club, she explained, and then Jake had bought it and moved his offices out here into the Berkshire countryside. He lived in the house, and there was an office suite housing Jake’s centre of operations in the former country club buildings on the far side of the old walled kitchen garden. There was a swimming pool, a sauna and steam room and a squash court over there, Kate told her as they pulled up outside on the broad gravel sweep, and all the facilities were available to the staff and their families.
Further evidence of his apparent generosity.
But it was the house which drew Amelia—old mellow red brick, with a beautiful Dutch gabled porch set in the centre, and as Kate opened the huge, heavy oak door that bore the scars of countless generations and ushered them into the great entrance hall, even the children fell silent.
‘Wow,’ Edward said after a long, breathless moment.
Wow, indeed. Amelia stared around her, dumbstruck. There was a beautiful, ancient oak staircase on her left, and across the wide hall which ran from side to side were several lovely old doors which must lead to the principal rooms.
She ran her hand over the top of the newel post, once heavily carved, the carving now almost worn away by the passage of generations of hands. She could feel them all, stretching back four hundred years, the young, the old, the children who’d been born and grown old and died here, sheltered and protected by this beautiful, magnificent old house, and ridiculous though it was, as the front door closed behind them, she felt as if the house was gathering them up into its heart.
‘Come on, I’ll give you a quick tour,’ Kate said, going down the corridor to the left, and they all trooped after her, the children still in a state of awe. The carpet under her feet must be a good inch thick, she thought numbly. Just how rich was this guy?
As Kate opened the door in front of her and they went into a vast and beautifully furnished sitting room with a huge bay window at the side overlooking what must surely be acres of parkland, she got her answer, and she felt her jaw drop.
Very rich. Fabulously, spectacularly rich, without a shadow of a doubt.
And yet he was gone, abandoning this beautiful house in which he lived alone to spend Christmas on a ski slope.
She felt tears prick her eyes, strangely sorry for a man she’d never met, who’d furnished his house with such love and attention to detail, and yet didn’t apparently want to stay in it at the time of year when it must surely be at its most welcoming.
‘Why?’ she asked, turning to Kate in confusion. ‘Why does he go?’
Kate shrugged. ‘Nobody really knows. Or nobody talks about it. There aren’t very many people who’ve worked for him that long. I’ve been his PA for a little over three years, since he moved the business here from London, and he doesn’t talk about himself.’
‘How sad.’
‘Sad? No. Not Jake. He’s not sad. He’s crazy, he has some pretty wacky ideas and they nearly always work, and he’s an amazingly thoughtful boss, but he’s intensely private. Nobody knows anything about him, really, although he always makes a point of asking about Megan, for instance. But I don’t think he’s sad. I think he’s just a loner and he likes to ski. Come and see the rest.’
They went back down the hall, along the squishy pile carpet that absorbed all the sound of their feet, past all the lovely old doors while Kate opened them one by one and showed them the rooms in turn.
A dining room with a huge table and oak-panelled walls; another sitting room, much smaller than the first, with a plasma TV in the corner, book-lined walls, battered leather sofas and all the evidence that this was his very personal retreat. There was a study at the front of the house which they didn’t enter; and then finally the room Kate called the breakfast room—huge again, but with the same informality as the little sitting room, with foot-wide oak boards on the floor and a great big old refectory table covered in the scars of generations and just made for family living.
And the kitchen off it was, as she might have expected, also designed for a family—or entertaining on an epic scale. Vast, with duck-egg blue painted cabinets under thick, oiled wood worktops, a gleaming white four-oven Aga in the inglenook, and in the middle a granite-topped island with stools pulled up to it. It was a kitchen to die for, the kitchen of her dreams and fantasies, and it took her breath away. It took all their breaths away.
The children stared round it in stunned silence, Edward motionless, Kitty running her fingers reverently over the highly polished black granite, lingering over the tiny gold sparkles trapped deep inside the stone. Edward was the first to recover.
‘Are we really going to stay here?’ he asked, finally finding his voice, and she shook her head in disbelief.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Of course you are!’
‘Kate, we can’t—’
‘Rubbish! Of course you can. It’s only for a week or two. Come and see the bedrooms.’
Amelia shifted Thomas to her other hip and followed Kate up the gently creaking stairs, the children trailing awestruck in her wake, listening to Megan chattering about when they’d stayed there earlier in the year.
‘That’s Jake’s room,’ Kate said, turning away from it, and Amelia felt a prickle of curiosity. What would his room be like? Opulent? Austere? Monastic?
No, not monastic. This man was a sensualist, she realised, fingering the curtains in the bedroom Kate led them into. Pure silk, lined with padding for warmth and that feeling of luxury that pervaded the entire house. Definitely not monastic.
‘All the rooms are like this—except for some in the attic, which are a bit simpler,’ Kate told her. ‘You could take your pick but I’d have the ones upstairs. They’re nicer.’
‘How many are there?’ she asked, amazed.
‘Ten. Seven en suite, five on this floor and two above, and three more in the attic which share a bathroom. Those are the simpler ones. He entertains business clients here quite often, and they love it. So many people have offered to buy it, but he just laughs and says no.’
‘I should think so. Oh, Kate—what if we ruin something?’
‘You won’t ruin it. The last person to stay here knocked a pot of coffee over on the bedroom carpet. He just had it cleaned.’
Millie didn’t bother to point out that the last person to stay here had been invited—not to mention an adult who presumably was either a friend or of some commercial interest to their unknowing host.
‘Can we see the attic? The simple rooms? It sounds more like our thing.’
‘Sure. Megan, why don’t you show Kitty and Edward your favourite room?’
The children ran upstairs after Megan, freed from their trance now and getting excited as the reality of it began to sink in, and she turned to Kate and took her arm. ‘Kate, we can’t possibly stay here without asking him,’ she said urgently, her voice low. ‘It would be so rude—and I just know something’ll get damaged.’
‘Don’t be silly. Come on, I’ll show you my favourite room. It’s lovely, you’ll adore it. Megan and I stayed here when my pipes froze last February, and it was bliss. It’s got a gorgeous bed.’
‘They’ve all got gorgeous beds.’
They had. Four-posters, with great heavy carved posts and silk canopies, or half testers with just the head end of the bed clothed in sumptuous drapes.
Except for the three Kate showed her now. In the first one, instead of a four-poster there was a great big old brass and iron bedstead, the whole style of the room much simpler and somehow less terrifying, even though the quality of the furnishings was every bit as good, and in the adjoining room was an antique child-sized sleigh bed that looked safe and inviting.
It was clearly intended to be a nursery, and would be perfect