The Daughters Of Red Hill Hall (19 page)

‘Spencer!’ Sarah threw back her head and laughed. ‘You think
Spencer
is my father? Well that is what my
real
father wanted people to think, to protect his own reputation. Dear old Spencer went along with it, all these years, out of his sense of duty.’

‘So who was your real father then? No one of importance, I’d wager.’

‘He was equally as important a man as yours was.’ Sarah’s eyes flashed in the lamplight.

‘How do you know? You never even met him. He abandoned you and your mother.’

‘Oh, I met him. Plenty of times, all my life. And he didn’t abandon us at all.’ Sarah’s tone was triumphant.

Rebecca shook her head. What Sarah was implying could not possibly be true. She was making it up. It was just Sarah’s little fantasy. She’d always wanted to be a proper part of the family, and Rebecca’s true sister rather than just adopted.

‘So you see,’ Sarah said, ‘I am just as eligible as you to inherit this estate. In fact as Papa’s firstborn, I have more claim to it than you. But it is all irrelevant anyway. Papa’s will clearly left it to
me
.’

‘You
made
him leave it to you. You turned Charles away from me. You have taken my love, my fortune and now you are trying to take my father. I hate you, Sarah! I hate you!’

Sarah laughed. ‘And I hate you too, dear sister. That’s why I want you out of my house. By tomorrow. Go, or I shall have you thrown out, and all your belongings burned.’

Rebecca looked down at her feet and let out a sob. Sarah sounded serious. She had always hoped that she would relent, and allow her to stay on. She had nowhere else to go. She put her hand into her skirt pocket and fingered the jewelled stock of the pistol.

‘You will
go
.’ Sarah’s voice had taken on a harsher tone.

Rebecca looked up and gasped. Sarah was pointing the other pistol at her, and it was cocked. She pulled out her own pistol, and with her other hand swiftly cocked it. Now it was Sarah’s turn to gasp. ‘What are you doing with that pistol?’

‘Defending myself,’ Rebecca said. ‘It seems we are evenly matched.’

‘The pistols may be even, but the women holding them are not,’ Sarah sneered. ‘You do not have the courage to fire. You are weak and feeble. My will is so much stronger. If I wanted to kill you I could, so very easily.’

‘And you’d be hanged for it. Drop the gun, Sarah. Put yours down and I will put mine down. This is just silly.’

‘Silly? I’m serious. Deadly serious. I want you gone, and I don’t care how. I won’t hang. I’ll say someone broke in and shot you and threatened me. They’d never suspect me of shooting you. I’m your
sister
. Your blood sister. Sisters don’t kill each other!’ Sarah took a step back and raised her gun, taking aim at Rebecca’s chest.

‘Sarah, no!’ Instinctively Rebecca raised her own gun. How had it come to this? They were but yards apart. If either fired they could not miss from this range, and a shot on target would be fatal for sure.

‘Why not?’ Sarah hissed. ‘I can’t think of a single reason why
not
.’ She brought her left hand up to steady the right, the one holding the pistol.

Rebecca kept her eye on Sarah’s fingers. It was hard to see in the dim light. Was she squeezing the trigger? Would she? Would she
really
? Could she? The only thing she was certain of was that if Sarah tightened her fingers on her trigger, then she must match the movement and tighten her own. If Sarah fired, so must she.

Chapter 17

August 2015

Gemma had a week off work. She had booked it months ago, back when she was still with Ben, and they had planned to drive down to Devon, camp near Woolacombe on the north Devon coast, and spend their days lazing on the beach or walking the clifftop paths. On her own, however, the prospect didn’t seem so appealing. Instead, she had decided to stay home and spend the week (the weather forecast was abysmal) pushing on with her research into the ruby duelling pistols and the events at Red Hill Hall.

She had contacted the owner of the hall, Don Gorman, and asked if she could visit to have a good look around. When she had told him she was from the museum and researching the hall’s history he had been very excited. ‘Yes, come, and I shall show you around myself. I believe I have something you would be very interested in, and perhaps we can come to some sort of arrangement…’

She had not been sure what he meant by this but his enthusiasm had spurred her on, and on the first of her days off she had driven over to the hall. It was a miserable kind of day – low cloud and drizzly rain – so she was in no danger of wishing she’d gone to the beach instead.

