CHAPTER EIGHTEENIt had been one of Mrs. Mitcham’s bad days.
She was querulous and disagreeable and everyone in contact with her was at fault.
‘She is desperately lonely,’ Fleur would remind herself.
When Mrs. Mitcham was difficult, when her voice was raised in anger and in complaint, Fleur would think of her son, crouching in the corner of some squalid little room, trying to think, not of that hectoring tirade that fell from his mother’s lips. But of the calm grey peace of The Priory, of the black swans reflected on the silver water of the lake and of the glimmer of the setting sun, rosy pink on the diamond-paned windows.
What happiness The Priory had been able to give him then! Fleur wondered if that secret solace had not meant a thousand times more to Sir Norman than the actual fact
