Echoes of Silence by Marjorie Eccles Read Free Book Online

was, of its sighs, creaks and groans, as if settling itself down for the night, like an old dog in its basket. More jumpy, at the echoes of its silence and the shadows in the corners. Silly, really, when every nook and cranny was as familiar as your own face – though when she was away, it was strange how she sometimes couldn’t remember it properly. Coming back to Low Rigg was always a journey of rediscovery to her, wandering through the house and reacquainting herself with it, coming to terms with how she felt about it. She’d been born here and felt a passion for it which she was never sure was love, or hate. She did know that it frightened her sometimes, the power it held, its strangeness and remoteness from the life of Steynton.
    She was almost as grateful as Harriet was for their warm hand contact, as they moved from one part to another, swinging arms and singing a nonsense rhyme, giggling the way she and Ginny, and Elf, too, had done. She ran her fingers along the honey-coloured walnut of a small table, caressed threadbare tapestry curtains, pausing only for a moment to glance at the portrait of old Josiah Denshaw. Too late for the ritual of a Josiah story for Harriet tonight, however short and amusing.
    A third-generation woollen manufacturer he’d been, a character, a stout Victorian about whom tales were legion, looking down at them out of an important frame with full knowledge of
a settled and rosy present, and confident expectations of even better things to come. It was as well he hadn’t been able to see into the future: a succession of male heirs killed in two world wars, leaving only two great-great-grandsons, Laurence and Philip, neither of whom was interested in carrying on his hard-won woollen empire. Gathering up the remnants of the fortune Josiah had made, these last two had sold their shares for much less than they should have done and got out of the industry. Laurence had taken up schoolmastering and Philip, medicine.
    Low Rigg had been in the possession of the Denshaws ever since Josiah had moved from the valley and acquired the old manor-house when his aspirations began to stretch to being more than the biggest wool-comber, dyer and spinner in the area and included hopes of being looked on as some sort of squire. He had bought Low Rigg Hall from the last descendant of its original owners, along with most of its sparse contents, and to his wife’s chagrin had filled the empty corners, being too tight-fisted to buy new, with the sort of second-hand furniture at that time poorly regarded: old-fashioned Regency tables, Hepplewhite chairs and the like. Over the years they, plus the Elizabethan oak of the original pieces and later, Victorian and Edwardian additions, had grown into something to make an antique dealer’s mouth water. Josiah’s wife would never have credited what they were worth now.
    As Polly reached out for the knob on Harriet’s door she found grit under her hand, from where she’d trailed it along the walnut table. She rubbed her fingers together irritably. She wasn’t finicky about housekeeping, but the neglected state of the house could always be guaranteed to reduce her to annoyance.
    She ought to confront Dot Nagle with it, but knew she wouldn’t. There were some things Freya would tolerate, but criticism of either of the Nagles was not one of them. She and Dot formed an unholy alliance, cronies from that former, distant, shiningly remembered world they had both once inhabited. Freya had few other friends, she was almost as much a stranger here now as she had been forty years ago, when she came here as a bride. Dot had been summoned as a mother’s help when Elf had been brought into the family as a baby, Polly had known her practically all her life, but she was still wary of tangling with her unnecessarily.

    She’d been a dresser at some couture house or other when she and Freya had met – nobody could ever do up eighteen