The Women of Heachley Hall

by Rachel Walkley

  I wanted to argue, pick holes in his explanation, but my fatigue gnawed. ‘Suppose,’ I grizzled.

  He led me back into the kitchen, one of my hands still captured in his. ‘Come, let’s dance. It’s excellent at chasing away worries.’

  ‘Dancing?’

  ‘Naturally.’ He grasped my hand higher and rested the other on the ledge of my waist. ‘Waltzing.’

  I laughed. ‘Waltz? I don’t know how. I’m more of a bopping, hip-hop girl.’

  ‘Hip-hop?’ he frowned. ‘Very un-ladylike. You’re mistress of Heachley Hall. You should dance with eloquence.’ He snaked his arm further around my back, drawing me closer to his chest. My chin nudged his shoulder, and I tilted my head. Rather like his clothes, he smelt natural, although this time I detected the scent of pine needles. With a gentle squeeze, he guided me, walking me backwards while maintaining a faint smile.

  ‘Footwork needs practice. Lightly on your toes,’ he sang.

  I snatched a breath between giggles. ‘Charles, I’m wearing slippers.’

  ‘We’ll cope. Follow my feet.’ He swirled me around and I trod on his right foot.

  ‘I’m hopeless.’

  ‘Don’t look down. Look at my face.’

  My cheeks burnt with heat. Look at him? I blinked under my fringe and peeked up. He held his head to one side, the small side-burn showing on one cheek. For a second, his eyes twinkled, quite different from their usual hollow appearance.

  ‘Why, sir,’ I murmured, ‘you’re making me blush.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he smiled, twirling me around again. ‘Left foot, not right,’ he corrected, as I made a guess at where to move.

  The music, which I barely noticed, had the right kind of rhythmic beat, but otherwise had nothing waltz like about it. Yet somehow, Charles fitted our little dance to the rhythm. I concentrated on mirroring his feet. My slippers slithered on the damp tiles and he snatched me closer, preventing me from sliding. I responded by pinching his sweater between my fingers and thumb, anchoring my balance.

  Something else. I blanked it out. Forcing it deeper, but for a fleeting second, it was there, toying with me, making its presence felt. That tingle, that zap of energy that comes when a man touches me. I glanced up, past the smooth outline of his chin and stared over his shoulder out the window avoiding eye contact as if he might draw me in deeper with his gaze.

  The song ended and he released his grip on my waist and hand. ‘There. You’re smiling now. Much better.’ A soft smile of satisfaction broke across his face.

  My silly night-time excursion had been briefly forgotten. ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘This house won’t hurt you and I don’t believe it would have harmed Felicity either,’ he said softly. ‘What happens beyond its walls and the gates, that’s a different matter.’

  I agreed. The mystery lay farther afield. I just needed to figure out where.

  Charles’s musical interlude had deflected and calmed me. It was time to refocus on other matters. Work, my obligations to my clients, they lay beyond the boundaries of Heachley. Charles and I parted company each to our own chores, but part of me knew it was too late and denying the organic response was futile. It had happened during that brief swirl in his arms. I no longer coveted just the house for myself. I wanted him, too.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  As I chipped away at February, pining for the first snowdrops and daffodils to fight their way through the undergrowth, I mastered the art of focusing on work and ignoring anything that might persuade me into thinking I lived amongst the spirits of the dead or some other spooky world. I slept better, too. Charles had been right, sleep was a great cure-all.

  While Charles painted the hallway – he’d convinced me he could manage the height of the stairwell on his own – I completed my alien storybook and moved Ruth’s project up the priority list.

  Clowns became my focus. I whittled away half a day at the library, poking around the book box the defiant toddler Flynn had dismantled a few weeks before, checking out the current offerings. Not much on circus life, it appeared.

  If the librarian remembered me, she said nothing. She merely nodded in my direction when I arrived and left.

  My little bubble of tranquillity was burst by a text message, which arrived as I unlocked the car in the library car park. Sent by Aunt Valerie, it declared – without any negotiation – of her intention to visit Heachley along with Aunt Grace, her younger sister.

  I groaned, head-butting the steering wheel. One aunt was hard work, the pair of them would induce a migraine.

