CHAPTER 3

          Only it wasn’t going to be so simple. An hour later, sitting across the coffee table in the living room from Anthony, Audrey and Amy stared in horror at the lawyer.

“I thought you knew…” Anthony had said this twice in the last ten minutes since he had dropped his bombshell and his voice was wretched. “I didn’t imagine… I mean…”

          He stopped abruptly.

“Your father said he was going to tell you, Addie.”

“I… Um… I suppose he was going to,” she replied numbly. “He’d asked me to come down to Seymour House the weekend before the crash but I’d got something on. I was coming down the next…”

          Her voice trailed away.

“How, Uncle Tony? How could he lose everything? What happened?”

“The business has been struggling for years but he hung on to the belief that the tide would turn. He thought borrowing against the house would be a short-term measure at first.”

          Anthony waved his hands expressively.

“Well, it wasn’t. There’s basically your father’s boatyard and one other left in the area and that’s one too many. They were both competing for a lucrative deal and they knew it would be the death knell for the one that didn’t get it. The other boatyard won. It’s as simple as that.”

“None of this is as simple as that...” she whispered.

          How could there be nothing left? How could her father have risked losing the house? Why hadn’t he cut his losses with the boatyard and got an ordinary job somewhere else? At least then the house would’ve been saved.

          Looking at her, reading on her face what she was thinking, Anthony continued quietly.

“The boatyard and the house went together in your father’s head, Addie. They were built at the same time by your great-great-grandfather…”

“No…”

          Her voice cracked.

“No, the house is different, Uncle Tony, and he should’ve seen that. Seymour House is…”

          She couldn’t find the words to describe what this place meant to her.

“There’s no way at all we can keep it?” Amy entered the conversation, her face white as a sheet. “I’ve got some savings, nearly twenty thousand in the bank. Would they come to some sort of an arrangement…?”

          Her voice trailed away as Anthony shook his head. Audrey reached out her hand and grasped Amy’s. She would remember Amy’s offer all her life.

“What happens now?”

“In essence, the bank will claim what it sees as belonging to it. Then Seymour House will go on the open market. In the position it occupies and being such a fine old house, you’ll be looking at a great deal of money. Even if you used Amy’s twenty thousand as a deposit, you wouldn’t be able to make the mortgage repayments.”

“What if… What if we transform it into a bed and breakfast, even evening meals, too? What if we turn this house into a hotel?”

“Have you any idea of the cost of such a project? You’d need to do so much work before you could start taking guests. All sorts of safety procedures, not to mention converting the bedrooms into suites and so on.”

“Three are already suites.”

“Addie, we’re talking tens of thousands to get the place around if you’re going to get approval from the tourist boards and so on. Where’s your collateral?”

“Uncle Tony, there has to be a way...”

          She stared at him, wild-eyed.

“I’m not going to give up without a fight. This is my house. They can’t take it from me.”

“Addie, to all extents and purposes it’s theirs already.”

“Dad would’ve wanted me to fight this.”

          Anthony said nothing, looking at her with sad eyes as he laid out a stack of papers on the table in front of her.

“Look at these overnight. This has been a shock, I see that, and if I had thought Henry hadn’t told you, I would’ve said something before rather than dropping it on you like this. Take time to let it sink in.”

          She didn’t want it to sink in. She wanted her house back. Somehow Audrey managed to pull herself together sufficiently to see Anthony out and then comfort Amy, who was beside herself.

          After Amy’s husband and two young sons of four and five had been drowned in a freak storm when he’d taken the boys out in his fishing boat, Henry and Diana Seymour had taken the broken woman in until she recovered sufficiently to decide what she wanted to do.

          Amy’s home had been rented and there had been no life assurance or anything of that nature. Shortly afterward, the Seymours’ housekeeper had suddenly upped and got married, and somehow Amy had just taken over the role.

          That had been over thirty years ago and the arrangement had been a blessing for everyone concerned. Now, though, it was as though Amy’s world had ended for the second time in her life.

          By the time Audrey had persuaded Amy to go to bed and taken the older woman a mug of hot, sweet milk and a couple of aspirin, she felt exhausted. Her head was spinning, she felt physically sick and stress was causing her temples to throb.

          Nevertheless, she sat down at the coffee table and began to work through the papers Anthony had left for her. There was no escaping the truth. Tears streaming down her face, she opened the French windows and stepped into the garden, which was bathed in the mauve shadows of twilight.

          Immediately, the scent from the hedge of China roses close to the house wafted in the warm breeze and, as she walked on in the violet dusk, pinks, sweet peas, and honeysuckle competed for her attention, their fragrance filling the air.

          A blackbird was singing its heart out somewhere close, the pure notes hanging on the breeze, and far below the house, Audrey could hear the whisper of the sea on the rocks below the cliff.

“No way I would give up without a fight! This is my home! Will always be my home!”

          Audrey had always known she would come back here one day. Boyfriends had come and gone and she had nearly had her heart broken once or twice, but deep inside she had always imagined coming back to the area she had grown up in, meeting someone local who would be able to love this place like she did and settling down somewhere close.

          And then one day, when she was much older and her parents had had the joy of watching grandchildren grow up, Audrey would inherit the house she loved with all her heart. And hold it in trust for her children…

          Sinking down onto a sun-warmed bench that had retained the day’s heat, she shut her eyes against the pain. If she lost Seymour House, then she would really lose her parents… That was how she felt.

          Audrey couldn’t explain it because of course they were gone, but here, in the house and garden which had nurtured so many generations of her family, she still felt close to them.

          She sat on in the quiet of the night until it was quite dark, the leaves on the trees surrounding the grounds of the house trembling slightly in the summer breeze. The moon had risen with silvery hauteur in the velvet-black sky, the stars twinkling in deference to their queen.

“Oh… Such a beautiful night…” she whispered.

          It was always a beautiful night indeed. And it was a wonderful, magical place in every season… In the spring, when the swallows began to build their nests under the eaves. In the summer, when the wild rabbits brought their babies onto the smooth lawns to eat grass that was sweeter than on the cliffs beyond Seymour House’s boundary.

          In the autumn, when the trees were a blaze of color and squirrels darted here and there anxiously burying nuts, or winter, when the sound of the sea crashing on the rocks filtered through shut windows and flavored dreams,

          In every moment of the year, Seymour was an enchanted place and the house… Well, the house was more than a house, it always had been. She knew by heart every corner of it, she had memories involving every room…  

“I have to do something… But what?”

          Audrey held her aching head in her hands, bewildered at how quickly her calm, happy life had been turned upside down. She didn’t know which way to turn. At midnight, Audrey walked back to the house, turning off the lights downstairs before retiring to her room.

          As she opened the door and looked at the room which had been hers as long as she could remember, desolation claimed her again.

“Enough for today, Addie. Now… sleep,” she said in the stillness of her room.

          She needed to sleep and then she would be fresher to think of a way to solve this mess. This was the twenty-first century, an age of miracles when things were happening which would have been considered unthinkable a century before. It couldn’t be beyond the wit of man, or woman, in this case, to think of a way to keep the Seymour House. She’d work twenty-four hours a day if necessary.

          Stripping off her charcoal-grey dress, Audrey threw it into a corner of the room. She would never wear it again. Nor the black shoes and jacket she had bought specially for the funeral.

          Without bothering to brush her teeth or shower, she crawled into bed in her slip, an exhaustion that rendered her limbs like lead taking over. In contrast to the last few nights after Amy’s shocking call, Audrey was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.