The Duchess Gave the Governess the Gatehouse 'and All Within Its Walls'—The Walls Ringed a Castle

She was twenty-seven, and after nine years of teaching a duke's daughters, Esther Lister was paid off with a gate. The Duchess of Kellow handed her the deed to the old gatehouse across the park in front of every upper servant in the hall, and said a governess might as well keep a gate, since she had kept nothing else. They laughed, and no one said goodbye. Esther's trunk was already on the carrier's cart. The gatehouse was one cold room with an old man by the hearth. Ned Webb read the last line of the deed aloud, slowly: the gatehouse of Kellow, and all within its walls. Then he unhooked a ring of iron keys from his belt and put it in her hands. Through the window stood the black shape of a keep nobody had opened in fourteen years, and at night it breathed when the wind came from the east. Esther's father was a surveyor who taught her to read a wall. What is inside those walls, and does the Duchess know what her own clerk wrote? A Victorian inheritance story about a governess, a deed and a castle. This is original fiction: every person in it is invented and a grown adult. Subscribe to Nettlebed Hall for more inheritance stories.