  My aunts, who’d always claimed they were there for me since Dad’s death, remained unreliable when it came to offering useful advice. Practical day-to-day stuff, fine, but with big life changing decisions they quickly lost any common sense. To add to the illusion of usefulness, they had a habit of deliberately disagreeing with each other. They detested the idea that one of them might be better informed than the other, and in the absence of an arbiter, they batted me back and forth, wearing me down in the process until I gave in to the loudest opinion.

  Ping-ponging text messages back and forth, it became apparent they planned to stay the weekend on the outskirts of Cambridge in an exclusive hotel, along with my uncles. And while the two men meandered about the golf course, they – my not-so adventurous aunts – would endeavour to track me down and come for lunch.

  I anticipated they would get lost driving on the country roads, which they did.

  Late on the following Saturday morning, the telephone rang.

  ‘The satnav can’t find you, darling,’ Valerie crackled, her stress levels easily discernible. ‘We’ve been up and down these silly little lanes.’

  I provided them directions over the phone until their mobile signal cut out and several minutes later, they edged along the driveway, the car wheels grinding on the gravel and announcing their arrival.

  They gaped in duet as they stepped out of the Mercedes, while underfoot their high heels sunk between the weeds and chippings. Foolishly, when I’d first informed them I was moving into Heachley Hall, I’d downgraded the scale of the property to something probably no bigger than a country manor house, rather than an imposing mansion. My intention had been to keep in check their curiosity about Felicity’s will and stem their general tendency to interfere with anything that smacked of status or wealth in the hope they might stay away from me. With their visit, my attempt at curtailing their busy-body natures came to a dramatic conclusion.

  Opening the front door I welcomed my aunts with an awkward smile. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Miriam,’ Grace shrieked across the drive. ‘This, this house. You never said your mother’s side of the family had this kind of money.’

  Valerie shot her sister a stabbing glance. ‘Now, Gracie, we said we wouldn’t mention poor Anna.’

  ‘I remember Malcolm saying this place was a disaster in the making.’ Grace marched up to the porch, sweeping her gaze back and forth across the frontage.

  ‘Nor Malcolm, either,’ Valerie reminded her sister. She threw open her arms, entombing me in a perfume laden embrace. ‘Darling, this is wonderful. How lucky for you to inherit such an amazing property.’

  I cleared my throat and accepted a peck on my cheek. ‘It’s not quite a disaster, but it isn’t exactly…’ I hunted for an appropriate word similar to road worthy and gave up. ‘You’ll see.’

  Charles’s touching up of the hall with a lick of paint had worked a treat for improving the first impression of the house. Along with the polished tiles and varnished staircase, the vestibule had recaptured much of its original grandness. What it lacked were pictures, mirrors and decorative lighting: the light bulb swinging in the draught wasn’t the most inviting picture.

  I closed the door behind me.

  ‘My, my. So spacious,’ Valerie admired, re-buttoning her half-opened jacket. ‘Cold, too.’

  I’d lit the downstairs fires at dawn, but due to a frosty morning, they’d had little impact on the ambient temperature o
f the house. Upstairs was even worse.

  Any attempt at keeping the facade of grandiose fell down the moment they entered the sitting room. My hotch-potch of furniture and lack of carpeting quickly dispelled any ideas I secretly lived the life of luxury.

  ‘It’s like Yvonne’s student days all over again,’ Valerie muttered, raising her eyebrows higher until she rested her attention on the cracked ceiling.

  I smirked. ‘It’s all I need.’

  ‘But, you don’t have a telly.’ Grace swept about the perimeter of the room. ‘Not one in the house?’

  ‘A radio is fine. I’m busy working.’

  They lauded the Rayburn, rubbing their hands over the heat. ‘This is more like it.’ Valerie tapped a cupboard door. ‘Original?’

  ‘Yes.’ I wanted to praise Charles’s work but I zipped my mouth shut – too complicated.

  Then, their frowns reappeared when I showed them the scullery with the rusting hulk of the disused boiler still waiting to be ripped out, the stained sink and the rotten slats of the wooden drainer.

