Free The Love Letter by Fiona Walker Page A

of sport and late-night philosophising over one too many cognacs; they adored good food, travel and adventure. Their circles of friends fused together perfectly.
    Before first-borns Rosalind and Freddie were a year old, the dinner parties in Kew and Richmond had already become legendary. By the time second children Daisy and then Allegra came along, the families were taking summer holidays together to remotecorners of the West Country, amongst which was an amazing clifftop estate belonging to a client of Nigel’s.
    Legs, who had been just four at the time, remembered little of their first trip to Farcombe, although it had been the holiday on which she and Daisy became true summer best friends, bonding over a sandcastle on Fargoe Beach that they decorated with pebbles and shells, photographs of which still rested on both the Spycove and Spywood mantels, shown off by its two little architects in swimming costumes holding buckets and spades. In those days, the families had stayed in a pair of pretty, ivy-clad cottages close to the main hall. Their enigmatic host, Hector Protheroe, hadn’t been in residence, so the girls had enjoyed free range around the amazing Farcombe estate, running through the courtyards, swimming in the pool, pretending they were princesses in a fairytale castle. They imagined Hector must be a king.
    Much later, Legs realised that this first summer holiday at Farcombe must have been the year that Hector’s wife Ella died. The Protheroes had been living in America to enable Ella to have the best of cutting-edge treatment in an attempt to turn the tide on the huge tumour growing in her heart. After he was widowed, Hector continued to live between New York and London, and the king of Farcombe eluded his princesses.
    The annual holidays at Farcombe continued for the Norths and Foulkes as the go-getting eighties were replaced by the caring nineties and the main Hall fell into increasing disrepair. Allegra and Daisy played in their magical kingdom each summer, their friendship deepening. At six, the two girls had made a friends-for-life pact in the woods above Eascombe Bay, burying their favourite Barbies side by side beneath a beech tree as a symbolic gesture of for ever friendship. As far as Legs knew they were still there, faded little plastic effigies with pert breasts and slim ankles nestling in the deep Devon loam. They knew every nook and cranny around Farcombe, every hiding spot. One summer, they even discovered a way of getting into the big house along the sea passage fromEascombe Cove that tunnelled up through the cellars, marvelling at the tapestries and panelling, the huge oil paintings and furniture all covered with dust sheets. It became their secret play castle.
    Then the king came back, and that was shattered. Hector had sold his company, Smile Media, to return to Farcombe and renovate the house in honour of his late wife. He would start up a jazz festival in his magical corner of North Devon; Farcombe Festival was going to be pure pleasure, a sabbatical project to enable him to take a much-needed rest from big business and spend time with his only son, Francis, who had been brought up and educated thus far in America.
    The North and Foulkes children were told there would be no more holidays at Farcombe. The cottages where the families had stayed each summer for half a decade were earmarked for staff accommodation. Legs and Daisy mourned their lost North Devon palace.
    Legs wrote a heartfelt letter to Hector, princess to king, begging him to reconsider his plans. It ran to three pages of lined A5, complete with pencil illustrations and a lucky four leaf clover that she’d found one year at Farcombe and kept pressed in her diary ever since. She Sellotaped it beside her signature – a swirly confection that she’d been perfecting all term, which made ‘Allegra’ indecipherable.
    Thus Hector Protheroe’s reply came addressed to Miss Alligator North. In flamboyant, spiky handwriting on