CHAPTER THREE
MATTEOWOKETO a ferocious wind howling outside, as rain lashed the rattling windows. Even though Easton Hall was made of stone, it was as if the whole house trembled against the storm’s onslaught.
He’d taken the spare room he’d used here as a boy that single summer he’d stayed. Ignoring Louisa’s mutinous glares as he’d brought his bags inside and removalists had come with a small truck to drop off computer equipment. If she refused to move out, then she’d have to get used to him moving in. Living here meant nothing. He had no house in the UK. On the odd occasion he was in the country, he stayed in one of his hotels. This was as good a base as any and the home needed to be assessed. He could use the time to do that, and to convince her to leave in the process.
He had all the time in the world to spare for that project.
Matteo tried closing his eyes, but his mind ticked over with work. Sleep had been an elusive state in his life. Owning an international business meant it was always daytime, somewhere. Right now, he had too many ideas crowding inside his head of how to turn this property into the newest jewel in his hotel chain’s crown. Giving his clientele the type of authentic ‘English country house’ experience they’d pay handsomely for.
With those thoughts whirring through his head, he gave up all pretence that he’d get to sleep any time soon, and turned on the bedside lamp, which lit the room with a dim glow, occasionally flickering as the flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder raged outside. Grabbing his mobile phone from the bedside table, he made a note to ask the engineer he’d rebooked to assess the building’s lighting protection system, assuming it had one.
Matteo propped his arm behind his head, and scanned his emails, seeing a report from his chief operating officer about a prospective property in Spain. Through the window ahead of him, flickering blue lights reflected in the glass slicked with rain. He ignored it, but a piercing cry rent the darkness. He sat bolt upright. What was that? A vixen’s cry? Though how could it be? It was the wrong time of the year and most definitely the wrong weather for that.
Matteo strained to listen for the noise again over the wind and rain. In the end, he left the comfort of his bed to investigate, dressed only in his boxer briefs. He raked his hands through his hair and peered outside at the persistent flashing lights close by. An emergency vehicle, he assumed as gusts of wind hurled at the home in a vicious assault. A tree down across the road? An accident? Who could tell? Anything was possible in this weather.
As he watched, a blazing white light burst outside with an instantaneous crack and boom. The lights in the room died. Matteo gripped the window ledge, heart thrashing in his chest. He enjoyed storms, the power of nature, but that had to be a direct strike on the house. Apart from the roar of the wind it was as if an ominous silence fell over Easton Hall, before he heard a creak and groan as if the home itself moaned in protest. All of him stilled. Waiting. For what he didn’t know, a sixth sense filling him with dread.
He turned on his phone torch and went to the door of his room, opened it. Above the noise of the storm there was a faint crackling sound. A taint to the air, like burning plastic. Smoke?
Fire.
Louisa.
He didn’t think as he strode down the hall. The torch app from his phone cast its trembling light in the darkness. He coughed at the thickening acrid scent. Electrical? No flames. In the ceiling?
They had to get out.
‘Louisa!’
Matteo knew from a multitude of fire-safety plans for his hotels that these old buildings were a tinderbox of ancient wood, ready to ignite. If on fire, in no time the whole place could explode over their heads.
‘Louisa!’
The chill air bit his naked skin. Threadbare carpet felt rough under his feet. He tried to remember her door. Which one? Guess. He pounded on the dark oak outside one room. Would she be asleep? Somewhere else in the house?
Movement made him stop. A figure in ghostly white appeared as the door in front of him partially opened. Hand up against the light of the phone torch he’d pointed her way.
‘Matty, what happened?’
She coughed. The air thicker, hazy.
‘Lightning. We need to leave now.’
She froze. Gripping the door as if paralysed.
‘C’mon. We have to go,’ he snapped through gritted teeth as she stared at him with her huge green eyes, wide in what looked like terror. Yet she still didn’t move.
‘Take my hand, Louisa.’ He held out his arm. Hand, palm up. As the wind still rattled the home round them, he willed his breathing to stay calm, measured, as she reached out, paused, drew back.
