The Sins of the Fathers

Chapter Thirteen

Ellington Manor

Meadvale

Surrey

"However long this goes on for, you can't stay here forever?" Harrison Slade told Hugh Blackstone as they sat on the terrace, enjoying the evening sunshine after a long day, before going upstairs to change for yet another dinner with the Osborne family. "And when you do leave here with Caroline, you are going to have to employ a keeper for her...and then find a solution for Diane? You have got to face it, Hugh? You have to do something?"

"Not everyone has a keeper?"

"True...lots of people can't afford one and that is acceptable...but they were not officially registered as a Daughter of Eve in twenty-twenty-four. Caroline took advantage of the system to ensure your demobilisation and then you confirmed it to get Diane out and employ her as your keeper? That is not rescindable? Social services would be onto you in a flash for denying your wife proper care after forty years?" Slade informed his friend, not for the first time. He knew it was not what Hugh wanted to hear, but even for him, the Doc was being particularly stubborn and obtuse. "And no new keeper is going to want...or need...a registered assistant to help her look after one Daughter of Eve?"

"Okay...then Diane lives with us as a companion, or whatever?"

"Yes...that is possible, I grant you...but social services won't like it...companions are not unheard of...they are often retired keepers who have been with a family for many years...and that fits with Diane...but that would normally be in a large household, not you shacking up with three women under one roof? And Diane would have to be a Daughter of Eve to make that work, obviously?"

"You're a real little ray of sunshine, aren't you?" Blackstone grumbled, and Slade shook his head in frustration, tiring of trying to make his friend face facts. "I've had an offer for the house...well, an offer for the land...the church wants to build a church hall, apparently?"

"And you'll get the insurance?"

"Yes...it's a horrible way to get rich, but it's a tidy sum, all in all?"

"So...at least you can buy a decent property to have your wife tortured in...with a nice room for your new employee?"

"Come on, Noddy...there has to be a way around this?"

"Forty years' experience of dealing with cases like this tells me otherwise...I suspect that you are already on the radar of social services, because of the amount of training Diane has had to submit to...so they are already watching you?"

"Are they really that desperate to torment two sixty-six-year-old women?"

"Well, if we're right and someone pretty high up burned down your house...or rather had it burned down...and then leaned on the registration and licensing authority...this is all about revenge? And despite their age, Caroline and Diane were nurses...if they could get fifteen years hard work out of each of them...ten even...they will have them in a convent as soon as they can pin something on you, my friend?"

"Maybe Osborne would keep Diane on? He technically employs her now?" Blackstone suggested, clutching at another straw.

"He already has two keepers and only one wife in permanent residence...and great scrutiny is almost certainly going to be aimed at him after his recent activities? It's up to us, Doc...and I do actually have a crazy idea..."

"What idea?"

"You can't live on your own with a keeper and a companion, but there is no law against two couples sharing a house...we would effectively be chaperoning ourselves...although it would mean hiring two keepers..."