The Lazarus Secrets Read Online Free PDF

thereafter, Michael, Alexander, Xavier, Charles, was commonly known as Max.
    A chilly breeze roused them from their day-dreaming. “Time we were heading home,” Alexander said, standing up and taking one last look at the house and the church yard where his mother rested in peace. They had parked the car on the road at the front of the house and they walked towards it to begin their journey back to Hampshire. Clarissa looked up at the window of the bedroom that had once been hers then glanced to the corner of the terrace where Michael would wait in the shadows to make sure she got home safely after their secret meetings, even so many years later her heart leapt within her chest.
    Charles got into the car and quickly switched on the ignition anxious to be away from the past and on the way home to the new life they had made for themselves in the picture postcard Hampshire village of Oak Hathern.
    It was at Charles’s insistence they had moved. He had used the excuse of how dangerous it would be living in the capital if the threatened second war with Germany began, but in truth after Eloise’s death and Max’s departure to university, he believed the three of them would wither and fossilise if they did not break free from the past. They were more in danger from their own introverted lifestyle than from war. The pact that had been such a support and saviour had suddenly felt like a ball and chain and threatened to stifle what was left of their lives. He had lost the love of his life because of the claustrophobic nature of their existence. Barbara Denby had brought joy, laughter and a breath of fresh air into the home, but she had left him when he found himself unable to move away from the others.
    The move to Hampshire had been a success, they had suffered the uncertainties and deprivations of six years of war but this experience had expanded all their lives in one way or another. They had, at last, broken free and embraced the future. Even Charles’s lost love Barbara had by some miracle come back into his life. Two more generations of the family now lived in Oak Hathern but still on days like this, the pact separated them from the others and drew these four together; they would never be truly free, they would always be ‘The Quartet’, the four who rose from the ashes of war, like Lazarus risen from death, to face the world together.

Chapter Two
    Max Darrington was a young man studying at Oxford when his widowed mother, Clarissa, her brother Charles Petersen and her brother-in-law Alexander Darrington left the family home in London and bought a cottage in the beautiful Hampshire village of Oak Hathern. The village was so named after the huge oak trees that had flourished for generations on the village green. Top Cottage, as their home was called, may have been a cottage at one time but in 1939, when the family took up residence, it was a large house sitting at the end of a narrow, hilly road winding up from the village. It looked out over the chimneys of the dwellings below across the Hampshire Downs to the sea in the far distance.
    Enjoying his first taste of independence, Max gave little thought to the reasons for the move. He assumed the impending war meant they would be safer out of London, or the recent death of his grandmother, and his departure to Oxford meant that the house was too big for the three people.
    Max had grown up safe and happy in their company but knew little of how or why they had come to live together. His mother and Uncle Charles had lived in the large London house throughout their childhood but his grandmother Eloise and his Uncle Alexander were from the North of England and had lived in very poor circumstances until the death of his father Michael in the Great War, when they too moved to the house in London.
    Charles and Alexander had formed the Darrington Peterson Housing Company building accommodation for the new middle classes that emerged after the First World War and