The Manor House

by Jane Holland

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

'Had me right from the first line!' FIVE STARS

'Totally Gripping!' FIVE STARS

'Loved it' FIVE STARS

1963. When Eleanor meets famous young poet, Lyndon Chance, he offers a way to flee her abusive father. In return, she must pretend to be Lyndon's wife. He takes her home to a Tudor manor on the Camel Estuary in Cornwall, where she finds herself in the middle of a feud between Lyndon and his twin brother, Oliver. It's soon clear that the old house hides many dark secrets. But could they be a threat to Eleanor?

Now. Taylor has come to idyllic Cornwall to research for her Master's thesis, combining her love for conservation with a personal interest in Chance's poetry. Haunted by her own tragic past, Taylor finds Chance's notoriety fascinating. If only the poet's grandson, Julius, wasn't so determined to thwart her attempts to uncover his family secrets.

As Eleanor realises she's out of her depth at Estuary House, drawn to Lyndon like a moth to a flame, Taylor and Julius must fight their own attraction - but could shadows from the past tear them all apart?

A stunning and richly evocative timeslip, perfect for fans of Lucinda Riley, Santa Montefiore and Kate Morton.

Release date: February 28, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 336

Sample

Years have passed. You haven’t changed.Same river, same boots, different fish.

– From ‘There’ in Estuary

Nobody had asked him the most important question of all.

Stunned by this astonishing oversight, Eleanor glanced about at the intent, forward-facing profiles of those around her.

All these clever people, she thought in disbelief, and not one had yet formulated the question that had been burning a hole in her mind even before she came here tonight. The question that had brought her to this poetry reading, despite it being forbidden, despite the risks, despite everything …

Still, she sat quietly, as she had been taught, waiting and listening with barely suppressed impatience to the sometimes rambling, sometimes erudite questions from other members of the audience, and the clear, natural, deeply reasoned responses of the man on stage.

His performance impressed her more with every word he uttered. There was something about his measured tone, the way he weighed each question and approached it on its own terms, however slight or inapposite, that filled her with a deep sense of admiration. To engage with such a mind …

But the one question she needed to have answered never came, and the omission was simply maddening.

Eleanor began to fidget as the lengthy question and answer session wore on, first chewing on her blonde hair and then playing with the gradually unravelling sleeve of her drab green cardigan.

Surely, she thought, somebody must ask him soon?

But nobody did.

She was still in a fever of expectation when the compere rose from his seat at the end of the first row and held aloft his clipboard to indicate that the session was at an end. He was short and sweating, with a little moustache and an indulgent expression on his round face as he briefly consulted his clipboard before launching into his vote of thanks to their guest speaker.

‘I think I speak for everyone when I say that tonight’s guest speaker, a young Cornishman of no little repute, has given us much to think about,’ he began, pausing for a hearty round of applause. Then he began to list what he felt had been among the highlights of the evening’s meeting, to more scattered applause and general comments of agreement.

Something burst in her chest; a floodtide of emotion suppressed too long swept through to demolish her inhibitions.

Eleanor abruptly thrust her hand in the air.

The compere faltered, catching the movement out of the corner of his eye. His voice tailed off, and he turned slightly towards her.

‘It seems we have one last question from the audience, Mr Chance,’ he said, and glanced at the man on stage. ‘Will you accept it?’

‘Gladly.’

The compere nodded in her direction, once again indulgent but now fatherly as well, as though conferring a very great favour on her. ‘Yes, miss? What would you like to ask our guest?’

Eleanor stared at him, suddenly mute. Her brain had not thought beyond the revolutionary act of putting her hand in the air.

Many other male eyes now turned towards her, a mind-numbing sea of faces gazing back at her through the dense, smoky air.

She felt her cheeks flush scarlet, adding to her confusion. Her mouth was dry and could not seem to utter sounds. She half-expected one of the men to jump up and demand that she leave the hall at once. ‘Fraud!’ ‘Imposter!’ ‘How dare you?’ And maybe they would be right.

She wasn’t a student or an academic. She’d never even been to school. Well, not a proper school like everyone else. She was also a woman, and young.

But none of that was her fault.

The man on stage was also waiting. She didn’t dare look up at him to find out. His silence was as eloquent as his speech.

‘Stand up, miss,’ the compere urged her with a gesture, impatient now. ‘So we can see you.’

