Escape from Passion by Barbara Cartland

Author:Barbara Cartland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788674492
Publisher: Barbara Cartland Ebooks ltd
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Every now and then she stopped and bent to inspect a chair or a picture frame for dust, conscientiously performing her duties and yet knowing that it was all a pretence.

She had another reason for moving about the house one that she was half-ashamed about. It was curiosity about The Priory’s former owner and Mistress, Norman Mitcham’s wife.

Fleur’s thoughts were continually on Lady Cynthia Ashwin, but why she could not tell.

She found herself thinking about her, wondering what she had been like and why she had married Norman Mitcham only to leave him and by her departure make herself an exile from her home and from all that was intimately connected with the history of her family.

For Fleur had learnt now that it was not Sir Norman’s good taste that she had admired the first day she had entered The Priory as the house had remained unchanged by his coming.

It was the Ashwins who had left a permanent memorial of themselves in the grey walls of a house which had been in their family for over five centuries.

It was impossible for Fleur not to think of Sir Norman and his mother as interlopers and at times she felt almost a personal resentment against them, especially Sir Norman.

When he was unusually morose and monosyllabic at meals, she would then fancy that the elegant Ashwins, looking down on them from their eminence on the panelled walls of the dining room, sneered as if they asked,

‘What can you expect from a mere manufacturer? We may have been bad, but we knew the arts and graces of life. This man only understands how to make wheels go round!’

Fleur would chide herself for such thoughts, but Sir Norman was difficult and sometimes it was hard to hide her own boredom and longing for someone she could talk to, someone who would share her interests and relieve an almost overwhelming inner loneliness.

Gradually, as she absorbed the family history, she then found herself becoming more and more curious about the last Ashwin to have lived here, the Lady Cynthia herself.

Fleur became determined that somehow she would learn more about her and she found herself searching the house for some sign of her presence.

It was impossible for Cynthia, vivid and vivacious as Fleur imagined her, to have come and gone and left nothing behind.

Today Fleur was determined to go to inspect Cynthia’s bedroom. She knew where it was. On her first tour of inspection, Manvers, the Head Housemaid, who had taken her round had passed a door in the West wing.

“What room is that?” Fleur had enquired.

“That room is kept closed,” Manvers had replied. “Sir Norman’s orders.”

“Is it ever turned out?”

“Once a month and I do it myself.”

Manvers was a gruff uncommunicative sort of woman who resented Fleur’s advent into the household and was determined to be as unhelpful as she dared.

Fleur said nothing at the time, she did not insist on her right of going into the room, but now she meant to satisfy her curiosity. It was Manvers’s day out and she was glad of that.

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