![]() ![]() I was a little frightened of the house at first: those eyes followed me doggedly, and at night, when the darkness was fathomless, the house embarked on long interior monologues, the water groaning It had the portrait of a lady at the top of the stairs with particularly penetrating eyes. We were renting a house in the grounds of the estate, abandoned by its lineage in the 1940s. ![]() There was me, my husband, my husband's eight-year-old daughter, and our own two children: a baby who cried passionately each time I moved out of her line of vision, and her sister, older by 15 months, whose abundant hair exactly matched the electrifying palette of autumn in the pleasure gardens that year. It lay remotely, far from town, in a lush green crease of hills that rose steadily up to meet the moor. It was a beautiful place in the Brendon Hills in Somerset, the rattling ghost of a grand estate, where a miniature ornamental lake still languished in the overgrown pleasure gardens, and the trees in the neglected orchard shed rare red, heart-shaped apples like the apples in a medieval tapestry. ![]()
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