Reluctantly, Eleanor rose to her feet, clutching her handbag, and the chair legs scraped on the wooden floor in the narrow space. It was an ugly sound and made her shudder. She found herself quite unable to look up at the stage, so cleared her throat and addressed herself to the back of the seated man’s head below her, who mercifully was still facing front.

‘Thank you for coming tonight, Mr Chance,’ she began. ‘I can’t tell you how much it meant to hear you read your poems the way they’re supposed to sound. I’ve only ever read verse in a book before, you see, so …’

A rumble of laughter made her stop and stare about herself.

‘Do you have a question for the speaker, miss?’ The compere glanced at the wall clock with undisguised significance. ‘We’re already running over time.’

‘All right, I’m getting to it,’ she said defensively.

Again, the men around her laughed.

They found her silly and ignorant, she realised, her heart thumping hard. She wished she’d never stuck her hand up. But there was no escape from it. Not now.

‘I just wanted to know,’ she rushed on, finally daring to raise her eyes to the man on stage, ‘if your poems are true.’

More laughter. Louder this time.

They had not understood what she was asking, she thought, and felt a stab of anger. What gave these people the right to laugh at her?

But the man on stage had understood. He was staring at her fixedly. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

She had not expected such a question, and blinked, temporarily flustered by it. She did not dare give her full name. Not here, in front of everyone. She thought for a guilty moment about lying, giving a false name instead. Or telling him she was called Nell, the nickname her mother had always used for her.

His intent gaze would not permit her to lie.

‘Eleanor.’

He had thick, springing dark hair that fell in a ramshackle manner across his forehead; he’d had to brush it back occasionally as he read his work to them, afterwards replacing his hand in one trouser pocket in a careless manner, rather like a schoolboy. His shoulders were broad and so was his chest, but he seemed agile enough when he moved.

There was a kind of smouldering restlessness and intensity about him that pleased her, and she guessed instinctively that he would understand and appreciate her own tempestuous moods.

The poet was younger than she’d expected, however. She doubted he was even thirty. Yet already he had two books of poetry out; they’d been well-received by London reviewers, and the first had won a national award, as the compere had pointed out in his introduction.

It was unnerving to consider how much this man had accomplished in such a short period of time, for he himself had admitted earlier that he’d only begun writing verse at the age of twenty. One year younger than her own age now.

‘Well, Eleanor,’ Mr Chance said, with an almost infinit­esimal pause after her name, ‘that rather depends on how you define the truth.’

She waited, confused, in the hope that he might elaborate. But Mr Chance merely looked away and lit a cigarette, his air casual, dismissive, as though the matter was over.

Was she supposed to have given him her definition of the truth before he could answer fully? All she had really wanted to know was whether his poetry was based on real life. If the mysterious ‘lady’ mentioned in some of his more recent poems, for example, was a real person or a figment of his imagination. But she had not dared ask such a personal question.

The compere inclined his head with a relieved smile, indicated that she should sit down again, and returned to his vote of thanks.

People began to applaud. The evening was over.

Disappointed, Eleanor dragged on her coat and knotted a patterned headscarf under her chin, making her way to the door with the rest. Someone had already started noisily stacking seats at the back of the hall. There was a queue to get out. Now that it was over, and she had not got what she came for, she began to fret about the lateness of the hour. The meeting had gone on far too long; she would be in trouble.

One man glanced at her knowingly, impudently, and she lowered her gaze to the shoes of the person in front. It was dark outside and raining softly, but she had not set her hair, so there was no need to worry …

‘Eleanor?’

Her name made her turn, startled. She’d known his voice immediately. The deep timbre that shook her to the core, the oddly out-of-place rustic accent on the ends of words.

‘Mr Chance?’

‘Lyndon, please,’ he corrected her, and put out his hand like a test. His eyes were dark and seemed to devour her. ‘It’s my father who’s Mr Chance.’

She stepped out of the queue, aware of others staring at her again, and shook his hand awkwardly, her handbag crooked in her elbow.

He had a fearless handshake, the kind where all four fingers curl around to grip you firmly and the thumb lies along the top. Pointing to the heart, her father would have said.

‘I’m sorry to have given you such a cryptic answer back there.’ Lyndon Chance held her gaze with dark, hypnotic eyes.

