by Thorne Moore
Sylvia sighed. ‘It’s true. If it weren’t for his money, he’d be living in the dog kennel.’
Tamsin glanced at me, screwing a finger into her forehead. ‘Totally gaga, both of them.’
‘It’s the only way to be,’ I said. Totally gaga in their sweet way, not in mine.
‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps,’ said Sylvia. ‘But poor you, all that trouble at work as well. What on earth was that Mardell man up to? So horrible for you, the police and all that. I know just what it’s like, you know. They won’t let go, they want to nose into everything, you don’t have any privacy left.’
She was speaking from experience. Her ex-husband Ken was a crook too, but proficient with it. Leo had simply been foolish, one rash mistake compounded by the next, until he had no way out, whereas Ken was a dedicated professional. Sylvia had been married to him for eighteen years, never suspecting a thing, until the fraud squad descended on their home.
‘It wasn’t that bad for me,’ I reassured her. ‘I’d only been there a couple of months. They gave me a clean bill of health.’
‘So I should think! The brutes. Of course you couldn’t possibly have been involved.’
The disorientation at the moment of Leo’s death swept back over me. That was involvement, Sylvia. As deep as it could get.
‘Kate.’ I found Michael watching me, his eyes expressing quiet sympathy. ‘Black. You don’t take sugar, do you?’
‘No.’ We shared a grimace.
He handed me a cup of pure caffeine to wash away the cloying sweetness of the tart and the bile of guilt. ‘Just so you can relax, we’re completely legal here. That’s probably the best that can be said of us. We’re chaotic, impractical and impossible, but we are strictly legal.’
I laughed. ‘I’m sure.’
‘And Kate will sort it all out,’ said Sylvia, reaching round the table to hug me. ‘You’re so clever. And you’re to leave all that horrible stuff behind.’
‘I already have,’ I promised. ‘I’ve cast anchor and set sail, utterly free.’
Michael gave me a wry smile. He too had cast anchor and sailed away from everything; career, home, the life he’d built with his wife Annette, before cancer claimed her. But he’d cut the ties because there was nothing left to stay for.
‘Anyway.’ Tamsin scraped back her chair. ‘Got to go.’
‘Lots of texting to do?’ suggested Sylvia.
‘Since you haven’t got broadband…,’ With a pointed sigh, she trailed from the room.
Sylvia beamed after her. ‘Kids, eh. Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, you can’t live without them.’
There was a moment of mutual cringing as the casual comment hit all three of us in different ways.
‘Oh God,’ said Sylvia. ‘My big mouth. Get the brandy, Mike.’
Michael fetched the bottle from the battered dresser. ‘Not for me.’ He gave her a quick kiss. ‘I’ll take my coffee out to the workshop, leave you two to catch up.’
‘You’re a good dog,’ Sylvia whispered.
‘Woof.’
She leaned back and poured the cognac. ‘Come on, let’s drown our sorrows together and compare notes. Talk about the shits who’ve wrecked our lives.’
I looked at her, astonished, my thoughts still focused on the kids we couldn’t live without. Her son Christian was the monster in her life, but I’d never heard her admit it before. How many times had I wished she could live without him?
‘Husbands!’ said Sylvia. ‘String up the lot of them, I say.’
Ah yes, husbands. A much safer target for our coconut shy. I smiled. ‘But we’re not letting husbands wreck our lives, are we, Syl? Ken really was a shit, I grant you, but you’re rid of him, and you’ve got Michael now. If you dare call him a shit, I’ll fight you.’
She laughed. ‘Mike’s a darling. I don’t know how I’d have coped without him. I don’t deserve him. And his kids are such unspeakable beasts to him, it isn’t fair. But Mike’s one in a million. Let’s face it, they’re mostly like curdling Ken and poisonous Pete.’
‘No. Please. Peter isn’t poisonous. It didn’t work out between us, that’s all. At least as much my fault as his.’
‘How can you say that? He ran off with his bloody secretary!’
‘Gabrielle was his colleague, Sylvia, not his secretary, and truthfully, it really didn’t matter that much.’
Sylvia glared. ‘Yes it did! I’m not having you meekly turning the other cheek!’
