Theirs Was The Kingdom by R.F. Delderfield

FIVE, THE rending, whickering snack of heavy timber rocketing her from sleep much shallower than the sleep she took for granted when he was beside her and her fears and frustrations were subject to his jocular analysis.
    Whenever he was absent for more than a few days, however, submerged worries, no more than vaguely bothersome by day, would rise to the surface of her mind when she was lying in what seemed to her—in his absence—about an acre of bed.
    Then, as now, sleep would either evade her altogether or she would drift into a series of muddled dreams, rising at odds with herself so that the business of the day would tend to clog, reminding her of her wifely inadequacies in the very earliest days of their marriage when she had no clear idea at all how to run a place like Tryst or hold her own with a pack of quarrelsome servants.
    Her current disquiet was uncharacteristic of the mature Henrietta Swann. In the last few years she had adjusted to the uneven rhythm of her life and even when hedged about with a variety of problems had been able to enjoy long periods of tranquillity in the midst of a domestic turmoil that less experienced women would have mistaken for anarchy.
    Sometimes she let him persuade her to allow house and family to take care of themselves and accompany him on one of his periodical migrations that took her as far north as Edinburgh and as far west as Plymouth, and when this happened she saw herself as the wife of a prosperous sea captain, with business in every corner of the world, so that her “shore” problems seemed trivial and remote. She had not accompanied him on his latest odyssey, however, and the weeks following the Colonel’s death were unlike any she could recall, if one excepted that awful interval following the Staplehurst rail crash, before absorption in his business had proved such a splendid antidote for fear and loneliness.
    Her mood was linked, she supposed, to the old Colonel’s elimination from the family circle, to the sour knowledge, whenever she wandered into his former quarters, that everything was in its place but he—the quiet, watchful, ever-tolerant presence—for so long attuned to her doubts and misgivings whenever she was thrown on her own resources. She told herself, repeatedly, that it was high time she adjusted to his death and to the absence of Stella and Alexander, reminding herself that, with George and Giles away at school, she still had more than enough to supervise, with the three younger children, a fifteen-month-old baby, a house of nearly fifty rooms, and a staff of eight, three of them less than half-trained.
    Reassurances, although well enough in daylight, brought no more than marginal peace of mind by night, especially as she was passing through one of her sleepless spells that was due, she decided, to the abominable weather they had been having since the snowfalls of late January and early February.
    The head gardener told her it was seasonable and perhaps it was: sleet showers that lashed the mullioned windows, and a string of southwesterlies that stormed into the hollow like a stampede of wild horses and set everything billowing and rattling, until they threatened to strip pantiles from beams where they had rested for three centuries and send the sugarloaf chimneys tumbling over the eaves and down into the forecourt.
    At the height of such a commotion it was like living on a ship, for up here the entire structure creaked and groaned and stirred and whispered, as though it shared her lifelong detestation for wind and would have welcomed a thunderstorm that neither she nor Tryst minded in the least.
    The wind had been particularly tiresome tonight, one of the last nights of winter she supposed, for she always assumed spring was on the doorstep when the hateful month of February was out. Outside, where the double avenue of copper beeches divided the paddocks and ran down to Twyforde Lane, the gale was baulked by rising ground so that having arrived