Hester's Story Read Online Free Page A

reason. I liked him at once, from the first moment I saw him. His smile was so open, and his warmth and love of the dance so evident in everything he said that I knew he was the sort of person I would enjoy welcoming to Wychwood House. There must be something wrong with me, Hester thought. Even after the shock I’ve had, I’m still looking forward to all of them arriving. The house is too quiet. It will be good to have it full of dancers again. Full of music and laughter.
    Wychwood House had once belonged to a Victorian mill-owner. It was a handsome, square building of grey stone with magnificent wrought-iron gates set into solid stone gateposts; a house with a confident façade and an air of being rooted firmly in the landscape, almost a part of nature. It hadn’t always looked like that. When Hester had first seen it, as a very young girl, it was shabby and neglected and the local children used to call it the Witch’s House.
    It’s different now, she thought. Between March and November, three young men from the village came in twice a week to keep the garden looking perfect. Flowerbeds filled with roses bordered the path from the house to the theatre. George loved old-fashioned roses and he was the person who oversaw all the work that went on in the grounds. Hester herself had mixed feelings about flowers of all kinds and roses in particular, though she would never have admitted it. Each individual bloom was pretty of course, but only for a little while before it became overblown and brown around the edges of the petals. Flowers had such a short life and were so quickly less than perfect. Hester preferred shrubs and evergreen trees, and often thought the flowerbeds looked best in winter when theplants had been pruned and nothing but sharp little twigs stuck up out of the black earth.
    She loved the garden. She enjoyed walking in it and delighted in the wide sweep of moor and sky that you could see wherever you stood. She had made sure that benches were placed in those spots that gave the best views. Every morning, unless the weather was atrocious, she walked for at least half an hour, through the garden and out to the slopes behind the house. She followed this with an hour at the barre she’d had specially installed in her dressing room.
    The house had ten bedrooms. Her own was along a corridor and set apart from the accommodation used by the visiting dancers. There was a public drawing room and the kitchen was shared by everyone when the Festival was on. The dining room was only used for the most formal occasions such as the New Year’s Eve dinner and the first night party. Ruby and George lived in a small cottage in the grounds. The passageway that led to the Arcadia Theatre went past the door of this room and she could always hear the dancers walking to and from their rehearsals.
    Hester had her own sitting room and this room, where she spent most of her time, was known as the Office. The desk stood under the window and she kept the paperwork for both the Festival and her master classes in a mahogany tallboy. A filing cabinet would have looked wrong in a room which resembled in almost every particular dressing rooms she’d known while she was a ballerina. That’s why I’m comfortable here, she often thought. It’s completely familiar to me. There were no light bulbs around the mirror which hung on the wall near the door, and the smell of greasepaint had been replaced by the fragrance coming from an enormous bowl of pot-pourri, but otherwise it was what she had been used to for years.
    She’d always insisted on having a chaise-longue in her dressing room and here in the Office she still liked to lie down whenever she needed to read or think. This chaise was new, and upholstered in dark red velvet, but the lacquered screen beside it, with its pattern of small boats on perfectly rippled water and conical snow-tipped mountains, was the same one she’d had since 1954. A cream silk shawl, fringed and printed with