Page 18 of Coming Home to Roseford Villas
Stella nodded. ‘Frederick came back after active service in the Congo, but he never married. In fact, he lived with Francesca in this house until his death. Francesca married fairly quickly after the war ended, and went on to have several children, but Frederick was always with her. I suppose, being twins, they had a special bond. There was some evidence that he came back from the war suffering from shell shock. Perhaps Francesca wanted to keep him where she could take care of him. There were no counsellors in those days, of course.’
‘Makes sense,’ Rory said, still gazing at the photograph. Carefully, she put it down again and turned her attention to removing the other photo, which had stuck face down onto the newspaper it had been stored with. She didn’t stop to think about the coronary she’d probably be giving the British Heritage Fund conservationists up at Roseford Hall by simply trying to peel it back off the paper, but she tried her best to keep it as intact as she could.
As the image finally came free of the paper, Rory drew in a sharp intake of breath. It was another picture of Edmund and Frederick, but this one felt different… more intimate.In a moment of affection, Edmund had put his arm around Frederick’s shoulder, and his head was tilted downwards, eyes half closed, as he gazed down at Frederick, who was smiling, too, but looking directly at the camera. It felt, again, like a very personal shot, captured by someone who knew them both well. Once more, Rory suspected Francesca was behind the camera.
As she put the two photographs side by side, Rory wondered why she and Stella hadn’t yet come across any pictures of Edmund and Francesca together. There were a few more shots of the three of them, but these looked far more staged, more formal. But as for photographic evidence of them as a romantic couple, there didn’t seem to be anything that had survived.
‘The boxes in the cellar were in a pretty bad state by the time I discovered them,’ Stella answered when Rory asked her if she’d seen any more photographs of the Middletons and Edmund. ‘And Chris, being the philistine that he is, had also dumped a load of stuff in a skip when he and his wife Olivia took the place on. He didn’t see the point in keeping anything that the old owners had left behind. What you’ve got in front of you is what was left mouldering down there, shoved behind a load of old machinery. It’s a miracle any of survived at all!’
‘So it’s possible that if there were any more photographs, they’re long gone now,’ Rory said. ‘That’s a shame. It would have been lovely to have been able to see some pictures of Edmund and Francesca together, but all we have is these ones of the two lads.’ As she said that, Rory’s heart did a little jump. Perhaps… but no, that would just be too heart-breaking for words. Especially when she knew that the young men had been separated and sent to different sides of the world.
‘Any sign of Edmund’s letters to Francesca yet?’ Rory asked Stella, who was leafing through another box.
‘Not yet,’ Stella replied. ‘I know I’ve seen some somewhere, though. I obviously wasn’t quite as efficient as I’d thought at cataloguing things. I’ll keep looking.’
The two of them carried on looking at their assigned piles of documents, and just as Rory was about to take a breather, and get five minutes of fresh air, she paused. Tucked between the pages of a waterlogged copy of Wilkie Collins’sThe Moonstonewas a piece of paper, just poking out of the book. Carefully, she opened the book, and realised, to her surprise, that the letter, while water damaged at the edges, had mostly been protected from the damp by the book itself, and was largely legible.
As she peered at the closely written page, with a shock of recognition she realised that the handwriting was identical to the letters she’d been studying up at Roseford Hall. There was no doubt that this was one of Edmund’s letters. It was just as passionately written as the ones that were in the Roseford Hall archives, and Rory’s heart sped a little faster as she carefully deciphered the densely written prose.
‘Wow,’ she breathed as she came to the end. ‘Francesca was a lucky, lucky girl. Edmund was obviously crazy about her. Listen to this, Stella… “I want to be lying in your arms, feeling the rightness of you pressed against me, making plans for our future. You complete me, my darling, darling F, and I cannot wait until we are both back and at one once again.”’
‘Wow!’ Stella laughed. ‘He certainly had a way with words. To think that all of that passion was going on underneath that buttoned up Treloar exterior!’ She took the letter from Rory and perused it for a moment. As she did so, she asked, ‘Where did you find this? I haven’t seen it before.’
‘It was tucked inside this book,’ Rory replied. ‘Maybe we’re the first to clap eyes on it since it was sent.’
‘Maybe,’ Stella, who was flipping carefully through the book, mused. ‘Funny, though…’
‘What?’
Stella paused. ‘This book… it’s got a plate in the front. I’m sure you must have had the same with some of your favourite novels if you were as much of a reading geek as I was.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Rory smiled. ‘I loved those “this book belongs to” stickers that you could stick onto the title page. It also stopped my mates from nicking my copies of theHarry Potternovels when I lent them out.’
