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.