I didn’t think I was, but of course Peter’s dalliance struck her as the worst of sins, after what she’d been through with Ken. It hadn’t been the law suits or the criminal charges that had wounded her. It had been the discovery of three mistresses. Three. Her divorce had been unpleasant and hysterical and she was still fighting Ken a decade on.
Peter’s affair was such a tame little thing, and though it had hurt me, it merely put the seal on damage already done. ‘We both had a lot to forgive. Peter’s a lovely man, just not for me. We were in trouble long ago and Gabrielle was his way out. We’d already come apart.’
‘Oh.’ Her face crumpled with pain. ‘Oh Kate. Not because of the baby.’
‘Don’t.’ I raised a hand. ‘Don’t go there. Please.’
Eyes brimming with tears, she came round and hugged me. ‘Not another word.’
‘And no more being beastly to Peter?’
‘Maybe a little bit. But no wax dolls and hot pins, I promise.’
*
Silence. No traffic. Someone screamed out there in the darkness, but Sylvia had warned me about foxes. I could cope with foxes. I sat on my bed, endlessly rearranging jumpers, underwear, makeup, pretending I was unpacking. Thinking. One thing my long chat with Sylvia had confirmed; I really didn’t hate Peter.
We’d agreed to part, he’d gone to Gabrielle, I’d packed up his CDs. It hadn’t been the most civilised of partings, but it hadn’t been the most acrimonious, either. I had loved him once. Perhaps, in a mortifying way, I still did.
My phone began to drone. I flicked it open. Peter. On cue.
He was talking before I could say a word. ‘Kate? What’s happening? Are you okay? You’re at Sylvia’s, is that right? Sarah told me.’
Of course Sarah had told him. Sylvia’s elder daughter, my very good friend, and wife of Peter’s buddy Phil. My marital breakup created all manner of complications in our incestuous circle.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Peter. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Hello Peter,’ I said.
‘You just upped and went? The house is on the market. What’s going on? I thought you were looking for a new job. Partington’s said they wanted you, and then there you were, gone. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I thought the deal was we didn’t have to tell each other anything, anymore.’
‘Oh, Kate. Don’t be like that. You know I still worry about you.’
‘Why on earth should you worry? Am I ill?’
A brief hesitation. ‘No, of course not. But this move ‒ it’s just a visit, right?’
‘No, I’ve gone into partnership with Sylvia and Mike. And what are you doing these days, Peter? Still setting the economy to rights? Do keep in touch occasionally. I’m sure I’ll follow your career with interest.’
‘All right, I deserve it. But you should have told me you were going to run away to the back of beyond.’
‘I didn’t run away, thank you. Where I choose to live and work now is my business.’
‘But you could still have—’
I could hear the voice in the background. ‘Petey darling, don’t be all night.’
I could tell he had his hand over the phone, before coming back to me, his voice lowered. ‘Look, Kate, I can’t—’
I switched the phone off in mid-sentence and returned it to my bag.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t love I still felt for him. But I really didn’t wish him ill. I was just better off alone. No one to love, no one to hate. I was fine.
Outside, in the darkness, an owl hooted derision.
Chapter 3
No!
I didn’t hear the word, but I felt it, pushing me out of the cramped attic room, with its leaking dormer window among the chimney pots.
I’d been waiting for some shadow to spring out on me throughout our tour of inspection, as Sylvia led me up staircases, down corridors, through one derelict room after another, but this, high up under the eaves, was the first sense of death and dark emotion I’d felt. There was fear in this garret, and a lingering misery, but mostly there was a strident, fierce defiance, determined to push me out.
No!
So I pushed back, and followed Sylvia in.
I’d done it. I’d conquered. Not so difficult after all. I just had to be strong. It was still there, that melting pot of misery and resistance, but I could put it firmly to one side.
‘…and perhaps the guttering.’ While I was vanquishing my shadows, Sylvia was considering the large blooms of damp on the sloping ceiling. She looked at me anxiously. ‘Could we?’
‘Sure!’ I felt absurdly all-conquering. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ I followed her, gleeful in my triumph, back down servants’ stairs to the ground floor.