  ‘Obviously I will get round to this room. Probably remove everything, leave it bare for the buyer to do as they wish.’

  Grace’s mouth, which had sprung open when we entered the scullery, failed to shut as we toured the rest of the downstairs, if anything, her jaw seemed to loll lower when I showed her the empty bedrooms.

  ‘Where do you sleep, darling?’ Valerie asked.

  ‘Upstairs in the attic.’

  ‘The attic?’ she wailed, melodramatically.

  ‘The rooms are smaller and easier to heat,’ I explained.

  Behind the veneer of lipstick, Grace’s lips had turned bluish. I’d grown accustomed to the cold and forgotten its impact on the uninitiated.

  When I opened the bathroom door, Grace visibly braced herself, as if she was about to be shown a frozen version of hell. Knowing how my aunts rate hygiene, I’d spent much of the previous day scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom to a standard way beyond my own needs. I could do little about the sparseness of furniture, but at least they couldn’t fault me on cleanliness. First thing Saturday morning I’d lit scented candles in the bathroom, polished the brass taps and turned the radiator up to maximum. Heat billowed out of the room the moment they stepped into it.

  ‘Oh,’ Grace almost sounded disappointed. ‘It’s not bad, really. Nice big tub.’

  I sighed, relieved I’d passed this test. The slightly more comfortable attic rooms ended the tour and when I offered to take them outside to show them the overgrown garden, they declined, preferring to view it from an upstairs window.

  Valerie wiped away the condensation from the windowpane. ‘It’s vast. All this land and woods.’

  I hedged a guess at the thoughts running through her scheming mind. ‘Unfortunately, Auntie, the gardens can’t be built on, nor Heachley Woods. Whoever buys this place has to be committed. It will take some looking after.’

  My aunt pouted. ‘Shame,’ she mumbled.

  We returned to the kitchen where I laid out a buffet of salad, cold beef and warm bread, which I’d baked in the oven. I suggested we ate before the fire in the sitting room. My aunts occupied the sofa, their plates perched on their knees, while I used the folding chair from the hall. The fire sizzled in the background as we munched. I awaited their verdict. It didn’t take long to arrive.

  ‘Such potential,’ Valerie declared.

  ‘But, you’ll have to make sure you get the house properly valued,’ Grace sipped orange juice from her glass.

  ‘I won’t have much say in setting the guide price.’

  ‘It has to go at auction?’ Valerie enquired.

  ‘Yes. The will stipulates auction only. I guess Felicity thought it might go for a better price if parties bid against each other.’ Liz certainly might fight for Heachley. The thought didn’t comfort me.

  ‘And you have to live here until October. Oh, my poor thing,’ Grace leaned over and patted my knee, consoling me like her pet dog. ‘There has to be some way of having you move out. You can’t live like this.’ She waved her hand in a vague direction and enunciated the last word with distaste while her nose wrinkled.

  There was no point arguing what exactly she meant by ‘this’; it would be beyond Grace’s cloistered upbringing to appreciate how far up the scale this house was compared to the lowliest accommodation frequented by the less fortunate. I might lack furniture and decorations, but for what I needed, the place functioned adequately.

  While they tried to outwit each other with solutions to my supposed problem, I sat on the sidelines, my plate resting on my lap and my chin tucked down. I’d expected their competitive streak to raise its ugly head. Neither of them wanted to do me out of my inheritance, so they plotted how to cheat the stipulations in Felicity’s will. The sisters bickered and suggested increasingly preposterous schemes.

  ‘Rent somewhere, nearby—’

  ‘But, Valerie, I have my place down in Chelmsford—’

  ‘Sh, dear. It’s too far, you need to be close by in case this solicitor calls by to check on you.’

  ‘He hasn’t so far,’ I admitted, then bit on my tongue with regret.

  Grace’s eyes popped open, latching onto my last few remark. ‘If he hasn’t, then move out and keep your name on the electoral register and for council tax, you can send him the bills as proof.’

  ‘But he might visit,’ I added, because I’d no doubt he would at some point, just to spite me. ‘He never said he wouldn’t.’

  Valerie frowned. ‘Too, risky, Gracie, she has to stay nearby, then she can pop up the road.’