‘I—I haven’t... M-my things. My art. I can’t.’
Then an alarm burst to life, another and another with their shrill and piercing sound. She clapped both of her hands over her ears.
Enough.
‘We don’t have a choice.’
This was taking too long. He stepped forward and simply swung her into his arms. She didn’t fight. There was no struggle. Louisa went limp as he held her tight. His phone in one hand attempting to light the way as he tried to keep as low as possible, the air a flare of grey, thin smoke in front of him as they both coughed. Finding the stairs. A crash sounded. Falling masonry? Louisa flinched in his arms. He gripped her tighter, her body soft against his.
‘We’ll be okay.’
It was a promise. When he made those, he kept them, since so often in his life promises made to him hadn’t been met. By some miracle he found the stairs, began walking down as fast as he could, reaching the bottom and heading through the house towards the front door as voices called out.
‘We’re okay,’ he shouted. As he did, a beam of light cut across them.
‘No one injured?’
He shook his head as firefighters and police milled about in the entry, escorting them towards the front door.
‘Anyone missing?’ a firefighter asked. Droplets of water on his uniform glittering in torchlight.
‘Not us.’ Matteo drew Louisa closer to him, ‘There are some staff who live here. It’s their day off. I don’t know if they got out.’
‘They all seem accounted for, sir. You might check, after we get you seen by the paramedic.’
Matteo nodded as they walked through the front door into a carnival of flashing lights of emergency services. The frigid gale hit him like a slap. He’d forgotten he was only partially dressed, the weight and heat of Louisa against him keeping him warm. Somehow tethering him, not letting the fear of what might have been get too much of a grip on his consciousness.
Around them, emergency services worked. Kept him moving forwards. The gravel of the drive was sharp and cutting on his bare feet. Someone wrapped a blanket round him. Led him to an ambulance. He told them their names. Relinquished Louisa even though he didn’t want to lose the sensation of her in his arms. The perfect fit. Sat as the adrenaline that had been rocketing through his body bled away and the world simply spun round them.
Against the backdrop of night, flames licked the roof of the house. Then hoses. Water jets. Shouts and movement. The warm glow of fire guttering. Dying. Igniting again in a fight to remain alive.
Little by little he came back to himself. Turned round as Louisa was huddled on a gurney.
If he hadn’t been awake. If the fire alarms hadn’t worked. If emergency services hadn’t been close...
If he hadn’t been here at all and Louisa had been alone in the house.
No.
Louisa coughed. Eyes wide as the ambulance officers asked questions. Not answering them.
‘We’ve inhaled some smoke.’
They came at him with an oxygen mask but he waved it away. ‘I’m fine. Look after her. I think it may be shock.’
The ambulance officers nodded, placing a blanket round Louisa too, covering her soft, sheer nightgown. It struck him then how out of place she was in all of this. How breakable she appeared.
Something of himself seemed to break inside too. At how fragile life could be. How one day everything seemed fine and the next, everything changed. One moment he’d had a healthy little sister, then came the unexpected bruising. The listlessness. Till her awful diagnosis. The chemo. The infections. Constant terror that one day he might come home and she’d be gone, for ever.
He stood. No. He’d hardened himself to it all and the pain of that time had gone away. He didn’t need to remember. Tonight, there were things he had to do. Plans to make. He’d wanted to get Louisa out of the house, and the universe had granted him the perfect opportunity.
‘I have staff to check on,’ he said to the ambulance officers. ‘Can I go?’
Louisa seemed to wake up from her inertia. Sat bolt upright on the gurney.
‘No!’
‘They need to check you over,’ Matteo said.
She shook her head violently, her hair swirling round her shoulders. ‘I’m fine.’ Tried to get up. Swayed. Her breaths short and shallow.
She looked just like Felicity had. Dark rings under her eyes, stark in the harsh light. Skin so pale she was almost translucent. Memories came flooding back of Flick being taken away in an ambulance all those years ago. The old fears. He shut them down.
