Time's Legacy by Barbara Erskine

were shadows around her eyes. She reached across and touched her mother’s hand. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up,’ she whispered.
    Laura smiled. ‘We rub along fine, my darling. You know we do.’ She sighed. Then abruptly she stood up. ‘Come with me. The time has come for me to show you something.’
    The Limes was large and square, built of grey stone some time in the 1920s in the centre of an acre of gardens. It was gracious, more restrained than some of its neighbours, but still a little extrovert with the architectural details, built on three storeys with a small rather skittish turret at the eastern corner. The top floor of the house was sparsely furnished. From time to time when the cousins, the children of Laura’s two sisters, had descended into Abi’s solitary childhood the rooms had echoed with laughter and music but as they all grew older and their jobs took them across the world the family gatherings had grown smaller and more infrequent. Now only one of the top floor rooms was used. It was her mother’s den. There was plenty of room downstairs but Laura preferred this low-ceilinged attic with windows on three sides, constantly full of sunshine and, when she opened the windows, the scent of flowers and the songs of birds.
    The large table in the centre was strewn with papers and books and sketches of flowerbeds. Three chests of drawers lined the walls, some with their drawers so stuffed full of papers they wouldn’t shut properly.
    Abi had always suspected Laura loved this room because it was away from her husband’s eagle eye. She had never seen her father up here. Not once, in her whole life. Maybe he came, but she suspected he couldn’t be bothered. He had no interest in gardens other than as places to sit, or probably in anything his wife did which did not involve or revolve around him.
    She followed Laura in and as always succumbed at once to the feeling of security and happiness which filled the room. It took her back to her childhood which had been in some ways idyllic. The room smelled of flowers and paint – her mother often painted and sketched the flowers she loved so much, leaving the paintings stacked in careless heaps on the chests of drawers. She never bothered to frame any of them, laughing off Abi’s suggestion that they were worth hanging on the wall.
    Abi threw herself down on the chaise longue which stood near the open window looking out across the garden. This piece of furniture, lovingly rescued by her mother from a local house sale, draped with a succession of bright Spanish shawls, had led to the christening of the room as Aunt Laura’s Boudoir by one of her cousins. The name had stuck.
    Following her inside Laura closed the door behind her. She was pale, Abi noticed again, and she was slightly out of breath after the climb up the stairs. She sat up. ‘Are you sure you are all right, Mummy? You look tired.’
    Laura smiled at her. ‘I’m fine.’ She came over to Abi and, stooping, caught Abi’s hands in her own. ‘Sweetheart, there’s something I have to show you and I want you to promise that whatever you think of it, whatever you feel, you will do as I ask.’
    Abi frowned. ‘That sounds a bit portentous.’
    Laura grimaced. As though realising how odd it must seem she released Abi’s hands and sat down beside her. ‘Promise, darling. I wouldn’t ask you to do anything if it wasn’t important.’
    ‘Of course I promise.’ Abi felt a shiver of apprehension creep down her spine.
    ‘This is something I have kept hidden from your father. He must never know I have told you about it.’ Laura stood up again. She hesitated, then she moved across the room to the chest of drawers standing in the alcove which had once been the fireplace before the attic chimney had been sealed. She knelt before it and dragged out the bottom drawer. At the back was a tin box which she extricated with difficulty. Abi sat without moving. She felt suddenly frozen.