Letter To My Love Read online

  Letter to My Love

  Elizabeth Cadell

  Friendly Air Publishing

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The Friendly Air

  Also by Elizabeth Cadell

  About the Author

  Afterword

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, locals, business, organizations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1963 by Elizabeth Cadell

  This edition, Copyright © 2017 by the Heirs of Elizabeth Cadell.

  “About the Author” Copyright © 2016 by Janet Reynolds

  Cover art by Aparna Bera

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Introduction

  What is the mystery in Grant Hewitt’s family which holds up his marriage to Claire? Why is he running away from his inheritance and his home? One missing letter lies at the centre of the mystery, a letter which would explain, if it could be found, an old woman’s Will and the strange effect it had on a household.

  Chapter 1

  The market town of Gisborough is situated in one of the less picturesque parts of Sussex. Although only a mile or two off the main London-Brighton road, it has a deserted, dispirited air, except on Thursday mornings, when stalls laden with fruit and vegetables appear on the square, giving it a colourful, almost Continental look. For a few hours, the streets and car parks become crowded and busy; the town’s only hotel enjoys a brief lunch-time prosperity—but by mid-afternoon, all is quiet once more; the car-park attendant and the hotel porter are left to count their tips and look forward to next Thursday, or to the only other likely source of revenue: a wedding.

  On a rainy afternoon in May, a wedding reception was being held in the hotel dining-room—but the porter, after running an experienced eye over the sparse assembly, decided that this was not the kind of wedding from which he could reap any substantial harvest. The guests were middle-aged or elderly, the bridegroom’s two sisters were on their last legs, and there had been no speeches, no toasts, none of the conviviality that led to a loosening of purse strings. You couldn’t, he summed up, carrying out the suitcases and placing himself in a strategic position by the door of the bridal car, call it a wedding at all, with a bride and bridegroom of that age.

  The bridegroom was sixty-four, and had a grown-up daughter named Claire, who, with her fiancé, had given the sole touch of youth to the occasion. The bride was forty-one, and had been, before today’s ceremony, Miss Margaret Swithin, Matron of the Gisborough Cottage Hospital. Now Mrs. Edwin Marston, she was considered by her husband’s two aged sisters, Netta and Ettie, who had not previously met her, to have won a valuable matrimonial prize, and they had come to the wedding in Queen Alexandra collars and Queen Mary toques with the hope of seeing in the bride a proper appreciation of her good fortune. By the end of the afternoon they had learned that she was a woman of dignity and of such sound good sense, that they were obliged to concede that some of the luck was on Edwin’s side. Having settled this matter, they turned their attention to the other reason that had brought them to the wedding: namely, to discover what was holding up the wedding of their niece Claire.

  They had, in the intervals of scrutinizing the bride, endeavoured to form some opinion of Claire’s fiancé, Grant Hewitt. Outwardly, Netta told Ettie, he looked sound enough. She paused, waved aside the champagne and gave a quavering but authoritative order for lemonade. She was tall and upright and had straight, scanty, iron-grey hair and her voice, in her youth, had been loud and commanding; it had subdued a great many people, including her long-dead husband. At eighty-three, the bugle note was cracked, and attempts to browbeat eighty-year-old Ettie were further defeated by the latter’s increasing tendency to slip away into a region inhabited entirely by ghosts.

  “He’s not tall, but he’s well-built, Ettie. He’s not handsome, but he’s got a steady look.”

  “Yes, dear.” Ettie, small and dessicated, had a dried-up wisp of a voice. Her tiny face was framed in fluffy, woolly white hair; her eyes, even now, were a tender blue. “How fast Claire’s growing.”

  “Claire isn’t growing. Claire’s twenty-six. Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

  “Of course. Go on with it, whatever it was.”

  “It was about her fiancé. I don’t know why we worried so much. I still don’t understand the reason for this long postponement, but you can see he’s very much in love with her.”

  “Then what,” enquired Ettie, “can it be?”

  “What can what be?”

  “Delay, you said. You said he must be slippery.”

  “If I did, which I doubt, I was wrong. I simply pointed out that he was thirty-one, with a house of his own and a good deal of money. You’ve only to look at him to see that he’s in splendid health—so why this hanging about? They became engaged in January and now we’re into May. There was, of course, the unfortunate business of his mother’s death—a pity it got into the newspapers—but that was at the beginning of February. So—Ettie, you’re not attending.”

  “Yes, indeed. You were saying that you liked Grant very much.”

  “What I said was that he seems to me quite reliable, but he looks as though there’s something weighing on his mind.”

  “Oh really?” fluted Ettie. “What, exactly?”

  “How should I know?”

  “But surely he should know?”

  “Most certainly Claire should know.”

  “Or,” said Ettie with one of her rare flashes of lucidity, “we should know.”

