by Georgia Hill
Gabe walked to her drawing board, positioned neatly in front of the uncurtained sash window and fingered her pencils. ‘What do you do?’
Rachel hurried over and nudged him out of the way. She shut her sketchbook and flipped the cloth over her drawing board. She hated people seeing her work until she felt it was finished, perfect. Or as perfect as she could make it.
‘I’m an illustrator. Freelance. I do drawings for magazines, books. That sort of thing.’ In a nervous gesture she put her pencils back into their size order and turned her back on the window, her hands resting defensively on the now safely covered drawing board.
Gabe looked at her intently. ‘Never would have guessed.’
‘What?’
‘That you were the creative sort.’
Not many people did, thought Rachel. She often wondered what it was about her that made them think she wasn’t artistic.
‘So where would I see your work?’
Rachel was beginning to feel hounded. Christ, would he let go? To fend him off she resorted to the truth. ‘Well,’ she admitted through clenched teeth, ‘Most of my bread-and- butter work is greetings cards.’
‘Is that so?’ Mike came to join them and picked up a pile of drawings due to be sent off for approval. ‘These are nice. Your mum would like these,’ he said to Gabe as he studied the watercolours of poppies and irises. ‘You’re good.’
Gabe peered at the drawings. He took one from Mike and examined it. ‘You’re really good. These are fantastic. Realistic, but you’ve made the flowers look almost like people reaching up to the sun. Yearning for it. For its life force.’
Mike harrumphed, obviously embarrassed. ‘Don’t take any notice of Gabriel, Rachel. He talks like this on occasion.’
Rachel was taken aback at Gabe’s perceptiveness. He was right; that was exactly the effect she’d been after. Another side to this intriguing man. However, she now felt thoroughly invaded. ‘Thank you,’ she managed as she snatched them back. ‘Come into the kitchen and I’ll put the kettle on. I was just about to make myself some tea.’
‘Well, if it’s all the same with you, me and Gabe’s got to get over to Ludlow later on today so we’d like a look round now. The tea can wait, lovely.’ Mike grinned his son’s smile.
She felt a knot of panic form and frowned. ‘But Gabe’s already done a quote.’
Mike held up his hand. ‘I know, but we were thinking. Place has been empty for a good few years now. Good chance the wiring’ll need doing and you might want central heating put in.’
‘I thought I’d just make do with a real fire in here.’ She looked to where her saggy old sofa, with its deep-red throws, was placed optimistically in front of the open fireplace.
Mike snorted. ‘Might change your mind come winter. Windy old spot up on the ridge, this is.’ Then he saw her anxious expression and relented. ‘Well, if you want a fire best to get that chimney swept and get that done in the summer.’
‘Oh.’ Yet another job to add to her list. It was all too much. Rachel felt her knees weaken and she sat down on the arm of a chair. It groaned in sympathy.
Gabe tugged at a long lock of hair that had escaped his ponytail. ‘Don’t scare her, Dad. Look, Rachel, as I said the other day, you can get things done in stages. Don’t have to do it all at once. I brought Dad up so as he could sort a timetable for you. He’s better at that than me.’
‘What, working to a deadline? Never been your strong point, has it Gabriel?’ Mike laughed.
Rachel saw Gabe blow out a breath. He looked tense. She wondered if father and son had problems working together. She suddenly felt sorry for him. He’d had his bubbly and genuine enthusiasm quashed and he looked defeated. Rachel knew about lack of confidence – she knew all about how hard it was to try to be the son or daughter your parent really wanted. It was something she’d spent most of her life attempting – and at which she had spectacularly failed. In their brief acquaintance, Gabe had been nothing but kindness itself and, although she suspected that the kindness was going to cost her a fortune, she found she wanted to reciprocate. ‘You’d better follow me, then,’ she said, resigned to her fate and rose to lead them upstairs.
Two hours later they were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking the inevitable tea. Rachel had never felt so stripped or so exposed. It was one thing to have Gabe look over her house when there were only packing cases in it; it was another when most of her belongings were out on show.
