Seraphina Montagu ran her hands through her short blonde hair and looked at Viola.
‘The actors are arriving tomorrow,’ she said. ‘You must be excited to see Sebastian.’
From the rather worn Laura Ashley armchair opposite, Viola nodded. She was excited to see her brother again. It had been far too long since they’d last seen each other. But she wanted, desperately, to see her actual brother again – the person she could talk to about anything – rather than the famous actor he had become. She hoped they would be able to find some time alone together, just to talk.
‘The beginning of summer,’ she said quietly. And then she sighed and untucked her legs from under her, stretching them out and pointing and flexing her toes. ‘I’m a bit worried that we should be busier than this.’
‘You’re still doing two tours every day that we’re open aren’t you?’ Seraphina asked.
‘Yes, but they aren’t always as popular as I’d like and so far tomorrow afternoon’s tour doesn’t have enough people on it to make it viable. I mean I’ll still do it of course but…’ She paused. ‘I worry that the Ghost of Annie Bishop isn’t enough to lure people in anymore.’
‘There are other angles for the Annie Bishop story though,’ Seraphina said. ‘The disappearance, the possible murder…’
‘Yes but the locals have all heard it before, and we simply don’t get enough passing traffic since the bypass was built. But on the subject of Annie Bishop and tourists, I met an American man yesterday…’
‘Oh yes,’ Seraphina interrupted, raising an eyebrow.
‘Not like that,’ Viola replied, trying not to think about Chase Matthews’ smile or the touch of his hand. ‘Although he was very good-looking. But anyway, he was talking about ghosts and ghost stories and it got me to thinking that in the autumn, once the actors have left for the summer, maybe we could do evening ghost tours. It’d be something different and…’
‘Viola,’ Seraphina said in the soothing voice she used when she wanted Viola to calm down. ‘Let’s just concentrate on the summer for now, shall we? The Shakespeare Festival always brings in a good crowd who spend money on refreshments and souvenirs as well. And this year we have been sold out for weeks, even with more performances than usual, thanks to your brother – the actual famous movie star! Do we have the security to deal with it?’
Viola smiled indulgently. ‘The theatre company are dealing with that,’ she said. ‘They’re used to it. We’ve got Millie Springs this year too, fresh from playing Anne Elliot in that new adaptation of Persuasion. Some people will be coming to see her.’
‘Yes, but she’s not on your brother’s level,’ Seraphina replied. ‘It’s so exciting! Such a coup. I can’t thank you enough for making it happen.’
Seraphina wasn’t the only one buzzing with excitement for the arrival of Viola’s brother. Everyone was talking about it, even though Sebastian had specifically asked for the entire thing to be kept as quiet as possible. How on earth could that be kept quiet? Viola felt as though she’d let him down somewhat with this level of excitement everywhere already.
‘But we need to turn all these newcomers into repeat visitors!’ Viola said. She saw this as a golden opportunity to get people interested in everything to do with Haverford House, not just the famous actor in their midst. ‘Ghost tours might be just what we need as something new and different. Or I could think up something else…’
Seraphina stood up. ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘And then I think we probably need to talk.’
Viola nodded, a feeling of dread in her stomach. She wanted to keep this job more than anything. She needed to stay at Haverford House. She had no idea why, but she had felt so connected to it since she’d first read about it five years ago and took a risk that felt even bigger than the one that had brought her to England in the first place.
She’d been working with Seraphina Montagu ever since. Some days, like today, when they worked together organising each season of events at the house, it was easy to forget that Seraphina was the Dowager Countess of Haverford. Her son David, the seventh (and current) Earl of Haverford, lived in London and worked in finance and refused to have almost anything to do with the house. If he’d had his way the whole estate would have been sold to developers by now, but Seraphina had persuaded him otherwise. She was as attached to the estate as Viola – more so probably. They both wanted to keep the house as it was – open to the public as a piece of history funded by a few meagre grants and as many events as she and her team could put together.
Seraphina’s husband Jeremy, the sixth earl, had died suddenly a decade before, leaving the entire estate and title to his son, who was only twenty-four at the time. That was when David first announced he had no intention of sitting about in the Yorkshire countryside desperately hoping that the house wasn’t going to fall down around his ears like his father had done. Instead, he was going to actually earn some money and do something with his Oxford degree. Seraphina had moved out of the main house and into the dower house – a smaller separate house at the end of the sweeping gravel drive, built specifically for the widows of previous earls – and set about her plan to open Haverford House to the public.
David had thought she was mad, of course.
