Domus Inter

  Domus Inter

  By

  Sarah Carter

  Chapter 1: The Will

  I had always felt like a caged tiger, raised in captivity and taught tricks, but still dreaming an ancestral dream of the jungle. I felt as though there should be more to my world, but was convinced that I wasn’t like all the other people who simply craved fame, money, beauty. I had this overwhelming sense of duty, an almost sinister feeling that there was something I should be fighting for.

  Yet, I didn't have a clue what my life was missing, so despite my feelings things were not as they were meant to be, it seemed I would be doomed to the normal, stereotypical life of someone of my generation and culture.

  But then - on what would have otherwise been a perfectly normal morning, of a perfectly normal day in June - my mother received a letter. This letter set off a chain of events that would ensure the fate I dreaded would not be mine.

  The letter informed her of the recent death of one Jack Lloyd. Mr. Lloyd claimed to be an old friend of my mother‘s and, having no living relatives or other friends, had written a will indicating her as his sole heir.

  Mum and Dad exchanged looks over the thick cream paper.

  “I vaguely remember the name,” muttered my mother as she unfolded the will. “We met a father and son by the name of Lloyd on holiday once, remember? I can’t quite remember the names. They used to send us Christmas cards for a few ye-” Mum stopped speaking suddenly and her eyes nearly popped out of her head. She handed the document wordlessly to Dad and leaned against the wall, fanning herself with the envelope.

  “Impossible!” scoffed my dad. “Must be some kind of prank or scam, Lynette.”

  “I don’t think so. Look, there’s the number of his solicitors on here and a website address and everything. I’ll give them a call.”

  Mum took the cordless phone into the kitchen, shutting the door behind her.

  “What was that about?” I asked from where I was sitting on the stairs, pulling a pair of boots on.

  Dad gave me a worried, slightly distracted look and said, “Let’s just wait and see what your mother can find out, Harriet. It‘s probably nothing.”

  My two sisters, Leona and Rachel, appeared from the dining room. “What’s up?” asked Leona after one look at Dad’s expression. He gave her pretty much the same answer he had given me.

  We all waited impatiently. Soon Mum emerged from the kitchen, her cheeks a little flushed. She was gripping the documents so tightly they were crumpling in her fingers.

  “It all seems to be in order,” she said hoarsely. “I called the solicitors and they confirmed it is all for real. They said they’d tried to call us several times before, but the line was always busy. You really do spend too much time on the phone, Leona,” she added absently.

  “I still don’t buy it,” Dad huffed.

  Mum shook her head. “I didn’t quite believe it either, so I looked the company up on the internet. The phone number matched the one on this letter, and it all seemed very professional and official. There were references to them on other sites, too. They said they’ll be sending over some paperwork soon. Poor old Jack Lloyd! I feel awful. We barely knew the man!”

  “What’s happening?” Leona demanded, the last of her patience running out.

  Mum explained briefly what the letter had been about for my sisters’ benefit.

  “So we’re rich now?” joked Leona. No sentiment over the loss of human life for her.

  “Yes, actually,” Dad said. “If this is for real. Jack Lloyd was a rich man. Very rich.”

  “Seriously?”

  “This letter,” said Mum, clutching the piece of paper as if her life depended on it, “claims that Jack Lloyd possessed over a million pounds and a large property in Wales called” - she glanced at the letter - “Domus Inter.”

  “But look here at the will,” said Dad, taking it from my mum. “I only skimmed it at first, and I was so shocked at the money that I didn’t notice this bit.” My parents stared at the will with slightly concerned expressions.

  “What is it?” Leona asked, her blue eyes bright with excitement below eyebrows that were still raised with surprise. “More money? Or maybe a villa in Spain?”

  “Nothing like that,” Dad laughed uneasily. “It’s a warning. It says: Before you set about doing whatever you shall be doing with my possessions I give you one last thing: a warning. Never venture into the top room of the tower if you value your life.”

