Page 3 of The Housekeeper's Secret

She let out a breath, misting the glass by her cheek. Through its haze she caught a movement in the park beyond.

A figure was standing on the top of the hill in front of the house. A man; tall and well built. Youthful. He was wearing a pale shirt, the sleeves rolled back, a jacket and a knapsack slung over his shoulder. Without thinking, her eyes firmly on him, she stood up. The breeze lifted his hair and made his shirt billow back and flatten against his chest. She was too far away to see his face properly, but she knew she hadn’t seen it before.

A stranger, then.

For a second, it seemed he looked straight at her; and in spite of the distance between them there was something dark in his stare, something searching. Instantly, she darted out of view and pressed herself against the wall panelling, the instinct to hide still overwhelming after all these years. Her heart rattled against her ribs and her palms were clammy as she waited, before edging back the stiff curtain and peering out.

He was gone.

Emerging cautiously, she looked out, and saw that he had put his jacket on and was walking towards the house with a loose-limbed, easy stride. His footsteps left a silvery trail in the damp grass.

She watched until he disappeared from view beneath the window. Taking a steadying breath, she gathered herself, brushing away the shadow of suspicion, the whisper of what if…? She collected her pile of clean towels and went to check that all was as it should be in the remaining guest rooms.

It wasn’t much of a place.

Oh, it had been once, there was no doubt about that. The house itself was a palace: a great big stone monument to wealth and power, with rows of windows stretching on forever and a huge triangular portico on the front supported by four mighty pillars. It had obviously been built to impress, and the fact that it was so hidden away just made its extravagance more arrogant. Its magnificence was not meant to be shared, its luxury intended only for a select few.

But it seemed that the plan had gone awry, and somewhere along the line seclusion had become isolation, sliding towards abandonment. Time and the elements had blackened the buff stone, and the windows were grimy, many of them shuttered. Paint flaked from frames and weeds sprouted from guttering.

Getting off the train at the tiny station in Hatherford, he’d asked directions and been told it would take two hours to walk the seven miles to Coldwell. He’d saved himself at least a mile by climbing over the high stone wall and cutting across the park, instead of following the winding road round to the gates. The ground was rough and tussocky with bracken, boggy enough to soak his boots. Labouring up the hill he’d noticed a squat stone church half-hidden by a vast cedar tree and, just beyond, the crumbling ruins of a tower.

At a distance it was impossible to tell whether its collapsed state was one of those deliberate things rich people built as novelties or an old structure that had simply been allowed to fall into disrepair. The top was crenellated, like a row of broken teeth, the high-up windows black and blind, and a tangle of brambles had been allowed to clutch and clamber around its walls. Drawing level with it, he’d seen a heavy iron padlock hanging from the door.

As he reached the top of the hill a cloud moved across the sun, extinguishing the weak spring sunlight like a candle being snuffed out. The house below shrank back into the shadows. Some recent attempt appeared to have been made to clear the weeds from the semicircle of gravel in front of the wide steps, but it had done little to dispel the air of shabby neglect or the slight sense of menace. Of something sinister, lurking out of sight.

Or perhaps he was imagining that.

A movement in one of the first-floor windows caught at the edge of his vision. He looked, and saw a face behind the glass: a pale oval, which vanished almost in the same second but left an impression of large eyes and sharp cheekbones. Blue eyes, he thought, though that seemed ridiculous. The glass was dirty, and he was too far away to tell.

But anyway, he had been seen, which meant he either had to make himself scarce before someone came after him or go through with it. Something in him recoiled at the thought of entering the great dark house, as if it might swallow him up completely, but he had come too far and waited too long to turn back now.

Shrugging on his jacket, he picked up his pack and smoothed down his hair, then set off down the slope.

Coldwell Hall had been built on the site of a remote sixteenth-century hunting lodge belonging to the Dukes of Northumberland (where, local legend had it, Henry VIII had once slain a rare white stag) on the expanse of bleak moorland that lay between Manchester and Sheffield.