At the reception desk she announced who she was and asked for Don. Immediately a man came through from the little office behind the desk. He was tall with dark hair that had just a few streaks of grey in. His face was open and although not classically good-looking he had a friendly, welcoming smile. She liked him at once.

‘Gemma Rowling? Welcome to Red Hill Hall! Is this your first visit?’ He came round from behind the reception desk and shook her hand firmly.

‘I was here a few weeks ago for a wedding,’ she replied. A pang of pain rushed through her as she recalled Ben and Nat dancing and kissing. Well, all that was in the past. She must move on.

‘OK, so you’ll have seen a bit of the hotel, like the new function rooms. Let me give you the full tour. Or would you rather have a coffee beforehand?’

‘Thanks, but no. I can’t wait to get going,’ she replied.

He grinned, and held open a door to the right of the reception desk. It led to the bar-cum-library, which she remembered from her earlier visit.

‘I love this room,’ she said, noticing that one bookcase was now filled with leather-bound vintage books, rather than the paperbacks that had been there before.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I’m gradually collecting suitable books to fill the shelves. It’ll cost me a fortune but hey-ho, to my mind it is worth it. One can never have too many books. Perhaps you can have a look through and tell me if I have any valuable ones in amongst that lot? They were all bought as a job lot at a car boot sale.’

She laughed. ‘Well I’m no expert on antiquarian books but I’d love to have a browse through them.’

‘You’re welcome to, whenever you want. Right then, onwards?’

She nodded and followed him back to the entrance hall, then into what had been the drawing room and was now the hotel’s dining room. Staff were bustling around, setting the tables ready for lunch. ‘Not many original features left here, unfortunately,’ he said. ‘Just the ceiling cornicing and the fireplace.’ It was another magnificent fireplace, like the one in the library but larger. A huge gilt-framed mirror hung over it.

It was hard to get a feel for how the house would have been in the old days from that room. So far, Gemma liked the library best.

The tour continued. Don showed her all the public areas, and a couple of unoccupied bedrooms. Sadly apart from the fireplaces and the library bookcases there were few original features left. The original servants’ wing had been remodelled to provide some downstairs bedrooms with disabled access, and a modern kitchen added in an extension at the back of the building. Gemma tried hard to imagine how it would have been around the time of the shooting but it was difficult. She felt vaguely disappointed. Hopefully the archive, which had been mentioned in the existing brief leaflet about the hotel’s history, would make up for it.

Finally Don showed her into a small office. ‘This was once the butler’s pantry, I believe. He’d have stored the silverware in here. These days we use it to hold something much more valuable, to my mind.’ He grinned at her as he unlocked a built-in wall cupboard. It was full of cardboard boxes of varying shapes and sizes. ‘Our archive. It’s a mess, but if you’re interested and want to help sort through it all, I am not going to stand in your way. I’ve done a bit of genealogy research myself – found my ancestors in the census records, that sort of thing – but although I’d dearly love to know what’s in this I just don’t have the time to go through it myself, plus I wouldn’t know where to begin. It was all here when I bought the hotel.’

Gemma gasped as he pulled out a box and opened the top. It was stuffed full of yellowing paper and old, marbled notebooks. She looked inside, then pulled a pair of white cotton gloves from her handbag. She’d brought them from the museum in anticipation of exactly this moment. ‘May I?’

‘Go ahead.’

She put on the gloves, then carefully took out the topmost piece of paper. It was a letter, dated 1865, and addressed to ‘My Dear Charles.’ Underneath that was an accounts book from the mid nineteenth century, then a bundle of other letters.

‘Wow. There is treasure indeed in these boxes! It’ll take a while, but I would love to go through and put it all into some sort of order, and find out more about the history of this place.’

‘You’re very welcome to have access to this archive whenever you want. You can take over this room, spread out, do whatever you need to. May I ask, why are you so interested in Red Hill Hall? I mean, I’m interested because I bought the place, and because…well, never mind, but what’s in it for you?’ He looked at her quizzically.

