thought her foolish for walking away from her little empire when it was doing so well, but Abi knew that she had to get out. It didn’t feel like her anymore. Somewhere along the way, Abigail Carey had gone missing. The young artist who had sat at her kitchen table, lost in her work, had been swallowed up in a company that had grown so fast, that not only had it made her head spin but she was in fear of losing her very mind.
So she had walked away. The newspapers were full of the story and, quite predictably, some had thought her crazy. But was it really important what strangers thought? Abi believed not. In fact, she believed that if she examined her critics’ lives that she would think them crazy. For we can’t live one another’s lives. Each of us, Abi reasoned, had their own vision of what their life should be and Abi’s had moved so far away from her vision that she had to do something drastic.
Now, sitting in the home she no longer wanted to live in and with no other home on the horizon, she wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake.
Autumn turned to winter and the Sussex landscape was shrouded in mist and rain. Edward stood shivering in one of the first floor rooms, gazing out over the countryside that was almost unrecognisable from that golden autumn day when he’d moved in. He’d taken a walk earlier in the day while the workmen had been making more noise than he could cope with. He’d followed the path from the hall which wound its way up the grassy slope of the down, the mist wet on his face and the scent of smoke spiralling up from the cottages in the village. Winter was definitely here, he’d mused, thinking of how very aware he was now of the passing seasons. Living in London, it was easy to be sheltered from the changes in the weather. Concrete didn’t blossom, and you could go whole weeks without seeing anything green if you were a workaholic as he was. But he was making changes now, wasn’t he? He was making time to see things, to hear them and smell them, to absorb them into his very being.
However, tuning into the senses wasn’t always such a good idea when you were surrounded by noisy workmen and their power tools. Edward had known that Winfield Hall needed a lot of work and he’d been prepared with a team of surveyors, architects and builders on standby for when all the paperwork was completed but the reality of the work was something else. One could never really prepare oneself for the intense noise and the constant dust in the air.
He made a little home for himself on the ground floor near the kitchen and set up his laptop so he could work and he’d bought an airbed for when he stayed overnight. It was kind of fun. A bit like camping only under ornate plaster ceilings. And it surprised him how very little he needed in order to function. Other than food and toiletries, a laptop, a bed, a kettle and a mug were pretty much it.
October mists turned into November sleet and that revealed the true state of the roof. An army of buckets were deployed as repairs were begun before the worst of the winter weather hit.
‘It could be worse,’ one of the builders told him. ‘But it will mean a delay.’
Of course, Edward thought sagely.
December showed the true horror of the rotting timbers behind some of the walls in the north wing, and there was woodworm, death watch beetle, rising damp and dry rot as well as crumbling plasterwork and blocked chimneys. All had to be fixed before the conversion into apartments began. It was a massive undertaking that came to a complete standstill with the onset of the Christmas holidays and New Year.
And then January came. Edward had been prepared for the extent of the work needed, but he hadn’t quite expected the nightmare that was exposed once walls were knocked down. Hundreds of years of horrors which had been patched up and covered over now needed attention. Builders from the past had chosen the wrong materials or taken shortcuts and everything was now being exposed and left for Edward to finance. Of course, he’d set aside a sum of money which he’d thought would be adequate for the restoration of the hall. He’d even topped it up