The last party at silver.., p.1
The Last Party at Silverton Hall, page 1
Also by Rachel Burton
The Tearoom on the Bay
The Summer Island Festival
A Bookshop Christmas
The Secrets of Summer House
THE LAST PARTY AT SILVERTON HALL
Rachel Burton
AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS
www.ariafiction.com
First published in the UK in 2023 by Head of Zeus Ltd, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Rachel Burton, 2023
The moral right of Rachel Burton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781803287256
ISBN (E): 9781803287263
Cover design: Leah Jacobs-Gordon
Head of Zeus Ltd
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WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Nick and Isobel’s Playlist
About the Author
Acknowledgements
An Invitation from the Publisher
In memory of Vesper, the ginger cat who sat at my feet as I worked.
Look at that sea, girls – all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn’t enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.
—L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Prologue
Norfolk, England – June 1953
She sat on the beach in her bathing suit, towel wrapped around her, knees tucked up to her chest. Her head ached from the champagne the previous night and her eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep. Her husband was at home, asleep now, resting from the night before, from the party at Silverton Hall, the most glamorous evening of her life, and from the revelations that came afterwards.
I’ll explain everything tomorrow.
But she hadn’t let him wait until tomorrow. She’d demanded he tell her everything then and there.
‘Let’s get some sleep,’ he’d said.
But she’d refused and so he’d told her as they stood in the kitchen next to the twin tub washing machine, dressed in their evening clothes. She could still feel the sensation of the countertop beneath her fingers, the countertop she’d gripped harder and harder as he’d told her the truth, quietly and calmly as though what he was saying was completely ordinary and routine.
When he’d finished, she’d walked away. He had called her name, tried to reach for her, but she’d gone upstairs, taken off the midnight-blue dress and packed it carefully away, wrapping it in tissue paper. Then she’d gathered her swimming things and left for the beach. As she passed through the living room she saw him asleep on the couch, snoring gently, his bow tie undone.
It was the morning after midsummer and the sun was already climbing in the sky. She could feel its warmth on her skin as she sat on the sand and waited for her friend. She wouldn’t have got through these last months without her, without their morning swims in the salt water. But she wondered now how much longer this early morning ritual could continue, or if she even wanted it to.
Because how could anything ever be the same now?
1
Norfolk – July 2019
‘I still can’t believe she left me Little Clarion,’ Isobel said, staring up at the house in front of her. ‘I always thought she’d leave it to my mother.’
‘These were Vivien’s instructions,’ the lawyer replied in clipped tones. ‘She was very specific.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Has your mother said something?’ he asked, fidgeting with concern. It was the most animated Isobel had seen her grandmother’s lawyer all morning. He was scratching his ear and squinting in the bright summer sunshine.
She smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Mum doesn’t want the house.’ Isobel wondered if her mother, Gina, wanted anything that reminded her of Vivien or Silverton Bay. Gina and Vivien had never seen eye to eye and Isobel had never really understood the reasons why. Knowing the stubbornness of both her mother and grandmother it was probably something petty that had got lost in the murkiness of the passing years.
‘I see,’ Mr Brecher said, shifting from one foot to the other, probably embarrassed by the flaws of other people’s families. ‘Well, perhaps it’s time to give you the keys.’ He held them out to her, explaining which key was for which lock. As she took them from him, she noticed that her hands were shaking.
Mr Brecher stayed at the bottom of the steps as Isobel walked up to the front door, looking up once again at the three-storey, late Victorian house that she couldn’t quite believe was now hers. She put the correct key in the lock and turned it until it clicked. The click brought back memories of when she used to live here – the last time she’d had her own front door key. She swallowed as the door swung open.
‘I’ll be on my way,’ Mr Brecher said as he backed down the garden path towards his car, which was parked behind Isobel’s battered Citroën on the road in front of the house.
‘Is there anything else I need to know?’ Isobel asked. She suddenly didn’t want to be left alone with this huge five-bedroomed house. It felt like too much of a responsibility.
‘There’s still some paperwork to go through,’ he said. He seemed small and faraway at the bottom of the steps and Isobel started to walk towards him again, away from the house. ‘Some things I need you to sign, but I’ll call you about those.’
‘OK,’ Isobel said as Mr Brecher opened the garden gate and stepped through.
As he closed the gate behind him he turned around, leaning slightly on the wrought iron. ‘Don’t forget Vivien’s wishes,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t know why, but they were very important to her.’
