Authors: Kimberley Freeman
But the west wing, the original two-story stone structure with its ornate Italianate arched windows and bracketed cornices: well, hardly anyone had been in there for decades.
And I had the key.
* * *
My life to this point had been spent avoiding spontaneous things, all to save my mother’s nerves. I’d never climbed trees, I’d never gone around in cars with boys, I’d never flitted off to the beach if friends asked me (when I had friends, which was rarely, because I was no fun to be around). I’d grown up considering everything through the prism of my mother’s perspective. She would have hated me inserting the key into the lock and turning it until it snicked. She would have hated me taking that one last look around the deserted site, serenaded by trees that rustled softly and distant traffic on the highway. She would have hated me stepping inside and closing the door behind me, to find myself in darkness. Because she would have hated it, I did it.
The windows had all been boarded over in some dim, distant past, and of course the electricity was not connected, so I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and switched on the torch. It was a narrow, short beam, but it would stop me from tripping over anything. Shining it around, I realized I was in some kind of foyer, with swollen parquetry, high ceilings and peeling cornices, flocked wallpaper whose corners sagged unhappily from stained walls, as well as a dusty broken chandelier that picked up the light from my torch beam and refracted it into a thousand crystalline sparks across the walls. I caught my breath, and in doing so inhaled a lungful of dust that made me cough for thirty seconds without stopping.
I stood there for a long time, in the middle of the foyer, trying to imagine what it had looked like in its prime; what it might look like in a few years when Tomas and his team had refurbished it. I felt a strange sense of privilege, seeing it like this. Raw, untouched, the layers of years still thick around me.
I shone my light about. On one side, a hallway branched off in front of me, on the other, a set of stairs. I didn’t trust the stairs to hold me, so I headed down the hallway, past a few empty rooms, and found myself in a large scullery. The floor was lined with uneven tiles, and a giant cast-iron oven dominated one wall. The big square sinks were full of silt. One of the boards was missing, and through the grimy window I saw the underside of an outdoor staircase, across which hung a
DANGER, KEEP OUT
sign. I felt a distinctly guilty prickle. I knew I should leave.
I made my way back down the hallway and across the foyer to the door, only to find that it wouldn’t open. There was no hole for the key on this side, and the handle was missing, leaving only a protruding stalk of metal. I put my phone between my teeth where it could illuminate my guilty feet, and twisted my hands around the stalk with all my might. My hands slipped off red and sore and smelling like old metal.
My heart fluttered as I realized I was locked in and nobody knew I was here. I could call Penny or Mrs. Tait. Or my mother—that idea made me laugh out loud, dispelling my initial alarm. I switched off the torch in my phone to preserve the battery while I thought it through.
But of course, this building was so vast, there would be other ways out. I headed back down the hallway and checked for exits in the empty rooms. The scullery door was boarded shut. Right at the end of the hallway were two doors: one with clear access, the second under the long slope of a staircase. I tried the first, but the
handle wouldn’t budge. I inserted the key, and it gave a millimeter and then gave no more. So I tried the second door, and that was my big mistake.
The key slotted in and turned with a wrench, I pushed the door in and met with resistance. So, I pushed harder and—
crash!
My pulse shot up. The initial crash was followed by a second, and a third, and then thud after thud as whatever I’d shoved the door into collapsed onto the floor. I gingerly switched on my torch and looked into what appeared to be a storeroom, the ceiling only just above head height. Judging by the mess, when I’d pushed the door in, I’d inadvertently knocked a heavy ceramic urn against the leg of an old table. The table leg had given way, and all of the things on it—suitcases, boxes of bric-a-brac, books, lamps, other items I had no hope of identifying—had slid to the floor in a jumble. The urn had survived, but an entire tea set had not.
I was faced with a dilemma: use the rest of my phone battery in lighting the scene of the crime sufficiently to clean up and hide the evidence, or call Penny and tell her what I’d done and suffer the humiliation.
I settled on a third option: clean up quickly, then find Tomas and confess all, and offer to pay for the tea set. Maybe the table. He would think me an idiot, and that would be that. It was a relief, in a way; no more longing for what I couldn’t have.
