Page 22 of Sunshine After the Rain

I sat on my bed several hours later, reflecting on everything I’d learned from Oliver and Rosie across the evening. They had a vision of Willowdale Hall becoming a place of sanctuary and healing but it sounded to me like it already had been for both of them, for Rosie’s parents, for Oliver’s dad Christian and for Oliver’s half-sister Emma. Granted, many bad things had happened here but those involved had recovered and were in a happy place now.

Could Willowdale Hall be the place to heal me?

12

I hadn’t thought it would be possible for me to fall more in love with Willowdale Hall but it seemed it was. With only a few items of furniture looking lost within the large rooms, neither my bedroom nor my office in the corner of the west wing could be labelled ‘homely’ but, to me, they already felt like home. Oliver had invited me to use furniture from other rooms and had helped me relocate a pair of armchairs and a nest of occasional tables from one of the downstairs sitting rooms into my bedroom. The material covering the chairs was way past its best but they were still really comfortable and a couple of cosy throws and a pair of scatter cushions from a shop in Keswick soon transformed them.

Oliver and Rosie had been so welcoming and already felt like friends rather than clients. I’d been invited for Sunday dinner with Rosie’s parents, Alice and Xander, and had also met Oliver’s dad, Christian, along with the seven alpacas he was looking after for Emma this week. It was the local half-term break and she’d gone on holiday with her partner, Killian – the groundsman for the estate – and his family so I looked forward to meeting the pair of them when they returned to work.

I hadn’t seen my parents since moving here because they were also away. Keira and Johnnie had booked a holiday cottage in Northumberland for a week and invited my parents to join them. With Astrid not yet attending school, they didn’t need to go away during school holidays but it had been a last-minute thing fitting around other staff holidays. Their absence worked well for me, giving me a week of settling into Willowdale Hall and finding my stride with my new project without worrying about how to rebuild my damaged relationship with my parents. I’d hoped to drop in after my interview to tell them in person that I was moving back to Willowdale but they’d been away for a long weekend. We’d played telephone tag for a week and, when I eventually caught Mum on the phone and gave her the news, I don’t think it sank in that I was actually moving home. She seemed convinced that I was just taking on a project here and, after going round in circles, I gave up and figured we could talk properly after their holiday when I was in situ.

Tonight, I was joining Tequila Mockingbird at The Hardy Herdwick quiz night and, while I was looking forward to it, I’d told Georgia I hoped she wasn’t expecting me to replace Keira and Johnnie’s collective brain power.

Rosie was meeting Autumn and Dane in the pub an hour before the quiz started so she’d invited me to join them. Although Oliver had been on their team on the night of Georgia’s birthday, he wasn’t a regular team member, usually playing squash with a colleague on a Thursday night and staying over at his house near Penrith.

We set off towards the village, chatting about how we’d spent the day. Rosie stopped as we reached the estate boundary and pointed to the other side of the road.

‘That’s where Hubert Cranleigh hit Mam and left her for dead.’

‘Wow! I remember hearing about it at the time but I hadn’t realised it was quite so close to the estate. Did they question him back then?’

‘Yes, because of how near it was, but he had a strong alibi which placed him out of the area at the time of the accident.’

We set off walking once more.

‘It must be hard passing the place where it happened every time you leave the estate.’

‘Mam couldn’t do it. Every time she passed that spot, she experienced terrifying flashbacks. What’s weird is that, in the same storm that brought down the tree on the boat house, the tree which marked the spot also came down so there’s not such a visual reminder anymore. I think that’s really helped Mam with her recovery.’

I still couldn’t quite get over what I’d learned about Hubert Cranleigh. ‘Who drives into a person and flees from the scene?’

‘The theory was that she’d been hit by a drunk driver and they were either oblivious because of that or they thought they’d hit an animal. We’ll never know for sure because it was after his Lordship died that we found the car and pieced it together. I like to think there was a small element of humanity buried inside him somewhere and he would have stopped if he’d realised he’d hit a person.’

We continued for several paces in silence.

‘If Hubert Cranleigh hadn’t had his riding accident and was still alive when you found his car and made the connections, what do you think you’d have done?’

‘Gosh, there’s a question! What I’d have wanted to do and what I’d probably have done are a bit different. I’d have wanted to jump in his car and drive it straight at him so he could experience Mam’s fear and pain for himself.’

‘Understandable.’

‘But what I think I’d have done is demand to know what really happened. Was he definitely drunk? Did he know he’d hit a person? Why didn’t he stop? Why did he hide the car? At what point did he realise it was Mam he’d hit? What was the real motivation for making it possible for us to stay in the cottage? So many questions but I’ll never get the answers and I’ve had to make my peace with that.’

‘Do you think you’d feel any better if you had the answers?’

She contemplated for a moment. ‘I don’t know. Possibly not. The answers I got might have been worse than the not knowing. What if he’d been aware that he’d hit her, stopped the car, saw it was Mam and she was in a bad way, and ran off so she couldn’t identify him if she came round? Would I want to know that about him? I prefer to think of him as someone who did a bad thing – a very bad thing – and did what he could to make amends by letting us keep our home and jobs. You know that phraseignorance is bliss? In this case, I think it really is.’

It was interesting to hear Rosie’s take on the issue. After Noah died, I’d wanted answers badly. Why had my boy been taken from me when he had his whole future ahead of him? I’d lashed out at everyone as I tried to find those answers, that explanation, that reason, because therehadto be one. But every unanswered question fuelled the anger inside of me. There had to be somebody to blame. His friends, his girlfriend, his teachers, his dad. Anyone. Everyone.

I never got to the bottom of it and that anger and frustration was still there, eating away at me during quiet moments. So I avoided them, immersing myself into my work and research with more vigour than ever before. Would those questions eventually fade away or would they burst forth, refusing to be silenced? My biggest fear right now was that my first sighting of Flynn might be the trigger for that explosion.

‘Slight subject change,’ Rosie announced, breaking into my thoughts. ‘Oliver and I have been talking about the conversion and we agree with you that it makes far more sense for us to live in the west wing and keep the library.’

‘Really? You’ve laid the ghosts to rest?’

‘Maybe not quite yet. What you said about the bedrooms just being rooms which can be changed in look and feel makes a lot of sense. The memories in Oliver’s head are stronger than anything he conjures up by standing in his old bedroom, his mum’s or Hubert’s so he thinks that he would be okay to make those rooms part of our home. But we’d never considered our home just being on one level and we quite like that idea, so we wondered if you could walk us through your vision for each of the west wing options.’

‘I’ll smarten up my sketches tomorrow, add some more detail, and I can run through them whenever you like.’

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