He Saved Her Child, Abandoned Ours novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: Hallam Court
Hallam Court stood at the end of a mile of beech trees, and I had been there exactly four times in seven years.
Rafe always said the roof leaked.
He said the heating was dead and the damp was in the walls, and that nobody should live there until he found the money to do it properly.
Bridie sat beside me in the hire car with her handbag on her knees and her mouth set in a line.
She had left Tilly with a friend from the lifeboat shop and taken the morning train up to meet me.
"If that house has a leaking roof," she said, "I'm the Queen of Sheba."
The housekeeper met us at the door.
She was a small grey woman in a wool skirt, and she had worked at Hallam Court since before Rafe's father died.
She looked at my face and said nothing.
"Mr Ashworth rang," she said at last. "He said you were to see everything."
"Everything?"
"The east wing, Mrs Ashworth. He was very clear."
She took us up the long staircase, past the portraits, and along a corridor that smelled of lavender polish and warm radiators.
The roof was perfectly sound.
The heating was on.
She opened the first door.
It was a child's bedroom, painted pink, with a white bed and a lamp shaped like a mushroom.
A shelf of picture books ran along one wall.
A toy kitchen stood in the corner with plastic eggs in a pan.
"Miss Posy's," said the housekeeper. "She's had this room since she was two."
"Two," I said.
"They came in March, a year ago. Before that, Mr Ashworth came to her in Chelsea, and then the little girl would come here for holidays." She said it flatly. "Miss Sedley and Miss Posy live in the east wing now. Mr Ashworth said they were to be treated as family."
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