Chapter 58
Leonora
She follows the same routine every morning. Takes a brisk walk to the beach and back. Makes a black coffee. Fires up the laptop she bought at great expense from the soft-spoken man in the computer shop. Checks the day’s news headlines. Then she types in her usual search term: “Raven Hall.”
After weeks of pulling up the same old news reports and photos, today she sees a new article at the top of the list. Her heart beats faster as she clicks on the link and waits for her feeble broadband to respond to her command.
She’s only sixty-four, but her joints are aching today, despite all the ginger tea she’s been drinking and her frequent dips in the sea.
Finally, the article loads.
“Take an exclusive peek at the magnificent interior of newly refurbished Raven Hall,” it says.
“Mr. El Daly, thirty-seven, shows us the grand new staircase and the luxuriously refitted reception rooms, all completed with carefully sourced materials and ethically produced furniture to delight any guest.”
She winces as she scrolls down.
“Following the devastating fire and near loss of life at Raven Hall a mere six months ago, many locals feared the house would once again fall into disrepair. But under the meticulous guidance of its proud new owner, the transformation is truly remarkable.”
Leonora’s smile is sour as she scrolls through the photos. How has it come to this? Nina, her only daughter, is languishing in a prison cell. And this stranger is now the legal owner of Raven Hall.
Leonora knows how hard Nina will be finding her loss of freedom.
After Markus died, Nina never did settle at the seaside cottage.
She moved out as soon as she turned sixteen, and she led an itinerant lifestyle for years: traveling with a loose group of friends, picking up temporary work, visiting Leonora only when it happened to suit her.
Sometimes, on those unannounced visits, Nina would bring gifts that hinted at where she might have been living—punnets of strawberries, baskets of apples, trugs of parsnips with the soil still clinging to them.
Occasionally, she brought people with her, and Leonora would feed them all a hearty meal while sneaking glances at their matted hair and unwashed clothes.
On one memorable occasion, Nina set down an apple basket in the hall as she came in, and it took Leonora twenty minutes to realize there was a baby inside it.
Leonora dashed to the shop for formula milk, and the infant guzzled it as if it hadn’t been fed for days.
Hoping to encourage Nina to settle down, Leonora transferred a hefty chunk of her inheritance into Nina’s bank account. But if Nina ever spent more than a bare minimum of it on herself, Leonora saw no evidence of it, and Nina continued to disappear for months at a time.
Until last year.
Perhaps it was Leonora’s relief at seeing Nina on her doorstep that made her drop her guard, last summer.
She had no one else to share her secrets with, after all, but this time she went too far.
She mentioned her ongoing desperate hope that Nina would one day inherit Raven Hall, and Nina’s face had instantly hardened.
Leonora kicked herself; Nina had accused her more than once of loving the house more than she loved Nina—Raven Hall was always a sensitive subject between them.
So Leonora had resigned herself to not seeing Nina for another few months after that.
But to her surprise, Nina returned a few days later, and she carried on visiting weekly.
She began to ask Leonora endless questions about her childhood, scrawling notes in her old daisy notebook, until Leonora felt decidedly uneasy.
“I’ve decided how I want to spend my Averell inheritance money,” Nina announced one afternoon. “And you’re going to help me, Mother—don’t look at me like that. By the end of it, Raven Hall will belong to us again . . .”
Leonora should never have trusted her. But Nina was her daughter; what else could she do?
She still doesn’t understand where she went wrong with Nina.
Despite all the terrible things that happened to Leonora when she was younger, she never sought revenge—not on Roy Everett, not on Hendrik, not on anyone.
All she wanted was to see Raven Hall returned to the Averell family.
She’s not even sure which caused her more pain—Nina’s attempt to kill her, or Nina’s attempt to destroy Raven Hall.
Raven Hall will always belong to the Averells, whatever the lawyers say. It seems unlikely, now, that Nina will ever set foot in it again, but Leonora hasn’t lost all hope—quite the opposite. Her dreams about Raven Hall are stronger now than they’ve ever been.
She reaches out a trembling finger and touches the image of the house on the screen.
“Hold on a little longer,” she whispers. “You will be ours again soon. I promise.”