‘Let them look at you.’ He made his voice stern. The voice of the businessman whose staff did exactly what he asked when he asked it. Louisa’s eyes widened, mouth trembling. He wished then that his tone had been gentle. But he had no time for softness and gentleness. That had ended in his teens. And yet he couldn’t move. Heart still pounding behind his ribs as if fighting for an escape.
‘Don’t let them do anything to me.’ Her voice was the barest whisper.
What in hell’s name would they do to put that fear on her face?
‘It hurts, Matty.’
One of the last conversations he’d had with his sister as a child, when she’d been in hospital, undergoing the awful treatment that would save her life. It was as if a hand grabbed his throat and began throttling him.
Had something like that happened to Louisa? No, it couldn’t have. She’d been a healthy child the last time he’d seen her at her father’s funeral, and Mae had told him nothing. Though whatever the reason, he knew fear when he saw it.
‘I’m right here. I won’t go anywhere.’
Matteo wanted to do more. Overcome by the almost overwhelming desire to take her into his arms again. Smooth his hands over her. Tell her it would all be okay. Hold her. Yet that made no sense. Shock, that was it. Like her, it must be affecting him too. The desire to cling to the nearest life. Instead, he pinned the ambulance officers with a glare of warning.
‘They won’t do anything to you other than check you over. Isn’t that correct?’
One of them nodded, turned to Louisa. ‘We’d like to take your blood pressure. Listen to your heart and lungs. Is that okay?’
Louisa looked at him, almost pleading.
‘I’ll hold your hand if you’re afraid,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ Louisa said, never once looking at the man and woman attending to her as they began their work. Each gently narrating what they were doing. Taking care until they finished.
One ambulance officer made way for him, and he took Louisa’s hand. Small, pale. Cold. He wrapped his fingers round hers. Gave a gentle squeeze. It brought him back to the hospital visits with Felicity. How small and scared she was. The ever-present dread that the time he saw her would be the last, till his parents sent him away and the only things he had were vague reports begged from the people who should have loved him as much as they loved their own true daughter.
His gut twisted into sickening knots. The memories that came flooding back, of the flashing lights, the medical care, the fear. Like a nightmare that had gone on for years till the news had finally come that Flick was in remission. She’d stayed in remission ever since, yet each year on that date he waited for the call that would tell him the cancer had come back, even though she was now in her twenties with no signs of relapse, and his sister was considered cured. Still...
‘Everything all right?’ he asked.
‘Blood pressure’s a little low, heart rate’s a little high. Lungs are clear. Otherwise, no injuries. We’d like her to stay here a little while, have some oxygen. Take her observations again.’
‘Are you okay with that, Louisa? I can ask them to call me over when they want to look at you again. For now, I’d like to go and check on Mrs Fancutt and talk to the others.’
The column of her slender throat moved in a swallow. ‘That’s fine.’
He stood and strode to a small group, huddled near a fire engine under some hastily erected cover. The rain wasn’t heavy any more but driven by the wind and stinging his bare legs as he held the blanket tight round him.
‘Everyone okay here?’ They all nodded, asked about him. Of Louisa especially.
‘We’re both fine.’
The housekeeper looked at him, her normally tidy grey hair a mess of being woken from sleep and the weather. ‘Are you sure?’
‘We have no injuries.’
‘That’s not what I meant. Miss Louisa hasn’t been outside the house in months, other than to attend the funeral. She hasn’t left the property other than to visit the village in far longer.’
Matteo stilled. He spent his time travelling, visiting his properties, working. He had ‘homes’ all over the world. His house in Italy when he’d sought to find his birth parents in earnest. The gleaming modern masterpiece of an apartment in New York, a chateau in the Loire Valley... He shook his head. Home was where he laid his head for the moment, not any one house or apartment.
‘How long is “far longer”?’
Mrs Fancutt hesitated. ‘Years.’
