And yet ... it slid off Christina’s skin like rain on glass. She didn’t feel the usual shame coiling inside her. Not even a sting. Just a dry, almost amused detachment. Was she ... getting used to it? Or maybe Christina was finally not letting this woman define who she was and expecting her to apologize for it.
‘Maybe he just loves us both,’ she said mildly.
Flora didn’t respond. She was staring out of the window now, her teacup raised but forgotten. Her fingers shook slightly as she set it back down.
Christina leaned closer. ‘Flora ... I need your help. There’s a document – a trust variation deed. It says you authorised removing one of the protected assets. A silver piece.’
Flora’s gaze slid back towards her, confused for a second, then shrewd. ‘Are you sure it was me? You know, Ernest has always had a fondness for silver. And secrets.’
Christina’s heart soared. ‘So, you didn’t sign the deed of variation for the loving cup?’
Flora frowned, her eyes losing their edge.
‘What cup? I need to send something to ... to Lady Wallace,’ she said, fumbling vaguely with her teacup. ‘She’s expecting the correspondence about the ... sugar tongs. They can’t be left in Rome. Nothing to do with a cup.’
Christina got up, took a step and then knelt at Flora’s feet as she took the other woman’s hands in hers.
‘Flora. Look at me. Did you sign anything? Recently?’
For a brief moment, something wavered in Flora’s gaze – alertness, recognition. Christina held her breath.
But then Flora’s expression turned vaguely scandalised. ‘I wouldn’t sign for a parcel without gloves,’ she said imperiously.‘You don’t know where the postman might have been.’
Hope drained from Christina like air from a balloon, leaving frustration in its place – sharp, childish, and utterly useless. Dementia had moved faster than Christina.
She pressed Flora’s hand gently, then rose, the weight of disappointment folding neatly into the shape of resolve. She told herself not to be disheartened.
Flora’s goodbye was perfunctory, her attention already drifting toward the garden.
Walking back through the institutional corridors, Christina breathed shallowly through her mouth, trying to avoid the concentrated scent of managed decline. Nurse Sarah accompanied her to the entrance, professional concern written across her features.
‘It’s hard,’ Sarah said. ‘Seeing them like this. But she’s safe here, and comfortable. She likes looking at the spring flowers. Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for.’
‘She seemed clearer for a moment,’ said Christina.
‘Sometimes it comes in flashes. Sometimes not at all,’ the nurse offered kindly.
Christina pushed through the double doors into the bright morning air which hit her like a wave – sunlight, the sound of a lawnmower, the smell of cut grass. Four days until the sale. It wouldn’t be long before Ernest demanded she return the cup.
No help was coming.
She would have to stop Ernest alone. And strangely, she wasn’t afraid of that anymore.
Ahead of Christina, Chase Lodge rose out of the valley like a brooding thought she’d tried and failed to banish. Half-hidden beneath a drift of early-spring cloud, the old Tudor gables hunched against the woods, and the blank windows stared down at her without welcome. She could still taste salt on the wind –faint and ghostlike – blown inland from the unseen Devon coast beyond the ridge.
She stepped out of the car, gravel shifting under her trainers, and asked herself what she was doing here. She had realised on that day in Penelope’s drawing room that this project wouldn’t save her marriage. Yet the idea of moving house persisted, reshaped – not as a solution, exactly, but as something she coulddo.
They couldn’t go on living in her mother-in-law’s grace-and-favour cottage. Space might help, distance perhaps. Or at least it would look like progress.
When Penelope had summoned her by WhatsApp –
Humphrey’s got some wonderful ideas darling. You must come at once– Christina had stared at the message for far too long, unable to muster the energy for a plausible excuse. In the end, she’d agreed to meet; after all, Hamish had liked the house.
Her friend and the architect stood together on the path, their shared enthusiasm radiating like burnished silver. Humphrey’s tall frame was wrapped in that elegant-but-frayed suit, hair windswept, sturdy boots on his feet. Penelope, by contrast, looked as if someone had pressed pause on a country house photo shoot: butter-soft gloves, silk blouse, a gold bee brooch perched at her shoulder as though ready to take flight. Even her low-heeled shoes gleamed. Not a single item of her ensemble suggested rural Devon or rickety staircases.
‘Christina!’ Penelope cried, as though greeting a guest arriving for dinner rather than a tour of a derelict Tudor shell. ‘Perfect timing. Humphrey was just saying the brick nogging might be salvageable after all.’
Humphrey nodded gravely. ‘If the tie beams haven’t shifted.’ He patted a pocket – the unmistakable outline of the key bulging faintly beneath the fabric. ‘Still, nothing we can’t stabilise with the right team.’
