Property of a Lady

‘Anything,’ said Michael, who wanted nothing more than to get to the privacy of his room and read the papers he had stolen from Charect House. No, stolen was too strong a word. He fully intended to give them to the house’s owner. After he had read them. They would turn out to be just somebody’s old laundry list, of course.

He put them on the bedside table and managed to make himself wait until the plate of sandwiches and pot of coffee had been brought. He was starting to feel slightly light-headed, although he had no idea if this was from ordinary hunger or nervous tension. Just in case it was hunger he gulped down some coffee and crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, then reached for the papers.

He had more than half expected to see Alice Wilson’s familiar writing at the top of the first page – his mind and his eyes were prepared to do so. But the writing was very different to Alice’s impatient scribble. The date was a good thirty years before Alice had come to Charect House.





7th February 1939


This morning I received the letter for which I have waited almost my entire life.

That strange, tragic woman, who dwelled in a sad twilight world for so long, has died, and Charect House is finally mine.

Father always said it would be. ‘One day, Harriet,’ he used to say, ‘one day, we shall be rich. We shall have a beautiful house in a wonderful party of the country. Remember that. Remember there’s only one person who stands between us and our inheritance.’

When I was small I believed it, but over the years the story of the house we should one day own took on the flavour of a dream – another one of Father’s many fantasies. Mother never believed it at all. She died telling me to look after Father because he was a dreamer and dreamers were notoriously impractical.

Sometimes Father tried to explain why we would one day inherit a house and to sketch out the line of descent, although I never really followed it. ‘The Ansteys are an obscure branch of the Shropshire Lees,’ he said. ‘It’s a complicated descent though.’

I don’t know the complexities of the line of descent, but I do know any cousins I might have had – any children born to my father’s generation – were all lost. The Great War took most of the men, leaving the ladies behind in a welter of jingoism and songs about it being a long way to Tipperary. It’s scaldingly sad that thousands of those men never came back, and that an incredibly large number of the girls never found anyone else to love, but clung to letters and photographs of heartbreakingly young men.

I’m one of those girls. I have my own sepia photograph of someone who might have married me if he hadn’t been killed on the Somme, and my own might-have-been daydreams. He still smiles out of the photograph at me, and I often smile back and say goodnight to him as I get into bed. Harry, that was his name. Harry Church. He used to say we were destined to be together because even our names fitted. Harry and Harriet.

But it’s sentimentality to talk like that, and it’s over twenty years ago since he died. And if I didn’t meet anyone else I could care about, I’ve had a good life so far. Nor is it over by a long way, because I’m only just turned forty, and if this new war is coming, as everyone says, I dare say there will be ways in which I can be useful.

And now, after all these years, there’s Charect House.

The solicitor’s letter says, with an unmistakable note of apology, that the place is not in a very good condition, due to its having been empty for a very long time. That sends me into a whole new set of romantic daydreams, visualizing a grey grange or gloomy manor house, dripping with cobwebs, occupied by insubstantial wraiths or unhouseled souls, sobbing with loneliness . . .

It takes me back to that strange haunted woman inhabiting her own mist-shrouded half-world for so many years.