  “Quite so. We must do something. Edwin can’t be expected to deal with a situation of this kind.”

  Claire Marston, studying her two aunts across the room, was well aware of both the reasons that had brought them down, at such great effort, from their comfortable flat in London. She had managed, so far, to avoid the traps they had set for her; now, seated in a quiet corner, they waited with a vacant seat between them, signalling to her to join them.

  “I suppose,” she said to Grant, “I’d better get it over.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  His tone, seldom other than calm, held resentment, and she turned to look at him. So he’d noticed, she thought, relief flooding her mind. He’d noticed. For her, the afternoon had been charged with the guests’ unspoken conjectures: what was holding up her wedding? Everybody present was aware that she was to have been married in March; everybody knew that her father’s marriage had for a time waited upon her own. Beneath today’s courtesies and congratulations there had been an undercurrent of keen speculation: could something be wrong? Claire, sensitive to atmosphere, had not expected Grant to show any awareness; she knew him to be lacking in imagination and perhaps in perception. Now, with gratitude, she realized that the unspoken criticism had found its way into his consciousness and had made him, for the first time in the past uneasy months, study their situation from a detached point of view.

  “I’ve got to talk to them,” she said. “You ought to come too.”

  “I’d much rather not.”

  Wi
thout further urging, she left him and walked over to join the two fragile old figures, and as always, the sight of them sent her feelings swinging between affection and pity and deep, impotent rage at the ravages that time had wrought in them. She could not remember them as other than aged and withered, but she knew that they had once been beautiful; old photographs proved it, as well as the legends that still persisted in their native village of Hallowes. Netta had married at nineteen; Ettie had remained single only because she had found it impossible to choose any one of the brilliant young men at her feet. The two sisters had been renowned for their dazzling complexions and their vitality and their hour-glass figures, and Claire could not bear to see what they had become. If life divided itself into seven ages or stages, she thought, taking the vacant chair, she herself would prefer to slip away before this last lamentable one.

  “Claire dear,” Netta began without preamble, “we’ve just been having a little talk about you. You mustn’t think us interfering old women; you must remember that there’s really nobody but ourselves to keep an eye on you. You can’t expect your father, with his precarious health, to—”

  The end of the sentence was lost on Claire, whose mind had fixed on the word precarious. Uncertain, doubtful. Could sixty-four years without actual illness, with no undue discomfort, come under the heading of precarious health? Her mother had undoubtedly thought so; she had throughout her married life accorded her husband the status of a semi-invalid. Before her, Netta and Ettie had thought so too; they had looked after their brother until his marriage. After her, the duty, or the privilege, had passed to Claire. She was aware that she had not shown the skill and devotion of her predecessors, and her father’s decision to avail himself of more efficient ministrations had not surprised her.

  Surprise had in any case been ruled out from the first by Miss Swithin’s open, disarmingly candid courtship. Mr. Marston had felt, a few months after his wife’s death, that time was failing to exercise its proverbial healing powers, and he had decided to go to the hospital at Gisborough, which had a wide and well-deserved reputation for the treatment of nervous cases. Claire drove him the eight intervening miles; Miss Swithin received him and might be said never to have given him back. She had, on his return home, promised to drive over to Hallowes and see how he was getting on; her little black car had become a familiar sight passing through the little village and entering the tall gates, and it had stood for many hours outside the graceful white house. Claire, waiting month after month for her fiancé to agree to a definite date for their own wedding, had watched with envy the cool, firm manner in which Margaret Swithin had handled her elderly suitor. Edwin Marston needed her, and she knew that she could make him happy; these facts being established, nothing remained but to bring about a union. This she had done; today she stood in her neat grey suit beside her husband, ready to protect and cherish him as his sisters and his first wife and his daughter had protected and cherished him. Good sense, good judgment, quiet, unobtrusive firmness—these qualities she had demonstrated clearly. She had used them on her own behalf, and Claire was longing to see them directed to her own problems. But the wedding preparations had left little time in which to approach her future stepmother, even if she had known how to phrase an appeal for help. The only counsellors she had were these two tottering old ladies from whom she realized her attention had wandered.

  “—holding up the wedding, Claire dear. It can’t,” Netta pointed out, “be on account of his mother’s death. That was a dreadful thing, of course, but young couples don’t put off marrying indefinitely if there’s a family bereavement; they simply postpone the wedding for a short while, and marry quietly. So—Ettie, may we have your attention?”

  Ettie, to Claire’s relief, was not interested in the present.

  “Surely”—she leaned across to Netta—“that’s Grace Hall over there?”

  “Grace Hall,” Netta said, “is dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Perfectly sure. She died over fifteen years ago, and we went to her funeral.”

  “In that case,” Ettie conceded, “she cannot be sitting over there. Unless…”

  “About the delay,” pursued Netta. “We understand that your fiancé inherited everything under his mother’s Will—house, money, everything. There were no bequests?”

