‘Two weeks is a ridiculously short amount of time,’ Caroline protested. ‘Who is the buyer? I’ll ask if we can have a bit more time.’

‘We’re not in a position to ask for anything. We no longer own this house,’ her father pointed out wryly. ‘I just hope that the buyer of Hales isn’t planning to make our remaining workers redundant and sell off the firm’s assets to the highest bidders.’

Caroline studied her parents, painfully aware of the march of advancing years and ill-health that made them poor candidates to deal with so much stress and upheaval. Her adoptive father suffered badly from angina, and on bad days her mother’s arthritic joints made even a walk across the room a painful challenge. Where on earth would they go without the cosy cocoon of financial security which they had enjoyed for so long? How would they cope and survive?

Winterwood was an enchanting, crumbling old house, built at the turn of the century for a large family with domestic staff. It had always been far too big for her parents, but Isabel Hales had been determined to impress everyone in the neighbourhood with visible evidence of her new status as the wife of a wealthy man. The new owner might well be planning to simply knock down Winterwood and redevelop the site. Even in the midst of more serious issues Caroline experienced a sharp pang at the prospect of her childhood home being razed to the ground and the gardens bulldozed.

‘You should never have moved out of Matthew’s family home and come back here to live with us,’ Isabel Hales told her daughter thinly. ‘Now you’ll have to come with us, and goodness knows where we’ll end up living!’