Chapter 12
12
I hadn’t thought it would be possible for me to fall more in love with Willowdale Hall but it seemed it was. With only a few items of furniture looking lost within the large rooms, neither my bedroom nor my office in the corner of the west wing could be labelled ‘homely’ but, to me, they already felt like home. Oliver had invited me to use furniture from other rooms and had helped me relocate a pair of armchairs and a nest of occasional tables from one of the downstairs sitting rooms into my bedroom. The material covering the chairs was way past its best but they were still really comfortable and a couple of cosy throws and a pair of scatter cushions from a shop in Keswick soon transformed them.
Oliver and Rosie had been so welcoming and already felt like friends rather than clients. I’d been invited for Sunday dinner with Rosie’s parents, Alice and Xander, and had also met Oliver’s dad, Christian, along with the seven alpacas he was looking after for Emma this week. It was the local half-term break and she’d gone on holiday with her partner, Killian – the groundsman for the estate – and his family so I looked forward to meeting the pair of them when they returned to work.
I hadn’t seen my parents since moving here because they were also away. Keira and Johnnie had booked a holiday cottage in Northumberland for a week and invited my parents to join them. With Astrid not yet attending school, they didn’t need to go away during school holidays but it had been a last-minute thing fitting around other staff holidays. Their absence worked well for me, giving me a week of settling into Willowdale Hall and finding my stride with my new project without worrying about how to rebuild my damaged relationship with my parents. I’d hoped to drop in after my interview to tell them in person that I was moving back to Willowdale but they’d been away for a long weekend. We’d played telephone tag for a week and, when I eventually caught Mum on the phone and gave her the news, I don’t think it sank in that I was actually moving home. She seemed convinced that I was just taking on a project here and, after going round in circles, I gave up and figured we could talk properly after their holiday when I was in situ.
Tonight, I was joining Tequila Mockingbird at The Hardy Herdwick quiz night and, while I was looking forward to it, I’d told Georgia I hoped she wasn’t expecting me to replace Keira and Johnnie’s collective brain power.
Rosie was meeting Autumn and Dane in the pub an hour before the quiz started so she’d invited me to join them. Although Oliver had been on their team on the night of Georgia’s birthday, he wasn’t a regular team member, usually playing squash with a colleague on a Thursday night and staying over at his house near Penrith.
We set off towards the village, chatting about how we’d spent the day. Rosie stopped as we reached the estate boundary and pointed to the other side of the road.
‘That’s where Hubert Cranleigh hit Mam and left her for dead.’
‘Wow! I remember hearing about it at the time but I hadn’t realised it was quite so close to the estate. Did they question him back then?’
‘Yes, because of how near it was, but he had a strong alibi which placed him out of the area at the time of the accident.’
We set off walking once more.
‘It must be hard passing the place where it happened every time you leave the estate.’
‘Mam couldn’t do it. Every time she passed that spot, she experienced terrifying flashbacks. What’s weird is that, in the same storm that brought down the tree on the boat house, the tree which marked the spot also came down so there’s not such a visual reminder anymore. I think that’s really helped Mam with her recovery.’
I still couldn’t quite get over what I’d learned about Hubert Cranleigh. ‘Who drives into a person and flees from the scene?’
‘The theory was that she’d been hit by a drunk driver and they were either oblivious because of that or they thought they’d hit an animal. We’ll never know for sure because it was after his Lordship died that we found the car and pieced it together. I like to think there was a small element of humanity buried inside him somewhere and he would have stopped if he’d realised he’d hit a person.’
We continued for several paces in silence.
‘If Hubert Cranleigh hadn’t had his riding accident and was still alive when you found his car and made the connections, what do you think you’d have done?’
‘Gosh, there’s a question! What I’d have wanted to do and what I’d probably have done are a bit different. I’d have wanted to jump in his car and drive it straight at him so he could experience Mam’s fear and pain for himself.’
‘Understandable.’
‘But what I think I’d have done is demand to know what really happened. Was he definitely drunk? Did he know he’d hit a person? Why didn’t he stop? Why did he hide the car? At what point did he realise it was Mam he’d hit? What was the real motivation for making it possible for us to stay in the cottage? So many questions but I’ll never get the answers and I’ve had to make my peace with that.’