There was something leonine about him up close, but earthy with it. He didn’t seem to have noticed her shabby clothes and shoes, or the cheap headscarf. Instead, he made her feel as though she were the only woman in the room. The only woman on earth, perhaps.

‘It was a question that deserved a longer answer than we had time for,’ he explained, adding, ‘Some of us are heading to the pub down the road. Perhaps I could buy you a drink? Make a better stab at answering you properly?’

Have a drink in a pub? With a real poet?

It would mean getting home late, Eleanor thought warily, and no doubt smelling of smoke and alcohol, too.

‘I’d like that, thank you.’

Later, on her walk home, her low heels clacking in the darkness, Eleanor felt herself sway and knew she ought not to have agreed to another drink. She never drank alcohol. And Lyndon had lit a cigarette at one point and passed it to her, and she hadn’t refused it, although she didn’t smoke either. It had all seemed so natural, even the way Lyndon had spoken to her, focused on her face, the two of them sitting far too close in the snug at the back of the pub, so that their thighs brushed from time to time …

Her cheeks flared with heat again.

She hardly dared recall what they had discussed. Though what a conversation it had been!

Lyndon had deftly turned aside her questions about his poetry, speaking instead with glowing pride of Cornwall, the duchy where he’d been born and still lived occasionally when he wasn’t travelling or studying. It sounded wonderful, an idyllic place compared to the dreary, smoky streets of the towns where she’d lived, so many of them, ending up at last here in tiny Cirencester.

He had a twin brother named Oliver, which was something she couldn’t imagine; to meet someone on the stair with the same face as oneself and an entirely separate life … So intimate and yet so different.

She’d laughed and smiled, and spoken utter nonsense, no doubt. Poetry had jostled in her head with alcohol and the thick drifting fragrance of cigar smoke from the compere, whose name was Teddy, and several of the arts committee, who were all fighting for the chance to speak to Lyndon Chance.

But the great man only had eyes for her.

‘And what about your family?’ Lyndon had asked at last, breaking the spell, his eyes so intent it was hard to look away.

‘Oh, well, I have a father, and a brother …’ Her voice had died away, and then she’d gathered up her coat and bag. ‘But look at the time! It’s last orders. I have to go, I’m sorry.’

He’d come to the door of the pub with her. ‘Let me walk you home.’

‘No, thank you.’ She’d been firm, declining his repeated offer to accompany her home. ‘It’s not far. And it’s perfectly safe. This is Cirencester. Nothing happens here.’ And she’d laughed, a little too wildly.

Lyndon had followed her along the street a few steps, until the sound of drinkers in the pub had begun to fade, and then caught her elbow, stopping her.

‘Eleanor, will you come and visit me in Cornwall?’

She’d stared at him, her mouth open. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You told me you liked Charles Causley’s work. I might be able to introduce you to him. And to other Cornish poets I know.’

‘Causley?’ she’d repeated in awed tones.

‘There’s quite a lively scene in Cornwall these days. It’s not like when I was younger. Betjeman has a house near us, too. Though he’s not often there.’

‘But Cornwall … It’s so far away.’

‘There’s a railway track runs past our house, all the way along the estuary. I could pick you up at the station in Wadebridge.’

His home, Lyndon had explained, was on the picturesque Camel Estuary in a remote corner of North Cornwall. He’d described the house to her in loving detail, a large Tudor manor house with granite walls and formal gardens, and how he used to look out of his bedroom window as a boy and watch birds break cover from among thick reeds at dawn to skim the pale waters of the estuary.

It all sounded marvellous, a perfect retreat from the world.

But she’d known it was impossible as soon as he mentioned it. Beyond impossible, in fact. They would never permit her to leave.

‘I can’t, I’m sorry.’

‘Give me your telephone number at least,’ Lyndon had persisted, not letting her go. ‘Or your address. I could write to you.’

Lyndon Chance, writing to her?

It was everything she had ever dreamt of.

But the thought of her father intercepting his telephone calls or his correspondence had terrified her; accusations and vicious punishment would inevitably follow such a discovery. She’d shaken her head, staring at him, numb with yearning, and he’d finally given up, backing away with a strange, bitter desperation in his face.

‘I’ll be at Green’s Hotel until nine o’clock tomorrow morning,’ he’d told her, his eyes locked with hers, ‘if you change your mind. You can drop a note in at reception. I’ll check there before I go.’

Then he’d left her.