  ‘Val, she can’t live in a cheap B&B—’

  ‘Mo-ney,’ I sang over the top of them.

  ‘You’ll catch pneumonia staying here.’ Grace tugged on the lapels of her tweed jacket. She’d not removed her scarf.

  ‘I’ve been here since October and managed to survive,’ I smiled, then nibbled on my buttered bread. I’d excelled myself at bread-baking, perhaps there was more of Felicity in me tucked out of sight.

  Things started to get farfetched when Grace wondered if they could bribe somebody at the solicitor’s office to warn of an impending visit. Then I could rush back – from where? – to meet him on the doorstep.

  ‘She’d have to leave a few things about to make it looked lived in,’ pointed out Valerie. ‘A bed.’

  I glanced at my watch. It was time to end the pointless debate. ‘I appreciate your concerns, but I’m happy here. I’ve got all I need.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Valerie snapped. ‘It’s not healthy being here on your own for weeks on end. You’re young, you should be out there,’ she jabbed a finger at the window, ‘finding yourself a man.’

  She’d hit on the crux of her annoyance. Here I was, their niece, whose mother had left not a clue about Heachley Hall, destined to inherit a mansion without recourse to marriage or career. Envy had finally arrived, and neither of my aunts had successfully hid the sentiment.

  I placed my empty plate on the hearth. ‘It’s only temporary. There is plenty of time for me to get hitched. Anyway, I’m not alone. I have neighbours and friends.’ Thank goodness Charles didn’t work weekends.

  ‘And what if you decide to stay on?’ Valerie’s grilling continued unabated.

  ‘I’m not staying here. I don’t want to.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t sell?’

  ‘It will. At least, there’s somebody who wants to buy it.’

  ‘Who?’ Valerie’s voice shot higher.

  ‘The neighbouring farmers.’

  ‘Farmers?’ Grace’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘Wealthy farmers. They have plans for this place and that’s that.’

  Money dismissed their concerns for me. The reminder of the potential worth of the estate put paid to their scheming ideas. I had to stay to the end, and they knew it, because they wanted to say there was money in the family even if it wasn’t theirs to fritter away. I rolled my eyes at the introduction they might foist upon me �
� have you met our niece, she’s a millionaire – I closed my eyes and buried the smarmy voice.

  After lunch I showed them my latest illustrations. They deluged me with niceties: cute, sweet and charming being the most common. I thanked them, increasingly aware of the sycophantic tones. I was to stay in touch and keep them up-to-date with the renovations and in return they would send me articles from home and interior design magazines. Anything to help me with my enormous project. I kept my lips tightly shut, not mentioning I intended to do the bare minimum and most of my focus in the coming months would be on the garden.

  By mid-afternoon, my headache had blossomed into a pounding pain across my temples. I guided them towards the porch door, thanking them for their time and reminding them my uncles were probably in the club house waiting for their return.

  Ultimately their visit buoyed my optimism. Whether they’d thought I would have cried on their shoulders in despair or have gone crazy with solitude, I’d presented myself as robust and on top of things. I grinned, unashamed at my success in keeping my interfering aunts at bay. They had no need to be involved and I would maintain the status quo for as long as possible.

  It wasn’t just about the money any longer. I actually felt at home. The sensation had crept up unnoticed and as I twirled around and congratulated myself, and Charles, on the replenished hallway. I had to truly acknowledge Felicity’s unexplained hunch that I would take to this place.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Mr Porter paid his visit at the end of February and I was given my opportunity to ask him about Felicity’s possessions. My hope in tracing the box remained despite the setbacks.

  He arrived with two days warning and if he anticipated finding the house in a terrible state, he kept quiet. Instead, he muttered a smattering of appreciative words about my efforts, especially with regard to the kitchen. As for evidence of habitation, there was no doubt that I lived in the house. He examined each room: the desk littered with sheets of drawing paper, the laundry drying on a clothes horse before a fire and the smell of bread baking in the kitchen. The small habits of life on display and they confirmed the truth – I’d no reason to practise the deceitful schemes of my aunts. The house was fit for purpose, almost comfortable and with winter slipping away, the interior arctic conditions had improved.