Chapter 8
Eight
The shed which served as Christina’s workshop was barely ten square feet, squeezed into the corner of the garden she tended with as much devotion as her craft.
After dropping Elspeth at school that morning, she’d spent an hour bringing order to the cottage garden – clearing beds, straightening borders, and imagining the buried bulbs readying themselves to pierce their warm blanket of mulch with spring colour.
Now, back in her shed, the harsh beam of her headlamp cut across the workbench, setting the silver ablaze as she worked. The gentle tapping of her tools mingled with the distant bleat of sheep drifting over the Devon hills.
Rain pattered steadily against the shed roof, filling Christina’s workshop with a soft, droning hush that made the space feel like a world apart.
Her breath clouded faintly in the chill, but she didn’t mind the cold.
She was bent over, a loupe balanced at her eye, a tiny lion passant on a bowl the focus of her attention.
This was the final commission she’d agreed to do for Ernest in exchange for him getting Flora to sell Chase Lodge.
The bowl was a lovely thing – Georgian, with delicate repoussé work depicting trailing vines around its body.
The rim had that soft, undulating edge that came from centuries of polishing, and the handles, cast as acanthus leaves, showed the kind of crisp detail that modern reproductions never quite captured.
Outside, birds grumbled about the weather. She shifted slightly on her stool and picked up her burnisher, tested the patina with gentle pressure, feeling for the telltale resistance of authentic age.
She couldn’t shake Elspeth’s report from her mind.
She remembered all too well the moment that she herself had received her first bad school report, a few months after her father had gone to New York on an extended business trip and she and her mother had relocated to Suffolk.
She must have been about Elspeth’s age. She and her mum had moved into a council flat, and after their big house in Glasgow, it was taking her a while to get used to.
She could almost hear the hiss of the steam press, see the blue light of the TV glowing in the corner, when her mother raised the topic of her report.
Dee was working as a school secretary back then – low pay, long hours, and a headteacher who treated her like a human post-it note.
‘Why have you started to answer back to teachers, love?’ Asked her mother, her voice gravelly but soft.
‘I only do it when they’re wrong, Mam!’ she shot back. ‘Or when they mention Dad.’
The iron stopped. ‘What do you say if they talk about him?’
‘What you told me to! That he ran away to New York and left us. Then I stick my tongue out and say it’s none of their business.’
Her mother pressed a pleat like it was a sacred ritual.
‘Oh Tina, sweetheart. I know you miss him. But you must be more careful. Don’t push.
Don’t shout. Don’t make waves.’ The iron glided over creases.
‘It’s best not to think about your dad too much, and just concentrate on fitting in.
Make everyone believe you’re harmless, and you’ll have a happy life.
Smart girls bend, sweetheart. Stupid ones break. ’
Christina put down the burnisher and sighed.
She had believed her mother’s words for so long.
Had bent herself around others all through school.
But at university, away from Dee, she started sharing her real thoughts, even if they differed from other people’s opinions.
And when she first met Hamish at St Andrews, he lapped it up; he seemed to revel in her rebelliousness.
Then she met Lady Flora, and Christina smoothed herself to fit the shape she thought her mother-in-law would admire.
Now Christina had bent so far, she wasn’t sure where she started anymore.
She picked up her polishing cloth. Then she heard the latch.
Hamish. She didn’t need to look up. No one else opened a door as if they already owned whatever lay beyond it.
‘Cold out there,’ he announced, shaking the rain from his curls.
She glanced up. ‘You’re in cords and a woollen jumper. You’re practically insulated.’
He smiled absently, then dropped a magazine on the table with a soft thud. ‘I found Elspeth’s school report.’
The polishing cloth felt heavier. ‘I meant to show you,’ she said too quickly.
He looked at her, that distant fog lifting just a little. ‘It’s not good.’ He swallowed. ‘Schoolwork seems fine, but . . . there are behavioural concerns. That doesn’t sound like her.’
‘Do you think she’s just being a drama queen?’
‘I know she likes drama. But she never used to perform in the classroom.’
‘She’s not violent,’ Christina said, trying to convince herself as much as Hamish. ‘She’s not bullying anyone. She’s just . . . eleven. And clever. And theatrical. She’s experimenting, maybe. Answering back. Pushing boundaries?’
He didn’t argue, but he didn’t agree either. He looked toward the rain-glossed window.
