Secret Shores by Ella Carey

Author:Ella Carey [Carey, Ella]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781542046497
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Haslemere, 1946

The horizon beyond the endless paddocks was stained a deep pink. Rebecca leaned against the fence at the edge of the old stable yard. She could not help but imagine the whispers and rustles that would fill the landscape overnight; snakes, possums, and mopokes would take over the paddocks while everyone in the grand old house slept.

It was the landscape that had drawn her in out here, so uniquely Australian, vast and beautiful and wild all at once. As darkness fell across Haslemere, she should have been seated at her dressing table and looking at her three-tiered mirror, being attended to by the maid. Instead, she’d found herself drawn not only to the ancient landscape but to the garden with its secret paths and the vast old mansion, where she sensed ghosts of generations past, of the women who’d married into the Russell family, living in such opulence as to have a steamship of their own. The endless, grand rooms fascinated her. She’d poked her head into the vast farmhouse kitchen, then gone in, as it was empty. Glancing into the servants’ small living room that led to their bedrooms and the laundry, she thought of all the lives spent here in service, while the family lived in splendid grandeur.

Rebecca turned back from gazing at the endless sky. She wandered through the quiet stable yard, opening the chipped green wooden door set in the old stone wall that she and Edward had taken when they left the garden, wandering back toward the roses that glistened in the dim light. She passed the aviary, big enough to house tall trees, and the conservatory with its tropical plants.

Rebecca made her way past the tennis court, its sagging net sitting as if waiting for someone, anyone, to play a game again. Beyond the tennis court, there was a folly, a tower that apparently Edward’s grandfather used to sit in while watching games of tennis in the station’s heyday when the house had been full of guests. So, where to with all this? How would Edward’s legacy marry with his modernist views?

And that begged the next question—unless someone with a slew of both determination and money took these old places on, what was going to become of these wonderful reminders of the past? How was all the hard work of previous generations and the lifestyle that these mansions demanded supposed to ring true with the generation who had just been through the war? No one wanted to work in service any more. Clare seemed an aberration to Rebecca.

Rebecca stopped by a wall that crumbled, the old sandstone tumbling to the earth in places. What Edward wanted was not going to be simple. She only hoped his dreams—which by now were intertwined with her own—were not going to be impossible in the end. She turned back to the house, wandering through darkness now.

She went into the front door, passing through the long gallery, past the library, greeting Clare and entering her bedroom. She

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