Eleanor walked and swayed, oblivious to her surroundings, and dreamed about how her life would be on the far-off Cornish coast …

But reality was waiting for her.

Before she could even fit her key to the lock, the front door jerked open and her father stood there, large in the doorway.

‘It’s almost midnight,’ he spat, then grabbed her in off the doorstep and slammed the door. ‘Don’t you care what the neighbours think?’ Then her father sniffed her, and his face darkened still further. ‘You’ve been drinking. And smoking.’

His voice shook with fury. ‘What have you been doing all this time? As if I need to ask … I can smell the stink of sin on your body. My God, you little whore!’

His arm swept up, the back of his hand catching her hard across the cheek, and she fell clumsily into the hat stand, knocking it over.

Her father stood over her, panting heavily.

A door opened upstairs, light spilling out onto the dark staircase, and then her brother Fred came thumping down in his pyjamas.

He was only three years older than Eleanor, but her father treated him like a man and her like a child; a child whose job it was to stay home and clean up after them and cook their meals. Because, since her mother’s death, there had been nobody else to do it.

‘Where’s she been, Dad?’

‘Who has she been with?’ her father growled, correcting him. ‘That’s the real question. And I intend to find out.’

Eleanor rubbed her cheek, trying not to cry. It would only encourage him to be crueller. Her instincts also warned her not to volunteer too much information about where she’d been. In the past, her father had turned up at places where she’d made friends and made it impossible for her to ever go there again.

‘I … I was at a meeting,’ she stammered.

‘What kind of meeting?’ Fred looked incredulous. ‘Do you mean a political meeting? Or a church meeting?’

‘A meeting that went on until such a late hour? And you stinking to high heaven of smoke and booze? What do you take me for? A fool? No, you’ve been to some filthy pub or night club. With someone you shouldn’t have been with.’ Her father would hit her again if she argued with him, she knew, so she stayed silent. ‘Get up and go to your room.’

Her father watched while Eleanor picked herself up, neither man offering her a hand. She staggered towards the stairs, her cheekbone aching. He followed after her, waited while she cleaned herself up in the bathroom, and then shoved her into the bedroom, locking the door after her.

He then went downstairs, presumably to talk to her brother where she couldn’t hear their conversation.

Taking care not to make too much noise, Eleanor knelt on her bedroom floor and peeled back the drab brown carpet at one corner. She prised up the loose floorboard beneath and listened intently to the conversation in the kitchen below.

‘She’s got some fancy man,’ her brother was saying angrily. ‘She must have, to be out so late. What are you going to do, Dad? You can’t let this go.’

There was a long silence.

‘Only one thing we can do,’ her father said in the end. ‘Take her back to her grandfather’s place in Plymouth. She’ll be kept tight there. Otherwise, whoever this man is, she’ll find a way to see him again. Soon as my back’s turned.’

‘I don’t want to leave Cirencester. I like my job.’

‘You don’t have to leave, son. I’ll go with her and come back once she’s safely stowed.’

‘Who’s going to clean for us until she comes back? Cook for us?’

‘I may have to marry again.’

Her brother said nothing to this, except, ‘Bloody girl.’

‘She’s unnatural, that one. Just like her mother. But my father will see to her, all right. He knows how to keep a woman in line. When I married your mother, he told me: spare the rod, spoil the bride. But I didn’t listen. More’s the pity.’

‘Maybe Grandad could find her a husband. Someone in the Brotherhood.’

‘That’s my thought, too.’ Her father gave a short sound like a laugh under his breath. ‘This could be useful to us, boy. If she marries someone high up, someone with influence. She’s not a bad looker, for all her ways.’

‘When will you leave?’

‘We can’t risk her getting away,’ her father said decisively. ‘I’ll pack a bag tonight and drive her down to Plymouth myself first thing in the morning. That will sort her out, you’ll see.’

Eleanor dropped the bedroom carpet back into place, and rolled over onto her back, staring up at the stained ceiling.

Go back to live with her grandfather in Plymouth?

No, never.

The man was vile, a brute and a bully who wielded his belt for every tiny or imagined transgression. Last time she’d been left with her grandfather, as a rebellious young teenager, she’d come away black and blue all over, barely able to walk for weeks afterwards.

Now she was twenty-one, God only knew what they’d do to her as punishment for her ‘sins’. Not that her father cared about that. So long as she meekly agreed to be married off to whomever they chose.