‘I won’t,’ Isobel said as the lawyer unlocked his Rover.
*
Isobel hadn’t really thought about what would happen to the house at all until the funeral – she’d been too wrapped up in her grief and her guilt. She’d loved her grandmother and had spent so much of her childhood in Silverton Bay with her, but she hadn’t been back to the village much over the last few years. She’d known Vivien was getting older, known she wasn’t really coping with the upkeep of the house anymore. She should have visited more often. She should have spent more time with her grandmother – more than just the odd day here and there, taking her out for lunch, or for a drive along the coast. Isobel had never wanted to stay in the house for very long when she visited – it had smelled musty, the beautiful garden had become overgrown, and Vivien was only living in the downstairs rooms. It was no longer the house Isobel had grown up in, and the sight of it slowly falling apart was too much of a reminder of her grandmother’s age. So she’d avoided it completely by taking Vivien out instead. Vivien had loved to go out for a drive, to get away from the Bay for a while. It had reminded her, she’d told Isobel once, of when she and her late husband, Max, had gone out in his open-top car – the first car she’d ever been in. It was one of only a handful of times Vivien ever mentioned Max.
When Isobel had taken the phone call back in April telling her that her grandmother had died – a heart attack, fatal and immediate, whilst shopping in the village – she’d felt her knees buckle beneath her from the shock. She hadn’t been expecting it, even though she should have been. Vivien had always been such a strong presence in Isobel’s life. It seemed almost impossible to imagine that she wasn’t there anymore, that she would never be there again.
‘But she seemed so well,’ she’d said to Spencer, who had called her to break the news. But as soon as Isobel said the words, she knew they weren’t true. Vivien hadn’t really been looking well for months – each time Isobel had visited her grandmother she’d seemed smaller, frailer.
‘I should have done more, seen her more often.’
‘There was nothing you could have done, love,’ Spencer had replied soothingly. ‘We all have our time and your grandmother had lived a good life.’
Isobel had gone to the funeral with her flatmate, Mattie, who’d insisted on coming for moral support. Gina, Isobel’s mother, hadn’t been able to come – the thought of getting on a flight from New York was too much for her still. She hadn’t flown since 2001.
‘You don’t understand,’ she’d told Isobel on numerous occasions. ‘You weren’t here, you didn’t see those planes fly into that building.’
Isobel’s father had offered to fly over to go with her, but she’d told him she was OK. She didn’t want to trouble him and, even more than that, she didn’t want to have a conversation about what she was going to do with her life. Not now.
So she’d gone to her grandmother’s funeral with Mattie and afterwards had been taken to one side by Mr Brecher. She’d thought she’d known what was coming, that the house would be left to Gina, who didn’t fly of course, so Isobel would have to deal with it all. She hadn’t been expecting Vivien to miss Gina out altogether.
She had been in a daze as Mattie drove them both back to Cambridge afterwards. She had been in a daze all day, truth be told, barely talking to anybody at the funeral, desperate to get back in Mattie’s car and away from the reminders of her grandmother. And so it had been Mattie who had presented the case, just as she would have done in court, for what became known as ‘Isobel’s New Start’.
‘A house in a village you love, no rent or mortgage, big enough to turn one room into a studio,’ she’d said, listing out the points on her fingers. ‘You could start painting again, Isobel, you could give up the job you hate. Have you any idea how many people dream of this?’
But it didn’t feel like a dream, not now Vivien was dead.
Leaving the job she hated was a good start, though, and she’d started back at St Swithin’s School after the Easter holidays by handing in her term’s notice.
‘But you’re the best art teacher this school has ever had,’ the head had said.
Too damn good for this place. Something both she and her father could agree on, but she didn’t say it out loud.
Three months after her grandmother’s funeral, on a warm and sunny July morning, Isobel stood in the hallway of the house that was now hers as Mr Brecher’s Rover drove away, leaving her alone. The house felt full of memories, emotions, potential. She could feel them all floating around her like the dust motes in the sun, but she felt reluctant to step further into the house for fear of disturbing ghosts. She could smell the musty smell of unused rooms and dirty upholstery that had put her off staying here too long for the last few years and she was sure she could smell damp. She touched the faded Strawberry Thief wallpaper in the hallway.
You’re being ridiculous, she told herself. It just needs a good airing, that’s all. It’s been shut up for months.