‘Do you think you’d feel any better if you had the answers?’
She contemplated for a moment. ‘I don’t know. Possibly not. The answers I got might have been worse than the not knowing. What if he’d been aware that he’d hit her, stopped the car, saw it was Mam and she was in a bad way, and ran off so she couldn’t identify him if she came round? Would I want to know that about him? I prefer to think of him as someone who did a bad thing – a very bad thing – and did what he could to make amends by letting us keep our home and jobs. You know that phrase ignorance is bliss ? In this case, I think it really is.’
It was interesting to hear Rosie’s take on the issue. After Noah died, I’d wanted answers badly. Why had my boy been taken from me when he had his whole future ahead of him? I’d lashed out at everyone as I tried to find those answers, that explanation, that reason, because there had to be one. But every unanswered question fuelled the anger inside of me. There had to be somebody to blame. His friends, his girlfriend, his teachers, his dad. Anyone. Everyone.
I never got to the bottom of it and that anger and frustration was still there, eating away at me during quiet moments. So I avoided them, immersing myself into my work and research with more vigour than ever before. Would those questions eventually fade away or would they burst forth, refusing to be silenced? My biggest fear right now was that my first sighting of Flynn might be the trigger for that explosion.
‘Slight subject change,’ Rosie announced, breaking into my thoughts. ‘Oliver and I have been talking about the conversion and we agree with you that it makes far more sense for us to live in the west wing and keep the library.’
‘Really? You’ve laid the ghosts to rest?’
‘Maybe not quite yet. What you said about the bedrooms just being rooms which can be changed in look and feel makes a lot of sense. The memories in Oliver’s head are stronger than anything he conjures up by standing in his old bedroom, his mum’s or Hubert’s so he thinks that he would be okay to make those rooms part of our home. But we’d never considered our home just being on one level and we quite like that idea, so we wondered if you could walk us through your vision for each of the west wing options.’
‘I’ll smarten up my sketches tomorrow, add some more detail, and I can run through them whenever you like.’
‘Awesome. I can’t wait to see them.’
With perfect timing, we passed the lane where Autumn and Dane lived just as they appeared, so we paused and waited for them to join us. I remembered Beatrice Eccles living in the furthest of the three cottages and wondered what it looked like inside now that it was free from all the Beatrix Potter memorabilia.
Even though the quiz wouldn’t start for another hour, it was already busy in the pub. The warmth from the real fire hugged me like an old friend as I slipped off my coat and scarf.
‘We’ve got some big news,’ Autumn announced, ‘so the drinks are on us.’
I smiled as Rosie glanced down at Autumn’s hand, presumably seeking out an engagement ring, but there wasn’t one, so either that wasn’t the news or there’d been a proposal with ring-shopping to follow.
Rosie and I grabbed a table and were soon joined by Autumn and Dane with four champagne flutes and an ice bucket containing a bottle of prosecco. The pair of them couldn’t stop smiling as they poured and passed round the drinks. Beside me, Rosie looked fit to burst in anticipation of their news.
‘We’ve secured a six-book publishing deal for Dane’s books,’ Autumn announced, her eyes sparkling. ‘Dane’s words, my illustrations, first book to be out for Christmas next year.’
‘Oh, wow, that’s amazing!’ Rosie cried. ‘Congratulations.’
I added my congratulations as we clinked our glasses together and took a sip of the bubbles.
‘Was that what the video call with your agent was about?’ Rosie asked.
‘Yes,’ Dane said. ‘We thought it was going to be an update on her pitches to publishers but it was actually to tell us there’d been a bidding war and she wanted to check we agreed with her on the best deal.’
‘I burst into tears!’ Autumn said. ‘It was so unexpected. We were geared up to hear a list of rejections although, looking back, she’d probably have put that in an email rather than a video call.’
‘What sort of books are they?’ I asked.
