was, so why I found myself on the verge of tears, I had no idea.
‘And were you happy with everything in the email?’ she asked as Luke made soothing noises in the background. ‘The salary, terms and so on.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘more than happy, which is more than my current employer will be when I tell him that I’m leaving.’
I had told Kate a little more about my time working with Eloise and how it contrasted with working for Jackson.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Luke. ‘We won’t be expecting a reference. Your experience speaks for itself.’
‘Along with your gut instinct,’ I reminded him, brushing away a happy tear and sitting up straighter knowing that he was right; I was up to the task.
‘Exactly,’ he laughed. ‘So, when can you come?’
‘Well,’ I said, mentally flicking through dates, ‘as long as we can get all the paperwork sorted and Harold is happily settled in his new place, I can come at the end of the month. I only have to give a week’s notice for every year I’ve worked at Broad-Meadows, so that’s three weeks in total.’
‘That’s Hallowe’en weekend,’ said Kate, shuffling papers. ‘We can get everything drawn up and signed by then and Harold is moving next weekend, so that will give me time to sort the house out a bit.’
‘Oh, please don’t worry about that, Kate,’ I insisted. ‘Everything there looked fine to me.’
‘Perhaps I’ll just fling the hoover about a bit,’ she said.
‘I can’t tell you how pleased we are, Freya,’ said Luke.
I really couldn’t believe this was happening. These wonderful people had landed in my life and solved my employment and housing problems in one fell swoop!
‘I won’t let you down,’ I told them both, my tears gathering apace. ‘The Winter Garden is going to be wonderful.’
I could hear Abigail cranking up the volume again and felt as if I might be about to match her.
‘I really don’t doubt it,’ said Kate, raising her voice above the din, ‘and I can’t wait to see it. I’ll email you with more details about everything later today, okay?’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘and thank you.’
‘Bye for now,’ they said together.
‘Bye,’ I said, ‘see you at the end of the month.’
‘See you on the thirty-first.’
I ended the call and had a bit of a sob before driving back to Broad-Meadows. Nell rested her head on my lap and I wondered what I was going to do about her now I had made up my mind to move.
Back at the house I tried to creep up to my room, but my plan was thwarted as Jackson was in the kitchen and insisted that I join him for lunch. He made it sound like a pleasant invitation to socialise, even including Nell in the party, but I was on my guard, which was just as well, because he had barely finished carving the joint of beef – badly – before I realised that this was very definitely a working lunch and the thrilling thoughts I wanted to indulge in about my new job and home were going to have to wait.
‘I think that should be enough to be going on with,’ Jackson smiled, once he had finished reeling off a list of tasks for the following week, very few of which had anything to do with the role that I had been employed for.
‘I should say so,’ I said, puffing out my cheeks. ‘I only hope you can find someone at such short notice to undertake them. I’ve more than enough to keep me occupied in the garden and of course, you let the housekeeper go, didn’t you?’
Jane Taylor had worked for Eloise for decades but Jackson had dismissed her within days of his arrival. He had reckoned, long before he had got the measure of the place and the work involved in looking after it, that it didn’t require live-in domestic staff. The agency he had since employed to clean, and who I suspected of gossiping, were slapdash to say the least.
‘I’ll be expecting you to muck in, Freya,’ he told me, with a challenging look in his eye. ‘You’re living here now too, after all.’
I bit my lip, determined not to tell him yet.
‘In lieu of charging you rent, I need you to help out in the house.’
What he really meant was, do most of the work that Jane used to do.
‘And you’ll have to go,’ he said, looking at Nell and addressing her in a completely different tone to the one he had