  “What on earth could that mean?” exclaimed Mum, rereading the last few sentences.

  “I thought you had to be of sound mind when you made a will, but Mr. Lloyd was obviously getting a little senile, the poor old boy,” said Dad, shaking his head regretfully.

  While the rest of my family gathered around my father and the will - Leona talking about all the clothes she could buy with the money and my younger sister, Rachel, asking if our parents were now rich enough to send her to some private school for the “gifted” - I turned from them in silence and strolled into the living room. All of the previous evening and that morning I had been feeling decidedly anxious, and the feeling had only grown worse as the letter’s contents had been divulged.

  A chill shot up my spine and I shivered. I suddenly had the feeling I was being watched. You know the itching between the shoulders characters in books and movies sometimes get? Yeah, well I always thought it was stupid, and you can’t actually sense when someone is watching you. But right then I knew someone was watching me. I turned slowly and looked out of the window. It was veiled in net curtains, making it impossible for anyone to be able to see in. Yet, there was a man with dark brown hair standing outside my house, staring directly into my eyes as if he could see in. As I looked at him, I got a strange burning sensation in my chest around my heart. Then I blinked and the man was gone.

  Shaking my head to clear the image of the strange man, I made my way to the kitchen to get some heart burn tablets. It was around about this time – just as I’d dropped the tablet into my mouth - that it struck me: We’re moving to the countryside! It had all just been meaningless words before, but now the actually fact of it sank in like a brick. I let out an excited squeal of joy, then proceeded to choke on my tablet. No one rushed to help me, which just goes to show how quickly money can make people heartless.

  Chapter 2: Moving

  Nearly three months later and my parents had sold our three bedroom house in central London, and we were on our way to Domus Inter. My parents were in the front of our silver people carrier, Leona and I in the middle and Rachel in the back with a picnic hamper crammed full of food for the long journey.

  We had actually crossed the border into Wales the previous evening, but Rachel had started feeling travel sick and Mum had been developing a migraine, so Dad had dropped us all off at a motel for the night while he went on to let the removal men dump all our stuff at our new house. I had wanted to go with him, but he insisted I stay behind. He wanted me to see the place for the first time in daylight, so I could appreciate it better. He wouldn’t even describe it to me or my sisters when he got back to the motel at midnight.

  “I know Domus means ‘house’ in Latin, but what about Inter? We’ll have to look it up,” said Dad over the music blaring from the car radio as we sped along a motorway.

  “Inter is Latin for ‘between’,” piped up Rachel, who was fourteen years old and one of those “child prodigies” you hear about. She had long, straight mousey brown hair, which she was forever having to brush out of her bright, inquisitive hazel eyes. “So, I guess it’s supposed to mean ‘House Between’.”

  Leona – two years older than me at nineteen - snapped her compact mirror shut and looked at me. “Is she for real?”

  I couldn‘t help laughing at th
e question. After all, Leona was one of the fakest people you could hope to meet. She seemed to spend half her time on sun beds - much to my parents’ displeasure - and she seemed incapable of leaving her bedroom without straightening her dark brown bob and applying a shovel-load of makeup.

  Laughing also helped ease the tight knot my stomach had tied itself in. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was happy and excited about the move, but I just couldn’t escape a strange, ambiguous feeling of impending doom. Trying to take my mind off my jittery stomach, I twisted around in my seat to face Rachel. “What do you want our new house to be like?”

  She shrugged. “I’d like it to be somewhere quiet, I guess,” she replied over the top of a book she was reading. “To be honest, I’ll be happy if my school’s grades are good, and the teachers are decent. It is a private school so I have quite high hopes that it shall meet my standards.”

  “Oh, please!” snorted Leona. “I’ll be perfectly happy as long as we’re not stuck out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a load of yokels.”

  Mum chuckled at this then turned to me with a slightly worried frown and asked gently, “What about you, Harry? What would you like our new home to be like?” She had obviously picked up on my off mood.

