House of Lost Secrets by L. J. Hutton

Author:L. J. Hutton [Hutton, L. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: historical mysteries, Cozy Mysteries, paranormal mystery, strong female, Magical Realism, house mysteries, female detective
Published: 2020-11-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

In her exhausted dream, Cleo was an onlooker in the bedroom she was now in, but it was a different time and place, and rather than herself in the bed, a pale young man lay there, his face creased in pain.

“Oh God it hurts!” he wept. “My leg, oh God, it hurts. How can it hurt when it’s gone?”

The door was flung open and the florid-faced man Cleo recognised from the library marched in.

“Bloody hell, Hugh! Shut up! You’re scaring the children! We’ve moved you as far away from everyone as we can. Do we have to put you out in the gardener’s cottage?”

“Sorry, Bertie, but it hurts so...”

“We know it bloody hurts! You never stop telling us it hurts! God in Heaven, how did you manage to be an officer for so long being such a bloody coward?”

Even in her dream state, Cleo was incensed. Had Bertie not seen Hugh’s medals? How dare he call him a coward? Yet there was enough steel left in Hugh’s soul for him to answer Bertie back.

“Coward, am I? Well I’m not the one too scared to do the decent thing and put right the old wrong.”

“You’d have me impoverish my own children for a fault that isn’t theirs? Damn you, Hugh!”

“Impoverish? God in Heaven, Bertie, you have a strange notion of what that truly means if you think that what we’d be left with would have driven us that low. You might have to live without your finest cigars and the special port you have imported, but none of us are likely to starve. And John and Horace were never going to somewhere like Eton anyway, so how are they going to suffer?”

“If you were a father you’d think differently. But then what woman is going to want a cripple like you?”

Cleo saw Hugh wince and knew that Bertie had hit a sore spot, but he wasn’t down and out yet.

“You just can’t help yourself, can you, Bertie? Always the one with the cruel joke or the barbed comment. And what have you found out now? Because when poor young George came to see me this afternoon, he looked like the world had fallen away from under his feet – and he’d been speaking to you down in the library before he came to me. I know he had, because I could hear you bawling at him from up here. So what did you say to the lad, hmm?”

“If you must know, I told him that it was a good thing I have two boys of my own, because I shall make damned sure that he never inherits.”

“Christ, Bertie! He’s not likely to anyway, so why torment him?”

“Because he’s a perversion, that’s why.”

Cleo’s dream self saw Hugh looking shocked as he demanded, “What in Heaven’s name makes you say that? Honestly, Bertie, sometimes I wish you’d had to go through some of what I’ve had to – though I wouldn’t put Passchendaele onto my worst enemy – because it might have woken you up to the things that really matter in life.

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