She ran a finger along the large desk. No dust. It seemed to be in regular use. A set of architectural plans took up most of the desktop. The top drawing showed the abbey’s front façade, restored and proud, like in the TV show. The new owner’s plans?
She flicked through the stack of drawings, frowning. This wasn’t a gutting of everything but the façade. No bowling alley or monster Jacuzzi. It was a utopia in which the old elements of the house were retained but expanded, with modern, sympathetic additions: a glass conservatory that wove in elements of the original home’s neoclassical style; a domed events space on the roof. There were artists’ impressions: a garden wedding; professionals sitting around a boardroom table in the conservatory, surrounded by tropical plants; picnickers watching a concert on the lawn; a liveried staff member delivering towels to a hotel guest; couples dancing among fairy lights in the restored ballroom; an art class; a yoga retreat. Next to the plans was a stack of hefty papers: business plan, geotech report, community ownership proposal, funding applications, social housing, community farm and garden… And the author’s name on every report? Thomas Calder.
She heard the tour group murmuring and shuffling their way into the entrance hall. Someone asked a question Amelia couldn’t make out, then Tom’s voice swept in. “Old money can’t compete with new. It’s the changing of the guard. It’s happening all over the UK, has been for decades. The abbey is lucky to have survived this long—they reckon 1200 English country houses were demolished in the twentieth century. In 1955 it was one a week. Besides, sheer luck of birth gave my family all of this. If fate wants to take it all away again, maybe that’s the reckoning the world needs.”
Amelia flipped through to a floor plan named “Private family apartment.” An artist’s rendering showed a man who looked a lot like Tom, sitting on a Turkish rug with a spaniel and a couple of tousle-haired kids playing with toy cars. A willowy woman with long, brown hair stood at an arched window, looking out over the grounds. Amelia felt a pang of jealousy for this fictional mother of Tom’s imaginary children living in their fairytale home. The rendering was signed: Tom Calder.
“If you’ll follow me outside,” Xanthe called out from the hall, “we’ll take a look at the old stables, part of which were converted into garaging around the time…”
Her voice faded, as did the footsteps and murmurings of the group. Silence descended, marked by the hollow ticking of a clock. Amelia pressed her palms together and suddenly she was diving into the drawing, scooping into the woman’s sleek form, assuming it. She swam through the room with broad breaststrokes. The windows dissolved and she soared over the grounds, weightless and immersed in the warmth of the sun and the intoxicating promise of a home all of her own, where nothing truly bad happened.
Quick footfalls approached, and Amelia was dumped back into her heavy old regular body, her hands still in prayer. She’d been smiling, but as soon as she became conscious of that, it faded. She felt the loss of the parallel life as if it had once been hers. Tom burst into the room, a robot vacuum under his arm. Amelia slapped the document shut and hurriedly shook out her hands.
“You okay?” he said, glancing at her hands.
“Mind playing tricks on me.Brandyplaying tricks.” She gestured at the documents on the desk. “You really fought for this place! You sounded so flippant about it.”
He grimaced. “I might have played that down.”
“This must have been so much work.”
“Something of an obsession. Connor helped. In hindsight, I’d have been better off making a go of the day job, so I’d have something to return to. You thought I gave up easily? I didn’t. But I did, eventually—yesterday morning, just before we met, in fact—finally recognize the point at which it became a futile battle. My forefathers believed it was their divine right to own this estate, that they had been selected by God to rule over the peasants. When, actually, the king at the time stole the land from the monks who used to live here and gave it to my family along with a title, purely because they sucked up to him. That’s my proud legacy.”
“You planned to transfer the estate into community ownership?”
“The debts made that impossible. The time to do something revolutionary was decades ago. My grandfather…” He tapped a name on the wall: Richard, 10th Earl of Hawthorne. “…was a staunch traditionalist, to his downfall. Our downfall. He refused to change or innovate, like other estates were doing—thought it crass and undignified.”
“This is the earl who disappeared?”
Tom looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite figure out.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to… You don’t have to…”
“Ah, yeah, he stomped off to the moor with his gun one night and that was it, never seen again.”
“You think he…”
“That’s the prevailing theory.”
“You don’t need to tell me. I shouldn’t have pried.”
“No, it’s okay. We were hosting a weekend stalking party, and I started an argument over dinner, told him he would lose the estate because he was too proud to save it, and he stormed out. I should have stopped him from going. He’d been drinking, andin hindsight was probably suffering from depression. But I was angry…”
Amelia reached for Tom’s hand, feeling like she needed to give him permission to share. He seemed to want to talk, and the least she could do was listen. He let her take it.
“I was all of twenty,” he continued. “I watched him walk into the fog, thinking ‘good riddance.’ Can you believe that?” Tom frowned. “I’ve never told anyone that bit before. I assumed he would take out his rage by culling feral rabbits. He did that, sometimes. Anyway…”
“It wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Do you really though?”
“You can’t help thinking about it, can you? If you’d done something differently…”
“He was never found?”
Tom shook his head. “But there are plenty of bogs out there that would swallow a body. We dredged the more likely ones but… Anyway. So my father took over the estate and the title. It was already too late to save the old girl, but that didn’t stop him driving himself to an early grave trying. He had a heart attack up there in the study. Nothing I could do.”
