The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton Read Free Page A

drawer along with the other two: a note from his former lover, Mary and one he had received the day before confirming the offer of a tutor’s position with an aristocratic family in Italy. He had made no decision yet, but would use his stay at Easton Deadall to consider it.
    His compass, measuring tape, batteries, torch and military field glasses, all of which he might need to assess the church, he placed on a small writing desk and he took out three books. One was a volume on Saxon and Norman church architecture; the second was Cary’s translation of Dante, the third was a present from his old school friend Charles, who had a passion for detective novels. This one was called Murder on the Links. A sinister-looking figure in overcoat and hat crouched in trees overlooking a bunker on a golf course. The title looked as if it had been daubed in blood. As he put it down he looked closely at a small photograph hanging above the nightstand. A handsome man and a smiling young woman stood outside the Hall. He took it down and turned it over. ‘DVGE and LTE October 1906’. The late Mr Digby and Mrs Lydia Easton, he supposed.
    Leaving his room, he stopped to look around and orient himself in the comfortable, slightly old-fashioned house. Despite its charms, it was from somewhere near here that Kitty Easton had gone missing over ten years ago. How, he thought, could Lydia Easton bear to remain in a place that must once have been filled with the sounds and traces of her daughter and husband, and which was now a monument to their absence? He had left his own marital home as soon as he could after the death of his wife and child. Being there had felt suffocating, as if it had already become a museum. Yet here Lydia stayed in the company of ghosts.
    Maggie appeared when he reached the bottom of the stairs. She led him across the hall in the direction of voices. He hesitated in the library doorway, but Lydia Easton saw him at once, stood up, although he noticed it was with some difficulty, and drew him in.
    She didn’t look like a woman who was shut away with horrors. In fact, when she smiled as she did now, her face had beauty; more so, he guessed, when she was approaching forty, than she might have possessed as a very young woman. The fullness of her mouth, the tiny laughter lines radiating outwards from her eyes, and irises that were almost amber in colour, were combined with a fine bone structure that would keep her striking into old age. The one anomaly was that the pupil of one eye was much larger than the other but that only made her eyes seem more luminous. She seemed too thin, he thought, and her skin was almost translucent, giving her a fragility that was entirely absent in her sister.
    Frances was sprawled in a battered leather armchair in stockinged feet, one leg under her, the other dangling. With her muddy hem, she had the look of a schoolgirl. She and Eleanor had broken off a conversation as he came in. A tea trolley stood between them.
    ‘Tea, Laurie?’ Eleanor reached for the teapot and strainer as Frances uncurled herself and waved a book at him.
    ‘Well done,’ she said. ‘Really interesting.’ She held it up so that he could see the jacket. ‘Eleanor gave me your book a while back. What an incredible amount of work.’
    He felt ridiculously pleased. In the years after the war, the writing of his work on London churches had seemed as stagnant as his life. He had long, solitary days at his disposal, yet somehow the manuscript never moved forward. When he had finally started work as a history beak at Westminster School, it was only then, when he no longer had any free time, that he was suddenly driven to finish it and he was surprised how gratified he’d felt with the result.
    ‘What I love,’ Frances said, as he took the fine china cup and saucer from Eleanor, ‘is that your own passions come through too. Like the bit on Chelsea Old Church. I used to know it and I could feel you hadn’t just ticked off its