Aunt Em’s Journal · Entry One

From the Journal of Lady Emily Christie

Hessleham Hall, August 1921

A word before you turn the page… Aunt Em has no manners whatsoever when it comes to spoilers. She tells all—who died, who did it, and precisely what she thought of everyone while it was happening. So if you haven’t yet read Murder at the Manor (the very first Tommy & Evelyn mystery), do slip away and read that first. Em will still be here, gin in hand, when you return. If you have read it—pour yourself something suitable and settle in.

I have never been a faithful keeper of journals. One writes when there is something worth the ink, and for the better part of sixty years there has been precious little at Hessleham Hall that qualified. This past fortnight has rather made up for the deficit.

Charles is dead. Eddie is dead. There—I have written it plainly, and the ceiling has not come down upon my head.

I know perfectly well what one is expected to feel. I shall wear my black, and at the appropriate moments I shall look appropriately solemn, and nobody shall have cause for complaint. But a journal is no place for pretence, and I am far too old to lie to my own pages. I did not love my nephew. I never forgave him Florence—my darling girl, worn away to nothing giving Charles the son he so desperately wanted. That the son should turn out to be Eddie suggests the Almighty, at least, retains a sense of humour. Eddie held the title for barely a day and spent the greater part of it shouting. His first act as Earl of Northmoor was to threaten to turn me out of my home. Charles at least waited until his will to insult me, solemnly bequeathing me jewels that belonged to my own mother and were therefore already mine. How very like him.

So here is the truth I shall write and never speak: what I feel, chiefly, is relief. And beneath the relief, something I had quite given up expecting to feel again in this lifetime. Hope.

This house has been dying a good deal longer than either of them. Since Florence went, Hessleham Hall has been a place where meals are served at precisely the correct hour to people with nothing whatever to say to one another. Charles kept a mausoleum with an excellent cellar. Had Eddie been spared, Lillian would have finished the place entirely—sold whatever glittered and let the rest moulder while she performed to an audience of nobody. Instead, by way of two deaths I should never have wished for yet cannot quite mourn, the Hall has passed to the only two members of this family capable of loving it properly.

Tommy is the Earl of Northmoor. I have written the words, and still they look improbable. Tommy—who possesses more decency than the last three earls put together, who squared up to Eddie for his rudeness before the ladies and made no fuss about it afterwards. He will run the estate as it ought to have been run these many years, fairly and without vanity, and the people on this land are about to discover what it is to be treated as though they matter.

And Evelyn. I must remember to call her Lady Northmoor in company, though I suspect she still flinches at it. I had begun to like her before all this unpleasantness—any woman who pours a proper measure of gin has a sound foundation of character—but watching her this past week has been the finest entertainment I have had in years. She faced down that dreadful detective and had the chief constable apologising within the hour. She stood before Lillian at her most poisonous and did not give an inch. And of a morning she slips down to the kitchen to knead bread with the cook. I am not supposed to know that, but, of course, I know everything that happens in this house; it is how I have amused myself for half a century.

My hopes, then, since a journal ought to record them. I hope the village fete returns to our lawn next summer, and the village with it. I hope Evelyn fills the stables with those absurd, glorious dogs of hers. I hope Victoria comes home at last, now there is no one left to disapprove of her. And I hope—I shall state it plainly—for children in this house. It has been far too long since there were children at Hessleham Hall. I intend to live an unreasonably long time so as to see them sliding down the banister. Properly supervised, unlike poor Eddie.

Lillian said something to me before she left us for America—that I had done nothing with my life but grow old in this house, a spinster. I told her I would rather live and die knowing one genuine love than possess an entire village full of lovers. I do not think she understood me, though I did not expect her to.

He is never far from my thoughts. Sixty-three years, and still, on summer evenings such as this one, I find myself nineteen again and in India, with the whole world before us. I shall not write his name, even here. His name is not kept on paper; it is kept where it has always been kept. But I will say this much to my journal, since there is no one else to say it to: when Tommy looks at Evelyn across the dinner table, I see the very look he once gave me. I know now what I am watching for in this house, and it is not murderers. It is that.

A stiff drink, I have always found, prepares one for most things that happen at Hessleham Hall. It is a novelty, at my age, to require one for happiness. I believe I shall have Gladys fetch the gin.

—E.C.