Fat chance.
Her grandfather had never listened to women and by the time he’d died there had been no money.
No money to fix the boiler, repair the roof, replace the guttering which, as the castle was listed, would have to be specially made to match the existing elaborate hoppers. No money to flip the cottage so that they could turn it into a holiday let...
She’d drawn up a five-year plan but it had ground to a halt. It was definitely time to look reality in the face and the woods had always been her favourite place to think.
Sunlight was filtering through the fresh green of the canopy but there was barely a hint of blue to lift her spirits and, as she took the path leading down to a clearing where the first bluebells would open, her footsteps beat out the word trapped, trapped, trapped...
* * *
Kam strode down the lane, oddly unsettled by his exchanges with Agnès. Her face, that last image of her, had been imprinted like a photograph on the hard drive of his memory.
In his head he’d known that she would be older, known exactly what kind of trouble she was in and yet the reality had been a shock.
In the few seconds when he’d watched her, before she’d known he was there, he’d seen the woman she had become. Her dark hair was still long and thick, tied back to keep it from her face.
Her voice was a little deeper, her shoulders wider, her neck still long.
But then she’d turned around to see who had invaded her privacy and he’d seen the dark shadows beneath eyes the exact grey of an osprey’s feather lit by sunlight, the strain of constantly flirting with the edge of disaster as she attempted to keep Priddy Castle ticking over.
The heat of embarrassment at being overheard begging.
In the millisecond of shock as she’d realised who he was, before the shutters had come down and she’d retreated behind the façade of businesswoman, he’d seen something else. A flash of some unreadable emotion as memory had flooded in.
He would have given a lot to know what she’d been thinking at that moment, but she was no longer the girl whose every thought had been telegraphed in a look. She’d grown up and learned to hide her feelings.
There had been a wish to see her suffer but, as he pushed open the gate of the house where he and his mother had had lived, it occurred to him that in taking the castle from her, he might be doing her a favour. That it would be something of a Pyrrhic victory.
Except that he would own the castle and she would be the one pushed out into the world, having to reinvent herself, make a new life.
That would be justice of a kind, he told himself as he walked around the outside of the cottage.
There were more tiles missing from the rear of the roof, cracked window panes held together with tape, a broken downpipe.
In the back garden, half buried in dead leaves and weeds, he found the stone under which he’d hidden his door key on the morning they’d left, because one day, he’d sworn, he would be back.
He turned it over, woodlice panicked and ran in every direction, a fat slug shrank from the sudden exposure to light, but the key was still there, waiting for him.
He picked it up, wiped it clean in the grass, dried it with his thumb. The lock was stiff but eventually turned and he stepped into the kitchen.
Technically, he was trespassing, but it was obvious that no one had been here in a long time.
Nothing had changed.
The kitchen hadn’t been updated since the cottage had been built when Victoria was on the throne. There were shelves lined with paper that had rotted to shreds, a stone sink that was still fitted with a pump to the well, although mains water had been connected a century ago.
What was new was the smell.
Damp, mice, rot...
Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, dried leaves had found their way in through the gaps under the doors, dead insects lay on the windowsills.
There was the same threadbare carpet in the living room and on the stairs, only now it was damp and mouldy.
He instinctively avoided the loose stair, the places that creaked as he walked upstairs.
The old claw-footed bath, worn with age but once polished to a shine, was streaked with limescale where a tap had been left dripping until someone had had the sense to turn off the water. He knew it must have been Agnès.
The brass fittings were green with verdigris and there were dead leaves and heaven knew what else clumped in a filthy mess in the bottom.
The rose-patterned wallpaper in what had been his mother’s room was peeling from the wall, there was a puddle of water rotting the floorboards where a window no longer fitted and everywhere there were mouse droppings.
It would all have to be ripped out, taken back to the bare bones. Or maybe he should just leave it and offer it to Agnès and her grandmother. They’d need somewhere to go, there would be a vacancy for a housekeeper and Agnès would need a job...
They would be the ones begging him to fix the roof, the windows. Priddy pride brought low, he thought. Although it had been pretty low when she was offering the heating engineer lunch to come and fix her boiler and no doubt a bung his boss would know nothing about.
There was a fly buzzing in the window. The wood was swollen; he had to bang on the frame with the heel of his hand to open it so that it could escape. Outside the air was fresh and he leaned on the sill to breathe in the scent of the woods. He could hear the birds, identifying their calls with ease, and in the distance the faint clang of rope against mast out on the creek.
He could have been fifteen again. Foraging for mushrooms at dawn, his dog at his side. Catching a sea trout or two if the warden was safely out of the way to drop off at the chandler’s on his way to school. At dusk he’d be lying in wait by a badger’s sett, or watching foxes slinking through the undergrowth hunting for small mammals. He’d built a hide so that he could watch a pair of owls floating silently to and from their nest as they fed their young, Agnès holding her breath at his side.
He’d caught fish for a young osprey he’d found with a broken wing and even when it was healed and she’d found a mate, had young to feed, she still came to his whistle, sure of a reward.
He’d had that freedom snatched away from him to be replaced by the concrete confines of a city tower block.
He took a step back from the window but as he reached for the catch a movement on the path through the woods caught his attention.
Agnès with that ridiculous dachshund.
She stopped for a moment to take a photograph with her phone, the dog dancing around her. She was looking down, untangling the lead from her legs and then, as if sensing him there, she looked up, lifting her hand to shade her eyes from a low shaft of sunlight that sliced through the trees and lit her face.
How many times had he seen her do that? Make exactly that gesture, looking up at his window, hoping he’d be there, desperate for company, for freedom from the miserable atmosphere in the castle.
A little girl racing through the woods, calling his name, hair flying, all legs and arms, her eyes and mouth too big for her face. Tripping over tree roots, grazing her knees, having to be taken home to have them cleaned up by his mother.
A nuisance, a liability, a responsibility.
But she’d stopped falling over, started to bring food with her. Sandwiches, pie, cake.
She’d been lonely and he’d always been hungry so he’d tolerated her presence. More than tolerated—he’d made her his accomplice. He might have suspected, but the fish warden wouldn’t dare stop Sir Hugo Prideaux’s granddaughter to check her pink backpack for poached fish, not if he valued his