Chapter 3 - THE WOMAN IN EAST LODGE
Hannah Vale opened the cottage door with one hand braced against the frame.
She was thirty-six.
Oliver knew her age because Eleanor had found the council records before breakfast.
She had the same dark hair as Maisie, the same careful expression—and something else Oliver could not immediately place.
“Mr Harrington.”
“Oliver.”
She looked past him.
“Did Malcolm see you come here?”
“Yes.”
Hannah almost laughed.
“Of course he did.”
East Lodge was small but carefully kept. Books crowded the shelves. A sewing machine occupied one corner. Maisie sat at the table drawing a picture of Harrington Hall with too many chimneys.
Oliver noticed the bruising on Hannah’s wrist.
Not severe.
Recent.
“Did Malcolm do that?”
She covered it.
“He grabbed me when I tried to enter the records room.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked for something he doesn’t want me to have.”
She brought out a battered biscuit tin.
Inside were letters.
Old receipts.
Photographs.
One showed the same young woman from Oliver’s torn library photograph.
“My grandmother,” Hannah said. “Marianne Vale.”
Oliver looked closer.
“Did she work here?”
“For years. Estate archives first. Then she looked after part of the library.”
“And the child?”
Hannah’s expression became guarded.
“My mother.”
Oliver looked up.
“Your mother was photographed with my father?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“That is what I’ve been trying to find out.”
Hannah explained that her mother, Ruth, had died twelve years earlier. Before her death she gave Hannah the rusted key and told her never to surrender it to anyone connected with the estate management office.
“She said the Harringtons owed us nothing,” Hannah said, “but that the truth belonged to us.”
“What truth?”
“She never said.”
That frustrated Oliver more than it should have.
Hannah opened another envelope.
Inside was an old bank advice slip.
Regular transfers had been made from an account identified only as:
Harrington Family Settlement No. 4
Beneficiary:
R. Vale.
The payments stopped eighteen years earlier.
The year Oliver left England.
“Did you ask Malcolm about this?”
“Several times.”
“What did he say?”
“That the payments were charity from your father and the arrangement ended.”
Maisie looked up from her drawing.
“Mum doesn’t believe him.”
Oliver glanced at the child.
“Why not?”
Maisie put down her purple pencil.
“Because Grandma Catherine gave Mum the key.”
Oliver went still.
“My mother?”
Maisie nodded.
Hannah looked embarrassed.
“Maisie.”
“But she did.”
Oliver turned to Hannah.
“You knew my mother?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“I was eleven.”
That was twenty-five years earlier.
Long before Oliver left.
Long before Malcolm claimed the Vales were merely difficult tenants.
Hannah’s voice softened.
“Your mother came to our flat in York. She gave my mother an envelope and told her, ‘If Edward fails to put this right, use the key.’”
Oliver felt the room shrink around him.
“What was in the envelope?”
Hannah looked toward the rusted key around Maisie’s neck.
May you like
“That’s the problem.”
“We never found what it opens.”
