house she had just moved into on her second cousin Lord Astlegh’s Cheshire estate was because of the land that went with it—land on which she would be able to grow some of her own herbs in a way that was completely natural and free from pesticides and any kind of chemicals. The house, which was miles away from any other habitation, might have drawn cries of despair from both her daughters, who had protested at its lack of modern amenities and creeping damp, but Honor had assured them that once she had time to get someone in to repair and improve the place, it would make a very snug home indeed.
‘It’s a hovel,’ Abigail had said forthrightly.
‘A wretched hovel,’ Ellen had agreed.
‘The locals will probably think you’re some kind of witch,’ Abigail had joked.
‘Thank you very much,’ Honor had told her daughter drily. ‘When I want my ego boosted, I shall know where to come.’
‘Oh, no, Mum, I didn’t mean you look like a witch,’ Abigail had immediately reassured her. ‘Actually, you look pretty good for your age.’
‘Mmm … Nowhere near forty-five,’ Ellen had agreed.
‘Forty-four, actually,’ Honor had corrected her with dignity.
‘Honestly, Mum,’ Abigail had told her. ‘With all the money you inherited from Dad, you could have bought yourself somewhere really comfortable. I know you had to scrimp and scrape whilst we were growing up, but now …’
‘Now I have chosen to come and live here,’ Honor had told them firmly.
She was still not totally over her shock at the amount of money she had inherited from Rourke. She hadn’t expected him to die so relatively young and certainly not from something so ridiculous as a cold turned to pneumonia. She was even more surprised to discover that since they had never divorced, she was his next of kin. The young leggy model he had been living with had been quite happy to accept the fact, simply shrugging her sparrow-like shoulder-blades and gazing at Honor with drug-glazed eyes as she shook her head over Honor’s concern and explained in a small, emotionless voice that she was really quite rich herself.
Rourke’s unexpected wealth had come not from his current work as a photographer but from his earlier and highly original work as a young man, which had now become extremely valuable collector’s pieces, selling for thousands upon thousands of pounds.
She had insisted on sharing the money with the girls, her daughters … Rourke’s daughters. Both of them were adults now and they often tended to treat her as though she were the one in need of parenting. Whilst both of them loved their mother’s elderly second cousin and thought that his Palladian home, Fitzburgh Place, and the philanthropic way in which he was developing the estate’s resources were both worthy of their highest approval, they were united in disapproval of the ramshackle place their mother had chosen to make her home.
‘I can’t bear to think about your living like this,’ Ellen had said, grimacing in distaste as she wiped a fastidious finger along one grimy window-sill the weekend her mother had moved into Foxdean.
‘Then don’t think about it,’ Honor had advised her gently.
Much as she loved them, her daughters, both wonderful girls, clever, independent, good fun to be with and undeniably beautiful, could, at times, in their attitudes and conversations, remind her disconcertingly of her own mother.
‘Honoraria has always been … way ward,’ her mother had been fond of saying exasperatedly, and Honor knew how pained and bemused her mother in particular had been at what she had seen as her daughter’s determination to turn her back on the kind of life they had expected her to lead.
If her decision not to go to Switzerland following in her mother’s footsteps and attending an exclusive finishing school but instead to study medicine had shocked and confused her parents, then the way she had ultimately lived her life, the man she had married, the friends she had made had earned her their wholehearted disapproval. But as she sometimes pithily had to remind the more conventional members of her large family, their aristocratic forebears, of whom they were so proud, had received their lands and titles for acts that had been little short of outright theft and barbarism.
Her parents had tried their best, poor darlings. No one could have been more true to stereotype than her father. His family, although not quite as noble as her mother’s, was nonetheless extremely respectably provenanced. No doubt the Victorian son of the Jessop family, who had so providentially married the only daughter of an extremely wealthy mill owner, had been more than happy to exchange his upper-class connections for her wealth. Honor’s mother’s family had always managed to marry well, which was, of course, the main reason why her second cousin, unlike so many of his peers, could afford to be paternally benevolent towards his tenants and keep his large estate in tiptop condition.
Apart, of course, from her house.
What she had not told her daughters, and moreover had no intention of telling them, was that the main reason the house was so dilapidated was because of the history appertaining to it.
Local legend had it that originally it had been built on the instructions of the younger brother of the then Lord Astlegh to accommodate his mistress. He would visit her there, often spending several days with her much to the disapproval of his elder brother and the rest of his family who had arranged a profitable marriage for him with the daughter of another landowner.
The young man refused to do their bidding. The only woman he wanted, the only one he could love, was his mistress, the wild gypsy girl for whom he had built the house but whom he would often find wandering barefoot through the woods scorning the comforts of the home he had given her.
‘Come with me,’ she was supposed to have begged him when he told her of his family’s plans for his future. ‘We can go away together … be together….’
He had shaken his head. He loved fine food, fine wines, fine books.
‘I can’t stay here,’ the gypsy girl had told him. ‘It hems me in. I need to travel, to be free. Come with me.’
‘I cannot,’ he had told her sorrowfully.
‘You are a coward,’ she had returned contemptuously. ‘You have no fire, no passion. You are weak. You are not a true man, not like a Romany man. A Romany man would kill for the woman he loved.’
Her voice had been scornful, her eyes flashing, and in the darkness of the small copse where they had argued, he had mistaken her tears for a gleam of taunting mockery.
It had been said later when the bodies were found that she had bewitched him and that only by killing her and then killing himself had he been able to break free of her spell.
He came from a powerful family, the most powerful family in the area. James, his elder brother, the then Lord Astlegh, used his position to have the affair hushed up, but news of what had happened quickly spread amongst the local population and with it claims that the copse and the house itself were haunted. Tenants who pooh-poohed the warnings and moved sturdily into it very quickly decided to move out again!
It was a reasonably sized house, a well-built, pretty Georgian red brick building with its own small porticoes and elegant sash windows, the kind of house that the upper-class women Honor had grown up with would drool over as the ideal country retreat, but her cousin was unable to successfully find a tenant. It was he who told Honor of the legend surrounding it.
