Chapter 11 #2
She scrubbed at a stubborn spot on a bowl, unaccountably close to tears.
She didn’t want to be angry with Leo all the time, but it was equally hard to handle him being nice, for some reason.
‘I feel like a spare part,’ she said, trying to move the conversation along.
‘I’m pretty sure they were desperate for help.
No rational person would have taken on someone who had no experience and who, by their own admission, had applied for the job pretty much on a whim. ’
‘And yet I’ve never found their decision-making to be flawed in any way.’ He paused, and she could feel his look burning into the side of her face. She kept her stance resolutely forward. ‘Perhaps you just have to trust the process.’
She frowned. What on earth did that mean?
‘Besides, you’ve been here less than a week, Gemma.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. I know you feel you haven’t made a good start because of your ankle but it’s getting better day by day, and in a month’s time, you probably won’t even remember it was ever a problem.
You’ll soon get into the rhythm of things. ’
She stared out of the window, knowing what he said was true but still unable to acknowledge that it would happen.
‘Goodness, is that fog?’ she said, peering at the escarpment of trees outside, which were rapidly disappearing from view.
Leo glanced up. ‘I expect so. It comes in off the river, and on a day like today with so much rain, it gets trapped in the valley.’
‘I didn’t know there was a river down there,’ said Gemma. She handed him another plate. ‘Why the look? What have I said now?’
‘Nothing.’ But the edges of his mouth pulled upward.
‘What else did you think was down there? The clue is in the word valley, or nant as they say in the traditional Cornish.’ His smile became broader.
‘In fairness, the river is kind of tucked in, and you can’t actually see it through the tree line from here. ’
‘Clever clogs. Which river is it then?’
‘The Fowey. Only in its infancy here, of course.’
Gemma stared at him, trying to pull a memory from the dark recesses of her mind. Something Leo had just said… Not about the river, but something else… And then it suddenly came to her. The Cornish word for a valley – nant – and the name of the house Ashley had found – Brenant.
‘We found some household accounts today on the county archive site, from a large house in this area. It was called Brenant, and it’s a bit of a long shot, but would it be feasible for a house with that name to lie somewhere along this valley?’
‘It would, but…’ He pressed a finger to his lips. ‘The first part of the name “Bre” just means hill, so that doesn’t give us any more clues, and it’s a little obvious.’ His lips twitched. ‘If there’s a valley, logically there must also be a hill.’
‘So literally Hill Valley House,’ said Gemma.
Leo shrugged. ‘Most house names aren’t overly descriptive,’ he replied. ‘Take Holly Cottage or Field View… They could be anywhere. But I wonder…’ He dropped the tea towel he was holding onto the table and opened the kitchen door.
Gemma joined him on the threshold, peering through the gloom into the evening sky.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Were there any maps of the house you found? Anything that might show its location?’
‘I don’t know. It was Ashley who found it, so I didn’t see all the documents. There were photos… the accounts I mentioned, and I think some sort of inventory because game was mentioned, and fish… from the river.’ Her eyes widened. ‘It can’t be the same place, can it?’
Gemma threw her dishcloth into the sink, snatching up a towel to dry her hands. ‘Let me get my laptop,’ she said, crossing to the row of hooks where she had hung her bag earlier.
Leo cleared a space on the table as she laid it down.
‘Damn…’ She looked up at him. ‘No internet.’
‘Use your phone as a hotspot,’ he said urgently.
Gemma nodded. ‘Let’s just pray I can get a signal.’
The site took an age to load and the documents for Brenant House even longer.
But there were, Gemma realised, many more than she had seen when she’d been with Ashley.
Most of them were photos – one of a rather smart carriage on a sweeping driveway; several more of the staff, lined up in front of a series of steps; and numerous images showing the gardens, once blooming with colour and life and now reduced to grainy black and white.
Then there were the pictures of the house itself, grand and imposing but virtually the same shot over and over again, and frustratingly none taken from any other angle.
It meant there was very little to go on in terms of the space around the building – no shots of the land surrounding it or outbuildings, nothing which would lend scope to the size of the estate.
Handsome though Brenant House was, it could have been anywhere.
The only other documents were ones which she had already seen.
A copy of the household accounts, and the other showing an inventory of supplies, presumably from the kitchen.
She pointed to the paragraph where it mentioned the fish from the river.
She was about to click on the photos again for another look when she realised that the cursor was only halfway down the screen, meaning there was at least one other page in the document.
She continued scrolling, peering closer as two more photos were revealed.
The first showed a garden, but it was too indistinct to make out much of the detail, and the other was a sketch of some kind, or perhaps a technical drawing, lines crisscrossing this way and that.
She zoomed in a little, but either the scan was poor, or the original document was.