  I smiled reassuringly. “I’m sure I’ll be happy at Domus Inter. It is in the countryside, which I’m sure will be beautiful.”

  Mum gave me an almost stern look. “Yes, but what do you want, Harriet?”

  I scowled at her slightly. She must have decided the reason I hadn’t been myself the past few days was because I was unhappy with the idea of moving. She sighed when she realised I wasn’t going to reply, and turned back to ask my dad something. I leant my head against the window and gazed out at the passing scenery. “I want…more,” I whispered when I was sure no one was paying me any attention.

  A couple of hours later, Dad was driving us down a narrow, winding Welsh country road in the middle of nowhere. He was having a hard time negotiating the twists and turns, and was red-going-on-purple with anger. When he’d made the journey yesterday, it had been dark and he’d been following the removal van, which had a sat nav device, but now he was having to go off of Mum’s directions from a map.

  “This place had better not be stuck out in the back of beyond!” said Leona as our dad slammed on the brakes when a tractor came lurching round the corner.

  “Stop whining, Leona!” snapped Dad as yet another vehicle appeared in front of us, seemingly from nowhere, forcing him to swerve suddenly onto a little side track to avoid a head on collision. The front of the car punched into a hedge at the edge of the track. Dad sat very still, clutching the steering wheel tightly.

  “Now, George, that was rather rash,” commented Mum mildly as she pushed her shoulder length greying brown hair back from her face. My dad also had brown hair. And everyone in my family had either blue or brown eyes. I had always been the odd one out with my long, light coppery coloured hair and unusual grey eyes.

  For a moment there was silence. Dad looked like he was starting to calm down, but then Rachel - who had been sleeping for the last hour - woke up and asked innocently, “Are we there yet?”

  “NO!” roared Dad.

  “Um…we are, actually,” I said quietly, pointing to a sign on the gate just to one side of us, which read “Domus Inter”.

  “No!” shrieked Leona, making me jump. “I am not living here!”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked as Mum hopped out to open the gate. We weren’t even able to see the house yet; the road leading up to it curved tightly and was lined with towering trees and hedges, which blocked our view.

  “It’s in the middle of nowhere! It’s surrounded by mud! And are those sheep wandering around over there?”

  I laughed. “Think about it, Leona. It‘s Halloween soon. If this driveway is anything to go by, the new place must be huge! We could have a massive party - invite everyone on your nurses’ course.”

  “I suppose it won’t be too bad,” conceded Leona after a moments’ thought. “With such a big place we could host the most fantastic parties. I’m so glad I just thought of that!”

  “Oh, so am I,” I concurred as the rest of the family rolled their eyes.

  Dad waited for Mum to jump back into the car then he let the people carrier roll up the driveway. As we rounded the bend my mouth fell open and stayed like that until Dad pulled up on the gravel in front of Domus Inter next to a silver Mercedes. I gazed up at the huge house. It was like a manor house I’d seen in one of my history books except that it had a tower which leaned inwards slightly, and looked to me as if it belonged to a castle rather than a house.

  I leapt out of the car as soon as it stopped and ran around to the side of the house where I stood gawking at the surrounding countryside.

  “How much of it is ours?” I wondered out loud, not expecting an answer.

  “Twenty acres,” said a strange voice. “So from the gate you just came through in the east, to the lake you can just about see shining over there in the west. And then from the little hills over there in the north, to a stream which runs through the forest you can see over there to the south.” This information came from a man - probably in his early thirties - who had just come striding out of a narrow door in the side of our new house. I thought I’d glimpsed a large kitchen on the other side.

  I had forgotten all about the man I’d seen outside our old house when we had just received Jack Lloyd‘s will, and the strange burning sensation around my heart that I’d taken for heartburn. But now I had the same feeling, although this man looked nothing like the one I had seen hazily through the net curtains. This one had thinning ginger hair and smiling brown eyes.