‘Picture books featuring an animal mountain rescue team, inspired by Dane’s real-life rescues. There was a risk that a publisher might want Dane’s stories with their own illustrator’s pictures but our agent, Lena, loved the partnership of a real-life couple and thought publishers would too, which thankfully they did.’
At my request, Autumn showed me some examples of the illustrations on her phone as well as some of the verses Dane had written. The pair of them were extremely talented.
‘I’m so impressed,’ I told them. ‘Georgia knows lots of authors, some successful and some who are really struggling, and I’ve heard all sorts of stories from her about how difficult it can be to get a publishing deal.’
‘We’ve been very lucky,’ Dane said. ‘You need to get the right story on the right person’s desk at the right time and that’s a lot of stars to align.’
‘What about the books you wrote?’ Rosie asked Autumn.
‘You write too?’ I asked, my eyes wide. ‘Also children’s books?’
‘Yes, featuring the fairies and woodland animals who live in Derwentside Dell.’
My breath caught. Derwentside Dell? How magical did that sound?
‘I don’t know if you’ve explored out the back of the hall yet,’ Rosie said, ‘but there’s an avenue of willow trees by the lakeside. That’s the inspiration.’
Between the three of them, they told me how Autumn used to be an illustrator for a greetings cards company but had lost her creative sparkle. She and Rosie were long-term penpals but had never actually met until Rosie invited her to stay, suggesting there’d be no better place to recover her mojo than walking in the footsteps of Beatrix Potter. Autumn fell in love with Willowdale and with Dane and renewed her passion for drawing.
‘Lena loved both series,’ Autumn said, ‘but we decided it would be best to lead with Dane’s as we both had an involvement in that. Once we’ve signed the contract, she’ll go back out with my series and some standalone books of Dane’s.’
I loved how collaborative the process had been. Even though Rosie hadn’t written the words or drawn any of the illustrations, she’d been instrumental in it all coming together from the invite for Autumn to stay through to the suggestion she add fairies into her tales. I was used to working on my own and I functioned effectively that way but there was something so special about working with likeminded people whose questions and suggestions could spark moments of brilliance.
Listening to Rosie, Autumn and Dane right now took me back to the excitement I’d felt working with Flynn. He was a talented builder and joiner who’d been working on new-build houses when I met him but, as the years passed, he found the work repetitive and lacking in challenge. He’d become increasingly interested in the old buildings I worked on and was eager for some hands-on experience to develop his skills. I had a word with Billy, the building contractor on one of my projects, and he offered Flynn some unpaid work experience in exchange for training him. With my support, Flynn dropped some hours on his regular job and the risk paid off. He showed such a passion for restoration as well as proving himself a quick and skilled learner that he was taken on full-time the moment Billy had a position and he quickly worked his way up to the number two in the business. Billy and Flynn recommended me to their clients and I returned the favour.
When Billy retired, Flynn bought the business and his first major change was taking me on as his partner, offering a fuller service to clients. I taught Flynn a lot but I also learned so much from him. I got such a buzz from working alongside someone as passionate about restoration as me, tossing around ideas, debating differences of opinion and working together to deliver quality projects. I’d missed that so much when our partnership dissolved. There’d been a few occasions when I’d felt a buzz since then by working with a particularly knowledgeable client or engaging building contractor, but those moments were short-lived and not nearly as exciting as they’d been with Flynn. Everything had been better working with him, but I’d blown it. I’d always been the fiery one and that fire had taken hold and burned everything around it.
Realising I’d zoned out for a moment, I focused back on what Autumn and Dane were saying about what would happen next in the process. It all sounded very exciting.
‘I’ll definitely want copies for my great-niece,’ I said. ‘She’ll be four when the first one comes out.’
Thanking me for the support, Autumn apologised for hogging the conversation and asked me how I was settling into Willowdale Hall. I was waxing lyrical about how it was better than I’d ever dreamed when the door opened and Mark entered the pub. There was still half an hour before the quiz so presumably he and Georgia had come early for a drink. But it wasn’t Georgia he was with.
The words stuck in my throat and I paused mid-sentence, heart racing, stomach churning as I stared at Mark’s companion. And suddenly I was back to the day nearly thirty years ago when I first laid eyes on him in this very pub.