  “None.”

  “But I understand from your father that there are some people living in the house, who refuse to leave.”

  “Grant hasn’t asked them to leave,” said Claire.

  “Who are they? Relations?”

  “One is Grant’s stepsister, Lotty.”

  “Stepsister? Grant’s mother was married more than once?”

  “Yes. Her name was Mrs. Tennant. She was a widow for a long time. Then, about eight years ago, she married someone who had a grown-up son and daughter.”

  “A great mistake,” Ettie said. “Don’t you remember poor Mary Tresser, Netta? She married a man with four children, and he died and left everything to them and poor Mary was left with nothing.”

  “She was left with a nice little income. What her stepchildren got was simply what had belonged to their own mother. Now, Claire: this Lotty you mentioned; she’s not the only one living in the house?”

  “No. There’s her little boy, and a housekeeper.”

  “Little boy? She’s married?”

  “She’s a widow.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Mrs. Summerhill.”

  “I knew a Summerhill once,” Ettie said. “I wonder if she’d be any relation? That girl who used to stay with the Howeys, Netta—do you remember?”

  “Her name was Summerley. Claire—”

  “She ran away with somebody—an actor. Not a good actor.”

  “Ettie, would you very kindly stop interrupting when I’m trying to talk to Claire? Now, Claire: Mrs. Summerhill and her little boy and a housekeeper. Who else?”

  “Nobody—except an old gardener. I saw them all when I went down to the funeral.”

  “I suppose you had met Grant’s mother?”

  “No. Grant and I had arranged to go down there just after we became engaged, but she died before I could meet her.”

  “No girl of my generation,” said Neta, “would have dreamed of accepting a man until she had met his family. I’m sorry to see the old rules being brushed aside. I can quite see why your father kept us in the dark about his decision to remarry: we would only have worried about him—quite unnecessarily, as it turns out. But you should have brought Grant to see us. We are, after all, your nearest relations. And you should have gone down to meet his mother before you became engaged.”

  “There wasn’t time,” Claire explained. “As you know, Grant and I met in September, just before his firm sent him to Canada for four months. He—”

  She paused. September…

  They had met at a dance, met once or twice by appointment afterwards—and then he had flown to Canada and she had gone on looking after her father, reading to him, sitting with him, taking him for slow, short walks or for slow, short drives. She had not forgotten the quiet, shy man with the fair hair and grey eyes and unemphatic way of speaking, and Grant Hewitt had been unable to forget the lovely, slender girl and her grace and her laughter. There had been letters. Claire, looking across the room at the grave, moody man by the window, wondered whether she had imagined the warm, passionate sentences, the bridge of love and longing that he had flung across an ocean. He had come back, they had become engaged . . .

  “So she died before you could meet her?” Netta was saying.

  “She fell down a flight of stairs at the lawyer’s office, just after making a new Will,” said Ettie. “I read about it. The same thing happened to poor Trixie Mayhew. But she didn’t die.”

  “She did die,” Netta said.

  “No, Netta. She broke a leg and—”

  “She died of pneumonia nearly twenty years ago.”

  “Did we go to her funeral?”

 
; “No, we didn’t.”

  “Then how can you be sure—”

  “She died in Hong Kong. What I want to know, Claire, is whether it’s this Will that’s causing the delay.”

  “In a way, yes,” Claire said.

  “Hitch in it?” Ettie asked. “I remember being left two thousand pounds by my poor godmother, but the hitch was that by the time she died, she’d spent all the legacies.”

  “This Will,” Claire said, “was quite in order.”

  “Then somebody must talk to this young man,” Netta said with as much decision as her quavering tones could command. “If this goes on, you’ll wake up and find yourself an old woman, like me.”

  “Or single, like me,” said Ettie.

  “Would you like me to talk to him?” Netta asked.

  “No, thank you, Aunt Netta. I wouldn’t,” Claire answered.

  But somebody, she thought, would soon have to say something. She had gone down with Grant to his mother’s funeral. Nobody in the circumstances could have been expected to be in a cheerful frame of mind, but after the reading of the Will—at which she was not present—he had turned without warning into the silent, morose man she had known for the past three months. The house he loved—Spenders House, on the outskirts of the Kentish town of the same name—the house about which he had told her so much, was now his, but he had from that day onwards made no attempt to outline his future plans, and had refused to go down to the house to discuss the situation with his stepsister or with his mother’s housekeeper. Claire had not at first pressed him; the terms of the Will had left him in a difficult position, and he was not a man capable of making swift decisions. But February had given way to March and April and May, and still the mere mention of the Will brought the same reactions; it had never, he protested over and over again, been meant by his mother to be her last; she would never have gone back on all her promises, never have left old servants unrewarded.