  “Jonathon Wise, solicitor to the late Jack Lloyd,” said the man, sticking out a hand towards Dad who had walked around the side of the house to join me with the rest of the family.

  “Nice to finally meet you,” said Dad, shaking the man’s hand. “I hadn’t realized this place was so big! It’s so difficult to tell in the dark, and the pictures you sent didn’t do it justice.”

  “It’s amazing!” I said, clapping my hands in delight as the strange sensation around my heart started to fade until it was barely noticeable.

  “Well I’m glad you think so, young lady!” laughed Jonathon Wise.

  “I’m George Lawson, by the way,” Dad introduced himself, even though they had talked on the phone before. “This is my wife, Lynette, and my three daughters, Leona, Harriet and Rachel,” he added, pointing to each member of our family as he mentioned our names.

  “Pleasure to meet you all. Now would you care for a guided tour?” asked the solicitor.

  Mother declined saying she had better unpack the car first, and I decided to explore the outside of our new home by myself, while Rachel and Leona dashed into the house to fight over the bedrooms.

  I set off in the direction of the lake at a run. Once I reached the shoreline, I dropped to the ground and sat there panting, staring out across the rippling dark water. I imagined having picnics there in the summer, maybe swimming in the lake’s cool waters when the weather was really hot. We could even get a little boat.

  I was still daydreaming while casting my gaze over the dark forest, when I noticed movement in the shifting shadows. At first I thought it was just a bird or a deer, or some other type of critter. But then it moved backwards and a beam of light filtering through the treetops gleamed off dark brown hair before the figure vanished from sight.

  For some reason I couldn’t explain even to myself, my heart was pounding, which was ridiculous of course. This wasn’t London, where we’d had a tiny postage stamp of a garden and would have called the police if we’d seen anyone in it. There were probably dozens of walking trails criss-crossing our land. The figure I had seen was most likely just a walking enthusiast, completely innocent of the fact that he was on private property. What really bothered me was that the strange burning sensation had returned for a moment. What on earth was wrong
with me?

  Having worked out a logical explanation for the stranger’s presence, I got to my feet and began to stroll back to the house. I waved to my mother who was still rummaging around in the car then ran into the house. The interior was a pleasant surprise. Despite the grand, medieval exterior, the décor on the inside was relatively modern in a quaint, countrified sort of way. I could hear Dad and the solicitor towards the back of the house, and went to find them. They were in the kitchen I had glimpsed before.

  When Dad saw me he smiled and gestured about the room. “Well? What do you think?”

  “Love it!” I enthused. My smile slipped slightly as I caught Jonathon Wise regarding me with a strange expression. It was almost as if he were sizing me up. When he saw that I had noticed him he quickly looked away and shook his head as though to clear his thoughts.

  “There are a few matters we must discuss at some point,” said Jonathon. “Over a cup of coffee perhaps? Once you have the required implements unpacked, of course.”

  “Of course!” agreed Dad. “I’ll get the kettle and a few mugs right now.” And with that he disappeared from the kitchen, leaving Mr Wise and I alone. Which was just fantastic. The solicitor looked like a decent enough sort, but the curious way he had looked at me…

  “Miss Lawson,” Jonathon began as he took a step towards me. I looked him in the eyes and smiled questioningly. “My good friend and client, Jack Lloyd, wished for me to give you an item which was of great personal importance to him, and he wanted me to give you some…some information in private. Would it be okay if we were to talk alone some time? Your family must not know of the meeting, you understand - Mr. Lloyd’s express wish. If you are at all uncomfortable with that I could always post you the item and information…”

  I felt my eyebrows rise slightly and my eyes widen, but I quickly made my face calm again. “I am not uncomfortable with you giving me this…this stuff privately, without my parents knowing. But it will be very hard for us to meet without their knowledge,” I replied, pulling myself up onto one of the kitchen’s marble effect worktops. Being able to look down on Jonathon made me feel a bit better.