The two men had inspected every inch of the house. They had spent twenty minutes inspecting the wall in the back bedroom, with much tutting and discussion, and had proclaimed damp. To her dismay, they had even poked about in the bathroom, as Gabe had thought he’d seen a silverfish invasion. She bit her lip. From the way they were talking, she would have their company for some considerable time. She wondered if she was being taken for a ride but had no prior experience to go on. Her London flat had never needed any work so she hadn’t a clue if the men were talking sense or inventing jobs for themselves.
Uncannily, Gabe again seemed to sense her mood. He turned from his father and said, ‘You can ask around, for references and the like. The Garths up at the farm had us in to do a fair bit of work last year; they’ll tell you if we’re ripping you off.’
Rachel smiled at him, embarrassed at being so transparent but grateful. ‘I – ’ she began.
Mike had been poring over scribbles in a notebook and interrupted, ‘’Bout four months’ work here, more if you wants heating put in.’
‘Four months!’ Rachel sat back in disbelief. She saw her independent and solitary life leaking away.
‘Well, might take less if we do it all at once, but you say you don’t want that?’
Rachel shook her head at Mike. ‘No, and to be honest, I can’t afford to have it all done at once.’
Mike smiled. ‘Well, we don’t expect payment straight away. Trust works both ways in this game. You trust us to do a good job and we have to trust you to pay us eventually, like. We’ll better get off then, our Gabe.’ He stood and then looked down at her. ‘We’ll leave you to think it over.’
Rachel nodded. ‘I’ll get back to you. I’ll need to get a few more quotes, you know.’ God, this was so embarrassing, but this is what you did, wasn’t it? You didn’t just take on a firm of builders without checking out the competition?
Mike looked from his son to Rachel and gave a cryptic smile. He nodded.
Gabe spoke. ‘Yes, well of course you need to do that. Ask the Garths as well, number’s in the book. Get back to us when you can.’
‘By the end of next week would be better,’ Mike interjected. ‘Otherwise we might not be able to fit her in along with the Halliday job.’
Rachel had had enough. She rose decisively. ‘I’ll ring you on Friday, then. And now I think we’ve all got things to do?’
She saw them out and, before the Toyota could be heard grinding down the track, was hunting through Yellow Pages.
Later that week Rachel took a pot of mint tea into the sitting room and collapsed on the sofa in front of the fireplace. The weather had turned cloudy and it was a clammy but chilly sort of an evening. If she could trust the chimney, she’d risk lighting a fire, but remembered Mike Llewellyn’s words that it would need sweeping first. She made do with her little electric radiator and wrinkled her nose against the dusty smell as it heated up.
The cottage had a strange atmosphere this evening and she needed comfort. Last night, her heart thumping, she’d woken up to sounds outside – some kind of screeching. Common sense told her it was probably an owl or something, but it had sounded disconcertingly like a person in pain. It had taken hours to get back to sleep and she’d become very aware of being alone in a remote place. Today she had wanted to continually look over her shoulder, certain someone was there. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed in ghosts, but there was definitely a weird atmosphere in the cottage sometimes. Putting it down to tiredness, she tried to shrug off her mood and took a sip of tea. She s
hivered. Perhaps it would be nice to have central heating after all.
After thinking through what Mike and Gabe had said, she was resigned to the inevitable; that the house needed work. A lot of work. So she had applied herself in her usual methodical and thorough way and had tried to get some comparable quotations for the job. But her search for other builders had proved fruitless. Two firms were unable to visit for another month; another local one had managed to come and had then quoted a price far higher than the Llewellyns’; one said they were fully booked for the next three months and yet another hadn’t even bothered to reply to the messages she’d left on their answering service.‘Looks like it’ll be the Llewellyn boys, then,’ she said to no one in particular and tried to warm her hands around her mug. ‘It shouldn’t be too bad,’ she went on, forcing herself to be optimistic, ‘as long as I can find a way of working around them.’