She wondered briefly what he’d been about to say, but answered him anyway. ‘Something happened here, in the summer of 1838, and I’m intrigued to find out more about it.’ She quickly outlined what she knew so far about the shooting and the other mysterious deaths. ‘I’d like to put the pistols on display at the museum, with a board telling the story of how they were used. I’ve been doing a bit of digging on the internet – newspaper archives and that sort of thing – but I’m hoping there might be some information in amongst these boxes.’

‘Wow, so there may have been a double murder here?’

‘Single murder. One of the girls survived.’

‘And the man in the well?’

‘The newspaper reports weren’t clear on whether foul play was suspected in that case. He may have fallen or jumped in himself. But as it happened on this estate, who knows, there might be something in this archive.’ She fingered the bundle of letters, itching to get going with the work.

‘OK, well I had better leave you to it then. Let me know if you find anything really interesting. Can I bring you a coffee?’

She shook her head. ‘Not in here, while I have the papers out. I’d hate to spill something on them.’

‘Good point. Well, you know where the bar is, in the library. They’ll make you one later if you need a break. And if you want me, ask reception to page me if I’m not in the office.’ He smiled and raised his eyebrows at her.

‘Thanks, will do.’

And finally she was left alone with this treasure trove of material. Talk about a busman’s holiday, she thought. Nat would think she was totally crazy. She spent her working days going through dusty archives and had chosen to do more, unpaid, for fun, during her week off.

The time passed so quickly. It was only when her stomach began to tell her it was well past lunchtime that she stopped to take stock. She had sorted the contents of the boxes into piles spread across the tables. There were dozens of estate accounts books – both for the internal running of the household and for the income from the farms. Many of the internal accounts books from the 1830s had totals summed and checked each month, and a signature: G. Spencer. Who was he or she, Gemma wondered. Perhaps a housekeeper or a butler or some other senior member of staff. She had noted the name down. The 1841 census, which was the first full census of England and Wales, would include all servants who lived at the hall as well as the ‘upstairs’ residents. She had yet to check up on this. So much to do!

There were scores of letters as well, which she had attempted to sort into roughly date order, but she had not had chance to read any of them yet. It would pay to be methodical. Sort it all first, read them later.

And then there were some journals and diaries. Those would possibly be the most interesting documents. Again she had stacked them into date order, but keeping those with similar handwriting together. There were certainly some from the 1830s though whether any of them would shed light on the mysterious deaths at the hall remained to be seen.

Don tapped on the door and entered the room just as she was thinking about going in search of lunch. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

‘Really well. I’m having a quick pass through it all to sort it first, then I’ll start reading through the documents tomorrow. There look to be some really interesting items here.’

‘Anything to help with your mystery shooting?’

‘I don’t know yet. I really hope so. There are certainly some documents from around that time so hopefully we’ll be in luck. And I should be able to write up a good history of the hall for you, with all this material.’

He smiled. ‘That would be marvellous. When you have, I’ll get it published. It’ll be such a surprise for… But meanwhile, my staff say you have not left this room since you arrived. Come on. I’m taking you for a late lunch. The kitchen can rustle us up some club sandwiches, if that sounds good to you?’

‘Perfect!’ He held the door open for her and she followed him to the bar. He was tall and trim, with a muscled back showing through his casual shirt. Tasty, she thought, wondering briefly if she’d stand any chance with him. But as soon as that thought crossed her mind it was chased away by a wave of pain from having lost Ben. She was not ready to date anyone else, as the disastrous evening out with Roger had proved.

By the time Gemma left Red Hill Hall that evening she had re-boxed all the documents, but now they were sorted by type and date, ready for her to start reading through and making notes. Her back ached from shifting boxes and leaning over the table, but she felt fired up by a successful day’s work, and was looking forward to getting back to it the next day. She was thinking about the archive throughout her drive home. What would she find? Would it deepen or resolve the mystery?

Back home she put some pasta on to cook, and treated herself to a glass of wine. She was on holiday, after all, so why not? She was about to sit down to eat when her mobile rang.