When Felicity and her team had left for the day, Victoria walked up and down the Long Gallery with her dog at her heels, just as countless Hamilton women had done over the centuries, not seeing the ancient oil paintings or the view over the formal knot gardens. All she could think about was what a mess she’d made. She wasn’t a coward—she’d tell her parents the news today—but she wasn’t going to tell them until she’d worked out a solution.
Pacing cleared her head enough for her to spend half an hour on the Internet, checking things. And finally she went to her parents’ apartment.
‘Hello, darling. You’re late tonight. Are you eating with us? I’ve made chicken cacciatore—your favourite,’ her mother said.
‘You might not want to feed me when you hear the news,’ Victoria said with a sigh. She wasn’t sure she was up to eating, either. She still felt too sick. ‘Felicity found a problem.’
‘Bad?’ Patrick Hamilton asked.
She nodded. ‘Mould in the ballroom, behind the mirror. They found it when they were checking the gilt. Best-case scenario, they’ll take the hangings down on that wall, dry them out, remove the mould and put backing on the weak areas of silk. Worst-case, we’ll have to get reproduction hangings made for that whole wall. We won’t know until the hangings come down.’ She dragged in a breath. ‘Hopefully we can get a heritage grant. If they turn us down because they’ve already allocated the funds for the year, then we’ll have to raise the money ourselves. We’ll have to raise a bit of it in any case.’ And she had ideas about that. It’d be a lot of work, but she didn’t mind.
‘Firstly,’ Patrick said, ‘you can stop beating yourself up, darling.’
‘But I should ha—’ she began.
‘It was behind the mirror, you said, so nobody would’ve known it was there until it reached the edge,’ Patrick pointed out gently. ‘If I’d still been running the house, the mould would still have been there.’ He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, Victoria. You’re doing a brilliant job. This year has been our best ever for visitor numbers, and your mother and I are incredibly proud of you.’ She could hear the worry and the warmth in her father’s voice and she knew he meant what he said. But why couldn’t she let herself believe it? Why couldn’t she feel as if she was enough? ‘Lizzie would be proud of you, too,’ Patrick continued.
At the mention of her little sister, Victoria’s throat felt thick and her eyes prickled with tears.
‘It’ll work out, darling,’ Diana said, enveloping her in a hug. ‘These things always do.’
‘I’ve been thinking about how we can raise the money. I know we usually close from half-term so we have a chance to do the conservation work before the visitor season starts again, but maybe we could open the house at Christmas this year. Just some of the rooms,’ Victoria said. ‘We could trim them up for Christmas as it would’ve been in Regency times, and hold workshops teaching people how to make Christmas wreaths and stained-glass ornaments and old-fashioned confectionery. And we could hold a proper Regency ball, with everyone in Regency dress and supper served exactly as it would’ve been two hundred years ago.’
‘Just like you and Lizzie used to pretend, when you were little and you’d just discovered Jane Austen.’ Diana ruffled her hair. ‘That’s a splendid idea. But it’ll be a lot of extra work, darling.’
‘I don’t mind.’ It wasn’t a job to her: she loved what she did. It was her life.
‘We can hire in some help to support you,’ Patrick said.
Victoria shook her head. ‘We can’t afford it, Dad. The cost of fixing the ballroom is going to be astronomical.’
‘Then we can try and find a volunteer to help you,’ Patrick said.
‘Yes—I can ask around,’ Diana added. ‘There’s bound to be someone we know whose son or daughter is taking a gap year and would leap at the chance to get experience like this. We could offer bed and board here, if that would help.’
‘Maybe this could be the start of a new Chiverton tradition,’ Patrick said. ‘The annual Christmas ball. In years to come, your grandchildren will still be talking about how you saved the ballroom.’
Grandchildren.
Victoria knew how much her parents wanted grandchildren—and she knew she was letting them down there, too.
The problem was, she’d never met the man who made her want to get married, much less have children. Her relationships had all fizzled out—mainly when she’d discovered that the men she’d dated hadn’t wanted her, they’d wanted the house and the lifestyle they thought went with it. Once they’d discovered the lifestyle didn’t match their dreams, she hadn’t seen them for dust. And she’d been stupid enough to be fooled three times, now. Never again.
She’d fallen back on the excuse of being too busy to date, which meant her parents had taken to inviting eligible men over for dinner. Every couple of weeks they’d surprise her with someone who’d just dropped in to say hello. It drove her crazy; but how could she complain when she was so hopeless and couldn’t seem to find someone for herself?
Maybe the one good thing about the ballroom restoration was that it might distract her parents from matchmaking. Just for a little while.
‘A new tradition sounds lovely,’ she said, and forced herself to smile.
‘That’s my girl,’ Patrick said, and patted her on the shoulder. ‘We’ll find you some help. And we’ll get that mould sorted. Together.’
Sam felt a twinge of guilt as he parked on the gravel outside his parents’ house. He really ought to come home more often. It wasn’t that far from London to Cambridge, and he was their only child. He really ought to make more of an effort.
His first inkling that something might be wrong was when he walked into the house with a large bouquet of flowers for his mother and a bottle of wine for his father, and his mother started crying.
He put everything he was carrying onto the kitchen table and hugged her. ‘If I’d known you were allergic to lilies, Mum, I would’ve brought you chocolate instead.’
‘It’s not that. I love the flowers.’ She sniffed.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘What, then?’ Please, not the unthinkable. Several of his friends had recently discovered that their parents were splitting up and were having a hard time dealing with it. But his parents’ marriage was rock-solid, he was sure.
‘It’s your dad. He had a TIA on Wednesday night—a mini-stroke.’
‘What?’ Wednesday was three days ago. He stared at her in horror. ‘Mum, why on earth didn’t you call me? I would’ve come straight to the hospital. You know that.’
She didn’t meet his eye. ‘You’re busy at work, sweetie.’
‘Dad’s more important than work, and so are you.’ He blew out a breath. ‘Is he still in hospital? Is he all right? And how are you doing?’
‘He’s recuperating at home, and I’m fine.’
The first bit might be true, but the second definitely wasn’t. ‘Mum, I hate that you went through this on your own.’ On Wednesday night, he’d been out partying. Without a clue that his father was in the emergency department with a potentially life-changing illness. ‘What did the doctors say?’
‘That if he wants to avoid having another one, or even a full-blown stroke, he needs to take it easier. Maybe think about retiring.’
Which was Sam’s cue to come back to Cambridge and take over Patrick’s place as the head of the family firm of stockbrokers. Leave the fast-paced, high-octane job he loved in the buzzing, vibrant capital for a staid, quiet job in an equally staid, quiet city.
He