‘You’ll never make any money,’ he’d said. ‘The house is a dead duck, a money pit. We should knock it down.’
‘It’s my home David,’ Seraphina had replied.
‘And I’m the earl,’ he’d argued, but he’d been smiling indulgently and Seraphina had known then that she’d win.
‘You can do what you like with it,’ David had capitulated in the end. ‘But as soon as the last bits of money run out, I…’
She’d held up her hand. ‘I know,’ she’d said.
Seraphina had told Viola all of this over coffee on that first morning over five years ago. She’d told her that her daughter, Belinda, was much more sympathetic and hadn’t wanted the house to be sold either, but she lived in Canada now so was no help at all. Then Seraphina had done a hilarious impression of her son, which had turned out to be absolutely spot on when Viola finally met the seventh earl – who looked disappointingly unlike a member of the English aristocracy and just like all the other suits in the City.
‘Miraculously the money has held out so far,’ Seraphina had said to Viola on that morning. ‘But, honestly, I’m desperate. I need help. Maybe David’s right and I should sell it.’
‘Oh, let’s not be too hasty,’ Viola had replied as she’d launched into the sales pitch that she had hoped would land her the job as the assistant that the dowager countess hadn’t known she’d needed.
Viola had been in the middle of another silent Sunday brunch with Robin in the café across the road from their flat off Chiswick High Street when she’d first read about Haverford House. Their Sunday brunches, and their lives in general, had become increasingly more silent over the last year since Robin’s promotion. All he had seemed to care about was work and even then, as they sat in the café, he had been engrossed in some paperwork or other for over half an hour while shovelling eggs and bacon into his mouth mindlessly.
Viola had known then that she was going to leave him; she’d known for weeks. His salary wasn’t so important to her that she was going to sacrifice her own happiness. She just hadn’t worked out the details – where she’d go or what she’d do. She’d finished her breakfast and, knowing that she wouldn’t get a word out of Robin for a while yet, she’d picked up a nearby magazine. That was where she’d seen the interview with the dowager countess.
To this day she couldn’t work out what it was that had sucked her into that article so much, or what it was that had made her feel as though she was right there with the dowager. Seraphina Montagu had talked about the history of the estate and about her decision to open the house and grounds to the public after her husband died. ‘My children have no interest,’ she’d told the interviewer. She’d relied almost entirely on volunteers up to that point, according to the interview, ‘but now I’m desperate,’ the dowager had gone on. ‘I probably need someone who knows what they’re doing – an events manager or something I suppose.’
And that was the moment Viola had known. This was the opportunity for the fresh start that she needed. She was the events manager the dowager was asking for. She’d folded the magazine in half and slipped it into her bag.
‘I’m leaving,’ she’d said to Robin, who’d nodded, not lifting his eyes from the pile of paper in front of him. At that point he’d probably just thought she was leaving the café.
The sales pitch to Seraphina that had taken place just a few weeks later had worked.
‘When can you start?’ she’d asked.
‘Straight away if you like,’ Viola had replied.
Five years later she was still here, still desperately trying to keep the house open and, each summer, wondering if it would be her last. She didn’t know what she’d do when her last summer finally came.
She looked up as Seraphina brought the tea tray into the living room of the dower house. Even after all these years Viola couldn’t believe that she regularly spent time drinking tea with a dowager countess. In her mind dowager countesses were terribly old and terribly bossy (not that she’d ever met one before) but Seraphina was neither of these things.
Now in her early sixties, all Seraphina wanted was for her children to be happy and for the house she used to live in to stay standing. It wasn’t very much to ask was it?
‘Here you go.’ Seraphina handed Viola a mug of the chamomile tea that she liked to drink in the evenings. ‘Biscuit?’
Viola took a jammy dodger and waited for Seraphina to sit down and say the sentence that she had been dreading for so long.
‘I think this might have to be our last season.’
*
Haverford House and gardens were open to the public every day except Monday from March until October. Before Viola had taken over as events manager (which, if she was honest, was just a fancy title for general dogsbody) the house had only been open one day a week and the gardens just two. It was no wonder, she’d thought when she’d first arrived, that the whole enterprise was running at a loss.
Viola had used all the experience she’d gained in her various conference and events jobs in London to pull together an action plan. She’d done it in just a few weeks while in the process of leaving Robin and her job at Kew Gardens, and writing an introductory letter to Seraphina Montagu who, thankfully, still seemed as desperate as she had in the magazine and wanted to meet her as soon as possible. She packed everything she’d owned into just two suitcases (what a sad state of affairs that was) and boarded a train to Yorkshire without planning what she would do when she arrived.
