The Body on the Beach (The Weymouth Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

vicar on my sixteenth birthday and went to live in the vicarage for a while. George was a very good man – a kind, worthy man and I am sure that he felt some affection for me, but I was only sixteen and he was over thirty when we married. Fifteen years is a very great gap for a young lady who has hardly finished her schooling and I am afraid that I found him very stuffy and dry. I wanted to be going out, to assemblies or the theatre – anywhere for a little diversion - and all he wanted to do was to stay at home and work. I did not realise quite what a marriage entailed, I fear, and I was totally ill prepared for it. But then he died. He was a conscientious parson and always insisted on tending to the sick. It was his undoing in the end. He caught a fever from one of his parishioners and died of it the following week. That was in the May – we had been married scarcely more than a year, as my birthday is in April. Bob was born three months later. He was born at Sandsford, so it has always been his home as well.’
    ‘And how did you end up here with your current husband?’
    ‘My brother passed away shortly after George, so my father changed his will to enable me to inherit. There was no-one else with any near relationship except for my father’s sister, my aunt, who also lived with us at the time. My mother had died when I was still a baby and my aunt had helped to bring me up. My father died in the October after my twenty first birthday so I was able to inherit the house and land straight away. The house is as you already know it. I daresay at one time it would have been thought quite grand , though it is in sore need of some improvement now. As you will have noticed, the kitchen lacks all the modern conveniences, and had we been anything like great entertainers we should have felt the lack of a dining room most severely . I had been saving up for some renovations before I met Giles , but when he arrived he considered it perfectly adequate as it was and decided not to go ahead with the m . Luckily it meets our more modest needs well enough, and of course it is my home after all. The land, though, is quite extensive. We own several cottages in the area as well as having a few animals of our own, although being so wild and open to the elements it offers a poor enough existence. Anyway, I was invited to spend that first Christmas with a school friend over in Dorchester. I was still in mourning for my father, of co urse, but she’ d invited several other friends and relations and I had to mix with them to some extent. One of them was Giles. I regret to say that he swept me off my feet. Just six months after my father died he asked me for my hand, and by the end of June – on his birthday – I found myself saying ‘I do’ with him at the altar of Preston church. Giles had very little of his own and as I already owned Sandsford House it seemed the natural thing for us to live together here. Of course, as soon as I married him the property became his anyway. As a married woman I am apparently not deemed fit to manage a property, despite having done so before. He is – well – he is quite a determined gentleman, Mr Berkeley. He soon took exception to my aunt living alongside us – I regret that she felt obliged to intervene on my behalf on several occasions – so he forbad her the use of the house. She has taken lodgings in Weymouth – essentially just a single room, I am sorry to say - and takes in plain sewing and mending from the guest houses to enable herself to live from hand to mouth. I pay the rent from my allowance. It leaves precious little else, but I feel it is the least that I can do. After all, it is quite my fault that she lost her lifelong home. I feel very bad about it and I should not have blamed her for one moment had she refused to know me after that. Unaccountably she remains quite fond of me, however. I am very grateful for it. She is the only remaining relative that I have – other, of course,