Tower of Silence

Chapter one 'If you're as broke as all that,' said Gillian Campbell to her godmother, 'why on earth don't you sell Teind House?' 'Oh, I couldn't do that,' said Selina at once. 'Why not? You'd probably make enough on the sale to live anywhere you liked. You could leave Inchcape altogether if you wanted. Buy a little bungalow.' 'Oh, no,' said Selina, and instantly felt the words take on a menacing reality. Leave-Inchcape,leave-Inchcape...She shivered and said, 'No, that's out of the question.' 'Why not?' said Gillian again. But it was impossible to explain to Gillian, who lived a crowded modern life in London, that there were things at Teind that strangers must never find: things that must be kept concealed from the prying outside world at all costs ...No, she could never leave Inchcape. And so she said, 'You see, Gillian, I've always lived here. Since I was seven years old -- dear goodness, forty-eight years ago! The aunts and Great-uncle Matthew left me Teind House. They wouldn't like to think of it going out of the family. I wouldn't like to think of it, either. I -- I feelsafehere.' Gillian looked at Selina, for whom life seemed to have stopped somewhere in the 1940s, and about whom people smiled sadly and indulgently and said, Oh, she's just like a Victorian pressed flower in somebody's old album, and tried very hard not to feel exasperated. Selina was not Victorian, of course, she was nowhere near old enough, but she did seem to have been stuck in a past age -- a dim, cobwebby past -- ever since Gillian could remember. All the fault of those finicky old women who had brought her up, and the even more finicky old man who had been their brother. 'OK, if you won't sell up, why don't you make the place work for you?' 'How?' 'Well, there's only you rattling around here and you don't use much more than a quarter of it. You could let the top floor -- turn the attics into a flat. There're always wildlife students at the bird sanctuary in Stornforth who want summer accommodation.' 'Oh, not students. I couldn't have students -- so noisy, so irresponsible. Parties and drugs--' Gillian pounced. 'Then how about offering bed and breakfast?' 'You mean -- charge people for giving them hospitality?' Dear, twittery Selina was plainly shocked to her toes. Gillian grinned and said, 'Why not? It needn't be anything high-powered; you'd get retired couples motoring through Scotland, or little groups of two or three ladies. Stop-over accommodation, that's what they call it. The Black Boar does lunches and nice evening bar meals, so all you'd need provide would be tea or coffee and orange juice, with scrambled eggs and ham or kedgeree and toast.' 'And a room.' 'Selina, darling, even without the attics you've got four bedrooms you never use, and three sitting rooms!' 'But there'd be laundry,' said Selina, rather desperately. 'Bathrooms -- gentlemen using the lavatory--' For pity's sake! thought Gillian, but she said, 'There's a perfectly good second loo on the half-landing. And a wash basin in two of the bedrooms to my knowledge. There's even a laundry in Stornforth who still collects and delivers. You could do it easily. Look on it as an adventure.' 'But would people want to come?' 'I don't see why not. There're always tourists driving through and stopping for lunch at the Black Boar. The bird sanctuary gets masses of visitors. And there's a lot of history scattered about this part of Scotland. I bet you'd get loads of people wanting to stay. You could charge thirty or forty quid a night, and you wouldn't need to take more than two couples at a time if you didn't want to -- in fact you'd probably only need to do it between April and October anyway. If you averaged two couples for two nights a week, that would bring in between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and sixty pounds each week.' She grinned. 'Truly, SelRayne, Sarah is the author of 'Tower of Silence', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743450898 and ISBN 0743450892.