She flung open double doors. ‘Ta-Ra! The drawing room. It’s the only one we’ve seriously tackled so far. What do you think?’
‘Hey.’ I could see why the room had inspired her into action. It was all mock-medieval plasterwork, with a Gothic fireplace and touches of stained glass in the tall arched windows that opened onto the terrace. Sylvia had decked it out with William Morris wallpaper, a chaise longue upholstered in faded red velvet, an Oriental rug and a brass oil-lamp with Tiffany shade. The sagging 1950s sofa and the Ikea futon slightly dampened the effect, but it was hard not to be impressed.
‘Wonderful. Creative. Just right.’ I reeled off compliments. It certainly demonstrated the potential of the place. Every other room merely screamed ‘Rewiring! Dry rot! Woodworm!’
‘I love it,’ said Sylvia. ‘Well, I think that’s it here. Now come outside.’
In the entrance hall, with its patterned tiles and mock-Tudor staircase, we struggled with the bolts of the towering front door, and emerged into the rinsing chill of a spring morning. Tissues of mist were clearing from the tree tops and the distant fields were already free from frost, though the sloping pasture below us was still crystalline grey.
From a mossy balustrade with crumbling urns, I surveyed the house. Solid Victorian, with heavy-handed touches of Gothic Revival; a pointed window here and there, a gargoyle or two, writhing vines on the woodwork.
‘We were so lucky to find it,’ said Sylvia happily. ‘You’d have thought developers would have snapped it up, wouldn’t you? But we just happened to be in the right place at the right time. An elderly spinster lived here for decades, in a couple of rooms downstairs, poor thing. That’s how it got so run down. When it went up for auction, I expect most people were put off by the amount of work it needs. Listed building and all that.’
‘But you and Mike didn’t mind?’
‘Of course not! I know there’s masses to do, but it’s such a dream and we’ve got money between us. Not endless money but you know, if we manage it carefully.’
I laughed. If Michael managed it carefully. Sylvia had never managed anything carefully in her life, least of all money.
‘And if we can get the easy bits up and running, like the lodge, well, it will just pay for itself, won’t it?’
I doubted it, but practicalities could come later.
‘Of course it’s a gamble,’ she went on. ‘But we both fell helplessly head over heels in love with it as soon as we saw it. And it does have incredible possibilities, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh God, yes.’ If the initial financial nightmares could be sorted out. That was where I came in. Nothing like a challenge.
‘Obviously guests,’ Sylvia took my arm and led me along, scrunching on gravel. ‘Music festivals perhaps. And a restaurant. You know, local organic produce, and our own herbs and vegetables. Themed weekends.’
We reached the end of the terrace. ‘And of course this is the real pièce de résistance.’
I jumped. There had been something so comfortably bourgeois about the Victorian façade that I was unprepared for what lay round the corner. The remnant of an old house. Much older, crouching behind the new. Nothing fake about this Gothic. Crumbling stonework, sagging beams, a small bush sprouting from a chimney.
‘What do you think?’ asked Sylvia, gleefully. ‘I could have taken you in through the boot room, but it’s so much more dramatic from this angle. Isn’t it incredible?’
I stared into the darkness behind crooked mullioned windows. My victory over an odd twinge in a servant’s attic was forgotten. This was altogether more forbidding. There were centuries upon centuries fossilised here.
‘A pity there’s so little of it,’ Sylvia continued. ‘Not much more than a hall, really, with a minstrel’s gallery. Oh, and there’s a dungeon. With a spiral stair! Lord knows how old it is. Mike’s researched it all, says it was already here in 1540. The rest of the house was demolished and rebuilt in Queen Anne’s time, and then again in Eighteen something.’ She patted the neat Victorian stonework as we passed.
I shivered. Hardly surprising with the frost still intact on the shaded gravel. Shiver with cold if I must, but it was absurd to shiver because of what might lie within.
There might be nothing.
Then again… Dungeons, Sylvia said. I’d dealt with an attic. Did I really have to deal with a dungeon too, on my first day?
Yes, apparently. Sylvia turned the iron handle on the grey, studded, plank door. I took a deep breath and followed her inside.
