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The Widow Objects
Marrow Grange is a stone house with fourteen bedrooms off the main corridor and a kitchen built in 1861 that has never once been remodelled.
- ~194 min (estimated)
- 42784 words
- 83 scenes
- 9 branch points
- 5 endings
28 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · art review pending · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
It stands on a hundred and forty acres of rented grazing and a shooting lease over the beck, four miles from the market town of Halstead-under-Wye, and it is worth four point one million pounds. It is worth one point four million pounds without the Occupancy Deed, a single page of a deed poll signed in June 2018 which ties the value of the residue to the continued presence of one person's body in one wing of one house. Nell Arden is forty-six. She drafted the Occupancy Deed. She was a senior associate at Fenn, Ludlow & Roe in 2018, seven years out of a partnership she never got, and the client wanted a covenant that would survive a divorce and a death, and she wrote one that did. She wrote it in the third person. Every noun in it is a defined term. The person whose body it pledges is called the Occupant, and the Occupant is described as she, throughout, in a document where a woman's own
Content notice8 topics · tap to review
- the death of a spouse, described from a post-mortem report and from what people said afterwards
- grief, prolonged, in a house with fourteen bedrooms
- a body pledged as security for a debt by a deed its subject drafted herself
- a marriage recorded as a compliance obligation and read aloud to strangers
- public disclosure of an intimate private record
- a professional and financial ruin that is not prevented
- explicit adult intimacy between a widow and a man who acts for the people she owes
- a hard moral choice with no option that costs nothing
Cast
- N Nell Arden protagonist, sole executor, author of the Occupancy Deed, the Occupant no portrait yet
- S Sebastian Ardley the person the protagonist wants, and the person who can prove what she wrote no portrait yet
- D Darryl Nkemelu beneficiary, and the only person in the book who is unambiguously right no portrait yet
- I Irene Masters housekeeper, owed nothing, and the only person who tells the truth for free no portrait yet