Free A Fall from Grace by Robert Barnard

frank.”
    â€œUnderstating things, I’d be willing to bet.”
    â€œYes, well . . . There was—is—one lady, Dora Catchpole, who’d done most of his cleaning for him since your mother’s death.”
    â€œUnpaid?”
    â€œOh yes, of course! None of us would have thoughtof accepting payment.” There was shock in her voice. It was obviously a very important class matter for Mrs. Easton. Only, the lack of payment made it more difficult to hand in your notice. “Anyway, Dora took on not just the scrubbing and vacuuming—he likes things just so, doesn’t he, your dad?—but bits of shopping and laundry. Those two items I sent,” even now she couldn’t bring herself to specify their nature, “came from her. And it was a lot for her to do, being a widow with a part-time job, and so sometimes she took along her granddaughter, just to give a hand like, at the start.”
    Eventually Felicity had to say the word “And,” just to break the silence.
    â€œWell, Kylie’s a nice girl, nearly fifteen, always got her nose in a book, no close friends, rather plain—lovely eyes, but the lads don’t bother much with eyes, do they? And she went along to the cottage to do bits and bobs to help her granny, but also because she was over the moon at getting to know a real writer. She read everything in the library by him, looked up to him, all breathless. Embarrassing to think of, isn’t it, the sort of things we did at that age? I had a thing about clergymen. But of course your father should have tried to cool things down. Everyone thought that.”
    â€œBut instead he accepted all the adoration?”
    â€œYes. Called her ‘my little princess’ and ‘my muse,’ read her what he was writing at the moment, used her name in the book for a fascinating young woman character. There’s not many girls of that age wouldn’t let that sort of thing go to their heads.”
    â€œNo, I can see that. It should never have been offered to her in the first place.”
    â€œIt shouldn’t. That’s what Dora Catchpole thought, though she kept it to herself at first. She went on with the work, but she got very unhappy about Kylie’s emotional state, and she had a few words with her daughter and son-in-law, playing it down a little. But the question kept nagging her: What was it going to lead to? Any mother or relative would have been uneasy.”
    â€œI can see that.”
    â€œSo of course she stopped bringing the girl, and he’d ask, ‘Where’s Kylie?’ and she’d say she had a lot of homework, or a school project or was taking swimming lessons. Eventually she realized she would have to tell him the truth. It was a day when she’d spent several hours giving the house a good going over, to salve her conscience, I expect. She was just off for home, and in the hallway he stopped her and said, ‘Be sure to bring Kylie next time.’ She expected it, because he was saying it all the time. She took a deep breath and said the parents weren’t happy about the situation—which they weren’t, but it was really herself she was talking about. She said with children that age relationships could get a bit more serious than was intended. It was a crucial time, with her exams coming up, and her parents thought it was time for her to stop coming up to the cottage with her granny and knuckle down to real work with her friends (though as I say she hadn’t got any what you’d call friends, which was part of the problem).”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    â€œIt wasn’t what he said, it was what he did.”
    Felicity’s heart missed a beat.
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œHe hit her . . . what you might call a cuff. A heavy cuff across the head. Then he swore at her. Poor Dora ran for her life.”
    * * *
    â€œSo you’ve decided you want to enter the