In the beginning . . .
‘Of course, it needs a bit of work,’ the estate agent said.
The woman looked around the room, noticing the crumbling plaster, the damp stone and the rotting timbers.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’
‘And that has been reflected in the price.’
She nodded, knowing that she was lucky to be even considering buying a place like this.
‘Would you mind if I walked around on my own for a while?’ she asked.
‘Of course not. I’ll wait for you outside.’
She watched as he left her, listening to the sound his neat shoes made on the old flagstone floor. It was a good floor, she noticed. Perhaps it was one of the few things in the place that didn’t need fixing. She looked up at the ceiling high above her and gasped. There was so much space here. Not that she needed a lot of space, being on her own, but she appreciated having it around her because it meant that other people wouldn’t occupy it. It would be all hers and that was important.
So there was a bit of work to do, but there wasn’t anything insurmountable, was there? Not after what she’d been through. A little painting here, a little carpeting there. Okay, maybe some new timbers, plastering and stonework. She’d look into that at some point. And some window shutters to block out that appalling draught coming straight off the North Sea. But – oh – how lovely the building was. She adored the way the honeyed light streamed in through the arched windows, and how the old stone walls were pitted and mellowed by the centuries, and the steps worn away by generations of feet. It would be a privilege to own something so old and beautiful, so ancient and age worn.
Maybe it was a little extravagant to buy something so big and so ridiculously fairy tale but, she thought as she walked down a corridor lined with arrow-slit windows, what better place was there to hide from the world than in a castle?
Chapter 1
Helen Hansard was a dreamer, but the nine-to-five usually got in the way. Not that it stopped her completely. She always made sure that there were little pockets of time to daydream, no matter how busy she was. She’d never make management – she knew that – mostly because a good portion of the time she sat in meetings was spent staring out of the window, watching the way the wind moved through the one beautiful tree that grew in the central London street, or the way sunlight flirted with the office windows opposite. It had been the same at school. Helen’s teachers had been constantly shouting at her for staring out of windows. But it couldn’t be helped. Helen had that rare quality of being able to see beauty wherever she went and, luckily for her, it made her rather mundane job bearable.
She’d spent the last ten years working for a small advertising company, Fiennes and Fairchild, taking a graduate placement straight out of university. She hadn’t meant it to last so long, only life seemed to have settled in this particular rut and the dreams she’d had of doing something better, more interesting, more creative, were always on hold while matters like paying bills took precedence.
But, oh, how she lived for the little moments in-between her job. It was as if she became a different person as soon as she left the office, shaking off the shackles of her administrative role and entering her other self – the truer version of the person she knew she was: the version she put out onto her favourite social media site, Galleria.
Helen had discovered Galleria during an aimless ramble around the internet and had soon been swept up by its magic and the photographs of beautiful gardens, of footpaths through woods, and smallholdings where people were growing their own food and delighting in every minute of it. Here, she’d thought, was a little corner of the web that wasn’t concerned with politics, that never discussed the horrors of war and that didn’t encourage debates you couldn’t win with strangers who didn’t really care anyway. Galleria felt like a safe haven where people shared their happiest pictures, beautifully framed, with gentle words to accompany them.
Helen adored those little square boxes of joy and would happily scroll through them several times a day to keep up to date with the people she was following. Some of them, she knew, were making a living from their art. They’d gathered thousands of followers and were now being courted and paid by companies for product placement. Helen wasn’t sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, it was always an admirable thing to be able to make a living from doing what you loved most, but she had to admit that the product placement thing did rather detract from the whole ethos of being oneself.
Mind you, that was another issue with social media sites such as Galleria. How much of what you saw was true, or rather the whole picture? Helen had often asked that question and had become very aware of it when she posted her own photographs. The Helen she was presenting to her followers was the fun, free version, whose world was full of beauty and charm. Gone were the spreadsheets, databases, endless emails and conference calls. She had happily banished the photocopier, the filing cabinets, the board room meetings and the many other dull bits of her life. Galleria was most definitely a highlights reel of her and everybody else’s life, for who really wanted to take a photo of a sink full of dirty dishes or share that mouldy patch on the north-facing bedroom wall or the mountain of ironing waiting to be done? Oh, no. Galleria was a blissful escape from all of that. It presented the very best pieces of people – the beautiful bits, neatly edited into one perfect square, accompanied by a poetic sentence or two – and Helen had bought into it big time. Only, her photography was slowly becoming more than that. She didn’t always want to squeeze it into one perfect box per day. She wanted to experiment and explore. She wanted to flex her creative wings and see if she could fly.
She was thinking about all this as she got off the Tube and headed across the concourse of the train station to catch the 17:54 train home to her village in Kent after a particularly dull day at the office. It was early April and there was still a full hour of light left, which meant Helen could gaze dreamily out of the train window and enjoy the changing landscape. As much as she was addicted to Galleria, she never forgot the primitive pleasure of being able to just sit and stare. So many of her fellow commuters had forgotten the simple delight of doing that. Now, gazes were locked onto screens as work was no longer left at the office, but followed one home. Helen refused to allow her work to accompany her home. She switched off her phone. Or rather, she switched off her work phone. She had a personal one too, and she got that out now, quickly texting her husband, Luke, to tell him she was on the train. As was her habit, she took a quick accompanying photo out of the window as they sped through a crowded station.
It was on her personal phone that she connected to Galleria and with which she took the majority of her photographs. She had several very good cameras at home too, but she liked the portability of the phone and the camera on it was good quality. Now, she scrolled through her most recent images. There was their recent weekend walk through the woods when she’d caught the purest of spring light and the fresh foliage of the beech trees. There were a few shots of the grey and fuming sea from their visit to the coast, when they’d had to bend their heads into the buffeting wind in order to remain upright. And there were several shots of their garden, full of the colours of spring, with her beloved tulips in terracotta pots and the crocuses crowding around the foot of the apple tree.