Chapter Fifty-Six
A good night’s sleep had eluded Venetia ever since losing Bon-Bon. This morning, and with an unpleasantly fuzzy head, she had been awake long before the first signs of the wintry dawn had appeared.
Now, as she finished her third cup of coffee and stood at the window of the sitting room, she looked out at the dense ribbons of eerily opaque mist snaking their way over the river.
Despite the quantity of strong coffee she had consumed, it hadn’t cleared the fog from her head, so she decided to go for a walk to see if that would do the trick.
She was also aware that she needed the exercise.
A disagreeable lethargy had come over her and she was conscious she was in danger of vegetating, of letting herself go.
It was ages since she’d had her hair and nails done and if she wasn’t careful, she was in danger of turning into one of those ancient old hags she’d vowed never to become. Something had to be done.
It was the worst kind of cold outside, the sort of bitter damp cold that seeped right through to the bone.
Jamming her hat further down over her head, she tightened the woollen scarf around her neck and set off with a resolute and purposeful step across the soggy long grass towards the river where the mist still hung over the torpid surface of the water.
The drab December sky was low and the air, still and dank, smelt of decay.
From the woods over to her left came the ugly call of crows, their sound magnified in the inertness of the morning as they circled above the naked limbs of the trees.
How would Ronnie adapt to this after the blue skies and sunny warmth of his life in Majorca?
she wondered. The last she’d heard from him, just a few days ago, was that the final stages of selling the hotel were within sight.
He claimed he was looking forward to retirement and taking it easy for the first time in his life.
‘It’s been a long time in coming,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘Stupidly, and maybe something to do with vanity, I believed I could keep going for ever, that retirement wasn’t for me, that the moment it happened it would sound the death knell.’
‘We always keep going with something when we enjoy it,’ she’d replied, ‘but the minute it stops being fun, that’s the time for a change of plan.’
The thought had crossed her mind more than once in the last few weeks that maybe she needed a change of plan for herself.
Moving here to Hope Hall had not brought her the satisfying sense of completion she had thought it would.
She knew that in all probability that was because of the needlessly tragic way her darling Bon-Bon had died, but even so she couldn’t shake off the feeling that she had made a mistake. A terrible mistake.
By the time she’d been walking for almost an hour the mist had lifted from the river, and there was a glimpse of an ethereal white ball of light breaking through the murkiness of the sky. After watching the progress of a heron flying languidly off into the distance, she turned around to go home.
Home. In her heart, Hope Hall had always been her home. A place where she had known love and given love, where her dreams for the future had been forged in the very fabric of the building. It had been her world, and everyone in it had been her family.
With the Hall now in front of her, she looked up at the extraordinarily imposing building, a sight that had never failed to fill her with myriad emotions.
Lucky and proud had been two of her early childhood feelings whenever she had taken the time to stand and gaze at the Hall.
She had felt so very lucky to call the place home, and proud too that she was a part of its history.
That was something that Lady Constance had tried to instil in them, to be proud of their beginnings in life and not be ashamed of growing up in a children’s home.
Venetia couldn’t speak for all the other children who had spent their childhood here, but she had never felt ashamed of her background. Even after everything that had happened here.