She’s unnatural, that one.

Her brother had not asked what Dad had meant by that.

She fingered the tender skin over her cheekbone and wondered if there’d be a bruise there in the morning. Though it hardly mattered. Not where she was being taken.

What on earth was she going to do?

It was a little after six-thirty in the morning.

Eleanor was crouched behind a small van in the car park of Green’s Hotel, with nothing but an overnight bag containing a few clean clothes and a spare pair of shoes, and her handbag.

Her ankle hurt, for she’d twisted it slightly when dropping out of the first-floor window into the flowerbed below. In the glimmering dark before dawn, she’d limped across the back lawn and groped along the fence for the place where a panel had come loose, and from there climbed out into the alley that ran behind the houses.

Once clear of the alley, she’d made her way through various back streets to Green’s Hotel, which stood silent and dark at that early hour, and hidden away in a corner to wait.

She needed to escape Cirencester unseen. But she had no cash of her own for the bus, despite a Post Office savings book with a few pounds in the account. Besides, the bus station would be the very first place her father would look for her. And she had few friends; she’d call most of them acquaintances rather than friends, and of those only two or three were not members of her father’s church.

Her father had discouraged friendships outside church circles and kept her at home most of her life. Indeed, it was only in the past year, since turning twenty, that Eleanor had begun to rebel, slipping out of an evening to go to the pictures on her own, pretending afterwards that she had been for a long walk. She could think of nobody who would willingly accept her into their home. Especially once she admitted that her irate father and brother might turn up at any minute to hammer on the front door.

The time passed intolerably slowly.

After several hours crouched behind the van, she was tired and stiff, and beginning to despair. But seeing Lyndon Chance’s tall figure cross the car park, Eleanor straightened and moved hurriedly to intercept him.

‘Hello.’ Her voice was high and breathless with nerves. ‘I’m so sorry, but is there any chance of a lift out of town?’

She’d had plenty of time to consider what would happen if the poet refused and was terrified by the prospect. Yet, somehow, she managed not to let it show.

Lyndon Chance stopped dead and stared at her. He held a battered-looking suitcase in one hand, a leather briefcase in the other.

Just as last night when she’d stood to ask her question, he seemed almost stunned by her approach, his gaze fixed on her face.

‘You.’

‘Yes, me again. Sorry to be a nuisance.’ Embarrassed by her situation, Eleanor glanced at the sports car he had been heading towards. ‘Is that your car? How marvellous. It looks awfully swish. I … I just need a lift out of town. I won’t get in your way, I promise.’

‘A lift out of town,’ he repeated mechanically, and unlocked the boot of the sports car. He put his cases inside. She got the feeling he was playing for time. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t mind. Er, are you heading towards Exeter?’

‘Of course. I can drop you in the city centre.’ He held out his hand for her bag. ‘It may be a bit of a squeeze to get that in the boot, but I’ll try.’

‘Thank you.’

He eyed her bruised face as he opened the passenger door for her, a frown in his eyes, and she steeled herself for some awkward questions.

But to her relief he said nothing.

Within minutes, they were motoring out of Cirencester on the Bristol Road. Lyndon had pulled on suede gloves and settled a tweed cap low on his forehead before heading off, and she had no qualms about his driving abilities, for he seemed confident and didn’t even bother to consult the map. There were still rainclouds to the east, but thankfully they were heading west, where a few glimpses of blue sky could be seen in the distance.

Eleanor sat beside him in a state of trembling wonder, not quite able to believe she had carried it off. All these years of captivity. And now she was escaping her family.

At last, at last …

Then, on the very outskirts of Cirencester, she nearly choked.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, staring bolt-eyed at the road ahead, her stomach lurching with fear.

‘What is it?’ he asked, glancing at her quickly.

‘My dad … That’s his car.’

The large old Ford was moving slowly and inexorably down the road towards them, her father behind the wheel in his best black overcoat, the one he wore to church meetings. He was pausing at every side road to look up and down, hunting for her, and then driving on.

She could tell from the way he was hunched over the wheel that her father was incandescent with rage, without even being close enough to see his expression.

To her relief, Lyndon didn’t demand an explanation, but nodded grimly. ‘Better get your head down, then.’ As she ducked, he dragged a tartan blanket through from the back seat and draped it over her. ‘Keep still. We’ll be past him in a minute.’