She took a breath and walked purposefully into the house, leaving the front door open behind her. She walked through to the dining room at the back of the house – it had large windows overlooking the garden and if she opened them she could get a through breeze. That would sort everything out.
The dining room window was stiff at first and seemed to be caught up in something that was growing up the back wall – a vine or ivy, perhaps? Isobel put her shoulder against it and pushed as hard as she could.
And watched as the bottom part of the window frame crumbled to dust.
*
‘How did I not notice how dilapidated everything had become?’ Isobel asked. On the other end of the phone she heard Mattie sigh a little bit.
‘I don’t know, Izzy, you told me it was ready to move into.’
‘I…I thought it was…’ Isobel hesitated. Had she really? Or had she been kidding herself, remembering the house of her childhood rather than the house of now?
The window frame had just been the start of it – she’d managed to get the window closed again so at least the house was secure, or as secure as she was going to get it. As she’d started walking around she’d noticed problem after problem – blown electric sockets, damp walls, dried mouse droppings on the top floor – and she realised she had no idea how to deal with any of it.
‘I knew the whole house was in need of modernisation,’ she said to Mattie. ‘I’m fairly sure it needs rewiring and the plumbing has been making a clanging noise for as long as I can remember. But I thought it was liveable. Nana had been living here after all.’
‘And you hadn’t noticed anything about the way she was living?’ Mattie asked. There was no malice or judgement in her question, she just wanted to know in that simple, straightforward way of hers. Suddenly Isobel just wanted to be back in Cambridge, sitting in the living room of Mattie’s flat, drinking too much tea and putting the world to rights.
‘No,’ she replied hesitantly. ‘But…well… I never really stayed long. Recently I’d taken to staying only long enough to pick Nana up and take her out for the day and then settle her back again afterwards. I’m not sure why.’
But she did know why. Just as she’d known, deep down, that the house was in worse repair than she was willing to admit. She couldn’t bear the thought of her grandmother, the person she loved most in the whole world, getting old, of her not being the woman she’d always been. So she’d ignored it, just as she’d ignored the cracks in the walls and the faint smell of must and damp in all the parts of the house that Vivien hadn’t lived in anymore.
And in her head Isobel had preserved the version of the house that had last existed during that one perfect summer before she went to university.
‘Come back,’ Mattie said now. ‘Come back to Cambridge and we’ll sort something out.’
It was so tempting, but… ‘No, I can’t. This was meant to be a second chance. I can’t give up at the first hurdle. I haven’t even been back in Silverton Bay for twenty-four hours!’
‘You don’t have to go back to teaching or anything. Just come back and put the house on the market. I know how much houses along the Norfolk coast sell for these days, even the dilapidated ones. Sell it and even after taxes the money will be enough to help you start again.’ A few years ago, just before Silverton Hall had reopened as a hotel, the gardens were used to portray Sotherton in a TV production of Mansfield Park. Ever since then, the village and the surrounding area kept appearing in the Sunday papers as a highly desirable place to live. House prices had shot through the roof.
‘I can’t sell it.’
‘I know how much you want this, Izzy, but—’
‘No, I can’t. Not for thirteen months from the day I get the keys. Nana stipulated it in her will.’
‘Can she do that? It doesn’t sound legally binding to me.’
‘You’re a criminal barrister not a probate lawyer, Mattie. Mr Brecher said I had to abide by her codicil.’
‘Hmmm…’ Mattie mumbled. She hadn’t liked Mr Brecher when she’d met him at the funeral. She’d called him ‘an old, fussy lawyer holding the profession back’ but Isobel suspected that he knew what he was talking about. ‘I’m going to ask around and find out how legally binding that request is.’
‘OK,’ Isobel replied, knowing there was little point in arguing. ‘And I’m going to stay here, for a day or so at least.’
‘In the house?’
Isobel thought for a moment. She thought about the bedrooms upstairs that seemed to have been closed off for years. She hadn’t wanted to open another window and she wasn’t sure if they could be slept in without being aired. She thought about the new sheets and duvet cover in the back of her car that she’d brought with her, ready for her new room in her new house – the bedroom on the top floor that she’d slept in when she was younger that now seemed to be home to a family of mice.
‘No, not in the house. Not for tonight at least.’ It wouldn’t take that much to get the house liveable in, would it? A dehumidifier, a pest control expert, someone to fix the windows…how much would all that cost? ‘I’ll stay at Silverton Hall again tonight.’ She’d stayed there the night before and could barely afford that, let alone a second night, but what else could she do right now?
