The Hartwell Inheritance

An October night at Hartwell Hall. A housemaid comes down the back stairs two at a time with a baby inside a borrowed shawl. She knows which step creaks. She has forgotten the bolt on the kitchen door, and the bolt is iron and thumb-thick and it is going to make a sound. On the lane behind the old icehouse there is a carriage and a driver she has never met and will have no way of finding again. She has paid him five pounds: three years of coppers and the occasional silver sixpence. *"Her name is Adelaide."* *"Tell her the truth when she's old enough."* Then she walks back through the garden, up the stairs she has scrubbed every Thursday for three years, fetches the cradle out of the attic, and feeds it into the kitchen stove. A century later, Catherine Hartwell is going through her dead grandmother's house looking for a key. The study is locked, and the key has probably been gone for thirty years. Her brother Lucas arrives early with the estate lawyer and a folder of preliminary valuations: seven acres of coastal frontage, private beach access, serious money. Cat teaches part-time, rents a one-bedroom flat in Portland, and has a seven-year-old daughter. Lucas has done the maths. The maths says sell. What the will does is split everything equally, and then add a codicil. *"I bequeath to my granddaughter, Catherine Hartwell, my personal diary and any photographs contained within the locked drawer of my study desk."* The diary is inscribed *Eleanor Hartwell. October 1912.* Eleanor is seventeen in it, and she writes about her twin. There is no twin. The family tree Cat was raised on has a single branch and no Adelaide anywhere on it. But there is a photograph as well, dated 1915: two young women, one in a white dress, the other in pale blue, and around one of their necks a silver heart locket that is currently sitting in a jewellery box in Portland. A multigenerational family saga about an inheritance two siblings cannot agree on, a name that was deliberately burned out of a family's record, and the distance between what a house is worth and what it is holding.