“According to my calculations… soon-ish. It’s been a good twenty minutes since we left Stonewell. It’s the closest village to Hanbury Manor, and the shopkeeper said the manor was no further than a thirty-minute drive down this road. So, I’d imagine we’ll see your destination soon enough.”
William raised a hand and placed it to his throat. Whenever Hanbury was mentioned he had to fight the urge to throw up. It wasn’t exactly a negative reaction, but merely the only way William felt he could deal with nerves.
“Let’s hope so,” William replied, folding back into the seat. He turned his attention beyond the window, resting his head against the cool glass.
“Funny place to buy, isn’t it,” the driver added, desperate for them not to return to their comfortable bouts of silence. At least the silence was comfort to William. “I suppose only someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts would be brave enough to fork out all that money. The shopkeeper said it was–”
“Haunted?” William answered for him, eyes scanning the barren landscape for any hint of his new home among it. “If that’s the case perhaps these ghosts can help pay towards the mortgage?”
The driver barked a laugh, biting like a fish to a hook at his opening of sarcasm. “Ha. Good one, William. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. A man of your spritely age being tied down to a thirty-plus year mortgage doesn’t sound so exciting, does it?”
William rolled his eyes. Luckily for him, he’d not bought the manor and there was no mortgage. But it was easier to tell the driver that he’d bought the property, because the truth of how he found it in his possession would’ve opened a can of worms he wanted to very much keep sealed shut.
Hanbury Manor was, in a sense, a fresh start – a place for William to hide his secrets. And there was certainly enough room to do so. He’d studied the floorplan of so many times since he’d been transferred ownership of it, and was transfixed on just how big it was. Of course anything seemed big in comparison to his flat in London. It was sensible to familiarise himself with the surroundings or what little known history there was to the manor.Hismanor, William reminded himself silently. He’d been two bottles of wine down, one white and one red, when he’d first stared at the deeds his solicitor had given him – since then this manor had been the only thing keeping him going.
“What’s a young man like yourself doing buying a big old property like this then?” the driver asked, knuckles squeaking on the car’s steering wheel. “Aren’t men like you wasting money on summers in Ibiza or something?”
“Pretty much the same reasons. I need a place to host my drug-fuelled sex parties,” William replied, breath fogging the glass and blurring the world beyond.
He was sure he heard the driver swallow hard.
“I’m joking,” William added for good measure, feeling a seed of guilt for being so unfriendly.
“Oh, I gathered. Although, I must say you are more a man than I am. Ghosts and all that upside-down cross stuff. It isn’t really for me.”
If it keeps people from visiting me, then good.
The taxi ran over another pothole, and the driver swore this time. William cringed at the clang of his suitcase in the boot, crashing against the plastic bags full of food he’d brought from the small village shop in Stonewell. He’d only purchased enough to last a week, which was all that was required when the pre-paid taxi would return to Hanbury Manor to take him back to his flat in London.
In the middle of nowhere, the city seemed like such a different world, where the only things one was surrounded with were grass, trees and the sound of nothing else. It was the escape William hoped it would be.
“If it’s really that bad to drive the rest of the way, I could walk from here,” William said as suddenly as the thought came to him. “If it saves you a trip to a garage about those tires…”
“No, no.” The driver dismissed William’s suggestion with a wave of his aged hand. “I take my jobveryseriously. I treat my passengers like an Amazon parcel withfragiletape stuck across it. It’s my personal quest to see you from door to door.”
William wasn’t the type of person to argue. He pressed his aching head onto the cool glass and closed his eyes, feeling the vibration of the wheels race across the stone gravel of the country road. The driver had either not noticed William’s defeat or didn’t care because he continued his monologue about ghosts in films, which somehow led to the conversation about his first girlfriend over forty years ago.
William had no clue how those two topics were related.
The final minutes of the journey to Hanbury Manor were the longest of the entire trip. Only when William felt the car finally slow, he opened his eyes and peered out the window.
He didn’t need to look far to see it.
“Home sweet home?” the driver said, his tone questionable.
William sat up straight as what felt like a bolt of electricity sliced down his spine. For the first time he laid eyes on Hanbury Manor in the flesh, instead of seeing it in brochures and web pages.
And it took his breath away. Even the driver was silent for the first time in hours, and that was saying something.
Hanbury had been listed as being built somewhere in the 1800s. It was a grand building once owned by a powerful family who commissioned the manor to be erected as a summer dwelling. Over time, it was passed down the family line until… Archie.
Pain jolted in his chest, so sharp and sudden his moment of weightlessness came to an abrupt end.
All it took was his mind drifting tohim.
The taxi turned onto a narrow track lined with towering pine trees. What waited down the long stretch of a driveway was William’s future. The manor looked so small in the distance, nestled at the end like a toy house one would find in the attic of anyone’s home. Old and forgotten. As a child, William had one like it himself, which was an anomaly because, back then, little girls played with doll houses, not boys. William was lucky to have parents who encouraged him to play with whatever he desired.
Fuck societies stereotypes, right?
