asked about the circumstances of her own birth). Only now did she realise how hard it must have been for Kitty to succumb to the routines of the hospice.
As no visitors had arrived yet, Della started to unpack a box of bendy plastic shields that would be as much use as floppy tortilla wraps in even the most mild-mannered battle. It seemed wrong that, while Heathfield Castle had stood for over nine hundred years, most of the souvenirs would barely last the car journey home. ‘Authentic’ tunics – fashioned from something like potato sacking, dyed silver – disintegrated at the first hint of energetic play. (Della knew this, having sent Isaac and Noah one each several birthdays ago.) Generic notebooks, rubbers and chocolate bars were emblazoned with the castle’s logo: a rather shabby drawing of the North Tower. But at least business was brisk as visitors began to drift in, which helped to take Della’s mind off Mark’s ill humour and Sophie’s imminent departure and, of course, what the heck she was going to do with her mother’s books.
By late morning the shop was milling with parents and grandparents and boisterous children. Two little girls launched into a full-scale scrap by the colouring books, and a mournful-looking boy seemed bitterly disappointed when his mother wouldn’t buy him an amethyst the size of a human head. ‘You can have this instead,’ she said, radiating fatigue as she brandished a bouncy ball that was supposed to resemble an eyeball (nothing medieval about that, as far as Della could make out).
‘So I guess you’ll be clearing out your mum’s house,’ Angie ventured, as the shop quietened down towards the end of the afternoon. ‘That’s going to be hard for you, Dell.’
She nodded. ‘I’m going to pop over after work and try to get my head around what needs to be done. It was tricky, with Roxanne, Jeff and Tamsin there.’
Angie pulled a sympathetic face. ‘I hope there’s no wrangling over your mum’s stuff? It’s just awful when that happens.’
‘No, I don’t think there will be. My sister-in-law’s bagged most of the jewellery already.’
‘No, that’s terrible!’
‘It’s fine,’ Della said firmly. ‘To be honest, Mum didn’t wear it much – at least, not after Dad left because he’d given her most of it.’ She paused. ‘I have taken her cookbook collection though.’
‘Oh, you can never have too many of those,’ Angie remarked, breaking off as a rather dishevelled man in a rain-speckled jacket tumbled into the shop, clutching the hand of a grumpy-looking boy of around eight years old.
‘Eddie, please stop moaning,’ the man exclaimed, throwing Angie and Della a quick look.
‘I wanted to go in the castle,’ the boy muttered. ‘You said the dungeons are haunted. Why can’t we just have a quick look?’
‘We will next time, okay?’ The man exhaled and raked back his light brown hair. Everything about him – the Toy Heaven carrier bag, the sadness in his soft grey eyes that suggested that today wasn’t turning out as he had hoped – said weekend dad.
‘You promised,’ the boy said crossly.
Della stepped towards them. ‘I’m sorry, the castle closes in five minutes.’
‘Yes, I realise that now,’ the man said with a rueful smile. ‘I’ve messed up my timings today.’
Della fixed Eddie with a bright smile. ‘The dungeon’s great, but you really need plenty of time to enjoy it properly. There are tours, you know. They turn the lights off and it’s really creepy.’
With his grumpiness subsiding, Eddie rubbed at his eyes. ‘Cool,’ he murmured.
‘So you should come back when there’s a tour on. That way, you’ll have a better chance of seeing a ghost.’
He regarded her intently. ‘Are there really ghosts here?’
Della paused. ‘Well, no one knows for sure. But there are plenty of stories about them.’
‘Who were they? The ghosts, I mean?’
‘Eddie, we really should be going,’ the man said, resting a hand on his shoulder. ‘These ladies will be closing the shop.’
‘We’ve got a few minutes,’ Angie called over from the till.
‘Who are the ghosts?’ Eddie repeated, eyes gleaming with rapt interest.
‘Um, well, some people think they’re prisoners who died in the dungeons hundreds of years ago.’
‘Why did they die?’ he asked eagerly.
Della glanced at Eddie’s father, wondering whether this line of questioning was okay. As a young child, Sophie had enjoyed the more gruesome aspects of history: floggings and hangings and witches being burned. She had devoured Horrible Histories books and, during one particularly fervent period, had insisted on visiting the castle’s dungeons every weekend for months on end. ‘They weren’t well looked after,’ Della explained, ‘so I think they probably died of starvation.’
Eddie seemed pretty thrilled by this as he turned to his dad. ‘Can we come back tomorrow?’
Della saw the man’s face relax for the first time since they had blundered in. ‘That might be tricky. It’s Milo’s party, remember?’
‘Can we come next weekend then? Please?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ The man smiled at Della. ‘Thank you,’ he added.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, although she wasn’t quite sure what he was thanking her for. What she did know, though, as the man and boy left, was that she felt different: lighter somehow, as if the weight of her mother’s funeral, and Mark’s grumblings about the cookbooks, had simply floated away. Even more startling was the fact that, when she climbed into her car and glimpsed her reflection in the rear-view mirror, she saw that her red lipstick – Impassioned – was still perfectly in place.
Without the cookbooks lining the walls, Rosemary Cottage seemed different too. It was as if a vital part of its fabric had been stripped away, leaving empty shelves stretching from floor to ceiling in every room of the house. The place looked ransacked, but then, what else could Della have done? Anyway, soon the whole place would be empty and someone else – perhaps a young couple keen to move from town to country – would look around and think, Hmm, well, it needs renovating, of course, and that antiquated kitchen and bathroom need to come out. But it has lots of potential …
Della ran a finger along an empty bookshelf. It came away fuzzy with dust. Striding from room to room – the cottage already felt rather chilly and stale – she assessed what needed to be done. It wasn’t that she relished the thought of sending the polished mahogany dining table or Kitty’s glass-topped dressing table to the auction house; more that, the sooner it was all dealt with, the sooner she could move on from all of this.
In the rickety utility room she found a wicker basket into which she packed hand-printed silk scarves, elegant handbags and a slim box containing a set of mother-of-pearl-handled butter knives.
