CHAPTER THREE

IT seemed impossible to believe that she had been at Darkwater for nearly a month, Chelsea reflected, walking up the overgrown lane which led from the Dower House to Darkwater. Her task was turning out to be one of the most demanding she had ever undertaken, but instead of depressing her, the restoration work on the tapestry promised to be so potentially rewarding that even the problems it caused her were a challenge rather than a chore.

The National Trust officials who had been working on the house had now completed their work—as it had been inhabited until the death of the owner very little had needed to be done, and Chelsea knew that the Trust had high hopes of opening the house to visitors the following summer.

Because Darkwater was so remote—ten miles from the nearest border town of Jedburgh—Chelsea was staying at the Dower House. The new owner, whom Mrs Rudge the housekeeper referred to in a rather tight-lipped fashion as ‘Mr Harold’s newphew’, was apparently away—Mrs Rudge had grudgingly informed her that he had considerable business interests which took him away a good deal.

‘Not that we ever saw much of him at all before he inherited,’ she had told Chelsea that morning at breakfast. ‘Born and brought up in the South, he was. Mr Harold’s sister married one of them stockbrokers. It would break Mr Harold’s heart if he knew what was going on with the house an’ all.’

‘It’s probably for the best,’ Chelsea had told her gently, guessing that the housekeeper’s feeling towards her late employer’s nephew sprang from resentment at what she saw as a callous indifference to his family home. ‘With death duties many families find keeping on their homes an impossible burden. At least endowing it to the Trust will ensure that it’s preserved.’ She knew that the Trust very rarely took on houses unless the donors were prepared to include a substantial sum of money for upkeep, which was why so many people were forced to sell their homes to developers, to be converted into flats and hotels.

Her walk took her past a newly ploughed field. Mist clung to the hedgerows as the ground dipped away; a faint riming of frost reminding her that it was less than a month to Christmas.

The red tractor in the distance executed a neat circle, its driver lifting a checked shirt-clad arm.

Chelsea waved back, her lips curving into a warm smile. The Littles, who farmed High Meadow, which had once been the home farm, had made her very welcome, especially Tom, the son of the family. Two years Chelsea’s senior, he had been farming in New Zealand when his father had suffered a heart attack, and as he ruefully told Chelsea, it was sometimes hard after living one’s own life to return to the parental roof.

Chelsea had found his mother to be a mine of information about the Darkwater family, although she had been surprised when Chelsea told her what she was doing in the Borders.

‘Restoring a tapestry?’ she had murmured. ‘Well, there’s a thing … a firescreen, is it?’

Chelsea had laughed, visualising the thirty-odd-foot length of mediaeval tapestry obviously designed to cover one of the walls in a huge baronial hall, and Mrs Little had joined in her laughter when she had explained.

Tomorrow she planned to drive into Newcastle to collect some silks she was having specially dyed. The tapestry itself, so fragile that in places it hung together on single threads, was being attached to a new backing. Once that was done Chelsea intended to clean it, using the specialised processes she had learned during her training. Old fabrics were notorious for their fragility and momentary clumsiness could ruin centuries-old articles.

As always when she saw the house she was struck by the granite hardness of it, rising out of the earth; more of a fortress than a home, its back to the sea looking down the long valley which linked England and Scotland; a formidable guardian of the Borders, and one whose owners had owed loyalty to both the English and the Scottish Crowns at various times in history.

It was hard to accept that once this green, fertile valley had run red with the blood of warring clansmen; Border reivers, a law unto themselves, too far from the civilising influences of both London and Edinburgh to heed the commands of their rulers.

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