The old lodge had been demolished—all except the tower of its gatehouse—and a grand baroque mansion constructed in its place by the first Baronet Bradfield, who had made a vast fortune as a colonial administrator in the East India Company. Coldwell Hall was intended to showcase his newfound wealth, do justice to his new-minted title, and house the collection of ancient Indian treasures he had amassed while imposing British rule on recalcitrant locals in Calcutta and Bengal. It had been designed to draw guests from distant London, to surprise and delight them with the contrast between the house’s wild, windswept surroundings and the cultured comforts inside.

But that had been more than a century ago.

Ironically, the coming of the railways had served to cut Coldwell off from civilisation more completely: the seven miles to the nearest station made it a far less convenient destination for a country house gathering or shooting party than properties with private railway platforms placed discreetly within their parks. These days the only visitors to Coldwell were Sir Henry’s physician, Dr Seymour; Reverend Moore from the parish church in Howden Bridge; and (less frequently) Mr Fortescue, the Hyde land agent. In the drifts of conversation that echoed through Coldwell’s quiet corridors during these visits Kate often heard the name of Sir Henry’s bachelor son, Randolph, along with the words ‘irresponsible,’ ‘feckless,’ and ‘profligate.’ On spidery half-written letters abandoned on the bureau in the Yellow Parlour, she read ‘debauched and dissolute—like history repeating itself. Another disgrace on the name of Hyde.’

After inspecting the guest rooms, Kate went down the main staircase, trailing a finger along the dado to check for dust, feeling the dank air enfold her as she descended into the marble-floored entrance hall. The house was set in a dip and the sun struggled to find its way into this cavernous space, where the heads of animals stared down from the walls, seeming to offer visitors more of a warning than a welcome.

The rocky ground of Derbyshire’s Dark Peak district didn’t lend itself to riding, so successive generations of Hydes had found their sporting pleasure in shooting grouse and stalking deer on home turf, and slaughtering more exotic prey while out on the subcontinent. Around the walls, red deer from the Derbyshire moors touched antlers with antelope and gazelle, and the fearsome horns of cattle whose faded, balding hides had once felt the warmth of the Indian sun. The centrepiece of the trophy display was a tiger, which appeared to leap out of its mahogany mount, ears flattened, teeth bared, green glass eyes fixed on the portrait of his nemesis on the wall opposite. Aubrey Hyde, the second Baronet Bradfield, secured in family legend as the black sheep, and the tiger hunter.

Kate always hurried past this portrait. There was something about the second baronet that unsettled her: something lascivious in his parted lips and the moist glisten the artist had given them; something disturbing in his watchful, hooded eyes and the way they seemed to follow her across the marble floor. His pose was relaxed, his hand resting casually on a stone balustrade beside him, and that unnerved her too.

She knew how deceptive such nonchalance could be. How quickly a hand loosely held could tighten into a fist.

The layers of silence were suddenly disturbed by the distant note of the church bell. Its thin chime was rapid and insistent, and she pictured Davy Wells hauling on the rope, red-faced and breathless from his race through the park. She felt an odd lurch of foreboding and her hand went to the Indian silver chatelaine fastened at her waist, touching the items suspended from it like a rosary—the scissors, the buttonhook, the thimble and pencil, the keys to her parlour and her desk. At the foot of the stairs she took in a breath, composing herself into the character she had taken such care to create. Mrs Furniss, the housekeeper. Calm, capable, conscientious, always in control.

All of it a fiction.

Her footsteps echoed in time to the clang of the bell as she crossed the hallway to the heavy door concealed beneath the staircase. Pushing it open, she left behind the stillness and went down the worn steps into the heat and noise of the servants’ basement.

The air in the kitchen passage was damp, hazy with game-scented steam. Passing the kitchen door, she saw Mrs Gatley hefting a great roasting tin out of the range, while Susan, the sole kitchen maid, whisked frantically at something in a pan. Tension simmered in the air like fat on a hotplate. Mrs Gatley was the head gardener’s wife and had taken on the job of cook as a temporary stopgap when finding someone willing to put up with Coldwell’s isolation, poor pay, and lack of modern kitchen conveniences had proved impossible. Ten years on she was still there, and rarely missed an opportunity to grumble about it.

‘Oi—hallboy! Let’s have some help with this luggage!’

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