She already had some work overdue, inevitably delayed by moving house. She was also getting far too distracted by the sumptuous countryside around the cottage. ‘I wonder if I could combine the two,’ she murmured. ‘Who would like some stunning landscapes?’
Rachel shook her head and laughed. It felt like madness talking to an empty room but, in some peculiar way, it really felt as though there was someone listening. Someone not completely unfriendly, more curious.
Her mother had always poured scorn on the thought of ghostly presences. ‘I leave the arty-farty nonsense to you, darling,’ she’d giggled, already on her second gin and tonic. ‘After all, you’re the one who claims to be artistic. That’s just the sort of rubbish you lot believe in, isn’t it?’
Rachel knew it had been the gin talking. When sober, her mother excelled in the odd, sly, caustic comment. She declared wide-eyed innocence if anyone took offence. She only really loosened up with alcohol. Rachel hated seeing her mother so out of control. She almost preferred the closed-up, sarcastic version.
She shook herself, trying to instil some sense into her head. It helped make up her mind; she’d ring Mike first thing in the morning. She lay back on the cushions, more relaxed now that she’d come to a decision, albeit an expensive one, and her eye was caught by the Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin. She’d shoved it out of the way when clearing the kitchen to paint and it was wedged between Sister Wendy Beckett and a book on Kandinsky. She’d forgotten all about it. Putting her mug down carefully, not wanting to stain the floor, she took the tin down and settled back on the sofa.
‘So, little tin, what secrets are you hiding?’ Part of her was aware of the air shifting around her as she unwrapped the book. There were the eclectic mixture of papers again, a few neatly stuck in. Some looked as if they had been cut from a diary and were covered in densely written handwriting. The photographs caught her eye. One, a wedding photograph, featured a tall man in uniform with a vibrant-looking woman at his side. They were both holding themselves very erect, looking tense. Another was of a very dashing dark-haired man on horseback, a whip in his hand and a grin splitting his face. Both photographs looked old; they were sepia-tinted and spotted with age.
As she sifted through the loose pages, Rachel noticed that each was neatly numbered at the top right-hand side.
‘Someone after my own heart,’ she said with a smile.
She flipped back to the very beginning until she found the frontispiece again. ‘Henrietta Trenchard-Lewis,’ it proclaimed in an elegant and imperious hand. ‘Her Life.’
Henrietta? Lewis? Rachel found the postcard from Brighton and again looked at the address. Mrs H. Lewis. There was no doubt about it; it must be the same Mrs Lewis who had lived in the cottage.
At the bottom of the tin lay the letters, tenderly tied with their faded-pink velvet ribbon. Rachel laid them to one side; it felt far too much of an intrusion to read them now. She checked the tin for any more loose pages and, satisfied that there were none, pulled the throw around her, snuggled into the sofa and started to read.
Chapter 5
June 1963, Clematis Cottage
I began to be who I am when I went to the big house for the very first time. This is my story.
Hetty readied herself. She re-filled her pen with indigo ink, took a sip of tea and grimaced. It had cooled since she’d sat down at the little table in the window and had become distracted by the view, as always. She gave herself a mental shake and began. If she didn’t start this now, in her seventieth year, it would be too late. She forced herself back into the past, the distant past, and began to write.
I was a young girl when I went to Delamere House. Now, I am an old lady seeing in a year I may not see out and surrounded by the detritus of a long life lived in many parts. I live in this cottage, with a blue clematis growing around the front door and am bothered by few. It is how I like it. For too long I have been at the mercy of others. I now intend to see out my days in a pure and blissful selfishness. The big house has long since been sold. The family has not, after all, managed to keep it. Perhaps if I’d had children? But I digress. I jump forward when really I should start at the beginning. The beginning of my life. I began to be who I am when I went to the big house for the first time.
It’s been over sixty years. Hard to believe that all those years have passed, but I can remember it better than yesterday. It was a fine spring day in 1903.