He stilled. What kind of life had she led? Louisa had talked about love but what held her here? He could hardly believe his great-aunt would compel her to stay. However, what did he know? This whole family was steeped in self-interest.
‘She needs to be looked after...’
‘Has she ever travelled? Been out of the country?’
‘Never, though Mae, God rest her soul, did try. Even got her a passport. Used to tell Louisa of her adventures when she was a young woman. Encouraging her to go on her own. She never did.’
Matteo glanced over at the ambulance. No wonder Louisa was reluctant to leave Easton Hall. She didn’t know what kind of world was out there waiting to be explored. With the money he was prepared to give her, she could do anything she wanted. An idea struck him. Louisa was trapped in an existence steeped in the past, yet she was a young woman with a big future in a wide world.
Whilst she might not believe him, he simply needed to show it to her.
Louisa sat in the back of a large black car. The luxury vehicle easing through the glaring, crowded streets of Milan. How could it have been only days since the storm and fire? That time had seemed to pass in a complete blur. All the while, Matteo had been there. Taking charge, taking control. Calmly talking to staff about what would happen until Easton Hall could be properly assessed. How their wages would be protected. Sourcing a replacement passport because hers was trapped in a house they couldn’t now enter till it was deemed safe.
Then he’d simply told her she was coming with him, bundled her into a private jet and flown her to one of his luxury hotels in northern Italy.
She’d tried to marvel at the flight, her first. The sky, so vast. The clouds like spun sugar in the sky. Yet it was as if she were cut adrift, having lost everything safe and familiar. Sitting in the back of the ambulance had brought back memories, taking her to dark places she hadn’t been in years. The nightmares she’d once suffered regularly, returning. Yet she didn’t have her sketchbook with her to draw them when she woke, to take away their power.
She took a deep breath. The lack of her art things carried a greater worry, that she’d fall behind on her illustrations when she had a contract to fulfil. A deadline, and Louisa never missed those. She’d tried to explain that to Matteo as well, yet he’d simply waved away her concerns. Said that he’d look after her. Told her to have some time off and have fun, when Louisa was convinced they had different meanings for the word. Like today, when he’d arranged a personal stylist to come and take her to buy clothes, on his account. They’d sourced a few simple dresses in the UK before leaving, but, with everything else trapped in the house, even she could see that she needed more.
‘Milan is the city of fashion,’ he’d said, as if that meant anything to her. The woman sitting next to her in the soft white leather seats seemed to understand the assignment. Elegant to a fault with glossy, smooth chocolate hair. A sharp black suit. Vibrant, multicoloured silk blouse with a stylishly asymmetrical bow at the neck. Barely there make-up. Long, manicured nails.
A picture of perfection, who’d seen Louisa, pursed her lips, looked her up and down. Then nodded once and simply said, ‘Come with me.’
No conversation about what she might like. Nothing. Now Louisa’s belly churned as if it were full of snakes. Why did she feel so...judged? Her needs were simple. Maybe Matteo had said something when arranging the day? Perhaps that he’d found her in some way lacking? Though why that should even matter, she couldn’t be sure.
He was the enemy. Trying to take away her home. She shouldn’t care less about what he thought of her. Should she?
They pulled up outside a building fronted with smooth cream marble. Windows of glistening glass. Gleaming gold accents. No name on the shopfront. A man in a dark suit opened the car door and she followed the stylist out into the harsh summer sunshine. The humidity of the day draped over Louisa like a damp blanket. Likely making her hair frizz, the floral cotton of her pretty dress crinkle and hang limp.
It didn’t seem to affect the woman she was with, who still looked crisp and cool as though she’d just stepped from a freezer. Cutting her way through the throng of tourists on the footpath who parted in her wake, whereas Louisa felt hemmed in, pressed on all sides.
She scurried to catch up, dodging a couple who’d stopped in front of her to take photographs, as the stylist strode through the door of the shop. Dagger-sharp heels, clicking staccato on the marble flooring as she entered. Leading Louisa through the back to a kind of showroom with plush couches, champagne on ice and racks of vibrant clothes. A couple more perfectly presented women entered. Assessing her. She spied herself in a wall of mirrors. Long red hair curling at the ends. No make-up. Floral cotton dress. Ballet flats.