I set my phone against the wall on the floor, to give me enough light to work. The table was beyond redemption, the leg cracked. I gathered the tea-set parts and put them just outside the door. I righted boxes, stacked suitcases, picked up shoehorns, and collected old light fittings and spare doorknobs and jumbled them all away as neatly as I could.
Then I lifted an overturned box and found myself looking at an old gramophone. Corroded clips on three sides and a broken handle
told me it had once been portable. As I carefully picked it up I saw that the side had cracked open in the fall. As I set it down on the floor near my phone, the light caught on something white, half hidden in the exposed crack. I poked inside, and pulled out a sheaf of envelopes tied with a discolored velvet ribbon.
I untied the ribbon and leafed through them. None was addressed, but there were clearly contents in all of them. I lifted the flap on the first, and slid out crackling, yellow pages. Handwriting in ink had been made sepia by time.
My darling, what torture it is that I cannot come to you tonight . . .
Love letters. Old love letters. Suddenly my heart swelled. I had stolen a key, broken into a deserted building, and found old love letters. I felt wonderful, heady, alive.
Take that, Mum.
This was just the kind of excitement I had missed in life by being too cautious.
Take that, Dad.
I retied the ribbon.
Take that, Adam.
A sudden barb of guilt cooled my joy. How could I think that? None of what happened had been Adam’s fault. He had never wanted to cast such a shadow: nobody on earth would have wanted to cast such a shadow.
I put the bundle of letters by my phone, and did my best to reorganize the storeroom, including propping the broken table against the wall. Then I pocketed the letters in my jacket and left, closing the door behind me. My torch helped me find my way back to the scullery, to the single unboarded window. I leaned across the sink and tried to push up the sash. It gave a little. I climbed onto the bench and stood in the sink, an inch deep in mud, and pushed up with all my might. With a groan the sash rose, the window opened, and I could smell the fresh evening air. I climbed out and closed the window behind me, then headed around the back of the building and through the car park to the street. Night had fallen while I’d been inside, and under the streetlight, kicking mud off my shoes,
I could see that my clothes were covered with dust. As I patted at it ineffectually a car beeped at me from behind, and I turned to see headlights approaching. I stepped off the road onto the damp grass, and the car pulled up beside me. It was Tomas.
“Need a lift?” he said, in his faint accent.
I felt so ashamed I could barely speak. “I . . . look, I need to talk to you about something.”
He raised his eyebrows with a hint of a smile. “Hop in, then. We’ll go back to my place. I live close by.”
Back to his place. I sighed. “Okay.” Then I was in his car, the love letters in my pocket, and we didn’t talk for the short drive to his cottage.
A security light switched on as we approached the porch. I expected him to ask me what I’d been doing at the Evergreen Spa, but instead he said something about the lovely night, about how much he liked it here in the Blue Mountains, about how different it was to living in Copenhagen; I’m sure I answered, but my brain was racing, trying to figure out how I was going to confess to him what I’d done.
He slung his keys on a sideboard and led me to the kitchen. I slipped off my shoes in case there was still mud on them, and tried to brush off more dust.
“Can I make you something? Tea? Cocoa? I wouldn’t dream of making you coffee: you usually make it for me.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“I’m going to make cocoa. I make it the way my mother did. It’s very nice.”
I forced a smile. “Okay, then, you’ve twisted my arm.”
“You sit down and tell me what it is you have to talk to me about.”
I sat at the kitchen table and watched as he searched for a cast-iron pot, which he put on the stove. While he turned to take milk
from the fridge and I couldn’t see his face, I said, “You left your key to the west wing at the café today.”
“Ah, so that’s where it went. I searched my office for it twice.”
“I’m really sorry. I put it in my apron and then my mother called and . . . she’s very . . . high maintenance.”
“It’s no matter.”
“Do you . . . go into the west wing often?”
He poured the milk into the pot and then came to sit with me while it warmed. “Not often. We’re not scheduled to work in there for another six to twelve months.”
“I went in.” My heartbeat thundered past my ears as I said this. I remembered a time I’d woken Adam from a deep sleep and Mum had roared at me and I felt just like this. In serious trouble.
He smiled. “Naughty girl.”
“It gets worse. I couldn’t get out. I opened another door and it turned out it was a storeroom and I . . . knocked some things down.”
“What things?”
“A lot of things. I broke an old tea set. God, I hope it wasn’t an antique.”
