Ivory Innocence Read Online Free

deals that went wrong. What was not in doubt was the fact that in time, through the influence of his "friend," John Meldrum faced bankruptcy.
    "That was when George Kendrake played his ace," Mrs. Meldrum had said. "He stepped in and offered to buy the estate, which was what he'd been scheming for all along. If it hadn't been for that man, we'd still be living at Hedley Hall."
    Ivory remembered her grandfather as a gentle man who had grown sadder as he grew older, a bent, graying figure pottering aimlessly about while his wife valiantly attempted to keep up appearances.
    Mrs. Meldrum had chaired the local Women's Institute and been on the flower roster at the church. She gave coffee mornings for good causes and helped out at jumble sales, as if she were still the lady of the manor. Most people respected her for it; most of the local people regarded George Kendrake with contempt. Ivory sometimes wondered if that was why he had chosen not to live at the Hall but had used it as a weekend retreat.
    Ivory was at college when her grandfather died suddenly. She returned to Hedley Magna to find her grandmother distraught and showing her age. Ivory did her best to offer comfort, but the old lady refused to be consoled.
    "When I've passed my finals," Ivory promised, "I'll come home and find a job somewhere near. I won't leave you alone. There's one consolation, grandmother: you've still got the cottage."
    Mrs. Meldrum had raised drowned, red-rimmed eyes and sobbed, "Oh, Ivory, if you only knew! If you only knew!"
    But she wouldn't say what it was that Ivory didn't know, and Ivory was left to guess that something other than her husband's death was distressing her.
    Fate had its ironic laugh when, only a few months later, the perfidious George Kendrake died. Mrs. Meldrum wrote and informed Ivory of the news with great bitterness:

    I can't feel sorry. I shall always hate that man. I'd have thought more kindly of him if he'd just stabbed your grandfather, but instead he killed him slowly, over forty years. And I hear he's left the estate to his nephew—another Kendrake to put his curse on the village. I expect he, too, will be an absentee landlord, since to my knowledge he's never been near the place. He lives abroad somewhere, so they say.
    Ivory, it's so unfair. The Hall should be yours instead of going to some stranger who cares nothing for it. But I shall make sure he receives a cool welcome when he comes to claim his ill-gotten inheritance.

    Unfortunately, months before Matthew Kendrake arrived, Mrs. Meldrum died, in a fire that gutted the cottage just before Easter in Ivory's last year at college.
    Even now, over a year later, Ivory vividly recalled now she had stood in pouring rain and stared in disbelief at the burned-out shell of the place that had been her home for sixteen years. Investigators said an electrical fault was to blame, but in Ivory's shocked mind this tragedy, too, could be laid at the Kendrakes' door. Everything she loved had, literally, gone up in smoke.
    Grieving, she had visited the solicitor and heard even more shocking news: the cottage had not belonged to her grandparents; it was still part of the Hall estate.
    Ivory recalled sitting in the solicitor's office and reading the letter her grandmother had left for her:

    I'm afraid it's the truth, Ivory. I always believed we owned the cottage, until your grandfather died, when I found out that he had been paying rent to George Kendrake. He must have kept it from me to save me from knowing that we were virtually living on that man's charity. And I have done the same for your sake. But now I must write the truth. George Kendrake took everything. There's nothing of value I can leave for you, except my bits and pieces of jewelry. But at least I know you will have the capital that came from the sale of your father's farm in Kenya. I hope you understand why I had to use the interest, on your behalf, to keep you and give you those little extras, and to put you through