It was unusually warm and sunny for April, and I regretted wearing my one good winter coat. It was the only black garment I possessed, and I thought it was only fitting that I appeared at my birthplace dressed in mourning. I brushed a bead of sweat from my forehead. I should have sprung for a taxi from the station. In the old days, the two miles never seemed that far to walk. I had walked home from the village school until I was eleven, and that was a good mile away. I remembered coming home for holidays from university and managing the distance carrying my heavy suitcase. I realised I must still be quite frail. Understandable, really, since it wasn’t too long that I had been out of hospital. They had told me my broken ribs would take time to heal. How long my heart would take they didn’t say.

The tall brick wall surrounding the Langley estate replaced the copse of trees, and involuntarily I picked up my pace, driven by memories of coming home. I’d always broken into a run for the last yards when I was coming home from the village school. I’d burst into the kitchen, and my mother would look up from the stove, where she was always preparing some sort of food. The warm smell of baking would envelop me. She’d be wearing a big white apron, her face would be red, and she’d be liberally sprinkled with flour. She’d open her arms and wrap me in a big hug.

“How was school?” she’d asked. “Were you a good girl and did what your teacher told you?”

“I’m always a good girl. And I always do what I’m told,” I’d replied, and added some minor triumph. “And guess what? I was the only one who could do the long division problem in sums today.”

“Well done.” She’d kissed the top of my head, then we’d looked up when my father came in.

“She was the only one who could finish the arithmetic problem in school today,” my mother had said proudly.

“Well, naturally,” he’d replied. “They are village children.” And he’d gone through to the living room, settling himself with the newspaper. Mum had looked at me, and we’d exchanged a grin of understanding.

The memory of my mother brought sudden tears to my eyes. All these years gone and I still missed her. If only she’d still been alive, things would have been so different. She’d have known what to do and say. She would have been my refuge. Hastily, I brushed the tears away. I was not going to let anybody see me cry.

As this memory played itself out in my head, the wall came to an abrupt end, and I found myself standing outside the massive wrought-iron gates that led to Langley Hall. On the other side of the gates the raked driveway ran between manicured flower beds to the house. The red brick of the Tudor fa?ade glowed in the afternoon sunshine. The sun winked back from leaded paned windows. The front part of the house was pure Tudor, the property given to Sir Edward Langley by King Henry VIII for helping him to dismantle and plunder the monasteries. In fact, this very property used to be home to a monastery until my ancestor destroyed it, drove out the monks, and built himself a fine new house in its place. I suppose I should have guessed from this that a curse would eventually catch up with us.

The house was bigger than it seemed from the front. Subsequent Langleys had added on two fine Georgian wings and a touch of Victorian monstrosity in a corner tower and large conservatory at the rear. I stood still, gawking like a tourist, my hands wrapped around the bars of the gate, as if seeing it for the first time and admiring its beauty. My ancestral home. Home of the Langleys for four hundred years. And I was not unaware of the irony that I had never personally lived in the house—only in the small, dark, and poky gatekeeper’s lodge.

The sign on the wall beside the gate proclaimed it to be “Langley Hall School for Girls.” Instead of attempting to open one of the gates, I went past to a small door in the wall and let myself in the way I had always done. I turned off up the narrow path to the lodge and tried the front door. It was locked. I don’t know who I’d been expecting to find there. My father had lived alone after I had gone to university. We had lived together there, just the two of us, after my mother died when I was eleven.

I stood outside the front door and noticed the peeling paint, the dirty windows, the tiny square of lawn that badly needed mowing, the neglected flower beds, with just a few brave daffodils showing through. A shiver of regret shot through me. I should have swallowed my stupid pride and come to visit. Instead, I had let him die all alone.

I hesitated, unsure what to do next. Langley Hall School was closed for the Easter holidays, but there should still have been someone in residence since the telegram had been sent from that address, indicating that Father had been found on school grounds. I presumed it had been sent by the headmistress, Miss Honeywell. She had a suite of rooms in the hall—what had been, according to my father, the best bedroom in the old days. I turned away from the lodge and willed myself to walk up the drive and confront my former nemesis from when I had spent seven miserable years at that school. After my father had been forced to sell Langley Hall and it had been turned into a girl’s boarding school, he had been allowed to stay on as art master and to have the use of the gatekeeper’s lodge. And when my mother had died, I was offered a scholarship to attend the school as a day girl. I suppose it was meant well—a kindly gesture. My father was delighted that I’d finally be mixing with the right sort of girls and would get the right sort of education. I would rather have gone to the local grammar school with the brightest of my classmates from the village, but one did not argue with my father when he had made up his mind.