Papa delivered me, thrust a package at me and then, almost immediately, went away again. As a small child I never did hold the same fascination as his spiders and insects.
I was to stay with my very distant relatives Aunts Hester and Leonora whilst he travelled on an expedition with the then Royal National Geographic and Scientific Institute. I loved Aunt Hester from the very beginning. She was all lavender scent and soft skirts. I detested Aunt Leonora almost as quickly. And I believe the feeling was entirely mutual. She never failed to point out my lack of manners and decorum. I asked for cake before sandwiches once and it was never forgotten or forgiven.
There were two boys in their charge, motherless as was I. Edward tall and slightly pompous, but kind also, and Richard. Ah, Richard! As handsome as the day, with the cheek of the devil. He got me into many a scrape as a child. And I was only too willing to follow his mischievous lead. Wicked, charming, irresistible Richard.
On that first day, I failed to notice the decrepit nature of the house, the gentility that papered over the lack of income.
As Richard often teased me, the hope of all was for me to marry Edward and therefore save the great house with my money. It did not quite work out that way.
Rachel woke with a start to find herself still on the sofa. She looked down at the biscuit tin in her lap and smiled. She could still hear the woman’s voice in her head. Slightly priggish and as imperious as her handwriting. She must have been a handful when she was a little girl. Rachel caught sight of the clock and groaned. Two o’clock in the morning and she had to go to London tomorrow.
‘No, Henrietta, no matter how fascinating you are, I have to go to bed.’ With a yawn, Rachel tucked the pages into their tin, replaced it on the shelf and went upstairs, smiling as she did so, her head still full of an Edwardian childhood.
Chapter 6
June 1963, Clematis Cottage
Hetty sat in her usual place by the window in the sitting room and looked out at the view. An unseasonal rain fell and, with it, she sank into a gloom. Old age loomed on the horizon; she even had to push her bicycle up the track to the cottage nowadays.
She laid her elbows on the small table she used as a desk – it had been Hester’s from her dressing room at Delamere – and cupped her chin in her hand. She thought back to the tea parties, the dances – before it all changed so horribly, horrifically, and not just for those at the Front. Hetty frowned. Could she do justice to this task? There were too many gaps, too many lost memories. Too many regrets. She watched, amused, as a blackbird flew down into the garden and began to groom his damp feathers. Straightening her shoulders, she reminded herself that she had never undertaken a challenge without facing it square-
on. After all she had lived through this really ought to be easy. She picked up her pen, dipped it into the ink and with it dipped into the past.
The bond between Richard and I was quick to form, thrown as we were into each other’s company. We had few other companions to dilute our friendship. I quickly regarded him as my best friend, although he irritated me more like a teasing brother.
It was a glorious summer afternoon in July 1907. I had been at Delamere for nearly four years and considered it my home. Richard was on holiday from school and had been taunting me from the door of the schoolroom while I did my lessons. In exasperation, Miss Taylor dismissed me. We found ourselves in the summer house again. It had quickly become our sanctuary, the place we came to when we wanted to escape the adults. Not that the aunts paid us a great deal of attention. As long as we did not cause any obvious mischief, they left us alone.
But we were no longer small children. We were growing up. A strange tension sprang up between us, making us unsure as to how to behave with each other. It was all terribly confusing.
Richard was in a strange mood that day. He often was. His mood would change in mercurial fashion from petulance to wild enthusiasm to an almost cruel delight in practical jokes. He had so much energy. He was easily bored and his mind danced like quicksilver onto the next enthusiasm before I had barely begun to grasp what it was. It was as if Delamere was too constricting, too limiting for him and he was bursting for more than anyone could offer. Today, he was almost febrile.
He sat me down on the flaking wooden seat and then looked about him furtively. There was no need. I’d spied the gardener over in the kitchen garden picking peas. I hoped they would appear at supper and my stomach rumbled in anticipation. Food, however, was all forgotten, when I saw what Richard drew from his pocket.