Bent almost double, with her head in the footwell, Eleanor waited in the stuffy dark under the tartan blanket.

She felt sick with apprehension, shivering at the thought of her father stopping Lyndon’s car and making her get out. Though that public humiliation would be nothing compared to what he and her grandfather would do to her later by way of reprisal.

‘It’s all right, he’s gone. You can come out again.’ He plucked the blanket off her head and watched as she sat up again, her hair dishevelled. ‘Bad news, is he, your old man?’ His gaze raked her pale face, and then he turned back to the road. ‘Is that where you got the shiner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Want to talk about it?’

Now that he had helped her escape her father’s clutches, Eleanor felt a little safer in his company.

Briefly, she told him what had happened when she got in the previous night, carefully leaving out the part about the religious sect they belonged to and her fear of being forced into marriage with one of the other members. She found most ordinary people disapproved of such sects, and she didn’t want Lyndon Chance to think poorly of her for having been brought up in one.

‘Sounds like a prize bastard,’ Lyndon said in a harsh tone. He seemed angry on her behalf, something she’d never experienced before, and which surprised her. ‘Small wonder you’re so eager to get out of town. But are you sure Exeter is the best place for you? Do you have friends there?’

‘No, but I’ll soon get a job. I’m a hard worker and there must be jobs available in a city that size.’

There was a slight smile on his face as he asked, ‘I take it you’ve never been to Exeter?’ When she shook her head, mystified, his grin widened. ‘Then I have news for you. Exeter may be a city, but it’s not that big a place. And it’s not so very far from Cirencester either. Not as far as London, I mean.’ He studied her face. ‘Won’t he go looking there eventually, once he’s tried Bath and Bristol?’

‘I suppose so, I don’t know. To be honest, I hadn’t thought beyond getting out of the house this morning.’ The terrible enormity of what she’d done suddenly hit her. ‘Oh God, what have I done? Dad’s going to kill me when he catches up to me.’

‘Then we’d better make sure he never does,’ Lyndon said, an edge to his voice. He glanced at her again, and his expression, which had become surprisingly fierce, softened. ‘Hey, don’t cry. You’re safe with me. I won’t let him touch you.’

‘Thank you,’ Eleanor managed to say.

Lyndon drove in silence for a while, staring fixedly at the road ahead, his gloved hands gripping the wheel. Then he turned his head to smile at her. ‘Look, you said you wouldn’t mind coming to visit me in Cornwall this summer. Why not bring that plan forward a little, and let me drive you down there now?’

She was amazed. ‘Sorry?’

‘You can stay as long as you like, we’ve got plenty of room. Our place is pretty inaccessible, too, right on the north coast and a good few miles from the nearest main road. Your father would never think to look for you there, I guarantee it.’

A distant alarm bell rang softly in her head. Something in the tone of his voice, perhaps, or his light smile. But she ignored it.

With any other man, she might have felt uneasy, agreeing to such an outrageous idea out of the blue. Motor all the way down to Cornwall with him? Stay in his family home?

They had only met last night, for goodness’ sake.

But this was Lyndon Chance, a well-known published poet, not some random stranger who’d picked her up from the side of the road.

Still, she ought to be cautious.

‘I say, that’s awfully kind of you,’ she said hesitantly. ‘And I’d love to say yes, of course I would. It sounds heavenly. But it does seem a bit intrusive, me just turning up out of the blue. I mean, won’t your family mind?’

‘Not even remotely,’ he assured her.

Spirit was her battle dress –Bold and precarious,Like a calf’s first tottering stepsInto April frost.

– From ‘Habit’ in Estuary

Taylor knocked the last tent peg as deep as she could into the dusty ground and checked the guy rope for adequate tension. Then she straightened up, hammer in hand, conscious of a job well done.

Directly ahead, looming over the smooth blue dome of her tent, was a large but somewhat ramshackle manor house, its earliest structures apparently dating from Tudor times. It was set in sloping gardens that must once have been quite fine but were now a mass of overgrown shrubs and cracked stone steps. There was a kind of malevolence at work there, she thought, studying the house. And yet a fierce happiness, too, a determination to be free.

If only she’d been tidier as a girl, more punctual, more obedient, he might not have lost his temper quite so often …

Beyond the manor house lay the Camel Estuary, a b. . .