‘Well, this book plate looks like it’s something similar.’ Stella glanced back at Rory. ‘But it’s odd. It’s not Francesca’s name written inside it… it’s Frederick’s.’
‘Maybe Francesca borrowed the book off her brother?’ Rory replied. ‘My sister and I were always pinching each other’s stuff. Perhaps it ended up on her shelf instead of his.’
Stella frowned, then nodded. ‘Maybe you’re right. It just seems a rather intimate letter to keep inside a copy of a book that isn’t yours, don’t you think? I mean, I wouldn’t stash something like this in a book that my brother might take back off me at any time. Imagine the embarrassment if he found it and read it!’
‘Yes,’ Rory agreed, ‘when you put it like that…’
Her mind, still half-mulling over the contents of the letter, returned to the two photographs she’d peeled from the old newspaper. Suddenly, the idea that had occurred to her when she’d seen the old photos presented itself again to her so vividly that she nearly dropped the letter and the book that Stella had handed back to her.What if…?
But no. There wasn’t any possibility of that, was there? She tried to push the idea away, but it remained, stubbornly, flitting through her brain so that she just couldn’t leave it alone. Could it be possible? Should she tell Stella what she thought?
No. She couldn’t be sure, just yet. She needed more time to think. She wasn’t an investigative journalist, she was a first-time novelist. But she was intrigued, and she definitely wanted tospend more time looking into the details. She jotted a couple of things down in her notebook, and then went back to the contents of the box.
21
Leo kept himself busy, but he couldn’t help the grin that kept stealing over his features every time he thought about the conversation with Rory the previous evening. Of course, they still had a way to go before the awkwardness of their two decades of separation had been fully breached, but he felt as though they’d made some decent headway. After Corinne, he didn’t think he’d ever feel that fluttering excitement of desire again, but he was coming to realise that something was reawakening in him that had lain dormant for a very long time. And it wasn’t just an emotional reawakening. Physically, he’d felt incredibly drawn back to Rory, and despite the challenges he’d felt recently in that area, he wondered if she was going to be the one who would help him to, so to speak, get back in the saddle. It had been a long time, nearly two years, since he’d been intimate with anyone, and while the thought of it definitely made him nervous, he was more than curious about what it would be like to be with Rory again. A lot had changed since they were each other’s ‘first’: what would it be like to sleep together now they were fully grown adults? Less fumbly, he hoped.
But he couldn’t just focus on the lust he was feeling for her. She’d put the brakes on his verbal outpourings last night, and he had the impression that she was even more likely to do the same if he tried to rush things physically between them. She’d always been cautious, but with maturity she’d developed a firmness to her manner that spoke volumes about what he could and couldn’t expect from her. The last thing he wanted to do was to jump the gun. He had to be careful to curb his impulses and try to remember that they weren’t kids any more.
But what could he do? He had to show her he was serious about spending time with her, but also that he understood the reason she’d come to Roseford was to work. She was writing a novel, he knew that. He also knew that RoseFest, the annual arts and literary festival, was coming up. He wondered if there were any events that Rory might be considering going to. Sitting down at the desk in the back office, he opened his laptop and searched for RoseFest. Soon, he was scanning the listings of speakers and events, and his eyes lit up when he spotted a familiar name. He was pretty certain that Rory had read a lot of that particular author’s novels when she was a teenager, and it looked as though the author was going to do a talk and a workshop in one of the function rooms at Roseford Hall during the festival. Before he had the chance to second guess himself, he clicked on the Eventbrite link and purchased two tickets. If the worst came to the worst and Rory didn’t fancy it, then at least the festival would get the income. It wasn’t really his kind of thing, but he was pretty sure Rory would love it. Or, at least, like it enough to want to go with him.
The afternoon passed in a series of run-of-the-mill jobs: mindless stuff that was needed to keep Roseford Villas ticking over, and before he knew it, it was getting close to evening again. Rory hadn’t yet returned from wherever she was, so Leo decided to send her a text, asking her to pop in when she got back. Hefelt a flutter of nerves in his stomach, followed by a jarring pain in the base of his spine that reminded him he’d been overdoing things. He had, for the most part, recovered from his injuries, but every so often when he did too much, his spine reminded him that he needed to take care of himself. On the way back to his room for a quick spray of deodorant and to run a brush through his unruly dark hair, he paused at the en suite and took a couple of painkillers. He didn’t like to keep taking them, but sometimes it was necessary. There had been a while when his daily diet had included a hefty dose of opiate-based medication, just to allow him to function, and those days, thankfully, were long past. He had to remember how far he’d come since then.
Glancing in the mirror of the en suite, he briskly brushed his hair back from his face and considered chucking some product through it but paused at the last minute. He didn’t want to look as though he was trying too hard.