Nothing seemed to have been touched here for centuries. Worn stone flags, huge beams smudged with cobwebs, tall leaded windows, a wide, arched fireplace.
The once noble hall was now just a barn. Mouldering harnesses and farm implements hung from the rafters, and a section of the roof had been patched with corrugated iron. Shrouded with dusty sacking, the lower walls were panelled, carving quietly rotting in its frames.
‘Mike’s working on this.’ Sylvia’s hand left a black print on one worm-eaten panel. ‘Linenfold. He’s using all the old techniques so that he can do a genuine job. A lot of it is salvageable, but some bits are just falling to pieces.’
‘So I can see.’ My voice echoed back at me.
‘Criminal, isn’t it? But can’t you just see what we could do with the place? Elizabethan banquets. Wedding receptions.’ Sylvia waved her arms to encompass the magnificence of her vision.
‘Oh definitely.’ Generations of memories were sealed into these walls, and somewhere in those memories there had to be nightmares, but Sylvia wanted banquets.
She climbed a stone stair to a creaking gallery at the end of the hall. ‘And musicians up here. Harps and psalteries! What is a psaltery?’
The gallery, far too narrow for musicians, gave access to an upper chamber. I followed, ready for whatever might lie through the stone arch.
Ruin and decay. Nature had reclaimed any grandeur. Torn plastic was pinned over the remains of an ornate window and sodden boards patched gaping holes in the roof. Wind and rain had wrecked the place, rotting the woodwork, devouring the stone, dissolving traces of decorative plaster.
‘I could weep,’ said Sylvia, testing the rotten boards, cautiously, with one toe. ‘So much work needed, but we’re still waiting for an assessment. And of course you can’t rush in and do what you like with a listed building. There are so many hoops to jump through.’
Her despondency lasted five seconds, then reverted to bouncy enthusiasm. ‘Oh but come and see the dungeon.’
Down in the hall, we passed through one of two doors under the upper chamber into a small, low room.
‘The buttery,’ said Sylvia. ‘Every hall would have had one, so I’m calling this the buttery. Would it be where they kept butter? I have no idea, but I like the nam
e.’ She opened another narrow door to the side. ‘Be careful, it’s dark.’
I peered down a spiral staircase. Sylvia unhooked a torch, hanging by the door. ‘Watch your feet. It’s a bit uneven.’
I groped the cold stonework for support and forced myself to follow. At the bottom, Sylvia grinned back at me, her upturned face ghoulishly underlit. ‘Creepy, isn’t it?’
‘Very,’ I agreed, heaving relief that I felt nothing worse than a twinge of claustrophobia. We were in a low undercroft, with an earthen floor. Barrel vaulting dripped minute stalactites of oozing lime.
‘Oo-er,’ she whispered. ‘Imagine the poor prisoners chained up down here.’
I was fairly certain nothing had ever been kept there except barrels of beer and sacks of grain, but I was willing to play along. ‘Don’t tell me, a reconstructed torture chamber?’
Sylvia whooped with delight. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful?’
‘Somewhere to send wedding guests if they get too rowdy?’
‘Of course! Frighten them into sobriety. Because it must be haunted. Is it haunted, Kate?’ She clapped her hands, like a child wanting ice-cream. ‘Oh please, please say there’s a ghost down here.’
‘There’s a ghost down here.’
‘No seriously, please tell me. You’d sense one, I know.’
What the hell. I closed my eyes solemnly. ‘I detect – a definite shiver of fear.’
‘Is that all? I was hoping for a white lady. If only we had battlements. I’m sure we’d have had a white lady, walking in the moonlight.’
‘Perhaps we can persuade one to move in.’
‘Yes!’ Sylvia gripped my arm. ‘A ghost hotel! We could get a licence to serve spirits!’
We were still laughing as we climbed back to the buttery. To finish, she led me on into the second small room, under the upper chamber.
As before, a low square room. One tiny window, two doors, stained walls, stone floor, just another empty room. ‘Not sure what to call this one,’ babbled my cousin. ‘Think of a good name. The armoury! I wonder if we could get a suit of armour.’ She was already opening the far door, into a panelled arch through deep masonry back into the Great Hall.