‘She’s got too much freedom,’ he said at last. ‘I wonder if she wouldn’t benefit from full-time boarding.’
Christina let out a slow breath, trying not to bristle. ‘What she needs is love.’
‘She gets love.’
‘She gets structure, Hamish. What she needs is affection. Hugs.’
He looked stung, then went quiet, like he was shelving the topic in some dusty mental archive. ‘My parents didn’t do hugs,’ he muttered.
Christina felt a sudden urge to hug him right then and there but didn’t know if he would welcome it. ‘You went to boarding school at seven,’ Christina pointed out. ‘No one hugged back then.’
‘I didn’t turn out so badly.’
‘I didn’t say you did.’
The silence that followed was heavy and familiar.
Outside, a gate clattered shut in the wind, as if sounding a warning.
Hamish shifted his weight. ‘What do we do?’
Christina stared at the polishing cloth as if it might give her the answer to the problem. ‘I’d like to talk to her favourite teacher, the drama mistress, Mrs Henderson.’
Her words appeared not to register. ‘She might do better if she was further away,’ mused Hamish, ‘learn how to be independent. What about sending her to Scotland, back to her roots?’
‘Better for who?’ Certainly not Elspeth. ‘Anyway, your ancestors left Scotland in the nineteenth century. Her roots are here in Devon. And she’s in the best school,’ she said, ‘small classes. Extra attention. A drama department she loves. We’re lucky the scholarship pays half of it.’
His brows rose. ‘You think she’s lucky? To be underachieving and confused?’
‘Better than scared and invisible,’ Christina said before she could stop herself.
For a few silent moments, he looked at her as if digesting her words.
Then, softly, she added, ‘You know, men made most of the silver; women kept it gleaming. That’s why I like what I do.
It’s a quiet kind of power, restoring history without rewriting it. ’
Hamish didn’t reply. She turned back to her work. But the quote felt wrong on her tongue now. Because she was rewriting history. With Ernest. One forgery at a time.
She swallowed. ‘All this,’ she said, gesturing vaguely to the room, ‘is me. And sometimes I think it’s the only part of me you still see.’
His eyes flicked to her, suddenly sharper. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘Isn’t it?’
She gulped down her simmering anger. Chirstina didn’t think their marriage could sustain another row, not after that dreadful one two years ago, where he had called her a social climber, and she had called him a spineless snob.
The one that had created a distance between them that was so great she wasn’t sure how to bridge it.
Now looking at the man she still loved despite it all, desperate to avoid the confrontation she felt blooming between them, she pivoted.
‘I’ve been thinking it might be time for us to buy a proper house.
Get out of our leaky cottage. What about Chase Lodge.
You know the derelict one in the valley? ’
He gave a short laugh. ‘That place? It’s a glorified ruin. Anyway, Ma won’t sell any more land.’
She didn’t look up, just kept moving the polishing cloth in slow, tight circles, watching how the light caught the engraving, making it shimmer.
She didn’t have to look at him to know his jaw was probably set the way it always was when talk drifted too close to recent family history and their lost fortune.
His hand brushed the edge of the workbench, lingered, then withdrew.
‘Ernest said she might sell,’ Christina murmured, noncommittal, as if his words had stirred nothing at all. ‘After all, it’s not land, just a derelict house, and she’d be selling to someone in the family.’
He tilted his head. ‘If that will make you happy.’
She smiled, tight-lipped. ‘It might.’
Anyway, she wasn’t doing it for happiness.
Not really. She was doing it for Hamish.
To win him back with a house with history, one that they could restore together – a shared project – bricks and floor plans.
She would earn her future, inch by inch.
Not by shouting – that would only confirm their worst suspicions about her breeding – but by finally becoming the woman her mother-in-law expected her to be, even if it killed the woman she’d once been.
‘I’ll go and see it,’ she said, mostly to herself. ‘Have a look through the windows, try and see what sort of work it needs.’
Hamish nodded, but his eyes had wandered again, unfocused and ancient. ‘You know, Bess of Hardwick built Chatsworth with her fourth husband’s money.’
‘Did she now?’
‘Formidable woman. Didn’t bend to anyone.’
Christina smiled without warmth. ‘Lucky her.’ She didn’t have lady Flora as a mother-in-law either.
He left, shutting the door quietly behind him.