her as she tried to hide her disappointment. It should have been an ego boost but all he wanted was to reach down the phone and hold her. Helpless, he waited until she began to repeat herself, finally ground to a halt, before he said, ‘I’m taking her in Gary’s car. I’ll leave the Landie keys under a flowerpot in the porch for you.’
‘Oh.’
‘That’s it?’ he asked. ‘You’re finally lost for words?’
‘No. I was just thinking that if you’re bringing Gary’s car back, I might as well stay here and wait for you.’
‘It’ll be late.’
‘We might have to stay the night,’ she agreed.
Not in a million years… ‘I’ve got a better idea. Let’s meet halfway at your place. We can have that picnic you promised me.’
‘Oh? And what will you bring to the party?’
‘A bottle of something chilled and a packet of three?’ he offered.
‘Three? That’s a bit ambitious, isn’t it?’
‘One for yesterday, one for this morning, one for fun?’ he suggested.
Her laugh was rich and warm. ‘Talk, talk, talk…’ she said, and ended the call.
He was grinning when he looked up and saw Mary watching him.
‘My suitcase is on the bed,’ she said primly. Then, as he passed her, she put her hand on his arm. ‘It was the motorbike, Darius. That’s why he told you about your Dad. Gary never cared about any of the other stuff you had, but that motorbike…’
‘I know…’
It was Gary, with a battered old machine that he was renovating, who’d taught him to ride on the estate roads, so when he’d come down and found a brand-new silver motorbike waiting for him on his seventeenth birthday, the first thing he’d done was fire it up and drive it down to show him.
Cock-of-the-walk full of himself, too immature to understand how the one who’d always been the leader might feel when he saw him astride a machine so far out of his own reach. The understanding, in that split second, of the reality of their friendship; how, from that moment on, every step would take them further apart. For him there would be sixth form, university, the eventual ownership of this estate. For Gary, who’d left school at sixteen with no qualifications, there would be only a life of manual labour on little more than the minimum wage. And he’d used the only weapon he had to put himself back on top.
‘He didn’t do anything wrong. He told the truth, what he knew of it, that’s all.’
‘He was a stiff, proud man, your grandfather. He broke your grandmother’s heart, barring your father from the house while he stayed with your mother. The poor lady was never the same after. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to love you, Darius, just that she’d lost so much that she couldn’t bear the risk.’
‘Everyone lost, Mary. My grandfather most of all.’
*
Tash rolled off his bed and crossed to the window to look out across the park in the direction of the gates, rubbing her arms briskly to rid herself of the tingle of excitement that, just hearing the sound of his voice, riffled her skin into goose bumps.
Silly. She couldn’t see the gatehouse cottage for the trees, but she was still grinning. She’d taken their relationship a step beyond a place Darius was comfortable with, hoping it would help him open up. Maybe it had. He’d stopped to talk to Gary’s grandmother and the fact that she was angry with him suggested a strong emotional bond.