Page 17 of Coming Home to Roseford Villas
‘My pleasure.’ Leo’s eyes looked deeper brown in the evening light, and Rory couldn’t resist putting a hand up to his shoulder and reaching up to kiss his cheek. ‘Thank you so much for cooking dinner.’
‘Any time,’ Leo murmured and the sensation of his breath tickling her ear as she spoke sent a shiver right to the base of Rory’s spine. She felt suddenly shocked at how much she didn’t want it to end. But she’d just warned Leo not to expect too much, too soon, and she couldn’t go back on that without raising his hopes.
‘Goodnight, Leo,’ she said gently. ‘I’ll see you soon.’
‘I hope so,’ Leo whispered into her ear. ‘It’s good to have you back, Rory.’
‘Likewise,’ Rory replied.
They paused, hesitating on the cusp of something, Rory’s hand still on Leo’s shoulder, and her lips close to his cheek, before both, rather regretfully, pulled away. Rory’s knees gave a rather less than subtle wobble as Leo turned away from her and walked back down the path to Roseford Villas. She watched himgrow less distinct in the gloom, and, heart hammering nineteen to the dozen, she let herself into the chalet.
20
The next afternoon, which was again drenched in sunshine, Rory headed out to Halstead House to meet Stella. She was fizzing with a different kind of excitement as she hurried down the hill. Whereas last night her tingles had been caused by spending the evening with Leo, now she was champing at the bit to get her hands on the papers from the Halstead House collection, in the hope that they might shed some light on Francesca’s side of the relationship with Edmund Treloar. She was looking forward to discussing her Roseford Hall findings with Stella, who’d come back with the news, late last night, that Halstead did indeed have some documents in its own archive that might provide the other half of the story.
When she arrived at Halstead House, it was a hive of activity. The next group of artists had arrived, and were being shown to their rooms by Chris, Stella’s partner, who waved a cheery but brief hello to her as she crossed the entrance hall.
‘Stella’s in the library,’ Chris called as he passed. ‘She said to tell you to go straight up.’
‘Thanks,’ Rory replied. ‘And how do I get to the library?’
‘Up the stairs and second on the right,’ Chris called back.
Thanking him again, Rory followed Chris’s directions and swiftly found Stella.
They greeted each other, and in no time Stella had opened a couple of archive boxes on the large mahogany desk off to one side of the library.
‘These are all of the surviving documents that Chris inherited when he bought the house,’ she said. ‘They’d been languishing in the cellar for a while, since the house was left unoccupied, but over the past couple of years I’ve gradually been trying to sort through them and get them into some sort of coherent order. It’s not easy – a lot of them have been damaged by mould. They weren’t exactly Chris’s priority when he took the place on, so it’s fallen to me, now that the house is finally in better shape, to act as unofficial historian and archivist.’
‘Looks as though you’ve got your work cut out,’ Rory observed as she carefully took a sheaf of letters from the top of a pile in the nearest box. ‘This could end up being a labour of love!’
‘The whole place has been, really.’ Stella smiled gently. ‘But it’s good to get a feel for Halstead House’s past. Our local film director and movie star, Finn Sanderson, is trying to put together a pitch for a period drama about some of the earlier inhabitants of Halstead House, so it’s given me an added incentive to try to find out as much as I can.’
Rory shook her head. ‘I can’t quite believetheFinn Sanderson lives in Roseford now! I remember watching him on the telly when I was a teenager. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw him in the pub the other night.’
‘I know,’ Stella laughed. ‘It is a bit surreal, but you kind of forget it after you’ve spent some time talking to him – he’s a lovely bloke and he and Lucy, who owns Roseford Café, are such a great couple. I think Lucy’s hoping Finn’s pitch gets green-lighted soon so he’ll be able to spend more time at home. He’s often away now his directing career has taken off. She misseshim a lot when he’s gone, what with their son Robin still only being a toddler.’
‘Well, perhaps we’ll be able to find some information that might help him to get his pitch accepted,’ Rory replied. ‘I mean, I’ve been inspired to write a pretty passionate story myself, just from reading Edmund’s half of the letters from Roseford Hall.’
‘Brilliant!’ Stella exclaimed. ‘Don’t you just love it when you get that, thatfizzwhen a story starts to take shape? It’s one of the best feelings you can have, and it never gets old.’
Rory smiled. She felt grateful for the way that Stella treated her with equanimity, even though their writing careers were so wildly different. It felt like being admitted into a special club, where it was all right to talk in depth about things that were only imagined. Briefly, she filled Stella in on her research about Edmund Treloar and how she’d been reading through his last diaries, and the stash of unsent letters that had been sent home to the family after his death.
‘Yes,’ Stella said, as Rory paused. ‘I know that Edmund was great friends with both Francesca and Frederick Middleton. They grew up together, and Edmund and Frederick went to the same small private school. I often wondered why they weren’t in the same platoon when they were both sent off to war, but I believe, from what I could work out from the Halstead archives, that Frederick ended up in the Congo, whereas Edmund, holding a somewhat more senior rank, was posted out to the Western Front. It seemed odd, really. So many friends enlisted together and then shipped out to the same place. But those two were continents apart.’
‘That must have made it even harder for Francesca, having been left at home,’ Rory observed. ‘At least, if Frederick and Edmund had been posted together, they’d have been able to keep a look out for each other, and it might have put her mind atrest, knowing that the man she hoped to marry and the brother she was so close to were in the same place.’
‘I can’t imagine what she’d have gone through,’ Stella replied. ‘She must have felt so helpless. Even if she ended up doing some kind of job to support the war effort, it must have been terrible, waving them both off. And then, to get the news eventually that Edmund had been killed…’ She trailed off, and both women paused for a moment, lost in their own thoughts.
Soon, though, they were engrossed in the documents that Stella had salvaged from the boxes in the cellar. She’d begun the laborious process of sorting them into a more coherent catalogue, but it was difficult due to the extent of the water and mould damage on some of them.
‘Oh, look!’ Rory said suddenly, as she leafed through a pile of papers, carefully trying to prise them apart from where they’d got damp and then dried. Between the pages of an old newspaper were a couple of photographs. She carefully managed to peel one of them from the other, and as she did so, she immediately spotted the handsome face of Edmund Treloar staring out at her. This was a contrasting picture from the sombre portrait that hung in the Long Gallery at Roseford Hall, and Rory was amazed at the openness of his smile, the crinkling of his eyes and the carefree way he was lounging on the grass. Obviously taken in high summer, despite the fact that the photograph was in black and white, Rory could almost see the vibrant colours of the garden, and the looming presence of Halstead House in the back of the shot. When her eyes had absorbed the details of Edmund’s smile, and his easy, relaxed demeanour, she was then drawn to the other man in the photograph, with darker hair, and the same contented expression.
‘That’s Frederick Middleton,’ Stella said, looking over at the photograph. ‘I assume the photo must have been taken by Francesca, the way they’re both smiling.’
Rory nodded. ‘They seem really chilled out, and as if they don’t mind having the picture taken – which is saying something, considering that it might have taken some time to set up.’ In fact, the image felt very Bloomsbury, with the men in loose Oxford trousers and slightly scruffy-looking pale shirts. It conjured up a pre-war world of heady days, languid evenings, tea on the terrace and not a care in the world. How that world was going to change in the space of a few months, Rory mused.
‘They look so happy there,’ Rory observed. ‘Awful to think how it all altered.’