He was still smiling, which gave me a little comfort.
“I’m so sorry. I’m not usually like this, I promise you. I have led such a straitlaced life. You can’t even imagine how straight I’ve been. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Curiosity, perhaps?” he said, rising and returning to the stove to stir the milk. “It’s all right. No harm done.”
“But I broke things.”
“The west wing was cleared out long ago. It’s probably old bric-a-brac of no value. Certainly nothing irreplaceable. Put it out of your mind.”
Relief flooded through me. “You’re very kind.”
“Did you think I’d wag my finger at you?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“I’m just glad you’re not hurt. I don’t know if you would have been covered by our insurance.”
“I stayed away from the stairs.”
He busied himself with cocoa, honey, and two enormous cups. “How did you get out?”
“One of the windows in the scullery was unboarded.”
“Resourceful girl.” He brought the cups and sat down again.
I sipped my cocoa. It was silky and sweet. “Oh, my,” I said. “This is wonderful.”
“I’ll tell Mama you like it next time I talk to her.”
I smiled at him, then remembered the letters. “Look,” I said, pulling them from my jacket and sliding them across the table. “I found them inside an old portable gramophone.”
“What are they?” He carefully untied the ribbon and opened one of the letters. After a moment his eyes met mine with a smile. “Love letters?”
“I think so. I only looked at one.”
He cleared his throat. “
My beloved. Today I lay in the sunshine behind the tennis court and in my mind I was with you again as we were last night, and my mouth was filled with the sweet dew of your—”
Tomas laughed. “I can’t read this aloud. Too sexy.”
My face flushed warmly as he refolded the letter and passed the bundle back to me. “You keep them. But I’d better get my key back from you.”
“Are you sure I can keep them?”
“I insist. Read them all and give me a summary of the best ones. See if you can find out who they were from and to. If they were hidden, perhaps the love affair was hidden, too. You may have happened upon a secret.”
The thought made me glow a little with excitement. Or perhaps
the excitement was from sitting with Tomas at his kitchen table, drinking his mama’s cocoa. Happiness.
We chatted. He told me about his mother and I told him—a little—about mine. I wasn’t ready to give him my whole life story. Not because it would take too long—I could have written it on the head of a pin—but because I wanted him to get to know the real me first.
Whoever the real me was. I still didn’t know.
He offered me another hot cocoa. I dearly wanted to stay, but my mother was due to call at any moment, and I didn’t want to talk to her in Tomas’s presence, or ignore the call and have her panic again.
“I’d best get away,” I said. “But thank you.”
“Do you need a lift?”
“No, I don’t live far away. I have a flat behind Mrs. Tait’s house. You know, the elderly lady who’s always at the café?”
“Yes, I do know her. She had me over for tea one afternoon when I first moved to town.”
We were at the porch now. Moths banged themselves against the light.
“Well, good night,” I said.
“Friday,” he blurted suddenly. “Can I take you to dinner?”
My brain took a moment to catch up with my heart, which was already singing
yes
in a grand opera voice. “Friday evening? Yes. Yes, I’d love that.”
“Good.” He looked relieved. His smile was wide. For me. I found it impossible to believe. “I’ll pick you up at six?”
“Yes. That would be . . . well, I’ll see you tomorrow morning in the café, won’t I?”
“I’ll be in Sydney for the next few days. So . . .”
“So . . .” I grinned stupidly. “See you Friday night.”
Then I was making my way home in the dark, buzzing with excitement. When my phone rang and I knew it was Mum, I didn’t even groan.
CHAPTER TWO
T
here were eleven love letters in the bundle, each full of a passion so scorching that I had to fan myself to cool down after reading them. Dark clouds had closed in outside, and the steady beat of rain on the tin roof drowned out the music I had put on. One by one, I pored over them, looking for names, dates—anything that would help me place them. All I knew by the time I’d finished was that they were written by a man whose initials were SHB; that the man had a sister who was never named (she was “Sissy” throughout); that they were written in or shortly after 1926 (a quick Internet search for the first “Miss Sydney” winner told me that: apparently she was staying at the hotel at the same time); and that their love affair was definitely forbidden. Oh, and that SHB was borderline obsessed with his lover’s “rosy nipples,” which received a mention at least once per letter.