‘I suppose they’ll try to sell it,’ said her listener.
‘Oh, they’ll try,’ said the vicar’s sister. ‘But I shouldn’t think they’ll succeed. Nobody will want it.’
THIRTEEN
Life changed after Simeon’s death. The farm began to fail, not all in one tumble, but little by little. Things that wore out were not replaced. Livestock dwindled. Crops did not have just one bad year, which most farmers expected, but several in a row.
Miss Hurst employed a manager, but the place became less and less prosperous. She herself did not change very much with the years; she continued to have her elderflower wine – ‘Just a little nip for comfort,’ she said – and the vicar continued to call regularly. Miss Hurst was always pleased to see him – a very kind gentleman, she said, entirely trustworthy, and most helpful over financial affairs. She did not understand these things, and Simeon had always handled such matters. If she had to go to the bank or the solicitor’s offices, the vicar always accompanied her, and his sister went along as well, because dear Cuthbert was an unworldly soul, and must be guarded against hussies such as Mildred Hurst. So they had gone all together in the vicar’s little rattletrap car, Miss Hurst in the back, her feet primly together, the vicar’s sister seated in the front so that Miss Hurst could not throw out any lures.
After Mildred’s death, there was a note for Leo which the solicitor handed to him.
‘I can’t leave Willow Bank Farm to you, Leo,’ she had written. ‘I should like to, but there are cousins who have a legal claim and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ Reading that, Leo had supposed there was some kind of entail. He had never expected to be left the farm, anyway. But Mildred Hurst had left him a fair sum of money. ‘The life savings of my brother and myself,’ the note said. ‘Dear Leo, you were the son I never had.’
Leo had cried over that, quietly and genuinely. He wished he had known what she meant to do, because he could have told her how very grateful he was, not specifically for the money, but for the home she and her brother had given him.
The vicar’s sister had been right in saying nobody would want Deadlight Hall. It had crouched on its patch of scrubby land, quietly decaying, its windows falling in, its stonework gradually covered by creeping moss and lichen. Sometimes Leo had frightening dreams about the misshapen shadow who had walked the dark corridors, and the voice calling for the children. After a while the dreams became less frequent, but they never quite went away.
He never forgot Deadlight Hall. Of course he did not – it was not the kind of place anyone could forget. It was reassuring, though, to remember that it was still standing empty. No one will ever live there, he had thought. It will fall down of its own accord in the end, and the shadow and whatever was in that furnace room will go.
But if he was able to push Deadlight Hall into the corners of his mind, he was never able to do the same thing with Sophie and Susannah. Just as Deadlight Hall was not the kind of place to forget, Sophie and Susannah were not the kind of people to forget, either.
As the years slid past he gradually accepted it was unlikely he would ever find out what had happened to them.
London
1944
Dear J.W.