Cricket Read Free

said, aware of how high-pitched his voice had become. Nerves. He was going to attribute that to nerves. “Sure, okay, whatever.”
    After rifling through her purse, Shenal pulled out a bunch of keys and unlocked the double front door. As she threw the old, creaking doors wide, Henry felt his heart stutter in his chest.
    The house was huge; he’d already established that. But it was beautiful as well.
    Inside, the entrance hall was tiled in terracotta and black squares, stretching away farther into the house. Straight ahead was a huge, sweeping staircase that reminded him of the Cinderella story his mother used to read to him at night. It was wide at the bottom and the top and narrower in the middle, the banisters on either side still far enough apart that Henry was sure he could stand with his arms outstretched and his fingers wouldn’t reach both sides.
    There was a door on either side of the hallway, but both were closed, and it seemed that to get to the back of the house it was necessary to walk around the staircase.
    “Nell Richardson lived here ?” Henry exclaimed as soon as he found his voice again. “On her own ?”
    “God, no,” Shenal said. “She lived in the little gatekeeper’s cottage we passed on the way in. It’s a two-up two-down place. No one’s lived here for at least forty, maybe fifty years. It was turned into a hospital in the Second World War, where they looked after injured soldiers. There’s a military base not far from here. Nell’s father, I believe, lived in the house after the war, but when he died she moved out.”
    “Wow,” Henry said.
    “For the past ten years, at least, she’s had interest from developers who want to turn it into flats. Apartments,” she corrected, for Henry’s benefit. “But she won’t have anyone dividing up the house, which was why she got English Heritage involved.”
    “Those are the people who can decide if it’s of historic importance, right?”
    “Yeah,” Shenal said, looking pleased. “You’ve done your research.”
    “Not really. My father’s lawyer told me.”
    “Well, it’s a long process,” Shenal continued and walked deeper into the house. For lack of anything better to do, Henry followed her. “At the moment, Nell’s being taken care of in a private care home, and it’s expensive. She was worried about some hotshot developer coming in and offering to cover all her bills, and not being able to refuse the money. That’s why there’s trustees involved.”
    “What is the problem, then?” he asked.
    She gave him a sad smile. “Time. For everything, really. She doesn’t have much longer to live, and she knows it, and this place needs serious work or it’s going to become completely irreparable. Her father was a clever man, and he made sure that his investments were in land and property, which he saw as more stable than stocks and shares.”
    “Sounds like a clever man to me.”
    “He was,” Shenal agreed, leading him back through to the main hall. “There are works of art in this place that I’m sure would make money if Nell sent them to auction, but she won’t. This is all she has. It’s her own heritage, and she doesn’t want it chopped up and sold off.”
    Henry sat down on the bottom step of the staircase, deciding that he didn’t care about dust, and put his face in his hands. He felt, rather than watched, Shenal sit down next to him.
    “I know this must be a bit overwhelming,” she said, gently laying a hand on his shoulder.
    “A bit?” he said with a laugh, then steeled himself and looked up. “Okay. What’s the deal here, then?”
    “Nell wants to sign the house and all its contents and land, over to you as her heir. The conditions are that you won’t sell the house, or modify the structure of it, or build on the land until after she’s passed away. Of course, she’d prefer it if you didn’t do that at all, but she appreciates that once she’s dead she doesn’t have much of a say in the