Her action plan convinced Seraphina to hire her without really questioning her CV or asking any difficult questions about that gap between leaving Australia and Viola’s first catering job in London. That meant Viola hadn’t had to tell her about the place at St John’s College, Oxford, which she had never settled into, or the unceremonious way in which she’d left (or was ‘sent down’ as the university preferred to say). That story could stay in London with Robin and her colleagues at Kew.
Her friends had thought she was mad to be leaving the civilisation of Chiswick for the wilds of the north. There were moments when she thought she was mad too. But most of the time, when she wasn’t panicking or ticking off endless to-do lists, it felt right. Nothing had felt so right since she’d first left Australia. Maybe even before that if she was honest with herself.
It had been the tale of the disappearance of Annie Bishop that had first hooked her interest. Annie’s story had been mentioned in the magazine interview and something about it had captured Viola’s imagination. She’d spent most of the next day, a day off from work, in the archives at Kew looking for birth and death certificates, old newspaper articles, searching for Annie Bishop and what might have become of her. She’d found a birth certificate that informed her that Annie had been born in April 1912 in the village of Cranmere near the Earl of Haverford’s estate, born on the very day that the Titanic hit the iceberg and the unsinkable ship sank.
She also found a few newspaper clippings, mainly local ones along with three lines in The Times. There was no death certificate because there had never been a body. From what Viola had been able to work out, a man who had been staying with Lord Haverford had been questioned but after that the matter seemed to have been dropped – Lord Haverford must have wanted the whole thing to disappear as quickly as possible, she suspected, and would have paid handsomely to make it do so.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to plant a seed of an idea in Viola’s head. Annie Bishop, according to the article, had been planning a new life in America when she disappeared, which is exactly what Viola had been doing when she first came to England from Australia. It hadn’t worked out for either of them, but Viola was still alive, she still had the chance to start again if she was brave enough. When she’d walked out on Robin at brunch the previous day she hadn’t really known what she’d meant by ‘I’m leaving’, but after her day going through the archives she’d known exactly what she must do.
Five years after leaving London on what was essentially a punt, Viola had built a life for herself at Haverford House and in Cranmere itself. She had built a team of both paid and voluntary workers who ran the house and gardens like clockwork throughout the year. The gift shop, café and second-hand bookshop were all doing well under Viola’s watch and she’d been particularly proud of the way she’d decorated these public areas in muted vintage colours that matched the rest of the house and conjured up a feeling of the period between the wars for the visitors. They even served afternoon teas on the lawn in the summer. The team both worked and played together – it was impossible not to in a village as small as Cranmere – enjoying quiz nights and slap-up dinners after work on Fridays in the local pub.
Winters were harder than summers up here on the edge of the North York Moors. The weather could be bitter and the days felt very long and dark when the house and gardens were shut to the public. Viola would spend the time working out what needed fixing around the estate and calling in the appropriate trade and craftspeople. She would also apply for any grant she thought they could get – anything to keep them going during the cold winter months. She’d managed to get funding to fix the roof the previous winter, which had been a huge relief. Without it, the servants’ rooms in the attic upon which her tour so relied would have been out of bounds.
Viola’s great mission, as she saw it at least, was to successfully apply to the Conservation Trust. The trust bought, repaired, restored and helped manage historic houses and land all over Britain but to be convinced to do so there had to be a reason, something special that was worth holding on to. A Georgian estate, similar to many others across the country, a few antique dollhouses and Viola’s dubious stories about Annie Bishop did not seem to be worth conserving in their eyes. But she was determined to find a way; she had to.
The local council had made an offer to buy the house and grounds and run it as a going concern but the price had been pitiful. David Montagu had actually laughed when Viola had shown it to him and threatened, once again, to sell to developers. If he did that, Seraphina would lose her home and many local people would lose their jobs. She simply couldn’t let it happen.
If Haverford House was sold, Viola too would lose her home – a small flat conversion on the first floor of the main house – and she had nowhere else to go. She couldn’t turn to Sebastian. His life was too different to hers. Sometimes she thought about the flat she used to share with Robin in Chiswick. Sometimes she even thought about her home in the small town in New South Wales that she had left fifteen years before, full of excitement, ambition and a side serving of crippling grief – grief that got the better of her in the end.
But she didn’t want to go backwards and saving the house had become the most important thing on her list of things she had to do.
