Read Another Heartbeat in the House for Free Online Page B

she pretended to be absorbed in the letter that she had read and reread a dozen times since it had arrived last week at her flat in Onslow Gardens.
    It went:
    Dear Miss Chadwick
,
    Mr Frobisher asked me to write to you with some information. I am the keyholder and sometime caretaker of Prospect House.
    You will find everything shipshape, I hope. I will leave bread, milk, ect. for you, and will make up a bed, set fires, ect.
    Things you need to know:
The water is heated by a back boiler, so you will have to light the fire in the library if you want a bath. I will make sure that there is a supply of logs, turf, ect, and candles and oil for lamps.
    You will find tea chests for packing things away in the old stable, and I have asked the grocer to let me have any cardboard boxes he can spare. I will leave these in the box room above the kitchen. I will also leave newspapers for wrapping ornaments, ect.
    The nearest town is an easy distance on bicycle, and you will find a telephone box at the crossroads. I have left a list of addresses and telephone numbers for doctor, solicitor, police station, ect., and the number also of an auctioneer recomended by Mr Frobisher’s solicitor.
    I am not on the telephone, but if you need me I am the farm with the red door just beyond the turn-off to Aill na Coill.
    Wishing you a good stay.
    Yours sincerely
,
    Catherine Healy (Mrs.)
    P.S. I will leave the key under a stone by the boot scraper.
    The letter had been written in an immaculate copperplate hand, and aside from the ‘ects’ Edie’s copy-editor’s eye had noticed only one misspelling. When it had arrived at her flat a week ago, the stamp on the envelope had brought home to her the fact that she really was off ‘somewhere foreign’, for Ireland was another country with its own language and customs and laws and currency and, presumably, prejudices.
    And lambs! Larking in the fields that flanked the lane-ways! She had never seen so many! Milo had never seen a lamb in his life; that was plain. He had his front paws up against the rear window of the Ford, like a child at Harrods at Christmastime.
    Edie folded the letter and put it back in her handbag. They had been driving for fifteen minutes now; they must be nearly there.
    â€˜Excuse me?’ Edie asked the driver. ‘Where is Aill na Coill?’
    â€˜Where did you say, Miss?’
    â€˜Aill na Coill. I’m sorry, my pronunciation is probably dreadful. I don’t speak Irish.’
    â€˜Aill na Coill is across on the other side of the loch, about two miles away by road.’ He pronounced it Al na Quill. ‘You just follow this road around. They call this the New Road. Before the automobiles came the only way you could get here was by a track through the forest. You’d hardly know it was there now –’tis barely recognizable as a right of way in places, let alone a thoroughfare.’
    The road they had turned onto followed the contours of a lake. The shoreline was of coral-pink shingle that looked as though it had never been disturbed by a human footstep. To the right a steep bank rose into a forest of deciduous trees; to the left, in the distance, she saw a small stone jetty poking into the water, and a tumbledown boathouse.
    Edie felt a twist of nostalgia. She remembered sitting on the end of the jetty with Hilly, their legs dangling over the edge as they combed through an illicit copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
for the dirty bits, sniggering at the woodruff in Constance Chatterley’s maiden-hair and crowing with laughter when they stumbled upon a ‘wilting penis’.
    The house sat on a rise overlooking the lake. To her mind it was still the kind of house one might happen upon in a fairy tale – a low, two-storey dwelling that sat gazing out over the lake with shuttered eyes and an air of Giaconda serenity. A turn to the right took them onto a bumpy avenue that wound uphill between trees and rhododendron