‘Please take a seat.’
She was guided to a couch, handed a glass of champagne. Some strawberries. She didn’t want the champagne right now, although the berries looked delicious. She put the glass down as a conversation in Italian swirled round her. Talking about her, she was sure. Shebit into a strawberry and a burst of juice exploded from the luscious fruit, dripping onto her dress. Leaving a blot of pink on the fabric as she was being...studied.
‘Can I please have a napkin and some water to clean this before it stains?’
‘You won’t need it. A man like Signor Bainbridge has certain...requirements for a woman and how she’s dressed,’ the woman said to her. Louisa wasn’t sure of her name. They hadn’t even really been introduced. She’d just swept in like a perfect, perfumed tidal wave and washed Louisa away with her.
‘He does?’ Louisa couldn’t understand. Wasn’t this trip about clothes for her? Why should Matteo care what she wore? Although he was paying, which didn’t sit right, but that was another thing he simply waved off in his imperious kind of way.
‘Of course. We will cater for all of them here. We have many ideas for you.’
What about her ideas for herself? She knew what she needed, what she wanted. What she liked. Though she supposed these people were professionals. She could sit back. At least it was cool here, out of the sunshine and the humidity.
They began taking clothes from the racks, holding them up for her. Suits as sharp as theirs. As sharp as Matteo’s own. Black, a colour she swore she’d only wear to a funeral. Bejewelled dresses with plunging necklines. Crystal-covered stilettos when she’d never worn a pair in her life and would likely break a limb or her neck if she tried. Nothing looked like her or felt like her style, at all. She was happy to try something new, but this? She kept shaking her head as the assembled women’s lips thinned, eyes narrowed, brows creased.
‘What do you like to wear?’ one of them asked.
She waved her hands up and down her body. ‘Dresses a bit like this. I also wore vintage clothes at home. I felt...pretty in those.’
‘And what if you were to go to a formal dinner? A cocktail party? Accompany Signor Bainbridge on a business lunch?’
‘I—I’m a children’s book illustrator. Why would I go to anything like that?’
They all muttered amongst themselves. Seemed to change tack. Out came underwear. Filmy lace. Embroidery. Barely there. Beautiful. But how would it even look on her and why? Something uncomfortable prickled at the back of her neck. A heated sensation that was part unpleasant and part sliding temptation. Did they think...?
‘I’m not Matteo’s lover.’
The women stopped their bustling. Stared at her.
‘What does it matter what you are?’ the stylist asked, one perfectly plucked brow raised. ‘We must do something with you. Perhaps your hair. It’s so...long. Cut. Highlights. Then you’ll feel like a new woman and want clothes.’
It was as if a hand grabbed Louisa’s throat and cut off her breath. She loathed the thought of anyone cutting her hair after her mother regularly had when she was a child, even taking to it with thinning scissors to reduce its thickness. To try and make her daughter look ill. Louisa had vowed that she’d never be subjected to that again. She stood, but the women completely ignored her. All nodded at the fine idea of changing her into someone else, and went back to talking amongst themselves.
The thing was, Louisa had accepted herself long ago. Mae and counselling had shown her that she was enough. And so, her mother’s barbed comments had dimmed over time. Why wasn’t she blonde, unfreckled, thinner, taller? Now, these women were a reminder of how others saw her. Tears burned the back of her nose. She didn’t need to be turned into someone else because some strangers wanted to squeeze her into a box that didn’t fit.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Come dici?’the stylist asked.
Even though Louisa couldn’t speak Italian the phrase was said in a way that clearly meant, What on earth are you talking about?
Louisa shook her head. Right now, she had to go. Today wasn’t fun. It was another kind of nightmare.
‘This is all a mistake. I won’t wear those clothes. I refuse to cut my hair. I want to go back to the hotel. We’re done here.’