‘You mean this will be the last Shakespeare Festival?’ Viola asked now in response to Seraphina’s rather worrying statement. ‘But why? It’s been going really well for years now.’ Her brother’s involvement had been a huge draw of course.
The Shakespeare Festival took place every summer at Haverford. The entire enterprise had been Viola’s baby right from the start. Watching Shakespeare outside on a balmy evening was one of Viola’s favourite things to do. While English summers were not guaranteed to be balmy as they were in New South Wales, she’d been to enough outdoor Shakespeare productions to know that people in England would happily turn out even on a chilly summer’s night and if it rained, they would just put up their umbrellas and carry on.
‘Do we have the summers for it?’ Seraphina had asked when Viola had first presented her with the idea. ‘I mean we don’t have Sydney summers up here. I’m not sure we even have London summers.’ Viola, who by then had lived through one disappointingly damp Yorkshire summer, was sure that with enough rugs and umbrellas for people to borrow, and with the right plays, the right actors, everything would fall into place.
She’d been right and had seen the surprise in Seraphina’s face when the first festival had sold out in just a few days. It had continued to be a success ever since.
The idea had come, not just from her own love of outdoor theatre, but also from something she had read about Thomas Everard. There was frustratingly little to be found about the American with the mysterious connection to the disappearance of Annie Bishop, other than he had been staying at Haverford House during the summer of 1933 and there had been talk of him marrying the then Lord Haverford’s youngest daughter. The other snippet of information Viola had managed to find out was that Thomas had been an up-and-coming actor and, a few months before arriving in Yorkshire, had played Horatio in a London production of Hamlet. Haverford House wasn’t old enough to try to claim any connection with Shakespeare himself, but as Chase Matthews had said, Thomas Everard had put on a production of Twelfth Night in the summer of 1933. From that connection Viola had launched the festival to much success.
She had worked so hard on the festival over the years, as well as on the house itself. While a part of her had been waiting for the conversation with Seraphina that she knew was about to happen, she also knew she would never be ready for it.
Seraphina put down her mug of tea and reached across to take Viola’s hand. ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘But not just the Shakespeare Festival.’
This year’s festival was bigger and better than anything they’d put on previously, mostly due to her brother and the publicity his name brought. Sebastian was playing a starring role in all three plays the festival was putting on that summer – Oberon, Banquo and Duke Orsino. But it still didn’t seem to be enough to save Haverford.
‘What then?’ Viola asked, although she already knew. She could already feel the news sitting in her stomach like lead.
‘It’s time, Viola. It’s time to put Haverford on the market. We’ve had a good run and tried our best, but David’s right. It’s just not financially viable anymore.’
‘But there’s so much we haven’t tried yet.’ Viola could feel the panic rising in her throat. ‘There’s still grants to apply for. We could try the ghost tours, maybe we could have overnight stays in the grounds – glamping or something and…’
‘Viola, we’ve tried everything – you know that. And we need hundreds of thousands a year to keep this place viable. I can no longer see a way of guaranteeing that.’
She knew they’d tried a lot of things. But she remained convinced that there must be something they’d missed, something that could save Haverford House and its grounds from the developer.
‘But what will you do? Where will you live?’
Seraphina leaned back in her chair and picked up her mug again. ‘Well, in an ideal world I’d like to stay in the dower house but I think we both know that won’t happen. A developer is hardly going to let me live here for free when they can sell the dower house for several million.’ She stopped for a moment and Viola watched her catch her breath. Seraphina wanted to stay here – she knew that. ‘David wants me to take one of the London properties, probably the Kensington flat. It will certainly do temporarily. If I can’t stand it, I’m sure I can persuade David to sell the flat and let me buy somewhere in Harrogate.’
‘But what…’
‘I know that you’ll be losing your home too,’ Seraphina interrupted gently with a sad smile. ‘But it’s not going to happen overnight. You’ll have plenty of time to find an even better job somewhere else. You’re an incredibly talented young lady, Viola. You’ll be snapped up in no time.’
Viola put down her empty mug. She desperately wanted to get out of the dower house and back to her flat before she started crying. ‘One last summer,’ she said as she started to get ready to leave. ‘Let’s make it the best summer ever then, shall we?’
‘That’s the spirit!’
As Viola was leaving, heading off back to her own flat in the main house, Seraphina called her back.
‘Viola, I can see this is incredibly hard for you,’ she said. ‘And I know how much Haverford has come to mean to you.’
Viola nodded in response, unable to find any suitable words.
‘I am truly sorry.’